The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dr. Garcia mentioned that when we admitted him, so we’ll certainly check for it when we do the tissue pathology. But he’s not showing any symptoms of toxic shock. His vitals are stable and strong, and his blood work’s good — normal pH, normal red-blood count, normal white-cell count.”

I glanced at Miranda; her eyes were locked on the surgeon’s with laser intensity, but I thought I saw traces of relief in her face, mirroring what must surely be showing in my own.

“We’ll keep a close eye on those,” Rivkin was saying, “but to me this looks like a textbook case of gangrene — localized necrosis, caused by poor circulation. I suspect the blood vessels in that hand were just too badly damaged by the radiation burn to recover.”

“And does the amputation resolve the problem,” Carmen asked quietly, “or will he need additional surgery?”

The surgeon shifted, visibly uncomfortable, and I had the feeling another shoe was about to drop. “We needed to provide blood supply and skin for his…wrist,” he said, sidestepping the word “stump,” which my mind had instantly plugged into the awkward pause. “So what we’ve done is a procedure called a pedicle flap.”

“I don’t know what that procedure is,” she said. “Tell me, please?”

“We’ve grafted his forearm to his abdomen,” he explained, “here, just beneath the skin.” Curling his right hand tightly, he jammed his wrist into his lower belly. “New blood vessels will grow from the abdomen into the wrist. Once they do — two or three weeks — we can reverse the procedure and detach the arm. Then we’ll take a flap of skin from the abdomen to cover the stump.” This time he didn’t flinch from the word.

If Carmen was taken aback by the news that her husband’s arm was now surgically grafted to his belly, she didn’t show it. She simply asked, “When can I see him?”

“He should be waking up soon. I can take you back to Recovery now.”

She nodded, hugged Miranda and me, and left with the surgeon.

On the drive back across the river to the stadium, my thoughts circled back to the idea I’d found so worrisome: the idea that Eddie had contrived to lose his hand, as a way of angling for a transplant. If the surgeon was right — if Eddie’s infection wasn’t caused by the deadly strain of microorganism that had killed Clarissa Lowe — my worry had been unfounded. That knowledge was a relief, but the relief was mixed with shame — shame at having suspected Eddie of recklessness and manipulation.

I also felt a fresh surge of sorrow and compassion. No matter how much moral integrity he might have, Eddie Garcia no longer possessed even a remnant of his hands.

CHAPTER 28

The marker at the head of the grave was a small, weather-stained slab of unpolished marble, far less ornate than Trey Willoughby’s monumental obelisk or even Pendergrast’s granite slab. The chiseled letters read, MISS ELIZABETH JENKINS, B. JAN. 22, 1916, D. OCT. 4, 2003. CARPE LIBRUM. The death date was within three days of Pendergrast’s and two days of Willoughby’s. DeVriess’s fishing expedition was expanding, but in very small outward ripples. In going back to the judge for additional exhumation orders, DeVriess had contended that mischief was clearly afoot at Ivy Mortuary in early October of 2003, and that the path of common sense and civil justice was to exhume other bodies from that same time period. His plan was to exhume other bodies buried by Ivy at that same time and then gradually work his way both forward and backward from there, in order to determine when the mischief had begun and when it had ended.

This time the television and newspaper reporters were already present, although Culpepper had corralled them into an area fifty feet away, behind a strand of yellow-and-black police tape.

Miss Jenkins — a former English teacher who’d lived and died alone — was buried in the simplest of steel coffins within a concrete vault. The coffin, like the headstone, had been purchased with donations from former students; the Latin inscription, Carpe librum, meant “Seize the book.” I groped at the foot of the coffin for the crank that would open the lid, then swiveled it outward and began turning it. “So,” I said, “predictions?”

“Four bags of sand,” Grease said.

“She’s a little old lady,” Miranda said. “Only two bags of sand.”

“Arms and legs, but no torso or head,” predicted Culpepper.

As the lid pivoted up, the tripods of the TV and newspaper photographers leaned against the police tape, straining to get a few inches closer to the graveside. The lid of the coffin blocked the cameras’ view of its interior, but it didn’t block their view of the four faces peering down in astonishment.

Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was a tiny, white-haired woman, her aged features well preserved, her wrinkled cheeks slightly rouged with mold.

And Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was wrapped in a macabre embrace with the rotting remains of a large human male. His left temporal bone — the oval of thin bone above the ear — had a one-inch circle punched in it, a blow delivered with enough force to drive the disk of bone deep into the brain.

* * *

“Not exactly the lovers of Valdaro,” commented Miranda as we extricated Miss Jenkins from the arms of her coffinmate. To escape the media circus, we’d loaded the coffin into my truck and taken it to the forensic center, tailed by a caravan of reporters. Culpepper had eventually dispersed them with the promise of a news conference and photos later in the day.

“The lovers of who?” asked Culpepper, clearly feeling squeamish.

“Not who,” Miranda corrected as I handed her one of the man’s arms. “Where. Valdaro. A village in northern Italy.” She laid the arm on an autopsy table we’d positioned beside the coffin. “Archaeologists excavated a pair of skeletons — a man and a woman — near Valdaro in 2007. They were buried together about five thousand years ago, wrapped in each other’s arms.”

“I remember that,” said Art, who’d already patted the two corpses with tape to collect stray hairs and fibers. “I saw something about it on Discovery or National Geographic. ‘The world’s longest hug,’ I think they called it. But didn’t somebody else dig up an even older couple someplace else just a few days later?”

“Dubious,” she answered. “Somebody did find an older pair of skeletons in Turkey — around nine thousand years old. But it’s not at all certain that those two were buried together. Could be just a case of commingling — mixed bones, one body dumped into the same patch of ground as another, maybe centuries apart. The Italian couple definitely had their arms wrapped around each other, though. Sweet, huh?”

“Very sweet,” I noted, “unless it was a double murder, or a murder-suicide.”

“Which this case could be,” offered Culpepper.

“Sure.” Miranda snorted. “Murder-suicide. Little Miss Jenkins whacks this big ol’ man upside the head, then takes a bottleful of sleeping pills and dies — but not before she embalms herself, climbs into the coffin, and hauls him in with her.”

“Okay, so maybe we can rule out murder-suicide,” Culpepper said sheepishly.

Unlike Trey Willoughby, whose lips were quite literally sealed, this man’s corpse was openmouthed; in fact, as I pulled gently downward on the lower jaw, so I could see the teeth, the mandible came loose in my hand. “Oh, man,” groaned Culpepper, turning away, “I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

Miranda and I studied the mandible, while Art fished around in the pockets of the dead man’s pants, which were greasy with fatty acids from the decaying corpse. Culpepper, still averting his eyes, asked, “So what’s the best way to ID him? Fillings? Bridgework? Dental X-rays?”

“We could go the forensic-dentistry route,” I said. “Means we’ll need to check with a lot of dentists once we chart his teeth.”

“Or we could go this route instead,” said Art, who had fished a wallet from the corpse’s left back pocket. Culpepper whirled around just as Art flipped opened the stained wallet and removed a driver’s license. “I believe we just found Kerry Roswell, our missing embalmer.”

&n