Four Scarpetta Novels (162 page)

T
he snow has
stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.

“Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up to Benton.

“Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.

She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It's Benton.

“This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can't you please come down? I'm cooking. Things are going to hell in Florida. I need to talk to you.”

She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.

“And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.

How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.

“This is ridiculous,” she says again.

“Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”

“Wood splinters?”

“A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”

“If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.

“If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn't she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I wish you'd come upstairs.”

“Any defense injuries?”

“Why don't you come up?”

“As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”

“No evidence of it, but it's certainly sexually motivated. I'm not hungry at the moment.”

She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.

“Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.

“Such as?”

“I don't know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”

“Seriously.”

“Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”

“Why don't we talk about this up here.”

Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.

“I'm hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.

“Glad you didn't walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”

“Good thing you weren't in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”

She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.

“Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.

Benton enlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.

“To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it's possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don't guess we have histology.”

“If there are slides, I wouldn't know,” Benton replies.

“Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”

“The state police labs have everything.”

“What I'd like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper.”

Benton looks at her, shrugs. “Why?”

“It's possible we're finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”

“The Quincy family was in the landscaping business. I would assume a lot of commercial citrus growers use copper sprays. Maybe the family tracked it into the back of The Christmas Shop.”

“And possibly bodypaint in there, too—in the storage area where we found blood.”

Benton falls silent, something else coming to him.

“A common denominator in Basil's murders,” he says. “All of the victims, at least the ones whose bodies were recovered, had copper. The trace had copper in it, also citrus pollen, which didn't mean much. There's citrus pollen all over the place in Florida. Nobody thought about copper sprays. Maybe he took them someplace where copper sprays were used, someplace with citrus trees.”

He looks out the window at the gray sky as a snow-plow works loudly on his street.

“What time do you need to head out?” Scarpetta clicks on a photograph of the abraded area on the dead woman's back.

“Not until late afternoon. Basil's coming in at five.”

“Wonderful. See how inflamed it is just in that one discrete area?” She points it out. “An area where there's been a removal of the epithelial layer of the skin by rubbing against some sort of rough surface. And if you zoom in”—she does—“you can see that before she was cleaned up, there's serosanguineous fluid on the surface of the abrasion. See it?”

“Okay. What looks like a little bit of scabbing. But not the entire area.”

“If an abrasion is deep enough, you get leakage of fluid from the vessels. And you're right, the entire area isn't scabbing, which makes me suspect that the abraded area is actually several scrape abrasions of differing age, injuries caused by repeated contact with a rough surface.”

“That's strange. I'm trying to imagine it.”

“I wish I had the histology. Polymorphonuclear white cells would indicate the injury is maybe four to six hours old. As for the brownish-reddish scabs, you generally start seeing those in a minimum of eight hours. She lived for at least a little while after she got this injury, these scrapes.”

She studies more photographs, studies them closely. She makes notes on a legal pad.

She says, “If you look at photographs thirteen through eighteen, you'll see, just barely, areas of what looks like localized red swelling on the backs of her legs and buttocks. What they look like to me are insect bites that have begun to heal. And if you go back to the picture of the abrasion, there's some localized swelling and barely visible petechial hemorrhaging, which can be associated with spider bites.

“If I'm right, microscopically you should see a congestion of blood vessels and an infiltration of white blood cells, mainly eosinophils, depending on her response. It's not very accurate, but we could look for tryptase levels, too, in the event she had an anaphylactic response. But I would be surprised. Certainly she didn't die of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite. I wish I had the damn histology. Could be more in there than splinters. Urticating hairs. Spiders—tarantulas, specifically—flick them, part of their defense system. Ev and Kristin's church is next door to a pet store that sells tarantulas.”

“Itching?” Benton asks.

“If she got flicked, she would have itched like hell,” Scarpetta says. “She might have rubbed up against something, scratching herself raw.”

S
he suffered.

“Wherever he kept her, she suffered from bites that were painful and itchy and awful,” Scarpetta says.

“Mosquitoes?” Benton suggests.

“Just one? Just one bad bite between her shoulder blades? There are no other similar abrasions with inflammation anywhere else on her body, except on her elbows and knees,” she goes on. “Mild abrasions, scrapes, such as you might expect if someone were kneeling or propping herself up by her elbows on a rough surface. But those abraded areas don't look anything like this.”

