“I’ll try not to make any sudden moves,” I said, opening the door amid billows of steam. As we made our way to the counter, I could feel my stomach rumbling and my salivary glands awakening.
The Soup Kitchen served soups and salads and bread cafeteria-style. The day’s soups — seven, usually, though by the time we got there they were down to five — were written in marker on a dry-erase board behind the serving counter. I ordered chili topped with a mound of Fritos and shredded cheddar; Isabella chose a creamy spinach soup that looked thick enough to clog arteries with a single serving. She got a small, round loaf of brown bread to go with hers; I figured the Fritos counted as my bread.
The chili was tangy but not spicy, with just the right balance of tomato, ground beef, onion, and toppings. I nodded my approval. “You were so smart to suggest this place,” I said.
“I didn’t. You did.”
“Well then,” I said, “I was so smart to suggest this place.”
“You were. It’s the second-best restaurant in Oak Ridge.”
Just then my cell phone rang. I frowned at the interruption, but when I saw the number, I murmured an apology to Isabella and answered the call. “I am about to make you a happy man,” said Jim Emert. “A very happy man.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Detective, I’m flattered,” I said, “but I just don’t feel attracted to you in that way. I have a strong preference for women.” I winked at Isabella across the table, but she was too busy slicing and buttering her bread to notice.
“Very funny,” he said. “Just for that, never mind.”
“Never mind what?”
“Never mind the great news I was about to share with you.”
“You caught the guy who killed Novak?”
“You might think this is better,” he said.
“You figured out who killed Novak and who killed G.I. Doe?”
“Better,” he said.
“The secret to world peace?”
“Better, better, better,” he said.
Suddenly it hit me. “No kidding? You’re serious?”
“I am,” he said.
“This is huge.”
“I knew you’d appreciate the significance,” Emert said. “We should have it safely in hand in another ten minutes.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He laughed. “This is worth dashing over from Knoxville at two hundred miles an hour?”
“It is,” I said, “but I don’t have to; I’m already in Oak Ridge. In fact, I’m only a couple of blocks downhill. Isabella and I are having lunch at the Soup Kitchen.”
“Very handy,” he said. “Just mosey on up when you get done.”
I snapped the phone shut. “Big break in the Novak case,” I said. Her eyes widened. “They’re finally draining the swimming pool. I’m about to get my chainsaw back.”
She looked deeply confused for a moment, then gave her head a brisk little shake, as if trying to shake off a deep fog or a hard knock. Then she laughed in disbelief. “Greater love hath no man,” she said.
“Don’t be jealous,” I teased. “I’d hate to have to choose. I would miss you.”
She rolled her eyes, then pinched off a piece of bread and flicked it at me across the table.
A stone’s throw from the Soup Kitchen, a staircase led upward through a small garden — or what would have been a garden in any other season of the year — and brought me out on Jackson Square, the original heart of wartime Oak Ridge. Since the city’s earliest days, the Jackson Square pharmacy had been dispensing medications, and the community theater had been dispensing tragedy and comedy. Slightly higher up the hill stood the Chapel on the Hill and the Alexander Inn, dramatic reminders of how the past of a place could thrive or could be allowed to die.
Crossing the street and stepping onto the sidewalk leading up to the inn, I noticed that the gutter alongside the curb ran dark with brackish water. A fire hose had been hooked to a drain notched into the embankment beneath the pool, and the hose was now dumping the pool’s contents down the gutter. With a gurgle and a swirl, the foul water plunged through a cast-iron grate and into a storm sewer. I heard a distant splashing sound — either the sewer pipe was huge or this drain emptied into a deep shaft — and I remembered Isabella talking about the elaborate network of tunnels the Army had built beneath Oak Ridge at the time of the city’s creation.
A small utility truck marked OAK RIDGE FIRE DEPARTMENT was parked alongside the pool, as was Emert’s car. Emert, wearing a red parka, stood at one end of the pool chatting with a firefighter. The detective hoisted a hand to wave as I approached. “Good timing,” he said. “We’re getting close to the bottom of the pool now. Unless it’s the deepest motel swimming pool ever dug.”
My eye was caught by a water-filled container standing between Emert and the firefighter. It was the trash can I’d given Emert on the loading dock of the hospital the day he fished Leonard Novak’s wallet and driver’s license from his pants pocket. Only ten days had passed. but it seemed like a lot of time — and a lot of innocence — had flowed beneath the bridge. Two people who mattered profoundly to me — a physician I respected deeply, and a student I felt closer to than anyone else on earth — hung in limbo, waiting to find out if they would lose fingertips or hands or even life itself. If Garcia’s bone marrow and immune system did not recover, a minor infection could quickly escalate and kill him. Even if he survived, he might well be disfigured for life; his injuries could end his career, and deal a crushing blow to his spirit and his family life.
I pushed the thoughts from my mind. There was nothing I could do to change the outcome for Garcia or Miranda, and there was no reason to burden Emert with my worries. “Okay,” I said, “so let’s talk strategy here. How do we get the saw out of the pool and into the trash can really quick?” I pointed to the swimming pool’s ladder. “That only goes halfway down the side of the pool, and you know that the concrete’s got to be slick as glass.”
“We’re way ahead of you, Doc,” he said. He pointed to the fence behind him. A long aluminum pole lay there, a lifeguard’s version of a shepherd’s crook. “We’ll just hook that through the guard bar,” he said, “and hoist it up. Rescue complete.”
A moment later, I nudged him. The curving, tubular guard bar of the saw came into view as the water receded. It was followed by the top of the saw’s orange casing, its brightness dulled considerably by a layer of slime.
The firefighter picked up the pole and threaded the crook through the guard bar. Spreading his feet wide for balance, he raised the pole with a hand-over-hand motion, almost as if he were reeling in a fish. As the saw cleared the edge of the pool, I took hold of it — slime and all — and unhooked it from the pole, then lowered it, engine first, into the clear water in the trash can. “The gods be praised,” I said.
“I’ll be damned,” Emert said.
I looked at him, puzzled, but he wasn’t addressing me. He was addressing the bottom of the pool, where the water, as it continued to recede, was revealing the unmistakable outline of another corpse. Protruding from its chest was the handle of a knife.
PART THREE
I feel we have blood on our hands.
Never mind. It’ll all come out in the wash.