“Angie and I work with biohazardous materials all the time,” I pointed out.
“But not on my property, you don’t,” he said. “If you got sick and sued, it could ruin me. My family, too.”
“No offense,” I said, “but it seems to me that even the dumbest lawyer in Tallahassee could create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind about the source of any nasty bugs Angie and I might happen to come down with.”
Walsh smiled, but he shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t have enough time or money to take that chance.”
“How about this,” I suggested. “How about if Angie and I sign liability releases, in blood, promising not to hold you or your company liable for anything that might happen?”
“It’s not just that,” he said. “If we go opening up biohazard bags, our neighbors—businesses and residents right around here—are going to smell it and get upset. I can’t afford to risk the ill will.”
“I understand your concern,” I said. “The Body Farm is only a few hundred yards downhill from a condominium development in Knoxville—fancy condos up on a bluff over the river—and on hot summer days when the air is just sitting still, our neighbors sometimes aren’t too happy.” I gestured out the window behind me. “But look out there. You really think anybody’s going to catch a whiff of anything right now?”
He looked; a storm was blowing up, and across Madison Street trees were swaying in the wind—a wind that would have whisked away the odor from a hundred corpses, let alone from some bloody cushions and carpeting.
Ten minutes later, he swiveled in his chair and took two hastily drafted liability releases from a computer printer on a table behind him. Angie and I glanced at what we were promising not to hold the company liable for: illness or injury, emotional trauma, even old age and eventual death, or so it seemed. We scrawled our signatures, and Walsh unlocked the chain-link gate so we could pull into the back lot alongside the biohazard storage trailers.
I’d somehow imagined that the cleanup crew had hauled away the sofa and flooring materials intact, more or less, except for the damage from the gun blast. When I saw what we’d be sifting through—how thoroughly everything had been disassembled—my heart sank. The frame of the sleeper sofa had been stripped down to the bare metal of the folding mechanism, and all the porous materials—the heavy batting of the cushions and the mattress, the blood-soaked carpeting, the rubber carpet pad, and the waferboard subflooring—had been cut apart and sealed into plastic biohazard bags inside cardboard boxes measuring two feet square. Before we could search the scene, we’d have to reconstruct it.