The Body Farm

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t go there.”

  I sat down in a chair by the bed and blew out a long, exhausted breath.

  “A hotel maybe?” I asked. “A friend?”

  “Maybe New York,” Jo said. “There’s a bar in Greenwich Village. Rubyfruit.”

  “You think she went to New York?” I asked, dismayed.

  “The owner’s name is Ann, a former cop,” her voice shook. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. She scares me when she runs away. She doesn’t think right when she gets like that.”

  “I know. And with all that’s gone on, she can’t be thinking right anyway. Jo, you should be getting out of here in another day or so if you behave,” I said with a smile. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t want to go home. You’ll find her, won’t you?”

  “Would you like to stay with me?” I asked.

  “My parents aren’t bad people,” she muttered as morphine dripped. “They don’t understand. They think . . . Why is it wrong . . . ?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Love is never wrong.”

  I left the room as she drifted.

  Her parents were outside the door. Both looked exhausted and sad.

  “How is she?” Mr. Sanders asked.

  “Not too well,” I said.

  Mrs. Sanders began to cry.

  “You have a right to believe the way you do,” I said. “But preventing Lucy and Jo from seeing each other is the last thing your daughter needs right now. She doesn’t need more fear and depression. She doesn’t need to lose her will to live, Mr. and Mrs. Sanders.”

  Neither of them replied.

  “I’m Lucy’s aunt,” I said.

  “She’s about back in this world anyway, I guess,” Mr. Sanders said. “Can’t keep anybody from her. We were just trying to do what’s best.”

  “Jo knows that,” I replied. “She loves you.”

  They didn’t say good-bye but watched me as I got on the elevator. I called Rubyfruit the minute I got home and asked for Ann over the loud noise of voices and a band.

  “She’s not in great shape,” Ann said to me, and I knew what that meant.

  “Will you take care of her?” I asked.

  “I already am,” she said. “Hold on. Let me get her.”

  “I saw Jo,” I said when Lucy got on the phone.

  “Oh,” was all she said, and it was obvious from one word that she was drunk.

  “Lucy!”

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” she said.

  “Jo loves you,” I said. “Come home.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “We bring her to my house from the hospital and you take care of her,” I said. “That’s what you do.”

  I barely slept. At 2:00 A.M. I finally got up and went into the kitchen to fix a cup of herbal tea. It was still raining hard, water running off the roof and splashing on the patio, and I couldn’t seem to get warm. I thought about the swabs and hair and photographs of bite marks locked inside my briefcase, and it almost seemed the killer was inside my house.

  I could feel his presence, as if those parts of him emanated evil. I thought about the awful irony. Interpol summoned me to France and after all was said and done, the only legal evidence I had was an Advil bottle filled with water and silt from the Seine.

  When it got to be 3:00 A.M., I sat up in bed writing draft after draft of a letter to Talley. Nothing sounded right. I was frightened by how much I missed him and what I had done to him. Now he was striking back and it was exactly what I deserved.

  I crumpled another sheet of stationery and looked at the phone. I calculated what time it was in Lyon and imagined him at his desk in one of his fine suits. I thought of him on the phone and in meetings or maybe escorting someone else around and not giving me a thought. I thought of his hard, smooth body and I wondered where he had learned to be such a lover.

  I went on to work. When it was almost two in the afternoon in France, I decided to call Interpol.

  “. . . Bonjour, hello . . .”

  “Jay Talley, please,” I said.

  I was transferred.

  “HIDTA,” a man answered.

  I paused, confused. “Is this Jay Talley’s extension?”

  “Who is this?”

  I told him.

  “He’s not here,” the man said.

  Fear shot through me. I didn’t believe him.

  “And to whom am I speaking?” I inquired.

  “Agent Wilson. I’m the FBI liaison. We didn’t meet the other day. Jay’s out.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “I see,” I said. “Is it possible for me to reach him? Or can you ask him to call me?”

  I knew I sounded nervous.

  “I really don’t know where he is,” he replied. “But if he checks in, I’ll let him know you called. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “No,” I said.

  I hung up and felt panicky. I was certain Talley didn’t want any contact with me and had instructed people that if I called, he wasn’t there.

  “Oh, God, oh, God,” I whispered as I walked past Rose’s desk. “What have I done?”

  “Are you talking to me?” She looked up from her keyboard, peering at me over her glasses. “Did you lose something again?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  At half past eight, I walked into the staff meeting and took my usual place at the head of the table.

  “What have we got?” I asked.

  “Black female, thirty-two years old, from Albemarle County,” Chong began. “Ran off the road and flipped her car. Apparently she just veered off the road and lost control. She has a fracture of the right leg, a basilar skull fracture, and the M.E. for Albemarle County, Dr. Richards, wants to us to do a post.” He looked up at me. “I’m just wondering why? Her cause and manner seem pretty clear.”

  “Because the code says we supply services to the local M.E.,” I replied. “They ask, we do it. We can take an hour to post her now, or we can take ten hours later on to sort it out if there’s a problem.”

  “Next is an eighty-year-old white female last seen yesterday morning around nine A.M. Her boyfriend found her last night at six-thirty . . .”

