The Devil's Bones Page 12

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just in a slightly delicate position here.” I was trying to figure out whether I needed to protect the confidentiality of information I had gained on behalf of a client, which is what Burt DeVriess was in this case, since it was his Aunt Jean’s cremains that had motivated my trip to Georgia.

  “Dr. Brockton, please tell me you haven’t stumbled into one of our undercover investigations again.”

  “If I had,” I countered, “how would I know? As you’ve seen, I’m not too good at spotting your undercover agents.”

  “True. But let’s cut to the chase, Doctor. Are you calling to report a federal crime?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think so. If a crematorium is paid to burn bodies, and if the bodies don’t get burned, that would be a breach of contract, right?”

  “Breach of contract or fraud, probably.”

  “And if they’re doing business over the phone with people in several states—say, Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia—would that count as interstate wire fraud?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  I struggled to remember what I knew about white-collar crime, which wasn’t much. Murder tended to wear a blue collar, or a blood-red one. “And am I right in thinking that interstate wire fraud is considered a form of organized crime?”

  “Technically, yes,” she said. “I suspect crematoriums weren’t tops on anybody’s list of dangerous criminal enterprises when the RICO statutes were written. But technically you’re probably correct—wire fraud is pretty broadly defined, so what you’re describing could constitute wire fraud and an organized-crime enterprise. Technically.”

  “You keep saying ‘technically.’ How come?”

  “Because there’s a fairly high threshold that has to be met before we’re going to pursue a federal wire-fraud case.”

  “What kind of threshold?”

  “A financial threshold. The dollar value’s got to be around a quarter million dollars to justify committing resources to an investigation and prosecution. The U.S. Attorney has to agree it’s worthwhile. It’s sort of like speeding—technically, the police can ticket you for doing forty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone, but they’re not going to waste their time on that. They’re going to be on the lookout for the guy going sixty or seventy. So to circle back to cremation, if a crematorium failed to cremate somebody they got paid to cremate, yeah, they committed fraud. If they used interstate phone lines to do it—and these days, unless you’re using tin cans and a string to talk to the guy next door, every telephone conversation uses nationwide networks—then yeah, it’s interstate wire fraud. But the reality is, we don’t have the time or resources to bring the hammer down on some crematorium that didn’t cremate a body. That’s what civil suits are for.”

  “How about a hundred bodies? Maybe more?”

  Price was silent for longer than I’d ever heard her stay quiet. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if this crematorium isn’t defrauding one or two people? What if they’re defrauding hundreds—everybody they deal with? What if they’re not cremating any of the bodies?”

  She paused again. I liked it when I could give Price pause. “And what are they doing with these bodies, if they’re not cremating them?”

  “Piling them in a patch of pine forest.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Hundreds of bodies?”

  “Technically,” I said, “I haven’t seen hundreds. Technically, I’ve seen fewer than a hundred—ninety-four, to be precise. But I didn’t exactly do a grid search. That’s what I saw in about ten minutes, in one corner of the woods.”

  “You saw ninety-four bodies piled in the woods?”

  “I saw eighty-eight piled in the woods…well, not piled, exactly—more like dumped and strewn and half hidden. I saw six more stacked in the back of a broken-down hearse.”

  “Damn, Doc,” she said. It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound impressed, or surprised, or anything other than strictly business. “Those folks are giving your Body Farm a run for the money.”

  “Yeah, except they’re not doing the research,” I said. “Oh, and they’re bringing in a lot more money than I am.”

  “How much does cremation cost?”

  “It costs the consumer about eight hundred to a thousand dollars,” I said, “but that includes the funeral home’s markup. The crematorium itself doesn’t charge that much, more like four hundred per cremation. I hear this place down in Georgia was doing it—or not doing it—for three hundred.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “So a hundred unburned bodies—we’ll go with a nice round number, to keep the math simple—would represent a thirty-thousand-dollar case of fraud. Have I got that decimal in the right place?”

