The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  It wasn’t long, I noticed, before the rising tide started lifting my own academic boat. I had gotten involved with the crematorium mess when Burt had sent me the urn that should have contained Aunt Jean’s knees but didn’t. We now knew there were hundreds more Aunt Jeans and Uncle Bobs and Mamas and Daddies out there—hundreds more bogus sets of cremains sitting on mantels, and possibly thousands of additional, legitimate urns that people suddenly suspected, and would continue to suspect, until someone proved the contents to be authentic.

  That someone, at least for Burt’s new clients, turned out to be me. Chloe began sending me packages almost daily; one day, in fact, I got three packages. The outer containers ranged from plain cardboard boxes to intricately carved wooden or brass chests, but the contents seldom varied, at least when the cremains hailed from Georgia. The twist-tied plastic bags from Trinity Crematorium nearly always contained the same mix of powder, sand, and pebbles I had found in Aunt Jean’s supposed cremains—a mixture, it turned out, remarkably similar in composition to Quikrete concrete mix. The day I got the three packages, I called Burt’s office to tease Chloe.

  “Too bad I can’t keep this material,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about pouring a patio in the backyard, and you’ve sent me enough Quikrete this week to pave half an acre.”

  Mine was not the only professional boat bobbing on the tide; my colleagues in Chemistry and Geology and even Forestry were helping analyze the mixtures from Georgia. Burt’s class-action suit was headed for trial, and he’d named a long list of defendants. First on the list, of course, came the crematorium and its owners. But I’d seen where the Littlejohns lived, and they didn’t look rich. The real prize, the mother lode Burt planned to mine for millions, was the list of funeral homes that had done business with Trinity. The funeral homes carried liability insurance, and the coverage typically ran to a million dollars or more per case. On paper, at least, that added up to a jackpot of more than $300 million. If Burt’s class-action suit could land the entire sum, his 30-percent contingency would be worth $90 million. The insurance companies were starting to sweat, and they’d already sent a few settlement feelers in Burt’s direction. Their initial offers were low, and Burt had rejected them swiftly, indignantly, and quotably—at a press conference that made page one of every newspaper in the Southeast, as well as several national network newscasts. “We seek the full measure of justice for these families who have suffered so much,” said Burt, in a voice that would have done a Baptist preacher proud. “We will not rest until their pain has been heard, their wounds have been healed, and their wrongs have been set right.” He’d paused to let the words sink in, and the television camera zoomed in for a close-up. When it did, I’d have sworn I saw a solitary tear trickle down his cheek, right on cue. God, the man was amazing.

  On the heels of that press conference, the consortium of insurance companies added another zero to the string of digits they were offering Burt to settle. He rejected that offer as well and readied for trial. He planned to call me to testify that the cremains I’d examined were not purely human bone, and I was ably qualified to do that. What I was not qualified to do, under the constraints of what was known in legal circles as the “Daubert rule,” was to testify about the actual composition of the bogus cremains. I could testify that the mixture appeared to contain sand, cement powder, and pebbles, but it would take Daubert-qualified experts—Ph.D.-packing geologists and chemists—to verify that the sand was indeed sand, the cement was bona fide cement, and the pebbles really were pebbles. Funding this small army of experts would whittle down Burt’s big bonanza, but not by much. In the first ten days after Burt started reeling in clients, I examined twenty-three sets of cremains. Of the twenty-three, the ten oldest cases were legitimate—for a while, up until a year or two earlier, the crematorium seemed to have done a decent job—but thirteen were problematic, containing the same odd mixture of human bone, animal bone, and Quikrete. Most of them weighed about half what they should have, judging by my regular trips out to East Tennessee Cremation, where Helen Taylor had graciously allowed me to come weigh cremains on a regular basis—using the new postal scale that had mysteriously appeared on my desk one day after my third unauthorized use of Peggy’s scale.

  I invoiced Burt $6,900 for the twenty-three examinations. Burt notified the insurance companies he’d added another $13 million in liability claims for the thirteen bogus cremains, plus half a million apiece for the ten legitimate cremains—compensation for the pain and suffering incurred by families whose faith had been shattered by the revelations about the crematorium’s shocking practices.

  My conversations with Burt were frequent, brisk, and focused, as the class-action suit gained clients and gathered momentum. Then one Thursday he called, and I noticed as soon as he spoke that he sounded upset and hesitant. “I was calling to ask a favor,” he said.

  Normally I’d have replied with a joke, but something in his tone told me now was not the time for humor. “Something wrong, Burt?”

  “The GBI just released my Aunt Jean’s body,” he said. “She’s at the funeral home in Polk County now, the place that handled the funeral two months ago. I’ve arranged to have her cremated up here in Alcoa tomorrow, at your friend Helen’s place.”

  “She’ll do an excellent job,” I assured him.

  “That’s good to know,” he said. “I want it done right this time.” He hesitated. “Would you be willing to come, Doc? I want to be absolutely certain there’s no mistake about which body they’ve sent.”

  “I can’t imagine that the GBI would mistakenly release the wrong body,” I said. “They’re going to be bending over backward to get everything right.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the next words sounded difficult for him. “I’m not just asking you as a scientist,” he said. “I’m asking you as a friend.”

