The Devil's Bones bf-3

by Jefferson Bass

  “Shucks, I reckon,” she mocked. “I’ll call you when I get something. Or when I strike out.”

  “You never strike out,” I said. By the time the door whammed shut behind me, the keys were already clattering.

  MY OFFICE phone rang an hour later. Miranda had dug deep into her bag of Google tricks without finding any trace of Trinity Crematorium. She’d also tried AnyWho.com and MapQuest, she said, in a vain effort to track down an address or phone number. “And I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked, to know that Rock Spring, Georgia, doesn’t have an online database of property-tax records.” She’d hit a stone wall with the records clerk in the county courthouse but finally hit pay dirt by calling the post office and pretending to be a UPS driver in need of help finding the Littlejohn house. “And,” she announced triumphantly, “I got a phone number.”

  “Miranda,” I said, “you are a Jedi master of skullduggery.”

  But if I thought my quest was over, I was wrong. When I dialed the number she gave me, a machine answered. There was no greeting or announcement, just a beep. I hadn’t mentally prepared a message, so I hung up. After collecting my thoughts, I called back, ready to say who I was and simply ask for a return call. Once again I was taken by surprise. “Hello,” said a flat, guarded male voice.

  “Oh, hello,” I said. “Is this Delbert Littlejohn?”

  There was a pause. “He’s not available right now. Who’s this?”

  “My name is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I began. “I’m a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee. I’ve been asked to take a look at some cremains that came from your crematorium-a Tennessee woman named Jean DeVriess. I’m hoping-”

  The line went dead. I hit redial, and I got the machine again. I hung up and tried again; again I got the machine. This time I left my name and number. I called once more, and this time the line was busy-or the phone was off the hook.

  My next call was to Burt DeVriess. I told Burt about Miranda’s near-fruitless research and my unsuccessful phone calls. “This smacks of skullduggery,” I said in conclusion. I liked the way it sounded; I could see why Miranda had grinned as she’d said it.

  “You’re right,” he said, “sounds like this place is screwing people over.”

  Damn, I thought, how’d he know that?

  “You willing to keep digging, Doc? Or duggering, or whatever?”

  “Keep digging how, Burt?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Doc-you’re the one who’s the forensic genius. Maybe go down there, poke around some, see what you stir up?”

  I considered the request. I could make a six-hour round-trip to the boonies of Georgia, not knowing if I’d fare any better in person than I’d fared on the phone…or I could sit around Knoxville waiting for the phone to ring with news about the search for Garland Hamilton.

  “I’ll go dugger around,” I said.

  “Might be a good idea to take somebody with you,” he said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, “but Miranda might find it interesting.”

  “I was thinking maybe somebody who could watch your back,” he said.

  “You’re thinking it might be dangerous?”

  “You never know,” he said, “seeing as how it smacks of skullduggery and all.”

  ART DIDN’T hesitate when I asked if he’d be willing to accompany me to Georgia. “When you want to go?”

  “Whenever you can,” I said. “I was supposed to be testifying this week at Garland Hamilton’s trial, but that particular engagement seems to have been postponed for now. And UT doesn’t start fall classes for another couple weeks. How short a leash are you on with this Internet assignment?”

  “If we left early in the morning and could get back by late afternoon, I can probably swing it,” he said. “The chat rooms don’t start heating up till around three or four, and they stay pretty lively till bedtime. Tiffany needs to be in school all day anyhow-that’s where innocent little fourteen-year-olds are supposed to be between eight and three-thirty. Unless it’s the weekend, and then they’re sleeping late.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “How ’bout I pick you up around six-thirty? That would put us down there around eight.”

  “How ’bout five-thirty,” he said, “so we’ve got time to grab breakfast at a Cracker Barrel down Chattanooga way?”

  “Deal,” I said. “I’ll buy.”

  “I think your buddy Grease should pick up the tab.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “Grease’ll buy.”

  “Be good for you to get out of town for a day,” he said, “and away from the Hamilton stuff.”

  He was right about that, too.

