Point of Origin

  Kellie Shephard had second-degree burns to her back and feet, and that was all.

  “What about a burglar alarm?” I asked.

  “Wasn’t armed,” McGovern replied.

  She opened the manila envelope and began spreading scene photographs over a desk. Benton, Gerde, and I took our time studying them. The victim in her bloody pajamas was facedown in the bathroom doorway, one arm under her body, the other straight out in front of her as if she had been reaching for something. Her legs were straight and close together, her feet almost reaching the toilet. Sooty water on the floor made it impossible to find bloody drag marks, had they existed, but close-ups of the door frame and surrounding wall showed obvious cuts to the wood that appeared fresh.

  “The fire’s point of origin,” McGovern said, “is right here.”

  She pointed to a photograph of the interior of the scorched bathroom.

  “This corner near the tub where there’s an open window with a curtain,” she said. “And in that area, as you can see, are burned remnants of wooden furniture and pillows from a couch.”

  She tapped the photograph.

  “So we’ve got an open door and an open window, or a flue and a chimney, so to speak. Just like a fireplace,” she went on. “The fire starts here on the tile floor, and involves the curtains. But the flames didn’t quite have the energy this time to fully engage the ceiling.”

  “Why do you suppose that is?” I asked.

  “Can only be one good reason,” she replied. “The damn thing wasn’t built right. I mean, it’s clear as day the killer piled furniture, couch cushions, and whatever into the bathroom to build his fire. But it just never got going the way it needed to. The initial fire was unable to involve the piled fuel load because of the open window and the flame bending toward it. He also didn’t stand around and watch, either, or he would have realized he screwed up. This time his fire didn’t do much more than lick over the body like a dragon’s tongue.”

  Benton was so silent and still he looked like a statue as his eyes traveled over photographs. I could tell he had much on his mind, but typically, he was guarded in his words. He had never worked with McGovern before, and he did not know Dr. Abraham Gerde.

  “We’re going to be a long time,” I said to him.

  “I’m heading out to the scene,” he replied.

  His face was stony, the way it got when he felt evil like a cold draft. I gave him my eyes, and his met mine.

  “You can follow me,” McGovern offered him.

  “Thanks.”

  “One other thing,” McGovern said. “The back door was unlocked, and there was an empty cat pan in the grass by the steps.”

  “So you think she went outside to empty the cat pan?” Gerde asked both of them. “And this guy was waiting for her?”

  “It’s just a theory,” said McGovern.

  “I don’t know,” Wesley said.

  “Then the killer knew she had a cat?” I said dubiously. “And that she eventually was going to let it out that night or clean out the cat pan?”

  “We don’t know that she didn’t empty the litter box earlier that evening and leave it in the yard to air out,” Wesley pointed out as he ripped off his gown. “She may have turned off her alarm and opened the door late that night or in the early morning hours for some other reason.”

  “And the cat?” I asked. “Has it shown up?”

  “Not yet,” McGovern said, and she and Benton left.

  “I’m going to start swabbing,” I said to Gerde.

  He reached for a camera and started shooting as I adjusted a light. I studied the cut to her face, and collected several fibers from it, and a wavy brown hair, four and a half inches long, that I suspected was her own. But there were other hairs, red and short, and I could tell they had been recently dyed because one-sixteenth of an inch at the root was dark. Of course, cat fur was everywhere, most likely transferred to bloody surfaces of the body when the victim was on the floor.

  “A Persian, maybe?” Gerde asked. “Long, very fine fur?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  15

  THE TASK OF collecting trace evidence was overwhelming and had to be done before anything else. People generally have no idea what a microscopic pigpen they carry with them until someone like me starts scouring clothing and bodies for barely visible debris. I found splinters of wood, likely from the floor and walls, and cat litter, dirt, bits and pieces of insects and plants, and the expected ash and trash from the fire. But the most telling discovery came from the tremendous injury to her neck. Through a lens, I found two shiny, metallic specks. I collected them with the tip of my little finger, and delicately transferred them to a square of clean white cotton cloth.