She again points out the inflamed area between the shoulder blades.

“It's my theory she was kneeling when he shot her,” Benton says. “Based on the blood pattern on her slacks. Could you get abrasions on your knees if you had pants on when you were kneeling?”

“Sure.”

“Then he killed her first, then undressed her. That tells a different story, now doesn't it. If he really wanted to sexually humiliate and terrorize, he would have made her undress, made her kneel nude, then put the shotgun barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“What about the shotgun shell in her rectum.”

“Could be anger. Could be he wanted us to find it and link it to the case in Florida.”

“You're suggesting her murder might have been impulsive, perhaps anger-driven. Yet you're also suggesting a significant element of premeditation, of game playing, as if he wanted us to link her case to that robbery-homicide.” Scarpetta looks at him.

“It all means something, at least to him. Welcome to the world of violent sociopaths.”

“Well, one thing is clear,” she says. “For a while, at least, she was held hostage some place where there was insect activity. Possibly fire ants, maybe spiders, and your normal hotel room or house isn't likely to have an infestation of fire ants or spiders, not around here. Not this time of year.”

“Except tarantulas. Usually they're pets, unrelated to the climate,” Benton says.

“She was abducted from someplace else. Where exactly was the body found?” she then asks. “Right at Walden Pond?”

“About fifty feet off a path that isn't used much this time of year but certainly is used some. A family hiking near the pond found her. Their black Lab ran off into the woods and started barking.”

“What a horrible thing to happen upon when you're minding your own business at Walden Pond.”

She scans the autopsy report on the screen.

“She wasn't out there long, her body dumped after dark,” she says. “If what I'm reading here is accurate. The after-dark part makes sense. And maybe he put her where he did, off the path and not in clear view, because he wasn't taking any chance of being seen. If anybody happened to show up—although not likely after dark—he's out of sight in the woods with her. And this business”—she points at the hooded face and what looks like a diaper—“you could do this in minutes if you'd premeditated it, already cut the eyeholes into the panties, if the body was already nude and so on. It all makes me suspect he's familiar with the area.”

“It makes sense he is.”

“Are you hungry or do you intend to obsess up here all day?”

“What did you make? Then I'll decide.”

“Risotto alla Sbirraglia. Also known as chicken risotto.”

“Sbirraglia?” He takes her hand. “That some exotic breed of Venetian chicken?”

“Supposedly from the word
sbirri,
which is pejorative for the police. A little humor on a day that hasn't been funny.”

“I don't understand what the police have to do with a chicken dish.”

“Supposedly when the Austrians occupied Venice, the police were quite fond of this particular dish, if my culinary sources are to be believed. And I was thinking of a bottle of Soave or a fuller-bodied Piave Pinot Bianco. You have both in your cellar, and as the Venetians say, ‘He who drinks well sleeps well, and he who sleeps well thinks no evil, does no evil and goes to heaven,' or something like that.”

“I'm afraid there's not a wine on earth that will stop me from thinking about evil,” Benton says. “And I don't believe in heaven. Only hell.”

O
n the ground
floor of the Academy's spacious stucco headquarters, the red light is on outside the firearms lab, and from the hallway, Marino hears the dull thud of gunfire. He walks in, not one to care if a range is hot, as long as it's Vince who's doing the shooting.

Vince withdraws a small pistol from the port of the horizontal stainless-steel bullet-recovery tank, which weighs five tons when filled with water, explaining why his lab is located where it is.

“You been out flying already?” Marino asks, climbing up the aluminum checker steps to the shooting platform.

Vince is dressed in a black flight suit and ankle-high black leather boots. When he isn't lost in his world of tool marks and guns, he's one of Lucy's helicopter pilots. As is true of a number of her staff, his appearance is inconsistent with what he does. Vince is sixty-five, flew Black Hawks in Vietnam, then went to work for ATF. He has short legs and a barrel chest, and a gray ponytail that he says he hasn't cut in ten years.

“You say something?” Vince asks, removing his hearing-protector headset and shooting glasses.

“It's a wonder you can hear a damn thing anymore.”

“Not as good as I used to. When I get home, I'm stone-deaf, according to my wife.”

Marino recognizes the pistol Vince is test-firing, the Black Widow with rosewood grips that was found beneath Daggie Simister's bed.

“A sweet little .22,” Vince says. “Thought it couldn't hurt to add it to the database.”

