The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

“No thanks. One’s my limit. When I was in my thirties, three was my limit. In my forties it dropped to two. Now, in my fifties, it’s one.”

“Their business is gonna go down the crapper when you hit your sixties,” he said. “Remind me not to invest in Krispy Kreme stock.” He pushed the doughnut aside and leaned forward. “So you said you use donated bodies for research, but also for training, right?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about the training. Who trains with bodies from the Body Farm, and how?”

“We work most often with the National Forensic Academy,” I told him. “They offer a ten-week course for crime-scene and crime-lab techs, four times a year. The NFA brings in experts on fingerprints, blood-spatter analysis, hair and fiber evidence, that sort of thing. Our piece of the curriculum is teaching them how to find clandestine graves and skeletal remains.” I nearly added that we spent a week every spring teaching those skills to FBI agents as well, but I was afraid I might give myself away if I mentioned the FBI — like a nervous poker player whose eye twitches when he tries a big bluff.

“Ever do any training with surgeons?”

“Surgeons?” I scanned backward through the talks I’d given during the past few years. “I don’t think so. I do continuing-education lectures every year for lots of dentists and nurses, but no groups of surgeons. You know how surgeons are — one rung above God Almighty in the cosmic order. They’re not going to sit through some lecture by a lowly anthropologist.”

“True,” he laughed, “but I wasn’t thinking of a lecture. More like an intensive, hands-on approach. Small sessions — ten or twenty docs — working on actual human material, the real deal. To learn a new procedure, you have to do it, right? But what patient in his right mind would want to be the guy whose pancreas or pecker you practice on?”

“Not me,” I agreed.

“So that’s another way tissue banks provide a huge service. Sure, providing tissues for transplants is our primary role, but providing material for research and medical training — absolutely crucial.”

I didn’t need convincing on that point, but he wanted to talk, and I wanted to keep him circling the bait, so I nodded enthusiastically.

“We helped with an interesting training a couple months ago,” I said. “Not a medical training, but similar — a disaster training, simulating mass fatalities from a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’ We provided fifteen bodies, and the disaster teams practiced finding the radioactive contamination and cleaning the bodies.”

“I hope they wore their lead-lined undies. Was that for FEMA?”

“Not exactly.” FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had sent a few representatives to the training, as had the U.S. Army, but those weren’t the lead organizations. “It was organized by DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Mostly volunteers — forensic dentists, EMTs, funeral directors, cops — who have some experience with death and are willing to help identify the dead after airplane crashes and hurricanes.”

“Sure, I know DMORT. I’ve done trainings for ’em. How to improvise cold-storage facilities at remote sites. How to protect yourself against hepatitis C.”

As he talked, I noticed that his chin was flecked with crumbs of sugar and doughnut.

“Hey, here’s a joke I used to tell DMORT people heading down to Louisiana after Katrina: What’s the best way to keep from getting hep C in New Orleans?”

I shrugged.

“Stay in New Jersey.” He chuckled. “Hey, here’s another one: What do you look for when you’re looking for a DMORT team member?”

Again I shrugged.

“You don’t need to look for anything; you just sniff — you can smell ’em a mile away.”

Mentally I was cursing Price and Rankin for roping me into this, and kicking myself under the table for agreeing to help. “That’s terrible,” I said.

“I know.” He grinned. “But hey, if we can’t find a little humor in our line of work, we’ll go nuts or slit our wrists, right?”

“Right.” At the moment I was feeling a powerful urge to walk away. Instead I shifted the conversation to something I was actually curious about. “I was surprised when Glen Faust interrupted you the way he did.”

He made a face. “I wasn’t.”

“So you know him?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Is there a story there?”

“Not really. He’s just a little full of himself for my taste.” Sinclair reached inside his jack

et and took out a folded program, which he opened to the next day’s schedule. “He’s giving a talk this afternoon—‘Tissue banks are obsolete’ is the message, though he’s calling it something fancier. It’s his manifesto about rebuilding the body with stem cells and cloning and bioengineering. You should go hear him.”

“Are you going?”

“Don’t need to. I’ve heard the spiel before.” He pointed to Faust’s name on the agenda. “See how he lists himself? ‘Dr. Glen McFarland Faust, M.D., Ph.D., Fellow, BMES’? Let’s all bow down. And then barf.”

His hostility startled me. “Have you two clashed before today? Is there bad blood between you?”

“Bad blood? Naw. I just think he’s a self-important prick, that’s all.”

His eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and as they shifted and his head swiveled, I saw that he was tracking a young woman — a girl, really, probably eighteen or twenty. She was tall and curvy, wearing tight jeans and a low-cut top that called attention to her figure, and she walked in a way that suggested she liked the attention.

Sinclair sucked in a breath and shook his head abruptly, as if he were snapping out of a dream. “Hot damn, that is one fine woman. I’d love to make a little donation to her tissue bank, wouldn’t you?”

I felt myself blushing. “She’s a bit young for me,” I said. “Looks like one of my undergraduate students.”

“Your students look like that?”

“Some of them.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “I need to go back to school and get a Ph.D. in anthropology, so I can teach at the University of Tennessee.”

“Bad idea.”

“How come? You think I’d get caught messing around with a student?”

“I think you’d get all self-important if you had that ‘Ph.D.’ after your name.”

He laughed. “Touché. So what were we talking about, before I got distracted by that gorgeous young thing?”

“Faust, I think, but I think we were done with him. Before that, I’m not sure. Trainings?” I hoped I wasn’t being too obvious in my attempt to set the hook.