The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (12 page)

The room’s size was what initially startled me, but its contents were what truly astonished me. A folding camp cot was nestled against one wall of the room; a puffy down sleeping bag lay crumpled on top, the bag’s red vivid against the blue of the cot’s taut nylon mesh. At the head of the cot, on a plastic milk crate, stood a kerosene lamp and a box of matches; at the foot was a wire-mesh wastebasket, half filled with empty cans and bottles and food wrappers. “My God,” I said, “someone’s been living here.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Emert chuckled, obviously pleased that he’d managed to surprise and impress me.

“Isabella?”

“Don’t know,” said Art. “Looks like plenty of prints on bottles and cans in the trash—the lamp, too, thanks to the kerosene and the soot—but it’s better to bag everything and take it back to the lab, instead of trying to fume it here.”

Emert caught my eye and pointed to the opposite wall—the one where we’d entered. Midway along the wall, between our pipe and another, a pair of plastic milk crates supported an unfinished pine plank, and on this plank stood an elaborately carved wooden artifact. “Get a load of the pagoda,” he said.

“It’s not exactly a pagoda,” I corrected, “but close. I saw a presentation about these a few years ago by a cultural anthropologist from Asia. It’s called akamidana, if I remember right, and it’s a Shinto shrine to the gods of the ancestors. You find them in a lot of Japanese homes.”

Arranged on the plank in front of the shrine was a cluster of small glass bottles. I knelt and shone my flashlight into them and saw that they contained rice, salt, wheat, and what I guessed to be dried tea berries—traditional Shinto offerings to the gods. Emert played the beam of his light on the wall above the kamidana, where a Japanese symbol reached nearly to the ceiling. The black paint was fresh and bold; the concrete had obviously been cleaned shortly before the paint had been brushed on. The room suddenly exploded with light. “Jesus H.,” snapped Emert in the general direction of Art, whom I could no longer see. “Couldn’t you have warned us before using the flash?”

“Sorry,” said Art. “I didn’t mean to take the picture yet. I was just trying to check the focus, but I guess I pushed the shutter all the way down.”

“Man,” grumped Emert. “I thought for a second there that Oak Ridge had just been vaporized.”

“Really sorry,” Art repeated. “But now that you’re already blinded, let me take a couple more, just to be sure. We can send it to a translator and find out what it means.”

“I know what it means,” I said as I covered my eyes to shield them from the flash. “I’ve seen that symbol once before, on a pendant, and the woman wearing it told me what it meant. It’s the Japanese symbol for

‘remembrance.’ Isabella wore it around her neck.”

I STOPPED BY KPD THE NEXT MORNING TO SEE ART
Bohanan. A trash can appeared to have exploded there in the forensic lab. Empty cans and scraps of food wrappers covered every table and countertop in the room. The lab room smelled like an untidy teenager’s room, one where pizza crusts and apple cores have accumulated under the bed for a week or two.

Art was bent over the red sleeping bag we’d hauled from the underground room. The bag was spread flat on a large piece of white paper, and Art was methodically coating the bag’s entire surface with overlapping strips of clear evidence tape. He laid the last strip in place just as I entered, then began peeling the tape off the bag as a single patchwork sheet. Holding a section of the tape up to a lamp on the table, he studied the fuzz and fibers stuck to the adhesive. “Looks like some black hairs,” he said. “We’ll compare them to the ones we found in her house, but I’m betting they match. If we’ve got follicles on any of these and any of those, we can do a DNA comparison.” Loosely wadding the tape, he dropped it into a plastic five-gallon bucket filled with water. The water-soluble tape quickly softened; once it had dissolved entirely, Art would strain the water to collect all the hairs and fibers. On one corner of a table, clumped on a tray, I noticed several wads of dirty cotton gauze. Beneath the grime were crusted, reddish brown stains. “That looks like blood to me,” I said.

“Looks like blood to the black light, too,” Art observed. “Take a gander—the light’s on the counter there.” I held the portable ultraviolet lamp over the gauze, and the stains darkened; if not for the ambient light in the room, I knew, they’d appear completely black. I couldn’t help wincing as I thought of Isabella’s fingers, seared into open wounds—not as bad as Garcia’s, but still serious—by the radiation source she’d handled before feeding it to Novak.

I surveyed the assortment of empty bottles, cans, and food wrappers. “Anything that indicates when she bought any of these items or when she consumed them?”

