Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  A battleship-gray four-drawer file cabinet stood at the end of the counter. Now, I’m no expert on barns, but I didn’t think a file cabinet was standard farm equipment. I ran a finger across the top and saw the track it left in dust. The cabinet was locked. I found a pry bar among the blood-tipped tools and forced the lock to give. The top drawer opened smoothly—army-green hanging files, letter size, with manila folders and plastic tabs for each letter of the alphabet—another example of organization not seen at the crematorium. The drawer was full and went only as far as the letter H. I removed the first file—Abbey, Jeff. Inside, two eight-by-ten-inch satin-finish photos, black-and-white, high-contrast. The man in the photographs looked to be about seventy. He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, feet flat on the floor, forearms rested on unupholstered walnut, black suit, white background, staring into the camera. It looked like something you’d find framed in an antiques store. The guy had a dead stare. I looked closer. A very dead stare. And pale as tilapia.

  I felt a spurt of excitement. I didn’t know where this was heading, but I had a feeling I’d just found one of the corner pieces on the jigsaw. I clicked a couple of pictures and put Abbey’s file back, removed the next one. Abbott, Alana. Two more satin-finish black-and-white photographs, same chair, same positioning, black dress, white pearls, same backdrop, same antiqued finish, another hollow gaze. I photographed the Alana Abbott file too, and pulled out the next one. Abbott, Carl. Same suit Jeff Abbey had been wearing, same chair, same everything. I grabbed the stool from the workstation and pulled it up to the file cabinet, opened up the second drawer and searched for Milner, Faye, the woman whose body had been stacked on top of two others and stuffed in a cardboard coffin and whose empty urn sat on the counter. I took the file folder from the cabinet and opened it. Same positioning and props used in the other photographs of dead women—black dress, pearls, an unoccupied, taped-up set of eyes. Faye Milner didn’t seem as big propped up in the chair as she had last night when the bodies hit the floor. I photographed the contents of her file, then looked for the others: Demetrius Trite and Joseph Wagner. And, finally, Shelia Marlene Wade, Billy Wade’s mother, Brenda’s mother-in-law. They were all there. I remembered Brenda saying they just wanted to know what happened. They needed to be sure Shelia Marlene was at rest. And here she was dressed up in undertaker grim clothing. I photographed her file, looked at the photographs for a few seconds. I don’t know what happens to us after death, but I do know something leaves the eyes. It’s like finding an empty birdcage after the dove has flown away. There’s just nothing there. Shelia Marlene Wade’s eyes were absent of all the things that signify life.

  In the early days of photography, it wasn’t unusual for families with money to have their loved ones posed for this kind of portraiture after they’d passed, especially babies and children. These photographs had the same feel. Creepy as that idea is now, it was seen as a way to honor and remember the dead, a sign of love and respect. I didn’t think Joe Ray or his mother shared that respect for the dead. What I’d found sitting in the ovens last night was evidence enough of that.

  What was going on at the crematorium and in this barn? I thought about Joe Ray and his mother driving into the barn last night. Is that what they do in here at night? Photograph their customers? And then they fill urns with cement? I thought it was interesting that the reception and receiving room at the crematorium were neat and everything out of sight seemed only half done, in some state of neglect. But the barn was different. Here, someone took time to hang things up, make repairs, keep the file cabinet alphabetized. Had Joe Ray Senior and his son had problems? Was this a payback to dear old Dad for some hurt, some perceived injustice or disrespect, trashing his business, turning it into whatever it was now? Rauser would say I was overthinking it. Follow the money. And that would lead me where?

  Outside, chickens milled around, pecking at invisible things in the dirt, looking busy. The chicken coop was open, shelves of wooden crates filled with straw, the sleeping quarters, I assumed. I have no experience with chickens. We don’t get a lot of them on Peachtree Street. I’m okay with that. One of them was checking me out. She was big, red and brown. She walked right up to me, pumped her neck a few times. I didn’t think I deserved the attitude. In the distance, a low rumble of thunder got my attention. I looked up to see clouds gathering to the west. A breeze had started to cool the air. Not necessarily a good thing during midday heating. When a cold front sneaks in from the north and slams into buckets of hot, tropical air pumped up from the Gulf, we’ve got ourselves a thunderstorm that can detonate in one hot second. Georgia in summer can be as violent and unpredictable as our capital city, and even more so in the last few years. Something about El Niño, which apparently especially dislikes the United States. Take a number.

