Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (17 page)

AS WE DROVE AWAY FROM
the research complex, I said to Thornton, “Arpad’s a little low-key, but he’s really excited about this.”

Thornton guffawed. “Yeah,” he said. “And Miranda’s voting Republican in the next election.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Okay, he’s not so excited,” I admitted. “I was trying to be upbeat. Sorry we wasted the trip.”

“Wasn’t wasted,” he said. “I can call up Arpad’s sponsor at DOJ and tell him the gadget works. Long as you already know where the body is.” I must have looked alarmed, because he quickly added, “Kidding. I’m kidding.”

We headed east, back toward Oak Ridge and Knoxville, for about a mile, then Thornton pointed to a sign on the left. “There it is—
SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE,
” he said. “That’s my stop.” The road wound uphill in a series of gentle S-curves; at the top of the ridge sprawled an immense new building, five curving stories of green glass and brushed aluminum.

“Wow,” I said. “Arpad needs to make friends with these guys. They’ve got better digs.” I parked near the entrance in a spot marked
VISITOR
, though we could have taken our pick of dozens of other convenient spots. “More parking, too.”

“I think they’re still putting the finishing touches on this,” he said. “I don’t believe the neutrons are spallating fully just yet.”

“Remind me what spallation means,” I said, as we walked toward the glass doors.

“Comes from the same root word as
spa-lat
,” he said, then he laughed. “Nah, kidding again. It’s from
spalling
—chipping—like concrete does. Spallation’s a subatomic version of concrete
chipping. This thing fires zillions of neutrons out a huge linear accelerator—see that long, straight dike of dirt there, running from the main building over to that smaller building way over there? I think the accelerator’s under there. Anyhow, it shoots neutrons at experimental targets or materials, and then people who are a lot smarter than I am figure out all sorts of important things about those materials, based on what happens when the neutrons bash into them.”

“Bash?”

“Bash. Splat. Wham. Take your pick. They’re all scientifically rigorous and precise.”

“Rigorous,” I said.

“And precise.”

“So they make radioisotopes here with some of the bashing?”

“Huh? I don’t think so,” he said. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Well, you have a meeting with an isotopes-production guy,” I said, “and we’re here.”

“Ah,” he said. “A reasonable inference, but wrong. They make the isotopes at a research reactor, the High-Flux Isotope Reactor. But the security’s tighter there, and the digs are better here. And the isotopes guy is apparently better connected than Arpad.”

Thornton’s “isotopes guy”—the program’s director, it turned out, named Barry Vandergriff—met us in the atrium and motioned us toward a cluster of overstuffed armchairs in an alcove of the lobby. I excused myself from their meeting and wandered among a series of displays that showed cutaway drawings of the facility’s accelerator and neutron-beam guides and experimental capabilities. Some of it was over my head, but I did grasp the notion that neutrons—and how they got deflected or scattered as they bounced off materials, or passed through them—could shed
a lot of light on the molecular structure of metals, plastics, even the proteins that make up living organisms.

I had just begun to study a large, mercury-filled metal tank—the mercury served as an immense catcher’s mitt, apparently, to stop the neutron beam after it had passed through its experimental target—when Thornton tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m done,” he said. “You ready, or did you want to study up some more?”

“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in neutrons.”

As we walked out of the building, Thornton said, “I wanted to talk to this guy to get more background on the iridium sources for radiographic cameras—who makes those sources, and how, and where.”

“And could he? Did he?”

“He could,” he said. “He did.”

“And?”

“For years, the only U.S. source of iridium-192 was the High-Flux Isotope Reactor, right here in Oak Ridge.”

“But now there are other U.S. sources?”

“No. Now not even HFIR’s making it. Too expensive. Now it’s imported from reactors in Belgium and the Netherlands and South Africa.”

“It’s cheaper to make it overseas and ship it in?”

“I guess so,” he said. “Maybe those governments subsidize the isotope reactors better, or maybe safety standards are lower or labor’s cheaper. Anyhow, that complicates our efforts to pin down where this came from.”

“Damn,” I said. “If this stuff has a half-life of only seventy-four days, how’s there time to ship it halfway around the world?”

He shrugged. “They ship sushi from Tokyo to New York, and
sushi has a lot shorter half-life than this stuff. It’s just a matter of figuring out a fast, reliable delivery system. Hell, iridium-192 can be air-expressed on DHL or FedEx if the shipment’s not huge and the container’s approved.”

