Bones of Betrayal

CHAPTER 1

The colorful tents crowding the clearing where I stood wouldn’t have looked out of place at a carnival or Renaissance fair. It would be an interesting irony: a Renaissance fair — a “rebirth” fair — here at the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, the one place in the world that revolves around the study of the dead and how they decay.

The tents — white, red, green, yellow, blue — jostled for space at the Anthropology Research Facility. Decades earlier, an FBI agent had dubbed the UT facility “the Body Farm” after seeing the corpses scattered throughout the three wooded acres. The nickname had stuck, and now it was even inspiring a spin-off nickname: a former UT graduate student was now setting up a similar research facility in San Marcos, Texas. Even before her first research cadaver hit the ground, the Texas facility was being called “the Body Ranch.”

Several of the tents huddled together were supported by inflatable frames, the rest by spidery arcs of geometric tubing — Quonset huts, twenty-first-century style. Normally there were no tents here; normally the brightest splash of color, apart from the grass and the leaves on the trees, was a large blue tarp draped over our corrugated-metal equipment shed and its small, fenced-in concrete pad. The tents — whose festive colors belied the barren winter landscape and bitter cold of the day — had been erected just twenty-four hours earlier, and twenty-four hours from now they would be gone again. Despite the carnival look, the tents were a stage for the acting out of a nightmare scenario, one of the darkest events imaginable: an act of nuclear terrorism.

A nude male body lay faceup on a gurney within the largest of the tents, his puckered skin gone gray and moldy from three weeks in the cooler at the morgue at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, visible just above the Body Farm’s wooden fence and barren treeline. Fourteen other bodies — selected and stored over the preceding month — were locked in a semi-tractor-trailer parked just outside the fence. The fifteen bodies were stand-ins for what could be hundreds or thousands or even — God forbid — tens of thousands of victims if nuclear terrorists managed to inflict wholesale death in a U.S. city somewhere, someday.

Five people surrounded the gurney. Their faces and even their genders were masked by goggles, respirators, and baggy biohazard suits whose white Tyvek sleeves and legs were sealed with duct tape to black rubber gloves and boots. One of the white-garbed figures held a boxy beige instrument in one hand, and in the other, a metal wand that was connected to the box. As the wand swept a few inches above the head, then the chest and abdomen, and then each arm, the box emitted occasional clicks. As the wand neared the left knee, though, the clicks became rapid, then merged into a continuous buzz. Having spent my childhood shivering through the Cold War — practicing “duck and cover” during civil defense drills, as if my wooden school desk could shield me from a Soviet hydrogen bomb — I was well acquainted with the urgent clicking of a Geiger counter.

As the wand hovered, the other four people leaned in to inspect the knee. One took photographs; two others began spraying the body with a soapy-looking liquid and scrubbing the skin, paying particular attention to the knee. As they scrubbed, one of them removed a small orange disk, about the size of a quarter, and handed it to the team leader. A tiny, safely encapsulated speck of radioactive strontium — enough to trigger the Geiger counter, but not enough to pose any hazard — simulated contamination on the corpse. Once the scrubbing was complete, the technician with the Geiger counter checked the knee once more. This time the instrument ticked lazily, signaling normal background radiation. At a sign from the team leader, the body was wheeled out of the tent and returned to the trailer that held the other fourteen corpses, which had already undergone similar screening and decontamination procedures.

One by one, the Tyvek-suited figures rinsed off beneath what had to be the world’s coldest shower: a spray of soapy water mixed with alcohol, a last-minute addition necessitated by the day’s subfreezing temperatures. The team’s contamination, like that of the bodies, was simulated, but the goal was to make the training as realistic as possible, despite the added challenges provided by the bitter cold. Only after the shower did the goggles and respirators come off. My red-tressed, freckled graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, emerged from one of the white suits, followed shortly by Art Bohanan, the resident fingerprint expert at the Knoxville Police Department. The team leader was Hank Strickland, a health physicist, one who specialized in radiation and radiation safety. Hank worked at a facility in Oak Ridge called REAC/TS — the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center and Training Site — that sent medical response teams to help treat victims of radiation accidents anywhere in the world.

But Hank, like Miranda and Art, was here today as a volunteer team member of DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Formed in the early 1990s to identify victims of mass disasters such as airliner crashes and hurricanes, DMORT was part of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the teams were staffed by volunteers with specialized, and even macabre, skills: their ranks included funeral directors, morticians, forensic dentists, physicians, forensic anthropologists, police officers, and fire fighters — people accustomed to working with bodies and bones. DMORT volunteers, including some of my students, had performed heroic service at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center bombings. They’d also spent two months recovering and identifying bodies after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Art himself had spent six weeks in Louisiana after Katrina, lifting fingerprints and palm prints from bloated, rotting corpses. One body was that of a man who’d been trapped in an attic by rising waters. More than a hundred days after the man drowned in the attic — how ironic was that? — Art and a colleague managed to lift a print and ID the man.

DMORT teams were acquainted with death and decay. But this training exercise represented a grim new twist to DMORT’s mission, a response to the nightmare of September 11, 2001. DMORT’s Weapons of Mass Destruction team had been formed shortly after 9/11, in grim recognition of the fact that terrorists who would turn civilian airliners into flying bombs might also attempt acts of wholesale chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorism. Because of the contamination such attacks would create, they would pose unique problems for workers recovering and identifying bodies. The WMD team’s exercise here at the Body Farm was a first step in developing and testing DMORT procedures for handling radiation-contaminated bodies — the sorts of contaminants that would be unleashed, for example, if a radioactive “dirty bomb” were exploded in New York Harbor.

Although it grieved me that nuclear-disaster procedures had to be developed, it made me proud that my research facility could help in the process. The Body Farm was the only place in the world where an emergency-response team like DMORT could simulate a mass disaster realistically, using numerous bodies. Although fifteen bodies was a tiny fraction of the number of victims who would die in an actual dirty-bomb explosion in New York — some estimates put the worst-case number of fatalities from that scenario at fifty thousand or more — fifteen was a place to start, and that was far more bodies than DMORT would be likely to use anyplace else.

Miranda and Art emerged from the decontamination shower stomping their boots and rubbing their arms, their breath steaming in the bitter air. “Sweet Jesus, I am so cold,” said Miranda. I wasn’t getting sprayed with cold water, but I was cold, too; I’d gotten an artificial hip about six months before, when a bullet shattered the top of my left femur, and the cold titanium implant ached deep within my hip. Miranda’s teeth began to chatter. “Whose bright idea was it,” she said, “to do this on the coldest day of the worst cold snap on record?”

“It’s not as fun as reading by the fireplace,” Art said, “but unless you can get the terrorists to attack only when the weather’s nice, it helps to practice in the worst conditions you can.”

“I know, I know,” grumbled Miranda. “It’s just that I’m so cold. After that shower, I might not have an impure thought ever again.”

“I didn’t realize you’d had them before,” said Art. “I didn’t think graduate students had time for such things.”

“Only during spring break,” I said.

“Spring break? What’s spring break?” said Miranda, feigning puzzlement and indignation. “I just want to spend the next six months in a hot bath.”

Just then my cell phone rang. Tugging off a thick glove, I fished the phone from my pocket and flipped it open, the cold biting at my fingertips. According to the display, the caller was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. “Hi, Peggy,” I said. “I hope you’re calling to tell me a heat wave is bearing down on us in the next five minutes.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m calling to tell you I have an agitated police lieutenant from Oak Ridge on the line.”

A small city about twenty-five miles west of Knoxville, Oak Ridge was home to a wide range of high-tech research and manufacturing industries, but the city’s main claim to fame was its pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, the race to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. “Did the lieutenant say what he’s agitated about?”

“They’ve just found a body they want you to take a look at,” she said. “Apparently they don’t find a lot of bodies in Oak Ridge.”

“No, the radioactivity helps protect them,” I said. “Killers are afraid of folks who glow in the dark.” It was an old, tired joke Knoxvillians tended to make about Oak Ridgers — one that Oak Ridgers sometimes made about themselves, in a sort of preemptive first strike of defiant civic pride.

“Well, you be careful,” she said. “All those fences and guard towers and nuclear reactors and bomb factories scare me.”

She patched through the Oak Ridge officer, Lieutenant Dewar. When I hung up, I said to Miranda, “You didn’t really want that hot bath, did you?”

“No, of course not,” she said, having heard my end of the conversation. “What I really want to do is complete my transformation into the Human Icicle.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I’ve got just the job for you.”

CHAPTER 2

Five minutes after the phone call from Oak Ridge, Miranda and I pulled away from the Body Farm, navigated the asphalt maze surrounding UT Medical Center, and crossed the Tennessee River. Far below the highway bridge, a ribbon of frigid green swirled between banks sheathed in ice.

A thought occurred to me, and instead of staying on Alcoa Highway to Interstate 40, I angled the truck onto Kingston Pike and threaded the winding streets into my neighborhood, Sequoyah Hills.

“I thought we were racing to a death scene in Oak Ridge,” said Miranda.

“We are,” I said. “But I just thought of something we might need, so we’re racing to my house first.”

“I hope what you’re thinking we might need is called ‘lunch,’” Miranda said, “because I’m getting hungry enough to chew my arm off.”

“The cupboard’s bare,” I said, “so you might as well start chewing. Don’t eat both arms — I’ll need you to take notes at the scene.”

“Your concern is deeply touching.”

“I know,” I said. “Sometimes I move myself to tears. Oh, if you’d prefer something vegetarian, I think there’s a Snickers bar in the glove box.” Evidently she did, because she opened the latch and rummaged around beneath a sheaf of registration papers and maintenance records.

“There better not be a mousetrap hidden in this — YOUCH!” She jumped, and that made me flinch. She laughed as she fished out the candy bar. “You are so gullible,” she said. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“I knew you were faking,” I said. “But I also knew you’d sulk if I didn’t play along.” As I pulled into the driveway, I tapped the remote to open the garage.

Miranda unwrapped one end of the Snickers bar — the giant size — and bit down. “Youch!” she said again, this time in earnest. “This thing is hard as a rock.” She studied the faint impressions her teeth had made in the frozen chocolate. “Lucky I didn’t break my teeth — I’d be suing UT for workers’ comp.”

“You’d file a claim for missing teeth? In Tennessee? You’d be laughed out of the state,” I said.

She flashed me a big, sarcastic smile — Miranda had one of the best smiles I’d ever seen — and then began gnawing at one corner of the Snickers with her right molars, the immense bar clenched in her fist. “You stay here and work on that,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I found what I was looking for in the garage — an oblong case made of bright orange plastic — and stowed it in the rear of the pickup. As I got back in the cab, Miranda’s eyebrows shot up quizzically. I smiled, backed out of the driveway, and headed for Oak Ridge. Miranda’s jaws were working hard — evidently she had sheared off a huge hunk of the candy bar. Finally she mumbled, “Ih at wuh I ink ih ih?”

“What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying when you mumble like that.”

“Ih AT wuh I INK ih ih?!”

“The problem here,” I said, “is not that I’m deaf. The problem here is that you’re talking with your mouth full.”

She rolled her eyes but swallowed hard, and I could see her running her tongue along the front and sides of her teeth to swab off the chocolate and caramel and peanuts. She swallowed again. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Is what what you think it is?” She popped me one on the shoulder, hard. “Youch,” I said. “Oh, you mean that thing I put in the back? It is if you think it’s a Stihl ‘Farm Boss’ chainsaw, model 290.” I liked the name, Stihl — German, originally, I guessed — and the fact that it was pronounced “steel.” A manly name for a manly power tool.

“Why on earth are you bringing a chainsaw to a death scene? You planning to dismember the body, just to make the case more interesting?”

“I used to be a Boy Scout,” I said. “It’s always a good idea to be prepared.”

“Yeah, well, it’s always a good idea to be sane, too,” she said, “but I don’t see you taking giant steps in that direction at the moment.”

“Watch and learn, grasshopper,” I said. “Watch and learn.”

We drove the twenty-five miles to Oak Ridge in silence. Near-silence, actually, broken only by the grinding, smacking sounds of Miranda’s molars steadily dismantling the rest of the Snickers bar.

As we topped the last rise before dropping down the four-lane into Oak Ridge, Miranda pointed at the Cumberlands, ten miles to the north. High atop Buffalo Mountain, a serpentine line of white wind turbines reared against the azure sky. The three-bladed rotors — they looked like the world’s largest airplane propellers — flashed as their tips caught the sun’s rays and whirled them back again. Judging by how far the turbines towered above nearby trees, they must have stretched nearly four hundred feet into the sky.

“Man, this place is like Energy USA,” Miranda said. “Talk about your microcosm of kilowatt production.”

She was right. The ridges around the wind farm had been carved into the sharp, right-angle benches and shelves of mountaintop strip mines. To the east, the smokestack of Bull Run Steam Plant soared eight hundred feet into the sky. Alongside the power plant, the Clinch River — still twitching from its spin through the hydroelectric turbines of Norris Dam — traced the boundaries of the city in swirls of emerald green. And then there was Oak Ridge itself, the Atomic City: birthplace of the bomb, cradle of nuclear power.

“I wonder if these Oak Ridge brainiacs will ever figure out how to harness nuclear fusion,” Miranda said. “The power of the stars. Run your car for a year on a teaspoon of water, right?”

“Right,” I said. “I think that’s next on the list, as soon as they invent the transporter beam and figure out how to turn lead into gold.”

“It’s been done,” she said.

“Done? The transporter beam?”

“No-o-o-o,” she groaned. “Lead to gold.”

“Lead to gold? Done?”

“Done,” she said. “Tiny amounts, mind you — nanograms or angiograms or some such. They can probably do it right here in Oak Ridge, with one of their particle accelerators or research reactors. All you do is smash a jillion protons or neutrons or quarks or what-have-you against an atom of lead, and presto-chango: you’ve got an atom of gold. Oh, and a boatload of deadly radioactive contamination.”

“Damn,” I said, “there’s just no such thing as a free lunch, is there? By the way, you owe me a Snickers.”

We crossed a set of railroad tracks and threaded through a series of shopping centers, then turned east on Oak Ridge Turnpike — the city’s main thoroughfare — and passed still more shopping centers and strip malls. Oak Ridge was a town without a downtown — many towns these days were, including some of Knoxville’s bedroom communities. But Oak Ridge had a better excuse for its lack of center. The city had been flung up practically overnight by the U.S. Army during World War II, and even though six decades had brought changes, the place still had a provisional, makeshift feel. Strung along the floor of a wide valley that angled from southwest to northeast, Oak Ridge’s main business district was one block wide and five miles long.

Sprinkled amid the modern banks and medical buildings and engineering firms, a few sagging clapboard buildings still showed their origins as army barracks and offices. Their quiet dilapidation seemed at odds with the urgent role they had once played in a desperate wartime gamble. Here, in a top secret military installation — so secret the town was not shown on maps until after 1945—eighty thousand production workers and scientists had raced night and day for two years to produce the material for the first atomic bombs. Those awesome, awful clouds that roiled up from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created, in great measure, here in this sleepy town in East Tennessee.

Following the map on the truck’s GPS screen, we made a left off the main street and meandered partway up a hillside, through a handful more buildings that dated back to the wartime years. A steepled white chapel, which could have been transported from New England, perched atop a grassy hill. Beneath it, a sprawling, white-columned hotel — the same vintage as the church, but not in the same pristine condition — lurked behind boarded-up windows, sloughing scales of chalky paint. Fading letters above the wide veranda told us the hotel was THE ALEXANDER INN; four Oak Ridge police cars — engines idling and exhausts steaming — told us this was the right place.

I parked beside the cars and we got out. The sun was brilliant but the day was still bitterly cold: barely twenty degrees, and windy enough to feel like minus five. Worse, this was the warmest day we’d had in a week, and the nighttime temperatures had hovered down in the single digits. As the wind bit my cheeks, I winced and wondered, Where’s global warming when you actually want it?

One uniformed officer huddled miserably inside the waist-high fence that surrounded the hotel’s swimming pool. As Miranda and I approached the gate, the doors on the police cars opened and two more uniformed officers emerged reluctantly, followed by two plainclothes officers. One was Lieutenant Dewar, the head of Major Crimes; the other, Detective Emert, would be the lead officer on the case.

We shook gloved hands all around, then Dewar and Emert led us through the gate and up to the edge of the pool. Although the hotel dated from the 1940s, the pool itself — modest in size, a kidney in shape — looked more like an afterthought from the sixties. Moreover, it appeared not to have been drained or cleaned since the sixties; it was nearly full, and the cold snap had turned the greenish black water into greenish black ice.

Entombed in the filthy ice near the deep end of the pool was a human corpse, frozen facedown, its arms and legs splayed wide. Although the shape of the body was masked by layers of winter clothing, the head was bare and the scalp was bald, so I assumed the corpse was male.

“Whoa,” said Miranda. “I’ve seen plenty of bodies on ice, but never one in ice. How we gonna…” She paused, and I could see a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Ah, master,” she said, “grasshopper is beginning to learn.” She excused herself and went back to the truck, then returned bearing the orange case.

The policemen looked as puzzled at the sight of the chainsaw as Miranda had at first, but gradually I saw the light dawn in their eyes as well. “They call me the Man of Stihl,” I said, grinning at the pun. I fired up the chainsaw — cold as it was, it took a few pulls on the starter rope — and stepped carefully onto the ice. Glancing back, I saw the six cops nervously eyeing me, the chainsaw, and the ice. Miranda’s face, in contrast, expressed pure amusement.

I squeezed the throttle a bit and eased the tip of the saw down onto the ice near one of the body’s outstretched hands. In an instant my face and glasses were covered with a layer of shaved ice. Sputtering, I let off the gas, set the saw down, and wiped my cheeks and lenses. For my second attempt, I cocked my head to one side as I lowered the snarling teeth into the ice. This time, the shower of ice crystals streamed onto my arm and shoulder, but my face remained clear. The chain bit into the ice easily, and before long I felt the saw break through the underside. Now the saw sprayed both ice and water onto me, and I could feel my coat beginning to get soaked and cold. I squeezed the throttle trigger all the way, which churned more water but also sped the saw’s progress through the ice. It took less than a minute to cut an arc stretching from just beyond one of the corpse’s outstretched hands, up and over the head, and down to the other hand. I stopped, knelt near the waist, and began cutting through the ice along the right side of the body. My plan was to work my way down to the feet, which would put me safely back on the pool’s deck when I made the final cuts to free the slab from the surrounding ice.

Once I’d cut through the ice on the right side down to the knee, I switched sides and began cutting down the left side, not stopping until I was alongside the left foot. Then I shifted back to the right side. By this point, the slab containing the body was barely connected to the main sheet of ice; only a few inches of ice beside either foot held the slab in place. With one foot, I gave an exploratory tap on the slab. It did not move. I tapped harder. Nothing. I stomped, and suddenly, with a sound like a rifle shot, the ice cracked — not just the small tabs of ice holding the slab in place, but the larger sheet on which I stood. The surface buckled beneath my feet, and I felt myself begin to fall. Instinctively I flung up my arms to regain my balance, and the chainsaw flew from my grasp. My arms were seized by two pairs of strong hands, and two of the uniformed officers hauled me up onto the deck of the pool. As they did, my prize chainsaw thudded onto the slab of ice, which had now been set free. As the slab bobbed, the saw slid back and forth a time or two, and then slithered past the corpse’s head and plunged into the pool. The deep end of the pool. There was a moment of collective silence, broken by a soft “oops” from one of the officers. Then I heard a snort that I recognized as Miranda’s, followed by a giggle — also Miranda’s — and then rising gales of laughter, not just from Miranda but from the six cops, too.

An hour later, back at UT, I eased the truck into the garage bay of the Regional Forensic Center. Miranda fetched a gurney and we carefully slid the icebound corpse onto the gurney, faceup, and wheeled it toward the autopsy suite. Detective Emert, who was also authorized to serve as a coroner, had gravely pronounced the iceman to be dead, once he’d stopped laughing about my chainsaw.

Miranda and I stopped in the hallway outside the autopsy suite long enough to weigh the corpse on the scales that were built into the floor. The scales, which automatically subtracted the weight of the gurney, gave the weight as 162 pounds. I knew that fifteen or twenty pounds of that total was ice, though, and I made a mental note to weigh the body again once the ice had thawed and dripped off.

