The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  I held the buzzer up to the cashier. “What do I do with it now?”

  “Leave it in the basket on the counter, down there where you pick up your order.”

  I followed her gaze and arrived at the pickup counter just as our food did. A large wicker basket occupied one end of the counter. Brimming with gadgets like the one vibrating in my hand, the basket buzzed like a flock of angry cicadas and flashed like a miniature disaster zone. It set me on edge, and I could understand why the young man putting our food on the counter looked far wearier than any twenty-year-old ought to look.

  Jeff had gotten our drinks and claimed a vacant booth in the back corner of the restaurant. We slid onto the benches and squirmed into our conversation. Jeff asked polite questions about the classes I was teaching this semester, and about my forensic cases, and about Dr. Garcia’s progress. Then, after a suitable amount of small talk, he ventured, “Sounds like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “I do.” I studied my hands. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Jeff. A couple of months ago, I…uh, slept with a woman.”

  He laughed. “Good for you,” he said. Then, “I sure hope you seemed more enthusiastic about it then than you do now.”

  I looked up, pained, and his expression changed to alarm.

  “Jesus, Dad, what is it? Did you get AIDS or herpes or something?”

  I shook my head.

  “Wait, wait — have you gone and gotten married to this woman? Is that what you’re worried about telling me?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t married her. Hell, I haven’t seen her since right after that night. She’s gone, I don’t know where.” I drew a breath. “You probably heard about her in the news, son. Her name’s Isabella Morgan. She’s the one who murdered that Oak Ridge scientist, Novak — the old Manhattan Project physicist.”

  His eyes got wide. “The one the media called ‘The A-Bomb Avenger’?”

  I nodded.

  “Christ, Dad.” His eyes darted back and forth as he sorted through various possibilities in his mind. “Are you in some sort of legal trouble? Did you know she’d killed the guy when you slept with her?”

  “No, of course not. I would never knowingly get involved with someone who’d committed murder.” I splayed my hands, palms up, on either side of my sandwich, which was missing only one bite so far. “She was a reference librarian at the Oak Ridge Public Library. She helped me with some research. Historical research. I had no idea….”

  He reached across the table and took my left hand in his right. “Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry. It must’ve really pulled the rug out from under you when you learned the truth.”

  “It did,” I said.

  He gave my hand a squeeze.

  “But there’s more, Jeff. Feels like another rug just got yanked out from under me.”

  “What do you mean? Have they caught her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you found out where she is?”

  “No. But I’ve found out she’s pregnant.”

  Jeff’s hand froze mid-squeeze. He stared at me, and then his eyes darted some more, and then he stared again. “She’s pregnant?”

  I nodded miserably.

  “Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

  I nodded again.

  My son removed his hand from mine. He pushed his half-eaten salad away, slid from the booth, and walked out.

  * * *

  That night I had a dream, and in my dream I was helping Eddie Garcia autopsy a woman’s body. But this was a young woman’s body, and when I made the long incision that opened the chest and abdomen, her belly opened to reveal a full-term fetus inside: a baby boy whose face I recognized. It was the face I’d seen three decades before, when Jeff was born. Then I looked closer, and I realized the face was my own.

  CHAPTER 17

  “You don’t look so hot,” said Miranda when I walked into the bone lab the next morning.

  “And yet I look better than I feel.”

  “Oh, my. So I guess I’d better start looking for a new Ph.D. adviser, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But first let’s watch this DVD that Eddie got from the surgeon in Crossville.” I slid the disc — a video of Clarissa Lowe’s surgery — out of the envelope that had arrived the day before, while we were doing the autopsy, and Miranda loaded it into the computer’s optical drive.

  Watching the video was like opening a letter or hearing a voice mail after the sender has died: There was Lowe, anesthetized but still alive — and still healthy, except for a bum neck — just ten days earlier. “This is creepy,” said Miranda, “but so cool. How’d they get this great camera angle?” If Lowe’s eyes had been open, they’d have been staring almost directly into the camera lens. Besides her face, which was obscured by an oxygen mask, the image showed her neck and chest as well.

