Cause of Death (22 page)

"She has a history of depression, mostly over her heart problems," Fielding was saying, "and this morning at about three o'clock her husband heard her get out of bed.

Apparently she went into the den and shot herself in the chest."

Possible views were of other poor souls who during the night had died from myocardial infarcts and wrecks in cars.

I turned down an elderly woman who clearly was a victim of cancer, and an indi-ent man who had succumbed to his t, coronary disease. Finally, we pushed back chairs and I went downstairs. My staff was respectful of my space and did not question what I was going through. No one spoke on the elevator as I stared straight ahead at shut doors, and in the locker room we put on gowns and washed our hands in silence. I was pulling on shoe covers and gloves when Fielding got close to me and spoke in my ear, "Why don't you let me take care of him?" His eyes were earnest on mine.

"I'll handle it," I said. "But thank you."

"Dr. Scarpetta, don't put yourself through it, you know'?

I wasn't here the week he came in. I never met him."

"It's okay, Jack." I walked away.

This was not the first time I had autopsied people I knew, and most police and even the other doctors did not always understand. They argued that the findings were more objective if someone else did the case, and this simply wasn't true as long as there were witnesses. Certainly, I had not known Danny intimately or for long, but he had worked for me, and in a way had died for me. I would give him the best that I had.

He was on a gurney parked next to table one, where I usually did my cases, and the sight of him this morning was worse and hit me with staggering force. He was cold and in full rigor, as if what had been human in him had given up during the night, after I had left him. Dried blood smeared his face, and his lips were parted as if he had tried to speak when life had fled from him. His eyes stared the slitted dull stare of the dead, and I saw his red brace and remembered him mopping the floor. I remembered his t, cheerfulness, and the sad look on his face when he talked about Ted Eddings and other young people suddenly gone.

"Jack." I motioned for Fielding.

He almost trotted to my side. "Yes, ma'am," he said.

"I'm going to take you up on your offer." I began labeling test tubes on a surgical cart. "I could use your help i f you're sure you're up to it."

"What do you want me to do?"

"We'll do him together."

"Not a problem. You want me to scribe?"

"Let's photograph him as he is but cover the table with a sheet first," I said.

Danny's case number was ME-3096, which meant he was the thirtieth case of the new year in the central district of Virginia. After hours of refrigeration he was not cooperative, and when we lifted him onto the table, arms and legs loudly banged against stainless steel as if protesting what we were about to do. We removed dirty, bloody clothing. Arms resisted coming out of sleeves, and tight-fitting jeans were Stubborn. I dipped my hands in pockets, and came up with twenty-seven cents in change, a Chap Stick and a ring of keys.

"That's weird," I said as we folded garments and placed them on top of the gurney covered by a disposable sheet.

"What happened to my car key?"

"Was it one of those remote-control ones?"

"Right." Velcro ripped as I removed the knee brace.

"And obviously, it wasn't anywhere at the scene."

"We didn't find it. And since it wasn't in the ignition, I assumed Danny would have had it." I was pulling off thick athletic socks.

"Well, I guess the killer Could have taken it, or it could have gotten lost."

I thought of the helicopter making a bigger mess, and I had heard that Marino had been on the news. He was shaking his fist and yelling for all the world to see, and I was there, too.

"Okay, he's got tattoos." Fielding picked up the clipboard.

Danny had a pair of dice inked into the top of his feet.

"Snake eyes," Fielding said. "Ouch, that must have hurt."

I found a faint scar from an appendectomy, and another old one on Danny's left knee that may have come from an accident when he was a child. On his right knee, scars from recent arthroscopic surgery were purple, the muscles in that leg showing minimal atrophy. I collected samples of his fingernails and hair, and at a glance saw nothing indicative of a struggle. I saw no reason to assume he had resisted whomever he had encountered outside the Hill Cafe when he had dropped his bag of leftovers.

"Let's turn him," I said.

