The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 by Jefferson Bass Read Free Book Online Page A

nearly killed him. Garcia allowed Miranda and me to help him rise from the wheelchair, but otherwise none of us acknowledged that anything was out of the ordinary. When I introduced Culpepper, Garcia bowed slightly in lieu of a handshake. Then he peered at Trey Willoughby’s mutilated body, and we all shifted our focus to the corpse as well.
    Willoughby’s body looked freakish, a horror-movie version of a disassembled mannequin. I’d taught anatomy for two years during graduate school, and I’d worked several dismemberment cases during the past twenty years. This one seemed different, though, more thoroughly and precisely stripped of its limbs than the others.
    The face and head had been injected with embalming fluid, and so had the abdomen; the efforts to preserve the head and torso were evident not only from the smell of the chemicals but also from the trocar, the large injection port in the stomach. But these steps at preservation seemed incongruous and absurdly irrelevant given the violence inflicted on the corpse.
    Garcia leaned down and peered at the left shoulder, where the collarbone and the shoulder blade had once been connected to the humeral head, the ball at the upper end of the arm. The tissue there had softened and decayed, but not so badly as to erase the original contours of the cut. “Bill,” he said to me,
    “could you take a probe and some pickups and expose more of that joint, please?” It pained me that he needed to ask someone to do a simple maneuver that would normally have been an automatic, five-second move for him. “The arms have been severed quite cleanly,” Garcia observed. He looked at the hip joints—more difficult to cut cleanly, because of the tendon that anchored the ball of the hip into the socket. “This amputation was the work of a professional,” he said. “It could have been done by a physician or a medical student. Or maybe,” he added, his eyes looking at me with a sparkle I hadn’t seen since his injury, “an anthropology professor who has a hidden dark side.”
    “Ha,” said Miranda. “Who says it’s hidden?”
    AFTER WE’D POKED AND PRODDED at Willoughby’s torso to the satisfaction of Garcia, I turned to Culpepper. “Okay if I pull a couple of teeth now for DeVriess’s DNA test?”
    Culpepper shrugged. “Dr. Garcia, do you see any reason why not?” Garcia shook his head. “Go ahead,”
    said the detective. “I’d hate to stand between a plaintiff’s attorney and his money—it’s like standing between a dog and a steak bone.”
    Willoughby’s lips had been glued together and his jaw sewn shut. Using a scalpel, I slit the lips open and cut the sutures. It took some digging to reach the stitches, as the embalmer had plumped the corpse’s cheeks with mortuary putty, which by now had hardened to the consistency of plaster. Once I’d managed to wrestle the mandible open, I pulled two molars, using a pair of slip-joint pliers whose ridged jaws I cushioned with a bit of paper toweling. Then, with a Stryker autopsy saw, I notched a chunk of bone from the hip. I swabbed the teeth and bone samples with disinfectant and sealed them in a padded FedEx envelope, which I tucked inside a FedEx mailer addressed to GeneTrax, a Dallas DNA lab. By the time I’d packed the samples and dropped the package at the forensic center’s front desk, Culpepper was antsy to head back to KPD. I walked with him to the loading-dock door, where he’d parked, then detoured to the front desk, where I left the Fed Ex envelope with Amy, the receptionist. I met Garcia and Miranda in the hallway; Miranda was pushing the wheelchair, but it was empty, and Garcia was walking.
    He seemed reluctant to leave the forensic center and head back upstairs to his hospital room, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Down here in the basement, he was an authoritative professional; up there, despite the deference he received from the hospital staff, he was just a patient. Either place, his injuries