The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (38 page)

“Not so fast,” I said. “You were in Texas for a job interview? Out at the Body Ranch—our new competition?”

She shrugged sheepishly. “They’re just getting off the ground. They thought maybe I could be helpful.”

She smiled once again—her old, full-face, eye-contact smile. “It’s nice to be wanted, but it didn’t mean a thing. Really. If you’ll take me back, I’ll never stray again.”

“Promise?”

She held up the three fingers of the Boy Scout salute. “Promise.”

“Deal.”

I AWOKE TO FIND A STRANGE HAND ON MY SHOULDER,
shaking me gently. The hand was attached to a nurse, who’d found Miranda and me slumped and sleeping in chairs in the surgery waiting room. I checked the wall clock: Four hours had passed since the surgery ended. Before falling asleep, I’d spent a while checking my many voice-mail messages and returning a handful of the calls. Steve Morgan had called; I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk with him after the FBI press conference, so he’d phoned to relay his personal good wishes, as well as those of the TBI. “I should have known there was a good reason—a very good reason—for whatever you were doing,” he said when I called him back. “I forgot some of the most important lessons you taught me in your class—lessons about character and integrity and trust. I’ll try not to forget those again.”

I also returned a call from Burt DeVriess. He’d dropped the Willoughby paternity suit, he said—his client was not, the DNA reported, Willoughby’s child—but he was suing for $20 million on behalf of Willoughby’s legitimate daughter and the former students who’d paid for the burial of Miss Elizabeth Jenkins. Most of the voice mails turned out to be media calls—from WBIR-TV, CNN, theKnoxville News Sentinel, theNational Enquirer, and a host of other news outlets I didn’t know or didn’t care about. Mercifully, my cell phone’s battery died just as my brain and body began shutting down, so I had a good excuse for ignoring the majority of the messages clamoring for my attention. At the moment, though, it was the scrub-clad nurse tugging at my sleepy sleeve. “He’s awake, and he’d like to see you both.” She smiled.

Miranda and I struggled to our feet. The nurse took us up an elevator and down a hall to an ICU room, which bristled with monitors. Through the large panel of glass that faced the nurses’ station, I saw Carmen sitting beside the head of the bed, stroking her husband’s cheek. Eddie opened his eyes and smiled groggily when we came into the room. “My friends,” he murmured.

“My good, good friends.” Then his eyes closed again.

His arms were fastened into an elaborate traction harness above the bed. Protruding from the ends of the arms were a pair of white oval bundles, roughly the size and shape of handmade loaves of bread. Five fingertips protruded from the end of each loaf. The swaddled hands looked awkward and out of place, strangely foreign, because just twenty-four hours before there had been nothing there. Nothing but emptiness and loss.

The hands—like the surgery’s outcome, and like Eddie’s future, and like all our hopes for it—hung in the air, suspended. And just for a moment, those bright white bundles of suspense and hope were transformed. In my mind they shone like a pair of binary stars at the center of the universe, and they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, or ever would.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
FACT AND FICTION

“THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION,” READS THE
disclaimer in the front of this novel. “Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

That very disclaimer itself is part fiction: Although many characters and most plot threads inThe Bone Thief are woven entirely out of thin air, this book has many bases in scientific and biomedical fact. Within this subject area, truth rivals or surpasses fiction in ways that are mostly inspiring but occasionally horrifying.

The thriving trade in bodies and body parts—including illegal black-market sales of corpses and tissues—was recently the subject of a riveting nonfiction book,Body Brokers, by Annie Cheney. Published in 2006, Cheney’s book documents—among other things—shocking postmortem “chop shops” (our term, not hers) operated by a California funeral-home owner and a Texas medical-school staff member.Body Brokers also describes multiple instances of bodies and body parts being sent to laboratories and even luxury hotels (including, Cheney reports, “forty-two heads and necks to the Marriott Marquis” in New York City’s Times Square) for medical trainings. Cheney’s book also documents the tragic case of a young man who died suddenly from toxic shock after receiving an improperly sterilized bone graft—one contaminated withClostridium sordellii bacteria. Crime fiction focuses, by definition, on the seamier side of life. The happier truth is that organ transplants and tissue grafts allow remarkable feats of medical repair and restoration. And as stem-cell technology advances—offering the potential to grow rejection-proof tissues and organs with the patient’s own DNA and tissue type—the possibilities become almost miraculous. Indeed, near miracles are already being wrought: The surgery in Spain that was described by our character Glen Faust—in which a cadaver trachea was used as a scaffold to create a new windpipe from the recipient’s own stem cells—is unvarnished fact. The one significant bit of artistic license we’ve taken with biomedical fact is the notion that by combining CT scans with advanced composite materials it’s possible to synthesize bones that are virtually exact copies of their originals. That’s not possible—not yet anyhow. But never say never. A few footnotes about hands: Artificial hands are now very sophisticated and lifelike in their workings, as a glance at the i-LIMB Hand—with its individually controlled fingers—makes clear (www.touchbionics.com/i-LIMB). Soon bionic prostheses will become even more advanced, thanks to millions of dollars’ worth of R&D sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program—motivated by the military’s commitment to restoring function to soldiers whose arms or hands have been lost to trauma—is led by two premiere R&D laboratories: DEKA Research and Development (the birthplace of the portable insulin pump and the Segway scooter) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (whose numerous other projects include interplanetary satellites and bomb-disposal robots). Within the next few years, Revolutionizing Prosthetics aims to create bionic arms that are virtually identical to natural limbs in performance and durability. For more information on this program, see www.darpa.mil/Docs/prosthetics_f_s3_200807180945042.pdf.

