The Body Farm

  I drove to my office with the windshield wipers working hard as the relentless downpour thrummed the roof. Traffic was thin because it was barely seven, and Richmond’s downtown skyline came into view slowly and by degrees in the watery fog. I thought of the photograph again. I envisioned it slowly painting down my screen, and the hairs on my arms stood up as a chill crept over me. I was disturbed in a way I could not define as it occurred to me for the first time that the person who had sent it might be someone I knew.

  Turning on the Seventh Street exit, I wound around Shockoe Slip, with its wet cobblestones and trendy restaurants that were dark at this hour. I passed parking lots barely beginning to fill, and turned into the one behind my four-story stucco building. I couldn’t believe it when I found a television news van waiting in my parking place, which was clearly designated by a sign that read CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER. The crew knew that if they waited there long enough, they would be rewarded with me.

  I pulled up close and motioned for them to move as the van’s doors slid open. A cameraman in a rain suit jumped out, coming my way, a reporter in tow with a microphone. I rolled my window down several inches.

  “Move,” I said, and I wasn’t nice about it. “You’re in my parking place.”

  They did not care as someone else got out with lights. For a moment I sat staring, anger turning me hard like amber. The reporter was blocking my door, her microphone shoved through the opening in the window.

  “Dr. Scarpetta, can you verify that the Butcher has struck again?” she asked, loudly, as the camera rolled and lights burned.

  “Move your van,” I said with iron calm as I stared right at her and the camera.

  “Is it in fact a torso that was found?” Rain was running off her hood as she pushed the microphone in farther.

  “I’m going to ask you one last time to move your van out of my parking place,” I said like a judge about to cite contempt of court. “You are trespassing.”

  The cameraman found a new angle, zooming in, harsh lights in my eyes.

  “Was it dismembered like the others . . . ?”

  She jerked the microphone away just in time as my window went up. I shoved the car in gear and began backing, the crew scrambling out of the way as I made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn. Tires spun and skidded as I parked right behind the van, pinning it between my Mercedes and the building.

  “Wait a minute!”

  “Hey! You can’t do that!”

  Their faces were disbelieving as I got out. Not bothering with an umbrella, I ran for the door and unlocked it.

  “Hey!” the protests continued. “We can’t get out!”

  Inside the bay, water was beaded on the oversized maroon station wagon and dripping to the concrete floor. I opened another door and walked into the corridor, looking around to see who else was here. White tile was spotless, the air heavy with industrial strength deodorizer, and as I walked to the morgue office, the massive stainless steel refrigerator door sucked open.

  “Good morning!” Wingo said with a surprised grin. “You’re early.”

  “Thanks for bringing the wagon in out of the rain,” I said.

  “No more cases coming in that I know of, so I didn’t think it would hurt to stick it in the bay.”

  “Did you see anybody out there when you drove it?” I asked.

  He looked puzzled. “No. But that was about an hour ago.”

  Wingo was the only member of my staff who routinely got to the office earlier than I did. He was lithe and attractive, with pretty features and shaggy dark hair. An obsessive-compulsive, he ironed his scrubs, washed the wagon and anatomical vans several times a week, and was forever polishing stainless steel until it shone like mirrors. His job was to run the morgue, and he did so with the precision and pride of a military leader. Carelessness and callousness were not allowed down here by either one of us, and no one dared dispose of hazardous waste or make sophomoric jokes about the dead.

  “The landfill case is still in the fridge,” Wingo said to me. “Do you want me to bring it out?”

  “Let’s wait until after staff meeting,” I said. “The longer she’s refrigerated, the better, and I don’t want anybody wandering in here to look.”

  “That won’t happen,” he said as if I had just implied he might be delinquent in his duties.

  “I don’t even want anybody on the staff wandering in out of curiosity.”

  “Oh.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “I just don’t understand people.”

  He never would, because he was not like them.

  “I’ll let you alert security,” I said. “The media’s already in the parking lot.”

  “You got to be kidding. This early?”

  “Channel Eight was waiting for me when I pulled in.” I handed him the key to my car. “Give them a few minutes, and then let them go.”

  “What do you mean, let them go?” He frowned, staring at the remote control key in his hand.

  “They’re in my parking place.” I headed toward the elevator.

  “They’re what?”

  “You’ll see.” I boarded. “If they so much as touch my car, I’ll charge them with trespassing and malicious property damage. Then I’m going to have the A.G.’s office call their station’s general manager. I might sue.” I smiled at him through shutting doors.

  My office was on the second floor of the Consolidated Lab Building, which had been constructed in the seventies and was soon to be abandoned by us and the scientists upstairs. At last, we were to get spacious quarters in the city’s new Biotech Park just off Broad Street, not far from the Marriott and the Coliseum.

  Construction was already under way, and I spent far too much time arguing over details, blueprints and budgets. What had been home to me for years was now in disarray, stacks of boxes lining hallways, and clerks not wanting to file, since everything would have to be packed anyway. Averting my gaze from more boxes, I followed the hallway to my office, where my desk was in its usual state of avalanche.

