I invoiced Burt $6,900 for the twenty-three examinations. Burt notified the insurance companies he’d added another $13 million in liability claims for the thirteen bogus cremains, plus half a million apiece for the ten legitimate cremains—compensation for the pain and suffering incurred by families whose faith had been shattered by the revelations about the crematorium’s shocking practices.
My conversations with Burt were frequent, brisk, and focused, as the class-action suit gained clients and gathered momentum. Then one Thursday he called, and I noticed as soon as he spoke that he sounded upset and hesitant. “I was calling to ask a favor,” he said.
Normally I’d have replied with a joke, but something in his tone told me now was not the time for humor. “Something wrong, Burt?”
“The GBI just released my Aunt Jean’s body,” he said. “She’s at the funeral home in Polk County now, the place that handled the funeral two months ago. I’ve arranged to have her cremated up here in Alcoa tomorrow, at your friend Helen’s place.”
“She’ll do an excellent job,” I assured him.
“That’s good to know,” he said. “I want it done right this time.” He hesitated. “Would you be willing to come, Doc? I want to be absolutely certain there’s no mistake about which body they’ve sent.”
“I can’t imagine that the GBI would mistakenly release the wrong body,” I said. “They’re going to be bending over backward to get everything right.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the next words sounded difficult for him. “I’m not just asking you as a scientist,” he said. “I’m asking you as a friend.”
“I’ll be there, Burt.”
At four o’clock Friday afternoon, a gleaming black hearse with a Polk County tag pulled up outside East Tennessee Cremation. Burt and I were already there waiting, chatting with Helen Taylor, who’d called to give us a heads-up an hour before the hearse was due to arrive.
The driver who emerged from the hearse wore a black suit and a nervous expression. The nervousness escalated to terror when Burt introduced himself and me. I shook the man’s hand; Burt, conspicuously, did not.
In the back of the hearse was an elegant wooden coffin, which appeared to be crafted from solid mahogany. It looked less like a coffin than like fine furniture, and it surprised me to see what an opulent coffin was about to be put to the torch. Helen Taylor rolled a gurney toward the back of the hearse, and as she passed me, she cut her eyes toward the coffin and silently mouthed the words, “Ten thousand dollars.” Part of me wanted to ask Burt, Are you sure about this? But the wasteful extravagance of incinerating a fancy coffin was none of my business. Besides, I supposed, burning an expensive coffin was no more of a waste than burying it. The fanciness was meant for the survivors, not for the deceased.
Then a more pragmatic consideration occurred to me. Burt probably had this rural Polk County funeral home on the hook for a million dollars, I realized—maybe more, if he and his Uncle Edgar testified convincingly about their pain and suffering. I thought back to my conversation with Norm Witherspoon, the Knoxville funeral director who’d resisted the cost-cutting overtures of Trinity’s cheaper services. Along about now, Norm had to be thanking his lucky stars that he’d never switched his business. And I felt sure the Polk County funeral home, like all the others in Burt’s crosshairs, rued the day they’d started sending bodies to north Georgia.
The sweating, nervous mortician in the black suit was not, I realized, some flunky. He was probably the owner or the manager of the funeral home, here to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, went wrong this time around with this particular cremation. And if offering up a ten-thousand-dollar coffin as a gesture of atonement—a burnt offering, of sorts—could appease a ferocious lawyer, it would be money well spent.
The funeral director and Helen grasped the carved handles of the coffin and pulled. The wood slid effortlessly on the rollers built into the bed of the hearse. Those rollers had probably gotten a fresh misting of WD-40 just before the coffin had been loaded, and the hearse looked freshly waxed. We followed Helen as she wheeled the coffin into the building, and she closed the overhead door.
“All right,” said Burt, “open it.” His voice carried a combination of anger and sadness I’d not heard in him before. I’d heard dramatic indignation from him, of course, in court, but never personal fury and never such pain.
The man hesitated. “It’s not going to be…She’s not…It’s been a while,” the mortician stammered.
“Open it,” said Burt, more softly but more menacingly.
The man looked at me in silent appeal.
“We need to see,” I said. “We need to be completely sure there’s no mistake this time.”