The Devil's Bones (Body Farm 3)

“Speed dating? What’s that?”

“You sign up and go meet a bunch of other people who are looking to meet Mr. or Ms. Right, and you spend five minutes apiece interviewing a bunch of them.”

“Five minutes? And the point of that is what, exactly?”

“It gives you a chance to see whether you like somebody, without the pressure of a fix-up or an actual date,” she said. “Actually being out with them, you know? If you like them, you give them your phone number. If you don’t, you say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ you shake their hand, and you move on.”

“What if they give you their phone number and you don’t really want it?”

“Then you toss it in the trash when you get home,” she said.

“What if they ask for your number and you don’t want to give it to them?”

“Then you smile sweetly and say, ‘I don’t think so.’ Look, I didn’t say it was the perfect system,” she said. “I only said it was interesting.”

“Just curious.” I laughed. “And did you meet the future Mr. Right?”

“As if,” she said, which I took to mean she hadn’t. “But I did meet a guy who could be Mr. Right Now. A guy who might be a good movie buddy till the real deal comes along.”

“Speed dating,” I marveled. “It’s a whole new world out there. Any old coots like me shuffling amidst the speed daters?”

“Ha-you will never be an old coot,” she said. “But it did tend to be a youngish crowd. Which is not to say you shouldn’t try it.”

“Me? I don’t think so, Chloe. I’m just curious about the anthropology of it,” I said.

“Well, then you should sign up sometime and go study the phenomenon firsthand.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. “Could I talk to Burt?”

“Sorry, he’s not here-he’ll be in court all day. His first trial in a month. If it’s urgent, I can try to get him a message, though.”

“No, I reckon it’s not urgent,” I said. “They’re not going to get any deader.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, Chloe, just talking to myself there. I was going to ask his advice on something, but I’ll figure it out myself.”

After I hung up and thought awhile, I opened my address book to the section headed “F” and dialed another call.

“Hello, you’ve reached the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Knoxville Division,” announced the woman’s voice in my ear. “If you know your party’s extension, you can dial it at any time.” I did not know my party’s extension, so I pressed 2, then punched in P, R, I, and C.

“This is Special Agent Price.” I tried to recall her first name from our meetings about official corruption in Cooke County-not that I would ever be on a first-name basis with Price, who was a study in cool, brisk efficiency. Andrea? No, not Andrea, but something along those lines.

“Hello there, Special Agent Price. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, from UT.”

“Ah, Dr. Brockton. Are you calling to plead guilty to gambling on cockfights, Dr. Brockton?”

I laughed. “Not exactly.” Price had sent an undercover FBI agent to gather evidence against a massive cockfighting operation in Cooke County the prior year. Quite by accident, I had found myself an inadvertent spectator as the roosters battled to their bloody deaths. During my brief glimpse at the seamy subculture of cockfighting, I had nearly thrown up on Price’s undercover agent. “I admit to second-degree spectating and first-degree nausea, but I did not gamble.”

“You sound like Bill Clinton talking about marijuana,” she said. “Or sex. What can I do for you, Dr. Brockton?”

“How much do you know about cremation?”

“Do you need help figuring out your funeral arrangements? Or is this a quiz?”

She sounded edgy and tough. Not a bad quality in a federal agent, I realized. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be cryptic. Suppose there were a crematorium that wasn’t doing its job.” I paused. She waited. I paused some more. Finally she gave up, unwilling to waste any more time.

“Wasn’t doing its job? What does that mean?”

“Well, what’s a crematorium’s job?”

“Incinerating bodies,” she snapped. “What’s your point here, Doctor? This is what you mean by trying not to be cryptic?”

“Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just in a slightly delicate position here.” I was trying to figure out whether I needed to protect the confidentiality of information I had gained on behalf of a client, which is what Burt DeVriess was in this case, since it was his Aunt Jean’s cremains that had motivated my trip to Georgia.

“Dr. Brockton, please tell me you haven’t stumbled into one of our undercover investigations again.”

“If I had,” I countered, “how would I know? As you’ve seen, I’m not too good at spotting your undercover agents.”

“True. But let’s cut to the chase, Doctor. Are you calling to report a federal crime?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think so. If a crematorium is paid to burn bodies, and if the bodies don’t get burned, that would be a breach of contract, right?”

“Breach of contract or fraud, probably.”

“And if they’re doing business over the phone with people in several states-say, Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia-would that count as interstate wire fraud?”

“Sounds like it.”

I struggled to remember what I knew about white-collar crime, which wasn’t much. Murder tended to wear a blue collar, or a blood-red one. “And am I right in thinking that interstate wire fraud is considered a form of organized crime?”

“Technically, yes,” she said. “I suspect crematoriums weren’t tops on anybody’s list of dangerous criminal enterprises when the RICO statutes were written. But technically you’re probably correct-wire fraud is pretty broadly defined, so what you’re describing could constitute wire fraud and an organized-crime enterprise. Technically.”

“You keep saying ‘technically.’ How come?”

“Because there’s a fairly high threshold that has to be met before we’re going to pursue a federal wire-fraud case.”

“What kind of threshold?”

“A financial threshold. The dollar value’s got to be around a quarter million dollars to justify committing resources to an investigation and prosecution. The U.S. Attorney has to agree it’s worthwhile. It’s sort of like speeding-technically, the police can ticket you for doing forty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone, but they’re not going to waste their time on that. They’re going to be on the lookout for the guy going sixty or seventy. So to circle back to cremation, if a crematorium failed to cremate somebody they got paid to cremate, yeah, they committed fraud. If they used interstate phone lin

es to do it-and these days, unless you’re using tin cans and a string to talk to the guy next door, every telephone conversation uses nationwide networks-then yeah, it’s interstate wire fraud. But the reality is, we don’t have the time or resources to bring the hammer down on some crematorium that didn’t cremate a body. That’s what civil suits are for.”

“How about a hundred bodies? Maybe more?”

Price was silent for longer than I’d ever heard her stay quiet. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if this crematorium isn’t defrauding one or two people? What if they’re defrauding hundreds-everybody they deal with? What if they’re not cremating any of the bodies?”

She paused again. I liked it when I could give Price pause. “And what are they doing with these bodies, if they’re not cremating them?”

“Piling them in a patch of pine forest.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Hundreds of bodies?”

“Technically,” I said, “I haven’t seen hundreds. Technically, I’ve seen fewer than a hundred-ninety-four, to be precise. But I didn’t exactly do a grid search. That’s what I saw in about ten minutes, in one corner of the woods.”

“You saw ninety-four bodies piled in the woods?”

“I saw eighty-eight piled in the woods…well, not piled, exactly-more like dumped and strewn and half hidden. I saw six more stacked in the back of a broken-down hearse.”

“Damn, Doc,” she said. It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound impressed, or surprised, or anything other than strictly business. “Those folks are giving your Body Farm a run for the money.”

“Yeah, except they’re not doing the research,” I said. “Oh, and they’re bringing in a lot more money than I am.”

“How much does cremation cost?”

“It costs the consumer about eight hundred to a thousand dollars,” I said, “but that includes the funeral home’s markup. The crematorium itself doesn’t charge that much, more like four hundred per cremation. I hear this place down in Georgia was doing it-or not doing it-for three hundred.”

“Hmm,” she said. “So a hundred unburned bodies-we’ll go with a nice round number, to keep the math simple-would represent a thirty-thousand-dollar case of fraud. Have I got that decimal in the right place?”