Maurie’s steady decline, documented in hundreds of pictures by now, was inevitable and irreversible. I wondered if mine was, too.
Locking the photos in my desk drawer, I locked the office and went outside, into the bracing breeze of the early-April afternoon.
* * *
Thirty minutes later I found myself striding into the Duncan Federal Building, demanding that the startled lobby guard send me up to the sixth floor. “Who are you going to see?”
“Special Agent Ben Rankin,” I snapped.
“Just a moment, sir,” the guard said warily. “I’ll need to call and make sure he’s expecting you. What’s your name?”
“Bill Brockton,” I snarled, “and I’m sure he’s not expecting me.”
He picked up a phone from the counter and dialed, then murmured into it, keeping his eyes on me as he talked and covering his mouth with his hand so I couldn’t hear what he said. “I’m sorry, sir, he’s not in.”
“Damn it. What about Angela Price?”
He murmured into the phone again, then paused to listen. He looked me up and down, then murmured some more. He hung up, eyeing me doubtfully, but motioned me through the metal detector, then escorted me to the elevator and pushed the sixth-floor button.
When the elevator door slid open, Price was standing in front of me. She held out a hand. “Dr. Brockton, good to see you. What can I do for you?”
“You can give me back my reputation,” I said.
“Here, step into my office.” She led me through the lobby, past its reception window of bulletproof glass and down a hall to an office whose windows offered a view of the Knoxville Convention Center and the eastern edge of the UT campus. Ben Rankin was sitting in one of the two chairs facing Price’s desk.
“I thought you weren’t in,” I said accusingly.
“I wasn’t. Just got back.”
“Have a seat, Dr. Brockton,” urged Price, “and tell us what’s bothering you.”
I told them about the envelope I’d just received, blushing as I described the photographs.
Price asked, “Did you bring it with you?”
“No. I locked it in my desk drawer. I started walking to clear my head. I didn’t realize I was going to end up here.”
She nodded slightly, then looked at Rankin. He glanced at me, then looked back at Price. A slow smile spread across his face.
She smiled slightly, too.
“Please clue me in,” I said. “What do you see here that’s worth a smile?”
“Blackmail,” responded Rankin happily.
“Or extortion,” added Price. “Maybe. If we’re lucky.”
“Lucky? I nearly passed out when I opened that envelope.”
“Don’t you see?” said Rankin. “We’re looking at a whole new count against him now. We were already looking at theft, fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and interstate racketeering, but if we can add extortion to the indictment, that’s potentially another twenty years.” He grinned. “Man, I never really believed he would be so dumb.” Price shot him a warning look, and the smile left his face.
For the second time in the past hour, I felt a churning wave of shock and sickness. I stared at Price, then at Rankin. “My God,” I breathed. “You knew this would happen. You wanted me to end up in this position all along.”
He frowned. “Not you, Doc — him. We wanted him to end up in this position. There’s a difference.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew the minute I agreed to go into that strip club that he’d do something like this, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t know,” Price answered for him, “but yes, we thought it was possible. The FBI would be doing a pretty sloppy job if we failed to anticipate this sort of thing. It’s a time-honored trap.”
I felt betrayed, humiliated, and furious. “Do the words ‘informed consent’ mean anything to you? You didn’t tell me the whole truth about what you expected when you pulled me into this. You got my consent under false pretenses. I deserved better than that.”
“Fair enough. Yes, you deserved better,” Price said, in a tone that sounded more like a challenge than a concession, “but we couldn’t afford to risk giving you better. We knew you’d hate the strip club, and we knew Sinclair might try to compromise you. But what Ben said when you called him that night was dead-on: If you were too much of a goody-goody to set foot in a strip club, why on earth would Sinclair believe you’d lie and steal?”
The words stung like a slap — not just “lie” and “steal” but “goody-goody” as well. Was that what Price thought of me? Was that what Rankin thought of me? Was that, in fact, what I was?
“I’m sorry,” Price added, her tone softening. “It was my call, not Ben’s, and I had to hold my nose as I made it. An undercover sting requires imperfect choices and tough decisions. But I stand by this one, and I hope you can understand why. We’ve got great audio and video evidence on multiple counts — wire fraud, conspiracy, and interfering with interstate commerce, for sure. If you’ll hang in there with us just one more step, we’ll nail this guy for extortion, too. And then we’ll let you get back to your normal life.”
“Normal life? I have no idea what that means anymore.”
I looked out the window for a long time. The sun was dropping toward the horizon. A few hundred yards down the hill from where I stood, a sliver of sunlight glanced off the bronze glass of the Sunsphere, one of the few remaining relics of Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair. A half mile or so beyond, just before the big bend where the Tennessee River first turns toward the Gulf of Mexico, Neyland Stadium glowed orange and white in the late-afternoon light. At this distance, at this moment, the massive stadium seemed small and unimportant, and my tiny office — my place beneath it — was an invisible, insignificant speck.
I looked back at Price. “I feel infected,” I said miserably. “Diseased. Feels like toxic shock attacking every moral fiber I’ve got.” I stared out the window at the river of cars flowing westward from downtown, taking normal people home to their neighborhoods and their families. “How do I get these toxins out of my system?”