  “Eddie said it’s a prototype OR video system, designed by the surgeon’s brother or cousin or something. The camera lens is built into the handle of the surgical light. So adjusting the angle of the light automatically adjusts the aim of the camera.”

  “Cool,” she repeated. “Wish I’d invented that. Right after inventing the transporter beam and the perpetual-motion machine.”

  Early in the video — before the incision — a gloved hand reached up, filling the screen, and the image on the screen lurched wildly as the light was adjusted. Eventually the lurching ceased and the image stabilized; once it did, the angles of the light and the camera were — as best I could tell — exactly the same as they’d been before all the jostling and adjusting. A few seconds elapsed, and then the hand loomed into view again; again the image careened wildly, and again it returned to exactly the same angle. “Whee, that was fun,” said Miranda. “Let’s do it again. Dramamine, anyone?”

  “Now, now,” I chided. “Don’t be snarky. If I were about to operate on your neck, wouldn’t you want the light to be aimed just right?”

  “If you were about to operate on my neck, I’d want someone to stop you.” She moved the computer’s cursor to an arrow labeled FF and clicked on the mouse. As the video scrolled forward, the camera zoomed in to a tighter shot of the neck, and the image lurched a third time — far more dramatically this time — and then, after it steadied, hands darted into the frame, a scalpel flicked swiftly, and the front of the woman’s neck gaped open.

  “Slow down, slow down,” I said. “We actually want to watch the surgery, remember?”

  “But the surgery lasted more than two hours, Dr. B. Do you really want to watch it all in real time? Can’t we fast-forward till we see something interesting?”

  “How will we know what’s interesting if it zooms past in a nanosecond?”

  “Tell you what,” she offered. “If we get to the end and we haven’t seen anything interesting, I’ll back it up and we can watch it in slo-mo. Deal?”

  “Deal.” On the screen, two pairs of hands converged on the neck, steel instruments glistening in the light, and then withdrew. Once they were out of the frame, I saw that the incision in the neck had been spread apart with clamps; the opening was now as wide as it was long. “Slow down; this is getting interesting.”

  “Yeah, fascinating,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in the sarcasm, and once the speed slowed to normal, she leaned closer to the screen, drawn into the drama as the woman’s trachea and esophagus were pulled to the side and the front of her spine was exposed to view. The surgery was accompanied by a sound track — country music, turned up loud — with an occasional indecipherable murmur of human voices underneath the drawling, twanging music.

  With a series of tools — forceps, scissors, scalpel, forceps again — the surgeon attacked the disk, yanking and snipping and gouging out the crumbling cartilage that separated the third cervical vertebra from the fourth. The surgeon’s gloves and the surgical drapes were soon spattered with blood and tissue. “Wow, I hadn’t fully appreciated how much an orthopedic surgeon has in common with a butcher,” Miranda remar
ked, adding, “Not much elbow room there in the neck.”

  “Not much,” I agreed. “Back when I was teaching anatomy, the surgery residents used to put pieces of tissue down in the bottom of Styrofoam coffee cups. They’d practice cutting and suturing without touching the sides of the cup.”

  She paused the video. “Like that doctor game for kids? Operation? The one where it buzzes if the tweezers touch the board while you’re lifting out the funny bone or the brain or whatever?”

  “Like that. The name of the patient was something-Sam, I think. Yosemite Sam? No, that was a cartoon character. Cavity Sam, maybe. Kathleen and I gave Jeff that game one year for Christmas.”

  “Did he like it?”

  “Not so much. I thought it was fun, but Jeff was disappointed. What he really wanted was a BB gun.”

  Miranda snorted. “He wanted a BB gun, and he got Operation? Poor Jeff — he’ll probably need therapy the rest of his life to get over the pain.”

