Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Detective Stanfield, I hope?” I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.

  “Good morning.” He catches himself as he stares at the body. “Well, I guess not for him.”

  Stanfield hasn’t bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word “chicken.” “Denial” is her word. I don’t care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don’t watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.

  “Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma’am,” Stanfield says. “Hope you got chains on your tires, ’cause I didn’t and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that’s why I wasn’t here earlier. You found out anything?”

  “His CO’s seventy-two percent.” Vernacular for carbon monoxide. “Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO.” I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. “STAT alcohol’s zero.”

  “So it was the fire that got him, for sure?”

  “We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid.” I cut through ribs. “He’s got anal tunneling—evidence of homosexual activity, in other words—and his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged.” I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the corners of the mouth. Stanfield’s eyes pop open. “The abrasions on his wrists aren’t crusty,” I go on. “They don’t look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death.” I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. “Fresh injection sites,” I explain. “But what’s interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I’ll put a block of liver through to check for triaditis—mild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we’ll see what comes back on his tox.”

  “Guess he could have AIDS.” This is foremost on Detective Stanfield’s mind.

  “We’ll do an HIV on him,” I reply.

  Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as “Chief.” I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn’t.

  “Ready for me to open up the skull, Chief?” Her question is an announcement that requires no answer. Turk is like a lot of the military women we get in here—tough, eager, quick to eclipse the men, who often, truthfully, are the squeamish ones. “That lady Dr. Chong’s working on,” Turk says as she plugs the Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel, “she’s got a living will and even wrote her own obituary. Got all her insurance papers in order, everything. Put ’em all in a binder and left it and her wedding band on the kitchen table before she laid herself down on the blanket and shot herself in the head. Can you imagine? Really, really sad.”

  “It’s very sad.” The organs are a shimmering bloc as I lift them out en masse and set them on a cutting board. “If you’re going to be in here, you really should cover up.” I direct this at Stanfield. “Did anybody show you where things are in the locker room?”

  He blankly stares at the cuffs of my blood-soaked sleeves, at the blood splashed on the front of my gown. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go over what I got,” he says. “If we could maybe sit down for a minute? Then I need to head on back before the weather gets any worse. Pretty soon, you’re gonna need Santa’s sleigh to get anywhere.”

  Turk picks up a scalpel and makes an incision around the back of the head, ear to ear. She reflects back the scalp and pulls it forward, and the face goes slack, collapsing into tragic protest before it is inside out like a folded-down sock. The exposed dome of the skull glistens pristinely white, and I take a good look at it. No hematomas. No indentations or fractures. The whir of the electric saw sounds like a hybrid of a table saw and a dentist’s drill as I pull off my gloves and drop them in a red biohazard trash can. I motion Stanfield to follow me to the long countertop that runs the length of the wall opposite the autopsy stations. We pull out chairs.

  “I gotta be honest with you, ma’am,” Stanfield begins with a slow, negative shake of his head. “We don’t got a clue where to start on this one. All I can tell you right now is this man”—he indicates the body on the table—“checked into The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground yesterday at three P.M.”

  “Where exactly is The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground?”

  “On Route Five West, no more than ten minutes from William and Mary.”

  “You talked to the clerk at this motel, The Fort James Motel?”

  “The lady in the office, yes ma’am, I did.” He opens a large manila envelope and scoops out a handful of Polaroid photographs. “Her name’s Bev Kiffin.” He spells it for me, slipping reading glasses out of an inner jacket pocket, hands trembling slightly as he flips through a notepad. “She said the young man come in and said he wants the sixteen-oh-seven special.”

  “I’m sorry. The what?” I rest my ballpoint pen on the notes I am making.

  “One hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents Monday through Friday. That’s five nights. Sixteen-oh-seven. The usual rate’s forty-six dollars a night, which is mighty high for a place like that, you ask me. But you know tourist traps.”

  “Sixteen-oh-seven? As in the date Jamestown was founded?” It seems odd to hear a reference to Jamestown. I just mentioned Jamestown to Anna last night when I was talking about Benton.

  Stanfield nods deeply. “As in Jamestown. Sixteen-oh-seven. That’s the business rate, or so they call it. The amount for the business week, and let me add, ma’am, this isn’t a very nice motel, not at all, no ma’am. A fleabag is what I would call it.”

  “Does it have a history of crime?”

  “Oh no. No ma’am. No history of crime I’m aware of, not at all.”

  “Just seedy.”

  “Just seedy.” He nods deeply.

  Detective Stanfield has a distinct way of speaking with emphasis, as if he is used to teaching a slow child who needs important words repeated or emphasized. He neatly arranges photographs in a lineup on the countertop and I look at them. “You took these?” I assume.

