The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  “Exactly. CT scans are such a rich vein of biomedical data. As you might imagine, OrthoMedica has quite an interest in mining that vein. Which brings me to you.”

  “Me? How so?”

  “During your presentation today, I was struck by what a unique resource your Body Farm is. A thousand modern skeletons — specimens whose age and race and sex and stature you know — plus, what, a hundred donated bodies every year?”

  “Actually, we’re getting closer to one-fifty now.”

  “And do you scan those bodies as they come in, before they go out to the Farm?”

  “I wish,” I said. “We’ve scanned most of the skeletons in the collection — we got a grant to do that — but we don’t have a way to scan the bodies. The hospital’s Radiology Department isn’t too keen on having dead bodies hauled up there and run through the same machines they use for live patients.”

  He chuckled. “What would you think of having a dedicated scanner at the Body Farm?”

  “I’d think it was swell. But those things cost serious money — hundreds of thousands of dollars, even used ones. Our entire annual budget for the Body Farm is less than ten thousand, and we’re looking at budget cuts that might whittle it down even below that.”

  “Terrible. A one-of-a-kind, world-renowned research facility, and you’re running it on a financial shoestring. Would you be interested in some research funding? A collaborative project involving the Body Farm, the university’s Biomedical Engineering Department, and OrthoMedica?”

  I felt the beginnings of a smile tugging at my face. “Sounds like you have an idea. Tell me more.”

  “I need data,” he said. “I need to know more about the human body, and I think you can help me learn. OrthoMedica will manufacture and sell sixty thousand hip implants and two hundred thousand knee replacements this year. We’re the nation’s second-largest source of artificial joints and orthopedic prosthetics. We want to be the biggest, and we want to be the best — the gold standard. To achieve that, we’re targeting breakthroughs in two critical areas. One is materials research. Artificial joints have to be incredibly tough and durable, and they have to survive in a surprisingly corrosive environment. We’re conducting or sponsoring dozens of projects geared toward creating better alloys, plastics, and ceramics for joint replacements and prosthetics.”

  “What’s the other area?”

  “Biomechanical engineering. Developing ways to customize every patient’s new hip or knee or shoulder implant for a perfect fit. Engineering computer-controlled surgical systems that can install those implants with absolute precision, within a tolerance of a ten-thousandth of an inch. Human surgeons can be remarkably gifted, but there’s simply too much slop, not enough precision, in orthopedic surgery today. Hell, if we put together airplanes with as much variation as we put in artificial joints, the planes would fall out of the sky.” He chuckled — a practiced chuckle, it sounded like, the sort you’d script into a briefing for investors or the board of directors. “What I’m trying to say, not very eloquently, is that if we had more data on the muscular and skeletal systems — if we had access to a shared database of cadaver scans, for instance — we could design better artificial joints, better surgical tools, and a host of other products. We could help a million patients a year achieve better surgical outcomes and better quality of life.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “How do you envision this collaboration with UT?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here, but my thought is that OrthoMedica could provide a scanner and a technician to run it. We might even be able to underwrite some research projects in anthropology and in biomedical engineering.”

  I thought of our shoestring budget and of the administrative scissors poised to cut it. I thought of Miranda and the possibility of her losing her assistantship. “Where do I sign,” I said, “and when do the scanner and the check arrive?”

  He laughed. “How about we start with a memorandum of understanding next week — a draft, mind you, for the university’s lawyers to look over. I’d be glad to hand-deliver it, if you’ve got the time and the willingness to show me around the Body Farm.”

  A week seemed head-spinningly fast; the wheels of progress evidently spun far more swiftly in the world of multibillion-dollar biomedical conglomerates than in the dusty corridors of the ivory tower. I extended my hand. “As we say in the South, y’all come see us.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The naked and dismembered corpse of Trey Willoughby lay faceup on an autopsy table in the Regional Forensic Center, a warren of offices and labs in the basement of UT Hospital. The forensic center and the hospital morgue shared space, including the autopsy suite into which Miranda and I had wheeled Willoughby bright and early on this Monday morning. He’d been chilling out in the cooler since Friday afternoon, when KPD’s evidence techs had finished checking the coffin at the cemetery and sent it to UT.

