“How much do you know about cremation?”
“Do you need help figuring out your funeral arrangements? Or is this a quiz?”
She sounded edgy and tough. Not a bad quality in a federal agent, I realized. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be cryptic. Suppose there were a crematorium that wasn’t doing its job.” I paused. She waited. I paused some more. Finally she gave up, unwilling to waste any more time.
“Wasn’t doing its job? What does that mean?”
“Well, what’s a crematorium’s job?”
“Incinerating bodies,” she snapped. “What’s your point here, Doctor? This is what you mean by trying not to be cryptic?”
“Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just in a slightly delicate position here.” I was trying to figure out whether I needed to protect the confidentiality of information I had gained on behalf of a client, which is what Burt DeVriess was in this case, since it was his Aunt Jean’s cremains that had motivated my trip to Georgia.
“Dr. Brockton, please tell me you haven’t stumbled into one of our undercover investigations again.”
“If I had,” I countered, “how would I know? As you’ve seen, I’m not too good at spotting your undercover agents.”
“True. But let’s cut to the chase, Doctor. Are you calling to report a federal crime?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think so. If a crematorium is paid to burn bodies, and if the bodies don’t get burned, that would be a breach of contract, right?”
“Breach of contract or fraud, probably.”
“And if they’re doing business over the phone with people in several states—say, Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia—would that count as interstate wire fraud?”
“Sounds like it.”
I struggled to remember what I knew about white-collar crime, which wasn’t much. Murder tended to wear a blue collar, or a blood-red one. “And am I right in thinking that interstate wire fraud is considered a form of organized crime?”
“Technically, yes,” she said. “I suspect crematoriums weren’t tops on anybody’s list of dangerous criminal enterprises when the RICO statutes were written. But technically you’re probably correct—wire fraud is pretty broadly defined, so what you’re describing could constitute wire fraud and an organized-crime enterprise. Technically.”
“You keep saying ‘technically.’ How come?”
“Because there’s a fairly high threshold that has to be met before we’re going to pursue a federal wire-fraud case.”
“What kind of threshold?”
“A financial threshold. The dollar value’s got to be around a quarter million dollars to justify committing resources to an investigation and prosecution. The U.S. Attorney has to agree it’s worthwhile. It’s sort of like speeding—technically, the police can ticket you for doing forty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone, but they’re not going to waste their time on that. They’re going to be on the lookout for the guy going sixty or seventy. So to circle back to cremation, if a crematorium failed to cremate somebody they got paid to cremate, yeah, they committed fraud. If they used interstate phone lines to do it—and these days, unless you’re using tin cans and a string to talk to the guy next door, every telephone conversation uses nationwide networks—then yeah, it’s interstate wire fraud. But the reality is, we don’t have the time or resources to bring the hammer down on some crematorium that didn’t cremate a body. That’s what civil suits are for.”
“How about a hundred bodies? Maybe more?”
Price was silent for longer than I’d ever heard her stay quiet. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if this crematorium isn’t defrauding one or two people? What if they’re defrauding hundreds—everybody they deal with? What if they’re not cremating any of the bodies?”
She paused again. I liked it when I could give Price pause. “And what are they doing with these bodies, if they’re not cremating them?”
“Piling them in a patch of pine forest.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Hundreds of bodies?”
“Technically,” I said, “I haven’t seen hundreds. Technically, I’ve seen fewer than a hundred—ninety-four, to be precise. But I didn’t exactly do a grid search. That’s what I saw in about ten minutes, in one corner of the woods.”
“You saw ninety-four bodies piled in the woods?”
“I saw eighty-eight piled in the woods…well, not piled, exactly—more like dumped and strewn and half hidden. I saw six more stacked in the back of a broken-down hearse.”
“Damn, Doc,” she said. It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound impressed, or surprised, or anything other than strictly business. “Those folks are giving your Body Farm a run for the money.”
“Yeah, except they’re not doing the research,” I said. “Oh, and they’re bringing in a lot more money than I am.”