“Ha,” said Vickery. “While you’re at it, could you put shock collars on a few of my colleagues?”
I laughed, and Angie laughed, too, which did my heart good. “So,” she said, “any chance we could beg, borrow, or steal an hour or so more of your expertise before I put you on your flight back to Knoxville?”
I pulled out my pocket calendar and took a look. I’d blocked out the next two weeks to write a journal article—an account of an experiment in which we’d tested the ability of side-scan sonar to image a body we’d submerged in the Tennessee River—but my heart wasn’t in the project.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a better offer. If you can sign this skull over to me for a few days, I’ll take it back to Tennessee, finish cleaning it, and write a forensic report on it. Then I’ll see if I can get you a facial reconstruction. There’s a forensic artist who works in the bone lab, and she does great work. If Joanna can put a face on this skull for us, somebody might recognize it.” I paused. “And if you can find me a cheaper place to stay, I’ll come back for a week and help you look into your sister’s death.”
Angie, not Stu, nearly caused me to miss my flight back to Knoxville. The reason was not that she was bad with a watch; the reason was that she took us on a three-hour detour to Associated Services.
Associated Services—was there ever a vaguer name?—cleaned up messes. If your house got flooded by a broken pipe or a monsoon—as hundreds of homes did in 2008, when Tropical Storm Fay dumped twenty inches of water on Tallahassee—Associated Services would pump out the water, remove the sodden carpet, replace the soggy, moldy drywall. If you bought a run-down house that was jammed with junk and filth, they’d shovel it out and scrub and disinfect it for you. And if your sister’s brains got spattered all over her living-room sofa and carpet and subflooring, the strong-stomached employees of Associated Services would don their biohazard suits and their respirators, clean up the bloody mess, and dispose of it safely.
Joe Walsh, whose father had started Associated Services thirty-five years before, met Angie and me at the company’s warehouselike facility near the campus of Florida State University. The building—brick and corrugated metal—had offices in the front half, a warehouse in the back. At one end of the building was a large gravel parking lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Five company vans were parked in the lot, as was a pair of black enclosed trailers emblazoned with two-foot-high biohazard warning emblems.
Walsh emerged from the front door and led us into a simply furnished office, motioning us onto a sofa. “I’d offer you coffee, but it’s from this morning, so I wouldn’t be doing you a favor by letting you drink it.”
He’d sounded hesitant, even suspicious, when Angie had called him—she’d phoned as she was driving me back to the Duval to check out—but as she’d talked about her sister’s death, and about why she and I hoped to sift through the shattered, spattered debris the company had removed from Kate’s living room, he’d lowered his guard, at least enough to agree to meet with us.
“I Googled you after I got off the phone,” he said to me. “I’d heard of the Body Farm, but I didn’t really know much about it. That’s interesting work you do there.” I thanked him; then there was a brief, awkward pause before he went on. “I’m sorry if I seemed rude on the phone,” he said. “You get all sorts of calls in a business like this, you know? I had a guy call me once, asking questions about what we’d do to clean up a scene where somebody’d died this way or that way, and it sounded like he was planning ahead, you know? Trying to make some choices on the front end. I told him the first thing we’d do is make sure law enforcement had investigated thoroughly and released the scene. He hung up pretty quick then. So next thing I did, I called the sheriff’s office and gave them his number off my caller ID and suggested they check him out.”
“It wasn’t by any chance a Georgia number,” asked Angie, “sometime in the past couple weeks?”
“No, ma’am,” he said sympathetically. “That call came from Sopchoppy, and it was two, three years ago.”
“Too bad,” she said. “Be great if your caller ID could point an incriminating finger at my scumbag brother-in-law.”
He shrugged apologetically. “Wish I could help you there, but I can’t.”
“But you can help us by letting us look through the debris you took out of my sister’s house.”
He winced and sighed. “Here’s the thing, Ms. St. Claire. I’m more than happy to cooperate with law enforcement. If FDLE wants to examine this material, all you need to do is bring me a court order, and I’ll be glad for you to take it over to the crime lab and go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But I can’t let you go through it here. It’s a biohazard, and I can’t take a chance on the liability.”