Five Scarpetta Novels (169 page)

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FTER
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CARPETTA
entered the OCME with Marino slowly following her, doing his best to walk normally, Bruce at the security desk sat up straighter and got a look of dread on his face.

“Uh, I've been given instructions,” Bruce says, refusing to meet her eyes. “The chief says no visitors. Maybe he doesn't mean you? Is he expecting you?”

“He isn't,” Scarpetta says with ease. Nothing surprises her at this point. “He probably does mean me.”

“Gee, I sure am sorry.” Bruce is acutely embarrassed, his cheeks burning pink. “How'ya doing, Pete?”

Marino leans against the desk, his feet spread, his pants hanging lower than usual. If he got in a foot pursuit, he might lose his pants. “Been better,” Marino says. “So Chief Little Thinks He's Big Man ain't letting us in. That what you're telling us, Bruce?”

“That guy,” Bruce says, catching himself. Like most people, Bruce would like to keep his job. He wears a nice Prussian blue uniform, carries a gun, and works in a beautiful building. Better to hold on to what he's got, even if he can't stand Dr. Marcus.

“Huh,” Marino says, stepping back from the console. “Well, hate to disappoint Chief Little, but we ain't here to see him, anyway. Got evidence to drop off at the labs, at Trace. But I'm curious, what order did you get, exactly? I'm just curious about the wording.”

“That guy,” Bruce says, and he starts to shake his head but catches himself. He likes his job.

“It's all right,” Scarpetta says. “I get the message loud and clear. Thanks for letting me know. Glad someone did.”

“He should have told you.” Bruce stops himself again, looking around. “Just so you know, everybody's been mighty happy to see you, Dr. Scarpetta.”

“Almost everybody.” She smiles. “It's not a problem. Can you let Mr. Eise know we're here? He is expecting us,” she adds, emphasizing the word “is.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Bruce says, cheering up a little. He picks up the phone and dials the extension and passes on the message.

For a minute or two, Scarpetta and Marino stand before the elevator, waiting for it. One can push the button all day and it won't do any good unless the person has a magic magnetic swipe card or the elevator is sent by someone who does. The doors open and they step aboard, and Scarpetta presses the button for the third floor, her black crime-scene bag slung over her shoulder.

“I guess the son of a bitch canned you,” Marino comments, the elevator car lurching slightly as it begins its short ascent.

“I guess he did.”

“So? What are you gonna do about it? You can't just let him get away with this. He begs you to come to Richmond and then treats you like shit. I'd get him fired.”

“He'll get himself fired one of these days. I have better things to do,” she replies as the stainless-steel doors open onto Junius Eise, who is waiting for them in a white corridor.

“Junius, thank you,” Scarpetta says, offering her hand. “Nice to see you again.”

“Oh, I'm happy to do it,” he says, slightly flustered.

He is a strange man with pale eyes. The middle of his upper lip fades into a fine scar that reaches to his nose, a typical poor mending job that she has seen many times before in people who were born with cleft palates. Appearance aside, he is odd, and Scarpetta thought so years ago when she used to encounter him now and then in the labs. She never talked to him much back then, but occasionally she consulted him on certain cases. When she was chief, she was pleasant and made it a practice to show the respect she honestly felt for all of the lab workers, but she was never overly friendly. As she accompanies Eise along the maze of white corridors and big glass windows that allow glimpses of the scientists at work in the labs, she is aware that the perception when she was here was that she was cold and intimidating. As chief she got respect but rarely affection. That was hard, extremely hard, but she lived with it because it went with the position. Now she doesn't have to live with it.

“How have you been doing, Junius?” she asks. “Understand you and Marino have been keeping the lights burning late at the FOP. I hope you aren't stressing yourself out too much about this recent trace evidence curiosity. If anyone can figure it out, you can.”

Eise glances at her, a look of disbelief on his face. “Let's hope so,” he says, flustered. “Well, I have to say, I know I didn't mix anything up. I don't care what anyone says. I damn well know I didn't.”

