Bones of Betrayal

CHAPTER 33

Emert, the firefighter, and I stared down at the body in the pool, the knife jutting from the chest. The first thing Emert did — after letting a few more cusswords fly — was call Hank Strickland at REAC/TS and say, “You got that Geiger counter handy?” Evidently Hank did. “Could you come check out another body for us? I don’t want to turn another medical examiner into a human gamma detector.” Emert had his phone in one hand and his personal radiation monitor in the other. The chirper remained reassuringly quiet, even when Emert stretched it out over the pool.

Hank arrived fifteen minutes later. By then the parking lot was filling with police cars and fire trucks. “Have gadget, will travel,” Hank said.

“Your office is only two blocks away,” I said, pointing down the hill to the hospital. “You call that traveling?” Hank shrugged. “How come it took you fifteen minutes to travel two blocks?”

“I was in the middle of a very important email,” he said. “A chain letter, only it’s email. Break the chain, you’re in for seven years of bad luck.” He looked at the body in the pool. “Maybe this guy broke the chain.”

“I’d say a knife in the chest is more like seven seconds of bad luck,” I said.

“I’d say it’s more like bad karma,” Emert said. “Somebody catches a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, that’s bad luck. Somebody catches a dagger in the left ventricle, that’s probably not so random.”

“So answer me this,” said Hank. “How come Novak’s body was frozen in the ice, but this guy sank to the bottom? And don’t tell me it’s because he had a chainsaw for an anchor. The chainsaw was a postmortem decorative accent, if the story I heard is true.” He grinned at me.

“True,” said Emert, “every word. Doc, you got a scientific explanation?”

“Maybe he’s got rocks in his pockets,” I said. “Or just denser bones. Novak was ninety-three, after all. His bones were probably pretty porous. But some people are floaters, and some are sinkers. I’ve got a friend who bobs like a cork, but I’m like a shark — if I don’t keep swimming, I sink to the bottom.”

Hank stretched the Geiger counter’s wand out over the edge of the pool; he set the detector for gamma radiation first, then beta, then alpha. The instrument emitted only the slow, comforting ticking I’d come to recognize as the sign of background radiation. Armed with that reassurance, he ventured down into the pool, with the help of a ladder off one of the fire trucks, and surveyed the body at close range. Satisfied that it posed no hazard, he climbed out.

Next to descend the ladder was Emert, who donned his coroner’s hat long enough to confirm that the man who’d been submerged for days or weeks with a knife in his heart was indeed dead. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the coroner in Munchkinland pronounces the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house to be “not only merely dead,” but “really most sincerely dead.”

Emert had called Art Bohanan and asked if Art would mind looking for prints on one more piece of evidence, and Art had agreed. Using a set of tongs he’d taken from an evidence kit, Emert worked the knife from the man’s chest, taking care not to touch the handle. He sealed the knife in an evidence bag, labeled it, and handed it up to me. Even through the bag’s plastic, even through the smear of body fluids and water on the blade, I thought I discerned the distinctive swirls of Damascus steel. “Looks like the missing knife from Novak’s display case,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”

A cloud of mist shrouded the knife handle. Art squeezed the spray bottle twice more. Mopping a few stray droplets from my face, I said, “And why is it you’re wetting it?”

“The moisture helps the superglue latch onto the oils from the print,” he said.

“I knew that,” I said.

He laid the knife in the transparent chamber of a boxy glass and metal apparatus—“the Bohanan Apparatus” was its official name, and it was patented — and switched on the device’s heating element. As the element vaporized the glue, white fumes swirled into the chamber hiding the knife from view. After several minutes Art switched on a fan, which sucked the fumes out of the glass chamber, up through an exhaust hood, and away from the KPD crime lab.

Holding the knife by the blade, Art lifted it from the fuming chamber and held it under a magnifying desk lamp. After studying it for a moment, he leaned back. “Take a look at the tang,” he said.

“Okay. Where do I look to see the tang?”

He laughed. “The tang is the part of the blade the handle is riveted to,” he said. “This knife has a thick blade, so the tang’s thick, too — an eighth of an inch, maybe three-sixteenths. That handle is horn, which is hard to print, but the metal tang can actually be etched by the oil in a fingerprint. Look right there,” he said, pointing to a spot near the guard that separated the tang from the sharpened edge of the blade. Dozens of closely spaced lines crossed the tang, with one tiny swirl at the center. “That’s a pretty good print,” he said.

“But it’s less than a quarter-inch wide,” I said. “Is that enough to match to anything?”

Art picked up a printout that showed a complete set of prints. “Look at the right thumb,” he said. I took the page and held it under the magnifying glass. “What do you think?”

“That loop in the center has the same little break as the one on the knife,” I said. “I think it’s the same print.”

“I think so, too,” he said, “and I’m pretty good at this stuff.”

I glanced at the words on the paper. The prints had been reproduced from a U.S. government security clearance file. “Damn,” I said. “He didn’t go gentle into that good night, did he?”

In his final moments, Leonard Novak — a ninety-three-year-old walking ghost — had stabbed to death a man roughly half his age.

CHAPTER 34

The autopsy of the third Oak Ridge victim — case 09–03 — was almost redundant, since the cause of death had been sticking out of the man’s chest. According to the Nashville medical examiner, the lungs contained a small amount of water, which suggested (but did not prove) that the victim had drawn a partial breath as his heart shuddered and stopped. Beyond that, the autopsy report contained nothing extraordinary, though it did shed some light on the guy’s life: a middle-aged white male, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, with blue eyes, thinning blond hair, and a gray beard. Thin, whitish scars indicated prior surgeries on the right ankle and left shoulder. A series of whole-body X-rays revealed numerous healed fractures — four ribs on the right side of the chest had been broken, as well as six ribs on the left — two of them in more than one place. The right femur bore evidence of a childhood fracture, the report noted, and was a quarter-inch shorter than the left. The spine, particularly the cervical spine, showed osteoarthritic lipping — ragged fringes of bone rimming the vertebrae in the neck — that was surprisingly severe for a man his age. My first thought, from the variety of skeletal trauma, was too many bar fights. But the victim had well-developed leg muscles and — until the knife blade made its entrance — a robust circulatory system. Maybe not bar fights after all, I thought. Maybe bicycle wrecks. Regardless, the guy seemed to have been rode hard and put away wet.

Miranda, Emert, Thornton, and I were huddled around a table of stale cookies and stale coffee at the ORPD. I had come straight from the KPD lab, so Miranda had caught a ride with Thornton. Strictly speaking, there was no compelling reason for her to be here, but it had become important to find things to occupy Miranda’s time and energy. Her three burned fingertips were getting worse — they’d progressed from blisters to open, oozing wounds, wrapped in gauze, and she couldn’t do the delicate reconstruction the North Knoxville skeleton required.

She also couldn’t shake her fear for Garcia. Somehow, despite the best precautions of the ICU staff, he’d picked up an infection, and his condition seemed more perilous than ever. He was unable to eat or drink anything, and his GI tract was racked with cramps and bloody diarrhea as the lining of his gut sloughed off. In the weeks or months to come, the lining might slowly regenerate, but it might not. His bone marrow was virtually destroyed, and the search was on for a matching marrow donor, but the prospects weren’t good. Even if a donor could be found, Garcia might not be robust enough to survive the transplant.

“The pool guy was carrying no identification,” said Emert. “No wallet, no credit card, no car keys, nothing. Some loose change in his right hip pocket, a pack of chewing gum in his left pocket.” He paused. “But he had this in his shirt pocket.” The detective slid a ziplock bag toward the center of the table. It contained a small, rectangular piece of white paper, stained with dirty water and smeared ink. Emert flipped it over to reveal the other side. Thornton, Miranda, and I leaned in to see. There, despite the smearing, four words remained legible: “I know your secret.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Interesting,” said Thornton.

“Creepy,” said Miranda. “These notes are like a modern-day version of those snitch reports Oak Ridgers sent back during the Manhattan Project. Only now, instead of sending them to Acme Whatchamacallit—”

“Credit,” Thornton supplied. “Acme Credit Corporation.”

“Right. Whatever,” she said. “Only instead of going to Acme, these are going straight to the people being spied on.” She frowned. “You know what else this makes me think of? Y’all know those REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY signs on the interstate? The ones with the 800 number you’re supposed to call—800-something-TIPS — if you spy something fishy?”

“800-492-TIPS,” said Thornton.

“It worries me that you know that,” she said. “My point is, imagine you’re driving along I-40 and suddenly your cell phone rings and a voice whispers in your ear, ‘I see what you’re doing.’ That’s what these notes make me think of. This whole spying and snitching thing is creeping me out.”

“Spoken like a woman with a guilty conscience,” I said. I was only teasing, so I was surprised when she turned red. A thought occurred to me, and I glanced at Thornton to see if he was blushing, too, but the FBI agent’s face was a study in nonchalance. Or was he feigning nonchalance, so as not to embarrass Miranda further? I couldn’t tell, and I realized it wasn’t any of my business if they had kissed and made up, ideologically or otherwise. I turned again to Emert. “So how do you figure out who our modern John Doe is?”

“Well, yet again, we’ve come up empty-handed on missing-person reports in Oak Ridge,” he said. “Nothing remotely similar in Knoxville or surrounding counties, either. We’re checking NCIC”—the National Crime Information Center—“to see if there’s anybody elsewhere in the country who fits the description. But NCIC has its shortcomings.” He looked at Thornton. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Thornton. “NCIC is the Bureau’s creation, not mine. We know it’s not perfect — if a missing-person report lists someone’s age as thirty-seven, and a cop plugs in thirty-to-thirty-five in the age range, the system won’t connect those two dots. But if the cop follows up with a second search, for ages thirty-six-to-forty, he’ll get the report he needs to see. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s a help.”

“Sure,” said Emert. “Anyhow. We’re running the guy’s fingerprints through the state’s automated fingerprint identification system, and the Bureau’s AFIS, too. So if he’s been arrested and printed, we might get lucky enough to ID him that way. Other thing we’re doing is running a picture of him in the Oak Ridger this afternoon.”

I was surprised to hear that. The dead man’s face — open-mouthed and glassy-eyed, the skin beginning to soften and slough off — was strong stuff for a small-town newspaper. “I’m guessing subscribers will be calling for the editor’s head when they see that photo,” I said.

“Not a photo,” he said. “We had an artist do a sketch. Not a perfect likeness, but maybe more recognizable — and less gruesome — than the photos. Surely somebody will be able to tell us who this guy was.”

In the Novak case, Thornton had disappointing news to relate about the radiography camera. Pipeline Services, the Louisiana company that owned the camera, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection two weeks before — probably within days or weeks after the fresh iridium-192 source had been shipped to New Iberia and loaded into the camera. The pipeline contractor’s doors had been padlocked, and no one seemed to know the camera had gone missing. “We found a window that was unlocked,” he said, “and the door to the lab where the camera was kept had been pried open.”

“Damn,” I said. “A town that small, lots of folks would’ve known the company had gone belly-up. Almost anybody could’ve stolen it, right?”

“Theoretically,” he said, “but I doubt it. Think about it: somebody who just happens to live in Podunk, Louisiana, suddenly sees their chance to make off with a radiography camera they’ve always wanted? I don’t believe in coincidences that big. We’re combing through the personnel records, and we’ll interview all the employees. And their neighbors and friends. And all the folks who aren’t their friends. I’m flying down there this afternoon. We’re getting close,” he said. “I can smell it.”

