Authors: Patricia Cornwell
“But first I’ve got to clear this with Reverend Justice—if I can find him,” she added. “You may have heard of him. He’s very famous these days. I just hope I can get hold of him. He seems to have vanished off the face of the planet. You wait right here.”
“I be right here,” Cruz promised.
Barbie went back to her office and locked the door. She called the secretary, who didn’t sound very sick when she answered the phone.
“You got any idea where Reverend Justice is?” Barbie asked as misgivings and fears began to gather inside her again, rainbow or not.
How could she be so sure that Hispanic boy was nice? What if he wasn’t?
“You tried him at home?” the secretary asked in an unfriendly way, as if Barbie were a nuisance.
“No one answers,” Barbie said in frustration as someone began knocking on her door.
She wished she could call Hooter and get her opinion on giving the Hispanic boy money, but as far as Barbie knew, there were no telephones in the tollbooths.
“Anybody here?” a loud female called out as she knocked harder.
Barbie hurried to see who it was.
“I’m sorry,” she nervously shouted through the shut door. “Who is it and do you have an appointment?”
“You take walk-ins? I must talk to somebody or I very well may drown myself in the lake. I’m not a Baptist, but it won’t matter if I take my own life and people, especially those who hate Baptists, find out you wouldn’t talk to me,” the person said in tears.
Regina Crimm’s path had led to Barbie Fogg and Cruz Morales in the most extraordinary way, and the timing could not have been better.
Trooper Macovich had been driving through downtown to return the failed Officer Reggie to the mansion, when he got a call over his radio that an old Grand Prix with New York plates had been discovered in the parking lot of the Country Club of Virginia. It was believed that the car had been dumped very recently because an old, beat-up vehicle that did not have Virginia tags would draw immediate attention at the club, and in fact had. A woman on her way to play indoor tennis spotted the Grand Prix while she was parking her Volvo and didn’t hesitate to call 911.
“Sorry,” Macovich said to Regina as he hit his siren and lights. “We gotta check something out. It may be that Hispanic everybody looking for.”
“That’s fine. I promise I won’t tell,” Regina said, cheered by the flashing lights and whelping siren, and excited by the knowledge that it was against regulations for EPU to respond to a dangerous call while protecting the First Family.
“Far as I concerned, you still an intern right this minute,” Macovich said as he sped west on Broad Street, weaving in and out of traffic. “So you get some big idea about snitching on me like you already done before when I beat you fair and square in pool, I gonna deny it and say you was officially riding along.”
“It’s Papa who got mad at you,” Regina retorted.
“Huh! ’Cause you such a sore loser and malingered me to him!” Macovich roared through a yellow light.
Motorists were pulling off on the shoulder, certain they
were about to get a ticket for something. Traffic had slowed to ten miles an hour as other drivers cowered in terror and prayed they hadn’t driven over a stripe on the street and their speed hadn’t been checked by some helicopter and now a trooper was after them.
“The governor didn’t see me beat you,” Macovich irritably went on as he did his best to cut through the barely moving cars. “So you had to snitch, and then suddenly I have to hope he don’t remember me.”
“He doesn’t remember you,” Regina reminded him. “He says you all look alike, and he doesn’t mean it in a way that’s not nice. But Papa can’t see most people, and sometimes he calls Constance
Faith
and the other way around, especially if they haven’t put on makeup and are still in their robes.”
“Would you get outta my way?” Macovich yelled at the cars he was trying to pass.
Within minutes, he was turning off Three Chopt Road into a long driveway that led to the stately country club with its elegant clubhouse, tennis and paddleball courts, and sprawling golf course. CCV, as the Country Club of Virginia was called, was in a very wealthy neighborhood where many of the homes were as big as the governor’s mansion. Macovich was in an anxious sweat as he drove slowly over a speed bump. People around here thought all black folks looked alike, too, and poor vision had nothing to do with it.
“I tell you, nothing I hate more than coming over here,” he muttered.
“What for? Papa’s been a member ever since he was governor the first time. I practically grew up in this club.” Regina scanned for the Grand Prix, hoping she would spot it first.
“Yeah. You a member as long as it’s a family membership, but the day come you try to get in on your own when your daddy no longer the guv, then you see what happen,” Macovich said, spotting the car near the indoor tennis facility. “Folk like you and me don’t get ’cepted into places like this, in case you ain’t figured that out yet. And most other guv’ners turn down the membership even if it’s free, ’cause it go against their conscious.”
This was news to Regina. “Why wouldn’t I get in on my own? I’m white and from an old Virginia family.”
“You still a minority.”
