Four Scarpetta Novels (67 page)

 

L
UCY AND
M
C
G
OVERN
go over plans until past midnight. They have given up trying to include me in their conversations and no longer even seem to notice that I have slipped away to the Old Country in my mind, staring into the fire, absently massaging my stiff left hand and worming a finger under plaster to scratch my miserable, air-starved flesh. Finally, Marino yawns like a bear and pulls himself to
his feet. He is made slightly unsteady by bourbon and smells like stale cigarettes, and regards me with a softness in his eyes that I might call sad love if I were willing to accept his true feelings for me. “Come on,” he says to me. “Walk me out to my truck, Doc.” This is his way of calling for a treaty between us. Marino is not a brute. He is feeling bad about the way he has been treating me since I was almost murdered, and he has never seen me so distant and strangely quiet.

The night is cold and still, and stars are shy behind vague clouds. From Anna's driveway, I take in the glow of her many candles in the windows and am reminded that tomorrow is Christmas Eve, the last Christmas Eve of the twentieth century. Keys disturb the peace as Marino unlocks his truck and hesitates awkwardly before opening the driver's door. “We got a lot to do. I'll meet you at the morgue early.” This is not what he really wants to say. He stares up at the dark sky and sighs. “Shit, Doc. Look, I've known for a while, okay? By now you've figured that out. I've known what that son of a bitch Righter was up to and I had to let it run its course.”

“When were you going to tell me?” I don't ask this accusingly, simply curiously.

He shrugs. “I'm glad Anna brought it up first. I know you didn't kill Diane Bray, for God's sake. But I wouldn't blame you if you had, truth be told. She was the biggest fucking bitch ever born. In my book, if you'd done her in, it would have been damn self-defense.”

“Well, it wouldn't have been.” I address the possibility seriously. “It wouldn't have been, Marino. And I didn't kill her.” I look closely at his hulking shape in the castoffs of carriage lamps and holiday lights in trees. “You've never really thought . . . ?” I don't finish the question. Maybe I really don't want to know his answer.

“Hell, I'm not sure what I've been thinking lately,” he says. “That's the truth. But what am I going to do, Doc?”

“Do? About what?” I don't know what he means.

He shrugs and gets choked up. I can't believe it. Marino is about to cry. “If you quit.” His voice rises and he clears his throat and fumbles for his Lucky Strikes. He cups his huge hands around my hand and lights
a cigarette for me, his skin rough against mine, the hairs on the back of his wrists whispering against my chin. He smokes, staring off, heartbroken. “Then what? I'm supposed to go down to the fucking morgue and you ain't there anymore? Hell, I wouldn't go down to that stink-hole half as much as I do if it wasn't for you being there, Doc. You're the only damn thing that gives any life to that joint, no kidding.”

I hug him. I barely come up to his chest, and his belly separates the beat of our hearts. He has raised his own barriers in this life and I am overwhelmed by an immeasurable compassion and need for him. I pat his broad chest and let him know, “We've been together for a long time, Marino. You're not rid of me yet.”

T
EETH HAVE THEIR
own stories. Your dental habits often reveal more about you than jewelry or designer clothes and can identify you to the exclusion of all others, providing you have premortem records for comparison. Teeth tell me about your hygiene. They whisper secrets about drug abuse, early childhood antibiotics, disease, injury and how important your appearance was to you. They confess if your dentist was a crook and billed your insurance company for work that was never done. They tell me, for that matter, if your dentist was competent.

Marino meets me at the morgue before daylight the next morning. He has in hand the dental records of a twenty-two-year-old James City County man who went out jogging yesterday near the campus of William & Mary and never returned home. His name is Mitch Barbosa. William & Mary is but a few miles from The Fort James Motel, and when Marino talked to Stanfield last night and was given this latest information, my first thought was, “How odd.” Marino's shifty attorney son, Rocky Caggiano, went to William & Mary. Life offers up yet one more eerie coincidence.

It is six-forty-five when I roll the body out of the X-ray room and over to my station inside the autopsy suite. Again, it is quiet. It is Christmas Eve and all state offices are closed. Marino is suited up to assist me, and I don't expect another living person—except the forensic dentist—to show up here right now. Marino's part will be to help me undress the stiff, unwilling body and lift it to and from the autopsy table. I would never allow him to assist in any medical procedure—not that he has ever
volunteered. I have never asked him to scribe and won't because his slaughter of Latin medical words and terms is remarkable.

“Hold him on either side,” I direct Marino. “Good. Just like that.”

Marino grips either side of the dead man's head, trying to hold it still as I work a thin chisel into the side of the mouth, sliding it between molars to pry open the jaws. Steel scrapes against enamel. I am careful not to cut the lips, but it is inevitable that I chip the surfaces of the back teeth.

“It's just a damn good thing people are dead when you do shit like this to them,” Marino says. “Bet you'll be glad when you got two hands again.”

“Don't remind me.” I am so sick of my cast, I have had thoughts of cutting it off myself with a Stryker saw.

