The Body Farm

  “I feel like shit.”

  “There’s this bug going around.”

  “You don’t even know the half of it,” I said.

  “What can I do?” He leaned closer to me, his attention completely focused.

  “I’m posting bond for Keith Pleasants,” I said. “Now this obviously won’t happen before tomorrow, I’m sorry to say. But I think you need to understand, Rob, that this is an innocent man who has been set up. He’s being persecuted because Investigator Ring is on a witch hunt and wants to make a name for himself.”

  Roy looked baffled. “Since when are you defending inmates?”

  “Since whenever they aren’t guilty,” I said. “And this guy is no more a serial killer than you or I. He didn’t try to elude the police and probably wasn’t even speeding. Ring’s hassling him and lying. Look how high the bond was set for a traffic violation.”

  He was silent, listening.

  “Pleasants has an old, infirm mother who has no one to take care of her. He’s about to lose his job. Now I know Ring’s uncle is the secretary of public safety, and he’s also a former sheriff,” I said. “And I know how that goes, Rob. I need you to help me out here. Ring has got to be stopped.”

  Roy pushed his plate away as his radio called him. “You really believe that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “This is fifty-one,” he said into the radio, adjusting his belt and the revolver on it.

  “We got anything on that robbery yet?” a voice came back.

  “Still waiting for it.”

  He signed off and said to me, “You got no doubt in your mind that this boy didn’t commit any crime.”

  I nodded again. “No doubt. The killer who dismembered that lady communicates with me on the Internet. Pleasants doesn’t even know what that is. There’s a very big picture that I can’t get into now. But believe me, what’s going on has nothing to do with this kid.”

  “You’re sure about Ring. I mean, you got to be if I’m going to do this.” His eyes were steady on mine.

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  He slammed his napkin down on the table. “Now, this really makes me mad.” He scooted back his chair. “I don’t like it when an innocent person’s locked up in my jail and some cop’s out there making the rest of us look bad.”

  “Do you know Kitchen, the man who owns the landfill?” I said.

  “Oh sure. We’re in the same lodge.” He pulled out his wallet.

  “Someone needs to talk to him so Keith doesn’t lose his job. We have to make this thing right,” I said.

  “Believe me, I’m going to.”

  He left money on the table and strode angrily out the door. I sat long enough to finish my tea, looking around at displays of striped candy, barbecue sauce and peanuts of every description. My head hurt and my skin was hot when I found a grocery store on 460 and stopped for milk, Hershey’s syrup, fresh vegetables and soup.

  I charged up and down aisles, and next thing I knew my cart was full of everything from toilet paper to deli meats. Then I got out a map and the address Pleasants had given to me. His mother was not too far off the main route, and when I arrived she was asleep.

  “Oh dear,” I said from the porch. “I didn’t mean to get you up.”

  “Who is it?” She peered blindly into the night as she unhooked the door.

  “Dr. Kay Scarpetta. You have no reason . . .”

  “What kind of doctor?”

  Mrs. Pleasants was wizened and stooped, her face wrinkled like crepe paper. Long gray hair floated like gossamer, and I thought of the landfill and the old woman deadoc had killed.

  “You can come on in.” She shoved open the door and looked frightened. “Is Keith all right? Nothing happened to him, did it?”

  “I saw him earlier, and he’s fine,” I assured her. “I brought groceries.” I had the bags in my hands.

  “That boy.” She shook her head, motioning me into her small, tidy home. “What would I do? You know, he’s all I’ve got in this world. When he was born I said, ‘Keith, it’s just you.”’

  She was scared and upset and didn’t want me to know.

  “Do you know where he is?” I gently said.

  We entered her kitchen with its old, squat refrigerator and gas stove, and she did not answer me. She started putting groceries away, fumbling with cans and dropping celery and carrots to the floor.

  “Here. Let me help,” I tried.

  “He didn’t do anything wrong.” She began to cry. “I know he didn’t. And that policeman won’t leave him be, always coming over, banging on the door.”

  She stood in the middle of her kitchen, wiping her face with her hands.

  “Keith says you like chocolate milk, and I’m going to make you one. It’s just what the doctor ordered.”

  I fetched a glass and a spoon from the drain board.

  “He’ll be home tomorrow,” I said. “And I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing from Investigator Ring anymore.”

  She stared at me as if I were a miracle.

  “I just wanted to make sure you have everything you need until your son gets here,” I said, handing her the glass of chocolate milk mixed medium dark.

  “I’m just trying to figure out who you are,” she finally said. “This is mighty good. Nothing in life any better.” She sipped and smiled and took her time.

  I briefly explained how I knew Keith and what I did professionally, but she did not understand. She assumed I was sweet on him and issued medical licenses for a living. On my way home, I played CDs loudly to keep me awake as I drove through thick darkness, where for long stretches there was not a single light except stars. I reached for the phone.

  Wingo’s mother answered and told me he was sick in bed. But she got him on the line.

  “Wingo, I’m worried about you,” I said with feeling.

  “I feel terrible.” He sounded like it. “I guess you can’t do anything for the flu.”

