The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  “That would be Miranda’s department,” I said. “I’d be as slow as you.” As soon as I heard the words, I wished I could reel them back in, but when Miranda snorted and Garcia laughed softly, I relaxed.

  Miranda moved to a rolling stool parked in front of the computer. As she swiveled into position in front of the keyboard, she made a big show of interlacing her fingers and cracking her knuckles. Then she rubbed her hands briskly together and wiggled her fingers rapidly. “At your service. What’s your wish?”

  “Let’s start with toe-to-thumb transplants,” he answered. Miranda’s fingers clattered rapidly over the keyboard.

  “Wow, look at that,” she said. “Over a hundred thousand hits. Who knew that was such a hot topic?”

  “This one.” He pointed with his pinkie to one of the search results. “Click on that, please.”

  Miranda used the mouse to highlight the link. As it loaded, she remarked, “You know, Eddie, if you replaced this clunky desktop computer with a laptop, you might get pretty good with the touch pad.”

  Before he had time to respond, the page finished loading and a television news story began to play. The footage showed a teenage boy — a New Jersey fourteen-year-old — who’d lost his thumb and first two fingers in a fireworks accident. A close-up showed the damage to the boy’s right hand, which looked almost exactly like Garcia’s right hand. Five months after the injury, a Philadelphia hand surgeon removed the second toe from the boy’s right foot — the toe Miranda liked to call the “index toe”—and fashioned a new thumb from it. “The structures line up very well,” explained the surgeon on camera. “You have two major nerves, you have a major blood vessel, you have similar tendons. The circumference is very similar.” In the story’s “after” images, the gap created by the missing index finger and middle finger remained quite prominent, but the reconstructed right thumb was a virtual mirror image of the boy’s undamaged left thumb.

  “Cool,” Miranda commented. “Very cool. That would give you back an opposable grip on your right hand.”

  Garcia pointed her through a quick series of articles about toe-to-thumb transplants. The procedure might not qualify as “routine”—complex microsurgery was required to stitch together the network of delicate blood vessels and nerves — but it had been performed hundreds of times during the past few decades, with a success rate of well over 90 percent.

  “Let’s change the search,” he said. “See what you find using ‘myoelectric prosthesis’ and ‘bionic hand’ as search terms.” The technical term — a reference to the use of electrical impulses from muscles in the arm to trigger electric switches and motors in an artificial hand — produced about a hundred thousand hits. The much catchier “bionic hand” yielded over three hundred thousand, including thumbnail-size photos and sketches. Miranda clicked on one of the images, a robotic-looking prosthesis called the i-Hand.

  Miranda leaned closer to the monitor. “Ooh, that’s kinda sexy,” she remarked, studying the photo. The i-Hand’s fingers were formed of pale white plastic, translucent enough to reveal bonelike metal rods in the fingers, as well as hinges and tiny motors. According to several articles, the i-Hand was the first prosthetic hand to faithfully mirror the structures and movements of the human hand. One video clip showed a young woman with an i-Hand lifting bags of groceries, picking up a set of car keys, and typing on a computer keyboard. Her bionic hand was covered with a flesh-toned “skin” of rubber. “I like it better without the skin.” Miranda frowned. “Much more futuristic-looking.”

  “Yes,” Garcia agreed, “very Luke Skywalker. But I suspect that the rubber provides a better grip than the hard plastic. It probably also protects the mechanism from things that could damage it. Dirt. Sharp edges. Coca-Cola.”

  “Embalming fluid,” I added, thinking of the body we’d just examined. “Blood.”

  “Oh, fine,” Miranda retorted with mock indignation. “Go ahead, rain on my style parade, see if I care.” She wiggled the fingers of one hand, then folded all of them except her middle finger. “I assume the i-Hand is capable of making this gesture, with or without the skin.” Garcia asked her to bookmark several of the i-Hand links, then asked if she’d search one more topic. “Sure,” she replied. “What?”

  “Total hand transplantation.” He said it quietly, but I heard an edge of hope and anxiety in his voice that I hadn’t heard earlier, when he’d asked for the other searches.

