“Goddamn you,” I muttered to my niece.
My heart slammed against me, as if trying to break free.
“Goddamn you, Lucy.” I wept.
10
The new building where I worked was the eye of a fierce storm of development I never could have imagined when I moved into it in the seventies. I remembered feeling rather betrayed when I charged in from Miami just as Richmond’s businesses decided to charge out to neighboring counties and malls. People stopped shopping and dining downtown, especially at night.
The city’s historic character turned victim to neglect and crime until the mid-nineties, when Virginia Commonwealth University began to reclaim and revitalize what had been relegated to ruin. It seemed that handsome buildings began springing up almost overnight, all of similar brick and glass design. My office and morgue shared space with the labs and the recently established Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, which was the first training academy of its type in the country, if not the world.
I even had a choice parking space near the lobby door, where I sat in my car this moment gathering my belongings and my spinning thoughts. I had childishly turned off my car phone so Lucy couldn’t get hold of me after I’d sped off. I turned it on now, hoping it would ring. I stared at it. The last time I had acted like this was after Benton and I had had our worst fight and I ordered him to leave my house and never come back. I unplugged my phones, only to plug them back in an hour later and panic when he didn’t call.
I looked at my watch. Lucy would be boarding her flight in less than an hour. I considered calling USAir and having her paged. I was shocked and humiliated by the way I had behaved. I felt powerless because I couldn’t apologize to someone named Terry Davis who didn’t have an aunt Kay or an accessible phone number and lived somewhere in South Beach.
I looked pretty rough when I walked into the glass-block and terrazzo lobby. Jake, who worked the security desk, noticed right away.
“Good morning, Dr. Scarpetta,” he said with his usual nervous eyes and hands. “You don’t look like you’re feeling so hot.”
“Good morning, Jake,” I replied. “How are you?”
“Same-o, same-o. Except the weather’s supposed to start turning real fast and get nasty, and I could do without that.”
He was clicking a pen open and shut.
“Can’t seem to get rid of this pain in my back, Dr. Scarpetta. It’s right between my shoulder blades.”
He rolled his shoulders and neck.
“Sort of pinches like something’s caught back there. Happened after I was lifting weights the other day. What do you think I should do? Or do I need to write you?”
I thought he was trying to be funny, but he wasn’t smiling.
“Moist heat. Lay off the weights for a while,” I said.
“Hey, thanks. How much you charge?”
“You can’t afford me, Jake.”
He grinned. I swiped my computer card over the electronic lock on the door outside my office door and the lock clicked free. I could hear my clerks, Cleta and Polly, talking and typing. The phones were already ringing and it wasn’t even seven-thirty yet.
“. . . It’s really, really bad.”
“You think people from other countries smell different when they decompose?”
“Come on, Polly. How stupid is that?”
They were tucked inside their gray cubicles, sifting through autopsy photographs and entering data into computers, cursors jumping field to field.
“Better get some coffee while you can,” Cleta greeted me with a judgmental look on her face.
“If that ain’t the truth.” Polly smacked the return key.
“I heard,” I said.
“Well, I’m keeping my mouth shut,” said Polly, who couldn’t if she tried.
Cleta made a zipping motion across her lips without missing a keystroke.
“Where is everyone?”
“In the morgue,” Cleta told me. “We’ve got eight cases today.”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight, Cleta,” I said, collecting death certificates from my inner-office mailbox.
“Twelve and a half pounds,” she exclaimed as she dealt gory photographs like playing cards, arranging them by case numbers. “Thank you for noticing. I’m glad somebody ’round here does.”
“Damn,” I said, glancing at the death certificate on top of my stack. “You think we might ever convince Dr. Carmichael that ‘cardiac arrest’ is not a cause of death? Everyone’s heart stops when he dies. The question is why did it stop. Well, that one gets amended.”
I flipped through more certificates as I followed the long teal- and plum-carpeted hallway to my corner office. Rose worked in an open space with plenty of windows, and it wasn’t possible to reach my door without entering her airspace. She was standing before an open filing cabinet drawer, fingers impatiently fluttering through labeled tabs.
“How are you?” she asked around a pen clamped in her mouth. “Marino’s looking for you.”
“Rose, we need to get Dr. Carmichael on the line.”
“Again?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“He needs to retire.”
My secretary had been saying this for years. She pushed the drawer shut and pulled open another one.
“Why is Marino looking for me? Did he call me from home?”
She took the pen out of her mouth.
“He’s here. Or was. Dr. Scarpetta, do you remember that letter you got last month from that hateful woman?”
“Which hateful woman?” I asked, looking up and down the hallway for Marino and seeing no sign of him.
“The one in prison for murdering her husband right after she took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on him.”
“Oh, that one,” I said.
I slipped off my suit jacket as I walked into my office and set my briefcase on the floor.
“Why is Marino looking for me?” I asked again.
Rose didn’t answer. I had noticed she was getting hard of hearing, and every reminder of her encroaching frailties frightened me. I put the death certificates on top of a stack of about a hundred others I hadn’t gotten around to reviewing yet and draped my suit jacket over my chair.
“Point is,” Rose loudly said, “she’s since sent you another letter. This time accusing you of racketeering.”
