Four Scarpetta Novels (53 page)

He shows me a photograph of a dark pile of clothing on the floor just
beyond the open bathroom door. I make out pants, a T-shirt, a jacket and shoes. Next I look at photographs taken inside the bathroom. On the sink is a coppertone plastic ice bucket, plastic glasses covered with cellophane and a small bar of soap still in its wrapper. Stanfield fishes in a pocket for a small knife, opens a blade and slits the evidence tape sealing the paper bag he brought with him. “His clothes,” he explains. “Or at least I assume they're his.”

“Hold on,” I tell him. I get up and cover a gurney with a clean sheet, and put on fresh gloves and ask him if a wallet or any other personal effects were recovered. He tells me no. I smell urine as I pull out clothing from the bag, careful that if any trace evidence is dislodged, it will fall on the sheet. I examine black bikini briefs and black Giorgio Armani cashmere trousers, both soaked with urine.

“He wet his pants,” I tell Stanfield.

He just shakes his head and shrugs, and doubt crosses his eyes—maybe doubt tainted by fear. None of this is making much sense, but the feeling I have is clear. This man may have checked in alone, but at some point, another person entered the picture, and I am wondering if the victim lost control of his bladder because he was terrified. “Does the lady in the office, Mrs. Kiffin, remember him dressed like this when he checked in?” I ask as I pull pockets inside out to see if there is anything in them. There isn't.

“Didn't ask her that,” Stanfield responds. “So he's got nothing in his pockets. That's kind of unusual.”

“No one checked them at the scene?”

“Well, I didn't bag the clothes, to tell you the truth. Another officer did that, but I'm sure nobody dug in the pockets, or at least no personal effects was found or I would know and have them with me,” he says.

“Well, how about you call Mrs. Kiffin right now and see if she remembers him wearing this clothing when he checked in?” I politely tell Stanfield to do his job. “And what about a car? Do we know how he got to the motel?”

“No vehicle's turned up so far.”

“The way he was dressed is certainly inconsistent with a low-budget
motel, Detective Stanfield.” I am drawing pants on a clothing diagram form.

The black jacket and black T-shirt as well as the belt, shoes and socks are expensive designer labels, and this makes me think about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose unique baby-fine hair was found all over Thomas's decomposing body when it showed up in the Richmond Port earlier this month. I comment on the similarity of the clothes to Stanfield. The prevailing theory, I go on to explain to him, is that Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother, Thomas, probably in Antwerp, Belgium, and switched clothing with him before sealing the body inside a cargo container bound for Richmond.

“Because you found all those hairs I been reading about in the paper?” Stanfield is trying to understand what would be difficult for even the most experienced investigator who has seen it all.

“That and microscopic findings that relate to diatoms—algae—consistent with an area of the Seine near the Chandonne house in Île Saint-Louis, in Paris.” I talk on. Stanfield is completely lost. “Look, all I can tell you, Detective Stanfield, is this man”—I refer to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—“has a very rare congenital disorder and allegedly has been known to bathe in the Seine, maybe thinking it might cure him. We have reason to believe the clothing on his brother's body was originally Jean-Baptiste's. Make sense?” I am drawing a belt and noting from the indentation in the leather which notch was used the most.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” Stanfield replies, “I been hearing about nothing but this weird case and this Werewolf fellow. I mean, ma'am, that really is all you hear when you turn on TV or pick up the paper, and I guess you know that, and by the way, I'm really sorry for what you been through and to tell you the truth, can't figure how you can even be in here or thinking straight. Godalmighty!” He shakes his head. “The wife said if something like that showed up at our door, he wouldn't have to do a thing to her. She'd die right off of a heart attack.”

I catch a spark of his misgivings about me. He is wondering if I am completely rational right now, if I might just be projecting—if somehow everything I experience becomes tainted by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.
I slip the clothing diagram off the clipboard and place it with John Doe's paperwork as Stanfield dials a number he reads from his notepad. I watch him insert a finger in his free ear, squinting as if Turk's sawing open another skull hurts his eyes. I can't hear what Stanfield is saying. He hangs up and comes back over to me as he reads the video display of his pager.

