The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  “No I don’t,” I snapped. “I hate it.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be watching and listening, and we’re close enough to come in and get you if we need to.”

  “Crap, I wasn’t expecting a strip club. What do I do?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What do I do?’ I believe look but don’t touch would be a good plan to follow. Unless you want to get to know the bouncer really quick.”

  “I’m not asking about etiquette. I’m asking if you actually think I should go in there. It seems pretty tawdry.”

  “Of course it’s tawdry,” he said. “I mean, I’m not the anthropologist here, but isn’t the tawdriness the point of a strip club?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been in one.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  “Well, then, this should be interesting. Listen to this. This is the description of the place that’s posted on the Web. ‘This gentlemen’s club isn’t just for bookworms. The club actually does have volumes lining the entrance, but the clientele comes here for a different type of learning experience. And they visit often enough to keep The Library busy even on school nights.’ That’s hilarious.”

  “Not to me,” I said. “I really don’t like this.”

  I heard him sigh. “I’m sorry you don’t like it, Doc. I’m not asking you to like it. But I am asking you to do it. Remember, this guy’s gonna want you — at least we hope he’s gonna want you — to break federal laws for him. If you balk at setting foot in a strip club, he might have deep doubts about your scofflaw sincerity.”

  “So if he wants me to hire a hooker or snort cocaine, am I supposed to do that, too, Rooster? How much of me’s for sale here?”

  “Not that much,” he said. “So no, don’t do hookers or cocaine. But do this meeting. Please.”

  “Hang on while I think about this.” The meter’s digits glowed bright red in the darkness below the dashboard; currently it read $17.50.

  A finger tapped my window, and I fumbled for the button to roll it down. “Sorry, I’m almost done,” I turned to tell the driver.

  But it was not the driver. “Take all the time you need,” said Raymond Sinclair. The cab’s meter flipped to $18.00.

  “I need to go,” I said into my cell phone. “I’m meeting a friend, and he just got here. I’ll talk to you later.” I snapped the phone closed, got out of the cab, and walked into The Library with Raymond Sinclair.

  The front door opened into a short hallway with a counter along one side; behind it sat a burly man wearing a bored expression, a tight black T-shirt, and a dusting of ashes from the cigarette that dangled from his lips. Sinclair flashed the man a plastic card labeled VIP PLATINUM MEMBER, which he acknowledged with a nod. A battered clipboard lay on the counter. The man nudged it toward me.

  “Sign in,” he said, “and I need to see a driver’s license.”

  I added my name to the list of other men and then fished my license out of my wallet and handed it to him, feeling embarrassed and vaguely guilty. He compared the names, handed my license back across the counter, then pressed a button beside the counter to buzz us into the main room.

  The room was loud and dark, with a lighted square stage in the middle. A few men sat on low stools surrounding the stage, a handful more sat at tables dispersed throughout the room, and several others were tucked into booths with flashy young women beside them. A pair of waist-high bookshelves, lined with battered paperbacks — presumably the “volumes” Rankin mentioned — flanked the doorway through which we’d entered. Clearly The Library had pulled out all the stops in its effort to provide a highbrow experience.

  As we entered, a tall young blond woman — naked except for a tiny G-string and a lace garter encircling one thigh — shinnied up a brass pole at center stage. Once she was at the top, she let go with her hands and leaned back, extending her arms and arching her torso to accentuate her breasts. They were, I had to admit, quite impressive. Then, extending one willowy leg, she hung by the other and began to slide downward, spiraling slowly around the pole, her descent set to throbbing music and strobing lights. During her final spin, timed to coincide with the end of the song, her long hair swept the stage, then fanned out behind her head as her body came to an artfully posed stop at the base of the pole. “That’s Desirée workin’ it for you, guys,” intoned a DJ’s unctuous voice. “Give her a big hand, fellows, and don’t forget to tip. These girls dance only for tips.” I felt obliged to applaud, but no one else did, so after a few self-conscious claps I stopped. One of the men sitting stageside extended a folded bill in the dancer’s direction; she squatted in front of him, hooking a finger under the garter to raise it off her thigh, and he slid the bill beneath the elastic band. The two men sitting beside him studiously looked away, their hands cupped around their beer cans. I wondered how much detail the tiny camera clipped to my tie was relaying to the FBI agents in the van.

