The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

The likelihood of this very conversation had filled me with dread, but the dread had motivated me to prepare for it, as best I could. “We’ve never studied differential decay in dismemberment cases,” I said. “If a killer cuts up a body, does that body decay at the same rate as an intact body? I don’t know. Nobody knows, because nobody’s done a controlled experiment to compare the decomp rates.”

“So now — on a whim — you’ve begun a large-scale study?” Her eyes bored into me. “If you’re doing a controlled experiment, where are the control subjects, the ten intact bodies?”

I had a halfway-plausible answer to this, too. “We’ve got years of decomp data from intact bodies,” I said. “We’ve got mathematical models that can calculate, at any range of temperatures, how long each stage lasts — fresh, bloat, decay, and dry. I’ve studied my ten control subjects, plus a whole lot more, over the past twenty years. The dismemberment study will be new data.”

She glared. “But just arms? Why not arms and legs?”

“One variable,” I responded. “Keep it simpler.”

“Then why the surgeries — all the incisions and sutures in those twenty arms? You’re studying differential decay in bodies that have been dismembered by murderous orthopedic surgeons? Is that it?”

I was angry — not with Miranda; angry with myself, and Ray Sinclair, and the FBI — but I vented the anger in her direction. “Miranda, it’s my research project, and it’s not your concern.”

“Not my concern?” She looked furious and deeply hurt. “I don’t know whether it’s what you’re saying or what you’re not saying that bothers me more, but I feel very concerned.”

“Drop it, Miranda. The subject’s closed.”

She stared at me, and then her expressive, angry, hurt face became a lifeless mask. “Yes, massa,” she said. She gave me a sarcastic version of a military salute, then left as suddenly as she’d appeared.

CHAPTER 34

It was a plain #10 envelope, addressed to me by hand, in blocky letters, with no return address.

The envelope was distorted and lumpy. Most of it felt empty, but clearly its center contained something: something oddly shaped and perhaps a quarter inch thick. I wiggled a finger under one end of the flap and tore open the top of the envelope, then turned it upside down and shook it above my kitchen counter.

The envelope’s contents — an angular, spiky piece of red paper — tumbled out. The bright red shape seemed to blaze on the speckled black granite, like a flame against a starry night sky. The paper was folded into an origami crane, the Japanese symbol of peace. The wing tips were blunted, I noticed; looking closer, I saw why: A tiny bit of each one appeared charred.

I plucked the crane from the counter by the long, slender tail jutting up from the body. The bird had been pressed flat by its flight through the U.S. postal system — a flight that had begun in San Francisco, according to the postmark on the envelope. Taking care not to touch the scorched tips, I raised the wings partly to horizontal, then pulled them gently outward, slightly away from the body. As the wings spread and the bird took flight in my hands, a second snippet of paper fluttered from a fold in the bird’s body. It was a second crane — a tiny replica of the first, so small it might have required tweezers and a magnifying glass to create — made of delicate white rice paper.

In her own way, Isabella was letting me know that she was alive and at liberty, and she was letting me know that she was pregnant.

It was with powerfully conflicting emotions that I phoned Oak Ridge detective Jim Emert. “I just got something in the mail from Isabella,” I said.

Telling him felt like the right thing to do by the simple, objective rules of law and order, but it felt miserably traitorous by a more complex inner calculus of loyalty or human compassion.

“What’d she say?” Beneath the surface calm, his voice was taut with suspense.

“Nothing. And everything.”

“Come again?”

“She didn’t say anything. But it was a very clear message.”

“Doc, any chance you could talk in plain English? I’m not so good at the riddles.”

I told him about the two cranes in the envelope and explained why I was so sure of their meaning.

When Isabella had fled two months ago, her disappearance had been marked by a flock of origami cranes — a thousand paper cranes — swirling in an eddy of wind at the base of the Oak Ridge Peace Bell. The Peace Bell itself had been a key part of that earlier message. The bell had been cast in Hiroshima, Japan, as a step toward healing and reconciliation between two cities linked by a terrible destiny: one city that was created by the Bomb, another that was destroyed by it. The cranes at the bell had been Isabella’s public gesture of atonement, I’d sensed at the time, for purposely killing an atomic scientist, and also for unintentionally inflicting such grievous harm on Eddie Garcia. The pair of cranes sent to my home, which I saw as a mother bird and her baby, was a very private message. It was a confidence, one I’d just betrayed out of a sense of duty.

