Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  “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?”

  In his final moments, Leonard Novak—a ninety-three-year-old walking ghost—had stabbed to death a man roughly half his age.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE AUTOPSY OF THE THIRD OAK RIDGE VICTIM—CASE 09-03—was almost redundant, since the cause of death had been sticking out of the man’s chest. According to the Nashville medical examiner, the lungs contained a small amount of water, which suggested (but did not prove) that the victim had drawn a partial breath as his heart shuddered and stopped. Beyond that, the autopsy report contained nothing extraordinary, though it did shed some light on the guy’s life: a middle-aged white male, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, with blue eyes, thinning blond hair, and a gray beard. Thin, whitish scars indicated prior surgeries on the right ankle and left shoulder. A series of whole-body X-rays revealed numerous healed fractures—four ribs on the right side of the chest had been broken, as well as six ribs on the left—two of them in more than one place. The right femur bore evidence of a childhood fracture, the report noted, and was a quarter-inch shorter than the left. The spine, particularly the cervical spine, showed osteoarthritic lipping—ragged fringes of bone rimming the vertebrae in the neck—that was surprisingly severe for a man his age. My first thought, from the variety of skeletal trauma, was too many bar fights. But the victim had well-developed leg muscles and—until the knife blade made its entrance—a robust circulatory system. Maybe not bar fights after all, I thought. Maybe bicycle wrecks. Regardless, the guy seemed to have been rode hard and put away wet.

  Miranda, Emert, Thornton, and I were huddled around a table of stale cookies and stale coffee at the ORPD. I had come straight from the KPD lab, so Miranda had caught a ride with Thornton. Strictly speaking, there was no compelling reason for her to be here, but it had become important to find things to occupy Miranda’s time and energy. Her three burned fingertips were getting worse—they’d progressed from blisters to open, oozing wounds, wrapped in gauze, and she couldn’t do the delicate reconstruction the North Knoxville skeleton required.

  She also couldn’t shake her fear for Garcia. Somehow, despite the best precautions of the ICU staff, he’d picked up an infection, and his condition seemed more perilous than ever. He was unable to eat or drink anything, and his GI tract was racked with cramps and bloody diarrhea as the lining of his gut sloughed off. In the weeks or months to come, the lining might slowly regenerate, but it might not. His bone marrow was virtually destroyed, and the search was on for a matching marrow donor, but the prospects weren’t good. Even if a donor could be found, Garcia might not be robust enough to survive the transplant.

  “The pool guy was carrying no identification,” said Emert. “No wallet, no credit card, no car keys, nothing. Some loose change in his right hip pocket, a pack of chewing gum in his left pocket.” He paused. “But he had this in his shirt pocket.” The detective slid a ziplock bag toward the center of the table. It contained a small, rectangular piece of white paper, stained with dirty water and smeared ink. Emert flipped it over to reveal the other side. Thornton, Miranda, and I leaned in to see. There, despite the smearing, four words remained legible: “I know your secret.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Interesting,” said Thornton.

  “Creepy,” said Miranda. “These notes are like a modern-day version of those snitch reports Oak Ridgers sent back during the Manhattan Project. Only now, instead of sending them to Acme Whatchamacallit—”

  “Credit,” Thornton supplied. “Acme Credit Corporation.”

  “Right. Whatever,” she said. “Only instead of going to Acme, these are going straight to the people being spied on.” She frowned. “You know what else this makes me think of? Y’all know those REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY signs on the interstate? The ones with the 800 number you’re supposed to call—800-something-TIPS—if you spy something fishy?”

  “800-492-TIPS,” said Thornton.

  “It worries me that you know that,” she said. “My point is, imagine you’re driving along I-40 and suddenly your cell phone rings and a voice whispers in your ear, ‘I see what you’re doing.’ That’s what these notes make me think of. This whole spying and snitching thing is creeping me out.”

  “Spoken like a woman with a guilty conscience,” I said. I was only teasing, so I was surprised when she turned red. A thought occurred to me, and I glanced at Thornton to see if he was blushing, too, but the FBI agent’s face was a study in nonchalance. Or was he feigning nonchalance, so as not to embarrass Miranda further? I couldn’t tell, and I realized it wasn’t any of my business if they had kissed and made up, ideologically or otherwise. I turned again to Emert. “So how do you figure out who our modern John Doe is?”

  “Well, yet again, we’ve come up empty-handed on missing-person reports in Oak Ridge,” he said. “Nothing remotely similar in Knoxville or surrounding counties, either. We’re checking NCIC”—the National Crime Information Center—“to see if there’s anybody elsewhere in the country who fits the description. But NCIC has its shortcomings.” He looked at Thornton. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Thornton. “NCIC is the Bureau’s creation, not mine. We know it’s not perfect—if a missing-person report lists someone’s age as thirty-seven, and a cop plugs in thirty-to-thirty-five in the age range, the system won’t connect those two dots. But if the cop follows up with a second search, for ages thirty-six-to-forty, he’ll get the report he needs to see. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s a help.”

