Stranger in the Room: A Novel (25 page)

“This is Special Agent Mike McMillan from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. You’re on speakers, Dr. Street. I’m with Deputy Director Freed.”

“You’ll have to speak up, Agent McMillan,” I said. “Bad storm up here.” The rain was rolling off the trees now.

“Looking at it on radar. It’s moving northeast pretty fast. Clear skies here. We’re going to fly in.”

“Good,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell McMillan the rain wasn’t helping to wash the smell away or that I didn’t want to be out here alone anymore.

“I’m looking at these pictures from Lieutenant Rauser. I’ve worked with Aaron. If he wasn’t a friend of mine and if I didn’t know you’d been FBI, I wouldn’t believe this.”

“Being here doesn’t make it more believable.”

“You’re still on the property, then? Do you know if they have firearms?”

“I’ve seen a shotgun. I don’t know what else they have.”

I gave him my location, explained that I’d been hired to find the truth behind the fake ashes. I told him where to find the file cabinets and the photographs of the dead. I explained the photograph of the chain and the hacksaw, the cement mix, the body parts, and the tire tracks, which probably led to more disposal sites, all pictures Rauser had forwarded to him.

“We’re almost wheels up, Dr. Street. Flight time is one hour. Hunker down until we’re on the ground and the structures are secure. I’ll let you know when to come out.”

“Agent McMillan.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to need to drag the lake too.”

A beat passed. “Affirmative.”

  
22

I
moved deeper into the woods, sat with my back against a tree trunk, and hugged my knees, pelted by the rain. Neil had called twice, then fired off a series of increasingly panicked text messages. My phone was starting to misbehave. And so were my muscles. Nerves had them coiled up tight as a rattlesnake.

I got a text off.
I’m okay. GBI on the way. Wait for me
.

Fifty-three minutes later I heard chopper blades whipping the air, echoing off the mountains like drumbeats. The rain was back to a trickle. I imagined Mrs. Stargell’s huge old binoculars lifting at the sound of the helicopters. That image brought on the smile I didn’t think I had left in me.

McMillan’s call came four minutes later. His team were on their way to meet me. I moved toward the tree line. The agents came around the barn. They walked through the meadow in black cargo pants that gathered around their boots, jackets, three men, two women.

McMillan introduced himself, then his team. I’d forgotten their names a second later. The shock was setting in. McMillan handed me a Windbreaker with
GBI
in big white letters. I pulled it on gratefully over soaked clothes.

“You mind leading the way, Dr. Street?”

A few yards into the woods we came upon the fleshy half-decayed skull I’d tripped over. As I led them deeper, McMillan stuffed his forearm
under his nose. A couple of the other agents made coughing sounds and did the same thing.

An arm sticking up through pine straw with long fingernails and blackened rotting skin caused one agent to spin away and vomit into the leaves. “It’s just the beginning,” I told them. “It’s a study in how the elements affect decomposition. I think you need to prepare yourselves.”

The agent with the video moved in close to the arm. Then we all slogged forward. My boots were caked with rotting leaves and mud and God only knows what else. I folded my arms over my chest, shivering violently.

“Holy Christ,” McMillan murmured after a few more yards. The agents made a slow circle, struggling to get some context. We were dead center in one of the Kirkpatricks’ bone yards. They hadn’t even bothered to bury this shame.

“According to the receiving-room log,” I told them, “almost four hundred bodies were checked in just this year. I have a feeling they’re all here. Or parts of them. And maybe more. I found vaults on the north edge.” I didn’t explain how I’d happened to have access to the crematorium logs, and no one asked. It didn’t matter now. They had their warrants. They’d find admissible evidence. Plenty of it.