Then it was my turn to talk about G.I. Doe. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to ID him from his teeth,” I said. Three of the soldier’s lower molars had fillings, I explained, including one of the third molars, or wisdom teeth. My hope was that the cavity in the third molar — a tooth that erupted around age eighteen — had been filled by an Army dentist. If that was the case, maybe there was a dental chart. The trick, I pointed out, would be to find it among the millions of army dental charts.

“First we found the film,” said Emert, “then we found the bones. Things come in threes. You’ll find it. G.I. Doe wants to be identified.”

When the meeting ended, Miranda, Thornton, and I headed outside. Thornton had parked in front of the building; I’d parked out back. The three of us stood together on the front steps of the municipal building. I said to Miranda, “You mind if I wander down to the library for a few minutes?”

“Why would I mind?”

“Well, you might be in a hurry to get back to campus.”

“But I rode with Thornton,” she said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

“But I thought you were riding back with me,” I said. “I thought Thornton had to catch a plane to Louisiana.” I looked at Thornton; he looked at Miranda.

“But…I dropped off my car at the Jiffy Lube on Bearden Hill on the way over here,” she said. “He…we were planning to swing by there on the way back.”

“But Bearden Hill’s just five minutes from my house,” I said. “Why don’t I just run you by there on my way home at the end of the day? That way you know they’re done. We don’t want Thornton to miss his plane.”

“It’s all right,” he said, a little quicker than necessary. “It’s practically on my way to the airport. And I’ve got time.”

“Okay, great,” I said, a little more cheerfully than I meant. Bearden was far out of his way, but there was no future in pointing that out. Clearly they wanted to be together, but didn’t want to say so. “I might just work in the library for the rest of the afternoon. Miranda, could you see about tracking something down for me later? A master’s thesis on Oak Ridge by Isabella Morgan?”

“Anthropology?”

“No, history,” I said.

“UT?”

“Yes,” I said. “Wait. Maybe not. Maybe Tulane or LSU.”

“Could you be any vaguer?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Never mind.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” I said. It might have been the first time we’d ever said something as formal as “Goodbye” to each other. Awkward as it felt, I hoped it would be the last.

I was still slightly off-balance as I walked into the library and back toward the Reference Desk. The chair was empty, but the telephone receiver was out of its cradle and the HOLD light was blinking, so I hoped Isabella had just stepped away to look up the answer to a caller’s question. “I’ll be right with you,” said a voice behind me, and a gray-haired woman I didn’t know stepped behind the desk, lifted the phone, and pressed the blinking light. “He was born November 13, 1955,” she said. “In St. Joseph, Missouri. Yes, I believe that was the eastern end of the Pony Express route. You’re quite welcome. Glad I could find that for you.” She smiled as she hung up the phone. “Can I help you?”

“I was actually looking for Isabella,” I said.

“She’s not in today. Is there something I can help you with?”

“It’s not a reference question,” I said. “I’m…I’m a friend of Isabella’s. I was just going to say hi.”

I saw recognition register in her eyes. “Oh, of course,” she said. “Yes. Well, she was in earlier, but then she had to leave rather suddenly. Apparently her father has fallen quite ill.” After she said it, she looked uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure she should have divulged this information to me; if I didn’t already know, was I authorized to know? Report Suspicious Activity, I thought, and imagined the librarian phoning the TIPS number.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Thank you. Sorry to bother you.” As I left the library and climbed the hill to my truck, part of my mind was feeling concern for Isabella; another part was spinning in surprise and confusion. I knew so little about her. She’d said something about her grandmother and the Graphite Reactor, but it was a passing mention we’d never circled back to. It had never occurred to me to ask about her parents. Or maybe I simply hadn’t had a chance yet. We’d flirted over photos and food; we’d shared the excitement of the search for the uranium bunker; we’d shared a night of passion. But what I knew about her was slight compared with what I didn’t know. Isabella was a bright, beautiful enigma.

CHAPTER 35

Despite what I’d said to Miranda about heading straight home from Oak Ridge, I drove to campus instead. I parallel-parked between a pair of concrete pillars under the stadium, then wandered upstairs to the departmental office to check my mail and messages. “Well, I’ll be,” said Peggy. “You are alive. I’d just about decided you were dead.”

“Just missing in action,” I said. “Speaking of MIA, could you call up Joe Cusick at CILHI for me?” Joe was a former student of mine; after earning his Ph.D., he’d gone to work for the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The lab’s official name had changed recently — to J.PAC, which stood for something I couldn’t remember — but I still thought of it by the old acronym, CILHI, pronounced “SILL-high.” I’d served on CILHI’s scientific advisory board for several years early in Joe’s tenure there, and I was always glad for an excuse to call or, better yet, pay a visit.

“You think he’d be at work already? It’s six hours earlier in Honolulu, you know.”

I checked my watch; it was 1:45 P.M. in Knoxville; 7:45 A.M. there. “He gets up with the chickens,” I said. “He’ll be there.”

I ducked into my seldom-used administrative office, through the doorway that adjoined Peggy’s office, and dumped the mountain of mail on the conference table that butted up against the front of the desk. “It’s ringing,” said Peggy. “Do you want me to go ahead and switch it to you?”

“Please,” I said.

“Uh,” grunted a voice two rings later. “Yeah…. Hello…. This is Joe Cusick.” It was not the voice of a man who’d gotten up with the chickens — not unless it had been a long, rough night in the coop.

“Good morning, Joe,” I said sunnily. “It’s Bill Brockton. Did I catch you before your coffee kicked in?”

“Woof. Give me just a second here,” he said. “Bill. Hey there. Haven’t had coffee yet. I’m in Cambodia. It’s, I dunno, two in the morning here.”

“Oh hell, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten that the number we had on file for him was a satellite phone. “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you eight hours from now.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” he said, sounding more alert now. “I’m used to this. Happens all the time. I’ll be snoring again five minutes after we hang up. I can fall asleep on a dime; I’m famous for it. Go ahead.”

“Okay,” I said, “if you insist. But what are you doing in Cambodia?”

“Looking at some bones in the hills near the Vietnamese border,” he said. “Supposedly an American pilot who crashed here in ’68 or ’69. If we can identify him, that’d leave only another seventeen hundred and fifty MIAs in Southeast Asia. What’s up? What can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping CILHI might be able to help us ID a World War II soldier,” I said. “His skeleton just surfaced in Oak Ridge. He was shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave out on the DOE reservation.”

Even though he was half a world away, our conversation bouncing off a satellite orbiting thousands of miles high, Joe’s whistle came across clearly. “So this was murder, not KIA,” he said.

“Probably not killed in action,” I agreed. “Not a lot of enemy combatants in Tennessee.”

“Did you find his dog tags?”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “No dog tags, no driver’s license. A wristwatch and the buttons off a pair of army-issue coveralls. Oh, and a really thick stack of papers. We’re wondering if he might’ve been spying.”

“If somebody caught him spying, wouldn’t they have turned him in, either before or after they shot him?”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “The picture in Oak Ridge is a little murky.” I told him about Novak’s bizarre death, and the film in the freezer, the additional body we’d found when the pool was drained.

“And I thought Southeast Asia was complicated,” he said. “Well, if this soldier was shot and buried on the sly, he’d have been reported AWOL pretty quick. And if he didn’t turn up in a month, he’d have been flagged as a deserter. We’ve got a database at CILHI that lists deserters. Let me call the office and have somebody take a look. So this was in Oak Ridge, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s?”

“Actually,” I said, “we think he was killed in 1945 or early 1946. He was buried sometime after a uranium bunker was built — that was in ’44—but before a tree started growing in ’46.”

Joe laughed. “Well, that should narrow down the list of potential deserters,” he said. “I’ll ask somebody to take a look and give you a call. Let me know how it all turns out.”

“Thanks, Joe. ’Preciate you. Sorry I woke you. Safe travels. Sleep fast.”

Two hours later, Peggy forwarded a call from Pete Rossi, an investigator at CILHI. “Our database turned up two deserters in East Tennessee in the summer of 1945,” Rossi said. “One was a guard from Camp Crossville, a prisoner-of-war camp up on the Cumberland Plateau where German and Italian officers were held. The guy from Camp Crossville was caught in Kentucky three months later and court-martialed. He claimed he was AWOL, not a deserter, and said he was gonna report back once his mama got well. He must have been convincing at the court-martial, because he got off with a two-year sentence and a dishonorable discharge.”

“And the other deserter?”

“The other was a corporal named Jonah Jamison,” said Rossi. “He was assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment — the military unit associated with the Manhattan Project — and posted to the Clinton Engineer Works. Never caught; vanished without a trace.”

“Clinton Engineer Works,” I said. “That was the army’s name for the Oak Ridge complex. That’s got to be our man.”

“Sounds like it,” Rossi agreed.

“How soon you reckon we can get his army dental records?” As soon as I said it, I remembered. “Oh crap. That might be a problem, huh?”

“Might be,” said Rossi. “Like the Pope might be Catholic.”

What I’d suddenly remembered was the fire. The National Archives stored tens of millions of military service records in a huge repository in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building, which contained two-thirds of the military files. By the time the blaze was extinguished, the files of seventeen million soldiers had been destroyed, singed, or soaked. To keep the waterlogged files from molding, archivists had put them all in refrigerated storage. Some of the damaged records were being reconstructed, by scanning their soggy pages to create duplicate files; however, progress was excruciatingly slow, and many records had been lost altogether. On two previous occasions, I had sought military dental records from the St. Louis facility. In one case, the records I needed had survived; in the other, they hadn’t. Eighty percent of the records from the 1940s had been destroyed, Rossi said, so he wasn’t optimistic about finding a dental record that would tell us whether or not it was Jonah Jamison’s skeleton laid out on a table in my bone lab.

“But I’m actually in St. Louis right now,” Rossi added, “looking through some Vietnam era records for Cusick. I’ll see if Jamison’s personnel file survived the fire.”

Statistically, the odds weren’t good — just one in five. But then I remembered Emert’s words. “Things come in threes. You’ll find it.”

Bless him: Emert was right. Jonah Jamison did want to be identified.

Jamison must have been a scientist or technician of some sort,” I said to Thornton. “Isn’t that the kind of folks who were in the Special Engineer Detachment?”

“Most of them were,” said Thornton. The agent was on a three-way call from New Iberia with Emert and me. “Jamison was different, though. He was a writer.”

“A writer? What the hell was a writer doing in a scientific and technical outfit?”

“Immortalizing the great endeavor,” he said. “General Groves had one eye on Japan and the other eye on history. Or fame.” I thought back to the photograph Miranda had shown me, and her comments on how narrowly the general’s horizon was drawn compared to Oppenheimer’s. “Groves had still photographers and cinematographers scurrying around all over the place, capturing everything on film,” Thornton was saying, “but apparently he wanted the story set down on paper too, and in style.”

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If the Manhattan Project succeeded, it would clearly play a pivotal role in human history. If it didn’t succeed, well, having the costly failure detailed on film and in print would likely be the least of the general’s worries. “So Jamison wrote for the Knoxville paper before the war?”

Thornton laughed. “Not exactly. Groves was aiming for greater glory,” he said. “Jamison was a New York Times reporter before the war. After he was drafted, he was assigned to write scripts for training films — how to clean your rifle, how not to get VD, that sort of thing — when Groves reached down and plucked him from the basement of the Pentagon.”

“How do you know all this stuff,” I asked, “when we didn’t even know who he was until twelve hours ago?”

