“Eddie,” I said, “don’t forget to estimate how long you spent near Novak’s body while you were doing other autopsies.”
“I know,” he said. “I was thinking about that on the toilet a minute ago. I spent ten or twelve hours in there, two or three feet away, soaking up gamma radiation.” He stared at his notepad, but his pen didn’t move. Finally, he picked up his pen and began to write.
Once we’d tallied up our exposure times and distances, I gathered up the notepads and handed them across to Sorensen. He glanced quickly at all of them; Eddie’s was on the bottom of the stack, and Sorensen frowned when he saw the number of hours. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. He unzipped a soft-sided computer case and took out a laptop; after a moment, he began punching in numbers. I didn’t want to hover, so I went back to the group at Garcia’s bedside.
After what might have been five minutes or five hours, Sorensen came over and pulled a chair away from the wall so he could sit facing us. “Okay, this is just ballpark,” he said, “based on the timelines you gave me. We’ll have a much clearer picture once we get another blood sample or two and graph the changes in your lymphocytes. We’re also going to use a technique developed in Oak Ridge called cytodosimetry — estimating your dose by analyzing DNA damage within your cells. So by this time tomorrow afternoon”—he checked his watch, then corrected himself—“by six-thirty tomorrow evening, we’ll be able to estimate your dose by three different methods.”
“But for now,” prompted Garcia, “what are the ballpark numbers, and what do they mean?”
Sorensen drew a breath. “Detective Emert.” Emert’s forehead creased, and he leaned forward. “It looks like you might have gotten exposed to something like twenty rads.”
“What the hell’s a rad, and how bad are twenty of ’em?”
“Well, in the course of a year, you get about one-tenth of a rad from background radiation — cosmic rays, radon gas seeping out of rocks in the ground, that sort of thing.”
“So I’ve gotten, what, two hundred years’ worth of radiation in the last four days?”
“Something like that,” said Sorensen.
“So that’s why I barfed during the autopsy? Do I need an IV, too?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Twenty rads isn’t something I’d recommend you get again, but it helps that your exposure came at intervals, rather than continuously. I’ve seen a lot of cases, and I’ve never seen anyone with symptoms of ARS at this low a dose. I suspect you vomited during the autopsy because it was an autopsy.”
Emert took a long breath and blew it out. It was the sound of deep relief.
“Dr. Brockton,” Sorensen said, “you and Ms. Lovelady may have gotten somewhere around 40 rads. More than we’d like, but also no symptoms, probably.” He looked at Miranda. “But I’m somewhat concerned about local injury to your fingertips.” He glanced down at Miranda’s notes. “You say you touched the source for only a few seconds?” She nodded. “That’s good, but at the surface, a hundred-curie source of iridium-192 is putting out over a hundred thousand rads a minute. If you got a couple thousand rads of exposure to your fingers, you’re likely to have some blistering, maybe even some necrosis.”
“You mean I might lose my fingers?”
“I doubt it, but it’s possible,” he said. “We’ll hope it’s just a bit of blistering at the fingertips, and hope it heals.” Miranda looked shaken, but she nodded with remarkable composure.
“Dr. Garcia,” said Sorensen, “I’m most concerned about you. You say the pellet was resting in your left palm for about thirty seconds, and between your right thumb and forefinger for fifteen to twenty seconds?”
“That’s just a guess,” said Garcia, “but I had no reason to think I needed to hurry as I was looking at it.”
“Of course not,” said Sorensen. “But I’m afraid you’re likely to have some localized damage to your hands.”
“Sounds like it,” said Garcia. “If I followed what you said to Miranda, and my math’s right, we’re talking, what, tens or even hundreds of thousands of rads to my hands?”
“Could be,” conceded Sorensen. “There’s some risk to your eyes as well. The lens of the eye is very sensitive to ionizing radiation, and if you were looking at the pellet at close range, you could develop cataracts within the next several years.”
