The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

pology office. Peggy glanced up at me, then back down at her computer, then up at me again, sharply this time. “You look terrible,” she said.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Sorry, nothing personal. You just look…tired? Worried? Sick?”

“So many wonderful choices,” I said. “Don’t you want to add ‘clinically depressed’ or ‘terminally ill’ or something equally cheerful?”

“No, none of those. But crabby, maybe.” She scrutinized me further. “Yes, crabby. Definitely crabby.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, surprised to find that I actually did feel relieved by this milder diagnosis. “Since I appear likely to pull through, I suppose I should ask if I’ve got any messages?”

“Two,” she said. “The dean called; he wonders if you can meet with him Thursday to go over the budget numbers.”

“Not again,” I groaned. “Okay, now I feel tired, worried, and clinically depressed. What else? The IRS called to say my tax returns are about be audited?”

“Do they call? I thought they indicted first and asked questions later. Actually, the other call was from Dr. Garcia.”

“Dr. Garcia?” I was suddenly on high alert, given what Miranda had relayed. “What did he say? How’d he sound? When did he call?”

“About ten minutes ago. He sounded pretty chipper, actually — not crabby, like some people I could name. He asked if you were in, and when I said you were at lunch, he said, ‘I hope his lunch tastes better than mine. The medical care at the hospital is superb, but the food is not superb.’ Then he asked me to have you call him when you get a chance.”

Feeling my heart rate slow to something approximating normal, I stepped through the doorway that led from Peggy’s office to my administrative office, the one where I scheduled meetings with peeved professors and stressed-out students. As a general rule, I preferred to make calls from the office at the other end of the stadium, but I didn’t want to delay my call to Eddie by the five minutes it would take to walk there. Dialing the number at UT Hospital I’d long since learned by heart, I drummed my fingers through one ring, two, three. “Seven West,” answered a familiar voice.

“LeeAnn?”

“Yes, this is LeeAnn. Who’s this? Oh, Dr. Brockton, is that you? Hi there.”

“Hi, LeeAnn. You’ve got a good ear.”

“Well, you have called a few million times this past month. What can I do for you?”

“Dr. Garcia called me a few minutes ago. Can you transfer me to his room?”

“Sure, hang on.”

After two rings I heard the hollow background sound of the hands-free speakerphone Eddie used.

“Hello, Eddie. Miranda tells me you got some bad news today.”

“The i-Hand. Yes, it’s disappointing, without a doubt. But that’s not why I’m calling you. I wonder if you can do a large favor for me.”

“Of course. How can I help?”

“By performing an autopsy for me.”

“An autopsy? Eddie, I’m not a pathologist.”

“I realize this, of course. But you taught anatomy when you were in graduate school, yes?”

“Yes. For two years.” I had mentioned my teaching assistantship once, in passing, during a conversation shortly after Garcia and I had met. I was surprised he remembered it. “But that was a long damn time ago, Eddie. A pathology resident would be much better qualified, I’m sure.” The phone fell silent except for the tinny background noise.

“Of course. I understand, Bill. I did not mean to impose.” He suddenly sounded defeated, and I wished I could take back my words. In my rush to downplay my own abilities, I’d failed to consider how difficult it must have been for him to ask for help with an autopsy he was no longer capable of doing himself. He could have let one of the contract M.E.’s handle the case. After all, for the past two months his caseload — dozens of unattended deaths and even several murders — had been farmed out to contract pathologists or sent to the state M.E.’s office in Nashville. He’d finally been ready to take a step toward returning to work, and I’d failed to recognize the significance of what he’d asked of me.

“Eddie?”

I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. If not for the background noise, I’d have thought he’d hung up. Finally: “Yes, Bill?”

“You’re not imposing, Eddie. That’s not it. I just don’t want to let you down. If you think you can guide me through it — if you trust me not to make a mess of things — I’d be honored to help.” The phone fell silent again, and I hoped what I’d said wasn’t too little, too late.

“How many years since you were in graduate school, Bill?”

“A lot,” I said. “Thirty? No, wait — only twenty-nine.” I laughed. Where had the time gone?

He laughed, too, and the significance of this moment, at least, was not lost on me: It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since his injury. “Thirty, that would be too many,” he said. “But twenty-nine? Bueno. Perfecto. You have got the job.”

* * *

The envelope in my mail bore the return address, “Barbara Pelot, Knoxville City Council,” along with the City-County Building’s street address. Inside was a handwritten note from Barbara. “Dear Dr. Brockton,” the note read, “I’m sorry to say that we’ve not found any funding in the city’s coffers that we can steer your way. Like UT, the city, too, is stretched pretty thin this year. I hope the enclosed will be of at least some help, however.” Tucked into the envelope behind the note was a check for a thousand dollars — a personal check from Barbara herself — made out to UT and designated for the Body Farm. It wasn’t enough to fill the cavity in my budget, but it was enough to fill me with gratitude. And it was a heck of a lot more than her husband’s dental practice had made by cleaning my teeth. I made a mental note to eat more M&Ms and to floss less rigorously.