“Because the FBI has files, too,” he said, “and ours weren’t stored in a firetrap in St. Louis. And because Jonah Jamison was considered a potential security risk.”

“A security risk?” That made no sense to me. “If they didn’t trust him, why didn’t they get somebody else to write about the project? Why take the chance?”

“Well, he looked like a red-blooded American risk,” said Thornton. “His Achilles’ heels were booze and women. And Groves really wanted him. Jamison had written some flattering pieces about Groves in 1942, when Groves spearheaded the construction of the Pentagon. That was the Army’s biggest project before the Manhattan Project, and apparently the stories made Groves look brilliant. Jamison was drafted at the end of ’42, and Groves had him posted to Oak Ridge in early ’43. He was reported AWOL on August 4, 1945—two days before Hiroshima.”

“And he disappeared without a trace?”

“Until you dug him up,” Thornton said. “Him and that thick stack of pages.”

“I sure wish we could read what was on those pages that were in the grave,” said Emert.

“I sure wish we knew who killed him for writing it,” I said. “Anything in his security file shed light on that?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Thornton said. “But speaking of security files, your storytelling gal pal turned up in two of the snitch reports to Acme Credit.”

“Beatrice?”

“Yup. One came from a neighbor, anonymous, who wrote, ‘That woman has the morals of an alley cat.’”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed at that. It was impossible to imagine Beatrice, her silver hair and wrinkled face, behaving scandalously. “The bad girl of AARP,” I said.

“Maybe not now,” he said. “But maybe back then. The other report came several months after that first one. An army doc at the Oak Ridge field hospital wrote that she came in bleeding and running a fever. She claimed she’d had a miscarriage. But the doctor suspected she’d had an abortion.”

CHAPTER 36

We wore badges everywhere in those days — not just to work, but to the grocery store, the post office, even church. Heaven forbid you should try to gain access to Jesus when your clearance was only for Yahweh. MPs ranged everywhere checking badges. The black section of town, Colored Town, was practically fenced off. If the face on your badge wasn’t black, a guard or MP sitting in a jeep beside the road into Colored Town might wave you over and ask what business you had in there.

The business I had in there was an abortion.

A year after I married Novak, I realized I was pregnant. This was not happy news. For one thing, I was working with radioactive materials.

We know a lot more now than we knew then about radioactivity and birth defects. I was working with equipment that flung atoms of U-235 and U-238 all over the place. In theory, the calutrons were collecting all the uranium, but in practice, it wasn’t so neat and tidy. It was probably like one of those big movie-theater popcorn poppers, the kind with the pot suspended up high inside a glass box. It’s designed to contain the popcorn, but if you look at the floor back there behind the concession stand, you’ll always see stray kernels that have ricocheted out through a gap in the gizmo. The calutrons were like that. At the end of every shift, they would run Geiger counters over us as we were leaving, and sometimes they’d find a stray particle or two of U-235 on somebody’s coveralls, which they’d remove with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It wasn’t that they were concerned about our health; it was that the uranium was so precious, they couldn’t afford to let a speck of it slip out the gate.

Today, they won’t let you have an X-ray in the doctor’s office if you’re pregnant. Back then, though, there were thousands of young women of childbearing age working in areas filled with radiation sources. It amazes me there wasn’t a whole herd of babies with birth defects born in Oak Ridge in 1944 and 1945.

But the reason I needed an abortion wasn’t because I was worried about birth defects. The reason I needed an abortion was because the baby wasn’t Novak’s. After twelve months of marriage, we’d still never consummated it. Leonard Novak was many things — smart, funny, a brilliant scientist, a great jazz pianist — but heterosexual wasn’t one of them. At least not with me.

I had done my best to seduce my husband. At bedtime, I would undress in front of him. Sometimes I’d brush my hair out, a hundred strokes, sitting in my slip in front of the mirror. I’d get him drunk, hoping that would lower his inhibitions. Once the lights were out and we were under the covers, I would press myself against him. None of it worked, ever.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman whose husband shows absolutely no desire for her? Never makes any move to touch her? I knew enough by this point to know that I liked sex. Needed it, too. Maybe it was because my father died and my mother abandoned me when I was still young. Whatever the reason, I craved affection. Or maybe I just wanted sex because I was a healthy, fertile young woman surrounded by healthy, virile young soldiers and construction workers.

Within a week of marrying Novak, I knew I’d made a mistake, and within six months, I was getting restless and flirting with other men. Around noon every day, while Novak was off making plutonium at the Graphite Reactor, I’d walk down the hill to the recreation hall and strike up a conversation with some guy at the soda fountain. Sometimes we’d just talk for a while and then I’d catch the bus out to Y-12 for my evening shift at the calutron; sometimes the guy, whoever he was, would take me to a dorm room or a car or a trailer. It felt furtive and dirty, but it took away some of the loneliness. It gave me something to look forward to — and something to remember — during those long afternoon hours in a factory filled with vacuum pumps and invisible atoms and magnetic fields that pulled the bobby pins out of my hair. And it gave me something to cling to in the long, empty hours at night, when my husband gave me a peck on the cheek and rolled to the far side of the mattress.

Novak had to know I was being unfaithful to him. He was a smart man, after all; how could he not notice that the woman who’s been throwing herself at him, night after night, suddenly isn’t anymore? Did his relief that I was letting him off the hook make it easy for him to keep quiet about whatever he was noticing or wondering or suspecting? I can only guess that it must have. And I chose to interpret his silence as tacit approval, in some way.

But a baby: I knew a baby would change everything. A baby would have forced us to confront the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun. I couldn’t do it. And so it was I found myself one Saturday night — a night when I was pregnant and Novak was away — on the bus into Colored Town.

I wasn’t alone. I was riding with a young black woman from Y-12. Mary Alice was a cleaning woman in my building. That was the only sort of job they gave black people during the war — manual labor or janitorial work. I’d gotten to know her during smoke breaks and I liked her. Her mother, she said, was a sort of midwife, nurse, and healer. And an abortionist. When I found out I was pregnant, it hadn’t been hard for me to come up with a pretext for catching a bus with Mary Alice to Colored Town. I would sneak in by posing for the cameras.

When I became the calutron poster girl, I’d gotten chummy with the photographer, Ed Westcott. Nothing improper, not with him, but anytime he was taking pictures in my building, he’d stop by and chat for a minute. And when I found out that Mary Alice and her mother could help me out of my dilemma, I came up with an idea. Westcott was always looking for human-interest pictures — kids playing in a swimming hole, cub scouts learning to build campfires, cars stuck in the mud. Once he shot Santa Claus being frisked by security guards. Christ, we thought, if even Santa’s getting checked for contraband, who are we mere mortals to complain?

Westcott was famous, in a way. As the project’s photographer, he was free to come and go pretty much wherever he pleased, and he’d been ranging all over the townsite and the plants since the very beginning. Most of the guards would motion him right through checkpoints, smiling and waving; some of them would stop him just long enough to strike a pose and ask him when he was going to take their picture. Occasionally he did, which earned him all sorts of goodwill.

Anyway, what I suggested to Westcott was a picture showing me giving reading lessons to Mary Alice and some of the other girls in Colored Town. “I think it could be a good civic project,” I said. “Maybe if you did a picture and the paper ran it, we’d drum up some interest and some volunteers.” He liked the idea, and he agreed to meet me at the colored recreation hall. So when the bus driver asked me why a white woman was heading into Colored Town on a Saturday night, I told him Mr. Westcott was coming to take a picture of me teaching colored girls to read. That seemed to be a good enough reason.

Colored Town was officially called the “colored hutment area” on the map. Hutments were shabby, prefab plywood shacks, sixteen feet square. They were trucked in by the thousands and shoehorned together, about ten feet apart. There was a hutment area for whites, too, but the white hutments were better. The colored hutments didn’t even have real windows, just screened-in openings covered with hinged panels of plywood. If the people inside wanted daylight, they’d swing up some of the hinged panels and prop them open. That might have been okay in decent weather, but when it was cold, the choice was between warmth and light, and even the warmth wasn’t all that warm — every hutment had a cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the room, but as drafty as the buildings were, and as scarce as coal rations were, people in the hutments were miserably cold in the winter. The other thing about the colored hutments was that there were men’s hutments and women’s hutments, four people per hutment. Black couples who were married got split up so the army could cram four people into every one of those dreadful little shacks.

Colored Town had its own rec center, too, and the story there was the same — it was cheaper and crummier than the white people’s version. No Ping-Pong tables or pool tables or piano; just a few tables and chairs. Even so, when Mary Alice and I walked in that night, the place was crowded and lively. Couples sat at some of the tables playing bridge; groups of men with poker chips at others. At one end of the room, somebody had a radio, and couples were jitterbugging to the music. The instant I walked in the door, the noise died down and every head turned in our direction. Thousands of black people crammed in a shabby ghetto, and in walks a lily-white woman.

“You in the wrong place, white girl,” said a man just inside the door, but then Mary Alice called him by name and told him to mind his business. “She’s all right,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with me.” She led us to a distant corner of the room where a middle-aged man and woman sat in straight-backed chairs angled toward each other. “Mama, this here is Beatrice, that I told you about.” Her mother looked me up and down. The man looked away, as if to give us a measure of privacy, and I was grateful.

“You sure this is what you got to do?” I nodded. “You got the money?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, and took two ten-dollar bills out of my skirt pocket. She smoothed and folded them, then tucked them into her blouse.

“Mary Alice,” she said, “you come with me and this white girl.”

She led us through a doorway into the women’s restroom. The restroom held one sink and three toilet stalls, none of them with a door. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned lately. She must have seen the look of revulsion on my face, because she said, “You want a nice doctor’s office, you come to the wrong place, white girl. You want to change your mind about this?”

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m just scared.”

“Ought to be,” she said. “This is scary business. Sad, too. How come you not want to have this child?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“Course you can, baby,” she told me. “You just won’t. ‘Can’t’ not the same thing as ‘won’t.’” She pointed at the third stall. “You need to pull off your panties and raise up your skirt. Sit on that toilet and scootch up to the front of the seat. You got to spread your knees wide and hang your bottom off the front edge so I can get in there. But you ought to pee first, if you can.”

I stared from her to Mary Alice and back again. “It’s all right,” said Mary Alice. “She’s done this a hundred times. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll be right there beside you. You go on and use the bathroom, and I’ll come in when you flush.”

I sat down on the toilet and bent over to hide my face while I peed, then reached back and flushed the toilet. Then I pulled off my underpants, and Mary Alice squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.

“Now scoot on up here and open up your legs,” said Mary Alice’s mother. “I know you know how to do that.”

“Mama!” Mary Alice sounded shocked.

“Mary Alice, don’t you start with me,” she said. “I know you’ve been opening yours for a while now, too. Women been gettin’ told to open their legs since the fall of man. That’s one part of the Lord’s curse. This here’s another part.”

She pulled a small bottle from her apron pocket, uncorked it, and handed it to me. “Here, drink this down. Absinthe. Help you relax.” The liquid in the bottle smelled like licorice, but it burned like whiskey going down. Within seconds I felt the heat in my stomach, then felt it spread through my belly and out into my arms and legs, and my head began to hum. Next she took a handkerchief from her apron and tied it into a fat knot. “Open your mouth,” she said, and when I did, she jammed the knot between my teeth. “Now you bite down hard. This gonna hurt some.” I clenched my jaws, and felt the knot begin to flatten under the pressure. “Mary Alice, you get ready.”

