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“Thank you so much,” Miranda said. “It was seeming a little too pleasant in here to suit me.”
I helped Emert out of the room, mopped up his mess, and found a clean pair of scrubs for me. When I got back into the suite, Garcia was puzzling over the gut, going through it with scissors and forceps. “Hmm,” he said, at regular intervals. After a half dozen or so “hmm’s,” it seemed worth asking what he meant.
So I asked. “What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”
“I’m seeing a lot of blood and necrosis in the gut,” he said. I nodded. Necrosis — dead tissue — fit with the smell of decomp I had noticed. “There’s some in the stomach, but a lot more in the intestines. Almost like the GI tract has been burned.”
“How? Poison? Acid?”
Garcia shook his head and studied the inside of a loop of intestine. “That’s the thing,” he said. “While you were out of the room, I checked the mouth and esophagus. Both of those are normal. If the guy had drunk enough acid to do this, they’d be damaged, too.”
Then he said one more “hmm,” this one deeper in pitch — more in the vein of an “aha” than a “what the hell?”
“Find something?” It was Miranda who asked the question I had been on the verge of asking, too.
“Maybe,” he said. “Not sure.” He plucked a bit of something from the sink with the forceps and set it in the gloved palm of his left hand. He laid the forceps aside and rolled the object around with his right index finger, then picked it up and studied it. It was small and cylindrical — maybe a quarter inch long and an eighth inch in diameter, rounded on one end, roughly flat on the other. It was about the size of a dried black bean, or — a more familiar comparison to me — a maggot that had hatched from a blowfly egg four or five days before. I thought I saw the dull glint of metal where Garcia had rubbed the surface clean.
“Miranda, did you X-ray the body before you took the clothes off?”
“I did,” she said, “but either the machine’s on the fritz or we got a bad batch of film. All of them came out fogged.”
My mind was racing. “Eddie, put it down and step away,” I said. “Everybody step away.”
Garcia looked up at me, puzzled, frozen, the small pellet still pinched between his thumb and forefinger. His hand was twelve inches, at most, from his face, and not a lot farther than that from Miranda’s face. I saw comprehension dawn in Miranda’s eyes, and behind the surgical mask, I saw the oval outline of her open mouth as she sucked in a breath. Before I could stop her, Miranda reached out, plucked the pellet from Garcia’s fingers with her own, and dropped it into the stainless-steel sink. Then she backed away from the counter, pulling Garcia with her. She continued pulling until he, and she, and I, had backed out of the autopsy suite and into the hallway, where an ashen-faced Jim Emert sat in a folding metal chair. Emert got to his feet and glanced at our faces. What he saw there made him turn and look into the autopsy suite. As the steel door closed, all four of us continued to stare at the sink, as if something sinister lurked within it. A monster. A bomb. A shroud of radioactivity intense enough to have ruined our X-ray film. Radioactivity deadly enough to have seared Leonard Novak’s internal organs in the hours or days it took that tiny pellet to travel through his stomach and along his intestine, killing him along the way.
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 acciden
t 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.
