The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (16 page)

“No, I’m not in trouble,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Are you sick? My God, Dad, are you sick?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I’m fine. Well, not ‘fine,’ exactly, but not sick.”

“What’s on your mind? Is something troubling you?”

“I…” I felt my throat tightening. “It’s just that there’s something important I need to talk to you about, Jeff. Face-to-face.”

There was a pause. “Okay, Dad. Sure. Tell you what. There’s a Panera Bread pretty close to my office, out in Turkey Creek. Do you know it?”

“Is that the one that’s inside the big Target store?”

“No, that’s Starbucks. Panera is across from the movie theaters. Kinda near Borders Books.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said, though I didn’t, actually—Turkey Creek was a huge, sprawling retail development, hundreds of stores and restaurants strung out along a two-mile, traffic-snarled boulevard. I avoided it whenever possible, which, luckily, was virtually always. I figured I could call Panera on my cell phone for directions if I had trouble spotting them amid the thicket of shops and signs.

“I forgot to bring anything to eat,” Jeff was saying, “and they’ve got decent soups and sandwiches. How about I meet you there in an hour? Well, let’s say fifty minutes; that would be seven-thirty. The dinner crowd will have slacked off by then.”

Forty minutes and two cell-phone calls later, I spotted the striped awnings of Panera and pulled into one of Turkey Creek’s gargantuan parking lots.Turkey Creek my foot, I thought.They should call this place Asphalt Acres. Then,Yeah, and they should call you Grumpy Old Man. I sat in the truck with the radio on—Sirius had a channel with 1940s big-band music I’d gotten hooked on lately—and watched for Jeff. Twenty minutes went by, and I was just about to call and check on him when his hybrid SUV whipped into the parking lot and lurched to a stop. Jeff jumped out, talking rapidly on his cell, and ended the call as we converged at the door.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “One of my clients is a surgeon, and, being a surgeon, he assumes he’s my most important client. So when he wants to discuss the draft tax return I e-mailed him, he assumes I’m at his beck and call.”

“No worries. I know you’re scrambling, and I appreciate your taking time to grab a bite with me. Let’s order. I’m starving.”

Jeff, health-conscious guy that he was, ordered a salad with grilled chicken; I got a chicken chipotle sandwich. At its center was grilled chicken like Jeff’s, but it was drenched in a tangy, unhealthy sauce and served on crusty, buttery grilled bread. For his side item, Jeff chose an apple; I chose potato chips. The young cashier handed me what looked like a square plastic coaster. I must have appeared puzzled, because she explained, “It’ll buzz when your order’s ready.” I had barely collected my change when the coaster practically leaped out of my hand, vibrating fiercely and flashing with enough red LED lights to serve as a road-hazard sign.

I held the buzzer up to the cashier. “What do I do with it now?”

“Leave it in the basket on the counter, down there where you pick up your order.”

I followed her gaze and arrived at the pickup counter just as our food did. A large wicker basket occupied one end of the counter. Brimming with gadgets like the one vibrating in my hand, the basket buzzed like a flock of angry cicadas and flashed like a miniature disaster zone. It set me on edge, and I could understand why the young man putting our food on the counter looked far wearier than any twenty-year-old ought to look.

Jeff had gotten our drinks and claimed a vacant booth in the back corner of the restaurant. We slid onto the benches and squirmed into our conversation. Jeff asked polite questions about the classes I was teaching this semester, and about my forensic cases, and about Dr. Garcia’s progress. Then, after a suitable amount of small talk, he ventured, “Sounds like you’ve got something on your mind.”

“I do.” I studied my hands. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Jeff. A couple of months ago, I…uh, slept with a woman.”

He laughed. “Good for you,” he said. Then, “I sure hope you seemed more enthusiastic about it then than you do now.”

I looked up, pained, and his expression changed to alarm.

“Jesus, Dad, what is it? Did you get AIDS or herpes or something?”

I shook my head.

“Wait, wait—have you gone and gotten married to this woman? Is that what you’re worried about telling me?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t married her. Hell, I haven’t seen her since right after that night. She’s gone, I don’t know where.” I drew a breath. “You probably heard about her in the news, son. Her name’s Isabella Morgan. She’s the one who murdered that Oak Ridge scientist, Novak—the old Manhattan Project physicist.”

