The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (22 page)

“So could I circle back to something we talked about on your visit to Tennessee? The i-Hand? You recommended that for Dr. Garcia, and he was all set to get one, but now he can’t.”

He winced. “I’m sorry about the timing of that. The decision to withdraw the i-Hand was made by our board of directors,” he said. “I was opposed to it. Still am. But OrthoMedica’s a multibillion-dollar company, and the people in the boardroom are the ones responsible for making the tough business decisions.”

“Any chance there’s a spare i-Hand still tucked in a warehouse somewhere? A leftover left hand?”

“I’ll check,” he said. “I hate to sound discouraging, but don’t hold your breath.”

I nodded, disappointed.

“On the bright side, though, the lawyers don’t seem to be finding anything too objectionable in the research collaboration I’m proposing with UT. You still want that CT scanner we’ve been talking about?”

“Absolutely. I’ve been talking to the facilities people about putting it in the spot I showed you, right by the gate of the Body Farm.”

“Sounds perfect.” He flashed me a thumbs-up. “If you’d put those people in touch with my assistant, we’ll see if we can get those wheels in motion.” He clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand.

“Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got a conference call to make to my masters back in Maryland.” He turned to go, then stopped and reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said. “For good luck.” He handed me the ceramic femoral head.

The sphere’s perfect smoothness and heft felt reassuring in my hand at first. But soon I found my fingers worrying at the flat spot and the hole at its center. The hole, my rational mind knew, was simply the attachment point for the metal neck of the artificial hip implant. But somehow, in my mind, the cavity evoked something else: the dark, hollow place into which I was about to crawl with Raymond Sinclair of Tissue Sciences and Services.

RAY HAD BEEN RIGHT. AS SOON AS I TOLD THE
cabdriver I was heading to the library, he pulled away from the hotel. The sun was going down in the distance, and the neon was coming up all around me. “Do you need the address?”

“Naw, I know where it is,” he said, waving off the card Sinclair had given me. The cab headed east on Tropicana Avenue. In a few short blocks, the bustle and blare of the Strip receded and I felt myself sink into the seat. The cab smelled of stale cigarettes and stale coffee and soured sweat, but I was too tired to care. I was just beginning to doze off when I heard the driver say, “Sir, we’re here.”

I opened my eyes and looked out the window. At first I felt half sleepy and half confused, but then I felt merely totally confused. The cab had stopped in front of a low cinder-block building that pulsed with music. I tapped the cabdriver on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said. “I think you misunderstood. I need to go to the library. Here’s the address.” I thrust the card at him; he took it grudgingly and gave it the briefest of glances.

“Yup, that’s the address. And yeah, that’s where we are.” He pointed to a sign above the building’s entrance. I had to lean to the side and look overhead to see the red neon letters: THE LIBRARY. Another large, flashing sign at the edge of the road proclaimed GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Underneath those words was the line CHECK OUT OUR SEXY LIBRARIANS!

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Listen, I need to make a phone call,” I told the driver, “and I might need you to take me back to my hotel. Can you give me some privacy for a couple minutes? Maybe stretch your legs or take a smoke break? You can leave the meter running.”

“Sure, no sweat.” He pulled forward, away from the entrance, and angled the cab into a parking spot. Leaving both the meter and the engine running, he got out and lit up. I leaned down and spoke to my chest, waving my hand in front of my tie. Strapped to my chest was a tiny microphone, with a digital recorder and transmitter tucked under my armpit; my tiepin was actually a miniature video camera, feeding images to a tiny flash drive. Two hours earlier Rankin and a New Jersey agent named Spellman had slipped into my hotel room and fitted me with the surveillance gear. “Rooster, are you there? Spellman? Where are you guys?” Through the fabric of my shirt, I tapped the microphone three times. “Can you hear me? Call me on my cell right away. This is not good.”

Nothing happened, so I scrolled through the recent calls on my cell phone and hit “send” when I got to Rankin’s number.Pick up, pick up, pick up, I prayed. Rankin’s voice answered my prayer. “Christ, Doc, what’s wrong? He’s not even here yet. And don’t thump the mike—you damn near blew out our eardrums.”

“Sorry; it was an SOS signal,” I explained. “Sinclair wasn’t talking about the place where you borrow books. He was talking about a strip club called The Library.” Suddenly it hit me: Rankin had used the word “here.” I scanned the parking lot. “Where are you?”

