The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  “I mean yeah, I know.”

  “You know? How the hell do you know?”

  “He just called me. Right after he called Carmen.”

  “He called Carmen? He didn’t go home when he checked out?”

  “No. He called from the car. He was in Chattanooga.”

  “Chattanooga? What’s he doing in Chattanooga?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “Just passing through on the way to where?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta? Why the hell’s he going to Atlanta? He’s still recovering from surgery. And how come he’s being all cloak-and-daggerish?”

  “He’s got an appointment at Emory. I guess he’s nervous about it. Maybe he didn’t want anybody to try to talk him out of it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise people’s hopes about it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise his own hopes.”

  “What hopes?”

  “His hopes for a total hand transplant. Emory has a new hand-transplant center, and they’re looking for their first patient. They’ve agreed to evaluate Eddie as a candidate.”

  CHAPTER 31

  For a bird or a plane or Superman, Asheville was seventy-five straight-line miles to the east of Knoxville. I was no Superman, unfortunately. I was an earthbound anthropologist with a truckload of amputated arms, and by road Asheville was forty miles farther than by air — forty twisting, turning, up-and-down miles across the backbone of the Appalachians. For much of the mountainous route, the interstate followed the gorge of the Pigeon River as it tumbled out of the mountains, and normally I enjoyed the rugged terrain and the demanding drive. Today, though, I might as well have been passing through blighted industrial wasteland, for all the attention I paid to the passing scenery. I’d glanced at the hydroelectric plant perched beside the Pigeon at the Tennessee-Carolina border, but everything since had passed unnoticed. Luckily, at daybreak on a Sunday morning, my truck was practically the only vehicle meandering this stretch of I-40.

  My attention deficit had two causes: I was deeply distressed, and I was seriously sleep-deprived. But there were causes within causes. When I’d agreed to help the FBI, I hadn’t anticipated how painful it would be to play the role of a greedy broker of body parts. I’d taken it on for worthy reasons, but inside the mask and the costume of corruptibility I’d donned, my soul’s skin was itching and burning. Every interaction with Miranda now felt strained, and I deeply missed the easy collegiality and playful banter we’d shared for years.

  I also grieved for the rift with Jeff. We’d not spoken since the night he walked out on me, the night I’d told him about Isabella and the likelihood that she was pregnant. I’d left several voice mails for him. I’d also spoken with Jenny, his wife, who — kindly but matter-of-factly — told me that this was a problem only Jeff and I could work out.

  Isabella, too, was weighing heavily on me. Where was she? Was she indeed pregnant? What would it mean to father a child with a fugitive, a killer, a woman I’d totally misjudged? How had I been so blind? Would I be able to trust a woman fully — or trust myself — ever again? These worries swirled through my weary mind like dry leaves in some corner of a courtyard, seized by the hand of an unseen whirlwind that lifted them, spun them into a frenzy, and dropped them through its fingers into a lifeless heap.

  My sleep deprivation was simpler: I’d just stayed up all night hauling bodies to the CT scanner and back, then amputating twenty arms. Over the past three weeks, I’d stockpiled ten bodies in the makeshift facility called the Annex, a corrugated metal building located a stone’s throw from the stadium. The Annex contained a processing room for cleaning skeletal material, but we rarely used it anymore now that we had far better facilities in the Regional Forensic Center at the hospital. The Annex also contained a dozen chest-type freezers, most of which I’d filled as the ten bodies arrived. On Thursday I’d taken the bodies out to thaw, and I’d spent Saturday evening ferrying the still-chilly corpses across the river to the CT scanner, then back again. Except for the fact that I was hauling the bodies in a GMC pickup and delivering them to a high-tech scanner, I could have been Charon, the boatman from Greek mythology, ferrying the dead across the river Styx to the underworld.

