At the left-hand end of the workbench was a large metal pot, the size and shape of a restaurant kitchen’s stockpot. “This is the processor,” she said. “You see the blades there in the bottom?” I looked into the vessel and saw a thin, flat bar attached to a bolt at the center. The pot was roughly fifteen inches in diameter; the bar reached about halfway to the sides of the pot. Both ends of the bar had shorter bars attached to what appeared to be bearings or pivots. “If you flip that switch, you’ll see how it works.” She nodded toward a toggle on the wall just above the container. I flipped it up, and the blades jolted into motion. I caught a brief glimpse of the shorter bars flipping outward toward the rim, and then the whole whirling assembly disappeared, the way an airplane propeller disappears at full throttle. I flipped the switch off, and the blades spun down, the centrifugal force keeping the shorter bars extended until the assembly coasted to a stop.
“That blade assembly looks like what I feel when I jam my hand down into my garbage disposal to untangle the dishrag,” I said, giving an involuntary shudder. “You could sure lose a hand in there fast.” She nodded again, then tipped the dustpan into the pot. She started an exhaust fan above the processor, then switched on the blades. A plume of dust eddied upward as the blades chewed through the chunks of bone, sending a swirl of powder and small bits of bone up the sides of the vessel. After a half minute or so, she switched off the motor, and the pulverized material settled, the blades sending smaller and smaller waves spinning through the powder as they slowed. She grasped the two handles of the pot, gave a twist to release it from the central shaft that came up from the motor underneath, and hoisted the pot up to the workbench. Then she tipped it into another hopper, this one emptying into a bag of clear, heavy plastic that was cinched to its spout. She tapped the side of the hopper to coax the last bit of powder to fall, then unhooked the bag, dropped in a small metal identification tag, and sealed the bag with a twist tie.
“Where does the tag come from?”
“I make those here,” she said. “Each body gets an ID number, which goes in the file and on this tag.”
“Just like at the Body Farm,” I said. “You’ve got a good system here.”
“Well, I’ve had twenty years to work out the kinks,” she replied, laughing.
The bag was already inside a black plastic container, measuring about six inches by eight inches wide and eight or ten inches tall. She folded down the box’s plastic lid and snapped it shut.
“Could I ask one more favor?”
“Sure,” she said. “What?”
“Would you mind if I took the bag out and weighed it?”
“Of course not,” she said.
Before leaving the Anthropology Department, I’d borrowed the postage scale from Peggy’s supply closet. I was curious to see how the cremains I’d received from Burt DeVriess compared in weight to those from the crematorium. Burt’s Aunt Jean had weighed barely three pounds. These cremains tipped the scales at nearly twice that. I commented on the difference to Helen. “Well, this gal was pretty good-sized,” she said. “Big-boned, as large people like to say.”
“It’s true,” I said. “The heavier you get, the stronger your bones have to be just to carry your body weight. Bones are like muscles—the more you challenge ’em, the stronger they grow.”
She smiled. “I like that analogy. Like muscles.”
“A little bit longer-lasting, though,” I said. “Especially when there’s fire involved.”
I thanked Helen for the help and headed back to UT. When I got back to the office, I looked again at the cremains Burt DeVriess had sent me. With the comparison fresh in my mind, I was struck more than ever by how wrong they looked. The bone fragments were too big and splintered. The granular part was too grainy. The powder was too fine. And those pebbles—they were just plain wrong. I’d known it from the moment I saw them; now, somehow, I took them as a personal affront. With the tip of a pencil, I stirred the mixture, frowning, thinking about various tests I could use to determine what precisely was in this urn besides, or instead of, Burt’s Aunt Jean.
The phone rang. “Dr. B.?”
“Yes, Peggy?”
“You haven’t seen my postage scale, have you?”
Damn—it was on the corner of my desk, where I’d set it and promptly forgotten it upon walking into my office.
“I need to mail Kate Spradley’s bound copy of her dissertation to her down in Pensacola, and I can’t find the scale to weigh it.”
“I’ll look around and see if I spy it anywhere,” I said.
“Would you like me to pick up one for you next time I’m at Office Depot, Dr. B.?”
“Whatever would I need with a postage scale, Peggy?”
“Heaven only knows,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.”
When I hung up, I made a mental note to stop by the men’s room on my way to her office. If I was lucky, the electric hand dryer would have enough oomph to blow away the coating of human dust from the crematorium.
I wished it could also dispell the layers of dread and fear that had settled over my heart since Garland Hamilton’s escape.
CHAPTER 9
THE PHONE RANG AND I GRABBED FOR IT, HOPING IT was Art—or a reporter, or anyone–calling to tell me Hamilton had been captured.