“Doesn't look to me like it's ever been fired.”

“Wouldn't surprise me. Can't tell you how many people have guns for home protection and don't remember they've got them or can't remember where they put it or even know if it's missing.”

“We've got a problem with something missing,” Marino says.

Vince opens a box of ammunition and begins pushing. 22 cartridges into the cylinder.

“Want to try it?” he says. “Kind of a strange thing for an old woman's self-protection. Bet somebody gave it to her. I usually recommend something more user-friendly, like a Lady Smith .38 or a pit bull. I understand it was under the bed, out of reach.”

“Who told you that?” Marino says, getting the same feeling he's been getting a lot lately.

“Dr. Amos.”

“He wasn't at the scene. What the hell does he know?”

“Not half as much as he thinks. He's in here all the time, drives me insane. I hope Dr. Scarpetta doesn't intend to hire him after he finishes his fellowship. She does, I might just go to work at Wal-Mart. Here.”

He offers Marino the pistol.

“No thanks. The only thing I feel like shooting right now is him.”

“What do you mean, something's missing.”

“We've got a shotgun missing from the reference collection, Vince.”

“Not possible,” he says, shaking his head.

They climb down from the platform, and Vince sets the pistol on top of an evidence table that is covered with other tagged firearms, boxes of ammunition, an array of targets with test powder patterns to determine distance and a shattered window of tempered automobile glass.

“Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump,” Marino says. “Used in a robbery-homicide down here two years ago. The case was exceptionally cleared when the guy behind the counter blew the suspect away.”

“Weird you would mention that,” he says, perplexed. “Dr. Amos called me not five minutes ago and asked if he could come down and check something on the computer.”

Vince moves to a counter arranged with comparison microscopes, a digital trigger-pull gauge and a computer. He taps the keyboard with his index finger, brings up a menu and selects reference collection. He enters the shotgun in question.

“I said no, as a matter of fact he couldn't. I was doing some test-fires and he couldn't come in. I asked what he wanted to check and he said never mind.”

“I don't know how he could be onto this,” Marino says. “How could he know about this? A buddy of mine at the Hollywood PD knows, he'd never say a word. Only other people I've told are the Doc and now you.”

“Camo stock, twenty-four-inch barrel, tritium ghost ring sights,” Vince reads. “You're right. Used in a homicide. Suspect dead. A donation from Hollywood police, March of last year.” He glances up at Marino. “As I recall, it was one of ten or twelve firearms they were clearing out of their inventory, their usual generous selves. Providing we give them free training and consultation, beer and door prizes. Let's see.” He scrolls down the screen. “According to this, it's only been checked out twice since we got it. Once by me last April eighth—on the remote-firing platform to make sure there was nothing wrong with it.”

“Son of a bitch,” Marino says, reading over his shoulder.

“And Dr. Amos checked it out the second time this last June twenty-eighth at three fifteen in the afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Maybe test-firing it in ordnance gelatin. Last summer was when Dr. Scarpetta started giving him cooking lessons. He's in and out of here so much, unfortunately, it's hard for me to remember. Says here he used it June twenty-eighth and returned it to the collection that same day, at five fifteen. And if I look up that date on the computer, there's the entry. What that means is I did get it out of the vault and put it back.”

“Then how come it's out on the street and killing people?”

“Unless this record is somehow wrong,” Vince considers, frowning.

“Maybe that's why he wanted to check the computer. Son of a bitch. Who maintains the log? You or the user? Anybody touch this computer besides you?”

“Electronically, I do. You make your request in writing in the book over there”—Vince indicates a spiral ledger book by the phone—“then you sign it out and sign it back in, all in your own handwriting and initialed. After the fact, I enter the information in the computer to verify that you used the gun and it was returned to the vault. Guess you've never played with guns up here.”

“I'm not a firearms examiner. I let you do that. Damn son of a bitch.”

“In the request, you write in what type of firearm you want and when you'd like to reserve the range or the water tank. I can show you.”

He retrieves the ledger and opens it to the last page filled in.

“Here's Dr. Amos again,” he says. “Ordnance gelatin test-fires with a Taurus PT-145 two weeks ago. At least this time he bothered to log it. He was in here the other day and didn't.”

“How did he get into the vault?”

“He brought his own pistol. He collects guns, is a real yahoo.”

