The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

He closed the stairwell door gently on his way out. I let the green M&M dissolve slowly in my mouth, feeling the wall of denial I’d erected around Isabella’s memory melt and crumble like the hard candy shell.

CHAPTER 8

I stared at the small digital recorder in my hand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog — do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain — not about Isabella.

As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you — naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness — might help you get a handle on it.”

Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?

Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.

* * *

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.

Did our story begin the night we ate pizza and I walked her partway home and listened to the wind sighing in the treetops and felt the urge to kiss her? Or did it begin the night she came to my house bringing a DVD of Dr. Strangelove and microwave popcorn and Coke? Perhaps it began the moment she pressed herself against me, took me into her arms, and gave herself to me.

But what can I say about her? That she was beautiful? She was. She still is, if she’s alive. Exotically beautiful, but in a way that was too subtle to pinpoint. One of her four grandparents had been Japanese; the others had been American missionaries who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: in Nagasaki in August of 1945, as American B-29s dropped the deadly fruit of the Manhattan Project.

Isabella’s ethnicity matters to me; it interests me, not just because it’s so entwined with her crime but also because of my habit of mind as an anthropologist. Knowing her ancestry gives me some skeletal context, something to latch onto when I reach out and try to grasp the enigma of her. Because she is one-quarter Asian, I know that most of her skeletal features are Caucasoid. Most — but not all. Some of the stories told in her bones are Mongoloid, Asian. Her cheekbones, as I picture them in my mind’s eye right now, are slightly higher and wider and flatter than, say, Miranda’s. Her skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s, too, but then again, almost everyone’s skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s. I remember her teeth in two ways: I remember how dazzling they were when she smiled at me and how quickly hidden they vanished behind the curtain of her hair when she ducked her head shyly. And I remember how they felt when we kissed, smooth and hard and slick against my tongue, nibbling gently at my lip and then, later, biting into the meat of my bicep and the heel of my hand hard enough to leave bruises outlined in tooth marks. If I had thought to run the tip of my tongue along the backs of those front teeth, I might have felt indentations, concavities: the distinctive scooped-out curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, a signature skeletal trait of Asians and Native Americans. But what man in his right mind would think of dental details when a lovely woman presses her warm mouth and trembling body to his?

As I listen to myself say these things, I feel foolish and pedantic. And yet. And yet: I have so few things to hang on to as I try to grasp Isabella that I suppose it’s understandable and forgivable that I should lapse into my comfortable role of professor and anthropologist — categorizer and explainer. Yet the truth is, I barely knew Isabella. Our lives intersected, briefly but powerfully, at two points — no, three. First when Garcia and Miranda and I were exposed to the radioactive pellet Isabella had used to murder Dr. Novak. Next when Isabella helped me discover the location where a murdered soldier had been secretly buried during World War II. And third when she offered her body and her passionate need to me. No, wait, there was a fourth time as well: when I realized that she was the one who had killed Novak, when I confronted her, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of storm sewers beneath Oak Ridge.

I followed her into the labyrinth. In hindsight maybe that was a mistake. In hindsight maybe confronting her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe making love to her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe hindsight itself is a mistake — what’s the point of following the trail of regret back into the past? It’s not possible to choose a different path from the very one that brought me to the present, to this exact moment, where I hide in the darkness of my living room and the labyrinth of my heart, murmuring into the digital emptiness I clutch in my hand.

I hate this. I don’t know what to say. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

CHAPTER 9

I dropped the recorder at Dr. Hoover’s office the next morning on my way to campus, still feeling self-conscious and vaguely guilty about voicing my thoughts and fears into a microphone. When I walked into the bone lab, Miranda looked at me sharply and said, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘What?’”

“You have a funny look on your face. Embarrassed or something. Like a kid who’s just peed in his pants.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You okay?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Just preoccupied.”

“Whatever you say. Anyhow, Eddie called. He’s got an appointment next week to get fitted for an i-Hand.”

“The bionic prosthesis? Just for his left hand?” She nodded. “I thought he was more interested in a transplant.”

“He was, but there’s a big problem with that, apparently.” She frowned. “It’s virtually impossible to be approved for a hand transplant unless you’re a double amputee.”

“Eddie is 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 h

er 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? If you were the one parceling out hands, how would you 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.