  Miranda’s fingers clattered. “Wow,” she breathed, “almost a million hits.” Garcia had her call up only a few of the million, but those were enough to confirm my prior impressions. Hand-transplant surgery was relatively new; the first total transplant had been attempted in Ecuador in 1964, but it didn’t work, and the procedure had been attempted only a few more times until the late 1990s. Even now it remained incredibly rare — so far, fewer than fifty hand transplants had been performed in the entire world. The surgery was extraordinarily complex, requiring surgeons to connect dozens of nerves, tendons, veins, arteries, and muscles. The operation was both an intricately choreographed ballet and a brutal test of endurance, requiring delicate, nonstop work for twelve to sixteen hours. Even if the surgery itself went perfectly, the long-term outcome was far from certain. To keep their immune systems from rejecting the transplants, recipients had to take immunosuppressants — drugs to weaken their immune systems — for the rest of their lives, and the immunosuppressants increased their vulnerability to diseases.

  Total hand transplantation looked like a medical miracle, no doubt about it. But I couldn’t help thinking how much riskier it looked than either the toe-to-thumb reconstruction or the prosthesis.

  “It’s a big risk,” Garcia said, as if hearing my thoughts. “But it would be worth taking a big risk to have real hands again.”

  His words stayed with me long after I drove back to the stadium and Miranda had wheeled him back upstairs to become the hand-trauma case in 718 once more.

  CHAPTER 7

  I gritted my teeth as I pulled into the parking lot in Farragut, the suburb to the west of Knoxville. I was headed for my spring dental cleaning, and like most people, I tended to be nervous about it. I would much rather be using my lunch hour to eat lunch than to have my teeth probed and scoured. “Sorry I’m late,” I said to Barbara, the dentist’s silver-haired office manager. “I just came from an autopsy. I figured y’all would appreciate it if I took the time to wash my hands afterwards.”

  “You figured right,” she said. “Anyhow, Reuben’s running a few minutes behind. How’re you doing today?” Barbara wasn’t just Dr. Pelot’s office manager. She was also his wife — and she was a Knoxville City Councilwoman, representing the city’s West Hills district.

  “Dentally speaking, I’m fine,” I answered, “unless your husband tells me I’m not flossing often enough. Professionally, though, I’ve got a big cavity forming in the Body Farm’s budget, and I don’t know how to fill it. I don’t suppose the city’s got any pots of money sitting around that could be tapped for educational purposes?”

  She frowned. “Let me think about that,” she mused, then she laughed. “The first thing that comes to mind is the Blighted Properties Redevelopment Program.”

  I laughed, too. “Well, ‘blighted’ does seem to be a shoe that fits the Body Farm. Truth is, ‘blighted’ would actually be a pretty charitable description of our residents.”

  She shook her head. “Unfortunately,” she went on, “that money’s all spent. Tell you what. City Council meets every Tuesday. At next week’s meeting, I’ll ask the Development staff if there’s any way we could scrape up some funding for you.”

  I thanked her and took my seat in the waiting room. Forty minutes later, my teeth scoured slick and my flossing pronounced satisfactory, I headed back to UT, hoping that Barbara and the City Council might find a few thousand dollars to offset UT’s belt-tightening.

  I stopped by the Anthropology Department’s administrative offices just long enough to retrieve a few messages from my sec
retary, Peggy. Then I’d retreated to this office — my private, preferred office at the far end of the stadium — to concentrate. This spring I was teaching Introduction to Forensic Anthropology, an upper-level undergraduate course, and I had thirty test papers to grade by tomorrow morning. Tucked beneath the north end-zone grandstands of Neyland Stadium, my sanctuary was a football field away, literally, from the constant distractions of the administrative office. But the hydraulic mechanism in the stairwell door had broken recently, and every time someone opened the door, it crashed into the concrete wall.

  After six or eight crashes, I’d stopped cursing, and after a couple dozen I’d called the maintenance department to report the faulty door. Shortly after a window-rattling impact, Gary Culpepper appeared in the doorway.

  “Hello, Detective. I hadn’t expected to see you again today.” I had just poured a large bag of M&M’s into a one-liter glass beaker. Plucking out one for myself — red, my favorite — I offered the beaker to Culpepper. “M&M?”