  There was a dissecting microscope on top of an old metal desk, and I set the magnification to twenty and adjusted the illuminator. I could scarcely believe it when I saw the tiny flattened and twisted silvery shavings in the bright circle of light.

  “This is very important,” I started talking fast. “I’m going to pack them in cotton inside an evidence container, and we need to make double sure there’s no other debris like this in any of the other wounds. To the naked eye, it flashes like a piece of silver glitter.”

  “Transferred from the weapon?”

  Gerde was excited, too, and he came over to take a look.

  “They were embedded deep inside the wound to her neck. So yes, I’d say that was a transfer, similar to what I found in the Warrenton case,” I answered him.

  “And we know what about that?”

  “A magnesium turning,” I answered. “And we don’t mention anything about this to anyone. We don’t want this leaking to the press. I’ll let Benton and McGovern know.”

  “You got it,” he said with feeling.

  There were twenty-seven wounds, and after a painful scrutinizing of all of them, we found no other bits of the shiny metal, and this struck me as a little puzzling since I had assumed the throat had been cut last. If that were the case, why wasn’t the turning transferred to an earlier wound? I believed it would have been, especially in those instances when the knife had penetrated up to the guard and was swiped clean by muscular and elastic tissue as the blade is withdrawn.

  “Not impossible but inconsistent,” I said to Gerde as I began measuring the cut to the throat. “Six and three-quarters inches long,” I said, jotting it down on a body diagram. “Shallow up around the right ear, then deep, through the strap muscles and trachea, then shallow again higher on the opposite side of the neck. Consistent with the knife drawn across the neck from behind, by a left-handed assailant.”

  It was almost two P.M. when we finally began washing the body, and for minutes, water draining through the steel tabletop was bright red. I scrubbed stubborn blood with a big soft sponge, and her wounds seemed even more gaping and mutilating when her taut brown skin was clean. Kellie Shephard had been a beautiful woman, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion as smooth as polished wood. She was five-foot-eight, with a lean, athletic figure. Her fingernails were unpainted, and she had been wearing no jewelry when she was found.

  When we opened her up, her pierced chest cavity was filled with almost a liter of blood that had hemorrhaged from the great vessels leading to and from her heart and from her lungs. After receiving these injuries, she would have bled to death in, at the most, minutes, and I placed the timing of those attacks later in the struggle, when she was weakening and slowing down. The angles of those wounds were slight enough for me to suspect she had been moving very little on the floor when they had been inflicted from above. Then she had managed to roll over, perhaps in her last dying effort to protect herself, and I conjectured that this was when her throat was slashed.

  “Someone should have had an awful lot of blood on him,” I commented as I began measuring the cuts to the hands.

  “No kidding.”

  “He had to clean up somewhere. You don’t walk into a motel lobby looking like that.”


  “Unless he lives around here.”

  “Or got into his vehicle and hoped he didn’t get pulled for something.”

  “She’s got a little brownish fluid in her stomach.”

  “So she hadn’t eaten recently, probably not since dinner, at any rate,” I said. “I guess we need to find out if her bed was unmade.”

  I was getting an image of a woman asleep when something happened either late Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday morning. For some reason, she got up and turned off the alarm and unlocked the back door. Gerde and I used surgical staples to close the Y incision at shortly past four. I cleaned up in the morgue’s small dressing room, where a mannikin used for staging violent deaths in court was in a state of disarray and undress on the shower floor.

  Other than teenagers burning down old farmhouses, arsons in Lehigh were rare. Violence in the tidy middle-class subdivision called Wescosville where Shephard had lived was unheard of, as well. Crime there had never been more serious than smash and grabs, when a thief spied a pocketbook or wallet in plain view inside a house, and broke in and grabbed. Since there was no police department in Lehigh, by the time state troopers responded to the clanging burglar alarm, the thief was long gone.

