Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  My adrenaline surged. In the blink of an eye, history had jumped off the page and become alive to me. This tiny speck of East Tennessee woods had once been a top-secret installation, heavily guarded and cleverly camouflaged. Oak Ridge’s eighty thousand wartime workers—and the Manhattan Project’s hundreds of millions of scarce dollars—had funneled into a small bunker tucked beneath this isolated hillside. I suddenly thought of an immense magnifying glass, focusing the rays of the sun into one tiny, intense point of light and heat and energy. The uranium-235 stored under the watchful eyes in this concrete tower had been such a focal point. It was here that the genie of atomic energy was squeezed into the smallest of bottles, so it could be unleashed later with devastating force.

  I looked at Miranda; I wanted to express everything that had just raced through my mind—the sense of awe and humility and excitement that had gripped me in an instant—but I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. She studied my face for a moment, then looked again at the stained concrete with the filthy windows and rusting gunports. “Yeah,” she said. “Pretty damn amazing, huh?”

  “Pretty damn amazing,” I agreed. Behind us, a car horn tooted briefly. I took my foot off the brake and made my way back to the present, back to the caravan of vehicles, and back to the task at hand: searching for an unknown and unreckoned casualty of the Manhattan Project.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE GRAVEL ROAD CONTINUED ALONG THE STREAMBED for another hundred yards or so, then crossed a steel culvert and began snaking up the opposite hillside. As it climbed, the road narrowed; the gravel gradually gave way to dirt, and the dirt soon disappeared beneath a layer of leaves and branches. It appeared that the road had not been used in years.

  We had negotiated several switchbacks and climbed well above the silo when the procession stopped. I heard a brief whoop from a siren, which I guessed might be a signal that we had reached our destination. I put the truck in park, set the brake, and got out to look. Up ahead a huge, mossy tree trunk blocked the rutted track.

  Off to the right side, the hillside fell away sharply, almost vertically; looking down, I saw the roof of the TWRA building and, beside it, the octagonal roof of the fortified silo. From this angle, I could not see the windows at the top of the tower—and that meant the guards in the tower could not have seen anyone who was standing in this spot back in 1945. I felt another surge of adrenaline as I realized that I was standing near the place where a body had been hidden some sixty years before. Near the place where human bones might still lie hidden, awaiting discovery.

  I walked back to my truck and opened the door. “We might be right where we need to be,” I said. “Can you hand me the photograph?” Miranda reached into a manila folder tucked down beside the console. Without the barn as a visual reference, it was hard to be certain, but the angle of the silo—seen from above, from what appeared to be a ledge or shelf—looked remarkably similar to what I’d just glimpsed.

  Emert and Dewar got out of the Oak Ridge police cruiser, each clutching a copy of the photo as well. Roy emerged from the F-150, eyeing the pictures with obvious interest, so I handed him the print I’d brought. His eyes widened as he took in the body, then his head swiveled and he scanned the valley down below. A broad smile spread across his face. “This is getting interesting,” he said. “A lot more fun than asking, ‘What’s the smallest line you can read?’ or ‘Which is clearer, 1 or 2?’”

  “Beats grading papers, too,” I said.

  Thornton was the last to join the group. Instead of the photograph, he was clutching the Starbucks cup in one hand. He tapped Miranda on the shoulder and, without a word, took her copy. “Make yourself at home,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked briefly at the silo, then at the photo, before handing it back to her. Then he looked back at the group. “Now what?”

  I looked at Arpad. Arpad looked at Roy. “I was thinking maybe Roy and Cherokee could do a sweep through the area, see if the dog indicates any interest, to narrow down where we need to probe.”

  “Sure,” said Roy. “He feels cheated if he doesn’t get to hop out and sniff around.” Roy bent down and picked up a dry leaf. Then, raising his arm to shoulder height and extending his hand, he crushed the leaf and sifted the fragments through his fingers, watching them drift in a breeze almost too slight to feel. “Looks like the air’s moving downhill and downstream,” he said. “Which means that the scent—if there is any—would be moving in that direction, too. Scent is like water—it tends to flow downhill, and tends to pool in low spots. Cool spots, too.” He glanced at the steep hillside and the line of vehicles, frowning slightly. “I hate to be a bother,” he said, “but could we maybe all back up a couple of hundred yards? I’d like to work him along the road, but the gas and oil fumes will pretty much overpower anything else that’s here.”

