Bones of Betrayal

CHAPTER 16

Crossing the Solway Bridge over the clinch River, I left behind the Solway community’s half-mile strip of convenience marts and auto-repair shops and barren produce stands. The bridge marked a border, a boundary: once my wheels were on the other side, I had crossed over, into the land General Leslie Groves had claimed for the Manhattan Project—59,000 acres, bounded on three sides by the Clinch, on the fourth side by Black Oak Ridge, and in every direction by the peculiar sensation that World War II still lived on, somehow, in this East Tennessee wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Although the security checkpoints at Solway and the handful of other entry points to Oak Ridge had long since been dismantled, much of the site looked just as it had during the war, and it was perhaps only natural that the city and its people tended to dwell in the black-and-white importance of the past.

On a whim, I varied my route into Oak Ridge this time, taking the exit ramp marked BETHEL VALLEY ROAD, which led to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 Plant. Bearing right at a fork in the road, I bore right onto Scarboro Road. I crossed a low ridge, dropped down into Union Valley, and saw the vast Y-12 complex sprawling to my left behind a high chain-link fence. My eye was caught by a cluster of large, brooding buildings. Their stout concrete frames were filled in with red brick, and strips of windows had been set near the roofline to allow daylight into the cavernous interiors. From the archival photos at the library, I recognized these as the buildings where Beatrice and the other calutron girls had sifted uranium-235 from U-238 for the Hiroshima bomb.

A quarter mile later, the road cut through a gap in a low, wooded ridge, and the Y-12 Plant disappeared from view. Just beyond the gap, a blocky concrete guardhouse, its windows and gunports long since boarded up, marked what had once been one of the Secret City’s gates. Passing the guardhouse, I was leaving the federal reservation and entering the town; leaving the past and rejoining the present. Yet pulling into the police department’s parking lot behind the municipal building, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had one foot in the twenty-first century and one foot in World War II. And sometimes it was tough to tell which foot was on firmer ground.

Detective Jim Emert peered at one of the prints through a magnifying glass, then laid the lens down in exasperation. “Hell,” he said, “with all that grain in the image, magnifying it just makes it worse.”

I’d done exactly the same thing an hour before, in my office under the stadium. Magnifying the print was like enlarging a newspaper photograph into a meaningless cloud of dots. “The prints aren’t great,” I said, “but it’s amazing there’s anything there at all.” Considering how faint the images on the film had been, I wasn’t sure whether to think of the guy at Thompson’s as a darkroom tech or a psychic medium. After conjuring up that first startling image of the young soldier’s body, Rodney had spent most of that night and all of this morning experimenting with different exposure times, contrast filters, and developer baths. He’d tried burning and dodging, which sounded like an arsonist’s modus operandi, but which actually meant using masks and screens to increase or decrease the amount of light falling on different regions of the photo paper. He’d also scanned the negatives into a digital-processing computer. In short, he’d tried every trick in the book to coax every speck of image out of that ghostly film. By the time he was through, he had used a hundred sheets of photo paper…and produced a sequence of prints that hinted at a chilling story.

The first image showed the rear end of an antique-looking car — late 1930s, I guessed, by the black paint, bulbous fenders, and small windows. The trunk lid was raised, and a pale bundle filled the cargo space. The detail left a lot to be desired, but over the years I’d seen enough blanket-wrapped bodies in enough trunks to recognize one. The second image showed the bundle lying beside a shallow, circular hole that appeared to have been freshly dug. In the third and fourth pictures, the body — no longer wrapped in the blanket or sheet, and wearing what appeared to be dark clothes — lay in the center of the depression. It was this third exposure Rodney had printed as I’d looked over his shoulder in the darkroom. But the fifth and sixth prints were even more haunting, for they showed close-ups of the man’s head and his face, the vacant eyes staring at us across the gulf of time.

Emert laid aside the last of the close-ups. “The weird thing,” he said, “besides who the hell’s this dead guy and what the hell’s going on here, is why Novak would take the photos in the first place? And why would he go to such trouble to preserve the film all these years? And why would he leave the film undeveloped, for Christ’s sake, if he wanted to keep the images?”

“That’s a whole bunch of weird things,” I pointed out. “You’re a man of many questions.”

“That’s what my mom used to say when I was a kid,” he said. “Since that’s the way I am, might as well get some good out of it. The way I see it, you ask enough people enough questions, enough times, sooner or later you might get an answer that tells you something.”

I’d been wondering about the same weird things as Emert, plus a few others. “Maybe it’s not Novak the pictures incriminate,” I said. I thought of the crumpled note outside Novak’s front door. “Maybe it’s somebody else. Somebody whose secret he knew. Maybe Novak was blackmailing whoever the pictures incriminated.”

“He was a pretty lousy blackmailer if he threw away the blackmail note,” Emert pointed out.

“Maybe he was still getting the hang of it,” I said. “Maybe he considered sending the note, then had second thoughts.”

“Come on, Doc — he’d had that film on ice for a long damn time. If he were gonna put the screws to somebody, he’d have done it decades ago, while his target was still alive, and while Novak was young enough to enjoy the money. Besides, you saw his handwriting on that legal pad. It doesn’t match the note.”

The detective was right. Novak’s handwriting was small and precise. The lettering on the note was large and blocky. “Okay, I give,” I said. “You got any theories?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “All I can come up with is that maybe he wanted an insurance policy of some sort, leverage he could use if he needed to. But he wanted to reduce the risk somebody might just stumble across the pictures — the maid or the home-health nurse or whoever — so he left the film undeveloped. It’s not a great theory, but it’s all I’ve got so far.”

The last three pictures in the series were different. They showed tree trunks and thickets of foliage, and — off in the distance, through a gap in the trees — a small barn. Here’s the view from the grave, I thought, trying to think like Leonard Novak might have. Here’s how to find it again someday.

I’d brought two sets of prints with me. I left one with Emert, and took the other with me as I left the police department, crossed the parking lot, and unlocked my truck. I slipped behind the wheel and started the engine, but then I just sat, my mind spinning faster than the motor.

A story had unspooled from that roll of film. A strange tale from beyond the grave, told by a man whose own murder was the most bizarre I had ever encountered. I didn’t know what it meant yet, and maybe I never would, but I couldn’t wait for the next chapter.

I switched off the key and got out of the truck.

CHAPTER 17

I didn’t see her at the reference desk, and the Oak Ridge Room was locked and empty. Disappointed, I turned to go, figuring I’d stop at the circulation desk on my way out and ask what hours Isabella, the history-minded librarian, worked. As I approached the desk, I heard a voice at my elbow, from somewhere amid rows of bookshelves. “Dr. Brockton? Is that you?”

I spun. “Oh, hi,” I said. “I was just looking for you. I was afraid maybe you weren’t working this afternoon.”

“Till six,” she said, stepping out of the shadowy stacks. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if I could look through those Manhattan Project photo binders again?”

“Of course,” she said. She led me back to the glass-walled room and unlocked the door. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Seems like I remember there was a set of photos of houses and farms that were already here when the project started. Sort of the ‘before’ picture of Oak Ridge?”

She smiled. “You paid good attention,” she said. Pulling a fat binder from among the dozens filling the bookcase, she handed it to me. “Anything else I can help you with?”

I almost said that she could help me with my lack of a dinner companion, but that seemed a bit forward. “Just this, for now,” I said. “Thanks.”

“If you think of something later, let me know,” she said. She hesitated slightly before she turned and walked away. I didn’t know why, but that half second of hesitation made me hope that she’d somehow read my mind, and that maybe she liked what she read there.

The binder was three inches thick, its black-and-white prints tucked into clear plastic sleeves. Flipping through the pages, I saw weathered farmhouses, ramshackle barns, tobacco sheds, haywagons, general stores, one-room churches, mule-drawn plows. I knew the photos were from the early 1940s — early 1943, most of them, because construction of Oak Ridge and its three huge installations began in earnest that spring — but many of the pictures could have passed for images from the 1920s, or even the 1890s. What inconceivable change: to go from such a rural, sleepy area — a place the transplanted scientists referred to as “Dogpatch”—to a churning, teeming enterprise, one that pushed the limits of science, engineering, and human endeavor on a gargantuan scale. What must those displaced farmers have thought? How many of them had heard of John Hendrix and the wild-eyed vision he’d shared back at the dawn of the twentieth century?

The images were fascinating without being helpful. I had opened the notebook hoping one of the photos might show a barn like the one in Leonard Novak’s photos — a small barn tucked at the base of a wooded ridge, a silo at one end. Although the binder contained pictures of barns and silos and woods, none of those pictures combined all three elements: here was a photo of a barn with no silo; there was a photo of a silo with no barn; a few pages farther, a barn and silo but no hillside or woods.

I closed the binder and sighed.

Just then I heard a slight tap on the glass. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Isabella, and I stood up. She opened the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said. “I was just about to take a break, and thought I’d ask if you need anything before I disappear.”

“Thanks for asking, but I think I’ve hit a dead end here,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is there anything other than a photograph that might tell you what you need to know?”

I smiled. “What I need to know? There’s no end to the things I need to know; just ask my colleagues or my secretary or my graduate assistant. But the thing I was hoping to find out just now? I’m not sure anything but a photograph would work.” She looked confused, and I didn’t blame her. “Here, I’ll show you, if you don’t mind,” I said. “But if you want to take your break instead, don’t let me keep you.”

“Show me,” she said.

I opened the manila envelope I’d brought with me, the prints of the Novak film. Reaching to the back of the sheaf of photos so as to keep the photos of the dead man tucked inside the envelope, I slid out the last few. “These are old, crummy pictures, taken somewhere near here — I think—in the 1940s. Maybe. Somewhere in the woods, apparently”—I used the end of a pen to point to the trees, and she nodded—“but with a view of what appears to be a barn and a silo.” She bit her lip and bent low over the photo, her black hair hanging down and curtaining off her face. “Hard to tell much from these pictures, but I didn’t see any pictures in the notebook that looked like they could possibly be this barn.”

“And you’re trying to identify this particular barn?”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, not exactly. What I’m really trying to do, if you want to split hairs, is find the spot from which this photograph of this barn was taken.”

She puzzled over that a moment. “In other words, if you knew where this barn was, you could figure out where this photographer was standing when he or she took this picture?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Is there any hope?”

“Absolutely none,” she said. Seeing my face fall, she laughed. “I’m kidding. I’m not making any promises, but if you’ll let me scan a copy of this, I’ll do some research. This is a lot more interesting than most of the questions I get.”

“Scan away,” I said. “That would be a big help.”

“If I find it, then what?”

“Then maybe I could buy you dinner,” I said, “to say thank you.”

“Oh,” she said, looking flustered and turning red. There was an awkward pause before she added, “I meant, then should I call or email you?”

“Ah,” I said, taking my turn to blush. “Calling is better. I’m not big on email.” I handed her one of my cards, which contained my office number and my home number.

She glanced at the card, then up at me. She paused again. “When I call to say I’ve found it, do you want the details over the phone? Or over dinner?”

I felt myself smile. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not all that keen on the telephone, either. How about over dinner?”

She did that half-second pause again, then nodded, and I left the library — walking or floating, I couldn’t have said which. This time, when I cranked the truck’s ignition key, the engine sounded not like aimless spinning, but like power and energy, awaiting my direction. I shifted out of park, pointed the wheels toward the east end of Oak Ridge, and gunned the gas. The vehicle surged forward, and I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere.

Then I thought, In your dreams, and laughed at myself.

CHAPTER 18

From the library, I headed east on Oak Ridge Turnpike, then meandered up the winding street to Beatrice’s house. I had set up another visit with her — Miranda and Thornton called it a date — in hopes of learning more about Leonard Novak, her not-so-happily-ever-after marriage to him, and the secret that had gotten him killed in such bizarre fashion.

I called her on my cell phone to make sure she was still expecting me. “Of course I’m still expecting you,” she said. “My dance card’s not exactly full these days. I’ll leave the door open for you. Just let yourself in and pour me a vodka.”

“Yes ma’am,” I laughed.

She must have made the tea and filled the ice bucket after she hung up the phone, because the tea was still steaming and the ice had not yet melted when I made her drink and sat down in what I had begun to think of as “my” chair.

“I drove past the Y-12 Plant on my way into town today,” I said. “I thought about you in there at the controls of your calutron.”

“What a tedious thing to think of,” she said. “My calutron is only interesting thanks to the hindsight of history. It helped make the bomb, so we’ve decided it was important and fascinating. But it was bloody boring to operate, I can tell you that. Like working on a Detroit assembly line, but without the satisfaction of seeing the car take shape. Without even seeing the conveyor belt move. We weren’t making a goddamn thing, as far as we could see. So even though we were cheered on every day by patriotic billboards and PA announcements, the inspiration wore pretty thin after a few hours of staring at those damn dials and needles. Only time things were interesting was when they went wrong.” Her lips twitched upward slightly at a memory.

“What sort of things went wrong?”

“Well,” she said, looking arch, “one evening in late 1943, when I was working the 3-to-11 shift, there was a bit of a commotion, and I glanced around and saw General Groves and Colonel Nichols and two civilian men, fairly well dressed. The officers were being very deferential to the civilians, especially the good-looking one in the expensive suit. He looked around, then came over to my cubicle — I was the best-looking girl working that evening — and asked my name. When I told him, he said, ‘Beatrice, would you mind if I borrow your calutron for a moment?’ I looked at my supervisor, who practically fell over himself to pull me away from the controls. ‘This is far too low,’ the man said. ‘You’ll never produce enough at those settings.’ He fiddled with the controls till the needles were practically off the scale. ‘There,’ he said, ‘you’ll get a lot more…product…at those settings.’ They turned and left. I said to my boss, ‘So who was that fancy guy?’ My boss, looking all starstruck, said, ‘That was Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of this machine.’ Five minutes later, we heard a boom. My calutron had exploded.”

I laughed. “That’s a great story,” I said. “Is it really true?”

“Mostly true,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time it was mind-numbing work. You shouldn’t think of me running a calutron. You should think of me singing or painting or playing Beethoven or writing poetry instead.”

“You can do all those things? I’m impressed.”

“I didn’t say I can do them, Bill. I just said you should think of me doing them. Where’s your imagination, man?” I laughed. “Now Leonard, he could do all those things. And brilliantly.”

“But he couldn’t be a brilliant husband to you.”

Her head snapped up at that. “Is that why you’re here? To grill me about Leonard’s failings?”

“Beatrice, we’re trying to figure out how he ended up with a pellet of iridium-192 in his gut,” I said, “and whether other people might be in danger, too. Not his failings. His vulnerabilities, maybe.”

She looked out the window for a long time. “All right,” she said finally, still looking outside. “I don’t suppose there’s any virtue in guarding his secret any longer.” She turned to face me. “Leonard was a fairy. ‘Gay,’ it’s called these days. Queer as a three-dollar bill.” I wasn’t sure which I found more surprising, the fact that he was gay, or the fact that she expressed it so coarsely. She must have seen the startled look on my face. “Today, nobody cares, but things were different then,” she said. “It was considered a perversion. He’d never have been able to keep his security clearance if they’d known.”

She was probably right about that. “I don’t mean to be indelicate,” I said, “but how could you not have realized that before you got married?”

“I told myself that he was being a perfect gentleman,” she said. “That he had set me on a pedestal and didn’t want to risk sullying my reputation.” She looked down. “Or maybe I was so thrilled to have caught a big fish, I chose to ignore the warning signs.”

“If he was gay, why did he ask you to marry him?”

“Maybe to protect his secret,” she said. “Or maybe he actually hoped he could overcome it. People thought that back then, you know. But he couldn’t overcome it, of course. On our wedding night, he kissed me on the lips, but it was the sort of kiss you might give a sister or an old friend — a quick peck with pursed lips. Then he pulled away and looked at me, and his eyes were full of shame and sadness. ‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘What have I done to you?’ Then he turned his back to me and cried. My bride-groom — the brilliant, sparkling wonderboy of the Manhattan Project — wept because he did not want me, and he never would. We didn’t talk about it. You just didn’t, in those days, unless you were Oscar Wilde. We entered into a pact of silence, without even speaking about the pact. Even the pact was a secret. He carried his burdens alone; I carried mine alone. After the war, after the bomb, I asked him for a divorce.” She fell silent, and I let her sit with her thoughts awhile.

When she finally turned and looked at me, I said, “I’m sorry. That must have been painful for you both. I’m not sure it sheds any light on his death, but I appreciate your trusting me enough to share that with me.”

She shook her head. “What difference could it make now? He’s dead, and I will be soon. Who on earth could possibly care?” She drew a deep breath. “There was one other burden Leonard carried.” From the end table beside her chair she lifted a creased, yellowed piece of paper. “This was an entry in his laboratory journal from November of 1943,” she said. “He wrote it right after the Graphite Reactor went critical. Then he started to worry that if the military snoops read it, he’d be considered unpatriotic, so he cut it out.” She handed me the paper. As I unfolded it, I worried that the creases would tear completely through the fragile paper. The ink was fading, yet the words, written in small, precise script, seemed to leap off the page as I read them.

CHAPTER 19

Jim Emert called just as I was about to swing by the hospital and visit Garcia; he wondered if I could sit in on a Novak meeting in an hour. “Thornton says the Bureau has some leads on the radiation source.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. I figured Garcia would rather I attend the meeting than hover outside his window. Miranda was planning to visit him at lunchtime; by then she’d need a break from the skull she was reconstructing. A contractor’s crew in North Knoxville, demolishing a block of old houses to make way for another strip mall, had unearthed a human skeleton. The bones, which were old and fragile, had been no match for the bulldozer that had churned them up. An adult human skeleton normally contained 206 bones; from the construction site, we’d sifted somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pieces. Miranda had weeks of tedious reassembly work ahead.

We met in a conference room in the Oak Ridge Municipal Building. When I told Emert and Thornton what I’d learned from Beatrice about Novak’s homosexuality, the FBI agent looked intrigued; when I described his crisis of conscience over his role in producing plutonium for the bomb, he looked troubled. He scribbled some notes, and when he finished, he shook his head doubtfully. “A ninety-three-year-old,” he said. “Seems harmless and grandfatherly, right? Then you start poking around in his past and you find pictures of a murdered guy, and a secret sexual life, and misgivings about helping his country win the war. Funny what a good disguise old age can be.” He shook his head again, this time as if to shake off his concerns about Novak and to refocus on what he’d come to tell us. “Okay, so here’s the latest from our forensic rad lab in Savannah River,” he said. “It is indeed iridium-192, as Duane Johnson determined the day of the incident,” he said. “It’s a sealed, metallic point source; you guys saw it in the morgue, so you already knew that. Tiny, but hotter than hell. It was roughly ninety-eight curies at the time of the autopsy. By now, it’s down in the mid-eighties, maybe high seventies. Eight weeks from now, it’ll be at fifty curies. You still wouldn’t want to swallow it, though.”

“Or pick it up with your fingers,” I said. “Or hold it in the palm of your hand.” I was surprised at the angry edge I heard in my voice.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, looking at me with concern.

“So how the hell did it wind up in Novak’s gut?” said Emert. “Unless somebody jammed it down his throat, he picked it up and put it in his mouth and swallowed it. Any chance he might have done it on purpose? Did bomb-guilt finally get to him? Or maybe fear of spending years as an invalid with no family to take care of him?”

“The Behavioral Sciences folks don’t think so,” Thornton said. “They’ve talked to a lot of Novak’s neighbors. He was energetic and positive. The guy walked a mile or two every day; hell, he was playing tennis until a couple years ago. Only reason nobody was worried about not seeing him lately was because of the cold weather. They figured he’d come back out once it warmed up. You saw all those espionage books on his desk. I think he was on the trail of a spy, and I think that’s why somebody fed him a pellet of iridium-192.”

“I can’t figure out how they did it,” I said. “It must not have been hidden in a hunk of meat or cheese. He’d have broken a tooth or at least spit the thing out.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Thornton said. “If you’re a health-conscious old guy, what do you swallow a lot of every day?”

“Ex-Lax,” said Emert, drawing a laugh from everyone.

“Pills,” I said. “Vitamins.”

“Exactly,” said Thornton. He turned to Emert. “Remember the medicine cabinet?”

“Looked like a damn pharmacy,” said Emert. “Mostly nonprescription stuff, though. Super-omega-this and antioxidant-that and mega-ultra-prostate formula. Flaxseed and glucosamine and St. John’s wort and I don’t know what-all else. The old dude was scarfing down twenty, thirty horse pills a day.”

“The iridium source,” I said. “How big was it?”

