“Arlene, could I make a quick call?” She motioned toward the phone at the nurses’ station, and I lifted the handset and dialed 0. “Hello, this is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I told the operator. “Yes, ma’am, the Body Farm guy…. I’m just fine, thank you for asking…. Well, I’m glad you liked it, Mary Louise; I always enjoy giving those lectures for the hospital staff…. No, of course I remember you…. Listen, Mary Louise, you reckon you could put me through to the hospital’s police dispatcher, please?…No, it’s not an emergency call. At least I don’t think so…. Thank you, Mary Louise.”
I heard a click, then a pause, and then a male voice came through the receiver. “Dispatch, this is Grimes,” he said. “What can I do for you, Dr. Brockton?”
“Officer Grimes, I’m hoping you might be able to shed some light on something for me. Dr. Garcia, the medical examiner—…Yes, that’s right. Well, Dr. Garcia had himself discharged from the hospital about an hour ago…. I know, I know he wasn’t really healed up yet, but he wanted to go…. Yes, doctors can be strong-headed. Anyhow, I…” My voice trailed off. I what? I was being nosy when I should mind my own business instead? “I was just worrying about him, and I wanted to make sure he got down to the entrance and got into the car okay. You reckon there might’ve been an officer down at the entrance who could ease my mind about that?”
“Hang on a second, Doc.” He put me on hold for what seemed several minutes. “Hey, Doc? I just talked with Jorgenson, who was down at the main entrance a while ago. He says not to worry — Dr. Garcia made it out of the wheelchair and into the car just fine. Those guys from paradise are really careful.”
“Guys from paradise?”
“Paradise. The limo service.”
When I returned to the CT scanner, Miranda was just emerging from the side door of the trailer. She gave me a thumbs-up sign of approval, though the grim expression on her face — an expression I’d seen a lot lately — didn’t match the jaunty gesture. I suspected that the thumbs-up reflected her feelings about the scanner while the expression reflected her recent feelings about me.
“You’re never going to believe this,” I said.
“Try me.”
“Eddie Garcia checked out of UT Hospital a couple hours ago.”
“Yeah.”
“He just — What do you mean, ‘Yeah’?”
“I mean yeah, I know.”
“You know? How the hell do you know?”
“He just called me. Right after he called Carmen.”
“He called Carmen? He didn’t go home when he checked out?”
“No. He called from the car. He was in Chattanooga.”
“Chattanooga? What’s he doing in Chattanooga?”
“Just passing through.”
“Just passing through on the way to where?”
“Atlanta.”
“Atlanta? Why the hell’s he going to Atlanta? He’s still recovering from surgery. And how come he’s being all cloak-and-daggerish?”
“He’s got an appointment at Emory. I guess he’s nervous about it. Maybe he didn’t want anybody to try to talk him out of it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise people’s hopes about it. Maybe he didn’t want to raise his own hopes.”
“What hopes?”
“His hopes for a total hand transplant. Emory has a new hand-transplant center, and they’re looking for their first patient. They’ve agreed to evaluate Eddie as a candidate.”
CHAPTER 31
For a bird or a plane or Superman, Asheville was seventy-five straight-line miles to the east of Knoxville. I was no Superman, unfortunately. I was an earthbound anthropologist with a truckload of amputated arms, and by road Asheville was forty miles farther than by air — forty twisting, turning, up-and-down miles across the backbone of the Appalachians. For much of the mountainous route, the interstate followed the gorge of the Pigeon River as it tumbled out of the mountains, and normally I enjoyed the rugged terrain and the demanding drive. Today, though, I might as well have been passing through blighted industrial wasteland, for all the attention I paid to the passing scenery. I’d glanced at the hydroelectric plant perched beside the Pigeon at the Tennessee-Carolina border, but everything since had passed unnoticed. Luckily, at daybreak on a Sunday morning, my truck was practically the only vehicle meandering this stretch of I-40.
My attention deficit had two causes: I was deeply distressed, and I was seriously sleep-deprived. But there were causes within causes. When I’d agreed to help the FBI, I hadn’t anticipated how painful it would be to play the role of a greedy broker of body parts. I’d taken it on for worthy reasons, but inside the mask and the costume of corruptibility I’d donned, my soul’s skin was itching and burning. Every interaction with Miranda now felt strained, and I deeply missed the easy collegiality and playful banter we’d shared for years.
I also grieved for the rift with Jeff. We’d not spoken since the night he walked out on me, the night I’d told him about Isabella and the likelihood that she was pregnant. I’d left several voice mails for him. I’d also spoken with Jenny, his wife, who — kindly but matter-of-factly — told me that this was a problem only Jeff and I could work out.
Isabella, too, was weighing heavily on me. Where was she? Was she indeed pregnant? What would it mean to father a child with a fugitive, a killer, a woman I’d totally misjudged? How had I been so blind? Would I be able to trust a woman fully — or trust myself — ever again? These worries swirled through my weary mind like dry leaves in some corner of a courtyard, seized by the hand of an unseen whirlwind that lifted them, spun them into a frenzy, and dropped them through its fingers into a lifeless heap.
My sleep deprivation was simpler: I’d just stayed up all night hauling bodies to the CT scanner and back, then amputating twenty arms. Over the past three weeks, I’d stockpiled ten bodies in the makeshift facility called the Annex, a corrugated metal building located a stone’s throw from the stadium. The Annex contained a processing room for cleaning skeletal material, but we rarely used it anymore now that we had far better facilities in the Regional Forensic Center at the hospital. The Annex also contained a dozen chest-type freezers, most of which I’d filled as the ten bodies arrived. On Thursday I’d taken the bodies out to thaw, and I’d spent Saturday evening ferrying the still-chilly corpses across the river to the CT scanner, then back again. Except for the fact that I was hauling the bodies in a GMC pickup and delivering them to a high-tech scanner, I could have been Charon, the boatman from Greek mythology, ferrying the dead across the river Styx to the underworld.
I’d done the transporting myself, rather than have Miranda do it, because I didn’t want to involve her in this — and because I didn’t want to incur any more of her suspicion and disapproval than I already had. I’d also paid Eric, the scanning technician, the ruinous rate of three hundred dollars, from my own pocket, since I was taking six hours out of his Saturday night. It would have been far simpler to skip the scans of these ten and just begin the scanning project with all subsequent donated bodies, but I felt I owed it to the research project — to Glen Faust and OrthoMedica and to the dead donors themselves — to secure the scans before severing the arms. Finally, at 2:00 A.M. — an hour when I was sure I wouldn’t have an audience in the Annex — I’d begun to cut.