Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (8 page)

IT WASN’T OFTEN THAT I ATTENDED THE FUNERALS
of people whose remains I had examined. For one thing, I usually had no sense of connection with them, despite my strange intimacy with their bodies and bones—despite the fact that in most cases, I had handled the very framework of their physical lives. In Novak’s case, I had not actually handled his bones; only Garcia had been unfortunate enough to have close, prolonged contact with Novak’s remains. Yet at the moment when I realized that Novak had exposed Garcia—and, to a lesser degree, Miranda (and even me) to gamma radiation—the flash of knowledge and concern and fear had seared me with something as emotionally powerful as the radiation, involving me in this case in a unique and powerful way. I wanted to help catch whoever had murdered Novak—assuming it really was a bizarre murder, rather than an even more bizarre suicide. More to the point, I wanted to help catch whoever had put my friends Eddie and Miranda at risk,
even though that was surely not intentional. What was the military euphemism for unintended casualties? Collateral damage. Eddie Garcia’s bone marrow and hands, and Miranda’s fingertips—if Sorensen’s worst-case medical scenario unfolded—might be considered minor collateral damage by a killer. But by my heart’s reckoning, those would be grievous losses.

The other factor that had drawn me to Oak Ridge for Novak’s funeral was anthropological fascination. As a physical anthropologist, I’d spent years handling the most basic and tangible remnants of human beings: their bones. Human culture, though—the structures built not of calcium or muscle or bricks and boards—had taken a backseat in my mind, except for the dark corners of culture where murder lurked. I knew, for instance, that men were partial to guns as their murder weapons, whereas women seemed to prefer knives or poison (although those traditional gender preferences appeared, in recent years, to be blurring). I knew that homosexuals often engaged in “overkill”—excessive and shocking violence, far beyond what was needed to end a life—if murdering a partner. I had learned that if a child was abducted by a sexual predator, the odds of finding the child alive plummeted after twenty-four hours. The rich drama of healthier human culture, though, had largely played out beyond my field of view, since my field of view was generally filled by images such as the mark left by a knife as it sliced through a rib, or the pattern of fractures radiating through a skull that had been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat.

Years before, I had taken graduate school courses in cultural anthropology. I had journeyed with Franz Boas—figuratively speaking—as he explored the fluid boundaries and social units of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s
and early 1900s. I had peered over Margaret Mead’s shoulder as she had researched the casual sexual couplings of teenagers on the South Pacific island of Samoa in the 1920s. But the unique cultural creation that was Oak Ridge—a small, secret, authority-dominated enclave where tens of thousands of young men and women were treated almost like worker ants in an anthill, except for a handful of military and scientific leaders who possessed the social status and secret knowledge traditionally reserved for an elite caste of high priests: I had never peered at Oak Ridge through the inquiring lens of an anthropologist.

Now, the odd case study that was Oak Ridge all but consumed me. In the handful of days since I had cut a physicist’s body from the ice of a murky frozen swimming pool, Oak Ridge had come to occupy most of my waking thoughts and more than a few of my dreams, and one of the things I found amazing was that it had taken so many years—and such a dramatic turn of personal events—to trigger my fascination. It was impossible to live in East Tennessee without knowing that Oak Ridge had played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. It was almost as widely understood that in the decades that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oak Ridge had helped harness atoms for peace, in the form of nuclear power and radioisotopes for medical research and treatment. Beyond those superficial bullet points, though, I had never bothered to read much or
think
much about the opening chapter in the history of Oak Ridge. As I considered it now, I marveled, again and again, how profoundly this tiny city had changed not just the nation but the entire world. Talk about a lever and a place to stand: nuclear energy was about as long and strong as a lever could get—I suppose a poet might argue that love or hatred could be stronger, but
as a scientist, I would find that argument somewhat abstract and unconvincing—and Oak Ridge had been the fulcrum, the fixed point around which the lever of the atom had swiveled to move the earth.

Oak Ridge wasn’t the only Manhattan Project installation, of course. There was also Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of physicists and other scientists devoted themselves to turning theoretical physics into deliverable bombs. And there was Hanford, Washington, where mammoth reactors—scaled-up versions of Novak’s reactor in Oak Ridge—cranked out the bomb-sized quantities of plutonium. But Oak Ridge was the biggest of the sites, and everything Los Alamos and Hanford did was built on the foundation of Oak Ridge. That alone made the city a fascinating specimen.

