by Gil Reavill
“Smells like death in here,” Banach said. “Death city in this motherfucking place.”
For a substance so closely associated with a specific shade, human blood spends surprisingly little of its time colored red. Within the body, of course, it cycles through half of its existence in veins as a deep, oxygen-depleted blue. Both the spurting arterial blood and the more sluggish venous fluid turn a bright crimson upon exposure to air. But a pool of blood never remains static. Immediately plasma and platelets begin to separate out. Coagulation paints the stain with prismatic shades of amber, black, and burgundy. Red is only one of blood’s colors.
Just above the dark, odorous pool of blood, a poster of the rap star Nelly and another that said “Flower Power” in Day-Glo sixties-style lettering were Scotch-taped to the wall. The vertical blinds clacked in the wind, which soughed through the window from outside. Michigan hurried winter. Stuck along the edge of the mirror, prom and graduation photos showed Myesha, a pretty, heavyset teenager with her scrawny, all-Adam’s-apple date.
The CSIs had left behind something else—a thicket of a half-dozen number-two pencils plugged into the bullet holes in the floor.
“They use those to trace trajectories,” Sundberg said.
“Correct, Greg,” Banach said.
Sighting along the pencils, I traced the bullet trajectory myself. Tarell Koss hated his sister. Really hated her. He could spare only a couple shots each for his parents, killed as they slept, but he pumped a dozen into his brainiac, know-it-all, suck-up-to-success sister. “And your little dog too,” as the Wicked Witch of the West would say.
“Christ fucking Jesus what a jag-off to shoot the dog,” Banach muttered, leaving to check out the other bedrooms.
California, Dan Doggett said, had a lot more regulations than other states. You couldn’t just store biomatter in boxes until the waste disposal service picked it up. It had to be refrigerated to forty degrees.
“When I worked at the nuclear plant—”
“Jesus Christ,” Banach cut him off. “Again with the fucking Mr. Smithers shit. This isn’t a nuclear plant, okay, Dan?”
Chastised, Dan shut up.
To the left off the hallway, opposite the stairs, Tarell’s room. Banach said, “It looks like someone ransacked the place, don’t it?”
“The cops did,” Sundberg said.
The death room of the parents. Banach crossed the room immediately on entering to close the blinds. “You don’t want to be the main attraction here.”
A massive oak bedstead dominated the room, its four posts topped by foot-round wooden globes.
“That’s a crazy bed,” Banach said. “That bed is worth nine thousand dollars easy.”
“So we’re going to try to save it?” Dan asked. I was always impressed by the scrupulous honesty of the Aftermath techs. I never saw anyone even once pocket a “souvenir.” On the contrary, I’ve seen them carefully save many items—a rusty, foul, dust-encrusted heating vent at a “filth job” comes to mind—that anyone else would have tossed immediately away.
“Whoa, look at this,” Banach said, fingering a bullet hole torn out of the wood on a sideboard of the bed. “So we can’t leave this piece. A family member sees something like this, they’ll go fucking bananas.”
A huge flat-screen TV entertainment center. DVDs, mostly action but also complete seasons of The Andy Griffith Show. On top of the shelving was a plastic dinner plate with an unfinished meal, congealed meat loaf, gravy, and mashed potatoes. And the offending “Jaguar” birthday card to Tarell, carefully saved beside a photo of him in his high school graduation gown. The last good time.
“Look at this, Greg,” Banach called. “The bathroom is so big it has a bathroom in it. A bathroom in a bathroom.” Declaring that the place still “smelled like stale dog shit,” Banach announced he would perform a foolproof trick to deodorize it, the “mouthwash fix.”
He flopped a folded towel into the bathtub, then took a three-quarters-full bottle of Scope mouthwash and poured the contents onto the towel.
“Tomorrow this place will smell like a crystal clean garden,” Banach said. “Mint is the best, but you can use whatever you got.”
The crew got down to work. I did the best I could without Banach’s direction. Reaching behind a chest of drawers, I picked off a small piece of skull, scalp still attached, that had stuck to the wall.
