The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  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.?”

  The likelihood of this very conversation had filled me with dread, but the dread had motivated me to prepare for it, as best I could. “We’ve never studied differential decay in dismemberment cases,” I said. “If a killer cuts up a body, does that body decay at the same rate as an intact body? I don’t know. Nobody knows, because nobody’s done a controlled experiment to compare the decomp rates.”

  “So now — on a whim — you’ve begun a large-scale study?” Her eyes bored into me. “If you’re doing a controlled experiment, where are the control subjects, the ten intact bodies?”

  I had a halfway-plausible answer to this, too. “We’ve got years of decomp data from intact bodies,” I said. “We’ve got mathematical models that can calculate, at any range of temperatures, how long each stage lasts — fresh, bloat, decay, and dry. I’ve studied my ten control subjects, plus a whole lot more, over the past twenty years. The dismemberment study will be new data.”

  She glared. “But just arms? Why not arms and legs?”

  “One variable,” I responded. “Keep it simpler.”

  “Then why the surgeries — all the incisions and sutures in those twenty arms? You’re studying differential decay in bodies that have been dismembered by murderous orthopedic surgeons? Is that it?”

  I was angry — not with Miranda; angry with myself, and Ray Sinclair, and the FBI — but I vented the anger in her direction. “Miranda, it’s my research project, and it’s not your concern.”

  “Not my concern?” She looked furious and deeply hurt. “I don’t know whether it’s what you’re saying or what you’re not saying that bothers me more, but I feel very concerned.”

  “Drop it, Miranda. The subject’s closed.”

  She stared at me, and then her expressive, angry, hurt face became a lifeless mask. “Yes, massa,” she said. She gave me a sarcastic version of a military salute, then left as suddenly as she’d appeared.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was a plain #10 envelope, addressed to me by hand, in blocky letters, with no return address.

  The envelope was distorted and lumpy. Most of it felt empty, but clearly its center contained something: something oddly shaped and perhaps a quarter inch thick. I wiggled a finger under one end of the flap and tore open the top of the envelope, then turned it upside down and shook it above my kitchen counter.

  The envelope’s contents — an angular, spiky piece of red paper — tumbled out. The bright red shape seemed to blaze on the speckled black granite, like a flame against a starry night sky. The paper was folded into an origami crane, the Japanese symbol of peace. The wing tips were blunted, I noticed; looking closer, I saw why: A tiny bit of each one appeared charred.

  I plucked the crane from the counter by the long, slender tail jutting up from the body. The bird had been pressed flat by its flight through the U.S. postal system — a flight that had begun in San Francisco, according to the postmark on the envelope. Taking care not to touch the scorched tips, I raised the wings partly to horizontal, then pulled them gently outward, slightly away from the body. As the wings spread and the bird took flight in my hands, a second snippet of paper fluttered from a fold in the bird’s body. It was a second crane — a tiny replica of the first, so small it might have required tweezers and a magnifying glass to create — made of delicate white rice paper.

  In her own way, Isabella was letting me know that she was alive and at liberty, and she was letting me know that she was pregnant.

  It was with powerfully conflicting emotions that I phoned Oak Ridge detective Jim Emert. “I just got something in the mail from Isabella,” I said.

  Telling him felt like the right thing to do by the simple, objective rules of law and order, but it felt miserably traitorous by a more complex inner calculus of loyalty or human compassion.

  “What’d she say?” Beneath the surface calm, his voice was taut with suspense.

  “Nothing. And everything.”

  “Come again?”

  “She didn’t say anything. But it was a very clear message.”

  “Doc, any chance you could talk in plain English? I’m not so good at the riddles.”

  I told him about the two cranes in the envelope and explained why I was so sure of their meaning.

  When Isabella had fled two months ago, her disappearance had been marked by a flock of origami cranes — a thousand paper cranes — swirling in an eddy of wind at the base of the Oak Ridge Peace Bell. The Peace Bell itself had been a key part of that earlier message. The bell had been cast in Hiroshima, Japan, as a step toward healing and reconciliation between two cities linked by a terrible destiny: one city that was created by the Bomb, another that was destroyed by it. The cranes at the bell had been Isabella’s public gesture of atonement, I’d sensed at the time, for purposely killing an atomic scientist, and also for unintentionally inflicting such grievous harm on Eddie Garcia. The pair of cranes sent to my home, which I saw as a mother bird and her baby, was a very private message. It was a confidence, one I’d just betrayed out of a sense of duty.

