I STARED AT THE CONTENTS OF THE PACKAGE AGAIN, then stared at the note once more. “Dr. Brockton, please call me when you get this. Thanks. Burt.”
I dialed Burt DeVriess. I didn’t have to refer to the number embossed on the fancy letterhead; I remembered it from the brief, memorable, and ruinously expensive period when DeVriess-better known as “Grease” throughout Knoxville’s legal (and illegal) circles-had served as my criminal defense attorney. Grease had charged me an arm and a leg, but he had also saved my neck, so it was hard to begrudge him that fifty-thousand-dollar retainer. His secretary, Chloe, seemed to think that our association had saved some part of Grease as well, the part that passed for the attorney’s shriveled soul. Judging by the years he’d spent ruthlessly representing Knoxville’s seamiest criminals-his client list read like a who’s who of killers, drug peddlers, and pedophiles-salvation seemed too much to hope for. Still, the fact was, DeVriess had taken to turning down the notorious clientele that had made him rich and infamous. He’d not yet traded his Bentley for a Prius, as far as I knew, or started doing pro bono work for the homeless. But even if he hadn’t attained sainthood yet, he at least seemed to qualify for some sort of “Most Improved Karma” award.
Chloe answered on the second ring. “Mr. DeVriess’s office, may I help you?”
“Hi, Chloe, it’s Bill Brockton.”
“Hi there,” she chirped. “How are you?”
“Hanging in there, Chloe. And you?”
“Pretty good, but we do miss you. You need to get yourself arrested again, so we’ll see you more often.”
“I can’t afford it,” I said, laughing. “If I had to hire Burt again, I’d go bankrupt.”
“Perfect,” she said. “Then he could represent you in bankruptcy court.”
“For free, no doubt,” I said. “So speaking of the master of legal larceny, what’s the story on this package he sent me?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “I think I’d better let him tell you about that. Hang on. And come see us?”
I smiled. Chloe had treated me exactly this way-as a friend-when I first walked in through her boss’s art deco doorway with a murder charge hanging over my head, so desperate that I’d stooped to hire the aggressive defense lawyer I despised above all others.
While I held the line for DeVriess, I took another look at the contents of the package he’d sent me. It was a small wooden box, almost a cube, about eight inches square. It was ornately carved, with an engraved brass latch and a hinged top. The box was beautiful, but what really caught my eye was the grainy, powdery mixture I saw when I opened the lid.
“Hello, Doc,” said a voice that managed to sound both butter smooth and granite hard at the same time. It sounded like money and power, and I knew that Knoxville’s winningest defense attorney had plenty of both. “How’s life down on the Farm these days?”
“People are dying to get in, Burt,” I joked. “How’s life down in the sewer?”
“Stagnating a little,” he said cheerily. “There’s a vicious rumor making the rounds that I’ve gone soft, maybe even developed a conscience. It’s killing my practice, but it’s great for my golf game.”
“There’s always a silver lining,” I said. “As they say, if you can’t have what you want, then want what you have. So this little present you sent me-is this what it looks like?” I stirred the upper layer of the mixture with the sharpened end of a pencil, and a tiny plume of dust rose from the box. Uppermost in the mixture was a layer of fine, grayish white powder; beneath that was a layer of grainy tan particles, along with what I quickly recognized as shards of incinerated bone. “I got excited when I opened the lid,” I joked. “Thought for a minute maybe these were your ashes.”
If he thought that was funny, he hid it well.
“So who is this, Burt?”
“That, Doc, is the sixty-four-million-dollar question,” he said. “Supposed to be my Aunt Jean. But my Uncle Edgar? He says not.”
“How come?”
“You looked at it yet?”
“Only a little.”
“Notice anything funny?”
I stirred around a bit more, creating another miniature dust storm. Down near the bottom of the box, I glimpsed what appeared to be small, rounded pebbles. “Well, there’s some rocks in here,” I said, “As least they sure look like rocks.”
“Damn right they look like rocks,” he said. “Doesn’t take a Ph.D. in anthropology to tell the difference between bone and pea gravel. Another thing? You wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, of course, but Aunt Jean’s knees aren’t in there.”
“Her knees? How do you know?”
“Because Aunt Jean’s knees were made of titanium. She had both of ’em replaced about five years ago.”
