The minivan was barely visible, tucked beneath the trees behind the mobile CT scanner. The morning was still dark enough to allow me to see a sliver of light through the gap at the base of the door. The knob was locked, but I had a key, and this one fit. As I turned the knob and eased the door open, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what on earth I was doing.
Through the circular opening at the center of the scanner, I glimpsed a man bent over the table in the small room behind it. I edged toward him, using the scanner as a screen. As I got closer, my field of view widened to include a stack of boxes on the table—long rectangular boxes, one foot square by three feet long: the kind of boxes in which we stored the skeletons in our collection. The man, his back turned toward me, was opening one of the boxes. As I watched in astonishment, he removed a left femur from the box, wrapped it in bubble wrap, and tucked it into a black nylon duffel bag. Then, reaching into a red duffel bag, he removed a bundle and unrolled a layer of bubble wrap, revealing another left femur. He placed this second femur into the bone box, closed the lid, and set the box at the end of the table. Then he raised the lid on another box and repeated the process of swapping out bones. I was stunned. He was taking bones from the skeletal collection, coolly and methodically, and replacing them with counterfeits. How many bones had he stolen, and over what period of time? I felt almost dizzy with shock, and I reached out a hand to steady myself on the scanner’s table. My hand grazed something lying on the edge of the table, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a Bic pen roll and fall. I made a grab for it, but I was too slow, and the pen clattered to the steel floor. The man at the table started. “Hello?” He stood and turned, and I could see his face for the first time. It was Glen Faust. He looked as stunned to see me as I was to see him. Suddenly it all seemed clear: Faust had been using us from the very beginning. The research collaboration had been a pretext, a smoke screen, a way to gain access to a reliable supply of material for OrthoMedica’s bone grafts and bone paste and product-development labs. How big was the annual revenue stream, as he liked to put it, from stolen bones?
“How long did you think it would be before we noticed?” My voice sounded foreign to me. It wasn’t the voice of a man who’d made a triumphant discovery; it was the voice of a man who realized he’d been played for a fool. I crossed to the table and opened the box where he’d just planted the substitute bone.
“The very first graduate student who looked at this femur would know it’s a fake,” I said, taking out the bone to underscore my point. I stared at it. It was stained, it was arthritic, it was labeled with the donation number—31-01—and it was gnarled from a badly healed fracture. The one thing itwasn’t was fake. But how could that be? I’d just seen him take it from his bag, unwrap it, and put it in the box.
“I can explain this, Bill,” he said.
“I seriously doubt that.”
Laying down the femur, I reached into the black bag and snatched out the femur he’d just removed from our collection. I stared it at, wondering if I was seeing double. The bone was identical in every detail to the one I’d just removed from the box: it was stained, it was arthritic, it was labeled 31-01, and it was gnarled.
“What in bloody hell,” I whispered.
My eyes darted from one bone to the other, seeking the differences between them. There were none—at least none that I could see. But as I grasped and shifted and rotated them in my hands, I perceived differences I couldfeel , though barely. One of the bones was a fraction of a percent heavier than the other—no more than the weight of a feather, I’d have sworn, but heavier. I rubbed each bone with a thumbnail. The lighter-weight bone felt slicker somehow, and as I bore down harder, the reddish brown stain on the shaft scraped off, revealing bright white bone underneath. Over the years I’d seen hundreds of thousands of stained bones, and the stain of time and decay and dirt did not, I knew, scrape off with a thumbnail.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “A forgery. A counterfeit. Amazing.”
“Let me explain,” he repeated.
“You can explain it to the police.” I laid down the femur I held in my left hand—the genuine one—and fished my cell phone from my hip pocket.
“Don’t do that,” he pleaded. “Listen to me.” I flipped open the phone and dialed 911. In the split second that I glanced down to find the “send” button, he rushed me. Ramming his body into mine, he grabbed for the cell phone with both hands and tried to pry my fingers from it. I began flailing at him with the counterfeit femur. As we grappled, he pulled me off balance, and we toppled to the floor. His body slammed onto my rib cage, knocking the breath from me.
He straddled me then, pinning me to the floor and sending the phone skidding underneath the scanner.