The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (23 page)

He nodded, looking slightly amused. “Think of all the money you’ve saved by not drinking. If I didn’t love scotch so much, I’d be a billionaire.” His gaze drifted from me to the redhead on stage, then back to me again. “Did you go hear Faust’s talk this afternoon?”

I nodded.

“What’d you think?”

“I thought it was interesting, especially the stuff about nanomaterials and tissue scaffolds for bone and cartilage. Sounds like five or ten years from now we’ll be able to limp into the doctor’s office and sprint out an hour later with a rebuilt knee.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he said.

“You think Faust is overstating the potential?”

He shrugged. “I think he’s underestimating the difficulties. Guys like him always do. They think they’re smarter than the rest of us. Smart enough to fix anything, solve anything. Smart enough to cheat death.”

He picked at the edges of a fingernail. “You remember all the buzz about cryonics a few years back?

Deep-freeze your way to immortality?”

“Vaguely. Wasn’t it Ted Williams, the baseball great, who had his head cut off and frozen when he died?”

“Right. Theory is, the brain—and memory, and personality, all that shit—can be preserved in liquid nitrogen and then thawed out and revived and spiffed up in a few decades or centuries and grafted onto a cloned body. Give me a break.”

I smiled. “It does sound like they’re selling water from a high-tech Fountain of Youth, doesn’t it?”

“Faust’s given money to those guys,” Sinclair said, studying my reaction as he played that card. “He’s funneled research funding to Alcor, the outfit in Arizona that has Ted’s head on ice. He’s on their scientific advisory committee, too.”

He was probably gratified by my look of surprise. “Well, that’s certainly interesting,” I said. “Plant enough seeds, some of them bear fruit someday. Probably not the cryonic immortality seeds, but maybe carbon-fiber bone scaffolds.”

He shook his head.

“So…clearly you’re not worried that the biomedical engineers are going to put you out of business.”

“Not a chance. People used to claim that the computer revolution would lead to the paperless office. Instead we use more paper than ever before. Same with human tissue. Even if Faust manages to create synthetic tissues—shit,especially if he manages to do it—the need for the real deal will always increase. Always.”

Our drinks arrived. I reached for my wallet, but Sinclair stopped me. “They’re running a tab for us,” he said. “We’ll settle up later.” As the waitress set his scotch down, Sinclair laid a hand on her wrist.

“We’re trying to talk some business here,” he said, “and we’re having to shout over the music. Is there a quieter room where we could talk?”

“There’s the Archives Room,” she said. “Nobody’s in there right now.”

“Sounds perfect.” Sinclair slid out of the booth. “Lead on.”

She took us through a wide door and a short hallway at one side of the main floor and showed us into a smaller, curtained-off room, ten or twelve feet square, with leather couches lining three of the four walls. In the corners between the sofas, end tables held potted ferns, leather-bound books, and brass lamps with shades of deep green glass. A waist-high stand in the middle of the room held a massive volume, which I recognized asWebster’s Unabridged Dictionary. I revised my earlier opinion of The Library’s lame literary décor; originally I’d given it two stars, but now I decided it might rate three. Sinclair sank into the corner of one sofa, gesturing with his glass to the adjoining sofa for me. In the background I could still hear the relentless throb of the music, but the volume had dropped by three-quarters, and I felt sure the audio recording would be much clearer here than in the main room. I also felt far more comfortable in here, away from the nonstop parade of exposed breasts and buttocks.

“This is much better,” I said.

He took a sip of the scotch. “Ah, mother’s milk,” he breathed. “How’s your Coke?”

I tasted it; it was flat and watery. “Fine. Hits the spot.”

He shook his head. “You are a party animal,” he said sarcastically. He was right. “Wild” was probably not the word my colleagues would use to describe me, but I didn’t care. “Relax, Bill. Loosen up. Take off your tie.”

I felt a flash of panic. Was he suspicious about the tiepin? “If I take it off, I’ll forget and walk out without it. But it would feel good to loosen it.” I unclipped the pin, slid the knot down a couple of inches, then reclipped the pin.

“Nice tiepin, by the way.”

“Thanks. It was a Father’s Day present from my son last year.”

“What’s the stone?” He leaned toward it, and my blood pressure zoomed.

