Once we crossed the Solway Bridge, we headed west on Bethel Valley Road, a long, straight, prairie-flat ribbon of two-lane leading to the research complex. Five miles out Bethel Valley we stopped at a security checkpoint, where an armed guard consulted a clipboard and my driver’s license, then nodded slightly at me. He practically genuflected at Thornton’s FBI shield. Not that I was jealous or anything.
The road beelined along another two miles of valley floor, lined on either side by pines and hardwood. It grazed the end of a frozen cove on Melton Hill Lake, then entered the sprawling laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory—known as “the Lab” to most of the scientists who worked there, as “ORNL” to the acronym-inclined, and as “X-10” to the blue-collared hourly workers—was the only research facility created in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. The Y-12 and K-25 plants had been huge production facilities staffed by hourly workers like Beatrice. The wartime Lab, though, had a higher ratio of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The Lab had been built around the Graphite Reactor—a much bigger version of Fermi’s makeshift Chicago reactor—so that Leonard Novak and his colleagues could devise the means to create and purify weapons-grade plutonium.
As Thornton and I turned off Bethel Valley Road and entered the research complex, we found ourselves surrounded by gleaming new buildings of glass and steel. Although the Lab was owned by the federal government—the Department of Energy—it was jointly operated these days by UT and Battelle, a research institute with billions of dollars in government contracts. Clearly the partnership had been a fruitful one, at least architecturally speaking.
After parking, Thornton and I threaded our way past the new buildings, and I began to recognize the massive Cold War buildings I remembered from a prior visit, years before. The old buildings hadn’t been replaced by the new buildings; they’d simply been supplemented and screened from initial view. We walked down a one-lane alley between two looming buildings, labeled 4500 NORTH and 4500 SOUTH, and then entered a metal doorway set in the vast brick wall of 4500 South. Just inside, a staircase led down into a basement and upward to two additional floors of offices and labs. We climbed one flight, then entered a hallway labeled H CORRIDOR. I knocked on the open doorway of the first office—the office was dark, which made me worry that I’d somehow gone astray—but a voice called, “Come in.”
Arpad Vass emerged from the dimness to shake my hand and turn on the light; the fluorescents were bright enough to hurt my eyes at first, and I could understand why Arpad might prefer the dark, at least for computer work.
Arpad was one of the most innovative graduate students I’d ever had. Rather than focusing on physical anthropology—bones, essentially—Arpad’s Ph.D. research had focused on chemicals. Specifically, he developed a way to interpret the chemicals of decomposition like a clock, one that told the time since death.
For the past five years, Arpad had been collecting and analyzing the gases given off by bodies as they decomposed. In one corner of the Body Farm, he’d buried four bodies in graves of varying depths. He threaded the graves with a grid of perforated pipes leading to the surface of the ground. Every two weeks since burying the bodies, he had collected air samples from within and above the graves, and had run the samples through a gas chromatograph—mass spectrometer, a sophisticated analytical instrument that isolated individual compounds from the smelly samples. Over the course of the experiment, Arpad had identified nearly five hundred separate compounds given off by bodies as they decay. Many of the compounds were common, found virtually everywhere in nature; however, he’d found about thirty key compounds that—collectively—could be read as the fingerprint of a buried body. More specifically, as the fingerprint of a buried human body, rather than as the rotting remains of, say, a deer or dog or pig.
But Arpad wasn’t just analyzing the chemical fingerprint of a buried body; he was also developing a gizmo that could detect that fingerprint out in the field. The gizmo, which he called “the sniffer,” was a mechanical version of a cadaver dog’s nose, and it was designed to find clandestine graves. The last time I’d seen him, Arpad was testing a prototype of the sniffer.
After shaking hands with Arpad, Thornton closed the door to the office. Arpad—a dark-haired, brown-eyed man of Hungarian descent—raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. At Thornton’s request, I hadn’t told Arpad what we wanted to see him about; only that an FBI agent and I wanted to consult him about a forensic case.
“This is fairly sensitive,” said Thornton. “We have evidence that a murder occurred in the vicinity of the Laboratory back during the Manhattan Project. We also suspect that espionage—spying for the Soviets—may have played some part in the murder.”