Four Scarpetta Novels (74 page)

“I know you people have to do your job,” he says in a dull, flat tone.

“Have you been inside?”

He hesitates and stares off at the house. “Can't do it.” His voice rises with emotion and tears cut him off. He shakes his head and climbs back inside his car. “I don't know how any of us . . . Well,” he clears his throat, talking to us through the open car door, the interior light on, the bell dinging. “How we're ever going to go in and deal with her things.” He focuses on me, and Berger introduces us. I have no doubt he already knows very well who I am.

“There are professional cleaning services in the area,” I delicately tell him. “I suggest you contact one and have them go in before you or any other family member does. Service Master, for example.” I have been through this many times with families whose loved ones have died violently inside the residence. No one should have to go in and deal with their loved one's blood and brains everywhere.

“They can just go in without us?” he asks me. “The cleaning people can?”

“Leave a key in a lock box at the door. And yes, they'll go in and take care of things without you present,” I reply. “They're bonded and insured.”

“I want to do that. We want to go on and sell this place,” he tells Berger. “If you're not needing it anymore.”

“I'll let you know,” she replies. “But you, of course, have the right to do whatever you want with the property, Mr. Bray.”

“Well, I don't know who will buy it after what happened,” he mutters.

Neither Berger nor I comment. He is probably right. Most people do not want a house where someone has been murdered. “I already talked to one realtor,” he goes on in a dull voice that belies his anger. “They said they couldn't take it on. They're sorry and all that, but they didn't want to represent the property. I don't know what to do.” He stares out at the dark, lifeless house. “You know, we weren't real close to Diane, no one in the family was. She wasn't what I would call really into her family or friends. Mostly just into herself, and I know I probably shouldn't say that. But it's the damn honest truth.”

“Did you see her very often?” Berger asks him.

He shakes his head, no. “I guess I knew her best because we're only two years apart. We all knew she had more money than we could understand. She stopped by my house on Thanksgiving, pulled up in this brand new red Jaguar.” He smiles bitterly and shakes his head again. “That's when I knew for sure she was into something I probably didn't want to know a damn thing about. I'm not surprised, really.” He takes a deep, quiet breath. “Not surprised really that it's ended up like this.”

“Were you aware of her involvement in drugs?” Berger shifts her file to her other arm.

I am getting cold standing out here, and the dark house pulls at us like a black hole.

“The police have said some things. Diane never talked about what she did and we didn't ask, frankly. As far as we know, she didn't even
have a will. So now we've got that mess, too,” Eric Bray tells us. “And what to do with her things.” He looks up at us from the driver's seat and the dark can't hide his misery. “I really don't know what to do.”

So much eddies around a violent death. These are hardships that no one sees in the movies or reads about in the newspapers: the people left behind and the wrenching concerns they bear. I give Eric Bray my business card and tell him to call my office if he has any further questions. I go through my usual routine of letting him know the Institute has a booklet, an excellent resource called
What to Do When the Police Leave
written by Bill Jenkins, whose young son was murdered during the mindless robbery of a fast-food restaurant a couple years back. “The book will answer a lot of your questions,” I add. “I'm sorry. A violent death leaves many victims in its wake. That's the unfortunate reality.”

“Yes, ma'am, that's for damn sure,” he says. “And yes, I'd like to read anything you got. I don't know what to expect, what to do about any of this,” he repeats himself. “I'm out here if you have any questions. I'll be right here inside the car.”

He shuts his door. My chest is tight. I am touched by his pain, yet I can't feel sorrow for his slain sister. If anything, the portrait he paints of her makes me like her even less. She wasn't even decent to her own flesh and blood. Berger says nothing as we climb the front steps and I sense her never-ending scrutiny. She is interested in my every reaction. She can tell that I still resent Diane Bray and what she tried to do to my life. I make no effort to hide it. Why bother at this point?

Berger is looking up at the porch light, which is faintly illuminated by the headlights of Eric Bray's car. It is a simple glass fixture, small and globe-shaped, supposed to be held into the fixture by screws. Police found the glass globe in the grass near a boxwood where Chandonne apparently tossed it. Then it was simply a matter of unscrewing the bulb, which “would have been hot,” I tell Berger. “So my guess is he covered it with something to protect his fingers. Maybe he used his coat.”

