“More often than I’d like,” I said.
“Ha, ha. I think if you’re running a high enough fever to melt your knees, you’re long since toasted.”
“Toasted is right,” I said. “The question is, could a cremation furnace melt a pair of knee implants?”
“I’d say it depends how hot the furnace gets.”
“Really? Amazing. Do the folks who give out the MacArthur genius grants know about you?”
“Don’t get smart with me, boss.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I’ll hang up.”
“Ooh,” I said, “now you’re really scaring me.”
I laughed when the line went dead. I was pretty sure she was laughing, too.
My next call was to Norman Witherspoon, a Knoxville funeral director who’d sent me a half dozen or so corpses during the past decade-people who’d wanted their bodies donated to science but who hadn’t made the arrangements before dying. “Norm, what do you do when somebody asks to be cremated?”
“I say, ‘Sorry, I have to wait until you’re dead.’”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” I said. “Let me rephrase the question. Norm, where do you send bodies to be cremated?”
“East Tennessee Cremation Services,” he said. “Out near the airport. In the Rockford industrial park, off Alcoa Highway.”
“I’ve got a case involving cremated remains. You reckon East Tennessee Cremation would let me come look at their equipment and ask a few questions?”
“Long as the case doesn’t involve them. Does it?”
“No,” I said. “A place down in the northwest part of Georgia-Trinity Crematorium.”
“Oh, that place.”
“Why do you say ‘that place’?”
“Well, that’s where funeral homes send cremations if they want to save a few bucks or a little time.”
“How many bucks is ‘a few’?”
“Not too many-about a hundred per cremation. We handle about sixty cremation requests a year, so we’d save about six thousand dollars if we switched. But if you factor in Trinity’s pickup and drop-off, the savings would be bigger.”
“How so?”
“We have to take the bodies out to East Tennessee Cremation, and then we have to go pick them up, either at the end of the day or sometime the next day. So that’s a hundred and twenty roundtrips. We’re only about fifteen miles from there, so it’s not a huge problem, but it can get complicated, especially if we have several burials going on at the same time, too. Trinity picks up the bodies and then returns the cremains, and that can save a lot of time. They courted us pretty hard, and we thought about switching, but in the end we decided to stick with East Tennessee Cremation.”
“Because?”
“I’ve known the folks there for twenty years. They do a good job, they keep their facility spotless, and they’re extremely professional.”
“Unlike the folks at that Georgia place?”
He laughed. “You sound like some fast-talking courtroom lawyer now. You’ve been spending way too much time being cross-examined. Look, I don’t know anything bad about them. But I don’t know anything great about them either. What it comes down to is, I don’t want to stop doing business with people I know and like, just for the sake of a hundred bucks here and there.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “No further questions at this time. Oh, except the name and number of the person I should call at the place over in Alcoa?”
“EAST TENNESSEE CREMATION.” The woman who answered sounded slightly out of breath, as if she’d had to dash for the phone.
“Is this Helen Taylor?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
I introduced myself and began a convoluted explanation of why I was calling.
“Norm Witherspoon told me you’d probably be calling,” she said, as soon as I gave her an opening. “I heard you lecture a few years ago at the Tennessee Association of Funeral Directors. You were showing pictures of how a body decays if the embalming job’s not good. You’re welcome to come out anytime.”
I wasn’t sure if she was extending the welcome in spite of my criticisms or because of them. Either way, I was quick to accept the invitation. “When would be a good time to visit?”
“Up to you. I’m here Monday through Friday, eight A.M. to five P.M. We’ve got three cremations scheduled today, so pretty much anytime you come, I’ll be putting somebody in, taking ’em out, or running them through the processor.”
“Sounds like they’re getting their money’s worth from you,” I said. “No wonder you sounded winded when you answered the phone.”
“There’s not a lot of downtime, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m just finishing one now, and I thought I’d start the next one right after lunch.”
I checked my watch; I’d just eaten a sandwich at my desk, but I tended to eat early. It was not quite eleven-thirty.