  I had to work very hard not to tune in and out.

  “. . . no known drug abuse or foul play,” Chong droned on. “Nitroglycerin present at scene.”

  Talley made love as if he were starving. I couldn’t believe I was having erotic thoughts in the middle of a staff meeting.

  “She needs a look-see for injury, and toxicology,” Fielding was saying. “Needs a view.”

  “Anybody know what I’m teaching at the Institute next week?” toxicologist Tim Cooper asked.

  “Toxicology, probably.”

  “Really.” Cooper sighed. “I need a secretary.”

  “I’ve got three court appearances today,” Assistant Chief Riley was saying. “Which is impossible since they’re all over the place.”

  The door opened and Rose stuck her head inside and motioned to me to come out into the hall.

  “Larry Posner’s got to leave in a little while,” she said. “And he’s wondering if you could stop by his lab right now?”

  “On my way,” I said.

  When I walked in, he was making a permanent slide, using a pipette to touch a drop of Cargille melt mount on the edge of a cover slip while other slides warmed up on a hot plate.

  “I don’t know if it adds up to much,” he said right off. “Take a look in the scope. Diatoms from your un-I.D.’d guy. Keep in mind the only thing an individual diatom will tell you, with rare exception, is if it’s saltwater, brackish or fresh.”

  I peered into the lens at little organisms that looked as if they were made of clear glass, in all sorts of shapes that brought to mind boats, chains and zigzags and slivered moons and tiger stripes and crosses and even stacks of poker chips. There were pieces and parts that reminded me
of confetti and grains of sand and other particles of different colors that probably were minerals.

  Posner removed the slide from the stage and replaced it with another.

  “The sample you brought back from the Seine,” he said. “Cymbella, Melosira, Navicula, Fragilaria. On and on. Common as dust. All freshwater, so at least that’s good, but they really tell us nothing in and of themselves.”

  I leaned back in the chair and looked at him.

  “You ordered me here to tell me that?” I said, disappointed.

  “Well, I’m no Robert McLaughlin,” he dryly said, referring to the world-renowned diatomist who had trained him.

  He leaned over the microscope and adjusted the magnification to 1000X and began moving slides around.

  “And no, I didn’t ask you to drop by for nothing,” he went on. “Where we lucked out is in the frequency of occurrence of each species in the flora.”

  Flora was a botanical listing of plants by species, or in this case, diatoms by species.

  “Fifty-one percent occurrence of Melosira, fifteen percent occurrence of Fragilaria. I won’t bore you with all of it, but the samples are very consistent with each other. So much so, actually, I would almost call them identical, which I find rather miraculous, since the flora where you dipped in your Advil bottle might be totally different a hundred feet away.”

  It chilled me to think of Île Saint-Louis’s shore, of the stories of the nude man swimming after dark so close to the Chandonne house. I imagined him dressing without showering or drying off, and transferring diatoms to the inside of his clothes.

  “If he swims in the Seine and these diatoms are all over his clothes,” I said, “he isn’t washing off before he dresses. What about Kim Luong’s body?”

  “Definitely not the same flora as the Seine,” Posner said. “But I did take a sample of water from the James River, close to where you live, as a matter of fact. Again, nearly the same frequency distribution.”

  “Flora on her body and flora in the James, consistent with each other?” I had to make sure.

  “One question I do have is whether diatoms from the James are going to be everywhere around here,” Posner said.

  “Well, let’s see,” I said.

  I got Q-tips and swabbed my forearm, my hair and the bottoms of my shoes, and Posner made more slides. There wasn’t a single diatom.

  “In tap water maybe?” I asked.

  Posner shook his head.

  “So they shouldn’t be all over a person, I wouldn’t think, unless that person has been in the river, lake, ocean . . .”

  I paused as an odd thought came to me.

  “The Dead Sea, the Jordan River,” I said.

  “What?” Posner asked, baffled.

  “The spring at Lourdes,” I said, getting more excited. “The Sacred River Ganges, all believed to be places of miracles where the blind, the lame and the paralyzed could enter the water to be healed.”

  “He’s swimming in the James this time of year?” Posner said. “The guy must be nuts.”

  “There’s no cure for hypertrichosis,” I said.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “A horrible, extremely rare disorder, hair all over your body when you’re born. A baby-fine hair that can get up to six, seven, nine inches long. Among other anomalies.”

  “Ehhh!”

  “Maybe he bathed nude in the Seine hoping he might be miraculously healed. Maybe now he’s doing the same thing in the James,” I said.

  “Jesus!” Posner said. “Now that’s a creepy thought.”

  When I returned to my office, Marino was sitting in a chair by my desk.

  “You look like you been up all night,” he said to me, slurping coffee.

  “Lucy ran off to New York. I talked to Jo and her parents.”

  “Lucy did what?”

  “She’s on her way back. It’s all right.”

  “Well, she’d better mind her p’s and q’s. This ain’t a good time for her to be acting squirrelly.”

  “Marino,” I quickly said, “it’s possible the killer bathes in rivers with some notion it might cure his disorder. I’m wondering if he’s staying someplace near the James.”

  He thought about this for a minute, an odd expression spreading over his face. Running footsteps sounded in the hall.

