Four Scarpetta Novels (52 page)

“Jack?” I summon him and begin collecting blank forms and body diagrams, attaching them to a clipboard.

“I can't believe you're going to work with that damn cast on.” He walks across the autopsy suite, his bulging biceps straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. My deputy chief may be famous for his body, but no amount of weightlifting or chocolate cream Myoplex high-protein meals in a glass can stop him from losing his hair. It is eerie, but in recent weeks his light brown hair has started falling out before our very eyes, clinging to his clothing, drifting through the air like down, as if he is molting.

He frowns at the misspelling on the toe tag. “The guy from the removal service must be Asian. John Dooo.”

“Who's the detective?” I ask.

“Stanfield. Don't know him. Just don't get a puncture in your glove or you'll be wearing a biological hazard for the next few weeks.” He indicates my latex-coated cast. “Actually, what would you do, now that I think of it?”

“Cut it off and put on a new one.”

“So maybe we should have disposable casts down here.”

“I feel like cutting it off anyway. This guy's burn pattern isn't making sense to me,” I tell him. “Do we know how far the body was from the fire?”

“About ten feet from the bed. I was told the bed's the only thing that burned and only partially. He was nude, sitting on the floor, back against the wall.”

“I wonder why only his upper body got burned.” I point out discrete burns the size and shape of silver dollars. “Arms, chest. One here on his left shoulder. And these on his face. And he has several on his back, which should have been spared if he was leaning against the wall. What about the drag marks?”

“As I understand it, when the fire department got there, they dragged his body out into the parking lot. One thing's for sure, he must've been
unconscious or incapacitated when the fire started,” Jack says. “Sure as hell don't know why else someone would just sit there getting burned and breathing in smoke. Obviously that happy-holiday time of year.” My second-in-command is cloaked in a hung-over weariness that causes me to suspect he had a very bad night. I wonder if he and his ex-wife had another one of their explosions. “Everybody killing themselves. That woman over there.” He points to the body on table 1, where Dr. Chong is busy taking photographs from a stepladder. “Dead on the kitchen floor, a pillow, a blanket. The neighbor heard one shot. Mother found her. There's a note. And behind door number two”—Jack stares at table 2—“a motor vehicle death the state police are suspicious is a suicide. She has extensive injuries. Plowed right into a tree.”

“Did her clothes come in?”

“Yup.”

“Let's x-ray her feet and get the labs to check the bottom of her shoes to see if she was braking or accelerating when she hit the tree.” I shade areas of a body diagram, indicating soot.

“And we got a known diabetic with a history of overdose,” Jack recites our guest list of the morning. “Was found outside in the yard. Question is drugs, alcohol or exposure.”

“Or a combination of the above.”

“Right. I see what you mean about the burns, though.” He leans closer to look, blinking often, reminding me he wears contact lenses. “And it's weird they're all about the same size and shape. You want me to help with this?”

“Thanks. I'll manage. How are you?” I glance up from my clipboard.

His eyes are tired, his boyish good looks strained. “Maybe we can grab some coffee sometime,” he says. “One of these days. And I should be asking about you.”

I pat his shoulder to let him know I am okay. “As well as can be expected, Jack,” I add.

I begin the external examination of John Doe with a PERK. This is a physical evidence recovery kit, a decided unpleasantness that includes swabbing orifices, clipping fingernails and plucking head, body and
pubic hair. We PERK all bodies when there is any reason to suspect something other than a natural death, and I will always PERK a body that is nude, unless there is an acceptable reason for the person's not being clothed when he died—in the bathtub or on the operating table, for example. For the most part, I don't spare my patients indignities. I can't. Sometimes the most important evidence lurks in the darkest, most delicate hollows, and clings underneath nails and in hair. During my violation of this man's most private places I discover healing tears of his anal ring. He has abrasions at the angles of his mouth. Fibers adhere to his tongue and the inside of his cheeks.

I go over every inch of him with a lens and the story he tells grows more suspicious. His elbows and knees are slightly abraded and covered with dirt and fibers, which I mundanely collect by pressing them with the adhesive backs of Post-its, which I seal inside plastic bags. Over the bony prominences of both wrists are incomplete circumferential dry, reddish-brown abrasions and minute skin tags. I draw blood from the iliac veins and vitreous fluid from the eyes, and test tubes ride up on the dumbwaiter to the third-floor toxicology lab for STAT alcohol and carbon monoxide tests. At half past ten, I am reflecting back tissue from the Y incision when I notice a tall, older man heading toward my station. He has a wide, tired face and maintains a safe distance from my table, gripping a grocery-size brown paper bag, the top folded over and sealed with red evidence tape. I have a flash of my bagged clothing on my red Jarrah Wood dining room table.

“Detective Stanfield, I hope?” I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.

“Good morning.” He catches himself as he stares at the body. “Well, I guess not for him.”

Stanfield hasn't bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused
me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word “chicken.” “Denial” is her word. I don't care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don't watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.

“Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma'am,” Stanfield says. “Hope you got chains on your tires, 'cause I didn't and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that's why I wasn't here earlier. You found out anything?”

“His CO's seventy-two percent.” Vernacular for carbon monoxide. “Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO.” I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. “STAT alcohol's zero.”

“So it was the fire that got him, for sure?”

“We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn't tell us much, I'm afraid.” I cut through ribs. “He's got anal tunneling—evidence of homosexual activity, in other words—and his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged.” I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the corners of the mouth. Stanfield's eyes pop open. “The abrasions on his wrists aren't crusty,” I go on. “They don't look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death.” I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. “Fresh injection sites,” I explain. “But what's interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I'll put a block of liver through to check for triaditis—mild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we'll see what comes back on his tox.”