“Not very,” said Thornton. “About an eighth of an inch in diameter. Plenty small enough to slip inside one of those capsules. I bet if we go back and look at all those bottles, we’ll find a pill bottle that doesn’t have as many fingerprints as the rest.”

“Because somebody wiped it clean after hiding the pellet inside the capsule,” said Emert.

Thornton nodded, then shifted back to the rad lab’s findings. “The half-life of iridium-192 is only seventy-four days,” he said. “So seventy-four days before the incident in the morgue, the pellet — assuming it was irradiated and fabricated that long ago — was twice that hot: nearly two hundred curies.”

“I’m assuming this thing wasn’t pried out of a household smoke detector,” said Emert.

“Not a chance,” said Thornton. “Smoke detectors use a different isotope, americium-241, and they use tiny, tiny amounts. Like a microcurie.”

“A microcurie,” the detective said. “That’s, what, a thousandth of a curie?”

Thornton shook his head. “A millionth,” he said. “A smoke detector contains one-millionth of a curie of radioactivity, and it’s mostly alpha radiation, the kind that can’t penetrate your skin or even a piece of paper. This iridium source in Novak’s gut was a hundred million times hotter, and it was spewing gamma, which can shoot through several inches of steel and come out the other side still feeling frisky.”

“What about a TheraSeed,” said Emert, “those little radioactive pellets they put in the prostates of old farts like me to shrink tumors?”

“Those are tiny,” Thornton said. “Small enough to be injected through a syringe. And they’re generally palladium-103 or iodine-125. They’re also very, very weak compared to this. You wouldn’t want your prostate to get cooked like Novak’s gut, would you?” Emert shuddered. “Speaking of medical isotopes, though,” Thornton went on, holding up an index finger to indicate that he found this an interesting sidelight, “one of the uses of iridium-192 is to create medical isotopes like palladium and iodine.” I was losing track of all the isotopes, but Thornton seemed to have no trouble keeping them straight.

“One isotope creating another,” I said. “The atomic ripple effect?”

“More like billiard balls,” Thornton said. “All those protons and neutrons and electrons and photons ricocheting around on the pool table of the universe. I’m amazed everything hangs together as well as it does. One of these days, seems like, the cosmic cue stick will strike, all the balls will scatter, and then they’ll drop, one after another, into the corner pockets and side pockets of oblivion.”

“Why, Agent Thornton,” I said, “you’re a poet.”

He laughed. “Nah, it’s just smoke and mirrors. I’m desperately trying to distract you from the realization that I don’t really understand this stuff.”

Smart, poetic, and self-deprecating, to boot — no wonder Miranda seemed to be taking a shine to him. “So this iridium-192,” I said. “UT Hospital has a pretty big nuclear-medicine department. Is there any chance this iridium-192 might have come from there?”

“Yes they are, but no it couldn’t,” he said. “They do create radioisotopes there. They’ve got a cyclotron right above the morgue that Ernest Lawrence would’ve given his left nut for. But UT doesn’t use iridium-192 sources.”

“Then who does?” Emert and I asked the question at the same time.

“I’m so glad you asked,” he smiled. He tapped the cursor pad on his computer, and a washed-out blue slide appeared on the white wall behind him. Thornton pointed at the fluorescents overhead, and Emert killed the lights. When he did, the FBI logo blazed from a deep blue background.

The intro slide faded to black, and then another image faded up. It was a nuclear power plant, its iconic cooling towers sending billows of steam skyward. “The pressure vessel and the cooling-water pipes in a reactor like this are about six inches thick,” he said. “Those components have to be strong as hell, and so do the welds that hold them together.” He flashed through a series of ghostly images, X-ray-like pictures of fissures and streaks and bubbles in metal tubes; cracks and voids in seams. “These are radiographs of pipes and welds in a nuclear plant,” he said. “And this is the camera that took them.”

The next slide showed a four-wheel dolly loaded with an instrument the size and shape of a footlocker. “This is an industrial radiography camera,” Thornton said. “Think of it as a turbo-charged big brother to a medical X-ray machine. It uses gamma radiation rather than X-rays, because gamma has higher energy and can penetrate steel much better.” He flashed to a close-up view of the box on the cart; enlarged, it looked like a footlocker with dials and cables in one end. “This particular camera uses cobalt-60, not iridium, as the gamma source; this is three hundred curies, which is a good bit hotter than what we’re dealing with.”

I recalled a tour I’d taken once of TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, located downstream from Knoxville. “Nuclear plants have pretty tight security,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be pretty tough for Bubba to wheel that cart out the gate and wrestle it into the bed of his pickup?”

“You’re right. So who else uses radiographic cameras?” He flashed up a series of slides showing mammoth industrial complexes — sprawling, three-dimensional mazes of pipes and girders and steel exhaust stacks filled the wall. “Petroleum refineries. Chemical plants. Just like nuclear plants, they’re pumping nasty stuff at high temperatures and pressures, through heavy-gauge pipe. So are these guys.” He flashed rapidly through several slides showing pipelines — the Alaskan oil pipeline, a water pipeline in the West, a natural-gas pipeline. “Every pipeline company in the world worries about weld failure,” he said. “Right now, as we sit here, there are dozens of technicians — maybe hundreds — scurrying around the country taking radiographs of power plants and refineries and chemical plants and pipelines.” He paused to let that sink in. “And a lot of them aren’t using the big rig on the cart. A lot of them are using gadgets like this.” He tapped the cursor again.

I found myself looking at the legs and waist and dangling left arm of a man photographed in mid-stride. Clutched in his hand was a bright yellow gizmo whose size and shape reminded me of a construction worker’s lunch box — the black, barn-shaped kind, with a rectangular base to hold the sandwich and apple and chips and cookies, and a cylindrical top to hold the thermos. A heavy, pipe-fitting-looking extension jutted from one end of the yellow box, though, and the universal warning sign for radiation was emblazoned prominently on the side. “This camera is handheld, obviously,” said Thornton. “Very compact; very portable. The case is rugged enough, with enough shielding, to allow a two-hundred-curie iridium source to be legally transported in any vehicle.”

He flashed to another picture, this one showing a boxier gadget topped by a tubular handle. This picture showed considerably more detail. “Another handheld radiography camera,” said Thornton, “the RadioGraph Elite, made by Field Imaging Equipment Company, in Shreveport, Louisiana.” He pulled a laser pointer from his shirt pocket and traced the instrument’s rectangular outline with the dot of light. “This is fourteen inches long by five inches square — the size and shape of those newspaper boxes people out in the country put underneath their mailbox. The case is stainless steel; inside the case is a shielding block of depleted uranium. It’s small, and you can carry it by that handle, but you wouldn’t want to carry it far, because that sucker weighs fifty pounds. The manufacturer calls it portable; I’d call it luggable.”

He replaced the photograph with a cutaway drawing of the camera. Most of the interior consisted of the block of depleted uranium. A hollow tube or tunnel traced a shallow S-curve through the center of the block, and Thornton ran the laser dot back and forth along a wire nestled within that S. “This cable is called the pigtail,” he said, “and here at the end of the pigtail”—the laser dot jiggled on a small, rounded bead—“is the gamma source: not much bigger than a grain of rice, but it’s two hundred curies of iridium-192.” The bead looked chillingly familiar.

“How does it work?” Emert asked. “There’s a lead shutter at one end? It opens and sends a beam of gamma rays out the tube?”

“This is the strange part, to my way of thinking,” said Thornton. “To take a radiograph, you put the film behind the pipe, you hide behind a shield, and you turn a crank that pushes the pigtail out the end of the box. That lets the gamma rays from the source go through the pipe — and pretty much anything else nearby — and hit the film.”

“Seems kinda primitive,” said Emert.

“Kinda dangerous, too,” I added.

“Yes, it does,” said Thornton. “And yes, it is. Anytime somebody’s using one of these, it’s important to get everybody else out of the area. The people who use these things tend to get the highest annual radiation exposures of any workers in the nation — ten times what somebody at a nuclear power plant gets. And that’s if the thing’s working right. If something goes wrong, it can get real bad, real fast.” He showed a picture of a pigtail — just the wire cable and the bead of the source, detached from the camera. “Occasionally the pigtail comes loose,” he said. “The operator thinks he’s reeled it back into the camera, but instead, it’s lying on the ground, sending out all this gamma at anybody unlucky enough to come close.”

“Or pick it up,” I said bitterly.

“Or pick it up,” he echoed. He proceeded to tell us, and to show us, the story of a pipeline welder in the mountains of Peru who — late in the afternoon of February 20, 1999—found a short length of wire cable lying on the ground. Thinking he might be able to use the cable or sell it for scrap, the man picked it up and put it in his pocket. It remained there until he took off his pants that night and draped them over the back of a chair. The man’s wife sat briefly in the chair.

Then, at 1 A.M., came a knock at the door. During the evening, the radiographer had tried to take an image of a weld. When he developed the film, he found that it was blank; unexposed. Backtracking, he checked the camera and discovered that the pigtail was gone. A frantic search began, which led to the welder’s house, where the source was recovered. The iridium had nestled against the man’s thigh for six hours; it had hovered at the base of his wife’s back for a few minutes. But in those hours and minutes, everything changed.

Twenty hours after pocketing the source, the welder entered a hospital in Lima. A red oval had appeared on the back of his right thigh, and he was vomiting. By the following day, the oval was an open ulcer, surrounded by a halo of inflammation. Within a month the crater extended almost to the bone, and infections and tissue damage were rampant. Six months after the man’s exposure, surgeons in Paris amputated his right leg and removed the right half of his pelvis — skeletal trauma that exceeded almost anything even I had ever witnessed — along with much of his intestinal and urinary tract. The man’s wife was luckier; she developed a burn at the base of her back, but it healed.

The wall went dark, but the images hung in my mind, and no one said anything for a while. Finally Emert did. “That guy lived?”

“He lived. He’s alive still,” said Thornton. “If you call that living.”

My thoughts flew from hospitals in Peru and Paris to one in Knoxville. I prayed that I had not just witnessed a preview of what lay in store for Eddie Garcia’s hands or Miranda’s fingers.

“So you guys think the gamma source in Novak’s gut was from one of these industrial radiography cameras?”

“We’re virtually sure. Field Imaging Equipment is sending somebody from Shreveport up to Savannah River to verify that.”

“And they can tell us whose camera the source came from?”

He shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. There are thousands of these cameras out there — all over the Texas oil patch and the Gulf Coast, for instance — and they’re not as tightly regulated or closely tracked as you might think. When a refinery or a pipeline-inspection contractor buys one, they’re required to register it with the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But after that?” He shrugged. “They can chuck it in a jeep and drive from one coast to the other with it. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner has to report that to the NRC. But what if nobody knows for a while? They might use the hell out of it for a week or two, then lock it away in a tool closet for six months or a year. Hell, hundreds of these cameras went missing in the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lost, mostly, but probably some were stolen.”

“Hundreds?” The number astonished me.

“Several hundred. Nearly all of them recovered since.”

“Nearly?”

“A few are still unaccounted for,” he acknowledged.

“So one of those missing Katrina cameras could have supplied the source that killed Novak?”

“Hang on,” he said, “I’ll get to that in a second. Another complication is that there’s no serial number on the source we found in Novak.”

“Garcia,” I said. “Garcia found it in Novak.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Yes, the source Dr. Garcia found in Novak. There would be a serial number on the camera, but there’s no room on the source. Which is too bad, since the source is what we have.” He shrugged again, and for some reason, I found the shrug — the even-keeled, accepting shrug — intolerable.

“Damm it!” I halfway shouted. “Isn’t there anything we can do to find out where this came from? Isn’t anybody in the government worried about these things? Isn’t anybody anywhere worried besides me?” Thornton and Emert stared at me, astonished at the outburst, and I realized that my anger stemmed not so much from the perils of portable radiography sources — peril could be found in any technology if you looked for it — but from my helplessness to do anything for Miranda or Garcia. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was out of line.”

“I understand,” he said. “You’ve got people whose health and safety have been compromised. On the bright side, we do have a couple of things that might help us narrow the search.”

“Tell me,” I said. “I could use some good news.”

“Remember, the half-life is just seventy-four days. So if you put a fresh two-hundred-curie source in your RadioGraph Elite, seventy-four days later it’s down to a hundred curies, and by a hundred and forty-eight days it’s down to fifty curies. At the end of a year, that stuff has decayed through five half-lives, so it’s down to six curies. Knowing the source in Novak was still around a hundred curies tells us something very useful.”

“It tells you the source was fresh,” I said. “And it tells you it wasn’t from one of those cameras that went missing in Katrina.”

“Bingo,” he said.

“So who actually makes the sources?” I said. “And how, and where, and when? Does this outfit in Shreveport have a reactor or a cyclotron or whatever is used to make iridium-192? Do they make big batches of these things — hundreds of things at once? — or just a few at a time? How hard can it be to track down everybody who got one sometime in the past three months?”

He smiled at the burst of questions. “It’s harder than I wish it were,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got a hundred people working on it. You know the old saying about the tip of the iceberg?” I nodded. “Well, I’m just the guy standing on top of the tip of the iceberg. Everything below is shrouded in fog.”

Just then his cell phone rang — an odd, warbling tone I’d never heard from a cell phone before. He looked startled, then murmured, “Excuse me.” He turned his back on us and spoke softly, but I could make out a few words, mostly “yes sir” and “no sir” and “thank you, sir.” He ended the call with a promise to phone with an update before the end of the day. He turned back to us, looking somewhere between embarrassed and shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I had to take that. The man calls, you answer.”

“Which man?” I asked. “Your boss? The head of the WMD Directorate?”

“His boss’s boss’s boss,” said Thornton. “The director. Of the FBI. He wants progress reports three times a day. This case is a big target on his radar screen.”

I felt a sudden tightening in my throat, and a sudden surge of hope that we’d find out who had killed Novak — and who might be slowly killing Garcia.

CHAPTER 20

The next morning Miranda and I had a short but cheerful visit at the hospital with Garcia. Garcia still looked weak, his burned hands were quite tender, and his lymphocyte count remained dangerously low, yet his spirits were surprisingly high. He was six chapters into a sterilized copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the books I’d seen on Leonard Novak’s desk. The book was propped on a reading stand, and Garcia was turning the pages with the eraser of a pencil, which he managed to grip with his bandaged right fist. “Great book,” he said. “Those Manhattan Project scientists were big thinkers. Complicated human beings, though.” I was surprised at his choice of reading material, but delighted to see him in good spirits.

After leaving the hospital, we returned to the bone lab. We’d just started reconstructing the cranium of the North Knoxville skeleton when Chip Thornton came knocking on the door. “Wow,” he said. “Skeleton in a kit. Looks like fun.”

Miranda made a face at him. “You came to help?”

“Yes,” he said. “Okay, no, that’s a lie. I was in the neighborhood and figured it was just as easy to relay this in person as on the phone.” That’s a lie, too, I thought. You figured you’d stop and flirt with Miranda. “We’ve had some people digging out old security files,” he said, “and they found an interesting note in Dr. Novak’s. Apparently there was some suspicion at the time that Novak was a homosexual. Army intelligence recommended that he be removed from the project as a security risk, but General Groves himself nixed it — he wrote that Novak could consort with farm animals as long as he produced sufficient plutonium in the reactors in Oak Ridge and Hanford.” Miranda looked appalled. My guess was that her disgust had less to do with the notion of interspecies love than with Groves’s readiness to ridicule the scientist at the same time he was depending on him.

“Poor Novak,” she said, confirming my thinking. “What on earth was he doing in the boonies of Tennessee?”

“It’s where the project was,” said Thornton. For such a smart guy, he had an unfortunate tendency to take things too literally at times. “Groves picked Oak Ridge as the main site for the Manhattan Project for a bunch of reasons,” he said. “Far enough inland that the Germans and Japanese couldn’t possibly attack it. Isolated enough to stay below the radar screen. Good access to rail lines and cooling water and hydroelectric power and a civilian workforce.” I nodded; I’d read this in several of the history books I’d hauled back from the Oak Ridge library in the past week. “I don’t know if this was another factor in the selection,” he went on, “or just something that Groves came to appreciate as the project progressed, but folks in Appalachia tend to be pretty tight-lipped.”

Miranda pursed her lips, then said, “Yup.” Thornton and I laughed.

“Conservative, too,” he said. “Oak Ridge was practically the polar opposite of Los Alamos. Los Alamos was filled with loose-lipped liberals, from the top down. Hell, up until Groves put him in charge of Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer gave money to Communist causes. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, was a member of the Communist Party. So was his younger brother, Frank. So was Oppenheimer’s girlfriend, until she committed suicide.”

“Wait, wait,” said Miranda. “Girlfriend as in ‘before he married Kitty’? Or girlfriend as in ‘running around on Kitty’?”

“Maybe both,” said Thornton. “He was engaged to a woman named Jean Tatlock before he married Kitty, and he stayed in touch with her occasionally afterward. One of the creepier things in Oppenheimer’s file is a report by an army intelligence agent, Boris Pash, who followed Oppenheimer from Los Alamos to Berkeley in June of 1943. Pash watched Oppy go inside Tatlock’s apartment, wrote down what time the lights went out, and then wrote down what time they came out of the building the next morning.”

“Yuck,” said Miranda.

“It might seem intrusive,” conceded Thornton, “but these guys were working on a life-and-death, fate-of-the-nation project. Oppenheimer was in the most sensitive position of all the scientists. And Berkeley, where he and a bunch of other Los Alamos scientists came from, was a hotbed of communism. You think Berkeley was leftist in the 1960s and 1970s, you should’ve seen it in the thirties and early forties.”

“If the choice is between peeping Toms and left-wing liberals,” said Miranda, “I’ll take the Berkeley crowd any day.”

“Swell place,” said Thornton, “if you like Marx and Lenin.” I heard a faint warning bell begin to ring in the back of my mind, but I shrugged it off. “Oppenheimer and the people he brought to Los Alamos were brilliant, no doubt about it,” the agent continued. “They were the ones who put the pieces of the bomb together. But Los Alamos leaked like a sieve. Oppenheimer ran Los Alamos sort of like a university physics department. He held seminars where people talked openly about the bomb. He gave folks a mimeographed handout—The Los Alamos Primer, it was called — that summed up everything they knew about how to build an atomic bomb.”

“Probably helped speed things along,” said Miranda. “Synergy, cross-fertilization of ideas, intellectual critical mass — all that stuff we liberal ivory-tower types believe in, you know?”

Thornton frowned at her slightly; he didn’t seem to approve of the handout, and he didn’t seem to like the edgy comment, either. “It might have helped speed the Manhattan Project, but it also helped speed the Soviets,” he said. “One of the Los Alamos physicists, Klaus Fuchs, gave a copy of the primer, or the key details from it, to a Soviet intelligence agent in June of 1945. It was like handing over a set of blueprints for the bomb. The guy betrayed us for five hundred bucks.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Five hundred dollars? The Soviets got America’s atomic secrets for five hundred dollars?”

He nodded. “I like Oak Ridge,” he said. “Oak Ridge was way bigger than Los Alamos, but a lot tighter-lipped. A lot more compartmentalized, too. Most people didn’t know what they were working on. They tended not to talk about it or speculate about it. And if they did, they got escorted out the gate, because anybody they talked to could have been a snitch.”

“A snitch?” Miranda sounded offended by the word. “What makes you say snitch?”

“Only word for it,” he said. “Security was a huge priority in Oak Ridge. There were hundreds of military intelligence officers in Oak Ridge. Some in uniform, some not. Some had cover jobs — they went around testing batteries and changing lightbulbs, menial work that let them watch and listen to workers all over the place. But the serious snitching was the Acme Credit Corporation.”

Miranda snorted. “Acme? How corny is that? Sounds like something from a Road Runner cartoon.”

Thornton smiled slightly. “It does sound corny these days, doesn’t it? It might not have sounded so corny back then — back before Road Runner. Back in the middle of a struggle for world domination.”

Miranda flushed slightly. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get all cynical and ironic on you. What was the Acme Credit Corporation?”

“A bogus name and a post-office box in Knoxville,” said Thornton. “If the military intelligence people decided you were trustworthy — from your background check or their eavesdropping or whatever — they’d ask you to keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything that seemed suspicious. If you agreed, they’d give you these preaddressed ACME CREDIT CORPORATION envelopes and blank cards, and if you thought something or somebody seemed fishy, all you had to do was jot down their name and what they said or did on the card, then drop it in the mail. If you didn’t see anything, you sent in a blank card. Every tip got investigated.”