“Well, we got good news and bad news,” he announces. “The lady, Mrs. Kiffin, remembers him dressed real nice in a dark suit. That's the good news. The bad news is, she also remembers he had a key in his hand, one of those remote kinds that a lot of new, expensive cars have.”

“But there's no car,” I reply.

“No ma'am, no car. No key, either,” he says. “Sure looks like whatever happened to him, he had some help. You think maybe somebody drugged him and then tried to burn him up to hide the evidence?”

“I think we'd better seriously consider homicide.” I state the obvious. “We need to get him printed and see if he matches up with anybody in AFIS.”

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allows us to scan fingerprints into a computer and compare them with those in a database that can be linked state to state. If this dead man has a criminal record in this country, or if his prints are in the database for some other reason, we most likely will get a hit. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves, doing my best to cover the plaster looped around my left lower palm and thumb. Fingerprinting dead bodies requires a simple tool called a spoon. It is nothing more than a curved metal implement shaped much like a hollow tube cut in half lengthwise. A strip of white paper is threaded through slits in the spoon so that the paper's surface is curved to accommodate the contours of fingers no longer flexible or compliant to their owner's will. With each print, the strip is advanced ahead to the next clean square. The procedure isn't hard. It doesn't require great intelligence. But when I tell Stanfield where the spoons are, he frowns as if I have just spoken to him in a foreign language. I ask him if he has ever printed a dead body before. He admits he has not.

“Hold on,” I say, and I go to the phone and dial the extension for the fingerprints lab. No one answers. I try the switchboard. Everyone is gone
for the day because of the weather, I am told. I get a spoon and ink pad from a drawer. Turk wipes off the dead man's hands and I ink his fingers, pressing them one at a time against the curved paper strip. “What I can do if you have no objection,” I tell Stanfield, “is see if Richmond City will pop these into AFIS so we can get that going.” I press a thumb inside the spoon while Stanfield watches with an unpleasant expression on his face. He is one of these people who hates the morgue and can't get out of it fast enough. “Doesn't look like there's anyone in the labs to help us right now, and the sooner we can figure out who this guy is, the better,” I explain. “And I'd like to get the prints and other information to Interpol in the event this man has international connections.”

“Okay,” Stanfield says with another nod as he glances at his watch.

“Have you ever dealt with Interpol?” I ask him.

“Can't say I have, ma'am. They're sort of like spies, aren't they?”

I page Marino to see if he can help. He drops by forty-five minutes later, by which time Stanfield is long gone and Turk is tucking John Doe's sectioned organs inside a heavy plastic bag that she will place in the body cavity before she sews up the Y incision.

“Yo Turk,” Marino hails her when he passes through opening steel doors. “Freezing leftovers again?”

She glances up at him with one raised eyebrow and a cocked smile. Marino likes Turk. He likes her so much he is rude to her at every opportunity. Turk doesn't look like what one might conjure up from her nickname. She is petite, with a clean prettiness and creamy complexion, her long blond hair tied back and clipped up high like a show horse's tail. She threads heavy white waxed twine into a twelve-gauge suture needle as Marino continues to pick on her. “I tell ya,” he says, “I ever get cut, I ain't coming to you for stitches, Turk.” She smiles, dipping the big, angled needle into flesh and tugging twine through.

Marino looks hung over, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. Despite his quips, he is in a foul mood. “You forget to go to bed last night?” I ask him.

“More or less. It's a long story.” He tries to ignore me, watching Turk
and oddly distracted and ill at ease. I untie my gown and take off my face shield, mask and O.R. cap. “See how quickly you guys can get these into the computer,” I tell him, all business and not especially friendly. He is keeping secrets from me and I am pissed off by his peacock display of adolescent behavior. “We've got a bad situation here, Marino.”

His attention lifts off Turk and lights on me. He gets serious. He drops the childish act. “How 'bout you tell me what's going on while I smoke,” he says to me, meeting my eyes for the first time in days.