His eyes got wide. “The one the media called ‘The A-Bomb Avenger’?”

I nodded.

“Christ, Dad.” His eyes darted back and forth as he sorted through various possibilities in his mind. “Are you in some sort of legal trouble? Did you know she’d killed the guy when you slept with her?”

“No, of course not. I would never knowingly get involved with someone who’d committed murder.” I splayed my hands, palms up, on either side of my sandwich, which was missing only one bite so far. “She was a reference librarian at the Oak Ridge Public Library. She helped me with some research. Historical research. I had no idea….”

He reached across the table and took my left hand in his right. “Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry. It must’ve really pulled the rug out from under you when you learned the truth.”

“It did,” I said.

He gave my hand a squeeze.

“But there’s more, Jeff. Feels like another rug just got yanked out from under me.”

“What do you mean? Have they caught her?”

I shook my head.

“Have you found out where she is?”

“No. But I’ve found out she’s pregnant.”

Jeff’s hand froze mid-squeeze. He stared at me, and then his eyes darted some more, and then he stared again. “She’s pregnant?”

I nodded miserably.

“Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

I nodded again.

My son removed his hand from mine. He pushed his half-eaten salad away, slid from the booth, and walked out.

THAT NIGHT I HAD A
dream, and in my dream I was helping Eddie Garcia autopsy a woman’s body. But this was a young woman’s body, and when I made the long incision that opened the chest and abdomen, her belly opened to reveal a full-term fetus inside: a baby boy whose face I recognized. It was the face I’d seen three decades before, when Jeff was born. Then I looked closer, and I realized the face was my own.

“YOU DON’T LOOK SO HOT,” SAID MIRANDA WHEN I
walked into the bone lab the next morning.

“And yet I look better than I feel.”

“Oh, my. So I guess I’d better start looking for a new Ph.D. adviser, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But first let’s watch this DVD that Eddie got from the surgeon in Crossville.” I slid the disc—a video of Clarissa Lowe’s surgery—out of the envelope that had arrived the day before, while we were doing the autopsy, and Miranda loaded it into the computer’s optical drive. Watching the video was like opening a letter or hearing a voice mail after the sender has died: There was Lowe, anesthetized but still alive—and still healthy, except for a bum neck—just ten days earlier. “This is creepy,” said Miranda, “butso cool. How’d they get this great camera angle?” If Lowe’s eyes had been open, they’d have been staring almost directly into the camera lens. Besides her face, which was obscured by an oxygen mask, the image showed her neck and chest as well.

“Eddie said it’s a prototype OR video system, designed by the surgeon’s brother or cousin or something. The camera lens is built into the handle of the surgical light. So adjusting the angle of the light automatically adjusts the aim of the camera.”

“Cool,” she repeated. “Wish I’d invented that. Right after inventing the transporter beam and the perpetual-motion machine.”

Early in the video—before the incision—a gloved hand reached up, filling the screen, and the image on the screen lurched wildly as the light was adjusted. Eventually the lurching ceased and the image stabilized; once it did, the angles of the light and the camera were—as best I could tell—exactly the same as they’d been before all the jostling and adjusting. A few seconds elapsed, and then the hand loomed into view again; again the image careened wildly, and again it returned to exactly the same angle. “Whee, that was fun,” said Miranda. “Let’s do it again. Dramamine, anyone?”

“Now, now,” I chided. “Don’t be snarky. If I were about to operate on your neck, wouldn’t you want the light to be aimed just right?”

“If you were about to operate on my neck, I’d want someone to stop you.” She moved the computer’s cursor to an arrow labeled FF and clicked on the mouse. As the video scrolled forward, the camera zoomed in to a tighter shot of the neck, and the image lurched a third time—far more dramatically this time—and then, after it steadied, hands darted into the frame, a scalpel flicked swiftly, and the front of the woman’s neck gaped open.

“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “We actually want to watch the surgery, remember?”

“But the surgery lasted more than two hours, Dr. B. Do you really want to watch it all in real time? Can’t we fast-forward till we see something interesting?”

“How will we know what’s interesting if it zooms past in a nanosecond?”

“Tell you what,” she offered. “If we get to the end and we haven’t seen anything interesting, I’ll back it up and we can watch it in slo-mo. Deal?”

