Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  “I don’t think it’s actually rusting while it’s submerged,” he said. “I think the rust starts to form only after it comes out of the water—takes moisture plus air to oxidize the steel.”

  Now that he said it, it made sense. I’d seen a gruesome version of that phenomenon affect decomposing bodies. Soft tissue that decayed in moist environments, such as basements and caves, was transformed into a waxy or soapy substance called adipocere. A few years before, in fact, I’d had a case in the mountains of Cooke County in which a young woman’s body—hidden in a cave for decades—turned into a remarkable adipocere mummy. In the absence of oxygen, though, completely submerged bodies did not turn to adipocere.

  “So when we do get the saw out,” Emert continued, “we’ll put it in a trash can filled with water, so it stays submerged till you can take it to a shop and get it taken apart and dried out.”

  In one corner of the loading dock I noticed an empty plastic trash can lying on its side. I picked it up and handed it to Emert. “Take good care of my baby,” I said. He laughed as he put it in the trunk.

  Emert patted down the clothing thoroughly with evidence tape. The tape’s sticky side would pick up hair and fibers, much like the lint roller I had at home. I’d seen evidence tape used many times, but Emert’s variety had a plastic backing I hadn’t seen before. “This is a fairly new kind,” he said. “The plastic’s water-soluble. Once I’m through, I put it in warm water to dissolve the backing. That leaves the hair and fibers in the water. Pour the water through a coffee filter, and voilà—everything’s together in one nice, neat place.”

  Once Emert was satisfied that he’d gone over the clothing thoroughly, he began checking the pockets of the pants. Easing a gloved hand into each of the front pockets, he extracted a set of keys and a few coins. Then he felt the seat of the pants—left, then right—to check the rear pockets. The left hip pocket was empty, but I saw him smile when he felt the right pocket. Un-buttoning the closure carefully, he slipped a hand into the pocket and fished out a worn leather wallet. He laid it on an absorbent pad and unfolded it gently.

  His eyes widened. Looking down to see what he’d seen, I made out the familiar markings of a Tennessee driver’s license through a clear plastic window in one side of the wallet. “Wow,” Emert said. “No wonder he looked familiar.”

  “Who is it?” Instead of answering, Emert held the wallet up so I could take a close look. LEONARD M. NOVAK, the small print on the license read. “Novak,” I said. “Rings a bell, but only vaguely.”

  “Dr. Leonard Novak is a living legend in Oak Ridge,” he said. “Or was, anyhow. He was one of the top scientists back during the Manhattan Project. He played a big part in making the atomic bomb possible. Last picture I saw of him was probably taken twenty years ago. Back when he was a fresh-faced kid of seventy-something.”

  “A big fish,” I said, “in that small, frozen pond.”

  “Very big,” he said.

  “But nobody’d reported him missing?”

  “No,” he said. “The only missing-person report we’ve had in the last six months is a runaway teenager.”

  “Be hard to mistake this guy for a teenager. Was he married?”

  “I don’t know,” Emert said. We both glanced at the dead man’s left hand, which had no wedding ring. “Maybe not. Maybe a widower. Must not have had anybody checking on him regularly.” With a gloved finger, he poked the corpse gently, in the thigh and in the abdomen. “You sure our bird’s thawed out enough to autopsy?”

  “If he were a Butterball turkey,” I said, “I’d be preheating the oven right now.”

  He gathered up the evidence bags containing the coins, the keys, the wallet, and the evidence tape, and ran them out to his car at the loading dock.

  CHAPTER 4

  SHALL WE BEGIN?” IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION— even as he said the words, Dr. Garcia was already pressing the scalpel to Leonard Novak’s scalp—but it served to focus everyone’s attention on the tip of the blade. Garcia was suited up in a blue surgical gown with a mask, a plastic face shield, and two pairs of purple gloves. So was Miranda, who was serving as his assistant, or Diener: a German word that literally translates as “servant” or “slave”—not the sort of job description that would normally sit well with Miranda, who sometimes chafed beneath her title of “graduate assistant.” I was wearing scrubs, as was Emert, although as far back as the detective was hovering, he would probably have been safe in a white linen suit. “Call me if there’s something I need to see,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll be over here hanging on to my lunch.”

  Normally Garcia would have begun the autopsy by making a Y-shaped incision to open the chest cavity and abdomen. But Novak had a gash on the left side of his scalp, high on the left side of the forehead. The wound didn’t look serious—an oval contusion a couple of inches long by an inch wide, and more like an abrasion than a cut—but it was the only visible trauma to the corpse, so it was a place to start. The old man’s body, naked and thin and ashen, looked sadder and more vulnerable, somehow, than most bodies I saw.

  With one swift sweep of the blade Garcia laid open the scalp, cutting from behind the left ear, up over the crown of the head, and down to the back of the right ear. Laying aside the scalpel, Garcia worked his fingers under the front flap of scalp, then gave a strong tug. With a wet, ripping sound, the scalp peeled free of the crown and forehead, and Garcia folded the flap down over the face. Behind me, I heard Emert gasp and whisper, “Christ.” I could scarcely imagine his reaction to some of the sights and smells he would encounter later in the autopsy. Garcia peeled the other half of the scalp backward, folding it down to the nape of the neck into a sort of gruesome collar, so that the entire top of the skull was now exposed.

  Garcia studied the bone in the region beneath the contusion, then stepped back and motioned to Miranda and me, inviting us to look. The bone—the frontal bone, near where it joined the parietal—showed no sign of damage, not even a hint of compression. “Well, I don’t think he died of blunt-force trauma,” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Garcia. “Maybe just scraped his head when he fell. There’s no scabbing, so it’s perimortem—around the time of death. Hard to tell, though, since he was in the water, whether it’s antemortem or post.”

