Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “My point exactly,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah,” yelled Emert. “Whatcha got?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sorry,” said the tech.

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

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

  He looked. “What about them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The words read, “I know your secret.”

  CHAPTER 10

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