  I’d done the transporting myself, rather than have Miranda do it, because I didn’t want to involve her in this — and because I didn’t want to incur any more of her suspicion and disapproval than I already had. I’d also paid Eric, the scanning technician, the ruinous rate of three hundred dollars, from my own pocket, since I was taking six hours out of his Saturday night. It would have been far simpler to skip the scans of these ten and just begin the scanning project with all subsequent donated bodies, but I felt I owed it to the research project — to Glen Faust and OrthoMedica and to the dead donors themselves — to secure the scans before severing the arms. Finally, at 2:00 A.M. — an hour when I was sure I wouldn’t have an audience in the Annex — I’d begun to cut.

  Slicing into the first one, I’d felt slightly tentative. I didn’t want to damage any bones, since they’d all end up in the skeletal collection, so I worked my way cautiously down through the muscles and tendons and ligaments linking the arms to the shoulders: the deltoid and teres major muscles, the four interwoven muscles of the rotator cuff, and the ligaments that helped secure the head of the humerus within the recesses of the scapula. I was grateful that I was removing arms, not legs; tucked deep within the acetabulum, the socket of the hip joint, was a ligament that was difficult to cut without gouging the bone.

  By the third corpse, I’d found a rhythm, and by the fifth I was slicing as swiftly and ruthlessly as a butcher. Still, it had been a long, tense night, and by the time I’d finished packing the arms in five ice chests and wrestling the coolers into the truck, I was spent. After a quick shower at my office, I’d donned khakis and a button-down shirt, along with the digital recorder and a new video camera from Rankin, this one concealed in a fat fountain pen in my pocket — a pen whose gold clip was adorned with a small disk of “onyx,” just like the tie clip I’d worn in Las Vegas. I merged onto I-40 East just as the Sunday sun was rising. Now — winding my way through the mountains toward Asheville — I felt fatigue replacing anxiety as my main problem.

  I was startled out of my fog by the electronic whoop of a siren. Checking the side mirror, I was dismayed to see a North Carolina highway patrol cruiser close behind me. I put on my blinker and eased to the shoulder, hoping — though my hope didn’t last long — that he would swing around me and accelerate away.

  As the trooper approached, I rolled down the window. Above his left shirt pocket, he wore a brass nameplate that read OFFICER HARRINGTON. “Good morning, Officer Harrington. Did I do something wrong?”

  “Sir, I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

  “Certainly.” I pulled my Tennessee driver’s license from my wallet and removed the paperwork from a small leather notebook I kept in the glove box. I also unclipped my Tennessee Bureau of Investigation consultant’s badge from my belt and handed it to him along with the other things. “Just so you know, I’m considered one of the good guys over on the other side of the mountains,” I said.

  He looked surprised when he saw the TBI shield. “Mr. Brockton, do you know why I stopped you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” I confessed.

  “I’ve been following you for the last five miles,” he said. “Were you aware of that?” I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know that either. “You’ve been driving very erratically. Slowing down, speeding up, drifting between the lanes. Have you been drinking, Mr. Brockton?”

  “No. I don’t drink. Ever.”

  “Are you sleepy?”

  “Not really. I’m tired, but not particularly sleepy. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I guess I was just really distracted.”

  “This is a dangerous stretch of road for that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll pay better attention.”

  “That’d be a good
idea. If you would sit tight for just a moment, Mr. Brockton, I need to call in a routine check on your license and registration. Do you have any recent citations that you know of?”

  “None. I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”

  “Never?”

  I shook my head.

  He smiled. “Congratulations. That’s rare. Sit tight — I’ll be right back.” He turned and started back toward the cruiser, then stopped. He peered through the window of the shell covering the back of the truck, then turned to me. “Mr. Brockton?”

  “Yes, Officer?”

  “You’ve got a lot of coolers in your truck. What’s in ’em?”

  My heart caught in my throat. “Specimens,” I said. “Biological specimens.”

  “Specimens of what?”

