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reporter’s sails. To deal with the media onslaught, the sheriff’s department sent one of the other investigators (the one who drew the shortest straw, no doubt) down to the bottom of the mountain to keep watch and say nothing—especially because Blair was still on the loose.
    Detective Mark Turner, who was still scouring the hills looking for Blair, was called back to the burial scene to help with the recovery. (Detective Stephanie McClure would miss all of the action, basking in the sun on a vacation she had planned months before this case occurred.) Detectives Matt Cubberley and Jeff McCarter worked lead on the burial recovery scene. Matt and Jeff had never worked one of these scenes, but they had the requisite experience, having been trained to unearth bodies at the outdoor anthropological research facility known as the Body Farm. For more than thirty years, this outdoor forensic laboratory has been devoted to the study of human decomposition. Over time, as the popularity of forensic science skyrocketed, the facility evolved and added human remains recovery to its repertoire. Today it is still the only place in the world where crime scene investigators can practice the proper way to identify a clandestine grave and exhume a human body. So the Sevier County CSIs were up to the challenge that this crime scene brought. Mark’s job would be to assist them; at the time of this case, he had yet to attend forensic school, though ironically, he began his training just two weeks later.
     
    “We decided we’d do it just like an archaeological dig, just like we were taught,” Jeff began, as we examined the trowel marks that were still visible, left on the walls of the clandestine grave they had excavated exactly one year earlier. But they didn’t start working the scene by exhuming the grave, as many people might think. Most investigators desperately want to begin with the body, unearthing it from the ground as soon as possible. That’s a natural instinct, but it’s not the proper way to work a burial scene. The first thing they did was to begin their search far from Kelly’s grave. They’d learned that patience pays off, and so they started their work away from the body, working slowly toward where she lay. This was the first buried murder victim that Sevier County had ever had, at least as long as anyone could remember, but the detectives knew exactly what to do from the moment they found the body. If it hadn’t been for the training they had received, they might never have known how to proceed. Too bad for the killer that they were some of the best students we had ever had graduate from the crime scene school.
     
    The group diligently worked toward Kelly’s body, marking evidence along the way, mixing dental stone for casting tire tracks, and photographically documenting every inch of the crime scene. They searched with such painstaking detail that they even discovered drops of blood on leaves on the ground, as well as a blood smear on a rock that was lying near the overturned tree. It took more than six hours to mark and collect all of the evidence before they even reached the spot where Kelly lay in a shallow grave. The sun had begun to set once again and darkness was creeping in fast by that time, and they had not even touched Kelly’s body yet—they knew it was going to be a long night. Generators and lights were brought in so that they could continue to work the scene meticulously, photographing, marking, measuring, scraping, sifting, digging, and collecting, one step at a time. Even Kelly’s uncles commented on how impressed they were with the crime scene team’s diligence.
    Finally, at long last, they reached the buried body wrapped in the tarp. As they excavated the grave, the CSIs tried as best as they could to keep her wrapped in the tarp in order to preserve any evidence that might still be in or on it. They even tried to keep the dirt that was on top of the tarp from moving.
    Several things were