“There’s a chunk of something down in the cut,” a man near the front called out quickly. This fifty-dollar-a-head crowd was quick and competitive, like a bunch of straight-A students competing in Brain Bowl.
“Very good,” I said. Lodged deep in the fissure was what appeared to be a boulder, several times the size of my head. “That looks pretty big under the electron microscope, but it’s actually a tiny speck, about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. About the thickness of the down on a newborn baby’s head. We analyzed that speck with an attachment to the microscope, something called an atom probe. Anybody want to guess what that speck is?”
Comments popped like kernels of corn. “Blood.” “DNA.” “Semen?” “Ooh, gross.” “Blood.” “Steel.”
“Steel’s close,” I said, “but not quite right. That’s a particle of cerium oxide. Cerium oxide is a ceramic that’s used to make knife sharpeners. The man who stabbed this girl had just sharpened his knife.”
A woman exclaimed, “Oh, dear God.”
The man near the front said, “So they did catch the killer?”
I always hated answering this question. “Unfortunately, no. If this were an episode of CSI, they would have arrested him after fifty-nine minutes. But in real life, people get away with murder. The police thought she’d been killed by one of her relatives, an uncle; the rumor was, he had a big pot patch and Leatha had threatened to tell the police about it. Her body was found in the woods near his house, hidden in a trash heap.” I always had trouble telling the next part. “The police actually found a cerium knife sharpener in his kitchen drawer.” I heard murmurs of distress and indignation from the audience. “But there was no direct evidence tying him to the crime. ‘A lot of people have cerium knife sharpeners,’ the prosecutor told me. ‘Hell, I have a cerium knife sharpener, but that doesn’t make me a killer.’ They never made an arrest, and that’s one of the sad parts of this job: Sometimes your best just isn’t quite good enough. I think we let Leatha down.”
I ended my lecture with a case that was gruesome but not so sad: the case of a woman who died at home and whose body was eventually eaten by her three hungry dogs. By the time I recounted the search for the woman’s missing diamond ring — a search that required a hapless sheriff’s deputy to collect a bushel of dog crap, which I X-rayed in a fruitless search for the ring — the audience was shrieking in horrified amusement. Leave them laughing if you can, I thought. They’ll get sad again soon enough.
After the lights came up and the screen came down, I packed up my slides and answered a few individual questions, things people hadn’t felt comfortable asking in a crowd — one woman wondered whether I would be able to tell, twenty years postmortem, if a sister’s fatal gunshot wound was a case of murder or suicide. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Women don’t tend to commit suicide by gunshot, but if the M.E. who did the autopsy was competent, I doubt that I’d see it any differently.”
As the crowd gradually trickled out, I noticed a man lingering near the back of the auditorium. Unlike most of the jeans-and-sweater crowd, he wore a wool suit, an oxford-cloth shirt, and a silk tie. The clothes looked expensive but subdued, as if the man wore them because he liked them, not because he wanted to impress others. He made his way forward as I finished packing my slides and projector. “Fascinating talk, Dr. Brockton,” he said. “Especially the SEM case — great use of heavy research artillery on a forensic case. Cutting-edge work, if you’ll pardon an inappropriate pun.”
“I’m the world’s worst punner, I’m told. No pardon necessary. You must have a science background if you’re on a first-name basis with a scanning electron microscope.”
“I do. I’m in research and development at a company called OrthoMedica.” He said it offhandedly, as if he doubted I’d ever heard of it, but the truth was, OrthoMedica was one of the nation’s biggest and best-known biomedical companies. An international conglomerate, it sold billions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies, artificial joints, and consumer health-care products every year. He fished a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Dr. Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D.,” it read. “Vice President, R&D.” The OrthoMedica logo intrigued me: It took Leonardo da Vinci’s classic drawing of the proportions of the human figure, Vitruvian Man, and gave it a high-tech, Bionic Man twist, superimposing X-rays and robotic prostheses and scans on various parts of the body.
I glanced at the address. “I didn’t realize OrthoMedica was based in Bethesda.”
“Spitting distance from here,” he said. “We collaborate closely with the National Institutes of Health. Our campus is less than a mile from theirs. We also work with Johns Hopkins, just up the road in Baltimore. And with Walter Reed Army Hospital and the Pentagon.”
“The Pentagon?”
He nodded. “Sure. The military drives a lot of health-care R&D, especially in areas like wound care and trauma surgery and prostheses.” It made sense: Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers had been wounded in the Iraq war, many of them by improvised explosive devices that blew off arms or legs.
He reached into his pocket again, removing a printout that he unfolded and handed to me. “Did you happen to see this story in the New York Times a while back? I thought of it when I saw the announcement about your talk.”
I glanced at the story, which described how the U.S. military was now doing “virtual autopsies”—CT scans — on the bodies of all soldiers killed in Iraq. “Yes, I remember reading this,” I said. “Fascinating. They’re using scanners to examine lethal wounds so they can develop better body armor and helmets and armored vehicles, right?”
“Exactly. CT scans are such a rich vein of biomedical data. As you might imagine, OrthoMedica has quite an interest in mining that vein. Which brings me to you.”
“Me? How so?”
“During your presentation today, I was struck by what a unique resource your Body Farm is. A thousand modern skeletons — specimens whose age and race and sex and stature you know — plus, what, a hundred donated bodies every year?”
“Actually, we’re getting closer to one-fifty now.”
“And do you scan those bodies as they come in, before they go out to the Farm?”
“I wish,” I said. “We’ve scanned most of the skeletons in the collection — we got a grant to do that — but we don’t have a way to scan the bodies. The hospital’s Radiology Department isn’t too keen on having dead bodies hauled up there and run through the same machines they use for live patients.”
He chuckled. “What would you think of having a dedicated scanner at the Body Farm?”
“I’d think it was swell. But those things cost serious money — hundreds of thousands of dollars, even used ones. Our entire annual budget for the Body Farm is less than ten thousand, and we’re looking at budget cuts that might whittle it down even below that.”
“Terrible. A one-of-a-kind, world-renowned research facility, and you’re running it on a financial shoestring. Would you be interested in some research funding? A collaborative project involving the Body Farm, the university’s Biomedical Engineering Department, and OrthoMedica?”