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

were the same, but down here the trauma was incidental to his identity; up there the traumawas his identity. He was a patient, defined as—and reduced to—“the hand-trauma case in 718.”
    He invited Miranda and me into his office. Settling weakly into the swiveling leather armchair behind the desk, he said, “Please,” and nodded to the two wing chairs that faced it. We sat. “Would you like something to drink? Perhaps coffee or tea?” We both declined quickly—too quickly, apparently, because he smiled sadly and said, “Please don’t stop using your hands just because you’re with me.” His forearms had been resting on the arms of his chair, slightly below the level of the desktop, but now he shifted them to the desktop and stared at their ravaged ends. “I can say this to you only because you are my friends. It makes me feel more conspicuous if you act incapable of picking up a coffee cup or pushing a button. That makes me feel almost as if I’m contagious—as if I’ve infected and destroyed your hands, too.”
    “I’m sorry, Eddie,” Miranda said. Leaning forward, she reached across the desk and gently squeezed his left elbow. “Thank you for telling us.” He smiled again, not as sadly. “Is there anything else we can do that would be helpful,” she asked, “besides, you know, not acting weird?”
    “As a matter of fact, there is.” With the two fingers that remained on his right hand, he gestured at the computer occupying a table to one side of the desk. “If one of you wouldn’t mind navigating the Web, I’d like to show you some sites I’ve been looking at. I’d show you myself, but I’m very slow on the keys, pecking with just one finger.”
    “That would be Miranda’s department,” I said. “I’d be as slow as you.” As soon as I heard the words, I wished I could reel them back in, but when Miranda snorted and Garcia laughed softly, I relaxed. Miranda moved to a rolling stool parked in front of the computer. As she swiveled into position in front of the keyboard, she made a big show of interlacing her fingers and cracking her knuckles. Then she rubbed her hands briskly together and wiggled her fingers rapidly. “At your service. What’s your wish?”
    “Let’s start with toe-to-thumb transplants,” he answered. Miranda’s fingers clattered rapidly over the keyboard.
    “Wow, look at that,” she said. “Over a hundred thousand hits. Who knew that was such a hot topic?”
    “This one.” He pointed with his pinkie to one of the search results. “Click on that, please.”
    Miranda used the mouse to highlight the link. As it loaded, she remarked, “You know, Eddie, if you replaced this clunky desktop computer with a laptop, you might get pretty good with the touch pad.”
    Before he had time to respond, the page finished loading and a television news story began to play. The footage showed a teenage boy—a New Jersey fourteen-year-old—who’d lost his thumb and first two fingers in a fireworks accident. A close-up showed the damage to the boy’s right hand, which looked almost exactly like Garcia’s right hand. Five months after the injury, a Philadelphia hand surgeon removed the second toe from the boy’s right foot—the toe Miranda liked to call the “index toe”—and fashioned a new thumb from it. “The structures line up very well,” explained the surgeon on camera. “You have two major nerves, you have a major blood vessel, you have similar tendons. The circumference is very similar.” In the story’s “after” images, the gap created by the missing index finger and middle finger remained quite prominent, but the reconstructed right thumb was a virtual mirror image of the boy’s undamaged left thumb.
    “Cool,” Miranda commented. “Very cool. That would give you back an opposable grip on your right hand.”
    Garcia pointed her through a quick series of articles about toe-to-thumb transplants. The procedure might not qualify as