Five Scarpetta Novels (137 page)

I waited for an explanation.

“We go way back. She's my radio room snitch,” he said.

I withdrew the thermometer and held it up.

“Eighty-eight-point-one,” I said. “The body usually cools about one and a half degrees an hour for the first eight hours. But she's going to cool a little quicker because she's partially unclothed. It's what? Maybe seventy degrees in here?”

“I don't know. I'm burning up,” he said. “For sure she was murdered last night, that much we know.”

“Her stomach contents may tell us more,” I said. “Do we have any idea how the killer got in?”

“I'm gonna check out the doors and windows after we finish up in here.”

“Long linear lacerations,” I said, touching her wounds and looking for any trace evidence that might not make it to the morgue. “Like a tire iron. Then there are these punched-out areas, too. Everywhere.”

“Could be the end of the tire iron,” Marino said, looking on.

“But what made this?” I asked.

In several places on the mattress, blood had been transferred from some object that left a striped pattern reminiscent of a plowed field. The stripes were approximately an inch and a half long with maybe an eighth of an inch of space between them, the total surface area of each transfer about the size of my palm.

“Make sure we check the drains for blood,” I said as voices sounded down the hall.

“Hope that's the Breakfast Boys,” Marino said, referring to Ham and Eggleston.

They showed up carrying large Pelican cases.

“You got any idea what the hell's going on?” Marino asked them.

The two crime-scene technicians stared.

“Mother of God,” Ham finally said.

“Does anyone have any idea what happened here?” Eggleston asked, his eyes fixed on what was left of Bray on the bed.

“You know about as much as we do,” Marino replied. “Why weren't you called earlier?”

“I'm surprised
you
found out,” Ham said. “No one told us until now.”

“I got my sources,” Marino said.

“Who tipped the media?” I asked.

“I guess they got their sources, too,” said Eggleston.

He and Ham began opening the cases and setting up lights. Marino's unit number blared from his purloined radio, startling both of us.

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Nine,” he said over the air.

Ham and Eggleston put on gray binocular magnifiers, or “Luke Skywalkers,” as the cops called them.

“Unit nine, ten-five three-fourteen,” the radio came back.

“Three-fourteen, you out there?” Marino said.

“Need you to step outside,” a voice returned.

“That's a ten-ten,” Marino said, refusing.

The techs began taking measurements in millimeters with additional magnifiers that looked rather much like jeweler's lenses. The binocular headsets alone could magnify only three-and-a-half, and some blood spatters were too small for that.

“There's someone who needs to see you. Now,” the radio went on.

“Man, there's castoff all over the place.” Eggleston was referring to blood thrown off during the backswing of a weapon, creating uniform trails or lines on whatever surface it impacted.

“Can't do it,” Marino answered the radio.

Three-fourteen didn't respond, and I unhappily suspected what this was all about, and I was right. In minutes, more footsteps sounded in the hall, and then Chief Rodney Harris was standing in the doorway, his face stone.

“Captain Marino,” Harris said.

“Yes, sir, Chief.” Marino studied an area of floor near the bathroom.

Ham and Eggleston in their black fatigues, latex gloves and binocular headsets only added to the cold horror of the scene as they worked with angles and axes and points of convergence to reconstruct, through geometry, where in space each blow was struck.

“Chief,” they both said.

Harris stared at the bed, jaw muscles bunching. He was short and homely, with thinning red hair and an ongoing battle with his weight. Maybe these misfortunes had shaped him. I didn't know. But Harris had always been a tyrant. He was aggressive and made it obvious he didn't like women who strayed from their proper place, which was why I'd never understood his hiring Bray, unless it was simply that he thought she'd make him look good.

“With all due respect, Chief,” Marino said, “don't step one damn inch closer.”

“I want to know, did you bring the media, Captain?” Harris said in a tone that would have frightened most people I knew. “Are you responsible for that, too? Or did you just directly counter my orders?”

“I guess it's the latter, Chief. I had nothing to do with the media. They was already here when the doc and I pulled up.”

Harris looked at me as if he'd just now noticed I was in the room. Ham and Eggleston climbed up on their stepladders, hiding behind their task.

“What happened to her?” Harris asked me, and his voice faltered a little. “Christ.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Beaten to death with some sort of instrument, maybe a tool. We don't know,” I said.

“I mean, is there anything . . . ?” he started to say, and his iron facade was rapidly slipping away. “Well . . .” He cleared his throat, his eyes pinned to Bray's body. “Why would someone do this? Who? Anything?”

“That's what we're working on, Chief,” Marino said. “Don't have a single damn answer right now, but maybe you can answer a few questions for me.”

The crime-scene techs had begun painstakingly taping bright pink surveyor's string above droplets of blood spattered on the white ceiling. Harris looked ill.

“You know anything about her personal life?” Marino asked.

“No,” Harris said. “In fact, I didn't know she had one.”

“She had someone over last night. They ate pizza, maybe drank a little. Appears her guest smoked,” Marino said.

“I never heard her say anything about going out with someone.” Harris tore his attention away from the bed. “We weren't really what I'd call friendly with each other.”