  Something about the woman’s face looked familiar, and I realized with a start that I’d seen her before — only hours before — in a drastically different light. I tapped Sinclair on the arm. “Isn’t that the woman who asked you the first couple of questions this morning?”

  “In the flesh.” He smiled at my obvious bafflement. “Sometimes it’s a good idea to frame the questions the way you want ’em framed,” he explained. “Gives you a little more leverage over the discussion. A bit of spin control. Politicians do it all the time — salt the audience at town meetings with friendly folks who’ll lob some easy questions over the plate.”

  I thought back to the end of Sinclair’s talk. “So when Glen Faust interrupted you — was that scripted, too?”

  Even in the club’s dim light, I could see Sinclair flush. “It sure as hell wasn’t scripted by me,” he snapped. “If I’d been scripting it, he’d have made some lame-ass point and I’d have demolished him. He caught me by surprise, and once he brought you into it, it got away from me.” As he spoke, he watched the woman onstage wriggle into a tight tube dress and descend a short set of steps to the main floor.

  “That lovely lady was Desirée,” the DJ oozed. “Next up is Mandy. Mandy’s going to do two numbers for you. Don’t be shy, fellows. If you like what you see, come up and tip the ladies. They’re available for table dances and lap dances, too.”

  A petite redhead wearing a push-up bra, lace panties, and stiletto heels took the stage. As soon as the song began, she unhooked the bra and let it fall, then slid down the panties and stepped out of them, snagging one heel briefly on the lace. I wondered when the striptease — the slow, tantalizing removal of layers of clothing — had been replaced by brutally efficient stripping.

  The gymnastic blonde, whom the DJ had called Desirée, sidled up to Sinclair and kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, doll,” he said. “Dr. Brockton, this is Melissa. Melissa, Dr. Brockton.”

  “Hi,” she said, offering me a hand to shake. “That was very interesting, what you were saying this morning.”

  “Oh, hell, not you, too.” Sinclair groaned. “Everybody loves this guy. What am I, chopped liver?”

  “Aw, don’t get jealous on me,” she cajoled, kissing his cheek again. “You’re the one that’s out on a date with him.” She looked at me naughtily. “I hope you’re not the kind of guy who puts out on the first date.”

  I felt myself turn crimson and was grateful for the darkness of the club. “Not to worry,” I said, unsure what to say next. Maybe, I didn’t recognize you without your clothes. Or, How’d you get so good at gymnastics? Or maybe, Doesn’t it bother you that strange men come in to stare at your body and don’t even clap or tip? I settled for the lame safety of, “Nice to meet you, Melissa.”

  Sinclair nudged me. “Where you want to sit? Up by the stage?”

  God forbid, I thought, but what I said — shouted, practically — was, “A booth, if that’s okay with you. Be a little easier to talk.”

  He nodded. “Sweetheart,” he said to Melissa/Desirée, “could you excuse us for a fe
w minutes? We need to talk a little shop.” She mimed a smooch at him, waved her fingertips at me, and sashayed away in her short dress and tall heels.

  Sinclair led us to a booth in a far corner of the room, mercifully far from the stage. As soon as we were seated, a pretty brunette — not as young as the two twentysomething dancers — came to take our drink order. She wore a simple white blouse, a straight gray skirt that reached below her knees, and a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses. Her hair was pinned back in a loose bun, skewered by a #2 wooden pencil. Despite how completely clichéd the costume was, I found the librarian-waitress far more attractive than I’d found either of the topless, gyrating dancers.

  Sinclair ordered a scotch, a single-malt whose name I didn’t know and probably couldn’t pronounce. He lifted an eyebrow at me when I ordered a Diet Coke. “I don’t drink alcohol,” I explained across the table. “I have Ménière’s disease — occasional spells of vertigo — so I’m pretty careful to steer clear of dizziness.”

