The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  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.”

  “So you think there’s another body or two up near to the edge of the property?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see where this bulldozer track leads.”

  Beyond the hearse the dirt track sliced through the woods toward where I guessed the house or the crematorium might be. I headed the opposite way. Before long I got another whiff of decomposition coming from somewhere ahead. I followed my nose along the red-dirt road, and in less than a minute, in an area where the road ended in a broader circle, I walked into the most surreal scene of my life.

  It was as if I’d stumbled into a massacre from Bosnia or Rwanda or Iraq—someplace where ethnic cleansing or mass murder had been unleashed. Bodies—dozens of bodies—lay half hidden in the woods on either side of the bulldozed circle. Some were partially buried in trenches; others were tucked behind trees; still others lay beneath bulldozed brush piles.

  “This is very, very creepy,” said Art.

  “If we were anyplace other than the grounds of a crematorium,” I said, “I’d swear we’d just discovered the world’s worst serial killer. Instead I’m thinking we just discovered the world’s worst crematorium.”

  Some of the corpses were missing arms and legs, and I noticed that a number of the long bones had been reduced to shafts, their ends gnawed away. A few of the bodies were nude, but most wore the tattered remains of what appeared to be church clothes. Funeral clothes. Art and I did a quick count of the bodies ranged around the circle. He counted eighty-six; I counted eighty-eight.

  “You think this is it,” he asked, “or do you want to look around some more?”

  “What difference would it make,” I said, “if we found ten or twenty or even fifty more? Let’s get out of here while the getting’s good.”

  Art nodded, and we began retracing our steps back through the woods. We were picking our way through the blackberry bushes when I heard a dog baying somewhere down the gravel drive. Then I heard a chorus of baying, from a chorus of dogs.

  “I think the getting just got less good,” said Art.

  We tore through the blackberry bushes and sprinted up the gravel driveway, clearing the gate just as a pack of dogs leaped against the inside of the bars. Art fished the Taser from his left ankle and handed it to me, then pulled a pistol from his right ankle. “Press the end against the dog and hold the trigger for two seconds,” he said, without offering any guidance on how to persuade the dog not to rip my throat out during those two seconds. It was difficult to be sure, for all the leaping and lunging, but I counted seven or eight dogs. If they all managed to leap the gate, either Art or I would be dog food. But the dogs stayed on the inside, milling and snarling. We got into the truck and hightailed it for U.S. 27. It wasn’t until we’d reached the Tennessee border that either of us spoke.

  “I guess we should call the law,” said Art.

  “You are the law,” I pointed out. “Didn’t they make you a U.S. marshal when you started tracking down Internet predators?”

  “They did,” he said, “but I’ve only got arrest powers in Tennessee.”

  “Well, damn,” I said. “You reckon we can persuade Mr. Littlejohn to haul those bodies across the state line so you can arrest him?”

  “Brilliant idea,” he said. “I’ll let you be the one to climb back over that gate, make friends with the nice doggies, and present that plan.” He flipped open his cell phone. “I think
it’s time to call the friendly neighborhood sheriff.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “What if Littlejohn’s in cahoots with the friendly neighborhood sheriff? Remember Cooke County.” Art and I had nearly perished in the mountainous county, not once but twice, both times at the hands of corrupt sheriff’s deputies. “If the sheriff’s in this guy’s pocket, we’d just be giving him a heads-up.”

  “O ye of little faith,” Art said. “Seriously, what do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know yet; let me sleep on it,” I said. “All those folks are already dead. They’re not going to get any deader if we wait twenty-four hours before we call the law.”

  We rode the rest of the way back to Knoxville in silence.

  AFTER I DROPPED Art at KPD headquarters, I called Jeff’s house. Jenny answered the phone. “Hey,” I said, “mind if I invite myself over again?”

  “I’d mind if you didn’t,” she said. “Jeff’s coaching Walker’s T-ball practice right now, and I’m dashing to pick up Tyler from his baseball practice, but we’ll all be back under one roof in half an hour. I hope.”

