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“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 st
one’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.
— Robert Oppenheimer to President Harry S. Truman, October, 1945
Never mind. It’ll all come out in the wash.
— Truman’s response to Oppenheimer
CHAPTER 33
Emert, the firefighter, and I stared down at the body in the pool, the knife jutting from the chest. The first thing Emert did — after letting a few more cusswords fly — was call Hank Strickland at REAC/TS and say, “You got that Geiger counter handy?” Evidently Hank did. “Could you come check out another body for us? I don’t want to turn another medical examiner into a human gamma detector.” Emert had his phone in one hand and his personal radiation monitor in the other. The chirper remained reassuringly quiet, even when Emert stretched it out over the pool.
Hank arrived fifteen minutes later. By then the parking lot was filling with police cars and fire trucks. “Have gadget, will travel,” Hank said.
“Your office is only two blocks away,” I said, pointing down the hill to the hospital. “You call that traveling?” Hank shrugged. “How come it took you fifteen minutes to travel two blocks?”
“I was in the middle of a very important email,” he said. “A chain letter, only it’s email. Break the chain, you’re in for seven years of bad luck.” He looked at the body in the pool. “Maybe this guy broke the chain.”
“I’d say a knife in the chest is more like seven seconds of bad luck,” I said.
“I’d say it’s more like bad karma,” Emert said. “Somebody catches a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, that’s bad luck. Somebody catches a dagger in the left ventricle, that’s probably not so random.”
“So answer me this,” said Hank. “How come Novak’s body was frozen in the ice, but this guy sank to the bottom? And don’t tell me it’s because he had a chainsaw for an anchor. The chainsaw was a postmortem decorative accent, if the story I heard is true.” He grinned at me.
“True,” said Emert, “every word. Doc, you got a scientific explanation?”
“Maybe he’s got rocks in his pockets,” I said. “Or just denser bones. Novak was ninety-three, after all. His bones were probably pretty porous. But some people are floaters, and some are sinkers. I’ve got a friend who bobs like a cork, but I’m like a shark — if I don’t keep swimming, I sink to the bottom.”
Hank stretched the Geiger counter’s wand out over the edge of the pool; he set the detector for gamma radiation first, then beta, then alpha. The instrument emitted only the slow, comforting ticking I’d come to recognize as the sign of background radiation. Armed with that reassurance, he ventured down into the pool, with the help of a ladder off one of the fire trucks, and surveyed the body at close range. Satisfied that it posed no hazard, he climbed out.
Next to descend the ladder was Emert, who donned his coroner’s hat long enough to confirm that the man who’d been submerged for days or weeks with a knife in his heart was indeed dead. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the coroner in Munchkinland pronounces the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house to be “not only merely dead,” but “really most sincerely dead.”
Emert had called Art Bohanan and asked if Art would mind looking for prints on one more piece of evidence, and Art had agreed. Using a set of tongs he’d taken from an evidence kit, Emert worked the knife from the man’s chest, taking care not to touch the handle. He sealed the knife in an evidence bag, labeled it, and handed it up to me. Even through the bag’s plastic, even through the smear of body fluids and water on the blade, I thought I discerned the distinctive swirls of Damascus steel. “Looks like the missing knife from Novak’s display case,” I said.
“It is,” he said. “I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”
* * *
A cloud of mist shrouded the knife handle. Art squeezed the spray bottle twice more. Mopping a few stray droplets from my face, I said, “And why is it you’re wetting it?”
“The moisture helps the superglue latch onto the oils from the print,” he said.
“I knew that,” I said.
He laid the knife in the transparent chamber
of a boxy glass and metal apparatus—“the Bohanan Apparatus” was its official name, and it was patented — and switched on the device’s heating element. As the element vaporized the glue, white fumes swirled into the chamber hiding the knife from view. After several minutes Art switched on a fan, which sucked the fumes out of the glass chamber, up through an exhaust hood, and away from the KPD crime lab.
Holding the knife by the blade, Art lifted it from the fuming chamber and held it under a magnifying desk lamp. After studying it for a moment, he leaned back. “Take a look at the tang,” he said.
“Okay. Where do I look to see the tang?”
He laughed. “The tang is the part of the blade the handle is riveted to,” he said. “This knife has a thick blade, so the tang’s thick, too — an eighth of an inch, maybe three-sixteenths. That handle is horn, which is hard to print, but the metal tang can actually be etched by the oil in a fingerprint. Look right there,” he said, pointing to a spot near the guard that separated the tang from the sharpened edge of the blade. Dozens of closely spaced lines crossed the tang, with one tiny swirl at the center. “That’s a pretty good print,” he said.
“But it’s less than a quarter-inch wide,” I said. “Is that enough to match to anything?”
Art picked up a printout that showed a complete set of prints. “Look at the right thumb,” he said. I took the page and held it under the magnifying glass. “What do you think?”
“That loop in the center has the same little break as the one on the knife,” I said. “I think it’s the same print.”
“I think so, too,” he said, “and I’m pretty good at this stuff.”
I glanced at the words on the paper. The prints had been reproduced from a U.S. government security clearance file. “Damn,” I said. “He didn’t go gentle into that good night, did he?”
