The Bone Thief (Body Farm 5)

After talking with Sinclair and Rankin, I felt the need for a more wholesome and pleasant experience, so I drove across the river to the Body Farm to check on Maurie Gershwin’s decomposition. As the weather had begun to warm, day by day, the pace of the anchorwoman’s decay had gradually accelerated. By now, some three weeks after her arrival, her eye orbits stared emptily at the camera and her cheekbones and chin jutted through the remnants of her face. Her blond hair had been stained a greasy gray by the volatile fatty acids leaching from her body, and her finger bones bore the fine tooth marks of small carnivores. I squatted beside her, studying her with interest and an odd sense of fondness — kinship, even. “It’s been a hard month,” I said to the vacant face. “For both of us.”

A few minutes later, so

mewhat restored, I headed to the UT Hospital cafeteria for a sandwich. In the lobby I passed a gray-haired, scrub-suited doctor who looked like he’d been on his feet for the past twenty years. He looked up as our paths crossed, and his face brightened, taking a decade off his age. When he smiled, I recognized him as Jim Yates, a cardiologist. “Bill Brockton,” he said, “your ears must be burning. I was just talking about you.”

“Uh-oh. Am I in trouble again?”

“Nothing we can’t fix with a new heart or a pig valve.” He laughed. “Actually, I have a patient who’s interested in taking up residence at the Body Farm. He’s in the cardiac-care unit, and he’s probably not long for this world. Have you got a minute?” I nodded, and he led me to an elevator and pushed the button for the floor that housed the CCU. “He’s got myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — and his right ventricle’s failing.”

“Can’t you get him a new heart?”

Yates shook his head. “There’s no time. He could have an arrhythmia and go into cardiac arrest at any moment. What would he need to sign to donate his body, and how could I get a hold of it for him?”

“Simple,” I said. “There’s a consent form he’d need to sign and have witnessed. I think it’s all of two or three sentences long. I can send it over in a campus-mail envelope if you want, or I can tell you how to find it on the Internet and print it out for him.”

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened on the cardiac floor. “You willing to step off long enough to show me?”

“Don’t you think that would make me look a little vulturish?”

Yates held the door and motioned me down the hall toward the nurses’ station. When we stepped behind the counter, a nurse — a heavyset African-American woman who looked to be in her late forties — glanced up. “Lord, Lord,” she said, “the vultures are circling.” I winced, but she and the cardiologist both guffawed.

Yates leaned over a computer and called up the hospital’s Web-access page. I sat down in the armless chair and rolled up to the keyboard. I’d never managed to remember all the slashes and periods in our Web site’s address, but I knew that if I searched for “tennessee forensic anthropology center body donation,” I’d be rewarded with a link to the donor form. Three mouse clicks later, I saw the words I’d seen thousands of times before: “I do hereby dispose of and give my body, after my death, to The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for use by the Department of Anthropology or its designee, for educational and research purposes. I request, authorize, and instruct my surviving spouse, next-of-kin, executor or the physician who certifies my death to notify The University of Tennessee, Department of Anthropology, immediately after my death of the availability of my body.” In a room under the stadium, a file drawer contained nearly two thousand of these forms, each signed and witnessed and awaiting the death and delivery of the donor’s body. In another, larger room, row upon row of metal shelves held almost a thousand boxed skeletons, the bones of donors who had already delivered on their promise.

I hit “print” and asked for three copies, and I was rewarded by the whir of the printer. “Done,” I announced over my shoulder to Dr. Yates, but he didn’t answer, and when I glanced around, he was gone. Puzzled, I looked at the nurse, who nodded wordlessly over the counter and down the hall. The cardiologist was emerging from a patient’s room. He caught my eye and beckoned to me.

“Bring that form, please, Bill,” he called, and I obliged, but when I realized what he had in mind, I flushed with self-consciousness and stopped halfway down the hall. He practically jogged toward me, this physician who’d looked dead on his feet just minutes before. “Don’t be shy,” he said. “When I told him you were out here, he was so pleased. He actually smiled, this dying man. It would mean a lot to him to meet you.”

Slumping, I allowed him to steer me into the room.

“Mr. Miller, this Dr. Brockton. Dr. Brockton, Ernest Miller.”

The man in the bed frowned at me. “Doesn’t take the vultures long to gather, does it?”

Aghast, I opened my mouth to apologize, when he gave me a weak smile.

“He told me to say that,” he said, glancing at Yates. “He was right — he said it would make you jump.”

I looked at Yates, prepared to squawk, but he was exchanging smiles with his patient, and I realized I didn’t mind being the butt of the prank.

“Good one,” I said. “Y’all got me.” I thought about adding, My truck is parked downstairs by the morgue, if you want me to haul you on over there tonight, but I decided that might be pushing the joke too far. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Miller. Do you have any questions I could answer?”

Dr. Yates excused himself and left us alone.