I almost wished he hadn’t told me that. I wasn’t sure I’d look at those delivery trucks in quite the same way ever again.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO HAVE DINNER?”

The question caught me by surprise. “Excuse me?” I pulled the cell phone slightly away from my ear and glanced at the display, hoping for quick enlightenment. I didn’t recognize the number, but I did recognize the 482 as an Oak Ridge number.
“Oh,”
I said, a smile breaking across my face. “I think you should be the one to choose. Since I gather you’ve hit the jackpot. Or found the barn.”

“Maybe,” said Isabella, the librarian. “If I’m wrong, I’ll pay you back. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“Then pick a good restaurant,” I said. “The best in Oak Ridge.”

“The best in Oak Ridge? That’s easy.”

Ninety minutes later, I parked my truck in the lot beside Wildcat Stadium, the high school football field in Oak Ridge, and one of the city’s earliest landmarks. Although the original high
school had long since been demolished—replaced by a sprawling, modern complex two miles away, right across the Turnpike from Isabella’s library—the stadium had never been replaced. Tucked into a natural hollow in the side of Black Oak Ridge, the stadium—home to quite a few championship football teams over the years—felt like small-town Americana. From where I parked, I could see the stadium, Chapel on the Hill, and the Alexander Inn. Clustered so close together, they seemed an architectural trinity of sorts, embodying human play, spiritual sanctuary, a scientific crossroads. Such a small town; such a big legacy.

Crossing Broadway, the two-block street that separated the football field from Jackson Square, I strolled beneath a sidewalk awning and stepped into the finest restaurant in Oak Ridge, and one of the finest in East Tennessee: Big Ed’s Pizza.

Big Ed’s was the creation of Ed Neusel, and the nickname was actually an understatement. Big Ed was a mountain of a man, as anyone who’d seen him perched on the bar stool at the back of the pizzeria could attest. Big Ed had long since gone to that great pizza kitchen in the sky, but his legacy and his likeness lived on. The restaurant’s glass front window featured a larger-than-life caricature of Big Ed’s face. T-shirts featuring the same likeness—and the quote
I MAKE MY OWN DOUGH
—were considered must-have souvenirs by tourists savvy enough to appreciate Oak Ridge’s contributions to history and cuisine.

The kitchen was open, and ran most of the length of the deep, narrow restaurant. Behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area, eight or ten high school kids—all wearing Big Ed’s T-shirts—hustled beneath fluorescent lights, twirling disks of dough, dealing out toppings, shuttling pies in and out of a wallful of ovens. During his lifetime, Ed Neusel had always
been quick to give a kid a job, and I was pleased to see that his policy, like his pizza, had survived his passing.

The dining area was dark as a cave—black ceiling, dark hardwood floor, dingy walls, dim lights. That was probably for the best. I felt my foot slip slightly, on grease or tomato sauce or a mix of the two, until its skid was halted by a sticky patch of drying beer or soda. There was probably a health inspector’s rating posted on a wall somewhere in here, but I didn’t want to see it.

I scanned the dim interior for Isabella. I didn’t see her. For that matter, although the place was full, I didn’t see much of anybody—not well enough to discern identifying facial features, at least. The place could have been packed with Anthropology Department faculty and graduate students, and I wouldn’t have been able to recognize any of them.

At my back, I felt a blast of cold air as the door to the street opened. “Hi.” I heard her voice at my elbow again. She had a way of sneaking up on me that I was starting to like. “We had an after-hours staff meeting that ran long. Somebody’s been cutting the racy paintings out of the art books, and we’re trying to figure out how to catch them.”

“Art thieves in the Oak Ridge library,” I said. “Who’d’ve guessed? Is nothing sacred anymore?”

“Maybe theft; maybe censorship,” she said. “Hard to tell. Either way, it’s bad for the books. Shall we sit?” She nodded at a booth tucked into a narrow alcove just inside the door, and we slid onto facing benches. Some of the fluorescent light from the kitchen spilled into the booth—not so good for the appetite, but better for watching as she talked. She handed me a menu—a simple card listing sizes and toppings, the paper translucent with grease. “What do you like?”

“Just about everything except olives,” I said. “Pepperoni, sausage, ham—any of those. What about you?”

