The three shocked MEs looked at one another and then at the young med student. Something wasn’t adding up at all. The sample of intestine had come from a man who had been signed out as having died of salmonella poisoning, yet the sample was emitting extremely high levels of alpha-particle radiation. This student had said that they had used radioisotopes in the laboratory as part of the experimental regimen, but could that have caused this radiation?
“What’s going on here?” Laurie asked, addressing Pia. Her voice was even, unchallenging. “This is all rather surprising. Do you have any explanation?”
Pia’s heart was racing, and she felt as though she might actually be in shock. She was not prepared to face the reality that Rothman’s and Yamamoto’s deaths might be a copycat of Alexander Litvinenko’s in London. Pia was terrified of not being able to get to the truth. Now, when it appeared that she’d found it, all she could feel was a rush of anxiety and paranoia. All she wanted to do at that moment was to get the hell out of the OCME, go back to the dorm, and give herself an opportunity to think about the implications of the discovery and what her next step should be.
“Miss, we need you to tell us what you think is going on,” Laurie said, her voice hardening to a degree. “This is an unexpected and very significant finding.”
Pia said nothing. She could feel the eyes of the MEs boring into her. She’d never had any reason to trust anyone in a position of authority. These three weren’t the police or hospital security, but they did work for the city. Who are the bad guys and who are the good guys? She didn’t know. The bigger question was, are there ever any good guys? She had to get away.
Jack was as flabbergasted as anyone else. “You mentioned isotopes, radioisotopes being used in Dr. Rothman’s lab?”
“Um, I’ll have to find out for sure,” Pia said. “I can get back to you in the morning. Do you come in on Saturdays?” She picked up her umbrella and hooked the shopping bag over her shoulder. She eyed the door to the hall.
Chet McGovern was trying hard to think of what Pia had told him about alpha emitters. “Earlier you mentioned something about lead and bismuth, something like lead-213 and bismuth-212, was that it?”
“It was the other way around: lead-212 and bismuth-213, actually. But yes, I did mention those isotopes, and now I have to go back and check to make sure they were the ones being used. I really need to leave.” Pia checked her watch. “Oh my goodness, it’s almost six o’clock. I promised to be back by six and it’s a forty-five-minute subway ride up to Washington Heights.”
The MEs could sense Pia’s acute anxiety. No one was convinced by her display of surprise at the time.
“I think you need to stay here until we get to the bottom of this,” Laurie said. “You might have been exposed yourself. Alpha emitters are dangerous if either ingested or breathed in. There might be other people who need to be checked out.”
“Thank you so much for your help,” Pia said nervously, looking at Laurie and Jack but not quite looking them in the eye. She was itching to get away. “I can be in touch about the isotopes tomorrow.”
Pia didn’t want to be trapped there when the MEs called the authorities, which she knew they would do shortly. She had to finish this on her terms.
“Young lady, what’s going on?” Jack said. “You show up with a Geiger counter in a shopping bag and bruises on your face. Are you a medical student at all? Who sent you here?”
“No one sent me,” said Pia. “I can see how this must look, but I am a medical student. You have to trust me-no one else was contaminated, I’m sure of it. But I can’t stay here, I have to get back, I’m sorry.”
Pia started backing toward the door, and Jack stepped toward her.
“You can’t hold me here if I want to leave,” Pia said. “And I want to leave. Right now!”
Laurie touched Jack on the shoulder, and he paused. Pia turned and walked away quickly. Chet followed and looked back at Jack, puzzlement written on his face. He had no idea what to do. He didn’t even have her cell number. Pia and Chet disappeared. Maureen was confused too, wondering if she should call security.
“She’s right, Jack, we can’t keep her here. She said she’s at Columbia, so she won’t be hard to find.”
“If she wasn’t lying about that too.”
Part of what Jack and Laurie liked about their work as MEs was the unexpected. This was something very new.
“What do you make of it?” Laurie asked.
“I dunno,” said Jack. “There’s a lot she isn’t saying. She suspected there’d be radiation in the bodies. Of course she did, she brought her own Geiger counter! But when she found what she was looking for, she was completely spooked. More like terrified.”
“Definitely,” Laurie said. “We need to get someone to track her down.”
“I agree.”
Jack thought for a second.
“Let’s check the other guy quickly.”
Maureen was glad to have something to do. She fetched Yamamoto’s specimens. They looked for all intents and purposes the same as Rothman’s, mirror images in fact. But whether they were radioactive they had no idea. Pia had taken her Geiger counter with her.
“Should we call DeVries to find out how we can determine what the radioisotope we’re dealing with is?” Jack asked, referring to the OCME head toxicologist.
Suddenly Laurie remembered a disaster kit that the OCME had put together after the agency had recovered from 9/11, the events of which had caught them, and most of the city agencies, completely unprepared. The concern was that if 9/11 had been a nuclear terrorist event, OCME would have been completely unable to cope. So as not to be caught unawares, the disaster kit had been put together. “I think there’s an instrument in the disaster kit that detects radiation,” Laurie said. “And it should be able to identify the radioisotopes involved. You remember? Bingham insisted on getting it.”
Jack didn’t recall, but he trusted Laurie’s memory. When she left to see if she could find the device, Jack called John DeVries, the toxicologist, and asked him how they could identify the radioactive material.
“I honestly have no idea, Jack. My whole career I’ve never had to, thank goodness. The only radioactive cases to come through the OCME in my experience were patients being treated by nuclear medicine so we already knew the identity of the radioisotope. I guess you’ll use atomic absorption somehow but I’ll have to get back to you. It’s Friday night, you know, Jack.”
“I know it is, John. Many thanks.”
That was a dead end for now. Then Laurie returned. She’d found the disaster kit and in it a Berkeley Nucleonics Corp. handheld Model 935 Surveillance and Measurement System, capable of identifying individual isotopes. Together Jack and Laurie read the directions and then used the machine to measure Rothman’s intestine’s emissions. After about five minutes, the result was available. Although mostly alpha particles were being emitted, there was also a low level of gamma radiation. It was the gamma radiation that yielded the result. It was polonium-210!
“The death certificates are wrong, both of them,” Jack said. “Damn it, I missed this completely. This was no accident.”
“Obviously. Do you know much about polonium?”
“I happen to know a little bit about it. First of all, there are no medical uses for it. In fact, you know what it’s mainly used for? It’s mixed with beryllium such that the alpha particles from the polonium cause the beryllium to release neutrons to act as a trigger for nuclear weapons.”
“Good God!” Laurie exclaimed. “How do you know
“I don’t know how I know it, but I know it,” said Jack. He remembered something else. “It was used to kill that Russian guy in London, you remember that?”
“Oh, yes, the defected former KGB officer?”
“Right.”
Laurie and Jack had taken a professional interest in the case a few years back as did most forensic pathologists.
“We have to report this to Homeland Security,” Laurie said.
“Yes,” Jack said. “It doesn’t mean Rothman and Yamamoto were making nuclear weapons, but it does mean that they didn’t die from typhoid fever alone. They had typhoid fever from the salmonella, but they obviously had