But there was more. There was the whole heroic and heartbreaking backdrop to Oak Ridge’s creation behind the veil of secrecy: there was World War II. I wasn’t born until a decade after Germany and Japan surrendered, so I knew only what I’d read and heard and seen, and that was only a small smattering of the historical record and archival images and firsthand stories. But from what I knew, it truly embodied the best of times and the worst of times; the best of mankind, and the cruelest and most depraved.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half
years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and
sixteen million
civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And how did the hundreds of millions of grieving survivors carry on in the face of such sorrow?

As my truck topped the rise and dropped once more into the valley where Oak Ridge sprawled, I looked at the place with new eyes. Against a global backdrop of unrelenting, apocalyptic death, this small place, which to modern eyes might look haphazard and provisional and ordinary, had been the focal point of the biggest, most complex, and most urgent endeavor the world had ever known. That endeavor was all the more amazing considering that it was accomplished without the world’s knowledge. Until that knowledge had burst, brighter than a hundred suns, above two cities in Japan.

LEONARD NOVAK’S FINAL RESTING PLACE
was barely a stone’s throw from his death scene. The funeral was held in the United Church—called the Chapel on the Hill by every Oak Ridger I heard refer to it—the small, historic church perched on the hillside just above the Alexander Inn. It seemed a fitting place to memorialize one of the pivotal scientists of the Manhattan
Project. Although Novak had long since retired, and although Emert had said the scientist wasn’t a churchgoer, the parking lot beside the church was packed, and even the faded asphalt down beside the derelict hotel was filling fast, with more than a few spots occupied by television news vehicles. Novak’s retirement had been a quiet, almost obscure one, according to Emert, but his bizarre death had thrust him squarely into the posthumous spotlight.

I parked in front of the old hotel and made my way up a sidewalk and a long flight of steps to the front door of the chapel.

One of the first public buildings erected during the city’s wartime construction boom, the Chapel on the Hill had done its part for the war effort by hosting services of multiple faiths and denominations. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews—they’d all held weekly services here during the war, each group distributing their prayer books or hymnals just before their appointed hour in the building, then gathering them up again at the end of the service. Church buildings often sit empty and idle most of the time, but not this one. During the war, it would have been hard to find an hour of the day when someone wasn’t preaching or praying or practicing on the church’s pump organ. I would like to have seen a time-lapse video—one compressing a week’s worth of comings and goings into, say, sixty seconds—just to watch the church’s doors open and close, the building rhythmically inhaling and exhaling streams of worshipers.

The chapel’s interior was packed; three television cameras rested on tripods at the back, and every seat seemed taken. I scanned the pews, seeking any open space, but I didn’t see one. In a moment, though, an usher came up the center aisle from near the front of the church and motioned me forward. There were
no rows reserved for family—Novak had been married, briefly, as a young man, the newspaper obituary had said, but he had no children—and I found myself shoehorned into the front row, in a slot better suited to someone half my size. The elderly man on my left—I guessed his age at seventy—pretended not to notice me, even as he drew himself in tightly and scooted, fussily but with no noticeable increase in room for me, away from me. To my right, an even older woman—she must have been eighty or more—nodded slightly as I sat down, then surprised me by turning to speak to me. In a stage whisper that could probably have been heard three rows back, she said, “Well, thank God
somebody
here is under sixty. We’ll be lucky if three or four of us don’t kick the bucket during the service.” I wanted to laugh—she might be old, but she seemed sharp and funny—but I managed to limit myself to a smile, since laughter didn’t seem to suit the setting or the occasion.

There was no coffin; instead an unadorned brass urn rested on a simple wooden altar. Within hours after the FBI had whisked the iridium source out of Knoxville, Garcia had phoned the state medical examiner’s office and they had sent a pathologist from Nashville to complete the autopsy so that Novak’s body—which was not getting any fresher—could be removed from the morgue and cremated. It had taken three people—Garcia, Duane Johnson, and Dr. Sorensen—to convince the Nashville pathologist that Novak’s radiation-ravaged body was no more hazardous than any other corpse. I had heard Johnson explaining the physics of it over the phone. “Think of the gamma source like a really strong magnet sitting on your desk,” he had said. “There’s a powerful energy field emanating from it—a magnetic field surrounding the magnet, gamma radiation around the iridium-192. If the magnet’s too
close to your computer, your hard drive is gonna be toast. If the gamma source is too close to your body, well…” He’d trailed off then, probably regretting his use of the word “toast,” given our concerns about Garcia’s hands. “Anyhow,” he went on, “once you get rid of the source, it’s gone. There’s no smear of magnetism lingering on your desk, waiting to trash your new hard drive; there’s no radioactivity in the sink or the cadaver.”

