The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  Whatever Rankin said to Steve during that hundred-yard walk, it was enough to get me out of the TBI agent’s car but not enough to remove the frown from his face. He opened the car door and informed me I could go, adding, “Take care. Good luck.”

  As Morgan’s Ford fishtailed down the gravel road, Rankin motioned toward his own car. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, I thought. The FBI-issue vehicle at least didn’t smell of spilled coffee. Rankin studied me. “You all right, Doc?”

  I shrugged, then nodded.

  “Sounds like you had a rough night of it. All things considered, you look pretty good.”

  I regarded him with a gimlet eye.

  “Okay, that was a lie. Actually, you look like hell, but I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “Thanks. Me, too. Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t realize what an iffy proposition that was.”

  “I’ve got an evidence team coming to search the area where you saw the shooter.” He paused. “Sinclair was in Knoxville yesterday.”

  “No kidding. Even I was able to figure that one out. Where is he today?”

  “Don’t know. We’re looking. He dropped off a rental car at the Knoxville airport last night and caught a flight back to Newark.”

  “Christ, Rooster. You guys arrested him three days ago. How is it he manages to fly to Knoxville, fire five shots at me, and then fly back to Newark without anybody at the FBI noticing?”

  Now Rankin looked as unhappy as Morgan had — and as unhappy as I felt. “He’s out on bail. That means he can go anywhere he wants to. Hell, he could flee the country if he took a mind to.” He saw the expression of dismay and disbelief on my face. “Jesus, Doc, we don’t have the resources to tail all the bad guys all the time,” he said. “We hadn’t picked up anything on the phone or computer taps that made us think he was heading to Knoxville to shoot at you. Sorry, Doc.”

  I stared out the window, then turned my weary gaze toward Rankin. “What’d you tell Morgan?”

  “I told him we needed to have a meeting next week — my boss and his boss. I told him you were working with us on a sensitive investigation and we’d appreciate it if the TBI could give us a little room around you. Oh, I also told him we needed that file of photos your assistant gave him. We’ll get them up to the lab in Quantico next week and see if we can still find Sinclair’s prints underneath everybody else’s.”

  The thought of the photos — and of their being seen by Miranda and Morgan and other people at the TBI — made me heart-sick. “Did you tell him I hadn’t done anything wrong?”

  “I told him I expected we’d be able to answer all his questions very soon.”

  “So he still thinks I’m a sleazebag?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks.”

  “He thinks I’m a sleazebag. You saw the look on his face when he let me out of his car.”

  Rankin shrugged. “Maybe he just thinks I’m a jerk.”

  “And you’re still not willing to tell the TBI or my assistant what’s really going on?”

  “We need to sit on this until after the grand jury hears it.”

  “And when is that?”

  “Tuesday. Just three more days. Once he’s been indicted, we’ll take the lid off. It might not seem like much consolation at the moment, but if the evidence team recovers anything here that ties him to the shooting — prints on the brass, bullets we can match to a gun, tire impressions that match the tread on the rental car — we can add attempted murder to the list of charges.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “At the moment that doesn’t seem like much consolation.”

  He made no move to offer anything more.

  “So do you need me for something else here, or can I go home and sleep for a week or two while my life crumbles around me?”

  “Go get some rest. But first show me where to send the evidence techs.”

  I took him to the fork in the trails and started up the path I’d taken. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s not disturb the area. Just show me.” I pointed to the cluster of hemlocks where I’d seen the muzzle flash, and I described the various points on the footbridge and the opposite embankment where I thought the bullets had hit.

  Then I got into my truck and headed back to Knoxville. By the time I turned in to my driveway and saw the garage door rising to receive me, I felt as if I were swimming underwater. I staggered through the living room and headed for the bedroom, but the blinking message light on the phone caught my eye. I debated briefly, then sighed and checked the voice mail. I had five new messages.

  Two of them had been left by Steve Morgan and were long since irrelevant; the first one, which he’d left at midafternoon Friday, sounded casual and friendly, while the second one, which he’d left Friday evening — probably around the time I was wading across the West Prong for the first time — sounded official and ominous: “This is Steve Morgan with the TBI again. I need you to contact me immediately. This is an urgent, official matter. It’s very serious, and it’s important that you call me right away.” Sandwiched between Morgan’s two calls was an end-of-the-day call from Peggy, reminding me of my Monday-morning appeal to the dean for more land. The fourth message of the five was from Carmen Garcia. The surgery to reverse the pedicle graft had gone very well, she said. Her voice sounded teary, though, not at all like the voice of someone calling with good news. I was puzzled by that, but only for a moment, until Carmen dropped the other shoe. “The possible donor you found — that heart patient at UT — his tissue does not match. Dr. Alvarez said Eddie would almost certainly reject those hands. So we are coming home again to wait. But we thank you so much for trying, Bill.” Her voice broke as she said it, and her sadness, together with my exhaustion, brought me crashing down. I hung up the phone without even listening to the last message and turned off the ringer.

  Shucking off my ragged, filthy clothes, I crawled straight into bed. By the time I’d tucked a pillow beneath my knees and arranged two more under my head, my eyes were rolling backward. I thought I heard the beginnings of a snore, but before I could listen for a second one, I was tunneling deep into sleep.

