Five Scarpetta Novels (109 page)

E
yes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin. His head lolled and he leaked what little fluid was left in him as I grabbed him around the knees and Ruffin got him under the arms. We struggled to lift him onto the portable table as Marino steadied the gurney.

“The whole point of these new tables,” I gasped, “is so we don't have to do this!”

Not all removal services and funeral homes had caught on yet. They still clattered in with their stretchers and transferred the body to whatever old gurney they found instead of one of the new autopsy tables that we could roll right up to the sink. So far, my efforts to save our backs hadn't amounted to much.

“Yo, Chuckie-boy,” Marino said. “I hear you want to sign on with us.”

“Who says?” Ruffin was clearly startled and instantly on the defensive.

The body thudded on stainless steel.

“That's the word on the street,” Marino said.

Ruffin didn't reply as he hosed off the gurney. He
mopped it dry with a towel, then covered it and a countertop with clean sheets while I took photographs.

“Well, let me just tell you,” Marino said, “it ain't all it's cut out to be.”

“Chuck,” I said. “We need some more Polaroid film.”

“Coming up.”

“Reality's always a little different,” Marino went on in his condescending tone. “It's driving around all night with nothing going on, bored out of your friggin' mind. It's being spat at, cussed, unappreciated, driving piece-of-shit cars while little assholes play politics and kiss ass and get nice offices and play golf with the brass.”

Air blew, water drummed and flowed. I sketched the metal sutures and accessory cusp and wished the heaviness inside me would lift. Despite all I knew about how the body worked, I didn't understand—not really—how grief could begin in the brain and spread through the body like a systemic infection, eroding and throbbing, inflaming and numbing, and ultimately destroying careers and families, or in some sad cases, a person's physical life.

“Nice threads,” Ruffin was saying. “Ar-man-i. Never seen it up close before.”

“His crocodile shoes and belt alone probably cost a thousand dollars,” I said.

“No shit?” Marino commented. “That's probably what killed him. His wife buys it for his birthday, he finds out what it cost and has a heart attack. You care if I light up in here, Doc?”

“Yes, I do. What about the temperature in Antwerp when the ship left? Did you ask Shaw about that?”

“Low of forty-nine, high of sixty-eight,” Marino answered. “Same weird warm weather everybody else's been having. May as well spend Christmas with Lucy in Miami if the weather stays like this. Either that or put up a palm tree in my living room.”

The mention of Lucy's name squeezed my heart with a
hard, cold hand. She had always been difficult and complicated. Very few people knew her, even if they thought they did. Crouched behind her bunker of intelligence, over-achievement and risk-taking was a furious, wounded child who went after dragons the rest of us feared. She was terrified of abandonment, imagined or not. Lucy always did the rejecting first.

“You ever notice how most people don't seem to be dressed very nice when they die,” Chuck said. “Wonder why that is.”

“Look, I'll put on clean gloves and stand in the corner,” Marino said. “I need a cigarette bad.”

“Except last spring when those kids got killed on their way home from the prom,” Chuck went on. “The guy's in this blue tux and comes in with the flower in his lapel.”

The waistband of the jeans was wrinkled inside the belt.

“Pants are too big in the waist,” I said, sketching it on a form. “Maybe by a size or two. He may have been heavier at some point.”

“Hard to tell what the hell size he was,” Marino said. “Right now he's got a gut bigger than mine.”

“He's full of gas,” I said.

“Too bad that's not your excuse.” Ruffin was getting bolder.

“Sixty-eight inches and weighs one hundred pounds, meaning, when you consider fluid loss, he was probably one-forty, one-fifty in life,” I calculated. “An average-sized man who, as I just said, may have been heavier at some earlier point, based on his clothing. He's got weird hair on his clothes. Six, seven inches long, very pale yellow.”

I turned the jeans' left pocket inside out and found more hair and a sterling silver cigar clipper and lighter. I set them on a clean sheet of white paper, careful not to ruin potential fingerprints. In the right pocket were two five-franc coins, an English pound and a lot of folded foreign cash that I was not familiar with.

“No wallet, no passport, no jewelry,” I said.

“Definitely looks like robbery,” Marino said. “Except for the stuff in his pockets. That doesn't make much sense. You'd think if he was robbed, the person would've taken that, too.”

“Chuck, have you called Dr. Boatwright yet?” I asked.

