AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER 1
The colorful tents crowding the clearing where I stood wouldn’t have looked out of place at a carnival or Renaissance fair. It would be an interesting irony: a Renaissance fair — a “rebirth” fair — here at the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, the one place in the world that revolves around the study of the dead and how they decay.
The tents — white, red, green, yellow, blue — jostled for space at the Anthropology Research Facility. Decades earlier, an FBI agent had dubbed the UT facility “the Body Farm” after seeing the corpses scattered throughout the three wooded acres. The nickname had stuck, and now it was even inspiring a spin-off nickname: a former UT graduate student was now setting up a similar research facility in San Marcos, Texas. Even before her first research cadaver hit the ground, the Texas facility was being called “the Body Ranch.”
Several of the tents huddled together were supported by inflatable frames, the rest by spidery arcs of geometric tubing — Quonset huts, twenty-first-century style. Normally there were no tents here; normally the brightest splash of color, apart from the grass and the leaves on the trees, was a large blue tarp draped over our corrugated-metal equipment shed and its small, fenced-in concrete pad. The tents — whose festive colors belied the barren winter landscape and bitter cold of the day — had been erected just twenty-four hours earlier, and twenty-four hours from now they would be gone again. Despite the carnival look, the tents were a stage for the acting out of a nightmare scenario, one of the darkest events imaginable: an act of nuclear terrorism.
A nude male body lay faceup on a gurney within the largest of the tents, his puckered skin gone gray and moldy from three weeks in the cooler at the morgue at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, visible just above the Body Farm’s wooden fence and barren treeline. Fourteen other bodies — selected and stored over the preceding month — were locked in a semi-tractor-trailer parked just outside the fence. The fifteen bodies were stand-ins for what could be hundreds or thousands or even — God forbid — tens of thousands of victims if nuclear terrorists managed to inflict wholesale death in a U.S. city somewhere, someday.
Five people surrounded the gurney. Their faces and even their genders were masked by goggles, respirators, and baggy biohazard suits whose white Tyvek sleeves and legs were sealed with duct tape to black rubber gloves and boots. One of the white-garbed figures held a boxy beige instrument in one hand, and in the other, a metal wand that was connected to the box. As the wand swept a few inches above the head, then the chest and abdomen, and then each arm, the box emitted occasional clicks. As the wand neared the left knee, though, the clicks became rapid, then merged into a continuous buzz. Having spent my childhood shivering through the Cold War — practicing “duck and cover” during civil defense drills, as if my wooden school desk could shield me from a Soviet hydrogen bomb — I was well acquainted with the urgent clicking of a Geiger counter.
As the wand hovered, the other four people leaned in to inspect the knee. One took photographs; two others began spraying the body with a soapy-looking liquid and scrubbing the skin, paying particular attention to the knee. As they scrubbed, one of them removed a small orange disk, about the size of a quarter, and handed it to the team leader. A tiny, safely encapsulated speck of radioactive strontium — enough to trigger the Geiger counter, but not enough to pose any hazard — simulated contamination on the corpse. Once the scrubbing was complete, the technician with the Geiger counter checked the knee once more. This time the instrument ticked lazily, signaling normal background radiation. At a sign from the team leader, the body was wheeled out of the tent and returned to the trailer that held the other fourteen corpses, which had already undergone similar screening and decontamination procedures.
One by one, the Tyvek-suited figures rinsed off beneath what had to be the world’s coldest shower: a spray of soapy water mixed with alcohol, a last-minute addition necessitated by the day’s subfreezing temperatures. The team’s contamination, like that of the bodies, was simulated, but the goal was to make the training as realistic as possible, despite the added challenges provided by the bitter cold. Only after the shower did the goggles and respirators come off. My red-tressed, freckled graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, emerged from one of the white suits, followed shortly by Art Bohanan, the resident fingerprint expert at the Knoxville Police Department. The team leader was Hank Strickland, a health physicist, one who specialized in radiation and radiation safety. Hank worked at a facility in Oak Ridge called REAC/TS — the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center and Training Site — that sent medical response teams to help treat victims of radiation accidents anywhere in the world.