“No fingerprints on it,” she says. “Not Chandonne's prints, according to Marino.” This is news to me. “But that doesn't surprise me, assuming he covered the bulb so he didn't burn his fingers,” she adds.

“What about the globe?”

“No prints. Not his.” Berger inserts the key in the lock. “But he might have his hands covered when he unscrewed that, too. Just wonder how he reached the light. It's pretty high up.” She opens the door and the alarm system begins beeping. “Think he climbed up on something?” She goes to the key pad inside and enters the code.

“Maybe he climbed up on the railing,” I suggest, suddenly the expert on Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's behavior and not liking the role.

“What about at your house?”

“He could have done that,” I reply. “Climbed up on the railing and steadied himself against the wall or the porch roof.”

“No prints on your light fixture or the bulb, in case you don't know,” she tells me. “Not his, at any rate.”

Clocks tick-tock in the living room, and I remember how surprised I was when I walked into Diane Bray's house for the first time, after she was dead, and discovered her collection of perfectly synchronized clocks and her grand but cold English antiques.

“Money.” Berger stands in the living room and looks around at the scroll-end sofa, the revolving bookcase, the ebonized sideboard. “Oh yes, indeed. Money, money, money. Cops don't live like this.”

“Drugs,” I comment.

“No fucking kidding.” Berger's eyes move everywhere. “User and dealer. Only she got others to be her mules. Including Anderson. Including your former morgue supervisor who was stealing prescription drugs that you assumed were being disposed of down the morgue sink. Chuck what's-his-name.” She touches gold damask draperies and looks up at the valances. “Cobwebs,” she observes. “Dust that didn't just appear during these last few days. There are other stories about her.”

“There must be,” I reply. “Selling prescription drugs on the street can't account for all this and a new Jaguar.”

“Brings me back to a question I keep asking everyone who will stand still long enough for me to talk to them.” Berger moves on toward the kitchen. “Why did Diane Bray move to Richmond?”

I have no answer.

“Not for the job, no matter what she said. Not for that. No way.” Berger opens the refrigerator door. There is very little inside: Grape-Nuts cereal, tangerines, mustard, Miracle Whip. The two percent milk passed its expiration date yesterday. “Rather interesting,” Berger says. “I don't think this lady was ever home.” She opens a cupboard and scans cans of Campbell's soup and a box of saltine crackers. There are three jars of gourmet olives. “Martinis? I wonder. She drink a lot?”

“Not the night she died,” I remind her.

“That's right. Point-oh-three alcohol level.” Berger opens another cupboard and another until she finds where Bray kept her liquor. “One bottle of vodka. One of Scotch. Two Argentine cabernets. Not the bar of someone who drank a lot. Probably was too vain about her figure to ruin it with booze. Pills at least aren't fattening. When you came to the scene, was that the first time you'd ever been to her house—to this house?” Berger asks.

“Yes.”

“But your house is only a few blocks away.”

“I'd seen this house in passing. From the street. But no, I'd never been inside. We weren't friends.”

“But she wanted to be friends.”

“I'm told she wanted to have lunch or whatever. To get to know me,” I reply.

“Marino.”

“That's what Marino told me,” I confirm, getting used to her questions by now.

“Do you think she was sexually interested in you?” Berger asks this very casually as she opens a cabinet door. Inside are glasses and dishes. “There are plenty of intimations that she played both sides of the net.”

“I've been asked that before. I don't know.”

“Would it have bothered you if she was?”

“It would have made me uncomfortable. Probably,” I admit.

“She eat out a lot?”

“It's my understanding she did.”

I am noting that Berger asks questions I suspect she already has
answered. She wants to hear what I have to say and weigh my perceptions against those of others. Some of what she explores carries the echo of what Anna asked me during our fireside confessionals. I wonder if it is remotely possible that Berger has talked to Anna, too.

“Reminds me of a store that's a front for some illegal business,” Berger says as she checks out what's beneath the sink: a few cleansers and several dried sponges. “Don't worry,” she seems to read my mind. “I'm not going to let anyone ask you these sorts of things in court, about your sex life or whatever. Nothing about her personal life, either. I realize that's not supposed to be your area of expertise.”

