Soon I found myself answering a string of rapid-fire questions. People asked about our research, asked how we cleaned the skeletal material, asked for details on the donation program. Finally someone asked where we’d put the sixteen hundred donors on our waiting list. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. I decided there’d never be a better opportunity to dangle the line that Price and Rankin had liked, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned casting it. “It’s not exactly that we have too many donated bodies,” I said. “We just don’t have enough space or enough funding.”
More questions followed. I felt bad for Sinclair. I hadn’t even planned to say anything, let alone steal the limelight, but once it shifted in my direction, I didn’t know how to get out of it.
To his credit, he didn’t seem to mind. When the session ended at ten forty-five, he made a point of coming over to speak to me. Faust, on the other hand, gave me a brief wave from the back of the room, then darted out the door like a scalded cat. There appeared to be no love lost between him and Sinclair, and I wondered what had originally caused the tension.
Sinclair hung back till a few people had finished chatting with me, then offered me a smile and a handshake. “Dr. Brockton, you certainly livened up the discussion,” he said. “It was fascinating, and I appreciate it. I have to say, you make me wonder if I’ve been too quick to resort to the ‘throw money at it’ solution to the problem of motivating donors.”
“Well, we’ve been really fortunate,” I said. “The university is very supportive, the local media seem to like us, and we’ve benefited from the CSI craze. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we’re happy to be bobbing along at the high-water mark.”
Suddenly he frowned, aiming a finger. “I have a suspicion about you,” he said, and I felt my stomach clench. Had I been so clumsy, so obvious, that I’d already botched things? “I suspect,” he went on, “you’re far too modest.”
So perhaps I hadn’t failed after all — not yet at least.
My relief turned to delight, followed swiftly by panic, when he added, “If you’ve got time, I’d love to hear more about your program over coffee.”
CHAPTER 23
“Sherwood Forest café or Sir Galahad’s pub?” Sinclair offered the hotel map for my perusal.
“Tough choice,” I mused. “If I were going just by the names, I’d go for Sherwood Forest, but it looks like it’s right off the casino floor, so I’m guessing it’s pretty noisy. Sir Galahad’s is on the second level, so maybe it’s quieter.”
“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 the New 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 to do 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.
“We helped with an interesting training a couple months ago,” I said. “Not a medical training, but similar — a disaster training, simulating mass fatalities from a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’ We provided fifteen bodies, and the disaster teams practiced finding the radioactive contamination and cleaning the bodies.”