I’d hesitated before saying I could spare her; after all, during half a decade as my graduate assistant, she’d made herself indispensable. I valued and respected Miranda’s intelligence and forensic expertise. But it went deeper than that, I had to admit: She was as important to me personally as she was professionally. In some ways, I felt closer to Miranda than to anyone else on earth, even my own son. If you took DNA out of the equation, Miranda was my next of kin. I felt certain that the bone lab and the Body Farm could limp along without Miranda for six weeks, but I wasn’t sure I could manage that long.
“Excuse me, Doc?” Rocky’s voice seemed to come from far away, not so much interrupting my thoughts as awakening me from some dream. “So if we’re done here, I guess I’ll be taking off. The TBI’s gonna think we’ve hijacked their chopper.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to check out on you there. Hang on—I’ll walk you out and lock up.”
I bent to straighten one corner of the body bag, and as I did, my cell phone began bleating. Fishing the phone from the pocket of the jumpsuit, I glanced at the display. I didn’t recognize the number; it started with 330, an area code I didn’t know, and it looked longer than a phone number should be. I stared dumbly for a moment before I realized why. It was a foreign call, and 33 was the country code—the code, I suddenly remembered, for France. Miranda! I flipped open the phone, but in my excitement, I fumbled it, and it fell onto my foot and skittered beneath the body bag. Flinging aside the bag, I rooted for the phone, which had lodged—ironically and absurdly—beside the dead man’s left ear. I had just laid hold of it when it fell silent. “Damn it,” I muttered. I punched the “send” button, only to be told by a robotic voice that my call “cannot be completed as dialed,” doubtless because it was an overseas number. “Damn damn damn,” I muttered, but just as I finished the third damn, the phone rang again, displaying the same number.
This time, I did not drop it. “Hello? Miranda? How are you?”
“Ah, no, sorry, it is not Miranda.” The voice was a man’s, accented in French. “This is Stefan Beauvoir. The archaeologist Miranda is helping. She wanted me to call you.”
My internal alarms began to shriek. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Miranda? Tell me.”
“The doctor says it is—merde, how do you say it?—the rupture of the appendicitis?”
“Miranda’s got a ruptured appendix?”
“Oui, yes, a ruptured appendix. She asked me to call and say, please, can you come?”
“Can I come? What, to France?”
“Oui. Please, can you come to France? To Avignon?” Ahveen-YOHN. I didn’t like the sound of it. “She is having the surgery now, and she will be very grateful if you can come.”
“Doesn’t she want someone from her family?”
“Ah, but it is not possible. I call her mother and her sister. Neither one has a passport. So she thinks next of you, and asks if you can please come quickly.”
“Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll get on a plane this afternoon.”
“Bon, good. You can fly into Avignon, but the flights are better if you come to Lyon or Marseilles. Marseilles is one hour by car.”
Racing down the path and out the gate, I frantically flagged down the TBI chopper, which was quivering on its landing skids, transitioning toward flight. Stone took off his headset, scrambled out of the helicopter, and hurried over to me.
“Doc, is something wrong?”
“Can you guys give me a ride? I need to get someplace fast.”
“Where?”
“France.”
SIXTY SECONDS LATER, WE WERE AIRBORNE AGAIN, this time with me in the right front seat. “Does this thing have turbo?” I asked the pilot. By way of an answer, he rolled the helicopter into a 90-degree bank.
“Holy shit,” I heard Stone squawk from the back.
Skimming low across the river, the chopper hurtled toward Neyland Stadium. “I don’t know where you can land,” I said, scanning the vicinity of the stadium. “The parking lots all look pretty full.”
The pilot grinned. “I think I see a spot that might just be big enough.” Swooping low over the towering scoreboard, we plunged straight into the bowl of the stadium.
“Touchdown,” Stone deadpanned as we thumped into the south end zone.
MY SECRETARY SCARCELY GLANCED UP AS I DASHED past her desk and into my office. “Peggy,” I called out, yanking down the zipper of the greasy, sooty jumpsuit. “I need you to do some airline research for me, please.” Yanking off my boots and the jumpsuit, I tossed them in a corner.
“For that conference in Seattle next month? I booked your tickets last week, remember? Nonrefundable.” Her typing hadn’t even slowed.
“Peggy, stop typing. Listen. I need to fly to France. Marseilles. Like, ten minutes ago.” On the other side of the doorway, her keyboard fell silent. “It’s Miranda,” I went on, pulling on the clothes I’d intended to wear to my meeting with the president. “Ruptured appendix. She’s going in for surgery right now.” Rummaging in my closet, I dug out my “go” bag, a duffel I kept packed and at the ready, and slung it over my shoulder.
“Oh, my Lord,” she gasped. “Poor thing.”