Five Scarpetta Novels (121 page)

“We found her pocketbook and coat,” Anderson went on. “Sixteen dollars in her billfold, so it doesn't look like he went in there. And oh, there was a paper bag nearby with a plastic container and fork. Looks like she brought dinner with her and warmed it up in the microwave.”

“How do you know she warmed it up?” Marino asked.

Anderson was caught.

“Putting two and two together don't always make twenty-two,” he added.

Livor mortis was in its early stages. Her jaw was set, and the small muscles of her neck and hands were, too.

“She's too stiff for only being dead a couple hours,” I said.

“What causes it anyway?” Eggleston asked.

“Me, too. I've always wondered that.”

“I had one in Bon Air one time . . .”

“What were you doing in Bon Air?” asked the officer taking photographs.

“It's a long story. But this guy has a heart attack during sex. The girlfriend just thinks he's gone to sleep, right? Wakes up the next morning and he's deader than dirt. She doesn't want it to look like he died in bed so she tries to put him in a chair. He was leaning against it like an ironing board.”

“I'm serious, Doc. What causes it?” Ham asked.

“I've always been curious about that, too.” Diane Bray's voice came from the doorway.

She was standing there, her eyes fastened to me like steel rivets.

“When you die, your body quits making adenosine triphosphate. That's why you get stiff,” I said, not giving her a glance. “Marino, can you hold her like this so I can get a picture?”

He moved closer to me, and his big gloved hands slid under her left side as I got my camera. I took a photograph of an injury below her left armpit, on the fleshy side of her left breast, as I calculated body temperature versus ambient temperature, and how advanced both livor mortis and rigor mortis were. I could hear footsteps and murmurs and someone coughing. I was sweating behind my surgical mask.

“I need some room,” I said.

Nobody moved.

I looked up at Bray and stopped what I was doing.

“I need room,” I sharply said to her. “Get these people out of here.”

She jerked her head at everyone but me. Cops dropped surgical gloves in a red biological hazard bag as they went out the door.

“You too,” Bray ordered Anderson.

Marino acted as if Bray didn't exist. Bray never took her eyes off me.

“I don't ever want to walk in on a scene like this again,” I said to her as I worked. “Your officers, your techs, nobody—and I mean
nobody
—touches the body or disturbs it in any way before I get there or one of my medical examiners does.”

I looked up at her.

“Are we clear on that?” I said.

She seemed to give what I was saying thoughtful consideration. I loaded film in my thirty-five-millimeter camera. My eyes were getting tired because the light was bad, and I took the flashlight from Marino. I shined it obliquely on the area near the left breast, and then on another area on the right shoulder. Bray stepped in closer, brushing against me to see what I was looking at, and it was odd and startling to smell her perfume mingling with the odor of decomposing blood.

“The crime scene belongs to us, Kay,” she said. “I understand you haven't had to work things that way in the past—probably not the entire time you've been here or maybe anywhere. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned . . .”

“That's a bunch of bullshit!” Marino hurled rude words in her face.

“Captain, you stay out of this,” Bray fired back at him.

“You're the one who needs to stay out of it,” he raised his voice.

“Deputy Chief Bray,” I said, “the law of Virginia states that the medical examiner shall take charge of the body. The body is my jurisdiction.”

I finished my photographs and met her cold, pale eyes.

“The body is not to be touched, altered or in any way interfered with. Am I clear?” I said again.

I pulled off my gloves and angrily threw them into the red bag.

“You have just cut this lady's heart out evidentially, Deputy Chief Bray.”

I closed my scene case and latched it.

“You and the prosecutor are gonna get along real good on this one,” Marino added furiously as he pulled off his gloves, too. “This kind of case is what's called a free lunch.”

He poked a thick finger at the dead woman as if it were Bray who had slaughtered her.

“You just let him get away with it!” he yelled at her. “You and your little power games and big tits! Who'd you fuck to get where you are?”

Bray's face went livid.

“Marino!” I grabbed his arm.

“Let me tell you something.”

Marino was out of control, yanking his arm away from me, breathing hard like a wounded bear.

“This lady's beat-up face ain't about politics and sound bites, you goddamn-motherfucking-bitch! How'd you like it if it was your sister? Oh hell! What am I saying?” Marino threw his talc-dusted hands up in the air. “You wouldn't know the first fucking thing about caring about anybody!”

“Marino, get the squad in here now,” I said.

“Marino's not calling anyone.” Bray's tone had the effect of a metal box slamming shut.

“What are you gonna do, fire me?” Marino continued to defy her. “Well, go right ahead. And I'll tell all the reporters from here to fucking Iceland why.”

“Firing's too good for you,” Bray said. “Better you continue to suffer out of service and without pay. Dear me, this could go on a very, very long time.”

She was gone in a flash of red, like a vengeful queen on her way to order armies to march in on us.

