The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  He closed the stairwell door gently on his way out. I let the green M&M dissolve slowly in my mouth, feeling the wall of denial I’d erected around Isabella’s memory melt and crumble like the hard candy shell.

  CHAPTER 8

  I stared at the small digital recorder in my hand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog — do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain — not about Isabella.

  As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you — naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness — might help you get a handle on it.”

  Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?

  Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.

  * * *

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

  I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.

  Did our story begin the night we ate pizza and I walked her partway home and listened to the wind sighing in the treetops and felt the urge to kiss her? Or did it begin the night she came to my house bringing a DVD of Dr. Strangelove and microwave popcorn and Coke? Perhaps it began the moment she pressed herself against me, took me into her arms, and gave herself to me.

  But what can I say about her? That she was beautiful? She was. She still is, if she’s alive. Exotically beautiful, but in a way that was too subtle to pinpoint. One of her four grandparents had been Japanese; the others had been American missionaries who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: in Nagasaki in August of 1945, as American B-29s dropped the deadly fruit of the Manhattan Project.

  Isabella’s ethnicity matters to me; it interests me, not just because it’s so entwined with her crime but also because of my habit of mind as an anthropologist. Knowing her ancestry gives me some skeletal context, something to latch onto when I reach out and try to grasp the enigma of her. Because she is one-quarter Asian, I know that most of her skeletal features are Caucasoid. Most — but not all. Some of the stories told in her bones are Mongoloid, Asian. Her cheekbones, as I picture them in my mind’s eye right now, are slightly higher and wider and flatter than, say, Miranda’s. Her skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s, too, but then again, almost everyone’s skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s. I remember her teeth in two ways: I remember how dazzling they were when she smiled at me and how quickly hidden they vanished behind the curtain of her hair when she ducked her head shyly. And I remember how they felt when we kissed, smooth and hard and slick against my tongue, nibbling gently at my lip and then, later, biting into the meat of my bicep and the heel of my hand hard enough to leave bruises outlined in tooth marks. If I had thought to run the tip of my tongue along the backs of those front teeth, I might have felt indentations, concavities: the distinctive scooped-out curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, a signature skeletal trait of Asians and Native Americans. But what man in his right mind would think of dental details when a lovely woman presses her warm mouth and trembling body to his?

  As I listen to myself say these things, I feel foolish and pedantic. And yet. And yet: I have so few things to hang on to as I try to grasp Isabella that I suppose it’s understandable and forgivable that I should lapse into my comfortable role of professor and anthropologist — categorizer and explainer. Yet the truth is, I barely knew Isabella. Our lives intersected, briefly but powerfully, at two points — no, three. First when Garcia and Miranda and I were exposed to the radioactive pellet Isabella had used to murder Dr. Novak. Next when Isabella helped me discover the location where a murdered soldier had been secretly buried during World War II. And third when she offered her body and her passionate need to me. No, wait, there was a fourth time as well: when I realized that she was the one who had killed Novak, when I confronted her, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of storm sewers beneath Oak Ridge.

  I followed her into the labyrinth. In hindsight maybe that was a mistake. In hindsight maybe confronting her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe making love to her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe hindsight itself is a mistake — what’s the point of following the trail of regret back into the past? It’s not possible to choose a different path from the very one that brought me to the present, to this exact moment, where I hide in the darkness of my living room and the labyrinth of my heart, murmuring into the digital emptiness I clutch in my hand.

  I hate this. I don’t know what to say. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

  CHAPTER 9

  I dropped the recorder at Dr. Hoover’s office the next morning on my way to campus, still feeling self-conscious and vaguely guilty about voicing my thoughts and fears into a microphone. When I walked into the bone lab, Miranda looked at me sharply and said, “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What?’”

  “You have a funny look on your face. Embarrassed or something. Like a kid who’s just peed in his pants.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “Just preoccupied.”

  “Whatever you say. Anyhow, Eddie called. He’s got an appointment next week to get fitted for an i-Hand.”

  “The bionic prosthesis? Just for his left hand?” She nodded. “I thought he was more interested in a transplant.”

  “He was, but there’s a big problem with that, apparently.” She frowned. “It’s virtually impossible to be approved for a hand transplant unless you’re a double amputee.”

  “Eddie is a double amputee, essentially,” I pointed out. “He’s only got two fingers on his right hand.”

  “Apparently the hand surgeons consider those fingers more of a plus than you and I do,” she said. “He does have some function in them, after all. And once he gets the toe-to-thumb transplant — in a month or so, he hopes — he’ll have three digits on the right hand, including an opposable thumb.”