  “Yes ma’am, I sure did.”

  Like him, what he has captured on film is emphatic and to the point: the motel door with the number 14 on it, the view of the room through the open doorway, the scorched bed, the smoke damage to the curtains and walls. There is a single chest of drawers and an area to hang clothes that is nothing more than a rod in a recessed area just inside the door. I note that the mattress on the bed has remnants of a cover and white sheets but nothing else. I ask Stanfield if perhaps he submitted the bedcovers to the labs to test for accelerants. He replies that there was nothing on the bed, nothing to submit except burned areas of the mattress, which he placed inside a tightly sealed aluminum paint can—“according to procedure” are his exact words, the words of someone very new at detective work. But he does agree it is odd that the bedcovers were missing.

  “They were on the bed when he checked in?” I ask.

  “Mrs. Kiffin says she didn’t accompany him to the room, but is sure the bed was properly made because she cleaned it up herself after the last guest checked out several days ago,” he replies, so that is good. At least he thought to ask her about it.

  “What about luggage?” I ask n
ext. “Did the victim have luggage?”

  “Didn’t find any luggage.”

  “And the fire department got there when?”

  “They were called at five-twenty-two P.M.”

  “Who called?” I am making notes.

  “Someone anonymous driving by. Saw smoke and called from his car phone. This time of year, the motel doesn’t do a lot of business, according to Mrs. Kiffin. She says about three fourths of the rooms was empty yesterday, being as how it’s almost Christmas and the weather and all the rest. You can see by looking at the bed, the fire wasn’t going nowhere.” He touches several of the photographs with a thick, rough finger. “It pretty much had put itself out by the time the fire trucks got there. All they needed was fire extinguishers, didn’t need to hose things down, which is a good thing for us. This here’s his clothes.”

  He shows me a photograph of a dark pile of clothing on the floor just beyond the open bathroom door. I make out pants, a T-shirt, a jacket and shoes. Next I look at photographs taken inside the bathroom. On the sink is a coppertone plastic ice bucket, plastic glasses covered with cellophane and a small bar of soap still in its wrapper. Stanfield fishes in a pocket for a small knife, opens a blade and slits the evidence tape sealing the paper bag he brought with him. “His clothes,” he explains. “Or at least I assume they’re his.”

  “Hold on,” I tell him. I get up and cover a gurney with a clean sheet, and put on fresh gloves and ask him if a wallet or any other personal effects were recovered. He tells me no. I smell urine as I pull out clothing from the bag, careful that if any trace evidence is dislodged, it will fall on the sheet. I examine black bikini briefs and black Giorgio Armani cashmere trousers, both soaked with urine.

  “He wet his pants,” I tell Stanfield.

  He just shakes his head and shrugs, and doubt crosses his eyes—maybe doubt tainted by fear. None of this is making much sense, but the feeling I have is clear. This man may have checked in alone, but at some point, another person entered the picture, and I am wondering if the victim lost control of his bladder because he was terrified. “Does the lady in the office, Mrs. Kiffin, remember him dressed like this when he checked in?” I ask as I pull pockets inside out to see if there is anything in them. There isn’t.

  “Didn’t ask her that,” Stanfield responds. “So he’s got nothing in his pockets. That’s kind of unusual.”

  “No one checked them at the scene?”

  “Well, I didn’t bag the clothes, to tell you the truth. Another officer did that, but I’m sure nobody dug in the pockets, or at least no personal effects was found or I would know and have them with me,” he says.

  “Well, how about you call Mrs. Kiffin right now and see if she remembers him wearing this clothing when he checked in?” I politely tell Stanfield to do his job. “And what about a car? Do we know how he got to the motel?”

  “No vehicle’s turned up so far.”

  “The way he was dressed is certainly inconsistent with a low-budget motel, Detective Stanfield.” I am drawing pants on a clothing diagram form.

  The black jacket and black T-shirt as well as the belt, shoes and socks are expensive designer labels, and this makes me think about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose unique baby-fine hair was found all over Thomas’s decomposing body when it showed up in the Richmond Port earlier this month. I comment on the similarity of the clothes to Stanfield. The prevailing theory, I go on to explain to him, is that Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother, Thomas, probably in Antwerp, Belgium, and switched clothing with him before sealing the body inside a cargo container bound for Richmond.

  “Because you found all those hairs I been reading about in the paper?” Stanfield is trying to understand what would be difficult for even the most experienced investigator who has seen it all.

