The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

“You betcha.”

“But isn’t that prohibited by law?”

He beamed. “You betcha,” he said. “Sort of. But not really. The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act and the National Organ Transplant Act do prohibit the buying and selling of human organs and tissues, but there are a couple of gray areas. As all of you who work at tissue banks already know, we’re allowed to recover costs associated with procuring organs and tissues. And defining ‘costs’ can be an exercise in creative writing — just ask any accountant at a Hollywood film studio. The reality is, tissue banks and anatomical-supply companies buy and sell bodies all the time; we just don’t directly, openly pay the body donors or the families who donate. And that, I believe, is the step we must take if we’re to meet the growing need for tissue and tissue-based products.”

More hands shot up, but the blond woman who’d asked the first question fired off a follow-up before anyone else got a chance to. “But isn’t the problem that paying donors — organ donors or whole-body donors — exploits the poor for the sake of the rich?” Her question prompted murmurs of assent throughout the room.

Sinclair shrugged. “Does it? Funny how it’s always people with money and power who say that. Anybody polling the poor about this issue? Case in point: Say some peasant in Pakistan sells a kidney to some rich American for twenty thousand bucks. I pick Pakistan because organ selling is pretty common there. Twenty thousand dollars is twenty years’ worth of income for the average Pakistani. Sure, he’s taking a huge health risk, but are his other options any better? Which is worse, taking a health risk for twenty grand or watching his kids starve to death for nothing?”

Half a dozen hands shot up, and several people tried to interrupt him with objections, but Sinclair plowed ahead.

“Hang on, hang on, everybody gets a turn, but let me finish making my point. I know a dozen bioethicists who say it’s exploitative to buy a kidney from a poor person, but I know three or four who think a mentally competent adult has a basic right to self-determination. Isn’t that one of the fundamental principles of America — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy, free-market dollars?”

A lot of faces were frowning.

“Fertility clinics pay sperm donors and egg donors. Couples pay surrogate mothers to bear children for them. It’s illegal to buy or sell a baby, but any honest attorney or social worker who’s spent much time in the trenches can tell you it happens.”

He paused for breath, and the hands shot up again.

“Wait, I’m almost done,” he said. “Seriously, we actually can buy bodies legally today, we just can’t call it ‘buying bodies.’ What we’re allowed to call it is ‘sparing you or your family the expense of a funeral.’ Talk about dancing around the truth. The average funeral costs six or seven thousand bucks, so what that means is we’re allowed to buy bodies for six or seven grand, provided we don’t own up to what the transaction really is. What a hypocritical crock. Insurance companies are willing to negotiate what they call ‘life settlements’—cash payments for insurance policies owned by old folks and sick folks. Not the full amount of the policy — that’s why the insurance companies are willing to do it — but at least you don’t have to be dead to collect. A woman with ovarian cancer who’s worth a hundred thousand dollars dead might rather get fifty thousand while she’s still alive. Shouldn’t she have that right? The right to cash in on her mortality? Shouldn’t anyone? People mortgage assets like houses all the time. Why not let them mortgage their bodies? Isn’t the body an asset, a very personal asset? How come, in the whole chain of organ and tissue transplantation — a multibillion-dollar enterprise — the one person who can’t make money off the damn deal is the donor?”

He shrugged again, an olive-branch, peacemaking kind of smile. “These are complicated legal and ethical issues, sure. But we need to grapple with them. And we need to get more honest, more creative, and more aggressive about offering financial incentives for whole-body donation. Otherwise we simply can’t expect to keep pace with the growing need for human tissue.”

“Bullshit.”

The comment came, in a confident, strong voice, from a darkened rear corner of the room. Sinclair looked startled; so did everyone else in the room. The speaker stepped out of the shadows and into a pool of light near the room’s rear door. I was shocked to see that it was Glen Faust of OrthoMedica.

“I think you’re selling people short. I think you’re seriously underestimating the generosity of the human spirit.”

At the podium Sinclair reddened. “I’m just saying we need to find realistic financial strategies for encouraging whole-body donations.”

“No, you’re saying people are greedy or stingy, that they have to be bought. I don’t agree, and I see one other person in the room who I suspect might back me up on this point.” He looked in my direction and pointed at me. “Dr. Brockton, forgive me for putting you on the spot, but have you had difficulty recruiting whole-body donors for your program?”

His question caught me utterly off guard. Price and Rankin had stressed the need to keep a low profile at the conference — the plan we’d agreed on was that I’d introduce myself to Sinclair after his talk and look for ways to bond with him — but it suddenly felt as if a spotlight as bright as the Luxor pyramid’s beacon was shining directly on me.

I stood up slowly, buying a few seconds of time, and cleared my throat. “Well, I reckon I’d have to say no, we haven’t had a lot of difficulty.”

Sinclair eyed me dubiously. “And your name and affiliation?”

“Bill Brockton. I’m the chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The program Dr. Faust mentioned is our decomposition-research facility. Most people call it by its nickname, the Body Farm. We study postmortem human decay and the way the rate of decay is affected by factors like temperature, humidity, presence or absence of clothing, and so on. We also do a lot of trainings for crime-scene investigators, teaching them how to find buried bodies, how to search for scattered bones, that sort of thing.”

