“How much does cremation cost?”
“It costs the consumer about eight hundred to a thousand dollars,” I said, “but that includes the funeral home’s markup. The crematorium itself doesn’t charge that much, more like four hundred per cremation. I hear this place down in Georgia was doing it—or not doing it—for three hundred.”
“Hmm,” she said. “So a hundred unburned bodies—we’ll go with a nice round number, to keep the math simple—would represent a thirty-thousand-dollar case of fraud. Have I got that decimal in the right place?”
Put that way—reduced to a bottom-line dollar amount—the shocking scene in the woods sounded insignificant. “But I bet there are more,” I said. “Maybe a lot more.”
“There would have to be,” she said. “I hate to break it to you, Dr. Brockton, but we’d need ten times that many bodies in the woods to justify a federal wire-fraud investigation.”
“You’re saying you’d need a thousand bodies? You’ve got to be joking.”
“I don’t joke, Dr. Brockton.” She had a point there, I realized.
“My white-collar-crime agents are swamped with cases right now—multimillion-dollar cases. You remember that chop shop we raided last spring over in Grainger County? They were selling stolen-car parts throughout the South, to the tune of seven million dollars a year. Your cockfighting friends in Cooke County? Illegal gambling—hundreds of thousands of dollars every day those birds were pecking each other to death.” Technically, I wanted to point out, the roosters spurred or slashed each other to death, but I didn’t see much future in interrupting Price just to correct her description of cockfighting. “I don’t mean to sound callous,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s big enough for us. Did you call local law enforcement?”
“No,” I said. “This a rural county in Podunk, Georgia. They don’t begin to have the forensic resources to deal with this.”
“If the locals request assistance, we could send in an Evidence Recovery Team.”
“There’s a whole lot of evidence to recover,” I said. “Why not just send in the cavalry now? Eliminate the middleman?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “We help if we’re asked—it’s called ‘domestic police cooperation’—but we have to be asked. And despite what you see on television, we consider the ‘cooperation’ part important. Call the locals.”
“That’s all you’ve got for me—‘call the locals’?”
“’Fraid so,” she said. “Sorry that’s not what you wanted to hear. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Thanks.”
She clicked off without saying good-bye.
Angela: that was her name. “Thanks for nothing, Angela,” I said to the dead receiver.
Call the locals? I didn’t even know who the locals were. I had an atlas in my truck, so I went out and got it and traced my route from Chattanooga down into the northwest corner of Georgia. It didn’t take long to pinpoint what county the crematorium was in, and I knew that it wouldn’t take a genius to track down the number for the county sheriff. But I found myself hesitating, resisting the idea of calling 411. As I took a mental step back and analyzed the reasons for my hesitation, it came clear. Over the years of my work, I had come to know and respect many sheriffs in rural Tennessee. But within the past year, I had survived a couple of near-death experiences with deputies in Cooke County, where Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings was a regular at the cockfights—and where Deputy Leon Williams had used dynamite to entomb Art Bohanan and me in a cave. On the one hand, I had no reason to suspect that the sheriff in northwest Georgia was looking the other way as bodies piled up in the woods. But then again, I had no particular basis for confidence either. And if the sheriff did happen to be in cahoots with the crematorium, my call might actually trigger a quick cleanup and a massive cover-up. The more I thought, the less I wanted to call the locals.
But if not the locals, then who could I call?
I glanced idly at the atlas again, and my gaze strayed southward, to Atlanta. “Sean Richter,” I said out loud. “I can call Sean.”
Sean Richter was one of my former graduate students. After completing his master’s degree, he had spent a year in the remnants of Yugoslavia, helping excavate mass graves and identify victims of ethnic-cleansing massacres in Kosovo. Now he was working in Atlanta as the staff forensic anthropologist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As an interstate wire-fraud case, the crematorium might be too small for the FBI to bother with. But as a Georgia fraud case, it might be big enough to interest the GBI. And I was certain it would interest Sean, with its similarities to the mass-fatality identifications he’d done in Kosovo. I fished out my pocket calendar, which had a small address book tucked in the back, and looked up his number.
“Anthropology lab, this is Richter.”