The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

“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 does that 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?”