The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (28 page)

I’d tried suggesting he call the TBI first, since I was pretty sure they’d vouch for my current standing (or at least my recent past) as a law-abiding, crime-solving consultant and professor. If I’d had the good fortune to be pulled over in Tennessee rather than North Carolina, I’d have been on my way within five minutes, I felt sure, but here in Carolina nobody knew me, so it was a thornier problem. I’d considered asking the trooper to call Ben Rankin at the FBI, but I quickly rejected that idea. Getting Rankin to rescue me from the North Carolina state police might save me some time and embarrassment in the short run, but it would compromise the secrecy of the sting. So instead I sat and chafed in the back of the police car while Harrington proved himself to be a thorough, dutiful cop, the sort who went by the book and worked things up the chain of command.

I’d noticed a pair of black Ford sedans cruise by, equipped with the radio antennas characteristic of law-enforcement vehicles.How ironic, I thought.I’m wired for sound and video, but the surveillance van’s fifty miles away in Asheville.

I’d tried to phone Rankin while Harrington ran my tag and my license—“Is that you that just went past?

Come back and get me out of here,” I’d have said—but there was no cell-phone signal in this part of the mountains, so I had no choice but to let the drama play out however it played out. Finally Harrington, his bosses, and the state’s environmental-protection guardians seemed satisfied that I was neither a murderer nor a bioterrorist. The trooper opened the door of the cruiser, and I was a free man once more. “Okay, Dr. Brockton”—I gathered that someone at the TBI had vouched for me as “

Dr.Brockton”—“we’re gonna let you head on to Asheville now. I’m sorry this took so long. It’s not the sort of situation we encounter every day.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you feel able to concentrate on your driving the rest of the way? Reason I ask is, if you had an accident and this stuff you’re carrying got strewn all over I-40, we would have one hell of a mess to deal with, and I’m not just talking about picking up the arms off the pavement.”

I winced, picturing the media circus and the scandal that would surely follow an arm-slinging crash. “I will pay total attention to the road,” I said. “Scout’s honor. I apologize for taking up so much of your morning.”

“No problem,” he said with a slight smile, handing me my license and registration. “Beats writing speeding tickets.”

I’D BUILT AN HOUR OF CUSHION INTO MY SCHEDULE,
in case the logistics of parking and unloading at the Grove Park proved complicated. My unscheduled stop on the shoulder of I-40 had used every minute of that. I might have been tempted to make up the lost time by speeding, but that impulse was held firmly in check by my frequent glances in the rearview mirror. There behind me, a respectful but vigilant hundred yards back, hung Officer Harrington. He followed me all the way to downtown Asheville, then parted company with me when I took the exit ramp. I rolled down my window and waved. He answered with a brief whoop of his siren.

Rankin had phoned as soon as I’d emerged from the mountains and gotten back into the land of cell-phone signal. “Jesus, Doc, what was that about? You had us shitting bricks.” When I told him, his reaction—half amusement at my predicament, half anger at my meandering driving, which had nearly derailed the operation—wasn’t quite the dose of sympathy I’d hoped for, but Rankin wasn’t inclined to listen to my woes. “I gotta go, Doc. We’ve got to finish setting up. Get here as soon as you can. Break a leg.”

The Grove Park Inn was set on a hillside a couple of miles north of downtown Asheville, amid historic mansions and towering hemlocks. The original stone lodge was rustic and charming. The lobby was flanked by a pair of fireplaces large enough to roast entire oxen, and a broad veranda overlooked the floor of the valley. In recent decades, though, the lodge had been virtually swallowed up by a series of additions: two wings of guest rooms and meeting facilities, a golf course and country club, a sports complex, and a luxury spa.

For the training, Sinclair had booked a large room on the tenth floor of one of the new wings. I threaded my way to the underground parking garage, scanning for a truck or van that might contain half a dozen FBI agents and a raft of electronic gear. I didn’t spot anything promising between the service entrance and the loading dock. I backed up to the dock and parked, feeling alone and uneasy. I pressed the

“Deliveries” button on an intercom box, and a voice crackled through the speaker: “ssszzztttssshelp you?”

“I’m here for the medical seminar that’s up in the Heritage Ballroom,” I said. “I’ve got some cases of material that need to go up the freight elevator. It would help if you’ve got a flatbed cart.”