“Maimed and blind,” said Garcia. “It just keeps getting better. What’s next? Things come in threes, right?”
“I’m afraid so. You’ve also got a higher whole-body dose, because of those additional hours in the morgue.”
“How much higher?”
Sorensen hesitated. Not a good sign. “Your exposure could be somewhere in the range of four to five hundred rads.”
“And what’s the prognosis for someone who’s been exposed to five hundred rads?”
Sorensen hesitated again. Another bad sign. “That’s getting up around the LD-50,” he said.
I heard Miranda draw a sharp breath.
“Excuse me,” said Emert. “What’s LD-50?”
Garcia answered before Sorensen could. “The 50 means fifty percent,” he said softly. “The LD means ‘lethal dose.’ What Dr. Sorensen is saying, very tactfully, is that first I probably lose my hands, and then God tosses a coin to see whether I live or die.”
Then he looked up at Miranda and me. “Would you two do me a favor? Would you please go to my house and tell Carmen what’s happened? I’ll call and tell her I’ve gotten delayed, but I don’t want her to hear the details over the phone. I want someone to be with her.”
Miranda reached out and took his hand. Her face was wet with tears again, but this time there was no hiding them.
* * *
Sorensen and Davies sent Garcia straight upstairs to an inpatient room. Emert, who lived in Oak Ridge, arranged to have his blood drawn at the hospital there so he didn’t have to come back to Knoxville in the middle of the night. Miranda and I were free to go, though we had strict orders to return at 6 A.M. for our twelve-hour blood sample. It was shaping up as a long, worrisome night. Before heading to Garcia’s house to talk with Carmen, we took a side trip downstairs to the Forensic Center. The DO NOT ENTER sign had been supplemented by yellow-and-black tape that read CAUTION — DO NOT ENTER, as well as a sign containing magenta wedges on a yellow background, with the words RADIATION HAZARD — KEEP OUT.
“Sounds like they mean it,” I said to Miranda.
“Probably fends off the door-to-door salesmen and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, too,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in the jest.
Just then Duane Johnson and a moon-suited technician I didn’t know emerged from the elevator, wheeling two rectangular metal slabs about two feet high by four feet wide. The metal slabs appeared to be heavy, judging by the way the two men leaned forward to roll them. “Lead shields,” Duane panted as they passed us and headed toward the locked door of the morgue. “Want to watch?”
“I think we’ve had enough radiation fun for one day,” I said.
“No pressure,” he said. “But as long as you stay behind the corner, where you were before, you won’t get any additional exposure.” I looked at Miranda, and she shrugged. Curiosity trumped caution, and we followed as Duane and the technician wheeled the shields toward the morgue.
Duane rapped on the door of the morgue a number of times — three quick knocks, then three slow ones, then three more fast ones — and I realized that the knocks were the Morse code distress signal, SOS. The door swung inward and Hank peered around the edge. He looked closely at Miranda and me and said, “Everybody okay?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Detective Emert’s gone back to Oak Ridge. They’ll be taking blood samples from all of us every few hours to calculate our dose. They’ve admitted Dr. Garcia, because he got the highest exposure — four to five hundred rads.”
The dismayed look on Hank’s face made it clear that he realized how perilous Garcia’s situation was. He shook his head grimly, then turned to
Johnson. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get that shit out of there.” Johnson and the tech wrangled the shields through the door, and once we were all inside, Hank locked it behind us.