Ham stopped what he was doing, the string he held connected only to air. Eggleston peered up through his Optivi-sor at blood droplets on the ceiling. He moved a measuring magnifier over them and wrote down millimeters.

“What about neighbors?” Harris then asked. “Did anyone hear anything, see anything?”

“Sorry, but we ain't had time to canvas the neighborhood yet, especially since nobody called any detectives or techs until I finally did,” Marino said.

Harris abruptly walked off. I looked at Marino and he avoided my eyes. I was certain he had just lost what was left of his job.

“How're we doing here?” he asked Ham.

“Already running out of shit to hang this on.” Ham taped one end of string over a blood droplet the size and shape of a comma. “Okay, so where do I tape the other end? How about you move that floor lamp over here. Thanks. Set it right there. Perfect,” Ham said, taping the string to the lamp's finial.

“You ought to quit your day job, Captain, and come work with us.”

“You would hate it,” Eggleston promised.

“You got that right. Nothing I hate more than wasting my time,” Marino said.

Stringing wasn't a waste of time, but it was a nightmare of tedium unless one was fond of protractors and trigonometry and had an anal-retentive mind. The point was that each droplet of blood has its individual trajectory from the impact site, or wound, to a target surface such as a wall, and depending on velocity, distance traveled and angles, droplets have many shapes that tell a gory story.

Although these days computers could come up with the same results, the scene work required just as much time, and all of us who had testified in court had learned that jurors would rather see brightly colored string in a tangible, three-dimensional model than hatch lines on a chart.

But calculating the exact position of a victim when each blow was struck was superfluous unless inches mattered, and they didn't matter here. I didn't need measurements to tell me this was a homicide versus a suicide or that the killer had been enraged and frenzied and all over the place.

“We need to get her downtown,” I said to Marino. “Let's get the squad up here.”

“I just can't figure how he got in,” Ham said. “She's a cop. You'd think she'd know better than to open the door to a stranger.”

“Assuming he was a stranger.”

“Hell, he's the same damn maniac who killed the girl in the Quik Cary. Gotta be.”

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Harris's voice came from the hall.

I turned around with a start. I'd thought he was gone.

“Where's her gun? Has anybody found it?” Marino asked.

“Not so far.”

“Could I see you for a minute, please?” Harris asked me.

Marino threw Harris a dirty look and stepped into the bathroom, calling out a little too loudly, “You guys know to check the drains and pipes, right?”

“We'll get there, boss.”

I joined Harris in the hall and he moved us away from the door where no one could hear what he had to say. Richmond's police chief had surrendered to tragedy. Anger had turned to fear, and that, I suspected, was what he didn't want his troops to see. His suit jacket was draped over an arm, his shirt collar open and tie loose. He was having a hard time breathing.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Asthma.”

“You have your inhaler?”

“Just used it.”

“Take it easy, Chief Harris,” I calmly said, because
asthma could get dangerous fast and stress made everything worse.

“Look,” he said, “there've been rumors. That she was involved in certain activities in D.C. I didn't know anything about it when I hired her. Where she gets her money,” he added, as if Diane Bray weren't dead. “And I know Anderson follows her around like a puppy.”

“Maybe followed her when Bray didn't know it, as well,” I said.

“We've got her in a patrol car,” he said, as if this were news to me.

“As a rule, it's not my place to voice opinions about who's guilty of murder,” I replied, “but I don't think Anderson committed this one.”

He got out his inhaler again and took two puffs.

“Chief Harris, we've got a sadistic killer out there who murdered Kim Luong. The M.O. here is the same. It's too unique to be someone else. There aren't enough details known for it to be a copycat—many details are known only by Marino and me.”

He struggled to breathe.

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” I asked. “Do you want others to die like this? Because it will happen again. And soon. This guy's losing control at a lightning rate. Maybe because he left his safe haven in Paris and now he's like a hunted wild animal with no place to run? And he's enraged, desperate. Maybe he feels challenged and he's taunting us,” I added as I wondered what Benton would have said. “Who knows what goes on inside a mind like that.”

Harris cleared his throat.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“A press release, and I mean now. We know he speaks French. He may have a congenital disorder that results in excessive hairiness. He may have long pale hair on his body. He may shave his entire face, neck and head, and
have deformed dentition, widely spaced, small, pointed teeth. His face is probably going to look odd, too.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Marino needs to handle this,” I told him, as if it were my right to do so.

“What did you say? We're supposed to tell the public we're looking for some man with hair all over his body and pointed teeth? You want to start a panic like this city's never seen?” He couldn't catch his breath.

“Calm down. Please.”

I put my fingers on his neck to check his pulse. It was running away with his life. I walked him into the living room and made him sit down. I brought him a glass of water and massaged his shoulders, talking quietly to him, gently coaxing him to be still, until he was soothed and breathing again.

“You don't need the pressure of this,” I said. “Marino should be working these cases, not riding around in a uniform all night. God help you if he's not working these homicides. God help all of us.”

Harris nodded. He got up and moved in slow steps back to the doorway of that terrible scene. Marino was rooting around in the walk-in closet by now.

“Captain Marino,” Harris said.

Marino stopped what he was doing and gave his chief a defiant look.

“You're in charge,” Harris said to him. “Let me know if there's anything you need.”