I retrieved my lab coat from the back of the door.
“She claims you conspired with the insurance company and changed her husband’s manner of death from accident to homicide so they wouldn’t have to pay out the money. And for this you got quite a large kickback, which is—according to her—how you can afford your Mercedes and expensive suits.”
I threw my lab coat over my shoulders and pushed my arms through the sleeves.
“You know, I can’t keep up with the crazies anymore, Dr. Scarpetta. Some of them really frighten me, and I think the Internet is making all of it worse.”
Rose peeked around the doorway.
“You aren’t listening to a word I’m saying,” she said.
“I get suits on sale,” I replied. “And you blame everything on the Internet.”
I probably wouldn’t bother shopping for clothes at all if Rose didn’t force me out the door every now and then when stores were clearing out last season’s styles. I hated shopping, unless it was for good wine or food. I hated crowds. I hated malls. Rose hated the Internet and believed the world would end one day because of it. I’d had to force her to use e-mail.
“If Lucy calls, will you make sure I get it no matter where I am?” I said as Marino walked into Rose’s office. “And try her field office, too. You can patch her through.”
The thought of Lucy knotted my stomach. I’d lost my temper and hurled words at her I didn’t mean. Rose glanced at me. Somehow she knew.
“Captain,” she said to Marino, “you look mighty spiffy this morning.”
Marino grunted. Glass rattled as he opened a jar of lemon drops on her
desk and helped himself.
“What do you want me to do with this crazy lady’s letter?” Rose peered through the open doorway at me, reading glasses perched on her nose as she dug through another drawer.
“I think it’s time we forward the lady’s file—if you ever find it—to the A.G.’s office,” I said. “In case she sues. Which will probably be next. Good morning, Marino.”
“You still talking about that nutcake I locked up?” he asked, sucking candy.
“That’s right,” I remembered. “That nutcake was one of your cases.”
“So I guess I’ll get sued, too.”
“Probably,” I muttered as I stood at my desk, shuffling through yesterday’s telephone messages. “Why does everybody call when I’m not here?”
“I’m kinda getting into being sued,” Marino said. “Makes me feel special.”
“I just can’t get used to you in uniform, Captain Marino,” Rose said. “Should I salute?”
“Don’t turn me on, Rose.”
“I thought your shift didn’t start until three,” I said.
“Nice thing about me being sued is the city’s gotta pay. Ha. Ha. Screw ’em.”
“We’ll see how Ha Ha it is when you end up paying one of these days and lose your truck and aboveground swimming pool. Or all those Christmas decorations and extra fuse boxes, God forbid,” Rose told him as I opened and shut my desk drawers.
“Has anybody seen my pens?” I asked. “I don’t have a single goddamn pen. Rose? Those Pilot rolling ball pens. I had at least a box of them on Friday. I know I did because I bought them myself last time I was at Ukrops. And I don’t believe it. My Waterman’s missing, too!”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about leaving anything valuable around here,” Rose told me.
“I gotta smoke,” Marino said to me. “I’ve had it with these damn smoke-free buildings. All these dead people in your joint and the state’s worried about smoking. What about all those formalin fumes? A few good whiffs of that will drop a horse.”
“Damn!” I shoved one drawer shut and yanked open another. “And guess what else? No Advil, no BC powders and no Sudafed. Now I’m really getting angry.”
“Coffee money, Cleta’s portable phone, lunches, and now your pens and aspirin. I’ve gotten to where I take my pocketbook everywhere I go. The office’s started calling whoever it is ‘The Body Snatcher,’” Rose angrily said. “Which I don’t think is funny in the least.”
Marino walked over and put his arm around her.
“Sweetheart, you can’t blame a guy for wanting to snatch your body,” he sweetly said in her ear. “I’ve been wanting to ever since I first laid eyes on you way back when I had to teach the doc everything she knows.”
Rose demurely pecked his cheek and leaned her head against his shoulder. She looked defeated and suddenly very old.
“I’m tired, Captain,” Rose muttered.
“Me, too, sweetheart. Me, too.”
I looked at my watch.
“Rose, please tell everyone staff conference’s going to be a few minutes late. Marino, let’s talk.”
The smoking room was a corner in the bay where there were two chairs, a Coke machine and a dirty, dented ashcan that Marino and I put between us. Both of us lit up, and I felt the same old bite of shame.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Didn’t you cause enough problems for yourself yesterday?”
“I was thinking about what Lucy said last night,” Marino said. “About my current situation, you know. How it’s like I’m hitting the bricks, out of service, finished, Doc. I can’t take it, if you want to know the truth. I’m a detective. I’ve been one almost all my life. I can’t do this uniform shit. I can’t work for assholes like Diane ‘Donkey’ Bray.”
“That’s why you took the field investigation exam last year,” I reminded him. “You don’t have to stay with the police department, Marino. Not with any police department. You’ve got more than enough years in to retire. You can make your own rules.”
“No offense, Doc, but I don’t want to work for you, either,” he said. “Not part-time or on a case basis or whatever.”
The state had given me two slots for field investigators, and I had not filled either one of them yet.
