It was impossible for me to sit still. In my bedroom I finally stripped and washed myself with a cloth. I put on a robe and slippers as I tried to think what I could do to occupy my time, because I was not one to allow empty space in my mind. I fantasized there was a message from Lucy but I couldn’t access it right now. I wrote letters and ended up crumpling them and tossing them into the fire. I watched the paper brown around the edges, ignite and turn black. Sleet smacked, and it began to get colder inside.
The temperature in my house slowly dropped, hours slipping deeper into the still morning. I tried to sleep and couldn’t get warm. My mind wouldn’t get still. My thoughts bounced from Lucy to Benton to the awful scene where I’d just been. I saw a hemorrhaging woman dragged across the floor, and small owl eyes staring out of rotting flesh. I shifted positions continually. Lucy did not call.
Fear picked at my loose threads when I looked out the window into my dark backyard. My breath fogged the glass, and the click-click of sleet turned into knitting needles when I dozed, to my mother knitting in Miami when my father was dying, knitting endless scarves for the poor in some cold place. Not a single car went by. I called Rita at the guard booth. She didn’t answer.
My eyes blurred as I tried to drift off again at 3:00 A.M. Tree branches cracked like guns going off, and in the distance a train lumbered along the river. Its forlorn horn seemed to set the pitch for a percussion of screeching, clanking and rumbling that made me more uneasy. I lay in the dark, a comforter wrapped around me, and when daylight bruised the horizon, the power came back on. Marino called minutes later.
“What time you want me to pick you up?” he asked, his voice hoarse from sleep.
“Pick me up for what?” I blearily walked into the kitchen to make coffee.
“Work.”
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“You looked out the window, Doc?” he asked. “No way you’re going anywhere in that Nazi-mobile of yours.”
“I’ve told you not to say that. It’s not funny.”
I went to the window and opened the blinds. The world was rock candy and glass coating every shrub and tree. Grass was a thick, stiff carpet. Icicles bared long teeth from the eaves, and I knew my car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I need a ride.”
Marino’s big truck with its big chains churned up Richmond’s roads for almost an hour before we reached my office. There wasn’t another car in the lot. We carefully made our way into the building, our feet almost going out from under us several times because the pavement was glazed and we were the first to challenge it. I draped my coat over my chair in my office and both of us headed to the locker rooms to change.
The rescue squad had used a transportable autopsy table so we didn’t have to lift the body off a gurney. We unzipped the pouch in the vast silence of this empty theater of death and opened the bloody sheets. Under the scrutiny of overhead diffused light, her wounds looked even more terrible. I pulled a fluorescent magnifying lamp closer, adjusting its arm and peering through the lens.
Her magnified skin was a desert of dried, cracked blood and canyons of gashes and gaping wounds. I collected hairs, dozens of them, those pale blond, baby-fine hairs. Most were six or seven or eight inches long. They adhered to her belly, shoulders and breasts. I didn’t find any on her face, and I placed the hairs inside a paper envelope to keep them dry.
Hours were thieves slipping past, stealing the morning, and no matter how hard I tried to find an explanation for the ripped tightly knit sweater and underwire bra, there wasn’t another one except the truth. The killer had done it with his bare hands.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” I said. “You’re talking about incredible strength.”
“Maybe he’s on cocaine or angel dust or something,” Marino said. “That might explain what he did to her, too. It might also account for the Gold Dot ammo, you know, if he’s doing drug deals on the street.”
“I think that’s the ammo Lucy said something about,” I seemed to recall.
“Hot shit on the street,” Marino said. “Big with dopers.”
“If he was whacked out on drugs,” I pointed out as I placed fibers in another envelope, “then it strikes me as rather improbable his thinking would be so organized. He put out the closed sign, locked the door, didn’t go out the back armed door until he was ready. And maybe washed up.”
“No evidence he did,” Marino let me know. “Nothing in the drains or sink or toilet. No bloody paper towels. No nothing. Not even on the door he opened on his way out of the storeroom, so what I’m thinking is he used something—maybe part of his clothing, a paper towel, who knows—to open the door with so he didn’t get blood or prints on the knob.”
“That’s not exactly disorganized. Not the actions of someone under the influence of drugs.”
“I’d rather think he was on drugs,” Marino said ominously. “The alternative’s a really bad one, I mean if he’s the Incredible Hulk or something. I wish . . .”
He stopped himself and I knew he was about to say he wished Benton were here to offer his experienced opinion. Yet it was so easy to depend on someone else when not all theories required an expert. Every scene and every wound resonated the emotion of the crime, and this homicide was frenzied and it was sexual and it was rage. That became only more apparent when I found large irregular areas of contusion. When I looked at them through a lens I saw small, curvilinear marks.
“Bite marks,” I said.
Marino came over to look.
“What’s left of them. Beaten with blunt force,” I added.
I moved the light around, looking for more and found two on the side of her right palm and one on the bottom of her left foot and two on the bottom of the right.
“Jesus,” Marino muttered in an unnerved tone I rarely heard.
He moved from the wounded hands to the feet, staring.
“What the hell are we dealing with, Doc?” he asked.
