Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (4 page)

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 shade 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.”

“Who’s Duane?” I asked.

“He’s the hospital’s radiological protection officer,” said Garcia. “A medical physicist, I think he’s called, on the School of Medicine faculty. He trains interns and residents in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He keeps track of all the hospital’s medical radioisotopes, and he trains ER teams how to respond if there’s a nuclear accident or terrorist act. His office is up on the ground floor, practically right over our heads, and he’s got all sorts of instruments and safety gear.”

Thirty seconds later Garcia was on the phone with Johnson, describing the tiny metallic pellet he’d found and the trail of shredded GI tissue leading up to it. Three minutes after the phone call, we heard a clatter at the far end of the hallway and Johnson appeared, wheeling a cart. The cart measured two or three feet square by six feet tall; one side was fitted with a corrugated blue door that resembled the flexible shutter on a big-city storefront or an antique rolltop desk. “Your receptionist didn’t want to let me in,” he said to Garcia. “I had to explain pretty bluntly that it was in her best interests and yours to unlock the door so I could figure out what’s going on in here.” He slid the plastic door up, revealing shelves laden with disposable clothing, cleaning solutions, plastic bags, and electronic instruments.

Rummaging around in a bin at the bottom of the cart, Johnson removed a tan Geiger counter, identical to the one Hank had used at the DMORT training, and switched it on. I heard the slow, buzzing clicks I had come to recognize as the baseline sound of normal, background radiation, like a clock ticking or a diesel engine idling. He extended the wand toward Garcia. “Hold out your hands,” he said, and when Garcia did, Hank passed the wand over them, front and back. The instrument continued to buzz at the same slow, reassuring rate. Next he waved the wand
over Garcia’s body from head to foot, with the same quiet results, and then over Miranda, and then over me and Emert. I felt myself starting to relax, and I relaxed a lot more when Duane said, “Well, there’s no contamination on any of you.”

Then he stepped around a corner and opened the door of the autopsy suite, and suddenly all hell broke loose. The Geiger counter ratcheted up to a harsh, continuous buzz, and a small, pager-looking gadget at Duane’s waist began shrieking. “Son of a
bitch,
” said Duane, backpedaling fast. Both instruments quieted down once he was away from the door, but my heart and my nerves—which had zoomed up in sync with the gadgets—continued to rev. “Something in there is hot as a pistol,” he said. He looked shaken, and that didn’t do a lot to calm me back down.

I was feeling some fear for my own safety, but more concern for Garcia’s and Emert’s, and—especially—for Miranda’s. She was a young woman of childbearing age, and if there was risk from radiation, she was potentially the most vulnerable. She was also my student, and I felt responsible for her safety. “Duane,” I said, “do we need to get out of here? And do we need to evacuate the hospital, or part of it?”

“We’re okay here,” said Duane, glancing at the meter as he said it. “These walls are concrete, and they’re pretty stout down here in the basement, so they’re good shielding. I’d like to figure out what kind of radiation this is, and how hot it is, before we do something as drastic as evacuating patients. If you start moving sick people, you can make them a lot sicker. But let me make sure the folks just above us aren’t at risk. Where’s the nearest phone?” Garcia pointed to the wall behind Johnson, and Johnson dialed a five-digit extension. “Hi, it’s Duane,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got an odd request. I’m one floor below you guys right now. Could you
run a survey meter around the offices and labs up there, make sure nothing’s coming up through the floor?” I heard the faint sound of questions bleeding out of the receiver. “The morgue,” Duane said. “I’m down in the morgue.” I heard more faint questions. “Look, just do it, would you? Like, right now? And if your active dosimeter isn’t already on, turn it on before you do anything else.” I saw a look of impatience flash across his face; he paused long enough for me to hear urgency in the voice at the other end of the line. “We may have an incident down here,” said the physicist, “but I don’t have time to talk right now. Check the whole lab area, get people out if you need to, and page me if you see anything worth worrying about. I’ll call you back in a few minutes, but right now I gotta go.” He hung up the phone and turned to the four of us. “We’re right underneath the cyclotron lab,” he said, “where we make radiopharmaceuticals for PET scans. The floor’s really thick, there are no patients in that area, and the staff knows how to make sure it’s safe up there.” He eyed the corner of the hallway. Around it lay the door of the morgue and the danger lurking within. He drew a deep breath. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

He went back to the cart and pulled out a bagged garment; as he unwrapped and unfolded it, I recognized it as a biohazard suit like the ones the DMORT team had worn. The DMORT team called the garments moon suits, but Duane called it a “bunny suit,” because its built-in booties and gloves and hood make it look like an Easter-rabbit costume, minus the ears. “Bunny suit” seemed an oddly innocent nickname, though, considering how concerned Johnson now seemed. Once he was zipped in, he took a red and yellow instrument out of the cart’s bin and switched it on. This gadget was similar to the Geiger counter—boxy and
about half the size of a car battery, with a wand attached to a flexible cord—but instead of a dial with a needle, this one had a digital display. “So what is that,” asked Miranda, “the all-new, fully equipped 2009 Geiger Counter Deluxe?”

