Body Farm: Bones Of Betrayal Part 7

BEATRICE DEFLECTED ALL MY FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS about Novak. "I'm tired," she said. "It's too sad to talk about right now." And then she added, "Tell me your name again?" The sudden, vague hint of senility might just be a ploy, I realized, but if I backed her into that corner, she might never come out of it again. Given that Emert and Thornton had both struck out with her, I decided a strategic retreat was in order.

I checked my unreliable wrist.w.a.tch. "I've probably overstayed my welcome," I said, "and I'd better be getting back to the university. It was so nice talking with you, Beatrice. You reckon I could come visit you again?"

She eyed me sharply, as if to size up my intentions or a.s.sess my sincerity. I smiled at her then, and it was a genuine smile-she really was a remarkable woman-and the smile seemed to tip the scales in my favor. "Of course, Bill," she said, "if you can tear yourself away from those comely UT coeds long enough to listen to an old woman rattle."

I held out my hand to shake goodbye but she ignored it, leaning a cheek toward me for a kiss. I brushed the pebbled skin lightly with my lips. She smelled of face powder and perfume and vodka, and I briefly imagined a different Beatrice, a young and beautiful Beatrice, offering her cheek or her lips to a soldier or a scientist. She would have been an irresistible force.

I was halfway back to UT when my cell phone rang. The display read THOMPSON PHOTO. It was Rodney Satterfield, and I hoped he had good news about the film from Novak's freezer. "So," I said, "what did you find on the world's oldest undeveloped film? Girlie pictures of some cute young calutron operator, circa 1944?" As soon as I heard myself make the joke, two images of Beatrice-young Beatrice and old Beatrice-popped into my head, and I felt doubly embarra.s.sed.

"Actually," he said, "we didn't find much of anything. A clear strip of film. Looks kinda like it hasn't been exposed. Back before everything went digital, we used to get two or three unexposed rolls a week. Somebody would load the film, then put the camera away without using it. Six months later, when they got the camera out to use it, they couldn't remember whether it was a new roll or a shot roll. So they'd rewind the blank film and bring it to us to develop. And then they'd be p.i.s.sed off at us because there weren't any pictures."

"Oh well," I said, "it's not like there was a note taped to the package saying, 'develop this if you want to see who killed me.' We just thought it was worth checking, since he'd gone to the trouble to wrap it up and keep it in the freezer all those years. Anyhow, thanks for trying. I'll need to take the film back to the police, just so they've got custody of it, even though it doesn't do them any good. I'm on my way to UT now; how about I swing by and pick it up on my way?"

"Actually, I said it looked like it hadn't been shot," Rodney corrected. "But it had. The images are just really faint. Either it's horribly underexposed, or the film's been faded by radiation."

"You mean because the guy whose freezer it was in was a walking radiographic camera?"

"Well, maybe," he said. "Or maybe just decades of background solar radiation. Over time, solar radiation can dissipate the images, even if the film is stashed in a freezer. I tried overprocessing it-letting the film soak in the chemicals about fifty percent longer, which usually helps with old film. Doesn't seem to have made much difference. But I'm not quite ready to give up on this," he said. "Mind you, the prints might not turn out black-and-white; they might turn out black-and-black. But it can't hurt to try. How far away are you?"

"I'm nearly to I-40," I said. "Ten minutes? Maybe twenty."

"You want to go in the darkroom with me? If you've got time, I'll wait till you get here."

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I pulled into the parking lot of Thompson Photo Products. Rodney met me at the counter and led me to a darkroom at the back of the building. I felt privileged; although I'd brought hundreds of rolls of crime-scene photos here over the years, I'd never before been ushered into the inner sanctum, the darkroom.

The film, cut into several one-foot strips, was hanging from the photographic equivalent of a clothesline. Rodney unclipped one of the strips and held it so I could see through it. The darkroom was lit by a single red bulb, so-not surprisingly-the room was...dark. Still, despite the dimness, I could see that the cause looked hopeless.

"You weren't kidding," I said. "It's like variations on a theme of clear. Clear, clearer, clearest. How do you know where to even begin? Which one's the least bad?"

"I looked at them again on a light box after we talked," he said. "I had to put a few layers of paper over the gla.s.s to dim the light, just so it wouldn't blow everything out completely. But once I got it dimmed down, I could see a little more-not much, but enough to tell that several of them seemed to have a similar smudge of image at the center. This one right here"-he pointed to the middle of the strip-"seems about a millionth of a percent less horrible than the others."

"That good, huh?" He nodded glumly. "Well, if it takes any of the pressure off you, the bar of my expectation is about six feet under, so there's no way it can be worse than I'm expecting."

