“Thank you, thank you,” I tell him as he begins arranging his paperwork on a clipboard. “You are a good man to come help us out this morning, Sam.”
He grins, then jerks his head at Marino and says in his most exaggerated New Jersey accent, “How’ya doin’, Marino?”
“You ever seen the Grinch steal Christmas? ’Cause if you haven’t, just hang out with me for a while. I’m in a mood to take back little kids’ toys and pat their mamas on the ass on my way up the chimney.”
“Don’t you be trying to go up no chimneys. You’ll get stuck for sure.”
“Hell, you could look out the top of a chimney and still have your feet in the fireplace. You still growing?”
“Not as much as you are, man. What you weighing in these days?” Terry thumbs through the dental charts Marino brought in. “Well, this won’t take long. He’s got a rotated right maxillary second premolar, the distal surface lingual. Annnndddd . . . lots of restorations. Saying this guy”—he holds up the charts—“and your guy are one and the same.”
“How about them Rams beating Louisville?” Marino calls out above the drumming of running water.
“Were you there?”
“Nope, and you wasn’t either, Terry, which is why they won.”
“Probably true.”
I pluck a surgical knife off the cart as the phone rings.
“Sam, you mind getting that?” I ask.
He trots to the corner, snaps up the phone and announces, “Morgue.” I cut through the costochondral cartilage junctions, removing a triangle of sternum and parasternal ribs. “Hold on,” Terry says to whoever has him on the line. “Dr. Scarpetta? Can you talk to Benton Wesley?”
The room becomes a vacuum that sucks out all light and sound. I freeze, staring, stunned, the steel surgical knife poised in my bloody, gloved right hand.
“What the fuck?” Marino blurts out. He strides over to Terry and snatches the phone from him. “Who the hell is this?” he yells into the mouthpiece. “Shit.” He tosses the receiver back into the cradle on the wall. Obviously, the person hung up. Terry looks stricken. He has no idea what just happened. He hasn’t known me long. There is no reason for him to know about Benton unless someone else told him, and apparently no one has.
“What exactly did the person say to you?” Marino asks Terry.
“I hope I didn’t do something wrong.”
“No, no.” I find my voice. “You didn’t,” I reassure him.
“Some man,” he replies. “All he said is he wanted to speak to you and he said his name was Benton Wesley.”
Marino picks up the phone again and swears and fumes because there is no Caller ID. We have never had occasion to need Caller ID in the morgue. He hits several buttons and listens. He writes down a number and dials it. “Yeah. Who’s this?” he demands over the line to whoever has picked up. “Where? Okay. You see someone else using this phone just a minute ago? The one you’re talking on. Uh huh. Yeah, well, I don’t believe you, asshole.” He slams down the receiver.
“You think it’s the same one who just called?” Terry asks him in confusion. “What’d you do, hit star sixty-nine?”
“A pay phone. At the Texaco on Midlothian Turnpike. Supposedly. I don’t know if it’s the same person who called. What was his voice like?” Marino pins Terry with a stare.
“He sort of sounded young. I think. I don’t know. Who’s Benton Wesley?”
“He’s dead.” I reach for the scalpel, pushing the point down on a cutting board, snapping in a new blade and dropping the old in a bright red biohazard plastic container. “He was a friend, a close friend.”
“Some squirrel playing a sick joke. How would anybody know the number down here?” Marino is upset. He is furious. He wants to find the caller and pound him. And he is considering that his malevolent son may be behind this. I can read it in Marino’s eyes. He is thinking about Rocky.
“Under state government listings in the phone book.” I begin cutting blood vessels, severing the carotids very low at the apex, moving down to the iliac arteries and veins of the pelvis.
“Don’t tell me it says morgue in the goddamn phone book.” Marino starts up his old routine again. He is blaming me.
“I think it’s listed under funeral information.” I cut through the thin flat muscle of the diaphragm, loosening the bloc of organs, freeing it from the vertebral column. Lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and spleen shimmer different hues of red as I lay the bloc on the cutting board and wash off blood with a gentle hosing of cold water. I notice petechial hemorrhages, dark areas of bleeding no bigger than pin pricks scattered over the heart and lungs. I associate this with persons who had difficulty breathing at or about the time of death.
Terry carries his black bag over to my station and sets it on the surgical cart. He gets out a dental mirror and goes inside the dead man’s mouth. We work in silence, the weight of what has just occurred pressing down hard. I reach for a bigger knife and cut sections of organs, slicing through the heart. The coronary arteries are open and clear, the left ventricle one centimeter wide, the valves normal. Other than a few fatty streaks in the aorta, the heart and vessels are healthy. The only thing wrong with it is the obvious: It quit. For some reason, this man’s heart stopped. I find no explanation anywhere I look.
“Like I said, this one’s easy,” Terry says as he makes notes on a chart. His voice is nervous. He wishes he had never answered the phone.
