“Long,” I said. “I sure wish Knoxville were an airline hub. It makes no sense to me to fly two hundred miles east to Charlotte to catch a westbound flight. Hell, the plane from Charlotte to Vegas probably passed right over Knoxville. It’s maddening to fly four hundred miles just to get back to the same place you started from two hours before.”
“Sorry, Doc. I’d have let you fly out tonight on the Bureau jet with me and the other guys from Knoxville and Newark, but that would’ve blown your cover. We appreciate your going on such short notice.”
“While you’re feeling appreciative, be grateful that Amanda Whiting worked us in on a nanosecond’s notice.” Whiting, UT’s general counsel, had actually cut short a meeting with the university president in order to hold an urgent conference with Rankin, Price, and me. She hadn’t been happy about it, but before we left her office, she hand-wrote a confidential memo of understanding, signed by herself, the agents, and me, outlining and endorsing the role that the Body Farm and I would play in an undercover FBI sting. Now, as the wheels of the jet stopped on the tarmac in Las Vegas, the wheels of the sting—the wheels of justice, I hoped—began to turn.
“Great timing,” Rankin was saying. “This tissue-bank convention’s the perfect opportunity to make contact with Sinclair.”
Raymond Sinclair was the founder and CEO of Tissue Sciences and Services, the New Jersey tissue bank that the FBI believed had obtained dozens of bodies from the MacArthur School of Medicine.
“And you’re sure he’ll be here?”
“Well, I’m sure he flew from Newark to Las Vegas yesterday, and I’m sure he’s scheduled to give a talk tomorrow morning. ‘Enrolling Donors: Thinking Outside the Box.’ I guess he means thinking outside the pine box.” Rankin snorted. “You think the irony in the title was intentional?”
“Ask me after I hear his talk. What time and where?”
“Ten A.M., Nottingham Room.”
“Nottingham? As in ‘Sheriff of,’ from Robin Hood? I thought the hotel was all about King Arthur. The hotel’s called the Excalibur, right?”
“King Arthur, Robin Hood, same difference,” he said. “Merrie Olde England. You were expecting rigorous historical accuracy at a casino hotel with red and blue plastic turrets at each corner?” He had a point there.
As Rankin went over the plan for tomorrow once more, the taxi left the airport and turned onto Sunset, then made a right onto Las Vegas Boulevard. To the left rose the three-winged tower of Mandalay Bay, its dark glass fa?ade split by vertical shafts of golden light. Up ahead glittered a compressed version of New York City’s skyline, where a roller coaster corkscrewed past a replica of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Farther up the Strip, the Eiffel Tower blazed with light; it was only half the size of the real one, in Paris, but I had to admit, even a half-size Eiffel Tower was impressive. Although I wasn’t fond of the noise or the crowds—or the traffic or the gambling or the drinking, for that matter—as an anthropologist I found Las Vegas fascinating. Plunked down in the middle of a hot, barren basin—Vegas averaged just four inches of rain a year, less than one-tenth Knoxville’s amount—the city had no logical reason to exist, or at least no logical reason to exist where it did. Yet somehow, in the sands of the desert, it had carved out a unique, neon-lit niche for itself in the life and lore of the nation. The taxi slowed as it passed the tawny sphinx guarding the Luxor, a black-glass pyramid of a hotel. From the pyramid’s tip, a column of blue-white light soared into the sky: a searchlight that sought nothing, an eye staring blindly, blindingly upward. Years before, on a trip to the Middle East, I’d traveled to Luxor, the Great Pyramids, and the Valley of the Kings; seeing the comic-book replicas, I found myself appalled and amused in equal measure.
Just beyond the Luxor, the cab turned in at the Excalibur, its castle turrets topped with crayon-colored cones. I bid Rankin good night, paid the taxi driver, and stepped into the hotel’s dark, mazy lobby, with its relentlessching-ching-ching of electronic slot machines. I checked in, rode the elevator up the vast tower of featureless rooms, and tumbled into bed to rest up for tomorrow morning’s gambling, when—if luck was with me—I’d be betting with chips of flesh and bone from the Body Farm.