“You're the last person who would mix something up,” she says.

“Well, thank you. That means a lot coming from you.” He lifts the swipe card from the lanyard around his neck and waves it past the sensor on the wall, and a lock clicks free. He opens the door. “It's not for me to say what anything means,” he adds as they walk into the Trace Evidence section. “But I know I didn't mislabel a sample. I never have. Not once. At least not once when I didn't catch it right away and the courts were none the wiser.”

“I understand.”

“Do you remember Kit?” Eise asks, as if Kit is nearby, but she isn't in sight. “She's not here, is out sick, as a matter of fact. I tell you, half the world has the flu. But I know she wanted to say hello. She'll be sorry she missed you.”

“Tell her I'm sorry too,” Scarpetta says as they reach a long black countertop in Eise's work area.

“Tell you what,” Marino says. “You got a quiet place with a phone?”

“You bet. The section chief's office around the corner. She's in court today. Help yourself, I know she wouldn't mind.”

“I'll leave you guys to play in the mud,” Marino says, walking off slowly, slightly bowlegged, like a cowboy who just came in from a long, rough ride.

Eise covers a section of countertop with clean white paper and Scarpetta opens her black bag and pulls out the soil samples. He pulls up another chair so she can sit next to him at the compound microscope and hands her a pair of examination gloves. The first stage of the many in this process is the simplest. Eise takes a tiny steel spatula, dips it into one of the bags, wipes a minute residue of red clay and sandy dirt on a clean slide, and places it on the stage of the microscope. Peering into the lenses, he adjusts the focus and slowly moves the slide around while Scarpetta looks on, unable to see anything except the swipe of damp reddish dirt on the glass. Removing the slide and setting it on a white paper towel, he uses the same method to prepare several more slides.

It is not until they are working on a second bag of the soil Scarpetta collected from the demolition site that Eise finds something.

“If I wasn't seeing this, I wouldn't believe it,” he says, looking up from the binocular eyepiece. “Help yourself.” He rolls back his chair, giving her room.

She moves closer to the microscope and looks through the lenses at a microscopic landfill of sand and other minerals, fragments of plant and insect pieces, and parts and bits of tobacco—all typical for a dirty parking lot—and she sees several flecks of metal that are partially a dull silver. This is not typical. She looks for a needle-pointed tool and finds several within reach. She carefully manipulates the metallic chips, isolating them, and sees that there are exactly three of them on this slide, all slightly bigger than the largest grain of silica or rock or other debris. Two are red and one is white. Moving the tungsten tip around a little more, she unearths one more find that captivates her interest. This one she recognizes quickly, but she takes her time saying so. She wants to be sure.

It is about the size of the smallest paint chip and grayish-yellow and a peculiar shape that is neither mineral nor man-made. In fact, the particle looks like a prehistoric bird with a hammer-shaped head, an eye, a narrow neck, and a bulbous body.

“The flat plates of the lamellae. They look like concentric circles and are the layers of bone like the rings of a tree,” she says, moving the particle a little. “And the grooves and channels of the canaliculi. That's the holes we're seeing, the haversian canals or canaliculi, where tiny blood vessels run through. You put this under the PolScope and you should see an undulating, wavy fanlike extension. My guess is when you get around to the XRD it's going to come up as calcium phosphate. Bone dust, in other words. I can't say I'm surprised, considering the context. That old building certainly would have had plenty of bone dust in it.”

“I'll be darned,” Eise says happily. “I've been making myself crazy over it. The same damn thing I found in the Sick Girl case, the Paulsson case, if we're on the same sheet of music. Mind if I look?”

She rolls back her chair, relieved but just as perplexed as she was before. Paint chips and bone dust might make sense in the tractor driver's case, but not in Gilly Paulsson's death. How can it be that the same type of microscopic trace evidence was recovered from inside her mouth?