  “You’re immunosuppressed. When I talked to Dr. Riley last, your CD4 cell count was not good.” I wanted him to face reality. “Describe your symptoms to me.”

  “My head’s killing me, my neck and back are killing me. Last time my temperature was taken it was a hundred and four. I’m so thirsty all the time.”

  Everything he said was setting off alarms in my head, for the symptoms also described the early stages of smallpox. But if his exposure was the torso, I was surprised he hadn’t gotten sick before now, especially in light of his compromised condition.

  “You haven’t touched one of those sprays we got at the office,” I said.

  “What sprays?”

  “The Vita facial sprays.”

  He was clueless, and then I remembered that he was out of the office much of today. I explained what had happened.

  “Oh my God,” he said suddenly, as fear shot through both of us. “One came in the mail. Mom had it on the kitchen counter.”

  “When?” I said in alarm.

  “I don’t know. A few days ago. When was that? I don’t know. We’d never seen anything so fancy. Imagine, something sweet to cool your face.”

  That made twelve canisters deadoc had delivered to my staff, and twelve had been his message to me. It was the number of full-time people in my central office, if I included myself. How could he know such trivia as the size of my staff, and even some of their names and where they lived, if he were far away and anonymous?

  I dreaded my next question because I already thought I knew. “Wingo, did you touch it in any way?”

  “I tried it. Just to see.” His voice was shaking badly and he was choking from coughing fits. “When it was sitting there. I picked it up one time, just to see. It smelled like roses.”

  “Who else in your house has tried it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want you to make certain no one touches that canister. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” He was sobbing.

  “I’m going to send some peo
ple to your house to pick it up and take care of you and your family, okay?”

  He was crying too hard to answer.

  When I got home, it was minutes past midnight, and I was so out of sorts and sick that I did not know what to do first. I called Marino and Wesley, and Fujitsubo. I told everybody what was happening and that Wingo and his family needed a team at their home immediately. My bad news was returned by theirs. The girl on Tangier who had gotten sick had died, and now a fisherman had the disease. Depressed and feeling like hell, I checked my e-mail, and deadoc was there in his small, mean way. I was glad. His message had been sent while Keith Pleasants was in jail.

  mirror mirror on the wall where have you been “You bastard,” I screamed at him.

  The day was too much. All of it was too much, and I was achy and woozy and completely fed up. So I should not have gone into that chat room, where I waited for him as if this were the O.K. Corral. I should have left it for another time. But I made my presence known and paced in my mind as I waited for the monster to appear. He did.

  DEADOC: toil and trouble

  SCARPETTA: What do you want!

  DEADOC: we re angry tonight

  SCARPETTA: Yes, we are.

  DEADOC: why should you care about ignorant fishermen and their ignorant families and those inept people who work for you

  SCARPETTA: Stop it. Tell me what you want to make this stop.

  DEADOC: it s too late the damage is done it was done long before this

  SCARPETTA: What was done to you?

  But he did not answer. Oddly, he did not leave the room, but he did not respond to any further questions from me. I thought of Squad 19 and prayed they were listening and following from trunk to trunk, tracing him to his lair. Half an hour passed. I finally logged off as my telephone rang.

  “You’re a genius!” Lucy was so excited she was hurting my ears. “How the hell have you managed to keep him on that long?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, amazed.

  “Eleven minutes so far. You win the prize.”

  “I was only on with him maybe two minutes.” I tried to cool my forehead with the back of my hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But she didn’t care. “We nailed the son of a bitch!” She was ecstatic. “A campground in Maryland, agents from Salisbury already en route. Janet and I gotta plane to catch.”

  • • •

  Before I got up the next morning, the World Health Organization put out another international alert about Vita aromatic facial spray. WHO reassured people that this virus would be eliminated, that we were working on the vaccine around the clock and would have it soon. But the panic began anyway.

  The virus, dubbed by the press Mutantpox, was on the cover of Newsweek and Time, and the Senate was forming a subcommittee as the White House contemplated emergency measures. Vita was distributed in New York, but the manufacturer was actually French. The obvious concern was that deadoc was making good on his threat. Although there were yet no reports of the disease in France, economic and diplomatic relations were strained as a large plant was forced to shut down, and accusations about where the tampering was done were volleyed back and forth between countries.

  Watermen were trying to flee Tangier in their fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard had called in more backups from stations as far south as Florida. I did not know all the details, but based on what I had heard, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Tangiermen in the Tangier Sound, boats anchored and going nowhere as winter winds howled.

  Meanwhile, CDC had deployed an isolation team of doctors and nurses to Wingo’s house, and word was out. Headlines screamed and people were evacuating a city that would be difficult, if not impossible, to quarantine. I was as distressed and sick as I’d ever been in my life, drinking hot tea in a bathrobe early Friday morning.

  My fever had peaked at a hundred and two, and Robitussin DM didn’t do a thing except make me vomit. Muscles in my neck and back hurt as if I had been playing football against people with clubs. But I could not go to bed. There was far too much to do. I called a bondsman and received the bad news that the only way to get Keith Pleasants out of jail was for me to drive downtown and pay in person. So I went out to my car, only to have to turn around ten minutes later because I’d left my checkbook on the table.