Somehow, despite the narrowness of the toilet stall, Mary Alice managed to turn and swing one leg over me, so she was straddling me — one leg on either side of the toilet — facing me, her chest in my face. She reached down and took my hands in hers, lacing her fingers through mine. I felt her mother kneel between my knees. “All right, easy does it,” she said. “If you can relax, that’d be good. If you can’t, you hold real still. This be over before you know it.”

I felt something cold and sharp pierce me to the core, and I heard a scream burrowing its way out of my throat and through the knot of fabric. My knees jerked up and my shoulders strained forward as my body fought to curl itself into a ball. “By God, white girl, you hold still. If you want to stay alive, you hold still,” she said. “Mary Alice, you got to hold her good.”

My nose closed from my tears, and the handkerchief filled my mouth. I could not breathe, and I began to gasp and gag. Everything started going black — everything except for the white-hot flame of pain. Then, just when I was sure I was dying, I felt the fabric yanked from my mouth, and I could breathe again and see again. “Done,” I heard Mary Alice’s mother say. “Done. Lord forgive us, it’s done.” I felt my belly cramping, and every spasm felt as if I were clenching shards of glass or slivers of metal deep within me. “I got to put these rags inside you,” she said. “Catch the blood. You wait till tomorrow evening to take ’em out.” I gasped when she prodded at me again, but it was a duller pain this time.

Mary Alice let go of one hand and swung her leg back across me, so she was beside me again. She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You done just fine,” she said. “You’ll be all right now.” I shook my head and cried.

I heard water running in the sink, and a moment later Mary Alice’s mother stepped into the stall again, holding two damp cloths. She handed one to Mary Alice, who mopped my face; with the other, she bent down and swabbed my blood-smeared thighs and bottom.

Suddenly there was a series of raps on the door. I nearly cried out with fear; the two black women exchanged swift, worried looks. More knocking, louder now. “Mary Alice? Miss Beatrice?”

“Yes, what is it?” Mary Alice said.

“Y’all about done in there? Y’all just about ready to get your picture took?”

I started to call out — I have no idea what I would have said — but luckily Mary Alice laid a hand over my mouth. “Just about,” she said. “One more minute.” She hauled me to my feet. “You splash some water on your face and comb your hair and put on this lipstick,” she said. “Then we got to get out there and act like everything is fine.”

In a daze — the cramps searing and my head buzzing — I rinsed my face and dabbed on lipstick. Then Mary Alice took my hand and led me out the restroom door. It was as if I had walked on-stage in a play: a card table in front of us glowed in a pool of light, and as Mary Alice and I stepped forward dozens of faces watched. Most of the faces were black, but several were white, and I recognized the uniforms and black armbands of MPs.

A few books were stacked on the table, and one lay open, its spine broken. It was the Bible, and it was open to the story of Adam and Eve. Westcott stepped toward us and ushered us into two chairs, which were angled at one corner of the table. “Ladies, you look lovely,” he said, though he looked at me closely, with what appeared to be concern. “Lean forward over the book a little, Beatrice. You, too, Mary Alice, and point to a word, like you’re asking Beatrice what the word is.”

Mary Alice’s index finger — blue-black skin, with a pink, pearly nail — traced a wavering line down one page, then came to rest beneath a verse. “What this Bible verse say right here, Miss Beatrice?” Her voice was a singsong caricature — like a darky in a Hollywood film — and I wondered if it was me she was mocking, or Westcott, or the segregated city and nation in which we lived and worked.

I looked, and I read the verse aloud: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

“Amen,” said Mary Alice as the flash blinded me.

The MPs — sent by the bus driver, apparently, to make sure the white woman wasn’t set upon by sex-crazed black men — stayed while Westcott packed up his his camera and lights and loaded them back into his jeep. Mary Alice and I had remained seated while the gear was packed. When everything was loaded, I stood up to go, and when I did, I felt my dress sticking to the metal folding chair. I looked down, and the seat was sticky with blood. Mary Alice glanced at the chair, then quickly stood beside me, an arm around my waist. With her free hand, she signaled to her mother, who came and stood close behind me. We walked that way, the two black women and I, out of the building and into the night. Mary Alice helped me onto the bus, and as I stepped up into the enveloping darkness of the bus, I heard one of the MPs say something to the other.

What he said was, “Nigger lover.”

CHAPTER 37

Beatrice turned to look at me. It had cost her some pain to tell me the story, I could tell.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have been desperate to have risked so much. You could have died. Or gone to prison.”

“Prison comes in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “So does death.” She turned and looked out the windows. “How did you know to ask me about that?”

I probably wasn’t supposed to say, but I felt I owed her a disclosure in return for what she’d just told me. “The FBI is looking at old files,” I said, “trying to figure out why Novak was killed. A doctor at the hospital reported that he suspected you’d had an abortion.”

“That son of a bitch,” she said. “I knew him for forty years, and I never could stand him.”

I realized I had no right to ask, but I asked anyhow. “Whose baby was it, Beatrice?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s another reason I had the abortion.” She sighed. “Novak was traveling out to Hanford a lot in the spring and summer of 1945,” she said. “The big plutonium production reactors out there were coming on line, and there were technical problems to solve. It turned out that trace amounts of boron were absorbing neutrons and slowing down the chain reaction. ‘Poisoning’ it, that’s the term they used. Novak had to solve the mystery of the boron poisoning. He’d be gone for a week or ten days at a time, and I got into the habit of going down to the Rec Hall at night, to pass the time.”

“You were lonely when he was gone,” I said.

“I was lonely when he was here,” she said. “Maybe lonelier. I think I was the loneliest when he was sleeping in the same bed with me, twelve inches away but beyond reach. When he was gone, at least I could do something about the loneliness. Sometimes I even brought a man home with me. I’m sure I was indiscreet; I’m sure the neighbors talked.”

Or snitched, I thought. “I should go,” I said.

“Where? Home? Do you have a good woman waiting for you, Bill? Or a good man?”

“No. I have work waiting for me,” I said. I stood to go. Something on the end table beside her chair caught my eye. Resting atop a stack of opened mail was a small, rectangular piece of white paper with blue lettering.

“Good God,” I said.

“What?” She followed my eyes. “Oh, that,” she said. “What a jerk.”

The lettering read, “I know your secret.”

Amazing,” I said to Emert. I had called him when I left Beatrice’s house to share what she’d told me about the note. Thirty minutes later, as I sat in his office, he had already gathered a remarkable amount of information. “So this guy was just on a random fishing expedition? Trying to trick Oak Ridge geezers into spilling whatever beans they had to spill from the bomb project or the Cold War?”

“Espionage-flavored beans,” said Emert. “He was pitching a documentary to the History Channel. Atomic Secrets, he called it.” Emert waved a one-page printout — a bad photocopy of a fax, or a really good photocopy of a really bad fax. “This is a one-page treatment he’d faxed to the History Channel. He didn’t have a deal for it yet, though — it was just a proposal.”

I read the subtitle. “No wonder he didn’t have a deal,” I said. “Get a load of that subtitle. How Soviet Spies Pierced the Heart of the Manhattan Project. How clunky is that?”

“Yeah, well, Ken Burns he wasn’t,” said Emert. “But you gotta love the irony of ‘pierced the heart,’ considering how he died. Apparently he was hoping to dig up something juicy in Oak Ridge, something that would hook the History Channel.”

“How’d you get this so fast?”

“I’ll never tell,” he said, holding a finger to his lips, like the World War II billboards that reminded Oak Ridgers to keep quiet.

“Okay,” I said.

“Oh, all right, I’ll tell,” he said. “Right after you called from Beatrice’s driveway, I got a call from a desk clerk at the Double-tree, who saw the sketch in the newspaper. The secret-sniffing guy — Willard Clarkson was his name — checked into the hotel seventeen days ago, on January ninth. On the tenth, he faxed this to New York. He also asked for extra chocolate-chip cookies.”

“The Doubletree makes a damn good cookie,” I said.

“Yeah, but you’re only entitled to one cookie, and only at check-in,” Emert said. “This guy went back for seconds. He thought the regular rules didn’t apply to him.”

“What are you, the cookie police? You’re saying he deserved to die because he went back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Please, sir, could I have more?’? Hell, I’ve done that.”

“Never do it again,” he said. “Look where you could end up.”

“Clearly the desk clerk had sufficient motive,” I said. “So, this bush-league documentary guy—”

“Sapling,” said Emert.

“Sapling?”

“Bush-league’s a little harsh,” he said. “Clarkson had already done some other History Channel shows. Things about World War II aircraft carriers and fighter planes and bombers. Not bad. Some glitzy stuff for A&E, too. But as I was saying—”

“Before you were so rudely interrupted?”

“Before I was so rudely interrupted,” he echoed. “The afternoon of January tenth, he sends the fax and asks for illegal seconds on the cookies. And then nobody at the Doubletree ever sees him again.”

“They thought he’d skipped out?”

“They just thought he was weird, or reclusive. He’d said he’d be staying for several weeks. They had his credit card on file, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging on the door. They were leaving him alone.”

“January tenth,” I said. “That was right before East Tennessee turned into Antarctica, if I remember right.”

“It was,” he said. “It was also one day after Leonard Novak checked out those library books about the Venona Project.”

Emert headed to the Doubletree, to lead the search of Willard Clarkson’s room. I headed down the hill once more, to the library. I was hoping that perhaps Isabella was back by now, her father’s health improving, but the substitute at the Reference Desk dashed my hopes. She dashed my fallback hope as well: no, she didn’t have any further details about how he was doing, or where I might send a get-well card, or when Isabella might be back. I tried to mask the frustration and embarrassment I felt; I must look like either a stalker or a fool, I realized, to be pursuing a woman who didn’t consider me worth turning to in a crisis.

“I was hoping to do a bit of history research today,” I said. It wasn’t true — it was a flimsy excuse for my presence here — but she unlocked the Oak Ridge Room for me, and I found it soothing, somehow, to be there. I looked through the notebook of photos from ORNL, and saw the Graphite Reactor take shape on a hillside, against the backdrop of a wooded ridge. I saw the immense U-shaped structure of the K-25 plant, which separated a gaseous form of uranium. The K-25 plant was the last to be completed but the largest in capacity, like some lumbering uranium freight train finally gathering momentum. I saw the oval racetracks of Y-12, their D-shaped calutrons linked by thousands of tons of silver borrowed from the U.S. Treasury. And I saw Beatrice, perched on her stool, one hand forever poised on the controls, altering the trajectory of uranium atoms and human history.

Looking through a binder labeled “Life in Oak Ridge,” I saw men and women lined up for cigarettes, boys and girls decked out in Cub Scout and Brownie uniforms, football players in helmets and pads, baseball teams in caps. I saw two pretty young women — one white, one black — looking at a book together, the black woman pointing a finger at the page as the white woman read aloud. The white woman’s eyes looked glassy.

I saw musicians playing and couples dancing. And among the dancing couples, I spotted Beatrice yet again. She was a photogenic young woman; if I were a photographer in wartime Oak Ridge, I’d have taken her picture every chance I got, too. In this photo, she was dancing with a handsome, smiling young man — a man who was not Leonard Novak. I checked the date on the photo: August 1, 1945. The Trinity test had shaken New Mexico two weeks before; in five more days, the city of Hiroshima would be decimated, and in eight days Nagasaki would share its fate. And at some point in the days or weeks after the photo was taken, the smiling young man would be shot at point-blank range and buried in a shallow grave, along with hundreds of pages of typescript. Were the pages a manuscript for posterity, or secrets for the Soviets? Or were they both?