  I got my BDUs and steel-reinforced boots from my turn-out bag and shared the same changing room with the mannikin. Gerde was kind enough to give me a ride to the fire scene, and I was impressed by lush fir trees and roadside flower gardens, and every now and then, a well-kept, unassuming church. We turned on Hanover Drive, where homes were modern brick and wood, two-story and spacious, with basketball hoops, bicycles, and other signs of children.

  “Do you have any idea of the price range?” I said, watching more houses flow past.

  “Two-to-three-hundred-K range,” he said. “Got a lot of engineers, nurses, stock brokers, and executives back here. Plus, I-78 is the main artery through Lehigh Valley, and you can shoot straight out on that and be in New York in an hour and a half. So some people commute back and forth to the city.”

  “What else is around here?” I asked.

  “A lot of industrial parks are just ten or fifteen minutes away. Coca-Cola, Air Products, Nestlé warehouses, Perrier. You pretty much name it. And farmland.”

  “But she worked at the hospital.”

  “Right. And that’s at most a ten-minute drive, as you can tell.”

  “Are you aware of ever having seen her before?”

  Gerde thought for a minute as thin smoke drifted up from behind trees at the end of the street.

  “I’m fairly certain I’ve seen her in the cafeteria before,” he answered. “It’s hard not to notice someone who looked like that. She may have been at a table with other nurses, I don’t really recall. But I don’t think we ever spoke.”

  Shephard’s house was yellow clapboard with white trim, and although the fire may not have been difficult to contain, the damage from water, and from axes chopping great holes to vent the fire out of the roof, was devastating. What was left was a sad, sooty face with a caved-in head, and shattered windows that were depressed, lifeless eyes. Borders of wildflowers were trampled, the neatly mown grass turned to mud, and a late-model Camry parked in the drive was covered with cinders. Fire department and ATF investigators were working inside, while two FBI agents in flak jackets were prowling the perimeter.

  I found McGovern in the backyard talking to an intense young woman dressed in cut-off jeans, sandals, and a T-shirt.

  “And that was what? Close to six?” McGovern was saying to her.

  “That’s right. I was getting dinner ready and saw her pull into her driveway, parking exactly where her car is now,” the woman excitedly recounted. “She went inside, then came out maybe thirty minutes later and began pulling weeds. She liked to work in the yard, cut her own grass and everything.”

  McGovern watched me as I walked up.

  “This is Mrs. Harvey,” she said to me. “The next-door neighbor.”

  “Hello,” I said to Mrs. Harvey, whose eyes were bright with excitement that bordered on fear.

  “Dr. Scarpetta is a medical examiner,” McGovern explained.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Harvey.

  “Did you see Kellie again that night?” McGovern then asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  “She went in,” she said, “I guess, and that was it. I know she worked real hard and usually didn’t stay up late.”

  “What about a relationship? Was there anybody she saw?”

  “Oh, she’s been through them,” Mrs. Harvey said. “A doctor here and there, different folks from the hospital. I remember last year she started seeing this man who had been her patient. Nothing lasted very long, it seems to me. She’s so beautiful, that’s the problem. The men wanted one thing, and she had something different in mind. I know because she used to make remarks about it.”

  “But nobody recently?” McGovern asked.

  Mrs. Harvey had to think.

  “Just her girlfriends,” she replied. “She has a couple people she works with, and sometimes they dropped by or went off somewhere together. But I don’t remember any activity that night. I mean, that’s not saying I would know. Someone could have come over, and I wouldn’t necessarily have heard a thing.”

  “Have we found her cat?” I asked.

  McGovern did not answer.

  “That darn cat,” Mrs. Harvey said. “Pumpkin. Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.”

  She smiled and her eyes filled with tears.

  “That was her child,” Harvey said.

  “An indoor cat?” I then asked.