As we wheeled the gurney into the suite, the medical examiner, Dr. Edelberto Garcia — an elegant Hispanic man in his late thirties — looked up from the corpse he was autopsying, a young black male. One of Garcia’s purple-gloved hands cradled the top of the man’s skull; the other hand held a Stryker autopsy saw, with which he had just opened the cranium. Sixty seconds from now, he’d be removing and weighing the brain. Garcia nodded at us, glanced at the body we’d just wheeled in, and looked a question at me. I nodded back at him and said, “Okay if we park this guy by the sink for a couple days, Eddie?”

Garcia’s eyes looked mildly surprised through the blood-spattered shield he wore. “Don’t leave him in here,” he said. “He’ll smell to high heaven. Put him in the cooler. I’ll try to get to him tomorrow.”

“He’s frozen solid,” I said. “If I put him in the cooler, it’ll take him a week to thaw out. Even in here, at room temperature, it’ll take a day or two.”

“Ah,” he said. “Sure, right there is fine.” He looked more closely at the body, noticing the ice that formed a rectangular frame around it. “You fish this guy out of a frozen pond?”

“Frozen swimming pool,” Miranda said. “Dirtier than any pond I ever saw. Ask Dr. B. how he got the guy out of the ice.” She snorted, just as she had in the momentary silence that had followed the splash at the pool. “Ask him about being prepared.”

“Watch it, smarty-pants,” I warned. “You are skating—” I stopped, one word too late.

“On thin ice?” She finished my sentence gleefully, then proceeded to recount my chainsaw misadventure to Garcia. As she pantomimed my whirling arms, the chainsaw’s slow-motion arc through the air, its slithering to-and-fro across the bobbing ice, and its plunge into the murky depths, they laughed until tears streamed from their eyes.

“Very funny,” I said. “Except to the guy whose chainsaw is rusting at the bottom of the pool.”

“Fear not, master,” she said. “All will be well. Because you are the Man of Stihl.”

CHAPTER 3

Twenty-four hours after I parked the gurney in the autopsy suite, the body was still half frozen, but the clothing had thawed. Water dripped slowly through the drain at the foot of the gurney and into the sink, to which I had latched the lower end of the gurney. I had taken the precaution of fitting a fine wire screen over the gurney’s drain to catch any hairs or fibers or other debris that came off the clothing as it thawed. Glancing at the screen, I saw only a few small, rotting bits of leaves, which I assumed had been floating in the pool before it froze.

Detective Emert had asked if Miranda and I would be willing to take the clothing off the corpse and hang it up in the morgue. “I need it to be dry so I can go over it with evidence tape,” he said, though I already knew that was the reason.

“Sure,” I said. “No point your making a trip just for that.” It wasn’t easy to undress the frozen body, but we managed it. As we removed the pants, I noticed that the underpants were soiled. The man appeared to have had diarrhea, and it looked reddish brown, possibly bloody. I made a note to point it out to Garcia the next day, when he did the autopsy.

As Miranda and I were driving back to the Anthropology Department, I called Emert. “Hello, Detective, it’s Dr. Brockton.”

“Hi, Doc,” he said. “Call me Jim, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. The clothing’s off and should be dry by tomorrow. Your man’s still half frozen, though. Reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner.”

Emert laughed. “How so?”

“Well, my wife — my late wife; she died several years ago — she always bought frozen turkeys, and she never seemed to remember that it takes a couple of days in the fridge to thaw one of those. So every Thanksgiving morning, she’d panic when she realized the turkey was still frozen solid. Every year I’d end up putting the damn thing in the bathtub in warm water to thaw it.”

“Hmm,” said Emert. “And you never remembered to put it in the fridge ahead of time, either?”

“Truth is,” I laughed, “I kinda got a kick out of it. After the first couple of times, it seemed like part of the tradition. For all I know, Kathleen might have been pretending to forget, just to amuse me. Or just to make me feel useful.”

“Some women are smart that way,” he said. “My wife has me cooking the turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas now. I deep-fry ’em. You ever done that?”

“No, but I’ve heard it’s good. True?”

“Once you’ve done it, you’ll never go back to baked turkey.”

“But it’s not like fried chicken, is it? You’re not dipping it in batter?”

“No, no,” he said. “You inject it with a marinade — my favorite’s a Cajun marinade, which has some kick to it — and when you put it down in the oil, the oil browns the skin really fast, seals in all the juices. Makes an oven-roasted turkey seem dry as shoe leather.”

“Sounds tasty,” I said. “Wish it weren’t ten months till Thanksgiving.”

“Tell you what,” he offered. “When we close this case, I’ll do a turkey-fry to celebrate.”

“Deal,” I said. “Dr. Garcia scheduled the autopsy for one o’clock tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

“This is the only homicide I’m working,” he said. “Of course it’s okay. How about if I show up at twelve-thirty, so I can go over the clothing?”

“I’ll meet you at the loading dock behind the hospital,” I said.

Hey,” I called as he opened the trunk of the white Crown Victoria the next day. “You got my chainsaw in there?”

“Sorry,” he said, removing an evidence kit and closing the lid. “We haven’t been able to empty the pool yet. Drainpipe’s frozen solid; so is the valve mechanism. We’ll need a few days above freezing to thaw it out enough to drain.”

“Can’t you just put in a sump pump and pump it out from the top?”

“We could, but then there’s that thick layer of frozen ice hanging up near the top of the pool. If we pump all the water out from underneath, a ton of ice could come crashing down on your chainsaw and bust it up. You don’t want that, do you?”

“Busted or rusted,” I sighed. “Not sure which is the greater of two evils.”

“I don’t think it’s actually rusting while it’s submerged,” he said. “I think the rust starts to form only after it comes out of the water — takes moisture plus air to oxidize the steel.”

Now that he said it, it made sense. I’d seen a gruesome version of that phenomenon affect decomposing bodies. Soft tissue that decayed in moist environments, such as basements and caves, was transformed into a waxy or soapy substance called adipocere. A few years before, in fact, I’d had a case in the mountains of Cooke County in which a young woman’s body — hidden in a cave for decades — turned into a remarkable adipocere mummy. In the absence of oxygen, though, completely submerged bodies did not turn to adipocere.

“So when we do get the saw out,” Emert continued, “we’ll put it in a trash can filled with water, so it stays submerged till you can take it to a shop and get it taken apart and dried out.”

In one corner of the loading dock I noticed an empty plastic trash can lying on its side. I picked it up and handed it to Emert. “Take good care of my baby,” I said. He laughed as he put it in the trunk.

Emert patted down the clothing thoroughly with evidence tape. The tape’s sticky side would pick up hair and fibers, much like the lint roller I had at home. I’d seen evidence tape used many times, but Emert’s variety had a plastic backing I hadn’t seen before. “This is a fairly new kind,” he said. “The plastic’s water-soluble. Once I’m through, I put it in warm water to dissolve the backing. That leaves the hair and fibers in the water. Pour the water through a coffee filter, and voilà—everything’s together in one nice, neat place.”

Once Emert was satisfied that he’d gone over the clothing thoroughly, he began checking the pockets of the pants. Easing a gloved hand into each of the front pockets, he extracted a set of keys and a few coins. Then he felt the seat of the pants — left, then right — to check the rear pockets. The left hip pocket was empty, but I saw him smile when he felt the right pocket. Un-buttoning the closure carefully, he slipped a hand into the pocket and fished out a worn leather wallet. He laid it on an absorbent pad and unfolded it gently.

His eyes widened. Looking down to see what he’d seen, I made out the familiar markings of a Tennessee driver’s license through a clear plastic window in one side of the wallet. “Wow,” Emert said. “No wonder he looked familiar.”

“Who is it?” Instead of answering, Emert held the wallet up so I could take a close look. LEONARD M. NOVAK, the small print on the license read. “Novak,” I said. “Rings a bell, but only vaguely.”

“Dr. Leonard Novak is a living legend in Oak Ridge,” he said. “Or was, anyhow. He was one of the top scientists back during the Manhattan Project. He played a big part in making the atomic bomb possible. Last picture I saw of him was probably taken twenty years ago. Back when he was a fresh-faced kid of seventy-something.”

“A big fish,” I said, “in that small, frozen pond.”

“Very big,” he said.

“But nobody’d reported him missing?”

“No,” he said. “The only missing-person report we’ve had in the last six months is a runaway teenager.”

“Be hard to mistake this guy for a teenager. Was he married?”

“I don’t know,” Emert said. We both glanced at the dead man’s left hand, which had no wedding ring. “Maybe not. Maybe a widower. Must not have had anybody checking on him regularly.” With a gloved finger, he poked the corpse gently, in the thigh and in the abdomen. “You sure our bird’s thawed out enough to autopsy?”

“If he were a Butterball turkey,” I said, “I’d be preheating the oven right now.”

He gathered up the evidence bags containing the coins, the keys, the wallet, and the evidence tape, and ran them out to his car at the loading dock.

CHAPTER 4

Shall we begin?” It was a rhetorical question — even as he said the words, Dr. Garcia was already pressing the scalpel to Leonard Novak’s scalp — but it served to focus everyone’s attention on the tip of the blade. Garcia was suited up in a blue surgical gown with a mask, a plastic face shield, and two pairs of purple gloves. So was Miranda, who was serving as his assistant, or Diener: a German word that literally translates as “servant” or “slave”—not the sort of job description that would normally sit well with Miranda, who sometimes chafed beneath her title of “graduate assistant.” I was wearing scrubs, as was Emert, although as far back as the detective was hovering, he would probably have been safe in a white linen suit. “Call me if there’s something I need to see,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll be over here hanging on to my lunch.”

Normally Garcia would have begun the autopsy by making a Y-shaped incision to open the chest cavity and abdomen. But Novak had a gash on the left side of his scalp, high on the left side of the forehead. The wound didn’t look serious — an oval contusion a couple of inches long by an inch wide, and more like an abrasion than a cut — but it was the only visible trauma to the corpse, so it was a place to start. The old man’s body, naked and thin and ashen, looked sadder and more vulnerable, somehow, than most bodies I saw.

With one swift sweep of the blade Garcia laid open the scalp, cutting from behind the left ear, up over the crown of the head, and down to the back of the right ear. Laying aside the scalpel, Garcia worked his fingers under the front flap of scalp, then gave a strong tug. With a wet, ripping sound, the scalp peeled free of the crown and forehead, and Garcia folded the flap down over the face. Behind me, I heard Emert gasp and whisper, “Christ.” I could scarcely imagine his reaction to some of the sights and smells he would encounter later in the autopsy. Garcia peeled the other half of the scalp backward, folding it down to the nape of the neck into a sort of gruesome collar, so that the entire top of the skull was now exposed.

Garcia studied the bone in the region beneath the contusion, then stepped back and motioned to Miranda and me, inviting us to look. The bone — the frontal bone, near where it joined the parietal — showed no sign of damage, not even a hint of compression. “Well, I don’t think he died of blunt-force trauma,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Garcia. “Maybe just scraped his head when he fell. There’s no scabbing, so it’s perimortem — around the time of death. Hard to tell, though, since he was in the water, whether it’s antemortem or post.”

“How could you tell?” asked Emert. “I mean, if he hadn’t been in the water?” He leaned closer, but only a few inches closer.

“If he were still alive, the wound would have bled,” said Garcia. “But not if his heart had already quit pumping when he fell.”

“Or got dumped,” said Miranda.

“Or dumped,” echoed Emert. “But if there’s water in the lungs, that’ll mean he drowned in the pool?”

“Or somewhere,” Miranda pointed out.

“Not necessarily,” said Garcia. “Water can seep into the lungs after death. Or be absorbed from the lungs after drowning. Don’t believe everything you see on television.”

Emert sighed, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because people kept complicating the scenarios or because he was having trouble with the sight of the scalped skull. His gaze, I noticed, kept straying toward the peeled bone, then flinching away.

Next Garcia took a Stryker autopsy saw from the shelf along the wall. The saw’s motor was about twice the size of a hand blender — a kitchen gadget whose name had always struck me as a marketing department’s worst nightmare. When he switched on the motor, a fan-shaped blade on the end of a shaft began to oscillate back and forth, its strokes so rapid and tiny as to be almost invisible. I never ceased to marvel at the ingenuity of the Stryker saw: if Garcia accidentally grazed his hand with the blade, his skin would simply vibrate in time with the blade: it might tickle, but it wouldn’t cut. If he pressed down hard, though — on his own finger, or on one of the corpse’s — the blade would chew through flesh and bone in seconds.

Starting at the center of the forehead, Garcia eased the blade into the skull, going slowly to make sure he didn’t cut into the brain. When the pitch of the motor rose, telling him the blade had penetrated all three layers of the bone, he began cutting horizontally, just above the left brow ridge, across the left temple, and around toward the back of the skull. Once he was nearly there, he shifted back to the forehead again and made a mirror-image cut around the right side of the skull, so that the top of the skull — the calvarium — was attached to the lower part of the skull by a one-inch bridge of bone at the back. Then, with two deft dips of the saw, he cut that bridge into a V-shaped tab.

I heard Emert whisper to Miranda, “Why’d he do that?”

“Because it’s so stylish,” said Miranda. “And because it keeps the top of the skull from sliding around when the pieces are put back together. Helps hold things together, which is particularly good if there’s an open-casket funeral.”

“Ah,” said Emert. “Good idea.” His words sounded casual, but his tone sounded strained.

With one hand Garcia gripped the corpse’s face, clamping his fingers hard around the zygomatic arches of the cheekbones; with the other, he gripped the calvarium and tugged. As the top of the skull pulled free, I heard a wet sucking sound from the vicinity of the brain, and a horrified gasp from the direction of Detective Emert.

Garcia made a few cuts with the scalpel to sever the spinal cord and a few membranes, then gently removed the brain from the skull. It always surprised me to see how much more easily the brain could be disconnected than, say, a femur or a rib, which took some determined cutting and tugging. After weighing it in the meat scales used to weigh organs — it tipped the scales at 1,773 grams, or a bit shy of three pounds — he laid it on a tray and nodded at Miranda. Miranda tied a loop of string around the bit of spinal cord dangling down, then suspended the brain upside down in a large jar of formalin, a weak solution of formaldehyde. Marinating for a couple weeks in the formalin would “fix” the brain: not as in “repair,” but as in “preserve and harden.” Garcia pronounced the appearance of Novak’s brain as normal, though from what little I’d heard about the scientist’s work, his brain sounded better than normal, at least during his working life.

As Garcia gripped the scalpel and prepared to make the Y-shaped incision that would open the chest and abdominal cavities, I turned to Emert. “You okay? You ready for this?”

“Ready,” he said, but he didn’t say it like he meant it. When Garcia used the chest spreader to cut the ribs from the sternum, I heard the detective grunt slightly as each rib gave way with a crunch. It was when Garcia cut open the abdominal cavity and prepared to “run the gut,” as pathologists call it, that things took an interesting turn. Two of them, actually.

Running the gut involves removing and dissecting the stomach and intestines — slicing them open to examine the contents and the linings. I had mentioned the diarrhea to Garcia, he had merely nodded, but I knew he’d be paying particular attention to the gastrointestinal tract. As anyone who’s ever thrown up or had a bowel movement knows, the contents of the digestive tract are not the most appetizing features of the human species. In fact, although the decomposing bodies at the Body Farm tended to smell bad, especially in the heat of summer, they were practically fragrant compared to the odor released when a pathologist was running the gut.

But Novak’s gut was different. It began to leak in Garcia’s hands as soon as he began lifting it from the abdominal cavity. The first smell to hit was the stench of vomit and gastric juice, which began oozing from the stomach. I don’t have a keen sense of smell, which is fortunate, given my line of work, but the smell of stomach contents is tough even for me to take. Then the intestines began to tear in his hands, overlaying the smell of vomit with the stench of feces. There was another layer of odor, too, which I recognized as the smell of decomposition. Leonard Novak, I realized, had died from the inside out. “Jesús, María, José,” breathed Garcia in Spanish, with more of an accent than I’d ever heard from him. “Miranda, help me with this.” Miranda rushed to his side, and together, their four hands cupped beneath the organs, they eased the dead man’s entrails into the sink.

The sight and the smell were enough to challenge even the most stoic of people.

And Detective Emert was not the most stoic of people. Just over my shoulder I heard a groaning, retching sound. That was followed, with unfortunate and unavoidable swiftness, by a gurgling noise, and then the splash of vomit cascading over my right shoulder and arm.

“Thank you so much,” Miranda said. “It was seeming a little too pleasant in here to suit me.”

I helped Emert out of the room, mopped up his mess, and found a clean pair of scrubs for me. When I got back into the suite, Garcia was puzzling over the gut, going through it with scissors and forceps. “Hmm,” he said, at regular intervals. After a half dozen or so “hmm’s,” it seemed worth asking what he meant.

So I asked. “What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”

“I’m seeing a lot of blood and necrosis in the gut,” he said. I nodded. Necrosis — dead tissue — fit with the smell of decomp I had noticed. “There’s some in the stomach, but a lot more in the intestines. Almost like the GI tract has been burned.”

“How? Poison? Acid?”

Garcia shook his head and studied the inside of a loop of intestine. “That’s the thing,” he said. “While you were out of the room, I checked the mouth and esophagus. Both of those are normal. If the guy had drunk enough acid to do this, they’d be damaged, too.”

Then he said one more “hmm,” this one deeper in pitch — more in the vein of an “aha” than a “what the hell?”

“Find something?” It was Miranda who asked the question I had been on the verge of asking, too.

“Maybe,” he said. “Not sure.” He plucked a bit of something from the sink with the forceps and set it in the gloved palm of his left hand. He laid the forceps aside and rolled the object around with his right index finger, then picked it up and studied it. It was small and cylindrical — maybe a quarter inch long and an eighth inch in diameter, rounded on one end, roughly flat on the other. It was about the size of a dried black bean, or — a more familiar comparison to me — a maggot that had hatched from a blowfly egg four or five days before. I thought I saw the dull glint of metal where Garcia had rubbed the surface clean.

“Miranda, did you X-ray the body before you took the clothes off?”

“I did,” she said, “but either the machine’s on the fritz or we got a bad batch of film. All of them came out fogged.”

My mind was racing. “Eddie, put it down and step away,” I said. “Everybody step away.”

Garcia looked up at me, puzzled, frozen, the small pellet still pinched between his thumb and forefinger. His hand was twelve inches, at most, from his face, and not a lot farther than that from Miranda’s face. I saw comprehension dawn in Miranda’s eyes, and behind the surgical mask, I saw the oval outline of her open mouth as she sucked in a breath. Before I could stop her, Miranda reached out, plucked the pellet from Garcia’s fingers with her own, and dropped it into the stainless-steel sink. Then she backed away from the counter, pulling Garcia with her. She continued pulling until he, and she, and I, had backed out of the autopsy suite and into the hallway, where an ashen-faced Jim Emert sat in a folding metal chair. Emert got to his feet and glanced at our faces. What he saw there made him turn and look into the autopsy suite. As the steel door closed, all four of us continued to stare at the sink, as if something sinister lurked within it. A monster. A bomb. A shroud of radioactivity intense enough to have ruined our X-ray film. Radioactivity deadly enough to have seared Leonard Novak’s internal organs in the hours or days it took that tiny pellet to travel through his stomach and along his intestine, killing him along the way.

CHAPTER 5

As soon as Miranda had plucked the small metal pellet from Eddie Garcia’s hand and dropped it into the sink, she and Garcia and I had hurried out of the autopsy suite and held a brief, urgent conference in the hallway. Detective Emert, still ashen-faced from his nausea, turned a whiter shade of pale when he heard us discussing radioactivity and hospital evacuation.

On the one hand, we weren’t certain that the pellet was radioactive, so we didn’t want to create needless alarm. On the other hand, we didn’t want to put people in danger, and that seemed to be a risk, if Novak had indeed died of some sort of radiation poisoning.

I hadn’t touched the pellet or even the body, at least not once the autopsy began, so my risk of contamination seemed lower than Miranda’s or Garcia’s. I picked up the receiver from a wall-mounted phone in the hallway and buzzed Lynette Wilkins, the receptionist at the front desk of the morgue. “Lynette,” I said, as evenly as I could manage, “this is Dr. Brockton. I’m in the hallway outside the autopsy suite with Dr. Garcia and Miranda Lovelady and an Oak Ridge police detective. We have a problem back here. Could you please round up everybody else in the Forensic Center and take them out the front door, into the hospital basement?”