“Uh, not sure. Maybe onyx?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He studied the pin closely. My palms began to sweat. “Looks more like moonstone to me.” He sat back, and my panic eased. “Listen, Bill, I’d like to bounce an idea off you. Feel free to say no. I’m not shy—I’ll ask anybody anything—but I never take it personally if the answer’s not the one I was hoping for.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Shoot.”

“I think we’ve got a lot in common, you and I,” he began. “We’re both outsiders, in a way. We work in fields that most people consider morbid or gruesome. The public benefits tremendously from what we do, but they don’t always appreciate us or reward us for doing it.”

I shifted in my seat. “I might have to disagree with you on that,” I said. “I like teaching, and I like the forensic work—identifying bodies, figuring out how or when somebody died. I find those rewarding.”

He wagged a corrective finger at me. “Ah, but those are internal rewards,” he said. “That’s your own inner sense of satisfaction, not external reward. How much did you make last year, Bill? What do they pay you to do what you do?”

“Less than I want,” I hedged, “but maybe more than I deserve.”

“Not a chance,” he said. “Okay, it’s none of my business, but I bet the university doesn’t pay you half as much as it pays the football coach.” In fact, UT didn’t pay me one-tenth as much as it paid its head coach, whose salary was more than $2 million a year. What’s more, UT was also paying $2 million a year to a coach it had recently fired. One year after signing a four-year, $7 million contract with coach Phil Fulmer, UT asked him to step down…and agreed to pay his salary for the remainder of his contract. In other words, Fulmer was being paid $6 million not to work for three years. I didn’t say all that to Sinclair, but I did say, “It would be nice if anthropology professors were considered as valuable as coaches or medical examiners or lawyers.”

“Hear, hear,” he said, raising his glass in toast. “To prosperous anthropology professors.” I clicked my Coke against his scotch, hoping my strained smile didn’t look too phony. “So I’m wondering if you do any consulting on the side? The university doesn’t prohibit that, does it?”

“Generally not,” I said. “Not unless it’s a conflict of interest, or unless it averages more than two days a month. But they don’t have to approve honoraria at all, so if you wanted me to do a lecture for you…”

“Hmm. We might be able to work it that way,” he mused. “This morning I mentioned putting on small trainings for surgeons. We actually get a lot of requests for those. Would you be interested in working with me on something like that?”

Careful,I told myself.Don’t look too eager. “I’m sure it’d be interesting, but I’m not qualified to teach surgeons. Not unless they want to know about postmortem decomposition and time since death.”

“You’re far too modest,” he said. “I’m sure surgeons could learn a lot from you. But not to worry. We’d also have a surgery consultant there, an expert in the procedure we’d be teaching.”

“I don’t mean to seem dense, but if you have a surgery consultant and you’re teaching surgeons a procedure, why do you need me?”

He raised his glass in a slight salute. “I do like a man who cuts to the chase, Bill. What I’m hoping is that you might be able to bring along some material.”

“What did you have in mind?”

He leaned across the end table toward me. “We have a one-day training for orthopedic surgeons coming up in a few weeks in Asheville,” he said. “Just across the mountains from Knoxville. We’re teaching microsurgery techniques for reattaching small blood vessels and nerves in the arm. He swirled the glass in one hand, frowning slightly at how little of his scotch remained. “Right now we’ve got the enrollment capped at ten, and we’re turning people away. If we had enough specimens, we could double or even triple the class size.”

“So you’re asking if I could haul ten or twenty arms to Asheville?”

“Like I said, I’ll ask anybody anything. Is that an impossible thing to ask?”

“Possibly impossible,” I answered, “but maybe just complicated. So the surgery consultant demonstrates the technique, then each of these surgeons practices it on an arm?”

He nodded.

“And where does this take place?”

“In a ballroom at the Grove Park Inn.”

“The Grove Park?” It was the most elegant hotel in Asheville, a massive stone lodge built in the 1920s. Several U.S. presidents had stayed there, as had dozens of Hollywood stars. “The Grove Park lets us waltz in with a bunch of cadaver arms and carve them up?”