  “Sure,” said Emert. “Anyhow. We’re running the guy’s fingerprints through the state’s automated fingerprint identification system, and the Bureau’s AFIS, too. So if he’s been arrested and printed, we might get lucky enough to ID him that way. Other thing we’re doing is running a picture of him in the Oak Ridger this afternoon.”

  I was surprised to hear that. The dead man’s face—open-mouthed and glassy-eyed, the skin beginning to soften and slough off—was strong stuff for a small-town newspaper. “I’m guessing subscribers will be calling for the editor’s head when they see that photo,” I said.

  “Not a photo,” he said. “We had an artist do a sketch. Not a perfect likeness, but maybe more recognizable—and less gruesome—than the photos. Surely somebody will be able to tell us who this guy was.”

  In the Novak case, Thornton had disappointing news to relate about the radiography camera. Pipeline Services, the Louisiana company that owned the camera, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection two weeks before—probably within days or weeks after the fresh iridium-192 source had been shipped to New Iberia and loaded into the camera. The pipeline contractor’s doors had been padlocked, and no one seemed to know the camera had gone missing. “We found a window that was unlocked,” he said, “and th
e door to the lab where the camera was kept had been pried open.”

  “Damn,” I said. “A town that small, lots of folks would’ve known the company had gone belly-up. Almost anybody could’ve stolen it, right?”

  “Theoretically,” he said, “but I doubt it. Think about it: somebody who just happens to live in Podunk, Louisiana, suddenly sees their chance to make off with a radiography camera they’ve always wanted? I don’t believe in coincidences that big. We’re combing through the personnel records, and we’ll interview all the employees. And their neighbors and friends. And all the folks who aren’t their friends. I’m flying down there this afternoon. We’re getting close,” he said. “I can smell it.”

  Then it was my turn to talk about G.I. Doe. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to ID him from his teeth,” I said. Three of the soldier’s lower molars had fillings, I explained, including one of the third molars, or wisdom teeth. My hope was that the cavity in the third molar—a tooth that erupted around age eighteen—had been filled by an Army dentist. If that was the case, maybe there was a dental chart. The trick, I pointed out, would be to find it among the millions of army dental charts.

  “First we found the film,” said Emert, “then we found the bones. Things come in threes. You’ll find it. G.I. Doe wants to be identified.”

  When the meeting ended, Miranda, Thornton, and I headed outside. Thornton had parked in front of the building; I’d parked out back. The three of us stood together on the front steps of the municipal building. I said to Miranda, “You mind if I wander down to the library for a few minutes?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Well, you might be in a hurry to get back to campus.”

  “But I rode with Thornton,” she said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

  “But I thought you were riding back with me,” I said. “I thought Thornton had to catch a plane to Louisiana.” I looked at Thornton; he looked at Miranda.

  “But…I dropped off my car at the Jiffy Lube on Bearden Hill on the way over here,” she said. “He…we were planning to swing by there on the way back.”

  “But Bearden Hill’s just five minutes from my house,” I said. “Why don’t I just run you by there on my way home at the end of the day? That way you know they’re done. We don’t want Thornton to miss his plane.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, a little quicker than necessary. “It’s practically on my way to the airport. And I’ve got time.”

  “Okay, great,” I said, a little more cheerfully than I meant. Bearden was far out of his way, but there was no future in pointing that out. Clearly they wanted to be together, but didn’t want to say so. “I might just work in the library for the rest of the afternoon. Miranda, could you see about tracking something down for me later? A master’s thesis on Oak Ridge by Isabella Morgan?”

  “Anthropology?”

  “No, history,” I said.

  “UT?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Wait. Maybe not. Maybe Tulane or LSU.”

  “Could you be any vaguer?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” I said. It might have been the first time we’d ever said something as formal as “Goodbye” to each other. Awkward as it felt, I hoped it would be the last.

  I WAS STILL SLIGHTLY OFF-BALANCE as I walked into the library and back toward the Reference Desk. The chair was empty, but the telephone receiver was out of its cradle and the HOLD light was blinking, so I hoped Isabella had just stepped away to look up the answer to a caller’s question. “I’ll be right with you,” said a voice behind me, and a gray-haired woman I didn’t know stepped behind the desk, lifted the phone, and pressed the blinking light. “He was born November 13, 1955,” she said. “In St. Joseph, Missouri. Yes, I believe that was the eastern end of the Pony Express route. You’re quite welcome. Glad I could find that for you.” She smiled as she hung up the phone. “Can I help you?”

  “I was actually looking for Isabella,” I said.

  “She’s not in today. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “It’s not a reference question,” I said. “I’m…I’m a friend of Isabella’s. I was just going to say hi.”

