I fished the spine out of the pot with a large pair of tongs and laid it in the deep, stainless-steel sink of the forensic center’s decomp room. Gripping the hot bones with the tongs, I slipped a scalpel between the vertebrae. Five of the seven parted easily; the other two remained joined by the titanium bracket and the tightly fitted wedge of bone.
I turned on the sink’s faucet—warm, not cold, so as not to risk fracturing the hot bones—and scrubbed the vertebrae with stiff brushes, including a bottle brush to swab out the circular spinal canal. The last shreds of tissue let go easily, swirling down the drain into the hospital’s sewer system. I saved the fused section for last, because I knew it would take more scrubbing, with a smaller brush, to clean the crevices and corners around the metal bracket and the bone graft. When I was satisfied that I’d removed all the soft tissue, I turned off the faucet, shook the water from the bones, and laid them on absorbent surgical pads on the counter. Then, switching on a lighted magnifier, I held the fused segment under the lens. What I saw was a juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign: the natural curves and planes of the vertebrae, with a trapezoidal wedge of lighter bone—a shape that looked more like a machined part than a human bone—jammed between them, locked into place by lustrous metal and screws. I was rotating the assembly beneath the light, studying it from the left side, when the phone on the wall began to ring. I ignored it, and after half a dozen rings it fell silent. A few seconds later, it jangled again; again I ignored it. Then, after a few seconds more, the door of the decomp room opened and Amy, the forensic center’s receptionist, leaned in. “Dr. Brockton? I hate to disturb you, but Dr. Garcia’s on line two for you, and he says it’s important.”
“Oops. Let me just get these gloves off and I’ll pick up. Thanks, Amy.”
Laying aside the bones and peeling off the gloves, I picked up the handset and pressed the blinking button. “Eddie, sorry to keep you waiting. I was just looking at Clarissa Lowe’s cervical spine. It cleaned up very nicely.”
“Don’t look too closely,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I just got a call from Calvin, my lab technician,” he answered.
“Is Calvin the guy who’s three doors down from me? The guy I saw looking into a microscope when I walked up the hall a few minutes ago?”
“Yes. Calvin. I think you should go look also. Can you go down to the lab and put me on the speakerphone?”
“Sure. If I lose you, call me back. Talk to you in a second.” I pressed the “hold” button, and the light for the phone line began to blink again. Twenty yards from the decomp room was the forensic center’s lab, a large room whose countertops bristled with petri dishes, culture incubators, and microscopes. Calvin, a pale, stooped young man whose name I would never have recalled if Garcia hadn’t mentioned it, glanced up from the microscope when I walked in. “’Lo, Dr. Brockton,” he greeted me.
“Hi, Calvin. Dr. Garcia tells me you’ve got something I should see.”
He flipped a switch on the scope; a monitor beside it lit up, and the screen filled with circles and ovals of gray and black. Their shapes reminded me of cross sections of tree trunks: circles within circles, crossed by faint lines radiating from the centers like wheel spokes.
I pressed the “speaker” button on the phone and was rewarded with a loud dial tone. “Oh, crap, I’ve lost Dr. Garcia,” I said. Then I noticed the button for line two, still blinking. “Oh, wait.” I pressed it, and the dial tone was replaced by hollow background noise. “Eddie, are you still there?”
“Yes. Are you in the lab with Calvin?”
“We’re here,” Calvin announced. “I’ve got the unstained slide on the monitor.”
“Good,” said Garcia. “Bill, do you recognize what you’re seeing there?”
“I do.” I’d seen hundreds of similar images over the years. Known as osteons and osteocytes, they were the microscopic framework of human bone—the skeleton’s own inner skeleton, so to speak, magnified hundreds of times. “That must be from the sample we took from the cervical spine.”
“Exactly,” said Garcia. “Calvin, now show him the sample you treated with Gram’s stain.” Calvin twisted the stage of the microscope. The image on the screen spun dizzyingly, and a new slide clicked into place. This slide also showed bone, but the colors had changed to shades of beige and brown, with a sprinkling of tiny purple cylinders amid the structures of the bone.
“Um, remind me what Gram’s stain is?”
“It’s a stain, a dye, that certain bacteria absorb,” Garcia answered. “It’s named for Hans Christian Gram, the Danish microbiologist who developed it. Gram’s stain distinguishes between two groups of bacteria, called Gram-negative and Gram-positive. Gram-positive bacteria absorb the stain and turn purple. Some species of Gram-positive bacteria are harmless; others are quite deadly.”