“The point is, you have options,” I replied, touched by hurt I would not show.
He was silent. Benton walked into my mind and I saw his feelings in his eyes, and then he was gone. I felt the cooling shadow of Rose and feared the loss of Lucy. I thought of getting old and people vanishing from my life.
“Don’t quit on me, Marino,” I told him.
He didn’t answer me right away, and when he did, his eyes blazed.
“Fuck ’em all, Doc,” he said. “No one’s telling me what to do. If I want to work a case, I’ll goddamn work it.”
He tapped an ash and seemed very pleased with himself.
“I don’t want you fired or demoted,” I said.
“They can’t demote me no lower than I am,” he said with another lightning bolt of anger. “They can’t make me less than a captain, and there’s no assignment worse than I got. And let ’em fire me. But guess what? They won’t. And you want to know why? Because I could go to Henrico, Chesterfield, Hanover, you name it. You don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to take over investigations in other departments.”
I remembered the unlit cigarette in my hand.
“A few of ’em have even wanted me to be chief.” He hobbled further along his Pollyanna path.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said as menthol made its hit. “Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m doing this again.”
“I’m not trying to fool anyone,” he said, and I could feel his depression moving in like a low-pressure front. “It’s like I’m on the wrong planet. I don’t know the Brays and Andersons of the world. Who are these women?”
“Power gluttons.”
“You’re powerful. You’re a hell of a lot more powerful than them or anybody I ever met, including most men, and you aren’t like that.”
“I don’t feel very powerful these days. I couldn’t even control my temper this morning on my own driveway in front of my niece and her girlfriend and probably a few neighbors.” I blew out smoke. “And I feel sick about it.”
Marino leaned forward in his chair. “You and me are the only two people who give a flying fuck about that rotting body in there.”
He jerked his thumb toward the door leading into the morgue.
“I bet Anderson don’t even show up this morning,” he went on. “One thing’s for damn sure, she ain’t gonna hang around watching you post him.”
The look on his face sent my heart out of rhythm. Marino was desperate. What he had done all his life was really all he had left, except for an ex-wife and an estranged son named Rocky. Marino was trapped in an abused body that most assuredly was going to pay him back one of these days. He had no money and awful taste in women. He was politically incorrect, slovenly and foul-mouthed.
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” I said. “You shouldn’t be in uniform. In fact, you’re rather much a disgrace to the department. What’s that on your shirt anyway? Mustard again? Your tie’s too short. Let me see your socks.”
I bent over and peeked under the cuffs of his uniform pants.
“They don’t match. One black, one navy,” I said.
“Don’t let me get you into trouble, Doc.”
“I’m already in trouble, Marino,” I said.
11
One of the more heartless aspects of my work was that unknown remains became “The Torso” or “The Trunk Lady” or “The Superman Man.” They were appellations that robbed the person of his identity and all he’d been or done on earth as surely as his death had.
I considered it a painful personal defeat when I could not bring about the identification of someone who came under my care. I packed bones in bankers’ boxes and stored them in the skeleton closet, in hopes they might tell me who they were som
eday. I kept intact bodies or their parts in freezers for months and years, and would not give them up to a pauper’s grave until there was no more hope or space. We didn’t have room enough to keep anyone forever.
This morning’s case had been christened “The Container Man.” He was in very grim shape, and I hoped I would not have to hold him long. When decomposition was this advanced, even refrigeration couldn’t stop it.
“Sometimes I don’t know how you stand it,” Marino grumbled.
We were in the changing room next to the morgue, and no locked door or concrete wall could completely block the smell.
“You don’t have to be here,” I reminded him.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
We suited up in double gowns, gloves, sleeve protectors, shoe covers, surgical caps and masks with shields. We didn’t have air packs because I didn’t believe in them, and I’d better never catch one of my doctors sneaking Vicks up his nose, although cops did it all the time. If a medical examiner can’t handle the unpleasantries of the job, he should do something else.
More to the point, odors are important. They have their own story to tell. A sweet smell might point at ethchlorvynol, while chloral hydrate smells like pears. Both might make me wonder about an overdose of hypnotics, while a hint of garlic might point at arsenic. Phenols and nitrobenzene bring to mind ether and shoe polish respectively, and ethylene glycol smells exactly like antifreeze because that’s exactly what it is. Isolating potentially significant smells from the awful stench of dirty bodies and rotting flesh is rather much like archaeology. You focus on what you are there to find and not on the miserable conditions around it.
The decomposed room, as we called it, was a miniature version of the autopsy suite. It had its own cooler and ventilation system and a single table I could roll up and attach to a big sink. Everything, including cabinets and doors, was stainless steel. Walls and the floors were coated with a non-absorbent acrylic that could withstand the most brutal washes with disinfectants and bleach. Automatic doors were opened by steel buttons that were big enough to push with elbows instead of hands.
When the doors slid shut behind Marino and me, I was startled to find Anderson leaning against a countertop, the gurney bearing the pouched body parked in the middle of the floor. The body is evidence. I never left an investigator alone with an unexamined body, certainly not since the badly botched O. J. Simpson trial, when it became the vogue for everyone except the defendant to be impeached in court.