Five Scarpetta Novels (46 page)

“What makes you think I don't already have plans?” He held the door for me.

The thought bothered me, even though I knew he was teasing.

“Let's wait until I can get away from here,” he said, and we were walking toward the parking lot now. “Maybe over the weekend, when we can relax a little more. I'll cook this time. Where are you parked?”

“Over here.” I pointed the key's remote control.

Doors unlocked and the interior light went on. Typically, we did not touch. We never had when someone might see.

“Sometimes I hate this,” I said as I got into my car. “It's fine to talk about body parts, rape and murder all day long, but not to hug each other, hold hands. God forbid anybody should see that.” I started the engine. “Tell me how normal that is? It's not like we're still having an affair or committing a crime.” I yanked my
seatbelt across my chest. “Is there some don't-ask-don't-tell FBI rule no one's let me in on?”

“Yes.”

He kissed me on the lips as a group of agents walked by. “So don't tell anyone,” he said.

 

Moments later, I parked in front of the Engineering Research Facility, or ERF, a huge, space age–looking building where the FBI conducted its classified technical research and development. If Lucy knew all of what went on in the labs here, she did not tell, and there were few areas of the building where I was allowed, even when escorted by her. She was waiting by the front door as I pointed the remote control at my car, which was not responding.

“It won't work here,” she said.

I looked up at the eerie rooftop of antennae and satellite dishes, sighing as I manually locked doors with the key.

“You'd think I'd remember after all these times,” I muttered.

“Your investigator friend, Ring, tried to walk me over here after the consultation,” she said, scanning her thumb in a biometric lock by the door.

“He's not my friend,” I told her.

The lobby was high-ceilinged and arranged with glass cases displaying clunky, inefficient radio and electronic equipment used by law enforcement before ERF was built.

“He asked me out again,” she said.

Corridors were monochromatic and seemed endless,
and I was forever impressed with the silence and sense that no one was here. Scientists and engineers worked behind shut doors in spaces big enough to accommodate automobiles, helicopters and small planes. Hundreds of Bureau personnel were employed at ERF, yet they had virtually no contact with any of us across the street. We did not know their names.

“I'm sure there are a million people who would like to ask you out,” I said as we boarded an elevator, and Lucy scanned her thumb again.

“Usually not after they've been around me very long,” she said.

“I don't know, I haven't gotten rid of you yet.”

But she was very serious. “Once I start talking shop, the guys turn off. But he likes a challenge, if you know the type.”

“I know it all too well.”

“He wants something from me, Aunt Kay.”

“Would you like to hazard a guess? And where are you taking me, by the way?”

“I don't know. But I just have this feeling.” She opened a door to the virtual environment lab, adding, “I have a rather interesting idea.”

Lucy's ideas were always more than interesting. Usually they were frightening. I followed her into a room of virtual system processors and graphic computers stacked on top of each other, and countertops scattered with tools, computer boards, chips and peripherals like DataGloves and helmet-mounted displays. Electrical cords were bundled in thick hanks and tied back from the blank expanse
of linoleum flooring where Lucy routinely lost herself in cyberspace.

She picked up a remote control and two video displays blinked on, and I recognized the photographs deadoc had sent to me. They were big and in color on the screens, and I began to get nervous.

“What are you doing?” I asked my niece.

“The basic question has always been, does an immersion into an environment actually improve the operator's performance,” she said, typing computer commands. “You never got a chance to be immersed in this environment. The crime scene.”

Both of us stared at the bloody stumps and lined-up body parts on the monitors, and a chill crept through me.

“But suppose you could have that chance now?” Lucy went on. “What if you could be inside deadoc's room?”

I started to interrupt, but she would not let me.

“What else might you see? What else might you do?” she said, and when she got like this, she was almost manic. “What else might you learn about the victim and him?”

“I don't know if I can use something like this,” I protested.

“Sure you can. Now what I haven't had time to do is add the synthetic sound. Well, except for the typical canned auditory cues. So a squelch is something opening, a click's a switch being turned on or off, a ding usually means you've just bumped into something.”

“Lucy,” I said as she took my left arm, “what the hell are you talking about?”

