my face and neck. Even cold, the air was ripe with the odor of decomp.
The interior was lit by a string of fluorescent work lights, jury-rigged to the ceiling. Both sides of the trailer were lined with metal shelving units, four shelves high. Every shelf held a body bag-some black, some white. The topmost shelves were head-high; at the far end of the trailer, I noticed a stepstool, which I’d need to stand on to inspect the upper row of bodies. Sean walked to the nearest bag, on a shelf at chest height, and tugged the zipper around the C-shaped opening. He folded back the flap, revealing a head, the skull and cervical vertebrae exposed. The skull was small and smooth, with a pointed chin and sharp edges at the top of the eye orbits-a classic female skull. A mat of long, tangled brown hair lay beside the skull. “Well, she’s in the right trailer, whoever she is,” I said.
Sean laughed. “Be kinda embarrassing if I’d unzipped one that we’d gotten wrong,” he said. He tugged the zipper farther toward the foot of the bag so he could fold back more of the flap. “We’ve tagged the upper left arm and the left ankle of every body,” he said. “Numerical tags, starting with one.” He checked the tag on the skeletal arm. “This is number forty-seven,” he said. “If I remember right, she was one of that batch you found over near the bulldozer. We started with the ones in the hearse-no particular reason; it was just someplace to start-then tackled the big group by the dozer. There were bodies everywhere, Bill. Bodies stacked in burial vaults in the shed, bodies dumped in a shallow pit-hell, even a couple bodies stuffed in an old chest-type freezer out by a trash pile.”
“What on earth were they thinking?”
“I’m not sure they
“Any idea how much money he saved by not cremating the bodies?”
“Seventy, eighty bucks apiece, best we can tell. Less than a hundred. Not near enough to justify this mess, that’s for sure.”
I couldn’t imagine what might be enough to justify this mess. It would cost millions of dollars, I felt sure, to clean up the site and identify the bodies, and many millions more to settle the lawsuits that aggrieved families were bound to start filing. I had long since given up on trying to predict the oddities that turned up in murder cases and death investigations, but this-the sheer scale and stupidity of it-stunned even me. “Sean, I’m going to suit up and start looking for Aunt Jean,” I said, “so you can get back to work.”
He nodded, suddenly looking weary. When he opened the trailer’s door, the blazing heat and blinding light outside nearly knocked us backward.
“Listen, I really appreciate your getting me in here to take a look,” I said as we thudded down the wooden steps. “If I find her, I’ll let you know. And if I don’t find her, I’ll let you know that, too.”
He peeled off his glove to shake my hand again-I wished I owned stock in the company that was providing the gloves and body bags for this operation-and thanked me once more, then headed for the command post. As he walked, I saw him checking his pager and shaking his head.
I walked to the back of my truck, lifted up the hard cover over the bed, and dropped the tailgate. Sitting on the gate, I shucked off my Doc Martens, then wiggled into a pair of insulated ski pants to keep my legs warm. Next I threaded my legs into a baggy Tyvek jumpsuit, then put my shoes back on and stretched paper booties over them, since there was likely to be goo here and there on the trailer floors. I stuffed a few pairs of nitrile gloves into the hip pockets of the jumpsuit, slung my camera around my neck, and tucked a thick sweater under one arm. I’d need the sweater in the coolers, but I wasn’t ready to put it on just yet. Before waddling back to trailer three, the empty sleeves of the jumpsuit dangling from my waist, I took another look at the picture I’d gotten from Burt DeVriess. Burt’s Aunt Jean smiled up at me from the photo. She wore a sky blue dress with a strand of black pearls-an anniversary present-around her neck. This had been her summer church outfit for years, Uncle Edgar had said. In the South, church clothes eventually became burial clothes. Uncle Edgar had kept the pearls as a memento after the memorial service, but I hoped the dress or its black plastic buttons would have survived.