Fielding held the legs while I gripped my hands under the arms. We got him on his belly and I used a lens and a strong light to examine the back of his head. Long dark hair was tangled with clotted blood and debris, and I palpated the scalp some more.

"I need to shave this here so I can be sure. But it looks like we've got a contact gunshot wound behind his right ear. Where are his films?"

"They should be ready." Fielding looked around.

"We need to reconstruct this."

"Shit." He helped me hold together what was a profound stellate wound that looked more like an exit, because it was so huge.

"It's definitely an entrance," I said as I used a scalpel blade to carefully shave that area of the scalp. "See, we've got a faint muzzle mark up here. Very faint. Right there."

I traced it with a gloved bloody finger. "This is very destructive. Almost like a rifle."

"Forty-five?"

"A half-inch hole," I said almost to myself as I used a ruler. "Yes, that's definitely consistent with a forty-five."

I was removing the skull cap in pieces to look at the brain when the autopsy technician appeared and slapped films up on a nearby light box. The bright white shape of the bullet was lodged in the frontal sinus, three inches from the top of the head.

"My God," I muttered as I stared at it.

"What the hell is that?" Fielding asked as both of us left the table to get closer.

The deformed bullet was big with sharp petals folded back like a claw.

"Hydra-Shok doesn't do that," my deputy chief said.

. "No, it does not. This is some kind of special highperformance ammo."

"Maybe Starfire or Golden Sabre?"

"Like that, yes," I answered, and I had never seen this ammunition in the morgue. "But I'm thinking Black Talon because the cartridge case recovered isn't PMC or Remington. It's Winchester. And Winchester made Black Talon until it was taken off the market."

"Winchester makes Silvertip. "This is definitely not Silvertip," I replied. "You ever seen a Black Talon?"

"Only in magazines."

"Black-coated, brass-jacketed with a notched hollow point that blossoms like this. See the points." I showed him on the film. "Unbelievably destructive. It goes through you like a buzz saw. Great for law enforcement but a nightmare if in the wrong hands."

"Jesus," Fielding said, amazed. "It looks like a damn octopus."

I pulled off latex gloves and replaced them with ones made of a tightly woven cloth, for ammunition like Black Talon was dangerous in the ER and the morgue. It was a bigger threat than a needle stick, and I did not know if Danny had hepatitis or AIDS. I did not want to cut myself on the jagged metal that had killed him so his assailant could end up taking two lives instead of one.

Fielding put on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves, which were sturdier than latex, but not good enough.

You can wear those for scribing," I said. "But that's "That bad?"

"Yes," I said, plugging in the autopsy saw. "You wear those and handle this and you're going to get cut."

"This doesn't seem like a carjacking. This seems like someone who was very serious."

"Believe me," I raised my voice above the loud whine of the saw, "it doesn't get any more serious than this."

The story told by what lay beneath the scalp only got worse. The bullet had shattered the temporal, occipital, parietal and frontal bones of the skull. In fact, had it not lost its energy fragmenting the thick petrous ridge, the twisted claw would have exited, and we would have lost what was a very important piece of evidence. As for the brain, what the Black Talon had done to it was awful. The explosion of gas and shredding caused by copper and lead had plowed a terrible path through the miraculous matter that had made Danny who he was. I rinsed the bullet, then cleaned it thoroughly in a weak solution of Clorox, because body fluids can be infectious and are notorious for oxidizing metal evidence.

At almost noon, I double-bagged it in plastic envelopes and carried it upstairs to the firearms lab, where weapons of every sort were tagged and deposited on countertops, or wrapped in brown paper bags. There were knives to be examined for tool marks, submachine guns and even a sword. Henry Frost, who was new to Richmond but well known in his field, was staring into a computer screen.

"Has Marino been up here?" I asked him as I walked in.

Frost looked up, hazel eyes focusing, as if he had just arrived from some distant place where I had never been.

