Ouch,I thought. The thunderhead appeared to have circled back.
“I didn’t really go to hear his talk,” I admitted. I vaguely recalled an old saying about the best lies being partly true. I’d never aspired to be a good liar, but at the moment I wished I felt slightly more fluent in falsehood. “I wanted to talk to him face-to-face about expanding their research funding, because we’re looking at more budget cuts.”
That, too, contained truth. The UT board of trustees had met six days earlier in emergency session to deal with the worsening budget crunch. Higher tuition—an increase of nearly 10 percent—had been expected to raise an additional $20 million in revenue for the current academic year. Unfortunately, the same economic bind that was squeezing UT itself was also squeezing the families of students; as a result the higher tuition had been largely offset by lower enrollment, and so more cuts were required. Miranda looked pained, and I felt bad for pressing on a sore spot—she knew I’d been struggling to protect the funding for her assistantship, and she was already feeling stress about that. But short of disclosing my role in the FBI’s investigation, I could come up with no other credible pretext for my trip.
“He didn’t make any guarantees,” I added, with as much cheeriness as I could muster, “but he promised to try.”
She returned her attention to the skull, which meant turning her back on me. “Well,” she said hollowly, “I hope he succeeds.” I was just opening the door to leave when she said, “Oh, we got a body while you were gone. Family donation—a white male, age sixty-seven, died of cardiopulmonary disease. His number is 37-09. He’s still in the cooler at the morgue. I’ll get him out to the facility sometime this afternoon.”
Reluctantly I stepped back into the lab and closed the door. “Actually, let’s leave him in the cooler for a while,” I said.
She swiveled the chair 180 degrees to face me. “How long? And how come?”
I’d spent much of my flight from Las Vegas to Knoxville dreading these very questions. “Two or three weeks,” I said, drawing a raised eyebrow that looked simultaneously curious and disapproving. Her second question was tougher:Why? I wasn’t dazzled by the answer I’d come up with during the plane ride, but it was the best I could do. “I’m thinking of doing a research project of my own,” I said. “I’d need at least five bodies to do it, maybe ten.”
She stared at me. “Are you kidding? How long since you’ve done research of your own?”
“Too long. Feels like I’m losing touch with what life is like for you overworked, underpaid graduate students.”
“Good of you to walk a mile in our moccasins, kemosabe,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be giving up your salary for a while, too?” She laid down the probe. “I need to go check on some bones I put in to simmer while you were gone. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Make sure the door’s locked when you leave.”
CHAPTER 27
TWO HOURS LATER THE STAIRWELL DOOR OUTSIDE MYoffice banged open, hard enough to send a slight shiver through the columns and girders of the stadium. Then my own office door was flung open with equal force.
Miranda burst into the room, wild-eyed, out of breath, and weeping.
“Miranda, what’s wrong?”
“It’s Eddie, it’s Eddie.” The words were barely discernible amid the sobs. “His right hand—it went septic.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Now. Carmen just called me from the ER. She said they’re taking him into emergency surgery.” She shook her head in sadness and shock. “They’re amputating the last bit of his hands right now.”
WE FOUND CARMEN IN THEsurgery waiting room, slumped in a chair, her face cradled in her hands. She looked up when Miranda called her name, and the face she raised to us had aged twenty years in the past two months.
“Oh, Carmen,” said Miranda, “I’m so, so sorry.” She sat beside her, taking Carmen’s right hand in both of hers. I sat on the other side, holding her left hand. We sat in silence for what seemed hours, our six hands entwined. Eventually I lost track of where my hands ended and Carmen’s began. I watched a finger twitch, and for a moment—until I noticed the small, manicured tip at the end of the nail—I thought the finger was one of my own, numb from lack of movement and blood.