  He held up a hand by way of declining. “Doesn’t mix well with the gum,” he smacked. “Besides, I’m a little off my feed since this morning’s session in the morgue.”

  “Feeling a bit squeamish?” He nodded sheepishly, and I laughed. “The last time I was in the morgue with Dr. Garcia, a detective from Oak Ridge was in there with us. First he threw up on me, then he fainted. You, by comparison, held up brilliantly.”

  “That Oak Ridge case,” he said, “that’s the one that injured Dr. Garcia, right? Where the woman murdered the old guy by slipping a radioactive pellet into his vitamin pills?”

  I nodded. “He was a retired physicist — an atomic scientist. He died within hours after swallowing the pill.”

  “And Dr. Garcia’s hands got cooked during the autopsy?”

  I nodded again.

  “What was the scientist’s name?”

  “Novak. Dr. Leonard Novak. He played a key role in the Manhattan Project during World War II. Dr. Garcia found the pellet in Novak’s intestine. He held it for less than a minute, but that was enough to destroy his hands.”

  Culpepper shook his head. “Damn shame.”

  “It was — still is — but it could’ve been even worse. Garcia nearly died. Miranda got some burns on her fingertips, too, but not serious. Garcia’s borne up pretty well, considering, but what a blow.” I thought of his wife and child, Carmen and Tomás, whom he could not hold again in the same way. “Hard on the whole family.”

  “I don’t get it, Doc. I mean, why single out one guy from the whole atom-bomb project? And why not just shoot him or stab him?”

  I agreed that it was arbitrary to wreak vengeance on one scientist, but I did see the symbolism behind choosing radioactivity as the murder weapon.

  “The killer was a Japanese-American librarian, right?” I nodded. “For chrissakes, why couldn’t she have beaten him to death with the Encyclopaedia Britannica? What kind of wacko would use radiation? She could’ve killed or hurt dozens of people.”

  His comment pressed a bruised spot in me. “She was deeply disturbed,” I acknowledged. “She was trying to settle Japan’s score with the U.S. over the atomic bomb. Sounds crazy, I know, but that was how she saw it. And she got pulled under by it — she went off the deep end — and she took some other folks with her.” I looked away from Culpepper, out through the grimy windows of my office. What I saw with my eyes was a spiderwork of filthy steel girders, the supports for the hundred thousand stadium seats and the plush skyboxes overhead. But what I saw in my mind was Isabella Arakawa Morgan, who’d purposely killed an old man and accidentally maimed a young physician. Isabella, who’d helped me research and solve a sixty-year-old murder in Oak Ridge, one that had been mysteriously connected to the creation of the atomic bomb. Isabella, who’d come to my house one night and made love to me. Isabella, whom I’d confronted when I realized what she’d done. Isabella, who’d run from me when I did, disappearing into the underground maze of Oak Ridge’s labyrinthine storm sewers.

  I looked back at Culpepper, who was studying my face closely. I realized that I had no notion of how long I’d stared out through the dusty pane and the dirty girders. Had it been a few seconds or many minutes? “Sorry, Detective. I seem to have spaced out on you there. Ghosts.”

  “I understand, Doc,” he said. “I get blindsided by one every now and then, too. My first year on the force, there was this kid — a six-year-old girl — who’d be alive today if I’d been a little smarter, a little quicker. She’d be seventeen now, and I’d probably never think of her. But she’s not seventeen and alive — she’s six and she’s dead. Always six, always dead, and often on my mind.”

  “I’m sure there are other people who are alive because of you. Don’t forget to think about those.”

  “Funny thing,” he said. “Those are harder to remember than the ones who aren’t alive.” He shrugged and turned his palms up. Maybe the gesture was expressing helplessness, maybe acceptance. Maybe both. “So I remembered something I should’ve asked you this morning at the morgue — an old case of yours. You worked a dismemberment case some years ago, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve worked several, actually,” I said, “but only one here in Knoxville. Ten or twelve years ago? No, longer — fifteen years, maybe more.”

  “Any similarities to this one? I mean, besides the fact that the victim was cut up? Any chance it was the work of the same killer?”

