“It’s safe,” he said. “We’ve checked it up one side and down the other. There’s no source in it—nothing radioactive. Only way this thing can hurt you is if you get a hernia trying to lift it. Which I think maybe I’ve done. Or if it falls on your foot, which would cripple you for life.”
Inside the case was an instrument I recognized as an industrial radiography camera—one of the two models Thornton had shown us, in fact, in his PowerPoint briefing about sources of iridium-192. “I thought the manufacturer was sending somebody to Savannah River to look at the source,” I said. “They decided to send a camera here instead?”
He shook his head. “We got lucky,” he said. “This is the very camera somebody raided for the iridium that killed Novak. Has to be.”
“My God,” I said. “Where’d you find it? How?”
“One of the things we assigned agents to do right away was to canvas scrap-metal recycling yards,” he said. “They started in Oak Ridge and fanned out from there. Our thinking was, the safest way to transport the iridium would be to leave it in the camera till you were ready to use it, since there’s all that built-in shielding. We hoped maybe the camera would get dumped after the pigtail was removed. Sure enough, it turned up at a salvage yard on Sutherland Avenue in Knoxville.”
My mind was racing. “Who brought it in? Did you get prints? Did you make an arrest?”
“We’re looking for the guy,” he said, “but it’s not our killer. Couldn’t be. Selling the camera would be a stupid risk to take for five bucks, which is all the scrapyard paid for it. The guy that brought it in was Hispanic, spoke almost no English, looked to be a day-laborer sort. That’s about all the fellow at the scrapyard remembers about him. A couple sets of prints, but the only hit is a match with the guy at the scrapyard, who stole a car years ago.”
The find was exciting, but frustrating, too, since it might be a dead end. “Now what? How do you figure out who took the pigtail out of the camera?”
Thornton unfurled a slow smile. “We send a planeload of agents down to New Iberia, Louisiana, to track down who stole it from Pipeline Services, Inc. And to find out why Pipeline Services never reported the theft to the NRC.”
CHAPTER 32
IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS SINCE I’D WATCHED DR. Strangelove with Isabella; two and a half days since I’d awakened at dawn, alone but content. My first impulse had been to send her flowers that morning, but something told me to give her some breathing room. She had bolted the night we’d shared pizza at Big Ed’s, and that skittishness was probably ratcheted up considerably higher now. And so I’d waited as long as I could stand to, then called and invited her to lunch. “I hear the Soup Kitchen’s good,” I said, “and it’s the right weather for hot soup and crusty bread.”
She hesitated, and I began to panic, but then she relented. “I only have half an hour for lunch,” she said, “one to one-thirty, so I’ll need to eat and run.”
“That’s okay,” I said, grateful she hadn’t turned me down. “Any longer than that and you’d find all sorts of other woeful gaps in my cultural education. You want me to pick you up at the library?”
This time she didn’t hesitate. “I’ll meet you there,” she said. “I need to swing by a cash machine on my way.”
Don’t push your luck, I told myself. “Okay, see you there at, what, ten after one?”
“That sounds about right. Thanks. Bye.” She clearly wasn’t the sort for long goodbyes.
I half expected her not to show up, but three hours later, as I lingered outside a low, whitesided building distinguished by its savory smells and steamed-up windows, she rounded the corner briskly and nearly bumped into me. “Oh!” she said.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. I felt a goofy smile spreading across my face.
She looked down and slightly away from me, and once again her hair made curtains that hid her face from view. “I’m actually a lot shyer than you think,” she said. I thought I glimpsed a smile, and I reached a hand beneath her chin to tip her face toward me. She flushed, and ducked her head again, but as she did, there was no doubt about the smile.
“I’ll try not to make any sudden moves,” I said, opening the door amid billows of steam. As we made our way to the counter, I could feel my stomach rumbling and my salivary glands awakening.
The Soup Kitchen served soups and salads and bread cafeteria-style. The day’s soups—seven, usually, though by the time we got there they were down to five—were written in marker on a dry-erase board behind the serving counter. I ordered chili topped with a mound of Fritos and shredded cheddar; Isabella chose a creamy spinach soup that looked thick enough to clog arteries with a single serving. She got a small, round loaf of brown bread to go with hers; I figured the Fritos counted as my bread.
The chili was tangy but not spicy, with just the right balance of tomato, ground beef, onion, and toppings. I nodded my approval. “You were so smart to suggest this place,” I said.
“I didn’t. You did.”
“Well then,” I said, “I was so smart to suggest this place.”