Aftermath, Inc.

by Gil Reavill

  Chris and Tim trooped back upstairs to look under the kitchen sink for cleaning supplies. They had brought over a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and a bottle of bleach from Tim’s apartment. In the house they found sponges, a plastic bottle of Mr. Clean, and another pair of rubber gloves.

  “You boys all set, then?” the cop asked.

  “Sure,” Tim said. “No problem.”

  “I’ll come back and check on you.” Then he left the house, got in his squad car, and drove away.

  They went back downstairs. They were unclear how to begin. Using a utility knife, Chris cut out a section of blood-soaked carpet. Tim scrubbed down the paneling. The light was not good. They couldn’t really see what they were doing.

  But when the cop came back three hours later, he seemed to be satisfied. “I want to thank you guys,” he said. “You just saved this family a heap of heartache.”

  He ushered them out of the house and locked the door behind them. Chris and Tim dragged the two garbage bags stuffed with bloody carpet remnants, rags, and paper towels to the curb. The cop gave a little farewell honk of his horn as he drove off.

  “Nowadays we would have done that job so differently,” Chris said, looking back. “We cut out the section of carpet; now all of it would go. The entire room would have been scrubbed down and biowashed, a three-step chemical process. We would have brought in lights and just flooded that room with light. If we had to, we would have brought in blue lights that show up blood.”

  “We were just scrubbing down the walls,” Tim said. “There was probably all sorts of biomatter left in that room.”

  They never saw the boy’s body. To this day neither Tim nor Chris has ever met the family of the victim. But that afternoon they came to a simple but crucial conclusion, one that altered the course of their future.

  They realized they had the stomach for the work.

  Tim and Chris knew little of what they were in for that first day, after they cleaned up the suicide across the street from Tim’s apartment building. They may not have been experienced in the protocols of crime scene cleanup, but neither were they dumb. They realized that they had stumbled onto something.

  A light went on. An “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” kind of light. It was Chris who articulated it first. “This could be a real niche business,” he said, as the two of them walked back across the street to Tim’s apartment.

  For the next two weeks Tim and Chris were on fire, on the telephone constantly, calling coroners, police, funeral homes, real estate management companies. They always asked the same questions of anyone who would talk to them. Would this be a good business to start? Is there a need for this kind of service?

  The answers always came back the same. Yes, yes, yes.

  “I could have really used you just last week,” a contact at the De Kalb, Illinois, coroner’s office told them. “We had a terrible crime scene, and the family had church members volunteer to come in, but a few of them just lost it and wound up sick in the hospital.”

  It would turn out later that Chris and Tim did not ask some questions that they should have, but for now, that yes repeated over and over was all they needed.

  Tim and Chris were pioneers in uncharted wilderness. There were no guidebooks on the subject, no industry standards since there wasn’t any industry. They had stumbled upon a situation that resulted when a sea change overtook society without anyone quite realizing its full impact.

  The sea change was the advent of AIDS and other blood-borne pathogens such as hepatitis C. Since the AIDS epidemic became widely recognized in the mid-1980s, the rules for dealing with biohazards—biological matter such as blood, body fluids, used hypodermic needles, flesh remnants—had shifted. Medical professionals were the first to recognize the shift. Police departments began developing anticontamination kits with gloves and other protective equipment. If someone had invested in latex futures around 1985 or so, he would have gotten in on the ground floor of a bull market.

  Since the sea change, no one in traditional housecleaning or janitorial firms would touch anything involving blood or body fluids. It was just too dangerous, full of killer unknowns and deadly variables. Since the cleaning-service industry was not centralized (apart from a few large franchise firms such as ServiceMaster), no one registered that the rules of the cleanup business had been drastically transformed.

  Meanwhile, human nature hadn’t altered at all. People were still hacking up their relatives in murderous rages and blowing their own brains out. The blood was still spattering around in sunporches and bedrooms and taverns and nightclubs. Old folks died alone and their bodies rotted and dissolved into sticky, possibly contagious messes. All this was still happening, but no professional service was cleaning it up anymore.

  Families of victims, those left behind in the wake of homicide, accidents, or suicide, were expected to cope, not only with grief and loss that was unbearable but also with the physical mess of violent death. Police and EMS teams were often unhelpful or downright dismissive. A crime scene cop would qualify as “caring” if he left the survivors with a can of ground coffee to sprinkle around the site, to soak up body fluids and (ineffectively) kill the stench. Sometimes, as in De Kalb, the cleanup would fall to woefully unprepared church groups.

  Until Chris Wilson and Tim Reifsteck. Every successful pioneering business, from Microsoft, Xerox, and Ford on down, was formed from just this sort of intuitive grasp of fundamental change.

  It took them a while to fully understand what they had. Business was excruciatingly slow. For the first six or seven months, they rarely had a job per month. They did not suffer, since they had their newspaper circulation business to fall back upon, but they were puzzled. They knew there were jobs out there, plenty of them, but they weren’t getting many. What was going on?

  The one question they had neglected to ask police officers, coroners, and morticians—all those folks who had said yes, yes, yes, we need your service—was a pretty basic one.

