I tore free of Stone’s grasp and ran back toward the plane. Behind me, I heard him shouting, “Doc, come back! Get out!”
A wall of flame had engulfed the far wing of the plane by the time I reached the dead agent. Grabbing his feet — the closest things to me — I tucked them under my arms and dragged him behind me like a sleigh, slipping and staggering as I hauled him through the muck. I’d almost made it to the door when the plane exploded, and a fist of fire slammed into my back and knocked me flat.
Rocky Stone helped me carry the body of his dead agent to the most secluded corner of the Body Farm and lay him at the foot of a big oak. Unzipping the body bag, I tugged it free, fastened ID tags on the left arm and left ankle, and then draped the bag over the corpse.
“You broke half a dozen procedures and every rule of common sense, going back for him like that,” Stone said. “And I am incredibly grateful. If you hadn’t gotten him out, we wouldn’t have a prayer of making a murder case.”
“I wish the shooter hadn’t gotten away.”
“You and me both, Doc. He was only a couple hundred yards away — up on that low ridge — but by the time any of our guys got there, he was gone.” Stone knelt and laid a DEA medallion on top of the bag. Closing his eyes, he said a few silent words, then stood. “So, you say it’ll take about two weeks to get us a report?”
“More or less. More if it turns cool, less if it gets really hot. Once the bugs and I have cleaned him off, I’ll take photos of all the fractures.” I had already documented them, or at least most of them, with X-rays, which I took with a portable machine at the loading dock of the Forensic Center. But if the case came to trial, the prosecutors would need crisp photos to corroborate the fuzzy X-ray images.
Normally I’d have delegated the cleanup to my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, who ran the bone lab and did much of the legwork at the Body Farm. Miranda had left for France only three days before, but already I was feeling her absence. I missed her help, and I missed her camaraderie. At the moment, though, I was relieved she hadn’t been with me in Sevierville. I’d narrowly escaped being incinerated; in fact, the hair on the back of my head was singed, and if I’d been wearing my usual outfit — jeans and a cotton shirt — instead of the Nomex jumpsuit, my clothes would surely have caught fire. Thank God Miranda wasn’t there, I thought.
She’d left on short notice, under circumstances that remained slightly mysterious to me. A week earlier, she’d received an urgent e-mail and then a phone call from a French archaeologist, Stefan Beauvoir, asking her to come help with a hastily arranged excavation. The site was a medieval palace dating from the thirteen hundreds — practically prehistoric by American standards, but nearly modern for Europe.
I’d hesitated before saying I could spare her; after all, during half a decade as my graduate assistant, she’d made herself indispensable. I valued and respected Miranda’s intelligence and forensic expertise. But it went deeper than that, I had to admit: She was as important to me personally as she was professionally. In some ways, I felt closer to Miranda than to anyone else on earth, even my own son. If you took DNA out of the equation, Miranda was my next of kin. I felt certain that the bone lab and the Body Farm could limp along without Miranda for six weeks, but I wasn’t sure I could manage that long.
“Excuse me, Doc?” Rocky’s voice seemed to come from far away, not so much interrupting my thoughts as awakening me from some dream. “So if we’re done here, I guess I’ll be taking off. The TBI’s gonna think we’ve hijacked their chopper.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to check out on you there. Hang on — I’ll walk you out and lock up.”
I bent to straighten one corner of the body bag, and as I did, my cell phone began bleating. Fishing the phone from the pocket of the jumpsuit, I glanced at the display. I didn’t recognize the number; it started with 330, an area code I didn’t know, and it looked longer than a phone number should be. I stared dumbly for a moment before I realized why. It was a foreign call, and 33 was the country code — the code, I suddenly remembered, for France. Miranda! I flipped open the phone, but in my excitement, I fumbled it, and it fell onto my foot and skittered beneath the body bag. Flinging aside the bag, I rooted for the phone, which had lodged — ironically and absurdly — beside the dead man’s left ear. I had just laid hold of it when it fell silent. “Damn it,” I muttered. I punched the “send” button, only to be told by a robotic voice that my call “cannot be completed as dialed,” doubtless because it was an overseas number. “Damn damn damn,” I muttered, but just as I finished the third damn, the phone rang again, displaying the same number.
This time, I did not drop it. “Hello? Miranda? How are you?”
“Ah, no, sorry, it is not Miranda.” The voice was a man’s, accented in French. “This is Stefan Beauvoir. The archaeologist Miranda is helping. She wanted me to call you.”
My internal alarms began to shriek. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Miranda? Tell me.”
“The doctor says it is—merde, how do you say it? — the rupture of the appendicitis?”
“Miranda’s got a ruptured appendix?”
“Oui, yes, a ruptured appendix. She asked me to call and say, please, can you come?”
“Can I come? What, to France?”
“Oui. Please, can you come to France? To Avignon?” Ahveen-YOHN. I didn’t like the sound of it. “She is having the surgery now, and she will be very grateful if you can come.”
“Doesn’t she want someone from her family?”
“Ah, but it is not possible. I call her mother and her sister. Neither one has a passport. So she thinks next of you, and asks if you can please come quickly.”
“Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll get on a plane this afternoon.”
“Bon, good. You can fly into Avignon, but the flights are better if you come to Lyon or Marseilles. Marseilles is one hour by car.”
Racing down the path and out the gate, I frantically flagged down the TBI chopper, which was quivering on its landing skids, transitioning toward flight. Stone took off his headset, scrambled out of the helicopter, and hurried over to me.
“Doc, is something wrong?”
“Can you guys give me a ride? I need to get someplace fast.”
“Where?”
“France.”
Sixty seconds later, we were airborne again, this time with me in the right front seat. “Does this thing have turbo?” I asked the pilot. By way of an answer, he rolled the helicopter into a 90-degree bank.
“Holy shit,” I heard Stone squawk from the back.
Skimming low across the river, the chopper hurtled toward Neyland Stadium. “I don’t know where you can land,” I said, scanning the vicinity of the stadium. “The parking lots all look pretty full.”
The pilot grinned. “I think I see a spot that might just be big enough.” Swooping low over the towering scoreboard, we plunged straight into the bowl of the stadium.
“Touchdown,” Stone deadpanned as we thumped into the south end zone.
My secretary scarcely glanced up as i dashed past her desk and into my office. “Peggy,” I called out, yanking down the zipper of the greasy, sooty jumpsuit. “I need you to do some airline research for me, please.” Yanking off my boots and the jumpsuit, I tossed them in a corner.