“Bravo,” I said. “I agree. Now let’s look at trauma. Did you see any skeletal trauma other than the wound to the head?”
“Nothing,” she said. “There’s a small amount of osteoarthritic lipping on some of the vertebrae, but that’s just the beginning of age-related wear-and-tear, not trauma. Nope, I think one shot to the head did it.”
I picked up the skull and, using a pair of calipers, measured the diameter of the entry wound in the right side of the cranium. The hole was almost perfectly circular, but not quite. At its widest, it measured nearly a third of an inch—about the size of a .32-caliber bullet. At its narrowest, though, which was the crucial dimension, the hole measured less than a quarter of an inch. That made it too small to be caused by anything larger than a .22. Short of cutting off the top of the skull, there was no way to get the calipers inside the cranium to measure the hole’s diameter as it broke through the bone and entered the brain, but by shining my key chain flashlight into the hole, I guessed the inner diameter to be nearly half an inch, because of the conical beveling gunshots always produced. The force of the bullet had also caused three small fractures, each about an inch long, to radiate outward from the hole.
A small, ragged blob of metal lay on a tray beside the skull. I laid the skull down and picked up the blob. Although it was small, it felt heavy and soft. “You got the bullet out,” I said.
“I did,” she said. “I managed to shake it out the foramen magnum,” the opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord exited. “Took me back to my childhood days, when I shook coins out of my piggy bank.”
As I studied the deformed bullet, I was struck by its shape. “Does this remind you of anything?”
“Reminds me not to get shot in the head,” she said.
“No, I mean the shape.”
She plucked it from my hand and held it in her fingertips, and the gesture clutched at my heart: It was the same way Garcia had held and studied the iridium in the morgue. It was the same way Miranda had plucked the deadly pellet from his grasp with these very fingertips. Now, though, they were tipped with white gauze.
“Well, I’ll be,” Miranda said. “This bullet is a dead ringer for a mushroom cloud.”
CHAPTER 30
I DIALED THE OAK RIDGE PUBLIC LIBRARY AT FIVE minutes to eight and asked for Isabella. “Sir, the library’s closing now,” said the young woman who’d answered the phone. “I don’t think she’s still taking questions.”
“It’s not a question,” I said, “it’s an answer. It’ll just take a second, and she’ll be glad to hear what it is.”
There was a pause, and then the woman said, with more curtness than I thought necessary, “Just a moment, sir, I’ll see if I can catch her.”
Another pause, then a click. “Library Reference; how can I help you?”
“You already did,” I said. “We found him.”
She laughed. “I don’t even need to ask what you’re talking about. Congratulations! You found him somewhere near that barn?”
“I’ll show you a picture,” I said. “The trees are taller and the barn’s turned to metal, but the view of the silo is dead-on.”
“Do you know who he was? Who killed him? Why?”
“No,” I said. I thought of what Thornton said. “Maybe he was stealing atomic secrets. Maybe he was saving atomic secrets. Maybe he just made a pass at some hothead’s wife.” I wanted to keep talking. I imagined the lights in the library going dark, Isabella sitting at the Reference Desk in the empty building, connected to me, sitting in my dark living room. “The bullet in his skull? It was shaped like a mushroom cloud,” I said. “Like a tiny atomic bomb going off in his head.” I laughed. “Oak Ridge is a strange place,” I said. “I think it’s making me a little strange, too.”
She was silent for a moment. “What do you think of strange love?”
“Huh?” I was baffled by the sudden shift in topic. “Well, let’s see,” I hedged, stalling for time, trying to think of something to say that might be clever and maybe even slightly naughty—was that what she wanted, sitting alone in the darkened library?—but not offensive. “I think strange love is a matter of personal…you know….”
“No, silly. Not ‘strange love,’ as in kinky sex. ‘Strangelove,’ as in Dr. Strangelove. The movie.”
I was still at a loss. “Dr. Strangelove? Sounds like something from the adult section of the video store.”
“You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never seen it—Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? It’s a classic. You grew up during the Cold War; how could you have missed the greatest Cold War satire ever made?”
“I lived the Cold War,” I said. “Duck and cover. Hiding under the desk at school. Running to the basement at home. I didn’t need to see it on the screen.”
“But your Cold War experience isn’t complete until you’ve seen this film,” she insisted. “What are you doing right now?”