  “Oh, absolutely. Kellie never let that cat out of the house, treated him like a hothouse tomato.”

  “His litter box was found in the backyard,” McGovern told her. “Did Kellie sometimes empty it and leave it out all night? Or for that matter, did she have a habit of emptying it at night? Going out after dark, the door unlocked and the alarm off.”

  Harvey looked confused, and I suspected she had no idea that her neighbor had been murdered.

  “Well,” she said, “I do know that I’ve seen her empty the litter before, but always in a trash bag that went into the super can. So it wouldn’t make sense for her to do that at night. My guess is, she might have emptied it and left it outside to air, you know? Or maybe she just didn’t have time to hose it off and was going to do it the next morning. But whatever the case, that cat knew how to use the toilet. So it wouldn’t be any big deal for him to be without his litter box for a night.”

  She stared off at a state police car cruising by.

  “No one’s said how the fire started,” Harvey went on. “Do we know?”

  “We’re working on it,” McGovern said.

  “She didn’t die . . . well, it was quick, wasn’t it?”

  She squinted in the setting sun, and she bit her lower lip.

  “I just don’t want to think she suffered,” she said.

  “Most people who die in fires don’t suffer,” I answered, evading her question with gentle words. “Usually carbon monoxide overcomes them and they aren’t conscious.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said.

  “I’ll be inside,” McGovern said to me.

  “Mrs. Harvey,” I said, “did you know Kellie very well?”

  “We’ve been neighbors for almost five years. Not that we did a whole lot together, but I certainly knew her.”

  “I’m wondering if you might have any recent photographs of her, or know someone who might?”

  “I might have something.”

  “I have to make sure of the identification,” I then said, although my motive was other than that.

  I wanted to see for myself what Shephard had looked like in life.

  “And if there’s anything else you can tell me about her, I would appreciate it,” I went on. “For example, does she have family here?”

  “Oh no,” Harvey said, staring at her neighbor’s ruined house. “She was from all over. Her father was military, you know,
and I think he and her mom live somewhere in North Carolina. Kellie was very worldly from having moved around so much. I used to tell her I wished I could be as strong and smart as her. She didn’t take crap off anyone, let me tell you. One time there was a snake on my deck, and I called her, all hysterical. She came on and chased it in the yard and killed it with a shovel. I guess she had to get that way because the men just wouldn’t leave her alone. I always told her she could be a movie star, and she would say, But Sandra, I can’t act. And I would say, But neither can most of them!”

  “She was pretty streetwise, then,” I said.

  “You bet. That’s why she had that burglar alarm put in. Feisty and streetwise, that’s Kellie. If you want to come in with me, I’ll see what I can do about pictures.”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”

  We cut through a hedge and I followed her up steps into her big, bright kitchen. It was apparent that Harvey liked to cook, based on a well-stocked pantry and every conceivable appliance. Cookware hung from hooks in the ceiling, and whatever was simmering on the stove smelled rich with beef and onions, perhaps a stroganoff or stew.

  “If you want to sit right over there by the window, I’ll go get what I’ve got from the den,” she said.

  I took a seat at the breakfast table and looked out the window at Kellie Shephard’s house. I could see people passing behind broken windows, and someone had set up lights because the sun was low and smoldering. I wondered how often her neighbor had watched her come and go.

  Certainly, Harvey was curious about the life of a woman exotic enough to be a movie star, and I wondered if someone could have stalked Shephard without her neighbor noticing a strange car or person in the area. But I had to be careful what I asked, because it was not publicly known that Shephard had died a violent death.

  “Well, I can’t believe it,” Harvey called out to me as she returned to the kitchen. “I got something better. You know, some television crew was at the hospital last week filming a feature about the trauma center. It showed on the evening news, and Kellie was in it, so I taped it. I can’t believe it took me this long to think of it, but my brain’s not working all that well, if you know what I mean.”