“Why? What’s wrong with the pig farm?”
“Besides the pig crap? It takes half an hour to get out there. If my graduate students have to drive all the way out there two or three times a day to get research data, it’ll take ’em ten years to do their dissertations. We need someplace close.” I pointed over his shoulder, out his window. “Look at all that empty space behind your office. We could put twenty, thirty bodies out there, easy.” He looked alarmed. “Or,” I quickly went on, “you could give me that patch of junk land near the hospital instead.”
“What junk land near the hospital?”
“Right across the river—behind UT Medical Center—there’s a place where the hospital used to burn their trash, back when medical waste could be dumped in an open pit and burned. There’s two or three acres there. Plenty of room for what I’ve got in mind.”
“Are you talking about the dairy farm? That’s the Ag school’s pride and joy.”
“No, I’m not making a grab for the dairy farm. That’s on the north side of the hospital. This is on the east side. At the far corner of the employees’ parking lot. It’s mostly woods, except for a little clearing where the burn pit used to be.”
He tented his fingers, a gesture that I knew meant he was giving the matter serious thought. “Well,” he mused, “that would certainly give the hospital a unique position in the world of medicine. There can’t be another university medical center that’s bordered by cows on one side and corpses on the other. A dairy farm and a body farm.” He gave his head a slow shake and smiled wryly. “This is not exactly how I envisioned my contribution to higher learning, back when I was writing my dissertation on the decline and fall of the British Empire.” He pressed his index fingers to his lips, and then flexed and straightened the tented fingers rhythmically, like a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. After half a dozen push-ups, he nodded and laid his hands on the desk. “Okay, I’ll make some calls. On one condition.”
“What’s that?” Now it was my turn to feel nervous.
“No more tawdry jokes during class.”
“Deal,” I said, standing and making tracks for the door before he could change his mind. “I’ll save them for afterward.”
As I hurried through the outer office, I heard his voice behind me. “Hey, wait. . . .” Without turning, I waved good-bye to Carissa and kept moving.
THE BONE LAB WAS empty and locked. Peering through the small glass window in the steel door, I saw two trays of bones—pubic bones—sitting on a lab table, but no signs of life. Crap, I thought, he’s probably at the Annex. I’d dialed the extension there and gotten no answer, but I knew that if Tyler wasn’t in the bone lab, the odds were good that he was at the Annex. That meant another trek across the scorching parking lot, but my mood was too ebullient for me to care. Besides, I’d be totally drenched in sweat before long anyhow.
Tyler looked up from the sink, surprised, when I walked in. “Hey, Dr. B. Was that you that called a few minutes ago?”
“It was.”
“Sorry I didn’t pick up.” By way of explanation, he held up a femur and a scrub brush. The femur—like the two hundred other bones still in the steam kettle—was from the guy we’d taken out to the pig barn two weeks before. In the space of just fourteen days, bacteria and bugs had consumed virtually all the soft tissue, leaving behind nothing but bare bones, a greasy stain in the dirt of the barn floor, and another body’s worth of stench. Fortunately, my sense of smell was fairly poor—it was one of my best qualifications for my work—so the odors of death and decomposition didn’t bother me as much as they bothered most people.
Tyler turned his attention back to the bone. “This guy must’ve had a hell of a limp,” he said, giving the bone a final rinse. “This femur’s two inches shorter than the other one. I thought he felt lopsided when we were carrying him. Here, take a look.” He patted the bone dry with a surgical pad and handed it to me. It was warped and had a thick knot at mid-shaft, like a tree branch that’s been cracked and has healed with a prominent and permanent deformity.
“Looks like he had a comminuted, displaced fracture,” I said, “and never got it set. Must have been years ago, though. See how much the bone has remodeled to try to smooth out that discontinuity and those sharp edges?” He nodded. “Must’ve hurt for the rest of his life, though,” I added. “Even with the remodeling, that had to interfere with the muscles and tendons.” I handed the bone back to him, and he laid it on the counter, alongside the longer, straighter femur. I waited, expecting a question, but he seemed preoccupied with the bones. “Aren’t you even going to ask?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Ask what?”
“Why I’m here.”