  “We didn’t want him to shoot his eye out, you know? But I felt so bad when I saw how sad he looked that Christmas morning that I got him a BB gun two months later, for his birthday.”

  “Did he shoot his eye out?”

  “He never did. Not yet anyhow. I do seem to remember replacing a window or two, though.” I laughed. “Oh, and the neighbor’s cat stopped coming over and eating our cat’s food. Which wasn’t such a bad thing.”

  “Just think of all the money you could’ve saved on cat food if you’d gotten him the BB gun two months sooner,” she said. “You ready to watch surgery again?” Without waiting for an answer, she hit “play,” and the bloody fingers and tools resumed their assault on the spinal disk. The scraps of cartilage grew smaller and smaller; then, after a pause, I heard a high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill. Gripping a small grinder, not unlike the Dremel tool I’d bought at Home Depot, the surgeon angled the tool into the opening in the patient’s neck. “Yikes,” said Miranda. “This is when you really don’t want your spine surgeon to have the shakes. One twitch and you’re a quad.”

  He laid aside the grinder and then, with a pair of forceps, held a small, white peg — a short, squat bone graft, roughly twice the diameter of a pencil eraser — in the neck, measuring it against the gap between the two vertebrae whose surfaces he’d just smoothed. The back of the surgeon’s head leaned into the frame, bending down for a closer look, and then he withdrew the forceps and reamed out the gap between the vertebrae a bit more. After another inspection he reinserted the peg into the opening in the neck, wedged it between the vertebrae, and then tapped it deeper into the intervertebral gap, using a small hammer and punch, creating a snug fit: a fit whose snugness I’d noticed when I removed the section of spine from the neck of the corpse. Finally he took a silvery metal bracket and screwed it to the bones. The procedure he’d just performed was an anterior decompression and fusion; the “fusion” part would be completed by the patient herself — or would have been, if she hadn’t died — as new bone grew from her vertebrae to surround and incorporate the grafted piece.

  On the monitor the surgeon removed the retractors and clamps from Lowe’s neck; once released, the skin contracted and the gaping incision half closed itself. With a curved needle and stiff black thread, the surgeon took fifteen neat stitches in the neck: the fifteen stitches that had so readily parted, only hours before, under the blade of the scalpel in my hand.

  A different, smaller pair of hands entered the video frame. With brisk efficiency they scrubbed the dried blood off the patient’s neck, then swabbed on iodine and applied a gauze dressing. The surgeon’s hand reappeared; it waved to the camera, then gave a cheery thumbs-up.

  Clarissa’s surgery was finished.

  Her swift death spiral was starting, and no inventor’s high-tech video system could rewind that.

  CHAPTER 18

  Culpepper paused between bites of egg salad. “So here’s another wild-ass guess. You think there’s any chance Willoughby’s dismemberment could’ve been cult-related?” The KPD detective had called just as I’d finished watching the video with Miranda. He’d offered to swing by a deli and pick up sandwiches so he could chat with me about postmortem mutilation over lunch.

  I didn’t answer the cult question right away — I’d just taken in a mouthful of smoked turkey and provolone cheese — so I shook my head to buy time. “You remember the Job Corps murder,” he said as I chewed. I did. It had been committed by a teenage girl, who’d repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned another girl, a classmate at the job-training center where they were enrolled. “That involved missing parts,” Culpepper persisted, “and there was a cult connection there, right? Didn’t she carve a pentagram into the chest of the victim?”

  I nodded, wiping a stray blob of mayonnaise from my lip. “She did,” I conceded. “She also kept a piece of the skull as a souvenir. But I don’t think it counts as a cult killing. I think it was mostly about jealousy over a boy they both liked. I think the pentagram and the souvenir were drunken, stoned-out afterthoughts. And anyhow, Willoughby’s limbs were amputated with surgical precision. Crazy cultists wouldn’t have done such a neat job of it.”

