The Inquisitor's Key (Body Farm 7)

“Merci. Oui, it’s very special,” she said. “L’orange sanguine. Do you say ‘bloody orange’?”

Miranda grinned. “Blood orange,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “How appropriate.”

After we finished our drinks, Jean took me upstairs to my room. It was a third-floor aerie — I was practically nesting in one of the plane trees — with a bird’s-eye view of the garden. In the distance, beyond Jean and Elisabeth’s smaller, separate house, sprawled a jumble of tiled rooftops and spiky church spires. One of the spires, silhouetted against the sky a few blocks away, was unlike any I’d seen before: an open iron frame, its cluster of bells completely exposed. It was a bare-bones skeleton of a steeple, I realized; exactly my kind of steeple.

I pointed. “That church steeple — is it being restored?”

He followed my gaze. “Ah, non,” he said. “That is the design. It’s built that way for the mistral.”

“The what?”

“The mistral. Strong wind from the northwest. The tower is open so it doesn’t fight against the wind. The wind blows through, instead of pushing it down.” I liked the steeple even more now; its spare skeletal beauty was born of function.

As I leaned on the sill, lingering over the view, I noticed Miranda looking up, waving. “I’m jealous,” she called. “I wish I had a room overlooking the Garden of Eden.”

“Come visit anytime,” I said. “Just watch out for snakes. And don’t eat the apples.”

* * *

“Sorry, Miranda. what?” I hadn’t heard the question. My brain was empty but my mouth was full. Blissfully full.

“I know carbon-14 dating’s pretty good,” she repeated, “but how close can it get? How precisely can it nail the age of the bones?”

“Pretty damn close,” I finally answered. “Man, that’s good.”

I was finishing a bowl of lamb stew — my second bowl of lamb stew — at Pace é Salute, a Corsican restaurant near Lumani that Jean and Elisabeth had recommended. Its name translated as “Peace and Good Health,” both of which I regarded as fine things, but neither could compete with the honeyed lamb stew, made with tender chunks of lamb and a rich sauce of honey, garlic, citrus, and savory broth.

Suddenly Miranda’s question triggered a faint memory — faint but recent, something that had occurred as I was preparing to board my flight from Knoxville to Dulles. Was it really possible that only eighteen hours had passed since my secretary, Peggy, had dashed out to the helicopter with my computer and my passport? Reaching into the inner pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing for the past four thousand miles, I pulled out a letter she’d tucked into my passport — a letter marked “Urgent” that had arrived in the morning’s mail. “I’m glad you said that,” I told Miranda. “I would have forgotten this until the next time I went to the dry cleaner’s. And that might’ve been years.”

The envelope was postmarked Charlotte, North Carolina. Smoothing the letter, I scanned it again, because I’d given it only a cursory glance on the plane. “You’re not the only one interested in C-14 dating. So is the Institute for Biblical Science.”

“The Institute for Biblical Science?” Miranda’s eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

“Not necessarily,” I said, “though in practice, yeah, science often takes a backseat to the Bible.”

“And they’re writing to ask your advice about C-14 dating? I’m surprised they’re not writing to heap fire and brimstone on you. You’ve taken some fierce swings at creationism from time to time.”

“Not fierce,” I said. “Just factual. Okay, maybe a little fierce, too. I don’t get a lot of fan mail from the fundamentalists.” Putting on my reading glasses — a recent, annoying necessity — I read aloud. “‘Dear Dr. Brockton: I’m writing to ask your opinion on the accuracy of carbon-14 dating. Our Institute is initiating a study of artifacts from the Holy Land, and we would very much appreciate your thoughts on the precision and reliability of C-14 dating for establishing the age of artifacts, as well as human and animal bones. I would also appreciate any insights you have on the feasibility of extracting and sequencing genetic material from bone specimens. We would be happy to hire you as a consultant on this project, although — as you might expect — our budget is limited. Please contact me at your earliest opportunity to discuss this exciting project. Best regards, Dr. Adam Newman, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Institute for Biblical Science.’”

I folded the letter and reached for the envelope, but Stefan held out his hand. “Permit me?” I handed him the page. He read it quickly, then handed it back with a look of disdain. “Do what you want, but I advise you to stay away from them. Crazies. If you work with them, it will damage your reputation.”

Miranda leaned forward on her elbows. “What makes you say that?”

