It didn’t seem to matter—to Burt, to prospective clients, or to legions of reporters—that he’d never before practiced anything but criminal defense. Nor did it actually matter to the Tennessee Bar Association. “Tennessee does not certify attorneys in specific areas of the law,” read the disclaimers on countless television commercials and phone-book ads. “The law is the law,” Burt had thundered when one reporter asked about the sudden, sharp switchback in his career path. Somehow that slick bit of fancy footwork got transformed into the story’s headline and then into the slogan of Burt’s campaign to bring the funeral industry to its knees. The truth was, if Burt had chosen to hang out his shingle in a small town somewhere in the hills—Jonesport, for instance—he’d have been forced to piece together a living out of whatever cases walked through his door, be they criminal defense, civil suits, wills and estates, prenups, or divorces. It was only because he’d been so spectacularly successful that Grease had gotten pigeonholed as a defense attorney. Burt was wearing, I supposed, a version of golden handcuffs. No reason he shouldn’t trade them for a platinum pair, if he wanted to; Burt’s greatest talent, in fact, was generating large amounts of news coverage and revenue. A big class-action contingency suit, particularly one as juicy as this, would generate copious quantities of coverage. And the revenue stream might well rival the Tennessee River at flood stage—and keep flowing strong for years to come.
It wasn’t long, I noticed, before the rising tide started lifting my own academic boat. I had gotten involved with the crematorium mess when Burt had sent me the urn that should have contained Aunt Jean’s knees but didn’t. We now knew there were hundreds more Aunt Jeans and Uncle Bobs and Mamas and Daddies out there—hundreds more bogus sets of cremains sitting on mantels, and possibly thousands of additional, legitimate urns that people suddenly suspected, and would continue to suspect, until someone proved the contents to be authentic.
That someone, at least for Burt’s new clients, turned out to be me. Chloe began sending me packages almost daily; one day, in fact, I got three packages. The outer containers ranged from plain cardboard boxes to intricately carved wooden or brass chests, but the contents seldom varied, at least when the cremains hailed from Georgia. The twist-tied plastic bags from Trinity Crematorium nearly always contained the same mix of powder, sand, and pebbles I had found in Aunt Jean’s supposed cremains—a mixture, it turned out, remarkably similar in composition to Quikrete concrete mix. The day I got the three packages, I called Burt’s office to tease Chloe.
“Too bad I can’t keep this material,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about pouring a patio in the backyard, and you’ve sent me enough Quikrete this week to pave half an acre.”
Mine was not the only professional boat bobbing on the tide; my colleagues in Chemistry and Geology and even Forestry were helping analyze the mixtures from Georgia. Burt’s class-action suit was headed for trial, and he’d named a long list of defendants. First on the list, of course, came the crematorium and its owners. But I’d seen where the Littlejohns lived, and they didn’t look rich. The real prize, the mother lode Burt planned to mine for millions, was the list of funeral homes that had done business with Trinity. The funeral homes carried liability insurance, and the coverage typically ran to a million dollars or more per case. On paper, at least, that added up to a jackpot of more than $300 million. If Burt’s class-action suit could land the entire sum, his 30-percent contingency would be worth $90 million. The insurance companies were starting to sweat, and they’d already sent a few settlement feelers in Burt’s direction. Their initial offers were low, and Burt had rejected them swiftly, indignantly, and quotably—at a press conference that made page one of every newspaper in the Southeast, as well as several national network newscasts. “We seek the full measure of justice for these families who have suffered so much,” said Burt, in a voice that would have done a Baptist preacher proud. “We will not rest until their pain has been heard, their wounds have been healed, and their wrongs have been set right.” He’d paused to let the words sink in, and the television camera zoomed in for a close-up. When it did, I’d have sworn I saw a solitary tear trickle down his cheek, right on cue. God, the man was amazing.
On the heels of that press conference, the consortium of insurance companies added another zero to the string of digits they were offering Burt to settle. He rejected that offer as well and readied for trial. He planned to call me to testify that the cremains I’d examined were not purely human bone, and I was ably qualified to do that. What I was not qualified to do, under the constraints of what was known in legal circles as the “Daubert rule,” was to testify about the actual composition of the bogus cremains. I could testify that the mixture appeared to contain sand, cement powder, and pebbles, but it would take Daubert-qualified experts—Ph.D.-packing geologists and chemists—to verify that the sand was indeed sand, the cement was bona fide cement, and the pebbles really were pebbles. Funding this small army of experts would whittle down Burt’s big bonanza, but not by much. In the first ten days after Burt started reeling in clients, I examined twenty-three sets of cremains. Of the twenty-three, the ten oldest cases were legitimate—for a while, up until a year or two earlier, the crematorium seemed to have done a decent job—but thirteen were problematic, containing the same odd mixture of human bone, animal bone, and Quikrete. Most of them weighed about half what they should have, judging by my regular trips out to East Tennessee Cremation, where Helen Taylor had graciously allowed me to come weigh cremains on a regular basis—using the new postal scale that had mysteriously appeared on my desk one day after my third unauthorized use of Peggy’s scale.