“Sir Galahad’s it is.” He motioned toward the escalator, and we headed down a floor from the meeting rooms. “Who the hell was Sir Galahad? Got any idea?”
“Hmm. One of the Knights of the Round Table.” I dug around in my memory banks. As a boy I’d read some of the Arthurian legends, but tales of chivalry were a far cry from blunt-force trauma and knife marks in bone. “Seems like Galahad was the squeaky-clean knight,” I ventured. “Raised by nuns. Chaste and very pious, when he wasn’t busy hacking foes to bits with his broadsword.” I fished around for any additional factoids I’d stored about Galahad. “Spent a lot of time on a quest for the Holy Grail. That’s about all I recall.”
“That’s a lot. I don’t recall that much about the talk I just gave.”
The escalator deposited us in front of a shuttered Italian restaurant and, beside it, a theater whose nightly show was “Thunder from Down Under,” billed as “Australia’s Hottest Hunks” and “Las Vegas’ Best Male Strip Show.” It struck me as interesting irony that the male strippers were performing a stone’s throw from an establishment named for the Arthurian knight who embodied chastity and purity. Sir Galahad’s was closed, too, so we ended up buying coffee from a Starbucks stand and doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme counter. I suspected that the Krispy Kremes were not what had sustained Sir Galahad on his search for the Grail, but they did taste divine: warm, cloudlike puffs of dough, deep-fried to airy perfection, then varnished with a crisp, delicate sugar glaze. “That’s tasty,” I marveled. “That would be worth a serious quest.”
Sinclair shook his head. “I gotta disagree with you there. I’ve never been a fan of the Krispy Kreme. I’m a die-hard Dunkin’ Donuts man myself.”
“Dunkin’ Donuts? But they’re so cakey.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what makes ’em good.” He shrugged. “You’re from Tennessee, I’m from Jersey. Maybe it’s a geographic thing.”
“Maybe that’s it,” I conceded. “It did take a while for Krispy Kreme to cross the Mason-Dixon Line.”
He laughed. “There was a big article in theNew York Times when the first Krispy Kreme opened in Manhattan. The barbarians were at the gates.”
“If you think Krispy Kreme is culture shock for New Yorkers,” I said, “just wait till Cracker Barrel hits town.”
“Hey, bring it on. The more biscuits and gravy and fried okra people eat, the better it is for my business, and yours.” He offered me his half-eaten doughnut. “You want the rest of that?”
“No thanks. One’s my limit. When I was in my thirties, three was my limit. In my forties it dropped to two. Now, in my fifties, it’s one.”
“Their business is gonna go down the crapper when you hit your sixties,” he said. “Remind me not to invest in Krispy Kreme stock.” He pushed the doughnut aside and leaned forward. “So you said you use donated bodies for research, but also for training, right?”
I nodded.
“Tell me about the training. Who trains with bodies from the Body Farm, and how?”
“We work most often with the National Forensic Academy,” I told him. “They offer a ten-week course for crime-scene and crime-lab techs, four times a year. The NFA brings in experts on fingerprints, blood-spatter analysis, hair and fiber evidence, that sort of thing. Our piece of the curriculum is teaching them how to find clandestine graves and skeletal remains.” I nearly added that we spent a week every spring teaching those skills to FBI agents as well, but I was afraid I might give myself away if I mentioned the FBI—like a nervous poker player whose eye twitches when he tries a big bluff.
“Ever do any training with surgeons?”
“Surgeons?” I scanned backward through the talks I’d given during the past few years. “I don’t think so. I do continuing-education lectures every year for lots of dentists and nurses, but no groups of surgeons. You know how surgeons are—one rung above God Almighty in the cosmic order. They’re not going to sit through some lecture by a lowly anthropologist.”
“True,” he laughed, “but I wasn’t thinking of a lecture. More like an intensive, hands-on approach. Small sessions—ten or twenty docs—working on actual human material, the real deal. To learn a new procedure, you have todo it, right? But what patient in his right mind would want to be the guy whose pancreas or pecker you practice on?”
“Not me,” I agreed.
“So that’s another way tissue banks provide a huge service. Sure, providing tissues for transplants is our primary role, but providing material for research and medical training—absolutely crucial.”
I didn’t need convincing on that point, but he wanted to talk, and I wanted to keep him circling the bait, so I nodded enthusiastically.