Together, they reached for one of the shields, tipped it to the floor, then flipped it upside down beside the other. The shields were designed to protect the torso of a nuclear-medicine technician or nurse from the activity of radioisotopes being administered to nuclear-medicine patients. That meant the rectangular panel was raised a couple of feet off the floor, to the level of a hospital bed or operating-room table. In this case, though, partial coverage wasn’t enough. After flipping the shields upside down, they clamped one to the other, to create an unbroken layer of shielding from toe height to neck height. Next they clamped a smaller shield, fitted with a thick window of leaded glass, atop the upper shield. They had assembled a variety of tools as well, including long tongs — wrapped at the ends with what appeared to be duct tape, the sticky side facing out — and a small round mirror on the end of a telescoping metal shaft. I gathered they planned to use it as a periscope, so they could keep their heads behind the shielding at all times while peering into the sink. They also had a square metal case, about a foot on either side by maybe eighteen inches high. The case appeared to be made of steel, but from the way the two men grunted and strained as they moved it, I suspected the inside was lined with a thick layer of lead.
Just as they were about to wheel the makeshift shielding toward the autopsy suite, Hank’s cell phone rang with an urgent warbling tone. He looked startled as he glanced at the display. “REAC/TS, Hank Strickland.” After a moment, he said, “You guys don’t waste any time, do you?” He listened a bit more. “That’s right…. About a hundred curies.” He glanced at Miranda and me, then looked away. “Too soon to tell; one of the four took quite a hit.” A longer interval of listening. “I understand…. I will; thanks. Have a safe flight.”
He hung up the phone. “Well, that was interesting. That was—”
His words were interrupted by a loud knocking at the locked door. “This is Captain Sievers, UT Medical Center Police. Open the door, please.” It didn’t really sound like a request; more like a command.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
Sievers, whom I’d known for years, looked surprised to see me; mostly, though, he looked upset. “We got a report,” he began, but then he stopped speaking as his eyes swept the room and took in the tableau of people and equipment: Miranda and me, still in our scrubs, and three moon-suited figures, clustered around a collection of lead shields, radiation meters, and other worrisome paraphernalia. “What the hell is going on in here?”
“We had an autopsy take an unexpected turn—” I started to explain.
“What Dr. Brockton means,” cut in Hank, “is that we’re simulating a radiological contamination event. It’s a cooperative exercise between the Forensic Center and our emergency-response team in Oak Ridge.”
Sievers stared at Hank, then at me, then at Johnson. “Bull. Shit,” he said. He pushed past me and the others, heading toward the autopsy suite.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Hank.
“You said it’s a drill,” shot back Sievers.
“Stop now,” said Hank.
“You’ve got about five seconds to tell me why I should,” said Sievers.
Hank sighed, then pulled out his cell phone and hit the LAST CALL button. “It’s Strickland, with REAC/TS,” he said. “We have a slight complication here. Would you mind talking with Captain Sievers, of the medical center police?…Yes, the hospital has its own police…. No, he’s not a rent-a-cop…. Sievers. Captain Sievers.”
Hank held out the phone to Sievers. The officer glared at him suspiciously, then snatched the phone. “This is Captain Sievers. Who the hell is this?” His eyes widened. “Yes sir,” he said. “Of course I’ve heard of your office.” He listened intently, his eyes darting around the room all the while. “I understand,” he said. “You’ll have our full cooperation. Yes sir. Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone and stared at it a moment. “Well,” he said, but that’s as far as he got.
“Hell-o?!” A stylishly coiffed and suited woman appeared in the doorway. It was Liz Chambers, the hospital’s public-relations officer. A former local news anchor, Liz always looked ready to go on camera at a moment’s notice. “Y’all aren’t throwing a party without me, are you?” She said it teasingly, but I saw her survey the room the same swift way Sievers had, and I braced for trouble.
“I sent you a memo about this last week, Liz,” said Sievers. “The radiation drill?”
It took everything I had to keep my jaw from dropping in disbelief. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Miranda. She was standing perfectly still, but tension coiled in her body. Despite the stresses of the past few hours, I could tell by her gleaming eyes that she was intrigued by this latest scene in the drama unfolding around us.
“What radiation drill? I didn’t get any memo about this,” said Liz. “I would have put out a press release. We could have gotten great media coverage.”
“I didn’t send you the memo? Crap,” said Sievers convincingly. “I am so sorry, Liz.”