Miranda leaned back in her chair and bit her lower lip slightly. In my experience, anytime she did that, an argument was about to ensue. “What kind of fishiness? ‘So-and-so is making bombs in his basement’ fishiness? Or ‘so-and-so likes to wear his wife’s underwear’ fishiness?”

“Probably some of each,” he said. “One episode I heard about involved a fellow who was spouting off at lunch one day about the Soviet system of government being better than the American system. A day or two later, Acme got a note, and the guy was gone — given his walking papers and told not to come back.”

“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” Miranda was shaking her head. “Sounds a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War, the way people ratted out their friends and neighbors to the Stasi.”

“Oh, come on,” said Thornton. “We were in the midst of a horrific war. Global, apocalyptic war. Secret codes, spies, sabotage — those were real things, legitimate concerns. A slight erosion of civil liberties in a top secret military installation seems pretty far down on the list of World War II evils, if you ask me.”

“Children, childen,” I said. “Let’s not bicker.” I heard Miranda draw a deep breath, and saw her relax, which meant Thornton and I could relax, too. “Does the army have a card that could tell us why Leonard Novak was reading books on espionage when he was killed?”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ve got people combing the Venona transcripts to see if they can find anything that might connect with Novak.”

Miranda looked puzzled. “Venona was the code name for a massive counterespionage operation,” Thornton explained. “Between 1944 and 1948, the agency that’s now called the NSA — the National Security Agency — intercepted and decoded thousands of telegram cables sent to Moscow from Soviet consulates around the world. Most of them were boring, bureaucratic stuff. But some, especially the ones from New York to Moscow, were spy reports. They used code names for people and places — the messages were in code, so the names were codes within codes — but the code-breakers eventually managed to decipher most of them. Amazing feat, really, because the Soviets were using complicated codes that changed every day. Cryptanalysists have extra gears in their minds — like physicists — that help them grasp things we mere mortals can’t make sense of. Anyhow, one of the interesting intercepts was telegram 940—”

“Telegram 940? I like it,” Miranda interrupted. “It even sounds like something from a spy thriller.” She was leaning forward on the table, rapt with attention now. Thornton smiled, pleased to have won her over, or relieved that she was off her civil-liberties high horse.

“Telegram 940 was sent in December 1944,” he said. “It listed seventeen scientists who were working on what it called ‘the problem.’ The names included Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Nils Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Arthur Compton — some of the top brains of the Manhattan Project.”

I held up a hand, which I practically had to wave directly between Thornton and Miranda to catch his attention. “I know some of those names,” I said, “but not all. Fermi was the guy who cobbled together the little reactor under the stadium in Chicago. But Bethe and Bohr — remind me. Physicists?”

“Right,” he said. “They were in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. Bohr was a Nobel laureate — so were Lawrence and Fermi, of course. Bohr escaped from Denmark under the noses of the Nazis, who were hoping to recruit him. He made it to London, then he and his son were flown to the States in an army transport plane.”

“Edward Teller,” said Miranda. “I’m not a fan of his.”

“No, I wouldn’t expect you to be,” he said. “Teller’s big claim to fame came in the late forties and fifties, of course, when he pushed for the hydrogen bomb — the ‘super,’ he called it — over the objections of Oppenheimer. Back during the Manhattan Project, Teller and von Neumann helped develop the implosion trigger for the plutonium bomb, the one used on Nagasaki.” I saw Miranda’s eyes cloud at the mention of Nagasaki; I’d noticed that anytime a discussion turned from the herculean labors of the Manhattan Project to the explosive fruits of those labors, it troubled her.

I tossed in another question, hoping to lead us away from Nagasaki. “How about Kistiakowsky? I never heard of him.”

“Interesting guy,” said Thornton. “Explosives expert. He cleared the first ski slope in Los Alamos by using rings of explosives to cut down trees.”

“Cool dude,” said Miranda. “See, that’s a use of explosives I can really get behind.” I was just congratulating myself on asking about Kistiakowsky when Thornton dropped the other, unfortunate shoe.

“Kistiakowsky was one of the unsung heroes of the project, if you ask me,” he said. “He was the bridge between the pie-in-the-sky theoretical physics and the nuts-and-bolts realities of building the bomb — the ‘Gadget,’ they called it in Los Alamos — and making it actually explode. Kistiakowsky came up with what’s called the implosion lenses for the plutonium.”

“Lenses?” I hadn’t known the atomic bomb involved optics.

“Not really lenses,” he said. “That was the term they used for wedges they formed out of conventional high explosives. The lenses surrounded the spherical core of plutonium. The theory was, when the lenses exploded, they’d create a very focused shock wave, which would compress the plutonium enough to cause critical mass.”

“And kablooey?” The edge on Miranda’s question was so fine as to be nearly invisible. I noticed it, but Thornton didn’t.

“Kablooey,” he said, with unfortunate cheerfulness. “But the wedges, the lenses, had to be machined with incredible precision — like, accurate to zillionths of an inch. Nobody thought Kistiakowsky could do it, including Oppenheimer. In fact,” he went on, warming to the story, “one reason they did the Trinity test with a plutonium bomb was because they were confident the uranium bomb would work but afraid the plutonium bomb would be a dud. Poor Kistiakowsky was already being set up as the scapegoat for failure. He finally got so fed up with the skepticism that he bet Oppenheimer a whole month’s pay — against just ten bucks from Oppenheimer — that it would work. And of course it did.”

“So Kistiakowsky got his ten bucks,” said Miranda, “and Nagasaki got vaporized.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “A real win-win.”

“Could’ve been worse,” said Thornton, finally punching back. “Fermi could’ve won his bet.”

Oh hell, I thought, here we go.

“And what was Fermi betting,” she snapped, “that maybe we’d come to our senses and not use the damn thing on innocent civilians?”

“Guys, guys,” I said, trying to de-escalate the conflict, but the chain reaction had gotten out of hand.

“No,” shot back Thornton. “Fermi was betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere. He was taking side bets, too: Would it incinerate the whole world, or just New Mexico?”

“Jesus,” said Miranda. “That is sickening.”

“You. Weren’t. There.” Thornton’s voice was quiet but hard as steel. “How dare you judge them? How dare you? You and I are part of the most sheltered, pampered generation ever to walk the face of this earth. These scientists, a lot of them, were refugees, Jewish refugees, from Europe — the land of Hitler, the land of the Holocaust, remember? Six million Jews murdered, just for being Jews. Tens of millions of other civilians killed just for living in the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong politics. If those scientists felt the need for a little gallows humor, who can blame them? The gallows was casting a shadow over the whole damn world at the time. How dare you sit there in your privileged, liberal smugness and pass moral judgment on them?”

Miranda drew back as if he’d slapped her. “Excuse me,” she whispered. She stood up, and before I knew what was happening, she was gone, the steel door of the bone lab banging shut behind her.

Thornton and I sat staring at each other. “Well, shit,” he finally said. “I just scorched the earth, didn’t I?”

“I should’ve stopped you somehow,” I said. “Kicked you under the table. Clobbered you with a femur.”

He rubbed his face with his hands. “The hell of it is, I really like her,” he said. “I thought maybe she liked me, too.”

“She did,” I said. “And she’s notoriously picky.”

“Crap.”

“Oh well,” I said. “You’ll always have Paris. Or Verona. Or Venona. Was there anything else about Venona or Novak or — I don’t know, about anything—you’d planned to tell us, before you went stomping across the minefield of Miranda’s opinions?”

He sighed. “A little,” he said. “Nothing concrete yet; just some tantalizing possibilities. There are lots of code names in the Venona transcripts that have never been deciphered — hundreds of Soviet spies in the United States back in the forties that have never been identified. We’re hoping, if we sift back through the transcripts again, maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe find something that ties to Novak.”

“Not to be too negative,” I said, “but if they threw thousands of people and millions of dollars at this back when it really mattered, isn’t it likely to be a dead end by now?”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “New things still bubble up. Just a couple years ago, we got some new insight on one of the few spies who infiltrated Oak Ridge. A health physicist, guy named Koval, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos and Hanford during the war. His job was checking radiation levels, so he got a look at all the crucial process equipment for creating weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and nobody suspected him at the time, even though he’d lived and studied in Russia.”

“I thought you said security in Oak Ridge was tight. They turned a Russian loose with a Geiger counter?”

“His parents were Russian immigrants, but Koval was an American, actually — born in Iowa, and christened George. Millions of European and Russian immigrants came to the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century — the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ remember? Koval’s parents were among them.”

One of the notations on Leonard Novak’s yellow notepad popped into my head. “George Koval?” Thornton nodded. “Novak wrote the initials ‘GK’ shortly before he died, and he was reading books about Venona at the time. Maybe he knew about Koval. Maybe they collaborated. Can you guys interrogate George, see if our guy Novak was one of his comrades?”

“George is outside our jurisdiction,” Thornton said dryly. “Moved to Moscow in 1948, died in 2006. After he died, Vladimir Putin awarded him Russia’s highest medal.”

“Damn,” I said. “Well, between the Acme Credit Corporation and the Venona transcripts, maybe something will turn up.”

He gave a rueful smile. “Unlike Kistiakowsky, I wouldn’t bet a month’s pay on it,” he said. “Hell, I wouldn’t bet ten bucks. But we’ll keep digging.” He thought of something. “You still in the good graces of the woman in Oak Ridge?”

I blushed. “The librarian? Isabella?”

He shook his head. “No, the old lady. Beatrice. The one that married Novak without having done due diligence about his sexual orientation.”

“Ah. No, I haven’t talked to Beatrice since she outed Novak as gay, but it’s not like she and I have had a spat.”

“Lucky you,” he said. “Listen, since you seem to bring out the gift of gab in Madame Beatrice, how about chatting her up some more, see if she thinks Novak was giving secrets to the Soviets?”

“If she snitches on him, should I send a note to the Acme Credit Corporation?”

“Sure,” he said. “We check the P.O. box twice a day.” He pushed back from the table. “I reckon I’ll slink back to my office now,” he said. “I’ve done enough damage here for one day.”

“You mean Miranda?” He nodded. “Surely you’re not throwing in the towel so soon,” I said. “I thought you G-men never gave up. ‘We always get our man’—wasn’t that an early FBI slogan?”

“Nah, that was the Canadian Mounties,” he said. “They had a better sloganeer than we did. Besides, this thing with Miranda, it’s outside my field of expertise. The bad guys, they’re pretty easy to figure out, Doc. It’s the great women that are truly mysterious.”

“I know, Chip,” I said. I walked him to the door of the lab. “That’s what makes them great.”

CHAPTER 21

Four hours after the blowup in the bone lab, as I was about to head to Oak Ridge for another stroll through the past with Beatrice, I heard a light tap on my door. Looking up, I was surprised to see Miranda; normally she just barged right in, her arrival accompanied by a wisecrack — usually one at my expense. Her eyes were red and she looked off-balance. I pointed to an empty chair that was shoved against the radiator under the window.

“No offense,” I said, “but you don’t look so hot.”

“I look a lot better than I feel,” she said. I was alarmed — was she developing symptoms of radiation sicknesss? — but she read my expression and swiftly waved a hand to let me know her problem wasn’t medical.

“You want to talk about it?” It seemed a safe question, since she’d shown up at my door, but as fragile as she seemed, I wanted to go easy.

“Some of it,” she said. “The ideas part. Not the boy-girl part.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. “The ideas?”

“The ideas. The ideals. The people. Patriots and traitors. Hard choices and hellish compromises.”

“Maybe we should send out for pizza,” I said. “And a six-pack of philosophers.”

She plunked down into the chair with a sigh. “In a way, the problem all boils down to the difference between Groves and Oppenheimer,” she said. “And it’s all written in their eyes.” I furrowed my brow at her. “Groves was like the ultimate can-do guy,” she said. “The steamroller of the Manhattan Project. Get it done, get it done, get it done. No matter what. He and his secret project had so much power. Groves had the authority to take whatever he wanted, build whatever was necessary. Not enough copper to make the Y-12 calutrons? No problem; we’ll just take fifteen thousand tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury. Not sure the calutrons can make enough uranium? We’ll build a gaseous-diffusion plant, too, the biggest factory in the world. Not sure uranium’s the ticket? Let’s make plutonium, too. He hedged all his bets, but in the end, all his bets paid off.” I nodded; to lessen the risk of failure, Groves had indeed pursued multiple paths to the bomb, and all of them succeeded. “But look at him, Dr. B.”

She pulled a photo of General Groves from a folder she’d brought with her and laid it on the desk. It was a famous photo, one I’d seen countless times since cutting Novak from the ice. The picture showed Groves studying a map of Japan. No, not studying it, exactly; more like burning a hole in it with his eyes. The general’s belly was doughy and his jowls were flabby, but his eyes were like lasers locked on a target. “That man’s horizon didn’t extend one inch beyond Japan,” she said. “Build the bomb; drop the bomb.”

“He was a good fit for the job,” I said.

“Now look at Oppenheimer,” she said, slipping another photo from the folder. The physicist was wearing the porkpie hat that had been his trademark, much like the battered fedora of Indiana Jones. A cigarette hung from Oppenheimer’s lips, and a wisp of smoke wafted up the left side of his face. A skinny tie was cinched around a scrawny neck — no flabby jowls on Oppenheimer — and the nubby collar of a tweed jacket gapped open above bony shoulders. At the center of the image was a pair of haunted, haunting eyes. They were staring straight into the lens, but they seemed to be focused on something far beyond it. “Do you see? Those are the eyes of a man who’s been chained to a rock; a man staring at eternity,” she said. “Where’s the border between America and Japan, or America and Russia, when you’re staring at eternity?”

“Are you sure he can see that far, Miranda? And are you sure you can see into his soul?”

“Come on, Dr. B. When the Trinity test worked, this guy didn’t say ‘yee haw’ or ‘hot damn’ or even ‘oh shit.’ This guy said, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He agonized. He tried to rein in nuclear weapons after the war, and he was painted as a traitor for that.”

“He did try,” I said. “But not until after the war.”

She frowned. “I know,” she said, “and that’s part of what’s tragic about him. He built the bomb, and then he hated what it did, and hated the arms race it triggered. And then he was destroyed for opposing the arms race. Meanwhile, look at Werner von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the war, but he became an American hero because he started building rockets for us instead of Hitler. Which brings me back to Klaus Fuchs, sort of. Was he a patriot or a traitor?”

“Traitor,” I said. “No question. He sold atomic secrets to our enemies.”

“But he was Jewish,” she said. “To him, the ultimate enemy was Hitler. And if the enemy of your enemy is your friend, that makes Russia your friend. Besides, they were our ally. In theory, at least.”

“Big difference between theory and practice,” I said. “Stalin was a tyrant and a butcher — before the war as well as afterward.”

“He was. But what’s the only nation on earth to have ever used weapons of mass destruction in an act of war? The United States. Twice.”

“We did it to save lives, Miranda,” I said. “Not just U.S. lives; Japanese lives, too. We fire-bombed Tokyo one night in March 1945. The firestorms destroyed fifteen square miles of the city and killed a hundred thousand civilians. Firebombing Tokyo didn’t move Japan to surrender. It took the symbolic power of the atomic bomb to end the war.”

“Highly debatable,” she said. “The Japanese sent out surrender overtures in late July, before Hiroshima. But we brushed them aside, because by that point we’d tested the bomb. We knew it worked, and we wanted to drop it. Not just to cinch the victory over Japan, but to intimidate the Russians, because we could already tell they were going to be our next big problem.”

“But they weren’t all that intimidated,” I pointed out. “Because by then they had blueprints of the bomb from Fuchs in Los Alamos. And descriptions of uranium-enrichment equipment from George Koval. Who knows, maybe they even had plutonium reactor blueprints from Leonard Novak.”

Miranda groaned. “Dammit,” she said. “Is. A. Puzzlement.” It was a line she often quoted from an old Broadway musical—The King and I—and it made me smile. If she was up to quoting show tunes, her angst had eased. “Okay,” she sighed, “I know it breaks your heart to hear this, but I need to go home and feed Immanuel Kat now.”

“Does this mean we’re not sending out for pizza and philosophers?”

“Not tonight,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow, when we take up the problems of genocide and starvation in Africa.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said, as she disappeared through the doorway.

She leaned her head back around the frame. “So, um…” She trailed off.

“Ye-e-s-s-s?”

“Thornton,” she said. “A shame. I was kinda liking him.”

I suppressed a smile. “I think he was kinda liking you, too. And I hear he’s notoriously picky.”

“Crap,” she said, and disappeared into the hallway again.

Then she reappeared once more. “The fundamental moral and ethical problem,” she said, “is this. I suspect Thornton’s a Republican. I could never sleep with a Republican.”

“Heavens no,” I said. “That would be a hellish compromise.”

CHAPTER 22

As I parked at Beatrice’s curb and headed toward her door, I noticed that I felt eager, almost as eager as if I were heading to a death scene to recover a skeleton. I told myself that this was natural; I was returning, after all, at the request of Emert and Thornton, who hoped I might extract more information from her than they had. But that wasn’t it, or wasn’t entirely it; her stories had shed a few glimmers on Novak, but mostly it was Beatrice herself who occupied the limelight of her stories. I knew better than to push her too hard about Novak; the one time I’d tried it, she’d all but played the senility card, just as she’d done with the law enforcement officers. But there was another reason I let her ramble on about herself, rather than demanding answers about Novak. The truth of the matter, I realized as I entered her house and poured her vodka, was that I’d fallen under the spell of the old woman and her stories, just as I’d fallen under the spell of the black-and-white photos and films in the museum and the library. The images gave me vivid glimpses of another time, when men and women toiled desperately in secret cities, and when science attained tragic greatness. Beatrice’s stories gave those images a human face and a human voice.

It was that reflective mood, I suppose, that prompted me to say, “It’s odd, isn’t it, that I’m sitting here again, back for another story?”

“No, not at all,” she said. “It couldn’t be any other way. Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments. There’s not a single thing that happens to you that doesn’t leave its mark; doesn’t redirect your course somehow; doesn’t make you more fully who you are. It took every single step — even the steps you took as life dragged you by the hair of your head — to put you exactly where you are. When I was a girl, life dragged me from Tennessee to New York and then back to Tennessee.”

“Tell me about that,” I said. “Tell me the story.”

CHAPTER 23

My father died when I was ten. My mother was a night auditor for a hotel in Chattanooga, so I got used to being alone at night at an early age. Getting used to it’s not the same as liking it, though. My father was gone for good; sometimes it seemed like my mother was, too.

The Christmas I was thirteen, Mother took me to New York on the train. My Aunt Rachel and Uncle Isaac lived there — Aunt Rachel was my father’s sister — and Mother said she wanted to visit them and show me the sights of New York for Christmas. We changed trains in Raleigh about lunchtime on a Friday, and we rode all night to get to New York. We shared a bunk in a sleeper car, and I remember falling asleep with my mother’s arms wrapped around me, which was something that hadn’t happened in years.

We got to Penn Station — this was Old Penn Station, mind you, which was spectacular, a lot grander than Grand Central — late in the afternoon on Christmas Day. From there we took a cab across town to Rockefeller Center. The outdoor ice-skating rink there had just opened, that very day. It was December 25, 1936. It was so beautiful it made my heart ache — all those Christmas decorations and lights, and everybody dressed up in their best winter clothes.

The country had just begun to crawl up out of the Great Depression, and that Christmas night in Rockefeller Square, I think people weren’t just celebrating the birth of Jesus, they were celebrating the rebirth of America. Mother and I waited in line for hours to skate, dragging our battered little suitcases with us. I didn’t mind the wait; I was giddy with the sights and sounds and glamour of it all. Finally, when we got up to the front of the line, Mother told me that she wasn’t going to skate; she would stay with our suitcases and just watch me. She asked a boy in line behind us if he’d help me get the hang of it. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older. Old enough to be interesting to me; not so old as to be scary. He held my hand and pulled me along, wobbling and shrieking and laughing. Every time we made a lap past the place where Mother was standing beside the rail, she’d wave and yell something encouraging.

And then the boy let go of my hand, and I was skating by myself. It was terrifying and thrilling — I’m sure I was just inching along, but it felt so daring and grown-up, and I couldn’t wait to circle back around and see Mother’s face when she realized I was doing it without any help. But her face wasn’t there. The fat man in the red scarf, who had been standing right beside her, was still there; so was the nun who had been on the other side. But she was gone, and the space where she had been standing was already closing up behind her.

