Aftermath, Inc.

by Gil Reavill

  “Even though it’s not biowaste, it’s a reminder of what happened,” Sundberg said. “So we take it.”

  Through a real estate contact of Tim’s, I got to witness how bioremediation was done on the cheap. I accompanied Tim and his contact on a walking tour of Brenda and Rick’s house, which would soon come on the market. (Full-disclosure laws in Illinois and many other states meant that the seller would have to tell prospective buyers about the homicides that had transpired there.)

  We first visited the River Hills house when the cleaning firm was in the midst of its job. Thick green hoses trailed in through the front door, leading back to a steam unit in the cleaning company’s van.

  “Look at that,” Tim said, disbelieving. “They’re just using a regular carpet cleaner.”

  Rentable at grocery and hardware stores, ordinary steam cleaning units work by blasting steam through carpet or furniture fabric. A return line extracts the resulting waste and feeds it back to a storage receptacle. The problem was, the approach doesn’t work all that well.

  “A steam cleaner like that leaves all sorts of stuff behind,” Tim said. “I’d say maybe fifty percent of the biomatter will still be in there when they are finished. It’ll look clean, but it won’t be clean.”

  And indeed, when I returned to the house with Tim’s contact for a walk-through two months after the murders, I could smell it. The living room exuded the musty, telltale funk of decayed blood. I put my face to the carpet and inhaled, and could smell it even more sharply.

  “Jesus,” Tim’s contact said, “it smells bad in here.”

  “Smell the carpet,” I said.

  “Um, no thanks,” she said.

  She wasn’t going to be showing the Livolsi house anytime soon. As the bioremediation industry grew, operators were pouring into the field, some of them much less professional than Aftermath. Chris and Tim always told me they wanted to be the Cadillac of bioremediation, the standard against which the field was measured. I initially dismissed such talk as promotional inflation. But after catching a glimpse of the competition at the Livolsi house, and after putting in my time on the HCV killing fields of suburban Chicago, I became a believer.

  INTERLUDE ONE:

  Man Versus Machine

  A turbofan

  There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently.

  —Martin Amis, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”

  The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

  —Marshall McLuhan

  Just before 9:00 A.M. on Sunday, January 16, 2005, Continental’s Flight 1515 boarded passengers at El Paso International for a jump across the state to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The first officer for the flight did the traditional walk-around inspection of the Boeing 737-500 and noticed a small patch of fluid (“probably oil,” he reported) beneath the right-hand number two engine. Boeing designers had slung the big GE CFM-56-3 power plant, with its distinctive “hamster pouch” look, underneath the wing, making the engine easily accessible for maintenance.

  While passengers were still shuffling into the fuselage above them for the morning flight, a crew from El Paso’s Julie’s Aircraft Service motored out to the site, popped the cowling off number two, and tried to trace the source of the leak. The day kicked off clear and sunlit, with scattered clouds beginning to blow in off a gentle north wind. This early it was still cold, forty degrees. Among the four-person maintenance team was a sixty-four-year-old veteran A & P (for “airframe and power plant”) mechanic named Donald Gene Buchanan.

  Buchanan had worked around the Boeing 737 for the whole of his career. He encountered the plane more than any other, which was not surprising given the 737’s wide use. It’s the most popular jet in the sky, making up a quarter of the worldwide commercial fleet, and the best-selling craft in the history of commercial aviation. For its distinctive stubby fuselage, pilots nicknamed the plane “Baby Boeing,” “Guppy,” or “Fluf” (for “fat little ugly fella”). About 1,250 are airborne at any given moment, and a 737 takes off or lands somewhere in the world every five seconds. So for Buchanan, troubleshooting on Flight 1515 that Sunday morning, it was as though he were working with an old friend.