  I checked my e-mail again, almost expecting another anonymous file like the last, but only the same messages were there, and I scanned through them, sending brief replies. The address deadoc quietly waited in my mailbox, and I could not resist opening it and the file with the photograph. I was concentrating so hard, I did not hear Rose walk in.

  “I think Noah had better build another ark,” she said.

  Startled, I looked up to see her in the doorway adjoining my office and hers. She was taking off her raincoat, and looked worried.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

  Hesitating, she stepped inside, scrutinizing me.

  “I knew you’d be here, despite all advice,” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “What are you doing here so early?” I asked.

  “I had a feeling you’d have your hands full.” She took off her coat. “You saw the paper this morning?”

  “Not yet.”

  She opened her pocketbook and got out her glasses. “All this Butcher business. You can imagine the uproar. While I was driving, I heard on the news that since these cases started, more handguns are being sold than you can shake a stick at. I sometimes wonder if the gun shops aren’t behind things like this. Frighten us out of our wits so we all make a mad dash for the nearest .38 or semiautomatic pistol.”

  Rose had hair the color of steel that she always wore up, her face patrician and keen. There was nothing she had not seen, and she was not afraid of anyone. I lived in the uneasy shadow of her retirement, for I knew her age. She did not have to work for me. She stayed only because she cared and had no one left at home.

  “Take a look,” I said, pushing back my chair.

  She came around to my side of the desk and stood so close I could smell White Musk, the fragrance of everything she had concocted at the Body Shop, where they were against testing with animals. Rose had recently adopted her fifth retired greyhound. She bred Siamese cats, kept several aquariums and was
one step short of being dangerous to anyone who wore fur. She stared into my computer screen, and did not seem to know what she was looking at. Then her demeanor stiffened.

  “My God,” she muttered, looking at me over the top of her bifocals. “Is this what’s downstairs?”

  “I think an earlier version of it,” I said. “Sent to me on AOL.”

  She did not speak.

  “Needless to say,” I went on, “I will trust you to keep an eagle eye on this place while I’m downstairs. If anybody comes into the lobby we don’t know or aren’t expecting, I want security to intercept them. Don’t you even think about going out to see what they want.” I looked pointedly at her, knowing what she was like.

  “You think he would come here?” she matter-of-factly stated.

  “I’m not sure what to think except that he clearly had some need to contact me.” I closed the file and got up. “And he has.”

  At not quite half past eight, Wingo rolled the body onto the floor scale, and we began what I knew would be a very long and painstaking examination. The torso weighed forty-six pounds and was twenty-one inches in length. Livormortis was faint posteriorly, meaning when her circulation had quit, blood had settled according to gravity, placing her on her back for hours or days after death. I could not look at her without seeing the savaged image on my computer screen, and believed it and the torso before me were the same.

  “How big do you think she was?” Wingo glanced at me as he parallel parked the gurney next to the first autopsy table.

  “We’ll use heights of lumbar vertebrae to estimate height, since we obviously don’t have tibias, femurs,” I said, tying a plastic apron over my gown. “But she looks small. Frail, actually.”

  Moments later, X rays had finished processing and he was attaching them to light boxes. What I saw told a story that did not seem to make sense. The faces of the pubic symphysis, or the surfaces where one pubis joins the other, were no longer rugged and ridged, as in youth. Instead, bone was badly eroded with irregular, lipped margins. More X rays revealed sternal rib ends with irregular bony growths, the bone very thin-walled with sharp edges, and there were degenerative changes to the lumbosacral vertebrae, as well.

  Wingo was no anthropologist, but he saw the obvious, too.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think we got her films mixed up with somebody else’s,” he said.

  “This lady’s old,” I said.

  “How old, would you guess?”

  “I don’t like to guess.” I was studying her X rays. “But I’d say seventy, at least. Or to play it really safe, between sixty-five and eighty. Come on. Let’s go through trash for a while.”

  The next two hours were spent sifting through a large garbage bag of trash from the landfill that had been directly under and around the body. The garbage bag I believed she had been in was black, thirty-gallon size, and had been sealed with a yellow plastic-toothed tie. Wearing masks and gloves, Wingo and I picked through shredded tire and the fluff from upholstery stuffing that was used as a cover in the landfill. We examined countless tatters of slimy plastic and paper, picking out maggots and dead flies and dropping them into a carton.

  Our treasures were few, a blue button that was probably unrelated, and, oddly, a child’s tooth, which I imagined was tossed, a coin left under a pillow. We found a mangled comb, a flattened battery, several shards of broken china, a tangled wire coat hanger, and the cap of a Bic pen. Mostly, it was rubber, fluff, torn black plastic and soggy paper that we threw into a garbage can. Then we circled bright lights around the table and centered her on a clean white sheet.

  Using a lens, I began going over her an inch at a time, her flesh a microscopic landfill of debris. With forceps, I collected pale fibers from the dark bloody stump that once had been her neck, and I found hairs, three of them, grayish-white, about fourteen inches long, adhering to dried blood, posteriorly.

  “I need another envelope,” I said to Wingo as I came across something else I did not expect.