I slid past the fat man and the nun — I was confused, and I also didn’t know how to stop — and went around the rink once more. The second time I came around, I ran into the rail to stop. I was still a few feet away from the two faces I recognized, so I pulled myself along the rail, my feet sliding out from under me again and again. I remember people laughing and pointing every time I caught myself on the rail and then hauled myself back up. By the time I got to the fat man and the nun, my heart had turned to ice, and I could feel tears running down my face — not because people were laughing at me, but because I knew something was wrong.

Our suitcases were both still there, wedged up against the railing right where she’d been standing. The nun told me my mother had needed to run to the restroom, and would be back in a few minutes. But somehow I knew she wouldn’t be.

After I’d stood at the railing crying for half an hour, the nun helped me change out of the skates and back into my shoes, then she took me over to a policeman who was standing near the entrance to the rink. I told him what had happened, and I could see him sizing me up — a scrawny girl from the sticks, with a tear-streaked face and a dripping nose and a cheap cardboard suitcase. He got this sad, weary look on his face, and that’s when I knew I’d never see my mother again.

On the cab ride up from Penn Station, Mother had tucked a big envelope into my coat pocket. She’d made a big production about how Aunt Rachel’s address and phone number were in the envelope, along with a five-dollar bill and a Christmas card for Rachel and Uncle Isaac. “You hang on to this for me,” she’d said. “You’re such a big girl now, and you know how I lose things. This way, when we get in the taxi for Brooklyn, the address and the cab fare will be right there, safe in your pocket.” As she said it, she patted the pocket.

When I told the policeman about Aunt Rachel and the envelope, he had me take it out and open it up. The Christmas card contained two letters. One was to Aunt Rachel, explaining how Mother had met a man she loved and wanted to be with, but the man — she didn’t even say what his name was — just couldn’t take on a thirteen-year-old. She was going away with him to South America, she said, where he would be working on a big construction project. She apologized for the unexpected Christmas present — me — and asked Rachel to please be kind to me.

The other letter was to me. She told me she loved me, and always would, and she hoped I could understand and forgive her someday. I never could, and I never did.

I don’t know how Mother afforded the train tickets, but two possibilities occurred to me years later. Maybe she embezzled the money from the hotel where she worked. Or maybe the man she abandoned me for gave her the money.

I don’t know whether she actually went to South America with the man. She might have just said that to throw us off the scent. Maybe she and her man settled down in Schenectady or Cincinnati. For that matter, I don’t even know if there really was a man; maybe she made that up, too, as a plausible reason for turning her back on a child. All I know is that I never saw or heard from her again.

Aunt Rachel helped me get an after-school job in a Wool-worth’s five-and-dime in Brooklyn. It didn’t pay much, but my little paychecks helped me feel like I was less of a burden to them. The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job at the Grumman aircraft factory on Long Island. Grumman built fighter planes for the navy — the Wildcat and the Hellcat, which became famous for their toughness against the Japanese — and I helped build the instrument panels for them.

Aunt Rachel never said so, but I could tell I’d long since worn out my welcome, so as the summer went on, I mentioned that it might be time for me to get out on my own. New York was expensive, though, so I worried about how I’d manage. She mentioned her other brother — my father’s brother, the one my mother had never liked. This uncle, Uncle Jake, lived in Knoxville, and he’d written Rachel to say that every girl in Tennessee was being hired for war work near Knoxville.

I stepped off the train in Knoxville in September of 1943, and a week later I started helping build the bomb, atom by atom.

CHAPTER 24

I walked into the bone lab and saw Miranda bent low over a lab table in concentration. It was a posture I’d seen her in so many times, for so many hours on end, that it sometimes surprised me to see that she was capable of standing, or even sitting up straight, rather than bending over bone fragments.

“Crap,” she said. “I’m too stupid and klutzy for this.”

“What are you working on?” I leaned around, expecting to see tiny bone fragments and a bottle of Duco cement. The skull of the North Knoxville skeleton had been crushed into dozens of pieces, some the size of rock salt. Instead of the drabness of bone, though, I saw a splash of vivid color: a small piece of fuchsia paper, creased into a bristling profusion of small triangles. “Is that origami?”

“It’s supposed to be, but it’s not. Dammit!” In frustration, she crumpled the paper and tossed it at a waste can beside the table. It missed, landing on the floor atop a heap of other wads of fuchsia.

“This might be a dumb question—” I began.

“Wouldn’t be the first,” she said.

“But if this is so frustrating, why are you doing it?”

“Because of a girl named Sadako,” she said. “And a friend named Eddie.”

“Sadako,” I said. “Neighbor? Daughter of a neighbor?”

“No. Sadako was a two-year-old living in Hiroshima in August of 1945. She was a mile and a half from the epicenter of the bomb blast. Sadako survived, but when she was twelve, she was diagnosed with leukemia.” Miranda slid another square of paper from the package on the table and folded it into a triangle. “Someone who came to visit her in the hospital told her that if she folded a thousand paper cranes and made a wish, her wish would come true. She made it to six hundred and forty-four, and then she died.”

Miranda folded the triangle in half again and again, into smaller triangles, and then gave the paper an angry yank that almost created wings, but not quite. I was formulating a logical response to her story about the girl — I thought of the dead in Pearl Harbor, the hundreds of thousands raped and slaughtered in China, the million projected to die in the assault on the Japanese home islands — when I noticed the misshapen wings begin to flutter. Miranda’s hands were shaking, and as I looked at them, I noticed that three of her fingertips, the three that had touched the iridium pellet in the morgue, were red and blistered. “Jesus, Miranda, we need to get you to the ER and get your fingers examined.”

She shook her head. “I went early this morning,” she said. “Dr. Davies met me there, and he talked to Dr. Sorensen on the phone. If the pain gets bad and the tissue gets necrotic, they’ll give me painkillers and ointments and antibiotics. But for now, there’s nothing to be done except ‘watchful waiting.’ Watching and waiting to see if my fingertips die or heal. Watching and waiting to see if Eddie heals or dies.” She studied her fingertips. “The necrosis has started in his hands.” She said it calmly, but then the shaking got worse. The tremor traveled up her arms to her shoulders, which began to quake. She said “dammit” again, very softly, and I knew she was not cursing the complexities of origami now. “Why,” she said, “God in heaven, why?”

“I don’t know, Miranda. I can’t think of anybody who deserves this less than you and Eddie.”

“Oh, Dr. B.,” she cried, “I’m not asking ‘why’ about Eddie and me. I’m asking ‘why’ about everything else. Everybody else. All the horror we’ve inflicted on one another.”

I’d known Miranda for years now; she could be as tough as cheap steak about her own hurts, but her heart bled freely for others. By “everybody else,” I figured she meant the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and maybe even more than those: maybe also Dresden and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Rwanda and Darfur and Baghdad. I laid one hand on her shoulder; with the other, I reached behind me and retrieved a Kleenex box from the desk. The paper bird fell from her hand, fluttered to the floor, and lay still. “Fucking war,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “God damn it to hell.”

“Yes,” I said. “God damn it to hell.”

I set the Kleenex box on the table, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and eased out of the bone lab. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob, locked the door behind me, and retreated to my office at the far end of the stadium. There, I locked my own door and unplugged the phone. I did a quick search of the Internet and clicked on a link that filled my computer screen with purple squares and triangles, crisscrossed with dotted lines. “Best Origami Crane Folding Instructions,” the caption read. I took a sheet of paper from the printer tray and folded it diagonally. I creased it between my fingertips until the edges were sharp as a blade.

That night i had a dream. In my dream, Garcia and Miranda reached out to me for help, but their outstretched hands crumbled before my eyes, leaving bloody stumps at the ends of their wrists. Then the dream shifted, and I was speaking to a large crowd in an auditorium in Oak Ridge. I realized I was talking to them about the atomic genie their city had helped loose from the bottle, and I realized I was distraught. I heard myself say to them, “Was anyone ever helped by it?” There was a stunned silence when I said it; even I, who dreamed the words, was shocked by them. Then, near the back of the room, I glimpsed movement. A woman rose slowly to her feet and stood. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf, in the manner favored by women who have lost their hair to radiation or chemotherapy. The woman didn’t speak; she didn’t move; she simply stood, holding that space, a calm answer to the bitter question I had posed.

Heads had swiveled in her direction when she stood, and the atmosphere in the dream-room suddenly felt alive and electric, the way the Tennessee air prickles just before a summer thunderstorm. Then a second person stood, and soon a dozen other people were on their feet, all bearing silent witness to cures effected, diseases diagnosed, homes heated, pipelines and airliners made safe.

The last person to stand was directly in front of me. He rose slowly, as if it cost him some pain to stand, and his head was bowed. He raised his head slowly, and I found myself staring into eyes that were both haunted and hopeful. I found myself staring into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer.

When I awoke — or dreamed I awoke — I seemed to see the world through such eyes myself.

CHAPTER 25

Thornton had sent a peace offering to Miranda — a dozen stems of iris, not yet unfurled, looking like green artists’ brushes dipped in indigo paint. Seven small sunflowers were tucked amid the blue tips, blazing like a week of summer days. Miranda wasn’t in the lab when I saw them; I knew they were from Thornton by the business card lying beside the vase, bearing his name, the FBI logo, and the word “Peace?” The man had flair, and he seemed smart and spunky, so maybe he was still in the game.

But he wasn’t ready to risk a personal appearance just yet, so I agreed to pick him up at the Federal Building, in downtown Knoxville, for our trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I’d come up with an idea about how we might search for the dead man shown on Novak’s film, and Thornton wanted to talk with someone in the Lab’s radioisotopes program, so we decided to ride-share.

Once we crossed the Solway Bridge, we headed west on Bethel Valley Road, a long, straight, prairie-flat ribbon of two-lane leading to the research complex. Five miles out Bethel Valley we stopped at a security checkpoint, where an armed guard consulted a clipboard and my driver’s license, then nodded slightly at me. He practically genuflected at Thornton’s FBI shield. Not that I was jealous or anything.

The road beelined along another two miles of valley floor, lined on either side by pines and hardwood. It grazed the end of a frozen cove on Melton Hill Lake, then entered the sprawling laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory — known as “the Lab” to most of the scientists who worked there, as “ORNL” to the acronym-inclined, and as “X-10” to the blue-collared hourly workers — was the only research facility created in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. The Y-12 and K-25 plants had been huge production facilities staffed by hourly workers like Beatrice. The wartime Lab, though, had a higher ratio of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The Lab had been built around the Graphite Reactor — a much bigger version of Fermi’s makeshift Chicago reactor — so that Leonard Novak and his colleagues could devise the means to create and purify weapons-grade plutonium.

As Thornton and I turned off Bethel Valley Road and entered the research complex, we found ourselves surrounded by gleaming new buildings of glass and steel. Although the Lab was owned by the federal government — the Department of Energy — it was jointly operated these days by UT and Battelle, a research institute with billions of dollars in government contracts. Clearly the partnership had been a fruitful one, at least architecturally speaking.

After parking, Thornton and I threaded our way past the new buildings, and I began to recognize the massive Cold War buildings I remembered from a prior visit, years before. The old buildings hadn’t been replaced by the new buildings; they’d simply been supplemented and screened from initial view. We walked down a one-lane alley between two looming buildings, labeled 4500 NORTH and 4500 SOUTH, and then entered a metal doorway set in the vast brick wall of 4500 South. Just inside, a staircase led down into a basement and upward to two additional floors of offices and labs. We climbed one flight, then entered a hallway labeled H CORRIDOR. I knocked on the open doorway of the first office — the office was dark, which made me worry that I’d somehow gone astray — but a voice called, “Come in.”

Arpad Vass emerged from the dimness to shake my hand and turn on the light; the fluorescents were bright enough to hurt my eyes at first, and I could understand why Arpad might prefer the dark, at least for computer work.

Arpad was one of the most innovative graduate students I’d ever had. Rather than focusing on physical anthropology — bones, essentially — Arpad’s Ph.D. research had focused on chemicals. Specifically, he developed a way to interpret the chemicals of decomposition like a clock, one that told the time since death.

For the past five years, Arpad had been collecting and analyzing the gases given off by bodies as they decomposed. In one corner of the Body Farm, he’d buried four bodies in graves of varying depths. He threaded the graves with a grid of perforated pipes leading to the surface of the ground. Every two weeks since burying the bodies, he had collected air samples from within and above the graves, and had run the samples through a gas chromatograph — mass spectrometer, a sophisticated analytical instrument that isolated individual compounds from the smelly samples. Over the course of the experiment, Arpad had identified nearly five hundred separate compounds given off by bodies as they decay. Many of the compounds were common, found virtually everywhere in nature; however, he’d found about thirty key compounds that — collectively — could be read as the fingerprint of a buried body. More specifically, as the fingerprint of a buried human body, rather than as the rotting remains of, say, a deer or dog or pig.

But Arpad wasn’t just analyzing the chemical fingerprint of a buried body; he was also developing a gizmo that could detect that fingerprint out in the field. The gizmo, which he called “the sniffer,” was a mechanical version of a cadaver dog’s nose, and it was designed to find clandestine graves. The last time I’d seen him, Arpad was testing a prototype of the sniffer.

After shaking hands with Arpad, Thornton closed the door to the office. Arpad — a dark-haired, brown-eyed man of Hungarian descent — raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. At Thornton’s request, I hadn’t told Arpad what we wanted to see him about; only that an FBI agent and I wanted to consult him about a forensic case.

“This is fairly sensitive,” said Thornton. “We have evidence that a murder occurred in the vicinity of the Laboratory back during the Manhattan Project. We also suspect that espionage — spying for the Soviets — may have played some part in the murder.”

“Interesting,” said Arpad. “What’s the evidence?”

Thornton nodded at me. I opened the manila envelope I’d brought with me and slid out the photographs, laying them on Arpad’s desk. As he studied the images of the body and the shallow grave, he smiled. “That looks like pretty good evidence,” he said. “This evidence has just come to light?” I nodded. “This body was never found?” I nodded again.

Arpad smiled again. “Very interesting,” he said.

“Tell me about this sniffer you’re working on,” Thornton said. “How does it work — and how well does it work?”

If I hadn’t known Arpad well, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the flicker of impatience in his eyes. It lasted only a split second, and then — almost like flipping a switch — he was in presentation mode, pitching himself and his work to the agent. “The research is funded by the Department of Justice,” he said. “We’ve been exploring two technologies for detecting clandestine graves. One is a simple off-the-shelf technology; the other is something more sophisticated, which we’re creating from scratch for DOJ.” He walked around the desk and picked up a pistol-shaped device from a bookshelf that lined the long wall of the office. In the place of a metal barrel, though, was an eighteen-inch black rubber tube, with a metal tip on the end. “This is a TopGun H10X commercial Freon detector,” Arpad said, “just like air-conditioning technicians use to check your central air for leaks.” Thornton looked puzzled, and I was pretty sure I did, too, as I hadn’t heard this part of Arpad’s pitch before. “It turns out,” Arpad went on, “that among the thirty key compounds a decaying body gives off, three are Freon compounds. So this is an easy way to do a crude search with existing, cheap technology. Here, I’ll show you.” Arpad opened up a file cabinet and removed a small glass vial sealed with a rubber stopper. Inside was about a teaspoonful of something that looked like garden-variety dirt.

“This is a soil sample from the surface of a shallow grave at the Body Farm,” he said. He pried out the stopper; I sniffed, but I didn’t smell decomp. “If the body had been on top of this, this would really stink,” he said, and I nodded in agreement. “But since it was above the body, the volatile fatty acids weren’t soaking into the dirt. Instead, as the bodies underneath off-gased, the gases slowly migrated up through the soil. Much, much fainter.” He dug around in the file drawer and found a plastic bag, then laid the vial in the bottom of the bag. Next he flipped a switch on the detector. It growled to life, with a noise somewhere between a squeal and electronic static. Arpad dialed a switch and the noise subsided to an occasional chirp. Inserting the end of the Freon detector’s wand in the bag, he clutched the bag tightly around the tube to seal it. After a few seconds, the detector began to chirp faster and faster, until soon it was almost back to a continuous squeal.

Thornton nodded, but there was a grudging quality to the nod. “So as long as somebody bags the body for you and you stick that wand in the bag, you can find the body?” This time anyone could have detected the impatience in Arpad’s expression.

“That’s about thirty grams of soil,” Arpad said. “An ounce. There’s probably a few picograms — a few billionths of an ounce — of decomp chemicals in that sample. This isn’t infallible, but it’s not bad for starters, considering that you can buy it on eBay for eighty bucks.”

“So that’s not the sniffer you’re creating for DOJ, right?”

“Right. This is the sniffer we’re creating for DOJ.” Arpad opened a cabinet and removed an instrument that appeared to be a cross between a metal detector and a weed whacker. On closer inspection, I noticed that instead of a loop or a cutting head, the lower end of the device held a small cylindrical probe. Arpad flipped a switch at the upper end of the device, and it clicked slowly, much like a Geiger counter. “Depending on which sensors we put in the probe,” he said, “we can search for a fresh body, a decaying body, or a really old one.” He inserted the probe into the bag, and after a few seconds the clicks ran together into a machine-gun-fire buzz.

Thornton leaned forward and studied the sniffer. “So how long would it take to search an area with that rig?”

“Depends on how big the area is,” said Arpad. “These photos seem to indicate the general location, but we could still be talking about an area a hundred yards square. If you tried to put the probe into the ground every square foot, you’d be taking eight hundred thousand samples. You got months to spend poking the tip of this into the ground?”

Thornton shrugged. “If that’s what it takes. We’ve spent years looking for Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Well, I don’t have years,” said Arpad. “I don’t even have a week, because my DOJ sponsors are breathing down my neck to lock the design of this thing so they can start getting it into the hands of police departments all around the country.”

“Any suggestions,” I intervened, “on how we might harness this as efficiently as possible?”

“I suggest we bring in a cadaver dog to prescreen the search area, see if there are places he’s interested in. Dogs cover ground faster than we can; a good dog could save us days or weeks of gridwork.”

“I thought the idea behind this was to replace the dog,” said Thornton.

“More like ‘supplement’ the dog,” Arpad said. “Dogs have spent millions of years evolving great noses. They can be trained to pick up tiny, tiny traces of specific scents — bombs, drugs, truffles, tumors, human bones. Not only can they detect it, they can track it, swim upstream — figuratively speaking — to the source of it. Scent isn’t a static, stationary thing; it’s almost got a life of its own, like moving water: it flows, it pools, it sinks, it creeps along underground layers of rock. A good cadaver dog can work his way up that current of scent — a few molecules at a time — till he gets closer and closer to the source. If we bring in a good cadaver dog, we could narrow the search area by ninety percent or more.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. “You know any good cadaver dogs?”

“Actually, yes,” said Arpad. “A German shepherd named Cherokee. He found some bare human bones in a creek bed up near Bristol, which isn’t particularly amazing; he found a freshly drowned man in twenty feet of water in the Big South Fork River, which is rather amazing. I actually worked with Cherokee to help calibrate the sniffer. I ran different decomp samples past him to see if he’d alert on them — to make sure he’d recognize them as human remains. Then I repeated the process with synthetic, laboratory mixtures of a few of the key chemicals in decomp. Cherokee alerted on them; so did the sniffer. All that was indoors. Then we went out into the woods, where we did all that again with buried samples. The dog found them all; so did the sniffer.”

Thornton settled back in his chair and drummed his fingers together. “So, no offense intended,” he said, “but what’s the sniffer got that the dog doesn’t have?”

“It’s got stamina,” said Arpad. “A dog’s nose gives out pretty quickly — the neurons that send signals to the brain just get tired and quit sending. A cadaver dog can work intensely for maybe half an hour, tops, then he’s got to rest. The only thing that gives out in the sniffer is the battery, and that takes sixty seconds to replace.”

Thornton nodded, satisfied. “You reckon we could get Cherokee out here anytime soon to scout around, help us narrow down the search area?”

“I’ll call and see,” he said. “Where’s the search area?” He reached back to a credenza tucked beneath the window and grabbed a cylinder of rolled paper. Unfurling a topographic map of the Oak Ridge Reservation, he spread it on his desk and weighted the corners with books.

Thornton and I looked at each other. “There’s the rub,” I said. “We’re not exactly sure.” Arpad’s gaze swiveled from me to Thornton and back again. I laid one of the hillside pictures on the map. “We think it’s buried here, where this picture of this barn was taken.”

“And where’s the barn?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “We don’t know where it is. Or was.”

He looked stunned. “You’re saying it could be — or could have been — anywhere on the reservation?” I nodded glumly. “And you don’t even know if it still exists?” I nodded again. “This is a chemical probe, guys, not a magic wand,” he said. “You’re talking about a search area that’s, what, fifty thousand acres? It would take a lifetime to probe this whole place. Several lifetimes. I don’t mind looking for a needle in a haystack, but this is fifty thousand haystacks. Call me when you can narrow it down to just one.”

