The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

Sinclair turned to me. “Got a minute before you hit the road?”

“Sure.” I unlocked the truck and nodded at the passenger door. “Step into my office.”

We got in and closed the doors. “What’d you think of the training?”

“Fascinating,” I said. “I had no idea it was possible to put on something like that in a hotel ballroom. And the microsurgery was remarkable. I don’t see how they make such tiny stitches by hand, even with the image magnified by the scope.” A question occurred to me. “What’d you tell the surgeons about where the arms came from?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. They’d rather not know. They realize that material’s hard to come by, so they’re grateful to pony up the cost of the training and keep their consciences clear.”

Lucky them, I thought.

“Couldn’t’ve done it without you, Bill. Here you go.” He handed me a thick manila envelope, which he’d brought down in the elevator with him. I’d been dreading this moment ever since I saw him take the envelope from a briefcase. “There’s a five-hundred-dollar honorarium check in there, in case you need something legit to show the accountants. And twenty grand in cash.” He grinned. “Don’t blow it all on booze and strippers.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I laid the envelope on the console between us, hoping the recorder and the video camera were successfully capturing the transaction. “And thanks for the opportunity.”

“Let’s hope it’s the first of many. So now it’s out to the Body Farm with these arms?”

I nodded.

“Man, I hate to picture all that perfectly good tissue rotting on the ground. Sure you don’t want to leave it with me?”

“Can’t,” I said. “Any skeleton we add to the collection needs to be complete, unless the donor lost a limb during life. The skeleton needs to match the donor’s medical-history file.”

“Sure, I get it,” he answered. “Sort of an all-or-nothing deal — none of the bones or all of the bones?”

“Right.”

“Speaking of that,” he said, “I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned that morning in Vegas. You said you’re long on bodies, short on space. You ever turn down donations?”

“Haven’t yet,” I answered. “Well, except in cases where the donor had HIV or hepatitis — we can’t risk exposing students to that. Otherwise we take all comers.” I paused for half a beat. “But frankly, that could be about to change. If the university doesn’t come up with some more land for us, we might have to start turning people away soon.”

“Hey, we’d be glad to help. Any bodies you can’t accommodate, we’d be glad to take ’em off your hands.”

I shook my head. “Not that simple,” I said. “When bodies are donated to UT, they become state property. The bean counters wouldn’t want us giving away state property.”

He drummed his fingers on the dash, then looked me in the eye. “What if the bean counters didn’t know?”

Make him spell out what he wants you to do, Rankin had stressed. I returned Sinclair’s gaze. “How do you mean? What do you suggest?”

“What if a body was never logged in, or whatever you call it, in the first place?”

I rubbed my chin; the simple roughness of the stubble felt comforting against my hand.

“Or what if you wrote it off as a loss somehow? You do all sorts of experiments, right?”

I nodded.

“So come up with some creative research, some destructive testing. Put a note in the inventory database or the files or wherever—‘body destroyed’ or some such.”

“So what good does the body do you if I destroy it?”

“Jesus, Bill, you’ve got a Ph.D., don’t be a dumb-ass. You don’t actually destroy the body, you just say you did. Creative accounting.”

“And then what?”

“You send it to Tissue Sciences. It helps train surgeons, repair tendons, rebuild spines, all sorts of good things.”

“Sounds great,” I said, “but unless I misunderstand you, you’re asking me to falsify records and steal state property. Tell me why I should take those risks. To borrow a phrase from your Las Vegas presentation, let’s talk financial incentives.”

“How about ten thousand a body? Would that be sufficient incentive?”

“I’ll need to think about it,” I said. “I feel a little like a peasant selling a kidney. If things go wrong, they can go really wrong. What’s the fair-market rate for kidneys in Pakistan?”

“Twenty grand and some change.” He said it quickly and matter-of-factly, like a man who had firsthand knowledge of the subject. “But you don’t look like you’ve got starving kids. And I’m not asking you to sell part of your own body.”

“No. You’re asking me to sell part of my soul.”

He tapped the manila envelope. “You already did.” He smiled slightly, then got out of the truck, closed the door, and walked away.

* * *

Sundown found me heading west on I-40, driving into the sun for the second time that day. The ice in the coolers had begun to melt. As I entered the serpentine stretch through the mountains, I could hear the ice and water and arms — the laid-open, tinkered-on, stitched-up arms — sloshing with each sway of the truck. And every slosh seemed the hiss of a serpent.

CHAPTER 33

I was still way behind on my sleep and way ahead on my stress Monday morning as I prepared to teach my ten o’clock Intro to Forensic Anthropology class. The topic of the day was forensic odontology: making positive identifications on the basis of unique features in teeth. The CSI-viewing public tended to regard DNA testing as far superior to any other method of identification, but I still considered dental records a powerful and often far faster means of identification.

I’d chosen three cases to illustrate the point. The first involved a missing toddler, a two-year-old girl who disappeared one night while her uncle was babysitting. Eight months after she vanished, a pair of hunters found a small skull in a nearby stream beside a cow pasture. The skull was missing most of its teeth, but when I went to the scene and sifted the sands of the streambed, like a prospector panning for gold, I managed to find most of the teeth that had fallen from the skull. The missing two-year-old had never been to the dentist, so there were no dental records for comparison. There was, however, a photograph: a snapshot showing the girl grinning at the camera. And in her grin I glimpsed distinctive notches at the corners of her four upper incisors — unique, identifying notches that matched the teeth I’d found.

The second case was the murder of a state police officer, gunned down in his driveway late one night after he finished his shift on duty. Investigators suspected he’d been shot by his brother-in-law, but the only evidence linking the suspect to the crime was a wooden cigar tip, found in the grass near the death scene. The tip bore deep indentations — bite marks — which meshed perfectly, it turned out, with the teeth of the suspect.

The third case gave me a pang as I reviewed it. The murder victim was a sixteen-year-old Japanese-American girl — a smart, pretty girl — who was abducted, raped, and bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. I identified her by comparing the teeth of the skeletonized remains with the dental records of the missing teenager. The first hint that the records would match the teeth came when I inspected an incisor found in the woods at the death scene. The tooth had the scooped-out, shovel-shaped cross section that typified Asian incisors, just as I imagined Isabella’s had.

I was flashing through the slides of this third case when Miranda rapped on the open door and strode into my office, demanding, “What in the world are you doing?”

“I’m looking at the slides I’m about to show to my ten o’clock class,” I said, startled by her vehemence.

“I am not talking about those slides,” she snapped. “I’m talking about what happened to those ten bodies over the weekend.”

One thing I’d wrestled with on the drive back from Asheville was

how I’d explain the ten mangled bodies and twenty stitched-up arms I’d parked in the cooler at the forensic center. “I told you I was doing a research project,” I began.

“Research? That’s not research. That’s butchery. Butchery. What the hell, Dr. B.?”