A look of relief passed between the agents. They still had me. The bait was thrashing, but it was still on the hook, still twitching and writhing as the big fish opened its jaws.
* * *
Rankin drove me back to my office, partly to save me the walk and partly to retrieve the envelope so the lab could fingerprint the photos. On the way he coached me about the call I needed to place to Sinclair. “You know the drill. Make him spell out the details, if you can. The more explicitly he threatens or pressures you, the stronger the extortion case is. So don’t initiate anything. Get him to say what he wants you to do or what he’ll do to you.”
“Got it,” I said impatiently. This was the third time he’d told me this, in slightly different words, since we’d ridden down in the elevator from Price’s office, and I’d grasped the point the first two times.
We threaded the service road ringing the base of the stadium and parked by the stairwell at the north end zone. Rankin followed me up to my office and took a seat as I unlocked the desk drawer where I’d hidden the envelope.
For the second time that day, I felt close to fainting. The envelope was gone.
CHAPTER 39
“And you’re sure it was in the drawer?”
“Positive.”
Rankin looked around the room. “What about the file cabinet? Couldn’t you have put it in the file cabinet?” I shook my head. “How about checking it, just to humor me?” I unlocked the file cabinet and yanked open the balky top drawer, then each of the lower drawers. It was not in the filing cabinet, as I’d known all along.
I went back to the desk drawer. “Look,” I said, removing a printout of an e-mail message that had been sent to me six hours before. “My secretary printed this out and handed it to me along with the packet from Sinclair. I put both things in the drawer.”
“Maybe you put the
e-mail in the drawer and the envelope in your briefcase,” Rankin suggested. “You know, if you were upset, maybe you got the e-mail and the envelope mixed up.”
I shook my head emphatically. “My briefcase is still in the truck. I never even brought it in this afternoon. I’m telling you, somebody’s come in and taken it.”
“You’re sure the drawer was locked? And you’re sure the office door was locked?”
“Give me a break,” I snapped. “I was mortified when I saw those pictures. If I could have bricked up the doorway and welded the damn drawer shut, I would have. Yes, I’m sure they were both locked.”
He leaned down and inspected the edges of the drawer. “Doesn’t look like it’s been forced,” he said. “So who else has keys?”
Before I could answer, the phone rang. The display announced the caller as Peggy. “My secretary,” I said, lifting the handset by reflex.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re there,” she said. “A Dr. Raymond Sinclair’s on the line for you. Something to do with funding for a research project he says he’s sponsoring. This is the third time he’s called this afternoon. He says it’s urgent he speak with you today.”
“Dr. Sinclair?” Given Ray Sinclair’s apparent scorn of advanced degrees, I could only assume the “Dr.” was designed to carry weight with Peggy. I looked to Rankin for guidance. He raised his left hand to his head — his thumb at his ear, his pinkie near his lips — as if the hand were a telephone. He nodded, spinning his right forefinger in a rolling, forward motion that meant go. “Oh, yes,” I said to Peggy. “I do need to speak with Dr. Sinclair. Please put him through right away.” I heard the line click. “Ray, are you there?”
“Hello, Bill,” he said. “How the hell are you?”
I caught Rankin’s eye and pointed toward the speakerphone button on the phone, raising my eyebrows in a question. He shook his head emphatically, so instead I angled the handset slightly away from my ear. The agent leaned close, his ear practically touching mine.
“How am I? How do you think I am, Ray? I’m a little off balance. I had an unpleasant surprise this afternoon.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. I thought you’d thank me.”
“Thank you? Why?”
“For sending you mementos of that swell evening we had in Las Vegas. You looked like you were having quite a time while I was out of the room.”
“How did you get those pictures, Ray?”
“A sweet young thing gave them to me. I believe her name is Marian. Marian, Madame Librarian.” He chuckled at the joke.
“And what do you plan to do with them?”
“Do with them? I don’t plan to do anything with them, Bill.” Rankin flashed a thumbs-down sign, which I took to mean he was unhappy to hear that. “I just thought you’d appreciate taking a walk down memory lane. A walk down lap-dance lane. Oh, but you don’t mind if I share them with our friends at The Library, do you? Those would be a nice addition to their Web site.”
“You must be joking,” I said. “Those pictures on the Web?”
“What, you don’t like that idea, Bill? You don’t want your colleagues and students and family to see what a great time you were having?”
“You know I don’t want those circulating on the Internet — or anyplace else. You know that would be very painful to me.”
“So here’s what’s very painful to me,” he shot back, the phony cheerfulness gone from his voice. “You said you’d provide me with bodies, and you haven’t. You thought you had me by the balls, and you got greedy. But who’s got the tighter grip, Bill? Tell me, how does it feel?”
“It feels like you’ve got me,” I admitted.
“Damn right I’ve got you.”
“So what do you want, Ray?”
“I want two bodies by Tuesday,” he said. “On ice, in Newark.”
“Tuesday? That’s not much time,” I protested. “What if I can’t get them to you that fast?”