“Can you tell when the entry for the Mossberg was entered into the computer?” Marino asks. “You know, like when you look at a file and can see the time and date when it was saved last? What I'm wondering is if there's some way Joe might have altered the computer after the fact, entered the shotgun to make it look like you gave it to him and then returned it to the vault.”

“It's just a word-processing file called Log. So I'm going to close it now without saving it, take a look at the last time stamp.” He looks hard at it, shocked. “Says here it was last saved twenty-three minutes ago. I can't believe it!”

“This thing not password-protected?”

“Of course it is. I'm the only person who can get into it. Except, of course, Lucy. So I wonder why Dr. Amos called and said he wanted to come down and check the computer. If he somehow altered the computer log, why bother to call me?”

“That's an easy one. If you opened the file for him and you saved it when you closed it, then that would explain the new date and time.”

“Then he's pretty damn smart.”

“We'll see how smart he is.”

“This is very upsetting. If he did that, he's got my password.”

“Is it written down anywhere?”

“No. I'm very careful.”

“Who besides you has access to the vault combination? I'm going to get him this time. One way or other.”

“Lucy. She can get into anything. Come on. Let's look.”

The vault is a fireproof room with a steel door that requires a code to unlock it. Inside are file drawers housing thousands of known bullet and cartridge case specimens, and in racks and hanging on pegboards are hundreds of rifles, shotguns and handguns, all tagged with accession numbers.

“Quite a candy store,” Marino says, looking around.

“You've never been in here?”

“I'm not a gun freak. I've had some bad experiences with them.”

“Like what?”

“Like having to use them.”

Vince scans racks of shoulder firearms, picks up each shotgun and checks the tag. He does it twice. He and Marino move from rack to rack, checking for the Mossberg. It isn't inside the vault.

 

S
carpetta points
out the livor mortis pattern, a reddish-purple discoloration caused by noncirculating blood settling due to gravity. Pale areas or blanching of the dead woman's right cheek, breasts, belly, thighs and the inside of her forearms were caused by those areas of her body pressing against some firm surface, perhaps a floor.

“She was facedown for some time,” Scarpetta is saying. “Hours at least, her head turned to the left, which is why there's blanching of the right cheek—it would have been against the floor or whatever flat surface she was on.”

She pulls up another photograph on the computer screen, this one showing the dead woman facedown on the autopsy table after she was washed, her body and hair wet, the red handprints bright and intact, obviously waterproof. She goes back to a photograph she just looked at, back and forth through a number of them, trying to piece together the artifacts of this woman's death.

“So, after he killed her,” Benton says, “maybe he turned her facedown to paint the handprints on her back, worked on her for hours. Her blood settled and lividity began to form, and that's why we have this pattern.”

“I have another scenario in mind,” Scarpetta says. “He painted her face-up first, then turned her over and worked on her back, and this was the position he left her in. Certainly he didn't do all this outside in the cold dark. Someplace where there was no risk anyone would hear the shotgun blast or see him trying to get the body into a vehicle. In fact, maybe he did all this in the vehicle he transported her in, a van, an SUV, a truck. Shot her, painted her, transported her.”

“One-stop shopping.”

“Well, that would have reduced the risk, wouldn't it. Abduct her, drive her to a remote area, and kill her inside the vehicle—as long as it's a vehicle with sufficient room in back—then dump the body,” she says, clicking through more photographs, stopping on one she's already looked at.

She sees it differently this time, the photograph of the woman's brain, what's left of it, on a cutting board. The tough, fibrous membrane that lines the inside of the cranium, the dura mater, is supposed to be creamy white. In this photograph, it is stained a yellowish-orange, and she envisions the two sisters, Ev and Kristin, with their hiking sticks, squinting in the sun, the photograph on the dresser in their bedroom. She recalls the somewhat jaundiced complexion of one of them and clicks back to the autopsy report, checks on what it says about the dead woman's sclera, the whites of her eyes. They're normal.

She recalls the raw vegetables, the nineteen bags of carrots in the refrigerator at Ev and Kristin's house, and thinks of the white linen pants the dead woman was wearing like a diaper, clothing consistent with a warm climate.

Benton is looking curiously at her.

“Xanthochromia of the skin,” Scarpetta says. “A yellow discoloration that doesn't affect the sclera. Possibly caused by carotenemia. We may know who she is.”