  “That and microscopic findings that relate to diatoms—algae—consistent with an area of the Seine near the Chandonne house in Île Saint-Louis, in Paris.” I talk on. Stanfield is completely lost. “Look, all I can tell you, Detective Stanfield, is this man”—I refer to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—“has a very rare congenital disorder and allegedly has been known to bathe in the Seine, maybe thinking it might cure him. We have reason to believe the clothing on his brother’s body was originally Jean-Baptiste’s. Make sense?” I am drawing a belt and noting from the indentation in the leather which notch was used the most.

  “Well, to tell you the truth,” Stanfield replies, “I been hearing about nothing but this weird case and this Werewolf fellow. I mean, ma’am, that really is all you hear when you turn on TV or pick up the paper, and I guess you know that, and by the way, I’m really sorry for what you been through and to tell you the truth, can’t figure how you can even be in here or thinking straight. Godalmighty!” He shakes his head. “The wife said if something like that showed up at our door, he wouldn’t have to do a thing to her. She’d die right off of a heart attack.”

  I catch a spark of his misgivings about me. He is wondering if I am completely rational right now, if I might just be projecting—if somehow everything I experience becomes tainted by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. I slip the clothing diagram off the clipboard and place it with John Doe’s paperwork as Stanfield dials a number he reads from his notepad. I watch him insert a finger in his free ear, squinting as if Turk’s sawing open another skull hurts his eyes. I can’t hear what Stanfield is saying. He hangs up and comes back over to me as he reads the video display of his pager.

  “Well, we got good news and bad news,” he announces. “The lady, Mrs. Kiffin, remembers him dressed real nice in a dark suit. That’s the good news. The bad news is, she also remembers he had a key in his hand, one of those remote kinds that a lot of new, expensive cars have.”

  “But there’s no car,” I reply.

  “No ma’am, no car. No key, either,” he says. “Sure looks like whatever happened to him, he had some help. You think maybe somebody drugged him and then tried to burn him up to hide the evidence?”

  “I think we’d better seriously consider homicide.” I state the obvious. “We need to get him printed and see if he matches up with anybody in AFIS.”

  The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allows us to scan fingerprints into a computer and compare them with those in a database that can be linked state to state. If this dead man has a criminal record in this country, or if his prints are in the database for some other reason, we most likely will get a hit. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves, doing my best to cover the plaster looped around my left lower palm and thumb. Fingerprinting dead bodies requires a simple tool called a spoon. It is nothing more than a curved metal implement shaped much like a hollow tube cut in half lengthwise. A strip of white paper is threaded through slits in the spoon so that the paper’s surface is curved to accommodate the contours of fingers no longer flexible or compliant to their owner’s will. With each print, the strip is advanced ahead to the next clean square. The procedure isn’t hard. It doesn’t require great intelligence. But when I tell Stanfield where the spoons are, he frowns as if I have just spoken to him in a foreign language. I ask him if he has ever printed a dead body before. He admits he has not.

  “Hold on,” I say, and I go to the phone and dial the extension for the fingerprints lab. No one answers. I try the switchboard. Everyone is gone for the day because of the weather, I am told. I get a spoon and ink pad from a drawer. Turk wipes off the dead man’s hands and I ink his fingers, pressing them one at a time against the curved paper strip. “What I can do if you have no objection,” I tell Stanfield, “is see if Richmond City will pop these into AFIS so we can get that going.” I press a thumb inside the spoon while Stanfield watches with an unpleasant expression on his face. He is one of these people who hates the morgue and can’t get out of it fast enough. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone in the labs to help us right now, and the sooner we can figure out who this guy is, the better,” I explain. “And I’d like to get the prints and other information to Interpol in the event thi
s man has international connections.”

  “Okay,” Stanfield says with another nod as he glances at his watch.

  “Have you ever dealt with Interpol?” I ask him.

  “Can’t say I have, ma’am. They’re sort of like spies, aren’t they?”

  I page Marino to see if he can help. He drops by forty-five minutes later, by which time Stanfield is long gone and Turk is tucking John Doe’s sectioned organs inside a heavy plastic bag that she will place in the body cavity before she sews up the Y incision.

  “Yo Turk,” Marino hails her when he passes through opening steel doors. “Freezing leftovers again?”

  She glances up at him with one raised eyebrow and a cocked smile. Marino likes Turk. He likes her so much he is rude to her at every opportunity. Turk doesn’t look like what one might conjure up from her nickname. She is petite, with a clean prettiness and creamy complexion, her long blond hair tied back and clipped up high like a show horse’s tail. She threads heavy white waxed twine into a twelve-gauge suture needle as Marino continues to pick on her. “I tell ya,” he says, “I ever get cut, I ain’t coming to you for stitches, Turk.” She smiles, dipping the big, angled needle into flesh and tugging twine through.

  Marino looks hung over, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. Despite his quips, he is in a foul mood. “You forget to go to bed last night?” I ask him.