The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

I was rotating the assembly beneath the light, studying it from the left side, when the phone on the wall began to ring. I ignored it, and after half a dozen rings it fell silent. A few seconds later, it jangled again; again I ignored it. Then, after a few seconds more, the door of the decomp room opened and Amy, the forensic center’s receptionist, leaned in. “Dr. Brockton? I hate to disturb you, but Dr. Garcia’s on line two for you, and he says it’s important.”

“Oops. Let me just get these gloves off and I’ll pick up. Thanks, Amy.”

Laying aside the bones and peeling off the gloves, I picked up the handset and pressed the blinking button. “Eddie, sorry to keep you waiting. I was just looking at Clarissa Lowe’s cervical spine. It cleaned up very nicely.”

“Don’t look too closely,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I just got a call from Calvin, my lab technician,” he answered.

“Is Calvin the guy who’s three doors down from me? The guy I saw looking into a microscope when I walked up the hall a few minutes ago?”

“Yes. Calvin. I think you should go look also. Can you go down to the lab and put me on the speakerphone?”

“Sure. If I lose you, call me back. Talk to you in a second.” I pressed the “hold” button, and the light for the phone line began to blink again. Twenty yards from the decomp room was the forensic center’s lab, a large room whose countertops bristled with petri dishes, culture incubators, and microscopes.

Calvin, a pale, stooped young man whose name I would never have recalled if Garcia hadn’t mentioned it, glanced up from the microscope when I walked in. “’Lo, Dr. Brockton,” he greeted me.

“Hi, Calvin. Dr. Garcia tells me you’ve got something I should see.”

He flipped a switch on the scope; a monitor beside it lit up, and the screen filled with circles and ovals of gray and black. Their shapes reminded me of cross sections of tree trunks: circles within circles, crossed by faint lines radiating from the centers like wheel spokes.

I pressed the “speaker” button on the phone and was rewarded with a loud dial tone. “Oh, crap, I’ve lost Dr. Garcia,” I said. Then I noticed the button for line two, still blinking. “Oh, wait.” I pressed it, and the dial tone was replaced by hollow background noise. “Eddie, are you still there?”

“Yes. Are you in the lab with Calvin?”

“We’re here,” Calvin announced. “I’ve got the unstained slide on the monitor.”

“Good,” said Garcia. “Bill, do you recognize what you’re seeing there?”

“I do.” I’d seen hundreds of similar images over the years. Known as osteons and osteocytes, they were the microscopic framework of human bone — the skeleton’s own inner skeleton, so to speak, magnified hundreds of times. “That must be from the sample we took from the cervical spine.”

“Exactly,” said Garcia. “Calvin, now show him the sample you treated with Gram’s stain.” Calvin twisted the stage of the microscope. The image on the screen spun dizzyingly, and a new slide clicked into place. This slide also showed bone, but the colors had changed to shades of beige and brown, with a sprinkling of tiny purple cylinders amid the structures of the bone.

“Um, remind me what Gram’s stain is?”

“It’s a stain, a dye, that certain bacteria absorb,” Garcia answered. “It’s named for Hans Christian Gram, the Danish microbiologist who developed it. Gram’s stain distinguishes between two groups of bacteria, called Gram-negative and Gram-positive. Gram-positive bacteria absorb the stain and turn purple. Some species of Gram-positive bacteria are harmless; others are quite deadly.”

“And how do you tell whether the purple stain Calvin’s got here is a friendly species or a deadly strain?”

“The most precise way is a DNA analysis,” he answered, “but that takes time. So I had Calvin do a two-stage stain. Calvin, could you show Dr. Brockton the next slide?” Calvin obliged, bringing up a slide showing small specks of red and black. “This second stain tells us that the bacteria in Lowe are from the genus Clostridium.”

“Go on,” I prompted.

“Clostridium is an interesting study in contrasts,” he said. “There are about a hundred species of it. Some of them are very useful — they have the potential to convert wood into ethanol or to target therapeutic drugs at cancer tumors.”

“So the good news is biofuels and magic bullets,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”

“Food poisoning. Tetanus. Botulism. Gas gangrene. Toxic shock. Clostridium produces some of the deadliest toxins on the planet. One thing about it that’s interesting,” he added, “is that we’re exposed to these bacteria all the time. Clostridium lives mostly in the soil, in dirt and rotting organic material — there’s probably a lot of it out at the Body Farm — but we also carry some species of it in our gastrointestinal tract. The vast majority of the time, our bodies manage to keep it in check.”

“So something tipped the scales in Lowe’s body after surgery,” I said, “allowing the bacteria in her gut to multiply like crazy and spread throughout her body?”

“Actually, no,” he answered. “I don’t believe her GI tract was the source. Remember, these slides you’re seeing are tissue samples from the allograft in her cervical spine. I think she received a graft of contaminated cadaver bone.”

I stared at the images on the microscope monitor. If Garcia was right, the surgeon had unwittingly put a ticking bacteriological time bomb into his patient. And that bomb was sitting on a countertop a few doors down the hallway. And I’d been handling it casually — gloved, but not masked — for the past hour. “What should I do with the cervical spine? Should I boil it? Sterilize it in an autoclave? Incinerate it?”

“I’d like to do more testing on it. Maybe contact the company that supplied it. I checked the operating notes, but there’s nothing that indicates who made it. I’ll call the surgeon and find out. Meanwhile, would you bag it and freeze it?”

“Sure.”

“And, Bill? Be sure to cover it with biohazard labels.”

For once in the conversation, I was already way ahead of him.

* * *

Two hours and half a dozen hand washings later, Special Agent Ben Rankin phoned me. “Hello, Rooster,” I said. “Are we still on for our meeting tomorrow morning?” We were scheduled to talk with Amanda Whiting, UT’s general counsel, about the proposed sting operation.

“No. We need to reschedule it.”

I was disappointed to hear that. We’d scheduled the meeting at eight at the FBI’s main office, located downtown in the John Duncan Federal Building. The part I’d been looking forward to wasn’t the meeting itself but the breakfast we’d decided to grab beforehand at Pete’s, a downtown coffee shop just around the corner.