The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  “Anything else on your wish list?”

  “This might be nearly as difficult to arrange,” I said, “but if you can’t bring the mountain of bodies to Mohammed, how about if Mohammed comes down to the mountain? I’d love to take a quick look around. Not just for curiosity,” I hastened to add. “You know the woman whose bogus cremains caused me to start poking around in the woods? I’m wondering if you’d be able and willing to let me take a quick look for her.” I was pretty sure Burt’s Aunt Jean was one of the hundreds of bodies chilling in those refrigerated trailers, but it might be months before Sean got to her. To him she was just one among hundreds, but to me—and to Grease, who’d asked whether I could get into the makeshift morgue and find her fast—she was a priority.

  “Ah,” he said. “I understand. I’d certainly have no problem with that. But it’s not my call. This is the highest-profile case anybody around here can remember, and the director and the public-affairs people are pretty touchy. So far, access is limited to the GBI, FBI, and DMORT teams. Hell, we even turned away the governor, who wanted to come up and hold a press conference in the woods with that grungy crematorium in the background.” He paused, and in the distance I could hear the hum of refrigeration units, the beep of a truck backing up, and the squawk of a public-address announcement asking somebody or other to report to the command post.

  “Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a shot at least,” I said.

  “Could save you a little time and money,” I added. “If I find her, that’d be one less person for you to ID. One less DNA test to pay for.”

  “Good point,” he said. “We’re at three hundred twenty-seven bodies already, and we haven’t finished searching. Can you maybe help us ID another fifty or sixty?”

  “If I say yes, does that give me a better shot at getting in to look for Aunt Jean?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  “I’d love to pitch in for a week or two,” I said, “but I want to stay close to home until Garland Hamilton’s back in custody. It’s not like I’m out beating the bushes myself, but I do want to stay near the phone.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Dr. Carter was a good M.E.—she worked with us on a couple of cases that crossed jurisdictional lines—and I was sorry to hear she’d been killed.” There was an awkward pause, and then he added, “I was also sorry to hear the police suspected you at first.”

  I appreciated Sean’s sentiments, but I suddenly wished the conversation hadn’t taken this particular turn.

  “Listen, Sean, I bet you’ve got half a dozen people clamoring for you,” I said. “I’d better let you get back to work. Call if you get the okay for me to come down in the next couple days.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  His best shot must have been pretty good, because two days later a Georgia state trooper swung open the gate and waved me into the driveway of the Littlejohn property. The watchdogs inside the fence were gone, replaced by a pack of television crews patrolling the outer perimeter. Several cameramen jogged toward my truck, cameras bobbing on their shoulders, but by the time they reached the gate, I was already crunching down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

  After threading through the pines for a quarter mile, the driveway emerged into a yard the size of a football field. To the left was a pond measuring maybe fifty yards across; to the right was a single-story brick ranch house with a small front porch at the center, framed by two white columns. I’d probably passed a dozen such houses, I realized, flanking the thirty miles of two-lane highway between Chattanooga and here. Next came a small prefab wooden building, roughly ten feet square—the sort of thing that might house a snow-cone stand for a few months in the summer. Beyond that was a big, barnlike shed. Inside, I glimpsed a tractor, a bushhog mowing attachment, a battered old pickup, and—the first indication that this was anything other than an ordinary rural farmstead—a handful of concrete burial vaults.

  The next odd thing I saw, as I passed the shed, was the row of stainless-steel refrigerated trailers parked behind it, their cluster of diesel generators and compressor motors combining to produce a roaring, clattering chorus. From here on, the driveway was lined with police vehicles—county, state, and federal cars, marked and unmarked—plus crime-lab vans and DMORT trucks. The final building was tucked beside a large turnaround area at the end of the drive. This building resembled a dilapidated garage with a rusty metal flue at one end, and I recognized it as a smaller, shabbier cousin of the immaculate crematorium I’d visited in Alcoa. Beside it, I noticed with a jolt, was a huge barbecue grill.

  A woman in a white biohazard suit labeled GBI was headed toward the building, a trowel in one hand, an evidence bag in the other. “Excuse me,” I called, “I’m looking for Sean Richter. Do you know where I might find him?” She glanced at me and seemed surprised to see a middle-aged, bespectacled guy in khakis and a polo shirt.