Rodney laid the film on the stage of an enlarger-a downward-pointing rig labeled BESELER that looked like a cross between an industrial lamp and an old-fas.h.i.+oned bellows-type camera-and slipped the film between the lamp and the lens. Then he took a sheet of 8-by-10 photo paper from a metal box and clipped it to an easel at the enlarger's base. "I'm guessing at this," he said, "but we need as little light going through this as I can get, so I've stopped the lens down all the way. Oh, and I've got a number-five contrast filter in there to pump up any trace of contrast we're lucky enough to have." He flipped a switch, and light streamed downward out of the lens and through the film, illuminating the white, empty rectangle of paper. Let there be light, I thought, Novak's funeral hymn echoing in my head.

The light clicked off after only a few seconds, leaving me blind for a moment-and leaving a reverse image on my retinas, a black 8-by-10-inch rectangle floating on a white background-until my eyes readjusted to the red safelight.

"d.a.m.n," I said. The paper was blank.

"Hang on," said Rodney. "You'll probably want to say that again in a minute, but we're not done yet. The image doesn't show up until we put the paper in the developer." He pointed to a shallow metal tray that contained an inch or so of clear liquid. "Faint as that image was, this'll probably develop pretty quickly, if there's anything there. Then I'll need to hustle it into the stop bath, to fix it."

Funny, I thought: a week ago-a moment before events in the morgue took their dramatic turn-Miranda had been preparing to fix Leonard's brain. Now Rodney was talking of fixing this ghostly image Novak had left behind.

Removing the paper from the base of the enlarger, he laid it gently in the tray.

I leaned close. I knew I wasn't supposed to hope for anything, but I did.

Ten seconds pa.s.sed, and the paper remained blank. After another ten, an image began to materialize, like something slowly emerging from a dense fog.

By the time thirty seconds had elapsed, I could tell what that something was. A young man-a young soldier-emerged from the mists of time onto the page. He lay in a shallow, fresh depression in the earth. His head was turned slightly, and I saw a dark circle at his right temple. I had a guess what the dark circle was, although I couldn't be sure.

One thing was unmistakable, though. The open, staring eyes were those of a dead man.

PART TWO.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

-Robert Oppenheimer.

quoting Hindu scripture after the Trinity atomic test, July 16, 1945.

Now we're all sons of b.i.t.c.hes.

-Ken Bainbridge, Trinity test director.

CHAPTER 16.

CROSSING THE SOLWAY BRIDGE OVER THE CLINCH River, I left behind the Solway community's half-mile strip of convenience marts and auto-repair shops and barren produce stands. The bridge marked a border, a boundary: once my wheels were on the other side, I had crossed over, into the land General Leslie Groves had claimed for the Manhattan Project-59,000 acres, bounded on three sides by the Clinch, on the fourth side by Black Oak Ridge, and in every direction by the peculiar sensation that World War II still lived on, somehow, in this East Tennessee wrinkle in the s.p.a.ce-time continuum. Although the security checkpoints at Solway and the handful of other entry points to Oak Ridge had long since been dismantled, much of the site looked just as it had during the war, and it was perhaps only natural that the city and its people tended to dwell in the black-and-white importance of the past.

On a whim, I varied my route into Oak Ridge this time, taking the exit ramp marked BETHEL VALLEY ROAD, which led to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 Plant. Bearing right at a fork in the road, I bore right onto Scarboro Road. I crossed a low ridge, dropped down into Union Valley, and saw the vast Y-12 complex sprawling to my left behind a high chain-link fence. My eye was caught by a cl.u.s.ter of large, brooding buildings. Their stout concrete frames were filled in with red brick, and strips of windows had been set near the roofline to allow daylight into the cavernous interiors. From the archival photos at the library, I recognized these as the buildings where Beatrice and the other calutron girls had sifted uranium-235 from U-238 for the Hiros.h.i.+ma bomb.

A quarter mile later, the road cut through a gap in a low, wooded ridge, and the Y-12 Plant disappeared from view. Just beyond the gap, a blocky concrete guardhouse, its windows and gunports long since boarded up, marked what had once been one of the Secret City's gates. Pa.s.sing the guardhouse, I was leaving the federal reservation and entering the town; leaving the past and rejoining the present. Yet pulling into the police department's parking lot behind the munic.i.p.al building, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had one foot in the twenty-first century and one foot in World War II. And sometimes it was tough to tell which foot was on firmer ground.

DETECTIVE JIM EMERT peered at one of the prints through a magnifying gla.s.s, then laid the lens down in exasperation. "h.e.l.l," he said, "with all that grain in the image, magnifying it just makes it worse."