“It’s actually my fault,” I said. I had no idea what I was doing, but something in the phone calls had changed things, and I didn’t want to leave Sievers hanging out there all alone. “I pulled this together on short notice.” Liz stared at me. “You remember that DMORT training we had a couple of days ago at the Body Farm?” She nodded suspiciously. “Well, Captain Sievers swung by to take a look.” Sievers nodded, not very convincingly. “So I asked if it’d be okay if we did a smaller drill in the morgue, just to take the training through the final step.” I raised both hands in a gesture of submission and apology. “I should have followed up with an email, so he could have brought you into the loop.”
“I told him to follow up,” chimed in Miranda. “Didn’t I tell you to follow up?”
“You did tell me to follow up,” I said. “And I forgot. I’m sorry. I accept full responsibility.”
Liz frowned at me. A small muscle beside her left eye was twitching, and the tendons in her neck were taut as bowstrings. “Guys, it’s hard for me to do my job if nobody tells me what’s going on. There are all kinds of rumors flying around about some kind of radiation accident, and it’ll take me days to put out the brush fires. Sure would have been easier to have put out a press release about a safety exercise.” She took one last look around, lingering on the moon suits, and shook her head sadly — lamenting not just the hassle of quashing rumors, I suspected, but also the lost opportunity to show high-tech training on the local news — and spun on her stilettos.
“That was interesting,” said Johnson, once the clicking of her steps had faded. “Last time I heard that many lies back-to-back was when Bill Clinton was describing the platonic nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”
I turned to Hank and Sievers to ask about the phone conversations that had set the series of lies in motion. “FBI,” said Sievers. “Special Agent Thornton will be here in a few hours.”
Given how intense the phone calls had seemed, I was surprised at the delay. “A few hours? What, he’s watching the UT basketball game on television first?”
“No,” said Hank. “He’s with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. He’s flying down from D.C.” Hank looked at Johnson. “So, what was it we were about to do before we were interrupted?”
* * *
Hunkered behind the massive shield they’d assembled, Hank and Johnson edged toward the door of the autopsy suite, towing the tongs and the metal shipping case behind them on a low cart. As the door opened, I heard one of the dosimeters begin to shriek, then Hank crouched lower and the shrieking stopped. The door closed behind them, and Miranda and I watched and listened anxiously. Suddenly both dosimeters began shrieking. Miranda, Sievers, and I looked at one another, worried but unable to do anything. After a few agonizing seconds, the alarms fell silent and I recognized Hank’s
voice shouting “Gotcha!” He and Johnson emerged from the autopsy suite, sweating and panting but looking relieved. Hank was wheeling the cart with the metal shipping case on it; Johnson held the wand of the ionization chamber over the box, and I was relieved to hear the instrument clicking lazily.
“Okay,” said Hank, “I think we’re okay now. We did a survey, and there’s nothing in there to be concerned about. Well, nothing except for that really disgusting corpse. Yuck. There’s nothing radiological to be concerned about. That one little pellet was it.”
“Let’s get this upstairs to the radiopharmaceuticals lab,” said Duane. “It would probably be fine in this box — we ship medical isotopes in these all the time, and the lead canister inside is about an inch thick — but I’d feel better if we had it locked in a hot cell.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
“First, though,” he said, “I should call TEMA again, tell them it’s under control.” He unzipped his suit and fished a cell phone out of a pocket. He hit a speed-dial button, then put the cell on speakerphone.
“TEMA, this is Wilhoit,” said a voice from the speaker.
“Hi, it’s Duane Johnson, at UT Medical Center again,” said Duane. “I’m calling to let you know we’ve retrieved the gamma source that was in the morgue. We’ve got it in a lead shipping container now, and we’re taking it up to one of the hot cells in Nuclear Medicine now.”
“Excuse me,” said Wilhoit. “TEMA has jurisdiction over this, not UT. We’ll decide what to do with it when we get there.”
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