  Culpepper chewed on this as he chewed on his egg-salad sandwich. For a man who chomped gum with such ferocity, Culpepper ate with surprising daintiness. He’d begun by nibbling the fringe of lettuce, pruning it to a neat, straight line, even with the edges of the white slices of loaf bread. From there he’d nibbled into the sandwich proper, starting at one corner and working his way around the perimeter of the crust. I watched in fascination as he spiraled slowly toward the center, one mincing bite at a time. He noticed me watching and stopped, the sandwich a few inches from his mouth. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve just never seen anybody eat a sandwich like that.”

  “The egg salad squishes a little bit with every bite,” he explained. “So if you start at one side and just go straight across, by the time you get to the other side, it’s all squishing and dripping out the edge. This keeps it corralled.”

  “But you end up with a golf-ball-size wad of it in the center,” I countered, pointing to the bulbous disk of sandwich clutched in his hand.

  “No problem,” he said. Opening his mouth wide, he popped it in, chewed briskly, and swallowed quickly. “So I went to East Tennessee Cremation to see your pal Helen. She remembered the name of the embalmer who was working at Ivy Mortuary back when Willoughby was buried,” he mumbled. “A guy named Kerry Roswell. She thinks maybe he started working there in the mid-nineties. She said Roswell was sued, along with Elmer Ivy, by a woman whose husband’s funeral service turned into an entomology science-fair project.”

  “Oh, the maggot case. Right. Burt DeVriess mentioned that.”

  He made a face, and I wasn’t sure whether it was inspired by the mental picture of the maggot-infested corpse or the thought of DeVriess. “So I checked the court documents DeVriess sent me, and sure enough, there’s Roswell’s name as a codefendant.” He popped a piece of gum into his mouth and began to work it. “Couple other tidbits from Helen. One, she said Roswell seemed kinda ambitious — talked about getting his funeral director’s license, talked about someday opening his own funeral home — but then, poof, he just dropped off the radar screen. Two, she said Elmer Ivy was thinking about selling the business, back around that same time. She actually considered buying it herself, but Ivy was asking too much. Supposedly he had some other potential buyer whose pockets were deeper than Helen’s. The other didn’t follow through, but by then she’d lost interest.”

  “Who was the other buyer?”

  “Dunno. Some guy from out of town, maybe with one of the national chains that’s been gobbling up the mom-and-pop mortuaries.”

  “Could it be SCI?” SCI — Service Corporation International — was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the death-care industry, a multibillion-dollar company that owned thousands of funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries worldwide. With its deep pockets and a reputation for rut
hless competition, SCI tended to inspire fear and loathing among locally owned funeral homes, especially any that found themselves targeted in the giant’s cross-hairs. SCI had been the subject of several lawsuits and scandalous news stories in recent years. One scandal was triggered by stories that National Funeral Home, an SCI facility in Virginia, had as many as two hundred unembalmed bodies stacked on racks in a big, unrefrigerated garage. Two other headline-making scandals — along with multimillion-dollar lawsuits — resulted from charges that graves and remains at SCI cemeteries in Florida and California had been secretly destroyed to make room for new burial plots.

  Culpepper shrugged. “She didn’t know what company. She never met the out-of-town guy, but she said she’d ask around, see if anybody else did. It was all just rumors, she said, but sometimes rumors have an underlying factual basis.”

  “Helen’s plugged in,” I said. “I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t dredge up something more for you.”

  “Let’s hope.” The detective folded another piece of gum into his mouth. He stood and headed for the door, then stopped and turned back. “By the way, I thought the ignition button was creepy but cool.”

  “Ignition button?”

  “Yeah, the ignition button. The red button beside the family viewing window. The grieving widow or whoever can push it to light the furnace and send her loved one up in smoke.”

  “Oh, that button. Right.” Helen had pointed it out to me when I’d toured her new facility. At the time I’d paid more attention to the three cremation furnaces and the six-body cooler, though I’d found the button intriguing and slightly amusing. Now I couldn’t help wondering: If my body were the one in the furnace, who would push the button — and with what mixture of feelings?