  He had earned a reputation around the El Paso airport as a better-than-competent mechanic and an all-around good guy. For Paisanos al Rescate (“countrymen to the rescue”), a group that drops water to immigrants making the dangerous border crossing in the deserts to the west of El Paso, Buchanan completely rebuilt a thirty-year-old Cessna. The mechanics and airline personnel made up his true family—he lived alone in a small house along Interstate 10, a couple miles south of the airport. He liked to feed the neighborhood cats.

  The maintenance team communicated with the cockpit flight crew via a plug-in intercom system used whenever passengers were boarded. The crew noted that the leak occurred only when the engine ran.

  “We need you to idle number two and then spool it up to seventy percent,” Buchanan told the captain.

  Normally, screamingly noisy engine “run-ups” such as this took place some distance from the terminal, at a designated location two and a half miles away in the holding bay of Runway 22. In rare instances—and this was one—National Transportation Safety Board rules allowed a pilot to test the engine while still at the gate.

  General Electric’s CFM-56-3 delivers anywhere from 18,500 to 23,500 pounds of thrust from a seven-foot-long, two-ton engine. In the engine’s nose, behind its domelike elliptical spinner, a five-foot compressor-mounted turbofan with thirty-eight aluminum alloy blades whirls around at 3,600 rpm. The fan provides the engine with the enormous gulps of air required for operation. It is a collection of spinning knives.

  At 9:23 A.M. Donald Gene Buchanan straightened up from a crouch and took a single step into the “hazard zone,” a fore-engine vortex of air intake. Tornado-strength suction lifted him off his feet and fed him into the turbofan, which effectively atomized his flesh. Blood and viscera coated the compressors, and a small amount burped out of the engine’s stern exhaust.

  The passengers already onboard heard a thump and felt a shudder rock the plane.

  “Something’s caught in the engine,” the copilot said to the captain, who immediately powered down.

  The death of Donald Gene Buchanan represented a particularly extreme example of a particularly violent category of Aftermath jobs, which are given the tag around the company of “man versus machine.”

  Even taking into account the remorseless nature of human violence, a certain ferocity marks man-versus-machine deaths. The CFM-56-3 turbofan that killed Buchanan had no feeling about the event one way or another. The holy trinity of crime—means, motive, opportunity—in this case lacked that vital central element. Man-versus-machine deaths embodied the “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge identified in Iago. There was no motive, and thus no appeal to fairness, balance, or revenge in the event’s aftermath. Nature was implacable, which lent an element of frustration and despair to those affected by it.

  What killed Buchanan was easy enough to plumb. But it’s not a whodunit, it’s a whatdunit. Here’s what killed him:

  In other words, a law of physics perpetrated the crime, a mass flow rate (density × velocity × flow area) that created the kind of vacuum so abhorrent to nature, which rushed in to fill it, sweeping the body of a man to his death.

  “Engine ingestion” is the euphemism aviation regulators apply to such incidents, mostly with geese, ducks, or other birds. Human engine ingestion had happened previously, but always in hangars, never before at a gate. A reporter from the El Paso Times interviewed several of the 144 passengers who were on Flight 1515 as it sat on the tarmac. They expressed sympathy for the victim’s family. Some of them were visibly shaken, although Continental later said none actually saw the accident occur. “Many of the passengers,” the paper noted dryly, “were interested in finding out wh
at happened, where their luggage was, and how they could book another flight.”

  What Continental Airlines had on its hands in El Paso was an unusable $10 million aircraft engine. Simply discarding the four-thousand-pound behemoth wasn’t an option. Continental equipment managers needed it cleaned.

  Who could they call?

  Humans help machines kill other humans all the time. Firearms themselves could be seen as machines (“deflagration-driven compressed-gas projectile devices”), and as the NRA never tires of informing the public, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The most common category of accidental death in Western countries is man versus machine: automobile fatalities, most of them attributable to human error.

  Perhaps there was a human element to blame in the death on the El Paso runway. Aviation safety experts (and some retired mechanics) had proposed lanyards and safety harnesses for everyone working around the low-to-the-ground 737 engines, but none of the maintenance team wore them that day. The engine run-up might have been more safely accomplished away from the terminal, out on runway twenty-two.