“Oh God,” she said. “Is there some nutcase back there with a gun? All you have to say is ‘yes’ and I’ll call for a SWAT team.”

“No, no,” I said, “it’s nothing like that. The only crazy people back here are us. We have what might be a contaminated body, and we want to make sure we don’t expose anybody else to contamination.”

“Do you want me to call the hospital hazmat team?”

“I’m not sure hazmat’s what we’re dealing with,” I said. “Miranda’s making a call right now that should help us figure it out. Just get everybody out calmly, would you?”

“Of course, Dr. B.”

“And Lynette?”

“Yes?”

“Lock the door behind you. And put up a DO NOT ENTER sign.”

“God almighty. Y’all be careful.”

Miranda had called Hank, the health physicist who was part of the DMORT team. Hank was on his way from Oak Ridge, but it would take him at least thirty or forty minutes to arrive. In the meantime, he suggested she call Duane Johnson. “Of course,” said Garcia when she relayed the suggestion. “If I weren’t so rattled, I’d have thought of Duane right away.”

“Who’s Duane?” I asked.

“He’s the hospital’s radiological protection officer,” said Garcia. “A medical physicist, I think he’s called, on the School of Medicine faculty. He trains interns and residents in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He keeps track of all the hospital’s medical radioisotopes, and he trains ER teams how to respond if there’s a nuclear accident or terrorist act. His office is up on the ground floor, practically right over our heads, and he’s got all sorts of instruments and safety gear.”

Thirty seconds later Garcia was on the phone with Johnson, describing the tiny metallic pellet he’d found and the trail of shredded GI tissue leading up to it. Three minutes after the phone call, we heard a clatter at the far end of the hallway and Johnson appeared, wheeling a cart. The cart measured two or three feet square by six feet tall; one side was fitted with a corrugated blue door that resembled the flexible shutter on a big-city storefront or an antique rolltop desk. “Your receptionist didn’t want to let me in,” he said to Garcia. “I had to explain pretty bluntly that it was in her best interests and yours to unlock the door so I could figure out what’s going on in here.” He slid the plastic door up, revealing shelves laden with disposable clothing, cleaning solutions, plastic bags, and electronic instruments.

Rummaging around in a bin at the bottom of the cart, Johnson removed a tan Geiger counter, identical to the one Hank had used at the DMORT training, and switched it on. I heard the slow, buzzing clicks I had come to recognize as the baseline sound of normal, background radiation, like a clock ticking or a diesel engine idling. He extended the wand toward Garcia. “Hold out your hands,” he said, and when Garcia did, Hank passed the wand over them, front and back. The instrument continued to buzz at the same slow, reassuring rate. Next he waved the wand over Garcia’s body from head to foot, with the same quiet results, and then over Miranda, and then over me and Emert. I felt myself starting to relax, and I relaxed a lot more when Duane said, “Well, there’s no contamination on any of you.”

Then he stepped around a corner and opened the door of the autopsy suite, and suddenly all hell broke loose. The Geiger counter ratcheted up to a harsh, continuous buzz, and a small, pager-looking gadget at Duane’s waist began shrieking. “Son of a bitch,” said Duane, backpedaling fast. Both instruments quieted down once he was away from the door, but my heart and my nerves — which had zoomed up in sync with the gadgets — continued to rev. “Something in there is hot as a pistol,” he said. He looked shaken, and that didn’t do a lot to calm me back down.

I was feeling some fear for my own safety, but more concern for Garcia’s and Emert’s, and — especially — for Miranda’s. She was a young woman of childbearing age, and if there was risk from radiation, she was potentially the most vulnerable. She was also my student, and I felt responsible for her safety. “Duane,” I said, “do we need to get out of here? And do we need to evacuate the hospital, or part of it?”

“We’re okay here,” said Duane, glancing at the meter as he said it. “These walls are concrete, and they’re pretty stout down here in the basement, so they’re good shielding. I’d like to figure out what kind of radiation this is, and how hot it is, before we do something as drastic as evacuating patients. If you start moving sick people, you can make them a lot sicker. But let me make sure the folks just above us aren’t at risk. Where’s the nearest phone?” Garcia pointed to the wall behind Johnson, and Johnson dialed a five-digit extension. “Hi, it’s Duane,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got an odd request. I’m one floor below you guys right now. Could you run a survey meter around the offices and labs up there, make sure nothing’s coming up through the floor?” I heard the faint sound of questions bleeding out of the receiver. “The morgue,” Duane said. “I’m down in the morgue.” I heard more faint questions. “Look, just do it, would you? Like, right now? And if your active dosimeter isn’t already on, turn it on before you do anything else.” I saw a look of impatience flash across his face; he paused long enough for me to hear urgency in the voice at the other end of the line. “We may have an incident down here,” said the physicist, “but I don’t have time to talk right now. Check the whole lab area, get people out if you need to, and page me if you see anything worth worrying about. I’ll call you back in a few minutes, but right now I gotta go.” He hung up the phone and turned to the four of us. “We’re right underneath the cyclotron lab,” he said, “where we make radiopharmaceuticals for PET scans. The floor’s really thick, there are no patients in that area, and the staff knows how to make sure it’s safe up there.” He eyed the corner of the hallway. Around it lay the door of the morgue and the danger lurking within. He drew a deep breath. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

He went back to the cart and pulled out a bagged garment; as he unwrapped and unfolded it, I recognized it as a biohazard suit like the ones the DMORT team had worn. The DMORT team called the garments moon suits, but Duane called it a “bunny suit,” because its built-in booties and gloves and hood make it look like an Easter-rabbit costume, minus the ears. “Bunny suit” seemed an oddly innocent nickname, though, considering how concerned Johnson now seemed. Once he was zipped in, he took a red and yellow instrument out of the cart’s bin and switched it on. This gadget was similar to the Geiger counter — boxy and about half the size of a car battery, with a wand attached to a flexible cord — but instead of a dial with a needle, this one had a digital display. “So what is that,” asked Miranda, “the all-new, fully equipped 2009 Geiger Counter Deluxe?”

“Sort of,” he said. “It’s an ionization chamber. A Geiger-Mueller counter gives you a yes-or-no answer — it tells you whether or not there’s elevated radioactivity — but it doesn’t tell much more than that. This one tells whether the activity is alpha, beta, or gamma radiation, and it measures the wavelength and energy accurately.”

“Sounds like a better gizmo,” she said. “Why doesn’t everybody use these?”

“These cost about four times as much,” he said. “And usually the Geiger-Mueller counter is good enough, because usually it tells you there’s nothing above background radiation.”

“But not always,” said Emert, who’d had a deer-in-the-headlights look ever since he’d vomited in the morgue.

“Not always,” conceded Johnson. He checked the ionization chamber’s display and seemed satisfied with what he saw there, then handed the instrument to Emert briefly while he rummaged around in the cart. First he dug out a pair of toy-looking plastic rings, which he put on his two index fingers. “Ring dosimeters,” he explained, showing us a small square of metallic foil in the broadest part of the band, where a gemstone would be if the rings were jewelry. He rotated the rings toward the inside of each finger. “To measure how much exposure my hands get.” Then he fished out a lead smock, the sort patients wear while having an arm or leg X-rayed, and put it on. “The body’s core is more vulnerable to radiation than the arms and legs,” he said. “The GI tract and the bone marrow, especially.”

Taking the ionization chamber back from Emert, he stepped around the corner. I saw him reach for the morgue’s door and open it, then extend the wand through the opening. He let out a low whistle just as the monitor clipped to his belt began to shriek again, then scurried back around the corner and rejoined us. He scanned our worried faces. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, from the reading I’m getting and from what you’ve told me you found in the body, this isn’t something that’s spreading contamination.”

Nobody else seemed to want to ask the logical next question, so I did. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, the source, whatever it is, is putting out some intense radiation. I’ll need to notify TEMA — the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency — and call the medical folks over in Oak Ridge. They’re some of the world’s best experts in treating radiation exposure.”

“Actually,” said Miranda, “just before you got here, I spoke with Hank Strickland, a health physicist I know at REAC/TS. He’s on his way over now.”

Johnson looked startled, but he quickly recovered. “While I call TEMA, call Hank back. Tell him we’re looking at an intense gamma radiation source. Ask him if one of their emergency physicians could meet you guys up in the ER.” I saw alarm in the faces of Miranda, Garcia, and Emert, and if they were looking, they saw it in mine, too. “It’s a precaution,” Johnson said. “Triage. We need to see how much exposure you’ve gotten, and we’ll need to start taking blood and urine samples for that.”

Just then Eddie Garcia grunted in pain, doubled over, and threw up. From my recent DMORT training, I knew that vomiting was one symptom of radiation sickness. I also knew that the sooner victims began to vomit after being exposed, the worse their condition.

Miranda knew it, too. The cell phone shook in her hands as she struggled to hit the redial button.

After some quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations, Duane Johnson estimated that the radioactive pellet from Novak’s gut was packing somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred curies of radioactivity, and it was spewing pure gamma, the most penetrating form of radiation. “Like armor-piercing X-rays,” Miranda said, and Johnson nodded grimly. The image was vivid, but it was far from reassuring.

Hank arrived just as Miranda, Garcia, Emert, and I were heading upstairs to the ER. He offered to help Johnson retrieve the source and get it shielded. Dr. Chris Sorensen, an emergency physician specializing in radiation accidents, was on his way from Oak Ridge as well, Hank said, and would meet us in the ER. Meanwhile, Dr. Sorensen was on the phone with Dr. Al Davies, a UT emergency physician Johnson had paged, briefed, and asked to meet us in the ER.

Never in the history of UT Hospital’s ER had four people been processed so swiftly. Dr. Davies whisked us back to a triage suite, where he assigned a nurse to each of us. In no time, all four of us had tourniquets around our biceps as nurses prepared to draw blood.

Three of us were stuck almost in unison, the blood spurting thick and dark into a series of five vials. Garcia’s arm remained untouched. Garcia was holding his right arm across his belly; his face was tense with pain. His nurse, a thickset and graying woman who appeared to be in her fifties, took a step back. Dr. Davies hurried to her side. “Nurse, is there a problem?”

“I…” she faltered. “I heard it’s something radioactive. Is that true?”

“We’re not certain, but we think so, yes,” said Davies. “That’s why we need the blood samples, so we can tell how severe the exposure is.”

“I’m not comfortable doing this,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to be contaminated.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped the doctor. Then, seeing the near-panic in her eyes, his tone softened. “This isn’t something he can spread to you,” he said. “It’s not like a virus or a chemical. It’s more like a sunburn, even though it isn’t showing up yet. You can’t catch this from him, any more than you could catch a sunburn.” He laid a hand on Garcia’s shoulder and left it there, showing her there was nothing to fear. “I’d draw his blood myself, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve done it, and it’d be cruel and inhuman treatement if I stuck Dr. Garcia with my rusty skills.” Still she held back, motionless except for her head, which began shaking “no.”

Just as Davies was drawing himself up to his most authoritative physician posture, my nurse — a young woman who had filled my two blood vials with cool efficiency — stepped in, taking the syringe from the hand of the reluctant nurse. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.” She tapped her index finger on the inside of Garcia’s elbow to bring the vein up, then eased in the needle.

Garcia raised his head and studied her face. “What’s your name?” His voice sounded reedy and forced.

“Darcy,” she said. “Darcy Bonnett.”

“Thank you, Darcy.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. When she was finished, she gave Garcia’s hand a quick squeeze.

After drawing our blood, they sent us to bathrooms with plastic specimen cups. When I emerged, the cup warm in my hand, I saw a tall, tanned, silver-haired man in civilian clothes — khaki pants, a blue shirt, a red tie — conferring with Dr. Davies. He introduced himself as Chris Sorensen, a radiation-medicine physician from REAC/TS. As Miranda, Garcia, and Emert emerged from other bathrooms and handed off their pee, we all instinctively gathered around Davies and Sorensen. “I just got an update from Hank,” Sorensen said. “He and Duane Johnson think they can retrieve the source and get it into a shielded vessel. So the good news is, this should be contained quickly.”

“I can tell you’re about to drop a bad-news shoe,” I said.

“It’s not great,” he said. “It’s a gamma source, for sure; luckily, it appears to be a sealed, single-point source — that little pellet that came from Dr. Novak’s intestine. Gamma sources don’t spread contamination, they just emit radiation. Like light, from a lightbulb, rather than water from a garden hose.” This sounded like something from a high school science-class talk he’d given a lot of times. “But this source is iridium-192, which is very intense.”

“You mean dangerous,” said Miranda.

He hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes,” he said, “dangerous. Those of you who touched it”—he looked directly at Garcia and Miranda, so I knew Hank had briefed him—“will probably have burns on your hands. My other concern is how much whole-body dose all of you got. We need to know whether it’s enough to damage your bone marrow or the lining of your GI tract. We’ll need to do whole-blood counts again at twelve hours and twenty-four hours to see if your lymphocyte counts are dropping.”

“Excuse me, Doc,” said Emert. “Our what counts?”

“Lymphocytes,” he said. “They’re a type of white blood cells. If they drop significantly, it means the stem cells in your bone marrow have been hit hard. Also means you’re vulnerable to infection.”

“Sort of like radiation-induced AIDS,” added Miranda. I was starting to wish she didn’t have such a gift for grim analogies.

“Sort of,” Sorensen agreed. “Tracking changes in your lymphocytes is one way we estimate the dose you’ve received. Another is to reconstruct the incident timeline. So I’ll need each of you to think back and give me your best estimate of how much time you spent near Dr. Novak’s body, particularly how close you were to the abdominal region, where the source was — three feet away for thirty minutes, for instance, and ten feet away for an hour. Between the incident timeline and the bloodwork, we’ll get a fairly precise idea of what sort of exposure you each got.”

“You mentioned burns,” I said, “but their hands look fine.” As if on cue, Miranda and Garcia held out their palms.

Sorensen and Davies both shook their heads. “Too soon to tell,” Davies said. “Normally the redness doesn’t show up till the next day. We see it occasionally in patients undergoing radiation therapy. Redness. You may have itching or swelling or numbness in your hands, too. The redness generally peaks about twenty-four hours after exposure, then it fades. Same with the symptoms of whole-body exposure — nausea, diarrhea, fatigue: they show up, then disappear, and everything seems fine. Even if it’s not.”

“The ‘prodromal stage’ is the term for that period of initial symptoms,” added Sorensen. “When they disappear, that marks the beginning of what we call the ‘latency stage’ of ARS, acute radiation syndrome. If it is ARS, the symptoms can come roaring back, anywhere from days to weeks after exposure. ‘Manifest illness,’ that stage is called. Radiation does strange things to the body. It damages the DNA in cells, and cells that get replaced more often — like the bone marrow and the lining of the gut — are affected first, and the worst.”

“So the bloodwork helps you estimate the dose and diagnose damage,” I said. “But what about treatment? What can you do for us? What can you do to reverse or minimize the effects of the radiation?”

“Not a lot, unfortunately,” said Sorensen. “If your lymphocytes drop significantly, we’ll start you on growth factors to stimulate the bone marrow. We can treat localized burns to ease pain and fight infection. If your immune system is compromised, we can isolate you.” He hesitated. “We can recommend psychological and psychiatric care, to help deal with anxiety or anger. Beyond that, it’s up to the body to repair and heal itself.”

“Shit,” said Emert. “This sucks.”

“I know,” said Sorensen. “I wish I had a magic pill I could give you.”

The detective puffed out a deep breath of frustration. “So tell me this,” he said. “Novak was a physicist in Oak Ridge, from the moment there was an Oak Ridge. He worked with nuclear reactors and radioactive materials for forty, fifty years. Could this be a bizarre side effect of all those years of radiation exposure?”

Sorensen shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “That gamma radiation is coming from that tiny pellet that was in his gut. Iridium-192 is a very unstable isotope, with a very short half-life. You have to work hard to make it radioactive, and once you do, it decays fast. As it emits all that gamma radiation, it’s changing steadily from radioactive iridium into ordinary platinum. A year or two from now, it’ll be relatively safe to handle.”

“So that hot little pellet,” I said, “isn’t some dangerous bit of flotsam or jetsam left over from the Manhattan Project?”

“It was probably created within the past six months,” he said, “and Dr. Novak couldn’t have survived more than a day or two after ingesting it. Within minutes he was doomed. Within hours he was what we call a ‘walking ghost.’”

CHAPTER 6

Armed with pens and notepads, Miranda, Garcia, Emert, and I huddled in plastic chairs in a triage room in the Emergency Department, comparing notes like classmates before a test. We were reconstructing what Sorensen called the “incident timeline”—which Miranda, in classic form, had nicknamed the “path to peril.” How long had I spent chainsawing Novak’s body out of the frozen swimming pool — ten minutes? fifteen? Had Miranda and I spent a full hour driving back to UT with the corpse in the pickup truck? Another fifteen minutes getting it onto the gurney and into the morgue? The next day, when Emert searched the clothing and identified Novak, were the detective and I beside the gurney for thirty minutes, or was it more like forty? How many lifetimes elapsed between the moment the autopsy began and the instant we fled the morgue?

As the four of us debated matters of minutes, Garcia winced and hastily excused himself. Miranda watched him hurry to a restroom, then looked at me. “I’m worried about Eddie,” she said. “This doesn’t look good. But I don’t understand why his symptoms would be so much worse than anyone else’s. The rest of us were around the body the day it was recovered, and he wasn’t.”

“Maybe it’s just the stress,” I said, but it rang false in my ears even as I said it. Suddenly it hit me. “Dammit,” I said. “The autopsy.”

“But we were there, too,” she said. “Sure, he was closer to Novak, but not that much closer.”

“Not Novak’s autopsy,” I said. “The one Eddie was doing the day we brought Novak in to thaw. Remember? We parked the gurney at the other sink, right behind Eddie. He was two feet away for hours.”

Miranda clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh God,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that. He did two that day. And another one the next morning, before Novak’s. Oh, this is bad, Dr. B. Very, very bad.” Her chin began to quiver, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

I glanced at the two doctors and saw them huddled with the nurse named Darcy. She nodded, then disappeared behind a curtain. A moment later she reappeared, wheeling a stand with an IV bag attached. Behind the door of the restroom, a toilet flushed with a roar. Miranda wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sniffed quickly. She picked up her pen and notepad again just as Garcia opened the restroom door and walked weakly toward us.

I looked at Garcia with sympathy. “Hurling again?”

He shook his head. “Other end,” he grimaced.

Miranda’s eyes darted from Garcia to me at the news of this additional symptom. Sorensen and Davies walked toward us. “Dr. Garcia, we’d like to go ahead and put you on an IV,” Davies said, “since you’re losing fluids.” Garcia nodded; as a physician, he had probably known they’d want to do this. “We’d also like to go ahead and admit you for observation.” If Garcia had seen this one coming, it didn’t show: the look on his face when Sorensen said this was somewhere between shock and despair, but he simply nodded again. We moved back into the ER’s triage area; Eddie disappeared behind a curtain long enough to change into a gown, climb into a bed, and get hooked to the IV. Then the nurse pulled back the curtain and we clustered around his bed to finish reconstructing the incident timeline.

“Eddie,” I said, “don’t forget to estimate how long you spent near Novak’s body while you were doing other autopsies.”

“I know,” he said. “I was thinking about that on the toilet a minute ago. I spent ten or twelve hours in there, two or three feet away, soaking up gamma radiation.” He stared at his notepad, but his pen didn’t move. Finally, he picked up his pen and began to write.

Once we’d tallied up our exposure times and distances, I gathered up the notepads and handed them across to Sorensen. He glanced quickly at all of them; Eddie’s was on the bottom of the stack, and Sorensen frowned when he saw the number of hours. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. He unzipped a soft-sided computer case and took out a laptop; after a moment, he began punching in numbers. I didn’t want to hover, so I went back to the group at Garcia’s bedside.

After what might have been five minutes or five hours, Sorensen came over and pulled a chair away from the wall so he could sit facing us. “Okay, this is just ballpark,” he said, “based on the timelines you gave me. We’ll have a much clearer picture once we get another blood sample or two and graph the changes in your lymphocytes. We’re also going to use a technique developed in Oak Ridge called cytodosimetry — estimating your dose by analyzing DNA damage within your cells. So by this time tomorrow afternoon”—he checked his watch, then corrected himself—“by six-thirty tomorrow evening, we’ll be able to estimate your dose by three different methods.”