All of the bite marks were contused so badly I could make out the abrasions of teeth but nothing more. The indentations needed for casting had been eradicated. Nothing was going to assist us. There was too little left to ever make a match.
I swabbed for saliva and began taking one-by-one photographs as I tried to imagine what biting palms and soles might mean to whoever had killed her. Did he know her, after all? Were her hands and feet symbolic to him, a reminder of who she was, just as her face had been?
“So he ain’t totally ignorant about evidence,” Marino said.
“It appears he knows bite marks can identify someone,” I replied as I used a spray hose to wash off the body.
“Brrrrr,” Marino shivered. “That always makes me cold.”
“She doesn’t feel it.”
“I hope like hell she didn’t feel any of what’s happened to her.”
“I think by the time he started in, she was already dead or close to dead, thank you, Lord,” I said.
Her autopsy revealed something else to add to the horror. The bullet that had entered Kim Luong’s neck and hit her carotid had also bruised her spinal cord between the fifth and sixth cervical disks, instantly paralyzing her. She could breathe and talk but not move as he dragged her down the aisle, her blood sweeping shelves, her useless arms spread wide, limp, unable to clutch the wound in her neck. In my mind I saw the terror in her eyes. I heard her whimper as she wondered what he was going to do to her next, as she watched herself die.
“Goddamn bastard!” I said.
“I’m sorry as fucking hell they switched to lethal injection,” Marino said in a hard, hateful voice. “Assholes like this ought to fry. They ought to choke on cyanide gas till their fucking eyes pop out. Instead, we send them off to a nice little nap.”
I swiftly ran the scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum and down to the pelvis in the usual incision shaped like a Y. Marino was quiet for a moment.
“You think you could stick th
at needle in his arm, Doc? You think you could turn on the gas or strap him in the chair and hit the switch?”
I didn’t reply.
“I think about that a lot,” he went on.
“I wouldn’t think about it too much,” I said.
“I know you could do it.” He wouldn’t let it rest. “And you know what else, I think you’d like it but just won’t admit it, not even to yourself. Sometimes I really want to kill someone.”
I glanced up at him, blood speckling my face shield and saturating the long sleeves of my gown.
“Now you’re really worrying me,” I said, and I meant it.
“See, I think a lot of people feel that way and just won’t admit it.”
Her heart and lungs were within normal limits.
“I think most people don’t feel that way.”
Marino was getting more belligerent, as if his rage over what had been done to Kim Luong made him feel as powerless as she had been.
“I think Lucy feels that way,” he said.
I glanced up at him, refusing to believe it.
“I think she just waits for an opportunity. And if she don’t get that out of her system, she’s gonna end up waiting tables.”
“Be quiet, Marino.”
“Truth hurts, don’t it? Least I admit it. Take the asshole who did this. Me? I’d like to handcuff him to a chair, shackle his ankles and put the barrel of my pistol in his mouth and ask him if he had an orthodontist because he was about to need one.”
Her spleen, kidneys, liver were within normal limits.
“Then I’d stick it against his eye, tell him to take a look and let me know if I needed to clean the inside of the barrel.”
Inside her stomach were what appeared to be remnants of chicken, rice and vegetables, and I thought of the container and fork that had been found in a paper bag near her pocketbook and coat.
“Hell, maybe I’d just back up like I’m on the fucking firing range and use him as a target, see how much he liked . . .”
“Stop it!” I said.
He shut up.
“Goddamn it, Marino. What’s gotten into you?” I asked, scalpel in one hand, forceps in the other.
He was quiet for a while, our silence heavy as I worked and kept him busy with various tasks.
Then he said, “The woman who ran up to the ambulance last night is a friend of Kim’s, works as a waitress at Shoney’s, was taking night classes at VCU. They lived together. So the friend gets home from class. She’s got no idea what’s happened and her phone rings, and this dumb-ass reporter says, ‘What was your reaction when you heard?’ ”
He paused. I looked up at him as he stared at the opened-up body, the chest cavity empty and gleaming red, pale ribs gracefully bowed out from the perfectly straight spine. I plugged in the Stryker saw.
“According to the friend, there’s no indication she might have known anybody who struck her as weird. Nobody coming into the store and bothering her, giving her the creeps. There was a false alarm earlier in the week, Tuesday, same back door, it happens a lot. People forget it’s armed,” he went on, his eyes distant. “It’s like he just suddenly flew out of hell.”
I began sawing through the skull with all its comminuted fractures and areas punched out by violent blows of a tool or tools I couldn’t identify. A hot bony dust drifted through the air.
26
By early afternoon, roads had thawed enough so that other diligent, hopelessly behind forensic scientists could come to work. I decided to make my rounds because I was frantic.
My first stop was the Forensic Biology Section, a ten-thousand-square-foot area where only an authorized few had access to electronic cards for the locks. People didn’t drop by to chat. They traversed the corridor and glanced at intense scientists in white behind glass but rarely got any closer than that.
I pressed an intercom button to see if Jamie Kuhn was in.
“Let me find him,” a voice called back.
