Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (5 page)

Garcia raised his head and studied her face. “What’s your name?” His voice sounded reedy and forced.

“Darcy,” she said. “Darcy Bonnett.”

“Thank you, Darcy.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. When she was finished, she gave Garcia’s hand a quick squeeze.

After drawing our blood, they sent us to bathrooms with plastic specimen cups. When I emerged, the cup warm in my hand, I saw a tall, tanned, silver-haired man in civilian clothes—khaki pants, a blue shirt, a red tie—conferring with Dr. Davies. He introduced himself as Chris Sorensen, a radiation-medicine physician from REAC/TS. As Miranda, Garcia, and Emert emerged from other bathrooms and handed off their pee, we all instinctively gathered around Davies and Sorensen. “I just got an update from Hank,” Sorensen said. “He and Duane Johnson think they can retrieve the source and get it into a shielded vessel. So the good news is, this should be contained quickly.”

“I can tell you’re about to drop a bad-news shoe,” I said.

“It’s not great,” he said. “It’s a gamma source, for sure; luckily, it appears to be a sealed, single-point source—that little pellet that came from Dr. Novak’s intestine. Gamma sources don’t spread contamination, they just emit radiation. Like light, from a lightbulb, rather than water from a garden hose.” This sounded like something from a high school science-class talk he’d given a lot of times. “But this source is iridium-192, which is very intense.”

“You mean dangerous,” said Miranda.

He hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes,” he said, “dangerous. Those of you who touched it”—he looked directly at Garcia and Miranda, so I knew Hank had briefed him—“will probably have burns on your hands. My other concern is how much whole-body dose all of you got. We need to know whether it’s enough to dam
age your bone marrow or the lining of your GI tract. We’ll need to do whole-blood counts again at twelve hours and twenty-four hours to see if your lymphocyte counts are dropping.”

“Excuse me, Doc,” said Emert. “Our what counts?”

“Lymphocytes,” he said. “They’re a type of white blood cells. If they drop significantly, it means the stem cells in your bone marrow have been hit hard. Also means you’re vulnerable to infection.”

“Sort of like radiation-induced AIDS,” added Miranda. I was starting to wish she didn’t have such a gift for grim analogies.

“Sort of,” Sorensen agreed. “Tracking changes in your lymphocytes is one way we estimate the dose you’ve received. Another is to reconstruct the incident timeline. So I’ll need each of you to think back and give me your best estimate of how much time you spent near Dr. Novak’s body, particularly how close you were to the abdominal region, where the source was—three feet away for thirty minutes, for instance, and ten feet away for an hour. Between the incident timeline and the bloodwork, we’ll get a fairly precise idea of what sort of exposure you each got.”

“You mentioned burns,” I said, “but their hands look fine.” As if on cue, Miranda and Garcia held out their palms.

Sorensen and Davies both shook their heads. “Too soon to tell,” Davies said. “Normally the redness doesn’t show up till the next day. We see it occasionally in patients undergoing radiation therapy. Redness. You may have itching or swelling or numbness in your hands, too. The redness generally peaks about twenty-four hours after exposure, then it fades. Same with the symptoms of whole-body exposure—nausea, diarrhea, fatigue: they show up, then disappear, and everything seems fine. Even if it’s not.”

“The ‘prodromal stage’ is the term for that period of initial symptoms,” added Sorensen. “When they disappear, that marks the beginning of what we call the ‘latency stage’ of ARS, acute radiation syndrome. If it is ARS, the symptoms can come roaring back, anywhere from days to weeks after exposure. ‘Manifest illness,’ that stage is called. Radiation does strange things to the body. It damages the DNA in cells, and cells that get replaced more often—like the bone marrow and the lining of the gut—are affected first, and the worst.”

“So the bloodwork helps you estimate the dose and diagnose damage,” I said. “But what about treatment? What can you do for us? What can you do to reverse or minimize the effects of the radiation?”

“Not a lot, unfortunately,” said Sorensen. “If your lymphocytes drop significantly, we’ll start you on growth factors to stimulate the bone marrow. We can treat localized burns to ease pain and fight infection. If your immune system is compromised, we can isolate you.” He hesitated. “We can recommend psychological and psychiatric care, to help deal with anxiety or anger. Beyond that, it’s up to the body to repair and heal itself.”

