The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (26 page)

he chirped, his face beaming.

Miranda hoisted him off Carmen’s hip and transferred him to her own, nestling him there as naturally as if he were her own child.“Hola, muchacho,” she said, and then repeated the greeting in English: “Hey, dude. How’s my little dude, huh?” She punctuated each word with a wet, smacking kiss, and laughter burbled up out of the boy. The pure, musical sound brought a smile to my face and, I was happy to see, to Carmen’s as well. Tomás pointed at a staircase in the hallway, and Miranda clambered over the safety gate and headed upstairs with him.

“I just made a pot of tea,” Carmen said. “Would you like a cup? Come, let’s sit.” She turned and led us around a corner into a large, open room in the shape of a semicircle. A galley-style kitchen ran the length of the one straight wall; on the other side of a full-length butcher-block counter, a long, curving wall of windows defined the living room. I walked to the center of the room and looked around me. It was now fully dark outside, so the arc of windows acted as mirrors, reflecting ten images of myself back at me.

“What an amazing house,” I said, and when I spoke, my voice sounded as if it were coming not just from within me but from slightly in front of me, too. “And the acoustics are interesting.” The effect was similar to hearing my voice amplified by a microphone and a high-fidelity speaker.

“Yes,” said Carmen. “It’s because you’re standing right at the center of that curve. It’s like the—oh, what’s the English term forpunto focal ?—the focal point of a lens. A lens of sound. Eddie and Tomás love the way it makes the sound big. I find it a little bit…um, haunting? Spooky?”

For someone born and raised in South America, Carmen spoke English with remarkable fluency.

“Spooky sounds right. Sorry to spook you.”

She fluttered her fingers at me to dismiss the apology. “No, don’t be silly, Bill. If you stand there and talk for an hour, you will make me crazy, but for now enjoy it.”

I hummed, changing position slightly to move in and out of the acoustic sweet spot at the center of the semicircle. As I did, my voice got louder and softer. I switched from humming to clapping, and Carmen laughed. “That’s just what Eddie and Tomás love to do,” she said. Then, suddenly, Carmen was weeping, staring stricken at my hands. My hands froze in the air, and my heart went out to her as I saw a wave of grief crash over her. “Oh, Carmen,” I said, “I’m so sorry about all this.” I reached out to give her shoulder a squeeze, and when I did, she crumpled against me like a child. Her breath was ragged, half choked. “Oh, Bill, I don’t know if I can bear it,” she cried. “What will become of Eddie? What will become of me? How do we go on?”

“I don’t know, Carmen,” I said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.” She began to sob—keening, shuddering sobs—and she clung to me. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated, wrapping my arms around her slight frame, stroking the back of her head with my right hand, the way I’d soothed my son when he was small. “So very sorry.”

As her sobs subsided, she reached up and took hold of my right hand with both of hers. I thought she was starting to disentangle herself, but instead her fingers began to trace my own, one after another, as if she were a blind woman taking the measure of an unknown object.My God, I realized,these are exotic things to her now: the hands of a man. The realization saddened me for both her and Eddie.

“Your husband is a very fine man,” I said. “And a very brave one, too.” I locked eyes with her. “I’m proud to be his friend,” I added. “And yours.” I kissed her on the forehead, then eased away. “I don’t know exactly how, but I believe that Eddie can get past this, and I believe you can, too. One thing I’m sure of: He has a lot better chance of reclaiming his health and his work—of reclaiming a life that’s worth living—with his family standing beside him.” Her eyes pooled again. “I see the light and the pride in his eyes whenever he talks about you and Tomás, Carmen. You both mean so much to him.”

She drew a deep breath, then another, blowing them out through pursed lips. She rubbed her face with her hands, then wiped her hands on her jeans. Stepping to the kitchen counter, she took a paper napkin from a stack and dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose. It honked, and she laughed tiredly. “God,” she said, “I didn’t know I had any tears left in me. I was so afraid when he nearly died, and so sad when he lost so much of his hands.” She wiped and blew again. “I’ve cried so much, I hoped I was finished.”

I thought about the deepest losses in my own life, Kathleen and Jess, and about how suddenly and strongly the wounds could be reopened by some slight, unexpected trigger—catching a whiff of the perfume Kathleen wore for years, or seeing Jess’s signature on an autopsy report in a case file.