“All right if I come on over in about an hour?”
“I’ll be looking for you.” She gave me directions, and after I’d gone through the morning’s mail, I headed out. The mail gave me an idea, so on the way I made a quick stop by Peggy’s. She wasn’t in, luckily, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have let me borrow her postage scale if she’d known what I planned to use it for.
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past the veterinary school and under the Alcoa Highway bridge. The bridge pilings were marked with horizontal lines at one-foot intervals, showing towboat pilots how much clearance they had between the waterline and the bottom of the bridge. Why are they called towboats, I wondered, when they move the barges by pushing, not pulling? Between the heat and the drought, the river was down as low as I’d ever seen it in summer. That meant there was plenty of clearance overhead-fifty-seven feet, according to the markings, which was two feet more than usual. But two feet more clearance overhead also meant two feet less water underneath. That wasn’t a worry here, where the river was narrow and the channel deep, but a few miles downstream the river spread into broad shallows, where even a fishing boat risked a mangled prop if it strayed from the center of the navigation channel. We need rain, I thought, and a hell of a cold front.
At the intersection of Neyland and Kingston Pike, I turned right, then also took the next right, onto the ramp for Alcoa Highway southbound. Crossing the high concrete bridge that I’d passed beneath only a moment before, I looked downriver, where the mansions of Sequoyah Hills lined the right-hand bank. I lived in Sequoyah, but my house-tucked into an incongruously modest little block of bungalows and ranchers-was probably worth one-tenth the price of these riverfront villas. I’d had the chance, when I first started teaching at UT, to buy one of the big houses, but the price-fifty-five thousand dollars-seemed astronomical at the time, at least on a professor’s salary. Twenty years later that house was worth at least a million, maybe more. The ones lining the waterfront were even more expensive. “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about barge traffic washing away my yard,” I said out loud, then laughed at myself. “Okay, Brockton, not only are you talking to yourself, but what you’re saying is a total crock.”
UT Hospital and the hills behind the Body Farm reared up on my left. On my right a UT cattle farm-green pastures dotted with black-and-white Holsteins-nestled in the big bend of the river. It was the place where the Tennessee first curved southward, starting its serpentine slide toward the Gulf of Mexico, sixteen hundred meandering miles away.
Acting on a sudden impulse, I veered off at the Cherokee Trail exit-the exit for the medical center-and threaded under the highway and around to the back corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot. We’d received a donated body several weeks before, and I remembered a note in the chart indicating that the donor-a man in his seventies-had undergone double knee replacement within the past two years. That made his knees newer than any I’d dug out of the boxes in the skeletal collection, and I had a sudden hankering to see them.
I fo
und him just off the main trail curving up into the woods and toward the river. He lay on his back near a fallen tree trunk, his skull detached and slightly downhill from his postcranial skeleton. A camera tripod stood nearby, with a black plastic mailbox fastened incongruously to the top. The mailbox was an improvised housing for a night-vision camera; the camera, sheltered by the weatherproof plastic, was connected to a motion sensor, so that when nocturnal carnivores-raccoons and opossums, mainly-came foraging, we could capture their feeding habits. The project was a Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation research, and I’d marveled over some of the photos, which showed cuddly raccoons reaching deep into body cavities to pluck out special delicacies. In the cold, clear light of dawn-actually the scorching, hazy light of high noon-I could see gnaw marks on the cheekbones, the hands, and the feet. But I was more interested at the moment in the hingelike hardware installed where the knees had once been.
I’d had the opportunity during my teaching career to witness two orthopedic surgeries-a hip replacement and a cervical-spine fusion-and I’d come away from both procedures marveling at the combination of precise control and bloody brute force. The neck surgery in particular was an astonishingly choreographed performance by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedist. First they yanked and gouged out three crumbling disks from the patient’s neck, at times reaming within a millimeter of the spinal cord; next they tapped pegs of precisely machined cadaver bone into place between the sagging vertebrae; finally they screwed an arched titanium bracket onto the front of the neck, to buttress the spine while the bones knitted together. As the pair of surgeons drilled and tapped and bolted, I couldn’t help comparing them to cabinetmakers. The hip replacement by comparison was heavy carpentry-sawing off the proximal end of the femur, drilling a hole down into the shaft, and then pounding the stem of the metal prosthesis into the opening.
