Read The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 for Free Online

projector.
    “Fascinating talk, Dr. Brockton,” he said. “Especially the SEM case—great use of heavy research artillery on a forensic case. Cutting-edge work, if you’ll pardon an inappropriate pun.”
    “I’m the world’s worst punner, I’m told. No pardon necessary. You must have a science background if you’re on a first-name basis with a scanning electron microscope.”
    “I do. I’m in research and development at a company called OrthoMedica.” He said it offhandedly, as if he doubted I’d ever heard of it, but the truth was, OrthoMedica was one of the nation’s biggest and best-known biomedical companies. An international conglomerate, it sold billions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies, artificial joints, and consumer health-care products every year. He fished a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.“Dr. Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D.,” it read.“Vice President, R&D.” The OrthoMedica logo intrigued me: It took Leonardo da Vinci’s classic drawing of the proportions of the human figure,Vitruvian Man, and gave it a high-tech, Bionic Man twist, superimposing X-rays and robotic prostheses and scans on various parts of the body. I glanced at the address. “I didn’t realize OrthoMedica was based in Bethesda.”
    “Spitting distance from here,” he said. “We collaborate closely with the National Institutes of Health. Our campus is less than a mile from theirs. We also work with Johns Hopkins, just up the road in Baltimore. And with Walter Reed Army Hospital and the Pentagon.”
    “The Pentagon?”
    He nodded. “Sure. The military drives a lot of health-care R&D, especially in areas like wound care and trauma surgery and prostheses.” It made sense: Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers had been wounded in the Iraq war, many of them by improvised explosive devices that blew off arms or legs. He reached into his pocket again, removing a printout that he unfolded and handed to me. “Did you happen to see this story in theNew York Times a while back? I thought of it when I saw the announcement about your talk.”
    I glanced at the story, which described how the U.S. military was now doing “virtual autopsies”—CT
    scans—on the bodies of all soldiers killed in Iraq. “Yes, I remember reading this,” I said. “Fascinating. They’re using scanners to examine lethal wounds so they can develop better body armor and helmets and armored vehicles, right?”
    “Exactly. CT scans are such a rich vein of biomedical data. As you might imagine, OrthoMedica has quite an interest in mining that vein. Which brings me to you.”
    “Me? How so?”
    “During your presentation today, I was struck by what a unique resource your Body Farm is. A thousand modern skeletons—specimens whose age and race and sex and stature you know—plus, what, a hundred donated bodies every year?”
    “Actually, we’re getting closer to one-fifty now.”
    “And do you scan those bodies as they come in, before they go out to the Farm?”
    “I wish,” I said. “We’ve scanned most of the skeletons in the collection—we got a grant to do that—but we don’t have a way to scan the bodies. The hospital’s Radiology Department isn’t too keen on having dead bodies hauled up there and run through the same machines they use for live patients.”
    He chuckled. “What would you think of having a dedicated scanner at the Body Farm?”
    “I’d think it was swell. But those things cost serious money—hundreds of thousands of dollars, even used ones. Our entire annual budget for the Body Farm is less than ten thousand, and we’re looking at budget cuts that might whittle it down even below that.”
    “Terrible. A one-of-a-kind, world-renowned research facility, and you’re running it on a financial shoestring. Would you be interested in some research funding? A collaborative project involving the Body Farm, the university’s Biomedical Engineering Department, and OrthoMedica?”
    I felt the beginnings