“Shit,” said Emert. “This sucks.”

“I know,” said Sorensen. “I wish I had a magic pill I could give you.”

The detective puffed out a deep breath of frustration. “So tell me this,” he said. “Novak was a physicist in Oak Ridge, from the moment there
was
an Oak Ridge. He worked with nuclear reactors and radioactive materials for forty, fifty years. Could this be a bizarre side effect of all those years of radiation exposure?”

Sorensen shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “That gamma radiation is coming from that tiny pellet that was in his
gut. Iridium-192 is a very unstable isotope, with a very short half-life. You have to work hard to make it radioactive, and once you do, it decays fast. As it emits all that gamma radiation, it’s changing steadily from radioactive iridium into ordinary platinum. A year or two from now, it’ll be relatively safe to handle.”

“So that hot little pellet,” I said, “isn’t some dangerous bit of flotsam or jetsam left over from the Manhattan Project?”

“It was probably created within the past six months,” he said, “and Dr. Novak couldn’t have survived more than a day or two after ingesting it. Within minutes he was doomed. Within hours he was what we call a ‘walking ghost.’”

ARMED WITH PENS AND NOTEPADS, MIRANDA, GARCIA,
Emert, and I huddled in plastic chairs in a triage room in the Emergency Department, comparing notes like classmates before a test. We were reconstructing what Sorensen called the “incident timeline”—which Miranda, in classic form, had nicknamed the “path to peril.” How long had I spent chainsawing Novak’s body out of the frozen swimming pool—ten minutes? fifteen? Had Miranda and I spent a full hour driving back to UT with the corpse in the pickup truck? Another fifteen minutes getting it onto the gurney and into the morgue? The next day, when Emert searched the clothing and identified Novak, were the detective and I beside the gurney for thirty minutes, or was it more like forty? How many lifetimes elapsed between the moment the autopsy began and the instant we fled the morgue?

As the four of us debated matters of minutes, Garcia winced and hastily excused himself. Miranda watched him hurry to a
restroom, then looked at me. “I’m worried about Eddie,” she said. “This doesn’t look good. But I don’t understand why his symptoms would be so much worse than anyone else’s. The rest of us were around the body the day it was recovered, and he wasn’t.”

“Maybe it’s just the stress,” I said, but it rang false in my ears even as I said it. Suddenly it hit me. “Dammit,” I said. “The autopsy.”

“But we were there, too,” she said. “Sure, he was closer to Novak, but not that much closer.”

“Not Novak’s autopsy,” I said. “The one Eddie was doing the day we brought Novak in to thaw. Remember? We parked the gurney at the other sink, right behind Eddie. He was two feet away for hours.”

Miranda clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh God,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that. He did two that day. And another one the next morning, before Novak’s. Oh, this is bad, Dr. B. Very, very bad.” Her chin began to quiver, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

I glanced at the two doctors and saw them huddled with the nurse named Darcy. She nodded, then disappeared behind a curtain. A moment later she reappeared, wheeling a stand with an IV bag attached. Behind the door of the restroom, a toilet flushed with a roar. Miranda wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sniffed quickly. She picked up her pen and notepad again just as Garcia opened the restroom door and walked weakly toward us.

I looked at Garcia with sympathy. “Hurling again?”

He shook his head. “Other end,” he grimaced.

Miranda’s eyes darted from Garcia to me at the news of this additional symptom. Sorensen and Davies walked toward us.
“Dr. Garcia, we’d like to go ahead and put you on an IV,” Davies said, “since you’re losing fluids.” Garcia nodded; as a physician, he had probably known they’d want to do this. “We’d also like to go ahead and admit you for observation.” If Garcia had seen this one coming, it didn’t show: the look on his face when Sorensen said this was somewhere between shock and despair, but he simply nodded again. We moved back into the ER’s triage area; Eddie disappeared behind a curtain long enough to change into a gown, climb into a bed, and get hooked to the IV. Then the nurse pulled back the curtain and we clustered around his bed to finish reconstructing the incident timeline.

“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, worri
some 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.