Five Scarpetta Novels (122 page)

I began sawing through the skull with all its comminuted fractures and areas punched out by violent blows of a tool or tools I couldn't identify. A hot bony dust drifted through the air.

B
y early afternoon, roads had thawed enough so that other diligent, hopelessly behind forensic scientists could come to work. I decided to make my rounds because I was frantic.

My first stop was the Forensic Biology Section, a ten-thousand-square-foot area where only an authorized few had access to electronic cards for the locks. People didn't drop by to chat. They traversed the corridor and glanced at intense scientists in white behind glass but rarely got any closer than that.

I pressed an intercom button to see if Jamie Kuhn was in.

“Let me find him,” a voice called back.

The instant he opened the door, Kuhn held out a clean, long white lab coat, gloves and mask. Contamination was the enemy of DNA, especially in an era when every pipette, microtome, glove, refrigerator and even pen used for labeling might be questioned in court. The degree of laboratory precautions had become just about as stringent as the sterile procedures found in the operating room.

“I hate to do this to you, Jamie,” I said.

“You always say that,” he said. “Come on in.”

There were three sets of doors to pass through, and fresh
lab coats hung in each airlocked space to make sure you exchanged the one you'd just put on for yet another one. Tacky paper on the floors was for the bottom of your shoes. The process was repeated twice more to make sure no one carried contaminants from one area into another.

The examiners' work area was an open, bright room of black counterspace and computers, water baths, containment units and laminar flow hoods. Individual stations were neatly arranged with mineral oil, autopipettes, polypropylene tubes and tube racks. Reagents, or the substances used to cause reactions, were made in big batches from molecular biology–grade chemicals. They were given unique identification numbers and stored in small aliquots away from chemicals kept for general use.

Contamination was managed primarily through serialization, heat denaturation, enzymatic digestion, screening, repeated analysis, ultraviolet irradiation, iodinizing irradiation, use of controls and samples taken from a healthy volunteer. If all else failed, the examiner just quit on certain samples. Maybe he tried again in a few months. Maybe he didn't.

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, had made it possible to get DNA results in days instead of weeks. Now with short tandem repeat typing, STR, it was theoretically possible that Kuhn could get results in a day. That was, if there was cellular tissue for testing, and in the case of the pale hair from the unidentified man found in the container, there was not.

“That's a damn shame,” I said. “Because it looks like I've found more of it. This time adhering to the body of the woman murdered last night at the Quik Cary.”

“Wait a minute. Am I hearing this right? The hair from the container guy's clothing matches hair on her?”

“Looks like it. You can see my urgency.”

“Your urgency's about to get more urgent,” he said. “Because the hair's not cat hair, dog hair. It's not animal hair. It's human.”

“It can't be,” I said.

“It absolutely is.”

Kuhn was a wiry young man who didn't get excited by much. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen his eyes light up.

“Fine, unpigmented, rudimentary,” he went on. “Baby hair. I figured maybe the guy has a baby at home. But now, two cases? Maybe the same hair on the murdered lady?”

“Baby hair isn't six or seven inches long,” I told him. “That's what I collected from her body.”

“Maybe it grows longer in Belgium,” he dryly said.

“Let's talk about the unidentified man in the container first. What would baby hair be doing all over him?” I asked. “Even if he does have a baby back home? And even if it were possible for baby hair to be that long?”

“Not all of them are that long. Some are extremely short. Like stubble when you shave.”

“Any of the hair forcibly removed?” I asked.

“I'm not seeing any roots with follicular tissues still adhering—mostly the bulbous-shaped roots you associate with hair naturally falling out. Shedding, in other words. Which is why I can't do DNA.”

“But some of it's been cut or shaved?” I thought out loud, drawing a blank.

“Right. Some's been cut, some hasn't. Like those weird styles. You've seen them—short on top and long and wispy on the sides.”

“Not on a baby I haven't,” I answered.