He was one of the odontologists, or forensic dentists, we routinely borrowed from the Medical College of Virginia.

“Just gonna do that.”

He peeled off his gloves and went to the phone. I heard him opening drawers and cabinets.

“You seen the phone sheet?” he asked.

“You're the one who's supposed to keep up with things like that,” I said testily.

“I'll be right back.” Ruffin couldn't wait to disappear somewhere yet one more time.

He trotted off, and Marino followed him with his eyes.

“Dumb as a bag of hammers,” he said.

“I don't know what to do about him,” I commented. “Because he really isn't dumb, Marino. That's part of the problem.”

“You tried asking him what the shit's going on? Like is he having memory lapses, attention disorder or something? Maybe he hit his head on something or's been playing with himself too much.”

“I haven't asked him those things specifically.”

“Don't forget last month when he lost a bullet down the sink, Doc. Then he acted like it was your fault, which was the bullshit of all time. I mean, I was standing right there.”

I was struggling with the dead man's wet, slimy jeans, trying to work them down his hips and thighs.

“You want to give me a hand?” I asked.

We carefully pulled the jeans over the knees and feet. We pulled off black briefs, socks and the T-shirt, and I placed them on the sheet-covered gurney. I examined them carefully for tears or holes or any obvious trace evidence. I
noted that the back of the trousers, especially the seat of them, was much dirtier than the front. The backs of the shoes were scuffed.

“Jeans, black briefs and T-shirt are Armani and Versace. The briefs are inside out,” I continued taking inventory. “Shoes, belt, socks are Armani. See the dirt and scuffing?” I pointed them out. “Could be consistent with him being dragged from behind, if someone had him under the arms.”

“That's what I'm thinking,” Marino said.

Some fifteen minutes later, the doors slid open and Ruffin walked in, a phone sheet in hand. He taped it up on a cabinet door.

“I miss anything?” he cheerfully asked.

“We'll take a look at the clothes with the Luma-Light, then let them dry and trace can do their thing with them,” I instructed Ruffin in an unfriendly tone. “Let his other personal effects air-dry, then bag them.”

He yanked on gloves.

“Ten-four,” he said with an edge.

“Looks like you're already studying to get into the academy.” Marino picked on him some more. “Good for you, kid.”

I
lost myself in what I was doing, my mind pulled into a body that was completely autolyzed and putrefied and hardly recognizable as human.

Death had rendered this man defenseless, and bacteria had escaped from the gastrointestinal tract, invading as it pleased, fomenting, fermenting, and filling every space with gas. Bacteria broke down cell walls and turned the blood in veins and arteries a greenish-black, making the entire circulatory system visible through the discolored skin like rivers and tributaries on a map.

Areas of the body that had been covered by clothing were in much better shape than the head and hands.

“God, how would you like to run into him when you're skinny-dipping at night?” Ruffin said, looking at the dead man.

“He can't help it,” I said.

“And guess what, Chuckie-boy?” Marino said. “After you die someday, you're gonna look ugly as hell, too.”

“Do we know exactly where the container was in the ship's hold?” I asked Marino.

“A couple rows down.”

“What about weather conditions during the two weeks it was out at sea?”

“Mostly mild, averaging around sixty with a high of seventy. Merry El Niño. People are doing Christmas shopping in their friggin' shorts.”

“So you're thinking maybe this guy died on board and someone stuck him inside the container?” Ruffin asked.

“No, that ain't what I'm thinking, Chuckie-boy.”

“The name's Chuck.”

“Depends on who's talking to you. So here's the daily double, Chuckie-boy. If you got tons of containers stacked like sardines in a hold, tell me how you sneak a dead body into one,” Marino said. “No way you could even open the door. Plus the seal was intact.”

I pulled a surgical lamp close and collected fibers and debris, using forceps and a lens, or, in some instances, swabs.

“Chuck, we need to check on how much formalin we've got,” I said. “It was low the other day. Or have you already taken care of that?”

“Not yet.”

“Don't inhale too many fumes,” Marino said. “You can see what it does to all those brains you haul over to MCV.”

Formalin was a diluted formaldehyde, a highly reactive chemical used to preserve or “fix” surgical sections or organs, or in anatomical donations, entire bodies. It killed tissue. It was extremely corrosive to respiratory passages, skin and eyes.

“I'll go check out the formalin,” Ruffin said.

