“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.’”
CHAPTER 6
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?