“Could it be SCI?” SCI—Service Corporation International—was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the death-care industry, a multibillion-dollar company that owned thousands of funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries worldwide. With its deep pockets and a reputation for ruthless competition, SCI tended to inspire fear and loathing among locally owned funeral homes, especially any that found themselves targeted in the giant’s cross-hairs. SCI had been the subject of several lawsuits and scandalous news stories in recent years. One scandal was triggered by stories that National Funeral Home, an SCI facility in Virginia, had as many as two hundred unembalmed bodies stacked on racks in a big, unrefrigerated garage. Two other headline-making scandals—along with multimillion-dollar lawsuits—resulted from charges that graves and remains at SCI cemeteries in Florida and California had been secretly destroyed to make room for new burial plots.
Culpepper shrugged. “She didn’t know what company. She never met the out-of-town guy, but she said she’d ask around, see if anybody else did. It was all just rumors, she said, but sometimes rumors have an underlying factual basis.”
“Helen’s plugged in,” I said. “I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t dredge up something more for you.”
“Let’s hope.” The detective folded another piece of gum into his mouth. He stood and headed for the door, then stopped and turned back. “By the way, I thought the ignition button was creepy but cool.”
“Ignition button?”
“Yeah, the ignition button. The red button beside the family viewing window. The grieving widow or whoever can push it to light the furnace and send her loved one up in smoke.”
“Oh, that button. Right.” Helen had pointed it out to me when I’d toured her new facility. At the time I’d paid more attention to the three cremation furnaces and the six-body cooler, though I’d found the button intriguing and slightly amusing. Now I couldn’t help wondering: If my body were the one in the furnace, who would push the button—and with what mixture of feelings?
With a casual wave of his hand and a loud pop of his gum, Culpepper left me to ponder the prospect of my own cremation.
CHAPTER 19
“SEEMS LIKE WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE!” SHOUTEDMiranda over the roar of the backhoe as it tugged at another coffin—this one the blue-green of oxidized copper—deep in a grave in Highland Cemetery. A rolling, parklike cemetery in the Bearden area, Highland was the nearest burial ground to the moneyed manses of my richer Sequoyah Hills neighbors.
“Déjà vu all over again!” yelled Grease. “Did you see that movie?Deja Vu ? With Will Smith? Think of me as Knoxville’s Will Smith.”
“Good God, man,” Miranda scolded, “that was Denzel Washington.”
“So think of me as Knoxville’s Denzel Washington.”
“Hard to do,” she shot back. “You’re not tall, dark, and handsome. You’re not even tall, dark,or handsome.”
He threw her a look of mock indignation. “But I gave an Oscar-worthy performance when I argued Judge Wilcox into signing the order for this exhumation.”
“Tell me about that,” I said, pulling on my gloves. “I was surprised when you called.”
“I used the old lawsuits I dug up—the complaints I exhumed, you might say—to convince him that Ivy Mortuary was engaged in a systematic pattern of fraud. He was willing to grant me one additional exhumation. I figured it made sense to go for another body that was buried around the same time as Willoughby’s.”
“Conspiracy theory meets fishing expedition,” observed Miranda.
“Like the Tom Waits song says,” DeVriess added, “‘Fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.’”