“What if he had triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets because his wife had been on a fertility drug?” Kuhn suggested. “The hair would be the same but if it's coming from different kids that might explain the different lengths. The DNA would be the same, too, saying you had anything to test.”

In identical twins, triplets, sextuplets, the DNA was identical, only the fingerprints were different.

“Dr. Scarpetta,” Kuhn said, “all I can tell you is the hairs
are alike visually, their morphology the same, in other words.”

“Well, these hairs on this lady are alike visually, too.”

“Any short ones, as if they were cut?”

“No,” I replied.

“Sorry I don't have more to tell you,” he said.

“Believe me, Jamie, you've just told me quite a lot,” I said. “I just don't know what any of it means.”

“You figure it out,” he tried to lighten up, “we'll write a paper on it.”

I tried the trace evidence lab next and didn't even bother saying hello to Larry Posner. He was peering into a microscope that probably was more sharply focused than he was when he looked up at me.

“Larry,” I said, “everything's going to hell.”

“Always has been.”

“What about our unidentified guy? Anything?” I asked. “Because let me tell you, I'm really groping.”

“I'm relieved. I thought you dropped by to ask me about your lady downstairs,” he replied. “And I was going to have to break the news that I'm not Mercury with winged feet.”

“There may be a link between the two cases. Same weird hair found on the bodies. Human hair, Larry.”

He thought about this for a long moment.

“I don't get it,” he finally said. “And I hate to tell you, but I don't have anything quite so dramatic to report to you.”

“Anything you can tell me at all?” I asked.

“Start with the soil samples from the container. PLM picked up the usual,” he began, referring to the polarized light microscopy. “Quartz, sand, diatomite, flint and elements like iron and aluminum. Lots of trash. Glass, paint chips, vegetable debris, rodent hairs. You can only begin to imagine all the crap inside a cargo container like that.

“And diatoms all over the place, but what's a little
offbeat is what I found when I examined the ones swept up from the container's floor, and the ones from the surface of the body and exterior of the clothes. They're a mixture of saltwater and freshwater diatoms.”

“Makes sense if the ship started out in the Scheldt River in Antwerp and then spent most of the voyage at sea,” I remarked.

“But the inside of the clothing? That's exclusively freshwater. Don't get that unless he washed his clothes, shoes, socks, even underwear in a river, lake, whatever. And I wouldn't expect you to launder Armani and crocodile shoes in a river or lake, or swim in clothes like that, either.

“So it's like he's got freshwater diatoms against his skin, which is weird. And the mixture of salt and fresh on the outside, which you'd expect under the circumstances. You know, walking around on the dock, saltwater diatoms in the air, getting on his clothes, but not on the inside of them.”

“What about the vertebral bone?” I then asked.

“Freshwater diatoms. Consistent with freshwater drowning, maybe the river in Antwerp. And the hair on the guy's head—all freshwater diatoms. No saltwater ones mixed in.”

Posner widened his eyes and rubbed them, as if they were very tired.

“This is really twisting my brain like a dishrag. Diatoms that don't add up, weirdo baby hair and the vertebral bone. Like an Oreo. One side chocolate, the other vanilla, with chocolate and vanilla icing in the middle and a scoop of vanilla on top.”

“Spare me the analogies, Larry. I'm confused enough.”

“So how do you explain it?”

“I can only offer a scenario.”

“Fire away.”

“He might have only freshwater diatoms in his hair if his head were immersed in fresh water,” I said. “If he were put
headfirst inside a barrel with fresh water in the bottom, for example. You do that to somebody, they can't get out, just like toddlers who fall headfirst into buckets of water—those five-gallon plastic kind detergent comes in. Waist-high and very stable. Impossible to topple it over. Or he could have been drowned in a normal-size bucket of fresh water if someone held him down.”

“I'm going to have nightmares,” Posner said.

“Don't stay here until the roads start freezing again,” I said.