  “He’s in there,” she said, cocking her head toward the building’s open garage door and the darkness within. She glanced at my feet and seemed about to say something but didn’t. I guessed that my shoes—rubber-soled Doc Martens—had passed muster, showing that I knew enough to leave my dress shoes at home in the closet. I thanked her, and she nodded, then walked around the end of the small building and disappeared behind it, leaving me alone at the entrance.

  After my eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, I found myself face-to-face with a cremation furnace that looked slightly archaic and more than a little sinister. My first thought was, Auschwitz. Unlike the lustrous steel control panels I’d seen at the Alcoa crematorium, this furnace had a massive door of black cast iron bolted directly to the brickwork, with huge hinges to support its weight. The furnace door was open, but the interior was utterly dark. My key ring had a tiny flashlight on it; I fished it out and shone the feeble light into the arched cavity. The firebrick was jagged and crumbling, completely caked with soot and cobwebs.

  Sean was nowhere to be seen, but I heard voices, so I called his name. From somewhere behind the furnace, I heard him answer. “Bill Brockton, is that you?”

  “It is,” I said. “Somebody told me you were in here. When I didn’t see you, I thought maybe you’d crawled into the furnace and burned up.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, emerging from the rear of the cramped building. “Nothing to burn. Guy at the gas company says they stopped taking propane deliveries about eighteen months ago. He actually smelled something the last time he was out there; got suspicious and called the cops. Whoever he talked to told him it was a dead cow and suggested he mind his own business.” So much for “call the locals,” I thought, wishing Agent Price were standing beside me to hear this. “Let’s head on up to the coolers, and we’ll get you started,” he said. “Do you need clothing?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got everything I need in the truck.”

  We trudged up the drive and toward the row of refrigerated trailers. Sean’s white biohazard suit, I noticed, was covered with soot and cobwebs from the filthy building.

  “We’ve divided them by sex,” he shouted over the rising din of the generators. “Males in trailers one and two, females in three and four, and unknowns in five and six.”

  “Roughly how many in each?”

  “Fairly evenly divided,” he yelled. “Not a whole lot of soft tissue on any of these—it’s Georgia and it’s summertime, so anybody who’s been here more than a week or two is pretty well skeletonized or mummified. The clothing seems to have held up better than the tissue, so that helps.”

  I nodded; I had expected as much from the bodies I’d seen.

  A set of bare wooden steps, assembled from fresh lumber, led up to the back of each trailer. I followed Sean up the steps of the third trailer. He unlatched the door, and a blast of frosty air rolled over me, chilling the sweat on 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 ceil
ing. 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 were thinking,” he said. “Guy said the furnace quit working and he just got behind and overwhelmed. But we had a technician check it out, and it seemed to be working fine once we got some propane in the tank. I’m not sure we’ll ever know the whole story. My theory? It’s like those folks out in the country that strew junked cars and washing machines and bedsprings all over their property. Only difference is, this guy wasn’t strewing around broken-down vehicles or appliances—this guy was accumulating broken-down human beings.”

  “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. Almost all her teeth, I corrected myself.

  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 fir
st, 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. Funny how a dead woman’s pie story could bring something to the surface through years of cynicism and bare-knuckles courtroom battles.

  “Okay, Number Ninety-nine,” I said to the rotted corpse on the shelf, “let’s have a look at your upper left lateral incisor.” I leaned down—the body was on the second shelf up from the floor, at waist level—to study the teeth. The head was in shadow, partly from the shelf above and partly from me, making it difficult to see the tooth’s contours, so I reached in and ran the tip of my left index finger over the biting surfaces of the upper teeth. Where the edge of the incisor should have been, I felt a quarter-inch notch instead. I retrieved my key chain again and shone the tiny LED light on the teeth. Years of wear had softened the edges, but half the tooth had broken away. This had to be Aunt Jean, but I needed to make absolutely sure. Unzipping the body bag completely, I folded back the entire C-shaped flap that constituted the bag’s upper surface. I gave the key-chain light another squeeze and swept the faint beam down from the face, down across the shipwreck of the rib cage, across the collapsed abdomen and jutting hipbones, and along the legs. When I got to the knees, I stopped. The light bounced back at me with a dull silvery sheen. Number 99 had two metallic knees—knees made of titanium-662, I felt certain.