As we drove away from the research complex, I said to Thornton, “Arpad’s a little low-key, but he’s really excited about this.”

Thornton guffawed. “Yeah,” he said. “And Miranda’s voting Republican in the next election.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Okay, he’s not so excited,” I admitted. “I was trying to be upbeat. Sorry we wasted the trip.”

“Wasn’t wasted,” he said. “I can call up Arpad’s sponsor at DOJ and tell him the gadget works. Long as you already know where the body is.” I must have looked alarmed, because he quickly added, “Kidding. I’m kidding.”

We headed east, back toward Oak Ridge and Knoxville, for about a mile, then Thornton pointed to a sign on the left. “There it is — SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE,” he said. “That’s my stop.” The road wound uphill in a series of gentle S-curves; at the top of the ridge sprawled an immense new building, five curving stories of green glass and brushed aluminum.

“Wow,” I said. “Arpad needs to make friends with these guys. They’ve got better digs.” I parked near the entrance in a spot marked VISITOR, though we could have taken our pick of dozens of other convenient spots. “More parking, too.”

“I think they’re still putting the finishing touches on this,” he said. “I don’t believe the neutrons are spallating fully just yet.”

“Remind me what spallation means,” I said, as we walked toward the glass doors.

“Comes from the same root word as spa-lat,” he said, then he laughed. “Nah, kidding again. It’s from spalling—chipping — like concrete does. Spallation’s a subatomic version of concrete chipping. This thing fires zillions of neutrons out a huge linear accelerator — see that long, straight dike of dirt there, running from the main building over to that smaller building way over there? I think the accelerator’s under there. Anyhow, it shoots neutrons at experimental targets or materials, and then people who are a lot smarter than I am figure out all sorts of important things about those materials, based on what happens when the neutrons bash into them.”

“Bash?”

“Bash. Splat. Wham. Take your pick. They’re all scientifically rigorous and precise.”

“Rigorous,” I said.

“And precise.”

“So they make radioisotopes here with some of the bashing?”

“Huh? I don’t think so,” he said. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Well, you have a meeting with an isotopes-production guy,” I said, “and we’re here.”

“Ah,” he said. “A reasonable inference, but wrong. They make the isotopes at a research reactor, the High-Flux Isotope Reactor. But the security’s tighter there, and the digs are better here. And the isotopes guy is apparently better connected than Arpad.”

Thornton’s “isotopes guy”—the program’s director, it turned out, named Barry Vandergriff — met us in the atrium and motioned us toward a cluster of overstuffed armchairs in an alcove of the lobby. I excused myself from their meeting and wandered among a series of displays that showed cutaway drawings of the facility’s accelerator and neutron-beam guides and experimental capabilities. Some of it was over my head, but I did grasp the notion that neutrons — and how they got deflected or scattered as they bounced off materials, or passed through them — could shed a lot of light on the molecular structure of metals, plastics, even the proteins that make up living organisms.

I had just begun to study a large, mercury-filled metal tank — the mercury served as an immense catcher’s mitt, apparently, to stop the neutron beam after it had passed through its experimental target — when Thornton tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m done,” he said. “You ready, or did you want to study up some more?”

“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in neutrons.”

As we walked out of the building, Thornton said, “I wanted to talk to this guy to get more background on the iridium sources for radiographic cameras — who makes those sources, and how, and where.”

“And could he? Did he?”

“He could,” he said. “He did.”

“And?”

“For years, the only U.S. source of iridium-192 was the High-Flux Isotope Reactor, right here in Oak Ridge.”

“But now there are other U.S. sources?”

“No. Now not even HFIR’s making it. Too expensive. Now it’s imported from reactors in Belgium and the Netherlands and South Africa.”

“It’s cheaper to make it overseas and ship it in?”

“I guess so,” he said. “Maybe those governments subsidize the isotope reactors better, or maybe safety standards are lower or labor’s cheaper. Anyhow, that complicates our efforts to pin down where this came from.”

“Damn,” I said. “If this stuff has a half-life of only seventy-four days, how’s there time to ship it halfway around the world?”

He shrugged. “They ship sushi from Tokyo to New York, and sushi has a lot shorter half-life than this stuff. It’s just a matter of figuring out a fast, reliable delivery system. Hell, iridium-192 can be air-expressed on DHL or FedEx if the shipment’s not huge and the container’s approved.”

I almost wished he hadn’t told me that. I wasn’t sure I’d look at those delivery trucks in quite the same way ever again.

CHAPTER 26

“Where do you want to have dinner?”

The question caught me by surprise. “Excuse me?” I pulled the cell phone slightly away from my ear and glanced at the display, hoping for quick enlightenment. I didn’t recognize the number, but I did recognize the 482 as an Oak Ridge number. “Oh,” I said, a smile breaking across my face. “I think you should be the one to choose. Since I gather you’ve hit the jackpot. Or found the barn.”

“Maybe,” said Isabella, the librarian. “If I’m wrong, I’ll pay you back. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“Then pick a good restaurant,” I said. “The best in Oak Ridge.”

“The best in Oak Ridge? That’s easy.”

Ninety minutes later, I parked my truck in the lot beside Wildcat Stadium, the high school football field in Oak Ridge, and one of the city’s earliest landmarks. Although the original high school had long since been demolished — replaced by a sprawling, modern complex two miles away, right across the Turnpike from Isabella’s library — the stadium had never been replaced. Tucked into a natural hollow in the side of Black Oak Ridge, the stadium — home to quite a few championship football teams over the years — felt like small-town Americana. From where I parked, I could see the stadium, Chapel on the Hill, and the Alexander Inn. Clustered so close together, they seemed an architectural trinity of sorts, embodying human play, spiritual sanctuary, a scientific crossroads. Such a small town; such a big legacy.

Crossing Broadway, the two-block street that separated the football field from Jackson Square, I strolled beneath a sidewalk awning and stepped into the finest restaurant in Oak Ridge, and one of the finest in East Tennessee: Big Ed’s Pizza.

Big Ed’s was the creation of Ed Neusel, and the nickname was actually an understatement. Big Ed was a mountain of a man, as anyone who’d seen him perched on the bar stool at the back of the pizzeria could attest. Big Ed had long since gone to that great pizza kitchen in the sky, but his legacy and his likeness lived on. The restaurant’s glass front window featured a larger-than-life caricature of Big Ed’s face. T-shirts featuring the same likeness — and the quote I MAKE MY OWN DOUGH — were considered must-have souvenirs by tourists savvy enough to appreciate Oak Ridge’s contributions to history and cuisine.

The kitchen was open, and ran most of the length of the deep, narrow restaurant. Behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area, eight or ten high school kids — all wearing Big Ed’s T-shirts — hustled beneath fluorescent lights, twirling disks of dough, dealing out toppings, shuttling pies in and out of a wallful of ovens. During his lifetime, Ed Neusel had always been quick to give a kid a job, and I was pleased to see that his policy, like his pizza, had survived his passing.

The dining area was dark as a cave — black ceiling, dark hardwood floor, dingy walls, dim lights. That was probably for the best. I felt my foot slip slightly, on grease or tomato sauce or a mix of the two, until its skid was halted by a sticky patch of drying beer or soda. There was probably a health inspector’s rating posted on a wall somewhere in here, but I didn’t want to see it.

I scanned the dim interior for Isabella. I didn’t see her. For that matter, although the place was full, I didn’t see much of anybody — not well enough to discern identifying facial features, at least. The place could have been packed with Anthropology Department faculty and graduate students, and I wouldn’t have been able to recognize any of them.

At my back, I felt a blast of cold air as the door to the street opened. “Hi.” I heard her voice at my elbow again. She had a way of sneaking up on me that I was starting to like. “We had an after-hours staff meeting that ran long. Somebody’s been cutting the racy paintings out of the art books, and we’re trying to figure out how to catch them.”

“Art thieves in the Oak Ridge library,” I said. “Who’d’ve guessed? Is nothing sacred anymore?”

“Maybe theft; maybe censorship,” she said. “Hard to tell. Either way, it’s bad for the books. Shall we sit?” She nodded at a booth tucked into a narrow alcove just inside the door, and we slid onto facing benches. Some of the fluorescent light from the kitchen spilled into the booth — not so good for the appetite, but better for watching as she talked. She handed me a menu — a simple card listing sizes and toppings, the paper translucent with grease. “What do you like?”

“Just about everything except olives,” I said. “Pepperoni, sausage, ham — any of those. What about you?”

“I’m a vegetarian,” she said. “How about we order two? One for you, one for me?”

One of the high schoolers, a lanky redhead sporting torn jeans and red Converse high-tops with his T-shirt, came to take our order. Isabella pointed him to me, so I ordered a Coke and a small Hawaiian pizza, with ham and pineapple and onion. She made a face, then ordered a beer and a veggie special for herself. The kid jotted it down and turned to go, then turned back. “The veggie — also small?”

“Actually, no,” she said. “Make mine a large.”

I laughed. “Aren’t you a dainty thing?”

“Hey, you’re buying. And I want leftovers.”

I called our server back a second time and changed my order to large as well.

“So,” I said to her, “you got something for me that’s worth a large veggie special and a beer?”

“If you don’t think so,” she said, “we’ll split the tab.”

She tugged a handful of napkins from the dispenser huddled against the wall — they were small, flimsy napkins, better suited to dabbing a crumb of crumpet off a powdered cheek than to soaking up grease and sauce — and swabbed the table with them. Then she reached into a shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine whose cover proclaimed it to be the ORNL Review. I’d seen an issue or two of it; it was published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it contained a mix of articles — some breezy, others way over my head, technically — that summed up what a billion dollars a year would buy these days, in the science-and-energy department. Your tax dollars at work, I always thought when I ran across the magazine. Better in Oak Ridge, and better in the cause of science, than in a lot of other places and ways I could think of.

She opened the magazine, and I saw a print of the Novak photo tucked into the pages. She rotated the magazine and the photo toward me, keeping the photo positioned over the one page of the spread — keeping me in suspense, I guessed. That was okay with me; I was enjoying this. It felt like a dance — the closest thing to dancing I’d done since Jess, whom I’d loved and lost less than a year before.

“So this, obviously, is your picture,” she was saying. “Not a lot to go on. Woods and a hillside and a barn. Doesn’t narrow things down a lot here in East Tennessee.” I shook my head sorrowfully, signaling that I knew the cause was hopeless — that it would take a miracle or a genius, or both, to solve this enigmatic puzzle. “I’ll pretend not to notice that you’re mocking me,” she said. I laughed, and so did she. “Anyway. I kept looking at this after you left, and thinking I’d seen that barn before. Of course, anytime you stare at something long enough, your mind plays tricks on you, right?” I nodded, not teasing this time, because I realized I’d been staring at her, and my mind was playing some tricks on me at this very moment. “So. I have some regulars — patrons who like to hang out in the Oak Ridge Room. Old-timers, mostly, people who lived through the stuff that’s archived on the shelves. It’s an easy trip down Memory Lane.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fascinated, and it’s not even my history.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, one of my regulars — oh, stop,” she scolded, kicking me slightly under the table for wiggling my eyebrows—“one of my regulars used to be Ed Westcott, the photographer who took all the pictures in those notebooks. His job was to document it, capture the Manhattan Project on film, for posterity. Unlike anybody except maybe General Groves or Colonel Nichols, Westcott could go wherever he wanted, see whatever he wanted, and photograph whatever he wanted. Pretty amazing, when you think about it. He had a stroke a couple of years ago, and he has trouble speaking, so he doesn’t get to the library much anymore. But he’s lucid, and he emails. So I emailed your picture to him. I also sent it to Ray Smith, who writes history columns about Oak Ridge history for two newspapers. I figured if anybody might recognize that barn, it’d be either Ray or Ed.” She paused and leaned back so she could study my reaction to what she’d said so far.

Or maybe she was just leaning back so the high school kid could set our drinks on the table. My Coke came in a paper cup; her beer arrived in a frosted-glass mug. Evidently Big Ed or his successors had considered beer to be higher than Coke on the beverage chain. She hoisted the mug in my direction, so I raised my cup to toast. “To historical detective work,” I said, and we tapped the glasses together. The paper cup did not produce a particularly satisfying sound or feel, but the gesture still felt celebratory. “And was either of these regulars of yours able to shed light on the mystery of the barn?”

She reached down, and without taking her eyes off my face, she slid the blurry photo off the magazine. I looked down and there it was, printed on the page. Set against a hillside was a simple, windowless wooden barn with a tall, thin silo at one end. I was not looking at a photograph; I was looking at an illustration, something like an architectural rendering. As I read the accompanying story, I heard myself saying “hmm” and “hmm” repeatedly. The “barn,” I read, was not a barn at all, though it was carefully designed and built to look like one. It was the camouflaged entrance to an underground storage bunker for bomb-grade uranium-235, the precious product Beatrice had helped sift from tons of uranium-238. The entire quantity of U-235 Oak Ridge produced during World War II would have fit easily — lethally, but easily — into a couple of shoe boxes. But producing that U-235 had required hundreds of scientists, tens of thousands of laborers, and hundreds of millions of scarce wartime dollars. The nation — though only a handful of people knew it — had bet hugely on this roll of the scientific dice. Small wonder, then, that General Groves wanted to hide it well.

The silo beside the barn was actually a guard tower of reinforced concrete, the article explained. Looking closely at the illustration, I saw windows — bulletproof glass, the text noted — tucked beneath the silo’s overhanging metal roof. Beneath the windows were small slits in panels of thick steel: firing ports for machine guns.

I picked up the scan of Novak’s photo. The quality was terrible, but not so terrible as to keep me from seeing that the proportions of the building and the silo were the same as those of the uranium bunker. The perspective was different, to be sure — the illustration had been drawn from a ground-level perspective, while Novak’s photo had been shot from somewhere above, looking down through a gap in the trees. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even the silo’s roof — an odd, octagonal hat of a roof, rather than the round dome found atop most silos — was a dead-on match.

Our food arrived, so I scooped up the magazine and the print. The two aluminum platters filled the tabletop. The sauce was steaming, the cheese was molten, and the wedges of pizza were immense. After he’d set down the trays, our server handed us two plastic forks, flimsier than I’d ever seen before, and two tiny paper plates — saucers, really — for the massive, messy slices of pizza. Big Ed, I thought, is up there somewhere, and he’s laughing at us.

And that, too, was okay with me.

We departed laden with leftovers, the boxes heavy and already beginning to sag from the grease as we crossed the street and walked into the parking lot adjoining the football field. I had rolled up the photo and the magazine, which she told me to keep, and tucked them in a hip pocket. I didn’t feel authorized to tell her details, but I said there might be someone buried near the spot where the photo was taken.

“I knew it,” she said.

“How?”

“Dead people are your thing,” she said. “They’re what you do. They’re what you care about. If you’re going to this much trouble, it’s for a dead person.” On their face, the words might have seemed like an insult or an accusation, but there was nothing in her tone to suggest she’d meant them that way. They were simply how she saw me, and the assessment was accurate, if un-sentimental.

“And what’s your thing? Books?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. I have a master’s in history, actually; I did my thesis on the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge.”

“Did you grow up in Oak Ridge?”

She shook her head. “Louisiana,” she said.

“What got you interested in Oak Ridge history?”

“A family connection,” she said. “My father. And my grandmother.”

“Was she one of the calutron girls separating uranium at Y-12?”

“No,” she said. She hesitated. “She was involved with the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project. The work they did at the Graphite Reactor.”

“Physicist? Chemist?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that fancy,” she said. “Listen, I should go. Thanks for the pizza and the company.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “On both counts. Where are you parked?”

“I’m not,” she said. “I live just up the hill. I’m walking.”

“Let me drive you,” I offered. She shook her head.

“There’s a shortcut through the football field,” she said. “It’s close, and I like the walk.”

“Then I’ll walk you home. I’ll carry your pizza, since you don’t have any books.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” she said. “Oak Ridge is very safe. Well, except for the occasional bizarre murder.”

I laughed. “At least let me walk you partway. Till we get past the dark place where the monsters lurk.” I tugged gently at the pizza box.

She relented, and we ambled up a paved ramp to the level of the football field. At the far end of the field she angled upward onto a footpath that led to another large, grassy field. Like the football field, this one was also nestled in a natural bowl, but this bowl was surrounded by trees rather than grandstands. The lights of 1940s-vintage houses shone through the barren trees. “This is a practice field,” she said. “The football team does workouts here; soccer leagues use it, too.” At the far end of the practice field, the woods closed in tightly. “Watch your step,” she said. “There’s a deep hole there. A big storm sewer starts there. Runs under the fields and all the way down the hill to the Turnpike. You fall in there, we might not find you till the spring rains washed you out near the Federal Building.”

I peered down into the darkness but I couldn’t see much. “You been spelunking in there? Sounds like you know your way around.”

“Only on paper,” she said. “I have maps. Well, the Oak Ridge Room has maps — the old Manhattan Project drawings from when they first laid out the roads and sewers. I’m probably the only person alive who thinks a 1945 map of the storm-sewer system is interesting.”

“Some of us like dead people, some of us like sewer maps,” I said. “It takes all kinds. I find it interesting that you find those interesting.”

She pointed to an opening in the treeline. “There’s the sidewalk up to my street,” she said. “Thanks again. It was lovely.”

Before I knew it was happening, she made a quick move toward me and kissed my cheek. Then she darted away, through the gap in the trees, into the darkness.

“Wait,” I called. “Your pizza.”

I listened for footsteps, but all I heard was the winter wind soughing through the empty arms of the branches. The wind was chilly, but my cheek felt warm.

CHAPTER 27

The vehicles began gathering just inside the security checkpoint on Bethel Valley Road at 10 A.M., which was late enough to let the morning ORNL traffic die down and — mercifully — allow the sun to knock the frost off the morning. I’d called Thornton and Emert the night before, and — at their insistence — had phoned Arpad as well to see how quickly we could orchestrate a search near the old uranium bunker.

An ORNL security vehicle was already waiting, idling on the shoulder of the road, when Miranda and I cleared the checkpoint. I tucked in behind the white SUV and shut off the engine. Miranda fished a sheaf of folded pages from her pocket. “Here, read this,” she said.

I unfolded the page. It appeared to be a printout off the Internet — a biography of George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos explosives expert who had triggered the blowup between Miranda and Thornton. A small photo of Kistiakowsky, at the top of the article, showed a balding man with deep-set eyes and a slightly sour expression, or maybe just a serious one. The photo was Kistiakowsky’s ID badge photo from Los Alamos. I scanned the beginning of the article. “Hmm,” I said. “Another Russian.”

“What, you thought ‘Kistiakowsky’ sounded Irish?”

“I dunno; maybe Polish,” I said. “I’m just saying, there sure were a lot of comrades running around Los Alamos.”

“No way this guy was a Commie,” she said. “He was an anti-Commie, see?” She pointed to a paragraph describing how Kistiakowsky had fought in the White Army against the Reds before escaping to the West. “But skip ahead, to page two,” she directed. During the Cold War, page two informed me, President Eisenhower had asked Kistiakowsky to improve America’s planning for nuclear war. Despite resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Strategic Air Command, Kistiakowsky had overhauled the war plans and created the National Nuclear Target List — a coordinated list that assigned specific Soviet and Chinese targets to specific U.S. bomber wings and nuclear-armed sub-marines.

I was puzzled by Miranda’s excitement. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This guy’s career seems to embody everything you’re opposed to. The National Nuclear Target List? I’d think you would consider that a doomsday to-do list.”

“It is,” she said, “but look.” She pointed triumphantly to the last paragraph of the bio. Kistiakowsky ended his career, the article said, by leading a group called the Council for a Livable World, opposing nuclear testing and campaigning to ban nuclear weapons. She’d highlighted the paragraph in pink — a fitting color, I thought — and added a note in the margin reading, “Great minds think alike!”

“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s some major ideological ammo you’ve got there — ten megatons, at least. You gonna drop that on Thornton today?”

She shook her head. “No need to,” she said, smiling slightly. “It came in the mail the day after the flowers. He highlighted that part. He wrote that in the margin.”

The age of miracles was not over after all, it seemed. Then, somewhere underneath my initial surprise and delight, I felt the stirrings of something unpleasant. Was it jealousy? Surely not. I shook it off.

