The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (8 page)

“Eddieis a double amputee, essentially,” I pointed out. “He’s only got two fingers on his right hand.”

“Apparently the hand surgeons consider those fingers more of a plus than you and I do,” she said. “He does have some function in them, after all. And once he gets the toe-to-thumb transplant—in a month or so, he hopes—he’ll have three digits on the right hand, including an opposable thumb.”

“Still,” I protested, “it seems harsh to rule him out for a transplant on the left side. It’s like he’s being punished for being not quite maimed enough, you know? Like that sick girl—what did she have, lupus?—whose insurance company refused to pay for her medical treatment until she was dying.”

“Well, yeah, sort of,” she hedged, “but on the other hand—ooh, remind me not to say that in front of Eddie—not everybody who wants a transplant can get one. If there aren’t enough hands to go around, what’s the best, fairest way to pick who gets one and who doesn’t? Ifyou were the one parceling out hands, how wouldyou pick?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. But I did have another question. “Are there really not enough hands to go around?”

She shrugged.

“How many kidney transplants were performed in the United States last year?”

She did a quick Google search. “Don’t know about last year,” she answered, “but over sixteen thousand were done in 2008.”

“And how many hand transplants?”

“Not a fair comparison,” she pointed out. “A lot of kidneys came from living donors—somebody’s son or sister or friend who was willing to give one up for a person they love.”

“You’re right, not the same thing. How many heart transplants?”

The keyboard rattled again. “Wow. Two thousand, one hundred sixty-three. I would have guessed a hundred or so.”

“Okay. So none of those heart donors got out alive. If my math’s right, those twenty-one hundred heart donors had forty-two hundred hands, plus or minus.”

“I don’t think you can say ‘plus’ unless some of them started out with three hands,” she said reasonably.

“Don’t be a hairsplitter. We’re talking about potentially four thousand transplantable hands, right?”

“Hang on,” she said. “This is a really interesting database. All categories of organ-donation stats compiled by the federal government. You can sort by organ, by donor type, by state, all kinds of things. Okay, actually, there were about eight thousand deceased organ donors in the U.S. in 2008. So, in theory, sixteen thousand hands, if all of them had both hands when they died.”

“And how many hand transplants in the U.S. in 2008?”

“No hand-transplant stats in the federal database. Let me try ‘hand transplants United States 2008’ and see if my friend Google can shed any light.” A moment later she said, “I say again, wow.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Two thousand?”

“No,” she answered. “Two, period. As in ‘one, two, buckle my shoe.’”

“So the problem’s not a shortage of hands,” I mused, “but a shortage of hand-transplant experts? Not enough surgeons who’ve been trained to do it?”

She worked the keyboard again. “I believe you have sussed out the problem, Wise Master. Listen to this press release from Emory University Medical Center, dated February 2008: ‘The only physician in the United States formally trained in both hand surgery and transplant surgery is establishing a new program at Emory to train other experts and to conduct research on what is still an extraordinary procedure.’ One formally trained hand-transplant surgeon in the whole U.S. of A.—that would appear to be a bit of a bottleneck.” She turned to me and frowned. “I don’t get it,” she pondered out loud. “What makes a hand transplant a thousand times more complicated than a heart transplant? Hearts have lots of blood vessels and nerves, and the potential for the recipient’s body to reject the transplant would appear to be the same, whether it’s a heart or a hand, wouldn’t you think?”

I considered that for a moment. “I’m not sure that it’s the complexity that accounts for the difference,” I answered. “A heart transplant’s a lifesaving procedure—if you need a heart and you don’t get one, you die. But there are a lot of people walking around minus a hand or two. So maybe refining the techniques in hand-transplant surgery isn’t considered as high a priority.”

“Hmm,” she grunted, and did another search. “Guess how many boob jobs were done in 2008?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Four hundred thousand. What doesthat say about priorities? Plenty of surgeons up to speed on that.”

“There’s a lot of money in plastic surgery,” I said. “It’s the free market at work.”

“Swell,” she retorted. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of perkiness.”

