The Body Farm

  “Did she ask who was there, anything? Or did she just open the door.”

  “If she knew it was me,” she said, “she just opened it.”

  “If she thought it was you, you mean,” Marino said.

  Anderson picked her way along our train of thought and then she stopped. She could go no further. She couldn’t bear it.

  “But you didn’t come back last night, did you?” I said.

  Her silence was her answer. She hadn’t come back. She hadn’t knocked three times, hard. The killer had, and Bray opened the door without pause. She probably was already saying something, resuming the argument when suddenly the monster was pushing his way into her house.

  “I didn’t do anything to her, I swear,” Anderson said. “It’s not my fault,” she said again and again because it wasn’t her nature to assume responsibility about anything.

  “Just a damn good thing you didn’t come back last night,” Marino told her. “Assuming you’re telling the truth.”

  “I am. I swear to God!”

  “If you’d showed up, you might have been next.”

  “I had nothing to do with it!”

  “Well, in a way you did. She wouldn’t have opened the door . . .”

  “That’s not fair!” Anderson said, and she was right. Whatever she had with Bray, it wasn’t the fault of either of them that the killer had been stalking and waiting.

  “So you go home,” Marino said. “You try to call her later? See if you could patch things up?”

  “Yes. She didn’t answer her phone.”

  “This was how long after you left?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes. I called several more times, just thinking she didn’t want to talk to me. Then I started getting worried when I tried several times after midnight and kept getting her machine.”

  “You leave messages?”

  “Well, a lot of times I didn’t.” She paused, swallowing hard. “And this morning I came to check on her, around six-thirty. I knocked and there was no answer. The door was unlocked and I went in.”

  She started trembling again, her eyes wide with horror.

  “And I went back there . . .” Her voice went up and stopped. “And I ran. I was so scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Of whoever . . . I could almost feel him, this horrible presence in that room, and I didn’t know if he was still somewhere . . . I had my gun in my hand and ran and drove away as fast as I could and stopped at a pay phone and called nine-one-one.”

  “Well, I’ll give you this much credit,” Marino said in a tired voice. “At least you identified yourself and didn’t try none of this anonymous-call shit.”

  “What if he comes after me now?” she asked, and she looked so small and ruined. “I’ve been in the Quik Cary before. I stop in there sometimes. I used to talk to Kim Luong.”

  “Nice of you to tell us now,” Marino said, and I realized how Kim Luong might be linked to all this.

  If the killer had been watching Anderson, she may have unwittingly led him to the Quik Cary, to his first Richmond victim. Or maybe Rose had. Maybe he’d been watching when Rose and I had walked to the parking lot at my office, or even when I stopped by her apartment.

  “We can lock you up if that’d make you feel safer,” Marino was saying, and he meant it.

  “What am I going to do?” she cried. “I live alone . . . I’m scared, I’m scared.”

  “Conspiracy to distribute and actual distribution of schedule-two drugs,” Marino thought out loud. “Plus possession without a prescription. All felonies. Let’s see. Since you and Chuckie-boy are both gainfully employed and have led such clean lives, bond won’t be set high. Probably twenty-five hundred bucks, which you can probably cover with your drug allowance. So that’s nice.”

  I dug in my satchel and got out my portable phone and called Fielding.

  “Her body just got here,” he told me. “Do you want me to start on her?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you know where Chuck is?”

  “He didn’t come in.”

  “I just bet he didn’t,” I said. “And if he does, sit him in your office and don’t let him go anywhere.”

  41

  At not quite 2:00 P.M. I pulled into the enclosed bay and parked out of the weather as two funeral home attendants loaded a pouched body into an old-model black hearse with blinds over the windows in back.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am. How are you?”

  “Who you got here?” I asked.

  “The construction worker from Petersburg.”

  They shut the tailgate and peeled off latex gloves.

  “One who got hit by that train,” they went on, both talking at once. “Can’t imagine that. Not the way I want to go. You have a nice day.”

  I used my card to unlock a side door and entered the well-lit corridor, where the floor was finished in biohazard epoxy and all activity was monitored by closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the walls. Rose was irritably pushing the Diet Coke button on the drink machine when I walked into the break room in search of coffee.

  “Damnation,” she blurted out. “I thought we’d gotten it fixed.”

  She worked the change return in vain.

  “Well, it’s doing the same damn thing. Doesn’t anybody do anything right anymore?” she complained away. “Do this, do that and still nothing works, just like state employees.”

  She exhaled a loud, frustrated breath.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” I said with no conviction. “It’s okay, Rose.”

  “I wish you could get some rest,” Rose sighed.

  “I wish we all could.”

  Staff mugs were hung on a Peg-Board next to the coffee machine, and I looked for mine with no success.

  “Try your bathroom, on the sink, that’s where you usually leave it,” Rose said. The reminder of the mundane minutiae of our normal worlds was a welcome relief, no matter how brief it might be.

  “Chuck won’t be back,” I said. “He’s going to be arrested, if he hasn’t already been.”

  “The police have already been here. I won’t be shedding any tears.”

  “I’ll be in the morgue. You know what I’ll be doing, so no phone calls unless it’s urgent,” I told her.

