Four Scarpetta Novels (138 page)

T
he autopsy room
is small with a tile floor and the usual surgical cart, digital scale, evidence cabinet, autopsy saws and various blades, dissecting boards and a transportable autopsy table latched to the front of a wall-mounted dissecting sink. The walk-in refrigerator is built into a wall, the door partially open.

Thrush hands Benton a pair of blue nitrile gloves, asks him, “You want booties or a mask or anything?”

“No thanks,” Benton says as Dr. Lonsdale emerges from the refrigerator, pushing a stainless-steel cadaver carrier bearing the pouched body.

“We need to make this quick,” he says as he parks near the sink and locks two of the swivel casters. “I'm already in deep shit with my wife. It's her birthday.”

He unzips the pouch and spreads it open. The victim has raggedly cut short, black hair that is damp and still gory with bits of brain and other tissue. There is almost nothing left of her face. It looks as if a small bomb blew up inside her head, which is rather much what happened.

“Shot in the mouth,” Dr. Lonsdale says, and he is young with an intensity that borders on impatience. “Massive skull fractures, brain pulpifaction, which of course we usually associate with suicides, but nothing else about this case is consistent with suicide. It appears to me that her head was tilted pretty far back when the trigger was pulled, explaining why her face is basically shot off, some of her teeth blown out. Again, not uncommon in suicides.”

He switches on a magnifying lamp and positions it close to the head.

“No need to pry open her mouth,” he comments. “Since she has no face left. Thank God for small favors.”

Benton leans close and smells the sweet, putrid stench of decomposing blood.

“Soot on the palate, the tongue,” Dr. Lonsdale continues. “Superficial lacerations of the tongue, the perioral skin and nasolabial fold due to the bulging-out effect when gases from the shotgun blast expand. Not a pretty way to die.”

He unzips the pouch the rest of the way.

“Saved the best for last,” Thrush says. “What do you make of it? Reminds me of Crazy Horse.”

“You mean the Indian?” Dr. Lonsdale gives him a quizzical look as he unscrews the lid from a small glass jar filled with a clear liquid.

“Yeah. I think he put red handprints on his horse's ass.”

There are red handprints on the woman, on her breasts, abdomen and upper inner thighs, and Benton positions the magnifying lamp closer.

Dr. Lonsdale swabs the edge of a handprint and says, “Isopropyl alcohol, a solvent like that will get it off. Obviously, it's not water-soluble and brings to mind the sort of stuff people use for temporary tattooing. Some type of paint or dye. Could also have been done in permanent Magic Marker, I suppose.”

“I'm assuming you haven't seen this in any other cases around here,” Benton says.

“Not at all.”

The magnified handprints are well defined with clean margins, as if made with a stencil, and Benton looks for feathering strokes of a brush, for anything that might indicate how the paint, ink or dye was applied. He can't tell, but based on the density of color, he suspects the body art is recent.

“I suppose she could have gotten this at some point earlier. In other words, it's unrelated to her death,” Dr. Lonsdale adds.

“That's what I'm thinking,” Thrush agrees. “There's a lot of witchcraft around here with Salem and all.”

“What I'm wondering is how quickly something like this begins to fade,” Benton says. “Have you measured them to see if they're the same size as her hand?” He indicates the body.

“They look bigger to me,” Thrush says, holding out his own hand.

“What about her back?” Benton asks.

“One on each buttock, one between her shoulder blades,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “Look like a man's size, the hands do.”

“Yeah,” Thrush says.

Dr. Lonsdale pulls the body partially on its side, and Benton studies the handprints on the back.

“Looks like she has some sort of abrasion here,” he says, noting a scraped area on the handprint between the shoulder blades. “Some inflammation.”

“I'm not clear on all the details,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “It's not my case.”

“Looks as if it was painted after she got the scrape,” Benton says. “Am I seeing welts, too?”

“Maybe some localized swelling. Histology should answer that. It's not my case,” he reminds them. “I didn't participate in her autopsy,” he is sure to remind them. “I glanced at her. That was it before I just now rolled her out. I did look over the autopsy report.”

Should the chief's work be negligent or incompetent, he's not about to take the blame.

“Any idea how long she's been dead?” Benton asks.

