Bones of Betrayal (Body Farm 4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something like that,” said Sorensen.

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

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

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

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

“You mean I might lose my fingers?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much higher?”

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

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

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

I heard Miranda draw a sharp breath.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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