I dialed Emert’s number and the call rolled immediately to his voice mail. “I’m at the library,” I said, “and I’m looking at a picture of Beatrice dancing with Jonah Jamison on August 1, 1945.”

When I ended the call, my phone beeped to tell me I’d received a voice mail. While I’d been leaving the message for Emert, the detective had been leaving one for me. “Maybe our dead documentary guy was after a big fish after all,” his message said. “We’re in his hotel room, and he’s got a fat file of transcripts from the Venona Project.”

As soon as I hung up, my phone rang. It was Emert again, live and in person this time. “Clarkson made some interesting notes in the margins of these Venona cables,” Emert said. On July 22, 1945, someone whose code name was “Chekhov” had traveled from Oak Ridge to Hanford; the cable added that “Pavlov” had found the way to “Chekhov” and would soon submit a detailed account of the project. Clarkson had highlighted “Chekhov” and written “Novak?” in the margin. He’d also highlighted “Pavlov” and scrawled a pair of question marks.

“I think we should go see your friend Beatrice together,” he said, “and ask her some more questions about her husband and her boyfriend.”

CHAPTER 38

Beatrice studied the copy of the photograph I’d duplicated at the library. She looked from my face to Emert’s and back again.

“Jonah was a handsome man, wasn’t he? Yes,” she said, “I had an affair with him.” She turned to me. “That’s why I had to have the abortion. How could I have a baby whose father had shot himself because of me?”

The casual way she said it stunned me, but Emert just shook his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Why would he shoot himself over you? Why didn’t you call the MPs when it happened? How’d you get the body way the hell out by that uranium bunker?” The man did like to fire off multiple questions.

Now it was Beatrice shaking her head. “Don’t you see, if I’d reported it, the scandal would have ruined Leonard’s career, and that would have destroyed Leonard. Leonard buried the body. To protect us both.”

I felt ten steps behind, struggling to catch up. “But Leonard was deeply conflicted about working on the atomic bomb anyhow,” I said. “It might have been a relief to be forced off the project.”

“No, you’re wrong,” she said. “Leonard’s moral pangs about the bomb were his own private pain. Public humiliation would have been intolerable to a sensitive man like Leonard.”

“So let me see if I understand this,” said Emert. “You’re saying he was too sensitive to face embarrassment, but not too sensitive to bury a body in the woods?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Leonard was used to keeping secrets, and he was used to self-recrimination. He had a streak of martyrdom in him — but he wanted to be the one to nail himself to the cross, rather than be nailed there by anyone else. There was an edge of arrogance on his finely honed sense of guilt.”

Something was nagging at me. Something written in four words on a small piece of paper. “Beatrice, did you talk to Novak after you heard from the man making the documentary about atomic secrets?” She looked startled.

“I…I don’t think so,” she said. “I really can’t remember.”

“The phone company’s computer can tell us if you two talked by telephone recently,” said Emert.

“I might have,” she said. “Wait, yes, I did. Briefly. Leonard called and asked if I had said anything to that dreadful television man about…anything. I told him no. I told him not to worry — that the man was just a TV muckraker. But Leonard was very upset. He said the man had all but accused him of giving the Russians information about the bomb during World War II.”

Emert leaned forward. “And did Leonard give the Russians information about the bomb?”

“Leonard? Heavens no,” she said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if Jonah did. I wasn’t his only girlfriend, you know. He spent far too much money on women and whiskey. I don’t see how he could afford his vices on a corporal’s salary.”

Emert stared at her stonily. “Lady, I think you’re lying to me. I want you to come down to the police station tomorrow afternoon and give me a statement. I’ll be asking you to take a poly-graph test, too, unless you’re afraid it will incriminate you.”

What she did next startled both Emert and me. Beatrice laughed. “Afraid? Detective, I believe every word I’ve said. Why on earth would I be afraid of a lie detector.” Suddenly her head nodded forward, then jerked upright again. “Oh my, this has all been quite exhausting,” she said. Her voice quavered a bit. “Would you gentlemen mind if an old woman goes to bed now? It sounds like I have a grueling afternoon in store for me tomorrow.”

Emert scowled, but he rose from the chair, so I stood up as well. “One o’clock,” he said. “Bring an attorney if you need one.”

“What I need is a time machine, detective,” she said, struggling to her feet and shuffling to the door with us.

CHAPTER 39

The phone rang a dozen times or more before she answered. “Hello?” She sounded old and tired. Not quavery, like last night; I was pretty sure the quaver had been for effect, to hurry Emert and me on our way. This sounded like the real deal. It was the same exhausted, defeated tone I’d heard an hour before in Eddie Garcia’s voice, when he’d told me that the national registry contained no matching bone-marrow donor, and that Carmen’s mother was coming up from Bogotá to help take care of the baby for a while.

“Beatrice, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’m sorry to call so early. I’m wondering if I could come see you this morning?”

“You and that hateful policeman?”

“No,” I said, “just me. I’m hoping you can tell me another story.”

“I see,” she said. “You’re keeping me around for the entertainment value. Like that Persian king What’s-his-name.”

“Which king?”

“King What’s-his-name. I don’t remember his name. Nobody remembers his name. It’s the storyteller we remember. Scheherazade.”

“Oh right,” I said. “The Thousand and One Nights. She kept herself from becoming a one-night stand by spinning stories that never ended.”

“It wasn’t just that they never ended,” she said. “They wove together to make a tapestry, stories threaded within other stories. Like life, Bill, but without the boring parts. She was the queen of the cliffhanger, Scheherazade. Every dawn, just as he was about to lop her head off, she’d leave him in suspense.”

“I’m feeling some pretty strong suspense about something myself,” I said.

She was silent. “I could probably dredge up another chapter,” she finally said. “How soon should I expect you?”

“I could be there in thirty minutes, but I’ll wait a while, if you’d rather.”

“No need to wait. Tempus fugit, Bill. Sic transit gloria mundi.”

“What?”

“Time flies; so passes the glory of this world. I’ll have the door open and my vodka in hand.”

“Beatrice, it’s only nine A.M.”

“It’s five P.M. somewhere. It’s a big world, Bill. Don’t draw your boundaries small.”

This early in the day, the walkway to her front door was deeply shadowed by the roof overhang and the evergreens. Through the windows, though, the redwood paneling glowed warmly in morning sun that streamed through windows. I rang the bell, mostly to hear the high, clear tone that pealed forth when I tugged the clapper. Then I let myself in as usual, calling out, “Beatrice? It’s Bill.”

She didn’t answer, so I headed for the living room. She was sitting in her wingback chair, and as I entered the room, she raised a tumbler of vodka to me in a toast.

She waved me toward my chair, and I sat down and began to rock. A steaming cup of tea sat on the end table; I took the mug and cradled it in my hands, glad of its warmth, for I felt cold inside.

She studied me through watery eyes. “What sort of story would you like to hear today?”

“I’d like to hear a true one,” I said, meeting her gaze. “A true one about the death of Jonah Jamison.”

“How do you mean?”

“I realized something today,” I said. “Or heard something. It was as if Jonah’s bones whispered a secret to me; as if he, too, had a story to tell.”

“And what was the story? What did he whisper?”

“He whispered that he didn’t shoot himself.”

She leaned forward and cocked her head slightly — probably the very same posture she’d seen me assume for hours over the past two weeks. Then she frowned and shook her head. “Back up,” she commanded. “You’ve jumped straight to the ending. Begin at the beginning.”

I was confused. “Which beginning?”

“The beginning of the story Jonah’s bones told you. ‘It was a dark and stormy night in the anthropology lab…’ or whatever. Set the scene; let it unfold. Have I taught you nothing?”

“Ah,” I said. “Now who’s being kept around just for the entertainment value? I’m not as good a storyteller as you.”

“No one’s as good as I am.” She smiled. “But you have to keep trying. It’s the only way to get any better.”

I thought for a moment, then drew a breath and began again. “The neighbor’s dog woke me up before dawn today,” I said. “Not because he was barking loudly — it was only one little yip — but because I was half awake already. Sleeping badly. Fretting about something. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew where it was. It was on my desk under the stadium. Down in that labyrinth whose windows look like they haven’t been washed since the Manhattan Project.”

She gave me a nod of approval. “Much better,” she said. “Go on.”

“Whenever I think I’m overlooking something in a case, what I do is put the bones on my desk where I can see them. Every now and then I’ll stop whatever I’m doing — grading papers or reading a journal article or eating a sandwich — and look at the bones. I try to keep my mind as empty as I can make it, and just look, hoping something new will catch me by surprise. Present itself to me. Speak to me. It’s like I’m trying to sneak up on something I already know, somewhere deep down, but can’t quite get ahold of.”

“That’s a good skill to cultivate,” she said. “You’ll need it more and more as you get older and start to lose track of things — names and faces and where you left your reading glasses and why you walked into the living room.”

I had the feeling she was trying to stretch my story out, and I couldn’t blame her. “I’ve been looking at Jonah Jamison’s skull that way for a week now,” I resumed, “but it hasn’t been working. Nothing new. Today, having dragged myself to work at six A.M., I found myself getting mad whenever I glanced at that damn skull. Almost as if he were being deliberately uncooperative. Too watchful for me to sneak up on, or something.”

“Well, he died during wartime in a top secret city,” she said. “You can’t really blame him for being vigilant, can you?”

“But I did,” I said. “I finally got so irritated I picked up the skull and put it in the box and closed the lid.”

“I guess you showed him,” she said.

“And that’s when I saw it,” I said.

“Saw what?”

“His left arm.”

“His left arm? What about it?”

“It was strong.”

She frowned, studying on this. “He was young. He was a soldier. Of course he was strong.”

“What I mean,” I said, “is that his left arm was stronger than his right arm.”

“But how can you possibly know which arm was stronger? The muscle was long gone, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But the muscle left its story behind on the bone.” She looked puzzled, so I tapped on the surface of the small pine table between us. “You see these two knots in this wood?” She nodded. “Two branches grew out of the tree trunk in those places, right?” She nodded. “Which of those two branches was bigger and stronger?” She tapped the knot closer to her, which was as big as the face on my watch — twice the diameter of the other knot. “The places where muscles fasten to bones are called muscle attachments; not a very imaginative name, but it’s easy for students to remember.” I flexed my left arm and made my bicep as big as I could, which wasn’t all that big. Then I pressed the tip of my right index finger against the inside of my elbow and wiggled the finger. “The tendon from the bicep muscle attaches to the bones of the forearm right here, so that when you tighten your bicep, it pulls your forearm up.” She set her glass down and copied what I was doing.

“Feels like twigs and thread,” she said. “Nobody would ever mistake this for a strong arm.”

“Well, maybe not,” I conceded. “But you’re right-handed, so the twigs and thread are a little thicker and stronger in your right arm than in your left. So the muscle attachments in your right arm are a little sturdier than in your left. Now, UT football players — or Arnold Schwarzennegger, or anybody else with really big biceps — will have big, sturdy muscle attachment points, like knobs or ridges, where the bone is reinforced to carry the load.”

“So just like a nation or a generation,” she said, “bone is tested and strengthened if you challenge it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And what I realized today is that Jonah Jamison consistently — day in, day out, thirty years — challenged his left arm more than his right. That tells he was left-handed. So does the wristwatch, which he wore on his right wrist. His handedness: that’s how I can tell he was murdered.”