“He’s our guy?” I ask him.
“Sure is.”
The carotid arteries lie like rails in the neck. Between them are the tongue and neck muscles, which I flip down and peel away so I can examine them closely on the cutting board. There are no hemorrhages in deep tissue. The tiny, fragile U-shaped hyoid bone is intact. He wasn’t strangled. When I reflect back his scalp, I find no contusions or fractures hiding underneath. I plug a Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel and realize I need more than one hand. Terry helps me steady the head as I push the whining, vibrating semicircular blade through the skull. Hot, bony dust drifts on the air, and the skullcap lifts off with a soft sucking sound, revealing the convoluted horizon of the brain. On gross examination, there is nothing wrong with it. Slices gleam like creamy agate with gray ruffled edges as I rinse them on the cutting board. I will save the brain and heart for further special studies, fixing them in formalin and sending them to the Medical College of Virginia.
My diagnosis this morning is one of exclusion. Having found no obvious, pathological cause of death, I am left with one that is based on whispers. Tiny hemorrhages on heart and lungs and burns and abrasions from bondage suggest Mitch Barbosa died from stress-induced arrhythmia. I also postulate that at some point he was holding his breath or his airway was obstructed—or for some reason his breathing was compromised to the extent that he partially asphyxiated. Perhaps the gag, which would have gotten wet from saliva, is to blame. Whatever the truth, I am getting a picture that is simple and ghastly and calls for demonstration. Terry and Marino are handy.
First I cut off several lengths of the thick white twine that we routinely use to suture up Y-incisions. I tell Marino to push up the sleeves of his surgical gown and hold out his hands. I tie one segment of twine around one wrist and a second strand around the other, not too tight, but snug. I instruct him to hold his arms up in the air and direct Terry to grab the loose ends of twine and pull up. Terry is tall enough to do this without a chair or footstool. The bindings immediately dig into the underside of Marino’s wrists and are angled up toward the knots. We try this in different positions, with variations of the arms close together and spread wide crucifixion-style. Of course, Marino’s feet remain squarely on the floor. In no instance is he hanging or even dangling.
“The weight of a body on outstretched arms interferes with exhalation,” I explain. “You can inhale but it’s difficult exhaling because the intercostal muscles are compromised. Over a period of time, this would lead to asphyxia. You add that to the shock of pain from torture,
you add fear and panic, and you could certainly suffer from an arrhythmia.”
“What about the nosebleed?” Marino holds out his wrists and I examine the indentations the twine has left in his skin. They are angled up similarly to those on the dead man.
“Increased intracranial pressure,” I say. “In a breath-holding situation, you can get nosebleeds. In the absence of injury, that’s a good guess.”
“My question is whether someone meant to kill him?” Terry poses.
“Most people aren’t going to string someone up and torture him and then let him go to tell the story,” I reply. “I’ll pend his cause and manner for now until we see what tox has to say.” My eyes light on Marino’s. “But I believe you’d best treat this as a homicide, a very awful one.”
We contemplate this later in the morning as we drive toward James City County. Marino wanted to take his truck, and I suggested we follow Route 5 east along the river, through Charles City County where eighteenth-century plantations fan out from the roadside in vast fallow fields that lead to the awesome brick mansions and outbuildings of Sherwood Forest, Westover, Berkeley, Shirley and Belle Air. There isn’t a tour bus in sight, no logging trucks or roadwork, and country stores are closed. It is Christmas Eve. The sun shines through endless arches of old trees, shadows dapple pavement and Smoky the Bear asks for help from a sign in a gracious part of the world where two men have died barbarically. It does not seem that anything so heinous could happen here until we get to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Tucked off Route 5 in the woods, it is a hodgepodge of cabins, trailers and motel buildings that are rusting and paint-peeled, reminding me of Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy: cheaply constructed facades where shady people are about to get raided by the law.
The rental office is in a small frame house overwhelmed by scrubby pines that have carpeted the roof and earth in brown tags. Soft-drink and ice machines in front glow through overgrown bushes. Children’s bicycles lie wounded in leaves, and ancient seesaws and swings aren’t to be trusted. A homely mixed-breed dog that sags with a history of chronic breeding rises to her old feet and stares at us from the sloping porch.
“I thought Stanfield was meeting us here.” I open my door.
“Go figure.” Marino climbs out of the truck, his eyes moving everywhere.
A veil of smoke drifts out the chimney and streams almost horizontally with the wind, and through a window I catch winking, gaudy Christmas lights. I feel eyes on us. A curtain moves, the sounds of a television muted from deep within the house as we wait on the porch and the dog sniffs my hand and licks me. Marino announces our arrival with a fist pounding the door, and finally calls out, “Anybody home? Hey!” Banging his fist hard. “Police!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” an impatient woman’s voice sings out. A hard, tired face fills the space of the opening door, the burglar chain still anchored and taut.
“You Mrs. Kiffin?” Marino asks her.