  “I’ll be there, Burt.”

  At four o’clock Friday afternoon, a gleaming black hearse with a Polk County tag pulled up outside East Tennessee Cremation. Burt and I were already there waiting, chatting with Helen Taylor, who’d called to give us a heads-up an hour before the hearse was due to arrive.

  The driver who emerged from the hearse wore a black suit and a nervous expression. The nervousness escalated to terror when Burt introduced himself and me. I shook the man’s hand; Burt, conspicuously, did not.

  In the back of the hearse was an elegant wooden coffin, which appeared to be crafted from solid mahogany. It looked less like a coffin than like fine furniture, and it surprised me to see what an opulent coffin was about to be put to the torch. Helen Taylor rolled a gurney toward the back of the hearse, and as she passed me, she cut her eyes toward the coffin and silently mouthed the words, “Ten thousand dollars.” Part of me wanted to ask Burt, Are you sure about this? But the wasteful extravagance of incinerating a fancy coffin was none of my business. Besides, I supposed, burning an expensive coffin was no more of a waste than burying it. The fanciness was meant for the survivors, not for the deceased.

  Then a more pragmatic consideration occurred to me. Burt probably had this rural Polk County funeral home on the hook for a million dollars, I realized—maybe more, if he and his Uncle Edgar testified convincingly about their pain and suffering. I thought back to my conversation with Norm Witherspoon, the Knoxville funeral director who’d resisted the cost-cutting overtures of Trinity’s cheaper services. Along about now, Norm had to be thanking his lucky stars that he’d never switched his business. And I felt sure the Polk County funeral home, like all the others in Burt’s crosshairs, rued the day they’d started sending bodies to north Georgia.

  The sweating, nervous mortician in the black suit was not, I realized, some flunky. He was probably the owner or the manager of the funeral home, here to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, went wrong this time around with this particular cremation. And if offering up a ten-thousand-dollar coffin as a gesture of atonement—a burnt offering, of sorts—could appease a ferocious lawyer,
it would be money well spent.

  The funeral director and Helen grasped the carved handles of the coffin and pulled. The wood slid effortlessly on the rollers built into the bed of the hearse. Those rollers had probably gotten a fresh misting of WD-40 just before the coffin had been loaded, and the hearse looked freshly waxed. We followed Helen as she wheeled the coffin into the building, and she closed the overhead door.

  “All right,” said Burt, “open it.” His voice carried a combination of anger and sadness I’d not heard in him before. I’d heard dramatic indignation from him, of course, in court, but never personal fury and never such pain.

  The man hesitated. “It’s not going to be…She’s not…It’s been a while,” the mortician stammered.

  “Open it,” said Burt, more softly but more menacingly.

  The man looked at me in silent appeal.

  “We need to see,” I said. “We need to be completely sure there’s no mistake this time.”

  His face turned pale, but he nodded. He fished a small crank from somewhere underneath the coffin, inserted it into a hole down near the foot, and began to turn.

  Almost as if by magic, the lid levitated an inch or so. When it did, the strong and unmistakable smell of decomposition roiled out of the interior. Burt flinched, and his face tightened into a mask, but he reached out, grasped the polished wood, and lifted the lid. Inside was Aunt Jean, still in the stained blue dress. Her hair was cleaner than when I’d seen her in the refrigerated trailer, and somebody had made a valiant effort to curl and brush it. The effect was bizarre but poignant, coiffed hair fringing a nearly bare skull. The few remaining tatters of skin served mainly to underscore how much bone was showing through: the zygomatic arches, the gaping teeth, the pointed chin, the sharp-edged eye orbits. When the light from the overhead fluorescents hit the face, a few maggots scurried for cover, and the funeral director turned a whiter shade of pale.

  “We did our best to clean her up,” he said. “I’m so sorry about that.”

  Burt didn’t respond, so I kept quiet, too.

  Burt leaned down and studied the teeth, just as I had, down at the makeshift morgue a few days before. “I’d know that smile anywhere,” he said, “even without the face around it. Damn, Doc. She died two months ago, and I made my peace with it then. But seeing her like this, it’s as if she just died all over again, only worse. The indignity, you know?” He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. This time Burt wasn’t playing for the cameras.

  “I know, Burt. I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Mr. DeVriess,” began the mortician, “on behalf of all of us at Eternal Rest Mortuary, I’d just like to express our deepest—”

  “Shut up,” snapped Burt. “Don’t you say one single sanctimonious word to me.”

  The man’s jaw sagged, then clenched tight.

  Burt pointed at the lustrous lid. “Now close it up.”

  The man scurried to crank the lid shut, and Burt nodded to Helen. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  She pressed a button, and the furnace door opened. She slid the coffin in, closed the door, and touched the button labeled AFTERBURNER, then PRE-IGNITION. I heard the whoosh of flame, and in a matter of moments the hand-rubbed finish of the mahogany ignited and Aunt Jean began to burn.