“I don’t think we finish crying until we finish living,” I said. I was reminded of something I’d read about joy and sorrow, about how the two are inseparably linked, like the opposite sides of an old-fashioned balance scale, one rising as the other falls. “But if we’re lucky,” I added, “we don’t finish laughing until then either.” I nodded at the teapot on the counter, a sleek, glossy vessel that would have looked at home in an art gallery or the Museum of Modern Art. “Any chance we could have that cup of tea now?”

She smiled, and I thought I saw a mixture of relief, gratitude, and sadness in it. “Of course. I didn’t mean to make you work so hard for it.”

“Nonsense, Carmen,” I said. “I’m proud to be your friend, too. I’ll go see if Miranda wants to join us for tea.” Retracing the path to the front door, I turned down the hallway and then called up the staircase.

“Miranda?”

“Yes?”

“You want some hot tea?”

“If there are juice boxes, Tomás and I would prefer juice boxes,” she called down. I heard her make loud smacking, slurping noises as she clumped down the stairs, and Tomás giggled as she rounded the landing with him slung on her hip again, his head thrown back in burbling delight as she nibbled noisily on his neck. Miranda would make a splendid mom, I realized, and the notion hit me with surprising force. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never imagined Miranda having a baby or raising a child. Graduate assistant, Ph.D. candidate, promising young forensic anthropologist—these were all hats I regularly pictured on Miranda’s head. But the mantle of motherhood, that was a new one. It was an idea I should probably get used to, I decided.

Miranda froze with one leg in midair over the safety gate and looked at me sharply. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?” It was the very question she’d asked me half an hour earlier in the truck.

“You’re looking at me funny,” she said, echoing my earlier response. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said, my face breaking into a big smile.

Over tea and juice boxes, Miranda and I talked with Carmen about Eddie’s weeks in the hospital and his despair over the latest damage to his right hand. “He’s very discouraged again,” Carmen said. “He tries to sound positive when he talks to me, but of course he is devastated by this.” She hesitated. “And afraid.”

Miranda posed the question I was loath to ask. “Afraid of what?”

“Afraid he is too damaged to be whole again. Afraid he cannot accept his disfigurement and limitations. Afraid he cannot do his job adequately.” She looked down, studying the contents of her teacup. “Afraid he cannot love me adequately.” She closed her eyes. “Afraid I cannot love him still.”

Miranda reached across the table and took one of Carmen’s hands in both of hers. “Can I tell you something, Carmen? I admire you tremendously. You have such a big, brave heart. No wonder Eddie loves you so.”

Carmen gave Miranda’s hands a squeeze, then refilled her cup and my own and then turned the conversation to more pragmatic talk of Eddie’s job. She asked how critical his absence was becoming, and I did my best to reassure her. The state medical examiner’s office in Nashville had contracted with several pathologists in Johnson City and Nashville and Chattanooga—Jess’s former office—to perform the autopsies that ordinarily would be done in Knoxville. “They’ll be glad to have Eddie back whenever he’s able to return to work,” I told her, “but they’re fine for now, and for months, if need be. If he wants to ease back into it, even for just a few hours a week, that’ll be fine. Eddie was injured in the line of duty, so his insurance and worker’s compensation benefits will take care of him and the family. His job is safe, so you can cross that off your list of worries.”

Talk turned to the Garcias’ house, and to a few maintenance needs that had arisen during the past month. The tall cedar structure tended to take a beating from the sun, the rain, and the wildlife—the high, heated walls made it an attractive nesting place for squirrels and woodpeckers, Carmen explained—and the structure’s height, forty or fifty feet at the roofline, tended to scare away contractors. Miranda recommended a handyman she’d used for various carpentry and plumbing jobs. “He can fix anything,”

she said, “and he goes rock climbing and rappelling for fun. He’ll love working on this house.”

Soon Tomás grew sleepy, so Miranda and I said our goodbyes. Carmen walked us out to the driveway.

“Drive boldly,” she advised as we clambered into the truck. “Get a good, strong start down here, because it gets steeper as you go up.”

The tires shrieked as I gunned the throttle and fishtailed out of the parking area. “Boldly done,” said Miranda.