“I’m a vegetarian,” she said. “How about we order two? One for you, one for me?”

One of the high schoolers, a lanky redhead sporting torn jeans and red Converse high-tops with his T-shirt, came to take our order. Isabella pointed him to me, so I ordered a Coke and a small Hawaiian pizza, with ham and pineapple and onion. She made a face, then ordered a beer and a veggie special for herself. The kid jotted it down and turned to go, then turned back. “The veggie—also small?”

“Actually, no,” she said. “Make mine a large.”

I laughed. “Aren’t you a dainty thing?”

“Hey, you’re buying. And I want leftovers.”

I called our server back a second time and changed my order to large as well.

“So,” I said to her, “you got something for me that’s worth a large veggie special and a beer?”

“If you don’t think so,” she said, “we’ll split the tab.”

She tugged a handful of napkins from the dispenser huddled against the wall—they were small, flimsy napkins, better suited to dabbing a crumb of crumpet off a powdered cheek than to soaking up grease and sauce—and swabbed the table with them. Then she reached into a shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine whose cover proclaimed it to be the
ORNL Review
. I’d seen an issue or two of it; it was published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it contained a mix of articles—some breezy, others way over my head, technically—that summed up what a billion dollars a year would buy these days, in the science-and-energy department.
Your tax dollars at work,
I always thought when I
ran across the magazine. Better in Oak Ridge, and better in the cause of science, than in a lot of other places and ways I could think of.

She opened the magazine, and I saw a print of the Novak photo tucked into the pages. She rotated the magazine and the photo toward me, keeping the photo positioned over the one page of the spread—keeping me in suspense, I guessed. That was okay with me; I was enjoying this. It felt like a dance—the closest thing to dancing I’d done since Jess, whom I’d loved and lost less than a year before.

“So this, obviously, is your picture,” she was saying. “Not a lot to go on. Woods and a hillside and a barn. Doesn’t narrow things down a lot here in East Tennessee.” I shook my head sorrowfully, signaling that I knew the cause was hopeless—that it would take a miracle or a genius, or both, to solve this enigmatic puzzle. “I’ll pretend not to notice that you’re mocking me,” she said. I laughed, and so did she. “Anyway. I kept looking at this after you left, and thinking I’d seen that barn before. Of course, anytime you stare at something long enough, your mind plays tricks on you, right?” I nodded, not teasing this time, because I realized I’d been staring at her, and my mind was playing some tricks on me at this very moment. “So. I have some regulars—patrons who like to hang out in the Oak Ridge Room. Old-timers, mostly, people who lived through the stuff that’s archived on the shelves. It’s an easy trip down Memory Lane.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fascinated, and it’s not even my history.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, one of my regulars—oh,
stop,
” she scolded, kicking me slightly under the table for wiggling my eyebrows—“one of my regulars used to be Ed Westcott, the photographer who took all the pictures in those notebooks. His job was
to document it, capture the Manhattan Project on film, for posterity. Unlike anybody except maybe General Groves or Colonel Nichols, Westcott could go wherever he wanted, see whatever he wanted, and photograph whatever he wanted. Pretty amazing, when you think about it. He had a stroke a couple of years ago, and he has trouble speaking, so he doesn’t get to the library much anymore. But he’s lucid, and he emails. So I emailed your picture to him. I also sent it to Ray Smith, who writes history columns about Oak Ridge history for two newspapers. I figured if anybody might recognize that barn, it’d be either Ray or Ed.” She paused and leaned back so she could study my reaction to what she’d said so far.

Or maybe she was just leaning back so the high school kid could set our drinks on the table. My Coke came in a paper cup; her beer arrived in a frosted-glass mug. Evidently Big Ed or his successors had considered beer to be higher than Coke on the beverage chain. She hoisted the mug in my direction, so I raised my cup to toast. “To historical detective work,” I said, and we tapped the glasses together. The paper cup did not produce a particularly satisfying sound or feel, but the gesture still felt celebratory. “And was either of these regulars of yours able to shed light on the mystery of the barn?”