  “Can you recommend us to the families of the deceased?”

  It turned out the answer to that question, for a lot of complicated reasons, was no. Generally, a public entity such as a coroner’s office or a police department could not legally recommend a for-profit service like Aftermath. Liability concerns were usually cited as the reason for this. But there was the old-boy network too. Chris and Tim were the new kids on the block, with a new service to boot.

  After three months in business, they had done a number of paying cleanup jobs that they could have counted on the fingers of one hand. They might easily have concluded that they had been wrong about there being a market for their service. They could have folded up their tent and gone home. But they persevered.

  In that first year, they did $37,000 worth of gross business, no pun intended. In the second year that total went up to $75,000. Every year, their gross doubled or tripled. When the amount of annual business came in at $250,000, and next year turned into $500,000 and the next rose to $1 million, they realized their hunch about Aftermath had been right.

  They slowly gained a level of expertise in a business they decided to make their own: cleaning up after crime. That’s what they called their company at first: After Crime Clean-Up. That was before they really knew the business, before they realized that it entailed far more than crime scenes and would eventually embrace all of the new field of “bioremediation.” Even though suicide is technically a crime (there’s an old riddle: What crime is prosecuted only when it is not successful?), the families of those who kill themselves did not want a van with After Crime Clean-Up painted on it parked in front of their houses.

  Chris and Tim gradually came to understand the precise service they were selling. A quadruple homicide in Harvey, Illinois, was a watershed, their first large-scale crime scene cleanup. Lucas Tavernier took a .357 Magnum—what’s called a hand cannon on the street—to his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s sister’s family. Tavernier hanged himself in the basement and left only an inf
ant alive upstairs.

  When Chris and Tim arrived on the scene the day after it happened, they could trace the progress of the crime by the bullet holes. “The oldest daughter jumped up in the second bedroom, and Tavernier just turned that way and blew her away right there,” Chris recalled. “You could see where the three holes went through her, because they went through the glass window right behind her too.”

  Chris and Tim were a bit shell-shocked themselves, and exchanged a look as they surveyed the scene. “It was like, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into?’” Tim said.

  The job was an early technical challenge because the sister and her husband had been killed while they lay in a waterbed, which burst and flooded the premises with a ghastly mixture of blood, water, and feces. Tim and Chris had learned by then to enter a scene wearing hazmat suits, and they would need the protection that day.

  But because the children who had been killed were twelve and eight years old, the Harvey job drove home another sort of challenge in their new work—an emotional one.

  “That was a wake-up call,” Chris said. “That was a huge one. It was a nice house with an in-ground pool in the back. Then we walked in and saw walls and walls of pictures of the kids and the family.” The scene made Chris want to run home and hug his daughter extra tight.

  On the threshold of the house in Cudahy, I was about to get an emotional wake-up call of my own.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Human Stain

  Who saw him die?

  The worm’s-eye view is so often the true one.

  —Uncle Pio, in Gilda

  There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ’em there buzzing.

  —John Prine

  As the door opened, the stench swung out from the interior like a hammer, landing a blow to my nostrils, sinuses, and mouth, crushing them all, so powerful an odor it was as though my skin felt it and my ears heard the sound of it too.

  I retched. When faced with danger the sea cucumber vomits up its entire digestive tract, afterward growing a new one. I hadn’t eaten, and if we’re hungry, our sense of smell is heightened. Unlucky me. So I retched. Again. And again. Nonproductive emesis.

  “Are you okay?” Dave asked.

  “Sure,” I managed. Then I gagged again.

  What was happening to me? I had never smelled anything remotely as intense before. It was like a drug rush, only in reverse. My mouth flooded with saliva, a predictable precursor to vomiting.

  All odor is particulate. Meaning that with respiration the rotted amino acid particles from the deceased (free-floating volatiles as small as 0.00000000000007 of an ounce) had entered my nostrils and nasopharynx. These odorant molecules, known by such evocative names as cadaverine and putrescine, swept against mucosa cilia in my nose and stimulated specific olfactory receptor neurons. Nerve cells passed along the oooh-bad-smell news via axon action to my regio olfactoria, which dumped a quick shovel pass to neuroreceptors in the lateral medullary reticular formation in my brain. Long story short, I felt like hurling.

  Another particulate by-product of human decay is gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, notorious in its pure form as a date-rape drug. Standing at the threshold of a stifling house in suburban Milwaukee, I was being date-raped by death.

  From Mikey’s (Elijah Wood) memorable reading of his English paper in the movie version of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm:

  Because of molecules we are connected to the outside world from our bodies. Like when you smell things, because when you smell a smell it’s not really a smell, it’s a part of the object that has come off of it—molecules. So when you smell something bad, it’s like in a way you’re eating it. This is why you should not really smell things, in the same way that you don’t eat everything in the world around you—because as a smell, it gets inside of you. So the next time you go into the bathroom after someone else has been there, remember what kinds of molecules you are in fact eating.

  The members of Mikey’s English class react to this recitative with “embarrassed silence” (according to James Shamus’s script for the movie), filing it, no doubt, under the category “facts I just really don’t need to know, Mikey.”

