“We have a slight, ah, problem,” Montgomery breathed, causing me to have a powerful sense of déjà vu, a sensation that only intensified when Angie asked what sort of problem we had. “Well . . .” He hesitated. “I don’t know if you were aware of this, but we were not able to embalm the, ah, deceased.”
“My sister, you mean,” said Angie sharply. “You weren’t able to embalm my sister. Because her head was blown off?” Montgomery drew back. “Or because her husband hustled her into the ground so fast?”
“Both the, ah, nature of her injuries and the timing of the arrangements made embalming impossible,” he said. “As a result, we’re unable to bring the body inside. The, ah, odor is quite strong.” From the look of distress on his face, he might almost have been experiencing the odor at this very moment. He looked from Angie, whose face was a stony mask, to me. “Surely you can understand? When people come here to pay their last respects, they don’t want . . .” He trailed off.
Angie finished the sentence for him. “They don’t want it to smell like somebody’s died?”
Montgomery sighed. “Well, yes, if you insist. The entire building would smell.”
I could understand Angie’s edginess, but I could also appreciate his dilemma. “So what do you suggest?”
“We have a maintenance building for the cemetery,” he said. “A garage and shop area. It’s not fancy, but there’s electrical power. Fluorescent lights. Water. No air-conditioning,” he added apologetically, “but fans, which would help keep the air moving through.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “Angie?”
She started to say something, then bit it back and simply nodded.
The bad news was, Morningside’s maintenance shop was a corrugated metal building that soaked up the midday sun, creaking and popping as it expanded in the heat. The good news was, the ceiling was high, and the thick concrete slab under our feet still retained a trace of the spring’s coolness. The better news was, the building had a garage door in the front and another directly opposite it, in back, and the fans Montgomery had mentioned—a pair of industrial-sized blowers with blade assemblies that might have come off a small aircraft—transformed the funeral home’s shop into a cross between a landscaper’s shed and a NASA wind tunnel. Montgomery had placed the coffin on a wooden workbench, which was about waist-high. As he unscrewed the lid and tilted it off, I caught a strong whiff of decomposition, but the smell swirled away swiftly, sucked out of the building and mixing with the scent of the longleaf pines and honeysuckle vines and road-killed deer and armadillos of south Georgia and north Florida.
The coffin was a bottom-of-the-line model, made of cloth-covered particleboard. It had not been sealed in a watertight burial vault, so the fabric was caked with mud and the particleboard was already becoming waterlogged. My work had trained me not to sentimentalize death or the trappings of funerals, but I couldn’t help thinking how little this woman must have mattered to her husband, so swiftly and so cheaply had he put her in the ground.
We’d been joined by a Cheatham County deputy—a hangdog-looking fellow named Chumley—and a grizzled death investigator named Maddox from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A former police detective who’d retired after thirty years of interrogating homicide suspects, Maddox had recently embarked on a new career of observing victims’ autopsies. Assigned to the medical examiner at the GBI’s central-region lab in Dry Branch, Georgia—a small town just east of Macon—Maddox had driven south three hours to join us, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Hell,” he said, “this would’ve been only thirty minutes from the southwestern lab, in Moultrie.”
I asked the obvious question. “Then why didn’t Moultrie send somebody?”
“Nobody in Moultrie to send anymore,” he grumbled. “We closed that lab last spring. Budget cuts. The main lab and the other regional labs are swamped, and there’s a big backlog of evidence from local law enforcement agencies. Penny wise, pound foolish, if you ask me. But nobody did.” He smiled ruefully. “Including you. Sorry to spout off.”
“It’s okay,” I said, turning my attention to Kate’s body.