“But for now,” prompted Garcia, “what are the ballpark numbers, and what do they mean?”

Sorensen drew a breath. “Detective Emert.” Emert’s forehead creased, and he leaned forward. “It looks like you might have gotten exposed to something like twenty rads.”

“What the hell’s a rad, and how bad are twenty of ’em?”

“Well, in the course of a year, you get about one-tenth of a rad from background radiation — cosmic rays, radon gas seeping out of rocks in the ground, that sort of thing.”

“So I’ve gotten, what, two hundred years’ worth of radiation in the last four days?”

“Something like that,” said Sorensen.

“So that’s why I barfed during the autopsy? Do I need an IV, too?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Twenty rads isn’t something I’d recommend you get again, but it helps that your exposure came at intervals, rather than continuously. I’ve seen a lot of cases, and I’ve never seen anyone with symptoms of ARS at this low a dose. I suspect you vomited during the autopsy because it was an autopsy.”

Emert took a long breath and blew it out. It was the sound of deep relief.

“Dr. Brockton,” Sorensen said, “you and Ms. Lovelady may have gotten somewhere around 40 rads. More than we’d like, but also no symptoms, probably.” He looked at Miranda. “But I’m somewhat concerned about local injury to your fingertips.” He glanced down at Miranda’s notes. “You say you touched the source for only a few seconds?” She nodded. “That’s good, but at the surface, a hundred-curie source of iridium-192 is putting out over a hundred thousand rads a minute. If you got a couple thousand rads of exposure to your fingers, you’re likely to have some blistering, maybe even some necrosis.”

“You mean I might lose my fingers?”

“I doubt it, but it’s possible,” he said. “We’ll hope it’s just a bit of blistering at the fingertips, and hope it heals.” Miranda looked shaken, but she nodded with remarkable composure.

“Dr. Garcia,” said Sorensen, “I’m most concerned about you. You say the pellet was resting in your left palm for about thirty seconds, and between your right thumb and forefinger for fifteen to twenty seconds?”

“That’s just a guess,” said Garcia, “but I had no reason to think I needed to hurry as I was looking at it.”

“Of course not,” said Sorensen. “But I’m afraid you’re likely to have some localized damage to your hands.”

“Sounds like it,” said Garcia. “If I followed what you said to Miranda, and my math’s right, we’re talking, what, tens or even hundreds of thousands of rads to my hands?”

“Could be,” conceded Sorensen. “There’s some risk to your eyes as well. The lens of the eye is very sensitive to ionizing radiation, and if you were looking at the pellet at close range, you could develop cataracts within the next several years.”

“Maimed and blind,” said Garcia. “It just keeps getting better. What’s next? Things come in threes, right?”

“I’m afraid so. You’ve also got a higher whole-body dose, because of those additional hours in the morgue.”

“How much higher?”

Sorensen hesitated. Not a good sign. “Your exposure could be somewhere in the range of four to five hundred rads.”

“And what’s the prognosis for someone who’s been exposed to five hundred rads?”

Sorensen hesitated again. Another bad sign. “That’s getting up around the LD-50,” he said.

I heard Miranda draw a sharp breath.

“Excuse me,” said Emert. “What’s LD-50?”

Garcia answered before Sorensen could. “The 50 means fifty percent,” he said softly. “The LD means ‘lethal dose.’ What Dr. Sorensen is saying, very tactfully, is that first I probably lose my hands, and then God tosses a coin to see whether I live or die.”

Then he looked up at Miranda and me. “Would you two do me a favor? Would you please go to my house and tell Carmen what’s happened? I’ll call and tell her I’ve gotten delayed, but I don’t want her to hear the details over the phone. I want someone to be with her.”

Miranda reached out and took his hand. Her face was wet with tears again, but this time there was no hiding them.

Sorensen and Davies sent Garcia straight upstairs to an inpatient room. Emert, who lived in Oak Ridge, arranged to have his blood drawn at the hospital there so he didn’t have to come back to Knoxville in the middle of the night. Miranda and I were free to go, though we had strict orders to return at 6 A.M. for our twelve-hour blood sample. It was shaping up as a long, worrisome night. Before heading to Garcia’s house to talk with Carmen, we took a side trip downstairs to the Forensic Center. The DO NOT ENTER sign had been supplemented by yellow-and-black tape that read CAUTION — DO NOT ENTER, as well as a sign containing magenta wedges on a yellow background, with the words RADIATION HAZARD — KEEP OUT.

“Sounds like they mean it,” I said to Miranda.

“Probably fends off the door-to-door salesmen and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, too,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in the jest.

Just then Duane Johnson and a moon-suited technician I didn’t know emerged from the elevator, wheeling two rectangular metal slabs about two feet high by four feet wide. The metal slabs appeared to be heavy, judging by the way the two men leaned forward to roll them. “Lead shields,” Duane panted as they passed us and headed toward the locked door of the morgue. “Want to watch?”

“I think we’ve had enough radiation fun for one day,” I said.

“No pressure,” he said. “But as long as you stay behind the corner, where you were before, you won’t get any additional exposure.” I looked at Miranda, and she shrugged. Curiosity trumped caution, and we followed as Duane and the technician wheeled the shields toward the morgue.

Duane rapped on the door of the morgue a number of times — three quick knocks, then three slow ones, then three more fast ones — and I realized that the knocks were the Morse code distress signal, SOS. The door swung inward and Hank peered around the edge. He looked closely at Miranda and me and said, “Everybody okay?”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Detective Emert’s gone back to Oak Ridge. They’ll be taking blood samples from all of us every few hours to calculate our dose. They’ve admitted Dr. Garcia, because he got the highest exposure — four to five hundred rads.”

The dismayed look on Hank’s face made it clear that he realized how perilous Garcia’s situation was. He shook his head grimly, then turned to Johnson. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get that shit out of there.” Johnson and the tech wrangled the shields through the door, and once we were all inside, Hank locked it behind us.

Together, they reached for one of the shields, tipped it to the floor, then flipped it upside down beside the other. The shields were designed to protect the torso of a nuclear-medicine technician or nurse from the activity of radioisotopes being administered to nuclear-medicine patients. That meant the rectangular panel was raised a couple of feet off the floor, to the level of a hospital bed or operating-room table. In this case, though, partial coverage wasn’t enough. After flipping the shields upside down, they clamped one to the other, to create an unbroken layer of shielding from toe height to neck height. Next they clamped a smaller shield, fitted with a thick window of leaded glass, atop the upper shield. They had assembled a variety of tools as well, including long tongs — wrapped at the ends with what appeared to be duct tape, the sticky side facing out — and a small round mirror on the end of a telescoping metal shaft. I gathered they planned to use it as a periscope, so they could keep their heads behind the shielding at all times while peering into the sink. They also had a square metal case, about a foot on either side by maybe eighteen inches high. The case appeared to be made of steel, but from the way the two men grunted and strained as they moved it, I suspected the inside was lined with a thick layer of lead.

Just as they were about to wheel the makeshift shielding toward the autopsy suite, Hank’s cell phone rang with an urgent warbling tone. He looked startled as he glanced at the display. “REAC/TS, Hank Strickland.” After a moment, he said, “You guys don’t waste any time, do you?” He listened a bit more. “That’s right…. About a hundred curies.” He glanced at Miranda and me, then looked away. “Too soon to tell; one of the four took quite a hit.” A longer interval of listening. “I understand…. I will; thanks. Have a safe flight.”

He hung up the phone. “Well, that was interesting. That was—”

His words were interrupted by a loud knocking at the locked door. “This is Captain Sievers, UT Medical Center Police. Open the door, please.” It didn’t really sound like a request; more like a command.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

Sievers, whom I’d known for years, looked surprised to see me; mostly, though, he looked upset. “We got a report,” he began, but then he stopped speaking as his eyes swept the room and took in the tableau of people and equipment: Miranda and me, still in our scrubs, and three moon-suited figures, clustered around a collection of lead shields, radiation meters, and other worrisome paraphernalia. “What the hell is going on in here?”

“We had an autopsy take an unexpected turn—” I started to explain.

“What Dr. Brockton means,” cut in Hank, “is that we’re simulating a radiological contamination event. It’s a cooperative exercise between the Forensic Center and our emergency-response team in Oak Ridge.”

Sievers stared at Hank, then at me, then at Johnson. “Bull. Shit,” he said. He pushed past me and the others, heading toward the autopsy suite.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Hank.

“You said it’s a drill,” shot back Sievers.

“Stop now,” said Hank.

“You’ve got about five seconds to tell me why I should,” said Sievers.

Hank sighed, then pulled out his cell phone and hit the LAST CALL button. “It’s Strickland, with REAC/TS,” he said. “We have a slight complication here. Would you mind talking with Captain Sievers, of the medical center police?…Yes, the hospital has its own police…. No, he’s not a rent-a-cop…. Sievers. Captain Sievers.”

Hank held out the phone to Sievers. The officer glared at him suspiciously, then snatched the phone. “This is Captain Sievers. Who the hell is this?” His eyes widened. “Yes sir,” he said. “Of course I’ve heard of your office.” He listened intently, his eyes darting around the room all the while. “I understand,” he said. “You’ll have our full cooperation. Yes sir. Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone and stared at it a moment. “Well,” he said, but that’s as far as he got.

“Hell-o?!” A stylishly coiffed and suited woman appeared in the doorway. It was Liz Chambers, the hospital’s public-relations officer. A former local news anchor, Liz always looked ready to go on camera at a moment’s notice. “Y’all aren’t throwing a party without me, are you?” She said it teasingly, but I saw her survey the room the same swift way Sievers had, and I braced for trouble.

“I sent you a memo about this last week, Liz,” said Sievers. “The radiation drill?”

It took everything I had to keep my jaw from dropping in disbelief. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Miranda. She was standing perfectly still, but tension coiled in her body. Despite the stresses of the past few hours, I could tell by her gleaming eyes that she was intrigued by this latest scene in the drama unfolding around us.

“What radiation drill? I didn’t get any memo about this,” said Liz. “I would have put out a press release. We could have gotten great media coverage.”

“I didn’t send you the memo? Crap,” said Sievers convincingly. “I am so sorry, Liz.”

“It’s actually my fault,” I said. I had no idea what I was doing, but something in the phone calls had changed things, and I didn’t want to leave Sievers hanging out there all alone. “I pulled this together on short notice.” Liz stared at me. “You remember that DMORT training we had a couple of days ago at the Body Farm?” She nodded suspiciously. “Well, Captain Sievers swung by to take a look.” Sievers nodded, not very convincingly. “So I asked if it’d be okay if we did a smaller drill in the morgue, just to take the training through the final step.” I raised both hands in a gesture of submission and apology. “I should have followed up with an email, so he could have brought you into the loop.”

“I told him to follow up,” chimed in Miranda. “Didn’t I tell you to follow up?”

“You did tell me to follow up,” I said. “And I forgot. I’m sorry. I accept full responsibility.”

Liz frowned at me. A small muscle beside her left eye was twitching, and the tendons in her neck were taut as bowstrings. “Guys, it’s hard for me to do my job if nobody tells me what’s going on. There are all kinds of rumors flying around about some kind of radiation accident, and it’ll take me days to put out the brush fires. Sure would have been easier to have put out a press release about a safety exercise.” She took one last look around, lingering on the moon suits, and shook her head sadly — lamenting not just the hassle of quashing rumors, I suspected, but also the lost opportunity to show high-tech training on the local news — and spun on her stilettos.

“That was interesting,” said Johnson, once the clicking of her steps had faded. “Last time I heard that many lies back-to-back was when Bill Clinton was describing the platonic nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”

I turned to Hank and Sievers to ask about the phone conversations that had set the series of lies in motion. “FBI,” said Sievers. “Special Agent Thornton will be here in a few hours.”

Given how intense the phone calls had seemed, I was surprised at the delay. “A few hours? What, he’s watching the UT basketball game on television first?”

“No,” said Hank. “He’s with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. He’s flying down from D.C.” Hank looked at Johnson. “So, what was it we were about to do before we were interrupted?”

Hunkered behind the massive shield they’d assembled, Hank and Johnson edged toward the door of the autopsy suite, towing the tongs and the metal shipping case behind them on a low cart. As the door opened, I heard one of the dosimeters begin to shriek, then Hank crouched lower and the shrieking stopped. The door closed behind them, and Miranda and I watched and listened anxiously. Suddenly both dosimeters began shrieking. Miranda, Sievers, and I looked at one another, worried but unable to do anything. After a few agonizing seconds, the alarms fell silent and I recognized Hank’s voice shouting “Gotcha!” He and Johnson emerged from the autopsy suite, sweating and panting but looking relieved. Hank was wheeling the cart with the metal shipping case on it; Johnson held the wand of the ionization chamber over the box, and I was relieved to hear the instrument clicking lazily.

“Okay,” said Hank, “I think we’re okay now. We did a survey, and there’s nothing in there to be concerned about. Well, nothing except for that really disgusting corpse. Yuck. There’s nothing radiological to be concerned about. That one little pellet was it.”

“Let’s get this upstairs to the radiopharmaceuticals lab,” said Duane. “It would probably be fine in this box — we ship medical isotopes in these all the time, and the lead canister inside is about an inch thick — but I’d feel better if we had it locked in a hot cell.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

“First, though,” he said, “I should call TEMA again, tell them it’s under control.” He unzipped his suit and fished a cell phone out of a pocket. He hit a speed-dial button, then put the cell on speakerphone.

“TEMA, this is Wilhoit,” said a voice from the speaker.

“Hi, it’s Duane Johnson, at UT Medical Center again,” said Duane. “I’m calling to let you know we’ve retrieved the gamma source that was in the morgue. We’ve got it in a lead shipping container now, and we’re taking it up to one of the hot cells in Nuclear Medicine now.”

“Excuse me,” said Wilhoit. “TEMA has jurisdiction over this, not UT. We’ll decide what to do with it when we get there.”

“Be my guest,” said Johnson. “You should’ve spoken up sooner. I’d’ve been happy to let you go in there and fish it out of the sink for us.”

The speaker fell silent for a few seconds. “Look, I’m glad you guys have secured it. I would have taken it a little slower, called in some more people and equipment—”

“—and generated two or three days of paralysis and panic doing it that way,” said Johnson. “We safed an extremely hot source in about an hour. We have years of experience here dealing with radioisotopes. If something like this had to happen, it’s hard to imagine a better-equipped place for it to happen than UT Medical Center. So: now that we’ve safed it for you, what does TEMA propose to do with a hundred curies of iridium-192?”

“We’ll have a staff meeting in the morning to discuss the options,” said Wilhoit. “Whoever owns the source is the culpable party, and they have a responsibility to collect and dispose of it.”

“And you think the ‘culpable party’ is going to be eager to step forward,” said Johnson, “eager to own up to one man’s death and four people’s exposure in the morgue? Meanwhile — as we wait for this ‘culpable party’ to step forward to say ‘Arrest me, and please sue me for millions of dollars, too’—do you plan on stashing this in your attic?”

The TEMA official fell silent again. “The Department of Energy,” he finally said. “DOE has a Radiological Assistance team based over in Oak Ridge. I’ll ask the governor to ask the feds to take it off our hands.”

“Sounds great,” said Johnson. “But at the risk of sounding like a broken record: Until DOE gets here, would you mind if we lock it up in a hot cell? That seems a little more secure than the frickin’ hallway it’s sitting in right now.”

Two minutes and a little fence-mending later, Johnson trundled the box to the elevator and up to a hot cell — a massive box of lead and leaded glass, equipped with robotic manipulator arms — built to handle powerful radiopharmaceuticals without risk to the hands and bone marrow of technicians and pharmacists.

It was a shame Garcia hadn’t known to conduct Leonard Novak’s autopsy inside a hot cell. Garcia might have looked like a mad scientist, wielding robotic arms to dissect a corpse. But better a mad scientist than a maimed or dying doctor.

CHAPTER 7

The knock on my office door made me jump, and I realized that I must have nodded off. Miranda and I had spent several hours with Carmen Garcia. Around midnight we’d returned to her husband’s hospital room, where we’d stayed until it was time for our 7 A.M. blood sample. Carmen had been terrified to learn that her husband — who had left home that morning as usual, kissing her and their baby goodbye in the kitchen after breakfast — was now a hospital patient, his hands and possibly even his life jeopardized by one of the bodies he had autopsied.

Garcia had served as the medical examiner for less than a year now; he’d been hired from Dallas to take Jess Carter’s place when Jess was killed. At first I’d disliked Garcia — he’d struck me as stuffy and condescending — but I soon realized that what I’d mistaken for stuffiness was actually just a veneer of formality, maybe even shyness. A slight, handsome man, he’d grown up in a well-to-do Mexico City family before being sent to the United States for college and medical school. His wife Carmen was a Colombian beauty; their Latino genes had combined to produce a gorgeous toddler, Tomas, who had a thick shock of curly black hair and enormous brown eyes. Miranda had taken to babysitting for Tomas one evening a week. She claimed it was so the boy’s harried parents could relax over dinner and a movie, but I suspected it was because she was so smitten with the child.

Another knock; another awakening. I had fallen back asleep after the first knock. “Sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Come in.”

“How’s Dr. Garcia?”

“Too soon to know,” I said, fully awake now. “But it doesn’t look good. Are you Special Agent Thornton?”

“Yes sir. Charles Thornton.”

He stepped into my office and gave me a solid handshake. Thornton was tall and lanky — six foot two, maybe, and tipping the scales at around 190; possibly 200, since he seemed to be carrying some lean muscle on his frame. His sandy hair was cut short, but it appeared to contain some styling gel and some color highlights and some attitude. Then there was the tie: he wore one, but he wore it loosely, like it was an afterthought or an ironic commentary; like he might take it the rest of the way off any minute. The tie was printed with an abstract design that was either the work of an artistic genius or a second grader. The guy was almost a cop, but not quite. Too metrosexual, if I understood the term right. I suspected some of his more buttoned-down FBI colleagues regarded his wardrobe with mistrust.

Thornton glanced around my office, taking in the grimy windows, the fretwork of crisscrossing steel girders outside, and the skulls resting on the wide windowsill. “I’m pleased to meet you, sir. I’ve heard a lot about the Body Farm from the Forensic Recovery Teams who’ve trained there. It’s a great opportunity for them.”

“We’re always glad to help,” I said. “And you don’t have to ‘sir’ me. Hell, you’re the high-wattage guy from FBI headquarters.”

He grinned, a lopsided, aw-shucks kind of grin. “Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate — sounds impressive, doesn’t it? I’m actually pretty low on the food chain, though.”

“Well, Captain Sievers practically saluted Hank’s cell phone when you started talking yesterday,” I said. “What’d you say to make such an impression?”

“Not much,” he said. “Usually the more I say, the less impressive I get.” That drew a laugh from me, weary though I was. “The WMD Directorate is part of the National Security Branch. I just told Captain Sievers this incident could involve terrorism and national security, and that we’d appreciate it if he could help us keep it low-profile till we figured out if there was a bigger threat.”

“Were you just blowing smoke to keep Sievers in line? Or might there really be a bigger threat?”

“In the post-9/11 world,” he said, “we consider any suspicious incident involving radiation to be terrorism, and we assume the threat could be big until we find out otherwise.”

Thornton pulled a small, glossy pamphlet out of a jacket pocket and handed it to me. Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the title panel read. A Pocket Guide. Inside, one panel described various weapons — explosive, chemical, biological, and radiological — while a second panel listed the federal laws terrorists would be breaking if they used weapons of mass destruction. The pamphlet’s innermost spread outlined how the FBI would assess the danger from an actual or threatened WMD attack.

“Yikes,” I said. “Good to know you guys are prepared, but scary that there’s the need to print this sort of thing in mass quantity. Also scary that you have to assume the worst.”

“We’ll be happy to be proven wrong,” he said. “We’ve sent the source to Savannah River National Laboratory, where we have a forensic rad lab. The lab should be able to tell us where it came from, and when.”

“It’s already there? That was quick.”

He shrugged. “We figured that since we were sending a plane to Knoxville anyhow, we might as well get some more mileage out of it. A couple of my cohorts landed in South Carolina with it about thirty minutes ago. That’s not for public consumption, by the way, but I wanted you to know we’ll be bringing a lot of resources to bear on this.”