“Well, we don’t exactly pile them on a baggage cart at the front entrance,” he chuckled, “but basically yeah. I’ve done this at convention hotels plenty of times. We pack the material in leakproof shipping cases, on ice, and bring it up the service elevator. We don’t allow hotel staff into the room, so nobody but the docs sees anything. End of the day, we pack everything up, haul it down the freight elevator and out the service entrance and back to where it came from. Piece of cake.”

“And you’re envisioning that I’d bring the material over just for the day, then take it back to Knoxville?”

He shrugged. “Your choice,” he said. “You want to send it home with me, great—we’d be glad to be the

‘designee’ your donor consent form mentions.”

I sipped my watery Coke and frowned. “I’d need to take it back with me. It would look pretty strange if a dozen skeletons in the collection were missing their arms.” As I said it, I thought of Trey Willoughby’s limbless corpse.

“Then take ’em back at the end of the seminar. If we can borrow or rent them for a day, that’s great. So you’re saying this is possible?”

“Possible. Wouldn’t be easy. We’d have to stockpile the material in a freezer.”What else? I asked myself.What else do I need to do to reel him in? “And those arms aren’t going to amputate themselves.”

“It would be a lot of work,” he conceded, “but I think you’d find that the honorarium would make it worthwhile.”

I stalled, studying the last of my drink. “How worthwhile?” I took another small sip. He didn’t hesitate. “A thousand an arm. Twenty arms, twenty grand.”

A stray droplet of Coke water went down my windpipe, and I found myself coughing convulsively. The coughing fit was so intense it brought tears to my eyes.

Once the coughing finally subsided into throat clearing, Sinclair added, “Does that mean you’d consider such an arrangement worthwhile?”

“That’s…quite worthwhile,” I managed to say.

He reached a hand across the corner of the end table. “Bill, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.” As we shook hands, he smiled a broad, slow smile, and it made my flesh crawl. He stood up suddenly. “This calls for a toast. Our lovely waitress seems to have forgotten us. Let me go get us a fresh round. You sit tight; I’ll be right back.” He stepped through the curtains and out the doorway before I could protest.

I slumped back in the sofa, spent from the coughing and dismayed by the deal I’d just made. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the surgical training—quite the contrary, in fact. It was myself I disapproved of: I had just agreed to exploit donated bodies for my own personal gain. I rested my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes.

“Jet-lagged?”

I jerked my head up and opened my eyes. It was the pretty waitress in the librarian outfit. She set down a fresh Coke and another scotch on the end table. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“It’s okay. I’ve just had a long day.”

She smiled. “You do look like you could use something to perk you up.” She turned and took a few steps, then stopped at the wooden stand holding the massive dictionary. Reaching out a hand, she touched the back of the stand. The lights dimmed, and the room filled with the driving beat of dance music. The young woman was standing with her back to me, her feet slightly apart, the skirt stretched tight. One leg began to keep time to the music, and then—as the Pointer Sisters burst into the lyrics of

“I’m So Excited”—she spun to face me. She widened her stance, and a slit in her skirt parted all the way up her left thigh. With one hand she removed her glasses and laid them on the dictionary; with the other she reached up and unpinned the bun, giving her head a toss that flipped her long hair into a high, sweeping arc. Then she began to move toward me, undulating and shimmying across the few feet of space that divided us.

“Wait,” I said.

She held one finger to her lips and pursed her mouth in an exaggerated “shush” expression. Then she yanked the white blouse open—I heard the sound of Velcro letting go—to reveal a sheer, low-cut black bra underneath.

“Wait, stop,” I said. “What are you doing?”

Instead of answering, she planted her right foot between my own feet, then wedged her left leg between my knees and levered them apart. Next she tugged at the top of the slit in her skirt, and the garment came off in her hand and fell to the floor. She was completely nude underneath.Dear God, I thought desperately and absurdly,what would Sir Galahad do?

“Stop,” I said. “Please stop now.”

She turned her back to me again, bent her knees, and arched her back, pushing her bare bottom toward me, swirling and swaying closer and closer in a sensual, primal rhythm.

“Stop!”I shouted. “Stop dancing and put on your clothes. Right now.”

She froze in mid-sway, inches away from me.

“I’m serious,” I added. “You’re a beautiful woman, but I didn’t ask for this, and I’m not comfortable with it.”