“Crematoriums don’t usually send things like that back to the family, Burt.”
“Uncle Edgar specifically asked for them.”
“Ah. Then that would seem to be a significant omission.”
“They couldn’t have melted and dripped down somewhere in the oven or something, could they?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Those orthopedic devices are made of pretty tough stuff. But let me do a little research on titanium and cremation and get back to you.”
“Could you do more than that, Doc?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s not right here, Doc,” he said. “What’d they do with her knees? What’s that gravel doing in there? And how come those chunks of bone are so big? I scattered my mother’s ashes up in the Smokies after she died, and there weren’t any pieces bigger than rock salt in Mom’s urn.”
“So you want me to do a forensic analysis on this set of cremains?”
“Cremains?” He snorted. “Who the hell came up with ‘cremains’?”
“Not me,” I said. “Some funeral director, probably. Easier to say than ‘cremated human remains,’ I reckon.”
“Cornier, too,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay your hourly expert-witness rate, for however many hours you need to spend on this.” My rate was two hundred dollars an hour; that meant I’d need to poke around in the cremains for 250 hours to recoup the fifty thousand dollars I’d forked over to Grease a few months earlier. I didn’t want to spend 250 hours breathing the dust of Aunt Jean, but I was intrigued by the case-and impressed that the lawyer had zeroed in on the puzzling things in the mixture.
“I’ll find out everything I can,” I said.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I owe you.”
“Not yet,” I said, “but you will.”
He laughed. “I guess I’d better sell one of the Bentleys,” he said, but we both knew that my bill wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what I’d paid Burt to defend me. He gave me a few more details-his aunt’s date of death, the name of the funeral home and the crematorium, and the phone number of his Uncle Edgar, who lived in Polk County-then signed off, saying “’Preciate you, Doc.”
I dialed the extension for the bone lab, tucked beneath the other end of the stadium, a five-minute walk through curving hallways along the base of the enormous ellipse. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda. Can I help you?”
“I sure hope so,” I said.
“Oh, it’s just you.”
“Try to contain your enthusiasm,” I said.
“Oh, ex-cuse me,” she gushed. “Dr. Brockton, how may I be of assistance?”
“That’s more like it,” I said. “Soon as you finish genuflecting, could I trouble you to dig up the melting point of titanium?”
“I live to serve,” she said. “Elemental or alloy?”
“I’m not sure.”
I heard the rapid clatter of keystrokes. “Well, if you’re talking pure titanium metal,” she said, “the melting point is a toasty nineteen hundred and thirty-three. That’s on the Kelvin scale, which is”-clatterclatterCLATTERclatter-“three thousand and change, Fahrenheit.”
“How’d you find that so fast?”
“The wonders of Google,” she said. “Google also lives to serve.”
“Damn,” I said. “Google, YouTube, MySpace-I feel like a dinosaur, Miranda.”
“Well, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward change,” she said. “So is that it? You just got curious about the properties of titanium?”
“No, actually, what I’m wondering about is the melting point of artificial knees.”
I heard another flurry of keystrokes. “Looks like most orthopedic implants are made of titanium alloy, cobalt chromium steel, or stainless steel. Also oxidized zirconium-sort of a cross between a metal and ceramic-which is harder than metal but tougher than ceramic.” More keystrokes. “The most common material seems to be titanium-662, though, an alloy of titanium, aluminum, and vanadium, plus a pinch of this and a dash of that.”
“Vanadium? Is that really an element, or are you just making that up?”
“Making it up? Moi? You cut me to the quick. That would be a violation of the Research Slave Code of Ethics. Besides, if I were going to make up an element, don’t you think I could come up with something better than ‘vanadium’? I think ‘mirandium’ has a nice ring, don’t you? And ‘loveladium’ rolls trippingly off the tongue, too.”
“What was I thinking? You’re right,” I said. “The periodic table really should revolve around you.”
“I’ll let the implication that I’m egocentric pass for the moment, because I’m so delighted to be doing your grunt work. Let’s see, titanium-662…. Melting point is…durn it…a closely guarded military secret, it would appear. Not really, but I’m not getting any Google hits that look like the answer. You want me to call some equally downtrodden peon in Engineering?”
“Nah, hold off for now,” I said. “I wouldn’t think the alloy’s melting point would be a whole lot lower.”
“You know what I think?”
