"No way, Stephen, I just…I can't put it any other way."
Crossing his arms over his latex coroner's gown, Bernie shook his head decisively, only taking his attention off the young Inspector for a second when an assistant stopped by to request a signature to move a body into the care of a funeral home.
"There are no new, state-of-the-art procedures that might show some potential when it comes to re-attaching limbs?"
"It's not that easy unfortunately."
Following Bernie when he walked past several gurneys with covered bodies awaiting his important services; Steve shoved his hands into the pockets of his black dress pants, hoping to escape the chill of the morgue, literally and figuratively.
"They can graft skin though? Could it be some sort of extension from that surgery?"
"Even skin grafting is a long way from being perfected yet.", Bernie responded patiently, then gestured for him to sit down in the guest chair when they arrived at his small office, "And that is when you transfer your own tissue onto a wound. You are talking about a surgery of massive scales. Even if we forget about how difficult it would be to reattach bone, tendons, live muscle, nerves, blood vessels and skin, the body would more than likely reject the transplant. It's difficult enough to find a viable donor and transplant an organ like a liver or a heart, you're talking about an actual limb that requires movement, incredible amount of stimuli from the brain to do what we want it to do, clear blood flow to supply all the individual parts of the limb…no…I find it impossible to believe that science would have advanced this far without word of it going out."
"What if it's an illegal operation and word about it is not supposed to go out?"
"Stephen, we've barely figured out how to safely give blood to one another, much less donating organs. The program you are describing would take years and an incredible team of doctors and scientists to master, we just don't know enough about the human body at this point to play Mister Potato Head. You can't just…you can't just take the leg of a 240lb guy and sew it onto a 160lb woman. I mean, think about the needle-in-a-haystack search needed in finding a perfect match. There would be an incredible effort required in figuring this out, along with an indefinite number of live human limbs to match and transplant to willing patients. It's just…I am sorry, it's just unfathomable."
"Unfathomable is right…", Steve breathed and put a finger on his lips, his mind travelling back to the US map where all their limbs had been found.
"I won't pretend that I have any knowledge in the medical field, Bernie, but I am going to tell you right now, that female leg we found up at Point Reyes the other day…it could have been a good match for the actress we visited this afternoon when it comes to size and weight. So even if you don't believe this will work, somebody out there does. And he's murdering people left and right to practice his skill. And his customers have been reassured that transplants will be available very soon…"