She gave me a look of disgusted disbelief. “You’re saying you don’t even keep track of whose bodies you’re experimenting on?”
I winced at the phrase experimenting on—it made me sound like Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor. “No, I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that we don’t refer to our research subjects by name. When bodies come in, we give them case numbers—to protect their privacy—and we always refer to them by those numbers.” She looked puzzled, so I explained. “For example, suppose a funeral home brings over a donated body this afternoon—a TV reporter, let’s say, whose story on the joys of skydiving didn’t turn out quite the way she’d planned.” She looked startled by the scenario, which was okay by me. “She’d be the thirty-eighth body donated to us in 2004. That means we—my graduate students and I—would refer to her, and would think of her, as ‘38-04,’ not as Melissa or Carissa or Athena or whatever her name was.” She no longer looked startled; now she looked angry. “My point,” I said, “is that we do keep track of the bodies we have—very careful track—but we also keep their names confidential. So if you’ll write down the names, I’ll go check our master file.” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were trying to pull a fast one on her, but then pulled out a small notepad and began scrawling names. “By the way,” I added, “did your secret source give you the dates these bodies supposedly arrived?” She looked up from the notepad, scowling. “Because if you can narrow down the time, it won’t take me as long to check the files. Which means I can answer your question sooner.” She added a year beside each name, then ripped the page from the pad.
Before handing me the paper, she held the microphone in my face again. “You haven’t answered my other question yet,” she said. “Why are you experimenting on these bodies? Have you no respect for the dead?”
“Ms. Stephanopolus—”
“Demopoulos,” she corrected sharply.
“Ms. Demopoulos,” I resumed, “I assure you, I have enormous respect for the dead.”
“You toss them on the ground and let them rot,” she shot back. “You call that respect?”
“I call it research. We don’t ‘toss’ them; we lay them. Carefully. Respectfully. We conduct scientific research on human decomposition during the extended postmortem interval. It’s never been done before.”
“Maybe there’s a good reason for that,” she countered.
“Nobody ever flew before,” I shot back, “until the Wright brothers did. Were they wrong to study flight?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Instead, she looked down, her gaze traveling down to my left hand. Then she locked eyes with me again, her expression now smug. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “If your wife died, would you take her to your Body Farm? Would you throw her in the woods, for the bugs and the buzzards to eat?”
If she’d been a man, I might have clenched my fist and hit her. Instead I clenched my jaw and silently counted to ten. Then I asked, in as neutral a tone as I could muster, “Are you married, Ms. Demopoulos?”
Her eyes hardened. “That’s a personal question. I don’t discuss my personal life on camera.”
“Neither do I,” I said coolly. I reached out and took the names from her. “Now, if you’ll have a seat, I’ll go check the files.”
I hurried down the long, curving corridor beneath the stadium to my other office, at the far end. The walk did me good—partly because it got me away from the reporter, and partly because it allowed me to let off a bit of steam in a way that was more constructive than taking a swing at a TV reporter. I thought back to the way the Fox 5 reporter in San Diego had ambushed Prescott, and I envied the FBI agent his coolness under fire.
Ten minutes after leaving the news crew cooling their heels in Peggy’s office, I returned and handed the list back to Athena Demopoulos. I had put a check mark beside each of the names, confirming that all four bodies had indeed been sent to us. “Your sources did get the names right,” I told her, “but not the context.” I motioned toward the open door of my office. “Please. Come in, and let me explain a little more about what we do.” She and the cameraman followed me in. He set up a tripod, latched the camera onto it, and gave her a “ready” nod.