The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

I nodded.

“So as you think about yourself, and your life, and the people you care about, and these things that are swirling around all of you — these messes, if you wish to call them that — what do you want to do, Bill? What do you choose to do, and why?”

I drew one deep breath and then another. “Isabella, that one’s complicated,” I said. “I’m concerned about her.”

“Do you still care about her?”

“Yes.” I was surprised how deeply true the word rang. “I do, but most of that situation is out of my control. As Miranda said, there’s not much I can do, besides wait for the other shoe to drop.” I grimaced. “The baby shoe. My baby shoe.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t another man who got her pregnant?”

“No, not a hundred percent sure. But I am a hundred percent sure that I might have gotten her pregnant. That information is relevant to the FBI investigation. That’s why I had to disclose it. No, wait — that’s why I chose to disclose it.”

He smiled. “That does seem the sort of disclosure a responsible man would make.” He cocked his head slightly to one side. “Why do you think your son is so angry with you?”

“Maybe his feelings are hurt,” I suggested.

“Hurt? Why? Because you didn’t consult him before going to bed with a beautiful woman?”

I imagined myself dialing Jeff’s phone number that night with one hand while ripping off my clothes with the other hand. The image made me laugh again, and the relief of laughter felt like balm to my soul.

He leaned toward me and repeated the question. “Why do you think your son is so angry with you?”

I sighed. I’d hoped I had laid this issue to rest, hoped I’d cleaned up this mess. “Because I was angry with Jeff, I think, after his mother died. Kathleen died three years ago of cancer. Uterine cancer. She’d had a very difficult pregnancy with Jeff, and she had three miscarriages after he was born. When she got cancer — even though it wasn’t until Jeff was grown — I think I associated uterine cancer with childbearing, and with our child. Stupid, and maybe I’m imagining the reason for it, but I did pull away from Jeff after Kathleen died. Truth is, I pulled away from everybody — I pretty much shut down emotionally for a couple of years — but the only person I feel serious regret about pulling away from is Jeff. I wasn’t as warm a father to him as I might have been during that time, and I wasn’t as loving a grandfather to his boys as I wish I’d been.”

“You said ‘for a couple of years.’ So you’d gotten closer to him again?”

“Yes. When I was accused of murder, Jeff stood by me.”

“And the woman you were accused of murdering — you were romantically involved with her, is that right?”

“Yes. Briefly. Her name was Jess Carter. She was the medical examiner in Chattanooga. We were working together on a case, and I had just started to fall for her when she was killed.”

“Was that a sexual relationship?”

I hesitated. “Yes. Barely, but wonderfully. I was falling in love with Jess — I knew Jess — and if she hadn’t been killed, we might have made a life together.”

Dr. Hoover looked startled, and I guessed that he was pondering the bizarre, mirror-image symmetry of my last two lovers: a woman who was murdered, then a murderous woman.

“Anyhow,” I went on, “when I was framed for Jess’s murder, Jeff ended up helping me, and I appreciated it. Over the past year or so, it felt like we’d regained most of the ground we’d lost. Until the night before last.”

“When he walked out on you.”

I nodded.

“Any more thoughts on why he got so angry?”

“Maybe because he had to work pretty hard to get my attention for a while. Maybe because I’ve always not been the most attentive or openhearted dad to him.”

“And yet here you go…?”

“Diverting my limited fatherly resources to some total stranger’s baby. To a murderer’s baby at that.”

“And that might make him feel…?”

“Slighted. Unimportant. Resentful. Afraid that this new baby could be a higher priority, could displace him somehow.”

“You think Jeff fears that another child could cut into his inheritance? That it might diminish his prospects, or his children’s prospects?”

That implication hadn’t even occurred to me. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”

“What sort of work does Jeff do?”

“He’s an accountant.”

“And you don’t think he’s imagined how the ledger sheet could change somewhere down the road?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. That might occur to him at some point, but I don’t think it would’ve popped into his head first thing, in the thirty seconds between the moment I told him and the moment he walked out of Panera.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “So how did you feel when he walked out on you? And how do you feel now?”

“Surprised. Confused. Embarrassed. Sad. Mad.”

“Mad then or mad now?”

I felt a flush of shame. “Both.”

“So what sorts of words might describe a son who reacted the way Jeff reacted?”

I looked into the cluster of oil lamps burning in the fireplace. “Same as me. Surprised. Confused. Embarrassed. Sad. Mad.” I looked into Hoover’s face. “Imperfect. Human.”

“And what do you want to do now, Bill?”

I smiled a slightly rueful smile. “I want to call my son and tell him I love him.”

He nodded.

“I want to tell him I didn’t mean to pull the rug out from under him. Ask for his understanding and forgiveness.”

He nodded again.

At the end of the session, I called Jeff to say those things. He didn’t answer, but I said them anyway, telling them to his voice mail.

r /> I hoped he’d hear the voice mail right away and call me back soon.

He didn’t.

CHAPTER 21

The steam-jacketed kettle had done its work well: Thirty-six hours in scalding water, Biz, and Downy had turned the soft tissue surrounding Clarissa Lowe’s cervical vertebrae into shreds of tissue and a slick of grease. If not for the orthopedic hardware and the rank odor, the pot might have contained beef soup bones, simmering their way toward broth.

I fished the spine out of the pot with a large pair of tongs and laid it in the deep, stainless-steel sink of the forensic center’s decomp room. Gripping the hot bones with the tongs, I slipped a scalpel between the vertebrae. Five of the seven parted easily; the other two remained joined by the titanium bracket and the tightly fitted wedge of bone.

I turned on the sink’s faucet — warm, not cold, so as not to risk fracturing the hot bones — and scrubbed the vertebrae with stiff brushes, including a bottle brush to swab out the circular spinal canal. The last shreds of tissue let go easily, swirling down the drain into the hospital’s sewer system. I saved the fused section for last, because I knew it would take more scrubbing, with a smaller brush, to clean the crevices and corners around the metal bracket and the bone graft. When I was satisfied that I’d removed all the soft tissue, I turned off the faucet, shook the water from the bones, and laid them on absorbent surgical pads on the counter. Then, switching on a lighted magnifier, I held the fused segment under the lens. What I saw was a juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign: the natural curves and planes of the vertebrae, with a trapezoidal wedge of lighter bone — a shape that looked more like a machined part than a human bone — jammed between them, locked into place by lustrous metal and screws.