  Roy ambled back to his truck, and the rest of us headed for our vehicles. After a few moments of tense, hesitant backing down the narrow pair of ruts, we all parked again. Roy opened the hatch of his camper shell and dropped the tailgate. I heard him talking in a low, soothing voice, and then a large German shepherd on a stout leather leash jumped down from the truck. Roy stood at least six feet tall and probably weighed somewhere around 200 pounds, but the dog was pulling him as if he were a child. “As you can see, he really gets into this,” Roy said. As they pulled alongside the group, Roy gave a quick tug on the leash. “Cherokee, sit,” he said firmly. The dog sat, but even sitting, he strained at the leash.

  Miranda leaned slightly toward the dog. “Is he friendly? Can I pet him?”

  “He’s a sweetheart,” said Roy, “but he’s more interested in work than love.”

  Emert laughed. “Reminds me of my ex,” he said.

  “Reminds me that dogs are more useful than men,” said Miranda. The rest of us—the six men she had just skewered—laughed briefly and changed the subject quickly.

  Roy led the dog upslope to pee, then had him sit again, slightly apart from the group this time. “Okay, the smell from the vehicles has probably dispersed enough now,” he said. “I’ll start by letting him off leash for what’s called a hasty search—pretty much what the name implies—and see if he picks up anything. If he doesn’t, I’ll work him through the area again on a grid pattern.”

  Thornton raised his hand, like a kid in elementary school. “Yes sir?” said Roy.

  “The dog doesn’t work on commission, does he?”

  Roy looked puzzled, and so did everyone else. Everyone except Miranda, who snorted. “Like, ten percent of the bones?”

  “Ten percent seems a little steep,” the agent said with a grin. “Anything over five seems greedy.”

  “I wish you were running the IRS,” Miranda said.

  Just then Thornton’s cell phone jangled loudly. “Sorry,” he said, snatching it from the holder clipped to his belt. He frowned at the display but answered anyway. “Hello? Who?” His frown deepened. “Yes,” he said. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?” He slumped—a dramatic gesture meant to telegraph his frustration to those of us watching him. It was the sort of gesture a man would make if his wife or girlfriend or teenager called him at an inopportune time. “You know, it really wasn’t that big a deal,” he said. “Anybody else would have done the same thing.” He paused, listening, shaking his head. “You’d have done the same thing, too,” he said, “in a heartbeat. Look, I really, really can’t talk right now. Gotta go. Sorry. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut with a wince, then looked apologetically at the group. “I am so sorry,” he said, and flashed us that damn Indiana Jones grin again.

  “Okay,” said Roy, “if y’all are ready, I’ll go ahead and let Cherokee work the area.” He looked around, and everyone nodded. “If everybody would just stay down in this area, that’ll minimize the scents and the distractions for him.”

  “Would it be okay if I took a few pictures,” I asked, “long as I stay back here?”

  “Absolutely,” Roy said.
“Long as you promise to shoot only my good side.” With that, he bent over and wiggled his butt.

  “You Ph.D.s,” Emert grumbled. “Always showing off your brains.”

  Roy reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled out a plastic water bottle. When he did, the dog’s demeanor changed instantly: his ears and tail stood up, and he began trotting back and forth almost like a Tennessee walking horse. “Cherokee, sit,” said Roy, and the dog sat, almost quivering with eagerness. Roy gave the bottle a squeeze, and a small stream of water shot out, which Cherokee lapped noisily from midair. Capping the bottle and putting it back in his coat, Roy made eye contact with the shepherd. “Zook mort,” he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “mort”—related to “mortal” and “mortality”—was a dog-handler term for “dead guy.” I remembered enough of my foreign-language studies to realize that “zook” was probably based on the German word for “seek.” I smiled at the thought that Roy was speaking German so that the dog—a German shepherd—could understand him.

