He nodded, suddenly looking weary. When he opened the trailer’s door, the blazing heat and blinding light outside nearly knocked us backward.
“Listen, I really appreciate your getting me in here to take a look,” I said as we thudded down the wooden steps. “If I find her, I’ll let you know. And if I don’t find her, I’ll let you know that, too.”
He peeled off his glove to shake my hand again—I wished I owned stock in the company that was providing the gloves and body bags for this operation—and thanked me once more, then headed for the command post. As he walked, I saw him checking his pager and shaking his head.
I walked to the back of my truck, lifted up the hard cover over the bed, and dropped the tailgate. Sitting on the gate, I shucked off my Doc Martens, then wiggled into a pair of insulated ski pants to keep my legs warm. Next I threaded my legs into a baggy Tyvek jumpsuit, then put my shoes back on and stretched paper booties over them, since there was likely to be goo here and there on the trailer floors. I stuffed a few pairs of nitrile gloves into the hip pockets of the jumpsuit, slung my camera around my neck, and tucked a thick sweater under one arm. I’d need the sweater in the coolers, but I wasn’t ready to put it on just yet. Before waddling back to trailer three, the empty sleeves of the jumpsuit dangling from my waist, I took another look at the picture I’d gotten from Burt DeVriess. Burt’s Aunt Jean smiled up at me from the photo. She wore a sky blue dress with a strand of black pearls—an anniversary present—around her neck. This had been her summer church outfit for years, Uncle Edgar had said. In the South, church clothes eventually became burial clothes. Uncle Edgar had kept the pearls as a memento after the memorial service, but I hoped the dress or its black plastic buttons would have survived.
I reentered trailer three, latched the door behind me, then squirmed into the sweater and zipped up the suit. Where to begin? “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” I said, pointing in turn to each of the trailer’s corners. “Moe” was back in the far right corner—up near where the cab would be when the trailer was being towed—so I headed that way. The stepstool was already back there, so I decided to start with the uppermost body, then work my way down toward the floor. Each shelving unit consisted of four shelves, and there were seven units along each wall. Twenty-eight bodies per side, fifty-six in this trailer. I’d need to hustle. For efficiency and thoroughness, I decided I’d work in a regular pattern: down four, over one, up four, over one, down another four, and so on, till my vertical zigzags brought me all the way back to the rear door. Then I’d work the other side, the other twenty-eight bodies in the same pattern. “Okay, here we go,” I said, scooting the stool into position, climbing to the upper step, and pulling down the zipper.
The body in the right front corner of the trailer was number 28, according to her arm tag, her leg tag, and a computer-generated tag stuck to the front of the metal shelf she lay on. She was dressed in what had once been a cream-colored suit, which had probably contrasted nicely with her skin tone, as she was an African-American woman. I couldn’t tell that by the skin—there wasn’t much left, and even white people’s corpses tended to turn black as they decayed. But her hair was characteristically kinky, and her jaws and teeth jutted forward in the distinctly Negroid feature called prognathism. I zipped her up and dropped down a level.
Body 107, the second I looked at, appeared to be an elderly white woman, with wispy, thinning hair. My pulse quickened when I saw that she wore blue—it looked closer to navy than to sky blue, but photos can be misleading. It only took a moment, though, to realize that she wore dentures, and I knew from Burt and his uncle that I was looking for a woman with all her teeth. Almost all her teeth, I corrected myself.
And so it went, up, across, down, across, up again: body after body, skeleton after skeleton, all of them female, none of them possessing quite the combination of features that, collectively, had once been called Jeannie by her husband, Aunt Jean by her nephew, and Mamaw by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.