The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (27 page)

I took the elevator to the seventh floor. Passing the nurses’ station, I nodded and continued a few doors farther down the corridor to Eddie Garcia’s room. Knocking gently, I pushed open the door to his room and walked in, hoping I wasn’t waking him up.

I wasn’t waking him up. The room was empty. Garcia was gone.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, HE
signed himself out?”

“Just that,” said Arlene, the duty nurse. “He signed himself out an hour ago.”

“The man’s got nohands, ” I said. “His right arm’s grafted to his belly. How the hell did he sign himself out?” The nurse flushed, her eyes narrowing in anger or shock at what I’d said. “Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Arlene. I didn’t mean that as harshly as it sounded. What I mean is, where did he go? And why? Did Carmen check him out?”

“No.” Suddenly she began to cry. “I’m so worried about him, Dr. Brockton. I begged him not to leave. I begged him to let me call his wife. But he refused. He insisted on being discharged, and he left with that man.”

“What man? Did you know who it was?”

She shook her head, and I racked my brain, trying to remember anything Garcia might have said about friends he’d made during the year he’d lived in Knoxville. I drew a blank. As far as I knew, the M.E. and his family kept mostly to themselves, and Miranda and I were as close to them as anyone. “Was it a relative? Did the man look or sound Mexican?”

“No, he had red hair. And he sounded like he grew up around here. Said, ‘Y’all have a good un,’ as they were leaving.”

“What else do you remember about him?”

She thought for a moment, then once more shook her head in frustration. “Not much, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be any good as a crime-scene witness.” She furrowed her brow and scrunched her mouth with the effort of concentration. “He was wearing a white shirt and a skinny black tie.”

“You mean, like a Mormon missionary? One of those bike-riding kids with a plastic name tag?”

“No, he was older than that. Thirty-five, maybe forty. And not as clean-cut as those Mormon boys.”

An alarming thought occurred to me. “Do you think Dr. Garcia might be in danger? Was he coerced into leaving with this guy?”

“No. No, it didn’t seem that way at all. Dr. Garcia acted eager to go, almost happy. The closest I’ve seen him to looking happy the whole time he’s been here.” She looked puzzled. “But it didn’t seem like the guy knew Dr. Garcia. I mean, he came to get him, and he told me that the doctor was expecting him—‘The doctor’s expecting me,’ that’s exactly how he put it—but he seemed surprised when I told him we’d need a wheelchair and really startled when he saw Dr. Garcia with his hands all bandaged and grafted.”

“Arlene, could I make a quick call?” She motioned toward the phone at the nurses’ station, and I lifted the handset and dialed 0. “Hello, this is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I told the operator. “Yes, ma’am, the Body Farm guy…. I’m just fine, thank you for asking…. Well, I’m glad you liked it, Mary Louise; I always enjoy giving those lectures for the hospital staff…. No, of course I remember you…. Listen, Mary Louise, you reckon you could put me through to the hospital’s police dispatcher, please?…No, it’s not an emergency call. At least I don’t think so…. Thank you, Mary Louise.”

I heard a click, then a pause, and then a male voice came through the receiver. “Dispatch, this is Grimes,”

he said. “What can I do for you, Dr. Brockton?”

“Officer Grimes, I’m hoping you might be able to shed some light on something for me. Dr. Garcia, the medical examiner—…Yes, that’s right. Well, Dr. Garcia had himself discharged from the hospital about an hour ago…. I know, I know he wasn’t really healed up yet, but he wanted to go…. Yes, doctors can be strong-headed. Anyhow, I…” My voice trailed off. I what? I was being nosy when I should mind my own business instead? “I was just worrying about him, and I wanted to make sure he got down to the entrance and got into the car okay. You reckon there might’ve been an officer down at the entrance who could ease my mind about that?”

“Hang on a second, Doc.” He put me on hold for what seemed several minutes. “Hey, Doc? I just talked with Jorgenson, who was down at the main entrance a while ago. He says not to worry—Dr. Garcia made it out of the wheelchair and into the car just fine. Those guys from paradise are really careful.”

“Guys from paradise?”

“Paradise. The limo service.”

WHEN I RETURNED TO THE
CT scanner, Miranda was just emerging from the side door of the trailer. She gave me a thumbs-up sign of approval, though the grim expression on her face—an expression I’d seen a lot lately—didn’t match the jaunty gesture. I suspected that the thumbs-up reflected her feelings about the scanner while the expression reflected her recent feelings about me.

