The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (18 page)

Hoover smiled. “Instead of talking about what youshould do, Bill, can you think about what youwant to do, what youchoose to do, as the intelligent and kind person that you are?”

“What’s the difference? Isn’t doing the right thing all that really counts?”

“Doing the thingright also matters,” he said. “When you do something because you ‘should,’ there’s a way in which you’re not doing it wholeheartedly, a way in which you’re not completely owning it. There’s a little bit of martyrdom in it, a smidgen of resentment or grudge—sort of ‘Look what you made me do; look how you’re making me suffer.’ I had a client once who went to his wife’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner every year, not because he wanted to but because he ‘should’—because that’s what a good husband has to do, right? And every Thanksgiving he felt trapped and resentful, and so his relatives felt a lot of discomfort around him, because who likes to spend Thanksgiving with somebody who’s pissed off? Finally one year his wife sat him down and said, ‘You’re not invited this year. You radiate resentment the whole time, and that spoils it for everyone else. Do us all a favor by spending the day at home or hunting or hiking, doing something you’d rather be doing.’ Complicated story—they had other issues to work on, not surprisingly—but eventually, once she’d let him off the hook, he decided that he actuallywanted to go. And for the first time ever, he had a good time. He discovered interesting things about his in-laws; they discovered that he was a nicer guy than the grouchy husband who’d suffered through all those turkey dinners. What made the difference was that he wanted to go, he chose to go. He went out of ‘get to,’ not out of ‘have to.’ Does that make sense?”

I nodded.

“So as you think about yourself, and your life, and the people you care about, and these things that are swirling around all of you—these messes, if you wish to call them that—what do you want to do, Bill?

What do you choose to do, and why?”

I drew one deep breath and then another. “Isabella, that one’s complicated,” I said. “I’m concerned about her.”

“Do you still care about her?”

“Yes.” I was surprised how deeply true the word rang. “I do, but most of that situation is out of my control. As Miranda said, there’s not much I can do, besides wait for the other shoe to drop.” I grimaced. “The baby shoe.My baby shoe.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t another man who got her pregnant?”

“No, not a hundred percent sure. But I am a hundred percent sure that Imight have gotten her pregnant. That information is relevant to the FBI investigation. That’s why I had to disclose it. No, wait—that’s why Ichose to disclose it.”

He smiled. “That does seem the sort of disclosure a responsible man would make.” He cocked his head slightly to one side. “Why do you think your son is so angry with you?”

“Maybe his feelings are hurt,” I suggested.

“Hurt? Why? Because you didn’t consult him before going to bed with a beautiful woman?”

I imagined myself dialing Jeff’s phone number that night with one hand while ripping off my clothes with the other hand. The image made me laugh again, and the relief of laughter felt like balm to my soul. He leaned toward me and repeated the question. “Why do you think your son is so angry with you?”

I sighed. I’d hoped I had laid this issue to rest, hoped I’d cleaned up this mess. “Because I was angry with Jeff, I think, after his mother died. Kathleen died three years ago of cancer. Uterine cancer. She’d had a very difficult pregnancy with Jeff, and she had three miscarriages after he was born. When she got cancer—even though it wasn’t until Jeff was grown—I think I associated uterine cancer with childbearing, and with our child. Stupid, and maybe I’m imagining the reason for it, but I did pull away from Jeff after Kathleen died. Truth is, I pulled away from everybody—I pretty much shut down emotionally for a couple of years—but the only person I feel serious regret about pulling away from is Jeff. I wasn’t as warm a father to him as I might have been during that time, and I wasn’t as loving a grandfather to his boys as I wish I’d been.”

“You said ‘for a couple of years.’ So you’d gotten closer to him again?”

“Yes. When I was accused of murder, Jeff stood by me.”

“And the woman you were accused of murdering—you were romantically involved with her, is that right?”

“Yes. Briefly. Her name was Jess Carter. She was the medical examiner in Chattanooga. We were working together on a case, and I had just started to fall for her when she was killed.”

“Was that a sexual relationship?”

I hesitated. “Yes. Barely, but wonderfully. I was falling in love with Jess—Iknew Jess—and if she hadn’t been killed, we might have made a life together.”

Dr. Hoover looked startled, and I guessed that he was pondering the bizarre, mirror-image symmetry of my last two lovers: a woman who was murdered, then a murderous woman.