  CHAPTER 14

  FRIDAY MORNING DAWNED HOT AND BRIGHT, AND BY the time it dawned, Art and I had been on the road for an hour already. At seven we bailed off the interstate at the Ooltewah exit, about ten miles north of Chattanooga. The acres of asphalt outside Cracker Barrel were virtually empty.

  “This parking lot is nearly as big as Neyland Stadium’s,” I said.

  “An hour from now, it’ll be full,” said Art. “You’d have to wait thirty minutes to get a table.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t have to?”

  “Wouldn’t wait,” I clarified. “I love the food here. Great breakfast, great vegetables. But I’m not willing to wait half an hour to get it.”

  “Me neither,” said Art. “I might be, though, if they’d ever get the biscuits right.”

  “You’re boycotting them over their biscuits?”

  “Not boycotting, exactly,” he said, “but less likely to fight the crowd on account of ’em. You’d think a place that prides itself on southern country cooking would make a decent biscuit, but theirs are sorry. Heavy and doughy, too much baking powder, or maybe they’re even using Bisquick. The ones at Hardee’s are ten times better. Golden and crispy on the outside, light as air on the inside.”

  “Hardee’s does make a better biscuit,” I agreed. “We should point that out to Cracker Barrel. In the spirit of constructive criticism, of course.”

  “I have,” he squawked. “I do. Every blessed time I eat at a Cracker Barrel, I fill out one of those customer-comment cards. ‘Your biscuits are sorry,’ I say.”

  “That’s your idea of constructive criticism?”

  “It gets more constructive after that. ‘Make better biscuits,’ I tell ’em. ‘Hire a biscuit maker from Hardee’s.’ You’d think they’d get the message. But they never do-not unless they’ve been hiring folks from Hardee’s and then making them follow the same sorry Cracker Barrel biscuit recipe. I’ve pretty much given up now. Always get the corn muffins instead.”

  “The corn muffins aren’t bad,” I said.

  “They’re not,” he said, “but at breakfast you really want a good biscuit. And anyhow, you’d think-”

  “Yeah, you’d think,” I said. “This world is a vale of tears, Art-rife with injustice and disappointment.”

  “And sorry biscuits,” he said.

  The peach pancakes were delicious, and the smoked sausage was worth every deadly glob of cholesterol. But I couldn’t help wishing for a decent biscuit, soaked in butter and honey, for dessert. I reached for the customer-comment card and wrote. Art did the same.

  AFTER CLIMBING East Ridge and dropping down into the broad valley that cradled Chattanooga, we took the Rossville Boulevard exit and headed south on U.S. 27, through the town of Fort Oglethorpe and then the well-tended lawns and woods of Chickamauga Battlefield, where the Army of the Confederacy had won a stunning victory, only to lose the bigger prizes of Chattanooga and then Atlanta not long afterward. South of Chickamauga the highway ran mostly straight and flat through stretches of pinewoods and pastures, punctuated by service stations, hair salons, and Baptist churches. We passed the crossroads of East Turnipseed and West Turnipseed roads, and a few miles beyond those we turned off the highway onto the blacktop road Miranda had marked o
n the map. The road was a lane and a half wide, with no centerline. Art and I both watched for a crematorium sign, but there wasn’t any. When we got to the end of the road, I knew we’d missed it. I turned and retraced the blacktop route, partly because I was determined to find the place and partly because there was no other way back to civilization.

  About a quarter mile after doubling back, I saw a gravel driveway on the left. The drive was blocked with a metal farm gate, the kind that resembles a ladder that’s four feet high and ten feet wide, the rungs made of tubular galvanized steel. A stout chain and padlock fastened the gate to a fat wooden fence post. A battered mailbox was nailed to the top of the post, and when I looked closely, I made out the name LITTLEJOHN in small, hand-painted letters.

  Fastened to the posts at both ends of the gate were large No Trespassing signs. Underneath each of those was another sign, adding Private Property. Under each of those was one that ordered Keep Out.

  “Not a very welcoming establishment,” I said to Art.

