“Sean, this is Bill Brockton.”
“Dr. Brockton, how are you?”
“I’m fine, but I’d be better if you quit calling me Dr. Brockton, Sean. You’re my colleague now, not my student. It’s time you graduated to calling me Bill.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “That’s gonna be a tough habit to break, though. Once a forensic god, always a forensic god.”
“Well, once you break this case wide open,” I said, “you’ll be a legend yourself.”
“What case?”
“How would you like to lead the recovery and identification of a hundred decomposing bodies, maybe more? Maybe lots more?”
He laughed. “You’re one of the few people who actually find that an irresistible temptation,” he said. “But I’m one of the others. Unfortunately, I doubt that I could get a leave of absence right now to do that. I fear my traveling days are over, for a while at least.”
“You wouldn’t have to travel. At least not outside your jurisdiction.”
Sean didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did speak, his voice sounded unnatural and forced, as if he were pushing the words out by sheer willpower. “Are you telling me you think there’s a mass grave here in Georgia with a hundred or more bodies in it?”
“No, and not exactly,” I said. “I don’t think—I know. But it’s not a grave, it’s surface. You wouldn’t even have to dig.” As I described what I’d seen in the woods, he interrupted me often, asking me to repeat or confirm or elaborate on some detail. The shakiness in his voice gave way to a mixture of excitement and anger. Sean was smart enough to realize that this case would be forensically fascinating, as well as a watershed in his career. But his anger at the indignity inflicted on the dead—dumped in the woods like refuse—was genuine, and I knew that Sean would do whatever it took to make the case a priority for the GBI.
His eagerness was tempered by one very legitimate concern. The GBI’s anthropology lab was small, and Sean’s resources—equipment and personnel—were nowhere near adequate to recover and identify so many bodies all at once. “You might want to ask for help from DMORT,” I said. DMORT—the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team—was a federally deployed unit designed to assist with mass fatalities. The team members, who included forensic anthropologists, dentists, funeral directors, and other professionals skilled at identifying or handling corpses, were volunteers, but they were highly trained and extremely capable. DMORT teams had performed heroically at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center attacks, and they had worked for months to identify the hundreds of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Sean agreed that DMORT could be a valuable resource.
“You might also want to ask the FBI for an Evidence Recovery Team,” I said. Then, and only then, did I recount the gist of my conversation with Special Agent Price. “They don’t want to run the case,” I said, “but I gather they’d be willing to roll up their sleeves and help with the fieldwork. If you ask.”
“I’ll certainly recommend that we ask,” he said. “This is going to be huge, and we’ll need all the help we can get.” He paused, then said, “Hmm.” I waited, figuring he was working up to another question, and I was right. “So when my bosses ask me how I know about this mess, what do I tell them?”
“Tell them the truth,” I said. “I don’t see how it can hurt. Might give them a little more confidence that it’s not a wild-goose chase if they know the tip came from a guy who has a reasonably good idea what bodies in the woods look like.”
He chuckled at that. “True. Be hard for them to doubt the accuracy of the report if they know it comes from you.”
“I don’t particularly want my name in the news, though, if you can keep me out of it,” I said. “Any chance y’all could say the GBI received a call from a ‘concerned citizen’ or some such?”
“I’ll suggest it,” he said. “Politically, that might have some appeal—if we say, ‘It took an anthropologist from Tennessee to sniff this out,’ the GBI doesn’t look real bright. But if we say, ‘We acted swiftly in response to a tip,’ we look semicompetent.”
“Semicompetent nothing,” I said. “Y’all’ll be heroes. But only if you quit yakking and get busy.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Dr. Brockton.”
“Excuse me—who?”
“Oh. Sorry. Thanks…Bill.”
His teeth were nearly clenched as he said it. But at least he said it.
CHAPTER 17
DOWN IN GEORGIA I’D STUMBLED UPON A BUNCH OF bodies that should have been burned but weren’t. Here in Knoxville, I reflected, I was obsessed with a body that shouldn’t have been burned but was. I guess the universe is in balance, I thought. Except that Garland Hamilton’s still out there somewhere.
Darren Cash answered his cell phone on the third ring.
“I think I know how he did it,” I said.