  But human error didn’t change the fundamental truth that lurked behind most of the man-versus-machine deaths I encountered at Aftermath. The universe is a cold, impersonal place. A jet engine, a piston, a drill press, a smelter, a printing press, an industrial saw, a bakery oven, or a high-pressure hose can work with horrific effect on human flesh. There were industrial machines that I learned could kill but of which I had never heard, like cleat-formers, screw feeder presenters, and automatic pin chucks. The human body, piece of wondrous work that it is, turns out to be not much of a match for a twenty-five-ton cold-stamping roller.

  At times man and machine colluded to spectacular and gruesome effect. In an industrial district on Chicago’s South Side, a depressed filing clerk at a Health and Human Services record-storage facility took the same route to work every day. He emerged from the orange line train station and walked west, by a long line of garages and warehouses. He passed the open bay of Tivoli Foundry, a white metal scrap concern that collected copper, zinc, tin, lead, and aluminum from discarded materials, melted them down, and sold the resulting ingots on the world market.

  Workers at the foundry grew accustomed to seeing the clerk pass. They fired the Cowper stoves and blast furnaces early in the morning, so fires were already glowing, booming out a sound much like an aircraft engine, by the time the streets filled with workers heading for their nine-to-fives (in Chicago, it was more often eight-to-fours). Scavengers showed up with commandeered shopping carts full of scrap. The darkened interior of the huge foundry space provided a good contrast to the spark and radiance of liquid copper. Passersby were always stopping to stare at the cherry-orange glow of the molten metal as it was fed down the feeder troughs into the molds.

  Most of the smelting buckets were small affairs, capable of only limited volumes, but the aluminum cauldron was huge, resembling a cement mixer without wheels. The aluminum glowed a pretty yellow-silver shade as it melted. Catwalks and railings surrounded the smelter.

  On a spring morning the government clerk didn’t walk by Tivoli Foundry the way he usually did. This time he walked directly into the bay. The employees were caught unawares. Nobody said as much as a “Can I help you?” as the clerk made a beeline for the aluminum smelter, mounted a ladder, and jumped in. Upon being immersed in the superheated metal, the wet flesh of the clerk’s body literally exploded, covering the immediate area around the smelter with smoking, burning gore. Much of the biomatter had simply been vaporized, Hiroshima style.

  The resulting cleanup was a fifty-hour Aftermath job.

  As grisly and massive as Tivoli was, it could not match the three weeks Ryan O’Shea and Dave Creager spent in a Continental warehouse outside Kansas City, painstakingly cleaning the six thousand parts of Flight 1515’s number two engine.

  At first, the enormity of the job stymied them. They had never attempted anything so complex. But after the first few days, the task proceeded in an orderly, if time-consuming, fashion. Aviation engineers dismantled the engine, passing each non-electronic part to Ryan and Dave for cleaning. They would first immerse the part in a bath of Microban and Liquid Alive enzyme cleaners (they had brought whole barrels down to Kansas City for the job), loosening the particles of biomatter. The techs then cleaned the part by brush or cloth. The electronic parts were cleaned separately, without liquid immersion, with a half mile of wire scrubbed inch by inch.

  “You couldn’t really see that much that looked like remains,” Dave said. “Some parts of the engine were just, like, coated with a film. But we didn’t find bone bits or hair or anything we thought we’d find.”

  Brain matter was always the most difficult substance to deal with, and it was notorious for its strange ability to spatter across unlikely distances. Bobby Hargis, a motorcycle cop riding in John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, was struck by the president’s brain matter, and told the Warren Commission, “It wasn’t really blood—it was a kind of bloody water.”

  When “bloody water” dries, it becomes difficult to remove. Aftermath techs usually attack it with putty scrapers (“It’s a bitch to get up,” a tech told me). At Kansas City, Ryan and Dave had to be more delicate. The brain matter had worked impossibly into nooks and crannies of the engine parts. Repeated soakings could not remove the sticky crust. It took several applications of Spray & Wipe, coupled with the enzyme cleaners, to do the trick.

