“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” I said innocently.
As I turned to go, she summoned me back. “This came through the fax machine for you,” she said. “From somebody over in the tree lab.”
I practically ripped the page from her hand. “I’ll be down in the osteo lab,” I called over my shoulder. “See if you can get Detective Emert and Agent Thornton on a three-way call.”
“What should I tell them it’s about?”
“Tell them it’s about the forensic power of the chainsaw,” I said.
So the tree rings,” came Emert’s voice from the speakerphone, “can tell us whether he died in 1948 or 1984 or whatever?”
“They can,” I said. “In fact, they already have.”
I’d taken the three-foot section of tulip-poplar trunk to one of my colleagues in the forestry lab. He had recut the end with a fine-toothed table saw — he’d also bored out a core sample — and had counted the growth rings. According to both counts, the tulip poplar was sixty-three years old. “That means it started growing in the spring of 1946,” I said.
“Meaning it was sometime before that,” said Miranda, “that G.I. Doe was planted.”
Eddie Garcia looked weak and scared. It had been only two days since I’d seen him, but in those forty-eight hours he’d worsened dramatically. They’d begun giving him blood transfusions of packed red blood cells, because his bone marrow had virtually ceased to function. Ironically, the transfused cells were irradiated to kill germs. As an extra precaution against infection, every nurse or doctor who entered his room had to scrub up and suit up in full surgical garb. Looking through the window, as a pair of masked figures checked his monitors and changed his IV bag, I was struck by the discrepancy between appearance and reality: it looked as if they were protecting themselves from Garcia, when in fact it was Garcia they were taking extreme precautions to safeguard. The most distressing sight, though, was his hands, swathed in thick layers of gauze. Unlike Miranda’s — so far, at least — Garcia’s localized burns had gone necrotic. His hands were dying.
I brought Garcia up to date on the Oak Ridge case, and he seemed intrigued, although maybe he was merely grateful for a distraction from his battle against acute radiation syndrome. But the drip must have contained something to ease his pain, because as I was telling him how the tree rings allowed us to estimate G.I. Doe’s time since death, his eyes lost their focus and he fell asleep. It shamed me to realize it, but I was relieved for the chance to ease away.
Late that afternoon I heard a dull thud outside my office door — the sound of something heavy hitting the floor — followed by the clatter of the stairwell door banging shut.
“Whoo,” gasped a voice I recognized as Thornton’s — a recognition confirmed by the appearance of his head in the entrance of my office as he tapped on the doorframe.
“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.