Hand surgery, too, has undergone remarkable advances. Toe-to-thumb transplantation, briefly discussed as a way to restore function to Dr. Garcia’s right hand, is a well-established and highly successful way to replace a missing thumb, as Asheville, North Carolina, hand surgeon Bruce Minkin—a former student of Dr. Bill Bass—explained to us in detail over dinner and via many subsequent e-mails. After a teenage patient lost his thumb and two fingers to an explosion, Dr. Minkin grafted one of the boy’s toes onto his mangled hand, creating a thumb that looks and functions almost like the original. Total hand transplantation is, for now, an inspiring but experimental and very rare procedure. Worldwide, only about forty hand transplants have ever been performed; in the United States, just half a dozen patients have received transplanted hands—and only one has received a bilateral (double) transplant. Those numbers will rise, and the procedure will become more common, if Dr. Linda Cendales has her way. Dr. Cendales—the inspiration for the Emory surgeon we call Dr. Alvarez—is the only surgeon in the United States who has been formally trained in both hand surgery and transplant surgery. Dr. Cendales helped perform two of the earliest U.S. transplants, including the 1999 transplant that—after more than a decade—remains the world’s most enduringly successful hand transplant. Dr. Cendales is not just a gifted surgeon, she’s also a pioneering researcher. She completed two research fellowships at the National Institutes for Health, focusing on ways to keep patients’ immune systems from rejecting transplants. Now, through a joint appointment at Emory University School of Medicine and the Atlanta VA Medical Center, Dr. Cendales is building a visionary new hand-transplant program, one that combines surgical expertise with immunological research. During the research for this book, Dr. Cendales graciously invited Jon Jefferson into her operating room to observe hand surgery. Using a curved needle and strong sutures, she carefully stitched together a severed tendon in a man’s hand, and then—peering through a microscope to guide an even more delicate part of the procedure—she snipped and spliced the ends of a damaged nerve together again. After the repairs were done, but before the hand was stitched shut, she flexed and straightened the sleeping patient’s index finger repeatedly, nodding with satisfaction as the reattached tendon slid smoothly within the remarkable cable-and-pulley mechanism of the human hand.

As the first edition of this book goes to press, Dr. Cendales is evaluating transplant candidates—and preparing to test a powerful new antirejection drug that she hopes will revolutionize transplant medicine and bring hope and hands to more real-life patients like our fictional Eddie Garcia.

MANY PEOPLE HELPED US MAKE THIS BOOK, AND HELPED
us make it better. At the Knoxville Police Department, Deputy Chief Gary Price was a helpful and gracious source of information about how KPD would investigate crimes involving dismemberment or mutilation of corpses. Art Bohanan, retired KPD criminalist extraordinaire, remains our favorite fingerprint adviser, patent holder, and real-life fictional character.

The Knoxville Division of the FBI has been remarkably cooperative throughout this series of books. Stacie Bohanan—the Bureau’s media liaison—responded swiftly and kindly to our latest request for help, and Special Agent in Charge Richard Lambert shared generously of his time and expertise in advising us how Dr. Bill Brockton might play a pivotal role in a fictional undercover sting. This book contains more medical detail than any of our prior books, and we’re grateful to the medical professionals who helped us get things right. The autopsy scene in chapter 15 draws heavily on the advice of Dr. Dan Canale, a Nashville pathologist, whose knowledge is accompanied by equal doses of patience and good humor. Emergency physician Dan Cauble, M.D., graciously reviewed the air-ambulance scene; so did Dr. Jim McLaughlin, an old buddy from way back. At the University of Tennessee Medical Center, Dr. Leonard Hines, Dr. Victor Krylov (a pioneering Russian hand surgeon), and nurse Judy Roark—all of the Simulation Center—offered unique glimpses into the realms of hand surgery and microsurgery. So did Dr. Bruce Minkin, an Asheville hand surgeon who was once one of Bill Bass’s best students…and who opened our eyes to the remarkable capabilities of reconstructive hand surgery, especially toe-to-thumb transplants. And at Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. Linda Cendales—a nationally prominent hand-transplant surgeon and a world-class human being—shared her inspiring vision of the promising future of hand transplantation.

We could never have embarked on the fictional journey of the Body Farm novels—nor continued it for an additional four books—without the unwavering enthusiasm and able assistance of our literary agent, Giles Anderson. We’re grateful to Giles for getting us the chance to write these books. We’re also deeply grateful to Harper Collins/William Morrow for making us feel so welcome for six years now. We bid a poignant farewell to our longtime Morrow publisher and friend Lisa Gallagher, and a warm welcome to our new publisher, Liate Stehlik. Magic occurs at Morrow, where our electronic drafts are transformed into edited copy, and edited copy is transformed into printed books—and then, remarkably, those printed books are transformed, when the planets align for us, into bestsellers. We’re delighted to be part of the Harper Collins/William Morrow family—and we’re thrilled to have such a large and supportive extended family of readers. How amazing, that these stories and characters we invent take on a life of their own, finding believers and making friends across the United States and around the world.

A special thanks to Frank Murphy, Knoxville radio personality, comedian, and eagle-eyed reader. Frank joined us in proofreadingThe Bone Thief , and caught several errors that would otherwise have slipped through the cracks.Gracias, Frank.

Last but best, our families and friends remain wondrous sources of support, encouragement, and inspiration. To one and all, thanks evermore.

—Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass

About the Author

JEFFERSON BASS
is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter century ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm,Death’s Acre . Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in theNew York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science , and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor ofDeath’s Acre , he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm. www.JeffersonBass.com

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Fiction

Bones of Betrayal

The Devil’s Bones

Flesh and Bone

Carved in Bone

Nonfiction

Beyond the Body Farm

Death’s Acre

Credits

Jacket design by Richard Aquan

Jacket photograph Montage: Skull © by Alamy; Crime Scene Tape © by Masterfile; Grass
Field © by Wildcard Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the
author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.