I sighed. “So the bottom line here, since it’s a left hand Eddie needs, is that the bionic hand, the i-Hand, looks like his best bet?”

“Looks like,” she agreed. “Be good to learn more about it, though—get a review from somebody other than the manufacturer’s own marketing department.”

“I think I know just the guy to ask,” I said.

THE GLEAMING WHITE PLANE TAXIING
toward me was unlike any I’d ever seen. It had wings and a tail, true, as well as a pair of turboprop engines. But the engines were at the trailing edge of the wings and faced aft, so the propellers pushed the plane rather than pulling it. The fuselage wasn’t cylindrical but slightly bulbous, like the sleek body of a seal or a killer whale. The wings were set far back, near the tail; up near the plane’s nose was a much smaller pair of wings that angled slightly downward. As the plane turned its two-eyed, droop-winged nose directly toward the ramp, I realized that it bore a striking resemblance to a flying fish. A flying catfish, to be precise. The props stopped, the engines spooled down, and a door just behind the cockpit swung open. A small folding stair unfolded outward and down, and Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D., descended from the aerial catfish and strode toward me, a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. “Dr. Brockton,” he called, “so nice of you to pick me up.”

“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said. “It was worth coming out here just to see that airplane. I’ve not seen one of those before.”

He smiled. “It’s a head turner, isn’t it? It’s an Italian design, which is why it looks so damn sexy. Nearly as fast as a jet—cruises at four hundred miles an hour—but a lot more efficient. Room for nine, and a high ceiling, thanks to that fat fuselage. Interesting thing is, the fuselage is actually an airfoil and provides part of the lift. That allows smaller wings—and therefore less drag. Clever, huh?”

“Clever,” I agreed. “Sounds like you know almost as much about the plane as the pilot.”

“I am the pilot”—he smiled—“about half the time, including today. When we were looking for a new corporate aircraft, I decided to meddle. ‘I’m a pilot,’ I told the CEO, ‘and I’m also in charge of research. Let me research this.’ He fell for it.” His smile broadened into a grin. “You wouldn’t believe the view coming down the Shenandoah Valley today at twenty thousand feet. I could see Knoxville all the way from Roanoke.” Roanoke was 250 miles to the north, so what he was describing was impossible; still, the day was crystal clear—thirty miles to the east of the airport, the Great Smoky Mountains looked an easy walk away—so I could almost believe the claim.

I led him from the ramp and through the lobby, out to where my truck was parked in the small lot. “Nice thing about the corporate terminal is not having to go in and out of the parking garage,” I said.

“Nice thing about having your own plane is not having to hassle with airport security. I swung through Starbucks and brought a big cup of coffee with me, I boarded two minutes before take-off, and I didn’t have to sit through a safety demo.” He patted his satchel. “Oh, and I stuffed my briefcase full of knives and guns.”

“Smart move. Clearly this isn’t your first trip to Tennessee.”

We headed north on Alcoa Highway, past mobile-home dealerships and abandoned shopping centers and broad, rolling pastures. In ten minutes we rounded a bend at the base of a wooded hill and the main tower of UT Medical Center appeared. I bore right onto the exit ramp, looped behind the hospital complex, and traversed the employee parking lot that bordered the Body Farm. Pulling into the farthest corner of the lot, I parked in front of the facility’s dual gates of chain-link and solid wooden planking.

“I’m surprised your place isn’t farther off the beaten track,” Faust commented.

“It used to be,” I said, unlocking the padlocks and opening the gates. “I first started with an old barn—a pig barn—out at one of the UT farms, but that was too far away. When I relocated to this spot, the parking lot wasn’t here yet and the hospital tower wasn’t even on the drawing board.”

As I led him inside, he peered over his shoulder, across the top of the wooden privacy fence. “It looks like you might actually be able to see inside here from the top floors of the hospital.”

“You can,” I said. “Gives the patients a little added motivation to get well.Memento mori and all that.”

“Does the hospital charge extra for that?”

“No, the view’s free. Where they make their money is selling air fresheners to the patients on hot summer days, when the Body Farm’s getting really ripe.” He smiled at the joke, so I kept it going. “If the billing folks could just figure out how to get Medicare to reimburse them a hundred bucks for every air freshener, their financial worries would be over.”