  I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road, not that there was much risk of traffic, as best I could tell. Art and I clambered out and stood at the gate, peering down a tunnel of trees and underbrush lining the gravel drive. We could see about fifty yards down the narrow drive before it entered a gradual curve and the view was blocked by a wall of trees. I listened for sounds of human activity, but all I could hear was the chittering of cicadas in the summer heat.

  “Hello,” I called, tentatively at first. When I got no answer, I called again, louder. “Hello there. Can you hear me? Anybody there?” Still no response. I tried once more, this time at the top of my lungs. Nothing. I went to the truck, leaned in the open window, and honked the horn three times. I waited a minute, then laid on it awhile.

  “I could be wrong,” said Art finally, “but I’m thinking either they’re not home or they don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Could be they’re deaf,” I said. I studied the six signs posted on either side of the gate. All six encouraged me not to enter the property, but I’d driven three hours to get here and I was seeking answers to what I considered disturbing questions. I looked at Art. “Shall we?”

  “Age before beauty,” he said, waving me toward the gate. Using the bars of the gate as a ladder, I climbed over, turned around, and descended the other side.

  My foot had scarcely touched the ground when I heard a low snarling sound. I spun. Rocketing down the driveway toward me, mouth agape and teeth bared, was the biggest, meanest-looking pit bull I’d ever seen. He moved remarkably fast for such a big animal, and I found myself moving with surprising swiftness, too, back up the bars of the gate, over the top, and down the other side. I’d just removed my hands from the top bar when a pair of jaws snapped shut like a bear trap, an inch away from my fingers. The dog was too big to get more than his muzzle through the bars, but that didn’t stop him from lunging and snapping. I remembered a documentary I’d seen once on Animal Planet, in which a shark attacked the bars of a protective cage so ferociously that it gradually began bending the bars aside, nearly consuming the human quivering inside. Fortunately, this gate was made of sterner stuff; it rattled and strained against the chain, but it held.

  Eventually the dog’s fury subsided a bit, but not the sense of menace it conveyed, and I decided we’d reached an impasse. I suspected that someone had let him out in response to my honking and calling, since he’d probably have arrived considerably sooner if he’d already been outdoors on guard duty. “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said. “Sorry we made the trip for nothing.” I fished out my handkerchief and mopped my face and neck. Some of the sweat probably came from the adrenaline rush the dog had provoked, but the morning was already remarkably hot. “Let’s stop at the nearest gas station and get a cold drink.”

  Just as I said it, I felt the air stir a bit, whispering from the south-from the woods inside the fence. When it did, I caught a whiff of something familiar, and for a moment I thought I’d had some lapse in consciousness-a blackout that had lasted until I was back in Knoxville, back behind the UT Medical Center. When I realized my mistake, the hairs on my arms and my neck stood up, and I felt a jolt like electricity shoot through me. I was inhaling the stench of death-wholesale human death, Body Farm scale of death-not in Tennessee but here in Georgia, as it drifted lazily across the gate of the Trinity Crematorium.

  CHAPTER 15

  “I THINK HIS BARK IS WORSE THAN HIS BITE,” ART said. He took a step toward the gate, and the dog lunged at him, roaring and snapping.

  “I think we can’t afford to test your theory,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. He bent down and fiddled with the left leg of his pants, and when he straightened up, I saw a gun in his right hand. He squatted down and aimed through the bars of the gate. “Jesus, Art, you can’t just shoot-” I began, but then I saw his finger twitch. Instead of a bang, I heard a loud click; for an instant I thought the gun had misfired, but then the dog crumpled to a twitching heap in the gravel. A pair of thin wires ran from the dog’s body back to the barrel of the weapon.

  “What the hell…?!”

  “Taser,” said Art. “Think of me as Captain Kirk from Star Trek, with my phaser set to stun.”

  I stared at the dog sprawled out in the road. “You sure you had that on stun?”

  He glanced down at the Taser, which had a fat, round barrel, black with yellow markings-like some high-voltage yellow jacket. “Oops,” he said, then, “No, just kidding. It’s always on stun. Fifty thousand volts’ worth of stun.”

