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Thornton nodded, but there was a grudging quality to the nod. “So as long as somebody bags the body for you and you stick that wand in the bag, you can find the body?” This time anyone could have detected the impatience in Arpad’s expression.
“That’s about thirty grams of soil,” Arpad said. “An ounce. There’s probably a few picograms — a few billionths of an ounce — of decomp chemicals in that sample. This isn’t infallible, but it’s not bad for starters, considering that you can buy it on eBay for eighty bucks.”
“So that’s not the sniffer you’re creating for DOJ, right?”
“Right. This is the sniffer we’re creating for DOJ.” Arpad opened a cabinet and removed an instrument that appeared to be a cross between a metal detector and a weed whacker. On closer inspection, I noticed that instead of a loop or a cutting head, the lower end of the device held a small cylindrical probe. Arpad flipped a switch at the upper end of the device, and it clicked slowly, much like a Geiger counter. “Depending on which sensors we put in the probe,” he said, “we can search for a fresh body, a decaying body, or a really old one.” He inserted the probe into the bag, and after a few seconds the clicks ran together into a machine-gun-fire buzz.
Thornton leaned forward and studied the sniffer. “So how long would it take to search an area with that rig?”
“Depends on how big the area is,” said Arpad. “These photos seem to indicate the general location, but we could still be talking about an area a hundred yards square. If you tried to put the probe into the ground every square foot, you’d be taking eight hundred thousand samples. You got months to spend poking the tip of this into the ground?”
Thornton shrugged. “If that’s what it takes. We’ve spent years looking for Jimmy Hoffa.”
“Well, I don’t have years,” said Arpad. “I don’t even have a week, because my DOJ sponsors are breathing down my neck to lock the design of this thing so they can start getting it into the hands of police departments all around the country.”
“Any suggestions,” I intervened, “on how we might harness this as efficiently as possible?”
“I suggest we bring in a cadaver dog to prescreen the search area, see if there are places he’s interested in. Dogs cover ground faster than we can; a good dog could save us days or weeks of gridwork.”
“I thought the idea behind this was to replace the dog,” said Thornton.
“More like ‘supplement’ the dog,” Arpad said. “Dogs have spent millions of years evolving great noses. They can be trained to pick up tiny, tiny traces of specific scents — bombs, drugs, truffles, tumors, human bones. Not only can they detect it, they can track it, swim upstream — figuratively speaking — to the source of it. Scent isn’t a static, stationary thing; it’s almost got a life of its own, like moving water: it flows, it pools, it sinks, it creeps along underground layers of rock. A good cadaver dog can work his way up that current of scent — a few molecules at a time — till he gets closer and closer to the source. If we bring in a good cadaver dog, we could narrow the search area by ninety percent or more.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. “You know any good cadaver dogs?”
“Actually, yes,” said Arpad. “A German shepherd named Cherokee. He found some bare human bones in a creek bed up near Bristol, which isn’t particularly amazing; he found a freshly drowned man in twenty feet of water in the Big South Fork River, which is rather amazing. I actually worked with Cherokee to help calibrate the sniffer. I ran different decomp samples past him to see if he’d alert on them — to make sure he’d recognize them as human remains. Then I repeated the process with synthetic, laboratory mixtures of a few of the key chemicals in decomp. Cherokee alerted on them; so did the sniffer. All that was indoors. Then we went out into the woods, where we did all that again with buried samples. The dog found them all; so did the sniffer.”
Thornton settled back in his chair and drummed his fingers together. “So, no offense intended,” he said, “but what’s the sniffer got that the dog doesn’t have?”
“It’s got stamina,” said Arpad. “A dog’s nose gives out pretty quickly — the neurons that send signals to the brain just get tired and quit sending. A cadaver dog can work intensely for maybe half an hour, tops, then he’s got to rest. The only thing that gives out in the sniffer is the battery, and that takes sixty seconds to replace.”
Thornton nodded, satisfied. “You reckon we could get Cherokee out here anytime soon to scout around, help us narrow down the search area?”