  I saw recognition register in her eyes. “Oh, of course,” she said. “Yes. Well, she was in earlier, but then she had to leave rather suddenly. Apparently her father has fallen quite ill.” After she said it, she looked uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure she should have divulged this information to me; if I didn’t already know, was I authorized to know? Report Suspicious Activity, I thought, and imagined the librarian phoning the TIPS number.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Thank you. Sorry to bother you.” As I left the library and climbed the hill to my truck, part of my mind was feeling concern for Isabella; another part was spinning in surprise and confusion. I knew so little about her. She’d said something about her grandmother and the Graphite Reactor, but it was a passing mention we’d never circled back to. It had never occurred to me to ask about her parents. Or maybe I simply hadn’t had a chance yet. We’d flirted over photos and food; we’d shared the excitement of the search for the uranium bunker; we’d shared a night of passion. But what I knew about her was slight compared with what I didn’t know. Isabella was a bright, beautiful enigma.

  CHAPTER 35

  DESPITE WHAT I’D SAID TO MIRANDA ABOUT HEADING straight home from Oak Ridge, I drove to campus instead. I parallel-parked between a pair of concrete pillars under the stadium, then wandered upstairs to the departmental office to check my mail and messages. “Well, I’ll be,” said Peggy. “You are alive. I’d just about decided you were dead.”

  “Just missing in action,” I said. “Speaking of MIA, could you call up Joe Cusick at CILHI for me?” Joe was a former student of mine; after earning his Ph.D., he’d gone to work for the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The lab’s official name had changed recently—to J.PAC, which stood for something I couldn’t remember—but I still thought of it by the old acronym, CILHI, pronounced “SILL-high.” I’d served on CILHI’s scientific advisory board for several years early in Joe’s tenure there, and I was always glad for an excuse to call or, better yet, pay a visit.

  “You think he’d be at work already? It’s six hours earlier in Honolulu, you know.”

  I checked my watch; it was 1:45 P.M. in Knoxville; 7:45 A.M. there. “He gets up with the chickens,” I said. “He’ll be there.”

  I ducked into my seldom-used administrative office, through the doorway that adjoined Peggy’s office, and dumped the mountain of mail on the conference table that butted up against the front of the desk. “It’s ringing,” said Peggy. “Do you want me to go ahead and switch it to you?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Uh,” grunted a voice two rings later. “Yeah…. Hello…. This is Joe Cusick.” It was not the voice of a man who’d gotten up with the chickens—not unless it had been a long, rough night in the coop.

  “Good morning, Joe,” I said sunnily. “It’s Bill Brockton. Did I catch you before your coffee kicked in?”

  “Woof. Give me just a second here,” he said. “Bill. Hey there. Haven’t had coffee yet. I’m in Cambodia. It’s, I dunno, two in the morning here.”

  “Oh hell, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten that the number we had on file for him was a satellite phone. “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you eight hours from now.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” he said, sounding more alert now. “I’m used to this. Happens all the time. I’ll be snoring again five minutes after we hang up. I can fall asleep on a dime; I’m famous for it. Go ahead.”

  “Okay,” I said, “if you insist. But what are you doing in Cambodia?”

  “Looking at some bones in the hills near the Vietnamese border,” he sa
id. “Supposedly an American pilot who crashed here in ’68 or ’69. If we can identify him, that’d leave only another seventeen hundred and fifty MIAs in Southeast Asia. What’s up? What can I do for you?”

  “I’m hoping CILHI might be able to help us ID a World War II soldier,” I said. “His skeleton just surfaced in Oak Ridge. He was shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave out on the DOE reservation.”

  Even though he was half a world away, our conversation bouncing off a satellite orbiting thousands of miles high, Joe’s whistle came across clearly. “So this was murder, not KIA,” he said.

  “Probably not killed in action,” I agreed. “Not a lot of enemy combatants in Tennessee.”

  “Did you find his dog tags?”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “No dog tags, no driver’s license. A wristwatch and the buttons off a pair of army-issue coveralls. Oh, and a really thick stack of papers. We’re wondering if he might’ve been spying.”

  “If somebody caught him spying, wouldn’t they have turned him in, either before or after they shot him?”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “The picture in Oak Ridge is a little murky.” I told him about Novak’s bizarre death, and the film in the freezer, the additional body we’d found when the pool was drained.

  “And I thought Southeast Asia was complicated,” he said. “Well, if this soldier was shot and buried on the sly, he’d have been reported AWOL pretty quick. And if he didn’t turn up in a month, he’d have been flagged as a deserter. We’ve got a database at CILHI that lists deserters. Let me call the office and have somebody take a look. So this was in Oak Ridge, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s?”

  “Actually,” I said, “we think he was killed in 1945 or early 1946. He was buried sometime after a uranium bunker was built—that was in ’44—but before a tree started growing in ’46.”

  Joe laughed. “Well, that should narrow down the list of potential deserters,” he said. “I’ll ask somebody to take a look and give you a call. Let me know how it all turns out.”