The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  He nodded.

  “And where does this take place?”

  “In a ballroom at the Grove Park Inn.”

  “The Grove Park?” It was the most elegant hotel in Asheville, a massive stone lodge built in the 1920s. Several U.S. presidents had stayed there, as had dozens of Hollywood stars. “The Grove Park lets us waltz in with a bunch of cadaver arms and carve them up?”

  “Well, we don’t exactly pile them on a baggage cart at the front entrance,” he chuckled, “but basically yeah. I’ve done this at convention hotels plenty of times. We pack the material in leakproof shipping cases, on ice, and bring it up the service elevator. We don’t allow hotel staff into the room, so nobody but the docs sees anything. End of the day, we pack everything up, haul it down the freight elevator and out the service entrance and back to where it came from. Piece of cake.”

  “And you’re envisioning that I’d bring the material over just for the day, then take it back to Knoxville?”

  He shrugged. “Your choice,” he said. “You want to send it home with me, great — we’d be glad to be the ‘designee’ your donor consent form mentions.”

  I sipped my watery Coke and frowned. “I’d need to take it back with me. It would look pretty strange if a dozen skeletons in the collection were missing their arms.” As I said it, I thought of Trey Willoughby’s limbless corpse.

  “Then take ’em back at the end of the seminar. If we can borrow or rent them for a day, that’s great. So you’re saying this is possible?”

  “Possible. Wouldn’t be easy. We’d have to stockpile the material in a freezer.” What else? I asked myself. What else do I need to do to reel him in? “And those arms aren’t going to amputate themselves.”

  “It would be a lot of work,” he conceded, “but I think you’d find that the honorarium would make it worthwhile.”

  I stalled, studying the last of my drink. “How worthwhile?” I took another small sip.

  He didn’t hesitate. “A thousand an arm. Twenty arms, twenty grand.”

  A stray droplet of Coke water went down my windpipe, and I found myself coughing convulsively. The coughing fit was so intense it brought tears to my eyes.

  Once the coughing finally subsided into throat clearing, Sinclair added, “Does that mean you’d consider such an arrangement worthwhile?”

  “That’s…quite worthwhile,” I managed to say.

  He reached a hand across the corner of the end table. “Bill, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.” As we shook hands, he smiled a broad, slow smile, and it made my flesh crawl. He stood up suddenly. “This calls for a toast. Our lovely waitress seems to have forgotten us. Let me go get us a fresh round. You sit tight; I’ll be right back.” He stepped through the curtains and out the doorway before I could protest.

  I slumped back in the sofa, spent from the coughing and dismayed by the deal I’d just made. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the surgical training — quite the contrary, in fact. It was myself I disapproved of: I had just agreed to exploit donated bodies for my own personal gain. I rested my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes.

  “Jet-lagged?”

  I jerked my head up and opened my eyes. It was the pretty waitress in the librarian outfit.

  She set down a fresh Coke and another scotch on the end table. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve just had a long day.”

  She smiled. “You do look like you could use something to perk you up.” She turned and took a few steps, then stopped at the wooden stand holding the massive dictionary. Reaching out a hand, she touched the back of the stand. The lights dimmed, and the room filled with the driving beat of dance music. The young woman was standing with her back to me, her feet slightly apart, the skirt stretched tight. One leg began to keep time to the music, and then — as the Pointer Sisters burst into the lyrics of “I’m So Excited”—she spun to face me. She widened her stance, and a slit in her skirt parted all the way up her left thigh. With one hand she removed her glasses and laid them on the dictionary; with the other she reached up and unpinned the bun, giving her head a toss that flipped her long hair into a high, sweeping arc. Then she began to move toward me, undulating and shimmying across the few feet of space that divided us.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She held one finger to her lips and pursed her mouth in an exaggerated “shush” expression. Then she yanked the white blouse open — I heard the sound of Velcro letting go — to reveal a sheer, low-cut black bra underneath.