Macovich radioed that he had found the Grand Prix and requested a backup as he lit a cigarette. He got out and checked the car, noting that the key was still in the ignition, and when he cranked the engine, he discovered that the gas tank was on empty. It also did not escape his attention that there were no personal effects inside the vehicle or the trunk. He got back on the radio.
“Subject appears to have abandoned the vehicle,” he informed another trooper who was minutes away. “I’m going to check the area and let you work out getting the vehicle to the city tow lot.”
“Ten-four.”
“What do you mean I’m a minority?” Regina resumed arguing with Macovich. “How dare you insult me like that.”
“Oh, I get it.” Macovich got mad inside his cloud of smoke. “It ain’t no insult for me to be a minority, but it is if you’re one. Well, let me tell you something,
Miss Majority.
Every time you daddy ain’t in office and you don’t have EPU following you around, it’s well known you hang out at Babe’s playing pool.”
“Not
every time.
Just the last two times. I was too young before that. And so what?”
“So when was the last time you saw a male in that joint, huh? We all know why you go in there. Maybe you come out with some nice field-hockey player with a shaved head and Dingo boots, or maybe you ride off on a Harley with some other sweet thing you meet in there at the bar. Or maybe you pick up a woman doctor or lawyer who live in the closet until it’s cocktail hour and they can hide in some booth inside a nice dark place where they can meet other
Majorities.
Woooo! You live some protected life, all right—acting like you the last one to know.”
Regina was crushed. She always assumed that when her father was out of office and not in the news, she could live her life as she wished. All the times she had frequented the women’s bar in the Carytown Shopping Center, it had never occurred to her that people were watching and gossiping. Mention of the field-hockey player, in particular, conjured up terribly painful memories of yet one more heartbreaking
failed romance. Regina had been desperately in love with D.D., a percussionist for the city symphony orchestra who had waited until Regina’s birthday to announce that D.D. was having an affair with a tuba player and never wanted to see or talk to Regina again.
“I hate my life,” Regina told Macovich as he turned off into the nearby University of Richmond grounds so he could check with the campus police and see if they might have noticed anybody unusual in the area.
“I can’t take this anymore.” Regina was more upset than Macovich had ever seen her. “You’re mean. Everybody’s mean to me. A person can only endure so much cruelty and humiliation.”
Macovich pulled into a small parking lot by the lake so he could turn around and head the other way.
“I’m so unhappy, I might just blow up! One of these days I think I’m just going to explode, and they’ll find just a little burned spot on the floor!” Regina threatened as she noticed a white minivan with a rainbow bumper sticker parked in front of a small brick building that said
BAPTIST CAMPUS MINISTRY
out front. “Stop the car!” she demanded. “Stop it now or I’ll hold my breath until I die and then you’ll have a lot of explaining to do. They won’t be able to find out what killed me, and you’ll be blamed.”
Macovich slammed on the brakes and parked by the minivan as Regina imagined her neglected, unloved body inside a pouch at the morgue. Dr. Scarpetta would spend an inordinate amount of time on Regina and finally admit that there was no apparent cause of death.
“It may be that she died of a broken heart,” the famous medical examiner would tell Regina’s important parents.
Or better yet, Regina would figure out a way to burn herself up like the fisherman, and then Andy would spend the rest of his life investigating her mysterious, tragic, and untimely death. He would be sleepless, frustrated, and compelled by guilt to somehow figure out exactly what had happened to her. He would think of her morning, noon, and night and wish he had been nicer to her and had not kicked her out of the very morgue where he would visit her after it was too late.
Regina walked past the minivan with its rainbow bumper
sticker, heading to the clinic, which she assumed specialized in counseling gay Baptists. How unfair to be born a gay Baptist, and she was surprised that the University of Richmond had enough gay Baptist students to merit a clinic for them. She climbed the front steps and walked into the lobby, where what she assumed was a gay Baptist Mexican was sitting on the couch. She self-consciously averted her puffy, tear-stained face from his curious eyes as she wiped her nose again and another wave of grief racked her massive body. Andy would be sorry, oh yes, he would. He would be devastated when he rushed to the morgue and begged to say goodbye to his former partner, Officer Reggie.
“Please let me have just a moment alone with her in the viewing room,” he would ask Dr. Scarpetta. “This is all my fault. I was afraid to show her how much I really cared and needed her, and now it’s come to this! The stress of her life and my unkindness toward her were too much and she burst into flames!”
Perhaps it was a touch of clairvoyance on Regina’s part, but even as she was fantasizing about spontaneous human combustion, Andy was speeding back to headquarters to post a Trooper Truth essay on that very subject.
