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

contained, the morgue was safe, the source of the elevated activity was being investigated, and everyone who had been exposed was being carefully monitored, the statement concluded.
    That sanitized version survived only through the noon news. By the five o’clock newscast, the story had attained critical mass in the media. A squadron of news helicopters spent the afternoon circling the hospital for aerial shots. In the Anthropology Department, Peggy was swamped with calls from reporters who’d heard that I was in the morgue at the time of the incident. Luckily, I’d talked with Peggy several times since the incident; otherwise she might have believed the journalist who called to ask how Peggy felt about my untimely death in the morgue. I thought of Mark Twain’s famous quip. “Tell the guy I said, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ Then tell him those were my dying words.”
    As the story took on a life of its own, reporters and news anchors began to speculate about whether Dr. Novak had absorbed enough radiation during his decades of work in Oak Ridge to become a hazardous source himself. It was a medical version of the glow-in-the-dark cliché, and it was the same question Emert had asked. Then they began to speculate that he might have been poisoned with polonium-210, as former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko had been in the fall of 2006. After a parade of expertshad refuted the glow-in-the-dark theory, polonium seemed to become the media’s prime suspect. REAC/TS took blood samples from everyone who’d been in the morgue during the time the body was there—eleven additional people—and from the five other police officers who’d been at the pool.
    Like some insidious form of contamination, the polonium theory spread from one news outlet to another. Polonium-210 was a potent source of alpha radiation, the stories pointed out, and although alpha particles could not penetrate skin—they would, in fact, bounce off clothing or a sheet of paper—the particles were dangerous if inhaled or ingested. Soon the stories were focusing on possible sources of “the polonium.” Early on, most stories hinted that the polonium must have come from Russia, where nearly all of the world’s polonium-210 was produced. Soon, though, enterprising journalists were pointing out that polonium-210 was found in antistatic brushes widely used by photographers and darkrooms to remove dust from camera lenses and enlargers. The media spotlight swiftly swiveled toward the Staticmaster brush—available from Amazon.com for $34.95—which contained five hundred microcuries of polonium-210, or about one-sixth of a potentially lethal dose. Within hours every camera shop in Knoxville had sold out of Staticmaster brushes, as journalists raced to prove their resourcefulness and bravery by acquiring and brandishing an actual source of polonium. My favorite story was the one that showed the Staticmaster brush approaching the lens of the television camera itself, looming ever closer and blurrier, until finally the brush blotted out the lens entirely, just as the reporter hinted at dark deeds investigators hoped to bring to light.
    By the late-night newscast on WBIR, Special Agent Charles Thornton himself—wearing a navy blue suit and sporting a businesslike gold tie cinched tight at his collar—was addressing a crowded press conference. Although he could not, Thornton said, comment specifically on any current investigation, he assured the cameras that the FBI took very seriously any actual or threatened crimes involving radioactive or nuclear materials, and was committed to investigating and preventing any such crimes. Thornton regretfully declined to take questions, including a shouted question about whether the FBI had removed radioactive material from UT Medical Center. Immediately after he ducked that question, though, the station aired a brief, fuzzy video clip—I gathered it had been shot by a hospital employee with a cell phone