  Put that way—reduced to a bottom-line dollar amount—the shocking scene in the woods sounded insignificant. “But I bet there are more,” I said. “Maybe a lot more.”

  “There would have to be,” she said. “I hate to break it to you, Dr. Brockton, but we’d need ten times that many bodies in the woods to justify a federal wire-fraud investigation.”

  “You’re saying you’d need a thousand bodies? You’ve got to be joking.”

  “I don’t joke, Dr. Brockton.” She had a point there, I realized.

  “My white-collar-crime agents are swamped with cases right now—multimillion-dollar cases. You remember that chop shop we raided last spring over in Grainger County? They were selling stolen-car parts throughout the South, to the tune of seven million dollars a year. Your cockfighting friends in Cooke County? Illegal gambling—hundreds of thousands of dollars every day those birds were pecking each other to death.” Technically, I wanted to point out, the roosters spurred or slashed each other to death, but I didn’t see much future in interrupting Price just to correct her description of cockfighting. “I don’t mean to sound callous,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s big enough for us. Did you call local law enforcement?”

  “No,” I said. “This a rural county in Podunk, Georgia. They don’t begin to have the forensic resources to deal with this.”

  “If the locals request assistance, we could send in an Evidence Recovery Team.”

  “There’s a whole lot of evidence to recover,” I said. “Why not just send in the cavalry now? Eliminate the middleman?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “We help if we’re asked—it’s called ‘domestic police cooperation’—but we have to be asked. And despite what you see on television, we consider the ‘cooperation’ part important. Call the locals.”

  “That’s all you’ve got for me—‘call the locals’?”

  “’Fraid so,” she said. “Sorry that’s not what you wanted to hear. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She clicked off without saying good-bye.

  Angela: that was her name. “Thanks for nothing, Angela,” I said to the dead receiver.

  Call the locals? I didn’t even know who the locals were. I had an atlas in my truck, so I went out and got it and traced my route from Chattanooga down into the northwest corner of Georgia. It didn’t take long to pinpoint what county the crematorium was in, and I knew that it wouldn’t take a genius to track down the number for the county sheriff. But I found myself hesitating, resisting the idea of calling 411. As I took a mental step back and analyzed the reasons for my hesitation, it came clear. Over the years of my work, I had come to know and respect many sheriffs in rural Tennessee. But within the past year, I had survived a couple of near-death experiences with deputies in Cooke County, where Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings was a regular at the cockfights—and where Deputy Leon Williams had used dynamite to entomb Art Bohanan and me in a cave. On the one hand, I had no reason to suspect that the sheriff in northwest Georgia was looking the other way as bodies piled up in the woods. But then again, I had no particular basis for confidenc
e either. And if the sheriff did happen to be in cahoots with the crematorium, my call might actually trigger a quick cleanup and a massive cover-up. The more I thought, the less I wanted to call the locals.

  But if not the locals, then who could I call?

  I glanced idly at the atlas again, and my gaze strayed southward, to Atlanta. “Sean Richter,” I said out loud. “I can call Sean.”

  Sean Richter was one of my former graduate students. After completing his master’s degree, he had spent a year in the remnants of Yugoslavia, helping excavate mass graves and identify victims of ethnic-cleansing massacres in Kosovo. Now he was working in Atlanta as the staff forensic anthropologist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As an interstate wire-fraud case, the crematorium might be too small for the FBI to bother with. But as a Georgia fraud case, it might be big enough to interest the GBI. And I was certain it would interest Sean, with its similarities to the mass-fatality identifications he’d done in Kosovo. I fished out my pocket calendar, which had a small address book tucked in the back, and looked up his number.

  “Anthropology lab, this is Richter.”

  “Sean, this is Bill Brockton.”