  “God, help me please,” I muttered as I sped up.

  Rubber squealed as I drove too fast through my neighborhood, and then moments later, back out, flying around corners in Windsor Farms. I wondered what had happened in Maryland during the night as I worried about Lucy, for whom every event was an adventure. She wanted to use guns and go on foot pursuit, fly helicopters and planes. I feared such a spirit would be crushed in its prime, because I knew too much about life and how it ended. I wondered if deadoc had been caught, but believed if he had, I would have been told.

  I had never needed a bondsman in my life, and this one, Vince Peeler, worked out of a shoe repair shop on Broad Street, along a strip of abandoned stores with nothing in their windows but graffiti and dust. He was a short, slight man with waxed black hair and a leather apron. Seated at an industrial-sized Singer sewing machine, he was stitching a new sole on a shoe. As I shut the door he gave me the piercing look of one accustomed to recognizing trouble.

  “You Dr. Scarpetta?” he asked as he sewed.

  “Yes.”

  I got out my checkbook and a pen, not feeling the least bit friendly as I wondered how many violent people this man had helped back out on the streets.

  “That will be five hundred and thirty dollars,” he said. “If you want to use a credit card, add three percent.”

  He got up and came to his scarred counter piled with shoes and tins of Kiwi paste. I could feel his eyes crawling over me.

  “Funny, I thought you’d be a lot older,” he considered. “You know, you read about people in the news and sometimes get flat-out wrong impressions.”

  “He’ll be freed today.” It was an order as I tore out the check and handed it to him.

  “Oh, sure.” His eyes darted and he looked at his watch.

  “When?”

  “When?” he echoed rhetorically.

  “Yes,” I said. “When will he be freed?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  “Good,” I said as I blew my nose. “I’m going to be watching for him to be freed like that.” I snapped my fingers, too. “And if he isn’t? Guess what? I’m also a lawyer and in a really, really shitty mood. And I’ll come after you. Okay?”

  He smiled at me and swallowed.

  “What kind of lawyer?” he asked.

  “The kind you don’t want to know,” I said as I went out the door.

  I got to the office maybe fifteen minutes later, and my pager vibrated and the phone rang as I sat behind my desk. Before I could do anything, Rose suddenly appeared and looked unusually stressed.

  “Everybody’s looking for you,” she said.

  “They always are.” I frowned at the number on my pager’s display. “Now who the hell is that?”

  “Marino’s on his way here,” she went on. “They’re sending a helicopter. To the helipad at MCV. USAMRIID’s in the air right now, heading here. They’ve let the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s office know a special team’s going to have to handle this, that the body will have to be autopsied in Frederick.”

  I gave her my eyes as my blood seemed to freeze. “Body?”

  “Apparently there’s some campground where the FBI traced a call.”

  “I know about that.” I had no patience. “In Maryland.”

  “They think they’ve found the killer’s camper. I’m not clear on all the details. But it has what might be a lab of some type. And there’s a body inside.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Whose body?”

  “They think, his. A possible suicide. Shot.” She peered at me over the top of her glasses, and shook her head. “You should be home in bed with a cup of my
chicken soup.”

  Marino picked me up in front of my office as wind gusted through downtown and whipped state flags on tops of buildings. I knew instantly that he was angry when he pulled out before I’d barely shut the door. Then he had nothing to say.

  “Thanks,” I said, unwrapping a cough drop.

  “You’re still sick.” He turned onto Franklin Street.

  “I certainly am. Thank you for asking.”

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said, and he was not in uniform. “Last thing I want to do is get near some goddamn lab where someone’s been making viruses.”

  “You’ll have special protection,” I replied.

  “I should probably have it now, being around you.”

  “I have the flu and am no longer infectious. Trust me. I know these things. And don’t be mad at me, because I have no intention of putting up with it.”

  “You’d better hope the flu’s what you got.”

  “If I had something worse, I would be getting worse and my fever would be higher. I would have a rash.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re already sick, don’t that mean you’re more likely to catch something else? Like, I don’t know why you want to be making this trip. ’Cause I sure the fuck don’t. And I don’t appreciate being dragged into it.”

  “Then drop me off and be on your way,” I said. “Don’t even think about whining to me right now. Not when the entire world’s going to hell.”

  “How’s Wingo?” he asked in a more conciliatory tone.

  “I’m frankly scared to death for him,” I replied.

  We drove through MCV, turning into a helipad behind a fence where patients and organs arrived when they were medflighted to the hospital. USAMRIID had not arrived yet, but in moments we could hear the powerful Blackhawk, and people in cars and walking along sidewalks stopped and stared. Several drivers pulled off the road to watch the magnificent machine darken the sky as it hammered in, blasting grass and debris as it landed.

  The door slid open and Marino and I climbed inside, where crew seats were already occupied by scientists from USAMRIID. We were surrounded by rescue gear, and another portable isolator that was collapsed like an accordion. I was handed a helmet with a microphone, and I put this on and fastened my five-point harness. Then I helped Marino with his as he perched primly on a fold-down seat not built for people his size.