The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

“You need to be someplace else in the morning?”

“I do. So do you.”

“Me?” I checked my pocket calendar. According to it, my morning was open, except for the FBI meeting. “Where do I need to be in the morning?”

“Las Vegas. And actually, you need to be there tonight. Your flight leaves in two hours.”

CHAPTER 22

I awoke to the thunk of the 737’s landing gear cycling down on approach to the Las Vegas airport. As the plane banked in the night sky, the city glittered and flashed like the world’s biggest carnival, full of dazzling promises, dizzying rides, and rigged games of skill and chance.

The trip itself was a high-stakes gamble, I reflected as the plane eased down to the runway. Las Vegas was not my dream destination; I’d far rather have been headed two hundred miles to the east, to the stark, rugged landscape of the Grand Canyon. But Vegas, not the Grand Canyon, was hosting the annual meeting of the National Consortium of Tissue Banks. At Rankin’s last-minute request just ten hours earlier, I’d filled out the online registration form, dashed home to pack a bag, and then raced to catch a hastily arranged flight.

As the jet angled off the runway and onto a taxiway, I switched on my cell phone, wh

ich beeped to tell me I had a new voice mail. “Call me,” said Rankin’s voice. I didn’t call him back until after I’d caught the monorail to the main terminal — even the airport had the feel of a theme park — and hailed a cab for the hotel. Rankin picked up on the second ring. “Hey, how was the flight?”

“Long,” I said. “I sure wish Knoxville were an airline hub. It makes no sense to me to fly two hundred miles east to Charlotte to catch a westbound flight. Hell, the plane from Charlotte to Vegas probably passed right over Knoxville. It’s maddening to fly four hundred miles just to get back to the same place you started from two hours before.”

“Sorry, Doc. I’d have let you fly out tonight on the Bureau jet with me and the other guys from Knoxville and Newark, but that would’ve blown your cover. We appreciate your going on such short notice.”

“While you’re feeling appreciative, be grateful that Amanda Whiting worked us in on a nanosecond’s notice.” Whiting, UT’s general counsel, had actually cut short a meeting with the university president in order to hold an urgent conference with Rankin, Price, and me. She hadn’t been happy about it, but before we left her office, she hand-wrote a confidential memo of understanding, signed by herself, the agents, and me, outlining and endorsing the role that the Body Farm and I would play in an undercover FBI sting. Now, as the wheels of the jet stopped on the tarmac in Las Vegas, the wheels of the sting — the wheels of justice, I hoped — began to turn.

“Great timing,” Rankin was saying. “This tissue-bank convention’s the perfect opportunity to make contact with Sinclair.”

Raymond Sinclair was the founder and CEO of Tissue Sciences and Services, the New Jersey tissue bank that the FBI believed had obtained dozens of bodies from the MacArthur School of Medicine. “And you’re sure he’ll be here?”

“Well, I’m sure he flew from Newark to Las Vegas yesterday, and I’m sure he’s scheduled to give a talk tomorrow morning. ‘Enrolling Donors: Thinking Outside the Box.’ I guess he means thinking outside the pine box.” Rankin snorted. “You think the irony in the title was intentional?”

“Ask me after I hear his talk. What time and where?”

“Ten A.M., Nottingham Room.”

“Nottingham? As in ‘Sheriff of,’ from Robin Hood? I thought the hotel was all about King Arthur. The hotel’s called the Excalibur, right?”

“King Arthur, Robin Hood, same difference,” he said. “Merrie Olde England. You were expecting rigorous historical accuracy at a casino hotel with red and blue plastic turrets at each corner?” He had a point there.

As Rankin went over the plan for tomorrow once more, the taxi left the airport and turned onto Sunset, then made a right onto Las Vegas Boulevard. To the left rose the three-winged tower of Mandalay Bay, its dark glass façade split by vertical shafts of golden light. Up ahead glittered a compressed version of New York City’s skyline, where a roller coaster corkscrewed past a replica of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Farther up the Strip, the Eiffel Tower blazed with light; it was only half the size of the real one, in Paris, but I had to admit, even a half-size Eiffel Tower was impressive. Although I wasn’t fond of the noise or the crowds — or the traffic or the gambling or the drinking, for that matter — as an anthropologist I found Las Vegas fascinating. Plunked down in the middle of a hot, barren basin — Vegas averaged just four inches of rain a year, less than one-tenth Knoxville’s amount — the city had no logical reason to exist, or at least no logical reason to exist where it did. Yet somehow, in the sands of the desert, it had carved out a unique, neon-lit niche for itself in the life and lore of the nation.

The taxi slowed as it passed the tawny sphinx guarding the Luxor, a black-glass pyramid of a hotel. From the pyramid’s tip, a column of blue-white light soared into the sky: a searchlight that sought nothing, an eye staring blindly, blindingly upward. Years before, on a trip to the Middle East, I’d traveled to Luxor, the Great Pyramids, and the Valley of the Kings; seeing the comic-book replicas, I found myself appalled and amused in equal measure.