“Damn skippy,” I answered, rocketing up the narrow band of concrete and whipping onto the road, grateful that no one was coming from either direction. “That Tomás is a cutie,” I added. “And he clearly thinks you hung the moon.”

“Mutual, I’m sure. He’s a sweet boy.” She sighed. “He misses his daddy.”

“Yeah.” We made the rest of the drive back to UT in silence. Threading my way down to the one-lane service road ringing the base of the stadium, I pulled in behind Miranda’s white Jetta and put the truck in park, the engine idling. “Thanks for going with me, Miranda.”

“You’re welcome.” She opened the door and got out, then leaned her head back in. “By the way,” she said, “you’re right. Eddie is a very fine man. I’m proud to be his friend, too.”

THE GLEAMING WHITE TRACTOR-TRAILER INCHED
along the edge of the parking lot, parallel to the fence of the Body Farm. The truck’s gears clashed when the driver wrestled the transmission into reverse, and then the clutch caught and the rig eased backward, scraping a few low branches that overhung the chain-link and the inner wooden fence. The driver stopped when the trailer’s rear end was just below the facility’s main gate. He got out, checked his parking job, and unhooked the connections between tractor and trailer. That done, he fired up the large diesel generator attached to the front of the trailer and began raising the front end of the trailer slightly, with a pair of powered jacks built into the trailer’s frame, to compensate for the slight grade of the parking lot. Calling up the contacts stored in my cell phone, I punched in “F” and dialed the first number there. The call went to voice mail; there was no personal greeting, simply a computer voice telling me the number was not available and offering me the chance to leave a message. “This is Bill Brockton,” I said, “calling from Knoxville to say thank you. It feels like Christmas came early to the Body Farm this year.”

I hadn’t fully allowed myself to believe it would happen, but Glen Faust had followed through on his pledge: The trailer contained a mobile CT scanner, housed in a sleek, modern imaging suite—not that the Body Farm’s “patients” were in any shape to notice or care about the ambience or décor, of course. My only hope was that the smell of decomp wouldn’t follow the scanner from Knoxville to its next assignment, wherever and whenever that might be. Faust had committed OrthoMedica to a collaborative research project for the next three months, with the strong possibility of renewing it for a year beyond that if the data proved useful.

We’d barely begun to plan how we’d use the data from the scanner. One thing I knew, though, was that we’d scan every incoming body donated to the research facility, capturing three-dimensional images, inside and out, while they were still fresh corpses. Then, months later, we’d rescan their bare skeletons. Comparing the before and after scans would offer valuable insights into the intricate architecture of flesh and bone, their intimate entwining. We’d agreed to share the data with both OrthoMedica and UT’s Biomedical Engineering Department. Biomedical Engineering had asked its faculty and graduate students to submit draft proposals for using the scanner to help design high-tech artificial joints and advanced surgical tools and techniques—what one of the faculty called “the operating room of the future.” We’d also received an inquiry from the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. One of my former students was working there on a team developing facial-reconstruction software: a way of restoring faces to the skulls of long-dead murder victims, using computer calculations rather than the sculptor’s clay used by traditional forensic artists. Our scans could allow them to see the skull beneath the skin of dozens or even hundreds of donor faces—and thus help improve the computer’s ability to model the skin atop the skulls of unknown murder victims.

Besides providing the scanner, OrthoMedica was funding two half-time assistantships. One of the half-time slots was for a graduate student in biomedical engineering, Eric Anderson, who already had training and prior experience as a scanning technician; the other slot was for Miranda, who would coordinate the arrival of the bodies with the arrival of the scanning tech. “Drop the kids off in the morning, pick ’em up after school,” she’d joked. I worried that assigning her the scanning project would spread her too thin—she was already running the bone lab and helping me on cases in the field—but after the dean’s latest call for budget cuts, it was the only way to keep her position fully funded. The truck driver seemed to have countless adjustments to make. In addition to leveling the trailer itself, he needed to attach and level a set of metal steps, as well as a hydraulic lift that hoisted patients on gurneys—or cadavers in body bags—into the imaging suite. The fellow seemed capable, so I decided to let him get by without my supervision long enough to pay a visit to Eddie Garcia. Parking my truck at the loading dock, I punched in the combination code to let myself in the back door of the Regional Forensic Center.