Bones of Betrayal (Body Farm 4)

“Our people in Behavioral Sciences — the profilers — are asking exactly those questions now.” He looked as if he were about to add something, then changed his mind and kept quiet.

Miranda saw the hesitation, and she pounced. “What?”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “It’s just…you know the riddle of the albatross?”

She looked perplexed. “Uh, something to do with a sailor who shoots a bird and brings bad luck down on a whole ship?”

“No, that’s a poem,” said Thornton. “This is a riddle. A man who has returned from a voyage walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders the albatross. The waiter brings it, the guy takes one bite, then rushes out of the restaurant and goes home and kills himself. Why?”

“Seems a bit of an overreaction,” I said. “It must have been really, really bad albatross.”

“It’s a guessing game,” said Thornton. “You have to guess what happened earlier, before he walked into the restaurant. You can ask me yes-or-no questions.”

“Was it really, really bad albatross?”

“No,” laughed the agent.

Miranda: “But his reaction had something to do with the albatross?”

“Yes.”

Me: “Was it fairly bad albatross?”

“Irrelevant.”

“That’s not yes or no,” I pointed out.

“But it’s helpful,” said Miranda, “and we need all the help we can get. Had he ever had albatross before?”

“No.”

Garcia: “Was there special significance to the fact that it was albatross?” Yes. “Did the man feel guilty about eating an albatross?” No.

A series of questions from me: “Was the man already depressed before he tasted the soup?” Yes. I thought of Jess. “Had the man lost someone he loved?” Yes. “And was an albatross somehow connected to that loss?” Yes. “Was it his wife he’d lost?” Yes. “Did she die on the voyage?” Yes.

Miranda: “Was there a shipwreck?” Yes. “Did she perish in the shipwreck?” Yes. “Was the man marooned on a desert island?” Yes. “All alone?” No. “Were other survivors with him?” Yes. “Did any of the others die?” No. “Were they marooned for a long time?”

“Depends on how you define it,” he said. “Ask more specifically.”

Me: “More than a month?” No. “More than a week?” Yes.

Garcia: “Did they have food from the ship?” No. “Did they catch fish?”

“No. Not enough, anyway.” Thornton was cheating slightly, maybe because we were slow.

Miranda: “Did they eat other food on the island?” Yes. “Albatross?” No. “Did the man think it was albatross?”

Thornton began to smile. “Yes, he did.”

“Bless his heart,” she said. “No wonder he killed himself.”

I was utterly bewildered. “What?” I stared from one of them to the other. “So are you two actually twins, separated at birth, with a secret language and some weird twin-logic all your own?”

“The survivors resorted to cannibalism,” she said. “They cooked his dead wife, but they told him it was albatross.”

“Huh?”

“Ah,” said Garcia. “So when he tasted the albatross in the restaurant, he realized that he’d never tasted albatross before — and he realized that it was his wife they’d eaten on the island.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I still think the guy overreacted.”

“Looks like overreaction to us,” said Thornton, “but to him, it seemed the only acceptable response. Same thing with the iridium murder or suicide. Once we know the backstory, we’ll understand the reason for the bizarre method.” He looked at Garcia. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get the guy who did this to you.”

Garcia gave Thornton an odd, sad smile. “Thank you, Agent Thornton,” he said. “But I have already eviscerated the guy who did this to me.”

Thornton turned bright red. “Wow,” Miranda said to Garcia, “you don’t even need a scalpel to eviscerate a guy.”

The FBI agent blinked as he processed Garcia’s joke and Miranda’s response. “Man, I’m out of my league here,” he said. “I better call headquarters and tell ’em to send the A-Team down to Tennessee.”

“Damn skippy,” said Miranda. “But don’t worry. We’ll go easy on you till they get here.” She flashed him a smile, and Thornton blushed again. He looked considerably more cheerful about it this time around.

CHAPTER 8

By the time Miranda, Thornton, and I left the hospital, the lid was blowing off the story. Rightly or wrongly, I blamed the skittish ER nurse for leaking word of the incident — I could imagine her calling WBIR-TV or the Knoxville News Sentinel to complain that she and other ER staff had been exposed to radioactive contamination. The truth, though, was that any number of people besides the nurse could have tipped off the media, including morgue employees (all of whom were being checked for exposure now), hospital police officers, even ORPD colleagues of Emert.

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.