“You handled that, make sure you put on a new pair of gloves,” Banach said as he knelt down in the middle of the room. Using a box cutter, he quickly excised a huge half-moon of bloodstained carpet.
Another trick: Instead of using bioboxes, Greg and Greg tied blue latex gloves (“blue for bio”) around the tops of garbage bags with contaminated material in them. They were thus easily distinguished from “GD” bags (for “general debris”). Each biobox or biobag cost $191 to dispose of by a licensed medical waste service, so the distinction was important.
I contented myself with humping the rapidly growing pile of garbage bags down to the bottom of the stairs. On my first trip, I was surprised by a carpenter, banging a sheet of four-by-eight plywood across the front door.
“Who the hell is that hammering?” Banach shouted from up above. He appeared at the top of the stairs. I told him that Donal’s brothers had hired a handyman to barricade the door, which the police had broken down upon entering.
“We’re going to be fucking trapped in here,” Banach laughed.
Sundberg and I dragged two GD bags each through the garage to the driveway, where Greg and Greg’s Aftermath truck was parked, its back end open. We tossed the bags in.
“That your truck?” I asked Greg S. about a brand-new Ford Explorer parked alongside the driveway. The SUV had a custom light rack on its roof.
“On the weekends,” Sundberg said sheepishly, “we like to fool around with putting light racks, bubble lights, stuff like that, on our vehicles.”
I nodded. Sundberg went back upstairs. I humped a half-dozen more GD bags out to the truck and then stood there, taking in the autumn evening. To the southwest, the lights of downtown Detroit glowed pink. I’d heard that every urban area had its own nocturnal light signature, New York white, Los Angeles green. At the end of the driveway, the mirror ball beneath the cherub bibliophile picked up the mercury shine of the streetlamps. The wind picked up, and I thought of the clacking blinds in Myesha’s bedroom, above the darkened black stain.
Then that loopy, booming, bottom-heavy bass drum kicked in.
Tell me, tell me, tell me
Oh, who wrote the Book of Love?
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Destroying Angel
The hepatitis C virus
Unless we do something about [Hepatitis C] soon, it will kill more people than AIDS.
—Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop
Catch my disease.
—Ben Lee
In my first few weeks at Aftermath, I had jumped in with two feet, doing a three-week decomp, a suicide, and a family mass murder in short order. But I was getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t gone through the company’s training program, except for the informal one that Ryan and Dave gave me on the Milwaukee job. I hadn’t studied OSHA directive CPL 02-02, “Enforcement Procedures for the Occupational Exposure to Bloodborne Pathogens.” I didn’t know what I was doing. Tim told me to come in to the office one morning, and he and Chris would talk about training and next steps.
The Aftermath offices in Plainfield consisted of two twenty-by-twelve office spaces, adjoining two double-story truck bays in the back of the building. The space above the offices was accessible from wooden stairways constructed in the bays, and given over to equipment and chemical storage. Chris and Tim stored some of their toys in the back, too, like an exercise machine and, once winter came, Chris’s sleek Wave Rider on its trailer.
I kept my kit bag on metal shelves to one side of the bay. From Ryan and Dave I learned to bring along a gym bag to every job, packed with spare clothes. I chose lightweight exercise
garments that would be comfortable under the steamy hazmat suits. My respirator belonged in the bag, too, although it never seemed to be there when I wanted it, and I packed a pair of running shoes that I used only on jobs. The whole idea was to leave as much of the job behind in the bag as possible, so as not to foul my Extended Stay nest, or cross-contaminate my life in general.
The techs stored their bioboxes in red bins from Medical Waste Solutions, a Gary, Indiana, company that picked up and treated Aftermath’s biohazardous waste. Two or three of the bins were parked in a back corner of the truck bay at any one time, with up to seven bioboxes fitted into each of them. Even though Medical Waste Solutions sent a truck around three times a week, the back of the offices sometimes took on the smell of a week-old decomp.
“Keep that door closed!” Raquel Garcia said as the techs wandered in and out from the truck bays, and odor wafted into the front offices.