But Hank, like Miranda and Art, was here today as a volunteer team member of
DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Formed in the early 1990s to identify victims of mass disasters such as airliner crashes and hurricanes, DMORT was part of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the teams were staffed by volunteers with specialized, and even macabre, skills: their ranks included funeral directors, morticians, forensic dentists, physicians, forensic anthropologists, police officers, and fire fighters — people accustomed to working with bodies and bones. DMORT volunteers, including some of my students, had performed heroic service at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center bombings. They’d also spent two months recovering and identifying bodies after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Art himself had spent six weeks in Louisiana after Katrina, lifting fingerprints and palm prints from bloated, rotting corpses. One body was that of a man who’d been trapped in an attic by rising waters. More than a hundred days after the man drowned in the attic — how ironic was that? — Art and a colleague managed to lift a print and ID the man.
DMORT teams were acquainted with death and decay. But this training exercise represented a grim new twist to DMORT’s mission, a response to the nightmare of September 11, 2001. DMORT’s Weapons of Mass Destruction team had been formed shortly after 9/11, in grim recognition of the fact that terrorists who would turn civilian airliners into flying bombs might also attempt acts of wholesale chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorism. Because of the contamination such attacks would create, they would pose unique problems for workers recovering and identifying bodies. The WMD team’s exercise here at the Body Farm was a first step in developing and testing DMORT procedures for handling radiation-contaminated bodies — the sorts of contaminants that would be unleashed, for example, if a radioactive “dirty bomb” were exploded in New York Harbor.
Although it grieved me that nuclear-disaster procedures had to be developed, it made me proud that my research facility could help in the process. The Body Farm was the only place in the world where an emergency-response team like DMORT could simulate a mass disaster realistically, using numerous bodies. Although fifteen bodies was a tiny fraction of the number of victims who would die in an actual dirty-bomb explosion in New York — some estimates put the worst-case number of fatalities from that scenario at fifty thousand or more — fifteen was a place to start, and that was far more bodies than DMORT would be likely to use anyplace else.
Miranda and Art emerged from the decontamination shower stomping their boots and rubbing their arms, their breath steaming in the bitter air. “Sweet Jesus, I am so cold,” said Miranda. I wasn’t getting sprayed with cold water, but I was cold, too; I’d gotten an artificial hip about six months before, when a bullet shattered the top of my left femur, and the cold titanium implant ached deep within my hip. Miranda’s teeth began to chatter. “Whose bright idea was it,” she said, “to do this on the coldest day of the worst cold snap on record?”
“It’s not as fun as reading by the fireplace,” Art said, “but unless you can get the terrorists to attack only when the weather’s nice, it helps to practice in the worst conditions you can.”
“I know, I know,” grumbled Miranda. “It’s just that I’m so cold. After that shower, I might not have an impure thought ever again.”
“I didn’t realize you’d had them before,” said Art. “I didn’t think graduate students had time for such things.”
“Only during spring break,” I said.
“Spring break? What’s spring break?” said Miranda, feigning puzzlement and indignation. “I just want to spend the next six months in a hot bath.”
Just then my cell phone rang. Tugging off a thick glove, I fished the phone from my pocket and flipped it open, the cold biting at my fingertips. According to the display, the caller was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. “Hi, Peggy,” I said. “I hope you’re calling to tell me a heat wave is bearing down on us in the next five minutes.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m calling to tell you I have an agitated police lieutenant from Oak Ridge on the line.”
A small city about twenty-five miles west of Knoxville, Oak Ridge was home to a wide range of high-tech research and manufacturing industries, but the city’s main claim to fame was its pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, the race to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. “Did the lieutenant say what he’s agitated about?”
“They’ve just found a body they want you to take a look at,” she said. “Apparently they don’t find a lot of bodies in Oak Ridge.”
“No, the radioactivity helps protect them,” I said. “Killers are afraid of folks who glow in the dark.” It was an old, tired joke Knoxvillians tended to make about Oak Ridgers — one that Oak Ridgers sometimes made about themselves, in a sort of preemptive first strike of defiant civic pride.
“Well, you be careful,” she said. “All those fences and guard towers and nuclear reactors and bomb factories scare me.”
She patched through the Oak Ridge officer, Lieutenant Dewar. When I hung up, I said to Miranda, “You didn’t really want that hot bath, did you?”
“No, of course not,” she said, having heard my end of the conversation. “What I really want to do is complete my transformation into the Human Icicle.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I’ve got just the job for you.”