  “Wait, stop,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  Instead of answering, she planted her right foot between my own feet, then wedged her left leg between my knees and levered them apart. Next she tugged at the top of the slit in her skirt, and the garment came off in her hand and fell to the floor. She was completely nude underneath. Dear God, I thought desperately and absurdly, what would Sir Galahad do?

  “Stop,” I said. “Please stop now.”

  She turned her back to me again, bent her knees, and arched her back, pushing her bare bottom toward me, swirling and swaying closer and closer in a sensual, primal rhythm.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Stop dancing and put on your clothes. Right now.”

  She froze in mid-sway, inches away from me.

  “I’m serious,” I added. “You’re a beautiful woman, but I didn’t ask for this, and I’m not comfortable with it.”

  She stood up straight and spun to face me, looking skeptical and confused and maybe a little mad. “You’re saying you didn’t ask for a lap dance from me?”

  “No,” I said, “I really don’t want a lap dance,” though that was no longer quite as true as it had been two minutes before. “Thank you, though.”

  Suddenly she looked embarrassed. She took two steps backward. With one hand she pulled her blouse closed, then stooped to pick up the skirt with the other. She wrapped the fabric around her hips and fastened it, then smoothed the blouse’s Velcro fasteners into place

  Just then the curtains in the doorway flew open. I was expecting — hoping — that Rankin and the rest of the FBI cavalry was riding to my rescue, but I was wrong, and disappointed, and very nervous: The burly man from the club’s entrance rushed toward me. Planting himself between the dancer and me, he held a meaty hand six inches from my face, opening and closing his fist like some beating heart of violence and menace. “What’s going on, Brenda? Is this guy giving you trouble? Did he paw you?”

  “No, it’s okay, Vic,” she answered.

  “I heard shouting,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Really, it’s okay, Vic,” she said. “He…he was on the phone, talking loud over the music.”

  Vic looked dubious. He lowered his hand, though it continued to clench and unclench.

  “Really. He didn’t do a thing. He’s a good guy.” Her face filled with sadness suddenly — sadness about this misunderstanding? sadness about the things she had to do for money? — and in her sadness she seemed more exposed than ever. “He’s a good guy,” she repeated with a shake of her head, making for the doorway.

  Just as she reached it, Sinclair walked in, carrying a drink in each hand. He stared at her as she brushed past, then stared at the bouncer, then at me. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and when I said it, I realized that Sinclair must have arranged the whole thing. When he’d gone to get the drinks, he must have told the waitress I’d requested the dance. I had the distinct feeling that I was in over my head. “Nothing happened. I just got a little woozy, and I need to go. I’ve got to get up in six hours to catch my flight anyway.”

  I sidestepped the bouncer and headed for the doorway. Sinclair made to follow me, but I waved him off.

  “You stay and enjoy yourself. Don’t let me put a damper on your evening. Give Melissa my regards.” As I parted the curtains, I looked back over my shoulder. It took everything I had to add, “Call me when you have a final head count f
or the training.”

  Would he call, or had I just lost the fish I’d been sent here to reel in? I didn’t know, and I didn’t much care.

  I snagged a cab that had paused at the club’s entrance to disgorge three rowdy young men sporting military haircuts. I hoped they were generous with their applause and their tips. I hoped they were good guys. I yanked off my tie, halfway hoping that I’d banged the microphone a few earsplitting times in the process.

  Rankin called to praise my performance, but I cut him off quickly. I went back to my tacky turreted hotel, stripped off my smoky clothes and the FBI’s recorder, and stood under a long, hot shower, trying to wash away the shame of having put out on my first date with Ray Sinclair.

  CHAPTER 26

  “So how was your Vegas trip?” Miranda’s tone was casual. She was hunkered over a table in the bone lab, touching the tip of a 3-D digitizing probe to landmarks on the skull from donor 77–08, a skeleton that had spent the fall of 2008 by the foot of an oak tree at the Body Farm. Her back was turned to me, and she didn’t even bother to look over her shoulder at me as she asked.