“I’ll call and see,” he said. “Where’s the search area?” He reached back to a credenza tucked beneath the window and grabbed a cylinder of rolled paper. Unfurling a topographic map of the Oak Ridge Reservation, he spread it on his desk and weighted the corners with books.
Thornton and I looked at each other. “There’s the rub,” I said. “We’re not exactly sure.” Arpad’s gaze swiveled from me to Thornton and back again. I laid one of the hillside pictures on the map. “We think it’s buried here, where this picture of this barn was taken.”
“And where’s the barn?”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “We don’t know where it is. Or was.”
He looked stunned. “You’re saying it could be — or could have been — anywhere on the reservation?” I nodded glumly. “And you don’t even know if it still exists?” I nodded again. “This is a chemical probe, guys, not a magic wand,” he said. “You’re talking about a search area that’s, what, fifty thousand acres? It would take a lifetime to probe this whole place. Several lifetimes. I don’t mind looking for a needle in a haystack, but this is fifty thousand haystacks. Call me when you can narrow it down to just one.”
* * *
As we drove away from the research complex, I said to Thornton, “Arpad’s a little low-key, but he’s really excited about this.”
Thornton guffawed. “Yeah,” he said. “And Miranda’s voting Republican in the next election.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Okay, he’s not so excited,” I admitted. “I was trying to be upbeat. Sorry we wasted the trip.”
“Wasn’t wasted,” he said. “I can call up Arpad’s sponsor at DOJ and tell him the gadget works. Long as you already know where the body is.” I must have looked alarmed, because he quickly added, “Kidding. I’m kidding.”
We headed east, back toward Oak Ridge and Knoxville, for about a mile, then Thornton pointed to a sign on the left. “There it is — SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE,” he said. “That’s my stop.” The road wound uphill in a series of gentle S-curves; at the top of the ridge sprawled an immense new building, five curving stories of green glass and brushed aluminum.
“Wow,” I said. “Arpad needs to make friends with these guys. They’ve got better digs.” I parked near the entrance in a spot marked VISITOR, though we could have taken our pick of dozens of other convenient spots. “More parking, too.”
“I think they’re still putting the finishing touches on this,” he said. “I don’t believe the neutrons are spallating fully just yet.”
“Remind me what spallation means,” I said, as we walked toward the glass doors.
“Comes from the same root word as spa-lat,” he said, then he laughed. “Nah, kidding again. It’s from spalling—chipping — like concrete does. Spallation’s a subatomic version of concrete chipping. This thing fires zillions of neutrons out a huge linear accelerator — see that long, straight dike of dirt there, running from the main building over to that smaller building way over there? I think the accelerator’s under there. Anyhow, it shoots neutrons at experimental targets or materials, and then people who are a lot smarter than I am figure out all sorts of important things about those materials, based on what happens when the neutrons bash into them.”
“Bash?”
“Bash. Splat. Wham. Take your pick. They’re all scientifically rigorous and precise.”
“Rigorous,” I said.
“And precise.”
“So they make ra
dioisotopes here with some of the bashing?”
“Huh? I don’t think so,” he said. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Well, you have a meeting with an isotopes-production guy,” I said, “and we’re here.”
“Ah,” he said. “A reasonable inference, but wrong. They make the isotopes at a research reactor, the High-Flux Isotope Reactor. But the security’s tighter there, and the digs are better here. And the isotopes guy is apparently better connected than Arpad.”
Thornton’s “isotopes guy”—the program’s director, it turned out, named Barry Vandergriff — met us in the atrium and motioned us toward a cluster of overstuffed armchairs in an alcove of the lobby. I excused myself from their meeting and wandered among a series of displays that showed cutaway drawings of the facility’s accelerator and neutron-beam guides and experimental capabilities. Some of it was over my head, but I did grasp the notion that neutrons — and how they got deflected or scattered as they bounced off materials, or passed through them — could shed a lot of light on the molecular structure of metals, plastics, even the proteins that make up living organisms.