“Anyhow,” I went on, “when I was framed for Jess’s murder, Jeff ended up helping me, and I appreciated it. Over the past year or so, it felt like we’d regained most of the ground we’d lost. Until the night before last.”

“When he walked out on you.”

I nodded.

“Any more thoughts on why he got so angry?”

“Maybe because he had to work pretty hard to get my attention for a while. Maybe because I’ve always not been the most attentive or openhearted dad to him.”

“And yet here you go…?”

“Diverting my limited fatherly resources to some total stranger’s baby. To a murderer’s baby at that.”

“And that might make him feel…?”

“Slighted. Unimportant. Resentful. Afraid that this new baby could be a higher priority, could displace him somehow.”

“You think Jeff fears that another child could cut into his inheritance? That it might diminish his prospects, or his children’s prospects?”

That implication hadn’t even occurred to me. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”

“What sort of work does Jeff do?”

“He’s an accountant.”

“And you don’t think he’s imagined how the ledger sheet could change somewhere down the road?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. That might occur to him at some point, but I don’t think it would’ve popped into his head first thing, in the thirty seconds between the moment I told him and the moment he walked out of Panera.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “So how did you feel when he walked out on you? And how do you feel now?”

“Surprised. Confused. Embarrassed. Sad. Mad.”

“Mad then or mad now?”

I felt a flush of shame. “Both.”

“So what sorts of words might describe a son who reacted the way Jeff reacted?”

I looked into the cluster of oil lamps burning in the fireplace. “Same as me. Surprised. Confused. Embarrassed. Sad. Mad.” I looked into Hoover’s face. “Imperfect. Human.”

“And what do you want to do now, Bill?”

I smiled a slightly rueful smile. “I want to call my son and tell him I love him.”

He nodded.

“I want to tell him I didn’t mean to pull the rug out from under him. Ask for his understanding and forgiveness.”

He nodded again.

At the end of the session, I called Jeff to say those things. He didn’t answer, but I said them anyway, telling them to his voice mail.

I hoped he’d hear the voice mail right away and call me back soon.

He didn’t.

THE STEAM-JACKETED KETTLE HAD DONE ITS WORK
well: Thirty-six hours in scalding water, Biz, and Downy had turned the soft tissue surrounding Clarissa Lowe’s cervical vertebrae into shreds of tissue and a slick of grease. If not for the orthopedic hardware and the rank odor, the pot might have contained beef soup bones, simmering their way toward broth.

I fished the spine out of the pot with a large pair of tongs and laid it in the deep, stainless-steel sink of the forensic center’s decomp room. Gripping the hot bones with the tongs, I slipped a scalpel between the vertebrae. Five of the seven parted easily; the other two remained joined by the titanium bracket and the tightly fitted wedge of bone.

I turned on the sink’s faucet—warm, not cold, so as not to risk fracturing the hot bones—and scrubbed the vertebrae with stiff brushes, including a bottle brush to swab out the circular spinal canal. The last shreds of tissue let go easily, swirling down the drain into the hospital’s sewer system. I saved the fused section for last, because I knew it would take more scrubbing, with a smaller brush, to clean the crevices and corners around the metal bracket and the bone graft. When I was satisfied that I’d removed all the soft tissue, I turned off the faucet, shook the water from the bones, and laid them on absorbent surgical pads on the counter. Then, switching on a lighted magnifier, I held the fused segment under the lens. What I saw was a juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign: the natural curves and planes of the vertebrae, with a trapezoidal wedge of lighter bone—a shape that looked more like a machined part than a human bone—jammed between them, locked into place by lustrous metal and screws. I was rotating the assembly beneath the light, studying it from the left side, when the phone on the wall began to ring. I ignored it, and after half a dozen rings it fell silent. A few seconds later, it jangled again; again I ignored it. Then, after a few seconds more, the door of the decomp room opened and Amy, the forensic center’s receptionist, leaned in. “Dr. Brockton? I hate to disturb you, but Dr. Garcia’s on line two for you, and he says it’s important.”

“Oops. Let me just get these gloves off and I’ll pick up. Thanks, Amy.”

