“Damn it,” said the nurse, “don’t do this to me.”
Flipping back the lid of a medical case, she removed a syringe and tore open a sterile wrapper, then depressed the plunger just far enough to spray a droplet out the end of the needle. “I’m giving him epinephrine,” she said. Sliding the needle into Faust’s arm, she slammed the plunger home and then yanked the empty syringe into a waste slot. She applied the defibrillator paddles again. “Clear.” The body twitched, and the blinking dashes on the monitor were replaced by numbers. Fluctuating, frightening, beautiful numbers.
I took a deep breath and looked up. Out the front windshield, the approaching skyline of Atlanta glittered like the Emerald City of Oz. Minutes later we settled onto a small rooftop helipad. A metal door at one side opened, and a pair of nurses jogged a gurney toward the helicopter, ducking beneath the spinning rotor. I checked the monitor: Faust’s heart was beating weakly and irregularly, but it was still beating, by damn. Within seconds the nurses had shifted him onto the gurney and hurried into the hospital with him. I unbuckled my harness, removed my headset, and followed.
Ten minutes later I found Carmen in an alcove outside a third-floor operating room. She hugged me and then wiped her eyes. I held my breath, bracing for disappointment again. “It looks good,” she said. “The transplant surgeon says they’re starting the procedure.”
Over the next twelve hours, updates trickled from the operating room: The bones of Faust’s left forearm had been grafted onto Garcia’s radius and ulna by the left-hand team. The bones of the right forearm had been joined by the other team. Left-hand nerves. Right-hand nerves. Right-hand tendons. Left-hand tendons. Left-hand blood vessels. Right-hand blood vessels. By the thirteen-hour mark, I was exhausted, but Carmen seemed as focused and quietly intent as she had at the beginning. When the head of the transplant team, Dr. Alvarez, appeared, Carmen and I stood to receive the news, our eyes boring into the doctor’s in an effort to see if she was bringing good news or bad. “We’ve had a setback,” she said quietly, and for the first time I sensed fear in Carmen. “A damaged blood vessel on the left side.”
Carmen’s voice was quiet but hard as granite. “Does that mean the left hand will fail?”
Dr. Alvarez shook her head. “I hope not. We’re taking a short section of vein from your husband’s leg and splicing it in to repair the damaged section. It’s not difficult to do, but we need to get the blood flowing to that hand as soon as possible. I’m going back to the OR, but I wanted to let you know.”
Carmen nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you for everything you’re doing for him.”
The surgeon smiled through her mask of fatigue as she turned to go.
An hour later she returned. “We’re finished. We got the bleeding stopped. Everything looks very good. There are no guarantees, of course. His body might reject the hands, the nerves might fail to regenerate, the immunosuppressants might cause complications. But if we’re lucky, none of those things will happen. And if we’re very lucky, within six months he’ll be able to hold a scalpel again, and be able to hold hands with you and your son again.”
Carmen’s face quivered, and then she began to tremble from head to toe, and she allowed herself to cry. “I am…so very grateful. To you. To everyone here at Emory. To that man who gave his hands for my husband. To…” She raised her arms wide, then let them fall with a teary smile. “So grateful.”
“So am I,” said the doctor with a tired but warm smile.
I excused myself to make a phone call. Sixteen hours earlier, just after they’d begun the transplant procedure, I’d phoned Miranda. She hadn’t answered, and the call had rolled to voice mail. “I’m at Emory,” I’d said. “They’ve just taken Eddie into surgery. They’re going for the bilateral transplant. I know you don’t want to talk to me or see me, but I’m sure Carmen and Eddie would appreciate it if you could come.” Then I’d turned off the phone.
Now, when I switched it back on, it chirped at me. The display told me I had new voice-mail messages — twenty-three, in fact, a number that astonished me. Before I got a chance to listen to even one of the twenty-three, though, the phone buzzed in my hand. It was Miranda calling, and she sounded breathless. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“It’s done,” I said. “Both hands. The doctor sounds very hopeful.”
The whoop of delight from my cell phone nearly split my ear. Then I heard a second whoop, this time in stereo: Miranda came sprinting around the corner, nearly careening into Carmen, the surgeon, and me.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!” Miranda cried. “Oh, how wonderful. Oh, hallelujah!” She threw her arms around Carmen. “I was in Texas, in the middle of a job interview, when the FBI called me.” The words tumbled out of her. “I ran out and jumped on a plane as soon as I heard the message. Oh, happy, happy day!”
Then she turned to me, her face wet with tears. “Damn you,” she said, and I felt my heart begin to crack, but suddenly she hugged me, as unreservedly and joyously as she’d hugged Carmen. “Damn you,” she repeated, this time through a mixture of tears and laughter. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” She pulled back and wiped her eyes. “I just saw your picture half a dozen times on the CNN monitors in the Atlanta airport. Black-market kidneys from Pakistan, butchered and stolen bodies, a murderous bone thief, and a daring professor who risked his life in an undercover sting. Hell of a story. If I weren’t so mad at you for keeping me in the dark, I’d be really, really proud.” She shook her head. “Damn you for playing your sleazy part so well”—she laughed—“and damn the FBI for being so secretive.” She smiled and planted a big kiss on my cheek.
“Not so fast,” I said. “You were in Texas for a job interview? Out at the Body Ranch — our new competition?”
She shrugged sheepishly. “They’re just getting off the ground. They thought maybe I could be helpful.” She smiled once again — her old, full-face, eye-contact smile. “It’s nice to be wanted, but it didn’t mean a thing. Really. If you’ll take me back, I’ll never stray again.”
“Promise?”
She held up the three fingers of the Boy Scout salute. “Promise.”
“Deal.”
EPILOGUE
I awoke to find a strange hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently. The hand was attached to a nurse, who’d found Miranda and me slumped and sleeping in chairs in the surgery waiting room. I checked the wall clock: Four hours had passed since the surgery ended. Before falling asleep, I’d spent a while checking my many voice-mail messages and returning a handful of the calls.
Steve Morgan had called; I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk with him after the FBI press conference, so he’d phoned to relay his personal good wishes, as well as those of the TBI. “I should have known there was a good reason — a very good reason — for whatever you were doing,” he said when I called him back. “I forgot some of the most important lessons you taught me in your class — lessons about character and integrity and trust. I’ll try not to forget those again.”
I also returned a call from Burt DeVriess. He’d dropped the Willoughby paternity suit, he said — his client was not, the DNA reported, Willoughby’s child — but he was suing for $20 million on behalf of Willoughby’s legitimate daughter and the former students who’d paid for the burial of Miss Elizabeth Jenkins. Most of the voice mails turned out to be media calls — from WBIR-TV, CNN, the Knoxville News Sentinel, the National Enquirer, and a host of other news outlets I didn’t know or didn’t care about. Mercifully, my cell phone’s battery died just as my brain and body began shutting down, so I had a good excuse for ignoring the majority of the messages clamoring for my attention.