Price and Rankin made no move to respond.
“And then there’s me,” I added. “If I understand you right, the guy from the medical school who was selling off bodies and body parts was about to be indicted.”
Price nodded reluctantly; she opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.
“Hang on, let me finish. The med-school guy was committing fraud, is that it? Altering donor charts or falsifying financial records to hide the fact that he was making a fortune off a postmortem chop shop?”
“That’s exactly what he was doing,” she said. “He would indicate that a body was unsuitable for use by the school, report it as cremated, and then sell it to Tissue Sciences. He took cash under the table — seven thousand per body, and he admitted to selling thirty-one bodies over the past three years. He paid cash for a big boat and a Mercedes convertible. For a guy with no college degree and no formal medical training, he was living large.”
“And you’re hoping Tissue Sciences will offer me that same sort of deal? Big bucks for bodies? Payola for parts?”
She nodded. “Technically, this is still Newark’s case, but if we can bring you in, a lot of the focus would shift to Knoxville, and Special Agent Rankin would serve as our lead agent. We’d begin gathering evidence here, starting with recordings of every conversation you have with Sinclair or anybody else at Tissue Sciences.”
“You’d tap his phone lines?”
“Actually, what we do is ask you to record all your conversations with him,” Rankin said. “We’d need a court order to do a wiretap, but in Tennessee, if one party to a conversation consents to recording the call — that would be you, we hope — it’s legal to record it. So if you’re willing, we’ll attach a recorder to your office and home phone lines. All you have to do is hit a button when you get a call from the guy.”
“What if he calls my cell phone?”
Rankin looked at Price, and she nodded, so he went on. “Actually, with your permission we can record your cell-phone conversations with him, too, by routing them through our engineering lab up in Quantico.”
“So it gets you the same evidence as a wiretap, but you don’t have to jump through the legal hoops to get it?”
“Pretty much,” he conceded.
“And was your med-school diener recording his calls with this guy Sinclair?”
Rankin nodded.
“Any chance he made a deathbed warning call to Sinclair from some other phone?”
“Unlikely,” he said. “We recorded a conversation they had only a few minutes before our source had the heart attack. Only other call he made before he died was to 911. He didn’t have an opportunity to spill the beans. He was too busy dying.”
“Any chance his heart attack was triggered by something other than fat and laziness? Maybe something somebody slipped into his coffee?” I thought of Leonard Novak, unsuspectingly swallowing the capsule that killed him. “Or into his vitamin pills?”
Rankin looked pained. “Also unlikely, but remotely possible.”
“What does that mean?”
“No poisons showed up in the toxicology screen at his autopsy,” he explained, “but his potassium level was abnormally high. And a massive dose of potassium can trigger a heart attack. But as I say, he was on the phone with Sinclair at Tissue Sciences shortly before he keeled over, and Sinclair talked like they’d be doing business for a long time.”
“Maybe so,” I pointed out, “but your snitch talked like that, too. Maybe they were both acting.”
Rankin shrugged; there was no way to disprove that possibility. “Either way, Sinclair’s a bad guy. Besides his med-school source, we think he’s buying bodies from funeral homes and crematories. And we’ve got some indications he’s buying kidneys from poor people overseas — living donors — then selling the organs to rich Americans and Europeans, patients who’ll pay top dollar to jump to the front of the line for a transplant.”
I felt my resistance weakening. “I can’t help you bust him for that,” I said, “since none of my donors have transplantable kidneys. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m willing to do this. What’s going to set the wheels of the sting in motion? Do I just call up this guy Sinclair and say, ‘Hey, the FBI tells me you need a new supply of black-market bodies’?”
“We’ll figure something out,” he said, “if you’re game to help us. We have some experience in setting up undercover sting operations.”
“Which brings me back to my big concern,” I responded. “If things go the way you hope they’ll go, I’ll have the opportunity to betray the university’s trust in me, betray donors’ trust in the Body Farm, and break sundry laws of the state of Tennessee and the United States of America.” I looked from him to Price. “You’re sending me into battle unarmed and defenseless?”
“We prefer to think that we’re protecting the integrity of the investigation,” she countered. “I know, it’s asking a lot.”
“It’s asking too much,” I said. “I was accused of a murder a couple of years ago, and it damn near killed me to have my friends and colleagues think I was guilty. I want some reassurance that my reputation won’t be ruined, and the university’s image won’t be destroyed, if I help you with this.”
“And the Bureau’s word isn’t good enough?”
I looked out the grimy windows for guidance. The view reminded me where I stood, and where Anthropology stood, in the pecking order of the university. When I’d come to Knoxville to head the department, I’d been promised that the makeshift space in the stadium was only temporary and that we’d get bigger, better quarters soon. I’d also been promised, time and time again, that our shoestring budget would be increased. And yet, twenty years later, here I was, still stuck beneath the lavishly funded football program, still nickel-and-diming the bush-league budgets of my research facility and my faculty and graduate students. The university hadn’t protected me when I’d been falsely accused of murder. Did I really need to worry so much about protecting the university?
I did, I decided. UT hadn’t given me everything I’d hoped for, but along with the shoestring support and the makeshift space, it had given me the freedom and encouragement to build a program in forensic anthropology that was considered one of the best in the world. Without ever once questioning my sanity, UT had allowed me to haul in bodies by the hundreds and watch them rot, just for the sake of science. In a very profound way, the university was my home, and my colleagues and graduate students were my family. I had a responsibility to protect that home and family as best I could.
“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it. Not without bringing the general counsel into the loop.”
Price’s face was grim. “Dr. Brockton, I wish you’d reconsider. We will stand behind you if you help us,” she assured me.
“No offense,” I countered, “but if this backfires on me, and on UT, I want at least some paper trail here within the university that says I didn’t crawl out on this limb without asking permission. Package deaclass="underline" me and the general counsel.”
“You’re putting us in a very difficult position here,” she said.
“Gee, welcome to the damn club, Angie. If the general counsel gives her blessing, I’m in. If not, I’m out. Simple as that. Sorry.” Price and Rankin exchanged unhappy looks. “By the way, just so you know,” I added, “if the general counsel says she’ll keep it to herself, she will. Her word’s as good as the Bureau’s.”
I expected them to leave. I figured they’d need to discuss my demand in private or run it up the chain of command. But Price didn’t even look at Rankin before she spoke.