I'd done exactly the same thing an hour before, in my office under the stadium. Magnifying the print was like enlarging a newspaper photograph into a meaningless cloud of dots. "The prints aren't great," I said, "but it's amazing there's anything there at all." Considering how faint the images on the film had been, I wasn't sure whether to think of the guy at Thompson's as a darkroom tech or a psychic medium. After conjuring up that first startling image of the young soldier's body, Rodney had spent most of that night and all of this morning experimenting with different exposure times, contrast filters, and developer baths. He'd tried burning and dodging, which sounded like an arsonist's modus operandi, but which actually meant using masks and screens to increase or decrease the amount of light falling on different regions of the photo paper. He'd also scanned the negatives into a digital-processing computer. In short, he'd tried every trick in the book to coax every speck of image out of that ghostly film. By the time he was through, he had used a hundred sheets of photo paper...and produced a sequence of prints that hinted at a chilling story.

The first image showed the rear end of an antique-looking car-late 1930s, I guessed, by the black paint, bulbous fenders, and small windows. The trunk lid was raised, and a pale bundle filled the cargo s.p.a.ce. The detail left a lot to be desired, but over the years I'd seen enough blanket-wrapped bodies in enough trunks to recognize one. The second image showed the bundle lying beside a shallow, circular hole that appeared to have been freshly dug. In the third and fourth pictures, the body-no longer wrapped in the blanket or sheet, and wearing what appeared to be dark clothes-lay in the center of the depression. It was this third exposure Rodney had printed as I'd looked over his shoulder in the darkroom. But the fifth and sixth prints were even more haunting, for they showed close-ups of the man's head and his face, the vacant eyes staring at us across the gulf of time.

Emert laid aside the last of the close-ups. "The weird thing," he said, "besides who the h.e.l.l's this dead guy and what the h.e.l.l's going on here, is why Novak would take the photos in the first place? And why would he go to such trouble to preserve the film all these years? And why would he leave the film undeveloped, for Christ's sake, if he wanted to keep the images?"

"That's a whole bunch of weird things," I pointed out. "You're a man of many questions."

"That's what my mom used to say when I was a kid," he said. "Since that's the way I am, might as well get some good out of it. The way I see it, you ask enough people enough questions, enough times, sooner or later you might get an answer that tells you something."

I'd been wondering about the same weird things as Emert, plus a few others. "Maybe it's not Novak the pictures incriminate," I said. I thought of the crumpled note outside Novak's front door. "Maybe it's somebody else. Somebody whose secret he knew. Maybe Novak was blackmailing whoever the pictures incriminated."

"He was a pretty lousy blackmailer if he threw away the blackmail note," Emert pointed out.

"Maybe he was still getting the hang of it," I said. "Maybe he considered sending the note, then had second thoughts."

"Come on, Doc-he'd had that film on ice for a long d.a.m.n time. If he were gonna put the screws to somebody, he'd have done it decades ago, while his target was still alive, and while Novak was young enough to enjoy the money. Besides, you saw his handwriting on that legal pad. It doesn't match the note."

The detective was right. Novak's handwriting was small and precise. The lettering on the note was large and blocky. "Okay, I give," I said. "You got any theories?"

"Not really," he admitted. "All I can come up with is that maybe he wanted an insurance policy of some sort, leverage he could use if he needed to. But he wanted to reduce the risk somebody might just stumble across the pictures-the maid or the home-health nurse or whoever-so he left the film undeveloped. It's not a great theory, but it's all I've got so far."

The last three pictures in the series were different. They showed tree trunks and thickets of foliage, and-off in the distance, through a gap in the trees-a small barn. Here's the view from the grave, I thought, trying to think like Leonard Novak might have. Here's how to find it again someday.

I'd brought two sets of prints with me. I left one with Emert, and took the other with me as I left the police department, crossed the parking lot, and unlocked my truck. I slipped behind the wheel and started the engine, but then I just sat, my mind spinning faster than the motor.

A story had unspooled from that roll of film. A strange tale from beyond the grave, told by a man whose own murder was the most bizarre I had ever encountered. I didn't know what it meant yet, and maybe I never would, but I couldn't wait for the next chapter.

I switched off the key and got out of the truck.

CHAPTER 17.

I DIDN'T SEE HER AT THE REFERENCE DESK, AND THE Oak Ridge Room was locked and empty. Disappointed, I turned to go, figuring I'd stop at the circulation desk on my way out and ask what hours Isabella, the history-minded librarian, worked. As I approached the desk, I heard a voice at my elbow, from somewhere amid rows of bookshelves. "Dr. Brockton? Is that you?"

I spun. "Oh, hi," I said. "I was just looking for you. I was afraid maybe you weren't working this afternoon."

"Till six," she said, stepping out of the shadowy stacks. "What can I do for you?"

"I was wondering if I could look through those Manhattan Project photo binders again?"

"Of course," she said. She led me back to the gla.s.s-walled room and unlocked the door. "Anything in particular you're looking for?"