  Roy set off up the narrow dirt road, walking slowly. The dog ranged slightly ahead, ambling back and forth across the ruts, pausing occasionally to sniff at a tree or patch of moss. He reached the mammoth fallen trunk and stopped, looked back at Roy, and whined once. As Roy drew close to the trunk, he turned to his left, walking parallel to the trunk, and said quietly, “Get back to work.” The dog snuffled along the trunk toward the tree’s ragged base.

  There, as Roy rounded the end and made to rejoin the dirt road, Cherokee did an abrupt U-turn, doubling back to the place where the tree’s roots had been ripped from the ground. Novak’s photos showed a raw crater torn in the ground, but in the intervening decades a fair-sized tulip poplar had taken root in the hollow. The dog circled the area slowly, his nose low to the ground, then sniffed his way toward the tree at the center. Once there, he simply sat, staring at the base of the tulip poplar. I waited for the dog to bark or whine or lie down, as I’d seen other cadaver dogs do to show they’d found something, but Cherokee simply sat and stared.

  “Well, this is gripping,” muttered Emert. “I can’t stand the suspense. Will he pee, or won’t he?”

  “Shh,” said Miranda.

  Roy sidled closer and studied the dog for a moment. “Cherokee, show mort,” he said. The dog stood up, slowly sniffed his way around the tulip poplar, and then sat again, in almost the same spot as before. This time, he bent down and touched his nose to the ground at the base of the tree. “Good boy! What a good boy!” The dog leapt to his feet and whirled, just in time to catch a knotted-up towel Roy had pulled from a pocket and tossed in his direction. With the force of a bear trap snapping, the dog’s jaws closed around the fabric, and he began biting and thrashing his head, as if he were trying to dismember a rat. With one paw, he held the end of the bundled fabric on the ground and shredded it with meticulous savagery.

  “Glad that’s not my throat he’s got ahold of,” commented Dewar.

  After the towel was reduced to bits, Roy led the dog back to our waiting group. “It looks like maybe there’s something near the base of that tulip poplar,” he said.

  “No kidding,” said Arpad. “I guess it’s my turn.”

  He opened the back door of the Subaru and brought out the TopGun Freon detector. It squealed when he switched it on, then the noise died down to an occasional chirp as Arpad walked toward the base of the fallen oak. We followed, since the gadget—unlike the dog—wasn’t prone to distraction by people or extraneous smells.

  Stopping midway between the dead tree and the live one, Arpad bent down and eased the tip of the wand through the leaves and into the soil. The detector continued to chirp at the same slow rate. Stepping closer to the tulip poplar, he repeated the maneuver, with no discernible change. Next he positioned himself right where the dog had indicated and took another reading. The chirping might have sped up slightly, or I might simply have imagined that it did. Arpad frowned, looking puzzled and slightly embarrassed. “As cold as it’s been, it could be that the Freon compounds just aren’t volatilizing,” he said. “Or maybe they’re long gone, if we’re looking for something sixty years old.”

  “Or maybe the dog’s just smarter,” said Emert, earning a scowl from Arpad.

  He took the Freon detector back to his car, swapping it for his prototype sniffer. As the gizmo fired up, I noticed how much I preferred its understated clicking to the Freon detector’s electronic squeal. As before, Arpad stopped short of the target area, gently working the instrument’s probe into the top of the soil. It continued to click quietly, almost like a clock ticking. Despite the chill of the day, I thought I saw glimmers of sweat on Arpad’s brow, and I realized that he had a lot riding on this field test. If the dog gave a positive alert but Arpad’s sophisticated instrument did not, should we excavate anyway? I thought we definitely should; after all, the dog had an impressive track record in other searches, and he seemed to show no hesitation or doubt once he started zeroing in on the tulip poplar. There was no guarantee we’d dig up anything, but it seemed only fair to give the dog the benefit of the doubt—after all, if we didn’t trust the dog, we shouldn’t have enlisted him in the search.

  But would Arpad—a former student and now a valued colleague—take offense if we seemed to trust the dog more than the gizmo? I hoped not, but I knew scientists could be sensitive if it appeared their work was being questioned.