  CHAPTER 24

  ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE CREMATORIUM, I STOPPED at a Hardee’s for a bacon cheeseburger. I was just about to pull up to the drive-through speaker when I remembered what Helen had said about the crematorium’s ashy dust—“it gets everywhere”—and I flashed back to the small cloud that had erupted from the processor when she’d ground the bones that day. Let’s wash our hands, I thought. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the water that swirled down the drain did seem a tad murkier than usual.

  I ordered the burger and a sweet tea, and while I waited for the sandwich, I went to the drink counter to get my tea. There’s no consensus in the South about the ideal sugar-to-tea ratio in sweet tea, and over the years I’ve found that the ratio can vary wildly, depending on who’s doing the mixing. I dispensed a small sample into the bottom of the cup, so I could see where on the scale this batch happened to fall. The tea was so thick and syrupy I could almost have eaten it with a fork. There had to be at least a five-pound bag of sugar in the five-gallon urn. One pound per gallon, I thought. It’s easy to remember, and there is a certain symmetry to the formula. To lower the risk of a sugar coma, I looked for lemon—one lemon per cup would probably be about right—but there was none. The next-best thing, I decided, would be to cut the tea with lemonade from the soda fountain. I filled the cup halfway with tea, then began adding lemonade, pausing to resample every few spurts. By the time I’d gotten to a fifty-fifty blend, I’d reined in the sweetness, but the tea flavor was now pretty dilute. Life is a series of compromises, I reminded myself.

  As I snapped a lid onto the cup, I heard what I took to be low, sustained laughter behind me. I turned with a smile, looking to see who was laughing, and why. It took me a moment to realize that I’d been 180 degrees wrong about the sound. A young woman in a Hardee’s uniform was bent over one end of the cash-register counter, her face in her hands, sobbing steadily. She looked young—a girl, really, no more than twenty—and plump, and when she raised her face for a moment, something in it made me wonder if she might be mildly retarded.

  I looked at the man behind the cash register, expecting to see him rush to offer aid or comfort. Instead he leaned toward the next customer in line and said, “Would you like to try a patty-melt combo today?” The customer—a man in a black suit and a white shirt, a red tie cinched tight at his throat—studied the menu board intently, then ordered a chicken fillet sandwich with large fries. It was as if the weeping woman at his elbow simply weren’t there. Another employee, a middle-aged woman, glanced at the girl, then looked away. As she turned back to the milkshake machine, the woman avoided my questioning gaze.

  It was none of my business, I realized. Perhaps the girl’s coworkers had a good reason for ignoring her distress—maybe instead of stepping outside for a smoke when her break time rolled around, she hunched over the counter and sobbed twice a day. But somehow I doubted that, and I felt an answering sadness welling up within me. Moving slowly to her, I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  After a moment she raised her head and looked at me, her face blotchy and her eyes swollen and bleak. “No,” she whispered, then dropped her face into her hands again and resumed sobbing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Bacon cheeseburger to go,” announced the man at the register. I lifted my hand from the girl’s shoulder, picked up the bag, and returned to my truck, wondering why this world contained so much pain. Wondering why some people’s share of the pain seemed so much greater than others’. Wishing some of the surplus sweetness in that urn of tea could somehow spill over into that poor girl’s life.

  CHAPTER 25

  DARREN CASH APPEARED AT MY OFFICE DOOR MONDAY morning. A long, thin tube of rolled-up paper—a blueprint, I was guessing—was tucked under one arm. I said hello, then nodded at the tube. “Whatcha got?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask.” He slid a rubber band down off one end and flattened a property-tax plat map on my desk.

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “Actually, it is. This is Middlebrook Pike here,” he said, tracing a line that curved from near downtown out to the west and then south. “Here’s the Lathams’ farm.”

  I studied the boundaries on the plat map. “How big is it—a hundred acres?”

  “Almost,” he said. “Eighty.”

  “That’s a mighty big parcel so close to downtown Knoxville,” I said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t been carved up into subdivisions and shopping centers by now.”

  “Mrs. Latham was quite attached to it. She grew up on that farm; it’d been in her family over a century. Notice anything unusual about the plat map?”

  I studied it. “Looks like somebod
y set a cup of coffee down on it,” I said, pointing to a circular brown stain in one corner.

  He laughed. “True, but not quite what I was after. If you were a developer, is there anything particular about that piece of property that would catch your eye?”

  “Besides there being a lot of it?” He nodded, so I studied the map more closely. “Well, it’s got great frontage along Middlebrook Pike.”

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “It also backs up to the 640 bypass,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  “And the railroad cuts through one corner. So potentially it’s easy to reach by road or by rail.”

  “And if you were going to do something with that property, what would you do?”

  “I’d expand the Body Farm,” I said. “We’re running out of space for all the donated bodies we’re getting these days.”

  Cash laughed.

  “If the neighbors wouldn’t let me do that, maybe I’d put in a fancy office park. Or a mix of office buildings, high-end retail shops, and fancy condos.”

  “You missed your calling,” he said. “That’s exactly the master plan the developer had in mind for it.”

  “What developer?”

  “The developer Stuart Latham was talking to behind his wife’s back. You got any guess what that land would be worth?”