Rankin had phoned as soon as I’d emerged from the mountains and gotten back into the land of cell-phone signal. “Jesus, Doc, what was that about? You had us shitting bricks.” When I told him, his reaction — half amusement at my predicament, half anger at my meandering driving, which had nearly derailed the operation — wasn’t quite the dose of sympathy I’d hoped for, but Rankin wasn’t inclined to listen to my woes. “I gotta go, Doc. We’ve got to finish setting up. Get here as soon as you can. Break a leg.”
The Grove Park Inn was set on a hillside a couple of miles north of downtown Asheville, amid historic mansions and towering hemlocks. The original stone lodge was rustic and charming. The lobby was flanked by a pair of fireplaces large enough to roast entire oxen, and a broad veranda overlooked the floor of the valley. In recent decades, though, the lodge had been virtually swallowed up by a series of additions: two wings of guest rooms and meeting facilities, a golf course and country club, a sports complex, and a luxury spa.
For the training, Sinclair had booked a large room on the tenth floor of one of the new wings. I threaded my way to the underground parking garage, scanning for a truck or van that might contain half a dozen FBI agents and a raft of electronic gear. I didn’t spot anything promising between the service entrance and the loading dock. I backed up to the dock and parked, feeling alone and uneasy. I pressed the “Deliveries” button on an intercom box, and a voice crackled through the speaker: “ssszzztttsss help you?”
“I’m here for the medical seminar that’s up in the Heritage Ballroom,” I said. “I’ve got some cases of material that need to go up the freight elevator. It would help if you’ve got a flatbed cart.”
“ssszzztttsss there.” A minute later, as I fumbled with the tiny switches on the audio and video recorders — I’d almost forgotten to turn them on — I heard the hum of an electric motor. In the wall beside me, a metal shutter door began to rise and the hotel’s basement opened like a massive rolltop desk. A slight young Hispanic man emerged, pushing a cart to the edge of the platform. He helped me wrestle the five coolers out of the truck and up onto the dock, which was a foot higher than the tailgate. Then we stacked them on the cart, and he bent low over the handle, putting his weight behind it. “It’s very heavy,” he said once it began to move. “What is it?”
I wished people would quit asking me that. “Refreshments,” I said.
I’d phoned Sinclair when I reached the hotel, and he was waiting for me as the elevator door opened on the tenth floor. “Glad you’re here,” he said. “I was getting worried. We’re cutting it a little close on the schedule.”
“Sorry. I’d meant to be here an hour ago, but I hit a little snag.” Without going into all the personal reasons for my erratic driving, I told him how I’d been pulled over in the mountains.
“Hang on, I want to hear the rest of the story,” he interrupted, “but let’s take care of this first.” He laid a hand on the shoulder of the hotel worker, saying, “This is fine. We’ll take it from here.” He pulled a twenty from his pocket and handed it to the young man, who thanked him politely and left.
We’d stopped in front of a pair of double doors marked HERITAGE A. Sinclair delivered a staccato series of raps, and the doors swung outward, pushed by two clean-cut young men in scrubs, followed by a third, who wheeled the cart into a cavernous ballroom, its floor dotted with tables draped in blue. We’d entered at one end of the room, near a raised stage and an enormous projection screen. A podium stood at one side of the stage; center stage was occupied by a waist-high table draped with blue sheets. A video camera stood at one side of the table; perched on the other side was a surgical microscope. As I studied the setup, a technician somewhere in the room flipped a switch, projecting a video image onto the screen. There, magnified to five times its actual size, was the image of the table’s surface. A tray of larger-than-life surgical instruments was neatly arranged at one end. At its center lay a human arm, amputated as neatly at the shoulder as were the twenty specimens in the coolers beside me.
The ballroom’s floor contained thirty tables, each outfitted with surgical implements and operating microscopes. And ten of the thirty already held arms. As I marveled at the ballroom’s transformation into a surgical classroom, I heard the clatter of metal latches snapping open. Working wordlessly, Sinclair’s three assistants rolled the cart down the center aisle between the tables, laying arms on the remaining tables, positioning each limb as methodically and swiftly as decorators setting out floral centerpieces for a banquet.
After the training — a tutorial in microsurgical repair of blood vessels and nerves — Sinclair’s assistants wordlessly collected my twenty arms — now crisscrossed with incisions and sutures — and loaded them into my coolers. Sinclair rode down the freight elevator with me and the hotel employee — this one a stocky African-American male — who’d been sent to help handle the coolers. After loading them into the truck, he latched the tailgate and hatch, accepted his tip from Sinclair, and disappeared into the basement of the hotel.
Sinclair turned to me. “Got a minute before you hit the road?”
“Sure.” I unlocked the truck and nodded at the passenger door. “Step into my office.”
We got in and closed the doors. “What’d you think of the training?”
“Fascinating,” I said. “I had no idea it was possible to put on something like that in a hotel ballroom. And the microsurgery was remarkable. I don’t see how they make such tiny stitches by hand, even with the image magnified by the scope.” A question occurred to me. “What’d you tell the surgeons about where the arms came from?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. They’d rather not know. They realize that material’s hard to come by, so they’re grateful to pony up the cost of the training and keep their consciences clear.”
Lucky them, I thought.
“Couldn’t’ve done it without you, Bill. Here you go.” He handed me a thick manila envelope, which he’d brought down in the elevator with him. I’d been dreading this moment ever since I saw him take the envelope from a briefcase. “There’s a five-hundred-dollar honorarium check in there, in case you need something legit to show the accountants. And twenty grand in cash.” He grinned. “Don’t blow it all on booze and strippers.”
“Thanks for the advice.” I laid the envelope on the console between us, hoping the recorder and the video camera were successfully capturing the transaction. “And thanks for the opportunity.”
“Let’s hope it’s the first of many. So now it’s out to the Body Farm with these arms?”
I nodded.
“Man, I hate to picture all that perfectly good tissue rotting on the ground. Sure you don’t want to leave it with me?”
“Can’t,” I said. “Any skeleton we add to the collection needs to be complete, unless the donor lost a limb during life. The skeleton needs to match the donor’s medical-history file.”
“Sure, I get it,” he answered. “Sort of an all-or-nothing deal — none of the bones or all of the bones?”
“Right.”
“Speaking of that,” he said, “I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned that morning in Vegas. You said you’re long on bodies, short on space. You ever turn down donations?”