  The whole job took more than two weeks, over 150 man hours. Ryan and Dave worked weekends, with the Continental engineers and mechanics putting in overtime (“Work hard—fly right” was the current slogan of the airline, an improvement on the former one: “We really move our tail for you”). But at the end of that time, the company had what it wanted: a $10 million engine, ready to be reassembled and recycled.

  Somewhere in the skies, one of the proud 737 “birds with the golden tail” flies with its engine parts cleaned and restored to use courtesy of Aftermath, Inc.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ageless

  Twice a day

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

  —Albert Camus

  Why wait?

  —Suicide note of George Eastman, inventor and founder of Kodak

  “You haven’t really worked this job until you’ve done two things,” Greg Banach told me, “—a three-week decomp and a shotgun suicide. If you can handle both of those, you can handle anything.”

  Three-week decomp, check. The horror show in Cudahy. It was midfall when I headed west from Chicago to Irene, a small hamlet on the southwestern edge of Rockford, Illinois. Dave Creager and Ryan O’Shea were going to clean up the shotgun suicide of an eighteen-year-old boy.

  I followed along behind Dave and Ryan’s truck in my rental. Catching a ride with me was Joe Halverson, a new company hire. The Aftermath recruitment process tended to stick close to home. Halverson was an old high school friend of Chris Wilson’s wife, Kelli.

  The route MapQuested through an exurban landscape of farmland and “build-aways,” modern single-family homes on wooded lots or on the edge of cornfields. We humped over a set of railroad tracks and drove along a row of older homes, ill-favored, asphalt-shingled residences and preranch bungalows, with a few prefabs and double-wides thrown among them. Ryan and Dave turned right up the steep driveway of a small, two-story brown house set above the road beneath a stand of sugar maples. Joe and I parked across the street and walked over.

  No one around.

  “The brother was supposed to be here,” Dave said, and he got on the cell phone.

  Across the driveway ten yards away, a neighbor’s house was also shut up tight, the only sign of movement in a rabbit hutch in the backyard. Standing next to the Aftermath truck I again felt like the Angel of Death. It was sunset, and the eastern sky had already lost the light. Beyond the line of maples, dark brown evening fields lay fallow. Across the street were the parking lots and grounds of a s
prawling new high school, most of the building itself invisible behind the huge brick box of its gymnasium.

  A small bowlegged man in his mid-twenties started up the steep asphalt driveway toward us. He staggered visibly, wobbly on his feet. Dave walked down to meet him. The rest of us suited up as Dave spoke to the big brother of the deceased.

  “I guess the place is empty,” Ryan said. “The family is at the brother’s down the way.”

  He looked over at the blank-windowed house. “This is going to be bad,” he said.

  Dave and the brother headed to the back door. The brother said that the homeowner’s insurance policy was inside. “Would you mind if you went in there with me?” he asked Dave. “I don’t want to go back into the house alone.”

  Dave said he would. I watched the two of them enter. There was something wrong with the brother. He couldn’t walk, and his speech was a mumble, almost incoherent. He appeared ill.

  Dave and the brother came out, and the brother walked un-steadily down the driveway and headed up the road.

  “Upstairs,” Dave said. “A twelve-gauge.”

  “All right,” Ryan said.

  “What was wrong with the brother?” I asked Dave. “Was he drunk or something?”

  “No,” Dave said.

  “Well, he looked like he was having trouble walking.”

  Dave looked over at me. “What you were seeing was someone deep in grief.”

  Right. Of course. I guess I had never really seen it before, at least not to that degree. When my father died there were tears and a solemn air to the gathering, but he had had a stroke in the years previous, so his death did not come as a lightning bolt to my family, the way the unexpected death of a child would. The brother of the suicide had been a total wreck.