“I’m pretty clear on the concept,” he said. “That cute news gal — Maurie — she did some stories on the Body Farm a while back. I meant to sign up then, but I got sidetracked and forgot. If I’m gonna do it, I reckon it’s now or never.” He held out his hand for the donor form. It didn’t take him long to read it. “Seems pretty straightforward. Can I borrow your pen?” He scrawled his signature, then glanced at the form again. “Could you witness it for me?”

“I’d be honored,” I said, “if you’re sure this is what you want to do. I wouldn’t want you to feel any pressure, though.” A thought occurred to me. Miller appeared to be in his early fifties — somewhere around my age. Young fellow, I joked to myself. I guessed his height to be somewhere around five-nine, give or take an inch: roughly the same stature and build as Eddie Garcia. I cast a quick glance at his hands. “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Miller, do you plan to donate your organs?”

“Does that affect whether I can go to the Body Farm?”

“Not at all,” I said. “If your organs have been harvested, we can’t use you for a research project, but we can still add you to our skeletal collection. Measurements of your bones will help keep our forensic data bank up to date. And we want as many teaching specimens as we can get. Donating your organs wouldn’t interfere with either of those things, and it might help some people who need corneas or kidneys. Or hands.” I hesitated, choosing my words more carefully than I wished, but probably not as carefully as I should have. “Oddly enough, I know a man who needs hands. Dr. Edelberto Garcia. Maybe you’ve heard about him; he’s the medical examiner here, and he lost his hands in a terrible accident a few months ago.”

Miller was listening, so I plunged ahead.

“Dr. Garcia’s a few years younger than you,” I went on. “He grew up in Mexico City, but he came to this country for his medical residency. He’s soft-spoken, a bit quiet. When I first met him, I thought he was standoffish, but once I got to know him, I realized he was just shy. That surprised me, that a man as smart and handsome and successful as Dr. Garcia — a man with a fine education and a prestigious job and a beautiful wife and a lovely child — felt any need to be shy.” I stopped, knowing that if I kept talking, my next sentence would be a direct request that Miller donate his hands. The request would be only natural and thoroughly unethical.

As if seeing the unspoken request in my eyes, Miller shook his head. “I don’t mind being eaten by the bugs,” he said, “but I don’t want to be chopped up for spare parts.”

I fought the urge to speak — to plead on Eddie’s behalf — and managed to stop myself. Miller was watching me closely. He shook his head again, more slowly this time, and I wondered if he was shaking it about organ donation or about me. “You can have me if you want me,” he said, “but if you take me, I want you to take all of me.” He handed me back the form.

We talked a bit more — mostly about his daughter in Kentucky, who was coming to see him soon — and then I thanked him and took my leave. As I stepped into the hallway, I glanced down at the Body Farm form he’d signed. I found myself thinking how easy it would be to forge a similar signature on an organ-donor form. After all, I was falsifying documents for the FBI and for Ray Sinclair. Wasn’t Eddie Garcia equally worthy of my duplicity?

CHAPTER 38

Peggy gave me a sidelong, inquisitive look as she handed me the manila envelope. “This just arrived by courier for you,” she said. “Must be important.”

The envelope bore a label printed with the words DR. BILL BROCKTON, PH.D., DABFA, in inch-high letters on the first line. Underneath, in equally large type, were the words PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. The third line, in slightly smaller type, read, TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY.

There was no return address on the label. I flipped the envelope to see if the other side provided any clue about the sender or the contents, but all I found there was another label, identical to the first, and a strip of mailing tape sealing the flap. Could it be something else from Isabella? I exited the departmental office without opening the envelope, leaving both Peggy and myself in a state of suspense.

When I got to my private office at the other end of the stadium, I closed the door and locked it — something I could never remember having done before. I took a letter opener from the desk drawer and slit the top of the envelope, bypassing the tightly taped flap altogether. Just as I was about to reach inside, I remembered Jim Emert’s disappointment when he learned that I’d handled the origami crane Isabella had mailed me. I laid the envelope down long enough to don a pair of latex gloves, then picked it up again and carefully slid the thin sheaf of pages onto the desk.

The top page was a two-line note, printed in the same font as the envelope’s label. “Let’s talk risks and benefits,” read the top line, and it told me that the envelope had come not from Isabella but from Raymond Sinclair. I was puzzled by the second line—“You look like a man with a stiff overdue fine”—but only until I flipped to the next page in the stack. Then I was overcome by a wave of dizziness and nausea. The rest of the pages were photographs, and they showed a young woman stripping off her clothes — a white blouse and a tight gray skirt — and dancing naked in front of a middle-aged professor sitting on a sofa. The professor’s face changed from photo to photo, moving from shock and dismay through a series of more complicated and conflicted expressions, ones it disturbed me to see. As I studied the sequence, I remembered the night not that long ago when I’d studied my face in the mirror, the night after I placed Maurie Gershwin on the ground at the Body Farm and began photographing the sequence of changes in her face.