Sinclair considered this. “And you use donated bodies for this work?”

“We do. Mostly. Some of our specimens are unclaimed bodies from the medical examiner’s system, but the majority are donated bodies. About a thousand people have donated their bodies so far, and we’ve got another sixteen hundred donors on our version of a waiting list.” I heard a few chuckles at my spin on the term “waiting list.”

Soon I found myself answering a string of rapid-fire questions. People asked about our research, asked how we cleaned the skeletal material, asked for details on the donation program. Finally someone asked where we’d put the sixteen hundred donors on our waiting list. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. I decided there’d never be a better opportunity to dangle the line that Price and Rankin had liked, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned casting it. “It’s not exactly that we have too many donated bodies,” I said. “We just don’t have enough space or enough funding.”

More questions followed. I felt bad for Sinclair. I hadn’t even planned to say anything, let alone steal the limelight, but once it shifted in my direction, I didn’t know how to get out of it.

To his credit, he didn’t seem to mind. When the session ended at ten forty-five, he made a point of coming over to speak to me. Faust, on the other hand, gave me a brief wave from the back of the room, then darted out the door like a scalded cat. There appeared to be no love lost between him and Sinclair, and I wondered what had originally caused the tension.

Sinclair hung back till a few people had finished chatting with me, then offered me a smile and a handshake. “Dr. Brockton, you certainly livened up the discussion,” he said. “It was fascinating, and I appreciate it. I have to say, you make me wonder if I’ve been too quick to resort to the ‘throw money at it’ solution to the problem of motivating donors.”

“Well, we’ve been really fortunate,” I said. “The university is very supportive, the local

media seem to like us, and we’ve benefited from the CSI craze. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we’re happy to be bobbing along at the high-water mark.”

Suddenly he frowned, aiming a finger. “I have a suspicion about you,” he said, and I felt my stomach clench. Had I been so clumsy, so obvious, that I’d already botched things? “I suspect,” he went on, “you’re far too modest.”

So perhaps I hadn’t failed after all — not yet at least.

My relief turned to delight, followed swiftly by panic, when he added, “If you’ve got time, I’d love to hear more about your program over coffee.”

CHAPTER 23

“Sherwood Forest café or Sir Galahad’s pub?” Sinclair offered the hotel map for my perusal.

“Tough choice,” I mused. “If I were going just by the names, I’d go for Sherwood Forest, but it looks like it’s right off the casino floor, so I’m guessing it’s pretty noisy. Sir Galahad’s is on the second level, so maybe it’s quieter.”

“Sir Galahad’s it is.” He motioned toward the escalator, and we headed down a floor from the meeting rooms. “Who the hell was Sir Galahad? Got any idea?”

“Hmm. One of the Knights of the Round Table.” I dug around in my memory banks. As a boy I’d read some of the Arthurian legends, but tales of chivalry were a far cry from blunt-force trauma and knife marks in bone. “Seems like Galahad was the squeaky-clean knight,” I ventured. “Raised by nuns. Chaste and very pious, when he wasn’t busy hacking foes to bits with his broadsword.” I fished around for any additional factoids I’d stored about Galahad. “Spent a lot of time on a quest for the Holy Grail. That’s about all I recall.”

“That’s a lot. I don’t recall that much about the talk I just gave.”

The escalator deposited us in front of a shuttered Italian restaurant and, beside it, a theater whose nightly show was “Thunder from Down Under,” billed as “Australia’s Hottest Hunks” and “Las Vegas’ Best Male Strip Show.” It struck me as interesting irony that the male strippers were performing a stone’s throw from an establishment named for the Arthurian knight who embodied chastity and purity.

Sir Galahad’s was closed, too, so we ended up buying coffee from a Starbucks stand and doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme counter. I suspected that the Krispy Kremes were not what had sustained Sir Galahad on his search for the Grail, but they did taste divine: warm, cloudlike puffs of dough, deep-fried to airy perfection, then varnished with a crisp, delicate sugar glaze. “That’s tasty,” I marveled. “That would be worth a serious quest.”

Sinclair shook his head. “I gotta disagree with you there. I’ve never been a fan of the Krispy Kreme. I’m a die-hard Dunkin’ Donuts man myself.”

“Dunkin’ Donuts? But they’re so cakey.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what makes ’em good.” He shrugged. “You’re from Tennessee, I’m from Jersey. Maybe it’s a geographic thing.”

“Maybe that’s it,” I conceded. “It did take a while for Krispy Kreme to cross the Mason-Dixon Line.”

He laughed. “There was a big article in the New York Times when the first Krispy Kreme opened in Manhattan. The barbarians were at the gates.”

“If you think Krispy Kreme is culture shock for New Yorkers,” I said, “just wait till Cracker Barrel hits town.”

“Hey, bring it on. The more biscuits and gravy and fried okra people eat, the better it is for my business, and yours.” He offered me his half-eaten doughnut. “You want the rest of that?”