Page 31 (1/2)

CHAPTER 1

The colorful tents crowding the clearing where I stood wouldn’t have looked out of place at a carnival or Renaissance fair It would be an interesting irony: a Renaissance fair — a “rebirth” fair — here at the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, the one place in the world that revolves around the study of the dead and how they decay

The tents — white, red, green, yellow, blue — jostled for space at the Anthropology Research Facility Decades earlier, an FBI agent had dubbed the UT facility “the Body Farhout the three wooded acres The nickna a spin-off nickna up a similar research facility in San Marcos, Texas Even before her first research cadaver hit the ground, the Texas facility was being called “the Body Ranch”

Several of the tents huddled together were supported by inflatable fra — Quonset huts, twenty-first-century style Norhtest splash of color, apart froe blue tarp draped over our corrugated-metal equipment shed and its small, fenced-in concrete pad The tents — whose festive colors belied the barren winter landscape and bitter cold of the day — had been erected just twenty-four hours earlier, and twenty-four hours froain Despite the carnival look, the tents were a stage for the acting out of a nightinable: an act of nuclear terrorism

A nude est of the tents, his puckered skin gone gray and ue at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, visible just above the Body Farm’s wooden fence and barren treeline Fourteen other bodies — selected and stored over the preceding month — were locked in a semi-tractor-trailer parked just outside the fence The fifteen bodies were stand-ins for what could be hundreds or thousands or even — God forbid — tens of thousands of victied to inflict wholesale death in a US city somewhere, someday

Five people surrounded the gurney Their faces and even their genders were y biohazard suits whose white Tyvek sleeves and legs were sealed with duct tape to black rubber gloves and boots One of the white-garbed figures held a boxy beige instrument in one hand, and in the other, a metal wand that was connected to the box As the wand swept a few inches above the head, then the chest and abdomen, and then each arm, the box emitted occasional clicks As the wand neared the left knee, though, the clicks beca spent“duck and cover” during civil defense drills, as if en boer counter

As the wand hovered, the other four people leaned in to inspect the knee One took photographs; two others began spraying the body with a soapy-looking liquid and scrubbing the skin, paying particular attention to the knee As they scrubbed, one of thee disk, about the size of a quarter, and handed it to the team leader A tiny, safely encapsulated speck of radioactive strontiuh to pose any hazard — si was coer counter checked the knee oncenorn from the team leader, the body heeled out of the tent and returned to the trailer that held the other fourteen corpses, which had already undergone si and decontamination procedures

One by one, the Tyvek-suited figures rinsed off beneath what had to be the world’s coldest shower: a spray of soapy water mixed with alcohol, a last- temperatures The team’s contaoal was toas realistic as possible, despite the added challenges provided by the bitter cold Only after the shower did the goggles and respirators coraduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, eed from one of the white suits, followed shortly by Art Bohanan, the resident fingerprint expert at the Knoxville Police Department The team leader was Hank Strickland, a health physicist, one who specialized in radiation and radiation safety Hank worked at a facility in Oak Ridge called REAC/TS — the Radiation E Site — that sent medical response teams to help treat victims of radiation accidents anywhere in the world

But Hank, like Miranda and Art, was here today as a volunteer team member of

DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team Formed in the early 1990s to identify victims of mass disasters such as airliner crashes and hurricanes, DMORT was part of the US Public Health Service, but the teams were staffed by volunteers with specialized, and even macabre, skills: their ranks included funeral directors, morticians, forensic dentists, physicians, forensic anthropologists, police officers, and fire fighters — people accusto with bodies and bones DMORT volunteers, including some of my students, had performed heroic service at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center bo and identifying bodies after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005

Art hi fingerprints and pal corpses One body was that of awaters More than a hundred days after the man drowned in the attic — how ironic was that? — Art and a colleague ed to lift a print and ID the man

DMORT tea exercise represented a grihtmare of September 11, 2001 DMORT’s Weapons of Mass Destruction teanition of the fact that terrorists ould turn civilian airliners into flying boical, or nuclear terrorism Because of the contamination such attacks would create, they would pose unique proble bodies The WMD team’s exercise here at the Body Far DMORT procedures for handling radiation-contaminated bodies — the sorts of contaminants that would be unleashed, for example, if a radioactive “dirty bomb” were exploded in New York Harbor

Although it grieved me that nuclear-disaster procedures had to be developed, it made me proud that my research facility could help in the process The Body Farency-response team like DMORT could si nuh fifteen bodies was a tiny fraction of the number of victims ould die in an actual dirty-bomb explosion in New York — some estimates put the worst-case number of fatalities from that scenario at fifty thousand or more — fifteen was a place to start, and that was far more bodies than DMORT would be likely to use anyplace else

Miranda and Art e their boots and rubbing their ar in the bitter air “Sweet Jesus, I a sprayed with cold water, but I was cold, too; I’d gotten an artificial hip about six months before, when a bullet shattered the top of my left femur, and the cold titaniuan to chatter “Whose bright idea was it,” she said, “to do this on the coldest day of the worst cold snap on record?”

“It’s not as fun as reading by the fireplace,” Art said, “but unless you can get the terrorists to attack only when the weather’s nice, it helps to practice in the worst conditions you can”

“I know, I know,” grumbled Miranda “It’s just that I’ht ever again”

“I didn’t realize you’d had theraduate students had tis”

“Only during spring break,” I said

“Spring break? What’s spring break?” said Miranda, feigning puzzlenation “I just want to spend the next six months in a hot bath”

Just then love, I fished the phone froertips According to the display, the caller was Peggy, the Anthropology Depart to telldown on us in the next five minutes”

“I’itated police lieutenant froe on the line”

A se was ho industries, but the city’s main claim to fame was its pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, the race to develop the ato World War II “Did the lieutenant say what he’s agitated about?”

“They’ve just found a body they want you to take a look at,” she said “Apparently they don’t find a lot of bodies in Oak Ridge”

“No, the radioactivity helps protect thelow in the dark” It was an old, tired joke Knoxvillians tended to ers sometimes made about themselves, in a sort of preemptive first strike of defiant civic pride

“Well, you be careful,” she said “All those fences and guard towers and nuclear reactors and bomb factories scare me”

She patched through the Oak Ridge officer, Lieutenant Dewar When I hung up, I said to Miranda, “You didn’t really want that hot bath, did you?”

“No, of course not,” she said, having heard my end of the conversation “What I really want to do is complete my transformation into the Human Icicle”

“That’s good,” I said “I’ve got just the job for you”