“Oh, no!” Marino called after her at the top of his voice. “You got it all wrong, babe. Guess I forgot to tell you
I fucking quit!”

He got on his radio and raised Ham to tell him that the
squad needed to get in here as my mind streaked through formulas that weren't computing.

“Guess I showed her, huh, Doc?” Marino said, but I wasn't listening.

The burglar alarm had gone off at seven-sixteen and now it was barely nine-thirty. Time of death was elusive and full of deceit if one wasn't careful to account for all of the variables, but Kim Luong's body temperature, liver mortis, rigor mortis and the condition of her spilled blood weren't consistent with her being dead only two hours.

“I feel like this room is shrink-wrapping me, Doc.”

“She's been dead at least four or five hours,” I said.

He wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, eyes almost glassy. He couldn't stay still and kept nervously patting the pack of cigarettes in his jeans pocket.

“Since one or two in the afternoon? You're kidding me. What's he doing all that time?”

His eyes kept going to the doorway, waiting to see who would fill it next.

“I think he was doing a lot of things to it,” I said.

“I guess I just fucked myself pretty good,” Marino said.

Shuffling feet and the clacking of a stretcher sounded from inside the store. Voices were muffled.

“I don't think she heard your last diplomatic comment,” I answered him. “Might be smart if you leave it that way.”

“You think he might have hung out as long as he did because he didn't want to walk out in broad daylight with blood all over his clothes?”

“I don't think that was the only reason,” I said as two paramedics in jumpsuits turned the stretcher sideways to get it through the door.

“There's a lot of blood in here,” I told them. “Go around that way.”

“Geez,” one of them said.

I took the folded disposable sheets off the stretcher and Marino helped me spread one of them open on the floor.

“You guys lift her a few inches and we're going to scoot this sheet right under her,” I instructed. “Good. That's fine.”

She was on her back. Gory eyes stared out of shattered orbits. Plasticized paper rustled as I covered her with the other sheet. We lifted her up and zipped her inside a dark red pouch.

“It's getting icy out there,” one of the paramedics let us know.

Marino's eyes darted around the store and then out the door into the parking lot where red and blue lights still strobed, but the attention had significantly waned. Reporters had dashed back to their newsrooms and stations, and only the crime-scene technicians and a uniformed officer remained.

“Yeah, right,” Marino muttered. “I'm suspended but you see any other detective here to work this thing? I ought to just let everything go to hell.”

We walked back to my car as an old blue Volkswagen Beetle turned into the parking lot. The engine cut so abruptly the clutch popped, and the driver's door flew open and a teenaged girl with pale skin and short dark hair almost fell out, she was in such a hurry. She ran toward the pouched body as the paramedics loaded it into the ambulance. She raced toward them as if she might tackle them.

“Hey!” Marino yelled, going after her.

She reached the back of the ambulance as the tailgate slammed shut. Marino grabbed her.

“Let me see her!” she screamed. “Oh, please let go of me! Let me see her!”

“Can't do that, ma'am,” Marino's voice carried.

The paramedics swung open their doors and jumped in.

“Let me see her!”

“It's gonna be all right.”

“No! No! Oh, please, God!”
Grief tumbled out of her like a waterfall.

Marino had her from behind, holding tight. The diesel engine rumbled awake and I couldn't hear what else he said to her, but he let go of her as the ambulance drove away. She dropped to her knees. She clamped her hands on both sides of her head and stared up at the icy, overcast night, shrieking and wailing and crying out the slain woman's name.

“KIM! KIM! KIM!”

M
arino decided to stay with Eggleston and Ham, also known as the Breakfast Boys, while they connected the dots with string at a scene where it wasn't necessary. I went home. Trees and grass were glazed with ice, and I thought all I needed now was a power outage, which was exactly what I got.

When I turned into my neighborhood, every house was dark, and Rita, working security, looked as if she were holding a séance in the guardhouse.

“Don't tell me,” I said to her.

Candle flames wavered behind glass as she stepped out, pulling her uniform jacket tightly around her.

“Been out since about nine-thirty,” she told me, shaking her head. “That's all we ever get in this city is ice.”

My neighborhood was in a blackout as if a war were going on, and the sky was too overcast to see even a smudge of the moon. I could barely find my driveway and almost fell going up my front stone steps because of the ice. I clung to the railing and somehow managed to find the right key to unlock the door. My burglar alarm was still armed because it was on a backup battery, but that
wouldn't last longer than twelve hours, and outages due to ice had been known to go on for days.

I punched in my code, then reset the alarm. I needed a shower. There was no way in hell I was going out to my garage to toss my scene clothes in the wash, and the thought of running naked through my pitch-dark house and jumping into a dark shower filled me with horror. Silence was absolute except for the quiet smacking of sleet.