She dropped both hands in her lap and looked down at them. “Handedness,” she said. “What a small detail for a story to turn on.”

“Yes,” I said. “Crucial, but small. So small a man wouldn’t give it an instant’s thought if he were about to blow his brains out. He’d be preoccupied with bigger things — wondering how it came to this, wondering if he’ll feel the bullet, wondering if he really has enough courage or enough despair to pull the trigger. It would never occur to him to wonder which hand to hold the gun in. He’d automatically, instinctively pick it up in his preferred hand. If he were Jonah Jamison, he’d pick it up with his left hand and press it to his left temple. Not his right temple.”

“Yes, that has the ring of truth to it,” she said.

“So the story I’m asking for,” I said, “is the story of Jonah Jamison’s murder. And don’t circle back and claim that Novak shot him, because Jonah was already listed as AWOL by the time Novak got back from Hanford.”

She sat perfectly still for a long time. The only sound in the room was the hollow ticking of a wall clock. The slow, steady ticking of background time. “All right,” she finally said. “One last story.”

CHAPTER 40

I came to Tennessee on a train from New York in the fall of 1943; that much of what I told you before was true. But I wasn’t just coming home to Tennessee. I was sent here.

I told you my father died before my mother abandoned me in New York; that’s also true. What I didn’t tell you is that he was a union organizer, and he was beaten to death for helping organize a strike at a Chattanooga steel mill in 1933. He worked for the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that tended to attract socialists and communist-leaning workers.

I was only ten when he was killed, but I remember hearing him say that if Jesus had been born in our lifetime, he’d have preached the gospel of communism. He loved the Bible story where Jesus fed the multitude by passing around communal baskets of loaves and fishes, and every time he told that story, he’d finish by saying, “Clearly Jesus was a Fellow Traveler.” Not the sort of thing that’s likely to win friends in the Deep South.

Most people today think the notion of an atomic bomb was completely unknown during World War II, except to a handful of brilliant physicists, but that’s not true. The lid of secrecy clamped down after the Manhattan Project began, but beforehand, any physics graduate student who was paying attention knew it might be possible. In the spring of 1939, the American Physical Society had an open meeting in Washington, D.C., where nuclear fission and atomic bombs were hot topics of discussion. The meeting was written up in the New York Times, which reported, among other things, that it might be fairly easy to create an atomic explosion that could destroy Manhattan completely. Even decades before that — all the way back in 1914—H. G. Wells predicted that whole cities would be destroyed by atomic bombs. Oddly enough, Wells was a major influence on Leo Szilard, the physicist who persuaded Albert Einstein to write FDR that famous letter. So Szilard actually helped bring the prophecy of H. G. Wells to pass. And the prophecy of John Hendrix, for that matter.

A few years after my mother abandoned me, I started looking for my father — not literally, but spiritually and intellectually — and I seemed to find him when I started spending time with labor organizers and socialists and communists. The summer I worked in the airplane factory, one of my socialist friends introduced me to a Russian man named Alexander, who seemed very interested in my work. That was in 1939, when it was becoming clear that the Soviet Union would bear the brunt of the war against Germany. Alexander talked about how hopeless the air battle would be with the Soviets’ primitive aircraft. By the middle of the summer, I was filching parts for him. By the end of the summer, he gave me a little camera, and I took pictures of engineering drawings. Alexander made me feel important and clever and brave — things I’d never felt before. “You are a citizen of the world,” he told me, and I believed it. Or I pretended to, at least, because I liked how special I felt when I did things for Alexander.

In the summer of 1943, Alexander introduced me to two physicists who were going to Los Alamos. They told me that a lot of work on uranium separation was being done in Tennessee. The three of them encouraged me to go to Knoxville, get a job, and learn whatever I could about the processes. I agreed, and Alexander arranged a contact for me in Knoxville.

When I got off the train in Knoxville I asked around for work, saying I’d heard there were defense plants in the area that needed help. I was practically snatched off the sidewalk and put on a bus for Oak Ridge. I had a ten-minute job interview, which was just about long enough to tell how I’d been orphaned in New York and how my uncle in Tennessee said I might find a job here. I figured they’d be too busy to check on me closely, and I was right.

It was my wits that got me a job operating a calutron in the heart of the Y-12 Plant. But it was luck that steered me to Leonard Novak the night he played and sang. You asked how I could not have known Leonard was gay. I did know. I also knew Leonard was marrying me to deflect suspicions about his homosexuality. But Leonard never knew I was marrying him to get information about his work. I didn’t get much; maybe his lips were looser with whatever lovers he took.

But I hit the mother lode with Jonah, who was tagging along with the photographer, Westcott, the day I became the calutron poster girl. If not for Jonah, I might have had nothing to show for two years of work but dial readings and the story about Lawrence blowing up the calutron. As luck would have it, though, while Westcott was setting up the camera and lights for the calutron shoot, Jonah was flirting and bragging about how he had a bird’s-eye view of the bustle and brilliance. That’s when I realized he could be my eyes all over Oak Ridge. That’s when I realized I had to make Jonah fall in love with me.

Once he did, it wasn’t hard to plant the idea in his head that we’d have more time together if he’d dictate his history of the project and let me type it up.

I didn’t dare make carbon copies; instead I took photos of Jonah’s manuscript pages, just as I’d done with the engineering drawings at the aircraft plant. My film drop was in the cemetery of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Knoxville, a block behind the bars on Gay Street. I could get a ride into Knoxville just about any weekend — Leonard was working eighty hours a week, and as long as I didn’t get into trouble, he felt guilty enough to let me do as I pleased. Everybody makes a big deal about how Oak Ridge was the city behind a fence, but the security guards were mainly searching guys for guns or hooch. Carloads of cute young women, out for a night on the town? The guards eyed us pretty closely, but they weren’t looking for film.

By the summer of 1945, the gaseous-diffusion cascades at K-25 were finally turning out significant amounts of slightly enriched uranium, and the calutrons at Y-12 were doing a good job of turning that into bomb-grade material. Leonard’s chemists at the Graphite Reactor had worked out how to create and extract plutonium, and the giant reactors out at Hanford were starting to crank that out steadily. In the two years since I’d gotten off the train, everything had come together. Groves pulled together all these theory-minded physicists and chemists, created immense factories around their ideas, and damned if it all didn’t work just like they said it would.

And Jonah Jamison wrote it all down, the epic saga of Oak Ridge. He was a good storyteller; much better than I’ve ever been. I read every word he wrote, and took pictures of them all.

Until the day he caught me, just as we were nearing the end of the story.

Leonard was on a trip to Hanford — as you know — so Jonah and I had gotten careless. He’d brought the typewriter over to the house, because his metal trailer was like a solar oven. He’d told me he’d be gone all morning, so I’d laid out some pages of typescript on the kitchen table, where the light was good, and I was shooting copies with my little Minox camera. I guess I’d forgotten to lock the door, because all of a sudden it opened, and there stood Jonah, the light pouring in around him, staring at me, staring at the pages on the table, staring at the tiny camera in my hands. We stood like that for what seemed like several minutes, just looking at each other, then he stepped inside, closed the door, and grabbed my wrist with his left hand. By the way, Bill, you’re right — his left arm and his grip were very strong. He bent my wrist back until I thought it would snap, and with his other hand he took the camera from me.

It was a hot day — early August, in a house with no air-conditioning. I wasn’t wearing much — just a short-sleeved shirt of Leonard’s, and it wasn’t even buttoned. When Jonah twisted my wrist back, the shirt came open, and Jonah looked down at my body. And even though he knew I was betraying him — knew I was betraying everything he was writing about — I saw that he still desired me, at least in that moment. When I saw the hunger, that’s when I knew I had a chance. Maybe he saw hunger in my eyes, too, mixed with my fear and desperation.

So we’re standing there, my wrist still bent back in his left hand, my shirt wide open, and Jonah takes the camera from me and sets it on the table, then he slides his hand down my throat and down my body. I’m trembling, and I can see that he likes that. He’s got his teeth clenched, and his nostrils are flaring, and his breath is getting ragged, and he’s starting to tremble, too, and then he starts fumbling with the buttons of the army coveralls he wore all the time.

“The bed,” I say. “Please. The bed.”

He picks me up and carries me into the bedroom and drops me onto the bed. He yanks down his coveralls, and he’s on top of me and pushing into me, biting my neck, clutching my hair. I can tell it isn’t going to take him long, so I arch my back and put my arms over my head and reach under the pillow for the pistol that I know Leonard keeps there. And just as Jonah groans, the gun fires, and then everything falls silent.

Leonard got home the next day. I met him at the door with a drink and told him something terrible had happened. Then I told him I’d been unfaithful — that wasn’t a surprise — and that Jonah had begged me to get a divorce so I could marry him. When I turned him down, Jonah had threatened me, I said. I pulled out the gun for protection, but Jonah grabbed it from me and shot himself.

I begged Leonard not to tell the MPs; it would ruin us both, I said, and that was true. “He’s probably already been reported AWOL,” I said. “What if he just stays AWOL?” He thought about it and agreed that might be best. That evening he wrapped up Jonah’s body and Jonah’s manuscript in an Army blanket and put the bundle in the trunk of his car.

He never told me where he went that night. He never came right out and challenged my story. But I knew, by the way he looked at me, that whatever odd affection we’d had was gone. Poisoned, the way the reactors at Hanford had been poisoned by boron. The difference was, there was no way to fix this.

A week later I realized I was pregnant. A month after that I had the abortion, and six months later I asked for a divorce. I didn’t need to say why, and he didn’t need to ask. We knew too many secrets about each other now, he and I. Enough to ruin each other. Our own domestic version of Mutual Assured Destruction. And like the superpowers, we somehow managed to tiptoe past Armageddon.

So, there you have it, Bill. No more cliffhangers; no happy ending, either. Just an old woman reaching the last chapter in her story.

CHAPTER 41

“And what did you think of that story?” her voice sounded far away. I looked around, halfway surprised to find myself sitting in a sunny living room on a bright winter morning with a silver-haired woman. In my mind, the gunshot was still echoing, the whispers of conspiracy still hanging in the heat of a long-ago August.

“I think it still has a few loose ends,” I said. “Did you kill Novak, too?”

“Christ, of course not. What makes you think I would?”

“Because he was about to spill your secret to the documentary guy?”

“I could spill his, too,” she said. “And I told him I would, if he breathed a word of mine. Mutual Assured Destruction, right up to the end. Leonard and I were good Oak Ridgers, in our different ways. He kept his secrets, I kept mine. Besides, where would an old bat like me get a lethal source of radiation?”

She had a point there. “Did you give the film of Jonah’s manuscript to the Soviets?” She nodded. “Why didn’t you go to Russia after the war? Surely you could have found a way to get there.”

“Russia? Why on earth would I want to live in Russia? I was a spy, not an idiot.” I had to laugh at that. “So what happens now?”

“We wait for Detective Emert or Agent Thornton to show up. I called them from the car when I got here to say I thought you’d killed Jamison. As soon as I told Emert, he said, ‘Then she was the spy, too.’ I didn’t believe it. I guess he’s smarter than I am.”

“Not smarter,” she said. “Less trusting.” She raised her glass to her lips — she’d left the drink untouched during her story — and drank deeply. She gave a slight shudder, then drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “You’re a good man, Bill. I’m going to miss you.”

“Oh, I’ll still come see you,” I said.

“Ah, but you can’t,” she said. She raised her glass in my direction, then drained it. “Not where I’m going.”