  “Dr. Brockton, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, but I’d be better if you quit calling me Dr. Brockton, Sean. You’re my colleague now, not my student. It’s time you graduated to calling me Bill.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “That’s gonna be a tough habit to break, though. Once a forensic god, always a forensic god.”

  “Well, once you break this case wide open,” I said, “you’ll be a legend yourself.”

  “What case?”

  “How would you like to lead the recovery and identification of a hundred decomposing bodies, maybe more? Maybe lots more?”

  He laughed. “You’re one of the few people who actually find that an irresistible temptation,” he said. “But I’m one of the others. Unfortunately, I doubt that I could get a leave of absence right now to do that. I fear my traveling days are over, for a while at least.”

  “You wouldn’t have to travel. At least not outside your jurisdiction.”

  Sean didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did speak, his voice sounded unnatural and forced, as if he were pushing the words out by sheer willpower. “Are you telling me you think there’s a mass grave here in Georgia with a hundred or more bodies in it?”

  “No, and not exactly,” I said. “I don’t think—I know. But it’s not a grave, it’s surface. You wouldn’t even have to dig.” As I described what I’d seen in the woods, he interrupted me often, asking me to repeat or confirm or elaborate on some detail. The shakiness in his voice gave way to a mixture of excitement and anger. Sean was smart enough to realize that this case would be forensically fascinating, as well as a watershed in his career. But his anger at the indignity inflicted on the dead—dumped in the woods like refuse—was genuine, and I knew that Sean would do whatever it took to make the case a priority for the GBI.

  His eagerness was tempered by one very legitimate concern. The GBI’s anthropology lab was small, and Sean’s resources—equipment and personnel—were nowhere near adequate to recover and identify so many bodies all at once. “You might want to ask for help from DMORT,” I said. DMORT—the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team—was a federally deployed unit designed to assist with mass fatalities. The team members, who included forensic anthropologists, dentists, funeral directors, and other professionals skilled at identifying or handling corpses, were volunteers, but they were highly trained and extremely capable. DMORT teams had performed heroically at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center attacks, and they had worked for months to identify the hundreds of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Sean agreed that DMORT could be a valuable resource.

  “You might also want to ask the FBI for an Evidence Recovery Team,” I said. Then, and only then, did I recount the gist of my conversation with Special Agent Price. “They don’t want to run the case,” I said, “but I gather they’d be willing to roll up their sleeves and help with the fieldwork. If you ask.”

  “I’ll certainly recommend that we ask,” he said. “This is going to be huge, and we’ll need all the help we can get.” He paused, then said, “Hmm.” I waited, figuring he was working up to another question, and I was right. “So when my bosses ask me how I know about this mess, what do I tell them?”

  “Tell them the truth,” I said. “I don’t see how it can hurt. Might give them a little more confidence that it’s not a wild-goose chase if they know the tip came from a guy who has a reasonably good idea what bodies in the woods look like.”

  He chuckled at that. “True. Be hard for them to doubt the accuracy of the report if they know it comes from you.”

  “I don’t particularly want my name in the news, though, if you can keep me out of it,” I said. “Any chance y’all could say the GBI received a call from a ‘concerned citizen’ or some such?”

  “I’ll suggest it,” he said. “Politically, that might have some appeal—if we say, ‘It took an anthropologist from Tennessee to sniff this out,’ the GBI doesn’t look real bright. But if we say, ‘We acted swiftly in response to a tip,’ we look semicompetent.”

  “Semicompetent nothing,” I said. “Y’all’ll be heroes. But only if you quit yakking and get busy.”

  “Right,” he said. “Thanks, Dr. Brockton.”

  “Excuse me—who?”

  “Oh. Sorry. Thanks…Bill.”

  His teeth were nearly clenched as he said it. But at least he said it.

  CHAPTER 17

  DOWN IN GEORGIA I’D STUMBLED UPON A BUNCH OF bodies that should have been burned but weren’t. Here in Knoxville, I reflected, I was obsessed with a body that shouldn’t have been burned but was. I guess the universe is in balance, I thought. Except that Garland Hamilton’s still out there somewhere.