  “How could you tell?” asked Emert. “I mean, if he hadn’t been in the water?” He leaned closer, but only a few inches closer.

  “If he were still alive, the wound would have bled,” said Garcia. “But not if his heart had already quit pumping when he fell.”

  “Or got dumped,” said Miranda.

  “Or dumped,” echoed Emert. “But if there’s water in the lungs, that’ll mean he drowned in the pool?”

  “Or somewhere,” Miranda pointed out.

  “Not necessarily,” said Garcia. “Water can seep into the lungs after death. Or be absorbed from the lungs after drowning. Don’t believe everything you see on television.”

  Emert sighed, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because people kept complicating the scenarios or because he was having trouble with the sight of the scalped skull. His gaze, I noticed, kept straying toward the peeled bone, then flinching away.

  Next Garcia took a Stryker autopsy saw from the shelf along the wall. The saw’s motor was about twice the size of a hand blender—a kitchen gadget whose name had always struck me as a marketing department’s worst nightmare. When he switched on the motor, a fan-shaped blade on the end of a shaft began to oscillate back and forth, its strokes so rapid and tiny as to be almost invisible. I never ceased to marvel at the ingenuity of the Stryker saw: if Garcia accidentally grazed his hand with the blade, his skin would simply vibrate in time with the blade: it might tickle, but it wouldn’t cut. If he pressed down hard, though—on his own finger, or on one of the corpse’s—the blade would chew through flesh and bone in seconds.

  Starting at the center of the forehead, Garcia eased the blade into the skull, going slowly to make sure he didn’t
cut into the brain. When the pitch of the motor rose, telling him the blade had penetrated all three layers of the bone, he began cutting horizontally, just above the left brow ridge, across the left temple, and around toward the back of the skull. Once he was nearly there, he shifted back to the forehead again and made a mirror-image cut around the right side of the skull, so that the top of the skull—the calvarium—was attached to the lower part of the skull by a one-inch bridge of bone at the back. Then, with two deft dips of the saw, he cut that bridge into a V-shaped tab.

  I heard Emert whisper to Miranda, “Why’d he do that?”

  “Because it’s so stylish,” said Miranda. “And because it keeps the top of the skull from sliding around when the pieces are put back together. Helps hold things together, which is particularly good if there’s an open-casket funeral.”

  “Ah,” said Emert. “Good idea.” His words sounded casual, but his tone sounded strained.

  With one hand Garcia gripped the corpse’s face, clamping his fingers hard around the zygomatic arches of the cheekbones; with the other, he gripped the calvarium and tugged. As the top of the skull pulled free, I heard a wet sucking sound from the vicinity of the brain, and a horrified gasp from the direction of Detective Emert.

  Garcia made a few cuts with the scalpel to sever the spinal cord and a few membranes, then gently removed the brain from the skull. It always surprised me to see how much more easily the brain could be disconnected than, say, a femur or a rib, which took some determined cutting and tugging. After weighing it in the meat scales used to weigh organs—it tipped the scales at 1,773 grams, or a bit shy of three pounds—he laid it on a tray and nodded at Miranda. Miranda tied a loop of string around the bit of spinal cord dangling down, then suspended the brain upside down in a large jar of formalin, a weak solution of formaldehyde. Marinating for a couple weeks in the formalin would “fix” the brain: not as in “repair,” but as in “preserve and harden.” Garcia pronounced the appearance of Novak’s brain as normal, though from what little I’d heard about the scientist’s work, his brain sounded better than normal, at least during his working life.

  As Garcia gripped the scalpel and prepared to make the Y-shaped incision that would open the chest and abdominal cavities, I turned to Emert. “You okay? You ready for this?”

  “Ready,” he said, but he didn’t say it like he meant it. When Garcia used the chest spreader to cut the ribs from the sternum, I heard the detective grunt slightly as each rib gave way with a crunch. It was when Garcia cut open the abdominal cavity and prepared to “run the gut,” as pathologists call it, that things took an interesting turn. Two of them, actually.

  Running the gut involves removing and dissecting the stomach and intestines—slicing them open to examine the contents and the linings. I had mentioned the diarrhea to Garcia, he had merely nodded, but I knew he’d be paying particular attention to the gastrointestinal tract. As anyone who’s ever thrown up or had a bowel movement knows, the contents of the digestive tract are not the most appetizing features of the human species. In fact, although the decomposing bodies at the Body Farm tended to smell bad, especially in the heat of summer, they were practically fragrant compared to the odor released when a pathologist was running the gut.

  But Novak’s gut was different. It began to leak in Garcia’s hands as soon as he began lifting it from the abdominal cavity. The first smell to hit was the stench of vomit and gastric juice, which began oozing from the stomach. I don’t have a keen sense of smell, which is fortunate, given my line of work, but the smell of stomach contents is tough even for me to take. Then the intestines began to tear in his hands, overlaying the smell of vomit with the stench of feces. There was another layer of odor, too, which I recognized as the smell of decomposition. Leonard Novak, I realized, had died from the inside out. “Jesús, María, José,” breathed Garcia in Spanish, with more of an accent than I’d ever heard from him. “Miranda, help me with this.” Miranda rushed to his side, and together, their four hands cupped beneath the organs, they eased the dead man’s entrails into the sink.

  The sight and the smell were enough to challenge even the most stoic of people.

  And Detective Emert was not the most stoic of people. Just over my shoulder I heard a groaning, retching sound. That was followed, with unfortunate and unavoidable swiftness, by a gurgling noise, and then the splash of vomit cascading over my right shoulder and arm.

  “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 s
hade 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.”