“More often than I’d like,” I said.
“Ha, ha. I think if you’re running a high enough fever to melt your knees, you’re long since toasted.”
“Toasted is right,” I said. “The question is, could a cremation furnace melt a pair of knee implants?”
“I’d say it depends how hot the furnace gets.”
“Really? Amazing. Do the folks who give out the MacArthur genius grants know about you?”
“Don’t get smart with me, boss.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I’ll hang up.”
“Ooh,” I said, “now you’re really scaring me.”
I laughed when the line went dead. I was pretty sure she was laughing, too.
My next call was to Norman Witherspoon, a Knoxville funeral director who’d sent me a half dozen or so corpses during the past decade-people who’d wanted their bodies donated to science but who hadn’t made the arrangements before dying. “Norm, what do you do when somebody asks to be cremated?”
“I say, ‘Sorry, I have to wait until you’re dead.’”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” I said. “Let me rephrase the question. Norm, where do you send bodies to be cremated?”
“East Tennessee Cremation Services,” he said. “Out near the airport. In the Rockford industrial park, off Alcoa Highway.”
“I’ve got a case involving cremated remains. You reckon East Tennessee Cremation would let me come look at their equipment and ask a few questions?”
“Long as the case doesn’t involve them. Does it?”
“No,” I said. “A place down in the northwest part of Georgia-Trinity Crematorium.”
“Oh, that place.”
“Why do you say ‘that place’?”
“Well, that’s where funeral homes send cremations if they want to save a few bucks or a little time.”
“How many bucks is ‘a few’?”
“Not too many-about a hundred per cremation. We handle about sixty cremation requests a year, so we’d save about six thousand dollars if we switched. But if you factor in Trinity’s pickup and drop-off, the savings would be bigger.”
“How so?”
“We have to take the bodies out to East Tennessee Cremation, and then we have to go pick them up, either at the end of the day or sometime the next day. So that’s a hundred and twenty roundtrips. We’re only about fifteen miles from there, so it’s not a huge problem, but it can get complicated, especially if we have several burials going on at the same time, too. Trinity picks up the bodies and then returns the cremains, and that can save a lot of time. They courted us pretty hard, and we thought about switching, but in the end we decided to stick with East Tennessee Cremation.”
“Because?”
“I’ve known the folks there for twenty years. They do a good job, they keep their facility spotless, and they’re extremely professional.”
“Unlike the folks at that Georgia place?”
He laughed. “You sound like some fast-talking courtroom lawyer now. You’ve been spending way too much time being cross-examined. Look, I don’t know anything bad about them. But I don’t know anything great about them either. What it comes down to is, I don’t want to stop doing business with people I know and like, just for the sake of a hundred bucks here and there.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “No further questions at this time. Oh, except the name and number of the person I should call at the place over in Alcoa?”
“EAST TENNESSEE CREMATION.” The woman who answered sounded slightly out of breath, as if she’d had to dash for the phone.
“Is this Helen Taylor?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
I introduced myself and began a convoluted explanation of why I was calling.
“Norm Witherspoon told me you’d probably be calling,” she said, as soon as I gave her an opening. “I heard you lecture a few years ago at the Tennessee Association of Funeral Directors. You were showing pictures of how a body decays if the embalming job’s not good. You’re welcome to come out anytime.”
I wasn’t sure if she was extending the welcome in spite of my criticisms or because of them. Either way, I was quick to accept the invitation. “When would be a good time to visit?”
“Up to you. I’m here Monday through Friday, eight A.M. to five P.M. We’ve got three cremations scheduled today, so pretty much anytime you come, I’ll be putting somebody in, taking ’em out, or running them through the processor.”
“Sounds like they’re getting their money’s worth from you,” I said. “No wonder you sounded winded when you answered the phone.”
“There’s not a lot of downtime, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m just finishing one now, and I thought I’d start the next one right after lunch.”
I checked my watch; I’d just eaten a sandwich at my desk, but I tended to eat early. It was not quite eleven-thirty.
“All right if I come on over in about an hour?”
“I’ll be looking for you.” She gave me directions, and after I’d gone through the morning’s mail, I headed out. The mail gave me an idea, so on the way I made a quick stop by Peggy’s. She wasn’t in, luckily, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have let me borrow her postage scale if she’d known what I planned to use it for.