  The table — a rectangular stainless-steel counter on wheels, essentially, with a flange around its edge to collect body fluids and a drain to funnel them out — was latched to a large sink along one wall. The drain was set into the foot of the table; it hung over the sink, so any liquid from the body would flow directly into the hospital’s waste system. In Willoughby’s case the drain would be carrying away not blood or other body fluids but vestiges of embalming chemicals. During the seven years since Willoughby’s burial, most of the preservatives had leached out of the body, but enough remained to sting my eyes and nose.

  Detective Gary Culpepper had arrived a few minutes earlier, accompanied by KPD’s resident fingerprint guru, Art Bohanan. One of Art’s claims to fame was the invention of the “Bohanan apparatus,” for which he was awarded U.S. patent 5395445. The Bohanan apparatus was a boxy, portable superglue-fuming system for detecting latent fingerprints. A heated tray in one chamber of the unit was loaded with a small amount of superglue; when the tray reached a temperature of a hundred degrees Celsius — equal to the boiling point of water — the glue vaporized. A small blower wafted the glue fumes into a second chamber, which contained an object to be checked for prints, such as a murder weapon. As anyone who’s ever superglued his fingers together can attest, superglue bonds strongly with chemicals in human fingerprints. Art was a pioneer in harnessing this particular chemical reaction to reveal latent prints — not just on objects but on human skin, too.

  Art hoisted the boxy apparatus onto the steel counter beside the sink and plugged it in. I eyed the fuming chamber dubiously. “How do you aim to fume this guy? Even without his arms and legs, he’s a lot bigger than that box.”

  “One piece at a time,” said Art. “I’ve got a chain saw out in the van.”

  I laughed. Bending down to the shipping case that the rig had been packed in, Art fished around and removed a flexible plastic hose that sported a boxy plastic attachment at one end.

  “That looks suspiciously like the hose from my vacuum cleaner,” I observed.

  “It is the hose from your vacuum cleaner,” he joked. “Used to be, anyhow. The hose connects to this port on the side of the fuming chamber, so I can apply fumes directly to the body through here.” He aimed the hose at me, and I saw that the end of the boxy attachment was open. “This one’s cut to fit the contours of the arm,” he explained, tracing the curved edges of the box with one finger. “Not that our guy’s got any arms to fume.” He removed the attachment and returned it to the case. “I’ve got another one that fits the curve of the thigh and the neck, and this flat one fits the chest and back.”

  Taking the flatter attachment from the case, he pressed it onto the hose, then fitted the other end of the hose to the back of the fuming chamber. Next he took a plastic bottle from the case and squeezed a small amount of liquid into a metal tray in the center of the chamber. Closing the chamber, he flipped a switch, and I soon caught the acrid scent of superglue. “The trick,” he said, “is to move the hose over the body slowly and evenly enough so that every part of the skin gets fumed for somewhere betwee
n fifteen and thirty seconds. Less than fifteen and the print doesn’t get enough glue to show up; more than thirty and the difference between the ridges and the valleys tends to blur.”

  Art slowly, methodically swept the fuming hose over the face, chest, abdomen, taking care not to linger more than thirty seconds in any one spot. Unfortunately, the timing turned out to be irrelevant — there were no prints to be found anywhere on Willoughby’s body. Culpepper was disappointed, but Art seemed unsurprised. “Embalming chemicals are strong solvents,” he explained. “They can dissolve the oils in fingerprints really quickly. Thing is, there might not have been any prints in the first place. Anybody handling this body after death would have worn rubber gloves, unless he was an idiot.”

  “Here’s to idiotic criminals,” said Culpepper. “What was it the man said? ‘Nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average criminal’?”

  “Not exactly,” corrected Art. “I think the quote dissed all of us, not just the bad guys. ‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,’ or something along those lines. Apparently — at least according to H. L. Mencken, who said it — we’re all idiots.”

  Culpepper smiled ruefully. “I guess I just proved his point by misquoting him, huh?”

