“Total hand transplantation.” He said it quietly, but I heard an edge of hope and anxiety in his voice that I hadn’t heard earlier, when he’d asked for the other searches.
Miranda’s fingers clattered. “Wow,” she breathed, “almost a million hits.” Garcia had her call up only a few of the million, but those were enough to confirm my prior impressions. Hand-transplant surgery was relatively new; the first total transplant had been attempted in Ecuador in 1964, but it didn’t work, and the procedure had been attempted only a few more times until the late 1990s. Even now it remained incredibly rare—so far, fewer than fifty hand transplants had been performed in the entire world. The surgery was extraordinarily complex, requiring surgeons to connect dozens of nerves, tendons, veins, arteries, and muscles. The operation was both an intricately choreographed ballet and a brutal test of endurance, requiring delicate, nonstop work for twelve to sixteen hours. Even if the surgery itself went perfectly, the long-term outcome was far from certain. To keep their immune systems from rejecting the transplants, recipients had to take immunosuppressants—drugs to weaken their immune systems—for the rest of their lives, and the immunosuppressants increased their vulnerability to diseases. Total hand transplantation looked like a medical miracle, no doubt about it. But I couldn’t help thinking how much riskier it looked than either the toe-to-thumb reconstruction or the prosthesis.
“It’s a big risk,” Garcia said, as if hearing my thoughts. “But it would be worth taking a big risk to have real hands again.”
His words stayed with me long after I drove back to the stadium and Miranda had wheeled him back upstairs to become the hand-trauma case in 718 once more.
CHAPTER 7
I GRITTED MY TEETH AS I PULLED INTO THE PARKINGlot in Farragut, the suburb to the west of Knoxville. I was headed for my spring dental cleaning, and like most people, I tended to be nervous about it. I would much rather be using my lunch hour to eat lunch than to have my teeth probed and scoured. “Sorry I’m late,” I said to Barbara, the dentist’s silver-haired office manager. “I just came from an autopsy. I figured y’all would appreciate it if I took the time to wash my hands afterwards.”
“You figured right,” she said. “Anyhow, Reuben’s running a few minutes behind. How’re you doing today?” Barbara wasn’t just Dr. Pelot’s office manager. She was also his wife—and she was a Knoxville City Councilwoman, representing the city’s West Hills district.
“Dentally speaking, I’m fine,” I answered, “unless your husband tells me I’m not flossing often enough. Professionally, though, I’ve got a big cavity forming in the Body Farm’s budget, and I don’t know how to fill it. I don’t suppose the city’s got any pots of money sitting around that could be tapped for educational purposes?”
She frowned. “Let me think about that,” she mused, then she laughed. “The first thing that comes to mind is the Blighted Properties Redevelopment Program.”
I laughed, too. “Well, ‘blighted’ does seem to be a shoe that fits the Body Farm. Truth is, ‘blighted’
would actually be a pretty charitable description of our residents.”
She shook her head. “Unfortunately,” she went on, “that money’s all spent. Tell you what. City Council meets every Tuesday. At next week’s meeting, I’ll ask the Development staff if there’s any way we could scrape up some funding for you.”
I thanked her and took my seat in the waiting room. Forty minutes later, my teeth scoured slick and my flossing pronounced satisfactory, I headed back to UT, hoping that Barbara and the City Council might find a few thousand dollars to offset UT’s belt-tightening.
I stopped by the Anthropology Department’s administrative offices just long enough to retrieve a few messages from my secretary, Peggy. Then I’d retreated to this office—my private, preferred office at the far end of the stadium—to concentrate. This spring I was teaching Introduction to Forensic Anthropology, an upper-level undergraduate course, and I had thirty test papers to grade by tomorrow morning. Tucked beneath the north end-zone grandstands of Neyland Stadium, my sanctuary was a football field away, literally, from the constant distractions of the administrative office. But the hydraulic mechanism in the stairwell door had broken recently, and every time someone opened the door, it crashed into the concrete wall.
After six or eight crashes, I’d stopped cursing, and after a couple dozen I’d called the maintenance department to report the faulty door. Shortly after a window-rattling impact, Gary Culpepper appeared in the doorway.
“Hello, Detective. I hadn’t expected to see you again today.” I had just poured a large bag of M&M’s into a one-liter glass beaker. Plucking out one for myself—red, my favorite—I offered the beaker to Culpepper. “M&M?”