Marino gave me a ride home, and I took the jar of formalin with me because I would not give up hope that the flesh inside it had something else to say. I would keep it on my desk in my study and now and then put on gloves and study it in sidelight like an archaeologist trying to read crude symbols worn away on stone.

“You coming in?” I asked Marino.

“You know, my damn pager keeps going off and I can't figure out who it is,” he said, shoving his truck in gear.

He held it up and squinted.

“Maybe if you turned on the overhead light,” I suggested.

“Probably some snitch too stoned to dial right,” he replied. “I'll eat something if you're offering. Then I gotta go.”

As we stepped inside my house, his pager vibrated again. He grabbed it off his belt in exasperation, tilting it until he could read the display.

“Screwed up again! What's five-three-one? Anything you know that's got those numbers in it?” he asked, exasperated.

“Rose's home number does,” I said.

R
ose had grieved when her husband died, and I thought she would fall apart when she'd had to put down one of her greyhounds. Yet somehow she'd always worn her dignity the same way she dressed, properly and with discretion. But when she learned on the news that morning that Kim Luong had been murdered, Rose got hysterical.

“If only, if only . . . ,” she went on and on, crying in the wing chair near the fire in her small apartment.

“Rose, you got to quit saying that,” Marino said.

She had known Kim Luong because Rose often shopped at the Quik Cary. Rose had gone there last night, probably at the same time the killer was still inside beating and biting and smearing blood. Thank God the store had been closed and locked.

I carried two mugs of ginseng tea into her living room while Marino drank coffee. Rose was shaking all over, face swollen from crying and gray hair hanging over the collar of her bathrobe. She looked like a neglected old woman in a nursing home.

“I didn't have the TV on. I was reading. So I didn't know about it until I heard it on the news this morning.” She kept telling us the same story in different ways. “I had
no idea, was sitting up in bed reading and worrying about all the problems in the office. Mainly Chuck. I think that boy's as twisted as they come and I've been working to show it.”

I set down her tea.

“Rose,” Marino said. “We can talk about Chuck another time. We need you to tell us exactly what happened last . . .”

“But you've got to listen to me first!” she exclaimed. “And Captain Marino, you've got to make Dr. Scarpetta listen! That boy hates her! He hates all three of us. I'm trying to tell you, you must do anything to get rid of him before it's too late.”

“I'm going to take care of it as soon as . . .” I started to say.

But she was shaking her head.

“He's pure evil. I believe he's been following me, or at least someone involved with him,” she claimed. “Maybe even that car you saw in my parking lot and the one following you. How do you know it wasn't him who rented it under a phony name so he didn't have to use his car and be recognized right away? How do you know it's not whoever he might be involved with?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Marino interrupted her, holding up his hand. “Why would he follow anybody?”

“Drugs,” she answered as if she knew it for a fact. “This past Monday we had an overdose case come in, and it just so happened I decided to come in an hour and a half early because I was going to take a long lunch break to get my hair done.”

I didn't believe that Rose just happened to come in early. I had asked her to help me find out what Ruffin was up to, and of course, she had made that her mission.

“You were out that day,” she said to me. “And you had misplaced your appointment book and we looked everywhere with no luck. So by Monday I was obsessed with finding it because I knew how much you need it. I thought I'd check the morgue again.

“And I went in there before I'd even taken my coat off,” she went on, “and here's Chuck at six forty-five in the morning sitting at a desk with the pill counter and dozens of bottles lined up. Well, he looked as if I'd just caught him with his pants down. I asked him why he was getting started so early, and he said it was going to be a busy day and he was trying to get a head start.”

“Was his car in the parking lot?” Marino asked.

“He parks in the deck,” I explained. “His car wouldn't be visible from our building.”

“The drugs were from Dr. Fielding's case,” Rose resumed, “and out of curiosity I looked at the report. Well, the woman had about every drug known to man. Tranquilizers, antidepressants, narcotics. A total of some thirteen hundred pills, if you can believe that.”

