Sprinkled amid the modern banks and medical buildings and engineering firms, a few sagging clapboard buildings still showed their origins as army barracks and offices. Their quiet dilapidation seemed at odds with the urgent role they had once played in a desperate wartime gamble. Here, in a top secret military installation—so secret the town was not shown on maps until after 1945—eighty thousand production workers and scientists had raced night and day for two years to produce the material for the first atomic bombs. Those awesome, awful clouds that roiled up from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created, in great measure, here in this sleepy town in East Tennessee.
Following the map on the truck’s GPS screen, we made a left off the main street and meandered partway up a hillside, through a handful more buildings that dated back to the wartime years. A steepled white chapel, which could have been transported from New England, perched atop a grassy hill. Beneath it, a sprawling, white-columned hotel—the same vintage as the church, but not in the same pristine condition—lurked behind boarded-up windows, sloughing scales of chalky paint. Fading letters above the wide veranda told us the hotel was THE ALEXANDER INN; four Oak Ridge police cars—engines idling and exhausts steaming—told us this was the right place.
I parked beside the cars and we got out. The sun was brilliant but the day was still bitterly cold: barely twenty degrees, and windy enough to feel like minus five. Worse, this was the warmest day we’d had in a week, and the nighttime temperatures had hovered down in the single digits. As the wind bit my cheeks, I winced and wondered, Where’s global warming when you actually want it?
One uniformed officer huddled miserably inside the waist-high fence that surrounded the hotel’s swimming pool. As Miranda and I approached the gate, the doors on the police cars opened and two more uniformed officers emerged reluctantly, followed by two plainclothes officers. One was Lieutenant Dewar, the head of Major Crimes; the other, Detective Emert, would be the lead officer on the case.
We shook gloved hands all around, then Dewar and Emert led us through the gate and up to the edge of the pool. Although the hotel dated from the 1940s, the pool itself—modest in size, a kidney in shape—looked more like an afterthought from the sixties. Moreover, it appeared not to have been drained or cleaned since the sixties; it was nearly full, and the cold snap had turned the greenish black water into greenish black ice.
Entombed in the filthy ice near the deep end of the pool was a human corpse, frozen facedown, its arms and legs splayed wide. Although the shape of the body was masked by layers of winter clothing, the head was bare and the scalp was bald, so I assumed the corpse was male.
“Whoa,” said Miranda. “I’ve seen plenty of bodies on ice, but never one in ice. How we gonna…” She paused, and I could see a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Ah, master,” she said, “grasshopper is beginning to learn.” She excused herself and went back to the truck, then returned bearing the orange case.
The policemen looked as puzzled at the sight of the chainsaw as Miranda had at first, but gradually I saw the light dawn in their eyes as well. “They call me the Man of Stihl,” I said, grinning at the pun. I fired up the chainsaw—cold as it was, it took a few pulls on the starter rope—and stepped carefully onto the ice. Glancing back, I saw the six cops nervously eyeing me, the chainsaw, and the ice. Miranda’s face, in contrast, expressed pure amusement.