Five Scarpetta Novels (5 page)

“You know much about hookahs?” Danny asked me, and he had returned to the table to help.

“I've never used one.”

I undermined the midline chest incision laterally. Reflecting back tissue, I formed a pocket in a side of skin, which Danny filled with water. Then I immersed my hand and inserted the scalpel blade between two ribs. I checked for a release of bubbles that might indicate a diving injury had
caused air to leak into the chest cavity. But there were none.

“Let's get the hookah and the hose out of the boat and bring them in,” I decided. “It would be good if we could get hold of a dive consultant for a second opinion. Do you know anyone around here we might be able to reach on a holiday?”

“There's a dive shop in Hampton Roads that Dr. Mant sometimes uses.”

He got the numbers and called, but the shop was closed this snowy New Year's Eve, and the owner did not seem to be at home. Then Danny went out to the bay, and when he returned a brief time later, I could hear a familiar voice talking loudly with him as heavy footsteps sounded along the hallway.

“They wouldn't let you if you were a cop,” Pete Marino's voice projected into the autopsy suite.

“I know, but I don't understand it,” Danny said.

“Well, I'll give you one damn good reason. Hair as long as yours gives the assholes out there one more thing to grab. Me? I'd cut it off. Besides, the girls would like you better.”

He had arrived in time to help carry in the hookah and coils of hose, and was giving Danny a fatherly lecture. It had never been hard for me to understand why Marino had terrible problems with his own grown son.

“You know anything about hookahs?” I asked Marino as he walked in. He looked blankly at the body “What? He's got some weirdo disease?”

“The thing you're carrying is called a hookah,” I explained.

He and Danny set the equipment on top of an empty steel table next to mine.

“Looks like dive shops are closed for the next few days,” I added. “But the compressor seems pretty
simple—a pump driven by a five-horsepower engine which pulls air through a filtered intake valve, then through the low-pressure hose connected to the diver's second-stage regulator. Filter looks all right. Fuel line is intact. That's all I can tell you.”

“The tank's empty,” Marino observed.

“I think he ran out of gas after death.”

“Why?” Roche had walked over to where we were, and he stared intensely at me and the front of my scrubs as if he and I were the only two people in the room. “How do you know he didn't lose track of time down there and run out of gas?”

“Because even if his air supply quit, he still had plenty of time to get to the surface. He was only thirty feet down,” I said.

“That's a long way if maybe your hose has gotten hung up on something.”

“It would be. But in that scenario, he could have dropped his weight belt.”

“Has the smell gone away?” he asked.

“No, but it's not as overpowering.”

“What smell?” Marino wanted to know.

“His blood has a weird odor.”

“You mean like booze?”

“No, not like that.”

He sniffed several times and shrugged as Roche moved past me, averting his gaze from what was on the table. I could not believe it when he brushed against me again though he had plenty of room and I had given him a warning. Marino was big and balding in a fleece-lined coat, and his eyes followed him.

“So, who's this?” he asked me.

“Yes, I guess the two of you haven't met,” I said.
“Detective Roche of Chesapeake, this is Captain Marino with Richmond.”

Roche was looking closely at the hookah, and the sound of Danny cutting through ribs with shears on the next table was getting to him. His complexion was the shade of milk glass again, his mouth bowed down.

Marino lit a cigarette and I could tell by the expression on his face that he had made his decision about Roche, and Roche was about to know it.

“I don't know about you,” he said to the detective, “but one thing I discovered early on, is once you come to this joint, you never feel the same about liver. You watch.” He tucked the lighter back inside his shirt pocket. “Me, I used to love it smothered in onions.” He blew out smoke. “Now, on the pain of death you couldn't make me touch it.”

Roche leaned closer to the hookah, almost burying his face in it, as if the smell of rubber and gasoline was the antidote he needed. I resumed work.

“Hey, Danny,” Marino went on, “you ever eat shit like kidneys and gizzards since you started working here?”

“I've never ate any of that my entire life,” he said as we removed the breastplate. “But I know what you mean. When I see people order big slabs of liver in restaurants, I almost have to dive for the door. Especially if it's even the slightest bit pink.”

The odor intensified as organs were exposed, and I leaned back.

“You smelling it?” Danny asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

Roche retreated to his distant corner, and now that Marino had had his fun, he walked over and stood next to me.

“So you think he drowned?” Marino quickly asked.

“At the moment I'm not thinking that. But certainly, I'm going to look for it,” I said.

“What can you do to figure out he didn't drown?”

Marino was not very familiar with drownings, since people rarely committed murder that way, so he was intensely curious. He wanted to understand everything I was doing.

“Actually, there are a lot of things I'm doing,” I said as I worked. “I've already made a skin pocket on the side of the chest, filled it with water and inserted a blade in the thorax to check for bubbles. I'm going to fill the pericardial sac with water and insert a needle into the heart, again to see if any bubbles form. And I'll check the brain for petechial hemorrhages, and look at the soft tissue of the mediastinum for extraalveolar air.”

“What will all that show?” he asked.

“Possibly pneumothorax or air embolism, which can occur in less than fifteen feet of water if the diver is breathing inadequately. The problem is that excessive pressure in the lungs can result in small tears of the alveolar walls, causing hemorrhages and air leaks into one or both pleural cavities.”

“And I'm assuming that could kill you,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That most certainly could.”

