The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

I snagged a cab that had paused at the club’s entrance to disgorge three rowdy young men sporting military haircuts. I hoped they were generous with their applause and their tips. I hoped they were good guys. I yanked off my tie, halfway hoping that I’d banged the microphone a few earsplitting times in the process.

Rankin called to praise my performance, but I cut him off quickly. I went back to my tacky turreted hotel, stripped off my smoky clothes and the FBI’s recorder, and stood under a long, hot shower, trying to wash away the shame of having put out on my first date with Ray Sinclair.

CHAPTER 26

“So how was your Vegas trip?” Miranda’s tone was casual. She was hunkered over a table in the bone lab, touching the tip of a 3-D digitizing probe to landmarks on the skull from donor 77–08, a skeleton that had spent the fall of 2008 by the foot of an oak tree at the Body Farm. Her back was turned to me, and she didn’t even bother to look over her shoulder at me as she asked.

Her casualness, I suspected, masked something serious. Normally Miranda was the queen of eye contact. She could ask the most trivial question—“What’d you have for lunch?” or “What time is it?”—and the directness of her gaze would make the question seem profound. Asking about my abrupt departure and swift return without so much as glancing in my direction was a storm warning.

“Quick,” I said. “Strange. Las Vegas — at least the parts I was in — is a bizarre place. A theme park disguised as a city. I’m sure hundreds of Ph.D. dissertations have been written about the odd cultural anthropology of Las Vegas.”

“And wouldn’t that be a waste of perfectly good trees.” She glanced at the numbers that the probe was feeding into her laptop computer. “Man, this guy had some wide-set eyes. The intraocular distance is eighty millimeters. That’s way wider than anything I’ve measured before. His depth perception must’ve been incredible.” She touched the probe to other landmarks on the skull: the high points of the zygomatic arches, the widest points of the nasal opening, the contours of the chin. “That’s a long haul to make in a day and a half. Was it worthwhile?”

Worthwhile. Her echo of Sinclair’s word gave me a pang. “I hope so,” I said.

She didn’t respond, and in the silence a host of unasked questions and withheld explanations seemed to hang in the air.

“Glen Faust was giving a paper at a tissue-bank convention,” I said.

“I know.”

“You know? How do you know?”

“Peggy said you’d gone to a conference in Las Vegas on short notice. I Googled to see what was going on there this week, conference-wise. I figured you must be at either the cosmetology convention or the tissue-bank meeting.”

“Cosmology? What do I know about cosmology?”

“Not cosmology, the nature of the universe,” she said. “Cosmetology. Hair and makeup. A thousand cosmetologists are in Vegas this week.”

“Hair and makeup? What do I care about hair and makeup?”

She finally looked in my direction, sizing up my appearance. “Not much, clearly.”

I laughed. I’d lobbed that one right over the plate for her.

“I was hoping maybe you’d pick up a few style pointers,” she added, meeting my gaze for the first time. “Then I saw Faust’s talk on the agenda for the tissue-bank meeting, and I abandoned all hope for your stylistic salvation.” The sarcasm, like the eye contact, was a relief — a hopeful sign that the invisible electrical charge in the air between us might dissipate, the way the static in the sky eases after a thunderhead passes over.

“He’s a good speaker,” I said.

“The abstract looked interesting. I can see why you felt moved to spend a thousand dollars and thirty-six hours to hear the talk, live and in person.”

Ouch, I thought. The thunderhead appeared to have circled back.

“I didn’t really go to hear his talk,” I admitted. I vaguely recalled an old saying about the best lies being partly true. I’d never aspired to be a good liar, but at the moment I wished I felt slightly more fluent in falsehood. “I wanted to talk to him face-to-face about expanding their research funding, because we’re looking at more budget cuts.”

That, too, contained truth. The UT board of trustees had met six days earlier in emergency session to deal with the worsening budget crunch. Higher tuition — an increase of nearly 10 percent — had been expected to raise an additional $20 million in revenue for the current academic year. Unfortunately, the same economic bind that was squeezing UT itself was also squeezing the families of students; as a result the higher tuition had been largely offset by lower enrollment, and so more cuts were required. Miranda looked pained, and I felt bad for pressing on a sore spot — she knew I’d been struggling to protect the funding for her assistantship, and she was already feeling stress about that. But short of disclosing my role in the FBI’s investigation, I could come up with no other credible pretext for my trip.

