The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

Faust stilled the murmurs with a rhetorical question. “So is this the beginning of the end for tissue banks? The dying days of allograft tissue transplants from deceased donors?” He shook his head decisively. “Not in our lifetimes anyway. Case in point: That windpipe created from the patient’s own stem cells? The stem cells needed a scaffold, and where did that scaffold come from? From the windpipe of a deceased donor. A cadaver. Everything but the collagen matrix of the cadaver windpipe was removed — dissolved and washed away — and the patient’s cells were cultured around that collagen matrix. So the stem-cell magic couldn’t have happened without cadaver tissue. That won’t always be the case; maybe someday cadaver tissue will no longer be necessary. Unlikely. But if that day ever dawns, it will bring with it a new era of medical miracles, and won’t that be a great day for humanity?” He paused to let us contemplate that. “Thank you for your time and attention.”

I stayed around to speak to him after the Q&A session. “Very interesting,” I said. “Impressive research and production facilities you’ve got. No wonder OrthoMedica’s doing so well.”

“We try.” He smiled.

“But you’re not on the verge of turning stem cells into replacement hands.”

“I wish,” he said. “You’re thinking about your friend? What’s his name? Dr. Garcia?”

I nodded, surprised he remembered.

“Someday we might be able to grow a new pair of hands for Dr. Garcia. Start with a few of his bone-marrow cells, reverse-engineer them into stem cells, and then program those stem cells to turn into a hand-shaped assembly of bones and muscles and nerves and blood vessels.”

“But that’s not six months or a year or even five years away,” I speculated.

“More like fifty,” he said. “In my most wildly optimistic moments — my delusional moments, my colleagues would probably say — I’d guess that we’re five years from being able to grow livers or kidneys, twenty years from hearts, and half a century from hands or feet. Reality is, we’ll probably never be able to grow hands and feet in the lab.” He smiled again. “I grew up on Popular Science magazine, and every month the cover showed some incredible invention that was about to change our lives forever. Flying cars. Personal jet packs. Elevators to the moon. Colonies on Mars. Limitless power from a gallon of seawater.” He shook his head good-naturedly. “I don’t much care about the elevator to the moon, but I’m still disappointed I don’t have the flying car or the jet pack.”

I returned the smile. I, too, had spent many youthful hours anticipating Popular Science breakthroughs that never quite materialized.

“On the other hand,” Faust went on, “sometimes they got it right. I seem to recall stories about heart transplants and microwave ovens and this clunky-looking gadget called the personal computer. Surely stem cells, too. But growing replacement hands and feet? I doubt even Popular Science is that optimistic.”

“So could I circle back to something we talked about on your visit to Tennessee? The i-Hand? You recommended that for Dr. Garcia, and he was all set to get one, but now he can’t.”

He winced. “I’m sorry about the timing of that. The decision to withdraw the i-Hand was made by our board of directors,” he said. “I was opposed to it. Still am. But OrthoMedica’s a multibillion-dollar company, and the people in the boardroom are the ones responsible for making the tough business decisions.”

“Any chance there’s a spare i-Hand still tucked in a warehouse somewhere? A leftover left hand?”

“I’ll check,” he said. “I hate to sound discouraging, but don’t hold your breath.”

I nodded, disappointed.

“On the bright side, though, the lawyers don’t seem to be finding anything too objectionable in the research collaboration I’m proposing with UT. You still want that CT scanner we’ve been talking about?”

“Absolutely. I’ve been talking to the facilities people about putting it in the spot I showed you, right by the gate of the Body Farm.”

“Sounds perfect.” He flashed me a thumbs-up. “If you’d put those people in touch with my assistant, we’ll see if we can get those wheels in motion.” He clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand. “Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got a conference call to make to my masters back in Maryland.” He turned to go, then stopped and reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said. “For good luck.” He handed me the ceramic femoral head.

The sphere’s perfect smoothness and heft felt reassuring in my hand at first. But soon I found my fingers worrying at the flat spot and the hole at its center. The hole, my rational mind knew, was simply the attachment point for the metal neck of the artificial hip implant. But somehow, in my mind, the cavity evoked something else: the dark, hollow place into which I was about to crawl with Raymond Sinclair of Tissue Sciences and Services.

CHAPTER 25

Ray had been right. As soon as I told the cabdriver I was heading to the library, he pulled away from the hotel. The sun was going down in the distance, and the neon was coming up all around me. “Do you need the address?”

“Naw, I know where it is,” he said, waving off the card Sinclair had given me. The cab headed east on Tropicana Avenue. In a few short blocks, the bustle and blare of the Strip receded and I felt myself sink into the seat. The cab smelled of stale cigarettes and stale coffee and soured sweat, but I was too tired to care. I was just beginning to doze off when I heard the driver say, “Sir, we’re here.”

I opened my eyes and looked out the window. At first I felt half sleepy and half confused, but then I felt merely totally confused. The cab had stopped in front of a low cinder-block building that pulsed with music. I tapped the cabdriver on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said. “I think you misunderstood. I need to go to the library. Here’s the address.” I thrust the card at him; he took it grudgingly and gave it the briefest of glances.

“Yup, that’s the address. And yeah, that’s where we are.” He pointed to a sign above the building’s entrance. I had to lean to the side and look overhead to see the red neon letters: THE LIBRARY. Another large, flashing sign at the edge of the road proclaimed GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Underneath those words was the line CHECK OUT OUR SEXY LIBRARIANS!

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Listen, I need to make a phone call,”

I told the driver, “and I might need you to take me back to my hotel. Can you give me some privacy for a couple minutes? Maybe stretch your legs or take a smoke break? You can leave the meter running.”

“Sure, no sweat.” He pulled forward, away from the entrance, and angled the cab into a parking spot. Leaving both the meter and the engine running, he got out and lit up.

I leaned down and spoke to my chest, waving my hand in front of my tie. Strapped to my chest was a tiny microphone, with a digital recorder and transmitter tucked under my armpit; my tiepin was actually a miniature video camera, feeding images to a tiny flash drive. Two hours earlier Rankin and a New Jersey agent named Spellman had slipped into my hotel room and fitted me with the surveillance gear. “Rooster, are you there? Spellman? Where are you guys?” Through the fabric of my shirt, I tapped the microphone three times. “Can you hear me? Call me on my cell right away. This is not good.”

Nothing happened, so I scrolled through the recent calls on my cell phone and hit “send” when I got to Rankin’s number. Pick up, pick up, pick up, I prayed. Rankin’s voice answered my prayer. “Christ, Doc, what’s wrong? He’s not even here yet. And don’t thump the mike — you damn near blew out our eardrums.”

“Sorry; it was an SOS signal,” I explained. “Sinclair wasn’t talking about the place where you borrow books. He was talking about a strip club called The Library.” Suddenly it hit me: Rankin had used the word “here.” I scanned the parking lot. “Where are you?”

“Across the street in a panel truck. Six of us. But don’t look.”

I looked anyway. There it was, a carpet-cleaning van. “You knew,” I said. “You knew he was bringing me to a strip club.”

“I didn’t know at first, but I did know before you got in the cab,” he admitted. “We can’t send an informant someplace we haven’t checked out ahead of time. That’d be dangerous. And shoddy.” He laughed. “A strip club called The Library. Only in Vegas, huh, Doc? You gotta love it.”