Bones of Betrayal (Body Farm 4)

In his final moments, Leonard Novak — a ninety-three-year-old walking ghost — had stabbed to death a man roughly half his age.

CHAPTER 34

The autopsy of the third Oak Ridge victim — case 09–03 — was almost redundant, since the cause of death had been sticking out of the man’s chest. According to the Nashville medical examiner, the lungs contained a small amount of water, which suggested (but did not prove) that the victim had drawn a partial breath as his heart shuddered and stopped. Beyond that, the autopsy report contained nothing extraordinary, though it did shed some light on the guy’s life: a middle-aged white male, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, with blue eyes, thinning blond hair, and a gray beard. Thin, whitish scars indicated prior surgeries on the right ankle and left shoulder. A series of whole-body X-rays revealed numerous healed fractures — four ribs on the right side of the chest had been broken, as well as six ribs on the left — two of them in more than one place. The right femur bore evidence of a childhood fracture, the report noted, and was a quarter-inch shorter than the left. The spine, particularly the cervical spine, showed osteoarthritic lipping — ragged fringes of bone rimming the vertebrae in the neck — that was surprisingly severe for a man his age. My first thought, from the variety of skeletal trauma, was too many bar fights. But the victim had well-developed leg muscles and — until the knife blade made its entrance — a robust circulatory system. Maybe not bar fights after all, I thought. Maybe bicycle wrecks. Regardless, the guy seemed to have been rode hard and put away wet.

Miranda, Emert, Thornton, and I were huddled around a table of stale cookies and stale coffee at the ORPD. I had come straight from the KPD lab, so Miranda had caught a ride with Thornton. Strictly speaking, there was no compelling reason for her to be here, but it had become important to find things to occupy Miranda’s time and energy. Her three burned fingertips were getting worse — they’d progressed from blisters to open, oozing wounds, wrapped in gauze, and she couldn’t do the delicate reconstruction the North Knoxville skeleton required.

She also couldn’t shake her fear for Garcia. Somehow, despite the best precautions of the ICU staff, he’d picked up an infection, and his condition seemed more perilous than ever. He was unable to eat or drink anything, and his GI tract was racked with cramps and bloody diarrhea as the lining of his gut sloughed off. In the weeks or months to come, the lining might slowly regenerate, but it might not. His bone marrow was virtually destroyed, and the search was on for a matching marrow donor, but the prospects weren’t good. Even if a donor could be found, Garcia might not be robust enough to survive the transplant.

“The pool guy was carrying no identification,” said Emert. “No wallet, no credit card, no car keys, nothing. Some loose change in his right hip pocket, a pack of chewing gum in his left pocket.” He paused. “But he had this in his shirt pocket.” The detective slid a ziplock bag toward the center of the table. It contained a small, rectangular piece of white paper, stained with dirty water and smeared ink. Emert flipped it over to reveal the other side. Thornton, Miranda, and I leaned in to see. There, despite the smearing, four words remained legible: “I know your secret.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Interesting,” said Thornton.

“Creepy,” said Miranda. “These notes are like a modern-day version of those snitch reports Oak Ridgers sent back during the Manhattan Project. Only now, instead of sending them to Acme Whatchamacallit—”

“Credit,” Thornton supplied. “Acme Credit Corporation.”

“Right. Whatever,” she said. “Only instead of going to Acme, these are going straight to the people being spied on.” She frowned. “You know what else this makes me think of? Y’all know those REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY signs on the interstate? The ones with the 800 number you’re supposed to call—800-something-TIPS — if you spy something fishy?”

“800-492-TIPS,” said Thornton.

“It worries me that you know that,” she said. “My point is, imagine you’re driving along I-40 and suddenly your cell phone rings and a voice whispers in your ear, ‘I see what you’re doing.’ That’s what these notes make me think of. This whole spying and snitching thing is creeping me out.”

“Spoken like a woman with a guilty conscience,” I said. I was only teasing, so I was surprised when she turned red. A thought occurred to me, and I glanced at Thornton to see if he was blushing, too, but the FBI agent’s face was a study in nonchalance. Or was he feigning nonchalance, so as not to embarrass Miranda further? I couldn’t tell, and I realized it wasn’t any of my business if they had kissed and made up, ideologically or otherwise. I turned again to Emert. “So how do you figure out who our modern John Doe is?”