  “Doc? Are you still there?”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry.” I realized that my attention had drifted far from Emert. “What were you saying?”

  “I was asking if you were careful not to contaminate the evidence.”

  “Of course I wasn’t careful not to contaminate the evidence. Hell, Jim, the envelope wasn’t exactly labeled ‘Evidence.’ It wasn’t until I looked at the birds that I had any idea the letter was from Isabella.” Just to make sure he got my point, I added, “I’m guessing twenty or thirty postal-service employees handled the evidence, too.”

  “I know, I know.” He sighed. “In a TV-show world, you would have had a hunch about the handwriting or something and we could’ve opened it in a lab and gotten your buddy Bohanan to lift prints off the birds.”

  “You probably still can,” I pointed out reluctantly. “I only touched the wings and the tail. I didn’t unfold any of the creases, so most of the surface area’s untouched, at least by me.”

  “Good point,” he said. “We might also be able to get DNA off the flap and match it to samples we got at her house. Though by the time DNA results come back, everybody connected to the case is likely to be dead of old age.”

  “What’s the waiting time for DNA results these days?”

  “Long and longer,” he said. “Six months in high-priority cases. A year or more otherwise. Most of the DNA headlines these days come from cold-hit murder cases, where a prisoner’s DNA sample triggers a match with blood or semen collected and analyzed years ago.”

  “What’s the point of it, Jim? We know Isabella sent it, apparently from San Francisco. What we don’t know is whether she’s still there. I’d bet not. I don’t know how she might’ve gotten there, but I’d bet she’s in Japan by now.”

  CHAPTER 35

  A day after Eddie Garcia’s surprise departure for Atlanta in the Paradise limo, Carmen drove down — not to retrieve him but to join him, to support him — during his evaluation by the Emory transplant team. Her mother had flown up from Bogotá to care for Tomás while Carmen and Eddie stayed in guest housing provided by the Transplant Center.

  The evaluation was a detailed process. In addition to evaluating Garcia’s medical past and present, the team had to consider his likely future — his chances for a life that was productive and healthy.

  Hand transplantation was a huge investment in high-tech hope — a giant gamble on the fortunate few selected to receive transplants. As Miranda had pointed out to me weeks before, saying yes to Garcia meant saying no to a host of other applicants, other people who’d lost hands to disease or trauma. The transplant team needed to feel confident that the investment and the gamble could pay off, not just for Garc
ia but also for society. That meant they needed to assess a host of factors: Apart from the injury to his hands, was Garcia’s health good? Did he fully understand the potential risks? Could he faithfully follow the postoperative protocols for physical therapy, infection control, and the lifelong medications required to suppress his immune system and prevent rejection? Was he psychologically prepared for the daunting endeavor — and robust enough to deal with failure, if the transplant didn’t succeed? What would be lost, to Garcia and the world, if he didn’t receive a transplant? What might be gained if he did?

  I gained a better perspective on the complex considerations of transplant evaluations when I called J. T. McLaughlin, a former undergraduate student of mine who’d gone on to become a nephrologist — a kidney specialist — in Montgomery, Alabama. J.T. hadn’t performed any kidney transplants himself, but several of his patients had received transplants at the University of Alabama’s medical center in Birmingham.

  After I’d described Garcia’s injuries — which J.T. found personally horrifying but medically fascinating — he peppered me with questions. “Is he a smoker?”

  “Heavens no.” I couldn’t imagine Garcia, who was immaculate almost to the point of fastidiousness, smoking a cigarette. “Does that strengthen his case much?”

  “Sure. Smokers have lousy circulatory systems. Lousy blood supply everywhere in the body, and that jeopardizes anything that gets transplanted to them. That lowers the odds of a successful outcome. Has he ever had a transfusion — either because of the trauma to his hands or because of some prior injury or illness?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “Why does that matter?”

  “If he has, his immune system’s been sensitized; that means he’d be more likely to reject the transplant. But the Emory people are on top of that — they’re among the nation’s leaders in transplant compatibility. They’ve developed something called the Emory algorithm, which is used all over the country, to help predict rejection. And I think they’re about to start clinical trials on a new immunosuppressant drug — supposedly the biggest advance in fighting transplant rejection in thirty years.”