"Seems like I remember there was a set of photos of houses and farms that were already here when the project started. Sort of the 'before' picture of Oak Ridge?"

She smiled. "You paid good attention," she said. Pulling a fat binder from among the dozens filling the bookcase, she handed it to me. "Anything else I can help you with?"

I almost said that she could help me with my lack of a dinner companion, but that seemed a bit forward. "Just this, for now," I said. "Thanks."

"If you think of something later, let me know," she said. She hesitated slightly before she turned and walked away. I didn't know why, but that half second of hesitation made me hope that she'd somehow read my mind, and that maybe she liked what she read there.

The binder was three inches thick, its black-and-white prints tucked into clear plastic sleeves. Flipping through the pages, I saw weathered farmhouses, ramshackle barns, tobacco sheds, haywagons, general stores, one-room churches, mule-drawn plows. I knew the photos were from the early 1940s-early 1943, most of them, because construction of Oak Ridge and its three huge installations began in earnest that spring-but many of the pictures could have pa.s.sed for images from the 1920s, or even the 1890s. What inconceivable change: to go from such a rural, sleepy area-a place the transplanted scientists referred to as "Dogpatch"-to a churning, teeming enterprise, one that pushed the limits of science, engineering, and human endeavor on a gargantuan scale. What must those displaced farmers have thought? How many of them had heard of John Hendrix and the wild-eyed vision he'd shared back at the dawn of the twentieth century?

The images were fascinating without being helpful. I had opened the notebook hoping one of the photos might show a barn like the one in Leonard Novak's photos-a small barn tucked at the base of a wooded ridge, a silo at one end. Although the binder contained pictures of barns and silos and woods, none of those pictures combined all three elements: here was a photo of a barn with no silo; there was a photo of a silo with no barn; a few pages farther, a barn and silo but no hillside or woods.

I closed the binder and sighed.

Just then I heard a slight tap on the gla.s.s. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Isabella, and I stood up. She opened the door. "I'm sorry to interrupt you," she said. "I was just about to take a break, and thought I'd ask if you need anything before I disappear."

"Thanks for asking, but I think I've hit a dead end here," I said.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Is there anything other than a photograph that might tell you what you need to know?"

I smiled. "What I need to know? There's no end to the things I need to know; just ask my colleagues or my secretary or my graduate a.s.sistant. But the thing I was hoping to find out just now? I'm not sure anything but a photograph would work." She looked confused, and I didn't blame her. "Here, I'll show you, if you don't mind," I said. "But if you want to take your break instead, don't let me keep you."

"Show me," she said.

I opened the manila envelope I'd brought with me, the prints of the Novak film. Reaching to the back of the sheaf of photos so as to keep the photos of the dead man tucked inside the envelope, I slid out the last few. "These are old, crummy pictures, taken somewhere near here-I think-in the 1940s. Maybe. Somewhere in the woods, apparently"-I used the end of a pen to point to the trees, and she nodded-"but with a view of what appears to be a barn and a silo." She bit her lip and bent low over the photo, her black hair hanging down and curtaining off her face. "Hard to tell much from these pictures, but I didn't see any pictures in the notebook that looked like they could possibly be this barn."

"And you're trying to identify this particular barn?"

"Yes," I said. "Well, not exactly. What I'm really trying to do, if you want to split hairs, is find the spot from which this photograph of this barn was taken."

She puzzled over that a moment. "In other words, if you knew where this barn was, you could figure out where this photographer was standing when he or she took this picture?"

"Exactly," I said. "Is there any hope?"

"Absolutely none," she said. Seeing my face fall, she laughed. "I'm kidding. I'm not making any promises, but if you'll let me scan a copy of this, I'll do some research. This is a lot more interesting than most of the questions I get."

"Scan away," I said. "That would be a big help."

"If I find it, then what?"

"Then maybe I could buy you dinner," I said, "to say thank you."

"Oh," she said, looking fl.u.s.tered and turning red. There was an awkward pause before she added, "I meant, then should I call or email you?"

"Ah," I said, taking my turn to blush. "Calling is better. I'm not big on email." I handed her one of my cards, which contained my office number and my home number.

She glanced at the card, then up at me. She paused again. "When I call to say I've found it, do you want the details over the phone? Or over dinner?"

I felt myself smile. "To tell you the truth," I said, "I'm not all that keen on the telephone, either. How about over dinner?"

She did that half-second pause again, then nodded, and I left the library-walking or floating, I couldn't have said which. This time, when I cranked the truck's ignition key, the engine sounded not like aimless spinning, but like power and energy, awaiting my direction. I s.h.i.+fted out of park, pointed the wheels toward the east end of Oak Ridge, and gunned the gas. The vehicle surged forward, and I thought, Now we're getting somewhere.

Then I thought, In your dreams, and laughed at myself.

CHAPTER 18.