She carefully pulled a DataGlove over my left hand, making sure it was snug.

“We use gestures for human communication. And we can use gestures, or positions as we call them, to communicate with the computer, too,” she explained.

The glove was black Lycra with fiber-optic sensors mounted on the back of it. These were attached to a cable that led to the high-performance host computer that Lucy had been typing on. Next she picked up a helmet-mounted display that was connected to another cable, and fear fluttered through my breast as she headed my way.

“One VPL Eyephone HRX,” she cheerfully said. “Same thing they're using at NASA's Ames Research Center, which is where I discovered it.” She was adjusting cables and straps. “Three hundred and fifty thousand color elements. Superior resolution and wide field of vision.”

She placed the helmet on top of my head, and it felt heavy and covered my eyes.

“What you're looking into are liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, your basic video displays. Glass plates, electrodes and molecules doing all kinds of cool things. How does it feel?”

“Like I'm going to fall down and suffocate.”

I was beginning to panic the way I had when I'd first learned how to scuba dive.

“You're not going to do either.” She was very patient, her hand steadying me. “Relax. It's normal to be phobic at first. I'll tell you what to do. Now you stand still and take deep breaths. I'm going to put you in.”

She made adjustments, tightening the display around my head, then returned to the host computer. I was blind and off balance, a tiny TV in front of each eye.

“Okay, here we go,” she said. “Don't know if it will do any good, but can't hurt to try.”

Keys clicked, and I was thrown inside that room. She began instructing me about what to do with my hand to fly forward or faster, or in reverse, and how to release and grab. I moved my index finger, made clicking motions, brought my thumb near my palm and moved my arm across my chest as I broke out in a sweat. I spent a good five minutes on the ceiling and walking into walls. At one point, I was on top of the table where the torso lay on its bloody blue cover, stepping on evidence and the dead.

“I think I might throw up,” I said.

“Just hold still for a minute,” Lucy said. “Catch your breath.”

I gestured as I started to say something more, and was instantly on the virtual floor, as if I had fallen from the air.

“That's why I told you to hold still,” she said as she watched what I was doing on the monitors. “Now move your hand in and point with your first two fingers toward where you hear my voice coming from. Better?”

“Better,” I said.

I was standing on the floor in the room, as if the photograph had come to life, three-dimensional and large. I looked around and did not actually see anything I hadn't before when Vander had done the image enhancement. It
was what this made me feel, and what I felt changed what I saw.

Walls were the color of putty, with faint discolorations that until now I had attributed to water damage, which might be expected in a basement or garage. But they seemed different now, more uniformly distributed, some so faint I could barely see them. Paper had once covered the putty paint on these walls. It had been removed but not replaced, as had the cornice box or drapery rod. Above a window covered with shut Venetian blinds were small holes where brackets once had been.

“This isn't where it happened,” I said as my heart beat harder.

Lucy was silent.

“She was brought in here after the fact to be photographed. This is not where the killing and dismemberment took place.”

“What are you seeing?” she asked.

I moved my hand and walked closer to the virtual table. I pointed at the virtual walls, to show Lucy what I saw. “Where did he plug in the autopsy saw?” I said.

I could find but one electrical outlet, and it was at the base of a wall.

“And the drop cloth is from here, too?” I went on. “It doesn't fit with everything else. No paint, no tools.” I kept looking around. “And look at the floor. The wood's lighter at the border as if there once was a rug. Who puts rugs in workshops? Who has wallpaper and drapes? Where are the outlets for power tools?”

“What do you feel?” she asked.

“I feel this is a room in someone's house where the furniture has been removed. Except there is some sort of table, which has been covered with something. Maybe a shower curtain. I don't know. The room feels domestic.”

I reached out my hand and tried to touch the edge of the table cover, as if I could lift it and reveal what was underneath, and as I looked around, details became so clear to me, I wondered how I could have missed them before. Wiring was exposed in the ceiling directly above the table, as if a chandelier or other type of light fixture had once hung there.

“What about my color perception right now?” I asked.

“Should be the same.”

“Then there's something else. These walls.” I touched them. “The color lightens in this direction. There's an opening. Maybe a doorway, with light coming through it.”

