The Bone Thief bf-5 Page 11

  I eyed the nearer chair doubtfully. “Are you sure this thing will hold me up?”

  “Hell, Doc,” he said, “that would hold up you and me both, with a couple hundred pounds of legal files sitting on our laps. If it breaks, sue me.” I laid a hand on the seat and gave an experimental push. The taut cords scarcely moved. I plucked one with a fingernail, and it hummed like a guitar string. “Go ahead, try it.” I sat, nervously at first, then with increasing confidence. I’d expected the cords to dig into me, but the chair was surprisingly comfortable. “Aren’t they cool? Designed by a Canadian architect in the 1950s. Manufactured by a company that made tennis rackets. Simple but elegant.”

  “Don’t you worry that somebody might sit down with something sharp sticking out of a back pocket? I’m guessing that if one cord got cut, the whole thing would implode.”

  “Hadn’t occurred to me to worry about that,” he said. “Remind me to frisk you next time you come in.” He tapped the file in front of him. “I dug up some interesting history on Ivy Mortuary. They were sued in 1999 by the widower of a woman who died and was cremated. Seems the cremains came back with a shiny set of dentures tucked inside the bag, but the deceased had died with a jack-o-lantern handful of rotting teeth. Turns out the funeral home swapped her cremains with those of a guy who wore dentures. Needless to say, the toothless guy’s family wasn’t real happy about the mix-up either. They sued, too.”

  “Who won?”

  “Both families settled out of court. The sum wasn’t disclosed, but I hear it was around fifty thousand apiece. I could’ve gotten ’em a lot more.”

  It wasn’t an idle boast. DeVriess had won a huge class-action lawsuit against a Georgia crematorium that had dumped bodies in the woods instead of incinerating them — a move that, in the short run, saved fifty or a hundred bucks’ worth of propane per body but that eventually cost millions of dollars in legal claims, as well as incalculable emotional pain. DeVriess’s own Aunt Jean, in fact, had been one of the 339 bodies the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had found amid the pines. I vividly remembered the day I’d identified her remains in a refrigerated semi trailer, one of five that served as makeshift morgues at the site of the gruesome discovery, and I also recalled the deep distress the discovery had caused DeVriess and his Uncle Edgar.

  “There was a prior case against Ivy, in 1997,” he went on. “Fancy funeral, open casket, the family’s saying their final goodbyes, and the widow faints when she sees maggots in the mouth of her dearly departed husband.”

  “Jeez. How long had the corpse been lying around at the funeral home? Was he embalmed? Didn’t they have him in a cooler?”

  “He’d only been at the funeral home for about twenty-four hours. But he’d died three days before that, down in Mississippi, fishing. Somebody found him floating in his fishing boat around midafternoon, and he’d launched his boat early in the morning.”

  “So the flies had plenty of time to lay eggs in his nose and mouth while he was drifting around outdoors. That doesn’t sound like the fault of the funeral home.”

  “Ha,” he said. “That might be true, but try telling that to a jury that’s been reduced to tears by the traumatized widow. The funeral home — actually, their insurance company — settled for half a million, and they were lucky to get off that easy.”

  “I could’ve gotten ’em a lot less,” I said, and he laughed at the topspin I’d put on his earlier comment. “So are you planning to share this with Culpepper?”

  “Already have.”

  “My, my, aren’t you helpful, Counselor?”

  He lifted his hands in a magnanimous gesture. “Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it the truth? Plus, I figure it’s probably wise not to blindside Culpepper with my next move.”

  I should have known that Grease would be working some sort of angle. “And what’s your next move?”

  “I want to exhume more of the people Ivy buried. Turn over a few more rocks, see what else crawls out.”

  “You planning another class-action suit, Burt? The funeral home’s out of business, remember?”

  “But their insurance company’s not.”

  “And the insurance company’s still on the hook for claims, years after their client’s ceased to exist?”

  “Arguable,” he conceded, “but there’s probably a case here. Statutes of repose cover how long the insurance company is on the hook. Of course, if it’s a clear case of fraud, rather than a mistake, the insurance company will argue that they’re not liable — fraud would be the action of an individual, not the mortuary. But I’ll argue that there’s a pattern of negligence, since there were multiple problems.”

  “Sounds like a lot of arguing,” I said.

  “It’s not a slam dunk, but it’s worth a try.”

  “Is it, Burt? No offense, but you’re already rich. How much richer do you need to be?”

  “This one wouldn’t really be about the money, Doc.”

  I gave him a skeptical look.

  “No, really,” he insisted. “It still makes me madder than hell to think how shamefully my Aunt Jean’s body was treated and how hurtful that was to my Uncle Edgar. I figure most funeral homes and crematories are honest and respectful. But I also figure it’s healthy for those to see why it pays to stay honest and respectful.”

  “Like the instructive example of a public flogging, back in the good old days?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “But instead of the lash, it’s the law, and instead of blood flowing, it’s money. And instead of the cobblestoned public square, it happens in the marbled and paneled courtroom.”

  “Or the glass-walled office tower,” I said, “with the art deco lamps and the tennis-racket chairs.”

  “There, too,” he said.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was just pulling in to the parking lot for a noon session with Dr. Hoover when my cell phone rang with a call from the bone lab. “Miranda, is that you?”

  “It’s me.” Her voice sounded glum.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Carmen Garcia just called. Eddie got some bad news this morning from the orthopedist.”

  “What kind of bad news?”

  “It’s about the i-Hand. He can’t get fitted with one next week after all.”

  “Why not? When can he get it?”

  “Maybe never. The i-Hand’s just been taken off the market.”

  I was stunned by that news, but even more stunned by what she went on to tell me.

  “The company that makes it was bought yesterday by OrthoMedica for ninety million dollars, and OrthoMedica announced today they’re suspending sales until further notice. Here, listen, this is from their press release: ‘We will continue to provide parts and service to patients already fitted with an i-Hand prosthesis, but we believe that our next-generation bionic hand, currently in development, offers sufficient advances to warrant Ortho Medica’s full, undivided attention.’ What do you suppose that means?”

  I had a sinking feeling, and the words “revenue stream” were part of the weight pulling me under. “I suppose,” I said, “it means that OrthoMedica bought out the competition in order to kill it.” I thought back to my conversation with Glen Faust. What was it he’d said when I asked his advice about the i-Hand? I’d tell your friend to get an i-Hand, and get it pretty damn quick.

  I’d planned to spend my therapy session with Dr. Hoover making peace with the idea that somewhere out there Isabella was running from the FBI, nursing burned hands, and heaving her way through a trimester of morning sickness. Now, instead of peacemaking, I spent my fifty minutes warring against the injustice of the universe — a universe that seemed to be dealing from a deck stacked mercilessly against the Garcias. My own troubles seemed, for the moment at least, comparatively minor, and as I drove back to campus, I offered up prayers — I wasn’t sure to whom or to what — on behalf of Eddie and his family.

  Parking beside the stadium and drawing a deep breath to reorient myself, I headed into the Anthro
pology office. Peggy glanced up at me, then back down at her computer, then up at me again, sharply this time. “You look terrible,” she said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Sorry, nothing personal. You just look…tired? Worried? Sick?”

  “So many wonderful choices,” I said. “Don’t you want to add ‘clinically depressed’ or ‘terminally ill’ or something equally cheerful?”

  “No, none of those. But crabby, maybe.” She scrutinized me further. “Yes, crabby. Definitely crabby.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said, surprised to find that I actually did feel relieved by this milder diagnosis. “Since I appear likely to pull through, I suppose I should ask if I’ve got any messages?”

  “Two,” she said. “The dean called; he wonders if you can meet with him Thursday to go over the budget numbers.”

  “Not again,” I groaned. “Okay, now I feel tired, worried, and clinically depressed. What else? The IRS called to say my tax returns are about be audited?”

  “Do they call? I thought they indicted first and asked questions later. Actually, the other call was from Dr. Garcia.”

  “Dr. Garcia?” I was suddenly on high alert, given what Miranda had relayed. “What did he say? How’d he sound? When did he call?”

  “About ten minutes ago. He sounded pretty chipper, actually — not crabby, like some people I could name. He asked if you were in, and when I said you were at lunch, he said, ‘I hope his lunch tastes better than mine. The medical care at the hospital is superb, but the food is not superb.’ Then he asked me to have you call him when you get a chance.”

  Feeling my heart rate slow to something approximating normal, I stepped through the doorway that led from Peggy’s office to my administrative office, the one where I scheduled meetings with peeved professors and stressed-out students. As a general rule, I preferred to make calls from the office at the other end of the stadium, but I didn’t want to delay my call to Eddie by the five minutes it would take to walk there. Dialing the number at UT Hospital I’d long since learned by heart, I drummed my fingers through one ring, two, three. “Seven West,” answered a familiar voice.

  “LeeAnn?”

  “Yes, this is LeeAnn. Who’s this? Oh, Dr. Brockton, is that you? Hi there.”

  “Hi, LeeAnn. You’ve got a good ear.”

  “Well, you have called a few million times this past month. What can I do for you?”

  “Dr. Garcia called me a few minutes ago. Can you transfer me to his room?”

  “Sure, hang on.”

  After two rings I heard the hollow background sound of the hands-free speakerphone Eddie used.

  “Hello, Eddie. Miranda tells me you got some bad news today.”

  “The i-Hand. Yes, it’s disappointing, without a doubt. But that’s not why I’m calling you. I wonder if you can do a large favor for me.”

  “Of course. How can I help?”

  “By performing an autopsy for me.”

  “An autopsy? Eddie, I’m not a pathologist.”

  “I realize this, of course. But you taught anatomy when you were in graduate school, yes?”

  “Yes. For two years.” I had mentioned my teaching assistantship once, in passing, during a conversation shortly after Garcia and I had met. I was surprised he remembered it. “But that was a long damn time ago, Eddie. A pathology resident would be much better qualified, I’m sure.” The phone fell silent except for the tinny background noise.

  “Of course. I understand, Bill. I did not mean to impose.” He suddenly sounded defeated, and I wished I could take back my words. In my rush to downplay my own abilities, I’d failed to consider how difficult it must have been for him to ask for help with an autopsy he was no longer capable of doing himself. He could have let one of the contract M.E.’s handle the case. After all, for the past two months his caseload — dozens of unattended deaths and even several murders — had been farmed out to contract pathologists or sent to the state M.E.’s office in Nashville. He’d finally been ready to take a step toward returning to work, and I’d failed to recognize the significance of what he’d asked of me.

  “Eddie?”

  I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. If not for the background noise, I’d have thought he’d hung up. Finally: “Yes, Bill?”

  “You’re not imposing, Eddie. That’s not it. I just don’t want to let you down. If you think you can guide me through it — if you trust me not to make a mess of things — I’d be honored to help.” The phone fell silent again, and I hoped what I’d said wasn’t too little, too late.

  “How many years since you were in graduate school, Bill?”

  “A lot,” I said. “Thirty? No, wait — only twenty-nine.” I laughed. Where had the time gone?

  He laughed, too, and the significance of this moment, at least, was not lost on me: It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since his injury. “Thirty, that would be too many,” he said. “But twenty-nine? Bueno. Perfecto. You have got the job.”

  * * *

  The envelope in my mail bore the return address, “Barbara Pelot, Knoxville City Council,” along with the City-County Building’s street address. Inside was a handwritten note from Barbara. “Dear Dr. Brockton,” the note read, “I’m sorry to say that we’ve not found any funding in the city’s coffers that we can steer your way. Like UT, the city, too, is stretched pretty thin this year. I hope the enclosed will be of at least some help, however.” Tucked into the envelope behind the note was a check for a thousand dollars — a personal check from Barbara herself — made out to UT and designated for the Body Farm. It wasn’t enough to fill the cavity in my budget, but it was enough to fill me with gratitude. And it was a heck of a lot more than her husband’s dental practice had made by cleaning my teeth. I made a mental note to eat more M&Ms and to floss less rigorously.

  * * *

  “Shall we begin?”