“Not supposed to be?” It seems an odd comment.

“Problem is, some of what you know isn't hearsay, but knowledge you got directly from her. She did tell you”—Berger opens a drawer—“that she often ate out alone, sat at the bar at Buckhead's.”

“That's what she told me.”

“The night you met her there in the parking lot and confronted her.”

“The night I tried to prove that she was in collusion with my morgue assistant, Chuck.”

“And she was.”

“Unfortunately, she certainly was,” I reply.

“And you confronted her.”

“I did.”

“Well, good ol' Chuck's in lockup where he belongs.” Berger walks out of the kitchen. “And if it's not hearsay,” she returns to that topic, “then Rocky Caggiano is going to ask you and I can't object. Or I can, but it will get me nowhere. You need to realize that. And how it makes you look.”

“Right now, I'm more worried about how everything makes me look to a special grand jury,” I pointedly answer her.

She stops in the hallway. At the end of it, the master bedroom is behind a door that is carelessly ajar, adding to the ambiance of neglect and indifference that chills this place. Berger meets my eyes. “I don't know you personally,” she says. “No one seated on that special grand jury is going to know you personally. It's your word against a murdered
policewoman's that it was she who harassed you and not the other way around, and that you had nothing to do with her murder—even though you seem to think the world is better off without her.”

“Did you get that from Anna or Righter?” I bitterly ask her.

She starts down the hallway. “Pretty soon, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, you're gonna get a thick skin,” she says. “I'm making that my mission.”

B
LOOD IS LIFE
. It behaves like a living creature.

When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in a panic, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear or cut. Platelets immediately rally to plug the hole. There are thirteen clotting factors and together they instigate their alchemy to stop blood loss. I have always thought that blood is bright red for a reason, too. It is the color of alarm, of emergency, of danger and distress. If blood were a clear fluid like sweat, we might not notice when we are injured or when someone else is. Bright red boasts of blood's importance, and it is the siren that sounds when the greatest of all violations has occurred: when another person has maimed or taken a life.

Diane Bray's blood cries out in drips and droplets, splashes and smears. It tattles on who did what and how and in some instances, why. The severity of a beating affects the velocity and volume of blood flying through the air. Cast-off blood from the backswing of a weapon tells the number of blows, which in this case were at least fifty-six. That is as precisely as we can calculate, because some blood spatters overlay other spatters and sorting out how many might be on top of each other is like trying to figure out how many times a hammer struck a nail to drive it into a tree. The number of blows mapped in this room are consistent with what Bray's body told me. But again, so many fractures overlaid others and so much bone was utterly crushed that I, too, lost count. Hate. Incredible lust and rage.

There has been no attempt to clean up what happened in the master bedroom, and what Berger and I find contrasts profoundly with the stillness and sterility of the rest of the house. First, there is what looks like a massive bright pink web spun by crime scene technicians who have used a method called stringing to find the trajectories of blood droplets that are simply everywhere. The objective is to determine distance, velocity and angle, to conjure up through a mathematical model the exact position of Bray's body when each blow was struck. The results look like a strange modern art design, a weird fuchsia geometry that leads the eye to walls, ceiling, floor, antique furniture and the four ornate mirrors where Bray once admired her spectacular, sensual beauty. Coagulated puddles of blood on the floor are now hard and thick like dried molasses, and the king-size bed where Bray's body was so crudely displayed looks as if someone dashed cans of black paint across the bare mattress.

I feel Berger's reaction as she stares. She is silent as she absorbs what is ghastly, truly incomprehensible. She becomes charged with a peculiar energy that only people, especially women, who battle violence for a living can really understand. “Where are the bed linens?” Berger opens the accordion file. “Were they turned in to the labs?”

“We never found them,” I reply, and I am reminded of the motel room at the campground. Those bed linens are missing, too. Chandonne claims bed linens disappeared from his apartment in Paris, I recall his saying.

“Removed before or after she was killed?” Berger slips photographs out of an envelope.