McMillan got on his radio. “Big Knob cops on the scene yet?” An affirmative crackled back through his radio. “Have the Kirkpatricks held at the city jail for now. Let’s start with theft by deception, abusing a corpse, suspicion of illegal tissue harvesting, and fraud. We got body parts everywhere out here. We’re going to need every agent and every technician we can pull in. And we gotta have heavy equipment.” He looked at me. “You ready to get out of here?” I nodded. “We have a civilian coming out of the woods behind the barn,” McMillan said. “Have somebody meet her, get a preliminary statement, then release her. She’s had a helluva day.”

The driveway was full of black SUVs and Crown Vics. The chopper sat in the meadow on the other side of the dirt lane. Two Big Knob black-and-whites were on hand. So was a Crime Scene Unit van. Collecting the evidence was going to take weeks. Sorting out and testing what they collected, even longer. I wondered what this would do to the logjam the labs were facing already.

I watched Joe Ray and Loretta Ann Kirkpatrick marched out in handcuffs and pressed into the back of a cop car. Mrs. Kirkpatrick peered at me through the window, her eyes sad and glassy. She was probably in some stage of disbelief at her weird world crumbling. I had no sympathy for her. If I felt pity at all, it was simply for how stupid and greedy they’d been.

“I’m Special Agent Cushman.” A woman with a service holster and a GBI cap and Windbreaker shook my hand and handed me a towel. The drizzle was dripping off the brim of her cap. “I was in the chopper with McMillan, so I’m up to speed. I’d like to get a partial statement from you for the record. Just the basics. We’ll finish up in Atlanta once we figure this out.” We started toward the Kirkpatrick house. “It’s pretty bad out there, huh?”

I threw the towel around my shoulders and raked back wet hair with my fingers. “Bad isn’t a big enough word for what’s out there,” I said.

She led me inside to a big sit-down kitchen and a long farmhouse table, tossed me a dry towel. I saw cookies on a plate and evidence Mrs. Kirkpatrick had entertained Neil and Mrs. Stargell. Cushman put her recorder on the table. “You need anything?”

“I’m fine,” I answered, but I knew I was pale as rice paper. I was still shivering.

“Any idea how many corpses are out there?”

I shook my head. “They’re in pieces.” I felt tears burn my eyes. Tension, sadness, shock, disgust. Understandable, I knew, and probably even healthy, but embarrassing nonetheless.

Cushman had the decency to ignore it. She continued the interview. When we were done, I called Neil and asked him to meet me in the car at the end of the dirt lane. The property entrance had been blocked off to anything but official business, I was told. All sixteen acres were now a crime scene.

I walked along the edge in the GBI Windbreaker as a convoy of law enforcement vehicles passed me. The rain had moved on, as Agent McMillan had promised. The July sun beamed through breaking clouds. Steam rose up off the fields and ground that had been cooked by summer sun. Our southern saunas.

I stopped and looked at the place where we’d watched Joe Ray
planting kudzu and suddenly realized it wasn’t kudzu he was planting at all. I made one last call to McMillan, then climbed into the passenger’s seat of my Impala at the end of the drive. Mrs. Stargell waved at me from her porch. I waved back. I could hear Rauser’s ringtone. But I didn’t answer. All I wanted was a shower. An endless, boiling-hot shower.

I sent a text.
I’m fine. Heading to hotel now. Need to decompress
.

He’d understand. Rauser was maybe the only person in the world who would understand completely. The benefits of dating a cop sometimes outweighed the hazards.

At the hotel I stripped and tossed my wet clothes in the wastebasket, then showered until the Big Knob Resort and Spa ran out of hot water. I thought about those agents in the woods hauling in excavators and backhoes. Trying to guard and protect that huge scene when the sun went down tonight. The media would descend on that place soon, if they hadn’t already, and the GBI would have their hands full. I wasn’t ready to turn on the television.

I twisted my hair up and slipped into one of the hotel robes. I couldn’t face the drive home to Atlanta right now. I didn’t feel like I could face anything. Except maybe a nice cognac swirling round a brandy snifter, sending heat down my throat to my stomach. Yeah, I could face one of those.

Neil ordered room service—cream of broccoli soup and warm bread, a pot of tea. Comfort food. He knew I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Neither of us was counting the dish of sticky rice Mary Kate Stargell set in front of me.