“That’s good to know,” I said. “Listen, I was just about to go look in on Dr. Garcia. You want to come with me?”

“Thanks, but I guess I should pass,” he said. “I probably should start seeing what we can dig up in Oak Ridge.”

“I understand,” I said. “Good luck.”

Just then I heard Miranda’s voice in the hallway. “Hey, boss, you ready to go back across the river?”

“Can’t wait,” I said as she reached the doorway. “Miranda, this is Special Agent Charles Thornton. Agent Thornton, this is my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady.”

Thornton held out a hand — more eagerly than he’d extended it to me, I thought — and said, “Chip. Call me Chip.”

“Miranda runs the bone lab and works forensic cases with me,” I said. “She was in the autopsy suite yesterday.”

“I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” he said. “Dr. Brockton invited me to head over to the hospital with you guys to meet Dr. Garcia. We can talk on the way.” Miranda looked a question at me; I answered with a slight shrug of the shoulders. Thornton had apparently decided he could wait a bit to start his spadework in Oak Ridge.

Despite the tangle of tubes and wires attached to him, Eddie Garcia looked better than he had in the ER fourteen hours before. His nausea and diarrhea had subsided, and ordinary fatigue had replaced panic as the predominant look on his face.

“You look pretty good,” I said. “You sure it wasn’t just something you ate?” Miranda elbowed me by way of a reprimand, then reached out and gave Garcia’s arm a squeeze. I felt a flash of panic when she did that — could that increase her exposure? — then I remembered the scene with the fearful ER nurse, and I felt ashamed. Garcia wasn’t contaminated or dangerous, I reminded myself; just exposed and endangered. Amazing, I thought, how easily fear trumps logic. I introduced Thornton, who shook hands with Garcia and then whipped out copies of the handy pocket guide for him and Miranda.

“Swell,” said Miranda. “Now I feel better.” Thornton glanced at me, but I just smiled. Apparently most people didn’t react to the pamphlet with the same pessimism Miranda and I had shown. She fluttered her fingers in the general direction of Garcia’s attachments. “What are all these things they’ve fastened to you since we were here a few hours ago?”

“The wires are EKG leads so they can monitor my heart,” he said. “One of the drips is saline and electrolytes, to replace what I’ve been losing from both ends. I have a line they can tap for blood without sticking me every time. So far, I’ve managed to fend off the nurse with the urinary catheter.”

“Pick your battles,” I said. “As good as you look, Eddie, I bet you’ll be out of here by this time tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “Appearances are deceiving with radiation sickness,” he said. “And you heard Dr. Sorensen; once the symptoms disappear, it’s just a matter of time before they come back with a vengeance. Sorensen’s seen a lot of cases of radiation sickness; if he’s worried about me, I’m in trouble.” I winced at his unsparing realism, though I admired the courage it took to face his situation squarely.

Miranda wheeled to face Thornton. “Who would have done this, and for God’s sake, why? It makes no sense. Why not just shoot the old guy, or strangle him? Why not just let him die of old age?” Her voice shook with anger and sorrow.

“Our people in Behavioral Sciences — the profilers — are asking exactly those questions now.” He looked as if he were about to add something, then changed his mind and kept quiet.

Miranda saw the hesitation, and she pounced. “What?”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “It’s just…you know the riddle of the albatross?”

She looked perplexed. “Uh, something to do with a sailor who shoots a bird and brings bad luck down on a whole ship?”

“No, that’s a poem,” said Thornton. “This is a riddle. A man who has returned from a voyage walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders the albatross. The waiter brings it, the guy takes one bite, then rushes out of the restaurant and goes home and kills himself. Why?”

“Seems a bit of an overreaction,” I said. “It must have been really, really bad albatross.”

“It’s a guessing game,” said Thornton. “You have to guess what happened earlier, before he walked into the restaurant. You can ask me yes-or-no questions.”

“Was it really, really bad albatross?”

“No,” laughed the agent.

Miranda: “But his reaction had something to do with the albatross?”

“Yes.”

Me: “Was it fairly bad albatross?”

“Irrelevant.”

“That’s not yes or no,” I pointed out.

“But it’s helpful,” said Miranda, “and we need all the help we can get. Had he ever had albatross before?”

“No.”

Garcia: “Was there special significance to the fact that it was albatross?” Yes. “Did the man feel guilty about eating an albatross?” No.

A series of questions from me: “Was the man already depressed before he tasted the soup?” Yes. I thought of Jess. “Had the man lost someone he loved?” Yes. “And was an albatross somehow connected to that loss?” Yes. “Was it his wife he’d lost?” Yes. “Did she die on the voyage?” Yes.

Miranda: “Was there a shipwreck?” Yes. “Did she perish in the shipwreck?” Yes. “Was the man marooned on a desert island?” Yes. “All alone?” No. “Were other survivors with him?” Yes. “Did any of the others die?” No. “Were they marooned for a long time?”

“Depends on how you define it,” he said. “Ask more specifically.”

Me: “More than a month?” No. “More than a week?” Yes.

Garcia: “Did they have food from the ship?” No. “Did they catch fish?”

“No. Not enough, anyway.” Thornton was cheating slightly, maybe because we were slow.

Miranda: “Did they eat other food on the island?” Yes. “Albatross?” No. “Did the man think it was albatross?”

Thornton began to smile. “Yes, he did.”

“Bless his heart,” she said. “No wonder he killed himself.”

I was utterly bewildered. “What?” I stared from one of them to the other. “So are you two actually twins, separated at birth, with a secret language and some weird twin-logic all your own?”

“The survivors resorted to cannibalism,” she said. “They cooked his dead wife, but they told him it was albatross.”

“Huh?”

“Ah,” said Garcia. “So when he tasted the albatross in the restaurant, he realized that he’d never tasted albatross before — and he realized that it was his wife they’d eaten on the island.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I still think the guy overreacted.”

“Looks like overreaction to us,” said Thornton, “but to him, it seemed the only acceptable response. Same thing with the iridium murder or suicide. Once we know the backstory, we’ll understand the reason for the bizarre method.” He looked at Garcia. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get the guy who did this to you.”

Garcia gave Thornton an odd, sad smile. “Thank you, Agent Thornton,” he said. “But I have already eviscerated the guy who did this to me.”

Thornton turned bright red. “Wow,” Miranda said to Garcia, “you don’t even need a scalpel to eviscerate a guy.”

The FBI agent blinked as he processed Garcia’s joke and Miranda’s response. “Man, I’m out of my league here,” he said. “I better call headquarters and tell ’em to send the A-Team down to Tennessee.”

“Damn skippy,” said Miranda. “But don’t worry. We’ll go easy on you till they get here.” She flashed him a smile, and Thornton blushed again. He looked considerably more cheerful about it this time around.

CHAPTER 8

By the time Miranda, Thornton, and I left the hospital, the lid was blowing off the story. Rightly or wrongly, I blamed the skittish ER nurse for leaking word of the incident — I could imagine her calling WBIR-TV or the Knoxville News Sentinel to complain that she and other ER staff had been exposed to radioactive contamination. The truth, though, was that any number of people besides the nurse could have tipped off the media, including morgue employees (all of whom were being checked for exposure now), hospital police officers, even ORPD colleagues of Emert.

By midmorning, reporters from WBIR, the Knoxville News Sentinel, and the Oak Ridger were besieging UT Medical Center and the Oak Ridge Police Department for information about what had happened in the morgue. The hospital’s PR officer, Liz Chambers, was furious that she’d been lied to. It took a personal visit from Special Agent Thornton to calm her down, though I wasn’t sure whether it was the national-security angle or Thornton’s personal charm that eased the facial tick and relaxed the neck tendons.

Liz initially issued a terse statement indicating that during a routine autopsy at the medical center, elevated levels of radioactivity were detected in the remains of Dr. Leonard Novak, a former Oak Ridge physicist. The radioactivity had been contained, the morgue was safe, the source of the elevated activity was being investigated, and everyone who had been exposed was being carefully monitored, the statement concluded.

That sanitized version survived only through the noon news. By the five o’clock newscast, the story had attained critical mass in the media. A squadron of news helicopters spent the afternoon circling the hospital for aerial shots. In the Anthropology Department, Peggy was swamped with calls from reporters who’d heard that I was in the morgue at the time of the incident. Luckily, I’d talked with Peggy several times since the incident; otherwise she might have believed the journalist who called to ask how Peggy felt about my untimely death in the morgue. I thought of Mark Twain’s famous quip. “Tell the guy I said, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ Then tell him those were my dying words.”

As the story took on a life of its own, reporters and news anchors began to speculate about whether Dr. Novak had absorbed enough radiation during his decades of work in Oak Ridge to become a hazardous source himself. It was a medical version of the glow-in-the-dark cliché, and it was the same question Emert had asked. Then they began to speculate that he might have been poisoned with polonium-210, as former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko had been in the fall of 2006. After a parade of experts had refuted the glow-in-the-dark theory, polonium seemed to become the media’s prime suspect. REAC/TS took blood samples from everyone who’d been in the morgue during the time the body was there — eleven additional people — and from the five other police officers who’d been at the pool.

Like some insidious form of contamination, the polonium theory spread from one news outlet to another. Polonium-210 was a potent source of alpha radiation, the stories pointed out, and although alpha particles could not penetrate skin — they would, in fact, bounce off clothing or a sheet of paper — the particles were dangerous if inhaled or ingested. Soon the stories were focusing on possible sources of “the polonium.” Early on, most stories hinted that the polonium must have come from Russia, where nearly all of the world’s polonium-210 was produced. Soon, though, enterprising journalists were pointing out that polonium-210 was found in antistatic brushes widely used by photographers and darkrooms to remove dust from camera lenses and enlargers. The media spotlight swiftly swiveled toward the Staticmaster brush — available from Amazon.com for $34.95—which contained five hundred microcuries of polonium-210, or about one-sixth of a potentially lethal dose. Within hours every camera shop in Knoxville had sold out of Staticmaster brushes, as journalists raced to prove their resourcefulness and bravery by acquiring and brandishing an actual source of polonium. My favorite story was the one that showed the Staticmaster brush approaching the lens of the television camera itself, looming ever closer and blurrier, until finally the brush blotted out the lens entirely, just as the reporter hinted at dark deeds investigators hoped to bring to light.

By the late-night newscast on WBIR, Special Agent Charles Thornton himself — wearing a navy blue suit and sporting a businesslike gold tie cinched tight at his collar — was addressing a crowded press conference. Although he could not, Thornton said, comment specifically on any current investigation, he assured the cameras that the FBI took very seriously any actual or threatened crimes involving radioactive or nuclear materials, and was committed to investigating and preventing any such crimes. Thornton regretfully declined to take questions, including a shouted question about whether the FBI had removed radioactive material from UT Medical Center. Immediately after he ducked that question, though, the station aired a brief, fuzzy video clip — I gathered it had been shot by a hospital employee with a cell phone video camera — showing Thornton and two dark-suited agents wheeling a cart onto the loading dock at the back of UT Hospital and lifting a dark, square container into the trunk of a black sedan. Fuzzy though the video was, I recognized the box. It was the lead-lined shipping case where Duane Johnson and Hank Strickland had secured the tiny pellet of iridium-192 that had killed Dr. Leonard Novak. The pellet that might yet kill Dr. Eddie Garcia.

CHAPTER 9

For sixty-five years, Leonard Novak lived atop Black Oak Ridge — the ridge John Hendrix had prophesied about and the ridge that later inspired the city’s name. Like thousands of other workers who descended on the wartime city-in-the-making, Novak had moved into a mass-produced house that had been knocked together in a matter of days. The walls were made of “cemesto,” structural panels formed from cement and asbestos sandwiched around a fiberboard core. Such carcinogen-laden building materials would never pass environmental muster these days — in fact, renovating or demolishing a cemesto house these days was considered riskier than living in one. But Oak Ridge was born of wartime urgency, and cemesto houses — trucked to Tennessee in modules that could be quickly connected — allowed the Manhattan Engineer District to build the city in record time. Local lore held that children walking home from school during the war years often got lost, because whole new neighborhoods would have sprung up during the hours between the Pledge of Allegiance and the end-of-the-day bell.

The people in cemestos were the lucky few. Shared dormitory rooms, small trailers, camplike “hutments,” and flimsy “Victory cottages” were far more common. The cemestos were reserved for the people higher in the scientific or managerial or military food chain, and the higher your rung on the ladder, the higher your house on the hill. “Snob Hill,” those who lived down in the valley called it.

As I followed the curves of Georgia Avenue up the ridge, I noticed that a few of the houses still showed their original cemesto exteriors. Most, though, had been modernized with siding and thermal-pane windows; many sported carports or garages or additions, small or large. Novak’s house was sided in gray clapboards, with white shutters and a bright red door. The house was on the north side of the ridge, and as I parked in front and walked down the steps, I caught a glimpse of daylight and the distant mountains behind the house.

Emert, Thornton, and two forensic techs were already inside; so was Art Bohanan. Emert had taken the ten-week training offered by the National Forensic Academy — a cooperative program of UT and the Knoxville Police Department — and when Art had come in to teach the academy’s two-day session on fingerprinting, Emert had impressed him with his conscientious attitude and meticulous work. It had taken a bit of administrative diplomacy — including an informal request from the FBI, which also knew and respected Art’s work — but Emert had managed to persuade KPD to allow Art to assist with fingerprinting at Novak’s house.

As I walked into the living room, Emert handed me a pair of gloves to wear, so I couldn’t inadvertently muddy the waters. I didn’t plan to touch anything, but just to be on the safe side, I donned the gloves. They’d been at it for over two hours by the time I got there; they’d begun right about the time my nine o’clock Human Identification class was getting started, the students shedding their coats and fortifying themselves with long swigs of mocha-hazelnut-latte-cappuccinos, or Irish coffees, or whatever it was they had in those quart-size Starbucks cups.

The first thing that struck me about Novak’s house was how spectacular the view out the back was. The interior of the house had been opened up by knocking out several walls, and while a brick fireplace remained to hint at the original boundary between living room, dining room, and kitchen, the rest of the space flowed around that fireplace like water around a small island, and the flow seemed to empty out a large bank of windows across the back. Twenty miles north, the Cumberland Mountains — still dusted with a snowfall from the prior week — sparkled in the midday sun. The view was framed by a pair of blue spruce trees, sixty or eighty feet tall, which must have been planted shortly after Novak had moved into the house. A long, low built-in desk ran along most of the back wall, with glass-doored bookcases tucked beneath most of its length. An elegant black spindleback chair was pushed back slightly from a yellow notepad that lay at the center of the neat desk; the lettering on the notepad read “Opp,” “GK,” “Frank,” “JJ,” and “Alex.”

On either side of the notepad were several books. I bent down to check the titles. Two by Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. A gray-and-tan textbookish tome titled The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Agency, Volume 1. Three books whose titles contained a word I mistook for Verona, the city in Italy, but then realized was actually “Venona” instead. Their subtitles promised shocking revelations about Soviet espionage and atomic spies.

I wandered back around the fireplace, where Emert and Art were studying a glass display case on the mantel. Thornton had migrated to the kitchen with one of the techs. The display case, roughly a foot square and several inches deep, contained two beautiful knives. One had a handle of horn or ivory, intricately carved with Moorish-looking patterns; the other’s handle was laminated, layered with many exotic woods, their colors ranging through all the hues of the spectrum. The most remarkable thing about the knives, though, was their blades: the steel had swirls and patterns as rich as red oak, as complex as burled maple. “Fancy knives,” I said. “What’s that swirly, grainy kind of steel called? Da Vinci?”

“Close,” said Art. “Damascus steel. Actually, if you want to split hairs, it’s called ‘pattern welded.’ It’s like the baklava of steel — the way you make it is by folding the steel over on itself lots of times, and forging all the layers together, like pastry with zillions of thin layers.”

“The baklava of steel? You never cease to amaze me. How do you know this weird stuff?”

Art shrugged. “I’ve got a cousin in Nashville who’s a blacksmith. He makes stuff like this, when he’s not shoeing horses for rich country singers who never actually ride.”

“So despite the aesthetic beauty of these two knives,” said Emert — he emphasized the words “aesthetic beauty,” either to make sure we didn’t miss his highbrow vocabulary or to let us know he was making fun of the pretentious phrase—“what I find more intriguing is the third knife.”

“What third knife? I only see two,” I said.

“My point exactly,” he said.

I looked at the case again. The knives were each supported by a pair of wooden pegs, one peg under the handle, the other under the edge of the blade. A third set of pegs stood in the center of the case, empty.

“Lots of dust on the case,” said Art, “but see there, and there?” He pointed to two smudges on the glass. “Looks like it’s been opened fairly recently. How’s about I dust that? See if it was Novak or somebody else who did the opening?”

“I knew there was a reason I asked for your help,” Emert dead-panned.

“There’s some interesting reading material on the desk,” I said. “Soviet spies and such. Did you see that?”

“I did,” he said. “We took pictures of the notepad and the book titles. Novak checked the books out of the library pretty recently. Thornton was very interested in those. I’m guessing his cohorts up at Bureau headquarters will be, too, since they’re already spun up about terrorists and the gamma source.”

“Hey, guys?” It was Thornton, calling from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” yelled Emert. “Whatcha got?”

“Spoiled milk and rotten vegetables in the fridge,” said the agent. “Healthy Choice entrées in the freezer. And Prince Albert in a can, hiding behind the Healthy Choice.”

Emert and I looked at each other. “Shit,” he said softly, then — louder, to Thornton and whoever was with him in the kitchen—“don’t touch it. Let me come check it out with my chirper.” The detective reached down to his belt and removed a small, pagerlike device. “Personal radiation monitor,” he said, checking a small display to be sure the gadget was on. “An active dosimeter, like Duane and Hank wear. That day in the morgue spooked me bad. I don’t even let my wife near me without switching this on.”

“I bet she really likes it,” said Art, “when you tell her she’s not hot.”

“I might oughta choose my words carefully,” he conceded, disappearing around the chimney. A moment later, he said, “It’s okay. Let’s see if there’s anything besides pipe tobacco inside.”

Art and I wandered in to see. With five of us in there, the kitchen was getting crowded. The forensic tech was holding a painted tin can bearing the scuffed image of Queen Victoria’s bewhiskered, pipe-smoking husband. A small metal key was affixed to the can’s rim — a built-in lever to pry the lid off. The tech set the can on the counter and raised the key. The lid seemed stuck. The technician pressed harder and the key began to bend. Finally, just as it seemed that the key would break, the lid popped from the can, cartwheeled through the air, and clattered to the floor. “Smooth,” said Emert. “That’s good for the evidence.”

“Sorry,” said the tech.

Emert peered into the can, then picked it up and tilted it toward Art and me. Tucked into the can was what appeared to be a roll of photographic film. “Looks like 35-millimeter, right?”

“Almost, but not quite,” I said. “Look at the ends of the canister.”

He looked. “What about them?”

“There’s no spindle,” I said. “I use a 35-millimeter camera to shoot slides at death scenes, so I’ve loaded lots of film. If you look at the top or the bottom of the film canister, there’s this spindle — like an axle — that the film is wound around. When you’ve finished shooting the roll, a little crank turns the spindle to rewind the film.”

He looked puzzled. “So it’s not film?”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it is,” I said. “See that slit, in the edge of the canister? It’s lined with black felt. That’s the opening for the film. The black felt keeps light from leaking in. I think maybe it’s just really old film — like, forty or fifty years old.”

“So if it is film,” Emert said, “is it exposed film or unexposed film? Are there pictures on here, or was he just trying to keep the film from going bad till he got around to using it?”

“It must’ve been shot,” said Art. “If it weren’t, there’d be a little tab of film sticking out — the leader, it’s called, right?” I nodded.

“So what the hell’s he doing keeping it in his freezer all these years,” Emert said, “if he’s got pictures on there?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Maybe if we develop the pictures, we’ll have a better idea. You guys got a darkroom?”

He shook his head. “We send things to the TBI lab. But with everything going to digital, they’ve cut back their photography unit. It might take weeks to get this processed. And if it’s some weird old film, I’m not sure they could even do it.”

“The Bureau has a pretty good photo lab,” said Thornton.