  Her casualness, I suspected, masked something serious. Normally Miranda was the queen of eye contact. She could ask the most trivial question—“What’d you have for lunch?” or “What time is it?”—and the directness of her gaze would make the question seem profound. Asking about my abrupt departure and swift return without so much as glancing in my direction was a storm warning.

  “Quick,” I said. “Strange. Las Vegas — at least the parts I was in — is a bizarre place. A theme park disguised as a city. I’m sure hundreds of Ph.D. dissertations have been written about the odd cultural anthropology of Las Vegas.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a waste of perfectly good trees.” She glanced at the numbers that the probe was feeding into her laptop computer. “Man, this guy had some wide-set eyes. The intraocular distance is eighty millimeters. That’s way wider than anything I’ve measured before. His depth perception must’ve been incredible.” She touched the probe to other landmarks on the skull: the high points of the zygomatic arches, the widest points of the nasal opening, the contours of the chin. “That’s a long haul to make in a day and a half. Was it worthwhile?”

  Worthwhile. Her echo of Sinclair’s word gave me a pang. “I hope so,” I said.

  She didn’t respond, and in the silence a host of unasked questions and withheld explanations seemed to hang in the air.

  “Glen Faust was giving a paper at a tissue-bank convention,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You know? How do you know?”

  “Peggy said you’d gone to a conference in Las Vegas on short notice. I Googled to see what was going on there this week, conference-wise. I figured you must be at either the cosmetology convention or the tissue-bank meeting.”

  “Cosmology? What do I know about cosmology?”

  “Not cosmology, the nature of the universe,” she said. “Cosmetology. Hair and makeup. A thousand cosmetologists are in Vegas this week.”

  “Hair and makeup? What do I care about hair and makeup?”

  She finally looked in my direction, sizing up my appearance. “Not much, clearly.”

  I laughed. I’d lobbed that one right over the plate for her.

  “I was hoping maybe you’d pick up a few style pointers,” she added, meeting my gaze for the first time. “Then I saw Faust’s talk on the agenda for the tissue-bank meeting, and I abandoned all hope for your stylistic salvation.” The sarcasm, like the eye contact, was a relief — a hopeful sign that the invisible electrical charge in the air between us might dissipate, the way the static in the sky eases after a thunderhead passes over.

  “He’s a good speaker,” I said.

  “The abstract looked interesting. I can see why you felt moved to spend a thousand dollars and thirty-six hours to hear the talk, live and in person.”

  Ouch, I thought. The thunderhead appeared to have circled back.

  “I didn’t really go to hear his talk,” I admitted. I vaguely recalled an old saying about the best lies being partly true. I’d never aspired to be a good liar, but at the moment I wished I felt slightly more fluent in falsehood. “I wanted to talk to him face-to-face about expanding their research funding, because we’re looking at more budget cuts.”

  That, too, contained truth. The UT board of trustees had met six days earlier in emergency session to deal with the worsening budget crunch. Higher tuition — an increase of nearly 10 percent — had been expected to raise an additional $20 million in revenue for the current academic year. Unfortunately, the same economic bind that was squeezing UT itself was also squeezing the families of students; as a result the higher tuition had been largely offset by lower enrollment, and so more cuts were required. Miranda looked pained, and I felt bad for pressing on a sore spot — she knew I’d been struggling to protect the funding for her assistantship, and she was already feeling stress about that. But short of disclosing my role in the FBI’s investigation, I could come up with no other credible pretext for my trip.

  “He didn’t make any guarantees,” I added, with as much cheeriness as I could muster, “but he promised to try.”

  She returned her attention to the skull, which meant turning her back on me. “Well,” she said hollowly, “I hope he succeeds.” I was just opening the door to leave when she said, “Oh, we got a body while you were gone. Family donation — a white male, age sixty-seven, died of cardiopulmonary disease. His number is 37–09. He’s still in the cooler at the morgue. I’ll get him out to the facility sometime this afternoon.”