T
HE
T
RUTH
A
BOUT
S
PONTANEOUS
H
UMAN
C
OMBUSTION
by Trooper Truth
Although there is no evidence that people literally blow up without some mechanical or chemical assistance, it is a fact that living human beings can burn up in the absence of any external fire. I make this distinction because many of you, my readers, mistakenly believe that
combust
means to blow up, when it doesn’t mean that at all. Now, it is true that combustion can refer to agitation or tumult, but for the purposes of this essay, when I mention combust, combustion, or combusting, I am talking about something or someone burning up.
For centuries spontaneous human combustion (SHC) has been written about but not always persuasively. Novelists like Melville and Dickens, for example, use SHC to demonstrate that what goes around comes around, and if you are evil and unfair to others, then it is poetic justice if you burst into flames one day while you’re minding your own selfish business in your castle or house.
What may perhaps surprise the reader is that there is a scientific explanation for SHC. Experiments on dead human bodies and body parts donated to The Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, have shown it is possible, given certain conditions, that if a body is ignited, it can continue to burn until it is almost completely cremated. Normally, it takes one to three and a half hours for a body to be reduced to bits of bone
and ash, and this only occurs in an extremely hot fire or a crematorium oven.
So I have to admit that when forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass first mentioned to me that one of his graduate students had written her master’s thesis on SHC, I thought he was joking.
“People don’t just burst into flames,” I protested as we ate barbecue at Calhouns in Knoxville. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Not literally burst into flames,” he said, drinking iced tea from a jelly jar as the setting sun played across the Tennessee River. “But burn for considerably long periods of time.”
This strange conversation over baby back ribs occurred last spring when I happened to drop by The Body Farm to see if the scientists there had ever done any experimenting on mummification. I had just returned from Argentina and was still very interested in mummies, and hoped Dr. Bass might be inclined to attempt an old-style Egyptian embalming on one of the bodies donated to the Farm. He saw no good purpose in this and explained that finding an apothecary shop that sold what we needed would be very hard and probably would exceed the budget.
However, Dr. Bass told me, and I sensed he hated for me to go away disappointed because he is a kind, humble man, The Body Farm was doing some rather unusual research on spontaneous human combustion, if I was interested. I replied that I certainly was, and over a period of weeks, I visited The Body Farm numerous times. It is not a pleasant place, and for those readers who are unfamiliar with it, I offer a brief description.
The University of Tennessee’s Decay Research Facility, or The Body Farm as most of us call it, is several wooded acres surrounded by a tall wooden fence topped with razor wire. For some twenty-five years, anthropologists and forensic experts have devoted themselves to studying decomposition, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. Without knowing how the human body changes in different conditions over periods of time, we would have no data to help us determine time of death.
The Body Farm is the only facility I know of that makes it possible for death investigators and scientists to conduct
important experiments that are not permitted in morgues, funeral homes, or medical schools. But when bodies are donated to The Body Farm, it is known up front and approved that the remains will be used for research, which in this instance included setting an amputated leg on fire to see if it could sustain almost complete combustion in the absence of external fuel.
I can summarize anthropologist Dr. Angi Christensen’s brilliant work by saying that the tissue was ignited by a cotton wick, and the sample continued to burn for forty-five minutes as it was fueled by melting fat which was absorbed by the wick (known as
the wicking effect
). Further experiments on burning bones showed that osteoporotic or thinning bones burn much more readily and completely than dense healthy bones. After many meticulous tests and mathematical calculations, Christensen concluded that in some instances, the human body can indeed burn itself up at a very low heat if it is aided by cotton clothing that serves as a wick.
Obese elderly women with thinning bones and cotton house dresses are most likely to fall victim to this rare but ghastly phenomenon, and I offer here the sad case of Ivy, whose last name I will withhold out of respect for her privacy.
Ivy was a seventy-four-year-old white female who, at four-foot-eleven, weighed almost two hundred pounds, according to her driver’s license and descriptions given by people who last saw her in the neighborhood. Up until two years before her strange, fiery death, she worked as a babysitter in Miami to supplement her modest income from Social Security checks and the small amount of cash her husband, Wally, had left her upon his sudden death. Ivy never worked for the same family longer than six months, as she would inevitably alienate the parents after they were subjected to one suspicious situation after another until finally they dismissed the peculiar woman even if they couldn’t prove that she had actually done anything wrong.
Ivy had an insatiable need to be needed, and by her way of thinking, no one was needier than a sick or frightened child. She was careful never to take jobs if the children were old enough to talk intelligently and credibly, and therefore the parents never heard the truth about her misdeeds but certainly
became concerned when they would return from outings and discover little Johnny or little Mary with stomach cramps, diarrhea, unusual bumps and burns, or in hysterics.
