I checked my watch. “I should probably head on over there,” I said. “I think they close at five, and it’s nearly four now.”
“Go,” he said. “Thanks for playing courier. Let me know what develops.” Art and I groaned in unison.
As I walked out the front door, my eye was caught by a small flash of white in the bushes beside the porch. Bending down for a closer look, I saw that it was a wadded-up scrap of paper. I stuck my head back in the door. “Guys? This is probably nothing, but you might want to check it out.” Emert came out, inspected the crumpled paper, and asked the tech to bring tweezers. The detective plucked the paper from the shrubbery, took it back inside, and laid it on a small table just inside the door, beside a handful of unopened mail. Wielding the tweezers gently, he teased open the wadded paper. Thornton, Art, and I gathered around and leaned in to look. As the paper unfolded, the inked squiggles became letters, and the letters became words.
The words read, “I know your secret.”
CHAPTER 10
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.