The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

Whatever Rankin said to Steve during that hundred-yard walk, it was enough to get me out of the TBI agent’s car but not enough to remove the frown from his face. He opened the car door and informed me I could go, adding, “Take care. Good luck.”

As Morgan’s Ford fishtailed down the gravel road, Rankin motioned toward his own car. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, I thought. The FBI-issue vehicle at least didn’t smell of spilled coffee. Rankin studied me. “You all right, Doc?”

I shrugged, then nodded.

“Sounds like you had a rough night of it. All things considered, you look pretty good.”

I regarded him with a gimlet eye.

“Okay, that was a lie. Actually, you look like hell, but I’m glad you’re alive.”

“Thanks. Me, too. Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t realize what an iffy proposition that was.”

“I’ve got an evidence team coming to search the area where you saw the shooter.” He paused. “Sinclair was in Knoxville yesterday.”

“No kidding. Even I was able to figure that one out. Where is he today?”

“Don’t know. We’re looking. He dropped off a rental car at the Knoxville airport last night and caught a flight back to Newark.”

“Christ, Rooster. You guys arrested him three days ago. How is it he manages to fly to Knoxville, fire five shots at me, and then fly back to Newark without anybody at the FBI noticing?”

Now Rankin looked as unhappy as Morgan had — and as unhappy as I felt. “He’s out on bail. That means he can go anywhere he wants to. Hell, he could flee the country if he took a mind to.” He saw the expression of dismay and disbelief on my face. “Jesus, Doc, we don’t have the resources to tail all the bad guys all the time,” he said. “We hadn’t picked up anything on the phone or computer taps that made us think he was heading to Knoxville to shoot at you. Sorry, Doc.”

I stared out the window, then turned my weary gaze toward Rankin. “What’d you tell Morgan?”

“I told him we needed to have a meeting next week — my boss and his boss. I told him you were working with us on a sensitive investigation and we’d appreciate it if the TBI could give us a little room around you. Oh, I also told him we needed that file of photos your assistant gave him. We’ll get them up to the lab in Quantico next week and see if we can still find Sinclair’s prints underneath everybody else’s.”

The thought of the photos — and of their being seen by Miranda and Morgan and other people at the TBI — made me heart-sick. “Did you tell him I hadn’t done anything wrong?”

“I told him I expected we’d be able to answer all his questions very soon.”

“So he still thinks I’m a sleazebag?”

“I don’t know what he thinks.”

“He thinks I’m a sleazebag. You saw the look on his face when he let me out of his car.”

Rankin shrugged. “Maybe he just thinks I’m a jerk.”

“And you’re still not willing to tell the TBI or my assistant what’s really going on?”

“We need to sit on this until after the grand jury hears it.”

“And when is that?”

“Tuesday. Just three more days. Once he’s been indicted, we’ll take the lid off. It might not seem like much consolation at the moment, but if the evidence team recovers anything here that ties him to the shooting — prints on the brass, bullets we can match to a gun, tire impressions that match the tread on the rental car — we can add attempted murder to the list of charges.”

“You’re right,” I said. “At the moment that doesn’t seem like much consolation.”

He made no move to offer anything more.

“So do you need me for something else here, or can I go home and sleep for a week or two while my life crumbles around me?”

“Go get some rest. But first show me where to send the evidence techs.”

I took him to the fork in the trails and started up the path I’d taken. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s not disturb the area. Just show me.” I pointed to the cluster of hemlocks where I’d seen the muzzle flash, and I described the various points on the footbridge and the opposite embankment where I thought the bullets had hit.

Then I got into my truck and headed back to Knoxville. By the time I turned in to my driveway and saw the garage door rising to receive me, I felt as if I were swimming underwater. I staggered through the living room and headed for the bedroom, but the blinking message light on the phone caught my eye. I debated briefly, then sighed and checked the voice mail. I had five new messages.

Two of them had been left by Steve Morgan and were long since irrelevant; the first one, which he’d left at midafternoon Friday, sounded casual and friendly, while the second one, which he’d left Friday evening — probably around the time I was wading across the West Prong for the first time — sounded official and ominous: “This is Steve Morgan with the TBI again. I need you to contact me immediately. This is an urgent, official matter. It’s very serious, and it’s important that you call me right away.” Sandwiched between Morgan’s two calls was an end-of-the-day call from Peggy, reminding me of my Monday-morning appeal to the dean for more land. The fourth message of the five was from Carmen Garcia. The surgery to reverse the pedicle graft had gone very well, she said. Her voice sounded teary, though, not at all like the voice of someone calling with good news. I was puzzled by that, but only for a moment, until Carmen dropped the other shoe. “The possible donor you found — that heart patient at UT — his tissue does not match. Dr. Alvarez said Eddie would almost certainly reject those hands. So we are coming home again to wait. But we thank you so much for trying, Bill.” Her voice broke as she said it, and her sadness, together with my exhaustion, brought me crashing down. I hung up the phone without even listening to the last message and turned off the ringer.

Shucking off my ragged, filthy clothes, I crawled straight into bed. By the time I’d tucked a pillow beneath my knees and arranged two more under my head, my eyes were rolling backward. I thought I heard the beginnings of a snore, but before I could listen for a second one, I was tunneling deep into sleep.

When I awoke, the house was dark and the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:17. I’d slept for eighteen hours. I took a long bath, in water that was seventy or eighty degrees hotter than the water I’d been in the previous night. My frostnipped fingertips still felt numb and still looked artificially white — like chicken that’s been blanched in boiling water — and my left ribs felt bruised from my tumble into the stream, but the rest of me felt surprisingly rested and restored.

When I got out, I turned on the phones and checked for messages. I now had three.

The first one — the message I’d ignored before tumbling into bed — wasn’t actually a message but a hang-up: a long silence followed by a dial tone. The call had been made shortly after midnight, from a restricted number, according to the caller ID log, but I suspected it had been dialed by Sinclair, checking to see if I’d managed to make it out of the mountains and make it home: checking to see if I was a sitting duck. Luckily, I’d been crawling and shivering in the mountains rather than sleeping in my bed when he’d called.

The second call came from Eric, the graduate student in biomedical engineering who operated the mobile CT scanner. “I got your message, and I scanned that batch of femurs you were in such a hurry for,” he said. “They’re on the table behind the scanner. Did you want to pick them up over the weekend or just let Miranda get them for you Monday?” My first thought was, Miranda won’t be getting anything for me Monday. Miranda’s gone. My second thought was, Huh? What message, and what batch of femurs, and what hurry? I was on the verge of ending the voice-mail call so I could phone Eric and ask what he meant when the third and final message began to play.

This last message was from Culpepper, and the KPD detective’s urgent tone stopped my finger just as I was reaching to disconnect. “Art got a match on the thumbprint from the bloody hammer,” Culpepper had practically shouted into the phone.