Bones of Betrayal (Body Farm 4)

“You all right? Sounds like you’re hauling furniture up those stairs,” I said.

“Feels like it,” he said. “I thought you might like to see this.” His head disappeared and I heard a labored grunt. He reappeared, lugging a brushed-aluminum case, the sort generally filled with expensive electronics or video gear. I cleared off the center of my desk, and he set it down with a gentler thud than he had out in the hallway. Then he laid it on its side, flipped four latches on the edge, and swung the lid up.

When I realized what it was, I jumped back. “What are you doing? Get that thing out of here.”

“It’s safe,” he said. “We’ve checked it up one side and down the other. There’s no source in it — nothing radioactive. Only way this thing can hurt you is if you get a hernia trying to lift it. Which I think maybe I’ve done. Or if it falls on your foot, which would cripple you for life.”

Inside the case was an instrument I recognized as an industrial radiography camera — one of the two models Thornton had shown us, in fact, in his PowerPoint briefing about sources of iridium-192. “I thought the manufacturer was sending somebody to Savannah River to look at the source,” I said. “They decided to send a camera here instead?”

He shook his head. “We got lucky,” he said. “This is the very camera somebody raided for the iridium that killed Novak. Has to be.”

“My God,” I said. “Where’d you find it? How?”

“One of the things we assigned agents to do right away was to canvas scrap-metal recycling yards,” he said. “They started in Oak Ridge and fanned out from there. Our thinking was, the safest way to transport the iridium would be to leave it in the camera till you were ready to use it, since there’s all that built-in shielding. We hoped maybe the camera would get dumped after the pigtail was removed. Sure enough, it turned up at a salvage yard on Sutherland Avenue in Knoxville.”

My mind was racing. “Who brought it in? Did you get prints? Did you make an arrest?”

“We’re looking for the guy,” he said, “but it’s not our killer. Couldn’t be. Selling the camera would be a stupid risk to take for five bucks, which is all the scrapyard paid for it. The guy that brought it in was Hispanic, spoke almost no English, looked to be a day-laborer sort. That’s about all the fellow at the scrapyard remembers about him. A couple sets of prints, but the only hit is a match with the guy at the scrapyard, who stole a car years ago.”

The find was exciting, but frustrating, too, since it might be a dead end. “Now what? How do you figure out who took the pigtail out of the camera?”

Thornton unfurled a slow smile. “We send a planeload of agents down to New Iberia, Louisiana, to track down who stole it from Pipeline Services, Inc. And to find out why Pipeline Services never reported the theft to the NRC.”

CHAPTER 32

It had been three days since i’d watched Dr. Strangelove with Isabella; two and a half days since I’d awakened at dawn, alone but content. My first impulse had been to send her flowers that morning, but something told me to give her some breathing room. She had bolted the night we’d shared pizza at Big Ed’s, and that skittishness was probably ratcheted up considerably higher now. And so I’d waited as long as I could stand to, then called and invited her to lunch. “I hear the Soup Kitchen’s good,” I said, “and it’s the right weather for hot soup and crusty bread.”

She hesitated, and I began to panic, but then she relented. “I only have half an hour for lunch,” she said, “one to one-thirty, so I’ll need to eat and run.”

“That’s okay,” I said, grateful she hadn’t turned me down. “Any longer than that and you’d find all sorts of other woeful gaps in my cultural education. You want me to pick you up at the library?”

This time she didn’t hesitate. “I’ll meet you there,” she said. “I need to swing by a cash machine on my way.”

Don’t push your luck, I told myself. “Okay, see you there at, what, ten after one?”

“That sounds about right. Thanks. Bye.” She clearly wasn’t the sort for long goodbyes.

I half expected her not to show up, but three hours later, as I lingered outside a low, whitesided building distinguished by its savory smells and steamed-up windows, she rounded the corner briskly and nearly bumped into me. “Oh!” she said.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. I felt a goofy smile spreading across my face.

She looked down and slightly away from me, and once again her hair made curtains that hid her face from view. “I’m actually a lot shyer than you think,” she said. I thought I glimpsed a smile, and I reached a hand beneath her chin to tip her face toward me. She flushed, and ducked her head again, but as she did, there was no doubt about the smile.

“I’ll try not to make any sudden moves,” I said, opening the door amid billows of steam. As we made our way to the counter, I could feel my stomach rumbling and my salivary glands awakening.

The Soup Kitchen served soups and salads and bread cafeteria-style. The day’s soups — seven, usually, though by the time we got there they were down to five — were written in marker on a dry-erase board behind the serving counter. I ordered chili topped with a mound of Fritos and shredded cheddar; Isabella chose a creamy spinach soup that looked thick enough to clog arteries with a single serving. She got a small, round loaf of brown bread to go with hers; I figured the Fritos counted as my bread.

The chili was tangy but not spicy, with just the right balance of tomato, ground beef, onion, and toppings. I nodded my approval. “You were so smart to suggest this place,” I said.

“I didn’t. You did.”

“Well then,” I said, “I was so smart to suggest this place.”

“You were. It’s the second-best restaurant in Oak Ridge.”

Just then my cell phone rang. I frowned at the interruption, but when I saw the number, I murmured an apology to Isabella and answered the call. “I am about to make you a happy man,” said Jim Emert. “A very happy man.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Detective, I’m flattered,” I said, “but I just don’t feel attracted to you in that way. I have a strong preference for women.” I winked at Isabella across the table, but she was too busy slicing and buttering her bread to notice.

“Very funny,” he said. “Just for that, never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

“Never mind the great news I was about to share with you.”

“You caught the guy who killed Novak?”

“You might think this is better,” he said.

“You figured out who killed Novak and who killed G.I. Doe?”

“Better,” he said.

“The secret to world peace?”

“Better, better, better,” he said.

Suddenly it hit me. “No kidding? You’re serious?”

“I am,” he said.

“This is huge.”

“I knew you’d appreciate the significance,” Emert said. “We should have it safely in hand in another ten minutes.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He laughed. “This is worth dashing over from Knoxville at two hundred miles an hour?”

“It is,” I said, “but I don’t have to; I’m already in Oak Ridge. In fact, I’m only a couple of blocks downhill. Isabella and I are having lunch at the Soup Kitchen.”

“Very handy,” he said. “Just mosey on up when you get done.”

I snapped the phone shut. “Big break in the Novak case,” I said. Her eyes widened. “They’re finally draining the swimming pool. I’m about to get my chainsaw back.”

She looked deeply confused for a moment, then gave her head a brisk little shake, as if trying to shake off a deep fog or a hard knock. Then she laughed in disbelief. “Greater love hath no man,” she said.