“Right. John Q, I think it was called. Kinda hokey, especially at the end, but they did a decent job of dramatizing the parents’ anguish. So the point I’m making, in a roundabout way, is that the wait for an organ can be agonizing but the organ-transplant process itself — matching needy recipients with suitable donors through the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network — is meticulous and rigorous. The donor and the recipient are scrupulously documented. It’s illegal in the U.S. to buy, sell, or trade human organs for transplant. In short, human organs are closely monitored. That’s not the case, though, with other forms of human tissue.”
My stomach rumbled again, and I wished he hadn’t just spent five minutes making a point that was really no more than throat clearing set to words. “You’re talking now about corneas, tendons, and so on.”
“Corneas, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, skin, bone,” he itemized. “There’s very little oversight, especially in terms of where those tissues come from. The same is true, with all due respect, to donated bodies.”
I felt my anxiety ratcheting up once more. Years before, a brief but intense political controversy had erupted when a Nashville television station reported that the bodies of low-income Vietnam veterans were being treated disrespectfully at the Body Farm. Nobody had told us that those particular men had been veterans; when we found out, we offered to send their bodies back to the Veterans Administration or to family members for military burials. A handful of state legislators proposed curtailing our postmortem research, but then a bunch of district attorneys rushed to defend the importance of our forensic work, so the storm blew over. I’d considered that issue long since dead, but perhaps it had merely been hibernating. I looked Price in the eye. “Is the FBI concerned about where we get our bodies for the Body Farm?”
“Not at all, Dr. Brockton. We have the utmost confidence in your program and in your professional and personal integrity. We’re here because we hope you can help us bring down some people who are not as honest and ethical as you are.”
“And how could I help you do that?”
She hesitated, but only for a second, and when I heard what she had to say, I wished she’d hesitated longer. I wished she’d hesitated forever, in fact. “By selling some of your bodies,” she said. “On the black market.”
I stared from Price’s face to Rankin’s. They stared back impassively. Finally I said, “That’s unethical. Probably illegal.”
“That’s the point,” she replied. “That’s why we want you to do it.”
“I’m sorry to be slow on the uptake,” I said. “I don’t, as a general principle, set out to break federal laws. What, exactly, are you asking me to do? And why?”
“We’d like you to help us run a sting,” she said. “We’ve been building a case against a tissue bank — a company that receives bodies and then distributes the organs and tissues for transplants and medical research. The company’s based in Newark, New Jersey; it’s called Tissue Sciences and Services.”
“Did you say it’s a company? I thought all tissue banks were nonprofit organizations.”
Price shook her head. “No, it’s definitely a for-profit company. Emphasis on ‘profit.’ We have strong evidence that Tissue Sciences engages in fraud and conspiracy to obtain bodies and body parts, then profits illegally when it resells the cadavers or various tissues from them.”
“So if you already have strong evidence, why not go ahead and bust them?”
“We were just about to,” she said. “The lead agent in our Newark field office was writing up a criminal complaint against the company’s president — a guy named Raymond Sinclair — when our key informant died.”
“Did the informant die from being an informant, by any chance?”
Rankin shook his head. “He died from being overweight and underexercised. Massive heart attack.” He shrugged slightly, then conceded, “It’s possible he was experiencing some additional stress about this investigation.”
I pressed. “Because…?”
“Because we had enough evidence to charge him on several counts,” he answered. “He was a target before he became an informant.”
“So he was cooperating because you promised him a break?”
He shook his head again. “We never promise breaks. All we promised was that we’d tell the U.S. Attorney’s Office how incredibly helpful he was.”
I raised my eyebrows quizzically, but he didn’t seem inclined to take the hint, so I put the question into words. “Who was this helpful fellow, and how’d he help before his untimely demise? Was he a disgruntled Tissue Sciences employee who squealed?”
He looked at Price and got another nod from her before answering. “No. The guy was the diener in the Anatomy Department of MacArthur School of Medicine, in Maryland. He prepped all the cadavers for the med students and faculty, and he ran the body-donation program. That meant he handled the intake and the disposition of every cadaver that came through the doors of the medical school.”
“And how many cadavers came through the door?”
“Twenty-seven last year.” He cocked his head. “How many’d you get last year, Doc?”
“A hundred thirty-five,” I said.
He whistled. “That’s a lot of bodies.”
“Lots of people want to donate their body to science,” I pointed out. “Partly that’s because funerals have gotten so damn expensive, but mostly it’s because people like the idea of doing some good after they die — helping train doctors or advancing medical research or forensic science. We’re getting four or five times as many bodies now as we were just a few years ago. We’re about to run out of places to put them.”
His gaze sharpened. “So are you getting more bodies than you can handle these days?”
“We can always make room for an FBI agent or two,” I joked. “In fact, I just happen to have donor forms here in this filing cabinet.”
Rankin smiled and shook his head.
“It’s true that we don’t need a hundred thirty bodies a year for research,” I said. “We don’t have enough graduate students and faculty to do that many experiments. And our three-acre site is getting kinda crowded. And we’re understaffed. It’s not that we have too many bodies. We just don’t have enough money or land.”
He and Price exchanged a look. “I like it,” he mused. “‘We don’t have too many bodies, we just don’t have enough money.’ What do you think?”
“Could be a good hook,” said Price.
Suddenly I had a bad feeling: the feeling that I myself was about to become a tasty bit of shark bait.
“Before I say yes,” I told Price, “I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You want to talk to your lawyer?”
“Not my lawyer, UT’s lawyer. Amanda Whiting, the general counsel — UT’s top legal eagle. Before I can do something like this, I’d need to make sure the university knows and supports it.”
Price shook her head. “Bureau policy is to keep a tight lid on our investigations,” she said. “The fewer people in the loop, the less risk that something leaks out. I’d have real concerns about bringing people from the legal department into this.”
“Not ‘ people,’” I countered, “one person. I’d have real concerns about not bringing her into this. Do you realize how bad it could look for UT if things go wrong?” She didn’t answer, so I painted the picture for her. “If word got out that the Anthropology Department was selling donated bodies on the black market, that would do terrible damage. We could kiss most of our donations good-bye — not just body donations to Anthropology but financial donations to the entire university. A scandal like that could cost us millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions.”