“Deal.” On the screen, two pairs of hands converged on the neck, steel instruments glistening in the light, and then withdrew. Once they were out of the frame, I saw that the incision in the neck had been spread apart with clamps; the opening was now as wide as it was long. “Slow down; this is getting interesting.”

“Yeah, fascinating,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in the sarcasm, and once the speed slowed to normal, she leaned closer to the screen, drawn into the drama as the woman’s trachea and esophagus were pulled to the side and the front of her spine was exposed to view. The surgery was accompanied by a sound track—country music, turned up loud—with an occasional indecipherable murmur of human voices underneath the drawling, twanging music.

With a series of tools—forceps, scissors, scalpel, forceps again—the surgeon attacked the disk, yanking and snipping and gouging out the crumbling cartilage that separated the third cervical vertebra from the fourth. The surgeon’s gloves and the surgical drapes were soon spattered with blood and tissue. “Wow, I hadn’t fully appreciated how much an orthopedic surgeon has in common with a butcher,” Miranda remarked, adding, “Not much elbow room there in the neck.”

“Not much,” I agreed. “Back when I was teaching anatomy, the surgery residents used to put pieces of tissue down in the bottom of Styrofoam coffee cups. They’d practice cutting and suturing without touching the sides of the cup.”

She paused the video. “Like that doctor game for kids? Operation? The one where it buzzes if the tweezers touch the board while you’re lifting out the funny bone or the brain or whatever?”

“Like that. The name of the patient was something-Sam, I think. Yosemite Sam? No, that was a cartoon character. Cavity Sam, maybe. Kathleen and I gave Jeff that game one year for Christmas.”

“Did he like it?”

“Not so much. I thought it was fun, but Jeff was disappointed. What he really wanted was a BB gun.”

Miranda snorted. “He wanted a BB gun, and he got Operation? Poor Jeff—he’ll probably need therapy the rest of his life to get over the pain.”

“We didn’t want him to shoot his eye out, you know? But I felt so bad when I saw how sad he looked that Christmas morning that I got him a BB gun two months later, for his birthday.”

“Did he shoot his eye out?”

“He never did. Not yet anyhow. I do seem to remember replacing a window or two, though.” I laughed.

“Oh, and the neighbor’s cat stopped coming over and eating our cat’s food. Which wasn’t such a bad thing.”

“Just think of all the money you could’ve saved on cat food if you’d gotten him the BB gun two months sooner,” she said. “You ready to watch surgery again?” Without waiting for an answer, she hit “play,”

and the bloody fingers and tools resumed their assault on the spinal disk. The scraps of cartilage grew smaller and smaller; then, after a pause, I heard a high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill. Gripping a small grinder, not unlike the Dremel tool I’d bought at Home Depot, the surgeon angled the tool into the opening in the patient’s neck. “Yikes,” said Miranda. “This is when you really don’t want your spine surgeon to have the shakes. One twitch and you’re a quad.”

He laid aside the grinder and then, with a pair of forceps, held a small, white peg—a short, squat bone graft, roughly twice the diameter of a pencil eraser—in the neck, measuring it against the gap between the two vertebrae whose surfaces he’d just smoothed. The back of the surgeon’s head leaned into the frame, bending down for a closer look, and then he withdrew the forceps and reamed out the gap between the vertebrae a bit more. After another inspection he reinserted the peg into the opening in the neck, wedged it between the vertebrae, and then tapped it deeper into the intervertebral gap, using a small hammer and punch, creating a snug fit: a fit whose snugness I’d noticed when I removed the section of spine from the neck of the corpse. Finally he took a silvery metal bracket and screwed it to the bones. The procedure he’d just performed was an anterior decompression and fusion; the “fusion” part would be completed by the patient herself—or would have been, if she hadn’t died—as new bone grew from her vertebrae to surround and incorporate the grafted piece.

On the monitor the surgeon removed the retractors and clamps from Lowe’s neck; once released, the skin contracted and the gaping incision half closed itself. With a curved needle and stiff black thread, the surgeon took fifteen neat stitches in the neck: the fifteen stitches that had so readily parted, only hours before, under the blade of the scalpel in my hand.

A different, smaller pair of hands entered the video frame. With brisk efficiency they scrubbed the dried blood off the patient’s neck, then swabbed on iodine and applied a gauze dressing. The surgeon’s hand reappeared; it waved to the camera, then gave a cheery thumbs-up.