  “Let’s hope there ain’t some old estate along there where the owner ain’t been heard from for a while,” Marino said. “I have a bad feeling.”

  Then Fielding was in my office yelling at Marino.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you!”

  Veins and arteries were bulging in Fielding’s neck, his face bright red. I’d never heard him raise his voice to anyone.

  “You let the fucking press find out before we can even get to the goddamn scene!” he accused.

  “Hey,” Marino said. “Calm down. Let the fucking press know what?”

  “Diane Bray’s been murdered,” Fielding said. “It’s all over the news. They’ve got a suspect in custody. Detective Anderson.”

  39

  It was very overcast and rain had begun to fall when we reached Windsor Farms, and it seemed bizarre to be driving the office’s black Suburban past Georgian brick and Tudor homes on gracious acres beneath old trees.

  I’d never known my neighbors to worry much about crime. It seemed that old family money and genteel streets with English names had created a fortress of false security. I had no doubt that was about to change.

  Diane Bray’s address was at the outer limits of the neighborhood, where the Downtown Expressway ran loudly and continuously on the other side of a brick wall. When I turned onto her narrow street, I was dismayed. Reporters were everywhere. Their cars and television trucks blocked traffic and outnumbered police vehicles three to one in front of a white Cape Cod with a gambrel roof that looked like it belonged in New England.

  “This is as close as I can get,” I said to Marino.

  “We’ll see about that,” he replied, jerking up his door handle.

  He got out in heavy rain and stalked over to a radio van that was halfway on the lawn in front of Bray’s house. The driver rolled down his window and was foolish enough to poke his microphone Marino’s way.

  “Move!” Marino said with violence in his voice.

  “Captain Marino, can you verify . . . ?”

  “Move your fucking van, now!”

  Tires spun, clawing up grass and mud as the driver of the van pulled out. He stopped in the center of the street and Marino kicked the back tire.

  “Move!” he ordered.

  The van driver rolled away, windshield wipers flying. He parked on someone’s lawn two houses away. Rain whipped my face and strong gusts of wind pushed me like a hand as I got my scene case out of the back of the Suburban.

  “I hope your latest act of graciousness doesn’t make it on the air,” I said when I reached Marino.

  “Who the hell’s working this thing?”

  “I hope you are,” I said, walking fast with head bent.

  Marino grabbed my arm. A dark blue Ford Contour was parked in Bray’s driveway. A patrol car was parked behind it, an officer in front, another in back with Anderson. She looked angry and hysterical, shaking her head and talking fast in words I couldn’t hear.

  “Dr. Scarpetta?” A television reporter headed toward me, the cameraman on his heels.

  “Recognize our rental car?” Marino quietly said to me, water running down his face as he stared at the dark blue Ford with the familiar number RGG-7112 on the license plate.

  “Dr. Scarpetta?”

  “No comment.”

  Anderson didn’t look at us as we walked past.

  “Can you tell . . . ?” Reporters were relentless.

  “No,” I said, hurrying up the front steps.

  “Captain Marino, I understand the police were led here by a tip.”

  Rain smacked and engines rumbled. We ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape stretching from railing to railing. T
he door suddenly swung open and an officer named Butterfield let us in.

  “Glad as hell to see you,” he said to both of us. “Thought you were on vacation,” he added to Marino.

  “Yeah. I got vacated, you’re right.”

  We put on gloves, and Butterfield shut the door behind us. His face was tight, his attention going everywhere.

  “Tell me about it,” Marino said, eyes sweeping the foyer and zooming into the living room beyond.

  “Got a nine-one-one call made from a phone booth not too far from here. We get here, and this is what we find. Someone beat the holy hell out of her,” Butterfield said.

  “What else?” Marino asked.

  “Sexual assault. Looks like robbery, too. Billfold on the floor, no money in it, everything in her purse dumped out. Watch where you step,” he added as if we didn’t know better.

  “Damn, she had big bucks, no kidding,” Marino marveled, looking around at the very expensive furnishings of Bray’s very expensive home.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Butterfield replied.

  What struck me first was the collection of clocks in the living room. There were wall clocks and hanging shelf clocks in rosewood, walnut and mahogany, and calendar and steeple clocks, and novelty clocks, all of them antique and perfectly synchronized. They tick-tocked loudly and would have driven me mad were I to live amidst their monotonous reminder of time.

  She was fond of English antiques that were grand and unfriendly. A scroll-end sofa and a revolving bookcase with dummy leather book dividers faced the TV. Placed here and there with no thought of company in mind, it seemed, were stiff armchairs with ornate upholstery and a satinwood pole-screen. A massive ebonized sideboard overpowered the room. The heavy gold damask draperies were drawn, and cobwebs laced box-pleated valances. I saw no art, not a single sculpture or painting, and with every detail I took in, Bray’s personality became colder and more overbearing. I liked her less. That was hard to acknowledge about someone who had just been beaten to death.

  “Where did she get her money?” I asked.

  “Got no idea,” Marino answered.

  “All of us been wondering that ever since she came here,” Butterfield said. “You ever seen her car?”

  “No,” I replied.