“You’re never going to believe this,” I said.

“Try me.”

“Eddie Garcia checked out of UT Hospital a couple hours ago.”

“Yeah.”

“He just—What do you mean, ‘Yeah’?”

“I mean yeah, I know.”

“You know? How the hell do you know?”

“He just called me. Right after he called Carmen.”

“He called Carmen? He didn’t go home when he checked out?”

“No. He called from the car. He was in Chattanooga.”

“Chattanooga? What’s he doing in Chattanooga?”

“Just passing through.”

“Just passing through on the way to where?”

“Atlanta.”

“Atlanta? Why the hell’s he going to Atlanta? He’s still recovering from surgery. And how come he’s being all cloak-and-daggerish?”

“He’s got an appointment at Emory. I guess he’s nervous about it. Maybe he didn’t want anybody to try to talk him out of it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise people’s hopes about it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise his own hopes.”

“What hopes?”

“His hopes for a total hand transplant. Emory has a new hand-transplant center, and they’re looking for their first patient. They’ve agreed to evaluate Eddie as a candidate.”

FOR A BIRD OR A PLANE OR SUPERMAN, ASHEVILLE
was seventy-five straight-line miles to the east of Knoxville. I was no Superman, unfortunately. I was an earthbound anthropologist with a truckload of amputated arms, and by road Asheville was forty miles farther than by air—forty twisting, turning, up-and-down miles across the backbone of the Appalachians. For much of the mountainous route, the interstate followed the gorge of the Pigeon River as it tumbled out of the mountains, and normally I enjoyed the rugged terrain and the demanding drive. Today, though, I might as well have been passing through blighted industrial wasteland, for all the attention I paid to the passing scenery. I’d glanced at the hydroelectric plant perched beside the Pigeon at the Tennessee-Carolina border, but everything since had passed unnoticed. Luckily, at daybreak on a Sunday morning, my truck was practically the only vehicle meandering this stretch of I-40.

My attention deficit had two causes: I was deeply distressed, and I was seriously sleep-deprived. But there were causes within causes. When I’d agreed to help the FBI, I hadn’t anticipated how painful it would be to play the role of a greedy broker of body parts. I’d taken it on for worthy reasons, but inside the mask and the costume of corruptibility I’d donned, my soul’s skin was itching and burning. Every interaction with Miranda now felt strained, and I deeply missed the easy collegiality and playful banter we’d shared for years.

I also grieved for the rift with Jeff. We’d not spoken since the night he walked out on me, the night I’d told him about Isabella and the likelihood that she was pregnant. I’d left several voice mails for him. I’d also spoken with Jenny, his wife, who—kindly but matter-of-factly—told me that this was a problem only Jeff and I could work out.

Isabella, too, was weighing heavily on me. Where was she? Was she indeed pregnant? What would it mean to father a child with a fugitive, a killer, a woman I’d totally misjudged? How had I been so blind?

Would I be able to trust a woman fully—or trust myself—ever again? These worries swirled through my weary mind like dry leaves in some corner of a courtyard, seized by the hand of an unseen whirlwind that lifted them, spun them into a frenzy, and dropped them through its fingers into a lifeless heap. My sleep deprivation was simpler: I’d just stayed up all night hauling bodies to the CT scanner and back, then amputating twenty arms. Over the past three weeks, I’d stockpiled ten bodies in the makeshift facility called the Annex, a corrugated metal building located a stone’s throw from the stadium. The Annex contained a processing room for cleaning skeletal material, but we rarely used it anymore now that we had far better facilities in the Regional Forensic Center at the hospital. The Annex also contained a dozen chest-type freezers, most of which I’d filled as the ten bodies arrived. On Thursday I’d taken the bodies out to thaw, and I’d spent Saturday evening ferrying the still-chilly corpses across the river to the CT scanner, then back again. Except for the fact that I was hauling the bodies in a GMC pickup and delivering them to a high-tech scanner, I could have been Charon, the boatman from Greek mythology, ferrying the dead across the river Styx to the underworld.

