length.
Maggie glanced back at the door. No sight or sound of Sheriff Clayton. But just in case, she chose to text- message her partner, R. J. Tully, rather than make a phone call.
HEY TULLY. SENDING PHOTOS. CAN U CHECK DATABASE?
It took her less than a minute to e-mail close-ups of the rope. Tully would be able to scan or download the photos and run the information through the FBI's database. Maybe they'd get lucky and be able to identify the manufacturer.
She remembered another case in the 1980s. An airman named John Joubert was arrested for murdering two little boys. Authorities found an unusual rope at one of the crime scenes. It had been used to bind the hands of one of the boys. This was before DNA analysis, so the unusual rope became a key piece of evidence. During a search of Joubert's quarters, they found a length of it.
Before she sent the last photo she had a text message from Tully.
NO PROB.
Finished with the rope, she moved on and shot photos of the cooler and the measuring tool inside the lid. Not much to see. She agreed with Sheriff Clayton's speculations about fingerprints. Maybe they'd get lucky with a print inside the lid, but the salt water had probably eliminated anything on the outside.
Maggie took a final shot of the open cooler, the smell less potent now. That's when she noticed something in the liquid. She held her breath again and leaned over for a closer look. A small piece of white paper, no larger than two inches by three inches, was stuck to the side, several inches from the bottom. Part of the paper fell below the liquid's surface and the moisture had loosened a corner. Had it not been for it flapping into the liquid, Maggie would have never noticed. And that was probably why Sheriff Clayton's staff had missed it.
She glanced over her shoulder. As she holstered her smartphone she searched the room. In a lone cupboard behind the door she found a box of ziplock bags. She grabbed one and pulled on the latex gloves Clayton had given her. Then carefully and slowly she peeled the piece of paper from the cooler wall, trying to limit her touch to the flapping corner as she eased it off little by little.
Maggie held the paper between her fingertips. She needed to be patient and let it air-dry before placing it into the plastic bag. As she waited she examined the other side of the paper. Its corners were rounded, resembling a stick-on label. The side that had been facing out was blank but the one that had been stuck to the wall of the cooler was not. The ink had bled away. Only a ghost of the hand printing remained. But Maggie could still read the three lines of letters and numbers, what looked like a code:
AMET
DESTIN: 082409
#8509000029
She glanced back inside the cooler. There was nothing else. Maybe this piece of paper didn't have a thing to do with the body parts. It could have been left over from the cooler's previous usage. Perhaps dropped in accidentally.
Or, and Maggie hoped this was the case, it had once been a label attached to one of the packages.
CHAPTER 25
Benjamin Platt leaned his elbows on the lab countertop. He pressed his eyes against the microscope and adjusted the magnification. Once in a while he glanced up at the test tubes he had prepared, watching for the results. Ronnie Towers's blood had already tested negative for several of Platt's best guesses. He was running out of ideas.
The small laboratory suited him despite the strong smell of disinfectants. It was well equipped and quiet, much better than the conditions he was used to on the road. Platt had learned long ago to travel with a hard-shell case filled with everything he'd need to run basic lab tests whether he was in a war zone, a hot zone, or even a tent in Sierra Leone.
He sat back on the stool and stared at the test tubes. No change. A good thing, albeit frustrating as hell. The young man's prosthetic leg rested on the counter next to him. He had carefully scraped some of the bone paste applied to the prosthetic during surgery. He smeared it on a slide then prepared a second slide from the sample tissue taken from Ronnie Towers.
What he had found so far was something he identified as a strain of clostridia, a family of bacteria that caused a number of infections. The most prevalent one was tetanus. Another was sepsis leading to toxic shock syndrome. Except what Platt saw under the microscope looked more complicated.
To his left, Platt had opened his laptop, accessing a database he had worked for several years to put together. Now on the screen was a close-up of the clostridia family. He needed to wait for all the files to download before he could begin clicking through the photos in his database. He hoped he would find an exact match to what he saw under his microscope.
While he waited, he pulled out his cell phone. Certainly he could get some basic information without breaking his word to Captain Ganz about keeping this situation classified.
He keyed in the number, expecting to get the voice-messaging service for the Centers for Disease Control's chief of outbreak response. Platt was surprised when Roger Bix's slow, Southern drawl answered, 'This is Bix.'
'Roger, it's Benjamin Platt.'
'Colonel, what can I do for you?'
'I didn't expect to get you on a Sunday.'
'It's a 24/7 job.' He laughed. 'I doubt you're calling me from a golf course. What's up?'
'I'm wondering if you have any recent reports of life-threatening infections related to ... say, any kind of donor tissue or bone transplants?'
'Illnesses, sure. Deaths? None if your definition of recent is the last forty-eight hours. I'd have to check for sure. Are you calling to report one?'
Platt had forgotten how direct and to the point Bix could be. Not a bad thing. The last time the two men had worked together they were dealing with two separate outbreaks of Ebola.
'Just need information,' Platt told him. 'If there was a possible contamination at a tissue bank or a hospital, you'd know, right?'
'Depends what the contamination is. Tissue banks are required to screen donors for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and other blood-borne viruses.'
'What about bacteria?'
'What kind of bacteria?'
'I don't know, Roger.' He felt himself shrugging as he stared at his computer screen. 'Infection-causing bacterium.'
'The FDA doesn't require us to culture donors for anything beyond blood-borne viruses. Many of the accredited tissue banks don't go beyond those requirements. Infections are rare. I won't say they never happen. I remember several years back three deaths in Minnesota. Routine knee surgeries using the cartilage from a cadaver. But that was a freaky case. Even our investigation couldn't determine whether the donor was already infected or whether the tissue became infected while it was processed. The tissue bank blamed the collection agency and the collection agency blamed the shipper. It's a crazy business.'
'Business?'
'Sure. It's a business. Organ transplants have strict regulations. Only one organization per region. Have to be nonprofit, so plenty of federal oversight. Whole different ball game. But you get into tissue, bone, ligaments, corneas, veins--the supply can't keep up with demand. A cadaver might be worth $5,000 to $10,000, but sliced and diced--excuse my flippancy--and sold piece by piece? That same cadaver's worth anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000.'
'I thought it was illegal to sell cadavers and human body parts.'