  Darren Cash answered his cell phone on the third ring.

  “I think I know how he did it,” I said.

  “How who did what?”

  I laughed. “Sorry. It’s Dr. Brockton from UT. I think I know how Stuart Latham set the car on fire while he was in Vegas.”

  “Do tell,” said Cash.

  “I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you,” I said. “I’d rather show you. Any chance you’ve got some free time late this afternoon or tomorrow?”

  “Since you ask so nice,” he said, “and since you’re about to help me blast a killer’s alibi out of the water, I’ll make time. I’ve got some folks to interview this morning and after lunch, but I should be through by four o’clock or so.”

  I checked my watch. It read 8:37.

  “Can you meet me at the Anthropology Department around four-thirty? We’ll take a little field trip from there.”

  “You’re being mighty cryptic,” he said, “but you’ve got me hooked.”

  I told him how to find my office, and then I called Jason Story, one of my master’s-level graduate students. Jason sounded sleepy when he answered the phone, which wasn’t surprising considering he’d sent me an e-mail in the middle of the night describing the experiment he’d just finished.

  “Sorry if I woke you up, Jason,” I said. “We need to do another run today.”

  He yawned. “So soon? I’ve already done six in the past two days.”

  “’Fraid so,” I said. “The stakes are higher on this one, though. This one’s the dog and pony show for the D.A.’s investigator.”

  Suddenly he sounded much more alert. “Okay, no problem,” he said.

  “Can you get it started by ten?”

  “A.M. or P.M.?”

  “A.M.”

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s cutting it close. But okay, yeah. You might want to stay upwind of me, though—it’s been pretty hot out there, and I won’t have time to take a shower.”

  “No matter how bad you smell, Jason? I’ve smelled worse things.”

  “I guess so.” He laughed. “What time are you bringing the guy from the D.A.’s offic
e out?”

  “Around five, five-thirty. That should be about right, shouldn’t it?”

  “Should be. Gotta go. See you then.”

  Jason was getting ready to enter his second year in the graduate program. Like countless other high-school and college kids who’d gotten hooked on CSI, Jason aspired to be a forensic scientist. Unlike most, though, Jason had gone out and gotten real-world experience. He’d spent three years as a volunteer with a Knox County Rescue Squad. The rescue squad didn’t handle criminal cases, but Jason had worked enough death scenes—car crashes and drownings, even a plane crash—to get past the jitters, and as soon as he took osteology, I was sure he’d be a valuable addition to my Forensic Response Team. He was good with gadgetry, too—Jason felt as comfortable with a GPS or with a topographic map and a compass as I felt with a mandible or a femur. And if I ever needed to tie somebody up and be sure they couldn’t get loose, Jason would be the one whose knotcraft I would call on. He was steady and reliable, and, maybe more to the point, he was in the market for a thesis topic, so he’d jumped at the chance to help with some research.

  At 4:20, Cash knocked on my door. “You’re early,” I said. “Good man.”

  “I finished up a little sooner than I expected,” he said, “and I didn’t see much point in just killing time. If you’ve got things to do, though, tell me, and I’ll make some phone calls till you’re ready.”

  ‘No, this is fine,” I said. “Let’s go. Do you want to ride with me or follow me?”

  “Let me follow you, so I can just head home when we’re done. You ready to tell me where we’re going?”

  “One of the Ag farms,” I said. “By way of Burger King, if you don’t mind?”

  “I never got lunch,” he said. “Burger King sounds great. At this point Purina Dog Chow would probably sound pretty good.”

  “Let’s say Burger King.”

  “WELC…BRRGRR…KI…” crackled the voice through the loudspeaker. I couldn’t even tell if the person was male or female. I hoped they’d be able to hear me better than I could hear them. “W…LIKE…TRY OUR zzttzztt COMBO…DAY?”