“Before. That's apparent from the bloody transfers on the bare mattress.” I step inside the room, moving around strings that point accusingly at Chandonne's crime like long slender fingers. I show Berger unusual parallel smears on the mattress, the bloody stripes transferred by the coil handle of the chipping hammer when Chandonne set it down on the mattress between or after blows. Berger doesn't see the pattern at first. She stares, slightly frowning as I decipher a chaos of dark stains that are handprints and smears where I believe Chandonne's knees may have been as he was straddling the body and acting out his
horrific sexual fantasies. “These patterns wouldn't have been transferred to the mattress if there were linens on the bed at the time of the attack,” I explain.

Berger studies a photograph of Bray on her back, sprawled across the middle of the mattress, black corduroy pants and belt on, but no shoes and socks, naked from the waist up, a smashed gold watch on her left wrist. A gold ring on her battered right hand is driven into the bone of her finger.

“So either there were no linens on the bed at the time, or he removed them for some reason,” I add.

“I'm trying to envision that.” Berger scans the mattress. “He's in the house. He's forcing her down the hallway, back to this area, to the bedroom. There's no sign of a struggle—no evidence he injured her until they get in here and then boom! All hell breaks loose. My question is this: He gets her back here and then says, ‘Hey, wait a second while I strip the bed'? He takes time to do that?”

“By the time he got her on the bed, I seriously doubt she was talking or able to run. If you look here and here and here and here.” I refer to segments of string taped to blood droplets that begin at the bedroom's entrance. “Cast-off blood from the backswing of the weapon—in this case, the chipping hammer.”

Berger follows the bright pink string design and tries to correlate what it indicates with what she is seeing in photographs she goes through. “Tell me the truth,” she says. “Do you really put a lot of credence in stringing? I know cops who think it's bullshit and a huge waste of time.”

“Not if the person knows what he's doing and is faithful to the science.”

“And the science is?”

I explain to her that blood is ninety-one percent water. It adheres to the physics of liquid, and it is affected by motion and gravity. A typical drop of blood will fall 25.1 feet per second. Stain diameter increases as the dropping distance increases. Blood dripping into blood produces a corona of spatters around the original pool. Splashed blood produces long, narrow spatters around a central stain, and as blood dries, it goes
from bright red to reddish-brown to brown to black. I know experts who have spent their entire careers affixing medicine droppers of blood to ring stands, using plumb lines, squeezing or dripping or pouring or projecting blood onto a variety of target surfaces from a variety of angles and heights, and walking through puddles and stamping and slapping, and experimenting. Then, of course, there is the math, the straight-line geometry and trigonometry for figuring out point of origin.

The blood in Diane Bray's bedroom, at a glance, is a videotape of what happened, but it is in a format that is unreadable unless we use science, experience and deductive reasoning to sort it out. Berger also wants me to use my intuition. Again, she wants me to edge beyond my clinical boundaries. I follow dozens of strands of string that connect spatters on the wall and the door frame and converge to a point in mid-air. Since you can't tape string to thin air, the crime scene technicians moved an antique coat rack in from the foyer and taped the string some five feet from the base of it to determine the point of origin. I show Berger where Bray probably was standing when Chandonne struck the first blow.

“She was several feet inside the door,” I say. “See this void area here?” I point out a space on the wall where there is no blood, just spatters in an aura all around it. “Her body or his blocked blood from hitting that part of the wall. She was upright. Or he was. And if he was upright, we can assume she was because you don't stand straight up and beat someone who is on the floor.” I stand straight up and show her. “Not unless you have arms six feet long. Also, the point of origin is more than five feet off the floor, implying this is where the blows were connecting with their target. Her body. Most likely, her head.” I move several feet closer to the bed. “Now she's down.”

I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

“Did he kick or stomp?” Berger asks.

“Nothing I found would tell me that.” It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emotions of the crime.

“Hands are more personal than feet,” Berger remarks. “That's been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping.”

I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satellite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood several feet from the bed. “She bled out here,” I tell her. “This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra.”

Berger shuffles through photographs and finds the one of Bray's green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor several feet from the bed.

“This close to the bed and we begin finding brain tissue.” I keep deciphering the gory hieroglyphics.

“He places her body on the bed,” Berger interpolates. “Versus forcing her on it. Question is, is she still conscious when he gets her on the bed?”

