CHAPTER 5
As soon as Miranda had plucked the small metal pellet from Eddie Garcia’s hand and dropped it into the sink, she and Garcia and I had hurried out of the autopsy suite and held a brief, urgent conference in the hallway. Detective Emert, still ashen-faced from his nausea, turned a whiter shade of pale when he heard us discussing radioactivity and hospital evacuation.
On the one hand, we weren’t certain that the pellet was radioactive, so we didn’t want to create needless alarm. On the other hand, we didn’t want to put people in danger, and that seemed to be a risk, if Novak had indeed died of some sort of radiation poisoning.
I hadn’t touched the pellet or even the body, at least not once the autopsy began, so my risk of contamination seemed lower than Miranda’s or Garcia’s. I picked up the receiver from a wall-mounted phone in the hallway and buzzed Lynette Wilkins, the receptionist at the front desk of the morgue. “Lynette,” I said, as evenly as I could manage, “this is Dr. Brockton. I’m in the hallway outside the autopsy suite with Dr. Garcia and Miranda Lovelady and an Oak Ridge police detective. We have a problem back here. Could you please round up everybody else in the Forensic Center and take them out the front door, into the hospital basement?”
“Oh God,” she said. “Is there some nutcase back there with a gun? All you have to say is ‘yes’ and I’ll call for a SWAT team.”
“No, no,” I said, “it’s nothing like that. The only crazy people back here are us. We have what might be a contaminated body, and we want to make sure we don’t expose anybody else to contamination.”
“Do you want me to call the hospital hazmat team?”
“I’m not sure hazmat’s what we’re dealing with,” I said. “Miranda’s making a call right now that should help us figure it out. Just get everybody out calmly, would you?”
“Of course, Dr. B.”
“And Lynette?”
“Yes?”
“Lock the door behind you. And put up a DO NOT ENTER sign.”
“God almighty. Y’all be careful.”
Miranda had called Hank, the health physicist who was part of the DMORT team. Hank was on his way from Oak Ridge, but it would take him at least thirty or forty minutes to arrive. In the meantime, he suggested she call Duane Johnson. “Of course,” said Garcia when she relayed the suggestion. “If I weren’t so rattled, I’d have thought of Duane right away.”
“Who’s Duane?” I asked.
“He’s the hospital’s radiological protection officer,” said Garcia. “A medical physicist, I think he’s called, on the School of Medicine faculty. He trains interns and residents in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He keeps track of all the hospital’s medical radioisotopes, and he trains ER teams how to respond if there’s a nuclear accident or terrorist act. His office is up on the ground floor, practically right over our heads, and he’s got all sorts of instruments and safety gear.”
Thirty seconds later Garcia was on the phone with Johnson, describing the tiny metallic pellet he’d found and the trail of shredded GI tissue leading up to it. Three minutes after the phone call, we heard a clatter at the far end of the hallway and Johnson appeared, wheeling a cart. The cart measured two or three feet square by six feet tall; one side was fitted with a corrugated blue door that resembled the flexible shutter on a big-city storefront or an antique rolltop desk. “Your receptionist didn’t want to let me in,” he said to Garcia. “I had to explain pretty bluntly that it was in her best interests and yours to unlock the door so I could figure out what’s going on in here.” He slid the plastic door up, revealing shelves laden with disposable clothing, cleaning solutions, plastic bags, and electronic instruments.
Rummaging around in a bin at the bottom of the cart, Johnson removed a tan Geiger counter, identical to the one Hank had used at the DMORT training, and switched it on. I heard the slow, buzzing clicks I had come to recognize as the baseline sound of normal, background radiation, like a clock ticking or a diesel engine idling. He extended the wand toward Garcia. “Hold out your hands,” he said, and when Garcia did, Hank passed the wand over them, front and back. The instrument continued to buzz at the same slow, reassuring rate. Next he waved the wand over Garcia’s body from head to foot, with the same quiet results, and then over Miranda, and then over me and Emert. I felt myself starting to relax, and I relaxed a lot more when Duane said, “Well, there’s no contamination on any of you.”
Then he stepped around a corner and opened the door of the autopsy suite, and suddenly all hell broke loose. The Geiger counter ratcheted up to a harsh, continuous buzz, and a small, pager-looking gadget at Duane’s waist began shrieking. “Son of a bitch,” said Duane, backpedaling fast. Both instruments quieted down once he was away from the door, but my heart and my nerves — which had zoomed up in sync with the gadgets — continued to rev. “Something in there is hot as a pistol,” he said. He looked shaken, and that didn’t do a lot to calm me back down.
I was feeling some fear for my own safety, but more concern for Garcia’s and Emert’s, and — especially — for Miranda’s. She was a young woman of childbearing age, and if there was risk from radiation, she was potentially the most vulnerable. She was also my student, and I felt responsible for her safety. “Duane,” I said, “do we need to get out of here? And do we need to evacuate the hospital, or part of it?”
“We’re okay here,” said Duane, glancing at the meter as he said it. “These walls are concrete, and they’re pretty stout down here in the basement, so they’re good shielding. I’d like to figure out what kind of radiation this is, and how hot it is, before we do something as drastic as evacuating patients. If you start moving sick people, you can make them a lot sicker. But let me make sure the folks just above us aren’t at risk. Where’s the nearest phone?” Garcia pointed to the wall behind Johnson, and Johnson dialed a five-digit extension. “Hi, it’s Duane,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got an odd request. I’m one floor below you guys right now. Could you run a survey meter around the offices and labs up there, make sure nothing’s coming up through the floor?” I heard the faint sound of questions bleeding out of the receiver. “The morgue,” Duane said. “I’m down in the morgue.” I heard more faint questions. “Look, just do it, would you? Like, right now? And if your active dosimeter isn’t already on, turn it on before you do anything else.” I saw a look of impatience flash across his face; he paused long enough for me to hear urgency in the voice at the other end of the line. “We may have an incident down here,” said the physicist, “but I don’t have time to talk right now. Check the whole lab area, get people out if you need to, and page me if you see anything worth worrying about. I’ll call you back in a few minutes, but right now I gotta go.” He hung up the phone and turned to the four of us. “We’re right underneath the cyclotron lab,” he said, “where we make radiopharmaceuticals for PET scans. The floor’s really thick, there are no patients in that area, and the staff knows how to make sure it’s safe up there.” He eyed the corner of the hallway. Around it lay the door of the morgue and the danger lurking within. He drew a deep breath. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”