It is always the person walking the dog that finds the body, well at least that is my perception. The other night Peri and I were taking in our regular evening stroll (that is if you consider stop-sniff-mark-forward-stop-sniff-mark a stroll) when we see something out of the ordinary at the bottom of a runoff for one of the culverts in the area.

Now, it seems strange that a 30 gallon trash can, the kind you might pick up at your local hardware store, would be lying at the bottom of this culvert and my first thought was that maybe it got swept up in some storm runoff but we haven’t had any storms and the culvert is much too small for the barrel to fit. It must have been dumped.

My intrepid companion and I decided to scramble part of the way down the slope to get a better look and notice that the top is sealed with a black plastic garbage bag and packing tape. Odd. Drawing upon my vast experience of back episodes of Forensic Files and movies such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog tells me that the configuration of trash barrel, trash bags, and packing tape is the hallmark of nefarious activity, though the use of clear packing tape is total bush league. The 13 year old in me wanted to climb the rest of the way down and poke it with a stick but the 32 year old in me faltered, “But my shoes might get wet!” Peri’s vote was for sniffing something else.

When we got back I told Management about our discovery and she offered the sage explanation that it is likely 30 gallons of dirty diapers and we were more than welcome to poke it with a stick provided we cleaned ourselves off outside with the hose. For now, I’m going to keep watching it to see if the plastic peels back a little more revealing the contents within which, hopefully, are nothing more than soiled Huggies. Then again, dog walkers always find the dead bodies.