  “Still,” I protested, “it seems harsh to rule him out for a transplant on the left side. It’s like he’s being punished for being not quite maimed enough, you know? Like that sick girl — what did she have, lupus? — whose insurance company refused to pay for h
er medical treatment until she was dying.”

  “Well, yeah, sort of,” she hedged, “but on the other hand — ooh, remind me not to say that in front of Eddie — not everybody who wants a transplant can get one. If there aren’t enough hands to go around, what’s the best, fairest way to pick who gets one and who doesn’t? If you were the one parceling out hands, how would you pick?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. But I did have another question. “Are there really not enough hands to go around?”

  She shrugged.

  “How many kidney transplants were performed in the United States last year?”

  She did a quick Google search. “Don’t know about last year,” she answered, “but over sixteen thousand were done in 2008.”

  “And how many hand transplants?”

  “Not a fair comparison,” she pointed out. “A lot of kidneys came from living donors — somebody’s son or sister or friend who was willing to give one up for a person they love.”

  “You’re right, not the same thing. How many heart transplants?”

  The keyboard rattled again. “Wow. Two thousand, one hundred sixty-three. I would have guessed a hundred or so.”

  “Okay. So none of those heart donors got out alive. If my math’s right, those twenty-one hundred heart donors had forty-two hundred hands, plus or minus.”

  “I don’t think you can say ‘plus’ unless some of them started out with three hands,” she said reasonably.

  “Don’t be a hairsplitter. We’re talking about potentially four thousand transplantable hands, right?”

  “Hang on,” she said. “This is a really interesting database. All categories of organ-donation stats compiled by the federal government. You can sort by organ, by donor type, by state, all kinds of things. Okay, actually, there were about eight thousand deceased organ donors in the U.S. in 2008. So, in theory, sixteen thousand hands, if all of them had both hands when they died.”

  “And how many hand transplants in the U.S. in 2008?”

  “No hand-transplant stats in the federal database. Let me try ‘hand transplants United States 2008’ and see if my friend Google can shed any light.” A moment later she said, “I say again, wow.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Two thousand?”

  “No,” she answered. “Two, period. As in ‘one, two, buckle my shoe.’”

  “So the problem’s not a shortage of hands,” I mused, “but a shortage of hand-transplant experts? Not enough surgeons who’ve been trained to do it?”

  She worked the keyboard again. “I believe you have sussed out the problem, Wise Master. Listen to this press release from Emory University Medical Center, dated February 2008: ‘The only physician in the United States formally trained in both hand surgery and transplant surgery is establishing a new program at Emory to train other experts and to conduct research on what is still an extraordinary procedure.’ One formally trained hand-transplant surgeon in the whole U.S. of A. — that would appear to be a bit of a bottleneck.” She turned to me and frowned. “I don’t get it,” she pondered out loud. “What makes a hand transplant a thousand times more complicated than a heart transplant? Hearts have lots of blood vessels and nerves, and the potential for the recipient’s body to reject the transplant would appear to be the same, whether it’s a heart or a hand, wouldn’t you think?”

  I considered that for a moment. “I’m not sure that it’s the complexity that accounts for the difference,” I answered. “A heart transplant’s a lifesaving procedure — if you need a heart and you don’t get one, you die. But there are a lot of people walking around minus a hand or two. So maybe refining the techniques in hand-transplant surgery isn’t considered as high a priority.”

  “Hmm,” she grunted, and did another search. “Guess how many boob jobs were done in 2008?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Four hundred thousand. What does that say about priorities? Plenty of surgeons up to speed on that.”

  “There’s a lot of money in plastic surgery,” I said. “It’s the free market at work.”

  “Swell,” she retorted. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of perkiness.”

  I sighed. “So the bottom line here, since it’s a left hand Eddie needs, is that the bionic hand, the i-Hand, looks like his best bet?”

  “Looks like,” she agreed. “Be good to learn more about it, though — get a review from somebody other than the manufacturer’s own marketing department.”

  “I think I know just the guy to ask,” I said.

  * * *

  The gleaming white plane taxiing toward me was unlike any I’d ever seen. It had wings and a tail, true, as well as a pair of turboprop engines. But the engines were at the trailing edge of the wings and faced aft, so the propellers pushed the plane rather than pulling it. The fuselage wasn’t cylindrical but slightly bulbous, like the sleek body of a seal or a killer whale. The wings were set far back, near the tail; up near the plane’s nose was a much smaller pair of wings that angled slightly downward. As the plane turned its two-eyed, droop-winged nose directly toward the ramp, I realized that it bore a striking resemblance to a flying fish. A flying catfish, to be precise.