“Beatrice? What have you done?”

“I said there were many forms of prison, and many forms of death. Leonard died a hard death. I’ll die an easy one. Vodka and Nembutal, which I bought from an obliging veterinarian last time I was in Mexico. I hear the combination’s quick and painless.”

Nembutal was a barbiturate, I knew — a powerful sedative, used mainly to euthanize suffering animals. I groped in my pocket for my cell phone.

“Too late,” she murmured. “Far too late.”

Just as I flipped it open to dial 911, the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the terrazzo floor. In a voice that sounded sleepy and peaceful and somehow young, she murmured “Hold my hand, would you, dear? I do so hate to sleep alone.”

I knelt beside her and took her hand in both of mine. She clutched my hand with both of hers, and her grip tightened. Then it slackened, and she was gone. I felt for a pulse, and there was none. Still I knelt there, her fingers laced through mine, her head leaning against one wing of the chair back. Thornton found us that way when he arrived.

“She’s dead,” I said.

He looked at her closely, then studied me. “What’d you do, interrogate her to death? Squeeze her hand really, really hard?”

I hesitated, unsure whether to tell him about the Nembutal. Would there be any harm in not telling him? It wasn’t as if Beatrice had given away any secrets in the past half century. True, she’d murdered Jonah Jamison, but she had just executed herself. Why not leave her a bit of privacy and a shred of dignity?

Because, I realized. Because I remembered something Art Bohanan had said to me a year or so before, when he and I went to confront a man who had murdered a serial pedophile: If you cross the line once, it’s easier to cross a second time, and it gets steadily easier, until finally you lose sight of the line altogether. “She killed herself,” I said. “She drank vodka and Nembutal, and I had no clue until it was too late.” I caught his gaze and held it. “I thought about not telling you,” I said. “Seemed almost like a sleeping dog. But I couldn’t let it lie.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Otherwise it would’ve been awkward when I heard the recording.”

“Recording?”

“We got a warrant for audio surveillance before your first visit,” he said. I must have looked startled. “Leonard Novak was once a high-level atomic scientist,” he explained, “and somebody killed him with an intense radioactive source. The director considered this case a high priority. He’d be very disappointed if I didn’t investigate every angle thoroughly. And I’d be very disappointed if you held back the truth.” He hesitated. “But I guess I’d also be disappointed if you hadn’t given some thought to an elderly woman’s reputation. Even if the old gal was an under-handed, soulless Commie spy.”

I laughed and sighed and shook my head all at the same time. “How’d you end up as a cop instead of a diplomat?”

“Didn’t want to end up huddled in an embassy compound in some plague-infested, two-bit, Third World shithole,” he said.

“Too bad,” I said. “With that silver tongue, you’d have made one hell of an ambassador.”

“Damn skippy,” he said. “By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we wanted this kept fairly quiet. The Bureau and the NSA are still trying to track down quite a few Cold War spies. We might not want to let on that we’re wise to Beatrice.”

The logic seemed flimsy, but then I had another thought. “Agent Thornton, is it possible? Is there a bleeding heart somewhere behind that FBI badge?”

“Not a chance,” he said. But I thought I saw a hint of a smile as he called for an ambulance to ferry Beatrice to the afterworld.

CHAPTER 42

I spent all the next morning and most of the afternoon at the hospital with Miranda and Carmen. A hand surgeon cut three fingers from Garcia’s right hand and amputated the left hand entirely, because everything below the wrist had died. There was a good chance, the surgeon assured Carmen, that Garcia could resume his work someday, with the help of sophisticated prosthetics and extensive rehabilitation. What the surgeon didn’t say was that there was also a chance Garcia might yet die from a runaway infection or internal bleeding.

Miranda’s fingertips, thank god, had begun to show signs of healing. She’d lost some tissue from the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, but Sorensen predicted she’d be left with little or no permanent scarring. She was getting off far more easily than she might have. Miranda had driven Carmen to the hospital, and once Garcia was back in his isolation room, still sedated, Miranda drove her home.

The light was fading and a cold, pitiless rain had begun to fall as I parked at the library in Oak Ridge. Thornton had left a message on voice mail while I was out of signal range inside the hospital. They’d identified a suspect in the radiography-camera theft — a Japanese-American immigrant named Arakawa — but he had died just as the agents were about to question him. He died, said the message, of radiation poisoning.

Opening my briefcase, I removed the large, padded envelope Miranda had handed me just before my drive to Oak Ridge and stared at it again. A yellow Post-it note on the outside, in Miranda’s handwriting, said, “Only grad student named Isabella who’s done a thesis on Oak Ridge.” The envelope itself was from UT’s Interlibrary Loan service; inside was a bound copy of a master’s-degree thesis, sent from the History Department at Tulane University. “The Role of National Myth in Legitimizing Mass Murder,” read the title. “From Oak Ridge to Nagasaki,” the subtitle added. The author of the thesis was listed as Isabella Arakawa, M.A.

My mind was careening and ricocheting in directions I didn’t want it to go. One by one, the billiard balls of fate seemed to be dropping into corner pockets and side pockets that were dark and bottomless. But I saw Isabella’s Prius tucked into the far corner of the parking lot, and that gave me a shred of hope as I pulled in beside it and parked.

I ducked, dripping, beneath the protective overhang of the library entrance just as one of the staff was locking the door. It was the gray-haired woman who’d seemed suspicious of me the other day. “You must have heard the news,” she said, with a sympathetic smile. “She’s very sad. I gather she and her father were very close.” The woman held the door for me and patted my shoulder as I went in. The library’s interior, usually filled with light and people, was silent and dim, lit only by a few of the fluorescent fixtures.

She wasn’t at her desk. I turned to the left and checked the Oak Ridge Room, but it was dark. Water dripped from my coat and pants onto the blue carpet as I tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together some other way, any other way.

A slight movement caught my eye. Something — someone — was within the darkened glass of the history room. It was Isabella; she was fumbling with a bag on the table. “Isabella,” I called. I ran to the door and pulled, but it was locked. She whirled and faced me, and even in the dimness of the unlit room I could see the wildness in her eyes.

“Isabella, open the door,” I said, rapping on the glass with a knuckle, then beating on it with the heel of my fist. She was looking at me, but also looking through me, beyond me. I’d seen versions of that distant look before. I’d seen one version in the haunted eyes of Robert Oppenheimer; I’d seen another in the vacant stare of Jonah Jamison. Without taking her eyes off me, she reached into her bag and pulled out a gun. She raised it, the barrel pointing at me, and then she turned it toward herself. “No!” I tore at the door handle with both hands. The glass door rattled and strained against the lock, and then the handle broke off in my hands, sending me staggering backward. She closed her eyes and pressed the barrel against her temple.

“No!” I shouted again. I had fallen against a table, one hand clutching at the back of a square-cornered wooden chair. I seized the chair, lifted it over my head, and hurled it at the glass. The air itself seemed to explode as the glass curtain shattered and sheeted down. I heard a scream; I didn’t know if it came from her or from me or from both of us. When the cascade of glass subsided, I expected to find her down and shattered, too — bloody fragments on the floor, a bullet in her head — but still she stood, frozen, dazed. Her arms were crossed in front of her face; shards of glass glinted in her dark hair.

I sprang forward, through a wall that no longer existed. I grabbed the gun with one hand, her wrist with the other. She cried out when I pried her fingers open and wrested the gun from her. There was dismay in the cry, but there was pain, too — physical, primal, wounded-animal pain. I looked at her hand, and it was as if I were seeing a far worse version of Miranda’s hand. Her fingertips were raw, oozing sores. “Oh dear God, Isabella,” I groaned, staring at her hands and all the terrible things they confirmed. “What have you done?”

Tears began to roll down her face, as if shards of shattered glass and shattered lives were pouring out of her. “I never meant to hurt so many,” she said. “Not Dr. Garcia. Not Miranda. Least of all you. Please believe that. Only Novak: his life for my grandmother’s life. My grandmother and all the other grandmothers and grandfathers and parents and children of Nagasaki. He was the only one I meant. I thought I could keep it pure.”

“Pure? What on earth does that word mean to you?” I tried to reconcile what she’d just said with what she’d done. How could grief for an unknown grandmother move her to murder an old man who had once been a cog — a crucial cog, but a cog nonetheless — in the machinery of the Manhattan Project? How could the loss of an ancestor so unhinge this bright, sensitive woman?

“It was too big for me, it got away from me,” she said. “I should have known it would. I should have learned more from all this history.” She reached up to the back of her neck. “Here,” she said. “I want you to have this.” She flinched as she fumbled with the clasp, and whimpered, and this whimper — unlike the whimper of desire I’d once heard from her — was excruciating. She lifted the silver pendant from within her shirt and held it out, suspended between us. “It’s the Japanese symbol for ‘remembrance,’” she said. “I had it made ten years ago,” she said, “when I decided to kill Leonard Novak for my grandmother’s sake. In ten years, I’ve never taken it off except for the night I was with you. I take it off forever now.” Her tears were falling faster now, and I felt answering tears on my own face, too. “My mother died long ago. My father is dead now, too. And I am a walking ghost.”

She stretched her arm toward me, offering the pendant. I reached to take it, but just before my fingers closed around it, it fell. I lunged to catch it, and in that instant she darted past me, over the ridge of crumbled glass, out into the main reading room. I turned in time to see her duck into the darkened stacks of books. I followed, racing from stack to stack, aisle after aisle, without a glimpse of her. Then I heard footsteps racing through the lobby, and the thud of a distant door banging. I sprinted after her, out into the twilight, splashing through the puddles and pools accumulating on the sidewalk and the parking lot.

By the time she reached the Prius I was gaining on her. Fifty yards, now forty, now thirty. She struggled with her keys; I thought I heard another cry of pain, and I saw the keys splash at her feet. She hesitated, then spun and began running again — out of the parking lot and across the wet grass of the park behind the library. Half scurrying, half sliding, she flung herself down an embankment and into the small stream that bisected the park.

As I watched in astonishment Isabella disappeared, leaving only a black, empty circle and rushing water where she had been. She had scrambled into the end of an immense pipe, which could only have been the outlet of the city’s storm-sewer system.

Isabella had vanished into a subterranean maze — a labyrinth constructed beneath the very foundations of the Secret City in the year 1943.

CHAPTER 43

I slid down the bank and into the icy water of the creek, which swirled around my thighs. The tunnel was a tube of concrete six or eight feet in diameter. The water pouring from it looked to be knee-deep; the blackness appeared infinitely deep.

I flipped open my cell phone and hit the call button; the phone automatically dialed the last number in its memory, which was Thornton’s. The call went immediately to his voice mail, which meant he was on another call. “It’s Brockton,” I said. “Isabella killed Novak. She knows we know. She’s in the storm sewers under Oak Ridge. Between the library and the police station. I’m going after her. Tell Emert.”

I snapped the phone shut and stepped up into the pipe. The water was shallower than in the creek, but it was moving more swiftly. I dug into my pocket and fished out my key ring, which had a tiny flashlight on it — one miniature bulb, about the size of the iridium pellet that had killed Leonard Novak. I squeezed the switch on the side of the case and the bulb glowed blue-white against the darkness. It wasn’t much light, but then again I didn’t need much light: the sides and top of the tunnel were only a foot or two away, and the bottom was hidden by the swirling water. I could see, faintly, twenty or thirty feet before the gray-white tube faded into darkness. I hoped that would be enough.

