“But you end up with a golf-ball-size wad of it in the center,” I countered, pointing to the bulbous disk of sandwich clutched in his hand.
“No problem,” he said. Opening his mouth wide, he popped it in, chewed briskly, and swallowed quickly. “So I went to East Tennessee Cremation to see your pal Helen. She remembered the name of the embalmer who was working at Ivy Mortuary back when Willoughby was buried,” he mumbled. “A guy named Kerry Roswell. She thinks maybe he started working there in the mid-nineties. She said Roswell was sued, along with Elmer Ivy, by a woman whose husband’s funeral service turned into an entomology science-fair project.”
“Oh, the maggot case. Right. Burt DeVriess mentioned that.”
He made a face, and I wasn’t sure whether it was inspired by the mental picture of the maggot-infested corpse or the thought of DeVriess. “So I checked the court documents DeVriess sent me, and sure enough, there’s Roswell’s name as a codefendant.” He popped a piece of gum into his mouth and began to work it. “Couple other tidbits from Helen. One, she said Roswell seemed kinda ambitious — talked about getting his funeral director’s license, talked about someday opening his own funeral home — but then, poof, he just dropped off the radar screen. Two, she said Elmer Ivy was thinking about selling the business, back around that same time. She actually considered buying it herself, but Ivy was asking too much. Supposedly he had some other potential buyer whose pockets were deeper than Helen’s. The other didn’t follow through, but by then she’d lost interest.”
“Who was the other buyer?”
“Dunno. Some guy from out of town, maybe with one of the national chains that’s been gobbling up the mom-and-pop mortuaries.”
“Could it be SCI?” SCI — Service Corporation International — was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the death-care industry, a multibillion-dollar company that owned thousands of funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries worldwide. With its deep pockets and a reputation for ruthless competition, SCI tended to inspire fear and loathing among locally owned funeral homes, especially any that found themselves targeted in the giant’s cross-hairs. SCI had been the subject of several lawsuits and scandalous news stories in recent years. One scandal was triggered by stories that National Funeral Home, an SCI facility in Virginia, had as many as two hundred unembalmed bodies stacked on racks in a big, unrefrigerated garage. Two other headline-making scandals — along with multimillion-dollar lawsuits — resulted from charges that graves and remains at SCI cemeteries in Florida and California had been secretly destroyed to make room for new burial plots.
Culpepper shrugged. “She didn’t know what company. She never met the out-of-town guy, but she said she’d ask around, see if anybody else did. It was all just rumors, she said, but sometimes rumors have an underlying factual basis.”
“Helen’s plugged in,” I said. “I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t dredge up something more for you.”
“Let’s hope.” The detective folded another piece of gum into his mouth. He stood and headed for the door, then stopped and turned back. “By the way, I thought the ignition button was creepy but cool.”
“Ignition button?”
“Yeah, the ignition button. The red button beside the family viewing window. The grieving widow or whoever can push it to light the furnace and send her loved one up in smoke.”
“Oh, that button. Right.” Helen had pointed it out to me when I’d toured her new facility. At the time I’d paid more attention to the three cremation furnaces and the six-body cooler, though I’d found the button intriguing and slightly amusing. Now I couldn’t help wondering: If my body were the one in the furnace, who would push the button — and with what mixture of feelings?
With a casual wave of his hand and a loud pop of his gum, Culpepper left me to ponder the prospect of my own cremation.
CHAPTER 19
“Seems like we’ve been here before!” shouted Miranda over the roar of the backhoe as it tugged at another coffin — this one the blue-green of oxidized copper — deep in a grave in Highland Cemetery. A rolling, parklike cemetery in the Bearden area, Highland was the nearest burial ground to the moneyed manses of my richer Sequoyah Hills neighbors.
“Déjà vu all over again!” yelled Grease. “Did you see that movie? Deja Vu? With Will Smith? Think of me as Knoxville’s Will Smith.”
“Good God, man,” Miranda scolded, “that was Denzel Washington.”
“So think of me as Knoxville’s Denzel Washington.”
“Hard to do,” she shot back. “You’re not tall, dark, and handsome. You’re not even tall, dark, or handsome.”
He threw her a look of mock indignation. “But I gave an Oscar-worthy performance when I argued Judge Wilcox into signing the order for this exhumation.”
“Tell me about that,” I said, pulling on my gloves. “I was surprised when you called.”
“I used the old lawsuits I dug up — the complaints I exhumed, you might say — to convince him that Ivy Mortuary was engaged in a systematic pattern of fraud. He was willing to grant me one additional exhumation. I figured it made sense to go for another body that was buried around the same time as Willoughby’s.”
“Conspiracy theory meets fishing expedition,” observed Miranda.
“Like the Tom Waits song says,” DeVriess added, “‘Fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.’”
“Looks like you’ve snagged a big one,” I said as the backhoe hoisted the coffin out of the grave. The operator swung the arm to one side of the grave and set the coffin on a rectangle of artificial turf. Then he throttled the machine to idle and clambered down to unhook the cable sling.
This time the backhoe had reeled in Gill Pendergrast, a thirty-nine-year-old white male who’d been killed in a motorcycle wreck a week before Trey Willoughby’s death. Both the accident report and the newspaper story DeVriess had found indicated that Pendergrast had died of massive head injuries sustained in the crash — he hadn’t been wearing a helmet — so I was braced to see a crushed skull when I cranked open the lid of the coffin. I was also prepared to see another limbless corpse.
I was not, however, prepared to see what the coffin actually contained: four pillow-shaped paper bags, each labeled PLAY-GROUND SAND 50 POUNDS.
“Knoxville police are investigating two bizarre cases of grave robbing,” began WBIR anchorman Randall Gibbons in that evening’s television newscast. “We should warn you, this story is disturbing and some of the images that follow are graphic.” I wasn’t sure whether the warning was meant to deter viewers from watching it or deter them from switching to another channel.
Gibbons had coanchored the broadcast with Maureen Gershwin until her on-camera death a few weeks before; his transition to solo anchor had been smooth, though I noticed that I still missed Maurie. “One of the bizarre body thefts came to light today,” Gibbons continued, “when a coffin exhumed at Highland Cemetery was found to contain four bags of sand instead of a body. The other theft — discovered last week at Old Gray Cemetery — was more gruesome: The corpse of a man exhumed for a DNA paternity test was found to be missing both arms and both legs. Police say both thefts occurred before burial, not afterward; they also say both bodies were buried in 2003, after funeral services at Ivy Mortuary.” The footage included wide shots and close-ups of Pendergrast’s copper coffin and its sandy contents, as well as deliberately blurred KPD crime-scene photos of Willoughby’s limbless body.
The story included brief bios of the two men, as well as a few sentences about the life and death of Ivy Mortuary. Then it segued to a brief interview with me, in which I said that whoever amputated Willoughby’s limbs seemed to know what they were doing, and a longer interview with Burt DeVriess, who denounced exploitation and dark misdeeds in “the death-care industry” without ever quite accusing Ivy or any other funeral home of specific crimes.