Several former clients of hers called her Poison Ivy behind her back and claimed she doctored their children’s food with laxatives and other medicines, and by overspicing. One couple was certain the woman had burned their two-year-old with a cigarette deliberately, although Ivy claimed the child had grabbed the cigarette out of the ashtray and stomped on it, thus explaining the eight burns on the bottom of his tiny feet. Tales and scandals swirled about Ivy, and she finally decided it was best to retire, which was when her real problems began.
Home alone most of the time in her tiny stucco house, Ivy spent her days drinking cheap port, smoking, and eating snacks in front of the television. She was very stooped and round-shouldered from osteoporosis, and her arthritis seemed to flare up more often. No one called anymore or needed her for a thing. She grew to hate her life and everybody who had ever touched it, and never imagined that she was well on her way to becoming a case study in spontaneous human combustion.
As fate would have it, Ivy was in an especially foul mood on Christmas Day, 1987, when she put on a long-sleeve cotton housedress because the weather was a bit nippy. She fixed herself a strong screwdriver after opening the deluxe box of Whitman chocolates that were a gift from her son, who lived nearby but never came to see her and rarely called. She parked herself on the vinyl couch in front of the TV and drank and smoked the morning away. It was here on this very couch that her badly burned body was discovered two days later when the Cuban lady who lived next door became concerned because Ivy had not picked up her newspapers.
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta worked the case, you, the reader, might be interested in knowing. She was beginning her career as a resident forensic pathologist at the Dade County medical examiner’s office and responded to the baffling scene. Fire investigators and the po-lice had never encountered anything like this, which isn’t surprising since there have been only some two hundred cases of
SHC reported since the 1600s. Ivy’s torso was almost completely incinerated, including the bones, yet there was no sign of a fire anywhere in the house. Although not much was known about SHC at the time of Ivy’s death, in retrospect it is fairly easy to reconstruct what happened.
Ivy passed out drunk and a lit cigarette dropped out of her mouth, setting her cotton housedress on fire. As her body began to burn, fat melted and the cotton became saturated and served as a wick. Ivy sustained low heat combustion possibly for many hours before the fire extinguished itself long after Ivy was dead. It’s just lucky I did research on this rare phenomenon, because I know enough to realize two things about the mysterious death of fisherman Caesar Fender, whose burned body was recently discovered on Canal Street:
SHC is not a paranormal event, nor does Caesar’s death meet the criteria in any sense.
In the first place, the grayish-white residue in his chest cavity clearly suggests an external fuel source. Also, Caesar was not very old or overweight, and it is unlikely his bones were thinning. Most significantly, he was not wearing cotton and a wicking effect could not have occurred. Nor was there any evidence that he was smoking at the time of his death, even if a witness, who is now the main suspect, claimed there was a Bic lighter in Caesar’s pocket. That alleged lighter or pieces of it were not recovered at the crime scene or the morgue.
This leads me to suspect that a flare gun was used to commit what is clearly a murder, and I have a feeling Dr. Scarpetta is thinking the same thing. This makes Caesar’s death quite different from what happened to Poison Ivy, who craved getting attention at the expense of others. Her syndrome is known as Munchausen’s by Proxy, which simply means that someone harms another person who can’t defend himself or describe what really took place. Victims are often young children or the infirm. The motivation of the perpetrator is to gain sympathy, attention, or feel needed as he rushes his victim to the doctor or the hospital.
“Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with my little baby,” the wicked perpetrator will sob to the doctor. “But he’s got terrible diarrhea again and is dehydrated and too weak to get out
of bed. I’m just so distraught, I don’t know what to do. I love my little baby so much, and I’ve already lost two babies, and if I lose another one I will lose my will to live!”
Another common reaction after the so-called caretaker has harmed someone in his or her care is to wrap the victim in his or her arms and coo and cry.
“Poor little baby,” the mendacious, cruel-hearted perpetrator cries out, “oh, my poor little baby! How did you burn your little feet? Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll take care of you. Don’t cry, please don’t cry, and don’t be mad at me. I didn’t do anything, you poor little darling.”
Baby wails and shrieks, and in pain and terror clings to mommy, daddy, or the caretaker’s neck as the little one is rushed to the doctor, where the parent or caretaker gets the desired attention and compassion.
I think it is entirely possible that Major Trader, in addition to his pirate proclivities, suffers from Munchausen’s by Proxy. He poisons others to manipulate and feel needed. If any of you, my readers, run across him or know where he is, please call the police immediately. He was last seen eating a breakfast sandwich as he backed out of his driveway earlier today, and has evaded arrest and is now considered a dangerous fugitive. If you spot him, please do not approach him, as he is violent and incapable of remorse. Nor should you accept any food from him, especially sweets.
Be careful out there!