It took me over an hour to look at the first twenty-eight bodies, only twenty minutes to work my way down the second side of the trailer. I studied the first dozen bodies closely, looking for markers of their age and race. By the second dozen bodies, I was already getting jaded, by the fourth dozen ruthless and impatient, as my stomach began rumbling and my feet started hurting. I found myself yanking each zipper down, casting a quick, exclusionary glance under the flap, and then pulling the zipper closed impatiently.
I was halfway down the first side of the second trailer—the trailer with the big black 4-F painted on the doors—when I froze, halfway through the reflexive upward tug that would zip the body bag closed. The dress I had glimpsed was nearly black in the center, but my peripheral vision, and then my brain, noticed that the dark color was limited to the chest and neck region. In the sleeves, enough of the original color showed through the dark stain to suggest that the fabric itself was light to medium blue—or once had been, back when a farm wife wore it to a white clapboard church. It would have been the kind of church where the Sunday service was followed by dinner on the grounds, a potluck where the world’s best cooks—southern church cooks—competed sweetly but fiercely to be the acknowledged winner: the one whose baked beans or fried chicken or peach cobbler was the dish that was emptied first, scraped cleanest, and then eyed most sadly by those who’d ended up too far back in the line.
I peeled off my right glove and unzipped my jumpsuit partway, then threaded my hand down the neck of my sweater and fished the photo out of my shirt pocket again. It showed a blue-dressed, silver-haired woman in her seventies. She was holding a toddler on her lap, probably a great-grandchild. She had kind eyes, with a big smile on her face. She also had a big chip out of her upper left lateral incisor. “Her pie injury,” Burt had said when he’d pointed it out to me.
“Pie injury?”
“Pie injury. My Aunt Jean loved pie,” he’d said. “Lord, Doc, that woman could knock back half a pie at one sitting and still want the other half. It’s a wonder she didn’t weigh four hundred pounds. Anyhow, years ago—I was just a kid then—she was eating a piece of cherry pie, and she bit down on a pit and broke a tooth. She could’ve gotten a crown put on, but I think she liked the attention. All the little kids in the family loved to hear her tell the pie story. Every time she told it, that cherry pit got bigger and harder. I swear, by the time she died, that pit was the size of Mount Rushmore and as hard as the Hope Diamond.” As he’d told the story, I’d heard things in Burt DeVriess’s voice that I’d never heard before—warmth and unguardedness and innocence and maybe even love. Funny how a dead woman’s pie story could bring something to the surface through years of cynicism and bare-knuckles courtroom battles.
“Okay, Number Ninety-nine,” I said to the rotted corpse on the shelf, “let’s have a look at your upper left lateral incisor.” I leaned down—the body was on the second shelf up from the floor, at waist level—to study the teeth. The head was in shadow, partly from the shelf above and partly from me, making it difficult to see the tooth’s contours, so I reached in and ran the tip of my left index finger over the biting surfaces of the upper teeth. Where the edge of the incisor should have been, I felt a quarter-inch notch instead. I retrieved my key chain again and shone the tiny LED light on the teeth. Years of wear had softened the edges, but half the tooth had broken away. This had to be Aunt Jean, but I needed to make absolutely sure. Unzipping the body bag completely, I folded back the entire C-shaped flap that constituted the bag’s upper surface. I gave the key-chain light another squeeze and swept the faint beam down from the face, down across the shipwreck of the rib cage, across the collapsed abdomen and jutting hipbones, and along the legs. When I got to the knees, I stopped. The light bounced back at me with a dull silvery sheen. Number 99 had two metallic knees—knees made of titanium-662, I felt certain.
“Hello, Aunt Jean,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m glad I found you.”
A dozen photos, a quick conversation with Sean, and a three-hour drive later, I rolled into Knoxville, feeling exhausted but accomplished. I took a long, hot shower to wash away the smell of death and the aches of bending, then tumbled into bed and fell swiftly asleep. In my dreams I shared a cherry pie with a skeletal woman who flashed me a crooked smile. “Watch out for the pits,” she said, “they’ll break a tooth if you bite down on ’em. Did I ever tell you about the pie that broke my tooth?”
“Tell me again,” I said to her. “Tell me the pie story.”
When I woke up, daylight was streaming in the windows, and I called Burt DeVriess to tell him I’d found her.
CHAPTER 20