"About two hours ago." He tapped several keys.

"Then he gave you the cartridge case." I moved beside his chair.

"I'm working on it now," he said. -The word is, this case is a number-one priority."

Frost, I guessed, was about my age and had been divorced at least twice. He was attractive and athletic, with well-proportioned features and short black hair. According to the typical legends people always claimed about their peers, he ran marathons, was an expert in whitewater rafting, and could shoot a fly off an elephant at a hundred paces. What I did know from personal observation was that he loved his trade better than any woman, and there was nothing he would rather talk about than guns.

"You've entered the forty-five?" I asked him.

"We don't know for a fact it's connected to the crime, do we?" He glanced at me.

"No," I said. "We don't know for a fact." I spotted a chair with wheels close by and pulled it over. "The cartridge case was found about ten feet from where we believe he was shot. In the woods. It's clean. It looks new. And I've got this." I dipped into a pocket of my lab coat and withdrew the envelope containing the Black Talon bullet.

"Wow," he said.

"Consistent with a Winchester forty-five?"

"Man alive. There is always a first time." He opened the envelope and was suddenly excited. "I'll measure lands and grooves and tell you in a minute whether it's a forty-five."

He moved before the comparison microscope and used the Air Gap method to fix the bullet to the stage with wax so he didn't leave any marks on metal that weren't already there.

"Okay," he talked without looking up, "the rifling is to the left, and we've got six lands and grooves." He began measuring with micrometer jaws. "Land impressions are point oh-seven-four. Groove impressions are point one-five-three. I'm going to enter that into the GRC,- he said, referring to the FBI's computerized General Rifling Characteristics. "Now let's determine the caliber," he spoke abstractedly as he typed.

While the computer raced through its databases, Frost checked the bullet with a vernier measuring device. Not surprisingly, what he found was that the caliber of the Black Talon was .45, and then the GRC came back with a list of twelve brands of firearms that could have fired it. All, except Sig Sauer and several Colts, were military pistols.

"What about the cartridge case?" I said. "Do we know anything about it?"

"I've got it on live video but I haven't run it yet."

He returned to the chair where I had found him when I had first come in and began typing on a workstation connected by modem to an FBI firearms evidence imaging system called DRUGFIRE. The application was part of the massive Crime Analysis Information Network known as CAIN, which Lucy had developed, and the point was to link firearms-related crimes. Succinctly put, I wanted to know if the gun that had killed Danny might have killed or maimed before, especially since the type of ammunition hinted that the assailant was no novice.

The workstation was simple, with its 486 turbo PC connected to a video camera and comparison microscope that made it possible to capture images in real time and in color on a twenty-inch screen. Frost went into another menu and the video display was suddenly filled with a checkerboard of silvery disks representing other .45 cartridge cases, each with unique impressions. The breech face of the Winchester .45 connected to my case was on the top left-hand side, and I could see every mark made by breech block, firing pin, ejector or any of her metal part of the gun that had fired the round into Danny's head.

"Yours has a big drag to the left." Frost showed me what looked like a tail coming out of the circular dent left by the firing pin. "And there's this other mark here, also to the left." He touched the screen with his finger.

"Ejector?" I said.

"Nope, I'd say that's from the firing pin bouncing back."

"Unusual?"

"Well, I'd just say it's unique to this weapon," he replied as he stared. "So we can run this if you want."

Let's.

He pulled up another screen and entered the information he had, such as the hemispherical shape the firing pin had impressed in the soft metal of the printer, and the direction of twist and parallel striation of the microscopic characteristics of the breech face. We did not enter anything about the bullet I had recovered from Danny's brain, for we could not prove that the Black Talon and the cartridge case were related, no matter how much we might suspect it. The examination of those two items of evidence was really unrelated, for lands and grooves and firing pin impressions are as different as fingerprints and footwear. All one can hope is that the stories the witnesses tell are the same.