  While Art packed up the superglue unit and trundled it away, I dialed the nurses’ station up on the hospital’s seventh floor. “We’re ready for him,” I said.

  * * *

  The wide, windowless door to the autopsy suite swung inward. With the squeak of rubber tires on polished concrete, Eddie Garcia rolled into the morgue.

  Unlike most people delivered on wheels, though, Eddie Garcia was very much alive. Actually, “very much alive” was a bit of a stretch. He arrived in a wheelchair, and he still looked weak. Six weeks earlier he was very nearly dead: A searing dose of radiation had destroyed his entire left hand and claimed all but the last two fingers of his right hand, as well as ravaging his bone marrow and immune system. He was still a patient here at UT Medical Center — Miranda had wheeled him down from his room on the seventh floor — but his wounds were healing and his immune system was recovering. When I’d told him about the limbless corpse Miranda and I had exhumed, though, he’d voiced an interest in seeing the body. Eddie — Dr. Edelberto Garcia — was Knox County’s medical examiner, as well as the director of the Regional Forensic Center, so even if he was still on medical leave, he was certainly entitled to be present. He was also likely to be helpful, and I considered it an encouraging sign of his recovery that he was here.

  I’d turned up the autopsy suite’s exhaust fan to remove the smell of embalming fluid, but even so the acrid chemicals — a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol, water, and various additives — stung my nostrils and eyes. They seemed to have stung Miranda’s, too, because she rubbed her face with a paper towel. The towel came away damp — her cheeks and the rims of her eyes were red and glistening — and I realized that it wasn’t the harsh chemicals causing her pain, but the far harsher blow that had been dealt to Eddie Garcia.

  Before his devastating injury, Garcia had been a handsome and elegant man. Tennessee’s first Hispanic medical examiner, he’d come to the United States from a prominent family in Mexico City. His medical education was first-rate, and his English was polished and precise — better than the English most of my friends and colleagues spoke, probably better than my own, too. His wife, Carmen, was a Colombian beauty; not surprisingly, their two-year-old son was a lovely boy. A few doors down the hall, on the desk in Garcia’s office, stood a family portrait, a black-and-white photo for which the family had posed in elaborate nineteenth-century dress. Carmen’s thick hair was pinned up, with a pair of tight curls framing the sides of her face above a pleated, high-collared white blouse and a fitted black jacket; Eddie’s wavy hair was slicked back, his mustache closely trimmed, a starched shirt buttoned tight; the baby, Tomás, wore a long white christening gown. With their aristocratic bearing and intelligent eyes, the people in the photo could have passed for old-line Spanish nobility, and for all I knew, they were.

  Now, though, it was impossible not to focus on the damage he’d suffered. Garcia’s right hand was a thin, scarred paw on which only the last two fingers remained; his left hand was simply not there. Destroyed by the radiation, the hand had been amputated just below the wrist. A pellet of intensely radioactive material, which he’d plucked from the body of a dead man, had seared both of Garcia’s hands and decimated his immune system. It had taken only a moment’s exposure — to a piece of metal the size of a ball bearing — to ravage his body, threaten his life, and jeopardize his career. Yet here he was now, against all odds, taking a first brave step back to the job that had nearly killed him.

  Garcia allowed Miranda and me to help him rise from the wheelchair, but otherwise none of us acknowledged that anything was out of the ordinary. When I introduced Culpepper, Garcia bowed slightly in lieu of a handshake. Then he peered at Trey Willoughby’s mutilated body, and we all shifted our focus to the corpse as well.

  Willoughby’s body looked freakish, a horror-movie version of a disassembled mannequin. I’d taught anatomy for two years during graduate school, and I’d worked several dismemberment cases during the past twenty years. This one seemed different, though, more thoroughly and precisely stripped of its limbs than the others.

  The face and head had been injected with embalming fluid, and so had the abdomen; the efforts to preserve the head and torso were evident not only from the smell of the chemicals but also from the trocar, the large injection port in the stomach. But these steps at preservation seemed incongruous and absurdly irrelevant given the violence inflicted on the corpse.