  When I awoke, the house was dark and the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:17. I’d slept for eighteen hours. I took a long bath, in water that was seventy or eighty degrees hotter than the water I’d been in the previous night. My frostnipped fingertips still felt numb and still looked artificially white — like chicken that’s been blanched in boiling water — and my left ribs felt bruised from my tumble into the stream, but the rest of me felt surprisingly rested and restored.

  When I got out, I turned on the phones and checked for messages. I now had three.

  The first one — the message I’d ignored before tumbling into bed — wasn’t actually a message but a hang-up: a long silence followed by a dial tone. The call had been made shortly after midnight, from a restricted number, according to the caller ID log, but I suspected it had been dialed by Sinclair, checking to see if I’d managed to make it out of the mountains and make it home: checking to see if I was a sitting duck. Luckily, I’d been crawling and shivering in the mountains rather than sleeping in my bed when he’d called.

  The second call came from Eric, the graduate student in biomedical engineering who operated the mobile CT scanner. “I got your message, and I scanned that batch of femurs you were in such a hurry for,” he said. “They’re on the table behind the scanner. Did you want to pick them up over the weekend or just let Miranda get them for you Monday?” My first thought was, Miranda won’t be getting anything for me Monday. Miranda’s gone. My second thought was, Huh? What message, and what batch of femurs, and what hurry? I was on the verge of ending the voice-mail call so I could phone Eric and ask what he meant when the third and final message began to play.

  This last message was from Culpepper, and the KPD detective’s urgent tone stopped my finger just as I was reaching to disconnect. “Art got a match on the thumbprint from the bloody hammer,” Culpepper had practically shouted into the phone.
“It matches one entered into the FBI’s database just yesterday. Somebody in New Jersey indicted for conspiracy. A guy named Raymond Sinclair.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Rooster Rankin was asleep when I phoned him — it was not yet daylight, and it was Sunday morning, I realized — but he snapped to alertness when I relayed Culpepper’s news to him. “Damn,” he said. “Our man Sinclair’s starting to look like Public Enemy Number One. At this rate he’ll be behind bars until the Second Coming.”

  “Unless he’s already skipped the country,” I said. “Have y’all found him yet?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted. “But we will. And this time we’ll make sure he’s held without bail. Meanwhile, sit tight and rest up. Don’t open the door, and stay away from the windows.”

  “Now you tell me,” I said. “I’ll barricade myself in the house again in a few minutes.”

  “Again? Where are you? Aren’t you at home recuperating?”

  “I was,” I said, “but something’s come up. I need to check on something at the Body Farm. Some sort of mix-up at the CT scanner.”

  “Can’t it wait? Surely it’s not an emergency.”

  “Hard to tell. I couldn’t reach the CT tech who called me last night, so I figured I’d just go take a look.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Crossing the river on Alcoa Highway.”

  “Pull over and park. Wait for me. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  I pulled off and tried, but I was too antsy to wait, so I took the Cherokee Trail exit, then turned onto the service road behind the hospital. When I did, I noticed a set of taillights crossing the upper staff parking lot. A car — a white minivan I didn’t recognize — braked to a stop in the upper corner of the lot, directly in front of the Body Farm’s gate. I stopped, switched off my headlights, and watched. A man got out and approached the chain-link fence, and a few moments later the gate swung open. Whoever it was had a key. I racked my brain, mentally running down the list of anthropology graduate students and their vehicles, and didn’t hit a match. As I watched, the minivan drove through the open gate and into the Body Farm, and then the gate swung shut. It was six o’clock on a Sunday morning, and my alarm bells were going crazy.

  Keeping my lights off, I eased into the parking lot and parked fifty yards downhill from the gate, hidden by the trailer of the CT scanner. When I reached the gate on foot, I found that it had been relocked, so I took out my own key to open the padlock. It didn’t fit. Was I holding it upside down? I flipped the key and tried again, but again the lock refused it. Bending down, I cradled the padlock in my hands and studied it. It was a solid brass Master lock — as I’d expected — but the bright, unscratched surface of the brass made it clear that this lock had not been subjected to years of rough weather and rough handling at the gate of the Body Farm. Whoever had just driven inside had relocked the gate with a new lock, one meant to guard against interruptions. Higher up, dangling from one of the diamonds of fencing, hung the weathered lock that normally secured the gate.

  For a moment I was puzzled. Then I was angry. Who the hell was inside, and who did he think he was, changing my lock? I felt invaded and violated, and as my anger spiked, I went back to the truck and grabbed a pair of leather work gloves. Then, furiously and recklessly, I began scaling the chain-link fence to break in to my own research facility. The concertina wire at the top of the gate clawed at the gloves, but the leather was thick and tough. At the top I teetered precariously, both hands gripping coils of wire as I swung one leg over, then the other. The metal points snagged at my pants — I heard fabric tearing and felt something sharp slicing down the calf of my right leg — but then I was over, dropping onto the grass in the main clearing.