The instant he opened the door, Kuhn held out a clean, long white lab coat, gloves and mask. Contamination was the enemy of DNA, especially in an era when every pipette, microtome, glove, refrigerator and even pen used for labeling might be questioned in court. The degree of laboratory precautions had become just about as stringent as the sterile procedures found in the operating room.
“I hate to do this to you, Jamie,” I said.
“You always say that,” he said. “Come on in.”
There were three sets of doors to pass through, and fresh lab coats hung in each airlocked space to make sure you exchanged the one you’d just put on for yet another one. Tacky paper on the floors was for the bottom of your shoes. The process was repeated twice more to make sure no one carried contaminants from one area into another.
The examiners’ work area was an open, bright room of black counterspace and computers, water baths, containment units and laminar flow hoods. Individual stations were neatly arranged with mineral oil, autopipettes, polypropylene tubes and tube racks. Reagents, or the substances used to cause reactions, were made in big batches from molecular biology–grade chemicals. They were given unique identification numbers and stored in small aliquots away from chemicals kept for general use.
Contamination was managed primarily through serialization, heat denaturation, enzymatic digestion, screening, repeated analysis, ultraviolet irradiation, iodinizing irradiation, use of controls and samples taken from a healthy volunteer. If all else failed, the examiner just quit on certain samples. Maybe he tried again in a few months. Maybe he didn’t.
Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, had made it possible to get DNA results in days instead of weeks. Now with short tandem repeat typing, STR, it was theoretically possible that Kuhn could get results in a day. That was, if there was cellular tissue for testing, and in the case of the pale hair from the unidentified man found in the container, there was not.
“That’s a damn shame,” I said. “Because it looks like I’ve found more of it. This time adhering to the body of the woman murdered last night at the Quik Cary.”
“Wait a minute. Am I hearing this right? The hair from the container guy’s clothing matches hair on her?”
“Looks like it. You can see my urgency.”
“Your urgency’s about to get more urgent,” he said. “Because the hair’s not cat hair, dog hair. It’s not animal hair. It’s human.”
“It can’t be,” I said.
“It absolutely is.”
Kuhn was a wiry young man who didn’t get excited by much. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen his eyes light up.
“Fine, unpigmented, rudimentary,” he went on. “Baby hair. I figured maybe the guy has a baby at home. But now, two cases? Maybe the same hair on the murdered lady?”
“Baby hair isn’t six or seven inches long,” I told him. “That’s what I collected from her body.”
“Maybe it grows longer in Belgium,” he dryly said.
“Let’s talk about the unidentified man in the container first. What would baby hair be doing all over him?” I asked. “Even if he does have a baby back home? And even if it were possible for baby hair to be that long?”
“Not all of them are that long. Some are extremely short. Like stubble when you shave.”
“Any of the hair forcibly removed?” I asked.
“I’m not seeing any roots with follicular tissues still adhering—mostly the bulbous-shaped roots you associate with hair naturally falling out. Shedding, in other words. Which is why I can’t do DNA.”
“But some of it’s been cut or shaved?” I thought out loud, drawing a blank.
“Right. Some’s been cut, some hasn’t. Like those weird styles. You’ve seen them—short on top and long and wispy on the sides.”
“Not on a baby I haven’t,” I answered.
“What if he had triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets because his wife had been on a fertility drug?” Kuhn suggested. “The hair would be the same but if it’s coming from different kids tha
t might explain the different lengths. The DNA would be the same, too, saying you had anything to test.”
In identical twins, triplets, sextuplets, the DNA was identical, only the fingerprints were different.
“Dr. Scarpetta,” Kuhn said, “all I can tell you is the hairs are alike visually, their morphology the same, in other words.”
“Well, these hairs on this lady are alike visually, too.”
“Any short ones, as if they were cut?”
“No,” I replied.
“Sorry I don’t have more to tell you,” he said.
“Believe me, Jamie, you’ve just told me quite a lot,” I said. “I just don’t know what any of it means.”
“You figure it out,” he tried to lighten up, “we’ll write a paper on it.”
I tried the trace evidence lab next and didn’t even bother saying hello to Larry Posner. He was peering into a microscope that probably was more sharply focused than he was when he looked up at me.
“Larry,” I said, “everything’s going to hell.”
“Always has been.”
“What about our unidentified guy? Anything?” I asked. “Because let me tell you, I’m really groping.”
“I’m relieved. I thought you dropped by to ask me about your lady downstairs,” he replied. “And I was going to have to break the news that I’m not Mercury with winged feet.”
“There may be a link between the two cases. Same weird hair found on the bodies. Human hair, Larry.”
He thought about this for a long moment.
“I don’t get it,” he finally said. “And I hate to tell you, but I don’t have anything quite so dramatic to report to you.”
“Anything you can tell me at all?” I asked.
“Start with the soil samples from the container. PLM picked up the usual,” he began, referring to the polarized light microscopy. “Quartz, sand, diatomite, flint and elements like iron and aluminum. Lots of trash. Glass, paint chips, vegetable debris, rodent hairs. You can only begin to imagine all the crap inside a cargo container like that.