  “Let’s take a look at the file.” I got up and crossed to an ancient four-drawer filing cabinet that stood beside an interior doorway. The olive drab cabinet, chin high, nearly blocked the doorway, which led to the collection: the series of adjoining rooms where nearly a thousand skeletons were neatly boxed and shelved.

  Tugging open the balky top drawer — the top left corner of the cabinet had been dented years ago, possibly around the time I was born, and the drawer had an annoying tendency to stick — I took out a manila file folder at the front. The folder contained a listing of all the forensic cases the Anthropology Department had assisted with, arranged chronologically and with a brief description after the case number. Beside case 93–17—the seventeenth forensic case of 1993 (because it was a criminal case, not a donated body, the year was the first number in the pair) — was the notation “Dismemberment/mutilation of male victim.” Squatting down, I slid open the lowest drawer of the cabinet and removed the case file, taking it to my desk. Besides my forensic report to KPD and the district attorney’s office, the file contained brittle newspaper clippings about the case. The grisly crime and the sensational trial had made front-page headlines off and on for weeks: HUMAN BODY PARTS TOSSED IN DUMPSTERS. VICTIM’S SEVERED HEAD FOUND IN DITCH. SUSPECT ARRESTED IN DISMEMBERMENT CASE. LOVE TRIANGLE MOTIVATED MUTILATION. DUMPSTER KILLER SENTENCED TO LIFE.

  The file confirmed my memory of the case. “That was a crime of passion,” I said. “A stabbing, followed by a crude mutilation of the corpse. Partly a clumsy attempt to dispose of the body, but partly a chance to add postmortem insult to injury. Stab a guy to death, then stab him some more, then hack him to pieces. It sends a message: ‘Mere murder’s way too good for this guy.’”

  I passed the file to Culpepper, who flipped through it wordlessly until he got to the photos of the severed body parts. “Yuck. This stuff makes Willoughby’s body look pretty damn good.”

  “Doesn’t it? As you can see, the cases are very different. Willoughby died of natural causes, and his arms and legs were cleanly amputated, not hacked off. Nothing personal about that. Hell, if it weren’t for the paternity suit, the dismemberment wouldn’t have been discovered,” I said. Culpepper was nodding glumly. “Anyhow, the Dumpster killer was in prison when Willoughby was buried, so he’s got a pretty good alibi.”

  Culpepper frowned. “Figures,” he sighed. “Not my first dead end of the day either. I followed up on the people working at Ivy Mortuary. The former owner, Elmer Ivy, died in 2005, the office manager got married and changed her name and moved who-knows-where, and nob
ody knows a damn thing about the embalmer who was working there in 2003.”

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” I said.

  “Sick what?”

  “Sic transit gloria mundi. Latin. ‘Thus passes the glory of the world,’ I think is how it translates. A highfalutin way of saying, ‘We’re nothing but dust in the wind.’ Most of us leave fainter tracks than we’d like to believe. Doesn’t take long for them to get covered over or swept away.” I thought for a moment. “I know somebody who would probably be able to tell you more about Ivy Mortuary. Helen Taylor. She runs East Tennessee Cremation Services, a crematorium out near the airport. She’s sharp and first-rate, and she’s done business with all the funeral homes in the area. I’d be surprised if she didn’t remember who worked at Ivy Mortuary seven years ago.” I flipped through my Rolodex and jotted down her name and number.

  The card tucked behind Helen Taylor’s was sticking up slightly higher than hers, and out of curiosity I flipped to it. It bore the distinctive gold-and-blue logo of the FBI and the name “Special Agent Charles Thornton.” Underneath his name were the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.” Seeing his card, so close on the heels of my conversation about the Oak Ridge case, spooked me all over again. Did all roads — all tracks — lead me back to Isabella?

  The stairwell door slammed again, jarring me back to the present and to Culpepper once more. I took another M&M from the beaker — green this time. Culpepper reached in and took one as well, a yellow. “Okay, I gotta go.” He raised the M&M as if it were a tiny drink and he were proposing a toast. “To finding the tracks before they’re swept away.” Then he tossed the candy straight up, catching it in his mouth as it arced down. “And to not going off the deep end.”