  As I was turning over the alternatives in my mind, trying to settle on the most diplomatic way of handling the dilemma, I became aware of a quietly insistent sound. Arpad now stood at the center of the circle with the gizmo’s probe in the ground, and the slow, steady ticking had given way to a sound almost like muted machine-gun fire. A smile spread across Arpad’s face. “Eureka!”

  “Cool,” said Miranda.

  Thornton reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded handkerchief, which he knotted into a ball. I was puzzled, until he said “Good boy” and tossed the handkerchief onto the ground in the direction of the gadget’s probe. Suddenly I glimpsed a streak of movement at the edge of my vision. Moving at lightning speed, Cherokee swooped in, grabbed the handkerchief, and began ripping it to bits.

  Miranda burst out laughing. “Holy crap, that was fast,” she said. “Serves you right for being a smart-ass.” Thornton just flashed her that grin again, bigger and more sheepish than ever. Miranda turned to me; it might have just been the effect of the chilly breeze, but her cheeks looked pink. “Does this mean it’s our turn to look now?”

  “I think it does,” I said. I tapped the two Oak Ridge detectives on the shoulder as Miranda and I started toward the truck. “You guys mind giving us a hand?”

  They followed us to the back of the truck and I handed a rake and galvanized-metal bucket to each of them. Miranda grabbed the two shovels, and I carried a large plastic bin containing smaller items: evidence bags, trowels, rubber gloves, a tape measure, a compass, a handheld GPS unit, a topographical map, my digital camera, a clipboard, pens and Sharpie markers, and a blue plastic tarp. I spread the tarp near the area we were about to excavate, and we laid the rest of the gear on it.

  I began, as always, by taking pictures—several wide shots at first, showing the entire area, the vehicles, and the group of people. Then an inspiration hit me, and I took several shots of the fallen tree, the small valley, and the concrete silo, reproducing Novak’s perspective as closely as possible. The comparison photos would be an interesting addition to the file, I thought. An interesting footnote to Oak Ridge history. An interesting thing to show Isabella over pizza. Next I took tighter shots of the fallen tree, the area near the base of its trunk, and the orange survey flag Arpad had stuck in the ground. Miranda switched on the GPS unit, held it over the flag, and pressed a button to save the latitude and longitude coordinates. I found it amazing that a three-hundred-dollar gadget, about the size and shape of a calculator, could home in on satellites hovering thousands of miles overhead, pin
pointing and remembering this precise location on an isolated hilltop: an electronic X marking a tiny spot on a big planet. I marveled at the technology, though I still didn’t entirely trust it. That’s why we had the compass and tape measure: in addition to marking the site on the topo map, Miranda would draw a more detailed sketch of the search area, showing the dirt road, the fallen tree, and the excavation, with compass directions and measurements—the diameter of the excavation, for instance, and how many feet west of the trunk the dog and the sniffer had alerted.

  I had tried to talk Miranda into letting me bring one of the other graduate students in her place—I worried that the burns on her fingers hurt, and I feared she might damage them—but she insisted on coming. “I’ll wear an extra pair of gloves,” she said, “and it’ll be fine.” I hoped she was right.

  After I’d taken a dozen or so photos and Miranda had sketched the key landmarks of the site, we began to rake the leaf litter off the soil. When the big tree had been ripped from the earth, long ago, its roots had torn a crater in the ground, six or eight feet in diameter and several feet deep. Gradually, though, the crater had filled as dirt fell from the edges, rainwater trickled down the sides, and decades of leaves swirled into the hole and crumbled into dust. By now all that remained was a slight, subtle hollow—with a sixty-foot tulip poplar growing from it. If not for the massive oak trunk touching one edge of the rim, the low spot would have seemed simply a slight, random variation in the surface of the ground. By excavating carefully, I hoped Miranda and I could work our way back to the original, deeper contour of the hole, as a starting point in our quest for whatever might lie at its center. It wouldn’t be easy, though.

  “So,” said Miranda, “that tree sure is in the way. Wonder what we could do about that pesky tree?”