Free Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass Page A

the man lost someone he loved?” Yes. “And was an albatross somehow connected to that loss?” Yes. “Was it his wife he’d lost?” Yes. “Did she die on the voyage?” Yes.
    Miranda: “Was there a shipwreck?” Yes. “Did she perish in the shipwreck?” Yes. “Was the man marooned on a desert island?” Yes. “All alone?” No. “Were other survivors with him?” Yes. “Did any of the others die?” No. “Were they marooned for a long time?”
    “Depends on how you define it,” he said. “Ask more specifically.”
    Me: “More than a month?” No. “More than a week?” Yes.
    Garcia: “Did they have food from the ship?” No. “Did they catch fish?”
    “No. Not enough, anyway.” Thornton was cheating slightly, maybe because we were slow.
    Miranda: “Did they eat other food on the island?” Yes. “Albatross?” No. “Did the man think it was albatross?”
    Thornton began to smile. “Yes, he did.”
    “Bless his heart,” she said. “No wonder he killed himself.”
    I was utterly bewildered. “What?” I stared from one of them to the other. “So are you two actually twins, separated at birth, with a secret language and some weird twin-logic all your own?”
    “The survivors resorted to cannibalism,” she said. “They cooked his dead wife, but they told him it was albatross.”
    “Huh?”
    “Ah,” said Garcia. “So when he tasted the albatross in the restaurant, he realized that he’d never tasted albatross before—and he realized that it was his wife they’d eaten on the island.”
    “Hmm,” I said. “I still think the guy overreacted.”
    “Looks like overreaction to us,” said Thornton, “but to him, it seemed the only acceptable response. Same thing with the iridium murder or suicide. Once we know the backstory, we’ll understand the reason for the bizarre method.” He looked at Garcia. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get the guy who did this to you.”
    Garcia gave Thornton an odd, sad smile. “Thank you, Agent Thornton,” he said. “But I have already eviscerated the guy who did this to me.”
    Thornton turned bright red. “Wow,” Miranda said to Garcia, “you don’t even need a scalpel to eviscerate a guy.”
    The FBI agent blinked as he processed Garcia’s joke and Miranda’s response. “Man, I’m out of my league here,” he said.“I better call headquarters and tell ’em to send the A-Team down to Tennessee.”
    “Damn skippy,” said Miranda. “But don’t worry. We’ll go easy on you till they get here.” She flashed him a smile, and Thornton blushed again. He looked considerably more cheerful about it this time around.

CHAPTER 8
    BY THE TIME MIRANDA, THORNTON, AND I LEFT THE hospital, the lid was blowing off the story. Rightly or wrongly, I blamed the skittish ER nurse for leaking word of the incident—I could imagine her calling WBIR-TV or the Knoxville News Sentinel to complain that she and other ER staff had been exposed to radioactive contamination. The truth, though, was that any number of people besides the nurse could have tipped off the media, including morgue employees (all of whom were being checked for exposure now), hospital police officers, even ORPD colleagues of Emert.
    By midmorning, reporters from WBIR, the Knoxville News Sentinel, and the Oak Ridger were besieging UT Medical Center and the Oak Ridge Police Department for information about what had happened in the morgue. The hospital’s PR officer, Liz Chambers, was furious that she’d been lied to. It took a personal visit from Special Agent Thornton to calm her down, though Iwasn’t sure whether it was the national-security angle or Thornton’s personal charm that eased the facial tick and relaxed the neck tendons.
    Liz initially issued a terse statement indicating that during a routine autopsy at the medical center, elevated levels of radioactivity were detected in the remains of Dr. Leonard Novak, a former Oak Ridge physicist. The radioactivity had been