“You know who’s great with old photos and film,” I said, “is Thompson Photo Products, in Knoxville. Those guys practically eat, sleep, and breathe in black-and-white. If you want me to, I’ll drop it by Thompson’s on my way back to UT.”

“He’s right,” said Art, “they’re the best. Anytime we get in over our heads at KPD on photography stuff, we go to them.”

Thornton shrugged. “Fine with me,” he said. “It’s probably just pictures of the Physics Department picnic back in 1955, but who knows — we might get lucky.” Emert sealed the film canister in an evidence bag and handed it to me, then went to the living room and pulled an evidence receipt from the depths of a battered leather briefcase.

I checked my watch. “I should probably head on over there,” I said. “I think they close at five, and it’s nearly four now.”

“Go,” he said. “Thanks for playing courier. Let me know what develops.” Art and I groaned in unison.

As I walked out the front door, my eye was caught by a small flash of white in the bushes beside the porch. Bending down for a closer look, I saw that it was a wadded-up scrap of paper. I stuck my head back in the door. “Guys? This is probably nothing, but you might want to check it out.” Emert came out, inspected the crumpled paper, and asked the tech to bring tweezers. The detective plucked the paper from the shrubbery, took it back inside, and laid it on a small table just inside the door, beside a handful of unopened mail. Wielding the tweezers gently, he teased open the wadded paper. Thornton, Art, and I gathered around and leaned in to look. As the paper unfolded, the inked squiggles became letters, and the letters became words.

The words read, “I know your secret.”

CHAPTER 10

It wasn’t often that I attended the funerals of people whose remains I had examined. For one thing, I usually had no sense of connection with them, despite my strange intimacy with their bodies and bones — despite the fact that in most cases, I had handled the very framework of their physical lives. In Novak’s case, I had not actually handled his bones; only Garcia had been unfortunate enough to have close, prolonged contact with Novak’s remains. Yet at the moment when I realized that Novak had exposed Garcia — and, to a lesser degree, Miranda (and even me) to gamma radiation — the flash of knowledge and concern and fear had seared me with something as emotionally powerful as the radiation, involving me in this case in a unique and powerful way. I wanted to help catch whoever had murdered Novak — assuming it really was a bizarre murder, rather than an even more bizarre suicide. More to the point, I wanted to help catch whoever had put my friends Eddie and Miranda at risk, even though that was surely not intentional. What was the military euphemism for unintended casualties? Collateral damage. Eddie Garcia’s bone marrow and hands, and Miranda’s fingertips — if Sorensen’s worst-case medical scenario unfolded — might be considered minor collateral damage by a killer. But by my heart’s reckoning, those would be grievous losses.

The other factor that had drawn me to Oak Ridge for Novak’s funeral was anthropological fascination. As a physical anthropologist, I’d spent years handling the most basic and tangible remnants of human beings: their bones. Human culture, though — the structures built not of calcium or muscle or bricks and boards — had taken a backseat in my mind, except for the dark corners of culture where murder lurked. I knew, for instance, that men were partial to guns as their murder weapons, whereas women seemed to prefer knives or poison (although those traditional gender preferences appeared, in recent years, to be blurring). I knew that homosexuals often engaged in “overkill”—excessive and shocking violence, far beyond what was needed to end a life — if murdering a partner. I had learned that if a child was abducted by a sexual predator, the odds of finding the child alive plummeted after twenty-four hours. The rich drama of healthier human culture, though, had largely played out beyond my field of view, since my field of view was generally filled by images such as the mark left by a knife as it sliced through a rib, or the pattern of fractures radiating through a skull that had been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat.

Years before, I had taken graduate school courses in cultural anthropology. I had journeyed with Franz Boas — figuratively speaking — as he explored the fluid boundaries and social units of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s and early 1900s. I had peered over Margaret Mead’s shoulder as she had researched the casual sexual couplings of teenagers on the South Pacific island of Samoa in the 1920s. But the unique cultural creation that was Oak Ridge — a small, secret, authority-dominated enclave where tens of thousands of young men and women were treated almost like worker ants in an anthill, except for a handful of military and scientific leaders who possessed the social status and secret knowledge traditionally reserved for an elite caste of high priests: I had never peered at Oak Ridge through the inquiring lens of an anthropologist.

Now, the odd case study that was Oak Ridge all but consumed me. In the handful of days since I had cut a physicist’s body from the ice of a murky frozen swimming pool, Oak Ridge had come to occupy most of my waking thoughts and more than a few of my dreams, and one of the things I found amazing was that it had taken so many years — and such a dramatic turn of personal events — to trigger my fascination. It was impossible to live in East Tennessee without knowing that Oak Ridge had played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. It was almost as widely understood that in the decades that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oak Ridge had helped harness atoms for peace, in the form of nuclear power and radioisotopes for medical research and treatment. Beyond those superficial bullet points, though, I had never bothered to read much or think much about the opening chapter in the history of Oak Ridge. As I considered it now, I marveled, again and again, how profoundly this tiny city had changed not just the nation but the entire world. Talk about a lever and a place to stand: nuclear energy was about as long and strong as a lever could get — I suppose a poet might argue that love or hatred could be stronger, but as a scientist, I would find that argument somewhat abstract and unconvincing — and Oak Ridge had been the fulcrum, the fixed point around which the lever of the atom had swiveled to move the earth.

Oak Ridge wasn’t the only Manhattan Project installation, of course. There was also Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of physicists and other scientists devoted themselves to turning theoretical physics into deliverable bombs. And there was Hanford, Washington, where mammoth reactors — scaled-up versions of Novak’s reactor in Oak Ridge — cranked out the bomb-sized quantities of plutonium. But Oak Ridge was the biggest of the sites, and everything Los Alamos and Hanford did was built on the foundation of Oak Ridge. That alone made the city a fascinating specimen.

But there was more. There was the whole heroic and heartbreaking backdrop to Oak Ridge’s creation behind the veil of secrecy: there was World War II. I wasn’t born until a decade after Germany and Japan surrendered, so I knew only what I’d read and heard and seen, and that was only a small smattering of the historical record and archival images and firsthand stories. But from what I knew, it truly embodied the best of times and the worst of times; the best of mankind, and the cruelest and most depraved.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too — another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting — a dreadful toll, to be sure — American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And how did the hundreds of millions of grieving survivors carry on in the face of such sorrow?

As my truck topped the rise and dropped once more into the valley where Oak Ridge sprawled, I looked at the place with new eyes. Against a global backdrop of unrelenting, apocalyptic death, this small place, which to modern eyes might look haphazard and provisional and ordinary, had been the focal point of the biggest, most complex, and most urgent endeavor the world had ever known. That endeavor was all the more amazing considering that it was accomplished without the world’s knowledge. Until that knowledge had burst, brighter than a hundred suns, above two cities in Japan.

Leonard Novak’s final resting place was barely a stone’s throw from his death scene. The funeral was held in the United Church — called the Chapel on the Hill by every Oak Ridger I heard refer to it — the small, historic church perched on the hillside just above the Alexander Inn. It seemed a fitting place to memorialize one of the pivotal scientists of the Manhattan Project. Although Novak had long since retired, and although Emert had said the scientist wasn’t a churchgoer, the parking lot beside the church was packed, and even the faded asphalt down beside the derelict hotel was filling fast, with more than a few spots occupied by television news vehicles. Novak’s retirement had been a quiet, almost obscure one, according to Emert, but his bizarre death had thrust him squarely into the posthumous spotlight.

I parked in front of the old hotel and made my way up a sidewalk and a long flight of steps to the front door of the chapel.

One of the first public buildings erected during the city’s wartime construction boom, the Chapel on the Hill had done its part for the war effort by hosting services of multiple faiths and denominations. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews — they’d all held weekly services here during the war, each group distributing their prayer books or hymnals just before their appointed hour in the building, then gathering them up again at the end of the service. Church buildings often sit empty and idle most of the time, but not this one. During the war, it would have been hard to find an hour of the day when someone wasn’t preaching or praying or practicing on the church’s pump organ. I would like to have seen a time-lapse video — one compressing a week’s worth of comings and goings into, say, sixty seconds — just to watch the church’s doors open and close, the building rhythmically inhaling and exhaling streams of worshipers.

The chapel’s interior was packed; three television cameras rested on tripods at the back, and every seat seemed taken. I scanned the pews, seeking any open space, but I didn’t see one. In a moment, though, an usher came up the center aisle from near the front of the church and motioned me forward. There were no rows reserved for family — Novak had been married, briefly, as a young man, the newspaper obituary had said, but he had no children — and I found myself shoehorned into the front row, in a slot better suited to someone half my size. The elderly man on my left — I guessed his age at seventy — pretended not to notice me, even as he drew himself in tightly and scooted, fussily but with no noticeable increase in room for me, away from me. To my right, an even older woman — she must have been eighty or more — nodded slightly as I sat down, then surprised me by turning to speak to me. In a stage whisper that could probably have been heard three rows back, she said, “Well, thank God somebody here is under sixty. We’ll be lucky if three or four of us don’t kick the bucket during the service.” I wanted to laugh — she might be old, but she seemed sharp and funny — but I managed to limit myself to a smile, since laughter didn’t seem to suit the setting or the occasion.

There was no coffin; instead an unadorned brass urn rested on a simple wooden altar. Within hours after the FBI had whisked the iridium source out of Knoxville, Garcia had phoned the state medical examiner’s office and they had sent a pathologist from Nashville to complete the autopsy so that Novak’s body — which was not getting any fresher — could be removed from the morgue and cremated. It had taken three people — Garcia, Duane Johnson, and Dr. Sorensen — to convince the Nashville pathologist that Novak’s radiation-ravaged body was no more hazardous than any other corpse. I had heard Johnson explaining the physics of it over the phone. “Think of the gamma source like a really strong magnet sitting on your desk,” he had said. “There’s a powerful energy field emanating from it — a magnetic field surrounding the magnet, gamma radiation around the iridium-192. If the magnet’s too close to your computer, your hard drive is gonna be toast. If the gamma source is too close to your body, well…” He’d trailed off then, probably regretting his use of the word “toast,” given our concerns about Garcia’s hands. “Anyhow,” he went on, “once you get rid of the source, it’s gone. There’s no smear of magnetism lingering on your desk, waiting to trash your new hard drive; there’s no radioactivity in the sink or the cadaver.”

In the end, though, it was probably not the magnet analogy that reassured the nervous Nashville pathologist, but Sorensen’s offer to assist in the morgue. It was one thing to say, “It’s perfectly safe”; it was another to say, “I’ll stand with you while you do this.” And for Sorensen, I realized, participating in the remainder of the autopsy was probably an interesting opportunity to learn more about the specific effects of a lethal dose of gamma radiation.

The body had been cremated by my friend Helen Taylor, in one of the gleaming furnaces at East Tennessee Cremation Services. Helen, too, had seemed nervous about handling the body. Taking a cue from Sorensen, I offered to bring the remains out personally; she thanked me for the offer, but said it wasn’t necessary. In my head, I knew the remains — and now the cremated remains, or cremains — were perfectly safe. Still, something spooked me about that brass urn on the altar. It was not what was in the urn that spooked me, I gradually realized, but what was in me — some kernel of superstition in my heart, some fear germinating in a dark corner of my psyche. Fear for Garcia and Miranda, perhaps. A sense of bad karma in the air, or spiritual fallout drifting down from the past.

I shook off my thoughts and focused on the lectern, where an ancient man was telling a story about Novak’s absentmindedness, which apparently was legendary. “And so we put this lead brick in his briefcase, to see how long it would take him to notice it. He never did. Carried the damn thing around for months.” He laughed, and the congregation laughed with him — enjoying his enjoyment, including the naughtiness of saying “damn” in a church. One of the few consolations of old age, I thought: you can say pretty much anything you want, even outrageous things, and people let them slide, or even find them charming. Beside me I felt a slight shift, then noticed my seatmate jotting a note on her program. She finished writing, then nudged me and held the note toward me with a twinkle in her eye. “Not true,” the spidery script read. “It was Richard Feynman who lugged that lead brick around, and it was in Los Alamos.”

I smiled. I liked her. She seemed both witty and slightly subversive. Her face said eighty, and so did her handwriting, but the note-passing spoke of a mischievous schoolgirl.

After the ancient colleague told a few more anecdotes — some lighthearted, some more serious — a minister took the podium to put Novak’s life and work in a philosophical and theological context. He talked about science and discovery — about Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci — whose given name Novak had shared — and Copernicus and Darwin. He reminded us that curiosity was what had called our primordial ancestors out of the sea and onto dry land. I suspected the aforementioned Darwin might have debated him on that; I didn’t remember reading much about curiosity in The Origin of Species. But this was a sermon, not a lecture, so I took it with a grain of scientific salt. The minister went on awhile about the quest for knowledge being a hallmark of humans. “The divine spark,” he called knowledge. “There is no brighter spark than atomic energy,” he went on — the transition to Oak Ridge, and to Novak, at last. He told how Novak had guided the construction and operation of the Graphite Reactor; how he’d created plutonium within the crucible of the reactor; how he’d mastered the steps needed to separate and purify this new element. “Un-locking the power of the atom,” he said dramatically. “The fire at the core of the universe. Like a twentieth-century Prometheus, Leonard Novak stole fire from the gods.” I heard a small, sharp exhalation from the woman beside me; it sounded surprisingly like exasperation. “Stealing fire from the gods,” the minister repeated, his voice rising as he got swept up in the mythology. “A bold theft. A world-changing theft. A perilous theft. The gift of fire; the curse of fire.” He surveyed the congregation, and stretched forth his arms as if to encompass us. “May we — those of us who dwell in the light and warmth of that Promethean fire”—he now raised his hands toward the ceiling, and the chandeliers glowing there, presumably powered by nuclear energy—“may we acquire the wisdom to harness that fire for good. Always, only for good.” He stood silent, his arms still aloft.

“Oh please.” It was the stage whisper again, surprisingly loud in the silence that had followed the minister’s big finish. I saw a few heads turn in the direction of my elderly seatmate; one of them was the minister’s. A look of confusion and anger flashed across his face, then he regained his composure and directed us to a closing hymn. The words were printed in the program, which everyone but me seemed to have received. We stood to sing, feet scraping and throats clearing, as the organist played a stanza to acquaint us with the melody.

The music sounded quaint and prim, like something from another century. I’d never considered myself much of a singer, so I didn’t much mind that I couldn’t sing along. I did feel slightly self-conscious, though, to be standing amid the singing throng with my mouth closed and my hands empty. I felt a gentle nudge at my right elbow. My neighbor extended her program slightly toward me. She gripped the lower right corner of the page between a bony thumb and knuckle, her skin papery and blue-veined. She gave the program a slight twitch to indicate that I should take hold of the lower left corner. The paper certainly didn’t require both of us to hold it up; rather, the paper was a sort of bridge, a bond, between two strangers jammed together on a wooden pew. It was an oddly intimate gesture. Two strangers bound, by a link and a story, to a brass urn and the ashes within, which had once been Leonard Novak. Together we sang.

As the words of the hymn sank in, I decided to cut the minister some slack for his overheated delivery. The beginning of the song fit with his “divine spark” image, and the ending — well, I decided it took some guts to close an A-bomb scientist’s funeral with an antiwar plea.

I halfway expected to hear a snort or feel a cynical elbow in my ribs at the song’s earnest goodheartedness, but I never did. And as the final notes died away, I glanced to my right and saw that the woman beside me — the same woman who had said “Oh, please” just moments before — had tears on her cheeks.

As the service ended, I turned to her. “Thank you for sharing your pew and your program with me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re Brockton, aren’t you?” I nodded, surprised. “You’re the guy that watches the bodies rot?”

I laughed. “You do have a way with words. How’d you know? Do I smell that bad?”

“I saw your picture in the Oak Ridger a couple of days ago. Here, let’s go out the back door. I don’t want to have to shake the preacher’s hand — it would just embarrass us both.” She steered me through a door that led through a cluttered vestry and out into the thin sunshine. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. Fifty yards ahead of us, walking down the steps and away from the chapel, I saw Jess Carter, my dead lover. I thought I saw her, at any rate: I saw a striking woman wearing Jess’s black hair and Jess’s lithe body, walking Jess’s walk. Then she turned her head enough for me to see that it was not Jess. Of course not: it had been nearly a year since Jess was murdered; I had attended her memorial service in Chattanooga, had seen her ashes buried in a churchyard, had nestled a granite plaque to honor Jess in the ground at the Body Farm, where her corpse had been taken by her killer. How could it possibly be Jess walking ahead of me down a hillside in Oak Ridge?

I felt a tug at my sleeve. My elderly companion was studying my face shrewdly. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” she said.

“I thought I did,” I said. “Or hoped I did. Sorry. You were saying something about the newspaper.”

“Oh, nothing important. Just that I saw your picture in the story about Novak. By the way, I gather that when you came to fetch the body, you left a souvenir behind, in about eight feet of water.” Her eyes were dancing as she pointed a crooked finger at the swimming pool, a hundred yards downslope from where we stood.

“They wrote about my chainsaw?” I meant to sigh but it came out as a laugh. “I wish they’d hurry up and drain that pool.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.

“Oh, it’s starting to warm up,” I said, although I noticed that the rectangular opening I had cut in the surface had refrozen. “It’ll probably thaw out enough to drain in another couple of days.”

“It’s not just the ice,” she said. “It’ll be a miracle if the drain still works. That whole place is falling apart.”

Even from this distance, the inn’s peeling paint and sagging roof were easy to see. So was the murky ice. “It has seen better days.”

“Haven’t we all,” she said, “haven’t we all. That crumbling hotel pretty much sums up Oak Ridge, and all of us who’ve been here since the creation. We used to be young and smart and important — crossroads of the world, at least the world of atomic physics. Look at us now. The glory days are long gone. In a few more years, that hotel will be dust. And so will all the famous people who sat on the porch and figured out how to build the bomb fifty years ago. No, sixty years ago. No, sixty-five, dammit. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence — they’ve been gone a long time. Novak was one of the last. They don’t seem to make them like that anymore.”

“So you knew him?”

“It was a long, long time ago,” she said, “but yes, I did. There’s a story in it. Would you like to hear it sometime?”

“I believe I would,” I said. “I’m guessing you spin a pretty good story.”

“Come see me,” she said, “and we’ll find out.”

She dug around in a small pocketbook and fished out a pen. Folding the photocopied program from the memorial service in half to make it stiffer, she wrote her name, address, and phone number and handed the paper to me.

“Beatrice Novak,” the name read.

My eyes widened. She smiled slightly. “I was married to him,” she said. “Once upon a time.”

CHAPTER 11

I wasn’t ready to leave Oak Ridge yet — I wanted to steep myself a little longer in the sepia-toned sense of history Novak’s funeral had stirred up — so I drove past the strip malls lining Oak Ridge Turnpike and turned in at the American Museum of Science and Energy, a blocky, mud-colored brick building beside the police station. The sidewalk outside the building was edged with spiky components from coal-mining machines and oil-drilling rigs. Inside — through a doorway bordered by barbed wire and a replica of a World War II sentry post — a series of photos and videos and documents told the story of the Manhattan Project. One display panel featured scratchy footage of Albert Einstein, instantly recognizable from the wild mop of fuzzy white hair, captured on film writing a letter. Alongside the video monitor was an enlarged copy of the letter Einstein had sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939, voicing concern about Germany’s atomic-energy research and recommending that the United States embark on a quest to build an atomic bomb. Although it would be two years before much would happen, Einstein’s letter had planted a seed, and — at least in historical hindsight — was part of the bomb’s scientific pedigree.

What interested me most in the darkened room, though, were the wartime photos documenting the creation and wartime years of the town that came to be known as Oak Ridge. In three short years, a handful of rural settlements — family farms, country stores, rustic schoolhouses — was transformed into the biggest scientific and military endeavor in the history of the world.

An elderly museum docent wandered through, possibly because I looked like an unsavory character, but more likely because I was the only visitor and the docent was bored. “These photos are amazing,” I said.

