“Clever,” I agreed. “Sounds like you know almost as much about the plane as the pilot.”
“I am the pilot”—he smiled—“about half the time, including today. When we were looking for a new corporate aircraft, I decided to meddle. ‘I’m a pilot,’ I told the CEO, ‘and I’m also in charge of research. Let me research this.’ He fell for it.” His smile broadened into a grin. “You wouldn’t believe the view coming down the Shenandoah Valley today at twenty thousand feet. I could see Knoxville all the way from Roanoke.” Roanoke was 250 miles to the north, so what he was describing was impossible; still, the day was crystal clear—thirty miles to the east of the airport, the Great Smoky Mountains looked an easy walk away—so I could almost believe the claim.
I led him from the ramp and through the lobby, out to where my truck was parked in the small lot. “Nice thing about the corporate terminal is not having to go in and out of the parking garage,” I said.
“Nice thing about having your own plane is not having to hassle with airport security. I swung through Starbucks and brought a big cup of coffee with me, I boarded two minutes before take-off, and I didn’t have to sit through a safety demo.” He patted his satchel. “Oh, and I stuffed my briefcase full of knives and guns.”
“Smart move. Clearly this isn’t your first trip to Tennessee.”
We headed north on Alcoa Highway, past mobile-home dealerships and abandoned shopping centers and broad, rolling pastures. In ten minutes we rounded a bend at the base of a wooded hill and the main tower of UT Medical Center appeared. I bore right onto the exit ramp, looped behind the hospital complex, and traversed the employee parking lot that bordered the Body Farm. Pulling into the farthest corner of the lot, I parked in front of the facility’s dual gates of chain-link and solid wooden planking.
“I’m surprised your place isn’t farther off the beaten track,” Faust commented.
“It used to be,” I said, unlocking the padlocks and opening the gates. “I first started with an old barn—a pig barn—out at one of the UT farms, but that was too far away. When I relocated to this spot, the parking lot wasn’t here yet and the hospital tower wasn’t even on the drawing board.”
As I led him inside, he peered over his shoulder, across the top of the wooden privacy fence. “It looks like you might actually be able to see inside here from the top floors of the hospital.”
“You can,” I said. “Gives the patients a little added motivation to get well.Memento mori and all that.”
“Does the hospital charge extra for that?”
“No, the view’s free. Where they make their money is selling air fresheners to the patients on hot summer days, when the Body Farm’s getting really ripe.” He smiled at the joke, so I kept it going. “If the billing folks could just figure out how to get Medicare to reimburse them a hundred bucks for every air freshener, their financial worries would be over.”
I gestured at the clearing inside the gate, a patch of brown grass and bare dirt that measured about sixty feet from edge to edge. “So this is it. We’ve got a little less than three acres here inside the fence now.” I led him across the grass and slightly downhill, where a cube of chain-link fence nestled beneath the trees, its roof draped with a bright blue tarp. “Originally all we had was this chain-link enclosure, which measures sixteen feet square. Now we keep equipment and a meteorological station in here, but this was where the research began.”
He nodded. “I’ve seen an old photo of you and some graduate students in here, with a body stretched out on the concrete.”
“That was taken the spring of our first year,” I recalled. “We got just four donated bodies that year, and they were all used to research a master’s thesis—a study of which insects feed on bodies, and when.”
“I’ve read it,” he said. “That was a seminal piece of research. Helped jump-start the field of forensic entomology, didn’t it? Laid the foundation for estimating time since death by collecting insects and maggots off a murder victim?”
“It did,” I agreed, adding, “You’ve done your homework.”
“I generally do, when we’re planning to invest half a million dollars in a research project.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Is that what you’re planning to invest here?”