Body Farm: Bones Of Betrayal Part 3

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

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

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

"How much higher?"

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

"And what's the prognosis for someone who's been exposed to five hundred rads?"

Sorensen hesitated again. Another bad sign. "That's getting up around the LD-50," he said.

I heard Miranda draw a sharp breath.

"Excuse me," said Emert. "What's LD-50?"

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

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

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

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

"Sounds like they mean it," I said to Miranda.

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

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

"I think we've had enough radiation fun for one day," I said.

"No pressure," he said. "But as long as you stay behind the corner, where you were before, you won't get any additional exposure." I looked at Miranda, and she shrugged. Curiosity trumped caution, and we followed as Duane and the technician wheeled the s.h.i.+elds toward the morgue.

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

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

The dismayed look on Hank's face made it clear that he realized how perilous Garcia's situation was. He shook his head grimly, then turned to Johnson. "Okay," he said, "let's get that s.h.i.+t out of there." Johnson and the tech wrangled the s.h.i.+elds through the door, and once we were all inside, Hank locked it behind us.

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

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

He hung up the phone. "Well, that was interesting. That was-"

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

"I'll get it," I said.

Sievers, whom I'd known for years, looked surprised to see me; mostly, though, he looked upset. "We got a report," he began, but then he stopped speaking as his eyes swept the room and took in the tableau of people and equipment: Miranda and me, still in our scrubs, and three moon-suited figures, cl.u.s.tered around a collection of lead s.h.i.+elds, radiation meters, and other worrisome paraphernalia. "What the h.e.l.l is going on in here?"

"We had an autopsy take an unexpected turn-" I started to explain.

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

Sievers stared at Hank, then at me, then at Johnson. "Bull. s.h.i.+t," he said. He pushed past me and the others, heading toward the autopsy suite.

"I wouldn't do that," said Hank.

"You said it's a drill," shot back Sievers.

"Stop now," said Hank.

"You've got about five seconds to tell me why I should," said Sievers.

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

Hank held out the phone to Sievers. The officer glared at him suspiciously, then s.n.a.t.c.hed the phone. "This is Captain Sievers. Who the h.e.l.l is this?" His eyes widened. "Yes sir," he said. "Of course I've heard of your office." He listened intently, his eyes darting around the room all the while. "I understand," he said. "You'll have our full cooperation. Yes sir. Thank you, sir." He hung up the phone and stared at it a moment. "Well," he said, but that's as far as he got.

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

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

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

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

"I didn't send you the memo? c.r.a.p," said Sievers convincingly. "I am so sorry, Liz."

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

"I told him to follow up," chimed in Miranda. "Didn't I tell you to follow up?"

"You did tell me to follow up," I said. "And I forgot. I'm sorry. I accept full responsibility."

Liz frowned at me. A small muscle beside her left eye was twitching, and the tendons in her neck were taut as bowstrings. "Guys, it's hard for me to do my job if n.o.body tells me what's going on. There are all kinds of rumors flying around about some kind of radiation accident, and it'll take me days to put out the brush fires. Sure would have been easier to have put out a press release about a safety exercise." She took one last look around, lingering on the moon suits, and shook her head sadly-lamenting not just the ha.s.sle of quas.h.i.+ng rumors, I suspected, but also the lost opportunity to show high-tech training on the local news-and spun on her stilettos.

"That was interesting," said Johnson, once the clicking of her steps had faded. "Last time I heard that many lies back-to-back was when Bill Clinton was describing the platonic nature of his relations.h.i.+p with Monica Lewinsky."

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

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

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

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

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

"Let's get this upstairs to the radiopharmaceuticals lab," said Duane. "It would probably be fine in this box-we s.h.i.+p medical isotopes in these all the time, and the lead canister inside is about an inch thick-but I'd feel better if we had it locked in a hot cell."

"Sounds like a good idea," I said.

"First, though," he said, "I should call TEMA again, tell them it's under control." He unzipped his suit and fished a cell phone out of a pocket. He hit a speed-dial b.u.t.ton, then put the cell on speakerphone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you think the 'culpable party' is going to be eager to step forward," said Johnson, "eager to own up to one man's death and four people's exposure in the morgue? Meanwhile-as we wait for this 'culpable party' to step forward to say 'Arrest me, and please sue me for millions of dollars, too'-do you plan on stas.h.i.+ng this in your attic?"

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 7.

THE KNOCK ON MY OFFICE DOOR MADE ME JUMP, AND I realized that I must have nodded off. Miranda and I had spent several hours with Carmen Garcia. Around midnight we'd returned to her husband's hospital room, where we'd stayed until it was time for our 7 A.M. blood sample. Carmen had been terrified to learn that her husband-who had left home that morning as usual, kissing her and their baby goodbye in the kitchen after breakfast-was now a hospital patient, his hands and possibly even his life jeopardized by one of the bodies he had autopsied.

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

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

"How's Dr. Garcia?"

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

"Yes sir. Charles Thornton."

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

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

"We're always glad to help," I said. "And you don't have to 'sir' me. h.e.l.l, you're the high-wattage guy from FBI headquarters."

He grinned, a lopsided, aw-shucks kind of grin. "Weapons of Ma.s.s Destruction Directorate-sounds impressive, doesn't it? I'm actually pretty low on the food chain, though."

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

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

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

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

Thornton pulled a small, glossy pamphlet out of a jacket pocket and handed it to me. Weapons of Ma.s.s Destruction (WMD), the t.i.tle panel read. A Pocket Guide. Inside, one panel described various weapons-explosive, chemical, biological, and radiological-while a second panel listed the federal laws terrorists would be breaking if they used weapons of ma.s.s destruction. The pamphlet's innermost spread outlined how the FBI would a.s.sess the danger from an actual or threatened WMD attack.

"Yikes," I said. "Good to know you guys are prepared, but scary that there's the need to print this sort of thing in ma.s.s quant.i.ty. Also scary that you have to a.s.sume the worst."

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

"It's already there? That was quick."

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

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

"Thanks, but I guess I should pa.s.s," he said. "I probably should start seeing what we can dig up in Oak Ridge."

"I understand," I said. "Good luck."

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

"Can't wait," I said as she reached the doorway. "Miranda, this is Special Agent Charles Thornton. Agent Thornton, this is my graduate a.s.sistant, Miranda Lovelady."

Thornton held out a hand-more eagerly than he'd extended it to me, I thought-and said, "Chip. Call me Chip."

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

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

DESPITE THE TANGLE OF TUBES and wires attached to him, Eddie Garcia looked better than he had in the ER fourteen hours before. His nausea and diarrhea had subsided, and ordinary fatigue had replaced panic as the predominant look on his face.

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