The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

Maurie’s steady decline, documented in hundreds of pictures by now, was inevitable and irreversible. I wondered if mine was, too.

Locking the photos in my desk drawer, I locked the office and went outside, into the bracing breeze of the early-April afternoon.

* * *

Thirty minutes later I found myself striding into the Duncan Federal Building, demanding that the startled lobby guard send me up to the sixth floor. “Who are you going to see?”

“Special Agent Ben Rankin,” I snapped.

“Just a moment, sir,” the guard said warily. “I’ll need to call and make sure he’s expecting you. What’s your name?”

“Bill Brockton,” I snarled, “and I’m sure he’s not expecting me.”

He picked up a phone from the counter and dialed, then murmured into it, keeping his eyes on me as he talked and covering his mouth with his hand so I couldn’t hear what he said. “I’m sorry, sir, he’s not in.”

“Damn it. What about Angela Price?”

He murmured into the phone again, then paused to listen. He looked me up and down, then murmured some more. He hung up, eyeing me doubtfully, but motioned me through the metal detector, then escorted me to the elevator and pushed the sixth-floor button.

When the elevator door slid open, Price was standing in front of me. She held out a hand. “Dr. Brockton, good to see you. What can I do for you?”

“You can give me back my reputation,” I said.

“Here, step into my office.” She led me through the lobby, past its reception window of bulletproof glass and down a hall to an office whose windows offered a view of the Knoxville Convention Center and the eastern edge of the UT campus. Ben Rankin was sitting in one of the two chairs facing Price’s desk.

“I thought you weren’t in,” I said accusingly.

“I wasn’t. Just got back.”

“Have a seat, Dr. Brockton,” urged Price, “and tell us what’s bothering you.”

I told them about the envelope I’d just received, blushing as I described the photographs.

Price asked, “Did you bring it with you?”

“No. I locked it in my desk drawer. I started walking to clear my head. I didn’t realize I was going to end up here.”

She nodded slightly, then looked at Rankin. He glanced at me, then looked back at Price. A slow smile spread across his face.

She smiled slightly, too.

“Please clue me in,” I said. “What do you see here that’s worth a smile?”

“Blackmail,” responded Rankin happily.

“Or extortion,” added Price. “Maybe. If we’re lucky.”

“Lucky? I nearly passed out when I opened that envelope.”

“Don’t you see?” said Rankin. “We’re looking at a whole new count against him now. We were already looking at theft, fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and interstate racketeering, but if we can add extortion to the indictment, that’s potentially another twenty years.” He grinned. “Man, I never really believed he would be so dumb.” Price shot him a warning look, and the smile left his face.

For the second time in the past hour, I felt a churning wave of shock and sickness. I stared at Price, then at Rankin. “My God,” I breathed. “You knew this would happen. You wanted me to end up in this position all along.”

He frowned. “Not you, Doc — him. We wanted him to end up in this position. There’s a difference.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew the minute I agreed to go into that strip club that he’d do something like this, didn’t you?”

“We didn’t know,” Price answered for him, “but yes, we thought it was possible. The FBI would be doing a pretty sloppy job if we failed to anticipate this sort of thing. It’s a time-honored trap.”

I felt betrayed, humiliated, and furious. “Do the words ‘informed consent’ mean anything to you? You didn’t tell me the whole truth about what you expected when you pulled me into this. You got my consent under false pretenses. I deserved better than that.”

“Fair enough. Yes, you deserved better,” Price said, in a tone that sounded more like a challenge than a concession, “but we couldn’t afford to risk giving you better. We knew you’d hate the strip club, and we knew Sinclair might try to compromise you. But what Ben said when you called him that night was dead-on: If you were too much of a goody-goody to set foot in a strip club, why on earth would Sinclair believe you’d lie and steal?”

The words stung like a slap — not just “lie” and “steal” but “goody-goody” as well. Was that what Price thought of me? Was that what Rankin thought of me? Was that, in fact, what I was?

“I’m sorry,” Price added, her tone softening. “It was my call, not Ben’s, and I had to hold my nose as I made it. An undercover sting requires imperfect choices and tough decisions. But I stand by this one, and I hope you can understand why. We’ve got great audio and video evidence on multiple counts — wire fraud, conspiracy, and interfering with interstate commerce, for sure. If you’ll hang in there with us just one more step, we’ll nail this guy for extortion, too. And then we’ll let you get back to your normal life.”

“Normal life? I have no idea what that means anymore.”

I looked out the window for a long time. The sun was dropping toward the horizon. A few hundred yards down the hill from where I stood, a sliver of sunlight glanced off the bronze glass of the Sunsphere, one of the few remaining relics of Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair. A half mile or so beyond, just before the big bend where the Tennessee River first turns toward the Gulf of Mexico, Neyland Stadium glowed orange and white in the late-afternoon light. At this distance, at this moment, the massive stadium seemed small and unimportant, and my tiny office — my place beneath it — was an invisible, insignificant speck.

I looked back at Price. “I feel infected,” I said miserably. “Diseased. Feels like toxic shock attacking every moral fiber I’ve got.” I stared out the window at the river of cars flowing westward from downtown, taking normal people home to their neighborhoods and their families. “How do I get these toxins out of my system?”

A look of relief passed between the agents. They still had me. The bait was thrashing, but it was still on the hook, still twitching and writhing as the big fish opened its jaws.

* * *

Rankin drove me back to my office, partly to save me the walk and partly to retrieve the envelope so the lab could fingerprint the photos. On the way he coached me about the call I needed to place to Sinclair. “You know the drill. Make him spell out the details, if you can. The more explicitly he threatens or pressures you, the stronger the extortion case is. So don’t initiate anything. Get him to say what he wants you to do or what he’ll do to you.”

“Got it,” I said impatiently. This was the third time he’d told me this, in slightly different words, since we’d ridden down in the elevator from Price’s office, and I’d grasped the point the first two times.

We threaded the service road ringing the base of the stadium and parked by the stairwell at the north end zone. Rankin followed me up to my office and took a seat as I unlocked the desk drawer where I’d hidden the envelope.

For the second time that day, I felt close to fainting. The envelope was gone.

CHAPTER 39

“And you’re sure it was in the drawer?”

“Positive.”

Rankin looked around the room. “What about the file cabinet? Couldn’t you have put it in the file cabinet?” I shook my head. “How about checking it, just to humor me?” I unlocked the file cabinet and yanked open the balky top drawer, then each of the lower drawers. It was not in the filing cabinet, as I’d known all along.

I went back to the desk drawer. “Look,” I said, removing a printout of an e-mail message that had been sent to me six hours before. “My secretary printed this out and handed it to me along with the packet from Sinclair. I put both things in the drawer.”

“Maybe you put the

e-mail in the drawer and the envelope in your briefcase,” Rankin suggested. “You know, if you were upset, maybe you got the e-mail and the envelope mixed up.”

I shook my head emphatically. “My briefcase is still in the truck. I never even brought it in this afternoon. I’m telling you, somebody’s come in and taken it.”

“You’re sure the drawer was locked? And you’re sure the office door was locked?”