“There's no doorway in the photo,” Lucy reminded me. “You can only see what's there.”

It was odd, but for a moment I thought I could smell her blood, the pungency of old flesh that has been dead for days. I remembered the doughy texture of her skin, and the peculiar eruptions that made me wonder if she had shingles.

“She wasn't random,” I said.

“And the others were.”

“The other cases are nothing like this one. I'm getting double imagery. Can you adjust that?”

“Vertical retinal image disparity.”

Then I felt her hand on my arm.

“Usually goes away after fifteen or twenty minutes,” she said. “It's time to take a break.”

“I don't feel too good.”

“Image rotation misalignment. Visual fatigue, simulation sickness, cybersick, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “Causing image blurring, tears, even queasiness.”

I couldn't wait to remove the helmet, and I was on the table again, facedown in blood before I could get the LCDs away from my eyes.

My hands were shaking as Lucy helped me take off the glove. I sat down on the floor.

“Are you all right?” she asked, kindly.

“That was awful,” I said.

“Then it was good.” She returned the helmet and glove to a counter. “You were immersed in the environment. That's what should happen.”

She handed me several tissues, and I wiped my face.

“What about the other photograph? Do you want to do that one, too?” she asked. “The one with the hands and feet?”

“I've been in that room quite enough,” I said.

I
drove home haunted. I had been going to crime scenes most of my professional life, but had never had one come to me. The sensation of being inside that photograph, of imagining I could smell and feel what was left of that body, had shaken me badly. It was almost midnight by the time I pulled into my garage, and I couldn't unlock my door fast enough. Inside my house, I turned the alarm off, then back on the instant I shut and locked the door. I looked around to make sure nothing was out of place.

Lighting a fire, I fixed a drink and missed cigarettes again. I turned on music to keep me company, then went inside my office to see what might await me there. I had various faxes and phone messages, and another communication in e-mail. This time, all deadoc had for me was to repeat,
you think you re so smart
. I was printing this
and wondering if Squad 19 had seen it, too, when the telephone rang, startling me.

“Hi,” Wesley said. “Just making sure you got in okay.”

“There's more mail,” I said, and I told him what it was.

“Save it and go to bed.”

“It's hard not to think about.”

“He wants you to stay up all night thinking. That's his power. That's his game.”

“Why me?” I was out of sorts and still felt queasy.

“Because you're the challenge, Kay. Even for nice people like me. Go to sleep. We'll talk tomorrow. I love you.”

But I did not get to sleep long. At several minutes past four
A
.
M
., my phone rang again. It was Dr. Hoyt this time, a family practitioner in Norfolk, where he had served as a state-appointed medical examiner for the last twenty years. He was pushing seventy, but spry and as lucid as new glass. I'd never known him to be alarmed by anything, and I was instantly unnerved by his tone.

“Dr. Scarpetta, I'm sorry,” he said, and he was talking very fast. “I'm on Tangier Island.”

All I could think of, oddly, were crab cakes. “What in the world are you doing there?”

I arranged pillows behind me, reaching for call sheets and pen.

“I got called late yesterday, been out here half the night. The Coast Guard had to bring me in one of their cutters, and I don't like boats worth a damn, beaten and
whipped around worse than eggs. Plus it was cold as hell.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The last time I saw anything like this was Texas, 1949,” he went on, talking fast, “when I was doing my residency and about to get married . . .”

I had to cut him off. “Slow down, Fred,” I said. “Tell me what's happened.”

“A fifty-two-year-old Tangier lady. Probably been dead at least twenty-four hours in her bedroom. She's got severe skin eruptions in crops, just covered with them, including the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet. Crazy as it sounds, it looks like smallpox.”

“You're right. That's crazy,” I said as my mouth got dry. “What about chicken pox? Any way this woman was immunosuppressed?”

“I don't know anything about her, but I've never seen chicken pox look like this. These eruptions follow the smallpox pattern. They're in crops, like I said, all about the same age, and the farther away from the center of the body, the denser they get. So they're confluent, on the face, the extremities.”

