The Devil's Bones

wife.”

“She outranks me now? You’re obviously not under my thumb anymore,” I said.

“Yet here you are,” he said good-naturedly, “still pulling my strings.” He took a deep breath and puffed it out. “You’re not calling to tell me about another big batch of bodies somewhere in Georgia, I hope?”

“How’d you guess?” I laughed. “No, not today. I’m calling to ask a favor-to see if you can pull a string or two for me.”

“You want us to just ship everything up to the Body Farm, right?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I said. “But now that you mention it, I’d love to add another three hundred skeletons to the collection. Can you have ’em here tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he joked, “piece of cake.” We both knew that eventually-once the bodies were identified-they’d need to be returned to their families, or to whoever had sent them to be cremated.

“Anything else on your wish list?”

“This might be nearly as difficult to arrange,” I said, “but if you can’t bring the mountain of bodies to Mohammed, how about if Mohammed comes down to the mountain? I’d love to take a quick look around. Not just for curiosity,” I hastened to add. “You know the woman whose bogus cremains caused me to start poking around in the woods? I’m wondering if you’d be able and willing to let me take a quick look for her.” I was pretty sure Burt’s Aunt Jean was one of the hundreds of bodies chilling in those refrigerated trailers, but it might be months before Sean got to her. To him she was just one among hundreds, but to me-and to Grease, who’d asked whether I could get into the makeshift morgue and find her fast-she was a priority.

“Ah,” he said. “I understand. I’d certainly have no problem with that. But it’s not my call. This is the highest- profile case anybody around here can remember, and the director and the public-affairs people are pretty touchy. So far, access is limited to the GBI, FBI, and DMORT teams. Hell, we even turned away the governor, who wanted to come up and hold a press conference in the woods with that grungy crematorium in the background.” He paused, and in the distance I could hear the hum of refrigeration units, the beep of a truck backing up, and the squawk of a public-address announcement asking somebody or other to report to the command post.

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a shot at least,” I said.

“Could save you a little time and money,” I added. “If I find her, that’d be one less person for you to ID. One less DNA test to pay for.”

“Good point,” he said. “We’re at three hundred twenty-seven bodies already, and we haven’t finished searching. Can you maybe help us ID another fifty or sixty?”

“If I say yes, does that give me a better shot at getting in to look for Aunt Jean?”

“You bet,” he said.

“I’d love to pitch in for a week or two,” I said, “but I want to stay close to home until Garland Hamilton’s back in custody. It’s not like I’m out beating the bushes myself, but I do want to stay near the phone.”

“I understand,” he said. “Dr. Carter was a good M.E.-she worked with us on a couple of cases that crossed jurisdictional lines-and I was sorry to hear she’d been killed.” There was an awkward pause, and then he added, “I was also sorry to hear the police suspected you at first.”

I appreciated Sean’s sentiments, but I suddenly wished the conversation hadn’t taken this particular turn.

“Listen, Sean, I bet you’ve got half a dozen people clamoring for you,” I said. “I’d better let you get back to work. Call if you get the okay for me to come down in the next couple days.”

“I will,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

His best shot must have been pretty good, because two days later a Georgia state trooper swung open the gate and waved me into the driveway of the Littlejohn property. The watchdogs inside the fence were gone, replaced by a pack of television crews patrolling the outer perimeter. Several cameramen jogged toward my truck, cameras bobbing on their shoulders, but by the time they reached the gate, I was already crunching down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

After threading through the pines for a quarter mile, the driveway emerged into a yard the size of a football field. To the left was a pond measuring maybe fifty yards across; to the right was a single-story brick ranch house with a small front porch at the center, framed by two white columns. I’d probably passed a dozen such houses, I realized, flanking the thirty miles of two-lane highway between Chattanooga and here. Next came a small prefab wooden building, roughly ten feet square-the sort of thing that might house a snow-cone stand for a few months in the summer. Beyond that was a big, barnlike shed. Inside, I glimpsed a tractor, a bushhog mowing attachment, a battered old pickup, and-the first indication that this was anything other than an ordinary rural farmstead-a handful of concrete burial vaults.

The next odd thing I saw, as I passed the shed, was the row of stainless-steel refrigerated trailers parked behind it, their cluster of diesel generators and compressor motors combining to produce a roaring, clattering chorus. From here on, the driveway was lined with police vehicles-county, state, and federal cars, marked and unmarked-plus crime-lab vans and DMORT trucks. The final building was tucked beside a large turnaround area at the end of the drive. This building resembled a dilapidated garage with a rusty metal flue at one end, and I recognized it as a smaller, shabbier cousin of the immaculate crematorium I’d visited in Alcoa. Beside it, I noticed with a jolt, was a huge barbecue grill.

A woman in a white biohazard suit labeled GBI was headed toward the building, a trowel in one hand, an evidence bag in the other. “Excuse me,” I called, “I’m looking for Sean Richter. Do you know where I might find him?” She glanced at me and seemed surprised to see a middle-aged, bespectacled guy in khakis and a polo shirt.

“He’s in there,” she said, cocking her head toward the building’s open garage door and the darkness within. She glanced at my feet and seemed about to say something but didn’t. I guessed that my shoes-rubber-soled Doc Martens-had passed muster, showing that I knew enough to leave my dress shoes at home in the closet. I thanked her, and she nodded, then walked around the end of the small building and disappeared behind it, leaving me alone at the entrance.

After my eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, I found myself face-to-face with a cremation furnace that looked slightly archaic and more than a little sinister. My first thought was, Auschwitz. Unlike the lustrous steel control panels I’d seen at the Alcoa crematorium, this furnace had a massive door of black cast iron bolted directly to the brickwork, with huge hinges to support its weight. The furnace door was open, but the interior was utterly dark. My key ring had a tiny flashlight on it; I fished it out and shone the feeble light into the arched cavity. The firebrick was jagged and crumbling, completely caked with soot and cobwebs.

Sean was nowhere to be seen, but I heard voices, so I called his name. From somewhere behind the furnace, I heard him answer. “Bill Brockton, is that you?”

“It is,” I said. “Somebody told me you were in here. When I didn’t see you, I thought maybe you’d crawled into the furnace and burned up.”

“Not a chance,” he said, emerging from the rear of the cramped building. “Nothing to burn. Guy at the gas company says they stopped taking propane deliveries about eighteen months ago. He actually smelled something the last time he was out there; got suspicious and called the cops. Whoever he talked to told him it was a dead cow and suggested he mind his own business.” So much for “call the locals,” I thought, wishing Agent Price were standing beside me to hear this. “Let’s head on up to the coolers, and we’ll get you started,” he said. “Do you need clothing?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got everything I need in the truck.”

We trudged up the drive and toward the row of refrigerated trailers. Sean’s white biohazard suit, I noticed, was covered with soot and cobwebs from the filthy building.

“We’ve divided them by sex,” he shouted over the rising din of the generators. “Males in trailers one and two, females in three and four, and unknowns in five and six.”

“Roughly how many in each?”

“Fairly evenly divided,” he yelled. “Not a whole lot of soft tissue on any of these-it’s Georgia and it’s summertime, so anybody who’s been here more than a week or two is pretty well skeletonized or mummified. The clothing seems to have held up better than the tissue, so that helps.”

I nodded; I had expected as much from the bodies I’d seen.

A set of bare wooden steps, assembled from fresh lumber, led up to the back of each trailer. I followed Sean up the steps of the third trailer. He unlatched the door, and a blast of frosty air rolled over me, chilling the sweat on