“He didn’t make any guarantees,” I added, with as much cheeriness as I could muster, “but he promised to try.”

She returned her attention to the skull, which meant turning her back on me. “Well,” she said hollowly, “I hope he succeeds.” I was just opening the door to leave when she said, “Oh, we got a body while you were gone. Family donation — a white male, age sixty-seven, died of cardiopulmonary disease. His number is 37–09. He’s still in the cooler at the morgue. I’ll get him out to the facility sometime this afternoon.”

Reluctantly I stepped back into the lab and closed the door. “Actually, let’s leave him in the cooler for a while,” I said.

She swiveled the chair 180 degrees to face me. “How long? And how come?”

I’d spent much of my flight from Las Vegas to Knoxville dreading these very questions. “Two or three weeks,” I said, drawing a raised eyebrow that looked simultaneously curious and disapproving. Her second question was tougher: Why? I wasn’t dazzled by the answer I’d come up with during the plane ride, but it was the best I could do. “I’m thinking of doing a research project of my own,” I said. “I’d need at least five bodies to do it, maybe ten.”

She stared at me. “Are you kidding? How long since you’ve done research of your own?”

“Too long. Feels like I’m losing touch with what life is like for you overworked, underpaid graduate students.”

“Good of you to walk a mile in our moccasins, kemosabe,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be giving up your salary for a while, too?” She laid down the probe. “I need to go check on some bones I put in to simmer while you were gone. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Make sure the door’s locked when you leave.”

CHAPTER 27

Two hours later the stairwell door outside my office banged open, hard enough to send a slight shiver through the columns and girders of the stadium. Then my own office door was flung open with equal force.

Miranda burst into the room, wild-eyed, out of breath, and weeping.

“Miranda, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Eddie, it’s Eddie.” The words were barely discernible amid the sobs. “His right hand — it went septic.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Now. Carmen just called me from the ER. She said they’re taking him into emergency surgery.” She shook her head in sadness and shock. “They’re amputating the last bit of his hands right now.”

* * *

We found Carmen in the surgery waiting room, slumped in a chair, her face cradled in her hands. She looked up when Miranda called her name, and the face she raised to us had aged twenty years in the past two months.

“Oh, Carmen,” said Miranda, “I’m so, so sorry.” She sat beside her, taking Carmen’s right hand in both of hers. I sat on the other side, holding her left hand. We sat in silence for what seemed hours, our six hands entwined. Eventually I lost track of where my hands ended and

Carmen’s began. I watched a finger twitch, and for a moment — until I noticed the small, manicured tip at the end of the nail — I thought the finger was one of my own, numb from lack of movement and blood.

As the time inched by, I became aware of a thought tugging at the sleeve of my mind. I tried ignoring it, then tried actively banishing it, but it returned to tug again and again, with increasing insistency. Underneath my worries about Eddie and Carmen — would he live? would he recover from this latest setback? would she? — swirled a cluster of darker questions: Had Eddie brought this on himself deliberately? Had he undertaken Clarissa Lowe’s autopsy not in spite of the risk but because of the risk? Had he decided that a toe-to-thumb transplant wasn’t good enough? Had he contrived to sacrifice his remaining half hand so he’d be a double amputee, and therefore a more compelling transplant candidate? I remembered the frightful, hopeful words he’d spoken the day Miranda had researched his options, when I pointed out the difficulties of transplantation. “It’s a big risk,” he’d said. “But to have hands again would be worth taking a big risk.” Had he taken that risk, gambling with his very life?

Finally a scrub-suited doctor came to deliver the ritual postoperative news. “Mrs. Garcia?” Carmen stood, helped out of her chair by Miranda and me. “I’m Dr. Rivkin; I’m the hand surgeon on call. First, most important, your husband’s in Recovery, and he’s doing well.” Carmen waited, knowing there was more. “Unfortunately, we did have to amputate the hand, just below the wrist. The good news is, we’re confident we got all the decayed and infected tissue, and we’ve put him on a strong course of antibiotics. So his prognosis is very good.” Carmen nodded numbly.

“Excuse me, Doctor,” I interrupted. “You might already know this, but Dr. Garcia was exposed to Clostridium bacteria last week during an autopsy.” I felt Miranda’s eyes on me, and I wondered if she’d been pondering the same dark questions as I had. “The autopsy subject died of toxic shock a week after surgery.” Carmen drew a sharp breath. “Does that exposure affect how you need to treat Dr. Garcia?”