  * * *

  I sat locked in the back of the cruiser for what seemed an eternity while Harrington explored the possibility that I was a chain-saw-happy serial killer. He talked on the radio to his dispatcher, the dispatcher’s supervisor, and the day-shift captain. Within seconds after Harrington had politely asked me to open one of the coolers, he’d drawn his gun and put me in the back of the car. Minutes later a second cruiser, lights strobing and siren screaming, screeched to a stop behind us, followed shortly by a third. The three troopers huddled at the back of my truck, chatting and shaking their heads in disbelief, raising the lid of the cooler repeatedly to confirm that yes, it really did contain four amputated human arms, nestled in the ice like fresh-caught fish, their tail fins replaced by fingers. The troopers’ roadside huddle was periodically interrupted by radio consultations, not just with Harrington’s supervisors but also with various officials of the state’s hazardous-materials office and — last but not least — the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

  I’d tried suggesting he call the TBI first, since I was pretty sure they’d vouch for my current standing (or at least my recent past) as a law-abiding, crime-solving consultant and professor. If I’d had the good fortune to be pulled over in Tennessee rather than North Carolina, I’d have been on my way within five minutes, I felt sure, but here in Carolina nobody knew me, so it was a thornier problem. I’d considered asking the trooper to call Ben Rankin at the FBI, but I quickly rejected that idea. Getting Rankin to rescue me from the North Carolina state police might save me some time and embarrassment in the short run, but it would compromise the secrecy of the sting. So instead I sat and chafed in the back of the police car while Harrington proved himself to be a thorough, dutiful cop, the sort who went by the book and worked things up the chain of command.

  I’d noticed a pair of black Ford sedans cruise by, equipped with the radio antennas characteristic of law-enforcement vehicles. How ironic, I thought. I’m wired for sound and video, but the surveillance van’s fifty miles away in Asheville.

  I’d tried to phone Rankin while Harrington ran my tag and my license—“Is that you that just went past? Come back and get me out of here,” I’d have said — but there was no cell-phone signal in this part of the mountains, so I had no choice but to let the drama play out however it played out.

  Finally Harrington, his bosses, and the state’s environmental-protection guardians seemed satisfied that I was neither a murderer nor a bioterrorist. The trooper opened the door of the cruiser, and I was a free man once more. “Okay, Dr. Brockton”—I gathered that someone at the TBI had vouched for me as “Dr. Brockton”—“we’re gonna let you head on to Asheville now. I’m sorry this took so long. It’s not the sort of situation we encounter every day.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Do you feel able to concentrate on your driving the rest of the way? Reason I ask is, if you had an accident and this stuff you’re carrying got strewn all over I-40, we would have one hell of a mess to deal with, and I’m not just talking about picking up the arms off the pavement.”

  I winced, picturing the media circus and the scandal that would surely follow an arm-slinging crash. “I will pay total attention to the road,” I said. “Scout’s honor. I apologize for taking up so much of your morning.”

  “No problem,” he said with a slight smile, handing me my license and registration. “Beats writing speeding tickets.”

  CHAPTER 32

  I’d built an hour of cushion into my schedule, in case the logistics of parking and unloading at the Grove Park proved complicated. My unscheduled stop on the shoulder of I-40 had used every minute of that. I might have been tempted to make up the lost time by speeding, but that impulse was held firmly in check by my frequent glances in the rearview mirror. There behind me, a respectful but vigilant hundred yards back, hung Officer Harrington. He followed me all the way to downtown Asheville, then parted company with me when I took the exit ramp. I rolled down my window and waved. He answered with a brief whoop of his siren.

  Rankin had phoned as soon as I’d emerged from the mountains and gotten back into the land of cell-phone signal. “Jesus, Doc, what was that about? You had us shitting bricks.” When I told him, his reaction — half amusement at my predicament, half anger at my meandering driving, which had nearly derailed the operation — wasn’t quite the dose of sympathy I’d hoped for, but Rankin wasn’t inclined to listen to my woes. “I gotta go, Doc. We’ve got to finish setting up. Get here as soon as you can. Break a leg.”