“Not now you won't,” I said. “Not until we're done here.”

He pulled off the cap of a permanent marker.

“How about buzzing Cleta to see if Anderson left,” I said. “I don't want her wandering around somewhere.”

“I'll do it,” Marino said.

“I gotta admit, it still blows my mind a little to see
chicks chasing after killers.” Ruffin directed this at Marino. “Back when you got started, they probably did nothing but check parking meters.”

Marino went to the phone.

“Take off your gloves,” I called after him, because he always forgot, no matter how many
Clean Hands
signs I posted.

I moved the lens slowly and stopped. The knees looked abraded and dirty, as if he had been kneeling on a rough, dirty surface without his pants on. I checked his elbows. They looked dirty and abraded, too, but it was hard to tell with certainty because his skin was in such bad shape. I dipped a cotton swab in sterile water as Marino hung up the phone. I heard him tear open another pair of gloves.

“Anderson ain't here,” he said. “Cleta said she left about a half hour ago.”

“So what do you think about women lifting weights?” Ruffin asked Marino. “You see the muscles in Anderson's arms?”

I used a six-inch ruler as a scale and started taking photographs with a thirty-five-millimeter camera and a macro lens. I found more dirty areas on the underside of the arms, and I swabbed them.

“I'm wondering if it was a full moon when the ship left Antwerp,” Marino said to me.

“I guess if you want to live in a man's world you gotta be as strong as one,” Ruffin went on.

Running water was relentless and steel clanged against steel and overhead lights allowed no shadows.

“Well, it will be a new moon tonight,” I said. “Belgium's in the eastern hemisphere, but the lunar cycle would be the same there.”

“So it could have been a full moon,” Marino said.

I knew where he was going with this and my silence told him to stay away from the subject of werewolves.

“So what happened, Marino? The two of you
arm-wrestle over your job?” Ruffin asked, cutting the twine around a bale of towels.

Marino's eyes were double barrels pointed at him.

“And I guess we know who won since she's the detective now and you're back in uniform,” Ruffin said, smirking.

“You talking to me?”

“You heard me.” Ruffin slid open a glass cabinet door.

“You know, it must be I'm getting old.” Marino snatched off his surgical cap and slammed it into the trash. “My hearing ain't what it used to be. But if I'm not mistaken, I believe you just pissed me off.”

“What do you think of those iron women on TV? What about women wrestlers?” Ruffin kept going.

“Shut the fuck up,” Marino told him.

“You're single, Marino. Would you go out with a woman like that?”

Ruffin had always resented Marino, and now he had a chance to do something about it, or so he thought, because Ruffin's egocentric world turned on a very weak axis. In his dim way of seeing things, Marino was down and wounded. It was a good time to kick him around.

“Question is, would a woman like that go out with you?” Ruffin didn't have sense enough to run out of the room. “Or would
any
woman go out with you?”

Marino walked up to him. He got so close to Ruffin, they were face shield to face shield.

“I got a few little words of advice for you, asshole,” Marino said, fogging up the plastic protecting his dangerous face. “Zip those sissy lips of yours before they kiss my fist. And put that tiny dick back in its holster before you hurt yourself with it.”

Chuck's face turned scarlet, all this going on while the doors slid open and Neils Vander walked in carrying ink, a roller and ten print cards.

“Straighten up, and I mean now,” I ordered Marino and Ruffin. “Or I'm throwing both of you out of here.”

“Good morning,” Vander said, as if it were.

“His skin's slipping badly,” I told him.

“Just makes it easier.”

Vander was the section chief of the fingerprints and impression lab, and wasn't bothered by much. It wasn't uncommon for him to shoo maggots away while he fingerprinted decomposed bodies, and he didn't flinch in burn cases when it was necessary to cut off the victim's fingers and carry them upstairs in a jar.

I had known him since the beginning of my time here, and he never seemed to get any older or change at all. He was still bald, tall and gangly and always lost in oversized lab coats that swirled and flapped around him as he hurried up and down halls.

Vander put on a pair of latex gloves and lightly held the dead man's hands, studying them, turning them this way and that.

“Easiest thing's gonna be to slide off the skin,” he decided.