“Well, the cold temperatures would have slowed rigor.”

“Frozen when she was found?”

“Not yet. Apparently, her body temperature when she got here was thirty-eight degrees. Fahrenheit. I didn't go to the scene. I can't give you those details.”

“The temperature at ten o'clock this morning was twenty-one degrees,” Thrush tells Benton. “The weather conditions are on the disk I gave you.”

“So the autopsy report has already been dictated,” Benton says.

“It's on the disk,” Thrush answers.

“Trace evidence?”

“Some soil, fibers, other debris adhering to blood,” Thrush replies. “I'll get them run in the labs as quick as I can.”

“Tell me about the shotgun shell you recovered,” Benton says to him.

“Inside her rectum. You couldn't see it from the outside, but it showed up on x-ray. Damnedest thing. When they first showed me the film, I thought maybe the shell was under her body on the x-ray tray. Had no idea the damn thing was inside her.”

“What kind?”

“Remington Express Magnum, twelve-gauge.”

“Well, if she shot herself, she's certainly not the one who shoved the shell up her rectum after the fact,” Benton says. “You running it through NIBIN?”

“Already in the works,” Thrush says. “The firing pin left a nice drag mark. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

E
arly the next
morning, snow blows sideways over Cape Cod Bay and melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy's windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.

Lucy shouldn't have gone to Lorraine's last night. She wishes she hadn't and can't stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here to Provincetown a week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn't. She couldn't face it. She watches Stevie's regular breathing.

“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”

She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren't frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can't believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.

“Stevie, wake up. I've got to get going,” she says loudly.

Stevie doesn't stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can't seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself
no more,
and then nights like last night happen and it isn't smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can't believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it's true and still can't comprehend it. How could this happen to her?

How could Johnny be dead?

She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.

I'm sorry,
she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn't entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.

“You've got to get up,” she says to Stevie.

Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang .380 pistol on the table by the bed.

“Come on, wake up.”

 

I
nside Basil
Jenrette's cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn't give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there's a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won't give off deadly gases if there's a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating.
God no.

When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He's not so bad. At least he's never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn't care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn't go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn't think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he'd curl up on the bed and start to shake.

Now he doesn't have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He's a science project.

He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.

He can't see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he's ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus's fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.

That's what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil's not getting his mail anymore. He hasn't gotten it for a month.

“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus's face behind the mesh. “It's my constitutional right to get my mail.”

“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.

Basil can't make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don't shine at him, so they don't see places they shouldn't before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can't do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.

“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”

The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.

“Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.

 

T
he wide
plank floor is cold beneath Lucy's bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol's magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.

“Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”

Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.

“What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.

“I've got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.

Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”

“Why wouldn't I trust you?”

“I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you've ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”

Lucy told her she is a Boston attorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren't true.

“How did you know I like my coffee black?”

“I didn't,” Lucy says. “There's no milk or cream in the house. I've really got to go.”

“I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That's a first.”

“Seems like a lot of things were your first.”

“You didn't take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That's a first, all right.”

“You weren't exactly with it.”

“I was with it enough to try. It's not too late to try again.”

She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn't believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.

“God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn't do that.”

“You mixed it with vodka.”

Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red handprints again.

“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.

“You asked me a lot of things last night.”

“I asked you where you got them done.”

“Why don't you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy's skin.

“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they're fake and I happen to think they are.”

“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I'm sure you don't have nail polish remover or baby oil.”

“What's the point?” Lucy stares at the handprints.

“It wasn't my idea.”

“Then whose?”

“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”

Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie's naked body. “You don't have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it's unimportant.

“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.

“We need to head out of here. I've got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.

She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.

“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You're really something. I want to be just like you.”

“You don't know me.”

“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn't want to be just like you? You don't seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”

Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie's face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.

“It's cold in here. I was just covering you because…”

“It's okay. It's happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I'm ugly, don't you. Ugly and fat. You don't like me. In the daylight, you don't.”

“You're anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It's just…Shit, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…”

“I'm not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I'm grateful. Thank you. I won't tell anyone.”

Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.

“God, please don't cry, Stevie.”

“At least call me the right thing!”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I'd like to go now, please. I won't tell anyone. Thank you, I'm very grateful.”

“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.

Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.