I started slogging up the pipe, upstream against the current, which resisted every step I took, shoving each foot backward as I lifted it. It was like running into the surf at the beach, except the wave never broke and every step was work. I found myself lifting my knees higher and higher, and eventually I settled into an awkward high-stepping jog, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain for long.

I hadn’t gone far — a hundred yards? two hundred? There was no way to tell how far I’d struggled against the blackness and the current — when I came to a side tunnel angling off to the right. This one was smaller, perhaps four feet in diameter, but still large enough for a person — large enough for Isabella, and large enough for me — though it would require stooping. Which would she have taken?

I kept to the main tunnel — if I were fleeing, I’d want as much distance and as much room as I could get, and the main tunnel seemed to offer more of those. Here and there, I passed small pipes, ranging from six inches to eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. I was grateful I didn’t have to decide whether she might have taken one of those, but they posed a different sort of problem: water shot from them into the main tunnel with enough force to strike the opposite wall. I had to force my way through them, and each one battered at me icily, sapping my strength and my body heat. Desperate though she was, I was amazed Isabella could force her way through this. Was she moving in utter darkness and blind panic, or did she have some small glimmer of light, too?

I came to another side tunnel; again I chose the main line. The current was running faster now, or maybe I was just giving out. I could no longer lift my knees clear of the water; it was getting deeper and flowing faster, and I was exhausted. My teeth began to chatter. My tiny light seemed to be dimming as well, though perhaps it was an optical illusion, a trick played by the darker concrete in this section of pipe, or played by my own fatigue and despair.

And then I came to a harder choice: a Y-shaped intersection, two four-foot tunnels angling to the right and left. No main line to make the decision easy for me anymore; two choices, with no way to know what I’d find in the one I chose — and no way to know what I’d miss in the one I didn’t.

As I reached the intersection, the concrete walls around me gave way to a wider chamber made of brick. Iron bars jutted from the bricks — the rungs of a ladder set into the wall. Overhead was a large black disk; water poured down on me through a dozen or more holes spaced evenly inside its circumference. I was directly beneath a manhole, and I was confronted by not two alternatives but three.

I shone my faint light on each. I didn’t much like the tunnel branching to the right; it seemed to be carrying more water than the one to the left, so between the current and the stooping, the going would be extremely difficult. Of the two, I’d be inclined to take the left fork.

But there was also the manhole. A world of freedom, an infinite number of paths to freedom, lay just beyond that barrier of iron. I made my choice. I grasped a rung and began to climb.

As I neared the top, some ten rungs up, doubts and questions set in. Would she have seen the manhole, if she didn’t have a light? Would she be able to raise the heavy disk? Would I be able to raise it? Well, if you can’t, she probably didn’t, I realized. Might as well try it.

Gripping the topmost rung with my left hand, I leaned back slightly into the vertical shaft and pushed upward at one edge of the manhole cover. It did not move. I tightened my grip and pushed harder, and the disk lifted slightly. I shifted my feet on the iron rung and put more force behind the push. The cover tilted upward — six inches, a foot, more — and then the iron rung in my right hand tore from the mortar between the bricks, and I was falling. When I hit the water, the shock of the fall and the chill of the water nearly claimed my consciousness. I struggled to regain my footing but the current was too swift, the walls were too smooth, and I was too weak. I felt myself swept along, down the dark passage, down toward icy oblivion. And then, just as I felt myself slipping into inner darkness, I shot out into a deeper pool of water, into a world lit by strobing blue lights, and unseen hands were bearing me up to safety.

CHAPTER 44

Okay, here’s what we’ve been able to piece together so far,” said Thornton. “Alvin and Theresa Morgan were young American missionaries who went to Japan in 1935, right after their marriage. By virtue of some incredibly bad luck, they settled in Nagasaki. In August 1945, Theresa was eight months pregnant. She was badly injured by the bomb. The doctors couldn’t save her, but they did manage to save the baby. Newspaper stories in Japan called him ‘the Nagasaki miracle.’ That baby was Isabella’s father, Jacob Morgan.”

“That’s a hell of a beginning,” I said. “What next?”

“He was adopted by another missionary couple. Raised in Japan. Married another Nagasaki survivor — a young woman who was the daughter of a Japanese nurse and an Italian physician. He took his wife’s family name, which was Arakawa.”

“So Isabella was only one-quarter Asian,” I said. That was why, despite her dark, exotic beauty, she didn’t look Japanese. “But why turn killer? Lots of people lost parents or grandparents in the bombings without becoming murderous.”

“Isabella’s mother died of bone cancer when Isabella was ten. Her father was treated for prostate cancer in his fifties. I’m sure she blamed the bomb for their cancer as well as her grandmother’s death. I suppose, for someone looking to avenge a Nagasaki family’s suffering, the guy responsible for the success of the plutonium reactors seemed a logical target.”

Miranda shook her head sadly. “Three generations of fallout from Nagasaki,” she said. “Gives a sad twist to the term ‘radioactive daughter product,’ doesn’t it?” Nobody smiled at the grim pun. “But if Isabella’s Japanese heritage mattered so much, why’d she change her name from Arakawa — that was the name on her master’s-degree thesis — to Morgan?”

“Two reasons, I suspect,” said Thornton. “First, in memory of her grandmother, the one who was killed by the Nagasaki bomb. Second, to make her connection to her father and to Japan harder to trace, once she set the wheels in motion.”

“Say some more about her father’s part in all this,” I said.

Thornton nodded. “Remember, Jacob Arakawa lost his mother and his wife and maybe his prostate to the bomb,” he said. “So it’s possible he raised his daughter on hatred. But that’s just speculation. What we do know is this. Four weeks ago, he retired from Pipeline Services, Inc., on the eve of the company’s financial collapse. Three weeks ago, according to credit-card transactions at gas stations, he drove from New Iberia to Oak Ridge. The very next day, he turned around and drove home again.”

“So he made the trip just to bring the radiography camera he’d stolen,” said Emert.

“Looks that way,” said Thornton. “Shortly after he got back to Louisiana, he showed up at a hospital ER in New Orleans. Two days ago, just as we were closing in on him, he died of acute radiation sickness.”

“From removing and handling the iridium source,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Thornton. “We’ll probably never know which one of them put it into the vitamin capsule Novak swallowed, or how they got the capsule into Novak’s pill bottle. From the burn you saw on Isabella’s hand, she must have handled it at some point — probably longer than Miranda did, but not as long as Dr. Garcia.” Miranda shot me a look of pain, and I knew she was grieving for Garcia’s hands.

“So,” I said to Emert, “where’s Isabella now?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s like she’s evaporated. She never showed up at her house, never came back for her car. Every officer in Oak Ridge has her picture committed to memory. If she surfaces here, we’ll nab her. But I think she’s gone. She knew we were onto her, Doc. She was about to skip out when you showed up at the library.”

I turned to Thornton. “What about you guys? What are y’all doing?”

“We’ve frozen her bank account,” he said, “we’ve tagged her credit cards, and her picture’s at every international airport and border crossing in the country. We’re also talking to everybody she worked with here and down at Tulane during graduate school. So far, we’ve got nothing. An elusive woman and her dead father. If she could find a way to get there,” he went on, “she might try for Japan. Her whole sense of identity seems to revolve around Nagasaki. Turns out she’s been there five times in the past ten years. But I don’t see how she’d get out of the country now.”

The memory of her hands, and how she’d cried out when I’d pried her fingers from the gun, stabbed at me.

Miranda shifted in her chair. “I hate to be the one to bring this up,” she said, “but is there a chance she’s still underground? Still somewhere in the sewer system?”

“Come on,” said Emert. “It’s been a week. Surely you don’t think she’s been hiding out down there in the dark for a week?”

“No,” she said quietly. “That’s not exactly what I was thinking.” She glanced in my direction, saw the pain in my eyes, and looked away.

“Ah,” said Emert awkwardly. “Well, we haven’t been able to search all the tunnels yet. Some of the pipes are fairly small, and the folks who work on the sewers all seem to be fairly stocky guys.” He seemed to have something more to say, but he stopped. Nobody else seemed to want to say it, either.

“You might want to call Roy Ferguson,” I finally said. “And Cherokee.” The room was silent except for the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. I stared at the table, and at my hands, which rested on it, the fingers spread slightly. “If there’s scent from…human remains…in one of the tunnels…” I had to pause; I took a breath, and then another. “The scent would spool downstream with the water. The dog should be able to detect it at the outfall near the library.” I focused on the right index finger on the table and willed it to move. The finger lifted slightly, yet still it seemed not quite my own. “Excuse me,” I whispered.

I left the room and turned down a dim inner hallway, heading for a rectangle of light — a glass door to the outside world. Just as I reached it, I heard a voice behind me. “Dr. B.?” I turned, and saw Miranda running toward me. She stopped a foot away. In the light pouring through the glass, her eyes shone with such kindness and compassion, I wondered what I could possibly have done to deserve them. Maybe nothing; maybe — like grace or mercy — they were unearned yet freely given, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven. I started to speak, but she held up a hand to stop me. “I need to say something to you,” she began, “and it’s really hard for me to say, because I know it will be hard for you to hear. I’m sorry about Isabella — that’s the truth, but that’s not what’s hard, because the fact is, you barely knew Isabella. But you did know Jess, and you did love Jess, and deep down, I think you’re still not over Jess’s murder. Not by a long shot. I think you’re lost in a maze of love and grief — more lost than you know — and you’re having a tough time finding your way out. It’s not just my fingertips or Eddie’s hands or some old scientist’s guts that are in tatters, Dr. B.; it’s your heart. And it’s not the storm sewers of Oak Ridge that are the labyrinth; it’s your life.” Miranda’s words shocked me — shocked me with the force of pure, blindsiding truth. “If you can work your way out of the maze, fine,” she went on. “Work as if your life depends on it, because it does. But if work isn’t the way out, then find another way instead. Talk to a therapist, take a sabbatical, get a dog, go on a pilgrimage. Whatever it takes to heal, do it. Do it for those of us who love you. Do it for Jess. Do it for yourself.”

With that she laid a hand on one of my cheeks, kissed me softly on the other, and then retraced the hallway and disappeared around a corner. I turned toward the light again, pushed open the door, and stepped into the cold February sunshine.

A slight breeze was sighing through the pines on the hill behind the police department. To my left, I saw a bright-yellow school bus stop at the entrance of the American Museum of Science and Energy. Dozens of youngsters, the age of my two grandsons, poured out of the bus and into the museum, with its displays and stories about the Secret City and the Manhattan Project. Below and to my right — just across the small stream emerging from a seven-foot circle of pipe — lay the blocky buildings of the Oak Ridge Civic Center and Public Library.

Straight ahead, through the trees and farther away, was a third destination, the one I chose. Approaching it from above, all I could see was a wooden, pagoda-like roof. Only as I descended the slope through the woods did the long, cylindrical shape of the Peace Bell come into view beneath the sheltering overhang.

The breeze kicked up slightly, and some of last fall’s dead leaves swirled around my feet. Most were brown, but some still bore traces of red and gold.

And fuchsia.

As I drew nearer the bell, a stream of fuchsia leaves flowed toward me from its base. But they were not leaves. Angular and sharply creased, they were paper cranes. Origami cranes. Hundreds of them; perhaps even a thousand.

I reached into my pocket, and my fingers closed around the hardness of silver and the softness of a silken cord.

I took the symbol of remembrance from my pocket and laid it at the base of the bell, amid a swirling flock of cranes.