The Devil's Bones

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 there. 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?”

“Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just in a slightly delicate position here.” I was trying to figure out whether I needed to protect the confidentiality of information I had gained on behalf of a client, which is what Burt DeVriess was in this case, since it was his Aunt Jean’s cremains that had motivated my trip to Georgia.

“Dr. Brockton, please tell me you haven’t stumbled into one of our undercover investigations again.”

“If I had,” I countered, “how would I know? As you’ve seen, I’m not too good at spotting your undercover agents.”

“True. But let’s cut to the chase, Doctor. Are you calling to report a federal crime?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think so. If a crematorium is paid to burn bodies, and if the bodies don’t get burned, that would be a breach of contract, right?”

“Breach of contract or fraud, probably.”

“And if they’re doing business over the phone with people in several states-say, Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia-would that count as interstate wire fraud?”

“Sounds like it.”

I struggled to remember what I knew about white-collar crime, which wasn’t much. Murder tended to wear a blue collar, or a blood-red one. “And am I right in thinking that interstate wire fraud is considered a form of organized crime?”

“Technically, yes,” she said. “I suspect crematoriums weren’t tops on anybody’s list of dangerous criminal enterprises when the RICO statutes were written. But technically you’re probably correct-wire fraud is pretty broadly defined, so what you’re describing could constitute wire fraud and an organized-crime enterprise. Technically.”

“You keep saying ‘technically.’ How come?”

“Because there’s a fairly high threshold that has to be met before we’re going to pursue a federal wire-fraud case.”

“What kind of threshold?”

“A financial threshold. The dollar value’s got to be around a quarter million dollars to justify committing resources to an investigation and prosecution. The U.S. Attorney has to agree it’s worthwhile. It’s sort of like speeding-technically, the police can ticket you for doing forty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone, but they’re not going to waste their time on that. They’re going to be on the lookout for the guy going sixty or seventy. So to circle back to cremation, if a crematorium failed to cremate somebody they got paid to cremate, yeah, they committed fraud. If they used interstate phone lines to do it-and these days, unless you’re using tin cans and a string to talk to the guy next door, every telephone conversation uses nationwide networks-then yeah, it’s interstate wire fraud. But the reality is, we don’t have the time or resources to bring the hammer down on some crematorium that didn’t cremate a body. That’s what civil suits are for.”

“How about a hundred bodies? Maybe more?”

Price was silent for longer than I’d ever heard her stay quiet. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if this crematorium isn’t defrauding one or two people? What if they’re defrauding hundreds-everybody they deal with? What if they’re not cremating any of the bodies?”

She paused again. I liked it when I could give Price pause. “And what are they doing with these bodies, if they’re not cremating them?”

“Piling them in a patch of pine forest.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Hundreds of bodies?”

“Technically,” I said, “I haven’t seen hundreds. Technically, I’ve seen fewer than a hundred-ninety-four, to be precise. But I didn’t exactly do a grid search. That’s what I saw in about ten minutes, in one corner of the woods.”

“You saw ninety-four bodies piled in the woods?”

“I saw eighty-eight piled in the woods…well, not piled, exactly-more like dumped and strewn and half hidden. I saw six more stacked in the back of a broken-down hearse.”

“Damn, Doc,” she said. It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound impressed, or surprised, or anything other than strictly business. “Those folks are giving your Body Farm a run for the money.”

“Yeah, except they’re not doing the research,” I said. “Oh, and they’re bringing in a lot more money than I am.”

“How much does cremation cost?”

“It costs the consumer about eight hundred to a thousand dollars,” I said, “but that includes the funeral home’s markup. The crematorium itself doesn’t charge that much, more like four hundred per cremation. I hear this place down in Georgia was doing it-or not doing it-for three hundred.”

“Hmm,” she said. “So a hundred unburned bodies-we’ll go with a nice round number, to keep the math simple-would represent a thirty-thousand-dollar case of fraud. Have I got that decimal in the right place?”

Put that way-reduced to a bottom-line dollar amount-the shocking scene in the woods sounded insignificant. “But I bet there are more,” I said. “Maybe a lot more.”

“There would have to be,” she said. “I hate to break it to you, Dr. Brockton, but we’d need ten times that many bodies in the woods to justify a federal wire-fraud investigation.”

“You’re saying you’d need a thousand bodies? You’ve got to be joking.”

“I don’t joke, Dr. Brockton.” She had a point there, I realized.

“My white-collar-crime agents are swamped with cases right now-multimillion-dollar cases. You remember that chop shop we raided last spring over in Grainger County? They were selling stolen-car parts throughout the South, to the tune of seven million dollars a year. Your cockfighting friends in Cooke County? Illegal gambling-hundreds of thousands of dollars every day those birds were pecking each other to death.” Technically, I wanted to point out, the roosters spurred or slashed each other to death, but I didn’t see much future in interrupting Price just to correct her description of cockfighting. “I don’t mean to sound callous,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s big enough for us. Did you call local law enforcement?”

“No,” I said. “This a rural county in Podunk, Georgia. They don’t begin to have the forensic resources to deal with this.”

“If the locals request assistance, we could send in an Evidence Recovery Team.”

“There’s a whole lot of evidence to recover,” I said. “Why not just send in the cavalry now? Eliminate the middleman?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “We help if we’re asked-it’s called ‘domestic police cooperation’-but we have to be asked. And despite what you see on television, we consider the ‘cooperation’ part important. Call the locals.”

“That’s all you’ve got for me-‘call the locals’?”

“’Fraid so,” she said. “Sorry that’s not what you wanted to hear. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Thanks.”

She clicked off without saying good-bye.