The body on the hillside-body 67–07, the sixty-seventh donated body of the year 2007-was almost entirely skeletonized after three weeks of decomposition. The metallic knees gleamed dully; faint saw marks were still visible where the arthritic joints had been cut away and removed from his legs. Remarkable, I thought, that people can walk again after having their knees chopped out. “Chopped” was probably not how this man’s surgeon had described the procedure, but as I studied the trauma that had been dealt to the bones, the drastic verb seemed to fit.
My reverie was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter buzzing low over the treetops. The air ambulances of LifeStar often passed directly over the Body Farm on their way to and from the hospital’s helipad, but this chopper, I realized, wasn’t flying a typical approach. The pitch of the rotor blades seemed steep and urgent, and the aircraft wheeled and banked abruptly, repeatedly. A siren-then two, then more-screamed toward the hospital, and a second helicopter joined the cacophony.
Over the rising din I suddenly heard my name. “Dr. Brockton! Dr. B., where are you?” It was Miranda, and as she called me, I heard something I’d never expected to hear from Miranda Lovelady: I heard fear.
“Bill!” shouted a man’s voice, and I saw Art Bohanan running toward me, Miranda two steps behind. Art’s face was flushed, his eyes were as focused as lasers, and his weapon was drawn.
“What on earth?!”
Art said only a few words, but when I heard the fourth one, I felt my knees go weak.
“Garland Hamilton just escaped,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
ART GRABBED ONE OF MY ARMS AND MIRANDA grabbed the other, and they practically dragged me down the hill, through the clearing, and out the gate of the Body Farm. Miranda paused just long enough to close the gates and snap the padlocks shut, while Art led me to my truck, peering inside and even underneath before allowing me to get in.
Once Miranda was in her car, Art hustled into his unmarked sedan, hit the siren, and switched on the blue lights hidden inside the grille. With Miranda’s Jetta in the rear, Art led us out of the hospital complex in a haze of smoking tires. As we careened onto Cherokee Trail, headed for Alcoa Highway, half a dozen police vehicles-KPD, Knox County Sheriff’s Office, and Tennessee Highway Patrol-screamed past in the opposite direction.
Five minutes later Art, Miranda, and I surveyed one another glumly across my desk beneath Neyland Stadium. “How did this happen?” I said. “Where? When? With his trial coming up, I’d have thought Hamilton would be watched like a hawk.”
Art sighed. “You and me both.”
“Was he in the Knox County Detention Center? Hell, they’ve got cameras by the hundreds out there-I don’t see how a prisoner could pick his nose without three cameras recording the boogers for posterity.”
He shook his head. “The reason we hustled you away from the Farm so fast is that he was only a stone’s throw away when he escaped.” I stared at Art uncomprehendingly. “He was in the ER at UT Hospital. They’d rushed him there after he went into convulsions,” Art said. “Or appeared to go into convulsions. As they were wheeling him into the ER, he jumped off the gurney and ran into a stairwell.”
“Damn it,” I said, “that’s the worst possible place for him to get loose. He knows every nook and cranny of that hospital. If they didn’t have it locked down in sixty seconds, he could have taken a hundred ways out.”
“They didn’t have it locked down in sixty seconds,” Art said.
I didn’t need him to tell me that. The chorus of helicopter rotors and police sirens told me Hamilton had gotten away. What I didn’t know was where he’d go and what he’d do: lie low, slip away, or try again to kill me?
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, I was still in shock. I’d spent a bad night, followed by a dismal day and an even more wretched night. Every sudden noise made me jump, and the only thing worse than the sound of the phone ringing was the sound of it not ringing-the sound of Hamilton slipping silently away.