Mine is a nonsmoking building, which has not stopped various people high in the pecking order from lighting up inside their offices if they are surrounded by people who won't snitch on them. In the morgue, I don't care who asks. I don't allow smoking, period. It isn't that our clientele need to worry about inhaling secondhand smoke, but my concern is for the living who should do nothing in the morgue that requires them to have hand-to-mouth contact. No eating, drinking or smoking, and I discourage chewing gum or sucking on candies or lozenges. Our designated smoking area is two chairs by an upright ash can near the soda machines in the bay. This time of year, this is not a warm, cozy place to sit, but it is private. The James City County case isn't Marino's jurisdiction, but I need to tell him about the clothes. “It's a feeling I have,” I sum it up.

He flicks an ash toward the can, his legs splayed in the plastic chair. We can see our breath.

“Yeah, well I don't like it, either,” he replies. “Fact is, it may be coincidence, Doc. But another fact is, the Chandonne family's scary shit. What we don't know is what the hell the fallout's going to be now that their ugly duckling son's locked up in the U.S. for murder—now that he's managed to draw so much attention to his Godfather daddy and all the rest. These are bad people capable of anything, you ask me. Believe me, I'm just beginning to see how really, really bad they are,” he cryptically adds. “I don't like the mob, Doc. No sir. When I was coming along, they ran everything.” His eyes get hard as he says this. “Fuck, they probably still do, only difference is, there ain't any rules, any respect anymore.
I don't know what the hell this guy was doing out near Jamestown, but it wasn't to sightsee, that's for sure. And Chandonne's just sixty miles away in the hospital. Something's going on.”

“Marino, let's get Interpol on this immediately,” I say.

It is up to the police to report individuals to Interpol, and to do this Marino will have to contact the liaison at State Police, who will pass on the case information to Interpol's U.S. National Central Bureau in Washington. What we will be asking Interpol to do is to issue an international advisory notice for our case and to search their massive criminal intelligence database at their General Secretariat in Lyon. Notices are color-coded: Red is for immediate arrest with probable extradition; blue is for someone who is wanted but his identity isn't absolutely clear; green is a warning about someone who is likely to commit crimes, such as habitual offenders like child molesters and pornographers; yellow is for missing people; and black is for unidentified dead bodies, those who most likely are fugitives and are also coded red. My case will be my second black notice this year, following the first one just weeks ago when the badly decomposed body of Thomas Chandonne was discovered in a cargo container at the Richmond Port.

“Okay, we'll get Interpol a mug shot, prints and your autopsy info,” Marino makes a mental note. “I'll do that soon as I leave here. Just hope Stanfield don't feel I'm stepping on his toes.” He says this as more of a warning. Marino doesn't care if he steps on Stanfield's toes but he doesn't want a hassle.

“He's clueless, Marino.”

“A shame, too, because James City County has real good cops,” Marino replies. “Problem is, Stanfield's brother-in-law is Representative Matthew Dinwiddie, so Stanfield's always gotten extra good treatment down there and has about as much business working homicides as Winnie-the-Pooh. But I guess he had that on his wish list and Dimwit, as I call him, must have sweet-talked the chief.”

“See what you can do,” I tell Marino.

He lights another cigarette, his eyes roving around the bay, thoughts palpable. I resist smoking. The craving is awful and I hate myself for ever
resuming the habit. Somehow I always think I can have just one cigarette, and I am always wrong. Marino and I share an awkward silence. Finally, I bring up the subject of the Chandonne case and what Righter told me on Sunday.

“Are you going to tell me what's going on?” I quietly say to Marino. “I assume he was released from the hospital early this morning, and I assume you were there. And I guess you've met Berger.”

He sucks on the cigarette, taking his time. “Yeah, Doc, I was there. Fucking zoo.” His words drift out on smoke. “They even had reporters from Europe.” He glances at me, and I sense there is much he isn't going to tell me, and this depresses me deeply. “You ask me, they ought to stick assholes like him in the Bermuda Triangle and not let nobody talk to them or take their picture,” Marino goes on. “It ain't right, except at least in this case, the guy's so ugly, he probably gave everybody technical problems, broke a bunch of expensive cameras. They brought him out in enough chains to anchor a damn battleship, leading him along like he was stone-blind. He had bandages over his eyes, faking like he's in pain, the whole nine yards.”