I reentered trailer three, latched the door behind me, then squirmed into the sweater and zipped up the suit. Where to begin? “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” I said, pointing in turn to each of the trailer’s corners. “Moe” was back in the far right corner-up near where the cab would be when the trailer was being towed-so I headed that way. The stepstool was already back there, so I decided to start with the uppermost body, then work my way down toward the floor. Each shelving unit consisted of four shelves, and there were seven units along each wall. Twenty-eight bodies per side, fifty-six in this trailer. I’d need to hustle. For efficiency and thoroughness, I decided I’d work in a regular pattern: down four, over one, up four, over one, down another four, and so on, till my vertical zigzags brought me all the way back to the rear door. Then I’d work the other side, the other twenty-eight bodies in the same pattern. “Okay, here we go,” I said, scooting the stool into position, climbing to the upper step, and pulling down the zipper.
The body in the right front corner of the trailer was number 28, according to her arm tag, her leg tag, and a computer-generated tag stuck to the front of the metal shelf she lay on. She was dressed in what had once been a cream-colored suit, which had probably contrasted nicely with her skin tone, as she was an African-American woman. I couldn’t tell that by the skin-there wasn’t much left, and even white people’s corpses tended to turn black as they decayed. But her hair was characteristically kinky, and her jaws and teeth jutted forward in the distinctly Negroid feature called prognathism. I zipped her up and dropped down a level.
Body 107, the second I looked at, appeared to be an elderly white woman, with wispy, thinning hair. My pulse quickened when I saw that she wore blue-it looked closer to navy than to sky blue, but photos can be misleading. It only took a moment, though, to realize that she wore dentures, and I knew from Burt and his uncle that I was looking for a woman with all her teeth.
And so it went, up, across, down, across, up again: body after body, skeleton after skeleton, all of them female, none of them possessing quite the combination of features that, collectively, had once been called Jeannie by her husband, Aunt Jean by her nephew, and Mamaw by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
It took me over an hour to look at the first twenty-eight bodies, only twenty minutes to work my way down the second side of the trailer. I studied the first dozen bodies closely, looking for markers of their age and race. By the second dozen bodies, I was already getting jaded, by the fourth dozen ruthless and impatient, as my stomach began rumbling and my feet started hurting. I found myself yanking each zipper down, casting a quick, exclusionary glance under the flap, and then pulling the zipper closed impatiently.
I was halfway down the first side of the second trailer-the trailer with the big black 4-F painted on the doors-when I froze, halfway through the reflexive upward tug that would zip the body bag closed. The dress I had glimpsed was nearly black in the center, but my peripheral vision, and then my brain, noticed that the dark color was limited to the chest and neck region. In the sleeves, enough of the original color showed through the dark stain to suggest that the fabric itself was light to medium blue-or once had been, back when a farm wife wore it to a white clapboard church. It would have been the kind of church where the Sunday service was followed by dinner on the grounds, a potluck where the world’s best cooks-southern church cooks-competed sweetly but fiercely to be the acknowledged winner: the one whose baked beans or fried chicken or peach cobbler was the dish that was emptied first, scraped cleanest, and then eyed most sadly by those who’d ended up too far back in the line.
I peeled off my right glove and unzipped my jumpsuit partway, then threaded my hand down the neck of my sweater and fished the photo out of my shirt pocket again. It showed a blue-dressed, silver-haired woman in her seventies. She was holding a toddler on her lap, probably a great-grandchild. She had kind eyes, with a big smile on her face. She also had a big chip out of her upper left lateral incisor. “Her pie injury,” Burt had said when he’d pointed it out to me.
“Pie injury?”
“Pie injury. My Aunt Jean loved pie,” he’d said. “Lord, Doc, that woman could knock back half a pie at one sitting and still want the other half. It’s a wonder she didn’t weigh four hundred pounds. Anyhow, years ago-I was just a kid then-she was eating a piece of cherry pie, and she bit down on a pit and broke a tooth. She could’ve gotten a crown put on, but I think she liked the attention. All the little kids in the family loved to hear her tell the pie story. Every time she told it, that cherry pit got bigger and harder. I swear, by the time she died, that pit was the size of Mount Rushmore and as hard as the Hope Diamond.” As he’d told the story, I’d heard things in Burt DeVriess’s voice that I’d never heard before-warmth and unguardedness and innocence and maybe even love.