  I used the key I’d found in the barn. It slid perfectly into the padlock. The shank popped up. Big Red crowded next to my ankles. I moved her out of the way gently with my foot as I opened the door. It didn’t go over. She threatened to make a scene, started squawking and flapping. She was a big bird. Kind of freaky. I let her inside simply to shut her up, though having not spent time with a chicken before, I was uneasy about the prospect of the two of us locked up together in a feed shack. Do chickens fly? A scene from a Hitchcock movie ran through my head. I saw bags of chicken feed stacked up. I was in her treat closet, I realized. There was a barrel full of feed with an empty Maxwell House can inside. I scooped some grain out, cracked the door, looked around, then tossed it on the ground outside. Big Red squeezed out clucking, started pushing the other chickens around right away—an extortionist and a control freak. I closed myself back inside.

  Bags of birdseed and cat food and chicken feed were all stacked up on a couple of pallets. The floor was coated in an ashy-gray dust. I moved some seed and animal food around, and there it was—sixty-pound bags of quick-setting masonry cement, ten of them, enough to fill a hell of a lot of urns. For commercial and decorative projects, the bag read. Just add water. It said nothing about its value as a counterfeit replacement for pulverized bone fragments.

  Also stored in the feed closet: cardboard tubes with fifty-foot rolls of two-mil plastic sheeting. I thought about that for a second.

  My phone vibrated. Neil: Truck coming. And Miss Muumuu’s ready for us 2 go.

  I blasted out of the storage room, snapped the padlock back in place, and dashed behind the barn. A few drops of rain hit my arm. I could hear the truck coming around the house. At the closest point, the tree line was fifty, sixty yards away. I’d have to go through an open field to get there, to get to cover. But then I’d be able to work my way around the property to the main road.

  I’m little, but I’m fast. I was a sprinter in high school. Coming out of the blocks in the hundred-meter, I could medal most of the time. You never forget how to accelerate like that once you’ve learned it.

  The path was well worn. The ground was dry. The grass had been flattened by tires. My lungs were letting me know how they felt about cardio without a warm-up at thirtysomething when I tumbled into the packed-down layers of leaves and pine straw on the forest bed.

  The very next thing that hit me was the smell.

  21

  It registers in some deep place. One never forgets. Investigators use different methods for pushing through the stench of decomposing flesh. It is one of the services the living must perform if they want justice for the dead. I had always reminded myself of this at the Bureau when we arrived at an especially horrid crime scene. Me, I try not to fight it. Accepting the organic realities of death makes you a better investigator. I never wanted to have to turn away from a scene, or from a victim.

  I followed my nose, and thirty yards deep into the woods I nearly fell over something encased in leaves and pine straw. I used a stick to gently rake away debris. I found myself staring into the cavernous eye sockets of an eaten-away face—mostly skinless, jawbone intact, a perfectly formed skull. All the parasites and bacteria and animals that
live off decay had done their job. Some of them were inside, doing it still.

  I took a picture, stood there for a few seconds. I was beginning to realize I was inside a crime scene. Was this a disposal site for uncremated bodies?

  Tall pine trees without lower branches made it easy to move through the dense forest. I began to pay closer attention to bumps and mounds in the pine straw. I found an arm, a hand, bones of a skinless leg. I saw tracks, impressions on the straw. Small tires, like those of a wheelbarrow. I followed them and heard the thick buzz of flies before I found a mass grave that the seasons hadn’t had time to blanket with leaves and pine needles. The smell here was stronger, like mill pulp and rotting animal and overripe fruit. It hung on the humid mosquito-infested air. Body parts, piled up and swarming with flies, thousands of them. Human debris was strewn recklessly, arrogantly, as if they were exempt here to the law, to moral borders—bodies without eyes, heads without bodies, arms and legs. When I spotted a leg with long patches of skin removed from the knee up, I was certain for the first time what this gruesome graveyard was all about and why. The Kirkpatricks had performed dark deeds in their barn while their neighbors and friends slept, the community that had entrusted them with the bodies of sisters and children and friends and fathers. The entire horrible scene finally made sense—the two-mil plastic that must have been strung up to prevent spatter, the bloodstained tools, the tissue in the saw chain. They were hacking, dismembering bodies for profit, selling the organs. Follow the money, Rauser always said, and that’s exactly what was happening here. The scene was so massive, the smell so overpowering, the flies and other parasites so thick, I could barely comprehend it.