  “Lucy called. She’s picking up Jo tonight.”

  “I wish you’d come stay with me, Rose.”

  “Thank you. I need to stay put.”

  “It would make me feel better if you came home with me.”

  “Dr. Scarpetta, if it’s not him, it’s always someone, isn’t it? Always someone evil out there. I have to live my life. I can’t be held hostage by fear and old age.”

  In the locker room, I changed into a plastic apron and surgical gown. My fingers were clumsy with ties and I kept dropping things. I felt chilled and achy, as if I were coming down with the flu. I was grateful I could suit up in a face shield, mask, cap, booties, layers of gloves, and all that protected me from biological hazards and my emotions. I wanted no one to see me now. It was bad enough that Rose had.

  Fielding was photographing Bray’s body when I walked into the autopsy room, where my two assistant chiefs and three residents were working on new cases because the day kept bringing in the dead. There was then the noise of running water and steel instruments against steel, muted voices and sounds. The telephones wouldn’t stop ringing.

  There was no color in this steel place except the hues of death. Contusions and suffusion were purple-blue and livor mortis was pink. Blood was bright against the yellow of fat. Chest cavities were open like tulips and organs were in scales and on cutting boards, the smell of decay strong this day.

  Two other cases were juveniles, one Hispanic, one white, both of them etched with crude tattoos and stabbed multiple times. Their faces of hate and anger were relaxed into those of the boys they might have been had life landed them on a different doorstep, perhaps with different genes. A gang had been their family, the str
eet their home. They had died the way they lived.

  “. . . deep penetration. Four inches over the left lateral back, through twelfth rib and aorta, over a liter of blood in left and right chest cavity,” Dan Chong was dictating into the microphone clipped to his scrubs as Amy Forbes worked across the table from him.

  “Did he hemoaspirate?”

  “Very minimally.”

  “And an abrasion on the left arm. Maybe from the terminal fall? Did I tell you I’m learning to scuba dive?”

  “Huh. Good luck around here. Wait until you do your open water dive in the quarry. That’s real fun. Especially in winter.”

  “God,” Fielding said. “Je-sus Christ.”

  He was spreading open the body bag and bloody sheet inside it. I went to him and felt the shock all over again as we freed her from her wrappings.

  “Jesus Christ,” Fielding kept saying under his breath.

  We lifted her onto the table and she stubbornly resumed the same position she’d had on the bed. We broke the rigor mortis in her arms and legs, relaxing those rigid muscles.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with people?” Fielding loaded film into a camera.

  “Same thing that’s always been wrong with them,” I said.

  We lock-attached her transportable autopsy table to one of the wall-mounted dissecting sinks. For a moment, all work in the room stopped as the other doctors came over to look. They couldn’t help themselves.

  “Oh, my God,” Chong muttered.

  Forbes could not speak as she stared in shock.

  “Please,” I said, searching their faces. “This is not a demo autopsy and Fielding and I will handle it.”

  I began going over the body with a lens, collecting more of that long, fine hellish hair.

  “He doesn’t care,” I said. “He doesn’t care if we know all about him.”

  “You think he knows you went to Paris?”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. “But I suppose he could be in touch with his family. Hell, they probably know everything.”

  I envisioned their big house and its chandeliers and myself scooping water out of the Seine in possibly the very spot where the killer waded in to cure his affliction. I thought of Dr. Stvan and hoped she was safe.

  “He’s got a dusky brain, too.” Chong had gotten back to his own work in progress.

  “Yeah, so does the other one. Heroin again, maybe. Fourth case in six weeks, all in the city.”

  “Must be some good stuff going around. Dr. Scarpetta?” Chong called over to me as if this were any other afternoon, and I was working any other case. “Same tattoo, like a homemade rectangle. In the web of the left hand, must of hurt like hell. Same gang?”

  “Photograph it,” I said.

  There were distinctive pattern injuries, especially on Bray’s forehead and left cheek, where the crushing force of the blows had lacerated the skin and left striated impact abrasions that I had seen before.

  “Possibly the threads of a pipe?” Fielding ventured.

  “It doesn’t quite fit a pipe,” I answered.

  The external examination of Bray took two more hours as Fielding and I meticulously measured, drew and photographed every wound. Her facial bones were crushed, the flesh lacerated over bony prominences. Her teeth were broken. Some were knocked out with such force they were halfway down her throat. Her lips, ears and the flesh of her chin were avulsed off the bone, and X rays revealed hundreds of fractures and punched-out areas in bone, especially the bone table of the skull.

  I was taking a shower at 7:00 P.M., and the water running off of me was pale red because I had gotten so bloody. I felt weak and light-headed, because I hadn’t eaten since early morning. There was no one left in the office but me. I walked out of the locker room drying my hair with a towel, and Marino suddenly emerged from my office. I almost screamed. I placed a hand on my chest as adrenaline shocked me.

  “Don’t startle me like that!” I exclaimed.

  “Didn’t mean to.” He looked grim.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Night security. We’re pals. I didn’t want you walking out to your car by yourself. I knew you’d still be here.”

