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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 my office 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 the surgery 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.

As the time inched by, I became aware of a thought tugging at the sleeve of my mind. I tried ignoring it, then tried actively banishing it, but it returned to tug again and again, with increasing insistency. Underneath my worries about Eddie and Carmen — would he live? would he recover from this latest setback? would she? — swirled a cluster of darker questions: Had Eddie brought this on himself deliberately? Had he undertaken Clarissa Lowe’s autopsy not in spite of the risk but because of the risk? Had he decided that a toe-to-thumb transplant wasn’t good enough? Had he contrived to sacrifice his remaining half hand so he’d be a double amputee, and therefore a more compelling transplant candidate? I remembered the frightful, hopeful words he’d spoken the day Miranda had researched his options, when I pointed out the difficulties of transplantation. “It’s a big risk,” he’d said. “But to have hands again would be worth taking a big risk.” Had he taken that risk, gambling with his very life?

Finally a scrub-suited doctor came to deliver the ritual postoperative news. “Mrs. Garcia?” Carmen stood, helped out of her chair by Miranda and me. “I’m Dr. Rivkin; I’m the hand surgeon on call. First, most important, your husband’s in Recovery, and he’s doing well.” Carmen waited, knowing there was more. “Unfortunately, we did have to amputate the hand, just below the wrist. The good news is, we’re confident we got all the decayed and infected tissue, and we’ve put him on a strong course of antibiotics. So his prognosis is very good.” Carmen nodded numbly.

“Excuse me, Doctor,” I interrupted. “You might already know this, but Dr. Garcia was exposed to Clostridium bacteria last week during an autopsy.” I felt Miranda’s eyes on me, and I wondered if she’d been pondering the same dark questions as I had. “The autopsy subject died of toxic shock a week after surgery.” Carmen drew a sharp breath. “Does that exposure affect how you need to treat Dr. Garcia?”

He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dr. Garcia mentioned that when we admitted him, so we’ll certainly check for it when we do the tissue pathology. But he’s not showing any symptoms of toxic shock. His vitals are stable and strong, and his blood work’s good — normal pH, normal red-blood count, normal white-cell count.”

I glanced at Miranda; her eyes were locked on the surgeon’s with laser intensity, but I thought I saw traces of relief in her face, mirroring what must surely be showing in my own.

“We’ll keep a close eye on those,” Rivkin was saying, “but to me this looks like a textbook case of gangrene — localized necrosis, caused by poor circulation. I suspect the blood vessels in that hand were just too badly damaged by the radiation burn to recover.”

“And does the amputation resolve the problem,” Carmen asked quietly, “or will he need additional surgery?”

The surgeon shifted, visibly uncomfortable, and I had the feeling another shoe was about to drop. “We needed to provide blood supply and skin for his…wrist,” he said, sidestepping the word “stump,” which my mind had instantly plugged into the awkward pause. “So what we’ve done is a procedure called a pedicle flap.”

“I don’t know what that procedure is,” she said. “Tell me, please?”

“We’ve grafted his forearm to his abdomen,” he explained, “here, just beneath the skin.” Curling his right hand tightly, he jammed his wrist into his lower belly. “New blood vessels will grow from the abdomen into the wrist. Once they do — two or three weeks — we can reverse the procedure and detach the arm. Then we’ll take a flap of skin from the abdomen to cover the stump.” This time he didn’t flinch from the word.

If Carmen was taken aback by the news that her husband’s arm was now surgically grafted to his belly, she didn’t show it. She simply asked, “When can I see him?”

“He should be waking up soon. I can take you back to Recovery now.”

She nodded, hugged Miranda and me, and left with the surgeon.

On the drive back across the river to the stadium, my thoughts circled back to the idea I’d found so worrisome: the idea that Eddie had contrived to lose his hand, as a way of angling for a transplant. If the surgeon was right — if Eddie’s infection wasn’t caused by the deadly strain of microorganism that had killed Clarissa Lowe — my worry had been unfounded. That knowledge was a relief, but the relief was mixed with shame — shame at having suspected Eddie of recklessness and manipulation.

I also felt a fresh surge of sorrow and compassion. No matter how much moral integrity he might have, Eddie Garcia no longer possessed even a remnant of his hands.