I gestured at the clearing inside the gate, a patch of brown grass and bare dirt that measured about sixty feet from edge to edge. “So this is it. We’ve got a little less than three acres here inside the fence now.” I led him across the grass and slightly downhill, where a cube of chain-link fence nestled beneath the trees, its roof draped with a bright blue tarp. “Originally all we had was this chain-link enclosure, which measures sixteen feet square. Now we keep equipment and a meteorological station in here, but this was where the research began.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen an old photo of you and some graduate students in here, with a body stretched out on the concrete.”

“That was taken the spring of our first year,” I recalled. “We got just four donated bodies that year, and they were all used to research a master’s thesis—a study of which insects feed on bodies, and when.”

“I’ve read it,” he said. “That was a seminal piece of research. Helped jump-start the field of forensic entomology, didn’t it? Laid the foundation for estimating time since death by collecting insects and maggots off a murder victim?”

“It did,” I agreed, adding, “You’ve done your homework.”

“I generally do, when we’re planning to invest half a million dollars in a research project.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Is that what you’re planning to invest here?”

“Could be.” The tripod with the camera caught his eye; he glanced from the equipment to the corpse of Maurie Gershwin. Most of the skin was gone from her skull, neck, and hands now; the fabric of her clothing hung loose and dark-stained on the bones of her torso and limbs. “Tell me about this?”

“Nothing too fancy,” I said. “Just using time-lapse photography to document this woman’s decomp. She’s been out here for about two weeks now. If this were August, she’d be bare bones by this point. But the blowflies are dormant if the temperature’s below fifty degrees, so there’s less insect activity in winter and spring. And the bacteria and enzymes that digest the body work slowly at lower temperatures.”

“Sure. Biochemistry 101: Heat accelerates almost every chemical reaction.”

I pointed toward a lower corner of the fence. “There’s some interesting research down this way,” I told him. “You see these concrete pads?” There were five of them, each measuring seven or eight feet square.

“I recognize those,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve seen those. From space.”

“I’m not following you.”

“They show up in satellite images,” he explained. “I peeked over your fence on Google Earth. It’s amazing what you can see in those satellite images. These concrete pads show up very clearly.” Pointing at a rumpled white body bag, which was draped atop a corpse, he added, “You can also see a couple of those. And Ithink maybe a body or two, but that might have been wishful thinking on my part.”

“Amazing. But I’m not sure I like the idea that just anybody can look over my fence from up in the sky.”

“You can only see it if you know where to look and what to look for. What sort of research is being done with those pads? Are there bodies buried underneath them?”

I nodded. “One of our graduate students was studying ground-penetrating radar and how the radar image—the signature—of a body changed as it decomposed. So she buried bodies at various depths, camouflaging some of them with debris, and then poured these concrete pads on top. She ran the radar rig across the pads once a week for several months. Looked sort of like she was using a floor polisher out here in the woods, but she was looking through the concrete, not cleaning the top of it.”

“How’d the images change?”

“To be honest,” I said, “to me they looked like clouds on a weather radar screen. Because I already knew they were bodies, I could see the outlines, and I could tell that they were collapsing as they decayed. But if I hadn’t already known what I was looking at, I’m not sure I’d’ve known what I was looking at.”

“Like me looking at the Body Farm from space,” he observed. “Research is tough. If you already knew what you were going to find out, you wouldn’t need to do the research. Sure does help to start out with an educated guess.”

We’d reached one of the lower corners of the facility. “Here’s our longest-running research project.” I pointed to a cluster of small stainless-steel pipes projecting slightly above the leaves and dirt. One of my former Ph.D. students, Arpad Vass—now a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—had spent the past six years analyzing the cornucopia of chemicals given off by decaying bodies, I told Faust. He’d buried three bodies in this corner of the facility, running a grid of perforated pipes through the graves. To collect and analyze the chemicals, Arpad used a vacuum pump to draw gases out of the pipes and through a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer.