The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (20 page)

Half a dozen hands shot up, and several people tried to interrupt him with objections, but Sinclair plowed ahead.

“Hang on, hang on, everybody gets a turn, but let me finish making my point. I know a dozen bioethicists who say it’s exploitative to buy a kidney from a poor person, but I know three or four who think a mentally competent adult has a basic right to self-determination. Isn’t that one of the fundamental principles of America—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy, free-market dollars?”

A lot of faces were frowning.

“Fertility clinics pay sperm donors and egg donors. Couples pay surrogate mothers to bear children for them. It’s illegal to buy or sell a baby, but any honest attorney or social worker who’s spent much time in the trenches can tell you it happens.”

He paused for breath, and the hands shot up again.

“Wait, I’m almost done,” he said. “Seriously, we actuallycan buy bodies legally today, we just can’tcall it

‘buying bodies.’ What we’re allowed to call it is ‘sparing you or your family the expense of a funeral.’

Talk about dancing around the truth. The average funeral costs six or seven thousand bucks, so what that means is we’re allowed to buy bodies for six or seven grand, provided we don’t own up to what the transaction really is. What a hypocritical crock. Insurance companies are willing to negotiate what they call ‘life settlements’—cash payments for insurance policies owned by old folks and sick folks. Not the full amount of the policy—that’s why the insurance companies are willing to do it—but at least you don’t have to be dead to collect. A woman with ovarian cancer who’s worth a hundred thousand dollars dead might rather get fifty thousand while she’s still alive. Shouldn’t she have that right? The right to cash in on her mortality? Shouldn’t anyone? People mortgage assets like houses all the time. Why not let them mortgage their bodies? Isn’t the body an asset, a very personal asset? How come, in the whole chain of organ and tissue transplantation—a multibillion-dollar enterprise—the one person who can’t make money off the damn deal is the donor?”

He shrugged again, an olive-branch, peacemaking kind of smile. “These are complicated legal and ethical issues, sure. But we need to grapple with them. And we need to get more honest, more creative, and more aggressive about offering financial incentives for whole-body donation. Otherwise we simply can’t expect to keep pace with the growing need for human tissue.”

“Bullshit.”

The comment came, in a confident, strong voice, from a darkened rear corner of the room. Sinclair looked startled; so did everyone else in the room. The speaker stepped out of the shadows and into a pool of light near the room’s rear door. I was shocked to see that it was Glen Faust of OrthoMedica.

“I think you’re selling people short. I think you’re seriously underestimating the generosity of the human spirit.”

At the podium Sinclair reddened. “I’m just saying we need to find realistic financial strategies for encouraging whole-body donations.”

“No, you’re saying people are greedy or stingy, that they have to be bought. I don’t agree, and I see one other person in the room who I suspect might back me up on this point.” He looked in my direction and pointed at me. “Dr. Brockton, forgive me for putting you on the spot, but have you had difficulty recruiting whole-body donors for your program?”

His question caught me utterly off guard. Price and Rankin had stressed the need to keep a low profile at the conference—the plan we’d agreed on was that I’d introduce myself to Sinclair after his talk and look for ways to bond with him—but it suddenly felt as if a spotlight as bright as the Luxor pyramid’s beacon was shining directly on me.

I stood up slowly, buying a few seconds of time, and cleared my throat. “Well, I reckon I’d have to say no, we haven’t had a lot of difficulty.”

Sinclair eyed me dubiously. “And your name and affiliation?”

“Bill Brockton. I’m the chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The program Dr. Faust mentioned is our decomposition-research facility. Most people call it by its nickname, the Body Farm. We study postmortem human decay and the way the rate of decay is affected by factors like temperature, humidity, presence or absence of clothing, and so on. We also do a lot of trainings for crime-scene investigators, teaching them how to find buried bodies, how to search for scattered bones, that sort of thing.”

Sinclair considered this. “And you use donated bodies for this work?”

“We do. Mostly. Some of our specimens are unclaimed bodies from the medical examiner’s system, but the majority are donated bodies. About a thousand people have donated their bodies so far, and we’ve got another sixteen hundred donors on our version of a waiting list.” I heard a few chuckles at my spin on the term “waiting list.”

Soon I found myself answering a string of rapid-fire questions. People asked about our research, asked how we cleaned the skeletal material, asked for details on the donation program. Finally someone asked where we’d put the sixteen hundred donors on our waiting list. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. I decided there’d never be a better opportunity to dangle the line that Price and Rankin had liked, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned casting it. “It’s not exactly that we have too many donated bodies,” I said. “We just don’t have enough space or enough funding.”

More questions followed. I felt bad for Sinclair. I hadn’t even planned to say anything, let alone steal the limelight, but once it shifted in my direction, I didn’t know how to get out of it. To his credit, he didn’t seem to mind. When the session ended at ten forty-five, he made a point of coming over to speak to me. Faust, on the other hand, gave me a brief wave from the back of the room, then darted out the door like a scalded cat. There appeared to be no love lost between him and Sinclair, and I wondered what had originally caused the tension.

Sinclair hung back till a few people had finished chatting with me, then offered me a smile and a handshake. “Dr. Brockton, you certainly livened up the discussion,” he said. “It was fascinating, and I appreciate it. I have to say, you make me wonder if I’ve been too quick to resort to the ‘throw money at it’ solution to the problem of motivating donors.”

“Well, we’ve been really fortunate,” I said. “The university is very supportive, the local media seem to like us, and we’ve benefited from theCSI craze. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we’re happy to be bobbing along at the high-water mark.”

Suddenly he frowned, aiming a finger. “I have a suspicion about you,” he said, and I felt my stomach clench. Had I been so clumsy, so obvious, that I’d already botched things? “I suspect,” he went on,

“you’re far too modest.”

So perhaps I hadn’t failed after all—not yet at least.

My relief turned to delight, followed swiftly by panic, when he added, “If you’ve got time, I’d love to hear more about your program over coffee.”

“SHERWOOD FOREST CAFÉ OR SIR GALAHAD’S PUB?”
Sinclair offered the hotel map for my perusal.

“Tough choice,” I mused. “If I were going just by the names, I’d go for Sherwood Forest, but it looks like it’s right off the casino floor, so I’m guessing it’s pretty noisy. Sir Galahad’s is on the second level, so maybe it’s quieter.”

“Sir Galahad’s it is.” He motioned toward the escalator, and we headed down a floor from the meeting rooms. “Who the hell was Sir Galahad? Got any idea?”

“Hmm. One of the Knights of the Round Table.” I dug around in my memory banks. As a boy I’d read some of the Arthurian legends, but tales of chivalry were a far cry from blunt-force trauma and knife marks in bone. “Seems like Galahad was the squeaky-clean knight,” I ventured. “Raised by nuns. Chaste and very pious, when he wasn’t busy hacking foes to bits with his broadsword.” I fished around for any additional factoids I’d stored about Galahad. “Spent a lot of time on a quest for the Holy Grail. That’s about all I recall.”

“That’s a lot. I don’t recall that much about the talk I just gave.”

The escalator deposited us in front of a shuttered Italian restaurant and, beside it, a theater whose nightly show was “Thunder from Down Under,” billed as “Australia’s Hottest Hunks” and “Las Vegas’ Best Male Strip Show.” It struck me as interesting irony that the male strippers were performing a stone’s throw from an establishment named for the Arthurian knight who embodied chastity and purity. Sir Galahad’s was closed, too, so we ended up buying coffee from a Starbucks stand and doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme counter. I suspected that the Krispy Kremes were not what had sustained Sir Galahad on his search for the Grail, but they did taste divine: warm, cloudlike puffs of dough, deep-fried to airy perfection, then varnished with a crisp, delicate sugar glaze. “That’s tasty,” I marveled. “That would be worth a serious quest.”

Sinclair shook his head. “I gotta disagree with you there. I’ve never been a fan of the Krispy Kreme. I’m a die-hard Dunkin’ Donuts man myself.”

“Dunkin’ Donuts? But they’re so cakey.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what makes ’em good.” He shrugged. “You’re from Tennessee, I’m from Jersey. Maybe it’s a geographic thing.”

“Maybe that’s it,” I conceded. “It did take a while for Krispy Kreme to cross the Mason-Dixon Line.”

He laughed. “There was a big article in theNew York Times when the first Krispy Kreme opened in Manhattan. The barbarians were at the gates.”

“If you think Krispy Kreme is culture shock for New Yorkers,” I said, “just wait till Cracker Barrel hits town.”

“Hey, bring it on. The more biscuits and gravy and fried okra people eat, the better it is for my business, and yours.” He offered me his half-eaten doughnut. “You want the rest of that?”

“No thanks. One’s my limit. When I was in my thirties, three was my limit. In my forties it dropped to two. Now, in my fifties, it’s one.”

“Their business is gonna go down the crapper when you hit your sixties,” he said. “Remind me not to invest in Krispy Kreme stock.” He pushed the doughnut aside and leaned forward. “So you said you use donated bodies for research, but also for training, right?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about the training. Who trains with bodies from the Body Farm, and how?”

“We work most often with the National Forensic Academy,” I told him. “They offer a ten-week course for crime-scene and crime-lab techs, four times a year. The NFA brings in experts on fingerprints, blood-spatter analysis, hair and fiber evidence, that sort of thing. Our piece of the curriculum is teaching them how to find clandestine graves and skeletal remains.” I nearly added that we spent a week every spring teaching those skills to FBI agents as well, but I was afraid I might give myself away if I mentioned the FBI—like a nervous poker player whose eye twitches when he tries a big bluff.

“Ever do any training with surgeons?”

“Surgeons?” I scanned backward through the talks I’d given during the past few years. “I don’t think so. I do continuing-education lectures every year for lots of dentists and nurses, but no groups of surgeons. You know how surgeons are—one rung above God Almighty in the cosmic order. They’re not going to sit through some lecture by a lowly anthropologist.”

“True,” he laughed, “but I wasn’t thinking of a lecture. More like an intensive, hands-on approach. Small sessions—ten or twenty docs—working on actual human material, the real deal. To learn a new procedure, you have todo it, right? But what patient in his right mind would want to be the guy whose pancreas or pecker you practice on?”

“Not me,” I agreed.

“So that’s another way tissue banks provide a huge service. Sure, providing tissues for transplants is our primary role, but providing material for research and medical training—absolutely crucial.”

I didn’t need convincing on that point, but he wanted to talk, and I wanted to keep him circling the bait, so I nodded enthusiastically.

“We helped with an interesting training a couple months ago,” I said. “Not a medical training, but similar—a disaster training, simulating mass fatalities from a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’ We provided fifteen bodies, and the disaster teams practiced finding the radioactive contamination and cleaning the bodies.”

“I hope they wore their lead-lined undies. Was that for FEMA?”

“Not exactly.” FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had sent a few representatives to the training, as had the U.S. Army, but those weren’t the lead organizations. “It was organized by DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Mostly volunteers—forensic dentists, EMTs, funeral directors, cops—who have some experience with death and are willing to help identify the dead after airplane crashes and hurricanes.”

“Sure, I know DMORT. I’ve done trainings for ’em. How to improvise cold-storage facilities at remote sites. How to protect yourself against hepatitis C.”

As he talked, I noticed that his chin was flecked with crumbs of sugar and doughnut.

“Hey, here’s a joke I used to tell DMORT people heading down to Louisiana after Katrina: What’s the best way to keep from getting hep C in New Orleans?”

I shrugged.

“Stay in New Jersey.” He chuckled. “Hey, here’s another one: What do you look for when you’re looking for a DMORT team member?”

Again I shrugged.

“You don’t need to look for anything; you just sniff—you can smell ’em a mile away.”

Mentally I was cursing Price and Rankin for roping me into this, and kicking myself under the table for agreeing to help. “That’s terrible,” I said.

“I know.” He grinned. “But hey, if we can’t find a little humor in our line of work, we’ll go nuts or slit our wrists, right?”

“Right.” At the moment I was feeling a powerful urge to walk away. Instead I shifted the conversation to something I was actually curious about. “I was surprised when Glen Faust interrupted you the way he did.”

He made a face. “I wasn’t.”

“So you know him?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Is there a story there?”

“Not really. He’s just a little full of himself for my taste.” Sinclair reached inside his jacket and took out a folded program, which he opened to the next day’s schedule. “He’s giving a talk this afternoon—‘Tissue banks are obsolete’ is the message, though he’s calling it something fancier. It’s his manifesto about rebuilding the body with stem cells and cloning and bioengineering. You should go hear him.”