“Guess he could have AIDS.” This is foremost on Detective Stanfield's mind.

“We'll do an HIV on him,” I reply.

Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She
is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as “Chief.” I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn't.

“Ready for me to open up the skull, Chief?” Her question is an announcement that requires no answer. Turk is like a lot of the military women we get in here—tough, eager, quick to eclipse the men, who often, truthfully, are the squeamish ones. “That lady Dr. Chong's working on,” Turk says as she plugs the Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel, “she's got a living will and even wrote her own obituary. Got all her insurance papers in order, everything. Put 'em all in a binder and left it and her wedding band on the kitchen table before she laid herself down on the blanket and shot herself in the head. Can you imagine? Really, really sad.”

“It's very sad.” The organs are a shimmering bloc as I lift them out en masse and set them on a cutting board. “If you're going to be in here, you really should cover up.” I direct this at Stanfield. “Did anybody show you where things are in the locker room?”

He blankly stares at the cuffs of my blood-soaked sleeves, at the blood splashed on the front of my gown. “Ma'am, if you don't mind, I'd like to go over what I got,” he says. “If we could maybe sit down for a minute? Then I need to head on back before the weather gets any worse. Pretty soon, you're gonna need Santa's sleigh to get anywhere.”

Turk picks up a scalpel and makes an incision around the back of the head, ear to ear. She reflects back the scalp and pulls it forward, and the face goes slack, collapsing into tragic protest before it is inside out like a folded-down sock. The exposed dome of the skull glistens pristinely white, and I take a good look at it. No hematomas. No indentations or fractures. The whir of the electric saw sounds like a hybrid of a table saw and a dentist's drill as I pull off my gloves and drop them in a red biohazard trash can. I motion Stanfield to follow me to the long countertop that runs the length of the wall opposite the autopsy stations. We pull out chairs.

“I gotta be honest with you, ma'am,” Stanfield begins with a slow, negative shake of his head. “We don't got a clue where to start on this
one. All I can tell you right now is this man”—he indicates the body on the table—“checked into The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground yesterday at three
P
.
M
.”

“Where exactly is The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground?”

“On Route Five West, no more than ten minutes from William and Mary.”

“You talked to the clerk at this motel, The Fort James Motel?”

“The lady in the office, yes ma'am, I did.” He opens a large manila envelope and scoops out a handful of Polaroid photographs. “Her name's Bev Kiffin.” He spells it for me, slipping reading glasses out of an inner jacket pocket, hands trembling slightly as he flips through a notepad. “She said the young man come in and said he wants the sixteen-oh-seven special.”

“I'm sorry. The what?” I rest my ballpoint pen on the notes I am making.

“One hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents Monday through Friday. That's five nights. Sixteen-oh-seven. The usual rate's forty-six dollars a night, which is mighty high for a place like that, you ask me. But you know tourist traps.”

“Sixteen-oh-seven? As in the date Jamestown was founded?” It seems odd to hear a reference to Jamestown. I just mentioned Jamestown to Anna last night when I was talking about Benton.

Stanfield nods deeply. “As in Jamestown. Sixteen-oh-seven. That's the business rate, or so they call it. The amount for the business week, and let me add, ma'am, this isn't a very nice motel, not at all, no ma'am. A fleabag is what I would call it.”

“Does it have a history of crime?”

“Oh no. No ma'am. No history of crime I'm aware of, not at all.”

“Just seedy.”

“Just seedy.” He nods deeply.

Detective Stanfield has a distinct way of speaking with emphasis, as if he is used to teaching a slow child who needs important words repeated or emphasized. He neatly arranges photographs in a lineup on the countertop and I look at them. “You took these?” I assume.

“Yes ma'am, I sure did.”

Like him, what he has captured on film is emphatic and to the point: the motel door with the number 14 on it, the view of the room through the open doorway, the scorched bed, the smoke damage to the curtains and walls. There is a single chest of drawers and an area to hang clothes that is nothing more than a rod in a recessed area just inside the door. I note that the mattress on the bed has remnants of a cover and white sheets but nothing else. I ask Stanfield if perhaps he submitted the bedcovers to the labs to test for accelerants. He replies that there was nothing on the bed, nothing to submit except burned areas of the mattress, which he placed inside a tightly sealed aluminum paint can—“according to procedure” are his exact words, the words of someone very new at detective work. But he does agree it is odd that the bedcovers were missing.

“They were on the bed when he checked in?” I ask.

“Mrs. Kiffin says she didn't accompany him to the room, but is sure the bed was properly made because she cleaned it up herself after the last guest checked out several days ago,” he replies, so that is good. At least he thought to ask her about it.

“What about luggage?” I ask next. “Did the victim have luggage?”

“Didn't find any luggage.”

“And the fire department got there when?”

“They were called at five-twenty-two
P
.
M
.”

“Who called?” I am making notes.

“Someone anonymous driving by. Saw smoke and called from his car phone. This time of year, the motel doesn't do a lot of business, according to Mrs. Kiffin. She says about three fourths of the rooms was empty yesterday, being as how it's almost Christmas and the weather and all the rest. You can see by looking at the bed, the fire wasn't going nowhere.” He touches several of the photographs with a thick, rough finger. “It pretty much had put itself out by the time the fire trucks got there. All they needed was fire extinguishers, didn't need to hose things down, which is a good thing for us. This here's his clothes.”