I found every candle I could and began strategically placing them around the house. I located flashlights. I built a fire, and the inside of my house was pockets of darkness with shadows pushed back by several small logs with thin fingers of flame. At least the phone was still working, but of course the answering machine was dead.

It was impossible for me to sit still. In my bedroom I finally stripped and washed myself with a cloth. I put on a robe and slippers as I tried to think what I could do to occupy my time, because I was not one to allow empty space in my mind. I fantasized there was a message from Lucy but I couldn't access it right now. I wrote letters and ended up crumpling them and tossing them into the fire. I watched the paper brown around the edges, ignite and turn black. Sleet smacked, and it began to get colder inside.

The temperature in my house slowly dropped, hours slipping deeper into the still morning. I tried to sleep and couldn't get warm. My mind wouldn't get still. My thoughts bounced from Lucy to Benton to the awful scene where I'd just been. I saw a hemorrhaging woman dragged across the floor, and small owl eyes staring out of rotting flesh. I shifted positions continually. Lucy did not call.

Fear picked at my loose threads when I looked out the window into my dark backyard. My breath fogged the glass, and the click-click of sleet turned into knitting needles when I dozed, to my mother knitting in Miami when
my father was dying, knitting endless scarves for the poor in some cold place. Not a single car went by. I called Rita at the guard booth. She didn't answer.

My eyes blurred as I tried to drift off again at 3:00
A
.
M
. Tree branches cracked like guns going off, and in the distance a train lumbered along the river. Its forlorn horn seemed to set the pitch for a percussion of screeching, clanking and rumbling that made me more uneasy. I lay in the dark, a comforter wrapped around me, and when daylight bruised the horizon, the power came back on. Marino called minutes later.

“What time you want me to pick you up?” he asked, his voice hoarse from sleep.

“Pick me up for what?” I blearily walked into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Work.”

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

“You looked out the window, Doc?” he asked. “No way you're going anywhere in that Nazi-mobile of yours.”

“I've told you not to say that. It's not funny.”

I went to the window and opened the blinds. The world was rock candy and glass coating every shrub and tree. Grass was a thick, stiff carpet. Icicles bared long teeth from the eaves, and I knew my car wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I need a ride.”

Marino's big truck with its big chains churned up Richmond's roads for almost an hour before we reached my office. There wasn't another car in the lot. We carefully made our way into the building, our feet almost going out from under us several times because the pavement was glazed and we were the first to challenge it. I draped my coat over my chair in my office and both of us headed to the locker rooms to change.

The rescue squad had used a transportable autopsy table so we didn't have to lift the body off a gurney. We
unzipped the pouch in the vast silence of this empty theater of death and opened the bloody sheets. Under the scrutiny of overhead diffused light, her wounds looked even more terrible. I pulled a fluorescent magnifying lamp closer, adjusting its arm and peering through the lens.

Her magnified skin was a desert of dried, cracked blood and canyons of gashes and gaping wounds. I collected hairs, dozens of them, those pale blond, baby-fine hairs. Most were six or seven or eight inches long. They adhered to her belly, shoulders and breasts. I didn't find any on her face, and I placed the hairs inside a paper envelope to keep them dry.

Hours were thieves slipping past, stealing the morning, and no matter how hard I tried to find an explanation for the ripped tightly knit sweater and underwire bra, there wasn't another one except the truth. The killer had done it with his bare hands.

“I've never seen anything quite like that,” I said. “You're talking about incredible strength.”

“Maybe he's on cocaine or angel dust or something,” Marino said. “That might explain what he did to her, too. It might also account for the Gold Dot ammo, you know, if he's doing drug deals on the street.”

“I think that's the ammo Lucy said something about,” I seemed to recall.

“Hot shit on the street,” Marino said. “Big with dopers.”

“If he was whacked out on drugs,” I pointed out as I placed fibers in another envelope, “then it strikes me as rather improbable his thinking would be so organized. He put out the
closed
sign, locked the door, didn't go out the back armed door until he was ready. And maybe washed up.”

“No evidence he did,” Marino let me know. “Nothing in the drains or sink or toilet. No bloody paper towels. No nothing. Not even on the door he opened on his way out of the storeroom, so what I'm thinking is he used something—maybe part of his clothing, a paper towel, who knows—to
open the door with so he didn't get blood or prints on the knob.”

“That's not exactly disorganized. Not the actions of someone under the influence of drugs.”

“I'd rather think he was on drugs,” Marino said ominously. “The alternative's a really bad one, I mean if he's the Incredible Hulk or something. I wish . . .”

He stopped himself and I knew he was about to say he wished Benton were here to offer his experienced opinion. Yet it was so easy to depend on someone else when not all theories required an expert. Every scene and every wound resonated the emotion of the crime, and this homicide was frenzied and it was sexual and it was rage. That became only more apparent when I found large irregular areas of contusion. When I looked at them through a lens I saw small, curvilinear marks.

