“We helped with an interesting training a couple months ago,” I said. “Not a medical training, but similar—a disaster training, simulating mass fatalities from a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’ We provided fifteen bodies, and the disaster teams practiced finding the radioactive contamination and cleaning the bodies.”
“I hope they wore their lead-lined undies. Was that for FEMA?”
“Not exactly.” FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had sent a few representatives to the training, as had the U.S. Army, but those weren’t the lead organizations. “It was organized by DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Mostly volunteers—forensic dentists, EMTs, funeral directors, cops—who have some experience with death and are willing to help identify the dead after airplane crashes and hurricanes.”
“Sure, I know DMORT. I’ve done trainings for ’em. How to improvise cold-storage facilities at remote sites. How to protect yourself against hepatitis C.”
As he talked, I noticed that his chin was flecked with crumbs of sugar and doughnut.
“Hey, here’s a joke I used to tell DMORT people heading down to Louisiana after Katrina: What’s the best way to keep from getting hep C in New Orleans?”
I shrugged.
“Stay in New Jersey.” He chuckled. “Hey, here’s another one: What do you look for when you’re looking for a DMORT team member?”
Again I shrugged.
“You don’t need to look for anything; you just sniff—you can smell ’em a mile away.”
Mentally I was cursing Price and Rankin for roping me into this, and kicking myself under the table for agreeing to help. “That’s terrible,” I said.
“I know.” He grinned. “But hey, if we can’t find a little humor in our line of work, we’ll go nuts or slit our wrists, right?”
“Right.” At the moment I was feeling a powerful urge to walk away. Instead I shifted the conversation to something I was actually curious about. “I was surprised when Glen Faust interrupted you the way he did.”
He made a face. “I wasn’t.”
“So you know him?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Is there a story there?”
“Not really. He’s just a little full of himself for my taste.” Sinclair reached inside his jacket and took out a folded program, which he opened to the next day’s schedule. “He’s giving a talk this afternoon—‘Tissue banks are obsolete’ is the message, though he’s calling it something fancier. It’s his manifesto about rebuilding the body with stem cells and cloning and bioengineering. You should go hear him.”
“Are you going?”
“Don’t need to. I’ve heard the spiel before.” He pointed to Faust’s name on the agenda. “See how he lists himself? ‘Dr. Glen McFarland Faust, M.D., Ph.D., Fellow, BMES’? Let’s all bow down. And then barf.”
His hostility startled me. “Have you two clashed before today? Is there bad blood between you?”
“Bad blood? Naw. I just think he’s a self-important prick, that’s all.”
His eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and as they shifted and his head swiveled, I saw that he was tracking a young woman—a girl, really, probably eighteen or twenty. She was tall and curvy, wearing tight jeans and a low-cut top that called attention to her figure, and she walked in a way that suggested she liked the attention.
Sinclair sucked in a breath and shook his head abruptly, as if he were snapping out of a dream. “Hot damn, that is one fine woman. I’d love to make a little donation to her tissue bank, wouldn’t you?”
I felt myself blushing. “She’s a bit young for me,” I said. “Looks like one of my undergraduate students.”
“Your students look like that?”
“Some of them.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “I need to go back to school and get a Ph.D. in anthropology, so I can teach at the University of Tennessee.”
“Bad idea.”
“How come? You think I’d get caught messing around with a student?”
“I think you’d get all self-important if you had that ‘Ph.D.’ after your name.”
He laughed. “Touché. So what were we talking about, before I got distracted by that gorgeous young thing?”
“Faust, I think, but I think we were done with him. Before that, I’m not sure. Trainings?” I hoped I wasn’t being too obvious in my attempt to set the hook.
“Bingo.” He thought for a moment. “I know what I wanted to ask you about. Consent forms. We’re in the process of overhauling our donor consent forms right now, and we’re wrestling with how much detail to include. On your forms do you spell out all the things you might do to bodies in the course of your research?”
“We don’t,” I said. “Our consent form is just two sentences long. It starts out, ‘I do hereby dispose of and give my body, after my death, to The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for use by the Department of Anthropology or its designee for educational and research purposes.’ The second sentence asks family members to notify us immediately when the donor dies.”
“Short and sweet,” he mused. “And very broad. That phrase ‘or its designee’ gives you a lot of latitude.”
“It does. It frees us up to let DMORT or the National Forensic Academy or the FBI use our donated bodies.”