Just then Arpad’s Subaru wagon arrived from the opposite direction, making a tight U-turn to pull in behind the security SUV and my UT truck. A couple of minutes later Emert’s Oak Ridge police car arrived, followed shortly by a white Ford F-150 pickup. The Ford had an extended cab, a shell over the bed, and an abundance of decals and bumper stickers reading K-9 and SEARCH & RESCUE.

Arpad got out of the Subaru and came to my window. “That’s Cherokee, the cadaver dog, in the white truck,” he said.

“No kidding,” I said. “He’s a good driver.”

“You want to come meet him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Miranda? Want to meet the famous Cherokee?” We walked back toward the truck; as we passed the Oak Ridge police car, Emert and his boss, Lieutenant Dewar, opened the front doors and fell in behind us. The ORNL guard leapt out and joined the procession.

The driver’s window on the Ford whisked down. “Uh-oh,” said a folksy voice from inside. “Looks like I’m in big trouble.” The door opened and a man stepped out and raised his hands in the air, then laughed and shook hands all around. Cherokee’s chauffeur — his trainer and handler, Roy Ferguson — stood a little over six feet tall. He looked about sixty; he wore bifocals and a scholarly look — not surprising, since he had a Ph.D. in education — but he talked and joked like a country boy. Roy and his wife Suzie owned a business, 20/20 Optical, in Sevierville, but it was hard to imagine how their volunteer activities left time to fit eyeglasses. They raised guide dogs—“leader dogs”—for the blind, Arpad said, and held Lion’s Club fund-raisers to save eyesight in developing countries. They also worked with a search-and-rescue team to find missing people, dead or alive. Normally Roy would have been accompanied by five or ten other team members, but in this case Arpad and Thornton and Emert preferred to keep the search as low-profile as possible.

Thornton’s unmarked FBI sedan showed up ten minutes after everyone else. The agent pulled alongside the group chatting by the road and rolled down his passenger window. “Hey, guys,” he called out. “Sorry I’m late. There was a wreck on I-40, and it took me a while to get past.”

“You should ask Uncle Sam to give you a blue light,” I said, though I was pretty sure he had one in the glove box, or a pair built into the grille of the car.

“Nah,” he said, “that would just give me an exaggerated sense of self-importance.” He flashed a crooked, self-deprecating grin that could have been lifted straight from the face of Indiana Jones, and I started to forgive him for keeping us all waiting. Then I noticed him reach down toward the console and hoist a big Starbucks cup to his lips. He tipped the cup only slightly, which meant that it was still nearly full. A wreck on I-40—yeah, right, I suddenly thought. That coffee’s probably still piping hot. And he probably practices that grin in front of the mirror.

The rest of us returned to our vehicles, and with the Lab’s security guard in the lead, our caravan headed west on Bethel Valley Road toward the main complex. Well before we got there, though, the white SUV turned right, up a gravel road marked WALKER BRANCH WATERSHED. The single lane of gravel meandered beside a small stream — Walker Branch, I guessed it to be. A few hundred yards later, we reached a small clearing tucked into the base of the ridge. Parked along a gravel pad were a handful of vehicles, including two government-green pickup trucks labeled TENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY. Across the road from the miniature parking lot was a blue corrugated-metal building which could have passed for a machine shop or farm building, except for the state seal and TWRA logo beside the windowless steel door. The security guard parked in front of the door, turned on his flashers — maybe out of habit, or maybe to tell the rest of us that he’d only be a moment — and ducked into the building. He emerged a minute or so later, accompanied by a uniformed TWRA officer, who glanced at our convoy, waved us on casually, and then disappeared back into the metal building.

As Miranda and I reached the end of the structure, I saw something that caused me to slam on the brakes. The truck slithered to a quick stop, and close behind me I heard another set of tires — Arpad’s tires — rasping across the gravel as he, too, locked his wheels. “Look,” I said to Miranda, pointing up and to our right. Just beyond the end of the shedlike building rose a tall, cylindrical structure — a concrete silo — capped with an octagonal metal roof. Tucked beneath the roof’s overhang were grimy horizontal windows and rusting steel gunports. The state wildlife officers were housed in what had once been a top secret uranium storage bunker, although the charming wooden barn that had once disguised the bunker’s entrance had been replaced with a boring blue box.

My adrenaline surged. In the blink of an eye, history had jumped off the page and become alive to me. This tiny speck of East Tennessee woods had once been a top-secret installation, heavily guarded and cleverly camouflaged. Oak Ridge’s eighty thousand wartime workers — and the Manhattan Project’s hundreds of millions of scarce dollars — had funneled into a small bunker tucked beneath this isolated hillside. I suddenly thought of an immense magnifying glass, focusing the rays of the sun into one tiny, intense point of light and heat and energy. The uranium-235 stored under the watchful eyes in this concrete tower had been such a focal point. It was here that the genie of atomic energy was squeezed into the smallest of bottles, so it could be unleashed later with devastating force.

I looked at Miranda; I wanted to express everything that had just raced through my mind — the sense of awe and humility and excitement that had gripped me in an instant — but I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. She studied my face for a moment, then looked again at the stained concrete with the filthy windows and rusting gunports. “Yeah,” she said. “Pretty damn amazing, huh?”

“Pretty damn amazing,” I agreed. Behind us, a car horn tooted briefly. I took my foot off the brake and made my way back to the present, back to the caravan of vehicles, and back to the task at hand: searching for an unknown and unreckoned casualty of the Manhattan Project.

CHAPTER 28

The gravel road continued along the streambed for another hundred yards or so, then crossed a steel culvert and began snaking up the opposite hillside. As it climbed, the road narrowed; the gravel gradually gave way to dirt, and the dirt soon disappeared beneath a layer of leaves and branches. It appeared that the road had not been used in years.

We had negotiated several switchbacks and climbed well above the silo when the procession stopped. I heard a brief whoop from a siren, which I guessed might be a signal that we had reached our destination. I put the truck in park, set the brake, and got out to look. Up ahead a huge, mossy tree trunk blocked the rutted track.

Off to the right side, the hillside fell away sharply, almost vertically; looking down, I saw the roof of the TWRA building and, beside it, the octagonal roof of the fortified silo. From this angle, I could not see the windows at the top of the tower — and that meant the guards in the tower could not have seen anyone who was standing in this spot back in 1945. I felt another surge of adrenaline as I realized that I was standing near the place where a body had been hidden some sixty years before. Near the place where human bones might still lie hidden, awaiting discovery.

I walked back to my truck and opened the door. “We might be right where we need to be,” I said. “Can you hand me the photograph?” Miranda reached into a manila folder tucked down beside the console. Without the barn as a visual reference, it was hard to be certain, but the angle of the silo — seen from above, from what appeared to be a ledge or shelf — looked remarkably similar to what I’d just glimpsed.

Emert and Dewar got out of the Oak Ridge police cruiser, each clutching a copy of the photo as well. Roy emerged from the F-150, eyeing the pictures with obvious interest, so I handed him the print I’d brought. His eyes widened as he took in the body, then his head swiveled and he scanned the valley down below. A broad smile spread across his face. “This is getting interesting,” he said. “A lot more fun than asking, ‘What’s the smallest line you can read?’ or ‘Which is clearer, 1 or 2?’”

“Beats grading papers, too,” I said.

Thornton was the last to join the group. Instead of the photograph, he was clutching the Starbucks cup in one hand. He tapped Miranda on the shoulder and, without a word, took her copy. “Make yourself at home,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. He looked briefly at the silo, then at the photo, before handing it back to her. Then he looked back at the group. “Now what?”

I looked at Arpad. Arpad looked at Roy. “I was thinking maybe Roy and Cherokee could do a sweep through the area, see if the dog indicates any interest, to narrow down where we need to probe.”

“Sure,” said Roy. “He feels cheated if he doesn’t get to hop out and sniff around.” Roy bent down and picked up a dry leaf. Then, raising his arm to shoulder height and extending his hand, he crushed the leaf and sifted the fragments through his fingers, watching them drift in a breeze almost too slight to feel. “Looks like the air’s moving downhill and downstream,” he said. “Which means that the scent — if there is any — would be moving in that direction, too. Scent is like water — it tends to flow downhill, and tends to pool in low spots. Cool spots, too.” He glanced at the steep hillside and the line of vehicles, frowning slightly. “I hate to be a bother,” he said, “but could we maybe all back up a couple of hundred yards? I’d like to work him along the road, but the gas and oil fumes will pretty much overpower anything else that’s here.”

Roy ambled back to his truck, and the rest of us headed for our vehicles. After a few moments of tense, hesitant backing down the narrow pair of ruts, we all parked again. Roy opened the hatch of his camper shell and dropped the tailgate. I heard him talking in a low, soothing voice, and then a large German shepherd on a stout leather leash jumped down from the truck. Roy stood at least six feet tall and probably weighed somewhere around 200 pounds, but the dog was pulling him as if he were a child. “As you can see, he really gets into this,” Roy said. As they pulled alongside the group, Roy gave a quick tug on the leash. “Cherokee, sit,” he said firmly. The dog sat, but even sitting, he strained at the leash.

Miranda leaned slightly toward the dog. “Is he friendly? Can I pet him?”

“He’s a sweetheart,” said Roy, “but he’s more interested in work than love.”

Emert laughed. “Reminds me of my ex,” he said.

“Reminds me that dogs are more useful than men,” said Miranda. The rest of us — the six men she had just skewered — laughed briefly and changed the subject quickly.

Roy led the dog upslope to pee, then had him sit again, slightly apart from the group this time. “Okay, the smell from the vehicles has probably dispersed enough now,” he said. “I’ll start by letting him off leash for what’s called a hasty search — pretty much what the name implies — and see if he picks up anything. If he doesn’t, I’ll work him through the area again on a grid pattern.”

Thornton raised his hand, like a kid in elementary school. “Yes sir?” said Roy.

“The dog doesn’t work on commission, does he?”

Roy looked puzzled, and so did everyone else. Everyone except Miranda, who snorted. “Like, ten percent of the bones?”

“Ten percent seems a little steep,” the agent said with a grin. “Anything over five seems greedy.”

“I wish you were running the IRS,” Miranda said.

Just then Thornton’s cell phone jangled loudly. “Sorry,” he said, snatching it from the holder clipped to his belt. He frowned at the display but answered anyway. “Hello? Who?” His frown deepened. “Yes,” he said. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?” He slumped — a dramatic gesture meant to telegraph his frustration to those of us watching him. It was the sort of gesture a man would make if his wife or girlfriend or teenager called him at an inopportune time. “You know, it really wasn’t that big a deal,” he said. “Anybody else would have done the same thing.” He paused, listening, shaking his head. “You’d have done the same thing, too,” he said, “in a heartbeat. Look, I really, really can’t talk right now. Gotta go. Sorry. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut with a wince, then looked apologetically at the group. “I am so sorry,” he said, and flashed us that damn Indiana Jones grin again.

“Okay,” said Roy, “if y’all are ready, I’ll go ahead and let Cherokee work the area.” He looked around, and everyone nodded. “If everybody would just stay down in this area, that’ll minimize the scents and the distractions for him.”

“Would it be okay if I took a few pictures,” I asked, “long as I stay back here?”

“Absolutely,” Roy said. “Long as you promise to shoot only my good side.” With that, he bent over and wiggled his butt.

“You Ph.D.s,” Emert grumbled. “Always showing off your brains.”

Roy reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled out a plastic water bottle. When he did, the dog’s demeanor changed instantly: his ears and tail stood up, and he began trotting back and forth almost like a Tennessee walking horse. “Cherokee, sit,” said Roy, and the dog sat, almost quivering with eagerness. Roy gave the bottle a squeeze, and a small stream of water shot out, which Cherokee lapped noisily from midair. Capping the bottle and putting it back in his coat, Roy made eye contact with the shepherd. “Zook mort,” he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “mort”—related to “mortal” and “mortality”—was a dog-handler term for “dead guy.” I remembered enough of my foreign-language studies to realize that “zook” was probably based on the German word for “seek.” I smiled at the thought that Roy was speaking German so that the dog — a German shepherd — could understand him.

Roy set off up the narrow dirt road, walking slowly. The dog ranged slightly ahead, ambling back and forth across the ruts, pausing occasionally to sniff at a tree or patch of moss. He reached the mammoth fallen trunk and stopped, looked back at Roy, and whined once. As Roy drew close to the trunk, he turned to his left, walking parallel to the trunk, and said quietly, “Get back to work.” The dog snuffled along the trunk toward the tree’s ragged base.

There, as Roy rounded the end and made to rejoin the dirt road, Cherokee did an abrupt U-turn, doubling back to the place where the tree’s roots had been ripped from the ground. Novak’s photos showed a raw crater torn in the ground, but in the intervening decades a fair-sized tulip poplar had taken root in the hollow. The dog circled the area slowly, his nose low to the ground, then sniffed his way toward the tree at the center. Once there, he simply sat, staring at the base of the tulip poplar. I waited for the dog to bark or whine or lie down, as I’d seen other cadaver dogs do to show they’d found something, but Cherokee simply sat and stared.

“Well, this is gripping,” muttered Emert. “I can’t stand the suspense. Will he pee, or won’t he?”

“Shh,” said Miranda.

Roy sidled closer and studied the dog for a moment. “Cherokee, show mort,” he said. The dog stood up, slowly sniffed his way around the tulip poplar, and then sat again, in almost the same spot as before. This time, he bent down and touched his nose to the ground at the base of the tree. “Good boy! What a good boy!” The dog leapt to his feet and whirled, just in time to catch a knotted-up towel Roy had pulled from a pocket and tossed in his direction. With the force of a bear trap snapping, the dog’s jaws closed around the fabric, and he began biting and thrashing his head, as if he were trying to dismember a rat. With one paw, he held the end of the bundled fabric on the ground and shredded it with meticulous savagery.

“Glad that’s not my throat he’s got ahold of,” commented Dewar.

After the towel was reduced to bits, Roy led the dog back to our waiting group. “It looks like maybe there’s something near the base of that tulip poplar,” he said.

“No kidding,” said Arpad. “I guess it’s my turn.”

He opened the back door of the Subaru and brought out the TopGun Freon detector. It squealed when he switched it on, then the noise died down to an occasional chirp as Arpad walked toward the base of the fallen oak. We followed, since the gadget — unlike the dog — wasn’t prone to distraction by people or extraneous smells.

Stopping midway between the dead tree and the live one, Arpad bent down and eased the tip of the wand through the leaves and into the soil. The detector continued to chirp at the same slow rate. Stepping closer to the tulip poplar, he repeated the maneuver, with no discernible change. Next he positioned himself right where the dog had indicated and took another reading. The chirping might have sped up slightly, or I might simply have imagined that it did. Arpad frowned, looking puzzled and slightly embarrassed. “As cold as it’s been, it could be that the Freon compounds just aren’t volatilizing,” he said. “Or maybe they’re long gone, if we’re looking for something sixty years old.”

“Or maybe the dog’s just smarter,” said Emert, earning a scowl from Arpad.

He took the Freon detector back to his car, swapping it for his prototype sniffer. As the gizmo fired up, I noticed how much I preferred its understated clicking to the Freon detector’s electronic squeal. As before, Arpad stopped short of the target area, gently working the instrument’s probe into the top of the soil. It continued to click quietly, almost like a clock ticking. Despite the chill of the day, I thought I saw glimmers of sweat on Arpad’s brow, and I realized that he had a lot riding on this field test. If the dog gave a positive alert but Arpad’s sophisticated instrument did not, should we excavate anyway? I thought we definitely should; after all, the dog had an impressive track record in other searches, and he seemed to show no hesitation or doubt once he started zeroing in on the tulip poplar. There was no guarantee we’d dig up anything, but it seemed only fair to give the dog the benefit of the doubt — after all, if we didn’t trust the dog, we shouldn’t have enlisted him in the search.

But would Arpad — a former student and now a valued colleague — take offense if we seemed to trust the dog more than the gizmo? I hoped not, but I knew scientists could be sensitive if it appeared their work was being questioned.

As I was turning over the alternatives in my mind, trying to settle on the most diplomatic way of handling the dilemma, I became aware of a quietly insistent sound. Arpad now stood at the center of the circle with the gizmo’s probe in the ground, and the slow, steady ticking had given way to a sound almost like muted machine-gun fire. A smile spread across Arpad’s face. “Eureka!”

“Cool,” said Miranda.

Thornton reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded handkerchief, which he knotted into a ball. I was puzzled, until he said “Good boy” and tossed the handkerchief onto the ground in the direction of the gadget’s probe. Suddenly I glimpsed a streak of movement at the edge of my vision. Moving at lightning speed, Cherokee swooped in, grabbed the handkerchief, and began ripping it to bits.

Miranda burst out laughing. “Holy crap, that was fast,” she said. “Serves you right for being a smart-ass.” Thornton just flashed her that grin again, bigger and more sheepish than ever. Miranda turned to me; it might have just been the effect of the chilly breeze, but her cheeks looked pink. “Does this mean it’s our turn to look now?”

“I think it does,” I said. I tapped the two Oak Ridge detectives on the shoulder as Miranda and I started toward the truck. “You guys mind giving us a hand?”

They followed us to the back of the truck and I handed a rake and galvanized-metal bucket to each of them. Miranda grabbed the two shovels, and I carried a large plastic bin containing smaller items: evidence bags, trowels, rubber gloves, a tape measure, a compass, a handheld GPS unit, a topographical map, my digital camera, a clipboard, pens and Sharpie markers, and a blue plastic tarp. I spread the tarp near the area we were about to excavate, and we laid the rest of the gear on it.

I began, as always, by taking pictures — several wide shots at first, showing the entire area, the vehicles, and the group of people. Then an inspiration hit me, and I took several shots of the fallen tree, the small valley, and the concrete silo, reproducing Novak’s perspective as closely as possible. The comparison photos would be an interesting addition to the file, I thought. An interesting footnote to Oak Ridge history. An interesting thing to show Isabella over pizza. Next I took tighter shots of the fallen tree, the area near the base of its trunk, and the orange survey flag Arpad had stuck in the ground. Miranda switched on the GPS unit, held it over the flag, and pressed a button to save the latitude and longitude coordinates. I found it amazing that a three-hundred-dollar gadget, about the size and shape of a calculator, could home in on satellites hovering thousands of miles overhead, pinpointing and remembering this precise location on an isolated hilltop: an electronic X marking a tiny spot on a big planet. I marveled at the technology, though I still didn’t entirely trust it. That’s why we had the compass and tape measure: in addition to marking the site on the topo map, Miranda would draw a more detailed sketch of the search area, showing the dirt road, the fallen tree, and the excavation, with compass directions and measurements — the diameter of the excavation, for instance, and how many feet west of the trunk the dog and the sniffer had alerted.

I had tried to talk Miranda into letting me bring one of the other graduate students in her place — I worried that the burns on her fingers hurt, and I feared she might damage them — but she insisted on coming. “I’ll wear an extra pair of gloves,” she said, “and it’ll be fine.” I hoped she was right.

After I’d taken a dozen or so photos and Miranda had sketched the key landmarks of the site, we began to rake the leaf litter off the soil. When the big tree had been ripped from the earth, long ago, its roots had torn a crater in the ground, six or eight feet in diameter and several feet deep. Gradually, though, the crater had filled as dirt fell from the edges, rainwater trickled down the sides, and decades of leaves swirled into the hole and crumbled into dust. By now all that remained was a slight, subtle hollow — with a sixty-foot tulip poplar growing from it. If not for the massive oak trunk touching one edge of the rim, the low spot would have seemed simply a slight, random variation in the surface of the ground. By excavating carefully, I hoped Miranda and I could work our way back to the original, deeper contour of the hole, as a starting point in our quest for whatever might lie at its center. It wouldn’t be easy, though.

“So,” said Miranda, “that tree sure is in the way. Wonder what we could do about that pesky tree?”

“Just a thought,” said Emert, picking up on the sly tone and the elbow-in-the-ribs emphasis, “but I’m thinking chainsaw. If only we had a chainsaw right about now.”

They laughed; Roy and Arpad and the ORNL guard looked puzzled, so Emert told the chainsaw story. “Go ahead,” I said. “Rub it in. But next time your heart is breaking, don’t expect sympathy from me.”

Roy spoke up. “I feel your pain, Doc. I’m pretty attached to my Husquevarna. Matter of fact, it’s in the back of the truck. If you promise not to steal it, I might be willing to share the love.”

The Husquevarna wasn’t as nice as the Stihl — it didn’t feel quite as solid, somehow — but it sliced through the eight-inch trunk in a couple of minutes. I cut the tree at about waist level, first, then — once it was down — cut the stump almost flush with the ground. I thanked Roy for the saw, handed it back, and then picked up the three-foot length of trunk and carried it to my truck. Emert asked, “You running low on firewood?”