“A colleague of mine did some excavation at Qumran,” he said. “The place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Someone from this place — this so-called institute — didn’t like a journal article she published. They attacked her work, tried to destroy her credibility. They even made threats against her. Very unpleasant.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, stuffing the letter back in my jacket.

“But we digress,” Miranda reminded me. “C-14?”

“Oh, right.” I spooned another dollop of sauce from the bowl. “Yum. If — and mind you, this strikes me as a mighty big if — if the bones from the Palace of the Popes are two thousand years old, the C-14 report will say something like ‘two thousand BP plus or minus one hundred.’ That means ‘two thousand years before the present, with a one-hundred-year margin of uncertainty either way.’ Wiggle room, in other words. So the two-thousand-year-old bones could be as old as twenty-one hundred years or as young as nineteen hundred.”

“Actually,” Stefan said, “we should be able to get closer than a hundred years. If it’s a good sample, an AMS test — accelerator mass spectrometry — can tell us the age plus or minus forty years.”

“Wowzer,” Miranda marveled. “I’m used to time-since-death estimates of days or weeks, not millennia. How does it do that?” It was one of Miranda’s favorite multipurpose utterances; sometimes it meant “Explain, please,” but sometimes — in response to, say, a 3-D laser hologram or a fiery sunset — it meant simply “That’s amazing!”

Stefan laid down the Corsican grilled cheese sandwich he’d been nibbling on, and he smiled the smile of a man who loves hearing himself explain things. “The machine, the spectrometer, counts the carbon atoms in the sample,” he said, “and it calculates the ratio of three different isotopes — three different forms of carbon. The ratio of those isotopes is like a signature…” He trailed off, frowning, then held up a finger, recalibrating his explanation, and resumed. “Non, the ratio is like a time stamp — the time stamp on an e-mail or a security-camera photo — that we can match to the ratio in the atmosphere at any point in time.”

“Call me dense,” Miranda persisted, “but how do you know what the ratio in the air was two thousand years ago?”

“Ah,” he beamed, “because the rings in trees have recorded the ratio in the air, year by year. And we have analyzed tree rings all the way back to ten thousand years ago.”

“We have?” Miranda arched her eyebrows. “We, you and I? Or we, you and other people?”

Stefan’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “We, the scientific community,” he said testily. I dabbed at my mouth with my napkin, hiding my smile. “So when we find which tree ring has the same ratio as the bones, voilà, we know that the man died the same year the tree ring was formed.”

“I like it,” Miranda said. “An atomic stopwatch. A wood-burning atomic stopwatch. And it’s really that accurate, that reliable?”

“Oui, sure. You know the Shroud of Turin, the so-called burial cloth of Jesus?” Miranda and I both nodded. “You remember when the fabric from it was carbon-dated?”

“I remember that,” I said, “but Miranda was probably still in diapers. Wasn’

t that, like, twenty years ago?”

“It was in 1988,” Stefan preened.

“I’ll have you know I was wearing big-girl pants in 1988,” Miranda said. “But I was too busy watching Sesame Street to tune in to the Vatican News Network.”

“So,” Stefan began, warming up for another mini-lecture. “Millions of people believe the Shroud of Turin is two thousand years old, oui?” God, I thought, he does love to hear himself talk. Was it just his smugness I objected to? Or was I jealous of him at some level — resentful of his tightness with Miranda, afraid he was taking my place in her esteem? Whatever the reason, I was starting to wish I hadn’t agreed to stay on and help the two of them. “But it was seen for the first time,” he went on, “the first time we can be sure of, anyway, here in France, in 1357. The C-14 samples were cut—”

“Wait, wait,” Miranda interrupted. “The Shroud of Turin started out as the Shroud of France? No kidding?”

“No kidding,” he said impatiently. “It was first shown in the village of Lirey, near Paris, in 1357. But the believers say non, the Shroud is much older than 1357. So finally, in 1988, the Vatican allows scientists to make a C-14 test. A small bit of the cloth is cut from one corner”—he made a snipping motion with his fingers—“and pieces are sent to three different laboratories. And voilà, all three labs say the same thing: The Shroud is from the fourteenth century.” He smiled wickedly as he pointed at me. “Ha! From the same century as Bill!” Miranda giggled, and my face flushed.

I pushed back from the table. “You know what, guys? Ancient relic that I am, I’m really beat,” I said.

“Oh come on, Dr. B,” Miranda cajoled, looking contrite. “It was a joke. Don’t leave.”