Bones of Betrayal

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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 Farm” after seeing the corpses scattered throughout the three wooded acres. The nickname had stuck, and now it was even inspiring a spin-off nickname: a former UT graduate student was now setting 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 frames, the rest by spidery arcs of geometric tubing — Quonset huts, twenty-first-century style. Normally there were no tents here; normally the brightest splash of color, apart from the grass and the leaves on the trees, was a large 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 from now they would be gone again. Despite the carnival look, the tents were a stage for the acting out of a nightmare scenario, one of the darkest events imaginable: an act of nuclear terrorism.

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