“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.”
“Be my guest,” said Johnson. “You should’ve spoken up sooner. I’d’ve been happy to let you go in there and fish it out of the sink for us.”
The speaker fell silent for a few seconds. “Look, I’m glad you guys have secured it. I would have taken it a little slower, called in some more people and equipment—”
“—and generated two or three days of paralysis and panic doing it that way,” said Johnson. “We safed an extremely hot source in about an hour. We have years of experience here dealing with radioisotopes. If something like this had to happen, it’s hard to imagine a better-equipped place for it to happen than UT Medical Center. So: now that we’ve safed it for you, what does TEMA propose to do with a hundred curies of iridium-192?”
“We’ll have a staff meeting in the morning to discuss the options,” said Wilhoit. “Whoever owns the source is the culpable party, and they have a responsibility to collect and dispose of it.”
“And you think the ‘culpable party’ is going to be eager to step forward,” said Johnson, “eager to own up to one man’s death and four people’s exposure in the morgue? Meanwhile — as we wait for this ‘culpable party’ to step forward to say ‘Arrest me, and please sue me for millions of dollars, too’—do you plan on stashing this in your attic?”
The TEMA official fell silent again. “The Department of Energy,” he finally said. “DOE has a Radiological Assistance team based over in Oak Ridge. I’ll ask the governor to ask the feds to take it off our hands.”
“Sounds great,” said Johnson. “But at the risk of sounding like a broken record: Until DOE gets here, would you mind if we lock it up in a hot cell? That seems a little more secure than the frickin’ hallway it’s sitting in right now.”
Two minutes and a little fence-mending later, Johnson trundled the box to the elevator and up to a hot cell — a massive box of lead and leaded glass, equipped with robotic manipulator arms — built to handle powerful radiopharmaceuticals without risk to the hands and bone marrow of technicians and pharmacists.
It was a shame Garcia hadn’t known to conduct Leonard Novak’s autopsy inside a hot cell. Garcia might have looked like a mad scientist, wielding robotic arms to dissect a corpse. But better a mad scientist than a maimed or dying doctor.
CHAPTER 7
The knock on my office door made me jump, and I realized that I must have nodded off. Miranda and I had spent several hours with Carmen Garcia. Around midnight we’d returned to her husband’s hospital room, where we’d stayed until it was time for our 7 A.M. blood sample. Carmen had been terrified to learn that her husband — who had left home that morning as usual, kissing her and their baby goodbye in the kitchen after breakfast — was now a hospital patient, his hands and possibly even his life jeopardized by one of the bodies he had autopsied.
Garcia had served as the medical examiner for less than a year now; he’d been hired from Dallas to take Jess Carter’s place when Jess was killed. At first I’d disliked Garcia — he’d struck me as stuffy and condescending — but I soon realized that what I’d mistaken for stuffiness was actually just a veneer of formality, maybe even shyness. A slight, handsome man, he’d grown up in a well-to-do Mexico City family before being sent to the United States for college and medical school. His wife Carmen was a Colombian beauty; their Latino genes had combined to produce a gorgeous toddler, Tomas, who had a thick shock of curly black hair and enormous brown eyes. Miranda had taken to babysitting for Tomas one evening a week. She claimed it was so the boy’s harried parents could relax over dinner and a movie, but I suspected it was because she was so smitten with the child.
Another knock; another awakening. I had fallen back asleep after the first knock. “Sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Come in.”
“How’s Dr. Garcia?”
“Too soon to know,” I said, fully awake now. “But it doesn’t look good. Are you Special Agent Thornton?”
“Yes sir. Charles Thornton.”
He stepped into my office and gave me a solid handshake. Thornton was tall and lanky — six foot two, maybe, and tipping the scales at around 190; possibly 200, since he seemed to be carrying some lean muscle on his frame. His sandy hair was cut short, but it appeared to contain some styling gel and some color highlights and some attitude. Then there was the tie: he wore one, but he wore it loosely, like it was an afterthought or an ironic commentary; like he might take it the rest of the way off any minute. The tie was printed with an abstract design that was either the work of an artistic genius or a second grader. The guy was almost a cop, but not quite. Too metrosexual, if I understood the term right. I suspected some of his more buttoned-down FBI colleagues regarded his wardrobe with mistrust.