I was thinking of the torso, of the small area of eruptions that I had assumed were shingles, my heart filled with dread. I did not know where that victim had died, but I believed it was somewhere in Virginia. Tangier Island was also in Virginia, a tiny barrier island in the Chesapeake Bay where the economy was based on crabbing.

“There are a lot of strange viruses out there these days,” he was saying.

“Yes, there are,” I agreed. “But Hanta, Ebola, HIV, dengue, et al., do not cause the symptoms you have described. That doesn't mean there isn't something else we don't know about.”

“I know smallpox. I'm old enough to have seen it with my own two eyes. But I'm not an expert in infectious diseases, Kay. And I sure as hell don't know the things that you do. But whatever it might be in this case, the fact is, the woman's dead and some type of poxvirus killed her.”

“Obviously, she lived alone.”

“Yes.”

“And she was last seen alive when?”

“The chief's working on that.”

“What chief?” I said.

“The Tangier police department has one officer. He's the chief. I'm in his trailer now, using the phone.”

“He's not overhearing this.”

“No, no. He's out talking to neighbors. I did my best to get information, without a whole lot of luck. You ever been out here?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Let's just say they don't exactly rotate their crops. There are maybe three family names on the whole island. Most folks grow up here, never leave. It's mighty hard to understand a word they're saying. Now that's a dialect you won't hear in any other corner of the world.”

“Nobody touches her until I have a better idea what we're dealing with,” I said, unbuttoning my pajamas.

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

“Get the police chief to guard the house. No one goes in or near it until I say. Go home. I'll call you later in the day.”

The labs had not completed microbiology on the torso, and now I could not wait. I dressed in a hurry, fumbling with everything I touched, as if my motor skills had completely left me. I sped downtown on streets that were deserted, and at close to five was parking in my space behind the morgue. As I let myself into the bay, I startled the night security guard and he startled me.

“Lord have mercy, Dr. Scarpetta,” said Evans, who had watched over the building for as long as I had been here.

“Sorry,” I said, my heart thudding. “I didn't mean to frighten you.”

“Just making my rounds. Is everything all right?”

“I sure hope so.” I went past him.

“Is something coming in?”

He followed me up the ramp. I opened the door leading inside, and looked at him.

“Nothing I know of,” I replied.

Now he was completely confused, for he did not understand why I was here at this hour if no case was coming in. He started shaking his head as he headed back toward the door leading out into the parking lot. From there, he would go next door to the lobby of the Consolidated Labs, where he would sit watching a small, flickering TV until it was time to make his rounds again. Evans would not step foot into the morgue. He did not
understand how anyone could, and I knew he was scared of me.

“I won't be down here long,” I told him. “Then I'll be upstairs.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, still shaking his head. “You know where I'll be.”

Midway along the corridor in the autopsy suite was a room not often entered, and I stopped there first, unlocking the door. Inside were three freezers unlike any normally seen. They were stainless steel and oversized, with temperatures digitally displayed on doors. On each was a list of case numbers, indicating the unidentified people inside.

I opened a door and thick fog rolled out as frigid air bit my face. She was in a pouch, and on a tray, and I put on gown, gloves, face shield, every layer of protection we had. I knew I might already be in trouble, and the thought of Wingo and his vulnerable condition thrilled me with fear as I slid out the pouch and lifted it onto a stainless steel table in the middle of the room. Unzipping black vinyl, I exposed the torso to ambient air, and I went out and unlocked the autopsy suite.

Collecting a scalpel and clean glass slides, I pulled the surgical mask back down over my nose and mouth, and returned to the freezer room, shutting the door. The torso's outer layer of skin was moist as thawing began, and I used warm, wet towels to speed that along before unroofing vesicles, or the eruptions clustered over her hip and at the ragged margins of the amputations.

With the scalpel, I scraped vesicular beds, and made
smears on the slides. I zipped up the pouch, marking it with blaze orange biological hazard tags, almost could not lift the body back up to its frigid shelf, my arms trembling under the strain. There was no one to call for help but Evans, so I managed on my own, and placed more warnings on the door.

