TO BECOME KING of the dead, it helps to start early. Villemarette was seven when he found his first skull. He was living in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where his father used to take him and his brother Joe out for walks in the woods. One day, the boys came across something wrapped in a blanket. They thought it might be a person but peeked anyway. It was a decomposed dog, and for Jay it was love at first sight. He still has the skull.

When Villemarette was 14, by then living in Oklahoma City, he'd already found enough critters to start a small bone collection. Word got around, and people started letting him know whenever they came across an interesting dead thing. One afternoon, a neighbor brought over a bobcat. Villemarette asked his mother if he could boil it in the kitchen. She said no, so he boiled it while she was at work.

During those early years, Villemarette tried to perfect his skeleton-cleaning methods, learning by trial and error, experimenting with acids and fire. Eventually, he found some flesh-eating dermestid beetles working on a carcass, took a few, and started his first bone-scouring insect colony. That colony lasted for years but picked up a mystery disease and died, down to the last bug. Villemarette's current bug team, housed in the processing building, is his second.

High school came and went; Villemarette turned his obsession into a business. He got married in 1985. In 1986, when he was 20, he printed a list of available skulls and sent them to schools, generating a few orders. As the business started growing, it took his wife a while to get used to the fact that her husband was a bone merchant.

"She pretty much cried herself to sleep the first few months," says Villemarette. "But she's fine with it now."

While Villemarette tells me these things, Michelle Hayer pokes her head in to announce that the Oklahoma City Zoo is on line one. Like many zoos, OKC's puts its animals in a freezer after they die. When the freezer fills up, Skulls gets the call to collect some free, rare, dead animals. As Villemarette and Williams swing into action, it seems like they should be sliding down a Batpole.

Alas, I'm not invited. "Zoos don't like to talk about the fact that their animals die or what they do with them after," Williams says as he and Villemarette head for the door. "They're just weird about it."

"We'll leave you with the skeleton crew," says Villemarette. We walk into the hot Oklahoma sun and cross over to the processing building, where I'm handed off to 32-year-old Eric Humphries, a 13-year Skulls veteran. The guys hop into Villemarette's maroon pickup (license plate: SKULLS) and they're off.