Unnatural Exposure

NIGHT FELL CLEAN and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air. Gusts shook old windowpanes and sounded like spirits rushing past as I rearranged pillows one more time, finally resting on my back in a snarl of Irish linen. But sleep would not touch me, and images from the day returned. I saw bodies without limbs or heads, and sat up, sweating.

I switched on lamps, and the Shelbourne Hotel was suddenly around me in a warm glow of rich old woods and deep red plaids. I put on a robe, my eyes lingering on the phone by my fitfully-slept-in bed. It was almost two A. M. In Richmond, Virginia, it would be five hours earlier, and Pete Marino, commander of the city police department's homicide squad, should be up. He was probably watching TV, smoking, eating something bad for him unless he was on the street.

I dialed his number, and he grabbed the phone as if he were right next to it.

'Trick or treat.' He was loudly on his way to being drunk.

'You're a little early,' I said, already regretting the call. 'By a couple of weeks.'

'Doc?' He paused in confusion. 'That you? You back in Richmond?'

'Still in Dublin. What's all the commotion?'

'Just some of us guys with faces so ugly we don't need masks. So every day is Halloween. Hey! Bubba's bluffing,' he yelled out.

'You always think everybody's bluffing,' a voice fired back. 'It's from being a detective too long.'

'What you talking about? Marino can't even detect his own B. O.'

Laughter in the background was loud as the drunk, derisive comments continued.

'We're playing poker,' Marino said to me. 'What the hell time is it there?'

'You don't want to know,' I answered. 'I've got some unsettling news, but it doesn't sound like we should get into it now.'

'No. No, hold on. Let me just move the phone. Shit. I hate the way the cord gets twisted, you know what I mean? Goddamn it.' I could hear his heavy footsteps and a chair scraping. 'Okay, Doc. So what the hell's going on?'

'I spent most of today discussing the landfill cases with the state pathologist. Marino, I'm increasingly suspicious that Ireland's serial dismemberments are the work of the same individual we're dealing with in Virginia.'

He raised his voice. 'You guys hold it down in there!'

I could hear him moving farther away from his pals as I rearranged the duvet around me. I reached for the last few sips of Black Bush I had carried to bed.

'Dr Foley worked the five Dublin cases,' I went on. 'I've reviewed all of them. Torsos. Spines cut horizontally through the caudal aspect of the fifth cervical vertebral body. Arms and legs severed through the joints, which is usual, as I've pointed out before. Victims are a racial mix, estimated ages between eighteen and thirty-five. All are unidentified and signed out as homicides by unspecified means. In each case, heads and limbs were never found, the remains discovered in privately owned landfills.'

'Damn, if that don't sound familiar.' he said.

'There are other details. But yes, the parallels are profound.'

'So maybe the squirrel's in the U. S. now,' he said. 'Guess it's a damn good thing you went over there, after all.'

He certainly hadn't thought so at first. No one really had. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and when the Royal College of Surgeons had invited me to give a series of lectures at Trinity's medical school, I could not pass up an opportunity to investigate the Dublin crimes. Marino had thought it a waste of time, while the FBI had assumed the value of the research would prove to be little more than statistical.

Doubts were understandable. The homicides in Ireland were more than ten years old, and as was true in the Virginia cases, there was so little to go on. We did not have fingerprints, dentition, sinus configurations or witnesses for identification. We did not have biological samples from people missing to compare to the victims' DNA. We did not know the means of death. Therefore, it was very difficult to say much about the killer, except that I believed he was experienced with a meat saw and quite possibly used one in his profession, or had at one time.

'The last case in Ireland, that we know of, was a decade ago,' I was saying to Marino over the line. 'In the past two years we've had four in Virginia.'

'So you're thinking he stopped for eight years?' he said. 'Why? He was in prison, maybe, for some other crime?'

'I don't know. He may have been killing somewhere else and the cases haven't been connected,' I replied as wind made unearthly sounds.

'There's those serial cases in South Africa,' he thickly thought out loud. 'In Florence, Germany, Russia, Australia. Shit, now that you think of it, they're friggin' everywhere. Hey!' He put his hand over the phone. 'Smoke your own damn cigarettes! What do you think this is? Friggin' welfare!'

Male voices were rowdy in the background, and someone had put on Randy Travis.

'Sounds like you're having fun,' I dryly said. 'Please don't invite me next year, either.'

'Bunch of animals,' he mumbled. 'Don't ask me why I do this. Every time they drink me outa house, home. Cheat at cards.'

'The M. O. in these cases is very distinctive.' My tone was meant to sober.

'Okay,' he said. 'So if this guy started in Dublin, maybe we're looking for someone Irish. I think you should hurry back home.' He belched. 'Sounds like we need to go to Quantico and get on this. You told Benton yet?'

Benton Wesley headed the FBI's Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit, or CASKU, for which both Marino and I were consultants.

'I haven't had a chance to tell him yet.' I replied, hesitantly. 'Maybe you can give him a heads-up. I'll get home as soon as I can.'

'Tomorrow would be good.'

'I'm not finished with the lecture series here,' I said.

'Ain't a place in the world that don't want you to lecture. You could probably do that and nothing else,' he said, and I knew he was about to dig into me.

'We export our violence to other countries,' I said. 'The least we can do is teach them what we know, what we've learned from years of working these crimes . . .'

'Lectures ain't why you're staying in the land of leprechauns, Doc,' he interrupted as a flip-top popped. 'It ain't why, and you know it.'

'Marino,' I warned. 'Don't do this.'

But he kept on. 'Ever since Wesley's divorce, you've found one reason or another to skip along the Yellow Brick Road, right on out of town. And you don't want to come home now, I can tell from the way you sound, because you don't want to deal, take a look at your hand and take your chances. Let me tell you. Comes a time when you got to call or fold . . .'