“Did I mention there’s video, too? You know what I think, Bill? I think you’re gonna be the next big hit on YouTube if I don’t get those bodies Tuesday. By the way, Bill, how’s your cardiovascular health? Any history of heart attacks in your family?”
Before I had a chance to respond — even before I remembered that the FBI’s previous informant against Sinclair had died of a massive coronary — Sinclair hung up.
Rankin flashed me a thumbs-up. I did not share his sense of success.
He made a call from his cell phone. “Did you get all that?” He nodded as he listened. “And the audio quality’s good?” He nodded again. “Great. You guys are the best.”
He hung up smiling, but then he remembered, and he frowned. “So the photos,” he said. “We really need those. Think hard. Where else might you have put them?”
“I’m telling you, they were locked in the drawer. I’d stake my life on it.”
“And who else has keys to the drawer?”
“No one. Well, almost no one. My secretary, Peggy. Some old guy, years ago, in the maintenance department.”
Then it hit me, the day’s third tsunami. “And Miranda.”
* * *
That night I had a dream, and in my dream I was walking a wide, sandy trail in a park — maybe in Florida — with lots of palmetto trees. Some slight movement at my feet caused me to look down. There, an inch-long worm of some sort thrashed wildly on the sand, in a series of violent movements — as if a tiny whip were somehow cracking itself. After a few seconds, the convulsions stopped and the worm slithered off into the grass. I was puzzled: What had triggered the spasms, and why had they suddenly stopped? Then, two feet farther up the trail, I saw a second worm thrashing. This one was covered, from end to end, with fire ants from a nearby anthill. It managed to fling off a few of the ants, but dozens more clung to it and still more flocked to it. As I watched in fascinated horror, the worm’s thrashing ebbed. It trembled a few times and then lay still, except for the quivering swarm of insects feeding on its dying body.
I awoke before dawn, trembling and drenched with sweat.
* * *
I’d been up for three hours, but the sun had been up for only one, when my home phone rang. It was Eddie Garcia, calling to say that he’d just heard from the Emory hand surgeon. “They’ve approved me,” he said. “I’m on their list — first on their list — when they find a matching donor for me.”
“That’s great news, Eddie.”
“That’s not all. She — Dr. Alvarez, the surgeon — just got a big research grant from the federal government. The grant will fund the cost of everything — the surgery, the postoperative care, the physical therapy. It even covers the immunotherapy meds I’ll have to take for the rest of my life.”
“That’s wonderful. Congratulations. Does she have any guess when she might be able to do the surgery?”
“No. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe five years from now. There’s no way to know.”
I knew that some wait-listed transplant recipients spent months or years in limbo, inching up the list and praying for a match. Some died waiting and praying. But Eddie’s situation was different: He wouldn’t die from the wait, unlike someone whose heart was failing. What’s more, his time in limbo might be far briefer than a heart or a kidney patient’s, he pointed out. “The surgery’s still experimental,” he explained, “so the wait list is short. Very short, in fact — I’m the only one on it so far.” He laughed. “So as soon as Emory gets a donor whose hands are a good match, it can happen.”
“And what now? You just wait for the word? The proverbial Phone Call?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Dr. Alvarez says the blood vessels in my right wrist have probably regrown and recovered by now. She wants me to come back to Atlanta so she can reverse the pedicle graft and tidy up the stump. That way I’ll be ready whenever she finds a donor.”
“How soon does she want you to come?”
“Today. Carmen will drive me down this afternoon, and Dr. Alvarez will detach th
e graft tomorrow morning.”
Eddie also had an update on Clarissa Lowe’s death. The CDC — the Centers for Disease Control — had done a genetic profile on the tissue sample Eddie had sent after the autopsy. The CDC lab had identified the bacterium in Lowe’s bone graft as Clostridium sordellii, a particularly toxic species. “They plan to look for other cases of bone grafts linked to toxic shock recently,” he added, “in case there’s a wider problem with improperly sterilized cadaver tissue.”
Eddie himself had pinned down the manufacturer of the bone graft Lowe had received. “The graft itself was made by OrthoMedica,” he said, “but OrthoMedica made it from bone they bought from a supplier — a tissue bank.” He named the four tissue banks OrthoMedica regularly bought cadaver tissue from. I’d never heard of the first three he mentioned — Gift of Life, BioLogic, and Donor Medical Services. But I’d damn sure heard of the fourth one: Tissue Sciences and Services, Incorporated. Given the bad blood between Ray Sinclair and Glen Faust, I was surprised to hear that Tissue Sciences did business with OrthoMedica. But just as blood was thicker than water, perhaps money was thicker than blood — even bad blood.
After Eddie hung up, I called the FBI to relay his findings to Rankin. If Tissue Sciences was the source of the bacteria-laden bone, it was possible that the company’s penchant for playing fast and loose included other crimes besides black-market body buying. I didn’t know what federal statutes — if any — governed how a tissue bank was required to process or sterilize cadaver tissue, but if anybody was in a position to find out quickly, it was surely Rankin. Rankin promised to look into it. “By the way,” he added, “we arrested Sinclair. Last night. I thought you’d want to know.” He was right. I began to see light at the end of the tunnel.
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