“Well, yet again, we’ve come up empty-handed on missing-person reports in Oak Ridge,” he said. “Nothing remotely similar in Knoxville or surrounding counties, either. We’re checking NCIC”—the National Crime Information Center—“to see if there’s anybody elsewhere in the country who fits the description. But NCIC has its shortcomings.” He looked at Thornton. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Thornton. “NCIC is the Bureau’s creation, not mine. We know it’s not perfect — if a missing-person report lists someone’s age as thirty-seven, and a cop plugs in thirty-to-thirty-five in the age range, the system won’t connect those two dots. But if the cop follows up with a second search, for ages thirty-six-to-forty, he’ll get the report he needs to see. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s a help.”

“Sure,” said Emert. “Anyhow. We’re running the guy’s fingerprints through the state’s automated fingerprint identification system, and the Bureau’s AFIS, too. So if he’s been arrested and printed, we might get lucky enough to ID him that way. Other thing we’re doing is running a picture of him in the Oak Ridger this afternoon.”

I was surprised to hear that. The dead man’s face — open-mouthed and glassy-eyed, the skin beginning to soften and slough off — was strong stuff for a small-town newspaper. “I’m guessing subscribers will be calling for the editor’s head when they see that photo,” I said.

“Not a photo,” he said. “We had an artist do a sketch. Not a perfect likeness, but maybe more recognizable — and less gruesome — than the photos. Surely somebody will be able to tell us who this guy was.”

In the Novak case, Thornton had disappointing news to relate about the radiography camera. Pipeline Services, the Louisiana company that owned the camera, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection two weeks before — probably within days or weeks after the fresh iridium-192 source had been shipped to New Iberia and loaded into the camera. The pipeline contractor’s doors had been padlocked, and no one seemed to know the camera had gone missing. “We found a window that was unlocked,” he said, “and the door to the lab where the camera was kept had been pried open.”

“Damn,” I said. “A town that small, lots of folks would’ve known the company had gone belly-up. Almost anybody could’ve stolen it, right?”

“Theoretically,” he said, “but I doubt it. Think about it: somebody who just happens to live in Podunk, Louisiana, suddenly sees their chance to make off with a radiography camera they’ve always wanted? I don’t believe in coincidences that big. We’re combing through the personnel records, and we’ll interview all the employees. And their neighbors and friends. And all the folks who aren’t their friends. I’m flying down there this afternoon. We’re getting close,” he said. “I can smell it.”

Then it was my turn to talk about G.I. Doe. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to ID him from his teeth,” I said. Three of the soldier’s lower molars had fillings, I explained, including one of the third molars, or wisdom teeth. My hope was that the cavity in the third molar — a tooth that erupted around age eighteen — had been filled by an Army dentist. If that was the case, maybe there was a dental chart. The trick, I pointed out, would be to find it among the millions of army dental charts.

“First we found the film,” said Emert, “then we found

the bones. Things come in threes. You’ll find it. G.I. Doe wants to be identified.”

When the meeting ended, Miranda, Thornton, and I headed outside. Thornton had parked in front of the building; I’d parked out back. The three of us stood together on the front steps of the municipal building. I said to Miranda, “You mind if I wander down to the library for a few minutes?”

“Why would I mind?”

“Well, you might be in a hurry to get back to campus.”

“But I rode with Thornton,” she said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

“But I thought you were riding back with me,” I said. “I thought Thornton had to catch a plane to Louisiana.” I looked at Thornton; he looked at Miranda.

“But…I dropped off my car at the Jiffy Lube on Bearden Hill on the way over here,” she said. “He…we were planning to swing by there on the way back.”

“But Bearden Hill’s just five minutes from my house,” I said. “Why don’t I just run you by there on my way home at the end of the day? That way you know they’re done. We don’t want Thornton to miss his plane.”

“It’s all right,” he said, a little quicker than necessary. “It’s practically on my way to the airport. And I’ve got time.”

“Okay, great,” I said, a little more cheerfully than I meant. Bearden was far out of his way, but there was no future in pointing that out. Clearly they wanted to be together, but didn’t want to say so. “I might just work in the library for the rest of the afternoon. Miranda, could you see about tracking something down for me later? A master’s thesis on Oak Ridge by Isabella Morgan?”

“Anthropology?”

“No, history,” I said.

“UT?”

“Yes,” I said. “Wait. Maybe not. Maybe Tulane or LSU.”

“Could you be any vaguer?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Never mind.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”