“I really don't think so.” I point out tiny bits of blackened tissue adhering to the headboard, the walls, a bedside lamp, the ceiling over the bed. “Brain tissue. She doesn't know what's going on anymore. That's just an opinion,” I offer.

“Still alive?”

“She's still bleeding out.” I indicate dense black areas of the mattress. “That's not an opinion. That's a fact. She still has a blood pressure, but it's very unlikely she's conscious.”

“Thank God.” Berger has gotten out her camera and begins taking photographs. I can tell she is skilled and has been properly trained. She walks out of the room and starts shooting as she comes back in, recreating what I have just walked her through and capturing it on film. “I'll get Escudero back here and videotape it,” she lets me know.

“The cops videoed it.”

“I know,” she replies as the flash goes off again and again. She doesn't care. Berger is a perfectionist. She wants it done her way. “I'd love to have you on tape explaining all this, but can't do it.”

She can't, not unless she wants opposing counsel to have access to the same tape. Based on the resounding absence of note-taking, I am certain that she doesn't want Rocky Caggiano to have access to a single word—written or spoken—that goes beyond what is on my standard reports. Her caution is extreme. I am shaded by suspicions that I have a hard time taking seriously. It really hasn't penetrated that anyone might seriously think I murdered the woman whose blood is all around us and under our feet.

 

BERGER AND I
finish with the bedroom. Next we explore other areas of the house that I paid little if any attention to when I was working the scene. I did go through the medicine cabinet in the master bedroom. I always do that. What people keep to alleviate bodily discomforts tells quite a story. I know who has migraines or mental illness or is obsessive about health. I know that Bray's chemicals of choice, for example, were Valium and Ativan. I found hundreds of pills that she had put in Nuprin and Tylenol PM bottles. She had a small amount of BuSpar, too. Bray liked sedatives. She craved soothing. Berger and I explore a guest bedroom down the hall. It is a room I have never stepped inside, and unsurprisingly, it is unlived-in. It isn't even furnished, but instead is cluttered with boxes that Bray apparently never unpacked.

“Are you getting the sensation that she wasn't planning on staying here long?” Berger is beginning to talk to me as if I am part of her prosecution team, her second seat in the trial. “Because I sure am. And you don't take on a major position in a police department without assuming you're going to stick it out for at least a few years. Even if the job is nothing but a stepping stone.”

I look around inside the bathroom and note there is no toilet paper, no tissues, not even soap. But what I find inside the medicine cabinet surprises me. “Ex-Lax,” I announce. “At least a dozen boxes.”

Berger appears in the doorway. “Well, I'll be damned,” she says. “Maybe our vain friend had an eating disorder.”

It is not uncommon with people who suffer from bulimia to use
laxatives to purge themselves after bingeing. I lift the toilet seat and find evidence of vomit that has splashed up on the inside of the rim and the bowl. It is a reddish color. Bray supposedly ate pizza before she died, and I recall that she had very little stomach contents: traces of ground meat and vegetables.

“If someone threw up after eating and then died maybe a half hour or hour later, would you expect his stomach to be totally empty?” Berger follows what I am piecing together.

“There would still be traces of food clinging to the stomach lining.” I lower the toilet seat. “A stomach isn't totally empty or clean unless the person has drunk huge amounts of water and purged. Like a lavage or a repeated infusion of water to wash out a poison, let's say.” Another section of footage plays before my eyes. This room was Bray's dirty, shameful secret. It is closed off from the regular flow of the house and no one but Bray ever came back here, so there was no fear of discovery, and I know enough about eating disorders and addictions to be very aware of the person's desperate need to hide his shameful ritual from others. Bray was determined that no one would ever catch even the slightest hint that she was bingeing and purging, and perhaps her problem explains why she kept so little food in the house. Perhaps the medications helped control the anxiety that is inevitably part of any compulsion.

“Maybe this is one of the reasons she was so quick to run Anderson off after eating,” Berger conjectures. “Bray wanted to get rid of the food and wanted privacy.”

“That would be at least one reason,” I reply. “People with this affliction are so overwhelmed by the impulse it tends to override anything else that might be going on. So yes, she might have wanted to be alone to take care of her problem. And she might have been back here in this bathroom when Chandonne showed up.”