“Complaining about me? Why on earth would any of the Anthropology faculty complain about me?”
“It’s those two new culturalists you hired last year,” she said. “They told the dean, in no uncertain terms, that ‘race’ is a social construct, not a physical trait. They demand that you cease all references to ‘the three races of man’—which is sexist, too, they say—in your classes.”
I laughed. “See,” I said, “very interesting people. Boring guys like me, we study an Asian, an African, and a Scandinavian skull, and we come to the simplistic conclusion that the differences in the cheekbones and the slope of the jaws and the width of the nasal opening are structural—that they reflect millennia of evolution and adaptation by those three populations. Interesting folks, on the other hand, they look at those same cheekbones and jaws and noses, and they see social constructs.”
“Go ahead, make light,” she said, “but this is going to cause you headaches.” She eyed me more closely. “I know that smile,” she said. “This is about that librarian, isn’t it? Miranda told me about her. That’s why you’re making all these trips to Oak Ridge.” She grinned triumphantly.
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” I said innocently.
As I turned to go, she summoned me back. “This came through the fax machine for you,” she said. “From somebody over in the tree lab.”
I practically ripped the page from her hand. “I’ll be down in the osteo lab,” I called over my shoulder. “See if you can get Detective Emert and Agent Thornton on a three-way call.”
“What should I tell them it’s about?”
“Tell them it’s about the forensic power of the chainsaw,” I said.
SO THE TREE RINGS,” CAME Emert’s voice from the speakerphone, “can tell us whether he died in 1948 or 1984 or whatever?”
“They can,” I said. “In fact, they already have.”
I’d taken the three-foot section of tulip-poplar trunk to one of my colleagues in the forestry lab. He had recut the end with a fine-toothed table saw—he’d also bored out a core sample—and had counted the growth rings. According to both counts, the tulip poplar was sixty-three years old. “That means it started growing in the spring of 1946,” I said.
“Meaning it was sometime before that,” said Miranda, “that G.I. Doe was planted.”
EDDIE GARCIA LOOKED WEAK and scared. It had been only two days since I’d seen him, but in those forty-eight hours he’d worsened dramatically. They’d begun giving him blood transfusions of packed red blood cells, because his bone marrow had virtually ceased to function. Ironically, the transfused cells were irradiated to kill germs. As an extra precaution against infection, every nurse or doctor who entered his room had to scrub up and suit up in full surgical garb. Looking through the window, as a pair of masked figures checked his monitors and changed his IV bag, I was struck by the discrepancy between appearance and reality: it looked as if they were protecting themselves from Garcia, when in fact it was Garcia they were taking extreme precautions to safeguard. The most distressing sight, though, was his hands, swathed in thick layers of gauze. Unlike Miranda’s—so far, at least—Garcia’s localized burns had gone necrotic. His hands were dying.
I brought Garcia up to date on the Oak Ridge case, and he seemed intrigued, although maybe he was merely grateful for a distraction from his battle against acute radiation syndrome. But the drip must have contained something to ease his pain, because as I was telling him how the tree rings allowed us to estimate G.I. Doe’s time since death, his eyes lost their focus and he fell asleep. It shamed me to realize it, but I was relieved for the chance to ease away.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON I heard a dull thud outside my office door—the sound of something heavy hitting the floor—followed by the clatter of the stairwell door banging shut.
“Whoo,” gasped a voice I recognized as Thornton’s—a recognition confirmed by the appearance of his head in the entrance of my office as he tapped on the doorframe.
“You all right? Sounds like you’re hauling furniture up those stairs,” I said.
“Feels like it,” he said. “I thought you might like to see this.” His head disappeared and I heard a labored grunt. He reappeared, lugging a brushed-aluminum case, the sort generally filled with expensive electronics or video gear. I cleared off the center of my desk, and he set it down with a gentler thud than he had out in the hallway. Then he laid it on its side, flipped four latches on the edge, and swung the lid up.
When I realized what it was, I jumped back. “What are you doing? Get that thing out of here.”