* * *

“Shall we begin?”

I’d heard Dr. Edelberto Garcia begin half a dozen autopsies, maybe more, with those three words. Always before, though — before his hands had been destroyed — he’d said them as a statement, a command swiftly followed by a Y-shaped incision into a chest cavity or an ear-to-ear scalp incision, followed by a saw cut into a skull. This time, for the first time, he was asking the question as if he didn’t know the answer. In fact, as I glanced across the autopsy table at Miranda, I guessed that as he was posing that single, simple question to us, he was asking himself a multitude of other questions, far more complicated: How can I work as a medical examiner without hands? Will I be able to contribute anything here today? Am I an asset or a liability in this case? Am I an asset or a liability to my family, and in this world?

And this time, for the first time, I was the one gripping the scalpel as Garcia posed the question. “I’m ready if you are,” I said. I looked over my left shoulder at him, and he nodded. Across the table Miranda nodded slightly, too, and I followed her eyes down to the dead woman on the table. A sixty-one-year-old white female, she was fairly tall — five feet eight inches — with the sort of lean, willowy frame shaped by years of yoga or running or swimming. The hair on her head was long and wavy, an elegant silvery gray that contrasted sharply with the still-black triangle of pubic hair. Her face wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but her coloring and features — olive skin, brown eyes, and a wide, full mouth — would have made her a handsome woman in life.

Her name was Clarissa Lowe; she’d died two days before, about a week after undergoing a cervical spine diskectomy and fusion — an operation to remove a damaged disk from her neck and then fuse the two adjoining vertebrae together. The surgery was performed at the regional hospital in Crossville, a town of about ten thousand people, sixty miles west of Knoxville. The procedure had gone smoothly, according to the neurosurgeon’s notes, and the woman appeared to be recovering well by the time she was discharged the following morning. Then, three days later, she called the surgeon’s office, complaining of nausea, weakness, and pain in her neck. The doctor saw her that same afternoon in his

office; not surprisingly, her neck appeared inflamed around the incision, but she wasn’t running any fever and her vital signs were normal, so he prescribed a stronger painkiller, recommended cold packs, and sent her home.

Eighteen hours later her panicked husband called 911. She’d vomited three times within an hour, he told the dispatcher — nothing but green liquid — and she was suddenly too weak to stand. By the time the ambulance arrived, she was going into shock; her pulse was fluctuating between 50 and 140 beats a minute, her blood pressure was alarmingly low, and her breathing was labored, though her temperature remained normal. An hour after arriving at the Crossville emergency room, she was fighting for breath, and within two she could no longer breathe on her own. The ER doc put her on a ventilator, started her on powerful antibiotics, and sent her to UT Hospital by ambulance. Ninety minutes later — as she was being wheeled into the ER in Knoxville — she died.

Garcia had briefed me on the woman’s surgery, complications, and death, but being briefed wasn’t the same as feeling prepared. Tightening my grip on the scalpel, I placed the tip on the woman’s chest, at the edge of her left armpit. Her body had been in the morgue’s cooler for the past twenty-four hours, so it was chilled nearly to freezing; beads of moisture were condensing on her clammy skin, and a few wisps of fog spooled upward from the corpse, pulled aloft by the morgue’s powerful ventilation system. Miranda and I had wedged a body block into place beneath the woman’s back; the curved block thrust the chest upward, as if the woman were offering herself to the scalpel as a sacrifice. I bore down, and the blade parted the flesh. Following the natural curve at the base of the left breast, I cut to the midline of the body, then made a mirror-image cut from the right side. The blade rose and dropped as it bumped across ribs. Where those two cuts joined at the breastbone, I began a new incision, this one running down the midline all the way to the pubic bone.

As the abdominal cavity opened, fluid — watery, almost clear but tinged with pink — poured from the incision. During my graduate training and my career, I’d seen twenty or thirty abdominal cavities opened, but I’d never seen one give off such a quantity of fluid. It sheeted down the sides of the abdomen, pooling at the foot of the autopsy table and then gurgling through the drain and into the sink below. “Copious peritoneal effusion,” noted Garcia, confirming my sense that the amount of fluid was unusual. “Estimated volume approximately one liter. Miranda, would you be so kind as to collect a sample?” Miranda took a small plastic vial from the counter and held it beneath the drain, catching a bit of the liquid as it dribbled through, then screwed the cap tightly in place.