  Embedded in the ends of each humerus, or the bone of the upper arm, and also in margins of muscle around it were more fibers and tiny fragments of fabric that looked pale blue, meaning the saw had to have gone through it.

  “She was dismembered through her clothes or something else she was wrapped in,” I said, startled.

  Wingo stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “The others weren’t.”

  Those victims appeared to have been nude when they were sawn apart. He made more notes as I moved on, peering through the lens.

  “Fibers and bits of fabric are also embedded in either femur.” I looked more closely.

  “So she was covered from the waist down, too?” he said.

  “That’s the way it’s looking.”

  “So someone waited until after she was dismembered, and then took all her clothes off?” He looked at me, emotion in his eyes as he started to envision it.

  “He wouldn’t want us to get the clothes. There might be too much information there,” I said.

  “Then why didn’t he undress her, unwrap her or whatever to begin with?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to look at her while he was dismembering her,” I said.

  “Oh, so now he’s getting sensitive on us,” Wingo said, as if he hated whoever it was.

  “Make a note of the measurements,” I told him. “Cervical spine is transected at the level of C-5. Residual femur on the right measures two inches below the lesser trochanter, and two and a half inches on the left, with saw marks visible. Right and left segments of humerus are one inch, saw marks visible. On the upper right hip is a three-quarters-of-an-inch old, healed vaccination scar.”

  “What about that?” He referred to the numerous raised, fluid-filled vesicles scattered over buttocks, shoulders and upper thighs.

  “I don’t know,” I said, reaching for a syringe. “I’m guessing herpes zoster virus.”

  “Whoa!” Wingo jumped back from the table. “I wish you’d told me that earlier.” He was scared.

  “Shingles.” I began labeling a test tube. “Maybe. I must confess, it’s a little weird.”

  “What do you mean?” He was getting more unnerved.

  “With shingles,” I replied, “the virus attacks sensory nerves. When the vesicles erupt, they do so in a swath along nerve distributions. Under a rib, for example. And the vesicles will be of varying ages. But this is a crop, and they all look the same age.”

  “What else could it be?” he asked. “Chicken pox?”

  “Same virus. Children get chicken pox. Adults get shingles.”

  “What if I get it?” Wingo said.

  “Did you have chicken pox as a kid?”

  “Got no idea.”

  “What about the VZV vaccine?” I asked. “Have you had that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you have no antibody to VZV, you should be vaccinated.” I glanced up at him. “Are you immunosuppressed?”

  He did not say anything as he went to a cart, snatching off his latex gloves and slamming them into the red can for biologically hazardous trash. Upset, he snatched a new pair made of heavier blue Nitrile. I stopped what I was doing, watching him until he returned to the table.

  “I just think you could have warned me before now,” he said, and he sounded on the verge of tears. “I mean, it’s not like you can take any precautions in this place, like vaccinations, except for hepatitis B. So I depend on you to let me know what’s coming in.”

  “Calm down.”

  I was gentle with him. Wingo was too sensitive for his own good, and that was really the only problem I ever had with him.

  “You can’t possibly get chicken pox or shingles from this lady unless you have an exchange of body fluids,” I said. “So as long as you’re wearing gloves and going about business in the usual way, and don’t cut yourself or get a needle stick, you will not be exposed to the virus.”

  For an instant, his eyes were bright, and he quickly looked away.

 
“I’ll start taking pictures,” he said.

  Four

  Marino and Benton Wesley appeared midafternoon, when the autopsy was well under way. There was nothing further I could do with the external examination, and Wingo had taken a late lunch, so I was alone. Wesley’s eyes were on me as he walked through the door, and I could tell by his coat that it was still raining.

  “Just so you know,” Marino said right off, “there’s a flood warning.”

  Since there were no windows in the morgue, I never knew the weather.

  “How serious a warning?” I asked, and Wesley had come close to the torso, and was looking at it.

  “Serious enough that if this keeps up, somebody’d better start piling up sandbags,” Marino replied as he parked his umbrella in a corner.

  My building was blocks from the James. Years ago, the lower level had flooded, bodies donated to science rising in overflowing vats, water poisoned pink with formalin seeping into the morgue and the parking lot in back.

  “How worried should I be?” I asked with concern.

  “It’s going to stop,” Wesley said, as if he could profile the weather, too.

  He took off his raincoat, and the suit beneath it was a dark blue that was almost black. He wore a starched white shirt and conservative silk tie, his silver hair a little longer than usual, but neat. His sharp features made him seem even keener and more intimidating than he was, but today his face was grim, and not just because of me. He and Marino went to a cart to put on gloves and masks.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” Wesley said to me as I continued working. “Every time I tried to get away from the house, the phone rang. This thing’s a real problem.”

  “Certainly for her it is,” I said.

  “Shit.” Marino stared at what was left of a human being. “How the hell does anybody do something like that?”

  “I’ll tell you how,” I said, cutting sections of spleen. “First you pick an old woman and make sure she isn’t properly watered or fed, and when she gets sick, forget medical care. Then you shoot or beat her in the head.” I glanced up at them. “My bet is that she has a basilar skull fracture, maybe some other type of trauma.”