“Sort of,” he said. “It’s an ionization chamber. A Geiger-Mueller counter gives you a yes-or-no answer—it tells you whether or not there’s elevated radioactivity—but it doesn’t tell much more than that. This one tells whether the activity is alpha, beta, or gamma radiation, and it measures the wavelength and energy accurately.”

“Sounds like a better gizmo,” she said. “Why doesn’t everybody use these?”

“These cost about four times as much,” he said. “And usually the Geiger-Mueller counter is good enough, because usually it tells you there’s nothing above background radiation.”

“But not always,” said Emert, who’d had a deer-in-the-headlights look ever since he’d vomited in the morgue.

“Not always,” conceded Johnson. He checked the ionization chamber’s display and seemed satisfied with what he saw there, then handed the instrument to Emert briefly while he rummaged around in the cart. First he dug out a pair of toy-looking plastic rings, which he put on his two index fingers. “Ring dosimeters,” he explained, showing us a small square of metallic foil in the broadest part of the band, where a gemstone would be if the rings were jewelry. He rotated the rings toward the inside of each finger. “To measure how much exposure my hands get.” Then he fished out a lead smock, the sort patients wear while having an arm or leg X-rayed, and put it on. “The body’s core is more vulnerable to radiation than the arms and legs,” he said. “The GI tract and the bone marrow, especially.”

Taking the ionization chamber back from Emert, he stepped around the corner. I saw him reach for the morgue’s door and open it, then extend the wand through the opening. He let out a low whistle just as the monitor clipped to his belt began to shriek again, then scurried back around the corner and rejoined us. He scanned our worried faces. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, from the reading I’m getting and from what you’ve told me you found in the body, this isn’t something that’s spreading contamination.”

Nobody else seemed to want to ask the logical next question, so I did. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, the source, whatever it is, is putting out some intense radiation. I’ll need to notify TEMA—the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency—and call the medical folks over in Oak Ridge. They’re some of the world’s best experts in treating radiation exposure.”

“Actually,” said Miranda, “just before you got here, I spoke with Hank Strickland, a health physicist I know at REAC/TS. He’s on his way over now.”

Johnson looked startled, but he quickly recovered. “While I call TEMA, call Hank back. Tell him we’re looking at an intense gamma radiation source. Ask him if one of their emergency physicians could meet you guys up in the ER.” I saw alarm in the faces of Miranda, Garcia, and Emert, and if they were looking, they saw it in mine, too. “It’s a precaution,” Johnson said. “Triage. We need to see how much exposure you’ve gotten, and we’ll need to start taking blood and urine samples for that.”

Just then Eddie Garcia grunted in pain, doubled over, and threw up. From my recent DMORT training, I knew that vomiting was one symptom of radiation sickness. I also knew that the
sooner victims began to vomit after being exposed, the worse their condition.

Miranda knew it, too. The cell phone shook in her hands as she struggled to hit the redial button.

AFTER SOME QUICK,
back-of-the-envelope calculations, Duane Johnson estimated that the radioactive pellet from Novak’s gut was packing somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred curies of radioactivity, and it was spewing pure gamma, the most penetrating form of radiation. “Like armor-piercing X-rays,” Miranda said, and Johnson nodded grimly. The image was vivid, but it was far from reassuring.

Hank arrived just as Miranda, Garcia, Emert, and I were heading upstairs to the ER. He offered to help Johnson retrieve the source and get it shielded. Dr. Chris Sorensen, an emergency physician specializing in radiation accidents, was on his way from Oak Ridge as well, Hank said, and would meet us in the ER. Meanwhile, Dr. Sorensen was on the phone with Dr. Al Davies, a UT emergency physician Johnson had paged, briefed, and asked to meet us in the ER.

Never in the history of UT Hospital’s ER had four people been processed so swiftly. Dr. Davies whisked us back to a triage suite, where he assigned a nurse to each of us. In no time, all four of us had tourniquets around our biceps as nurses prepared to draw blood.

Three of us were stuck almost in unison, the blood spurting thick and dark into a series of five vials. Garcia’s arm remained untouched. Garcia was holding his right arm across his belly; his face was tense with pain. His nurse, a thickset and graying
woman who appeared to be in her fifties, took a step back. Dr. Davies hurried to her side. “Nurse, is there a problem?”

“I…” she faltered. “I heard it’s something radioactive. Is that true?”

“We’re not certain, but we think so, yes,” said Davies. “That’s why we need the blood samples, so we can tell how severe the exposure is.”

“I’m not comfortable doing this,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to be contaminated.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped the doctor. Then, seeing the near-panic in her eyes, his tone softened. “This isn’t something he can spread to you,” he said. “It’s not like a virus or a chemical. It’s more like a sunburn, even though it isn’t showing up yet. You can’t catch this from him, any more than you could catch a sunburn.” He laid a hand on Garcia’s shoulder and left it there, showing her there was nothing to fear. “I’d draw his blood myself, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve done it, and it’d be cruel and inhuman treatement if I stuck Dr. Garcia with my rusty skills.” Still she held back, motionless except for her head, which began shaking “no.”

Just as Davies was drawing himself up to his most authoritative physician posture, my nurse—a young woman who had filled my two blood vials with cool efficiency—stepped in, taking the syringe from the hand of the reluctant nurse. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.” She tapped her index finger on the inside of Garcia’s elbow to bring the vein up, then eased in the needle.