  I’d heard Dr. Edelberto Garcia begin half a dozen autopsies, maybe more, with those three words. Always before, though — before his hands had been destroyed — he’d said them as a statement, a command swiftly followed by a Y-shaped incision into a chest cavity or an ear-to-ear scalp incision, followed by a saw cut into a skull. This time, for the first time, he was asking the question as if he didn’t know the answer. In fact, as I glanced across the autopsy table at Miranda, I guessed that as he was posing that single, simple question to us, he was asking himself a multitude of other questions, far more complicated: How can I work as a medical examiner without hands? Will I be able to contribute anything here today? Am I an asset or a liability in this case? Am I an asset or a liability to my family, and in this world?

  And this time, for the first time, I was the one gripping the scalpel as Garcia posed the question. “I’m ready if you are,” I said. I looked over my left shoulder at him, and he nodded. Across the table Miranda nodded slightly, too, and I followed her eyes down to the dead woman on the table. A sixty-one-year-old white female, she was fairly tall — five feet eight inches — with the sort of lean, willowy frame shaped by years of yoga or running or swimming. The hair on her head was long and wavy, an elegant silvery gray that contrasted sharply with the still-black triangle of pubic hair. Her face wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but her coloring and features — olive skin, brown eyes, and a wide, full mouth — would have made her a handsome woman in life.

  Her name was Clarissa Lowe; she’d died two days before, about a week after undergoing a cervical spine diskectomy and fusion — an operation to remove a damaged disk from her neck and then fuse the two adjoining vertebrae together. The surgery was performed at the regional hospital in Crossville, a town of about ten thousand people, sixty miles west of Knoxville. The procedure had gone smoothly, according to the neurosurgeon’s notes, and the woman appeared to be recovering well by the time she was discharged the following morning. Then, three days later, she called the surgeon’s office, complaining of nausea, weakness, and pain in her neck. The doctor saw her that same afternoon in his
office; not surprisingly, her neck appeared inflamed around the incision, but she wasn’t running any fever and her vital signs were normal, so he prescribed a stronger painkiller, recommended cold packs, and sent her home.

  Eighteen hours later her panicked husband called 911. She’d vomited three times within an hour, he told the dispatcher — nothing but green liquid — and she was suddenly too weak to stand. By the time the ambulance arrived, she was going into shock; her pulse was fluctuating between 50 and 140 beats a minute, her blood pressure was alarmingly low, and her breathing was labored, though her temperature remained normal. An hour after arriving at the Crossville emergency room, she was fighting for breath, and within two she could no longer breathe on her own. The ER doc put her on a ventilator, started her on powerful antibiotics, and sent her to UT Hospital by ambulance. Ninety minutes later — as she was being wheeled into the ER in Knoxville — she died.

  Garcia had briefed me on the woman’s surgery, complications, and death, but being briefed wasn’t the same as feeling prepared. Tightening my grip on the scalpel, I placed the tip on the woman’s chest, at the edge of her left armpit. Her body had been in the morgue’s cooler for the past twenty-four hours, so it was chilled nearly to freezing; beads of moisture were condensing on her clammy skin, and a few wisps of fog spooled upward from the corpse, pulled aloft by the morgue’s powerful ventilation system. Miranda and I had wedged a body block into place beneath the woman’s back; the curved block thrust the chest upward, as if the woman were offering herself to the scalpel as a sacrifice. I bore down, and the blade parted the flesh. Following the natural curve at the base of the left breast, I cut to the midline of the body, then made a mirror-image cut from the right side. The blade rose and dropped as it bumped across ribs. Where those two cuts joined at the breastbone, I began a new incision, this one running down the midline all the way to the pubic bone.

  As the abdominal cavity opened, fluid — watery, almost clear but tinged with pink — poured from the incision. During my graduate training and my career, I’d seen twenty or thirty abdominal cavities opened, but I’d never seen one give off such a quantity of fluid. It sheeted down the sides of the abdomen, pooling at the foot of the autopsy table and then gurgling through the drain and into the sink below. “Copious peritoneal effusion,” noted Garcia, confirming my sense that the amount of fluid was unusual. “Estimated volume approximately one liter. Miranda, would you be so kind as to collect a sample?” Miranda took a small plastic vial from the counter and held it beneath the drain, catching a bit of the liquid as it dribbled through, then screwed the cap tightly in place.