“Not that I’ve found so far,” he said. “None of this stuff was perishable—bottled water, canned tuna fish, dried fruit—so there’s no pull date, the way there’d be on a jug of milk or a pound of ground beef. Some of this stuff has a shelf life that’s measured in decades. Look at this unopened pack of trail mix—‘Best when consumed by July 2017.’ California might have slid into the ocean by then, but these nuts and raisins will still be lip-smacking good.” He laughed. “The most interesting thing is that, though.” He pointed to a small, wandlike object of white plastic, half hidden beneath a Hershey bar wrapper. At first glance I thought it was a digital fever thermometer, but looking closer I realized the shape wasn’t quite right; it was about as long and wide as a tongue depressor, but considerably thicker. “What is it?”

“Look but don’t touch,” he said. “Here’s some tweezers.”

With the tip of the tweezers, I slid the candy-bar wrapper aside for an unobstructed look, but I still couldn’t tell what I was seeing. “Accu-Clear,” read a word in small blue letters. To the left of the word was an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic, and within the indentation were two small cutout windows. One of the windows, an oval, was bisected by a crisp magenta line on a white background. The other opening, a small rectangle, also showed a line, a fuzzier, paler pink. “I still don’t know what it is.”

“Flip it over and read what’s on the back.”

Gingerly I grasped the object by the edges and turned it. This side was printed with instructions in the same blue ink. “Hold for five seconds in urine stream,” read the first line. “Urine stream?” I asked.

“It’s a pregnancy test, dummy.”

A small illustration on the back depicted the two small cutout windows, complete with the colored lines I’d seen on the other side. The caption beside this illustration explained what the pair of lines meant. The lines meant my life had just turned upside down. Unless someone else had taken the test, Isabella was pregnant.

“JESUS,” SAID MIRANDA, “SHE’S ON THE LAM AND SHE’S
knocked up to boot?” It was the morning after I’d seen the pregnancy-test kit in Art’s lab, and I’d dropped by the bone lab when I first arrived on campus. I’d had a bad night of it, so I was eager to get out of bed and onto campus, and I’d been relieved to see Miranda’s car parked beside the stadium when I arrived. When I walked into the lab, she was checking her Facebook page on the computer, but now—when I told her of Isabella’s pregnancy—she closed the window on the screen and gave me full attention. Suddenly her eyes widened and she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Holy crap, Dr. B. Oh, my God. It’s your baby, isn’t it? Oh my God, oh my God, oh myGod. ”

I shrugged miserably. “I don’t know. It seems so far-fetched in so many ways, but then again, she doesn’t—didn’t?—seem like the sort to sleep around.” I shook my head. “Then again, what the hell do I know about what sort she is? She killed a man to avenge the bombing of Nagasaki; clearly she’s a bit unhinged. For all I know, she might’ve slept with a dozen other men in the past few months.” But even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t true.

“When you say ‘other men,’ I assume you mean besides you. Iknew you were sleeping with her,” she said, with what sounded like a mix of vindication and disapproval.

“Slept,” I corrected miserably. “Just once.”

“And am I right in thinking that maybe, just possibly, the topic of protection did not…um, arise, before or during the doing of the deed?”

“Alas, you are correct,” I said. “Things happened pretty quick that night. I think we both got swept away.”

“Swept away? Sweptaway ? What are you, sixteen years old? Jesus, Dr. B., this isn’t the Age of Aquarius, it’s the Age of HIV. And herpes, not to mention—duh—unplanned pregnancy.”

“You’re right, of course. But you know what, Miranda? It’s easy to be right in hindsight. Haven’t you ever been wrong—wrong and headlong—in the heat of the moment?”

“Not since undergraduate—” She stopped midsentence, and her cheeks reddened. “Okay, okay, I see your point. Butfuck, Dr. B.” She snorted. “Oh, wait, you already did that, didn’t you?” I was not amused, and she could tell. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make light of your distress. Butfuck , Dr. B.—you had sex with a murderer.”

“I know that now,” I protested, “but I didn’t know it then. I mean, I knew I was having sex with her. But I didn’t know she was a murderer. Murderess. Whichever.”

“I prefer the term ‘crazed killer,’ actually,” she said. “But don’t let me sway you one way or another.”