Raquel supervised the temps who were laboriously compiling and updating a database of every police chief, coroner, medical examiner, and mortician in the country. Waiting for Chris and Tim to free up that fall morning, I listened to the drone of their calls.
“Hello, is this Middleton Police Department? I’m calling from Aftermath, Incorporated, and I’d just like to check on the contact information for the chief of police there. Would that still be Chief Neil White? And is his number the same?”
Over and over, two temp secretaries hard at work, making dozens of calls every hour. Chris and Tim marketed Aftermath aggressively, pursuing contacts and leads at professional conventions of funeral home directors, for example, or annual gatherings of homicide detectives. Civil service rules still prevented many police officers and medical examiners from referring Aftermath directly, but getting the company’s name out was vital to its continued expansion. Many coroners now kept lists of bioremediation companies and would hand out a copy to interested parties, thereby carefully skirting rules against recommending any individual concern. But it was crucial for Aftermath to be on the list.
“Since a lot of the lists are alphabetical, it helps that we’re at the top,” Tim said.
Nancy Doggett, Aftermath’s spark plug of an office supervisor, ruled the executive office space. I overheard her speaking on the phone. “He got caught between the loading dock and a truck full of lumber,” she said. “His head popped like a grapefruit.”
Just small talk on an ordinary day at Aftermath, Inc.
The first thing Tim and Chris advised, when I met with them, was that I should get my shots.
“Make sure your tetanus is up to date,” Tim said, “and there’s a hepatitis B vaccine you should get too.” The vaccine protects against a virus formerly known as serum hepatitis. OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal government’s largely defanged bureaucracy devoted to workplace safety—strongly encouraged the shots as a prophylactic measure for anyone exposed to blood-borne pathogens. This primarily meant health-care workers, but included bioremediation techs too.
The next day I drove over to a busy clinic in Aurora where Aftermath sent all its personnel for their shots. The nurse practitioner, a sunny young needle-wielder named Jennifer Arroyo, asked me if I would be working in the health field.
“Have you ever heard of Aftermath?” I asked. “They send their people here all the time.”
She said she hadn’t heard of the company. I explained what the job involved. “They work a lot around blood and body fluids, the same as you do. Only they sometimes do building demolition at the same time.”
“Wow,” Arroyo said. “Well, then it’s a really good idea for you to get this vaccine.”
She smiled. “But first, I am going to have to give you a little test.”
“A blood test?” I asked.
“A pencil-and-paper test,” she said.
She wasn’t joking. As part of OSHA’s certification of Blood-borne Pathogen Training, I was required to examine a fourteen-page booklet entitled “Protect Yourself.” The information seemed pitched around a high school level of comprehension, which was okay with me. I hadn’t taken a test since my daughter gave me a Cosmopolitan quiz on “sexability.” The heart of the matter showed up on page five, in large white type on a bright red background. “TREAT ALL BLOOD AND BODY FLUIDS AS POTENTIALLY INFECTIOUS.” I thought about the Aftermath jobs I had already been on. Had I done that? I wasn’t sure.
OSHA called its infection control measures “Universal Precautions,” and the policy was well-recognized by the health-care community. In the absence of a blood test, lacking a certain knowledge of the status of the body fluids you might encounter, you play it safe. Universal Precaution paints the world as a seething, malevolent place, rife with contagion and disease. A wrong step and suddenly you’re toe-tagged.
Nurse Arroyo let me study the booklet for fifteen minutes, then gave me a three-page questionnaire. “I’ve got terrible test anxiety,” I told her.
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said. “It’s multiple choice.”
And I did do fine, perfect in fact, even though the reward for doing so was to get a hypodermic needle jabbed into my arm. I would need a pair of booster shots, Nurse Arroyo told me, one at six weeks and one at six months. But from the time of the first shot, I would be protected from serum hepatitis. The vaccine was made up of protein cell-coatings from the virus itself, which would stimulate my immune system to produce antigens of its own against the disease.