  I turned my face away so that Ryan and Dave would not see me retch. They were evidently iron-stomached, but they re-seated their respirators and indicated by hand gestures that I should do the same.

  The deceased had expired in the hallway, just inside the front door. To the left and right I glimpsed rooms piled high with clutter. Straight ahead was the kitchen. The kitchen windows had black-green shades pulled down on them, shielding out the bright summer sunlight. Then the shades moved. They weren’t shades after all. Thick carpets of flies covered all the windows. Even through the respirator, the smell was terrific.

  “The family put these down so they could walk through here,” Dave said, referring to a layer of flattened cardboard boxes, discolored with a dark, oily liquid. “But it was probably not a good idea.”

  He raised the corrugated cardboard. It lifted with a sucking sound. Long, ropy strings of black gelatinous muck came up with it, then broke off and fell back into the mess congealed on the floorboards below.

  The human stain. Philip Roth, in his novel, was talking about the metaphysical mark left by human life, or at least the socio-political mark, the taint that our species leaves on whatever it touches. But here was the human stain in its physical essence. An oblong sheen of dark biomatter, truly sickening to behold, a skid-mark exudate on the knickers of life.

  Ryan and Dave were all business. Dave propped the gooey cardboard against the wall of the hallway. Their job was to eliminate from the site any trace of biohazard, but first they had to ascertain what was contaminated and what was not. They would take a Sawzall to the contaminated floorboards. The stain and everything it touched would be extracted from the site, packed in the two-by-four “bioboxes.” The fluid-soaked corrugated cardboard laid down by the family, for example, would itself be broken down and packed into boxes. Boxes inside boxes, Chinese style.

  Ryan knelt alongside the stain, using a pry-bar to break off a piece of brown-varnished floor molding along the east wall, trying to determine the cadaver’s “drip zone.” He pried up a floorboard. “It’s all into the subflooring,” he announced to Dave, his voice muffled by his mask.

  Sherwin B. Nuland, a doctor and author, wrote compelling “reflections on life’s final chapter” in his best-selling book, How We Die. I was confronting what happens next. How We Decompose.

  In life, our bodies exist in a constant state of war, a state of siege. The barbarians at the gates are microbial. A few of them are fifth columnists already within the gates: Staphylococcus, Candida, Malasseria, Bacillus, and Streptococcus, which all humans harbor in their intestinal tracts. The beasts within are normally kept in check by the body’s police-state enforcers from the immune system, but death means no more cops, and anarchy.

  The last dated mail in the mailbox of the tan clapboard house bore a postmark of July 1. Let’s take noon of that day, a Friday, as our TOD—time of death.* To mark the moment, the deceased may have emitted a death rattle, the last respiration before expiration, caused by the loss of the normal cough reflex to clear the mucus in the throat. The last breath “rattles” across the clogged phlegm, causing the eerie sound.

  Human decomposition began almost immediately, approximately four minutes after death, at 12:04 P.M. By around one o’clock, the body had cooled (algor mortis) to the ambient temperature, which that day in Milwaukee was seventy-five degrees. The heat wave had receded somewhat, but the actual indoor temperature within the stuffy, sunny-side-of-the-street house was probably a couple degrees higher. The body’s cellular cytoplasm gelled (rigor mortis), producing the well-known rigidity of the limbs—the stiffness from which the slang term stiff comes.

  Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, until around noon on Saturday, July 2, the blood settled in the lower parts of the body (livor mortis), and the rigor disappeared. As the deceased lay facedown
in the overheated Milwaukee hallway, spinal and brain fluids began debouching from his nostrils, eye sockets, and ears, providing an accessible buffet for bugs.

  The insect assault on the corpse began immediately at death. Flies smell death, alerted by aromatic compounds released in amounts so small they are measured in parts per million or billion. By now the public has been carefully educated by repeated viewings of CSI to know that insects arrive in predictable, chronological waves, with houseflies and blowflies (including my personal favorite, the green hairy maggot blowfly—could a species have a more gross name?) as the first pioneers. The worms that crawl in and out and play pinochle on your snout are more specifically fly larvae.

  We must imagine a clock—or better yet, a stopwatch. Only, this stopwatch exhibits a strange face indeed. Instead of numbers, it bears insect species. A small symbol of a blowfly, say, appears instead of the numeral 1. At every point along the chronological path of the stopwatch’s ticking, specific bugs mark the “PMI,” the postmortem interval, the time that has elapsed since death. Knowing the approximate PMI, we can thus discover the TOD, time of death—the holy grail of homicide detectives, which can rule out some suspects, focus in on others, and help detectives clear the case.

  The bugs used to determine PMI are mostly of the kind Linnaeus, who developed the species classification system, called life’s vilest: soft-bodied maggots passing through their three in-stars of growth, scavenger beetles, tiny parasitic wasps.

  When an investigator catalogs the presence of certain insects on a corpse, noting their size and stages of development, it is as though he or she is reading the time on a stopwatch. Adjusting for temperature and other environmental factors, the investigator determines the time marked on the insect clock, and can testify with relative (and approximate) assurance when the deceased ceased.