The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

I held the buzzer up to the cashier. “What do I do with it now?”

“Leave it in the basket on the counter, down there where you pick up your order.”

I followed her gaze and arrived at the pickup counter just as our food did. A large wicker basket occupied one end of the counter. Brimming with gadgets like the one vibrating in my hand, the basket buzzed like a flock of angry cicadas and flashed like a miniature disaster zone. It set me on edge, and I could understand why the young man putting our food on the counter looked far wearier than any twenty-year-old ought to look.

Jeff had gotten our drinks and claimed a vacant booth in the back corner of the restaurant. We slid onto the benches and squirmed into our conversation. Jeff asked polite questions about the classes I was teaching this semester, and about my forensic cases, and about Dr. Garcia’s progress. Then, after a suitable amount of small talk, he ventured, “Sounds like you’ve got something on your mind.”

“I do.” I studied my hands. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Jeff. A couple of months ago, I…uh, slept with a woman.”

He laughed. “Good for you,” he said. Then, “I sure hope you seemed more enthusiastic about it then than you do now.”

I looked up, pained, and his expression changed to alarm.

“Jesus, Dad, what is it? Did you get AIDS or herpes or something?”

I shook my head.

“Wait, wait — have you gone and gotten married to this woman? Is that what you’re worried about telling me?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t married her. Hell, I haven’t seen her since right after that night. She’s gone, I don’t know where.” I drew a breath. “You probably heard about her in the news, son. Her name’s Isabella Morgan. She’s the one who murdered that Oak Ridge scientist, Novak — the old Manhattan Project physicist.”

His eyes got wide. “The one the media called ‘The A-Bomb Avenger’?”

I nodded.

“Christ, Dad.” His eyes darted back and forth as he sorted through various possibilities in his mind. “Are you in some sort of legal trouble? Did you know she’d killed the guy when you slept with her?”

“No, of course not. I would never knowingly get involved with someone who’d committed murder.” I splayed my hands, palms up, on either side of my sandwich, which was missing only one bite so far. “She was a reference librarian at the Oak Ridge Public Library. She helped me with some research. Historical research. I had no idea….”

He reached across the table and took my left hand in his right. “Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry. It must’ve really pulled the rug out from under you when you learned the truth.”

“It did,” I said.

He gave my hand a squeeze.

“But there’s more, Jeff. Feels like another rug just got yanked out from under me.”

“What do you mean? Have they caught her?”

I shook my head.

“Have you found out where she is?”

“No. But I’ve found out she’s pregnant.”

Jeff’s hand froze mid-squeeze. He stared at me, and then his eyes darted some more, and then he stared again. “She’s pregnant?”

I nodded miserably.

“Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

I nodded again.

My son removed his hand from mine. He pushed his half-eaten salad away, slid from the booth, and walked out.

* * *

That night I had a dream, and in my dream I was helping Eddie Garcia autopsy a woman’s body. But this was a young woman’s body, and when I made the long incision that opened the chest and abdomen, her belly opened to reveal a full-term fetus inside: a baby boy whose face I recognized. It was the face I’d seen three decades before, when Jeff was born. Then I looked closer, and I realized the face was my own.

CHAPTER 17

“You don’t look so hot,” said Miranda when I walked into the bone lab the next morning.

“And yet I look better than I feel.”

“Oh, my. So I guess I’d better start looking for a new Ph.D. adviser, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But first let’s watch this DVD that Eddie got from the surgeon in Crossville.” I slid the disc — a video of Clarissa Lowe’s surgery — out of the envelope that had arrived the day before, while we were doing the autopsy, and Miranda loaded it into the computer’s optical drive.

Watching the video was like opening a letter or hearing a voice mail after the sender has died: There was Lowe, anesthetized but still alive — and still healthy, except for a bum neck — just ten days earlier. “This is creepy,” said Miranda, “but so cool. How’d they get this great camera angle?” If Lowe’s eyes had been open, they’d have been staring almost directly into the camera lens. Besides her face, which was obscured by an oxygen mask, the image showed her neck and chest as well.

“Eddie said it’s a prototype OR video system, designed by the surgeon’s brother or cousin or something. The camera lens is built into the handle of the surgical light. So adjusting the angle of the light automatically adjusts the aim of the camera.”

“Cool,” she repeated. “Wish I’d invented that. Right after inventing the transporter beam and the perpetual-motion machine.”

Early in the video — before the incision — a gloved hand reached up, filling the screen, and the image on the screen lurched wildly as the light was adjusted. Eventually the lurching ceased and the image stabilized; once it did, the angles of the light and the camera were — as best I could tell — exactly the same as they’d been before all the jostling and adjusting. A few seconds elapsed, and then the hand loomed into view again; again the image careened wildly, and again it returned to exactly the same angle. “Whee, that was fun,” said Miranda. “Let’s do it again. Dramamine, anyone?”

“Now, now,” I chided. “Don’t be snarky. If I were about to operate on your neck, wouldn’t you want the light to be aimed just right?”

“If you were about to operate on my neck, I’d want someone to stop you.” She moved the computer’s cursor to an arrow labeled FF and clicked on the mouse. As the video scrolled forward, the camera zoomed in to a tighter shot of the neck, and the image lurched a third time — far more dramatically this time — and then, after it steadied, hands darted into the frame, a scalpel flicked swiftly, and the front of the woman’s neck gaped open.

“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “We actually want to watch the surgery, remember?”

“But the surgery lasted more than two hours, Dr. B. Do you really want to watch it all in real time? Can’t we fast-forward till we see something interesting?”