  The props stopped, the engines spooled down, and a door just behind the cockpit swung open. A small folding stair unfolded outward and down, and Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D., descended from the aerial catfish and strode toward me, a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. “Dr. Brockton,” he called, “so nice of you to pick me up.”

  “Welcome to Tennessee,” I said. “It was worth coming out here just to see that airplane. I’ve not seen one of those before.”

  He smiled. “It’s a head turner, isn’t it? It’s an Italian design, which is why it looks so damn sexy. Nearly as fast as a jet — cruises at four hundred miles an hour — but a lot more efficient. Room for nine, and a high ceiling, thanks to that fat fuselage. Interesting thing is, the fuselage is actually an airfoil and provides part of the lift. That allows smaller wings — and therefore less drag. Clever, huh?”

  “Clever,” I agreed. “Sounds like you know almost as much about the plane as the pilot.”

  “I am the pilot”—he smiled—“about half the time, including today. When we were looking for a new corporate aircraft, I decided to meddle. ‘I’m a pilot,’ I told the CEO, ‘and I’m also in charge of research. Let me research this.’ He fell for it.” His smile broadened into a grin. “You wouldn’t believe the view coming down the Shenandoah Valley today at twenty thousand feet. I could see Knoxville all the way from Roanoke.” Roanoke was 250 miles to the north, so what he was describing was impossible; still, the day was crystal clear — thirty miles to the east of the airport, the Great Smoky Mountains looked an easy walk away — so I could almost believe the claim.

  I led him from the ramp and through the lobby, out to where my truck was parked in the small lot. “Nice thing about the corporate terminal is not having to go in and out of the parking garage,” I said.

  “Nice thing about having your own plane is not having to hassle with airport security. I swung through Starbucks and brought a big cup of coffee with me, I boarded two minutes before take-off, and I didn’t have to sit through a safety demo.” He patted his satchel. “Oh, and I stuffed my briefcase full of knives and guns.”

  “Smart move. Clearly this isn’t your first trip to Tennessee.”

  We headed north on Alcoa Highway, past mobile-home dealerships and abandoned shopping centers and broad, rolling pastures. In ten minutes we rounded a bend at the base of a wooded hill and the main tower of UT Medical Center appeared. I bore right onto the exit ramp, looped behind the hospital complex, and traversed the employee parking lot that bordered the Body Farm. Pulling into the farthest corner of the lot, I parked in front of the facility’s dual gates of chain-link and solid wooden planking. “I’m surprised your place isn’t farther off the beaten track,” Faust commented.

  “It used to be,” I said, unlocking the padlocks and opening the gates.
“I first started with an old barn — a pig barn — out at one of the UT farms, but that was too far away. When I relocated to this spot, the parking lot wasn’t here yet and the hospital tower wasn’t even on the drawing board.”

  As I led him inside, he peered over his shoulder, across the top of the wooden privacy fence. “It looks like you might actually be able to see inside here from the top floors of the hospital.”

  “You can,” I said. “Gives the patients a little added motivation to get well. Memento mori and all that.”

  “Does the hospital charge extra for that?”

  “No, the view’s free. Where they make their money is selling air fresheners to the patients on hot summer days, when the Body Farm’s getting really ripe.” He smiled at the joke, so I kept it going. “If the billing folks could just figure out how to get Medicare to reimburse them a hundred bucks for every air freshener, their financial worries would be over.”

  I gestured at the clearing inside the gate, a patch of brown grass and bare dirt that measured about sixty feet from edge to edge. “So this is it. We’ve got a little less than three acres here inside the fence now.” I led him across the grass and slightly downhill, where a cube of chain-link fence nestled beneath the trees, its roof draped with a bright blue tarp. “Originally all we had was this chain-link enclosure, which measures sixteen feet square. Now we keep equipment and a meteorological station in here, but this was where the research began.”

  He nodded. “I’ve seen an old photo of you and some graduate students in here, with a body stretched out on the concrete.”

  “That was taken the spring of our first year,” I recalled. “We got just four donated bodies that year, and they were all used to research a master’s thesis — a study of which insects feed on bodies, and when.”

  “I’ve read it,” he said. “That was a seminal piece of research. Helped jump-start the field of forensic entomology, didn’t it? Laid the foundation for estimating time since death by collecting insects and maggots off a murder victim?”