The tires shrieked as I gunned the throttle and fishtailed out of the parking area. “Boldly done,” said Miranda.
“Damn skippy,” I answered, rocketing up the narrow band of concrete and whipping onto the road, grateful that no one was coming from either direction. “That Tomás is a cutie,” I added. “And he clearly thinks you hung the moon.”
“Mutual, I’m sure. He’s a sweet boy.” She sighed. “He misses his daddy.”
“Yeah.” We made the rest of the drive back to UT in silence. Threading my way down to the one-lane service road ringing the base of the stadium, I pulled in behind Miranda’s white Jetta and put the truck in park, the engine idling. “Thanks for going with me, Miranda.”
“You’re welcome.” She opened the door and got out, then leaned her head back in. “By the way,” she said, “you’re right. Eddie is a very fine man. I’m proud to be his friend, too.”
CHAPTER 30
THE GLEAMING WHITE TRACTOR-TRAILER INCHEDalong the edge of the parking lot, parallel to the fence of the Body Farm. The truck’s gears clashed when the driver wrestled the transmission into reverse, and then the clutch caught and the rig eased backward, scraping a few low branches that overhung the chain-link and the inner wooden fence. The driver stopped when the trailer’s rear end was just below the facility’s main gate. He got out, checked his parking job, and unhooked the connections between tractor and trailer. That done, he fired up the large diesel generator attached to the front of the trailer and began raising the front end of the trailer slightly, with a pair of powered jacks built into the trailer’s frame, to compensate for the slight grade of the parking lot. Calling up the contacts stored in my cell phone, I punched in “F” and dialed the first number there. The call went to voice mail; there was no personal greeting, simply a computer voice telling me the number was not available and offering me the chance to leave a message. “This is Bill Brockton,” I said, “calling from Knoxville to say thank you. It feels like Christmas came early to the Body Farm this year.”
I hadn’t fully allowed myself to believe it would happen, but Glen Faust had followed through on his pledge: The trailer contained a mobile CT scanner, housed in a sleek, modern imaging suite—not that the Body Farm’s “patients” were in any shape to notice or care about the ambience or décor, of course. My only hope was that the smell of decomp wouldn’t follow the scanner from Knoxville to its next assignment, wherever and whenever that might be. Faust had committed OrthoMedica to a collaborative research project for the next three months, with the strong possibility of renewing it for a year beyond that if the data proved useful.