“ssszzztttsssthere.” A minute later, as I fumbled with the tiny switches on the audio and video recorders—I’d almost forgotten to turn them on—I heard the hum of an electric motor. In the wall beside me, a metal shutter door began to rise and the hotel’s basement opened like a massive rolltop desk. A slight young Hispanic man emerged, pushing a cart to the edge of the platform. He helped me wrestle the five coolers out of the truck and up onto the dock, which was a foot higher than the tailgate. Then we stacked them on the cart, and he bent low over the handle, putting his weight behind it. “It’s very heavy,” he said once it began to move. “What is it?”

I wished people would quit asking me that. “Refreshments,” I said.

I’d phoned Sinclair when I reached the hotel, and he was waiting for me as the elevator door opened on the tenth floor. “Glad you’re here,” he said. “I was getting worried. We’re cutting it a little close on the schedule.”

“Sorry. I’d meant to be here an hour ago, but I hit a little snag.” Without going into all the personal reasons for my erratic driving, I told him how I’d been pulled over in the mountains.

“Hang on, I want to hear the rest of the story,” he interrupted, “but let’s take care of this first.” He laid a hand on the shoulder of the hotel worker, saying, “This is fine. We’ll take it from here.” He pulled a twenty from his pocket and handed it to the young man, who thanked him politely and left. We’d stopped in front of a pair of double doors marked HERITAGE A. Sinclair delivered a staccato series of raps, and the doors swung outward, pushed by two clean-cut young men in scrubs, followed by a third, who wheeled the cart into a cavernous ballroom, its floor dotted with tables draped in blue. We’d entered at one end of the room, near a raised stage and an enormous projection screen. A podium stood at one side of the stage; center stage was occupied by a waist-high table draped with blue sheets. A video camera stood at one side of the table; perched on the other side was a surgical microscope. As I studied the setup, a technician somewhere in the room flipped a switch, projecting a video image onto the screen. There, magnified to five times its actual size, was the image of the table’s surface. A tray of larger-than-life surgical instruments was neatly arranged at one end. At its center lay a human arm, amputated as neatly at the shoulder as were the twenty specimens in the coolers beside me. The ballroom’s floor contained thirty tables, each outfitted with surgical implements and operating microscopes. And ten of the thirty already held arms. As I marveled at the ballroom’s transformation into a surgical classroom, I heard the clatter of metal latches snapping open. Working wordlessly, Sinclair’s three assistants rolled the cart down the center aisle between the tables, laying arms on the remaining tables, positioning each limb as methodically and swiftly as decorators setting out floral centerpieces for a banquet.

AFTER THE TRAINING—A TUTORIAL
in microsurgical repair of blood vessels and nerves—Sinclair’s assistants wordlessly collected my twenty arms—now crisscrossed with incisions and sutures—and loaded them into my coolers. Sinclair rode down the freight elevator with me and the hotel employee—this one a stocky African-American male—who’d been sent to help handle the coolers. After loading them into the truck, he latched the tailgate and hatch, accepted his tip from Sinclair, and disappeared into the basement of the hotel.

Sinclair turned to me. “Got a minute before you hit the road?”

“Sure.” I unlocked the truck and nodded at the passenger door. “Step into my office.”

We got in and closed the doors. “What’d you think of the training?”

“Fascinating,” I said. “I had no idea it was possible to put on something like that in a hotel ballroom. And the microsurgery was remarkable. I don’t see how they make such tiny stitches by hand, even with the image magnified by the scope.” A question occurred to me. “What’d you tell the surgeons about where the arms came from?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. They’d rather not know. They realize that material’s hard to come by, so they’re grateful to pony up the cost of the training and keep their consciences clear.”

Lucky them,I thought.

“Couldn’t’ve done it without you, Bill. Here you go.” He handed me a thick manila envelope, which he’d brought down in the elevator with him. I’d been dreading this moment ever since I saw him take the envelope from a briefcase. “There’s a five-hundred-dollar honorarium check in there, in case you need something legit to show the accountants. And twenty grand in cash.” He grinned. “Don’t blow it all on booze and strippers.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I laid the envelope on the console between us, hoping the recorder and the video camera were successfully capturing the transaction. “And thanks for the opportunity.”

“Let’s hope it’s the first of many. So now it’s out to the Body Farm with these arms?”

I nodded.

“Man, I hate to picture all that perfectly good tissue rotting on the ground. Sure you don’t want to leave it with me?”

“Can’t,” I said. “Any skeleton we add to the collection needs to be complete, unless the donor lost a limb during life. The skeleton needs to match the donor’s medical-history file.”