“They have copies of all of these, plus a lot more down at the library,” he said. “In the Oak Ridge Room, which is the local history collection. If you’re interested, it’s worth a look. It’s in the Civic Center, just down the hill.” He pointed toward the back wall of the room, and I remembered seeing a pair of buildings, linked by an outdoor plaza and a fountain, set in a park below the police station. I thanked him and resumed wandering through the displays, which culminated in a short black-and-white film on the flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that lumbered aloft from an airfield on the island of Tinian in the predawn hours of August 6, 1945. Many hours later and ten thousand pounds lighter, the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, having dropped a single bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Almost as an afterthought, the film included a brief segment on the decimation, three days later, of Nagasaki by a second atomic bomb. Two entire cities had been reduced to rubble, and many thousands of people vaporized, in the blink of an eye. And although the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small — scarcely firecrackers, compared to the massive hydrogen bombs developed during the 1950s and 1960s — the images of unprecedented devastation weighed on my heart.

Wandering out of the darkened history room and into the brighter light of the lobby, I lifted a hand in goodbye to the docent. “We have other exhibits,” he called after me. “Nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, neutron research.”

“Another time,” I said. “Today, I’m in history mode.” I pushed through the glass doors, passed the mining and drilling machinery, and ambled down the long, gentle hill toward the Civic Center and the library. In the foreground was an outdoor stage topped by a gleaming white tent of some high-tech architectural fabric. Far off to one side was another, smaller pavilion of some sort, this one a rustic structure framed of wood timber. Curious, I decided to take a closer look. The structure’s gabled roof and heavy beams reminded me of a Japanese temple, and as I drew near, I saw an immense bell — long and cylindrical, rather than wide at the base — suspended from the trusswork. Beside the bell was a plaque. FRIENDSHIP BELL, the words read. It had been cast in Japan in 1993, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Oak Ridge. A SYMBOL OF THE FRIENDSHIP AND MUTUAL REGARD THAT HAVE DEVELOPED BETWEEN OAK RIDGE AND JAPAN OVER THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, it went on. FRIENDSHIP MADE SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL BECAUSE OF THE TERRIBLE CONFLICT OF WORLD WAR II WHICH OAK RIDGE PLAYED SUCH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN ENDING. I was particularly struck by the plaque’s final words: THIS BELL FURTHER SERVES AS A SYMBOL OF OUR MUTUAL LONGING AND PLEDGE TO WORK FOR FREEDOM, WELL-BEING, JUSTICE, AND PEACE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD IN THE YEARS TO COME. Oak Ridge had come a long way, I reflected, turning my steps toward the library.

The library, like its companion building, was a contemporary structure—1970s, I guessed — made of poured, putty-colored concrete topped by bands of clerestory windows. The forms for the concrete had been lined with rough-sawn vertical boards, and the grain of the wood was etched into the concrete. Maybe it was just the reflective mood I was in, but I liked the notion that the wood’s contribution — brief but important — had been captured for posterity in the structure’s very bones.

Inside, I stopped at the circulation desk to ask about the local history room. “Yes, the Oak Ridge Room,” said the young woman at the counter. “It’s right back there.” She pointed toward a back corner of the building. I thanked her and headed that way.

The room had been partitioned off from the main area by glass walls and glass doors. Inside, I saw brimming bookshelves, tall filing cabinets, flat map drawers, and a shelving unit crammed with fat, black binders. If it was local history I was hungry for, the Oak Ridge Room appeared to offer an all-you-can-eat buffet. I took hold of the handle of one of the glass doors and tugged. It rattled but did not open. I tugged on the other door’s handle. Nothing doing.

“Try pushing,” said a female voice behind me. I pushed. Still nothing. “Oh. I guess the lock works after all,” said the voice. I turned and saw a woman with black hair and laughing eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist. You looked so serious.” I stared at her, and her amusement turned to concern. “Really, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just thought—”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “It’s not about the door. The door…the door thing was funny. It’s just that for a second there, you reminded me of someone.” The librarian — Isabella Morgan, according to a plastic nameplate pinned to her sweater — was the woman I’d glimpsed earlier in the day; the woman who made me think I’d seen a ghost. “Weren’t you at Dr. Novak’s funeral?”

She looked startled. “Yes,” she said. There was a pause, and then she added — awkwardly, I thought—“speaking of local history.” I introduced myself, and told her about cutting Novak’s body from the ice of the swimming pool. “Oh right,” she said. “Your picture was in the Oak Ridger. You’re the one with the chainsaw.”

I laughed. “Actually, I’m the one without the chainsaw, as everyone keeps reminding me. Anyhow, I’ve gotten interested in the city’s history. I was hoping to browse around in the Oak Ridge Room for a bit.”

She reached into a pocket of her sweater and pulled out a key. “Browse away,” she said. “Anything in particular I can help you find?”

“Hmm. Well, a guy up at the museum said you’ve got a whole bunch of World War II photographs. Might be fun to look through those, if they’re easy to get to.”

She pointed to the shelves of fat three-ring binders. “Easiest thing in the room to find,” she said. “It’s a remarkable collection.”

“From the ones I saw in the museum,” I said, “it looks like the photographer started snapping pictures before the Army even set foot here.”

“Just about,” she said. “It’s almost like he wanted to show how the prophecy came true.”

“The prophecy? What prophecy?”

“You don’t know about the prophecy?”

“I guess not,” I said. “What prophecy?”

“Around 1900,” she said, “a local mystic predicted the creation of Oak Ridge and the role the city would play in World War II.”

“Some hillbilly a century ago knew about uranium enrichment and plutonium production? So that’s where Fermi and Oppenheimer and Einstein got the idea?”

She smiled. “Well, he didn’t go into details about the physics and chemistry,” she said. “John Hendrix was his name; he was a preacher who was considered a bit of a crackpot. He also drank a bit, they say.”

“Helps the sermons flow more trippingly off the tongue,” I said. “Or gives you more knowledge of sin, maybe.”

“The story goes,” she went on, “that John Hendrix heard a voice telling him to sleep in the woods and pray for forty days and forty nights.”

“That’s a lot of praying,” I said.

She nodded. “On the forty-first day, he emerged and told some people at a little country store that he’d had a vision.” She took down a well-worn book—Back of Oak Ridge—and opened it to a page near the front. “Here’s what he said: ‘There will be a city on Black Oak Ridge’—that’s the ridge where all the World War II housing was built—‘and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock’s farm and Joe Pyatt’s place.’” I was about to ask who Sevier Tadlock and Joe Pyatt were, but — as if reading my mind — she held up a finger to shush me. “He said, ‘A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville, and then branch off and turn toward Scarboro. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake.’ But here’s the best part, where he talks about Bear Creek Valley, where the Y-12 Plant was built: ‘Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be.’” She paused just long enough to let that sink in, then read one more line: “‘I’ve seen it. It’s coming.’”

She closed the book slowly, then looked at me over her glasses, her eyebrows rising to ask, Well?

To my surprise, the words had sent a bit of a shiver along my spine. By this stage of my life, I had become a bit of a skeptic when it came to matters of metaphysics. I dealt in scientific and forensic facts — grim facts, at that — and the comforting words of organized religion ignored a lot of suffering. My faith had also been pretty thoroughly undermined by the unmerited suffering and death of my wife Kathleen a few years before. Nevertheless, I had to admit that occasionally I encountered phenomena that science seemed unable to explain. This prophecy appeared to be another of those.

“He said that in 1900? Forty years before the bulldozers showed up?”

“Somewhere around there. And he died in 1915, so it’s not like he saw it unfold, then stepped forward after the fact and claimed, ‘Oh yeah, I had a vision about this a long time ago.’ It’s been pretty well documented that he came out of the woods wild-eyed, talking about factories and engines and winning a big war.”

“And the bit about Tadlock and Pyatt?”

“Their farms straddled the little hill where the Manhattan Project headquarters was built,” she said. “During the war, it was a huge wooden building nicknamed ‘the castle on the hill.’ In the 1970s, DOE — the Department of Energy — built a concrete and glass building on the same site. So it’s still what Hendrix called ‘the center of authority,’ even today.”

“And the railroad spur?”

“Goes right past his grave,” she said. “Within a mile or so of the Y-12 Plant.”

I nodded. “Sounds like Hendrix got it right,” I said. “A lot more specific than the psychics who call up the police and say, ‘I see a body in a dark, damp place.’ Did he predict the Friendship Bell, too?”

She laughed — a musical laugh that reminded me of pealing bells — and I felt another tingle along my spine. “No, he didn’t look that far ahead,” she said, “though it seems like he should have, since he talked about great wars.” Seeing my puzzled look, she explained. “There was a big controversy about the bell,” she said. “The Peace Bell, most people call it. Some locals thought it was a slap in the face of everyone who’d worked on the Manhattan Project. Too much like an apology. There was even a lawsuit by some folks who claimed it was a religious shrine, and shouldn’t be on public property. The controversy seems to have died down by now, though.”

“Maybe because most of the people who worked on the bomb are dying down, too,” I said. She gave me an odd, sharp look, and I wished I’d been more tactful.

“If you need anything, I’ll be at the Reference Desk,” she said, pointing to the other side of the reading room. She left me flipping through photos of bulldozers and cranes and trucks mired to their axles in mud. But the image that most occupied my mind’s eye was the image of the black-haired, brown-eyed librarian reading me the prophecy of Oak Ridge and its role in winning “the greatest war that ever will be.”

I hoped that the future would prove John Hendrix to be as accurate on that last point as he’d already been on the others.

CHAPTER 12

The morning after the funeral, I woke up feeling more energetic than I had in days. Maybe that was because I’d gotten a solid night’s sleep, uninterrupted by needles jabbing me for blood. Or maybe it was because I’d had a nice dream about the librarian in Oak Ridge. I got to campus by seven, stopped off in the bone lab to leave some notes for Miranda, then spent a couple of hours grading the first Human Origins test of the semester.

At eleven Peggy called. “Don’t forget the talk you’re giving at lunchtime.”

“Which talk I’m giving at lunchtime?”

Even through the receiver, her exasperated sigh carried clearly. “Rotary Club.”

“Oh, the Rotary talk,” I said. “Sure. I remembered. You had me worried for a second there. I was afraid maybe you’d double-booked me.”

“I am never the one who double-books you,” she said tartly.

At eleven-thirty I left campus and drove to the Marriott. The Marriott was an architectural oddity — a concrete wedge that looked like a cross between a Mayan pyramid and a misplaced hydroelectric dam — perched on a hill above the river. Townes Osborn, who had booked me for the talk, was waiting at the entrance when I arrived. Despite her questionable taste in luncheon speakers, Townes — who ran a prominent advertising agency — was the only woman ever elected president of the Knoxville Rotary Club.

After the Rotarians lunched on orange-glazed chicken breast and rice pilaf and whatever vegetable medley was the current fashion among civic groups, I showed slides from a case I’d worked near Nashville some years ago. The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had received a call expressing concern about a well-to-do middle-aged woman who lived alone in a mansion on thirty or forty acres. She hadn’t made the trip down the driveway to the mailbox in more than a week, said the observant neighbor, and although her car was parked at the house, she wasn’t answering the phone. A deputy was duly dispatched to check on the woman. She didn’t come when he rang the bell, but the door was unlocked, so he turned the knob and opened it to call out to her. When he did, the woman’s three large dogs — two German shepherds and a collie — bolted past him and into the yard.

The woman was nowhere to be seen — at least not in recognizable human form. The story, as we quite literally pieced it together, was this: The woman, who had a serious heart condition, had died, and with no other source of sustenance available, her dogs had eaten her body to stay alive. Combing the house, my students and I found only the cranial vault, the well-chewed shafts of a few long bones, and one painted toenail — just one — which the dogs had turned up their noses at for some odd reason. As the Rotarians chuckled, I thought about the shipwrecked man eating what he believed to be albatross. The dog story had a bizarre postscript: a couple of weeks later, a woman called me from a Nashville bank to ask, “Did you happen to find a seven-thousand-dollar diamond ring in that house?” I did not, I assured her. The bank, it seems, had insured the ring, and if it couldn’t be found, they’d have to pay the sum to the dead woman’s estate.

“There is one other place the ring might be,” I said. The woman was excited to hear this. “You know she was eaten by her dogs,” I said. She gasped; apparently she had not heard this minor detail. “If you could get someone to collect all the dog crap and sift through it, there’s a chance they’d find that ring.” She thanked me profusely and hung up. Two days later, a Williamson County deputy appeared in my classroom with a bag containing thirteen pounds of dog turds. The deputy looked quite unhappy, so I assumed he’d been the one assigned to collect the…evidence. His countenance brightened considerably when I told him that every single turd would have to be carefully squeezed between the fingers of my students. Misery really does love company, I concluded when I saw him grin. Once he was gone, I sent the bag of dog crap to be X-rayed. There was no ring to be seen, though I did notice a tangle of undigested panty hose in the bag — containing another toenail snagged in one stocking foot. “Next time you see your dog looking at you with love and devotion,” I concluded, “remember, he might be thinking about a snack.” The Rotarians laughed and clapped.

During the Q&A session at the end of the talk, Townes asked about Dr. Novak’s death, since the story — including the wild speculation about the “polonium” that had supposedly killed him — had been splashed all over the media. “I can’t really talk about that case,” I said, “since it’s still an open investigation. All I’ll say is that I’m saving a lot on my light bill these days, since I now glow in the dark.” The joke drew a few groans but a fair number of laughs.

As I was packing up my slide projector afterward, an elderly man who’d been sitting near the front of the room approached. “I worked in Oak Ridge during the war,” he said. I was surprised; he had some years on him, but he looked strong and vigorous still.

“Didn’t they have child-labor laws back then? You don’t look old enough to have worked in Oak Ridge during the war.”

He ignored the transparent flattery. “I was in charge of security,” he said, and my head snapped up. Funny: you see a ninety-year-old at a Rotary Club luncheon, you tend to see him just as some old codger with a lot of hours to fill. You don’t tend to look at him and think, I bet this guy once helped guard atomic secrets at the world’s biggest military project. I didn’t say that, of course; I just said, “That was a big job. Must have been tough.”

He shook his head. “Sure beat the hell out of dying on some Jap-infested island in the Pacific,” he said. “I knew I’d live to see the end of the war. And we were working on something that was supposed to help end the war, so I figured I was probably in the best-defended place on earth. I felt like a lucky guy.” I nodded.

“Did you know what you were protecting?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “One of the MPs did, and a day later he was gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They sent him to the Pacific. They didn’t dare send him to Europe, because they didn’t want to take a chance that the Germans would capture him and get some information out of him. Poor bastard was probably dead three months later.” He hesitated, studying me closely, as if to determine whether I was trustworthy. “By the summer of ’45, I had a pretty good idea what they were building. But I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to stay right here.”

We chatted a bit more, then he excused himself. Townes, who’d been talking to several power-suited women, came over to carry my slide carousel to the truck. I said, “Do you know that guy I was talking to? He was in charge of security in Oak Ridge back during the war.”

She smiled. “You might say I know him,” she said. “That’s Bill Sergeant. He spent twelve years spearheading Rotary International’s global campaign to eradicate polio. There’s a statue of Bill downtown in Krutch Park.”

On the way back to campus, I detoured through downtown and parked — briefly — in front of a fire hydrant beside Krutch Park. Seated in the southwest corner, a strong-limbed child perched on his lap, was a life-size bronze statue of a lucky, modest old codger.

CHAPTER 13

Three days after the morgue disaster, Dr. Sorensen had data from dozens of blood samples and urine samples, which he’d gathered to track lymphocyte levels and DNA damage in our cells. That data, combined with the incident timelines we’d compiled, helped him refine his initial estimate of our exposures. He’d been surprisingly close that evening in the ER: Emert had gotten “only” 18 to 24 rads; Miranda and I, 25 to 35 rads; and Garcia, 380 to 520 rads. The lymphocyte counts for everyone but Garcia had dropped only slightly, remaining well within the range considered normal. Garcia’s lymphocytes, however, had plummeted: at his first blood draw, his lymphocyte count was a robust 2,950, a number that corresponded to the nearly three billion white cells in every liter of his blood. Twenty-four hours later, it had fallen to 1100, and at the forty-eight-hour blood sample, it was hovering at 600. His bone marrow was dying, and his immune system was shutting down. According to Sorensen, Garcia was almost certain to develop acute radiation syndrome, probably a severe case. The unspoken subtext of “severe” was that he might not survive.

Garcia had been shifted to a reverse-isolation room — a “bubble” room, I’d heard it called — as even minor infections could prove fatal to him. The air was filtered and the room was pressurized so outside air couldn’t seep in. Still, Miranda and I made it a point to visit the hospital once or twice a day, waving to him through the glass window and talking to him on the intercom. The second morning of his ICU stay, we entered the unit and came upon Carmen Garcia, slumped in a chair in the hallway, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Miranda sat on one side of Carmen, I sat on the other, and we wrapped our arms around her as she wept. When her sobs finally stopped, she reached up and laid one hand briefly on Miranda’s cheek, the other on my cheek, and then she rose and walked toward the elevators. None of us had said a word. After she was gone, Miranda and I went to Eddie’s window. Switching on the intercom microphone and then kneeling down on the concrete floor, we put sock puppets on our hands and enacted a three-minute Punch-and-Judy routine, one that spoofed ourselves arguing in the bone lab about whether a mystery bone was from a human or a blowfly. Miranda’s sock puppet was a caricature of me, and mine was a red-haired sock version of Miranda. She dropped her voice half an octave and did her best impression of a pompous but clueless professor, while I affected a falsetto and sang the praises of Google and Wikipedia and left-wing liberalism. After it was done, and Garcia had called “bravo!” and pretended to applaud with his bandaged hands, and told us what attentive care he was receiving, we said goodbye. In the hallway, Miranda sank into a chair — the same chair we’d found Carmen in — and wept on my shoulder.

Emert and Thornton had both interviewed Novak’s former wife, the woman I’d met at the funeral, and both had come away empty-handed, they reported in a three-way teleconference. Emert was of the opinion that she had Alzheimer’s disease—“She kept asking me who I was,” he said, “and then talking to me like I was her son, saying ‘Mommy this’ and ‘Mommy that.’ She said she’d never heard of anybody named Leonard Novak.” Thornton hadn’t fared much better; she’d told him she used to know someone named Lenny, but she couldn’t quite remember where or when or how.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “That woman was sharp as a tack when I talked to her at Novak’s funeral. She was lucid, she was irreverent, she was funny. She even noticed that I got spooked for a second, when I thought I saw Jess. A woman I lost.”

“I think maybe the old gal’s sweet on you,” said Emert.

“I think maybe Emert’s right,” said Thornton. “And I think maybe you should see if you can get more out of her than we did. Find out what she knows about Novak, and who might have killed him, and why.”

“And what ‘I know your secret’ meant,” added Emert.

And so it was, after that conversation and a call to the phone number Beatrice had scrawled on the funeral program, that I found myself winding up Black Oak Ridge in search of her house.

I passed the house twice before I found it. It was set back off the street and down a slight slope, tucked amid hemlock trees and rhododendron bushes. It was a low, flat-roofed house with wide, overhanging eaves; judging by the clean lines, the ample windows, and the warm redwood siding, I guessed that it dated from the 1960s. It reminded me of the houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was famous for blending houses into their natural settings.

Stepping beneath them onto the flagstones bordering the front wall, I felt myself entering a zone of shelter, of sanctuary. The door — a large red slab flanked by narrow sidelights and shielded by a glass storm door — nestled within the corner of an L, and the roofline angled across the corner, creating a triangular porch at the entryway. The walkway and porch were bordered by low irregular terraces of river rock and creeping juniper. A small, artificial stream tumbled down the rocks and into a pool at the doorway. To reach the door, I crossed a huge flagstone — it must have weighed a thousand pounds or more — that bridged the pool. Now this, I thought, this is an entrance.

Beside the door, suspended from a curlicue bracket of wrought iron, hung a bell with a leather cord dangling from its clapper. I gave the cord a tentative tug, and the clapper swung gently, barely tapping the bell. I gave a stronger pull, and the clapper struck with a pure, high ring, the sort of ethereal chime you might hear wafting down from some Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas. I waited a moment, listening for footsteps, but heard none. She’s eighty-five years old, I reminded myself, give her a minute. Still no one came, so I rapped more loudly on one of the sidelights. Still no footsteps. Feeling slightly furtive, I tried the handle on the glass storm door. It was unlocked, as was the red wooden door. I eased it open just far enough to lean my head inside and called out, “Hello? Mrs. Novak?”

“Yes?” The voice had a slight quaver to it.

“It’s Dr. Brockton. We spoke on the phone.”