A security camera showed that Hamilton had ducked out through the back door of the Forensic Center only minutes after leaping off the gurney. In fact, he was already outside before the first KPD units were dispatched toward the hospital. Somewhere between the ER and the Forensic Center’s exit, he’d tugged on a pair of scrubs and a surgical mask. One of the pathology residents later told police that he thought he’d glimpsed Hamilton in the hallway, but he’d dismissed the notion, since he knew-or thought he knew-that Hamilton was in custody.
Once beyond the loading-dock camera’s field of view, Hamilton had vanished completely. It was possible he’d stowed away in the back of a linen truck or one of the dozens of other service vehicles entering and exiting the hospital complex daily. It was also possible he’d simply walked across a parking lot and slipped into the woods that bordered the grounds on the south and the east. Two days of searching-by tracking dogs, by helicopters, and by dozens of KPD officers, Knox County deputies, and TBI agents-had failed to turn up any leads.
Hamilton’s escape was the lead story in the Knoxville News Sentinel and on every local TV station. His picture and Jess’s and mine were prominently featured, and my house was once more besieged with reporters clamoring for sound bites describing how it felt to know that the man who’d killed Jess and tried to kill me was on the loose. The only consolation to the media frenzy was that if Hamilton showed up within a mile of my house, he’d be captured instantly, at least on videotape, by several news crews. The two days after his escape were among my life’s lowest points-surpassed only by Kathleen’s death, Jess’s murder, and my arrest.
The third day I rose from the dead, or at least from the deadly paralysis of spirit that had gripped me. The only way to get my mind off Hamilton, I realized that day, was to get it on something else. One such something, I decided, could be unraveling Burt DeVriess’s questions about his Aunt Jean’s cremation.
I called Helen Taylor at East Tennessee Cremation and apologized for standing her up two days before. “If you’re still willing to show me around, I’d appreciate it, but if you don’t want to bother at this point, I understand.”
She assured me she’d not taken
offense-she’d seen me on the news after Hamilton escaped-and invited me to come out as soon as I could.
“Is thirty minutes too soon?” I asked.
“Thirty minutes is fine,” she said.
I resumed the journey I’d begun two days before.
East Tennessee Cremation occupied a low, modest building on a grassy corner at the Rockford industrial park’s entrance. Facing it, across the street, was a prefab metal warehouse identified as S AND S SERVICES. The crematorium was no bigger than a two-car garage and not much fancier, the owners apparently seeing no need to indulge in the frilly sentiment or veneered stateliness of funeral homes. I liked the unpretentious plainness-it was fitting, I decided, for a place that took in dead bodies, laid them in an incinerator of sorts, and burned them down to inorganic minerals. The building had a low L on one side, which housed an office with a glass door and double-hung windows. The business part of the building-the part in the higher, cinder-block portion-had a big roll-up garage door on the front end and two steel exhaust stacks on the other. The building had no sign of any kind; it was the stacks-their tops a swirl of bluish black that bespoke extreme heat-that told me I’d found the crematorium.
I knocked on the glass storm door, but I didn’t get an answer, so I peered inside. The office looked vacant. The door was unlocked, so I stuck my head in and called, “Hello? Ms. Taylor?”
From around a corner, in the garage-looking part of the building, I heard a muffled female voice say, “I’ll be right there.”
A pleasant, fiftyish woman emerged. Dressed in a gray pantsuit and black pumps, she would have looked at home in a bank or real-estate office, except for the work gloves she wore-the leather-and-canvas kind favored by carpenters and farmers. She took off one glove and held out a hand.
“You must be Dr. Brockton,” she said. “I’m Helen Taylor. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“I kept you waiting for two days,” I said, “so you’ve still got a ways to go before you need to apologize. Thanks for agreeing to give me a look around.” I shook her hand. She had a firm grip and an open, direct gaze that I liked. For some reason, maybe because so many funeral directors tended to look deferentially downward, I hadn’t expected someone so forthright.
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