  I’d seen tissue-trading cases when I was with the Bureau. It’s a brutal practice in a field where safeguards like tracking and oversight have not caught up to the trafficking. Illegal tissue brokers don’t have an ethics issue when it comes to selling improperly harvested body parts. Death certificates, origin and source certificates can be faked so that tissue banks don’t know when they’re buying diseased organs from decomposing bodies. Larry Quinn and Neil and I had laughed about the chicken feed in the urn when he called to offer me this job. I didn’t feel like laughing now.

  I should have called this in immediately, but the investigator in me wanted to do what I’d been hired to do first. I moved carefully through the woods, trying to disturb as little as possible, getting what ghastly photos I could. I found more disposal sites. Each one made it seem less real. By the time I attached a couple of photographs of the carnage to an email for Quinn, my spirits were somewhere in my boots.

  My phone jiggled in my hand a minute later. It was Larry. I told him about the dirty chain saw, six hundred pounds of cement mix in the storage room, empty urns in the barn with labels on them, the photographs, the body parts, hundreds of them tossed so carelessly in the woods it was impossible to estimate the numbers. “Are you okay?” he wanted to know when I’d finished. “We need to get you out of there.”

  “Rauser has contacts at the GBI,” I answered. “Can you catch him up and let him make the calls? I’m going to start emailing the rest of the pictures to you both before my phone is toast. The rain is picking up.”

  I moved closer to the edge of the tree line. Here there were more tire tracks forking out from the barn to the lake and from the barn to other sections of forest—more disposal sites. I’d lost the ability to even estimate the scope.

  I thought about the families who had grieved these people, about the Wades, about the people who had just begun to heal from their loss. They would have to confront this barbarism—the Kirkpatricks stripping bodies of organs and skin and eyes, and not only selling them but recklessly putting the recipients at terrible risk. Someone had to be held accountable. My stomach rolled for the first time, came all the way up to my throat.

  Heavy clouds had turned the day to charcoal blue. The drizzle had morphed into a steady rain. My spirits sank even lower as lightning popped and an earthshaking clap of thunder rumbled under my feet like an aftershock. I moved back into the woods where the trees would provide some protection from weather and from Joe Ray and his creepy toe-sock-wearing mama. Lightning again, too near. The trees had started to sway. I shivered.

  I could barely hear Rauser’s ringtone over the rain. “I forwarded the pictures to Mike McMillan at the GBI. A warrant is forthcoming. It looks like a fucking nightmare, Street. Are you safe?”

  “Yes. They don’t know I’m here. Rauser, there’s death everywhere you look.” I couldn’t even hide the darkness in my voice. “I’m standing in the middle of some madman’s cemetery.” I came up on a row of aluminum vaults, eight feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep. Latches on each end, three latches on the long section. Didn’t take a genius to figure out what was in them. The only questions were how many were piled up this time and in what stage of decay. I kept moving. I needed to get deeper into the woods for shelter. I said good-bye to Rauser and answered an incoming call.

  “This is Special Agent Mike McMillan from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. You’re on speakers, Dr. Street. I’m with Deputy Director Freed.”

  “You’ll have to speak up, Agent McMillan,” I said. “Bad storm up here.” The rain was rolling off the trees now.

  “Looking at it on radar. It’s moving northeast pretty fast. Clear skies here. We’re going to fly in.”

  “Good,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell McMillan the rain wasn’t helping to wash the smell away or that I didn’t want to be out here alone anymore.