Angela: that was her name. “Thanks for nothing, Angela,” I said to the dead receiver.

Call the locals? I didn’t even know who the locals were. I had an atlas in my truck, so I went out and got it and traced my route from Chattanooga down into the northwest corner of Georgia. It didn’t take long to pinpoint what county the crematorium was in, and I knew that it wouldn’t take a genius to track down the number for the county sheriff. But I found myself hesitating, resisting the idea of calling 411. As I took a mental step back and analyzed the reasons for my hesitation, it came clear. Over the years of my work, I had come to know and respect many sheriffs in rural Tennessee. But within the past year, I had survived a couple of near-death experiences with deputies in Cooke County, where Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings was a regular at the cockfights-and where Deputy Leon Williams had used dynamite to entomb Art Bohanan and me in a cave. On the one hand, I had no reason to suspect that the sheriff in northwest Georgia was looking the other way as bodies piled up in the woods. But then again, I had no particular basis for confidence either. And if the sheriff did happen to be in cahoots with the crematorium, my call might actually trigger a quick cleanup and a massive cover-up. The more I thought, the less I wanted to call the locals.

But if not the locals, then who could I call?

I glanced idly at the atlas again, and my gaze strayed southward, to Atlanta. “Sean Richter,” I said out loud. “I can call Sean.”

Sean Richter was one of my former graduate students. After completing his master’s degree, he had spent a year in the remnants of Yugoslavia, helping excavate mass graves and identify victims of ethnic-cleansing massacres in Kosovo. Now he was working in Atlanta as the staff forensic anthropologist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As an interstate wire-fraud case, the crematorium might be too small for the FBI to bother with. But as a Georgia fraud case, it might be big enough to interest the GBI. And I was certain it would interest Sean, with its similarities to the mass-fatality identifications he’d done in Kosovo. I fished out my pocket calendar, which had a small address book tucked in the back, and looked up his number.

“Anthropology lab, this is Richter.”

“Sean, this is Bill Brockton.”

“Dr. Brockton, how are you?”

“I’m fine, but I’d be better if you quit calling me Dr. Brockton, Sean. You’re my colleague now, not my student. It’s time you graduated to calling me Bill.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “That’s gonna be a tough habit to break, though. Once a forensic god, always a forensic god.”

“Well, once you break this case wide open,” I said, “you’ll be a legend yourself.”

“What case?”

“How would you like to lead the recovery and identification of a hundred decomposing bodies, maybe more? Maybe lots more?”

He laughed. “You’re one of the few people who actually find that an irresistible temptation,” he said. “But I’m one of the others. Unfortunately, I doubt that I could get a leave of absence right now to do that. I fear my traveling days are over, for a while at least.”

“You wouldn’t have to travel. At least not outside your jurisdiction.”

Sean didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did speak, his voice sounded unnatural and forced, as if he were pushing the words out by sheer willpower. “Are you telling me you think there’s a mass grave here in Georgia with a hundred or more bodies in it?”

“No, and not exactly,” I said. “I don’t think-I know. But it’s not a grave, it’s surface. You wouldn’t even have to dig.” As I described what I’d seen in the woods, he interrupted me often, asking me to repeat or confirm or elaborate on some detail. The shakiness in his voice gave way to a mixture of excitement and anger. Sean was smart enough to realize that this case would be forensically fascinating, as well as a watershed in his career. But his anger at the indignity inflicted on the dead-dumped in the woods like refuse-was genuine, and I knew that Sean would do whatever it took to make the case a priority for the GBI.

His eagerness was tempered by one very legitimate concern. The GBI’s anthropology lab was small, and Sean’s resources-equipment and personnel-were nowhere near adequate to recover and identify so many bodies all at once. “You might want to ask for help from DMORT,” I said. DMORT-the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team-was a federally deployed unit designed to assist with mass fatalities. The team members, who included forensic anthropologists, dentists, funeral directors, and other professionals skilled at identifying or handling corpses, were volunteers, but they were highly trained and extremely capable. DMORT teams had performed heroically at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center attacks, and they had worked for months to identify the hundreds of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Sean agreed that DMORT could be a valuable resource.

“You might also want to ask the FBI for an Evidence Recovery Team,” I said. Then, and only then, did I recount the gist of my conversation with Special Agent Price. “They don’t want to run the case,” I said, “but I gather they’d be willing to roll up their sleeves and help with the fieldwork. If you ask.”

“I’ll certainly recommend that we ask,” he said. “This is going to be huge, and we’ll need all the help we can get.” He paused, then said, “Hmm.” I waited, figuring he was working up to another question, and I was right. “So when my bosses ask me how I know about this mess, what do I tell them?”

“Tell them the truth,” I said. “I don’t see how it can hurt. Might give them a little more confidence that it’s not a wild-goose chase if they know the tip came from a guy who has a reasonably good idea what bodies in the woods look like.”

He chuckled at that. “True. Be hard for them to doubt the accuracy of the report if they know it comes from you.”

“I don’t particularly want my name in the news, though, if you can keep me out of it,” I said. “Any chance y’all could say the GBI received a call from a ‘concerned citizen’ or some such?”

“I’ll suggest it,” he said. “Politically, that might have some appeal-if we say, ‘It took an anthropologist from Tennessee to sniff this out,’ the GBI doesn’t look real bright. But if we say, ‘We acted swiftly in response to a tip,’ we look semicompetent.”

“Semicompetent nothing,” I said. “Y’all’ll be heroes. But only if you quit yakking and get busy.”

“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Dr. Brockton.”

“Excuse me-who?”

“Oh. Sorry. Thanks…Bill.”

His teeth were nearly clenched as he said it. But at least he said it.