“Unfortunately, I can,” I said.

Overdoses and suicides typically came to us with months, even years, of prescription drugs. Codeine, Percocet, morphine, methadone, PDC, Valium and fentanyl patches to name a few. It was an unbearably tedious task to count them to see how many were supposed to have been in the bottle and how many were left.

“So he's stealing pills instead of washing them down the sink,” Marino said.

“I can't prove it,” Rose replied. “But Monday wasn't god-awful busy like it usually is. The overdose was the only case. Chuck avoided me as much as he could after that, and every time drugs came in with cases, I wondered if they'd gone in his pocket instead of down the drain.”

“We can hook up a VCR where he's not going to see it. You've already got cameras down there. If he's doing it, we'll get him,” Marino promised.

“That on top of everything else,” I said. “The press about that would be awful. It might even go out on the wire, especially if an investigative reporter started digging and found out about my alleged refusal to take calls from
families, and the chat room, and even the subterfuge of running into Bray in a parking lot.”

Paranoia pushed against my chest and I took a deep breath. Marino was watching me.

“You're not thinking Bray's got something to do with this,” Marino said, skeptically.

“Only in the sense that she helped put Chuck on the road he's on. He himself told me the more bad things he did, the easier it got.”

“Well, I think Chuckie-boy's on his own when it comes to stealing prescription drugs. It's too easy for slime like him to resist. Like the cops who can't resist pocketing wads of cash at drug busts and shit like that. Hell, drugs like Lortabs, Lorcet, not to mention Percocet, can go for two to five bucks a pop on the street. What I'm curious about is where he's unloading the stuff.”

“Maybe you can find out from his wife if he's out a lot at night,” Rose suggested.

“Honey,” Marino replied, “bad people do stuff like this in broad daylight.”

Rose looked dejected and somewhat embarrassed, as if afraid that her being so upset had sent her spinning threads of truth into a tapestry of conjecture. Marino got up to pour more coffee.

“You're thinking he's following you because you're suspicious of his drug dealing?” he asked Rose.

“Oh, I guess it sounds so far-fetched when I hear myself say it.”

“Might be someone involved with Chuck, if we want to keep going down this path. And I don't think we should dismiss anything right now,” Marino added. “If Rose knows, then you do,” he said to me. “Chuck sure as hell knows that.”

“If this is tied in with drugs, then what's the motive if Chuck's involved in our being followed? To hurt us? To intimidate us?” I asked.

“This much I can guarantee,” Marino replied from the kitchen. “He's mixed up with people who are way out of his league. And we're not talking small amounts of money. Think how many pills come in with some of these bodies. Cops have to turn in every bottle they find. Think of all the leftover pain medication or who-knows-what in your average person's medicine cabinet.”

He came back into the living room and sat down, blowing into the cup as if that really would cool his coffee in a hurry.

“Add that to the shitload of other stuff they're actively taking or supposed to be taking and what do you get?” he went on. “That the only reason Chuckie-boy needs his job in the morgue is to steal drugs. Hell, he doesn't need the pay, and that may have something to do with why he's been doing such a shitty job over the last few months.”

“He could be taking in thousands of dollars a week,” I said.

“Doc, you got any reason to think he might be hooked up with your other offices, getting somebody to do the same thing? They get him the pills, he gives them a small cut.”

“I have no idea.”

“You got four district offices. You steal drugs from all of them, you're getting into really big bucks now,” Marino said. “Hell, the little shit may even be involved in organized crime, just one more drone bringing stuff to the hive. Problem is, this ain't shopping at Wal-Mart. He thinks it's so easy making deals with some guy in a suit, some foxy woman. This person moves the merchandise along to the next person in the chain. Maybe it's eventually traded for guns that end up in New York.”

Or Miami, I thought.

“Thank God you alerted us, Rose,” I said. “The last thing I want is anything flowing out of the office and ending up in the hands of people who will hurt others or even kill them.”