'Point taken.' I was gentle as I cut off his besotted good intentions. 'Marino, don't stay up all night.'

The Coroner's Office was at No. 3 Store Street, across from the Custom House and central bus station, near docks and the river Liffey. The brick building was small and old, the alleyway leading to the back barred by a heavy black gate with MORGUE painted across it in bold white letters. Climbing steps to the Georgian entrance, I rang the bell and waited in mist.

It was cool this Tuesday morning, trees beginning to look like fall. I could feel my lack of sleep. My eyes burned, my head was dull, and I was unsettled by what Marino had said before I had almost hung up on him.

'Hello.' The administrator cheerfully let me in. 'How are we this morning, Dr Scarpetta?'

His name was Jimmy Shaw, and he was very young and Irish, with hair as fiery as copper ivy, and eyes as blue as sky.

'I've been better,' I confessed.

'Well, I was just boiling tea,' he said, shutting us inside a narrow, dimly lit hallway, which we followed to his office. 'Sounds like you could use a cup.'

'That would be lovely, Jimmy,' I said.

'As for the good doctor, she should be finishing up an inquest.' He glanced at his watch as we entered his cluttered small space. 'She should be out in no time.'

His desk was dominated by a large Coroner's Inquiries book, black and bound in heavy leather, and he had been reading a biography of Steve McQueen and eating toast before I arrived. Momentarily, he was setting a mug of tea within my reach, not asking how I took it, for by now he knew.

'A little toast with jam?' he asked as he did every morning.

'I ate at the hotel, thanks.' I gave the same reply as he sat behind his desk.

'Never stops me from eating again.' He smiled, slipping on glasses. 'I'll just go over your schedule, then. You lecture at eleven this morning, then again at one P. M. Both at the college, in the old pathology building. I should expect about seventy-five students for each, but there could be more. I don't know. You're awfully popular over here, Dr Kay Scarpetta,' he cheerfully said. 'Or maybe it's just that American violence is so exotic to us.'

'That's rather much like calling a plague exotic,' I said.

'Well, we can't help but be fascinated by what you see.'

'And I guess that bothers me,' I said in a friendly but ominous way. 'Don't be too fascinated.'

We were interrupted by the phone, which he snapped up with the impatience of one who answers it too often.

Listening for a moment, he brusquely said. 'Right, right. Well, we can't place an order like that just yet. I'll have to ring you back another time.

'I've been wanting computers for years,' he complained to me as he hung up. 'No bloody money when you're the dog wagged by the Socialist tail.'

'There will never be enough money. Dead men don't vote.'

'The bloody truth. So what's the topic of the day?' he wanted to know.

'Sexual homicide,' I replied. 'Specifically the role DNA can play.'

'These dismemberments you're so interested in.' He sipped tea. 'Do you think they're sexual? I mean, would that be the motivation on the part of whoever would do this?' His eyes were keen with interest.

'It's certainly an element,' I replied.

'But how can you know that when none of the victims has ever been identified? Couldn't it just be someone who kills for sport? Like, say, your Son of Sam, for example?'

'What the Son of Sam did had a sexual element,' I said, looking around for my pathologist friend. 'Do you know how much longer she might be? I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a hurry.'

Shaw glanced at his watch again. 'You can check. Or I suppose she may have gone on to the morgue. We have a case coming in. A young male, suspected suicide.'

'I'll see if I can find her.' I got up.

Off the hallway near the entrance was the coroner's court, where inquests for unnatural deaths were held before a jury. This included industrial and traffic accidents, homicides and suicides, the proceedings in camera, for the press in Ireland was not allowed to print many details. I ducked inside a stark, chilly room of varnished benches and naked walls, and found several men inside, tucking paperwork into briefcases.

'I'm looking for the coroner,' I said.

'She slipped out about twenty minutes ago. Believe she had a viewing,' one of them said.

I left the building through the back door. Crossing a small parking lot, I headed to the morgue as an old man came out of it. He seemed disoriented, almost stumbling as he looked about, dazed. For an instant, he stared at me as if I held some answer, and my heart hurt for him. No business that had brought him here could possibly be kind. I watched him hurry toward the gate as Dr Margaret Foley suddenly emerged after him, harried, her graying hair disarrayed.

'My God!' She almost ran into me. 'I turn my back for a minute and he's gone.'

The man let himself out, the gate flung open wide as he fled. Foley trotted across the parking lot to shut and latch it again. When she got back to me, she was out of breath and almost tripped over a bump in the pavement.

'Kay, you're out and about early,' she said.

'A relative?' I asked.

'The father. Left without identifying him, before I could even pull back the sheet. That will foul me up the rest of the day.'

She led me inside the small brick morgue with its white porcelain autopsy tables that probably belonged in a medical museum and old iron stove that heated nothing anymore. The air was refrigerated-chilly, modern equipment nonexistent except for electric autopsy saws. Thin gray light seeped through opaque skylights, barely illuminating the white paper sheet covering a body that a father could not bear to see.

'It's always the hardest part,' she was saying. 'No one should ever have to look at anyone in here.'

I followed her into a small storeroom and helped carry out boxes of new syringes, masks and gloves.

'Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,' she went on as we worked. 'Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They hang themselves or jump off bridges.' She glanced at me as we restocked a surgical cart. 'Thank God we don't have guns. Especially since I don't have an X-ray machine.'

Foley was a slight woman with old-fashioned thick glasses and a penchant for tweed. We had met years ago at an international forensic science conference in Vienna, when female forensic pathologists were a rare breed, especially overseas. We quickly had become friends.