“Doc? Are you still there?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” I realized that my attention had drifted far from Emert. “What were you saying?”

“I was asking if you were careful not to contaminate the evidence.”

“Of course I wasn’t careful not to contaminate the evidence. Hell, Jim, the envelope wasn’t exactly labeled ‘Evidence.’ It wasn’t until I looked at the birds that I had any idea the letter was from Isabella.” Just to make sure he got my point, I added, “I’m guessing twenty or thirty postal-service employees handled the evidence, too.”

“I know, I know.” He sighed. “In a TV-show world, you would have had a hunch about the handwriting or something and we could’ve opened it in a lab and gotten your buddy Bohanan to lift prints off the birds.”

“You probably still can,” I pointed out reluctantly. “I only touched the wings and the tail. I didn’t unfold any of the creases, so most of the surface area’s untouched, at least by me.”

“Good point,” he said. “We might also be able to get DNA off the flap and match it to samples we got at her house. Though by the time DNA results come back, everybody connected to the case is likely to be dead of old age.”

“What’s the waiting time for DNA results these days?”

“Long and longer,” he said. “Six months in high-priority cases. A year or more otherwise. Most of the DNA headlines these days come from cold-hit murder cases, where a prisoner’s DNA sample triggers a match with blood or semen collected and analyzed years ago.”

“What’s the point of it, Jim? We know Isabella sent it, apparently from San Francisco. What we don’t know is whether she’s still there. I’d bet not. I don’t know how she might’ve gotten there, but I’d bet she’s in Japan by now.”

CHAPTER 35

A day after Eddie Garcia’s surprise departure for Atlanta in the Paradise limo, Carmen drove down — not to retrieve him but to join him, to support him — during his evaluation by the Emory transplant team. Her mother had flown up from Bogotá to care for Tomás while Carmen and Eddie stayed in guest housing provided by the Transplant Center.

The evaluation was a detailed process. In addition to evaluating Garcia’s medical past and present, the team had to consider his likely future — his chances for a life that was productive and healthy.

Hand transplantation was a huge investment in high-tech hope — a giant gamble on the fortunate few selected to receive transplants. As Miranda had pointed out to me weeks before, saying yes to Garcia meant saying no to a host of other applicants, other people who’d lost hands to disease or trauma. The transplant team needed to feel confident that the investment and the gamble could pay off, not just for Garc

ia but also for society. That meant they needed to assess a host of factors: Apart from the injury to his hands, was Garcia’s health good? Did he fully understand the potential risks? Could he faithfully follow the postoperative protocols for physical therapy, infection control, and the lifelong medications required to suppress his immune system and prevent rejection? Was he psychologically prepared for the daunting endeavor — and robust enough to deal with failure, if the transplant didn’t succeed? What would be lost, to Garcia and the world, if he didn’t receive a transplant? What might be gained if he did?

I gained a better perspective on the complex considerations of transplant evaluations when I called J. T. McLaughlin, a former undergraduate student of mine who’d gone on to become a nephrologist — a kidney specialist — in Montgomery, Alabama. J.T. hadn’t performed any kidney transplants himself, but several of his patients had received transplants at the University of Alabama’s medical center in Birmingham.

After I’d described Garcia’s injuries — which J.T. found personally horrifying but medically fascinating — he peppered me with questions. “Is he a smoker?”

“Heavens no.” I couldn’t imagine Garcia, who was immaculate almost to the point of fastidiousness, smoking a cigarette. “Does that strengthen his case much?”

“Sure. Smokers have lousy circulatory systems. Lousy blood supply everywhere in the body, and that jeopardizes anything that gets transplanted to them. That lowers the odds of a successful outcome. Has he ever had a transfusion — either because of the trauma to his hands or because of some prior injury or illness?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Why does that matter?”

“If he has, his immune system’s been sensitized; that means he’d be more likely to reject the transplant. But the Emory people are on top of that — they’re among the nation’s leaders in transplant compatibility. They’ve developed something called the Emory algorithm, which is used all over the country, to help predict rejection. And I think they’re about to start clinical trials on a new immunosuppressant drug — supposedly the biggest advance in fighting transplant rejection in thirty years.”