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“Mostly,” he said. “But I’ve decided to branch out-try my hand in the civil courts, as a plaintiff’s attorney.”
“Plaintiff’s attorney? You’re going to start suing people?”
“I believe so,” he said. “And now seems like a good time to dip a toe in the water.”
“You’re going to sue the crematorium for not cremating your aunt?”
“My aunt and a whole bunch of other folks.”
A lightbulb flickered on above my head. “Ah. A class-action lawsuit. But how you gonna track down all the families of these people?”
“I won’t have to,” he said. “They’ll track me down.”
“How will they know to do that?”
“You forgetting what a master of the media I am, Doc?”
I had a quick flashback to the press conference Burt had held-had orchestrated, scripted, and choreographed-the moment the video expert had found the evidence that cleared me of Jess’s murder. “Silly me,” I said. “What was I thinking? You’ll probably be on Larry King, and I should hang up so you can start working the press and taking phone calls.”
“Before you do,” Burt said, “can I ask you for another favor?”
“You can always ask,” I said.
“I know you must have called in some markers to set those wheels in motion down in Georgia,” he said.
“I’ve helped a few people in law enforcement over the years,” I said. “They’re pretty willing to help me in return, if they can. Besides, it was the right thing to do.”
“Whatever string you pulled down there to blow the lid off that thing-any chance you could tug on it one more time?”
I felt my guard go up, knowing he was probably already laying plans for a class-action suit that could net him millions in contingency fees. “What do you want, Burt?”
“I want my Aunt Jean, Doc,” he said. “I know she’s one of those three hundred bodies they’re hauling out of the woods. It’s gonna kill my Uncle Edgar to find out how she was treated. If there’s any way you can go back down there and find her, so we can get her home and try to set this thing right, I’d be forever grateful.”
The request surprised me, and impressed me. “I’ll see, Burt,” I said, “but I can’t promise anything. Everybody who ever sent a loved one there is going to be clamoring to get in, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “But you’re the guy who uncovered the truth.”
“I’ll see, Burt,” I repeated. “That’s all I can do.”
“I understand. Thanks, Doc. I ’preciate you.”
CHAPTER 19
WHEN I DIALED SEAN RICHTER, I GOT HIS PAGER, which didn’t surprise me. Sean would have his hands full, and then some, for quite a while. During their first day’s search of the woods surrounding the crematorium, the GBI and FBI evidence teams had found nearly three hundred bodies and skeletons. Recovering them could take weeks; identifying them could take months, if not years. DMORT had brought in a couple of inflatable morgues, and the GBI had trucked in a small fleet of refrigerated trailers to house the bodies while they figured out how to process them. My guess was they’d end up building a massive new morgue and DNA lab dedicated to this one case.
The gruesome scene in the Georgia backwoods was the lead story on every major television network, wire service, and Internet news site in the country. It was also, I learned from the stack of printouts Miranda had put on my desk, the topic of dozens of international headlines-variations on the theme of “Americans are barbarians,” many of them. Atop the stack Miranda had left a sticky note: “How come you couldn’t have found this in Tennessee instead of Georgia? Jealous Junior Anthropologist.”
Sean returned my page within ten minutes, which did surprise me. “I didn’t think you’d get a chance to call me back for…oh, about ten or twenty years.”
“It’s a zoo,” he said, “and it’ll stay that way for a long time. But since you’re the one who steered us to this, I figure if you page me, I return the call. You’re number three on my priority list, right after the GBI director and my wife.”
“She outranks me now? You’re obviously not under my thumb anymore,” I said.
“Yet here you are,” he said good-naturedly, “still pulling my strings.” He took a deep breath and puffed it out. “You’re not calling to tell me about another big batch of bodies somewhere in Georgia, I hope?”
“How’d you guess?” I laughed. “No, not today. I’m calling to ask a favor-to see if you can pull a string or two for me.”
“You want us to just ship everything up to the Body Farm, right?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I said. “But now that you mention it, I’d love to add another three hundred skeletons to the collection. Can you have ’em here tomorrow?”