I called my mom to check on things in Decatur. The neighborhood barbeque was under way. They’d scheduled it for late afternoon, when some of the heat had passed. Dad had strung up lights and sprayed everything in sight with chemicals in an effort to defeat the mosquitoes. Miki had been a big help and seemed to be enjoying the distraction, Mother reported. I smiled at that. My parents had been more parents to her than her own had been. I was glad she had that right now. I think maybe Miki had felt terribly alone a lot. Still, I felt a pang of resentment that she had brought her waist-deep crap into our lives.

I picked at my food. My appetite was on a rare furlough. I talked to Neil about what those agents were digging up out there. All the
charges they’d slap on the Kirkpatricks would be multiplied by the number of bodies they could identify. Joe Ray and his bossy mama might end up with a thousand counts against them. I wondered aloud when a respected family had made that first critical decision to cheat and if it had escalated slowly, step-by-step, until they were so deep it didn’t matter anymore. Perhaps it was thought out, but I didn’t think so, I told Neil. I thought something went wrong with the crematory along the way and someone couldn’t stand to turn the business away. How easily this could have evolved to selling the dead rather than just tossing them away. How easily they could have convinced themselves they were actually contributing something valuable, filling a need for organs and tissue.

“It’s totally sick,” Neil said.

“At least one of them felt guilty. I think that’s what the photographs are about.”

Neil brought his napkin from his lap, touched his mouth. “What do you say we forget about this for a while? I mean, we’re here for the night. It’s early. Let’s do the town.”

I shook my head. “Take the car. Have fun. I’m beat.”

He didn’t push it. He touched my shoulder as he passed by and picked up the car keys. “Call if you need me.”

I sat at the window after Neil left, hotel robe wrapped around me, no lights on inside my room. Hand-holding couples crossed the fairway below and families with children and blankets had gathered on the hilly green. The long dock at the shore was lined with onlookers gazing out at the dark lake.

I thought about Rauser, about his voice, about how nice his wide shoulders would feel against my cheek right now. I wanted to call him. But I didn’t. What would I say? That I’d spent the day in greed so dark and soulless that I’d been literally ankle deep in human debris?

I heard the first high-pitched whine of fireworks darting into the night, the hiss and crackle of one lit fuse after another, and the sky exploded in thunderous booms of bright gold and red and blue to the delighted cheers of the crowd outside the hotel.

I pulled the robe closer around me and felt as utterly alone as I ever had. My phone rang. I wanted to ignore it. It rang again and I retrieved
it from the table where it sat next to my uneaten room-service dinner. I saw my cousin’s name on the display. But Miki’s phone was lost, wasn’t it? Rauser had tracked the last location to the Whole Foods in Midtown. Had they found it?

I answered and heard voices. Lots of them. Chattering. Music in the background. And then I heard my mother’s voice. She was talking cheerfully to someone.

“Miki, are you there? Mom, can you hear me?”

No answer. Just the same chatter. I went from zero to eighty-five in one second flat. I hit the end-call button and pressed my mother’s mobile number. Four long rings. “Mom, thank God! Did y’all get Miki’s phone back?”

“You have to speak up, honey. Half the neighborhood is here. We just had the most beautiful fireworks show.” I heard the sangria she loved to make for parties in her voice.

“Mom, did you get Miki’s phone back?”

“Why, no. We’re going by the Verizon store after my audition to pick up a new one.”

“Do you see Miki?” I started getting dressed, tossing cosmetics into my bag.

“I’m looking at her right now. Keye, honey, what’s wrong?”

“Mother, listen to me. Find Dad and y’all take Miki and get inside the house. Keep your cool, but do it now.” I didn’t know if the call had been intentional. I knew my number must have been on Miki’s call log. Maybe it had been accidentally pressed. But not by Miki. And that was the problem. I burst into Neil’s room, started gathering up his things too.

“Keye, what in the world—?”