  The Grove Park Inn was set on a hillside a couple of miles north of downtown Asheville, amid historic mansions and towering hemlocks. The original stone lodge was rustic and charming. The lobby was flanked by a pair of fireplaces large enough to roast entire oxen, and a broad veranda overlooked the floor of the valley. In recent decades, though, the lodge had been virtually swallowed up by a series of additions: two wings of guest rooms and meeting facilities, a golf course and country club, a sports complex, and a luxury spa.

  For the training, Sinclair had booked a large room on the tenth floor of one of the new wings. I threaded my way to the underground parking garage, scanning for a truck or van that might contain half a dozen FBI agents and a raft of electronic gear. I didn’t spot anything promising between the service entrance and the loading dock. I backed up to the dock and parked, feeling alone and uneasy. I pressed the “Deliveries” button on an intercom box, and a voice crackled through the speaker: “ssszzztttsss help you?”

  “I’m here for the medical seminar that’s up in the Heritage Ballroom,” I said. “I’ve got some cases of material that need to go up the freight elevator. It would help if you’ve got a flatbed cart.”

  “ssszzztttsss there.” A minute later, as I fumbled with the tiny switches on the audio and video recorders — I’d almost forgotten to turn them on — I heard the hum of an electric motor. In the wall beside me, a metal shutter door began to rise and the hotel’s basement opened like a massive rolltop desk. A slight young Hispanic man emerged, pushing a cart to the edge of the platform. He helped me wrestle the five coolers out of the truck and up onto the dock, which was a foot higher than the tailgate. Then we stacked them on the cart, and he bent low over the handle, putting his weight behind it. “It’s very heavy,” he said once it began to move. “What is it?”

  I wished people would quit asking me that. “Refreshments,” I said.

  I’d phoned Sinclair when I reached the hotel, and he was waiting for me as the elevator door opened on the tenth floor. “Glad you’re here,” he said. “I was getting worried. We’re cutting it a little close on the schedule.”

  “Sorry. I’d meant to be here an hour ago, but I hit a little snag.” Without going into all the personal reasons for my erratic driving, I told him how I’d been pulled over in the mountains.

  “Hang on, I want to hear the rest of the story,” he interrupted, “but let’s take care of this first.” He laid a hand on the shoulder of the hotel worker, saying, “This is fine. We’ll take it from here.” He pulled a twenty from his pocket and handed it to the young man, who thanked him politely and left.

  We’d stopped in front of a pair of double doors marked HERITAG
E A. Sinclair delivered a staccato series of raps, and the doors swung outward, pushed by two clean-cut young men in scrubs, followed by a third, who wheeled the cart into a cavernous ballroom, its floor dotted with tables draped in blue. We’d entered at one end of the room, near a raised stage and an enormous projection screen. A podium stood at one side of the stage; center stage was occupied by a waist-high table draped with blue sheets. A video camera stood at one side of the table; perched on the other side was a surgical microscope. As I studied the setup, a technician somewhere in the room flipped a switch, projecting a video image onto the screen. There, magnified to five times its actual size, was the image of the table’s surface. A tray of larger-than-life surgical instruments was neatly arranged at one end. At its center lay a human arm, amputated as neatly at the shoulder as were the twenty specimens in the coolers beside me.

  The ballroom’s floor contained thirty tables, each outfitted with surgical implements and operating microscopes. And ten of the thirty already held arms. As I marveled at the ballroom’s transformation into a surgical classroom, I heard the clatter of metal latches snapping open. Working wordlessly, Sinclair’s three assistants rolled the cart down the center aisle between the tables, laying arms on the remaining tables, positioning each limb as methodically and swiftly as decorators setting out floral centerpieces for a banquet.

  * * *

  After the training — a tutorial in microsurgical repair of blood vessels and nerves — Sinclair’s assistants wordlessly collected my twenty arms — now crisscrossed with incisions and sutures — and loaded them into my coolers. Sinclair rode down the freight elevator with me and the hotel employee — this one a stocky African-American male — who’d been sent to help handle the coolers. After loading them into the truck, he latched the tailgate and hatch, accepted his tip from Sinclair, and disappeared into the basement of the hotel.