CHAPTER 2
Five minutes after the phone call from Oak Ridge, Miranda and I pulled away from the Body Farm, navigated the asphalt maze surrounding UT Medical Center, and crossed the Tennessee River. Far below the highway bridge, a ribbon of frigid green swirled between banks sheathed in ice.
A thought occurred to me, and instead of staying on Alcoa Highway to Interstate 40, I angled the truck onto Kingston Pike and threaded the winding streets into my neighborhood, Sequoyah Hills.
“I thought we were racing to a death scene in Oak Ridge,” said Miranda.
“We are,” I said. “But I just thought of something we might need, so we’re racing to my house first.”
“I hope what you’re thinking we might need is called ‘lunch,’” Miranda said, “because I’m getting hungry enough to chew my arm off.”
“The cupboard’s bare,” I said, “so you might as well start chewing. Don’t eat both arms — I’ll need you to take notes at the scene.”
“Your concern is deeply touching.”
“I know,” I said. “Sometimes I move myself to tears. Oh, if you’d prefer something vegetarian, I think there’s a Snickers bar in the glove box.” Evidently she did, because she opened the latch and rummaged around beneath a sheaf of registration papers and maintenance records.
“There better not be a mousetrap hidden in this — YOUCH!” She jumped, and that made me flinch. She laughed as she fished out the candy bar. “You are so gullible,” she said. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“I knew you were faking,” I said. “But I also knew you’d sulk if I didn’t play along.” As I pulled into the driveway, I tapped the remote to open the garage.
Miranda unwrapped one end of the Snickers bar — the giant size — and bit down. “Youch!” she said again, this time in earnest. “This thing is hard as a rock.” She studied the faint impressions her teeth had made in the frozen chocolate. “Lucky I didn’t break my teeth — I’d be suing UT for workers’ comp.”
“You’d file a claim for missing teeth? In Tennessee? You’d be laughed out of the state,” I said.
She flashed me a big, sarcastic smile — Miranda had one of the best smiles I’d ever seen — and then began gnawing at one corner of the Snickers with her right molars, the immense bar clenched in her fist. “You stay here and work on that,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I found what I was looking for in the garage — an oblong case made of bright orange plastic — and stowed it in the rear of the pickup. As I got back in the cab, Miranda’s eyebrows shot up quizzically. I smiled, backed out of the driveway, and headed for Oak Ridge. Miranda’s jaws were working hard — evi
dently she had sheared off a huge hunk of the candy bar. Finally she mumbled, “Ih at wuh I ink ih ih?”
“What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying when you mumble like that.”
“Ih AT wuh I INK ih ih?!”
“The problem here,” I said, “is not that I’m deaf. The problem here is that you’re talking with your mouth full.”
She rolled her eyes but swallowed hard, and I could see her running her tongue along the front and sides of her teeth to swab off the chocolate and caramel and peanuts. She swallowed again. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Is what what you think it is?” She popped me one on the shoulder, hard. “Youch,” I said. “Oh, you mean that thing I put in the back? It is if you think it’s a Stihl ‘Farm Boss’ chainsaw, model 290.” I liked the name, Stihl — German, originally, I guessed — and the fact that it was pronounced “steel.” A manly name for a manly power tool.
“Why on earth are you bringing a chainsaw to a death scene? You planning to dismember the body, just to make the case more interesting?”
“I used to be a Boy Scout,” I said. “It’s always a good idea to be prepared.”
“Yeah, well, it’s always a good idea to be sane, too,” she said, “but I don’t see you taking giant steps in that direction at the moment.”
“Watch and learn, grasshopper,” I said. “Watch and learn.”
We drove the twenty-five miles to Oak Ridge in silence. Near-silence, actually, broken only by the grinding, smacking sounds of Miranda’s molars steadily dismantling the rest of the Snickers bar.
As we topped the last rise before dropping down the four-lane into Oak Ridge, Miranda pointed at the Cumberlands, ten miles to the north. High atop Buffalo Mountain, a serpentine line of white wind turbines reared against the azure sky. The three-bladed rotors — they looked like the world’s largest airplane propellers — flashed as their tips caught the sun’s rays and whirled them back again. Judging by how far the turbines towered above nearby trees, they must have stretched nearly four hundred feet into the sky.