  He nodded, looking slightly amused. “Think of all the money you’ve saved by not drinking. If I didn’t love scotch so much, I’d be a billionaire.” His gaze drifted from me to the redhead on stage, then back to me again. “Did you go hear Faust’s talk this afternoon?”

  I nodded.

  “What’d you think?”

  “I thought it was interesting, especially the stuff about nanomaterials and tissue scaffolds for bone and cartilage. Sounds like five or ten years from now we’ll be able to limp into the doctor’s office and sprint out an hour later with a rebuilt knee.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” he said.

  “You think Faust is overstating the potential?”

  He shrugged. “I think he’s underestimating the difficulties. Guys like him always do. They think they’re smarter than the rest of us. Smart enough to fix anything, solve anything. Smart enough to cheat death.” He picked at the edges of a fingernail. “You remember all the buzz about cryonics a few years back? Deep-freeze your way to immortality?”

  “Vaguely. Wasn’t it Ted Williams, the baseball great, who had his head cut off and frozen when he died?”

  “Right. Theory is, the brain — and memory, and personality, all that shit — can be preserved in liquid nitrogen and then thawed out and revived and spiffed up in a few decades or centuries and grafted onto a cloned body. Give me a break.”

  I smiled. “It does sound like they’re selling water from a high-tech Fountain of Youth, doesn’t it?”

  “Faust’s given money to those guys,” Sinclair said, studying my reaction as he played that card. “He’s funneled research funding to Alcor, the outfit in Arizona that has Ted’s head on ice. He’s on their scientific advisory committee, too.”

  He was probably gratified by my look of surprise. “Well, that’s certainly interesting,” I said. “Plant enough seeds, some of them bear fruit someday. Probably not the cryonic immortality seeds, but maybe carbon-fiber bone scaffolds.”

  He shook his head.

  “So…clearly you’re not worried that the biomedical engineers are going to put you out of business.”

  “Not a chance. People used to claim that the computer revolution would lead to the paperless office. Instead we use more paper than ever before. Same with human tissue. Even if Faust manages to create synthetic tissues — shit, especially if he manages to do it — the need for the real deal will always increase. Always.”

  Our drinks arrived. I reached for my wallet, but Sinclair stopped me. “They’re running a tab for us,” he said. “We’ll settle up later.” As the waitress set his scotch down, Sinclair laid a hand on her wrist. “We’re trying to talk some business here,” he said, “and we’re having to shout over the music. Is there a quieter room where we could talk?”

  “There’s the Archives Room,” she said. “Nobody’s in there right now.”

  “Sounds perfect.” Sinclair slid out of the booth. “Lead on.”

  She took us through a wide door and a short hallway at one side of the main floor and showed us into a smaller, curtained-off room, ten or twelve feet square, with leather couches lining three of the four walls. In the corners between the sofas, end tables held potted ferns, leather-bound books, and brass lamps with shades of deep green glass. A waist-high stand in the middle of the room held a massive volume, which I recognized as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. I revised my earlier opinion of The Library’s lame literary décor; originally I’d given it two stars, but now I decided it might rate three. Sinclair sank into the corner of one sofa, gesturing with his glass to the adjoining sofa for me. In the background I could still hear the relentless throb of the music, but the volume had dropped by three-quarters, and I felt sure the audio recording would be much clearer here than in the main room. I also felt far more comfortable in here, away from the nonstop parade of exposed breasts and buttocks.

  “This is much better,” I said.

  He took a sip of the scotch. “Ah, mother’s milk,” he breathed. “How’s your Coke?”

  I tasted it; it was flat and watery. “Fine. Hits the spot.”

  He shook his head. “You are a party animal,” he said sarcastically. He was right. “Wild” was probably not the word my colleagues would use to describe me, but I didn’t care. “Relax, Bill. Loosen up. Take off your tie.”