“What about when you come up and go down too fast?” He had moved to the other side of the table so he could watch.

“Pressure changes, or barotrauma, associated with descent or ascent aren't very likely in the depth he was diving. And as you can see, his tissues aren't spongy as I would expect them to be were he a death by barotrauma. Would you like some protective clothing?”

“So I can look like I work for Terminex?” Marino looked in Roche's direction.

“Just hope you don't get AIDS,” Roche wanly said from far away.

Marino put on apron and gloves as I began explaining the pertinent negatives I needed to look for in order to also rule out a death by decompression or the bends, or drowning. It was when I inserted an eighteen-gauge needle into the trachea to obtain a sample of air for cyanide testing that Roche decided to leave. He rapidly walked across the room, paper rattling as he collected his evidence bag from a counter.

“So we won't know anything until you do tests,” he said from the doorway.

“That's correct. For now his cause and manner of death are pending.” I paused and looked up at him. “You'll get a copy of my report when it's complete. And I'd like to see his personal effects before you leave.”

He would come no closer, and my hands were bloody.

I looked at Marino. “Would you mind?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

He went to him, took the bag and gruffly said, “Come on. We'll go through it in the hall so you can get some air.”

They walked just beyond the doorway, and as I continued to work, paper rattled some more. I heard Marino drop the magazine from a pistol, open the slide and loudly complain that the gun had not been made safe.

“I can't believe you're carrying this thing around loaded,” Marino's voice boomed. “Jesus Christ! You know, it's not like this is your friggin' lunch in a bag.”

“It's not been processed for prints yet.”

“Well, then you put on gloves and dump the ammo like I just did. And then you clear the chamber, the way I just did. Where'd you go? The Keystone Police Academy where
they also must have taught you your gentlemanly manners?”

Marino went on, and it was now clear to me why he had taken Roche into the hall, and it wasn't for fresh air. Danny glanced across the table at me and grinned.

Moments later Marino returned to us shaking his head, and Roche was gone. I was relieved, and it showed.

“Good God,” I said. “What's his story?”

“He thinks with the head God gave him,” Marino said. “The one between his legs.”

“Like I said,” Danny replied, “he's been down here a couple of times before, bothering Dr. Mant about things. But what I didn't tell you is he always talked to him upstairs. He never would come down to the morgue.”

“I'm shocked,” Marino drolly said.

“I heard that when he was in the police academy he called in sick the day they were supposed to come down here for the demo autopsy,” Danny went on. “Plus, he just got transferred over from juvenile. So he's been a homicide detective for only about two months.”

“Oh, now that's good,” Marino said. “Just the kind of person we want working something like this.”

I asked him, “Can you smell the cyanide?”

“Nope. Right now all I smell is my cigarette, which is exactly how I want it.”

“Danny?”

“No, ma'am.” He sounded disappointed.

“So far I'm seeing no evidence that this is a diving death. No bubbles in the heart or thorax. No subcutaneous emphysema. No water in the stomach or lungs. I can't tell if he's congested.” I cut another section of heart. “Well, he does have congestion of the heart, but is it due to the left heart failing the right—just due to dying, in other
words? And he does have some reddening of the stomach wall, which is consistent with cyanide.”

“Doc,” Marino said, “how well did you know him?”

“Personally, really not at all.”

“Well, I'm going to tell you what was in the bag because Roche didn't know what he was looking at and I didn't want to tell him.”

He at last slipped out of his coat and looked for a safe place to hang it, deciding on the back of a chair. He lit another cigarette.

“Damn, these floors kill my feet,” he said as he went to the table where hookah and hose were piled, and leaned against the edge. “It must kill your knee,” he said to Danny.

“Totally kills it.”

“Eddings' got a Browning nine-millimeter pistol with a Birdsong desert brown finish,” Marino said.

“What's Birdsong?” Danny placed the spleen in a hanging scale.

“The Rembrandt of pistol finishes. Mr. Birdsong's the guy you send your weapon to if you want it waterproofed and painted to blend with the environment,” Marino answered. “What he does, basically, is strip it, sandblast it and then spray it with Teflon, which is baked on. All of HRT's pistols have a Birdsong finish.”

HRT was the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. I felt sure that given the number of stories Eddings had done on law enforcement, he would have been exposed to the FBI Academy at Quantico and its finest trained agents.

“Sounds like something Navy SEALs would have, too,” Danny suggested.

“Them, SWAT teams, counterterrorists, guys like me.” Marino was looking again at the hookah's fuel line and intake valves. “And most of us have Novak sights like he's
got, too. But what we don't have is KTW metal-piercing ammo, also known as cop killers.”

“He's got Teflon-coated ammo?” I glanced up.

“Seventeen rounds, one in the chamber. All with red lacquer around the primer for waterproofing.”

“Well, he didn't get armor-piercing ammo here. At least not legally, because it's been outlawed in Virginia for years. And as for the finish on his pistol, are you certain it's Birdsong, the same company the Bureau uses?”

“Looks like Birdsong's magic touch to me,” Marino replied. “'Course, there are other outfits that do similar work.”

I opened the stomach as mine continued to close like a fist. Eddings had seemed such a fan of law enforcement. I had heard he used to ride along with the police, and go to their picnics and their balls. He had never struck me as gung-ho about weapons, and I was stunned that he would have loaded a pistol with illegal ammunition notorious for being used to murder and maim the very people who were his sources and perhaps his friends.