  “How long will he be out?”

  “Don’t know,” said Art. “Never used one on a dog before. Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe.” He scaled the gate and dropped to the other side. “You coming?”

  “Isn’t he gonna come after us again when he wakes up?”

  “Only if he’s a really dumb dog,” Art chuckled. “And if he does, I’ve got fifty more shots.” He frowned. “Of course, having fired my one set of barbs, I have to actually hold this gizmo against him for the next fifty shots. If he hasn’t learned by then, he’s got big problems.”

  “If he comes after us fifty-one more times, we’ve got bigger problems than he does,” I reasoned.

  “If he comes after us fifty-one times, we switch to Plan B,” Art said, patting his right ankle. He sniffed the air, like a hound seeking a rabbit. “Any guess where that aroma’s coming from?”

  “Seems like the breeze is blowing from over that way,” I said, pointing slightly to the left of the gravel road, on a tangent that would take us into the woods.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I hope you put on tick repellent before you left home.”

  “I did,” I said. “Did you?”

  “Oops,” he said again, scratching his left thigh.

  The going was slow at first, as we had to tread and trample our way through a tangle of blackberry bushes lining the road. The leaves hung heavy and orange, laden with dust from the road. Here and there I spotted shriveled berries. “Too bad we weren’t here six weeks ago,” I said. “This is a pretty good patch. We could’ve picked enough for a cobbler.”

  “Maybe if we make friends with the people who own that nice doggy,” Art said, “they’ll let us come back next year, during blackberry season.”

  Once we were beneath the shade of the forest canopy, the blackberries ended and the underbrush thinned, leaving us in a pine thicket with widely spaced trunks and a carpet of needles on the floor.

  About a hundred yards in, I glimpsed what looked to be a narrow dirt track bulldozed through the woods. I touched Art’s arm and nodded in its direction. He changed course, heading for it at a brisk stride, and I followed. When we reached it, I saw multiple sets of tracks, some made by rubber tires, others by a tracked vehicle-a bulldozer or Bobcat. I looked in both directions and spied a rusting bulldozer tucked into a gap in the trees. Just beyond it, half hidden by the yellow dozer, I saw the boxy back end of a black vehicle. I pointed.

  “Is
that what I think it is?” Art asked.

  “If you think it’s a hearse,” I said.

  We passed the dozer, and sure enough, tucked in beside it was a black Cadillac hearse. I’d seen a lot of hearses in my day, but this one was the only one I’d ever seen that was covered with dust and pocked with rust. All four tires were flat, and the windows were nearly opaque with grime.

  I waved off a fly that was buzzing around my head, and then another, and another. I noticed Art swatting the air, too. Then I noticed that the entire vehicle was surrounded by flies. I walked to the back of the vehicle, leaned close, and took a sniff, and when I did, I knew what the flies had come for. I tried the latch on the back door, found it unlocked, and pulled it open. The opening door unleashed a wave of odor so strong it almost knocked me down, carried on the wings of thousands of blowflies. Inside the back of the hearse, stacked one atop the other, were half a dozen decaying corpses.

  The bodies on the bottom were virtually skeletonized; the ones on top still had tissue on the bones, and I knew-in this heat, with all these flies-that the uppermost bodies couldn’t have been here nearly as long as the hearse had been collecting dust and rust and blowflies. They had to be recent additions. Beneath the bodies the floor of the hearse glistened with black, greasy goo, the volatile fatty acids leaching out of the bodies as they decomposed. A writhing mass of maggots covered the entire mess.

  Art had stepped away from the vehicle as soon as I opened it, and as the fumes roiled out, he continued to backpedal. “Woof,” he said. “I guess we know now what we were smelling, huh?”

  “I guess so,” I said, but then an unsettling thought occurred to me. “Actually, I’m not so sure.” He looked puzzled. “This is part of what we smelled,” I explained, “but I don’t see how this could account for all the smell. The vehicle was closed, right?” He nodded uneasily. “And we didn’t notice a lot of odor till I opened it.”