“Souvenir,” I said.

The edge of what had once been the crater in the ground — the border between “hole” and “not hole”—wasn’t at the surface, so I used a shovel to remove a thin layer of topsoil, beginning within the slight depression and skimming outward, beyond the rim. The shovel slid easily at first, which told me that the soil here was loose; after about a foot, though, I encountered more resistance: the resistance of packed, undisturbed earth. I lifted the shovel and looked at the swath I’d just sliced. Sure enough, closer to me, the soil appeared lighter, fluffier, and more crumbly; then — across a faint and irregular but unmistakable line — the soil was denser and darker, infused with rocks and clay that appeared to have lain undisturbed since the dawn of time.

“Okay,” I said to Miranda, “here’s the rim. How about we excavate about halfway around the circumference, then work in from the edge?”

“Whatever you say, Kemo Sabe,” she said.

“Excuse me, Dr. Kemo Sabe,” said Thornton. “Can I ask a dumb question?”

“No such thing as a dumb question,” I said.

“That’s not what the instructors at the Academy used to tell me,” he said. “Why start excavating at the edge? Why not just aim right for the bull’s-eye, which seems to be somewhere around that stump you just made?”

“If we dig straight down and there is something there, we’ll keep knocking dirt down onto it,” I said. “The sides of the hole will keep collapsing. Plus we’d be on top of the bones; we might end up breaking some of them. Coming in from the side means a little more digging — but a lot more control.”

“Ah,” he said. “Anything we can do to help you?”

“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t mind lifting buckets of dirt, you guys could haul out dirt as we excavate.”

“Sounds like something we might be able to handle,” he said.

“Arpad,” I said, “how long since you’ve used a trowel?”

“To dig up bones, or to plant tulips?”

“To dig up bones.”

“Not so long ago that I’ve forgotten the backaches,” he said. “Ten, twelve years, maybe.”

“About time you brushed up,” I said, handing him a trowel.

I was about two feet in from the rim of the crater, and about eighteen inches below the level of the leaves and twigs Miranda and I had raked off the surface, when my trowel hit something hard. Using its triangular tip, I flicked at the soil underneath what I’d hit, and as the dirt fell away from the object, I gradually made out the distal end — the elbow end — of a humerus, an upper arm bone. “Eureka!” I said, echoing Arpad’s earlier exclamation. Burrowing a bit farther, I unearthed the medial ends of the radius and ulna, the bones of the forearm. From the angle at the elbow, I could tell the arm was slightly flexed, with the hand probably somewhere in the vicinity of the hip. “This is the right arm,” I said. “He’s lying facedown. Assuming it’s a male.” I troweled away more soil, exposing the distal end of the forearm, the loose, pebbly bones of the wrist, and the carpals and metacarpals of the hand.

Emert leaned in and squinted at the stained bones. “You’re sure it’s human,” he said, “not a bear? I saw the bones of a bear’s paw once, and I’d have sworn it was a hand or a foot.”

“Well, unless these Oak Ridge bears are smart enough to tell time, I’m pretty sure it’s human,” I said, “because it’s wearing a man’s wristwatch.” With the tip of my trowel, I pointed to a disk of corroded metal hidden beneath the wrist.

“Eureka indeed,” said Thornton.

Before I even had a chance to ask her, Miranda left the spot where she’d been working and came to kneel beside me. We’d done this so many times, our teamwork was seamless, wordless, and almost telepathic. I shifted to the upper arm and began excavating toward the shoulder and head; Miranda began working her way along the hand and then down the right leg.

As I troweled my way along the shoulder and toward the area of the head, the dirt began to drop away, revealing the rounded surface of a skull. Working with only the tip of the trowel, I started teasing the soil free. Occasionally I was forced to trade the trowel for small gardening shears, so I could snip away roots that clutched at the bones.

As the back of the skull came into view, I saw a prominent bump at its base. The bump — the external occipital protuberance — had once served as an attachment point for muscles at the back of the neck. The bump’s presence and prominence told me that the skeleton was definitely male, and a robust male, at that. I’d been fairly certain of the sex just from the size and muscle markings on the humerus, not to mention the wristwatch, but the external occipital protuberance confirmed it.

The head was rotated, so that instead of facing straight down, it was turned toward the left shoulder; it was tilted slightly backward at an odd angle as well. For a moment I wondered if the neck had been broken — hard to tell, with all the soft tissue gone — but I quickly rejected that theory in favor of another, simpler explanation: the body had simply been rolled down into the hole, and had come to rest slightly askew.

With three of us excavating, the work moved fairly quickly, but even so, it was midafternoon before we had worked our way around the entire skeleton. Rather than removing bones one at a time, we left the skeleton in place until we had exposed it completely, digging down on all sides so that the bones lay on a raised platform of earth — a technique called “pedestaling.” The soft tissue had decayed completely, as had all the clothing, except for thin, crumbling remnants of the leather soles of the shoes.

One by one, Miranda and I snipped the tulip poplar’s remaining roots, freeing the bones from their grasp. By the time the roots were cut and the stump pulled from above the torso, the stump itself looked skeletal and dismembered.

The torso posed a challenge. Normally a body in a shallow grave would gradually collapse, the vaulted rib cage flattening as the cartilage decayed and the ribs detached from the spine and sternum. In this case, though, a latticework of tree roots supported the ribs.

By this point I’d been on my hands and knees for the better part of four hours, so I groaned my way to my feet and clambered out of the hole we’d dug. Excusing myself from the group, I wandered into the woods, ducked behind a large tree, and took a much-needed bathroom break. Arpad and Miranda headed off in other directions to do likewise. In years past, I’d had female graduate students for whom the lack of bathroom facilities in the field posed problems, ranging from minor inconvenience to full-blown crisis, but Miranda had long since jettisoned most of her modesty about such matters. “Oh, good grief,” I’d once heard her chide a squirming female colleague, “we’re out here scooping up some dead guy’s rotten guts, and you’re too refined to tinkle in the bushes? Get over it already.” From the direction of a pine thicket about fifty yards away, I heard a yelp. “Jeepers,” Miranda shouted, “you guys have no idea how cold it is out here.”

“Next time I’ll bring a propane bun-warmer just for you,” called Arpad.

Once we regrouped, I photographed the skeleton from every angle, including wide shots and close-ups, and then prepared to remove the bones from the pedestaled grave. I asked Miranda to record the inventory of the skeletal elements — the listing of every bone — and Arpad to bag them in evidence bags.

I began with the skull. As I eased it from the ground, lifting and rotating it, I got my first glimpse of the right temporal bone, the oval bone just above the ear. A small, neat hole pierced the bone. The location coincided exactly with the dark circle on the head of the dead man in Leonard Novak’s photographs. “It’s you,” I said to the skull. “It really is you.”

The hole was about a quarter inch in diameter at the outer surface, but it flared wider as it bored through the bone. The beveling was the unmistakable signature of a bullet blasting its way through the skull. Any kid who’s ever shot a BB gun through a plate-glass window has seen the same physics, on a smaller and less lethal scale: as the BB enters the glass, it creates a shock wave that fans out like a cone, fracturing a steadily wider cross-section until it emerges on the other side of the window amid a shower of tiny shards.

The entry wound was about an inch above the opening for the right ear, and judging by its perfect roundness, the bullet had been fired directly toward the center of the cranial vault, since an angled trajectory would have caused an oval hole. There was no exit wound on the left side of the skull. I gave the skull a vigorous shake and was rewarded with a clattering inside. “I think we’ve still got the bullet,” I said. “Probably a.22. The entry wound’s small, and the bullet didn’t have enough oomph to punch out the other side.”

“Had enough oomph to do the job, though,” said one of the detectives.

“Funny thing about a.22,” I said. “Seems like a sissy gun, but the bullets tend to ricochet around inside the skull and really chew up the brain. Sometimes a.22 does more damage than a larger-caliber bullet that just blasts right through.”

“Reckon what he was doing,” said Emert, “when that bullet hit him?”

“Trying to steal atomic secrets,” said Thornton. “Or trying to keep them from being stolen.”

“Or making a pass at the wrong guy’s wife or girlfriend,” I said.

“Pleading for his life,” said Miranda.

We had not unearthed any artifacts besides the watch in the process of pedastaling the skeleton. Now, though, as we removed and bagged the bones, I came across seven small objects embedded in the soil. Six were metal buttons — one in the region of the chest, where a left shirt pocket would have been; three along the midline of the body, spaced between the chest and the pelvis; and one at each ankle. The seventh object, at the waist, was a rectangular plastic buckle, olive green, with a rotting bit of canvas webbing still threaded through it. As I handed each object to Arpad, as carefully as if it were a precious gem recovered from a pharaoh’s tomb, the law enforcement officers crowded around to inspect them. At the sight of the buckle, Emert voiced what I’d been thinking. “This guy was wearing army coveralls,” he said. “I’ve still got my dad’s in a chest in the attic.” There were no coins or keys in the grave, which led me to believe that the pockets had been emptied. I was therefore not surprised, though I was disappointed, that the grave contained no dog tags.

“So we’ve got a dead G.I. from World War II here,” said Emert. “Swell. There were only, what, ten thousand of those here in Oak Ridge?”

I thought we were finished — through the bones, down to the dirt — when the tip of my trowel snagged on a clump of clay. But it wasn’t clay. A chunk of it broke off, and when it did, it revealed odd striations within the soil. Looking closer, I began to discern a lump, a shape, about a foot long and slightly narrower, somewhat paler than the rest of the red clay lining the grave. I probed gently at the edge I had exposed. The striations were quite thin — paper-thin, I realized, as the proportions of the rectangle registered in my brain. “I don’t know what this guy was doing when he died,” I said, “but it seems to have involved a mighty thick stack of papers.”

CHAPTER 29

I hoped the bones might tell us more than the papers did about the dead soldier. Officially he was case 09–02, the second forensic case of 2009, but a number was a poor substitute for a name.

One of my UT colleagues in the College of Agriculture — a scientist in the Forest Products Laboratory — had confirmed that the rectangular lump we dug from the grave was indeed a stack of paper. From the thickness, he estimated it to be somewhere between 400 and 500 pages, and he said it appeared to be a low grade of typing paper — long on wood pulp, short on linen fibers. Because it was cheap and pulpy, it tended to crumble into chunks, rather than peeling apart into individual sheets. “I managed to pry apart a few fragments,” he told me, “but I’m afraid there’s not much there. Ink smears and mold. Whatever’s written on those pages, it hasn’t stood the test of time.”

The bones, on the other hand, had held up well. After a day of simmering in hot water, Biz, and Downy fabric softener, followed by some gentle scrubbing with a toothbrush, Miranda had laid the clean, caramel-colored bones of G.I. Doe — that’s what she‘d dubbed 09–02—in anatomical order on a table in the osteology lab. She had also taken skeletal measurements with a 3D digitizing probe. After entering the measurements in the Forensic Data Bank, she plugged them into ForDisc, the software developed by one of my computer-savvy colleagues at UT. According to ForDisc’s analysis of the data — the size of the skull, spacing of the eye orbits, width of the nasal opening, and the length and diameter of various bones, among others — G.I. Doe was a white male of about 180 centimeters, or five feet eleven inches, in stature. None of that surprised me; after all, ForDisc had been programmed to make, quickly and automatically, the kinds of calculations and analyses physical anthropologists had spent years learning how to make with calipers, and slide rules and calculators.

ForDisc was not, on the other hand, programmed to estimate age. Estimates of age required looking at multiple features of the skeleton and making judgments, sometimes complicated or subjective ones, about the degree of development or maturity in the bones. Those weren’t the kinds of automatic calculations a computer program could perform.

It was my custom, when doing a forensic examination of a skeleton, to keep quiet until my students had examined the bones and offered their opinions. Miranda was used to this, and she required no prompting, beyond a tilt of my head and an inquiring lift of my eyebrows. She began by setting the skull upside down in a doughnut-shaped cushion, exposing the upper teeth and the roof of the mouth. Then she picked up the lower jaw in her left hand, pointing with the little finger of her right hand at the teeth. “So. Both third molars in the mandible are fully erupted,” she said, “which would indicate an adult.” Still holding the mandible in her left hand, she touched her pinkie to the wisdom teeth in the upper jaw, which were small and well below the level of the second molars. “The third molars haven’t erupted in the maxilla,” she said, “but these appear to be impacted, unlikely ever to erupt through the gums. So, his teeth say that he was probably at least eighteen years of age.”

She laid the mandible down and lifted the skull from the cushion that cradled it. Cupping it in her left hand, she used the tip of a probe to trace the pattern of the four sutures, or seams, in the roof of the mouth. One of these, the palatomaxillary suture, ran from one side of the palate to the other, like a line drawn between the second molars. Another, the incisive suture, also ran sideways, just behind the four incisors at the front of the jaw. Two of the sutures ran along the midline of the roof of the mouth: the intermaxillary suture extended from the front of the mouth to its intersection with the palatomaxillary suture, and the interpalatine suture ran from that intersection to the back of the palate. In most subadults — people under eighteen — these four sutures were not fully closed; the joints were still in the process of being filled with new, growing bone. By eighteen, though, they tended to be fused, and during the decades of adulthood, the suture lines gradually smoothed and faded, or obliterated, sometimes disappearing altogether. In 09–02, the maxillary sutures were fully fused, but their lines remained vividly drawn. “The maxillary sutures are fully fused, so we know he was an adult,” Miranda said, “but probably a young adult. Not a geezer, for sure.” I smiled at the way Miranda bounced back and forth between scientific formality and slang.

“I’m gonna save us both some time here,” I said. “I know you know the basics. You’ve probably got the whole osteology handbook memorized by now, right?”

“I’m a little fuzzy on some of the specifics on page two,” she said.

“What’s on page two?”

“All that Library of Congress copyright stuff,” she said.

“I’d be worried if you were wasting brain cells on that. Okay, let’s skip ahead. Instead of talking me through the whole skeleton, show me what you think can pin down his age more precisely.”

“Three things,” she said. “First, the anterior iliac crest.” She pointed to the large, curving edge of the hipbone and used her finger to trace a line near the edge. A faint seam there marked a joint in the broad bone, as if the Creator had decided the hips were a touch too narrow and had gone back and tacked another sliver of bone along the outer edge. It wasn’t actually an afterthought, of course, but an epiphysis, a joint that had remained open while the bones were still growing, then closed when the final growth of adolescence was done. “The epiphysis is completely united, so that suggests he was in his early twenties, at least, and maybe mid-twenties or later. The prime of life, in other words.” She wiggled her eyebrows, and I smiled; Miranda was poised between her mid-and late twenties.

“I’m following you so far,” I said, “even though my brain is well past its prime. Second?”

“Second, the pubic symphysis.” She picked up the two halves of the pubic bone and showed me the face where they met at the midline of the body. “The symphyseal face shows a lot of beveling in the ventral area,” she said, pointing to the rear portion of the joint. “That suggests late twenties or beyond.”

“Are you basing that on the work of Todd, or McKern and Stewart, or Suchey?”

“All of the above,” she said.

I smiled. “Good answer. Third?”

“Third is always most important,” she said. “Third, the clavicle.” She picked up the left collarbone, which was nearer the edge of the table, and indicated a faint, smooth seam near the end that joined the shoulder. “The lateral epiphysis is fully fused, which you’d expect, since the dude’s a grown-up. But the medial epiphysis”—she pointed at a ragged, incomplete seam near the bone’s other end—“isn’t completely united yet; it’s still undergoing terminal union.”

“Leading you,” I said, “to conclude what?”

“To conclude that G.I. Doe was thirty. Plus or minus a year or two.”

“Bravo,” I said. “I agree. Now let’s look at trauma. Did you see any skeletal trauma other than the wound to the head?”

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s a small amount of osteoarthritic lipping on some of the vertebrae, but that’s just the beginning of age-related wear-and-tear, not trauma. Nope, I think one shot to the head did it.”

I picked up the skull and, using a pair of calipers, measured the diameter of the entry wound in the right side of the cranium. The hole was almost perfectly circular, but not quite. At its widest, it measured nearly a third of an inch — about the size of a.32-caliber bullet. At its narrowest, though, which was the crucial dimension, the hole measured less than a quarter of an inch. That made it too small to be caused by anything larger than a.22. Short of cutting off the top of the skull, there was no way to get the calipers inside the cranium to measure the hole’s diameter as it broke through the bone and entered the brain, but by shining my key chain flashlight into the hole, I guessed the inner diameter to be nearly half an inch, because of the conical beveling gunshots always produced. The force of the bullet had also caused three small fractures, each about an inch long, to radiate outward from the hole.

A small, ragged blob of metal lay on a tray beside the skull. I laid the skull down and picked up the blob. Although it was small, it felt heavy and soft. “You got the bullet out,” I said.

“I did,” she said. “I managed to shake it out the foramen magnum,” the opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord exited. “Took me back to my childhood days, when I shook coins out of my piggy bank.”

As I studied the deformed bullet, I was struck by its shape. “Does this remind you of anything?”

“Reminds me not to get shot in the head,” she said.

“No, I mean the shape.”

She plucked it from my hand and held it in her fingertips, and the gesture clutched at my heart: It was the same way Garcia had held and studied the iridium in the morgue. It was the same way Miranda had plucked the deadly pellet from his grasp with these very fingertips. Now, though, they were tipped with white gauze.

“Well, I’ll be,” Miranda said. “This bullet is a dead ringer for a mushroom cloud.”

CHAPTER 30

I dialed the Oak Ridge Public Library at five minutes to eight and asked for Isabella. “Sir, the library’s closing now,” said the young woman who’d answered the phone. “I don’t think she’s still taking questions.”

“It’s not a question,” I said, “it’s an answer. It’ll just take a second, and she’ll be glad to hear what it is.”

There was a pause, and then the woman said, with more curtness than I thought necessary, “Just a moment, sir, I’ll see if I can catch her.”

Another pause, then a click. “Library Reference; how can I help you?”

“You already did,” I said. “We found him.”

She laughed. “I don’t even need to ask what you’re talking about. Congratulations! You found him somewhere near that barn?”

“I’ll show you a picture,” I said. “The trees are taller and the barn’s turned to metal, but the view of the silo is dead-on.”

“Do you know who he was? Who killed him? Why?”

“No,” I said. I thought of what Thornton said. “Maybe he was stealing atomic secrets. Maybe he was saving atomic secrets. Maybe he just made a pass at some hothead’s wife.” I wanted to keep talking. I imagined the lights in the library going dark, Isabella sitting at the Reference Desk in the empty building, connected to me, sitting in my dark living room. “The bullet in his skull? It was shaped like a mushroom cloud,” I said. “Like a tiny atomic bomb going off in his head.” I laughed. “Oak Ridge is a strange place,” I said. “I think it’s making me a little strange, too.”

She was silent for a moment. “What do you think of strange love?”

“Huh?” I was baffled by the sudden shift in topic. “Well, let’s see,” I hedged, stalling for time, trying to think of something to say that might be clever and maybe even slightly naughty — was that what she wanted, sitting alone in the darkened library? — but not offensive. “I think strange love is a matter of personal…you know….”

“No, silly. Not ‘strange love,’ as in kinky sex. ‘Strangelove,’ as in Dr. Strangelove. The movie.”

I was still at a loss. “Dr. Strangelove? Sounds like something from the adult section of the video store.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never seen it—Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? It’s a classic. You grew up during the Cold War; how could you have missed the greatest Cold War satire ever made?”

“I lived the Cold War,” I said. “Duck and cover. Hiding under the desk at school. Running to the basement at home. I didn’t need to see it on the screen.”

“But your Cold War experience isn’t complete until you’ve seen this film,” she insisted. “What are you doing right now?”

“Huh?”

“You keep saying that,” she said. “It makes you sound far less intelligent than you are. What are you doing right now?”

“I’m looking at chainsaw brochures,” I said.

“Oh, good grief,” she said. “Your cinematic education has a hole in it the size of Lake Michigan, and you’re squandering your precious time on power-tool porn?”

I laughed again. “I am not going to touch that line.”

“Yeah, I know: with a ten-foot pole,” she said. “Stay right there. I’ll be there in an hour.”

“You’re coming here? To my house?”

“Yes. The wonders of MapQuest. And I’m bringing Dr. Strangelove with me. Unless you’d rather I didn’t.”

“No,” I said.

“No, which?”

“No, I wouldn’t rather you didn’t. Yes, I’d rather you did. I mean, please do.”