In the end, though, it was probably not the magnet analogy that reassured the nervous Nashville pathologist, but Sorensen’s offer to assist in the morgue. It was one thing to say, “It’s perfectly safe”; it was another to say, “I’ll stand with you while you do this.” And for Sorensen, I realized, participating in the remainder of the autopsy was probably an interesting opportunity to learn more about the specific effects of a lethal dose of gamma radiation.

The body had been cremated by my friend Helen Taylor, in one of the gleaming furnaces at East Tennessee Cremation Services. Helen, too, had seemed nervous about handling the body. Taking a cue from Sorensen, I offered to bring the remains out personally; she thanked me for the offer, but said it wasn’t necessary. In my head, I knew the remains—and now the cremated remains, or cremains—were perfectly safe. Still, something spooked me about that brass urn on the altar. It was not what was in the urn that spooked me, I gradually realized, but what was in me—some kernel of superstition in my heart, some fear germinating in a dark corner of my psyche. Fear for Garcia and Miranda, perhaps. A sense of bad karma in the air, or spiritual fallout drifting down from the past.

I shook off my thoughts and focused on the lectern, where an ancient man was telling a story about Novak’s absentminded
ness, which apparently was legendary. “And so we put this lead brick in his briefcase, to see how long it would take him to notice it. He never did. Carried the damn thing around for months.” He laughed, and the congregation laughed with him—enjoying his enjoyment, including the naughtiness of saying “damn” in a church. One of the few consolations of old age, I thought: you can say pretty much anything you want, even outrageous things, and people let them slide, or even find them charming. Beside me I felt a slight shift, then noticed my seatmate jotting a note on her program. She finished writing, then nudged me and held the note toward me with a twinkle in her eye. “Not true,” the spidery script read. “It was Richard Feynman who lugged that lead brick around, and it was in Los Alamos.”

I smiled. I liked her. She seemed both witty and slightly subversive. Her face said eighty, and so did her handwriting, but the note-passing spoke of a mischievous schoolgirl.

After the ancient colleague told a few more anecdotes—some lighthearted, some more serious—a minister took the podium to put Novak’s life and work in a philosophical and theological context. He talked about science and discovery—about Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci—whose given name Novak had shared—and Copernicus and Darwin. He reminded us that curiosity was what had called our primordial ancestors out of the sea and onto dry land. I suspected the aforementioned Darwin might have debated him on that; I didn’t remember reading much about curiosity in
The Origin of Species
. But this was a sermon, not a lecture, so I took it with a grain of scientific salt. The minister went on awhile about the quest for knowledge being a hallmark of humans. “The divine spark,” he called knowledge. “There is no brighter spark than atomic energy,” he went on—the transition to Oak Ridge,
and to Novak, at last. He told how Novak had guided the construction and operation of the Graphite Reactor; how he’d created plutonium within the crucible of the reactor; how he’d mastered the steps needed to separate and purify this new element. “Un-locking the power of the atom,” he said dramatically. “The fire at the core of the universe. Like a twentieth-century Prometheus, Leonard Novak stole fire from the gods.” I heard a small, sharp exhalation from the woman beside me; it sounded surprisingly like exasperation. “Stealing fire from the gods,” the minister repeated, his voice rising as he got swept up in the mythology. “A bold theft. A world-changing theft. A perilous theft. The gift of fire; the curse of fire.” He surveyed the congregation, and stretched forth his arms as if to encompass us. “May we—those of us who dwell in the light and warmth of that Promethean fire”—he now raised his hands toward the ceiling, and the chandeliers glowing there, presumably powered by nuclear energy—“may we acquire the wisdom to harness that fire for good. Always, only for good.” He stood silent, his arms still aloft.