“Bite marks,” I said.

Marino came over to look.

“What's left of them. Beaten with blunt force,” I added.

I moved the light around, looking for more and found two on the side of her right palm and one on the bottom of her left foot and two on the bottom of the right.

“Jesus,” Marino muttered in an unnerved tone I rarely heard.

He moved from the wounded hands to the feet, staring.

“What the hell are we dealing with, Doc?” he asked.

All of the bite marks were contused so badly I could make out the abrasions of teeth but nothing more. The indentations needed for casting had been eradicated. Nothing was going to assist us. There was too little left to ever make a match.

I swabbed for saliva and began taking one-by-one photographs as I tried to imagine what biting palms and soles might mean to whoever had killed her. Did he know her, after all? Were her hands and feet symbolic to him, a reminder of who she was, just as her face had been?

“So he ain't totally ignorant about evidence,” Marino said.

“It appears he knows bite marks can identify someone,” I replied as I used a spray hose to wash off the body.

“Brrrrr,” Marino shivered. “That always makes me cold.”

“She doesn't feel it.”

“I hope like hell she didn't feel any of what's happened to her.”

“I think by the time he started in, she was already dead or close to dead, thank you, Lord,” I said.

Her autopsy revealed something else to add to the horror. The bullet that had entered Kim Luong's neck and hit her carotid had also bruised her spinal cord between the fifth and sixth cervical disks, instantly paralyzing her. She could breathe and talk but not move as he dragged her down the aisle, her blood sweeping shelves, her useless arms spread wide, limp, unable to clutch the wound in her neck. In my mind I saw the terror in her eyes. I heard her whimper as she wondered what he was going to do to her next, as she watched herself die.

“Goddamn bastard!” I said.

“I'm sorry as fucking hell they switched to lethal injection,” Marino said in a hard, hateful voice. “Assholes like this ought to fry. They ought to choke on cyanide gas till their fucking eyes pop out. Instead, we send them off to a nice little nap.”

I swiftly ran the scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum and down to the pelvis in the usual incision shaped like a Y. Marino was quiet for a moment.

“You think you could stick that needle in his arm, Doc? You think you could turn on the gas or strap him in the chair and hit the switch?”

I didn't reply.

“I think about that a lot,” he went on.

“I wouldn't think about it too much,” I said.

“I know you could do it.” He wouldn't let it rest. “And you know what else, I think you'd like it but just won't admit it, not even to yourself. Sometimes I really want to kill someone.”

I glanced up at him, blood speckling my face shield and saturating the long sleeves of my gown.

“Now you're really worrying me,” I said, and I meant it.

“See, I think a lot of people feel that way and just won't admit it.”

Her heart and lungs were within normal limits.

“I think most people
don't
feel that way.”

Marino was getting more belligerent, as if his rage over what had been done to Kim Luong made him feel as powerless as she had been.

“I think Lucy feels that way,” he said.

I glanced up at him, refusing to believe it.

“I think she just waits for an opportunity. And if she don't get that out of her system, she's gonna end up waiting tables.”

“Be quiet, Marino.”

“Truth hurts, don't it? Least I admit it. Take the asshole who did this. Me? I'd like to handcuff him to a chair, shackle his ankles and put the barrel of my pistol in his mouth and ask him if he had an orthodontist because he was about to need one.”

Her spleen, kidneys, liver were within normal limits.

“Then I'd stick it against his eye, tell him to take a look and let me know if I needed to clean the inside of the barrel.”

Inside her stomach were what appeared to be remnants of chicken, rice and vegetables, and I thought of the container and fork that had been found in a paper bag near her pocketbook and coat.

“Hell, maybe I'd just back up like I'm on the fucking firing range and use him as a target, see how much he liked . . .”

“Stop it!” I said.

He shut up.

“Goddamn it, Marino. What's gotten into you?” I asked, scalpel in one hand, forceps in the other.

He was quiet for a while, our silence heavy as I worked and kept him busy with various tasks.

Then he said, “The woman who ran up to the ambulance last night is a friend of Kim's, works as a waitress at Shoney's, was taking night classes at VCU. They lived together. So the friend gets home from class. She's got no idea what's happened and her phone rings, and this dumb-ass reporter says, ‘What was your reaction when you heard?' ”

He paused. I looked up at him as he stared at the opened-up body, the chest cavity empty and gleaming red, pale ribs gracefully bowed out from the perfectly straight spine. I plugged in the Stryker saw.

“According to the friend, there's no indication she might have known anybody who struck her as weird. Nobody coming into the store and bothering her, giving her the creeps. There was a false alarm earlier in the week, Tuesday, same back door, it happens a lot. People forget it's armed,” he went on, his eyes distant. “It's like he just suddenly flew out of hell.”