“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.
Like some insidious form of contamination, the polonium theory spread from one news outlet to another. Polonium-210 was a potent source of alpha radiation, the stories pointed out, and although alpha particles could not penetrate skin — they would, in fact, bounce off clothing or a sheet of paper — the particles were dangerous if inhaled or ingested. Soon the stories were focusing on possible sources of “the polonium.” Early on, most stories hinted that the polonium must have come from Russia, where nearly all of the world’s polonium-210 was produced. Soon, though, enterprising journalists were pointing out that polonium-210 was found in antistatic brushes widely used by photographers and darkrooms to remove dust from camera lenses and enlargers. The media spotlight swiftly swiveled toward the Staticmaster brush — available from Amazon.com for $34.95—which contained five hundred microcuries of polonium-210, or about one-sixth of a potentially lethal dose. Within hours every camera shop in Knoxville had sold out of Staticmaster brushes, as journalists raced to prove their resourcefulness and bravery by acquiring and brandishing an actual source of polonium. My favorite story was the one that showed the Staticmaster brush approaching the lens of the television camera itself, looming ever closer and blurrier, until finally the brush blotted out the lens entirely, just as the reporter hinted at dark deeds investigators hoped to bring to light.
By the late-night newscast on WBIR, Special Agent Charles Thornton himself — wearing a navy blue suit and sporting a businesslike gold tie cinched tight at his collar — was addressing a crowded press conference. Although he could not, Thornton said, comment specifically on any current investigation, he assured the cameras that the FBI took very seriously any actual or threatened crimes involving radioactive or nuclear materials, and was committed to investigating and preventing any such crimes. Thornton regretfully declined to take questions, including a shouted question about whether the FBI had removed radioactive material from UT Medical Center. Immediately after he ducked that question, though, the station aired a brief, fuzzy video clip — I gathered it had been shot by a hospital employee with a cell phone video camera — showing Thornton and two dark-suited agents wheeling a cart onto the loading dock at the back of UT Hospital and lifting a dark, square container into the trunk of a black sedan. Fuzzy though the video was, I recognized the box. It was the lead-lined shipping case where Duane Johnson and Hank Strickland had secured the tiny pellet of iridium-192 that had killed Dr. Leonard Novak. The pellet that might yet kill Dr. Eddie Garcia.