The dead man's jaws give up and open, and I turn on the surgical lamp and fill the inside of his mouth with white light. There are fibers on his tongue, and I collect them. Marino helps me break the rigor mortis in the arms so we can get the jacket and shirt off, and then I take off shoes and socks, and finally the warm-up pants and running shorts. I PERK him and find no evidence of injury to his anus, nothing so far to suggest homosexual activity. Marino's pager goes off. It is Stanfield again. Marino has not said a word about Rocky this morning, but the specter of him hovers. Rocky is in the air, and the effect this has on his father is subtle but profound. A heavy, helpless anguish radiates from Marino like body heat. I should be worried about what Rocky has in store for me, but all I can think about is what will happen to Marino.

Now that my patient is naked before me, I take in the full picture of who he was physically. He is five-foot-seven and a lean one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. He has muscular legs but little muscle development in his upper body, which is consistent with a runner. He has no tattoos, is circumcised and clearly cared about his grooming, based on his neatly manicured fingernails and toenails and clean-shaven face. So far, I find no evidence of injury externally, and X rays reveal no projectiles, no fractures. He has old scars on his knees and left elbow, but nothing fresh except the abrasions from being bound and gagged. What happened to
you? Why did you die? He remains silent. Only Marino is talking in a blunt, loud way to disguise how unsettled he is. He thinks Stanfield is a dolt and treats him as such. Marino is more impatient, more insulting than usual.

“Yeah, well, it
sure
would be nice if we knew that,” Marino blasts sarcasm into the wallphone. “Death don't take no holiday,” he adds a moment later. “You tell whoever I'm coming and they
will
let me in.” Then, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. 'Tis the season. And Stanfield? Keep your mouth shut, okay? You got that? I read about this in the goddamn paper one more time . . . Oh really, well, maybe you didn't see the Richmond paper yet. I'll make sure and tear out this morning's article for you. All this Jamestown shit, hate crime shit. One more peep and I'm gonna get tear-ass. You never seen me tear-ass and you don't want to.”

Marino pulls on fresh gloves as he returns to the gurney, his gown flapping around his legs. “Well, it just gets more squirrelly, Doc. Assuming this guy here's our disappeared jogger, it appears we're dealing with a garden-variety truck driver. No record. No trouble. Lived in a condo with a girlfriend who's ID'ed him by photo. That's who Stanfield talked to late last night, apparently, but she ain't answering the phone so far this morning.” He gets a lost look on his face, not certain how much he has already told me.

“Let's get him on the table,” I say.

I parallel-park the gurney next to the autopsy table. Marino gets the feet, I grab an arm, and we pull. The body bangs against steel and blood trickles from the nose. I turn on water and it drums into the steel sink, the dead man's X rays glowing from light boxes on the wall, revealing perfectly pristine bones, and the skull from different angles, and the zipper of the warm-up jacket snaking down each side of gracefully bowed ribs. The buzzer sounds out in the bay as I run a scalpel from shoulder to shoulder, then down to the pelvis, making a small detour around the navel. I observe Dr. Sam Terry's image on closed-circuit TV and hit a button with my elbow to open the bay door. He is one of our odontologists, or forensic dentists, whose bad luck it is to be on call Christmas Eve.

“I'm thinking we need to drop by and pay her a visit while we're in
the area,” Marino goes on. “I got her address, the girlfriend. The condo where they live.” He glances down at the body. “Lived, I guess.”

“And you think Stanfield can keep his mouth shut?” I reflect back tissue with staccato cuts of the scalpel, awkwardly gripping forceps in the gloved fingertips of my plaster-bound left hand.

“Yeah. Says he'll meet us at the motel, which ain't being real friendly, moaning and groaning it's Christmas Eve and they don't want any more attention because it's already hurt their business. Something like ten cancellations because of people hearing about it on the news. Yeah, like bullshit, is what I say. Most the people who stay in that dump probably don't know shit about what's happened around here or care.”

Dr. Terry walks in, his scuffed black doctor's bag in hand, a fresh surgical gown untied in back and billowing as he heads to the counter. He is our youngest and newest odontologist and is almost seven feet tall. Legend has it that he could have had a career with the NBA but wanted to continue his education. The truth, and he'll tell you if you ask, is he was a mediocre guard at Virginia Commonwealth University, that the only good shooting he has ever done is with guns, the only good rebounding is with women and he only went into dentistry because he couldn't get into medical school. Terry desperately wanted to be a forensic pathologist. What he's doing as basically a volunteer is as close as he will ever get.

“Thank you, thank you,” I tell him as he begins arranging his paperwork on a clipboard. “You are a good man to come help us out this morning, Sam.”

He grins, then jerks his head at Marino and says in his most exaggerated New Jersey accent, “How'ya doin', Marino?”

“You ever seen the Grinch steal Christmas? 'Cause if you haven't, just hang out with me for a while. I'm in a mood to take back little kids' toys and pat their mamas on the ass on my way up the chimney.”

“Don't you be trying to go up no chimneys. You'll get stuck for sure.”

“Hell, you could look out the top of a chimney and still have your feet in the fireplace. You still growing?”

