“You bet,” he said.
“I’d love to pitch in for a week or two,” I said, “but I want to stay close to home until Garland Hamilton’s back in custody. It’s not like I’m out beating the bushes myself, but I do want to stay near the phone.”
“I understand,” he said. “Dr. Carter was a good M.E.—she worked with us on a couple of cases that crossed jurisdictional lines—and I was sorry to hear she’d been killed.” There was an awkward pause, and then he added, “I was also sorry to hear the police suspected you at first.”
I appreciated Sean’s sentiments, but I suddenly wished the conversation hadn’t taken this particular turn.
“Listen, Sean, I bet you’ve got half a dozen people clamoring for you,” I said. “I’d better let you get back to work. Call if you get the okay for me to come down in the next couple days.”
“I will,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
His best shot must have been pretty good, because two days later a Georgia state trooper swung open the gate and waved me into the driveway of the Littlejohn property. The watchdogs inside the fence were gone, replaced by a pack of television crews patrolling the outer perimeter. Several cameramen jogged toward my truck, cameras bobbing on their shoulders, but by the time they reached the gate, I was already crunching down the driveway in a cloud of dust.
After threading through the pines for a quarter mile, the driveway emerged into a yard the size of a football field. To the left was a pond measuring maybe fifty yards across; to the right was a single-story brick ranch house with a small front porch at the center, framed by two white columns. I’d probably passed a dozen such houses, I realized, flanking the thirty miles of two-lane highway between Chattanooga and here. Next came a small prefab wooden building, roughly ten feet square—the sort of thing that might house a snow-cone stand for a few months in the summer. Beyond that was a big, barnlike shed. Inside, I glimpsed a tractor, a bushhog mowing attachment, a battered old pickup, and—the first indication that this was anything other than an ordinary rural farmstead—a handful of concrete burial vaults.
The next odd thing I saw, as I passed the shed, was the row of stainless-steel refrigerated trailers parked behind it, their cluster of diesel generators and compressor motors combining to produce a roaring, clattering chorus. From here on, the driveway was lined with police vehicles—county, state, and federal cars, marked and unmarked—plus crime-lab vans and DMORT trucks. The final building was tucked beside a large turnaround area at the end of the drive. This building resembled a dilapidated garage with a rusty metal flue at one end, and I recognized it as a smaller, shabbier cousin of the immaculate crematorium I’d visited in Alcoa. Beside it, I noticed with a jolt, was a huge barbecue grill.
A woman in a white biohazard suit labeled GBI was headed toward the building, a trowel in one hand, an evidence bag in the other. “Excuse me,” I called, “I’m looking for Sean Richter. Do you know where I might find him?” She glanced at me and seemed surprised to see a middle-aged, bespectacled guy in khakis and a polo shirt.
“He’s in there,” she said, cocking her head toward the building’s open garage door and the darkness within. She glanced at my feet and seemed about to say something but didn’t. I guessed that my shoes—rubber-soled Doc Martens—had passed muster, showing that I knew enough to leave my dress shoes at home in the closet. I thanked her, and she nodded, then walked around the end of the small building and disappeared behind it, leaving me alone at the entrance.
After my eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, I found myself face-to-face with a cremation furnace that looked slightly archaic and more than a little sinister. My first thought was, Auschwitz. Unlike the lustrous steel control panels I’d seen at the Alcoa crematorium, this furnace had a massive door of black cast iron bolted directly to the brickwork, with huge hinges to support its weight. The furnace door was open, but the interior was utterly dark. My key ring had a tiny flashlight on it; I fished it out and shone the feeble light into the arched cavity. The firebrick was jagged and crumbling, completely caked with soot and cobwebs.
Sean was nowhere to be seen, but I heard voices, so I called his name. From somewhere behind the furnace, I heard him answer. “Bill Brockton, is that you?”