When a body was as decomposed as this one, the hand's top layer of skin slips off like a glove and, in fact, is called a glove. Vander worked fast, sliding off the gloves intact from each hand and working his own latex-sheathed hands inside them. Wearing the dead man's hands, in a sense, he inked each finger and rolled it onto a ten-print card. He removed the skin gloves and left them neatly on a surgical tray, then popped off his latex ones, before heading back upstairs.

“Chuck, put those in formalin,” I said. “We'll want to save them.”

He was sullen, screwing the lid off a plastic quart jar.

“Let's turn him,” I said.

Marino helped us flip the body facedown. I found more dirt, mostly on the buttocks, and got swabs of that, too. I saw no injuries, only an area over the right upper back that seemed darker than the skin around it. I looked at it
through a lens, staring, blanking out my thought process as I always did when looking for pattern injuries, bite marks or other elusive evidence. It was like scuba diving in water with almost no visibility. All I could make out were shades and shapes and wait until I bumped into something.

“Do you see this, Marino? Or is it just my imagination?” I asked.

He sniffed more Vicks vapors up his nose and leaned against the table. He looked and looked.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don't know.”

I wiped off the skin with a wet towel, and the outer layer, or epidermis, slipped right off. The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.

“A tattoo.” I was pretty sure. “The ink penetrated to the dermis, but I can't make out anything. Just a big splotch.”

“Like one of those purple birthmarks some people have,” Marino offered.

I leaned closer with the lens and adjusted a surgical lamp to its best advantage. Ruffin was obsessively polishing a stainless steel countertop and pouting.

“Let's try UV,” I decided.

The multiband ultraviolet lamp was very simple to use and looked rather much like the handheld scanners in airports. We dimmed the lights and I tried longwave UV first, holding the lamp close to the area I was interested in. Nothing fluoresced, but a hint of purple seemed to feather out in a pattern, and I wondered if this might mean we were picking up white ink. Under UV light, anything white, such as the sheet on the nearby gurney, will radiate like snow in moonlight and possibly pick up a blush of violet from the lamp. I slid the selector down and tried shortwave next. I could see no difference between the two.

“Lights,” I said.

Ruffin turned them up.

“I would think tattoo ink would light up like neon,” Marino said.

“Fluorescent inks do,” I replied. “But since high concentrations of iodine and mercury aren't so great for your health, they're not used anymore.”

It was past noon when I finally began the autopsy, making the Y incision and removing the breastplate of ribs. I found pretty much what I expected. The organs were soft and friable. They virtually fell apart at the touch and I had to be very careful when weighing and sectioning them. I couldn't tell much about the coronary arteries except that they were not occluded. There was no blood left, only the putrefied fluid called oily effusate that I collected from the pleural cavity. The brain was liquefied.

“Samples of the brain and the effusate go to tox for a STAT alcohol,” I said to Ruffin as I worked.

Urine and bile had seeped through the cells of their hollow organs and were gone, and there was nothing left of the stomach. But when I reflected back flesh from the skull, I thought I had my answer. He had staining of the petrous ridge of the temporal bones and mastoid air cells, bilaterally.

Although I couldn't diagnose anything with certainty until all toxicology results were back, I was fairly certain this man had drowned.

“What?” Marino was staring at me.

“See the staining here?” I pointed it out. “Tremendous hemorrhaging, probably while he struggled as he was drowning.”

The phone rang and Ruffin trotted over to answer it.

“When's the last time you dealt with Interpol?” I asked Marino.

“Five, maybe six years ago, when that fugitive from Greece ended up over here and got in a fight in a bar off Hull Street.”

“There certainly are international connections in this
one. And if he's missing in France, England, Belgium or God knows where, if he's some sort of international fugitive, we're never going to know it here in Richmond unless Interpol can link him with someone in their computer system.”

“You ever talked to them?” he asked me.

“No. That's for you guys to do.”

“You ought to hear all these cops hoping they get a case that involves Interpol, but if you ask 'em what Interpol is, they ain't got a clue,” Marino said. “You want to know the truth, I got no interest in dealing with Interpol. They scare me like the CIA. I don't even want people like that knowing I exist.”

“That's ridiculous. You know what Interpol means, Marino?”

“Yeah. Secret Squirrels.”

“It's a contraction of
international police.
The point is to get police in member countries to work together, talk to each other. Sort of what you wish people in your department would do.”

“Then they must not have a Bray working for them.”

I was watching Ruffin on the phone. Whomever he was talking to, he was trying to keep it private.