“Sure,” he joked, “piece of cake.” We both knew that eventually-once the bodies were identified-they’d need to be returned to their families, or to whoever had sent them to be cremated.
“Anything else on your wish list?”
“This might be nearly as difficult to arrange,” I said, “but if you can’t bring the mountain of bodies to Mohammed, how about if Mohammed comes down to the mountain? I’d love to take a quick look around. Not just for curiosity,” I hastened to add. “You know the woman whose bogus cremains caused me to start poking around in the woods? I’m wondering if you’d be able and willing to let me take a quick look for her.” I was pretty sure Burt’s Aunt Jean was one of the hundreds of bodies chilling in those refrigerated trailers, but it might be months before Sean got to her. To him she was just one among hundreds, but to me-and to Grease, who’d asked whether I could get into the makeshift morgue and find her fast-she was a priority.
“Ah,” he said. “I understand. I’d certainly have no problem with that. But it’s not my call. This is the highest-profile case anybody around here can remember, and the director and the public-affairs people are pretty touchy. So far, access is limited to the GBI, FBI, and DMORT teams. Hell, we even turned away the governor, who wanted to come up and hold a press conference in the woods with that grungy crematorium in the background.” He paused, and in the distance I could hear the hum of refrigeration units, the beep of a truck backing up, and the squawk of a public-address announcement asking somebody or other to report to the command post.
“Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a shot at least,” I said.
“Could save you a little time and money,” I added. “If I find her, that’d be one less person for you to ID. One less DNA test to pay for.”
“Good point,” he said. “We’re at three hundred twenty-seven bodies already, and we haven’t finished searching. Can you maybe help us ID another fifty or sixty?”
“If I say yes, does that give me a better shot at getting in to look for Aunt Jean?”
“You bet,” he said.
“I’d love to pitch in for a week or two,” I said, “but I want to stay close to home until Garland Hamilton’s back in custody. It’s not like I’m out beating the bushes myself, but I do want to stay near the phone.”
“I understand,” he said. “Dr. Carter was a good M.E.-she worked with us on a couple of cases that crossed jurisdictional lines-and I was sorry to hear she’d been killed.” There was an awkward pause, and then he added, “I was also sorry to hear the police suspected you at first.”
I appreciated Sean’s sentiments, but I suddenly wished the conversation hadn’t taken this particular turn.
“Listen, Sean, I bet you’ve got half a dozen people clamoring for you,” I said. “I’d better let you get back to work. Call if you get the okay
for me to come down in the next couple days.”
“I will,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
His best shot must have been pretty good, because two days later a Georgia state trooper swung open the gate and waved me into the driveway of the Littlejohn property. The watchdogs inside the fence were gone, replaced by a pack of television crews patrolling the outer perimeter. Several cameramen jogged toward my truck, cameras bobbing on their shoulders, but by the time they reached the gate, I was already crunching down the driveway in a cloud of dust.
After threading through the pines for a quarter mile, the driveway emerged into a yard the size of a football field. To the left was a pond measuring maybe fifty yards across; to the right was a single-story brick ranch house with a small front porch at the center, framed by two white columns. I’d probably passed a dozen such houses, I realized, flanking the thirty miles of two-lane highway between Chattanooga and here. Next came a small prefab wooden building, roughly ten feet square-the sort of thing that might house a snow-cone stand for a few months in the summer. Beyond that was a big, barnlike shed. Inside, I glimpsed a tractor, a bushhog mowing attachment, a battered old pickup, and-the first indication that this was anything other than an ordinary rural farmstead-a handful of concrete burial vaults.
The next odd thing I saw, as I passed the shed, was the row of stainless-steel refrigerated trailers parked behind it, their cluster of diesel generators and compressor motors combining to produce a roaring, clattering chorus. From here on, the driveway was lined with police vehicles-county, state, and federal cars, marked and unmarked-plus crime-lab vans and DMORT trucks. The final building was tucked beside a large turnaround area at the end of the drive. This building resembled a dilapidated garage with a rusty metal flue at one end, and I recognized it as a smaller, shabbier cousin of the immaculate crematorium I’d visited in Alcoa. Beside it, I noticed with a jolt, was a huge barbecue grill.