  “I’m looking at these pictures from Lieutenant Rauser. I’ve worked with Aaron. If he wasn’t a friend of mine and if I didn’t know you’d been FBI, I wouldn’t believe this.”

  “Being here doesn’t make it more believable.”

  “You’re still on the property, then? Do you know if they have firearms?”

  “I’ve seen a shotgun. I don’t know what else they have.”

  I gave him my location, explained that I’d been hired to find the truth behind the fake ashes. I told him where to find the file cabinets and the photographs of the dead. I explained the photograph of the chain and the hacksaw, the cement mix, the body parts, and the tire tracks, which probably led to more disposal sites, all pictures Rauser had forwarded to him.

  “We’re almost wheels up, Dr. Street. Flight time is one hour. Hunker down until we’re on the ground and the structures are secure. I’ll let you know when to come out.”

  “Agent McMillan.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to need to drag the lake too.”

  A beat passed. “Affirmative.”

  22

  I moved deeper into the woods, sat with my back against a tree trunk, and hugged my knees, pelted by the rain. Neil had called twice, then fired off a series of increasingly panicked text messages. My phone was starting to misbehave. And so were my muscles. Nerves had them coiled up tight as a rattlesnake.

  I got a text off. I’m okay. GBI on the way. Wait for me.

  Fifty-three minutes later I heard chopper blades whipping the air, echoing off the mountains like drumbeats. The rain was back to a trickle. I imagined Mrs. Stargell’s huge old binoculars lifting at the sound of the helicopters. That image brought on the smile I didn’t think I had left in me.

  McMillan’s call came four minutes later. His team were on their way to meet me. I moved toward the tree line. The agents came around the barn. They walked through the meadow in black cargo pants that gathered around their boots, jackets, three men, two women.

  McMillan introduced himself, then his team. I’d forgotten their names a second later. The shock was setting in. McMillan handed me a Windbreaker with GBI in big white letters. I pulled it on gratefully over soaked clothes.

  “You mind leading the way, Dr. Street?”

  A few yards into the woods we came upon the fleshy half-decayed skull I’d tripped over. As I led them deeper, McMillan stuffed his forearm under his nose. A couple of the oth
er agents made coughing sounds and did the same thing.

  An arm sticking up through pine straw with long fingernails and blackened rotting skin caused one agent to spin away and vomit into the leaves. “It’s just the beginning,” I told them. “It’s a study in how the elements affect decomposition. I think you need to prepare yourselves.”

  The agent with the video moved in close to the arm. Then we all slogged forward. My boots were caked with rotting leaves and mud and God only knows what else. I folded my arms over my chest, shivering violently.

  “Holy Christ,” McMillan murmured after a few more yards. The agents made a slow circle, struggling to get some context. We were dead center in one of the Kirkpatricks’ bone yards. They hadn’t even bothered to bury this shame.

  “According to the receiving-room log,” I told them, “almost four hundred bodies were checked in just this year. I have a feeling they’re all here. Or parts of them. And maybe more. I found vaults on the north edge.” I didn’t explain how I’d happened to have access to the crematorium logs, and no one asked. It didn’t matter now. They had their warrants. They’d find admissible evidence. Plenty of it.

  McMillan got on his radio. “Big Knob cops on the scene yet?” An affirmative crackled back through his radio. “Have the Kirkpatricks held at the city jail for now. Let’s start with theft by deception, abusing a corpse, suspicion of illegal tissue harvesting, and fraud. We got body parts everywhere out here. We’re going to need every agent and every technician we can pull in. And we gotta have heavy equipment.” He looked at me. “You ready to get out of here?” I nodded. “We have a civilian coming out of the woods behind the barn,” McMillan said. “Have somebody meet her, get a preliminary statement, then release her. She’s had a helluva day.”

  The driveway was full of black SUVs and Crown Vics. The chopper sat in the meadow on the other side of the dirt lane. Two Big Knob black-and-whites were on hand. So was a Crime Scene Unit van. Collecting the evidence was going to take weeks. Sorting out and testing what they collected, even longer. I wondered what this would do to the logjam the labs were facing already.