Just beyond the Luxor, the cab turned in at the Excalibur, its castle turrets topped with crayon-colored cones. I bid Rankin good night, paid the taxi driver, and stepped into the hotel’s dark, mazy lobby, with its relentless ching-ching-ching of electronic slot machines. I checked in, rode the elevator up the vast tower of featureless rooms, and tumbled into bed to rest up for tomorrow morning’s gambling, when — if luck was with me — I’d be betting with chips of flesh and bone from the Body Farm.

* * *

“Enrolling donors: thinking outside the Box” was a more interesting talk than the clunky title had led me to expect. Raymond Sinclair — and the talk he gave — reminded me of Las Vegas: loud, flashy, and repellent, yet also equally fascinating. He began with a rapid-fire review of the history and growth of allograft transplants, transplants from dead bodies to living patients. First attempted a century and a half ago — a French surgeon transplanted skin from a fresh cadaver to a patient — allograft transplants had remained rare for decades but had soared during the second half of the twentieth century. By 2008 the number had risen to 1.5 million a year, and it was still rising fast. Surgeries that had once been risky experimental procedures — transplanting corneas and rebuilding knees with cadaver cartilage, for instance — were now routine; meanwhile, new transplant surgeries were being developed all the time.

“So when the number of tissue transplants reaches two million a year,” Sinclair said, “or five million a year, or ten million a year — and trust me, that’ll happen in the blink of a laser-corrected eye — where will we get all those corneas and tendons and ligaments?” He paused to let the hundred people in the room consider the problem. “I’ll tell you,” he went on. “The government in Washington is gonna merge the IRS and the FDA to create a new federal agency that combines revenue collection with medical oversight. And if you think you pay an arm and a leg in taxes now…”

He left it unfinished, and as the joke slowly sank in, a few people laughed, and a chubby guy in the second row groaned.

“Hey, buddy, don’t piss me off,” Sinclair warned, “or I’ll tell my amputation jokes, and those are really, really lame.”

This time half the audience groaned, but the other half — and Sinclair himself — laughed at the outrageous political incorrectness. The bleary-eyed, jet-lagged crowd was warming to Vegas Ray.

And then he turned on a dime. “Seriously, folks, how do we, as tissue banks, keep pace with the rising demand? The organ-procurement network has made huge progress on that front, by a very simple mechanism. Millions of people in the United States every year are now routinely asked the question ‘Do you wish to be an organ donor?’ when they renew their driver’s license. The number of people who’ve said yes to that question — the number who opt in — is incredible: eighty million. Eighty million people have said, ‘Yes, I do.’ If you’ve got a spouse or a son or a daughter wait-listed for a kidney, the suspense is pure hell. Still, at this moment hundreds of millions of human organs are flowing, at whatever speed fate decrees, toward the mouth of the donor pipeline. Isn’t that amazing?”

He looked around the room, and heads nodded, including mine.

“But. But,” he went on, “even with all the public support for organ donation, it’s not enough. Thousands of people on the organ waiting list die every year for lack of a matching transplant. And whole-body donation faces far bigger challenges. People are good at denying the finality of death if they’re signing over just a few parts. But the clerks at the DMV don’t ask about whole-body donation, and — somebody correct me if I’m wrong — Hollywood isn’t rushing to make blockbuster movies about cadaver tendon or bone paste.”

Damn skippy, I heard myself thinking. It was an expression I’d picked up from Miranda, which I understood to mean “Amen, brother,” or “You got that right.”

“There are two things we absolutely must do,” he went on, “if we’re to have any hope of enlisting enough whole-bod

y donors to meet the growing need for tissue. First, we have got to do a better job of storytelling. People connect with human stories — stories of wrenching need, stories of inspiring generosity. If all we say is, ‘Give the gift of life,’ we’re doing a piss-poor job of educating the public about the importance of whole-body donation. It’s crucial that we tell the stories of real-life people — flesh-and-blood people — whose broken lives could be mended with tissue from whole-body donation.” He raised his arms and spread them wide, a gesture that reminded me of paintings of Jesus. “We are modern-day miracle workers, folks: healing the sick, helping the lame walk, and making the blind see. And we have a duty, to donors and recipients alike, to share those stories proudly with the world.” His fervor surprised me, and so did the enthusiastic applause it inspired.

He nodded a couple times in humble acknowledgment, then held up a hand to quiet the room. “You might not feel so kindly toward me when I make this second point,” he said. “The other thing we’ve got to do, to start thinking outside the box, is to get more realistic and more creative about incentives for whole-body donation. Tissue Sciences, like many tissue banks, now covers the cost of cremation for whole-body donors. We harvest and process everything we can, we cremate the remains, and — if the family wishes — we return the ashes to the family. For people who are planning ahead, we offer the opportunity not just to help the sick but also to help their own families, by sparing them the cost of a funeral or cremation. For a grieving family, we lighten the financial burden of death. But that’s too little, too late. We need to expand the incentives we offer families who donate their loved ones…and we need to create substantial financial incentives for individuals considering becoming whole-body donors.”

Several hands went up at the phrase “substantial financial incentives.” He pointed to an attractive young blond woman in the center of the room, who asked, “Are you suggesting we pay prospective donors?”