  Garcia leaned down and peered at the left shoulder, where the collarbone and the shoulder blade had once been connected to the humeral head, the ball at the upper end of the arm. The tissue there had softened and decayed, but not so badly as to erase the original contours of the cut. “Bill,” he said to me, “could you take a probe and some pickups and expose more of that joint, please?” It pained me that he needed to ask someone to do a simple maneuver that would normally have been an automatic, five-second move for him. “The arms have been severed quite cleanly,” Garcia observed. He looked at the hip joints — more difficult to cut cleanly, because of the tendon that anchored the ball of the hip into the socket. “This amputation was the work of a professional,” he said. “It could have been done by a physician or a medical student. Or maybe,” he added, his eyes looking at me with a sparkle I hadn’t seen since his injury, “an anthropology professor who has a hidden dark side.”

  “Ha,” said Miranda. “Who says it’s hidden?”

  * * *

  After we’d poked and prodded at Willoughby’s torso to the satisfaction of Garcia, I turned to Culpepper. “Okay if I pull a couple of teeth now for DeVriess’s DNA test?”

  Culpepper shrugged. “Dr. Garcia, do you see any reason why not?” Garcia shook his head. “Go ahead,” said the detective. “I’d hate to stand between a plaintiff’s attorney and his money — it’s like standing between a dog and a steak bone.”

  Willoughby’s lips had been glued together and his jaw sewn shut. Using a scalpel, I slit the lips open and cut the sutures. It took some digging to reach the stitches, as the embalmer had plumped the corpse’s cheeks with mortuary putty, which by now had hardened to the consistency of plaster. Once I’d managed to wrestle the mandible open, I pulled two molars, using a pair of slip-joint pliers whose ridged jaws I cushioned with a bit of paper toweling. Then, with a Stryker autopsy saw, I notched a chunk of bone from the hip. I swabbed the teeth and bone samples with disinfectant and sealed them in a padded FedEx envelope, which I tucked inside a FedEx mailer addressed to GeneTrax, a Dallas DNA lab.

  By the time I’d packed the samples and dropped the package at the forensic center’s front desk, Culpepper was antsy to head back to KPD. I walked with him to the loading-dock door, where he’d parked, then detoured to the fr
ont desk, where I left the Fed Ex envelope with Amy, the receptionist. I met Garcia and Miranda in the hallway; Miranda was pushing the wheelchair, but it was empty, and Garcia was walking.

  He seemed reluctant to leave the forensic center and head back upstairs to his hospital room, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Down here in the basement, he was an authoritative professional; up there, despite the deference he received from the hospital staff, he was just a patient. Either place, his injuries were the same, but down here the trauma was incidental to his identity; up there the trauma was his identity. He was a patient, defined as — and reduced to—“the hand-trauma case in 718.”

  He invited Miranda and me into his office. Settling weakly into the swiveling leather armchair behind the desk, he said, “Please,” and nodded to the two wing chairs that faced it. We sat. “Would you like something to drink? Perhaps coffee or tea?” We both declined quickly — too quickly, apparently, because he smiled sadly and said, “Please don’t stop using your hands just because you’re with me.” His forearms had been resting on the arms of his chair, slightly below the level of the desktop, but now he shifted them to the desktop and stared at their ravaged ends. “I can say this to you only because you are my friends. It makes me feel more conspicuous if you act incapable of picking up a coffee cup or pushing a button. That makes me feel almost as if I’m contagious — as if I’ve infected and destroyed your hands, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Eddie,” Miranda said. Leaning forward, she reached across the desk and gently squeezed his left elbow. “Thank you for telling us.” He smiled again, not as sadly. “Is there anything else we can do that would be helpful,” she asked, “besides, you know, not acting weird?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is.” With the two fingers that remained on his right hand, he gestured at the computer occupying a table to one side of the desk. “If one of you wouldn’t mind navigating the Web, I’d like to show you some sites I’ve been looking at. I’d show you myself, but I’m very slow on the keys, pecking with just one finger.”