“Same damn stuff,” Eise says with certainty. “Let me get Sick Girl's slides and show you. You won't believe it.” He picks up a thick envelope from a pile on his desk and peels tape off the flap and pulls out a cardboard file of slides. “Been keeping her stuff handy because I've looked at it so many times, believe you me.” He places a slide on the stage. “Red, white, and blue paint particles, some adhering to metal chips, some not.” He moves the slide around and gets it into focus. “Paint's single-layer, at least an epoxy enamel, and it may have been modified. Meaning, whatever the object is, it might have started out white and had additional paint added, specifically the red, white, and blue added. Take a look.”

Eise has painstakingly removed all particles from whatever was submitted to him in the Paulsson case, and only red, white, and blue paint chips are on the slide. They look big and bright, like a child's building blocks but irregularly shaped. Some of them adhere to dull silver metal and some seem to be just paint. The color and texture of the paint seem identical to what she just saw when she looked at her soil sample, and her growing disbelief is well on its way to numbness. She can't think. Her brain is slowing down like a computer running out of memory. She simply can't find the logical connections.

“Here's the other particles you're calling bone dust.” He pulls away the side and replaces it with another one.

“And this was on her swabs?” She wants to make sure because it is hard to believe.

“No question about it. You're looking at it.”

“The same damn dust.”

“Think how much of that would be down there. More dust than there are stars in the universe if you started scraping up all the dirt down there,” Eise says.

“A few of these particles look like they're old and the product of natural flaking or exfoliation as the periosteum begins to break down,” Scarpetta says. “See how rounded and gradually thinned the edges are? I expect dust like that with skeletal remains, bones dug up or carried in from the woods and so on. Untraumatized bones will have untraumatized dust. But a few of these”—she isolates a particle of bone dust that is jagged and fractured and several shades lighter in color—“look pulverized to me.”

He leans in to see for himself, and then moves out of her way, and she peers into the lenses.

“In fact, I'm thinking this particle here is burned. Did you notice how fine it is? I'm seeing a little blackish margin. It looks carbonized, burned. Bet if I put my finger on this particle it would probably stick to the oil on my skin, and regular flaked bone won't,” she says, intrigued. “I think some of what we're looking at is from cremains.” She peers at the bluish-white ragged particle with its carbonized margin in the bright circle of light. “It looks chalky and fractured but not necessarily heat fractured. I don't know. I've never had a reason to pay attention to bone dust, certainly not burned bone dust. An elemental analysis will tell you. With burned bone you should get different levels of calcium, higher levels of phosphorus,” she explains without moving her eyes from the binocular lenses. “And by the way, I might expect dust from cremains in the rubble and dirt at the old building since there was a crematorium oven. God knows how many bodies were cremated in that place over the decades. But I'm a little perplexed that the debris from this soil I brought in would have bone dust in it. I scraped that soil from the pavement near the back door. They haven't started knocking down the back of the building and digging up the back parking lot yet. The Anatomical Division should still be completely intact. Remember the back door of the old building?”

“Sure I do.”

“That's where it was. Why would dust from cremains be in the parking lot, right there on top of the parking lot? Unless it was tracked outside the building?”

“You mean someone stepped in it down there in the Anatomical Division and then tracked it out into the parking lot?”

“I don't know, possibly, but it appears Mr. Whitby's bloody face must have been against the pavement, the muddy dirty pavement, and this trace evidence adhered to his wound and the blood on his face.”

“Take me back to the part about bone dust getting fractured,” Eise says, mystified. “So you got burned bone and then how does it get fractured if not by heat?”

“As I said, I don't know for a fact, but dust from cremains mixed in with dirt on pavement and perhaps run over by a tractor and cars and even people stepping on it. Could bone dust exposed to that sort of traffic look traumatized? I just don't know the answer.”

“But why the hell would there be cremated bone dust in Sick Girl's case?” Eise asks.

“That's right.” She tries to clear her head and organize her thoughts. “That's right. This isn't from the Whitby case. This burned-looking fractured dust isn't from his case. I'm looking at her trace.”

“Dust from cremains inside Sick Girl's mouth? Holy Mother of God! I can't explain that. Sure as heck can't. Can you?”