  The minivan was barely visible, tucked beneath the trees behind the mobile CT scanner. The morning was still dark enough to allow me to see a sliver of light through the gap at the base of the door. The knob was locked, but I had a key, and this one fit. As I turned the knob and eased the door open, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what on earth I was doing.

  Through the circular opening at the center of the scanner, I glimpsed a man bent over the table in the small room behind it. I edged toward him, using the scanner as a screen. As I got closer, my field of view widened to include a stack of boxes on the table — long rectangular boxes, one foot square by three feet long: the kind of boxes in which we stored the skeletons in our collection. The man, his back turned toward me, was opening one of the boxes. As I watched in astonishment, he removed a left femur from the box, wrapped it in bubble wrap, and tucked it into a black nylon duffel bag. Then, reaching into a red duffel bag, he removed a bundle and unrolled a layer of bubble wrap, revealing another left femur. He placed this second femur into the bone box, closed the lid, and set the box at the end of the table. Then he raised the lid on another box and repeated the process of swapping out bones.

  I was stunned. He was taking bones from the skeletal collection, coolly and methodically, and replacing them with counterfeits. How many bones had he stolen, and over what period of time? I felt almost dizzy with shock, and I reached out a hand to steady myself on the scanner’s table. My hand grazed something lying on the edge of the table, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a Bic pen roll and fall. I made a grab for it, but I was too slow, and the pen clattered to the steel floor.

  The man at the table started. “Hello?” He stood and turned, and I could see his face for the first time. It was Glen Faust. He looked as stunned to see me as I was to see him. Suddenly it all seemed clear: Faust had been using us from the very beginning. The research collaboration had been a pretext, a smoke screen, a way to gain access to a reliable supply of material for OrthoMedica’s bone grafts and bone paste and product-development labs. How big was the annual revenue stream, as he liked to put it, from stolen bones?

  “How long did you think it would be before we noticed?” My voice sounded foreign to me. It wasn’t the voice of a man who’d made a triumphant discovery; it was the voice of a man who realized he’d been played for a fool. I crossed to the table and opened the box where he’d just planted the substitute bone. “The very first graduate student who looked at this femur would know it’s a fake,” I said, taking out the bone to underscore my point. I stared at it. It was stained, it was arthritic, it was labeled with the donation number—31–01—and it was gnarled from a badly healed fracture. The one thing it wasn’t was fake. But how could that be? I’d just seen him take it from his bag, unwrap it, and put it in the box.

  “I can explain this, Bill,” he said.

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  Laying down the femur, I reached into the black bag and snatched out the femur he’d just removed from our collection. I stared it at, wondering if I was seeing double. The bone was identical in every detail to the one I’d just removed from the box: it was stained, it was arthritic, it was labeled 31–01, and it was gnarled.

  “What in bloody hell,” I whispered.

  My eyes darted from one bone to the other, seeking the differences between them. There were none — at least none that I could see. But as I grasped and shifted and rotated them in my hands, I perceived differences I could feel, though barely. One of the bones was a fraction of a percent heavier than the other — no more than the weight of a feather, I’d have sworn, but heavier. I rubbed each bone with a thumbnail. The lighter-weight bone felt slicker somehow, and as I bore down harder, the reddish brown stain on the shaft scraped off, revealing bright white bone underneath. Over the years I’d seen hundreds of thousands of stained bones, and the stain of time and decay and dirt did not, I knew, scrape off with a thumbnail.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “A forgery. A counterfeit. Amazing.”

  “Let me explain,” he repeated.

  “You can explain it to the police.” I laid down the femur I held in my left hand — the genuine one — and fished my cell phone from my hip pocket.

  “Don’t do that,” he pleaded. “Listen t
o me.” I flipped open the phone and dialed 911. In the split second that I glanced down to find the “send” button, he rushed me. Ramming his body into mine, he grabbed for the cell phone with both hands and tried to pry my fingers from it. I began flailing at him with the counterfeit femur. As we grappled, he pulled me off balance, and we toppled to the floor. His body slammed onto my rib cage, knocking the breath from me.

  He straddled me then, pinning me to the floor and sending the phone skidding underneath the scanner. “Now, listen to me,” he gasped. “We are on the verge of a huge breakthrough here. Synthetic bone, stronger and tougher than the real thing, created by combining CT images and composite materials and computer-controlled production equipment. Surely you, of all people, can understand the importance. We’re so close, Bill. Almost close enough to fool even you.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me this was the point of the research, Glen? I would have done all I could to help.”

  “Because he was greedy,” said another voice. Raymond Sinclair stepped from behind the scanner, just as I’d done moments earlier. But unlike me, Sinclair was holding a gun in one hand. “He didn’t want to share the glory, and he didn’t want to share the money. It’s a billion-dollar revenue stream, isn’t that right, Glen?”

  “Get out of here, Ray,” Faust snapped. “Now. Leave while you still can.”

  I stared at them, finally realizing that underneath the surface tension I’d witnessed between them there was a bond of complicity. “You supply tissue for his research,” I said to Sinclair. “You sent him bodies and parts from a Knoxville funeral home you talked about buying.” Neither of them denied it. “You bastards,” I said. “You’re like two sides of the same bad coin. Black-market bodies and stolen bones.”