She hung up without another word, and I found myself staring stupidly at the receiver. Isabella was coming to my house? At nine o’clock at night? To bring me a movie?

I wasn’t sure what else, if anything, to make of it. I’d put on a pair of scrubs after I ate dinner — for some reason I’d always felt silly in pajamas, but scrubs gave me the comfort of PJs without the self-consciousness. Now I changed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.

Forty-five minutes later, I saw headlights in the driveway, and then the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I saw that Isabella had a canvas book bag hooked over one shoulder.

“You’re nuts,” I said. “Why didn’t you just hand it to me next time I came to the library to flirt with you?”

“Because I know you’d never get around to watching it if I just handed it to you,” she said. “You’d set it aside and look at bones. Or chainsaw brochures.”

“So you’re not just handing it to me now?”

“Not a chance. We are going to sit down and watch this together.”

“What — now? You’re making me watch this right now?”

“You’ll thank me later,” she said. “Your moral and intellectual development hangs in the balance. Besides, it’s funny as hell. Also scary as hell, because things haven’t changed as much as they should’ve.” She reached into the bag and pulled out a DVD case, which she handed to me. “Okay, you start the movie while I start the microwave.”

“Why are you starting the microwave?”

“To pop the popcorn, of course.” She reached into the bag again and pulled out a pack of Pop Secret. The name made me smile. Or maybe it was the way she wiggled her eyebrows as she wiggled the package. “I brought Diet Coke for you, Original Sin for me.”

I was almost afraid to ask. “Original Sin?”

“Hard cider,” she said brightly. “Apple juice for grown-ups. You should try it sometime.”

“I’ve got Menier’s disease,” I told her. “Occasional vertigo. The last thing I need is something else that makes me dizzy.”

“One bottle of cider would not make you dizzy,” she said. “But no peer pressure. I would never dream of telling you what to do. Now go start the movie.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I pointed her toward the kitchen, and a moment later I heard the microwave beep as she keyed in numbers and hit START. Then, as the FBI copyright warning on the television screen gave way to the film’s opening credits, I heard the staccato fire of corn kernels exploding. Over the noise in both rooms, I called, “Do you want me to pause this?”

“No,” she yelled. “I’ve seen it fifty-seven times. Sit. Watch.”

I sat. I watched the credits roll. “I didn’t know Peter Sellers was in this. I love the Pink Panther movies.”

“He plays three roles in this,” she said from the doorway. “He was originally supposed to play four, but he sprained his ankle and couldn’t do the fourth.”

The film appeared to be in black and white, which seemed odd. “When was this made? I thought color film was invented in the 1930s.”

“In 1964. It’s in black and white to look like the Cold War and civil defense films and whatnot. Now shush! Watch. And marvel.”

I shushed. I watched. And I marveled. Starting with the notion of “mutual assured destruction”—the Cold War strategy that created nuclear arsenals capable of incinerating the planet many times over — the film took the arms race to its logical conclusion, if “logical” can be used to describe a scenario in which one superpower booby-traps the entire planet and the other superpower springs the trap.

As I sat there on the sofa, it was almost as if there were two of me. One “me” was intent on the film. The other was acutely conscious of the woman sitting beside me, a bowl of popcorn nestled between us. Every time she took a handful of popcorn, I felt the bowl press slightly against my thigh. I wondered if she felt the same sensation when I reached into the bowl, and if she found it as electrifying.

The film ended badly for the human race — mushroom clouds blossoming everywhere, synchronized to the lilting melody and chirpy lyrics of “We’ll Meet Again Some Sunny Day.” Despite the incineration of the planet, though, the film managed to walk the tightrope between horror and hilarity. Generals and heads of state bickered like kindergartners. Doomsday dawned because an unhinged Air Force colonel became convinced that fluoridated drinking water was a Communist plot. And Peter Sellers — playing a gentlemanly British officer, a wimpy U.S. president, and a deranged ex-Nazi guiding U.S. weapons policy — turned in three brilliant performances.

“Okay,” I said as I got to my feet and switched off the TV, “you were right. I had a shameful gap in my cultural education. Thank you for filling it.”

“I seen my duty and I done it,” she said. She set the greasy bowl on the coffee table and stood, stretching. “I wouldn’t have slept a wink tonight if I’d left you in ignorance. Not knowing Dr. Strangelove is like not knowing Casablanca or Citizen Kane.”

“Citizen who?”

“Citizen Kane,” she said. “Please tell me you’re not serious?”

“Oh, Citizen Kane,” I said. “Right. Of course. That’s that movie about…you know…that…citizen.”

“That citizen? Oh my God,” she groaned, “you have a Citizen Kane gap, too. You’re hopeless.” She swatted me on the chest with an open palm. Once. Twice. The third time, she let her hand rest there on my chest. I reached up and laid one of my hands atop hers.

“Hopeless? Really?” A lopsided, sheepish grin seemed to be twitching at my mouth. Was I imitating Thornton, who seemed to have the gift of charm? Or was this just the way guys grinned when they were falling for someone pretty and smart? Would my version of the grin charm Isabella as thoroughly as Thornton’s seemed to charm Miranda?

“Really,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Well,” I said, “you could kiss me, if you had a mind to. I have a kissing deficit, too, which I personally think is a lot more worrisome than my Citizen Kane deficit.”

“A kissing deficit?”

I nodded gravely. “I’ve practically forgotten how.”

She took a small step forward, which brought her to within about an inch of me. She left her hand on my chest. I put both of mine on her shoulders. The air around us changed; the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck tingled, as if lightning were about to strike, and then it did: tilting her head slightly back and to the side, she raised her mouth to mine. Her lips were softer than I would have imagined; softer than I could have imagined any lips to be. I reached a hand up and stroked her hair — that thick, wavy black hair — and when I did, she trembled.

She pulled away from the kiss and laid the other hand on my chest, dropping her head onto my shoulder. Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she was still shaking. “Oh my,” she murmured. “I wonder how it’d be if you were in practice.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’d be nice to find out.”

I bent to kiss her again, but she turned her face and pushed me away slightly. “Wait,” she said, and I feared I had overstepped, crossed some boundary in my eagerness. Her hands fumbled at the back of her neck. She unfastened a black cord and removed a necklace that had been hanging inside her sweater. The pendant, which was silver, looked striking — an abstract rendering of something real; a figure that was angular and curving and ancient and modern at the same time. She slipped the pendant in the pocket of her jeans. Then she kissed me again, and my interest in the necklace evaporated. I reached for her hair again, and ran my fingers through it like a comb — a comb that twisted and tugged gently as it wove through the strands — and when I did, she made a small soft sound. Half sigh, half whimper, it was the most thrilling sound I had ever heard. I drew in my breath and felt my fingers tighten, and felt her body begin to shake again.

She slipped out sometime after I fell asleep; I don’t know when. All I know is that I awoke at dawn to a sunrise the color of a blood orange.

CHAPTER 31

Peggy did a double-take when I stopped by her office to retrieve my mail and ask if there were any meetings on my calendar. “What happened to you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re smiling like you just got named ‘Professor of the Year’ or something,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s a beautiful day, I love my work, and I’m surrounded by bright, interesting people,” I said.

She shot back, “It’s cold as hell, the budget cuts are wreaking havoc with our equipment needs, and two of your junior faculty just sent a memo to the dean complaining about you.”

“Complaining about me? Why on earth would any of the Anthropology faculty complain about me?”

“It’s those two new culturalists you hired last year,” she said. “They told the dean, in no uncertain terms, that ‘race’ is a social construct, not a physical trait. They demand that you cease all references to ‘the three races of man’—which is sexist, too, they say — in your classes.”

I laughed. “See,” I said, “very interesting people. Boring guys like me, we study an Asian, an African, and a Scandinavian skull, and we come to the simplistic conclusion that the differences in the cheekbones and the slope of the jaws and the width of the nasal opening are structural — that they reflect millennia of evolution and adaptation by those three populations. Interesting folks, on the other hand, they look at those same cheekbones and jaws and noses, and they see social constructs.”

“Go ahead, make light,” she said, “but this is going to cause you headaches.” She eyed me more closely. “I know that smile,” she said. “This is about that librarian, isn’t it? Miranda told me about her. That’s why you’re making all these trips to Oak Ridge.” She grinned triumphantly.

“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” I said innocently.

As I turned to go, she summoned me back. “This came through the fax machine for you,” she said. “From somebody over in the tree lab.”

I practically ripped the page from her hand. “I’ll be down in the osteo lab,” I called over my shoulder. “See if you can get Detective Emert and Agent Thornton on a three-way call.”

“What should I tell them it’s about?”

“Tell them it’s about the forensic power of the chainsaw,” I said.

So the tree rings,” came Emert’s voice from the speakerphone, “can tell us whether he died in 1948 or 1984 or whatever?”

“They can,” I said. “In fact, they already have.”

I’d taken the three-foot section of tulip-poplar trunk to one of my colleagues in the forestry lab. He had recut the end with a fine-toothed table saw — he’d also bored out a core sample — and had counted the growth rings. According to both counts, the tulip poplar was sixty-three years old. “That means it started growing in the spring of 1946,” I said.

“Meaning it was sometime before that,” said Miranda, “that G.I. Doe was planted.”

Eddie Garcia looked weak and scared. It had been only two days since I’d seen him, but in those forty-eight hours he’d worsened dramatically. They’d begun giving him blood transfusions of packed red blood cells, because his bone marrow had virtually ceased to function. Ironically, the transfused cells were irradiated to kill germs. As an extra precaution against infection, every nurse or doctor who entered his room had to scrub up and suit up in full surgical garb. Looking through the window, as a pair of masked figures checked his monitors and changed his IV bag, I was struck by the discrepancy between appearance and reality: it looked as if they were protecting themselves from Garcia, when in fact it was Garcia they were taking extreme precautions to safeguard. The most distressing sight, though, was his hands, swathed in thick layers of gauze. Unlike Miranda’s — so far, at least — Garcia’s localized burns had gone necrotic. His hands were dying.

I brought Garcia up to date on the Oak Ridge case, and he seemed intrigued, although maybe he was merely grateful for a distraction from his battle against acute radiation syndrome. But the drip must have contained something to ease his pain, because as I was telling him how the tree rings allowed us to estimate G.I. Doe’s time since death, his eyes lost their focus and he fell asleep. It shamed me to realize it, but I was relieved for the chance to ease away.

Late that afternoon I heard a dull thud outside my office door — the sound of something heavy hitting the floor — followed by the clatter of the stairwell door banging shut.

“Whoo,” gasped a voice I recognized as Thornton’s — a recognition confirmed by the appearance of his head in the entrance of my office as he tapped on the doorframe.

“You all right? Sounds like you’re hauling furniture up those stairs,” I said.

“Feels like it,” he said. “I thought you might like to see this.” His head disappeared and I heard a labored grunt. He reappeared, lugging a brushed-aluminum case, the sort generally filled with expensive electronics or video gear. I cleared off the center of my desk, and he set it down with a gentler thud than he had out in the hallway. Then he laid it on its side, flipped four latches on the edge, and swung the lid up.

When I realized what it was, I jumped back. “What are you doing? Get that thing out of here.”

“It’s safe,” he said. “We’ve checked it up one side and down the other. There’s no source in it — nothing radioactive. Only way this thing can hurt you is if you get a hernia trying to lift it. Which I think maybe I’ve done. Or if it falls on your foot, which would cripple you for life.”

Inside the case was an instrument I recognized as an industrial radiography camera — one of the two models Thornton had shown us, in fact, in his PowerPoint briefing about sources of iridium-192. “I thought the manufacturer was sending somebody to Savannah River to look at the source,” I said. “They decided to send a camera here instead?”

He shook his head. “We got lucky,” he said. “This is the very camera somebody raided for the iridium that killed Novak. Has to be.”

“My God,” I said. “Where’d you find it? How?”

“One of the things we assigned agents to do right away was to canvas scrap-metal recycling yards,” he said. “They started in Oak Ridge and fanned out from there. Our thinking was, the safest way to transport the iridium would be to leave it in the camera till you were ready to use it, since there’s all that built-in shielding. We hoped maybe the camera would get dumped after the pigtail was removed. Sure enough, it turned up at a salvage yard on Sutherland Avenue in Knoxville.”

My mind was racing. “Who brought it in? Did you get prints? Did you make an arrest?”

“We’re looking for the guy,” he said, “but it’s not our killer. Couldn’t be. Selling the camera would be a stupid risk to take for five bucks, which is all the scrapyard paid for it. The guy that brought it in was Hispanic, spoke almost no English, looked to be a day-laborer sort. That’s about all the fellow at the scrapyard remembers about him. A couple sets of prints, but the only hit is a match with the guy at the scrapyard, who stole a car years ago.”

The find was exciting, but frustrating, too, since it might be a dead end. “Now what? How do you figure out who took the pigtail out of the camera?”

Thornton unfurled a slow smile. “We send a planeload of agents down to New Iberia, Louisiana, to track down who stole it from Pipeline Services, Inc. And to find out why Pipeline Services never reported the theft to the NRC.”

CHAPTER 32

It had been three days since i’d watched Dr. Strangelove with Isabella; two and a half days since I’d awakened at dawn, alone but content. My first impulse had been to send her flowers that morning, but something told me to give her some breathing room. She had bolted the night we’d shared pizza at Big Ed’s, and that skittishness was probably ratcheted up considerably higher now. And so I’d waited as long as I could stand to, then called and invited her to lunch. “I hear the Soup Kitchen’s good,” I said, “and it’s the right weather for hot soup and crusty bread.”

She hesitated, and I began to panic, but then she relented. “I only have half an hour for lunch,” she said, “one to one-thirty, so I’ll need to eat and run.”

“That’s okay,” I said, grateful she hadn’t turned me down. “Any longer than that and you’d find all sorts of other woeful gaps in my cultural education. You want me to pick you up at the library?”

This time she didn’t hesitate. “I’ll meet you there,” she said. “I need to swing by a cash machine on my way.”

Don’t push your luck, I told myself. “Okay, see you there at, what, ten after one?”

“That sounds about right. Thanks. Bye.” She clearly wasn’t the sort for long goodbyes.

I half expected her not to show up, but three hours later, as I lingered outside a low, whitesided building distinguished by its savory smells and steamed-up windows, she rounded the corner briskly and nearly bumped into me. “Oh!” she said.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. I felt a goofy smile spreading across my face.

She looked down and slightly away from me, and once again her hair made curtains that hid her face from view. “I’m actually a lot shyer than you think,” she said. I thought I glimpsed a smile, and I reached a hand beneath her chin to tip her face toward me. She flushed, and ducked her head again, but as she did, there was no doubt about the smile.

“I’ll try not to make any sudden moves,” I said, opening the door amid billows of steam. As we made our way to the counter, I could feel my stomach rumbling and my salivary glands awakening.

The Soup Kitchen served soups and salads and bread cafeteria-style. The day’s soups — seven, usually, though by the time we got there they were down to five — were written in marker on a dry-erase board behind the serving counter. I ordered chili topped with a mound of Fritos and shredded cheddar; Isabella chose a creamy spinach soup that looked thick enough to clog arteries with a single serving. She got a small, round loaf of brown bread to go with hers; I figured the Fritos counted as my bread.

The chili was tangy but not spicy, with just the right balance of tomato, ground beef, onion, and toppings. I nodded my approval. “You were so smart to suggest this place,” I said.

“I didn’t. You did.”

“Well then,” I said, “I was so smart to suggest this place.”

“You were. It’s the second-best restaurant in Oak Ridge.”

Just then my cell phone rang. I frowned at the interruption, but when I saw the number, I murmured an apology to Isabella and answered the call. “I am about to make you a happy man,” said Jim Emert. “A very happy man.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Detective, I’m flattered,” I said, “but I just don’t feel attracted to you in that way. I have a strong preference for women.” I winked at Isabella across the table, but she was too busy slicing and buttering her bread to notice.

“Very funny,” he said. “Just for that, never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

“Never mind the great news I was about to share with you.”

“You caught the guy who killed Novak?”

“You might think this is better,” he said.

“You figured out who killed Novak and who killed G.I. Doe?”

“Better,” he said.

“The secret to world peace?”

“Better, better, better,” he said.

Suddenly it hit me. “No kidding? You’re serious?”

“I am,” he said.

“This is huge.”

“I knew you’d appreciate the significance,” Emert said. “We should have it safely in hand in another ten minutes.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He laughed. “This is worth dashing over from Knoxville at two hundred miles an hour?”

“It is,” I said, “but I don’t have to; I’m already in Oak Ridge. In fact, I’m only a couple of blocks downhill. Isabella and I are having lunch at the Soup Kitchen.”

“Very handy,” he said. “Just mosey on up when you get done.”

I snapped the phone shut. “Big break in the Novak case,” I said. Her eyes widened. “They’re finally draining the swimming pool. I’m about to get my chainsaw back.”

She looked deeply confused for a moment, then gave her head a brisk little shake, as if trying to shake off a deep fog or a hard knock. Then she laughed in disbelief. “Greater love hath no man,” she said.

“Don’t be jealous,” I teased. “I’d hate to have to choose. I would miss you.”

She rolled her eyes, then pinched off a piece of bread and flicked it at me across the table.

A stone’s throw from the Soup Kitchen, a staircase led upward through a small garden — or what would have been a garden in any other season of the year — and brought me out on Jackson Square, the original heart of wartime Oak Ridge. Since the city’s earliest days, the Jackson Square pharmacy had been dispensing medications, and the community theater had been dispensing tragedy and comedy. Slightly higher up the hill stood the Chapel on the Hill and the Alexander Inn, dramatic reminders of how the past of a place could thrive or could be allowed to die.

Crossing the street and stepping onto the sidewalk leading up to the inn, I noticed that the gutter alongside the curb ran dark with brackish water. A fire hose had been hooked to a drain notched into the embankment beneath the pool, and the hose was now dumping the pool’s contents down the gutter. With a gurgle and a swirl, the foul water plunged through a cast-iron grate and into a storm sewer. I heard a distant splashing sound — either the sewer pipe was huge or this drain emptied into a deep shaft — and I remembered Isabella talking about the elaborate network of tunnels the Army had built beneath Oak Ridge at the time of the city’s creation.

A small utility truck marked OAK RIDGE FIRE DEPARTMENT was parked alongside the pool, as was Emert’s car. Emert, wearing a red parka, stood at one end of the pool chatting with a firefighter. The detective hoisted a hand to wave as I approached. “Good timing,” he said. “We’re getting close to the bottom of the pool now. Unless it’s the deepest motel swimming pool ever dug.”

My eye was caught by a water-filled container standing between Emert and the firefighter. It was the trash can I’d given Emert on the loading dock of the hospital the day he fished Leonard Novak’s wallet and driver’s license from his pants pocket. Only ten days had passed. but it seemed like a lot of time — and a lot of innocence — had flowed beneath the bridge. Two people who mattered profoundly to me — a physician I respected deeply, and a student I felt closer to than anyone else on earth — hung in limbo, waiting to find out if they would lose fingertips or hands or even life itself. If Garcia’s bone marrow and immune system did not recover, a minor infection could quickly escalate and kill him. Even if he survived, he might well be disfigured for life; his injuries could end his career, and deal a crushing blow to his spirit and his family life.

I pushed the thoughts from my mind. There was nothing I could do to change the outcome for Garcia or Miranda, and there was no reason to burden Emert with my worries. “Okay,” I said, “so let’s talk strategy here. How do we get the saw out of the pool and into the trash can really quick?” I pointed to the swimming pool’s ladder. “That only goes halfway down the side of the pool, and you know that the concrete’s got to be slick as glass.”

“We’re way ahead of you, Doc,” he said. He pointed to the fence behind him. A long aluminum pole lay there, a lifeguard’s version of a shepherd’s crook. “We’ll just hook that through the guard bar,” he said, “and hoist it up. Rescue complete.”

A moment later, I nudged him. The curving, tubular guard bar of the saw came into view as the water receded. It was followed by the top of the saw’s orange casing, its brightness dulled considerably by a layer of slime.

The firefighter picked up the pole and threaded the crook through the guard bar. Spreading his feet wide for balance, he raised the pole with a hand-over-hand motion, almost as if he were reeling in a fish. As the saw cleared the edge of the pool, I took hold of it — slime and all — and unhooked it from the pole, then lowered it, engine first, into the clear water in the trash can. “The gods be praised,” I said.

“I’ll be damned,” Emert said.

I looked at him, puzzled, but he wasn’t addressing me. He was addressing the bottom of the pool, where the water, as it continued to recede, was revealing the unmistakable outline of another corpse. Protruding from its chest was the handle of a knife.