But it turned out that hep B was not the most lethal worry on the job. Always hovering in the background were the “Twin Reapers,” HIV and HCV, the viruses that caused AIDS and hepatitis C, both deadly, both incurable. It was usually impossible to know whether the blood encountered by the techs harbored HIV or HCV, especially since long provirus latency periods sometimes meant that not even the symptomless carriers themselves were aware of the viral presence in their systems.
Several known cases document infection with human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the pathogen that causes AIDS, via accidental puncture wounds. Usually these have been nurses or doctors pricked by discarded needles, or “sharps,” that were contaminated with the virus. Aftermath techs have participated in the kind of fear and uncertainty faced by health-care professionals, EMT “first-responders,” police and fire rescue personnel, and others exposed to HIV in their line of work.
Reggie Fluty, a female police officer on the Laramie, Wyoming, force, was first on the scene of the Matthew Shepard gay-bashing “crucifixion.” She found Shepard still alive but covered in blood. The latex gloves issued by the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department were faulty and the supply had run out. Fluty said her training told her, “Don’t hesitate,” so she cleared an airway in Shepard’s bloody mouth with her bare hands—hands that were covered in cuts from when she had recently built a shed for her livestock.
A day after Fluty helped rescue Shepard, she was informed that he was HIV positive. Fluty immediately embarked upon a drug regimen and later proved not infected by the virus. Fluty, a mother of two who was later portrayed in the play The Laramie Project, said of the incident, “I think it brought home to my girls what their mom does for a living.”
“No Aftermath employee has ever been infected on the job,” Tim Reifsteck said, after which the normally nonsuperstitious Reifsteck looked around for wood on which to knock.
But there have been close calls. An Aftermath tech I’ll refer to as Robby Green worked a week-old decomp in the southwest Chicago suburb of Orland Park. The scene represented what the techs have come to call a “filth job.” The term covers the extreme range of decomps, such as the one I encountered in Cudahy, to include locations where deranged individuals have lived and died in unspeakably vile conditions.
The Orland Park scene pushed the limits even in the Twilight Zone world of filth jobs. An obese trust-funder named Hennig Geller rarely ventured out of his three-bedroom split-level ranch, preferring instead to remain sequestered within his darkened house, injecting himself with drug
cocktails. He gained more and more weight. As his fifty-year-old body rebelled against his lifestyle, his activities gradually became extremely circumscribed, until he was limited to a bedlike couch in his living room, and a narrow, uncluttered path from the living room to the bathroom. Then Geller’s heart gave out.
When Robby Green arrived for the cleanup, the three-hundred-pound body had already been removed. But the smell remained overwhelming. Rotted food in the kitchen attracted vermin. The couch in the living room where Geller had ended his days retained the brown, greasy imprint of his body. His heavyweight tread had worn away the carpet on his path to the bathroom, exposing the floor down to splintered wood. In the bathroom itself, two cracked-linoleum shoe prints indicated where Geller had stood to evacuate. The toilet bowl was piled high with feces, which were also spattered around every other inch of floor apart from the two silhouetted footprints.
Heavy-duty demolition work usually comprises a major component of filth jobs, and Orland Park was no different. Body fluids and feces contaminated the carpets, furniture, floorboards, and subflooring. Green’s task, to physically remove all contaminated material, meant he would be doing strenuous physical labor around nails, carpet tack strips, and splintered wood, among other sharp objects.
He and his partner got through the job without incident. They transferred the discarded contents of the house into a Dumpster Aftermath had contracted to be parked on the front lawn. They filled biobox after biobox with contaminated material. Green recalled being extra-careful, since this was a rare Aftermath job where they had prior notice about the HIV-positive status of the deceased. Entering the split ranch of Hennig Geller was like walking through a pathogenic minefield.
As Green carried a heavy, rolled-up section of contaminated carpet down the four-step foyer stairs, he tripped and fell. He had wrapped the carpet around several splintered floorboards. As Green stumbled, an evil-looking, gleet-encrusted flooring nail poked out from within the carpet roll and drove its point an inch and a half deep into the flesh of his right calf. Accompanying the physical pain of the puncture wound was the emotional shock of exposure.