Bones of Betrayal (Body Farm 4)

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 shit out of there.” Johnson and the tech wrangled the shields through the door, and once we were all inside, Hank locked it behind us.

Together, they reached for one of the shields, tipped it to the floor, then flipped it upside down beside the other. The shields 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 shields upside down, they clamped one to the other, to create an unbroken layer of shielding from toe height to neck height. Next they clamped a smaller shield, fitted with a thick window of leaded glass, atop the upper shield. They had assembled 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 shielding 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 makeshift shielding 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, clustered around a collection of lead shields, radiation meters, and other worrisome paraphernalia. “What the hell 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. Shit,” 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 button. “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 snatched the phone. “This is Captain Sievers. Who the hell 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.

“Hell-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? Crap,” 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 nobody 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 hassle of quashing 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 relationship 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 Mass 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 massive shield they’d assembled, Hank and Johnson edged toward the door of the autopsy suite, towing the tongs and the metal shipping 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 shipping 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 ship 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 button, 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 shipping 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.”