“It is,” I said. “Somebody told me you were in here. When I didn’t see you, I thought maybe you’d crawled into the furnace and burned up.”
“Not a chance,” he said, emerging from the rear of the cramped building. “Nothing to burn. Guy at the gas company says they stopped taking propane deliveries about eighteen months ago. He actually smelled something the last time he was out there; got suspicious and called the cops. Whoever he talked to told him it was a dead cow and suggested he mind his own business.” So much for “call the locals,” I thought, wishing Agent Price were standing beside me to hear this. “Let’s head on up to the coolers, and we’ll get you started,” he said. “Do you need clothing?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got everything I need in the truck.”
We trudged up the drive and toward the row of refrigerated trailers. Sean’s white biohazard suit, I noticed, was covered with soot and cobwebs from the filthy building.
“We’ve divided them by sex,” he shouted over the rising din of the generators. “Males in trailers one and two, females in three and four, and unknowns in five and six.”
“Roughly how many in each?”
“Fairly evenly divided,” he yelled. “Not a whole lot of soft tissue on any of these—it’s Georgia and it’s summertime, so anybody who’s been here more than a week or two is pretty well skeletonized or mummified. The clothing seems to have held up better than the tissue, so that helps.”
I nodded; I had expected as much from the bodies I’d seen.
A set of bare wooden steps, assembled from fresh lumber, led up to the back of each trailer. I followed Sean up the steps of the third trailer. He unlatched the door, and a blast of frosty air rolled over me, chilling the sweat on my face and neck. Even cold, the air was ripe with the odor of decomp.
The interior was lit by a string of fluorescent work lights, jury-rigged to the ceiling. Both sides of the trailer were lined with metal shelving units, four shelves high. Every shelf held a body bag—some black, some white. The topmost shelves were head-high; at the far end of the trailer, I noticed a stepstool, which I’d need to stand on to inspect the upper row of bodies. Sean walked to the nearest bag, on a shelf at chest height, and tugged the zipper around the C-shaped opening. He folded back the flap, revealing a head, the skull and cervical vertebrae exposed. The skull was small and smooth, with a pointed chin and sharp edges at the top of the eye orbits—a classic female skull. A mat of long, tangled brown hair lay beside the skull. “Well, she’s in the right trailer, whoever she is,” I said.
Sean laughed. “Be kinda embarrassing if I’d unzipped one that we’d gotten wrong,” he said. He tugged the zipper farther toward the foot of the bag so he could fold back more of the flap. “We’ve tagged the upper left arm and the left ankle of every body,” he said. “Numerical tags, starting with one.” He checked the tag on the skeletal arm. “This is number forty-seven,” he said. “If I remember right, she was one of that batch you found over near the bulldozer. We started with the ones in the hearse—no particular reason; it was just someplace to start—then tackled the big group by the dozer. There were bodies everywhere, Bill. Bodies stacked in burial vaults in the shed, bodies dumped in a shallow pit—hell, even a couple bodies stuffed in an old chest-type freezer out by a trash pile.”
“What on earth were they thinking?”
“I’m not sure they were thinking,” he said. “Guy said the furnace quit working and he just got behind and overwhelmed. But we had a technician check it out, and it seemed to be working fine once we got some propane in the tank. I’m not sure we’ll ever know the whole story. My theory? It’s like those folks out in the country that strew junked cars and washing machines and bedsprings all over their property. Only difference is, this guy wasn’t strewing around broken-down vehicles or appliances—this guy was accumulating broken-down human beings.”
“Any idea how much money he saved by not cremating the bodies?”
“Seventy, eighty bucks apiece, best we can tell. Less than a hundred. Not near enough to justify this mess, that’s for sure.”
I couldn’t imagine what might be enough to justify this mess. It would cost millions of dollars, I felt sure, to clean up the site and identify the bodies, and many millions more to settle the lawsuits that aggrieved families were bound to start filing. I had long since given up on trying to predict the oddities that turned up in murder cases and death investigations, but this—the sheer scale and stupidity of it—stunned even me. “Sean, I’m going to suit up and start looking for Aunt Jean,” I said, “so you can get back to work.”