  Reluctantly I stepped back into the lab and closed the door. “Actually, let’s leave him in the cooler for a while,” I said.

  She swiveled the chair 180 degrees to face me. “How long? And how come?”

  I’d spent much of my flight from Las Vegas to Knoxville dreading these very questions. “Two or three weeks,” I said, drawing a raised eyebrow that looked simultaneously curious and disapproving. Her second question was tougher: Why? I wasn’t dazzled by the answer I’d come up with during the plane ride, but it was the best I could do. “I’m thinking of doing a research project of my own,” I said. “I’d need at least five bodies to do it, maybe ten.”

  She stared at me. “Are you kidding? How long since you’ve done research of your own?”

  “Too long. Feels like I’m losing touch with what life is like for you overworked, underpaid graduate students.”

  “Good of you to walk a mile in our moccasins, kemosabe,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be giving up your salary for a while, too?” She laid down the probe. “I need to go check on some bones I put in to simmer while you were gone. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Make sure the door’s locked when you leave.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Two hours later the stairwell door outside my office banged open, hard enough to send a slight shiver through the columns and girders of the stadium. Then my own office door was flung open with equal force.

  Miranda burst into the room, wild-eyed, out of breath, and weeping.

  “Miranda, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s Eddie, it’s Eddie.” The words were barely discernible amid the sobs. “His right hand — it went septic.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Now. Carmen just called me from the ER. She said they’re taking him into emergency surgery.” She shook her head in sadness and shock. “They’re amputating the last bit of his hands right now.”

  * * *

  We found Carmen in the surgery waiting room, slumped in a chair, her face cradled in her hands. She looked up when Miranda called her name, and the face she raised to us had aged twenty years in the past two months.

  “Oh, Carmen,” said Miranda, “I’m so, so sorry.” She sat beside her, taking Carmen’s right hand in both of hers. I sat on the other side, holding her left hand. We sat in silence for what seemed hours, our six hands entwined. Eventually I lost track of where my hands ended and
Carmen’s began. I watched a finger twitch, and for a moment — until I noticed the small, manicured tip at the end of the nail — I thought the finger was one of my own, numb from lack of movement and blood.

  As the time inched by, I became aware of a thought tugging at the sleeve of my mind. I tried ignoring it, then tried actively banishing it, but it returned to tug again and again, with increasing insistency. Underneath my worries about Eddie and Carmen — would he live? would he recover from this latest setback? would she? — swirled a cluster of darker questions: Had Eddie brought this on himself deliberately? Had he undertaken Clarissa Lowe’s autopsy not in spite of the risk but because of the risk? Had he decided that a toe-to-thumb transplant wasn’t good enough? Had he contrived to sacrifice his remaining half hand so he’d be a double amputee, and therefore a more compelling transplant candidate? I remembered the frightful, hopeful words he’d spoken the day Miranda had researched his options, when I pointed out the difficulties of transplantation. “It’s a big risk,” he’d said. “But to have hands again would be worth taking a big risk.” Had he taken that risk, gambling with his very life?

  Finally a scrub-suited doctor came to deliver the ritual postoperative news. “Mrs. Garcia?” Carmen stood, helped out of her chair by Miranda and me. “I’m Dr. Rivkin; I’m the hand surgeon on call. First, most important, your husband’s in Recovery, and he’s doing well.” Carmen waited, knowing there was more. “Unfortunately, we did have to amputate the hand, just below the wrist. The good news is, we’re confident we got all the decayed and infected tissue, and we’ve put him on a strong course of antibiotics. So his prognosis is very good.” Carmen nodded numbly.

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” I interrupted. “You might already know this, but Dr. Garcia was exposed to Clostridium bacteria last week during an autopsy.” I felt Miranda’s eyes on me, and I wondered if she’d been pondering the same dark questions as I had. “The autopsy subject died of toxic shock a week after surgery.” Carmen drew a sharp breath. “Does that exposure affect how you need to treat Dr. Garcia?”