I’d done the transporting myself, rather than have Miranda do it, because I didn’t want to involve her in this—and because I didn’t want to incur any more of her suspicion and disapproval than I already had. I’d also paid Eric, the scanning technician, the ruinous rate of three hundred dollars, from my own pocket, since I was taking six hours out of his Saturday night. It would have been far simpler to skip the scans of these ten and just begin the scanning project with all subsequent donated bodies, but I felt I owed it to the research project—to Glen Faust and OrthoMedica and to the dead donors themselves—to secure the scans before severing the arms. Finally, at 2:00 A.M.—an hour when I was sure I wouldn’t have an audience in the Annex—I’d begun to cut.

Slicing into the first one, I’d felt slightly tentative. I didn’t want to damage any bones, since they’d all end up in the skeletal collection, so I worked my way cautiously down through the muscles and tendons and ligaments linking the arms to the shoulders: the deltoid and teres major muscles, the four interwoven muscles of the rotator cuff, and the ligaments that helped secure the head of the humerus within the recesses of the scapula. I was grateful that I was removing arms, not legs; tucked deep within the acetabulum, the socket of the hip joint, was a ligament that was difficult to cut without gouging the bone. By the third corpse, I’d found a rhythm, and by the fifth I was slicing as swiftly and ruthlessly as a butcher. Still, it had been a long, tense night, and by the time I’d finished packing the arms in five ice chests and wrestling the coolers into the truck, I was spent. After a quick shower at my office, I’d donned khakis and a button-down shirt, along with the digital recorder and a new video camera from Rankin, this one concealed in a fat fountain pen in my pocket—a pen whose gold clip was adorned with a small disk of “onyx,” just like the tie clip I’d worn in Las Vegas. I merged onto I-40 East just as the Sunday sun was rising. Now—winding my way through the mountains toward Asheville—I felt fatigue replacing anxiety as my main problem.

I was startled out of my fog by the electronic whoop of a siren. Checking the side mirror, I was dismayed to see a North Carolina highway patrol cruiser close behind me. I put on my blinker and eased to the shoulder, hoping—though my hope didn’t last long—that he would swing around me and accelerate away.

As the trooper approached, I rolled down the window. Above his left shirt pocket, he wore a brass nameplate that read OFFICER HARRINGTON. “Good morning, Officer Harrington. Did I do something wrong?”

“Sir, I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

“Certainly.” I pulled my Tennessee driver’s license from my wallet and removed the paperwork from a small leather notebook I kept in the glove box. I also unclipped my Tennessee Bureau of Investigation consultant’s badge from my belt and handed it to him along with the other things. “Just so you know, I’m considered one of the good guys over on the other side of the mountains,” I said. He looked surprised when he saw the TBI shield. “Mr. Brockton, do you know why I stopped you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” I confessed.

“I’ve been following you for the last five miles,” he said. “Were you aware of that?” I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know that either. “You’ve been driving very erratically. Slowing down, speeding up, drifting between the lanes. Have you been drinking, Mr. Brockton?”

“No. I don’t drink. Ever.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“Not really. I’m tired, but not particularly sleepy. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I guess I was just really distracted.”

“This is a dangerous stretch of road for that.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll pay better attention.”

“That’d be a good idea. If you would sit tight for just a moment, Mr. Brockton, I need to call in a routine check on your license and registration. Do you have any recent citations that you know of?”

“None. I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”

“Never?”

I shook my head.

He smiled. “Congratulations. That’s rare. Sit tight—I’ll be right back.” He turned and started back toward the cruiser, then stopped. He peered through the window of the shell covering the back of the truck, then turned to me. “Mr. Brockton?”

“Yes, Officer?”

“You’ve got a lot of coolers in your truck. What’s in ’em?”

My heart caught in my throat. “Specimens,” I said. “Biological specimens.”

“Specimens of what?”

I SAT LOCKED IN THE
back of the cruiser for what seemed an eternity while Harrington explored the possibility that I was a chain-saw-happy serial killer. He talked on the radio to his dispatcher, the dispatcher’s supervisor, and the day-shift captain. Within seconds after Harrington had politely asked me to open one of the coolers, he’d drawn his gun and put me in the back of the car. Minutes later a second cruiser, lights strobing and siren screaming, screeched to a stop behind us, followed shortly by a third. The three troopers huddled at the back of my truck, chatting and shaking their heads in disbelief, raising the lid of the cooler repeatedly to confirm that yes, it really did contain four amputated human arms, nestled in the ice like fresh-caught fish, their tail fins replaced by fingers. The troopers’ roadside huddle was periodically interrupted by radio consultations, not just with Harrington’s supervisors but also with various officials of the state’s hazardous-materials office and—last but not least—the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.