“Across the street in a panel truck. Six of us. But don’t look.”

I looked anyway. There it was, a carpet-cleaning van. “You knew,” I said. “You knew he was bringing me to a strip club.”

“I didn’t know at first, but I did know before you got in the cab,” he admitted. “We can’t send an informant someplace we haven’t checked out ahead of time. That’d be dangerous. And shoddy.” He laughed. “A strip club called The Library. Only in Vegas, huh, Doc? You gotta love it.”

“No I don’t,” I snapped. “I hate it.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be watching and listening, and we’re close enough to come in and get you if we need to.”

“Crap, I wasn’t expecting a strip club. What do I do?”

“What do you mean, ‘What do I do?’ I believe look but don’t touch would be a good plan to follow. Unless you want to get to know the bouncer really quick.”

“I’m not asking about etiquette. I’m asking if you actually think I should go in there. It seems pretty tawdry.”

“Of course it’s tawdry,” he said. “I mean, I’m not the anthropologist here, but isn’t the tawdriness the point of a strip club?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been in one.”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Well, then, this should be interesting. Listen to this. This is the description of the place that’s posted on the Web. ‘This gentlemen’s club isn’t just for bookworms. The club actually does have volumes lining the entrance, but the clientele comes here for a different type of learning experience. And they visit often enough to keep The Library busy even on school nights.’ That’s hilarious.”

“Not to me,” I said. “I really don’t like this.”

I heard him sigh. “I’m sorry you don’t like it, Doc. I’m not asking you to like it. But I am asking you todo it. Remember, this guy’s gonna want you—at least wehope he’s gonna want you—to break federal laws for him. If you balk at setting foot in a strip club, he might have deep doubts about your scofflaw sincerity.”

“So if he wants me to hire a hooker or snort cocaine, am I supposed to do that, too, Rooster? How much of me’s for sale here?”

“Not that much,” he said. “So no, don’t do hookers or cocaine. But do this meeting. Please.”

“Hang on while I think about this.” The meter’s digits glowed bright red in the darkness below the dashboard; currently it read $17.50.

A finger tapped my window, and I fumbled for the button to roll it down. “Sorry, I’m almost done,” I turned to tell the driver.

But it was not the driver. “Take all the time you need,” said Raymond Sinclair. The cab’s meter flipped to

$18.00.

“I need to go,” I said into my cell phone. “I’m meeting a friend, and he just got here. I’ll talk to you later.”

I snapped the phone closed, got out of the cab, and walked into The Library with Raymond Sinclair. The front door opened into a short hallway with a counter along one side; behind it sat a burly man wearing a bored expression, a tight black T-shirt, and a dusting of ashes from the cigarette that dangled from his lips. Sinclair flashed the man a plastic card labeled VIP PLATINUM MEMBER, which he acknowledged with a nod. A battered clipboard lay on the counter. The man nudged it toward me.

“Sign in,” he said, “and I need to see a driver’s license.”

I added my name to the list of other men and then fished my license out of my wallet and handed it to him, feeling embarrassed and vaguely guilty. He compared the names, handed my license back across the counter, then pressed a button beside the counter to buzz us into the main room. The room was loud and dark, with a lighted square stage in the middle. A few men sat on low stools surrounding the stage, a handful more sat at tables dispersed throughout the room, and several others were tucked into booths with flashy young women beside them. A pair of waist-high bookshelves, lined with battered paperbacks—presumably the “volumes” Rankin mentioned—flanked the doorway through which we’d entered. Clearly The Library had pulled out all the stops in its effort to provide a highbrow experience.

As we entered, a tall young blond woman—naked except for a tiny G-string and a lace garter encircling one thigh—shinnied up a brass pole at center stage. Once she was at the top, she let go with her hands and leaned back, extending her arms and arching her torso to accentuate her breasts. They were, I had to admit, quite impressive. Then, extending one willowy leg, she hung by the other and began to slide downward, spiraling slowly around the pole, her descent set to throbbing music and strobing lights. During her final spin, timed to coincide with the end of the song, her long hair swept the stage, then fanned out behind her head as her body came to an artfully posed stop at the base of the pole. “That’s Desirée workin’ it for you, guys,” intoned a DJ’s unctuous voice. “Give her a big hand, fellows, and don’t forget to tip. These girls dance only for tips.” I felt obliged to applaud, but no one else did, so after a few self-conscious claps I stopped. One of the men sitting stageside extended a folded bill in the dancer’s direction; she squatted in front of him, hooking a finger under the garter to raise it off her thigh, and he slid the bill beneath the elastic band. The two men sitting beside him studiously looked away, their hands cupped around their beer cans. I wondered how much detail the tiny camera clipped to my tie was relaying to the FBI agents in the van.