I headed upstairs to the third floor, and unlocked a small lab that would have looked like most were it not for various instruments used only in the microscopic study of tissue, or histology. On a counter was a tissue processor, which fixed and dehydrated samples such as liver, kidney, spleen, and then infiltrated them with paraffin. From there the blocks went to the embedding center, and on to the microtome where they were shaved into thin ribbons. The end product was what kept me bent over my microscope downstairs.

While slides air-dried, I rooted around shelves, moving aside stains of bright orange, blue and pink in coplin jars, pulling out Gram's iodine for bacteria, Oil Red for fat in liver, silver nitrate, Biebrach Scarlet and Acridine Orange, as I thought about Tangier Island, where I'd never had a case before. Nor was there much crime, so I had been told, only drunkenness, which was common with men alone at sea. I thought of blue crab again, and irrationally wished Bev had sold me rock fish or tuna.

Finding the bottle of Nicolaou stain, I dipped in an eye dropper and carefully dripped a tiny amount of the red fluid on each slide, then finished with cover slips. These I secured in a sturdy cardboard folder, and I headed downstairs to my floor. By now, people were beginning to
arrive for work, and they gave me odd looks as I came down the hall and boarded the elevator in scrubs, mask and gloves. In my office, Rose was collecting dirty coffee mugs off my desk. She froze at the sight of me.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” she said. “What in the world is going on?”

“I'm not sure, but I hope nothing,” I replied as I sat at my desk and took the cover off my microscope.

She stood in the doorway, watching as I placed a slide on the stage. She knew by my mood, if by nothing else, that something was very wrong.

“What can I do to help,” she said in a grim, quiet way.

The smear on the slide came into focus, magnified four hundred and fifty times, and then I applied a drop of oil. I stared at waves of bright red eosinophilic inclusions within infected epithelial cells, or the cytoplasmic Guarnieri bodies indicative of a pox-type virus. I fitted a Polaroid MicroCam to the microscope, and took instant high-resolution color photographs of what I suspected would have cruelly killed the old woman anyway. Death had given her no humane choice, but had it been me, I would have chosen a gun or a blade.

“Check MCV, see if Phyllis has gotten in,” I said to Rose. “Tell her the sample I sent on Saturday can't wait.”

Within the hour, Rose had dropped me off at Eleventh and Marshall streets, at the Medical College of Virginia, or MCV, where I had done my forensic pathology residency when I wasn't much older than the students I now advised and presented gross conferences to throughout the year. Sanger Hall was sixties architecture, with a facade
of garish bright blue tiles that could be spotted for miles. I got on an elevator packed with other doctors I knew, and students who feared them.

“Good morning.”

“You, too. Teaching a class?”

I shook my head, surrounded by lab coats. “Need to borrow your TEM.”

“You hear about the autopsy we had downstairs the other day?” a pulmonary specialist said to me as doors parted. “Mineral dust pneumoconiosis. Berylliosis, specifically. How often you ever see that around here?”

On the fifth floor, I walked quickly to the Pathology Electron Microscopy Lab, which housed the only transmission electron microscope, or TEM, in the city. Typically, carts and countertops had not an inch of room to spare, crowded with photo and light microscopes, and other esoteric instruments for analyzing cell sizes, and coating specimens with carbon for X-ray microanalysis.

As a rule, TEM was reserved for the living, most often used in renal biopsies and specific tumors, and viruses rarely, and autopsy specimens almost never. In terms of my ongoing needs and patients already dead, it was difficult to get scientists and physicians very excited when hospital beds were filled with people awaiting word that might grant them a reprieve from a tragic end. So I never prodded microbiologist Dr. Phyllis Crowder into instant action on the occasions I had needed her in the past. She knew this was different.

From the hall, I recognized her British accent as she talked on the phone.

“I know. I understand that,” she was saying as I knocked on the open door. “But you're either going to have to reschedule or go on without me. Something else has come up.” She smiled, motioning me in.

I had known her during my residency days, and had always believed that kind words from faculty like her had everything to do with why I had come to mind when the chief's position had opened in Virginia. She was close to my age and had never married, her short hair the same dark gray as her eyes, and she always wore the same gold cross necklace that looked antique. Her parents were American, but she had been born in England, which was where she had trained and worked in her first lab.