“Not to mention, Chuck's days are probably going to be numbered, too,” Marino said. “People like him usually don't live too long.”

He got up and moved to the end of the couch, closer to Rose.

“Now, Rose?” he gently said. “What's making you think what you've just told us has anything to do with Kim Luong's murder?”

She took a deep breath and turned off the lamp next to her as if it was bothering her eyes. Her hands were shaking so badly that when she reached for her mug, she spilled some of her tea. She dabbed the wet spot on her lap with a tissue.

“On my way home from the office last night, I decided to pick up shortbreads and a few other things,” she began, her voice getting shaky again.

“Do you know exactly what time this was?” Marino asked.

“Not to the minute. Around ten of six as best I can say.”

“Let me be sure I've got this straight,” Marino said, taking notes. “You stopped at the Quik Cary at about six o'clock
P
.
M
. Was it closed?”

“Yes. Which irritated me a little because it's not supposed to close until six. I thought ugly thoughts, and now I feel so bad about that, too. Here she is dead in there and I'm mad at her because I couldn't get cookies . . . !” she sobbed.

“Did you see any cars in the lot?” Marino asked. “Any person or persons?”

“Not a one,” she barely said.

“Think hard, Rose. Was there anything that struck you at all?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “And this is what I've been trying to get at. I could see from Libbie that the market was closed because the lights were out, so I pulled into the lot to turn around, and I saw the
closed
sign on the door. I got
back on Libbie and hadn't gone any farther than the ABC store when this car was suddenly behind me with its high beams on.”

“Were you headed home?” I asked.

“Yes. And I really didn't think anything until I turned on Grove and he did, too, staying on my bumper with those darn lights about to blind me. Cars going the other way were flicking their lights up and down to tell him his high beams were on, in case he didn't know. But he clearly intended for them to be on. By now I was getting frightened.”

“Any idea what kind of car? Could you see anything?” Marino asked.

“I was practically blinded, and then I was so confused. Immediately I thought of the car in my parking lot on Tuesday night when you came by,” she said to me. “And then your telling me you'd been followed. And I started thinking about Chuck and drugs and the sort of horrible people who get involved in that.”

“So you're driving along Grove,” Marino got her back on track.

“Of course, I drove right on past my apartment building, trying to figure out where to go to get away with him. And I don't know how I thought of it, but I suddenly cut over to the left and did a U-turn. Then I drove to where Grove ends at Three Chopt and took a left, him still behind me. The next right was the Country Club of Virginia, and I turned in there and drove straight to the entrance where the valets were. Needless to say, whoever it was vanished.”

“That was damn smart of you,” Marino said. “Damn smart. But why didn't you call the police?”

“It wouldn't have done any good. They wouldn't have believed me and I couldn't have described a thing, anyway.”

“Well, you should have called me, at least,” Marino said.

“I know.”

“After this where did you go?” I asked.

“Here.”

“Rose, you're scaring me,” I said. “What if he was waiting for you somewhere?”

“I couldn't stay out all night, and I went a different route home.”

“Any idea what time it was when he vanished?” Marino asked.

“Somewhere between six and six-fifteen. Oh, dear Lord, I just can't believe when I pulled up to that store she was in there. And what if he was? If only I'd known. I can't stop thinking there must have been something I should have noticed. Maybe even when I was in there Tuesday night.”

“Rose, you couldn't have known a damn thing unless you're a gypsy with a crystal ball,” Marino told her.

She took a deep, shaky breath and pulled her robe more tightly around her.

“I can't seem to get warm,” she said. “Kim was such a nice girl.”

She stopped again, her face contorted by grief. Tears filled her eyes and spilled.

“She was never rude to anyone and worked so hard. How could anybody do something like that! She wanted to be a nurse! She wanted to spend her life helping people! I remember worrying about her being alone in there so late at night, oh, God help me. It even crossed my mind when I was there on Tuesday but I didn't say anything!”