Something about the woman’s face looked familiar, and I realized with a start that I’d seen her before—only hours before—in a drastically different light. I tapped Sinclair on the arm. “Isn’t that the woman who asked you the first couple of questions this morning?”

“In the flesh.” He smiled at my obvious bafflement. “Sometimes it’s a good idea to frame the questions the way you want ’em framed,” he explained. “Gives you a little more leverage over the discussion. A bit of spin control. Politicians do it all the time—salt the audience at town meetings with friendly folks who’ll lob some easy questions over the plate.”

I thought back to the end of Sinclair’s talk. “So when Glen Faust interrupted you—was that scripted, too?”

Even in the club’s dim light, I could see Sinclair flush. “It sure as hell wasn’t scripted by me,” he snapped.

“If I’d been scripting it, he’d have made some lame-ass point and I’d have demolished him. He caught me by surprise, and once he brought you into it, it got away from me.” As he spoke, he watched the woman onstage wriggle into a tight tube dress and descend a short set of steps to the main floor.

“That lovely lady was Desirée,” the DJ oozed. “Next up is Mandy. Mandy’s going to do two numbers for you. Don’t be shy, fellows. If you like what you see, come up and tip the ladies. They’re available for table dances and lap dances, too.”

A petite redhead wearing a push-up bra, lace panties, and stiletto heels took the stage. As soon as the song began, she unhooked the bra and let it fall, then slid down the panties and stepped out of them, snagging one heel briefly on the lace. I wondered when the striptease—the slow, tantalizing removal of layers of clothing—had been replaced by brutally efficient stripping. The gymnastic blonde, whom the DJ had called Desirée, sidled up to Sinclair and kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, doll,” he said. “Dr. Brockton, this is Melissa. Melissa, Dr. Brockton.”

“Hi,” she said, offering me a hand to shake. “That was very interesting, what you were saying this morning.”

“Oh, hell, not you, too.” Sinclair groaned. “Everybody loves this guy. What am I, chopped liver?”

“Aw, don’t get jealous on me,” she cajoled, kissing his cheek again. “You’re the one that’s out on a date with him.” She looked at me naughtily. “I hope you’re not the kind of guy who puts out on the first date.”

I felt myself turn crimson and was grateful for the darkness of the club. “Not to worry,” I said, unsure what to say next. Maybe,I didn’t recognize you without your clothes . Or,How’d you get so good at gymnastics? Or maybe,Doesn’t it bother you that strange men come in to stare at your body and don’t even clap or tip? I settled for the lame safety of, “Nice to meet you, Melissa.”

Sinclair nudged me. “Where you want to sit? Up by the stage?”

God forbid,I thought, but what I said—shouted, practically—was, “A booth, if that’s okay with you. Be a little easier to talk.”

He nodded. “Sweetheart,” he said to Melissa/Desirée, “could you excuse us for a few minutes? We need to talk a little shop.” She mimed a smooch at him, waved her fingertips at me, and sashayed away in her short dress and tall heels.

Sinclair led us to a booth in a far corner of the room, mercifully far from the stage. As soon as we were seated, a pretty brunette—not as young as the two twentysomething dancers—came to take our drink order. She wore a simple white blouse, a straight gray skirt that reached below her knees, and a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses. Her hair was pinned back in a loose bun, skewered by a #2 wooden pencil. Despite how completely clichéd the costume was, I found the librarian-waitress far more attractive than I’d found either of the topless, gyrating dancers.

Sinclair ordered a scotch, a single-malt whose name I didn’t know and probably couldn’t pronounce. He lifted an eyebrow at me when I ordered a Diet Coke. “I don’t drink alcohol,” I explained across the table. “I have Ménière’s disease—occasional spells of vertigo—so I’m pretty careful to steer clear of dizziness.”