Read Online The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 by Jefferson Bass - Free Book Online Page B

grandparents had been Japanese; the others had been American missionaries who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: in Nagasaki in August of 1945, as American B-29s dropped the deadly fruit of the Manhattan Project. Isabella’s ethnicity matters to me; it interests me, not just because it’s so entwined with her crime but also because of my habit of mind as an anthropologist. Knowing her ancestry gives me some skeletal context, something to latch onto when I reach out and try to grasp the enigma of her. Because she is one-quarter Asian, I know that most of her skeletal features are Caucasoid. Most—but not all. Some of the stories told in her bones are Mongoloid, Asian. Her cheekbones, as I picture them in my mind’s eye right now, are slightly higher and wider and flatter than, say, Miranda’s. Her skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s, too, but then again, almost everyone’s skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s. I remember her teeth in two ways: I remember how dazzling they were when she smiled at me and how quickly hidden they vanished behind the curtain of her hair when she ducked her head shyly. And I remember how they felt when we kissed, smooth and hard and slick against my tongue, nibbling gently at my lip and then, later, biting into the meat of my bicep and the heel of my hand hard enough to leave bruises outlined in tooth marks. If I had thought to run the tip of my tongue along the backs of those front teeth, I might have felt indentations, concavities: the distinctive scooped-out curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, a signature skeletal trait of Asians and Native Americans. But what man in his right mind would think of dental details when a lovely woman presses her warm mouth and trembling body to his?
    As I listen to myself say these things, I feel foolish and pedantic. And yet. And yet: I have so few things to hang on to as I try to grasp Isabella that I suppose it’s understandable and forgivable that I should lapse into my comfortable role of professor and anthropologist—categorizer and explainer. Yet the truth is, I barely knew Isabella. Our lives intersected, briefly but powerfully, at two points—no, three. First when Garcia and Miranda and I were exposed to the radioactive pellet Isabella had used to murder Dr. Novak. Next when Isabella helped me discover the location where a murdered soldier had been secretly buried during World War II. And third when she offered her body and her passionate need to me. No, wait, there was a fourth time as well: when I realized that she was the one who had killed Novak, when I confronted her, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of storm sewers beneath Oak Ridge. I followed her into the labyrinth. In hindsight maybe that was a mistake. In hindsight maybe confronting her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe making love to her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe hindsight itself is a mistake—what’s the point of following the trail of regret back into the past? It’s not possible to choose a different path from the very one that brought me to the present, to this exact moment, where I hide in the darkness of my living room and the labyrinth of my heart, murmuring into the digital emptiness I clutch in my hand.
    I hate this. I don’t know what to say. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

CHAPTER 9
    I DROPPED THE RECORDER AT DR. HOOVER’S OFFICE the next morning on my way to campus, still feeling self-conscious and vaguely guilty about voicing my thoughts and fears into a microphone. When I walked into the bone lab, Miranda looked at me sharply and said, “What?”
    “What do you mean, ‘What?’”
    “You have a funny look on your face. Embarrassed or something. Like a kid who’s just peed in his pants.”
    “Thanks a lot.”
    “You okay?”
    “Sure,” I lied. “Just preoccupied.”
    “Whatever you say. Anyhow, Eddie called. He’s got an appointment next week to get fitted for an