Laying aside the bones and peeling off the gloves, I picked up the handset and pressed the blinking button. “Eddie, sorry to keep you waiting. I was just looking at Clarissa Lowe’s cervical spine. It cleaned up very nicely.”

“Don’t look too closely,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I just got a call from Calvin, my lab technician,” he answered.

“Is Calvin the guy who’s three doors down from me? The guy I saw looking into a microscope when I walked up the hall a few minutes ago?”

“Yes. Calvin. I think you should go look also. Can you go down to the lab and put me on the speakerphone?”

“Sure. If I lose you, call me back. Talk to you in a second.” I pressed the “hold” button, and the light for the phone line began to blink again. Twenty yards from the decomp room was the forensic center’s lab, a large room whose countertops bristled with petri dishes, culture incubators, and microscopes. Calvin, a pale, stooped young man whose name I would never have recalled if Garcia hadn’t mentioned it, glanced up from the microscope when I walked in. “’Lo, Dr. Brockton,” he greeted me.

“Hi, Calvin. Dr. Garcia tells me you’ve got something I should see.”

He flipped a switch on the scope; a monitor beside it lit up, and the screen filled with circles and ovals of gray and black. Their shapes reminded me of cross sections of tree trunks: circles within circles, crossed by faint lines radiating from the centers like wheel spokes.

I pressed the “speaker” button on the phone and was rewarded with a loud dial tone. “Oh, crap, I’ve lost Dr. Garcia,” I said. Then I noticed the button for line two, still blinking. “Oh, wait.” I pressed it, and the dial tone was replaced by hollow background noise. “Eddie, are you still there?”

“Yes. Are you in the lab with Calvin?”

“We’re here,” Calvin announced. “I’ve got the unstained slide on the monitor.”

“Good,” said Garcia. “Bill, do you recognize what you’re seeing there?”

“I do.” I’d seen hundreds of similar images over the years. Known as osteons and osteocytes, they were the microscopic framework of human bone—the skeleton’s own inner skeleton, so to speak, magnified hundreds of times. “That must be from the sample we took from the cervical spine.”

“Exactly,” said Garcia. “Calvin, now show him the sample you treated with Gram’s stain.” Calvin twisted the stage of the microscope. The image on the screen spun dizzyingly, and a new slide clicked into place. This slide also showed bone, but the colors had changed to shades of beige and brown, with a sprinkling of tiny purple cylinders amid the structures of the bone.

“Um, remind me what Gram’s stain is?”

“It’s a stain, a dye, that certain bacteria absorb,” Garcia answered. “It’s named for Hans Christian Gram, the Danish microbiologist who developed it. Gram’s stain distinguishes between two groups of bacteria, called Gram-negative and Gram-positive. Gram-positive bacteria absorb the stain and turn purple. Some species of Gram-positive bacteria are harmless; others are quite deadly.”

“And how do you tell whether the purple stain Calvin’s got here is a friendly species or a deadly strain?”

“The most precise way is a DNA analysis,” he answered, “but that takes time. So I had Calvin do a two-stage stain. Calvin, could you show Dr. Brockton the next slide?” Calvin obliged, bringing up a slide showing small specks of red and black. “This second stain tells us that the bacteria in Lowe are from the genusClostridium. ”

“Go on,” I prompted.

“Clostridiumis an interesting study in contrasts,” he said. “There are about a hundred species of it. Some of them are very useful—they have the potential to convert wood into ethanol or to target therapeutic drugs at cancer tumors.”

“So the good news is biofuels and magic bullets,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”

“Food poisoning. Tetanus. Botulism. Gas gangrene. Toxic shock.Clostridium produces some of the deadliest toxins on the planet. One thing about it that’s interesting,” he added, “is that we’re exposed to these bacteria all the time.Clostridium lives mostly in the soil, in dirt and rotting organic material—there’s probably a lot of it out at the Body Farm—but we also carry some species of it in our gastrointestinal tract. The vast majority of the time, our bodies manage to keep it in check.”

“So something tipped the scales in Lowe’s body after surgery,” I said, “allowing the bacteria in her gut to multiply like crazy and spread throughout her body?”

“Actually, no,” he answered. “I don’t believe her GI tract was the source. Remember, these slides you’re seeing are tissue samples from the allograft in her cervical spine. I think she received a graft of contaminated cadaver bone.”