“Not as much as you are, man. What you weighing in these days?”
Terry thumbs through the dental charts Marino brought in. “Well, this won't take long. He's got a rotated right maxillary second premolar, the distal surface lingual. Annnndddd . . . lots of restorations. Saying this guy”—he holds up the charts—“and your guy are one and the same.”

“How about them Rams beating Louisville?” Marino calls out above the drumming of running water.

“Were you there?”

“Nope, and you wasn't either, Terry, which is why they won.”

“Probably true.”

I pluck a surgical knife off the cart as the phone rings.

“Sam, you mind getting that?” I ask.

He trots to the corner, snaps up the phone and announces, “Morgue.” I cut through the costochondral cartilage junctions, removing a triangle of sternum and parasternal ribs. “Hold on,” Terry says to whoever has him on the line. “Dr. Scarpetta? Can you talk to Benton Wesley?”

The room becomes a vacuum that sucks out all light and sound. I freeze, staring, stunned, the steel surgical knife poised in my bloody, gloved right hand.

“What the fuck?” Marino blurts out. He strides over to Terry and snatches the phone from him. “Who the hell is this?” he yells into the mouthpiece. “Shit.” He tosses the receiver back into the cradle on the wall. Obviously, the person hung up. Terry looks stricken. He has no idea what just happened. He hasn't known me long. There is no reason for him to know about Benton unless someone else told him, and apparently no one has.

“What exactly did the person say to you?” Marino asks Terry.

“I hope I didn't do something wrong.”

“No, no.” I find my voice. “You didn't,” I reassure him.

“Some man,” he replies. “All he said is he wanted to speak to you and he said his name was Benton Wesley.”

Marino picks up the phone again and swears and fumes because there is no Caller ID. We have never had occasion to need Caller ID in the morgue. He hits several buttons and listens. He writes down a number and dials it. “Yeah. Who's this?” he demands over the line to
whoever has picked up. “Where? Okay. You see someone else using this phone just a minute ago? The one you're talking on. Uh huh. Yeah, well, I don't believe you, asshole.” He slams down the receiver.

“You think it's the same one who just called?” Terry asks him in confusion. “What'd you do, hit star sixty-nine?”

“A pay phone. At the Texaco on Midlothian Turnpike. Supposedly. I don't know if it's the same person who called. What was his voice like?” Marino pins Terry with a stare.

“He sort of sounded young. I think. I don't know. Who's Benton Wesley?”

“He's dead.” I reach for the scalpel, pushing the point down on a cutting board, snapping in a new blade and dropping the old in a bright red biohazard plastic container. “He was a friend, a close friend.”

“Some squirrel playing a sick joke. How would anybody know the number down here?” Marino is upset. He is furious. He wants to find the caller and pound him. And he is considering that his malevolent son may be behind this. I can read it in Marino's eyes. He is thinking about Rocky.

“Under state government listings in the phone book.” I begin cutting blood vessels, severing the carotids very low at the apex, moving down to the iliac arteries and veins of the pelvis.

“Don't tell me it says
morgue
in the goddamn phone book.” Marino starts up his old routine again. He is blaming me.

“I think it's listed under funeral information.” I cut through the thin flat muscle of the diaphragm, loosening the bloc of organs, freeing it from the vertebral column. Lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and spleen shimmer different hues of red as I lay the bloc on the cutting board and wash off blood with a gentle hosing of cold water. I notice petechial hemorrhages, dark areas of bleeding no bigger than pin pricks scattered over the heart and lungs. I associate this with persons who had difficulty breathing at or about the time of death.

Terry carries his black bag over to my station and sets it on the surgical cart. He gets out a dental mirror and goes inside the dead man's mouth. We work in silence, the weight of what has just occurred
pressing down hard. I reach for a bigger knife and cut sections of organs, slicing through the heart. The coronary arteries are open and clear, the left ventricle one centimeter wide, the valves normal. Other than a few fatty streaks in the aorta, the heart and vessels are healthy. The only thing wrong with it is the obvious: It quit. For some reason, this man's heart stopped. I find no explanation anywhere I look.

“Like I said, this one's easy,” Terry says as he makes notes on a chart. His voice is nervous. He wishes he had never answered the phone.

“He's our guy?” I ask him.

“Sure is.”

The carotid arteries lie like rails in the neck. Between them are the tongue and neck muscles, which I flip down and peel away so I can examine them closely on the cutting board. There are no hemorrhages in deep tissue. The tiny, fragile U-shaped hyoid bone is intact. He wasn't strangled. When I reflect back his scalp, I find no contusions or fractures hiding underneath. I plug a Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel and realize I need more than one hand. Terry helps me steady the head as I push the whining, vibrating semicircular blade through the skull. Hot, bony dust drifts on the air, and the skullcap lifts off with a soft sucking sound, revealing the convoluted horizon of the brain. On gross examination, there is nothing wrong with it. Slices gleam like creamy agate with gray ruffled edges as I rinse them on the cutting board. I will save the brain and heart for further special studies, fixing them in formalin and sending them to the Medical College of Virginia.