“Sure, I get it,” he answered. “Sort of an all-or-nothing deal—none of the bones or all of the bones?”

“Right.”

“Speaking of that,” he said, “I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned that morning in Vegas. You said you’re long on bodies, short on space. You ever turn down donations?”

“Haven’t yet,” I answered. “Well, except in cases where the donor had HIV or hepatitis—we can’t risk exposing students to that. Otherwise we take all comers.” I paused for half a beat. “But frankly, that could be about to change. If the university doesn’t come up with some more land for us, we might have to start turning people away soon.”

“Hey, we’d be glad to help. Any bodies you can’t accommodate, we’d be glad to take ’em off your hands.”

I shook my head. “Not that simple,” I said. “When bodies are donated to UT, they become state property. The bean counters wouldn’t want us giving away state property.”

He drummed his fingers on the dash, then looked me in the eye. “What if the bean counters didn’t know?”

Make him spell out what he wants you to do,Rankin had stressed. I returned Sinclair’s gaze. “How do you mean? What do you suggest?”

“What if a body was never logged in, or whatever you call it, in the first place?”

I rubbed my chin; the simple roughness of the stubble felt comforting against my hand.

“Or what if you wrote it off as a loss somehow? You do all sorts of experiments, right?”

I nodded.

“So come up with some creative research, some destructive testing. Put a note in the inventory database or the files or wherever—‘body destroyed’ or some such.”

“So what good does the body do you if I destroy it?”

“Jesus, Bill, you’ve got a Ph.D., don’t be a dumb-ass. You don’t actually destroy the body, you justsay you did. Creative accounting.”

“And then what?”

“You send it to Tissue Sciences. It helps train surgeons, repair tendons, rebuild spines, all sorts of good things.”

“Sounds great,” I said, “but unless I misunderstand you, you’re asking me to falsify records and steal state property. Tell me why I should take those risks. To borrow a phrase from your Las Vegas presentation, let’s talk financial incentives.”

“How about ten thousand a body? Would that be sufficient incentive?”

“I’ll need to think about it,” I said. “I feel a little like a peasant selling a kidney. If things go wrong, they can go really wrong. What’s the fair-market rate for kidneys in Pakistan?”

“Twenty grand and some change.” He said it quickly and matter-of-factly, like a man who had firsthand knowledge of the subject. “But you don’t look like you’ve got starving kids. And I’m not asking you to sell part of your own body.”

“No. You’re asking me to sell part of my soul.”

He tapped the manila envelope. “You already did.” He smiled slightly, then got out of the truck, closed the door, and walked away.

SUNDOWN FOUND ME HEADING WEST
on I-40, driving into the sun for the second time that day. The ice in the coolers had begun to melt. As I entered the serpentine stretch through the mountains, I could hear the ice and water and arms—the laid-open, tinkered-on, stitched-up arms—sloshing with each sway of the truck. And every slosh seemed the hiss of a serpent.

I WAS STILL WAY BEHIND ON MY SLEEP AND WAY
ahead on my stress Monday morning as I prepared to teach my ten o’clock Intro to Forensic Anthropology class. The topic of the day was forensic odontology: making positive identifications on the basis of unique features in teeth. TheCSI

-viewing public tended to regard DNA testing as far superior to any other method of identification, but I still considered dental records a powerful and often far faster means of identification. I’d chosen three cases to illustrate the point. The first involved a missing toddler, a two-year-old girl who disappeared one night while her uncle was babysitting. Eight months after she vanished, a pair of hunters found a small skull in a nearby stream beside a cow pasture. The skull was missing most of its teeth, but when I went to the scene and sifted the sands of the streambed, like a prospector panning for gold, I managed to find most of the teeth that had fallen from the skull. The missing two-year-old had never been to the dentist, so there were no dental records for comparison. There was, however, a photograph: a snapshot showing the girl grinning at the camera. And in her grin I glimpsed distinctive notches at the corners of her four upper incisors—unique, identifying notches that matched the teeth I’d found. The second case was the murder of a state police officer, gunned down in his driveway late one night after he finished his shift on duty. Investigators suspected he’d been shot by his brother-in-law, but the only evidence linking the suspect to the crime was a wooden cigar tip, found in the grass near the death scene. The tip bore deep indentations—bite marks—which meshed perfectly, it turned out, with the teeth of the suspect.