“I know we did. I might be ancient, but I’m not senile.”

I smiled. Yes, she was sharp all right. “Should I come in?”

“Unless you’d rather stay outside and shout,” she said, sounding simultaneously amused and exasperated, crusty and playful. “Follow my voice.” I stepped inside and found myself in a low-ceilinged foyer, its walls paneled with the same warm redwood as the home’s exterior. The floor was terrazzo, a glassy-smooth mosaic of marble chips set into concrete and polished to a soft lustre of green, red, black, and ivory. “I was beginning to think maybe you’d stood me up.”

Her voice, together with a broad track of reflected daylight, led me to a wide doorway. When I stepped through it, the space opened up dramatically, and I blinked from both the brightness and the unexpectedness of it. “Oh my,” I heard myself saying, “this is wonderful.”

“Yes,” she said. “I designed it to be wonderful. Back when wonderful was still a possibility.”

It took me a moment to find her, just as it had taken some effort to find her house. She was sitting in a high, wing-backed chair that nearly enveloped her; the chair was off to one side of a large living room, facing a wall of glass that looked out into the woods behind the house. The polished floor extended seamlessly beyond the glass and onto a large terrace; the terrace was partly sheltered beneath a high, wide roof overhang; the overhang was made of the same tongue-and-groove redwood as the walls and eaves of the house. Together, the architectural elements and their blurred transitions — the seamless floor, the wall of glass, and the unbroken planes of redwood — conspired to hide the boundary between indoors and out, and if not for the warmth in the sun-drenched room, I’d have been hard pressed to say whether the space was enclosed or not.

“Looks like wonderful is still possible,” I said, walking to the side of her chair, “at least in here. It’s Dr. Brockton, Mrs. Novak. Thank you for letting me come see you.”

“Letting you? I practically twisted your arm out of the socket. Do you have any idea how seldom I have company? Almost everyone I used to know is dead or dying. It’s depressing as hell. By the way, I haven’t been Mrs. Novak in sixty years. Novak was three husbands ago. It’s Montgomery now, and Mr. Montgomery kicked the bucket quite a while back. So call me Beatrice, unless you want to remind me I’m old and make me cranky.”

“I’d hate to make you cranky, Beatrice,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be in your best interest,” she agreed. “Sit down, and tell me what it is you want to know. The tea should still be hot — I made it about five minutes ago.” A large mug sat on a table between the two chairs, and wisps of steam wafting up from it caught the slanting afternoon light. Beside the mug was a small china plate that held two round, golden cookies. “The cookies are Scottish shortbread,” she said. “Butter and flour and sugar. If you don’t want them, throw them out for the birds, because I’m not supposed to have them.”

I headed to the rocker but stopped before sitting down. “You’re not having any tea? Can I get you anything else — some water, maybe?”

“Water? Never touch the damn stuff,” she said. “I’ll have some vodka when it’s cocktail hour.”

“When’s that?”

“Five,” she said. “What time is it now?”

I glanced at my watch; I was about to tell her it was three forty-five when the note of teasing and hopefulness in her voice registered with me. “This watch is not worth a damn,” I fibbed. “It eats a battery once a week.”

She laughed. “Dear me, you are a smooth one,” she said. “Too bad I’m not forty years younger. I’d make you fall desperately in love with me. You’re an interesting fellow, Dr. Brockton.”

“Call me Bill,” I said, “unless you want to make me cranky.”

She smiled, then tilted her face toward the window and closed her eyes; the low sun highlighted the wrinkles left by decades of laughter and pain, but underneath I could discern the planes of a younger woman’s face. “That sun looks like a five-o’clock sun to me,” she said. “Close enough, anyway. The vodka’s on the bookshelf behind you. Pour me two fingers’ worth, would you, Bill? There’s ice in the ice bucket. Join me if you like.”

“I’d better not,” I said. “I can tell I need to keep my wits about me when I’m with you.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that I didn’t drink alcohol; she might think I disapproved of drinking, and that wasn’t the case. Rather, having spent years battling Menier’s disease, I tended to steer clear of anything that had the remotest chance of making me dizzy.

A crystal decanter, silver ice bucket, tongs, and two tumblers sat on a silver tray on a waist-high counter running the length of the back wall. Below the counter were cabinets; above it were bookshelves containing hundreds of volumes, ranging from small paperbacks to large leatherbound volumes. I wondered if she’d read them all. I put a few ice cubes into a tumbler, then poured the vodka from the decanter, catching a whiff of orange in the liquor. Did “two fingers” mean with or without the ice, I wondered, but I hated to betray my ignorance by asking. Without, I decided, and kept pouring, since the ice alone filled at least one finger’s worth of space.

One end of the counter held a cluster of framed photographs, and as I delivered the vodka, I detoured past the pictures. A half dozen or so in number, they were all in black-and-white, and I guessed by the clothing and hairstyles that they were from the 1940s. Suddenly I recognized one of the photos: I had seen it in the museum and the library the day of Novak’s funeral. It showed a striking young woman perched at a console of dials and levers, and in the five seconds it took me to walk back to the chairs with Beatrice’s drink, I realized that the pretty girl in the photo had the same cheekbones and jawline as the old woman facing the fading light. “That’s you in the picture,” I said.

“Not anymore,” she said. “That was a lifetime ago. But back during the war, I was the calutron poster girl.”

“What’s a calutron?”

“A California University cyclotron,” she said. “Invented by Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel laureate physicist from Berkeley. We used them at Y-12 to separate uranium-235 for the bomb. We weren’t told that’s what we were doing, of course. The foreman just told us to watch the gauges and twist the dials to keep the needles centered. So I watched and I twisted. And atom by atom, I was separating the isotopic wheat from the chaff, you might say. I was a winnower, Bill, on the threshing floor of the atomic barn.”

I held out the tumbler to her, and I noticed a slight tremor in the hand that took it. The sunlight caught the ice cubes and made them glow, like golden, living things. Beatrice’s skin was translucent in the sunlight; through it, I could see the spiderwork of thin purple veins, and — underneath — the withering strings of muscle and tendon. I almost thought I could see bone, too, but perhaps I was imagining it. She drew a deep breath, blew it out, and then took a sip of vodka. “I was a beauty once,” she said, pointing with her glass toward the photograph. She didn’t say it boastfully; it was a statement of fact, with a layer of nostalgia underneath. “As I said, that was a lifetime ago. I’m not that girl anymore. But oh, the stories I could tell you about her.”

“Tell me one,” I said, settling into the rocker. “Tell me the story of how she met and married Leonard Novak.”

With that, she began to speak, and her words began to weave a spell.

CHAPTER 14

Once upon a time, Bill, Oak Ridge blazed with brilliance and vitality, and Leonard Novak and I burned at the heart of the flame.

It wasn’t just the work; in fact, for most of us, the work was the dull, dreary part; the hours were long and the work was backbreaking or mind-numbing. It seems exciting and glamorous now, but back then, only a handful of people knew our place in the grand scheme of things. The top military leaders, like General Groves and Colonel Nichols, saw the big picture; so did the senior scientists, like Oppenheimer and Fermi and Lawrence, although those three never lived here; they just descended on Oak Ridge now and again, like visiting heads of state. Of the hundreds of scientists in Oak Ridge, Novak was one of the very few who grasped what this vast, desperate endeavor was all about.

The other eighty thousand of us were grunts; we saw only our own tiny little speck of work, and we had no idea what it meant. So I spent eight hours a day, six days a week, staring at needles and twisting knobs. Other people spent fifty or sixty hours a week pouring concrete or bulldozing mud or fitting pipe or welding. When we weren’t working, we spent a lot of time standing in lines. Lines to clock in, lines to clock out. Lines to buy groceries — groceries that sometimes ran out before the line did. Lines to buy cigarettes. People would see a line and queue up, sometimes not even knowing what the line was for, because if other people were in line, there must be something worth lining up for. It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, the one where Chaplin is reduced to a human cog in a huge assembly line.

You’d think we’d have been exhausted, ready to tumble into bed after so much drudgery, but we weren’t. For me, staring at those two dials all day, every day created a pent-up energy, like static electricity. The tedium was exhausting, but at the end of my shift, something in me would wake up, and I’d be ready to stay up half the night. And thousands of other pent-up young people were happy to stay up with me.

The Central Rec Hall was near the middle of what was called Townsite — Jackson Square now, a couple of blocks below Chapel on the Hill. There must have been a dozen or so dormitories within a few blocks of the rec hall, and each dorm housed hundreds of young men and women, most of them single. So the rec hall was jammed every night, all night. Right around midnight, about the time the day-shift workers would start running out of steam, the people who worked evening shift would clock out and come pouring into the rec hall and stay till dawn, and just as they were staggering off to catch some sleep, the graveyard-shift workers would come in. On weekends, the dance floor would be so crowded you could barely move.

One night in the spring of 1944, my roommate Roxanne and I walked in figuring we’d do a little jitterbugging to Glenn Miller records, but instead, there was a guy singing and playing the piano. He looked sophisticated and older — twenty-five, maybe all of thirty; can you believe that? These days Oak Ridge is full of fossils like me, but back then, nearly everybody here was under thirty. Construction workers had to be young and strong to do the manual labor, and scientists had to be young and mentally agile to do the mental gymnastics. I was twenty; most of the girls I worked with had just graduated from high school.

Roxanne and I worked our way up to the front of the room, but it took a while, because we had to wiggle between scores of men to get up there, and the men didn’t want to make it too easy for us to get past them. Oak Ridge in the early forties was like a Gold Rush boomtown back in the 1800s; there were fifteen or twenty men to every woman in Oak Ridge during the war, so it was always easy to get dates — some gals would double-or triple-book, starting one date at eight, another at ten, and another at midnight. But the sad truth was, what Oak Ridge had in quantity, it lacked in quality. Lots of the men were just dumb louts — fine if you wanted to dig a foundation, bulldoze a road, or tangle in a darkened doorway, but if you were looking for more, the wheat-to-chaff ratio was about as low as the ratio of U-235 to U-238.

Up close the guy at the piano looked kind of fancy. He was wearing a coat and tie, he had round, horn-rimmed glasses and wavy, combed-back hair. He looked brainy and the music he was playing went along with the look — Cole Porter. Porter’s lyrics are clever and suggestive, and you could tell by the singer’s inflections and eyebrow wiggles that he knew what all the double-entendres meant. But underneath the glitter, Porter was deeply cynical — like a cocktail party that sounds fun until you really listen, and then you start to hear the anger and desperation lurking beneath the laughter and clinking ice cubes. After half a dozen songs of sparkling, witty cynicism I was beginning to lose interest, but then he launched into something soft and mournful. The crowd’s chatter had gotten a little louder as the set stretched on, and the first few bars of the piano were drowned out, but pretty soon everybody shut up. I’m not exaggerating, you could hear people near the back of the room shushing folks behind them so they could hear the song, a wistful number about romantic disillusionment called “Love for Sale.”

I looked at Roxanne, and the look in her eyes was the same bittersweet look I felt in mine as he sang it. I looked back at the singer, and suddenly his gaze locked on me, another pair of eyes that had already seen a lifetime worth of loss. “Old love, new love, every love but true love.” By the time he got to the end he was almost whispering, and he finished the song with a soft piano flourish that drifted up into the rafters like cigarette smoke. Before the notes had completely died away, he’d risen from the bench, stepped out of the circle of light, and disappeared into the mass of bodies.

The room was silent for a moment, then the crowd cheered and whistled and called for more. He did not reappear, and after several moments the PA system offered us consolation in the melodious form of the Andrews Sisters. A strapping young man in a corporal’s uniform asked me to dance, and I obliged. He leered at me, to make sure I knew that he — like the Andrews Sisters — was in the mood. “Man, those gals sure can sing it,” he said.

“They’re fine,” I said, “but that guy at the piano — he was really something. I wonder if he’s on a USO tour.”

“Him?” The corporal looked at me like I was an idiot. “Nah, that guy works here. He’s one of the eggheads. Chemist or something.”

Just then — at least, this is the way I like to remember the timing — I saw a long finger tap the corporal on the shoulder. “Mind if I cut in?” It was him: the singer; he was talking to the soldier, but he was smiling at me. The corporal looked annoyed but also embarrassed, as if he thought the guy had heard himself called an egghead, or as if the corporal had called down this punishment on himself by being an unappreciative listener.

We danced just that one dance, then he asked if he could walk me back to my dorm. The walk was only two blocks, but that was enough to decide things for me. The corporal was right about one thing, Novak was a scientst. But he was wrong about the other — Novak wasn’t an egghead; he was funny and self-deprecating, and an odd mixture of confidence and humility. He was a prodigy, with Ph.D.’s in both chemistry and physics, but he was surprisingly humble. I thought I had hit the jackpot, Bill.

We got married six weeks later, in the Chapel on the Hill. He and I exchanged vows in the very same spot where you and I saw his ashes yesterday.

I moved from the dorm to the house on the ridge that Novak was entitled to, as a senior scientist. “Snob Hill,” everyone called it, even those of us lucky enough to live on it, because we knew we didn’t necessarily deserve to live so much better than the people down in the valley. The difference between the ridge and the valley was amazing — down among the dormitories, trailers, and hutments, there were no trees and very little grass. During wet weather, the valley floor was a sea of mud — cars would get stuck up to their axles, and if you had to walk somewhere that didn’t have a raised boardwalk, you’d sink so deep your shoes would get sucked right off your feet. During hot, dry spells, it was like living in the Dust Bowl — dust got into every nook and cranny, you’d choke if you didn’t breathe through a handkerchief, and your face would be caked with red dust and streaks of sweat. Up on Snob Hill the roads were good, the yards were nice, and crime was virtually nonexistent.

Happily ever after, right?

Except that it wasn’t.

But that’s another story, Bill. Another story for another day.

CHAPTER 15

Beatrice deflected all my follow-up questions about Novak. “I’m tired,” she said. “It’s too sad to talk about right now.” And then she added, “Tell me your name again?” The sudden, vague hint of senility might just be a ploy, I realized, but if I backed her into that corner, she might never come out of it again. Given that Emert and Thornton had both struck out with her, I decided a strategic retreat was in order.

I checked my unreliable wristwatch. “I’ve probably overstayed my welcome,” I said, “and I’d better be getting back to the university. It was so nice talking with you, Beatrice. You reckon I could come visit you again?”

She eyed me sharply, as if to size up my intentions or assess my sincerity. I smiled at her then, and it was a genuine smile — she really was a remarkable woman — and the smile seemed to tip the scales in my favor. “Of course, Bill,” she said, “if you can tear yourself away from those comely UT coeds long enough to listen to an old woman rattle.”

I held out my hand to shake goodbye but she ignored it, leaning a cheek toward me for a kiss. I brushed the pebbled skin lightly with my lips. She smelled of face powder and perfume and vodka, and I briefly imagined a different Beatrice, a young and beautiful Beatrice, offering her cheek or her lips to a soldier or a scientist. She would have been an irresistible force.

I was halfway back to UT when my cell phone rang. The display read THOMPSON PHOTO. It was Rodney Satterfield, and I hoped he had good news about the film from Novak’s freezer. “So,” I said, “what did you find on the world’s oldest undeveloped film? Girlie pictures of some cute young calutron operator, circa 1944?” As soon as I heard myself make the joke, two images of Beatrice — young Beatrice and old Beatrice — popped into my head, and I felt doubly embarrassed.

“Actually,” he said, “we didn’t find much of anything. A clear strip of film. Looks kinda like it hasn’t been exposed. Back before everything went digital, we used to get two or three unexposed rolls a week. Somebody would load the film, then put the camera away without using it. Six months later, when they got the camera out to use it, they couldn’t remember whether it was a new roll or a shot roll. So they’d rewind the blank film and bring it to us to develop. And then they’d be pissed off at us because there weren’t any pictures.”

“Oh well,” I said, “it’s not like there was a note taped to the package saying, ‘develop this if you want to see who killed me.’ We just thought it was worth checking, since he’d gone to the trouble to wrap it up and keep it in the freezer all those years. Anyhow, thanks for trying. I’ll need to take the film back to the police, just so they’ve got custody of it, even though it doesn’t do them any good. I’m on my way to UT now; how about I swing by and pick it up on my way?”

“Actually, I said it looked like it hadn’t been shot,” Rodney corrected. “But it had. The images are just really faint. Either it’s horribly underexposed, or the film’s been faded by radiation.”

“You mean because the guy whose freezer it was in was a walking radiographic camera?”

“Well, maybe,” he said. “Or maybe just decades of background solar radiation. Over time, solar radiation can dissipate the images, even if the film is stashed in a freezer. I tried overprocessing it — letting the film soak in the chemicals about fifty percent longer, which usually helps with old film. Doesn’t seem to have made much difference. But I’m not quite ready to give up on this,” he said. “Mind you, the prints might not turn out black-and-white; they might turn out black-and-black. But it can’t hurt to try. How far away are you?”

“I’m nearly to I-40,” I said. “Ten minutes? Maybe twenty.”

“You want to go in the darkroom with me? If you’ve got time, I’ll wait till you get here.”

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of Thompson Photo Products. Rodney met me at the counter and led me to a darkroom at the back of the building. I felt privileged; although I’d brought hundreds of rolls of crime-scene photos here over the years, I’d never before been ushered into the inner sanctum, the darkroom.

The film, cut into several one-foot strips, was hanging from the photographic equivalent of a clothesline. Rodney unclipped one of the strips and held it so I could see through it. The darkroom was lit by a single red bulb, so — not surprisingly — the room was…dark. Still, despite the dimness, I could see that the cause looked hopeless.

“You weren’t kidding,” I said. “It’s like variations on a theme of clear. Clear, clearer, clearest. How do you know where to even begin? Which one’s the least bad?”

“I looked at them again on a light box after we talked,” he said. “I had to put a few layers of paper over the glass to dim the light, just so it wouldn’t blow everything out completely. But once I got it dimmed down, I could see a little more — not much, but enough to tell that several of them seemed to have a similar smudge of image at the center. This one right here”—he pointed to the middle of the strip—“seems about a millionth of a percent less horrible than the others.”

“That good, huh?” He nodded glumly. “Well, if it takes any of the pressure off you, the bar of my expectation is about six feet under, so there’s no way it can be worse than I’m expecting.”

Rodney laid the film on the stage of an enlarger — a downward-pointing rig labeled BESELER that looked like a cross between an industrial lamp and an old-fashioned bellows-type camera — and slipped the film between the lamp and the lens. Then he took a sheet of 8-by-10 photo paper from a metal box and clipped it to an easel at the enlarger’s base. “I’m guessing at this,” he said, “but we need as little light going through this as I can get, so I’ve stopped the lens down all the way. Oh, and I’ve got a number-five contrast filter in there to pump up any trace of contrast we’re lucky enough to have.” He flipped a switch, and light streamed downward out of the lens and through the film, illuminating the white, empty rectangle of paper. Let there be light, I thought, Novak’s funeral hymn echoing in my head.

The light clicked off after only a few seconds, leaving me blind for a moment — and leaving a reverse image on my retinas, a black 8-by-10-inch rectangle floating on a white background — until my eyes readjusted to the red safelight.

“Damn,” I said. The paper was blank.

“Hang on,” said Rodney. “You’ll probably want to say that again in a minute, but we’re not done yet. The image doesn’t show up until we put the paper in the developer.” He pointed to a shallow metal tray that contained an inch or so of clear liquid. “Faint as that image was, this’ll probably develop pretty quickly, if there’s anything there. Then I’ll need to hustle it into the stop bath, to fix it.”

Funny, I thought: a week ago — a moment before events in the morgue took their dramatic turn — Miranda had been preparing to fix Leonard’s brain. Now Rodney was talking of fixing this ghostly image Novak had left behind.

Removing the paper from the base of the enlarger, he laid it gently in the tray.

I leaned close. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hope for anything, but I did.

Ten seconds passed, and the paper remained blank. After another ten, an image began to materialize, like something slowly emerging from a dense fog.

By the time thirty seconds had elapsed, I could tell what that something was. A young man — a young soldier — emerged from the mists of time onto the page. He lay in a shallow, fresh depression in the earth. His head was turned slightly, and I saw a dark circle at his right temple. I had a guess what the dark circle was, although I couldn’t be sure.

One thing was unmistakable, though. The open, staring eyes were those of a dead man.