  I felt a flash of panic. Was he suspicious about the tiepin? “If I take it off, I’ll forget and walk out without it. But it would feel good to loosen it.” I unclipped the pin, slid the knot down a couple of inches, then reclipped the pin.

  “Nice tiepin, by the way.”

  “Thanks. It was a Father’s Day present from my son last year.”

  “What’s the stone?” He leaned toward it, and my blood pressure zoomed.

  “Uh, not sure. Maybe onyx?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He studied the pin closely. My palms began to sweat. “Looks more like moonstone to me.” He sat back, and my panic eased. “Listen, Bill, I’d like to bounce an idea off you. Feel free to say no. I’m not shy — I’ll ask anybody anything — but I never take it personally if the answer’s not the one I was hoping for.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Shoot.”

  “I think we’ve got a lot in common, you and I,” he began. “We’re both outsiders, in a way. We work in fields that most people consider morbid or gruesome. The public benefits tremendously from what we do, but they don’t always appreciate us or reward us for doing it.”

  I shifted in my seat. “I might have to disagree with you on that,” I said. “I like teaching, and I like the forensic work — identifying bodies, figuring out how or when somebody died. I find those rewarding.”

  He wagged a corrective finger at me. “Ah, but those are internal rewards,” he said. “That’s your own inner sense of satisfaction, not external reward. How much did you make last year, Bill? What do they pay you to do what you do?”

  “Less than I want,” I hedged, “but maybe more than I deserve.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “Okay, it’s none of my business, but I bet the university doesn’t pay you half as much as it pays the football coach.” In fact, UT didn’t pay me one-tenth as much as it paid its head coach, whose salary was more than $2 million a year. What’s more, UT was also paying $2 million a year to a coach it had recently fired. One year after signing a four-year, $7 million contract with coach Phil Fulmer, UT asked him to step down…and agreed to pay his salary for the remainder of his contract. In other words, Fulmer was being paid $6 million not to work for three years. I didn’t say all that to Sinclair, but I did say, “It would be nice if anthropology professors were considered as valuable as coaches or medical examiners or lawyers.”

  “Hear, hear,” he said, raising his glass in toast. “To prosperous anthropology professors.” I clicked my Coke against his scotch, hoping my strained smile didn’t look too phony. “So I’m wondering if you do any consulting on the side? The university doesn’t prohibit that, does it?”


  “Generally not,” I said. “Not unless it’s a conflict of interest, or unless it averages more than two days a month. But they don’t have to approve honoraria at all, so if you wanted me to do a lecture for you…”

  “Hmm. We might be able to work it that way,” he mused. “This morning I mentioned putting on small trainings for surgeons. We actually get a lot of requests for those. Would you be interested in working with me on something like that?”

  Careful, I told myself. Don’t look too eager. “I’m sure it’d be interesting, but I’m not qualified to teach surgeons. Not unless they want to know about postmortem decomposition and time since death.”

  “You’re far too modest,” he said. “I’m sure surgeons could learn a lot from you. But not to worry. We’d also have a surgery consultant there, an expert in the procedure we’d be teaching.”

  “I don’t mean to seem dense, but if you have a surgery consultant and you’re teaching surgeons a procedure, why do you need me?”

  He raised his glass in a slight salute. “I do like a man who cuts to the chase, Bill. What I’m hoping is that you might be able to bring along some material.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  He leaned across the end table toward me. “We have a one-day training for orthopedic surgeons coming up in a few weeks in Asheville,” he said. “Just across the mountains from Knoxville. We’re teaching microsurgery techniques for reattaching small blood vessels and nerves in the arm. He swirled the glass in one hand, frowning slightly at how little of his scotch remained. “Right now we’ve got the enrollment capped at ten, and we’re turning people away. If we had enough specimens, we could double or even triple the class size.”

  “So you’re asking if I could haul ten or twenty arms to Asheville?”

  “Like I said, I’ll ask anybody anything. Is that an impossible thing to ask?”

  “Possibly impossible,” I answered, “but maybe just complicated. So the surgery consultant demonstrates the technique, then each of these surgeons practices it on an arm?”