Pedromar Augusto de Souza is the chief of police in the nearest city. The Formosa station house has six bullet holes in the door; police work is serious business here in Brazil, where cops and gangsters have running gun battles. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, and, as if to prove it, Pedromar pulls a big hog-leg .45 automatic from his waistband, ejects the magazine from the butt, jacks the chambered round, which bounces three times and settles. He hands over the shiny gun for inspection. The bullet? A hollow point. Goes in little, comes out big.

He has been working hard investigating the bizarre death of Tony Lee Harris, American citizen. It's the only case assigned directly to him. From afar, he has heard the conspiracy theories from the folks back in the States: that Universo lured Tony down to Brazil to kill him; that the police are covering up a crime, or worse; or even that the Brazilian Army killed him. Most of the theories are rooted in misinformation: Some media reports in Seattle included errors, which aroused suspicion; the cremation of the body was viewed as suspicious, though family members back home didn't know there was really nothing left but skin, bones and worms. He knows people think he's not being thorough. "It would be easy to say it's a suicide and close the case," he says. "I want to make really sure it was not homicide. To be 100 percent sure."

There are a few questions left. The decomposition of the body prohibited an accurate toxicology report. The cause of death is still officially undetermined, and lab officials cannot say with complete certainty that it was a death by hanging. They are virtually certain, but the state of the corpse has hindered the detective work. And there are other stray facts: Two cigarette butts were found near the body. Lab technicians are working to determine whether these were smoked by Tony, though no lighter was found near his body. Tony's wedding ring was missing. His wallet was missing. His sweatpants were missing. There was likely money missing, though how much is unknown.

And then there's the biggest mystery of all: the curious extra shoelace.

De Souza needs answers before closing the case. Right now, there is a sliver of doubt. A heartbreaking possibility exists: Could Tony Harris have been losing his mind, running from people who were not chasing him, only to end up surrounded by actual danger? "The most likely is suicide," de Souza says. "But some people walking around the street asking for money, maybe they saw him and thought this guy has money and they killed him. That's another question."

Will it ever be possible to conclusively prove what happened?

De Souza considers the question. The body had no bullet holes or stab wounds, no broken bones or tissue under the fingernails. But the rain and the wilderness erased any other forensic clues.

"No," he says.

... When they took the body down, a tree remained, with the cerrado alive around it, birds chirping, water running, nature going on as if Tony Harris had never lived ...

The walk to the monkey pepper tree is long and difficult, no matter the route. Tony Harris leaves the gas station, and disappears into the cerrado, a sprawling Brazilian savanna that surrounds the town. Cerrado means "inaccessible" in Portuguese.

The land is frightening and foreign, quilts of open field dotted with termite mounds and tall, tropical trees. There are long runs of covered forest. The greens are psychedelic. Jaguars roam the forests and grasslands, their roar like a loud cough. Water flows, maybe a stream, maybe runoff from a recent shower. Large birds circle the tops of the trees, their shrieks breaking the peaceful gurgle of the water. Songbirds sing a sweet melody in the background. During the day, the sun bakes down, steaming all living things with alternating flurries of sun, rain, then more sun. At night, the chill comes and with it a darkness unlike anything a man from a civilized world has ever seen. At night, it's like God himself forgot the cerrado.

How long was Tony lost out here? A day? Two? Three? The soldiers say you could live for a month, if you knew what you were doing. The place is covered with edible fruit and fresh water. No one knows where Tony Harris walked, or what he thought or felt as he wove deeper and deeper into the maze-like wilderness. Was he scared? Did something finally turn off that neon sign in his mind? Did he stop running? Did someone stop him from running? Somehow he ended up at the monkey pepper tree. It's clearly visible, atop the crown of a small mound, in a clearing, a few smaller trees setting a perimeter. Though there is deeper forest around it, from the tree, a man can look up and see heaven.

No one knows exactly what happened to Tony Harris in his last minutes, but they do know where he was found. Police estimate he died on or about Friday, Nov. 9. An anonymous call came in on Sunday, Nov. 18, his birthday. About 20 feet from the monkey pepper tree is a fishing hole, though you can't see it without crawling through dense vegetation. A walking path to it, if you know where to dip into the forest, goes past the tree. Police believe the tipster is an illegal fisherman without permission to be on military property. That's yet another heartbreaking detail: Tony Harris loved to fish and some investigators believe he might have been out of his mind from dehydration. But if he had walked more or less straight here from town, he ended up only 20 yards shy of life-saving water and more fish than he could have eaten in a month.

Police and soldiers arrive on the scene. They smell it before they see it, a grotesque, barely human form, bleached white in spots and warped by the sun and rain, skin losing to gravity in big folds, those big basketball shoes just a foot off the ground. Bugs swarm and body fluids stain the trunk of the tree black. The corpse, no longer Tony Harris, hangs from a sturdy branch by a black shoelace. They notice that both of the shoelaces are in place. So he brought an extra shoelace with him from Brasilia, managed to keep it despite losing his computer, pants, wallet and ring? Could have happened.

The location of the pepper tree leads everyone who sees it to think suicide. This place seems too remote for anyone to have carried a body so far, and forensic evidence suggests Tony's life ended in this clearing, hanging from a monkey pepper tree, four miles from Bezerra, 6,000 miles from Seattle, totally and utterly alone.

It's the perfect tree. A short step up onto a low branch, an easy reach to tie the shoelace around a higher branch, then a quick step off. Death would have begun quickly, air cut off, the pressure on the spinal column beginning a domino effect, motor ability lessened or lost. Did his life flash before his eyes? Did he see a lost job and rejected applications? Did he see people chasing him and shadows and whispers? Or did he see other, happier things? Maybe a boy in Seattle pointing so many years ago and telling his mom: That's Tony Harris. He plays for Garfield. Maybe a bear hug with Kelvin Sampson after making it to the NCAA Tournament. Or did he see his 14-year-old son, who looks just like him, or his wife, or his mother, or his friends? Did he see his future?

No one knows. But the police do believe this: The very last act of Tony Harris on planet earth was to fight for his life. As he hung from that shoelace, his time now down to seconds, unable to use his arms and legs, he bit down on the tree, sinking his teeth into the trunk, as if to buy one inch of life-saving air. He failed, and he died there, hanging from the monkey pepper tree.

The day after cutting his body down, police found a hole burrowed deep into the bark of the tree. Laying on the ground below was a tooth, the last will and testament of a man struggling for light in a place consumed by darkness.



Courtesy of Lori Harris ... But he did live, and he did amazing things with his life, things that will be missed. That's what his family tries to focus on. The good things, the happy times, back before the darkness.