“Spring break? What’s spring break?” said Miranda, feigning puzzlement and indignation. “I just want to spend the next six months in a hot bath.”
Just then my cell phone rang. Tugging off a thick glove, I fished the phone from my pocket and flipped it open, the cold biting at my fingertips. According to the display, the caller was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. “Hi, Peggy,” I said. “I hope you’re calling to tell me a heat wave is bearing down on us in the next five minutes.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m calling to tell you I have an agitated police lieutenant from Oak Ridge on the line.”
A small city about twenty-five miles west of Knoxville, Oak Ridge was home to a wide range of high-tech research and manufacturing industries, but the city’s main claim to fame was its pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, the race to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. “Did the lieutenant say what he’s agitated about?”
“They’ve just found a body they want you to take a look at,” she said. “Apparently they don’t find a lot of bodies in Oak Ridge.”
“No, the radioactivity helps protect them,” I said. “Killers are afraid of folks who glow in the dark.” It was an old, tired joke Knoxvillians tended to make about Oak Ridgers—one that Oak Ridgers sometimes made about themselves, in a sort of preemptive first strike of defiant civic pride.
“Well, you be careful,” she said. “All those fences and guard towers and nuclear reactors and bomb factories scare me.”
She patched through the Oak Ridge officer, Lieutenant Dewar. When I hung up, I said to Miranda, “You didn’t really want that hot bath, did you?”
“No, of course not,” she said, having heard my end of the conversation. “What I really want to do is complete my transformation into the Human Icicle.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I’ve got just the job for you.”
CHAPTER 2
FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE PHONE CALL FROM OAK Ridge, Miranda and I pulled away from the Body Farm, navigated the asphalt maze surrounding UT Medical Center, and crossed the Tennessee River. Far below the highway bridge, a ribbon of frigid green swirled between banks sheathed in ice.
A thought occurred to me, and instead of staying on Alcoa Highway to Interstate 40, I angled the truck onto Kingston Pike and threaded the winding streets into my neighborhood, Sequoyah Hills.
“I thought we were racing to a death scene in Oak Ridge,” said Miranda.
“We are,” I said. “But I just thought of something we might need, so we’re racing to my house first.”
“I hope what you’re thinking we might need is called ‘lunch,’” Miranda said, “because I’m getting hungry enough to chew my arm off.”
“The cupboard’s bare,” I said, “so you might as well start chewing. Don’t eat both arms—I’ll need you to take notes at the scene.”
“Your concern is deeply touching.”
“I know,” I said. “Sometimes I move myself to tears. Oh, if you’d prefer something vegetarian, I think there’s a Snickers bar in the glove box.” Evidently she did, because she opened the latch and rummaged around beneath a sheaf of registration papers and maintenance records.
“There better not be a mousetrap hidden in this—YOUCH!” She jumped, and that made me flinch. She laughed as she fished out the candy bar. “You are so gullible,” she said. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“I knew you were faking,” I said. “But I also knew you’d sulk if I didn’t play along.” As I pulled into the driveway, I tapped the remote to open the garage.
Miranda unwrapped one end of the Snickers bar—the giant size—and bit down. “Youch!” she said again, this time in earnest. “This thing is hard as a rock.” She studied the faint impressions her teeth had made in the frozen chocolate. “Lucky I didn’t break my teeth—I’d be suing UT for workers’ comp.”
“You’d file a claim for missing teeth? In Tennessee? You’d be laughed out of the state,” I said.
She flashed me a big, sarcastic smile—Miranda had one of the best smiles I’d ever seen—and then began gnawing at one corner of the Snickers with her right molars, the immense bar clenched in her fist. “You stay here and work on that,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I found what I was looking for in the garage—an oblong case made of bright orange plastic—and stowed it in the rear of the pickup. As I got back in the cab, Miranda’s eyebrows shot up quizzically. I smiled, backed out of the driveway, and headed for Oak Ridge. Miranda’s jaws were working hard—evidently she had sheared off a huge hunk of the candy bar. Finally she mumbled, “Ih at wuh I ink ih ih?”
“What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying when you mumble like that.”
“Ih AT wuh I INK ih ih?!”