The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

She hesitated, but only for a second, and when I heard what she had to say, I wished she’d hesitated longer. I wished she’d hesitated forever, in fact. “By selling some of your bodies,” she said. “On the black market.”

I stared from Price’s face to Rankin’s. They stared back impassively. Finally I said, “That’s unethical. Probably illegal.”

“That’s the point,” she replied. “That’s why we want you to do it.”

“I’m sorry to be slow on the uptake,” I said. “I don’t, as a general principle, set out to break federal laws. What, exactly, are you asking me to do? And why?”

“We’d like you to help us run a sting,” she said. “We’ve been building a case against a tissue bank — a company that receives bodies and then distributes the organs and tissues for transplants and medical research. The company’s based in Newark, New Jersey; it’s called Tissue Sciences and Services.”

“Did you say it’s a company? I thought all tissue banks were nonprofit organizations.”

Price shook her head. “No, it’s definitely a for-profit company. Emphasis on ‘profit.’ We have strong evidence that Tissue Sciences engages in fraud and conspiracy to obtain bodies and body parts, then profits illegally when it resells the cadavers or various tissues from them.”

“So if you already have strong evidence, why not go ahead and bust them?”

“We were just about to,” she said. “The lead agent in our Newark field office was writing up a criminal complaint against the company’s president — a guy named Raymond Sinclair — when our key informant died.”

“Did the informant die from being an informant, by any chance?”

Rankin shook his head. “He died from being overweight and underexercised. Massive heart attack.” He shrugged slightly, then conceded, “It’s possible he was experiencing some additional stress about this investigation.”

I pressed. “Because…?”

“Because we had enough evidence to charge him on several counts,” he answered. “He was a target before he became an informant.”

“So he was cooperating because you promised him a break?”

He shook his head again. “We never promise breaks. All we promised was that we’d tell the U.S. Attorney’s Office how incredibly helpful he was.”

I raised my eyebrows quizzically, but he didn’t seem inclined to take the hint, so I put the question into words. “Who was this helpful fellow, and how’d he help before his untimely demise? Was he a disgruntled Tissue Sciences employee who squealed?”

He looked at Price and got another nod from her before answering. “No. The guy was the diener in the Anatomy Department of MacArthur School of Medicine, in Maryland. He prepped all the cadavers for the med students and faculty, and he ran the body-donation program. That meant he handled the intake and the disposition of every cadaver that came through the doors of the medical school.”

“And how many cadavers came through the door?”

“Twenty-seven last year.” He cocked his head. “How many’d you get last year, Doc?”

“A hundred thirty-five,” I said.

He whistled. “That’s a lot of bodies.”

“Lots of people want to donate their body to science,” I pointed out. “Partly that’s because funerals have gotten so damn expensive, but mostly it’s because people like the idea of doing some good after they die — helping train doctors or advancing medical research or forensic science. We’re getting four or five times as many bodies now as we were just a few years ago. We’re about to run out of places to put them.”

His gaze sharpened. “So are you getting more bodies than you can handle these days?”

“We can always make room for an FBI agent or two,” I joked. “In fact, I just happen to have donor forms here in this filing cabinet.”

Rankin smiled and shook his head.

“It’s true that we don’t need a hundred thirty bodies a year for research,” I said. “We don’t have enough graduate students and faculty to do that many experiments. And our three-acre site is getting kinda crowded. And we’re understaffed. It’s not that we have too many bodies. We just don’t have enough money or land.”

He and Price exchanged a look. “I like it,” he mused. “‘We don’t have too many bodies, we just don’t have enough money.’ What do you think?”

“Could be a good hook,” said Price.

Suddenly I had a bad feeling: the feeling that I myself was about to become a tasty bit of shark bait.

“Before I say yes,” I told Price, “I need to talk to a lawyer.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You want to talk to your lawyer?”

“Not my lawyer, UT’s lawyer. Amanda Whiting, the general counsel — UT’s top legal eagle. Before I can do something like this, I’d need to make sure the university knows and supports it.”

Price shook her head. “Bureau policy is to keep a tight lid on our investigations,” she said. “The fewer people in the loop, the less risk that something leaks out. I’d have real concerns about bringing people from the legal department into this.”

“Not ‘ people,’” I countered, “one person. I’d have real concerns about not bringing her into this. Do you realize how bad it could look for UT if things go wrong?” She didn’t answer, so I painted the picture for her. “If word got out that the Anthropology Department was selling donated bodies on the black market, that would do terrible damage. We could kiss most of our donations good-bye — not just body donations to Anthropology but financial donations to the entire university. A scandal like that could cost us millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions.”

Price and Rankin made no move to respond.

“And then there’s me,” I added. “If I understand you right, the guy from the medical school who was selling off bodies and body parts was about to be indicted.”

Price nodded reluctantly; she opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“Hang on, let me finish. The med-school guy was committing fraud, is that it? Altering donor charts or falsifying financial records to hide the fact that he was making a fortune off a postmortem chop shop?”

“That’s exactly what he was doing,” she said. “He would indicate that a body was unsuitable for use by the school, report it as cremated, and then sell it to Tissue Sciences. He took cash under the table — seven thousand per body, and he admitted to selling thirty-one bodies over the past three years. He paid cash for a big boat and a Mercedes convertible. For a guy with no college degree and no formal medical training, he was living large.”

“And you’re hoping Tissue Sciences will offer me that same sort of deal? Big bucks for bodies? Payola for parts?”

She nodded. “Technically, this is still Newark’s case, but if we can bring you in, a lot of the focus would shift to Knoxville, and Special Agent Rankin would serve as our lead agent. We’d begin gathering evidence here, starting with recordings of every conversation you have with Sinclair or anybody else at Tissue Sciences.”

“You’d tap his phone lines?”

“Actually, what we do is ask you to record all your conversations with him,” Rankin said. “We’d need a court order to do a wiretap, but in Tennessee, if one party to a conversation consents to recording the call — that would be you, we hope — it’s legal to record it. So if you’re willing, we’ll attach a recorder to your office and home phone lines. All you have to do is hit a button when you get a call from the guy.”

“What if he calls my cell phone?”

Rankin looked at Price, and she nodded, so he went on. “Actually, with your permission we can record your cell-phone conversations with him, too, by routing them through our engineering lab up in Quantico.”

“So it gets you the same evidence as a wiretap, but you don’t have to jump through the legal hoops to get it?”

“Pretty much,” he conceded.

“And was your med-school diener recording his calls with this guy Sinclair?”

Rankin

nodded.