She reached down, and without taking her eyes off my face, she slid the blurry photo off the magazine. I looked down and there it was, printed on the page. Set against a hillside was a simple, windowless wooden barn with a tall, thin silo at one end. I was not looking at a photograph; I was looking at an illustration, something like an architectural rendering. As I read the accompanying story, I heard myself saying “hmm” and
“hmm”
repeatedly. The “barn,” I read, was not a barn at all, though it
was carefully designed and built to look like one. It was the camouflaged entrance to an underground storage bunker for bomb-grade uranium-235, the precious product Beatrice had helped sift from tons of uranium-238. The entire quantity of U-235 Oak Ridge produced during World War II would have fit easily—lethally, but easily—into a couple of shoe boxes. But producing that U-235 had required hundreds of scientists, tens of thousands of laborers, and hundreds of millions of scarce wartime dollars. The nation—though only a handful of people knew it—had bet hugely on this roll of the scientific dice. Small wonder, then, that General Groves wanted to hide it well.

The silo beside the barn was actually a guard tower of reinforced concrete, the article explained. Looking closely at the illustration, I saw windows—bulletproof glass, the text noted—tucked beneath the silo’s overhanging metal roof. Beneath the windows were small slits in panels of thick steel: firing ports for machine guns.

I picked up the scan of Novak’s photo. The quality was terrible, but not so terrible as to keep me from seeing that the proportions of the building and the silo were the same as those of the uranium bunker. The perspective was different, to be sure—the illustration had been drawn from a ground-level perspective, while Novak’s photo had been shot from somewhere above, looking down through a gap in the trees. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even the silo’s roof—an odd, octagonal hat of a roof, rather than the round dome found atop most silos—was a dead-on match.

Our food arrived, so I scooped up the magazine and the print. The two aluminum platters filled the tabletop. The sauce was steaming, the cheese was molten, and the wedges of pizza were immense. After he’d set down the trays, our server handed us
two plastic forks, flimsier than I’d ever seen before, and two tiny paper plates—saucers, really—for the massive, messy slices of pizza.
Big Ed,
I thought,
is up there somewhere, and he’s laughing at us
.

And that, too, was okay with me.

WE DEPARTED LADEN WITH LEFTOVERS,
the boxes heavy and already beginning to sag from the grease as we crossed the street and walked into the parking lot adjoining the football field. I had rolled up the photo and the magazine, which she told me to keep, and tucked them in a hip pocket. I didn’t feel authorized to tell her details, but I said there might be someone buried near the spot where the photo was taken.

“I knew it,” she said.

“How?”

“Dead people are your thing,” she said. “They’re what you do. They’re what you care about. If you’re going to this much trouble, it’s for a dead person.” On their face, the words might have seemed like an insult or an accusation, but there was nothing in her tone to suggest she’d meant them that way. They were simply how she saw me, and the assessment was accurate, if un-sentimental.

“And what’s your thing? Books?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. I have a master’s in history, actually; I did my thesis on the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge.”

“Did you grow up in Oak Ridge?”

She shook her head. “Louisiana,” she said.

“What got you interested in Oak Ridge history?”

“A family connection,” she said. “My father. And my grandmother.”

“Was she one of the calutron girls separating uranium at Y-12?”

“No,” she said. She hesitated. “She was involved with the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project. The work they did at the Graphite Reactor.”

“Physicist? Chemist?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that fancy,” she said. “Listen, I should go. Thanks for the pizza and the company.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “On both counts. Where are you parked?”

“I’m not,” she said. “I live just up the hill. I’m walking.”

“Let me drive you,” I offered. She shook her head.

“There’s a shortcut through the football field,” she said. “It’s close, and I like the walk.”

“Then I’ll walk you home. I’ll carry your pizza, since you don’t have any books.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” she said. “Oak Ridge is very safe. Well, except for the occasional bizarre murder.”

I laughed. “At least let me walk you partway. Till we get past the dark place where the monsters lurk.” I tugged gently at the pizza box.

She relented, and we ambled up a paved ramp to the level of the football field. At the far end of the field she angled upward onto a footpath that led to another large, grassy field. Like the football field, this one was also nestled in a natural bowl, but this bowl was surrounded by trees rather than grandstands. The lights of 1940s-vintage houses shone through the barren trees. “This is a practice field,” she said. “The football team does workouts here;
soccer leagues use it, too.” At the far end of the practice field, the woods closed in tightly. “Watch your step,” she said. “There’s a deep hole there. A big storm sewer starts there. Runs under the fields and all the way down the hill to the Turnpike. You fall in there, we might not find you till the spring rains washed you out near the Federal Building.”