  “How ’bout I pick up some Buddy’s barbecue?”

  “You willing to bring some coleslaw and potato salad and baked beans to the table, too? Oh, and a bag of ice?”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” I said, “but okay, deal.”

  “What about some batter-dipped, deep-fried corn on the cob?”

  “They have deep-fried corn on the cob at Buddy’s?”

  “Tragically, no,” she said. “Only at Sullivan’s in Rocky Hill. Breaks my heart I can’t get it anywhere out this way. My consumption’s fallen way off since we moved to Farragut.”

  “I’m not sure I believe in deep-fried corn on the cob,” I said.

  “Sounds like gilding the lily to me.”

  “You’ve never had it?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “If you’d had it, you’d definitely remember,” she said. “It’s practically a religious experience. Better than sex.”

  “Remind me to have a talk with Jeff,” I said. “Sounds like he could use some pointers.”

  “He does all right,” she said. “But deep-fried corn—that’s some pretty stiff competition.”

  “No pun intended, I hope.”

  She laughed. “No pun intended.”

  “Seriously, you’ve got a desperate craving for fried corn?”

  “I do,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be good by the time you got out here with it. It’s gotta be fresh from the grease, so the batter’s still crunchy.”

  “Sounds like you’ve made a careful study of this,” I said.

  “I have done years of research on Sullivan’s deep-fried corn,” she said. “I should have a Ph.D. in food science, I’ve done so much research. I’ve probably eaten my weight in deep-fried corn by now. That’s one reason I still run—to burn off the calories. Otherwise I’d weigh four hundred pounds by now.”

  “Who knew?” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”

  “It will change your life,” she said. “Take me with you when you go. I want to see the look on your face when you taste it for the first time.”

  “You’ll be sitting right across the table when that hot grease scorches my lips,” I said.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  An hour later Jeff and Jenny’s kitchen was a debris field. The pine trestle table and the tiled floor beneath were strewn with sandwich wrappers, plastic forks, soggy Chinet plates, spilled drinks, melting ice, and stray bits of food: pulled pork, slaw, potato salad, and baked beans. The only thing missing was a pile of ragged corncobs. “Looks like somebody had a food fight in here,” I said.

  “Doesn’t take long to demolish dinner after ball practice,” said Jeff.

  “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when they’re both teenagers,” said Jenny. “We’ll probably need to contract with a wholesale food distributor to keep them fed.”

  After dinner the boys spun off to watch a Disney movie before baths and bedtime. As the sounds of singing squirrels and chipmunks wafted through from the living room, I described what Art and I had seen in the Georgia woods earlier in the day. Jeff and Jenny stared in astonishment.

  “Did you call the cops yet?” Jeff asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m not sure which cops to call, or even what crime’s been committed—if any. I don’t think it’s murder. Maybe just first-degree sorriness.”

  “Isn’t there some law against desecrating corpses?” asked Jenny.

  “There is,” I said, “but I don’t know if dumping them in the woods counts as desecrating them. I’ll call Grease—I mean, Mr. DeVriess—first thing Monday morning. He’s the one who got me into this, and he’s a lawyer. Maybe he can help me figure out what to do.”

  A short time and some chitchat later, I headed home to bed, feeling more connected with the world of the living than I’d felt twelve hours before, surrounded by corpses in the Georgia woods.

  But I hadn’t reckoned on what awaited me in my house: emptiness and the looming menace of Garland Hamilton. Nature really does abhor a vacuum, and it wasn’t long before the voids in my house and my heart began to fill with sadness, loneliness, fear, and regrets.

  I wasn’t sure that I could have lived my life any differently or altered its main events. But I was pretty sure I could have stayed with Jeff and Jenny another hour or two. And I was pretty sure that would’ve been better than this.

  CHAPTER 16

  “GOOD MORNING,” CHIRPED THE VOICE AT THE OTHER end of the phone. “Mr. DeVriess’s office.”