  I ran my fingers through my damp hair, and he followed me into my office. I draped the towel over my chair and began collecting everything that needed to go home with me. I noticed lab reports Rose had left on my desk. Fingerprints on the bucket found inside the container matched the unidentified dead man’s.

  “Well, a shitload of good that does,” Marino said.

  In addition, there was a DNA report with a note from Jamie Kuhn. He had used short tandem repeats, or STR, and already had results.

  “. . . found a profile . . . very similar with very slight differences,” I scanned out loud without much heart for it. “. . . consistent with the depositor of the biological sample . . . close relative . . .”

  I looked up at Marino.

  “So, long story short, the unidentified man’s and the killer’s DNA are consistent with these two individuals being related to each other. Period.”

  “Consistent,” Marino said in disgust. “I hate all this scientific consistent shit! The two assholes are brothers.”

  I had no doubt of that.

  “We need blood samples from the parents to prove it,” I said.

  “Let’s just call ’em up and see if we can drop by,” Marino cynically replied. “The lovely Chandonne sons. Hooray.”

  I threw the report on top of my desk.

  “Hooray is right,” I said.

  “Who gives a shit.”

  “I sure would like to know what tool he used,” I said.

  “I’ve spent all afternoon calling these big hoity-toity mansions on the river.” Marino had changed his lane of thought. “The good news is everyone seems to be present and accounted for. The bad news is we still got no idea where he’s hanging out. And it’s twenty-five degrees out there. No way he’s just walking around or sleeping under a tree.”

  “What about hotels?”

  “Nobody hairy with a French accent or ugly teeth. Nobody even close. And no-tell motels ain’t too chatty with cops.”

  He was walking along the hallway with me, and he seemed in no hurry to leave, as if he had something else on his mind.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Besides everything?”

  “Lucy was supposed to be in D.C. yesterday, Doc, to go before the review board. They’ve flown in four Waco guys to counsel her, the whole nine yards. And she insists on staying here until Jo’s okay.”

  We walked out into the parking lot.

  “Everybody understands that,” he went on as my anxieties grew. “But that ain’t the way it works when the director of ATF is rolling up his sleeves in this and she’s a no-show.”

  “Marino, I’m sure she’s let them know what’s . . .” I started to defend her.

  “Oh yeah. She’s been on the phone and promised she’ll be there in a few days.”

  “They can’t wait a few days for her to get there?” I asked as I unlocked my car.

  “The whole fuckup down there was videotaped,” he said as I slid into a cold leather seat. “And they’ve been going through it over and over again.”

  I started the engine as the night suddenly seemed darker and colder and emptier.

  “There’s a lot of questions.” He dug his hands in the pocket of his coat.

  “About whether the shooting was justified? Isn’t saving Jo’s life, her own life, justification enough?”

  “I think it’s her attitude, mainly, Doc. She’s so, well, you know. So ready to charge in and fight all the time. It comes across in everything she does, which is why she’s so damn good. But it can also be one hell of a problem if it gets out of hand.”

  “You want to get inside the car so you don’t freeze?”

  “I’m going to follow you home, then I got things to do. Lucy’s going to be there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Otherwise I ain’t leavin
g you alone, not with that asshole still on the loose out there.”

  “What do I do about her?” I quietly asked.

  I no longer knew. I felt my niece was beyond my reach. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure she loved me anymore.

  “This is all about Benton, you know,” Marino said. “Sure, she’s pissed at life in general and goes off on a regular basis. Maybe you should show her his autopsy report, make her face it, get it the hell out of her system before she does herself in.”

  “I will never do that,” I said as old pain rushed back, but not as intensely.

  “Jesus, it’s cold. And getting closer to a full moon, which is exactly what I don’t want to see right now.”

  “All a full moon means is that if he tries again, it will be easier to see him,” I said.

  “Want me to follow you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, you call me if for some reason Lucy ain’t there. No way you’re staying alone.”

  I felt like Rose as I drove toward home. I knew exactly what she meant about being held hostage by fear, by old age, by grief, by anything or anyone. I had almost reached my neighborhood when I decided to turn around and cut over to West Broad Street, where I occasionally went to Pleasants Hardware on the twenty-two-hundred block. It was an old neighborhood store that had expanded over the years and tended to carry more than just the standard tools and garden supplies.

  When I shopped here, I never arrived earlier than seven o’clock in the evening, when most men came in after work and cruised the aisles like boys coveting toys. There were many cars, trucks and vans in the parking lot, and I was in a hurry as I walked past close-out lawn furniture and discontinued power tools. Just inside the door, spring flower bulbs were on special, and clearance-sale gallon cans of blue and white paint were stacked in a pyramid.

  I wasn’t sure what class of tool I was looking for, although I suspected the weapon that had killed Bray was something like a pickaxe or a hammer. So I kept an open mind and went up and down aisles, scanning shelves of nails, nuts, fasteners, screw hooks, hinges, hasps and latches. I wandered through thousands of feet of neatly coiled rope and cord, and weatherizers and caulk and just about everything one needed for plumbing. I saw nothing that mattered, not in the large section of bars and claws and hammers, either.