“Now you tell me,” I said. “I’ll barricade myself in the house again in a few minutes.”
“Again? Where are you? Aren’t you at home recuperating?”
“I was,” I said, “but something’s come up. I need to check on something at the Body Farm. Some sort of mix-up at the CT scanner.”
“Can’t it wait? Surely it’s not an emergency.”
“Hard to tell. I couldn’t reach the CT tech who called me last night, so I figured I’d just go take a look.”
“Where are you now?”
“Crossing the river on Alcoa Highway.”
“Pull over and park. Wait for me. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I pulled off and tried, but I was too antsy to wait, so I took the Cherokee Trail exit, then turned onto the service road behind the hospital. When I did, I noticed a set of taillights crossing the upper staff parking lot. A car—a white minivan I didn’t recognize—braked to a stop in the upper corner of the lot, directly in front of the Body Farm’s gate. I stopped, switched off my headlights, and watched. A man got out and approached the chain-link fence, and a few moments later the gate swung open. Whoever it was had a key. I racked my brain, mentally running down the list of anthropology graduate students and their vehicles, and didn’t hit a match. As I watched, the minivan drove through the open gate and into the Body Farm, and then the gate swung shut. It was six o’clock on a Sunday morning, and my alarm bells were going crazy.
Keeping my lights off, I eased into the parking lot and parked fifty yards downhill from the gate, hidden by the trailer of the CT scanner. When I reached the gate on foot, I found that it had been relocked, so I took out my own key to open the padlock. It didn’t fit. Was I holding it upside down? I flipped the key and tried again, but again the lock refused it. Bending down, I cradled the padlock in my hands and studied it. It was a solid brass Master lock—as I’d expected—but the bright, unscratched surface of the brass made it clear that this lock had not been subjected to years of rough weather and rough handling at the gate of the Body Farm. Whoever had just driven inside had relocked the gate with a new lock, one meant to guard against interruptions. Higher up, dangling from one of the diamonds of fencing, hung the weathered lock that normally secured the gate.
For a moment I was puzzled. Then I was angry. Who the hell was inside, and who did he think he was, changing my lock? I felt invaded and violated, and as my anger spiked, I went back to the truck and grabbed a pair of leather work gloves. Then, furiously and recklessly, I began scaling the chain-link fence to break in to my own research facility. The concertina wire at the top of the gate clawed at the gloves, but the leather was thick and tough. At the top I teetered precariously, both hands gripping coils of wire as I swung one leg over, then the other. The metal points snagged at my pants—I heard fabric tearing and felt something sharp slicing down the calf of my right leg—but then I was over, dropping onto the grass in the main clearing.