  “Good morning, Chloe. It’s Dr. Brockton.”

  “Hi there. How was your weekend?”

  “Let’s call it interesting,” I said. “Very interesting. How was yours?”

  “Also interesting,” she said. “I tried speed dating.”

  “Speed dating? What’s that?”

  “You sign up and go meet a bunch of other people who are looking to meet Mr. or Ms. Right, and you spend five minutes apiece interviewing a bunch of them.”

  “Five minutes? And the point of that is what, exactly?”

  “It gives you a chance to see whether you like somebody, without the pressure of a fix-up or an actual date,” she said. “Actually being out with them, you know? If you like them, you give them your phone number. If you don’t, you say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ you shake their hand, and you move on.”

  “What if they give you their phone number and you don’t really want it?”

  “Then you toss it in the trash when you get home,” she said.

  “What if they ask for your number and you don’t want to give it to them?”

  “Then you smile sweetly and say, ‘I don’t think so.’ Look, I didn’t say it was the perfect system,” she said. “I only said it was interesting.”

  “Just curious.” I laughed. “And did you meet the future Mr. Right?”

  “As if,” she said, which I took to mean she hadn’t. “But I did meet a guy who could be Mr. Right Now. A guy who might be a good movie buddy till the real deal comes along.”

  “Speed dating,” I marveled. “It’s a whole new world out there. Any old coots like me shuffling amidst the speed daters?”

  “Ha—you will never be an old coot,” she said. “But it did tend to be a youngish crowd. Which is not to say you shouldn’t try it.”

  “Me? I don’t think so, Chloe. I’m just curious about the anthropology of it,” I said.

  “Well, then you should sign up sometime and go study the phenomenon firsthand.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “Could I talk to Burt?”

  “Sorry, he’s not here—he’ll be in court all day. His first trial in a month. If it’s urgent, I can try to get him a message, though.”

  “No, I reckon it’s not urgent,” I said. “They’re not going to get any deader.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, Chloe, just talking to myself t
here. I was going to ask his advice on something, but I’ll figure it out myself.”

  After I hung up and thought awhile, I opened my address book to the section headed “F” and dialed another call.

  “Hello, you’ve reached the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Knoxville Division,” announced the woman’s voice in my ear. “If you know your party’s extension, you can dial it at any time.” I did not know my party’s extension, so I pressed 2, then punched in P, R, I, and C.

  “This is Special Agent Price.” I tried to recall her first name from our meetings about official corruption in Cooke County—not that I would ever be on a first-name basis with Price, who was a study in cool, brisk efficiency. Andrea? No, not Andrea, but something along those lines.

  “Hello there, Special Agent Price. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, from UT.”

  “Ah, Dr. Brockton. Are you calling to plead guilty to gambling on cockfights, Dr. Brockton?”

  I laughed. “Not exactly.” Price had sent an undercover FBI agent to gather evidence against a massive cockfighting operation in Cooke County the prior year. Quite by accident, I had found myself an inadvertent spectator as the roosters battled to their bloody deaths. During my brief glimpse at the seamy subculture of cockfighting, I had nearly thrown up on Price’s undercover agent. “I admit to second-degree spectating and first-degree nausea, but I did not gamble.”

  “You sound like Bill Clinton talking about marijuana,” she said. “Or sex. What can I do for you, Dr. Brockton?”

  “How much do you know about cremation?”

  “Do you need help figuring out your funeral arrangements? Or is this a quiz?”

  She sounded edgy and tough. Not a bad quality in a federal agent, I realized. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be cryptic. Suppose there were a crematorium that wasn’t doing its job.” I paused. She waited. I paused some more. Finally she gave up, unwilling to waste any more time.

  “Wasn’t doing its job? What does that mean?”

  “Well, what’s a crematorium’s job?”

  “Incinerating bodies,” she snapped. “What’s your point here, Doctor? This is what you mean by trying not to be cryptic?”