She studied me, her face suddenly serious. “So if Isabella got pregnant after being exposed to gamma radiation, does that complicate things medically? Isn’t there a big risk of birth defects?”

I shook my head. “I looked that up yesterday, and I don’t think so. Handling the source burned her fingers—just like it singed your fingertips and cooked Eddie’s hands—but apparently it wouldn’t endanger a baby who was conceived a week or two later.”

“Well, thank heaven for small favors,” Miranda responded. “Still, if it’s your baby, that’s pretty heavy stuff. How are you doing with that?”

“I don’t honestly know,” I said. “I can’t even imagine it. There might be a baby on the way that I’ve fathered, with a woman who’s wanted by the police and the FBI? I have a grown son, Miranda. I have two grandsons. I don’t know this woman. I don’t even know where she is. And if I did, I’d have to turn her in.”

“Wow. Makes worrying about a dissertation topic seem like small potatoes.”

“What do I do about this, Miranda?”

She shrugged. “Whatcan you do? She’s a fugitive. It’s not like you can get together and discuss the situation over coffee at Starbucks. I mean, if the FBI can’t find her, you probably won’t be able to. So unless she surfaces, I don’t see how you can do anything except wait.”

“But she’s in trouble—deep trouble—and she needs medical care for her hands, and she needs prenatal care for the baby. Formy baby. Jesus. What a mess.”

“It is a mess,” she agreed. She paused, looking uncomfortable, then added, “So…um, Dr. B.? Is there somebody else you can talk to about this? Because I’m probably not the best person. A therapist, maybe? Or your son?”

I didn’t tell her that I was already talking to a therapist. She was right, of course, to feel uncomfortable about the conversation. It had been inappropriate to unburden myself to one of my students, even one with whom I’d worked for years, almost as an equal. “I’m sorry, Miranda. That was inconsiderate of me. You’re right. I’ll talk to Jeff.”

Leaving the bone lab, I avoided the stairs that led up one flight to the departmental office. Instead I took a right, out the door at the bottom of the stairwell, and then skirted the base of the stadium on the one-lane service road that threaded between the girders and the columns. The day was chilly, and the cold felt good on my face for the two-minute walk to the north end zone. There I closed my door and dialed a call.

But it was not my son I called—it was the Oak Ridge Police Department, and I was pretty sure the call wasn’t going to make me feel better.

“AND YOU DON’T WANT TO
tell me what this is about before I call the feds?” Jim Emert sounded both intrigued and unhappy.

“Not really,” I said. “I’d rather tell you and Thornton at the same time.” Thornton—Special Agent Charles “Chip” Thornton—was assigned to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. When Novak had been killed by a radiation source, the Bureau feared that it was the work of terrorists. Thornton had been sent down to Tennessee to head the investigation.

Emert sighed. “Dr. Bill Brockton, man of mystery. Hang on a second. I’m putting you on hold while I conference Thornton in. If I lose you, I’ll call you right back.” I heard a click, then silence. A minute passed, then a couple more. I’d just about decided I’d been disconnected when the phone clicked again.

“Doc, are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Special Agent Thornton?”

“Yeah, Chip here. Hello, Doc.”

“Hi, Chip. How’s life in our nation’s capital?”

“I miss Tennessee. I got spoiled down there.”

“You know where to find us.” I hesitated, unsure how to begin the discussion that I’d requested. “You guys still beating the bushes for Isabella?”

“We are. Nothing but leaves and branches so far, unfortunately. We’d thought she might turn up in Baton Rouge or Shreveport, since she grew up in Louisiana, but no trace of her there so far. Emert says they found a room in the Oak Ridge storm-sewer system where she holed up for at least a few days.”

“Incredible,” I said. “She must have stashed the food and stuff there before she killed Novak, in case she needed to lie low.” I was stalling, I realized. “Did Jim tell you there were bloody bandages in the trash they found in the room?”

“He did,” said Thornton. “He sent me an inventory of everything the forensic techs recovered from the scene.”

I couldn’t stall any longer. “Then you know she’s pregnant. Or probably is. Or was.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Puts an interesting twist on things, doesn’t it?”

The line went quiet. They were both waiting for me, the one who’d requested the conference call, to continue. “So,” I began, “about that interesting twist…” I foundered, but neither one seemed inclined to help me out. “I need to tell you guys that I slept with Isabella. I’m probably the one who got her pregnant.”