“Who are you?” she asks him back.
“Captain Marino, Richmond P.D. This is Dr. Scarpetta.”
“What you bringing a doctor for?” Brow furrowing, she glances at me from her shadowy crack. A stirring at her feet, and a child peeks out at us and smiles like an imp. “Zack, you go back inside.” Small bare arms, hands with dirty nails wrap around mama’s knee. She shakes him loose. “Go on!” He disconnects and is gone.
“Going to need you to show us the room where the fire was,” Marino tells her. “Detective Stanfield with James City County should be here. You seen him?”
“No police been here this morning.” She pushes the door shut and the burglar chain rattles as she removes it, then the door opens again, this time wide, and she steps out on the porch, pushing her arms into the sleeves of a lumberjack’s red plaid coat, a ring of keys jingling in her hand. She yells into the house, “Y’all stay! Zack, don’t you get into the cookie dough! I’ll be right back.” She shuts the door. “Never seen anybody love cookie dough like that boy,” she tells us as we go down the steps. “Sometimes I buy the premade in rolls and one day I catch Zack eating one, wrapper peeled down like a banana. Ate half of it by the time I caught him. I told him, You know what’s in it? Raw eggs, that’s what.”
Bev Kiffin is probably no more than forty-five, her prettiness hard and garish like truck-stop cafes and late-night diners. Her hair is dyed bright blond and is curly like a French poodle, her dimples deep, her figure ripe on the way to matronly. She has a defensive, obstinate air about her that I associate with people who are used to being worn down and in trouble. I would also call her shifty. I am about to distrust every word she says.
“I don’t want problems out here,” she lets us know. “As if I don’t have enough going on, especially this time of year,” she says as she walks. “All these people pulling in here morning, noon and night to gawk and take pictures.”
“What people?” Marino asks her.
“Just people in cars, pulling up in the drive, staring. Some of them getting out and roaming around. Last night I woke up when someone drove through. It was two A.M.”
Marino lights a cigarette. We follow Kiffin through the shade of pines along an overgrown path of churned-up snow, past old campers that list like unseaworthy ships. Near a picnic table is a nest of personal belongings that at first glance look like trash from a campsite someone didn’t clean up. But then I see the unexpected: an odd collection of toys, dolls, paperback books, sheets, two pillows, a blanket, a double baby carriage—items that are soggy and dirty not because they were worthless and deliberately pitched but because they have been inadvertently exposed to the elements. Scattered throughout are shredded plastic wrappers that instantly connect with the fragment I found clinging to the first victim’s burned back. The fragments are white, blue and bright orange and are ripped in narrow strips, as if whoever did it has a nervous habit of picking things to pieces.
“Someone sure left in a hurry,” Marino comments.
Kiffin is watching me.
“Maybe skipped without settling the bill?” Marino says.
“Oh no.” She seems in a hurry to move on to the small tawdry motel showing through trees ahead. “They paid up front like everyone else. A family with two little ones staying in a tent and all of a sudden they hightailed it out of here. Don’t know why they left all that. Some of it, like the baby buggy’s pretty nice. Course, then it snowed on everything.”
A gust of wind scatters several bits of wrappers like confetti. I wander closer and nudge a pillow with my foot, turning it over. A pungent, sour odor rises to my nostrils as I squat and take a closer look. Clinging to the underside of the pillow is hair—long, pale hair, very fine hair that has no pigmentation. My heart thuds like the sudden, unexpected kick of a bass drum. I move the shredded wrappers around with my finger. The plasticized material is pliable but tough, so it doesn’t tear easily unless you start at a crinkled edge where the wrapper was heat-sealed together. Some of the fragments are large and easily recognizable as having come from PayDay peanut-caramel candy bars. I can even make out the website address for Hershey’s Chocolate. More hair on the blanket, short, dark hair, a pubic hair. And several more of the long, pale hairs.
“PayDay candy bars,” I say to Marino. I look at Kiffin as I open my satchel. “Know anybody out here who eats a lot of PayDay candy bars and picks apart the wrappers?”
“Well, it didn’t come from my house.” As if we have accused her, or maybe Zack and his sweet tooth.
I do not carry my aluminum crime scene case to scenes where there is no body. But I always keep an emergency kit in my satchel, a heavy-duty freezer bag filled with disposable gloves, evidence bags, swabs, a tiny vial of distilled water and gunshot residue (GSR) kits, among other items. I remove the cap from a GSR kit. It is nothing more than a small, clear plastic stub with an adhesive tip that I use to collect three hairs from the pillow and two from the blanket. I seal the stub and the hairs inside a small transparent plastic evidence bag.
“You
don’t mind my asking?” Kiffin says to me. “What are you doing that for?”
“Think I’ll just bag all this crap, the whole campsite, and take it in to the labs.” Marino is suddenly low-key, calm like a seasoned poker player. He knows how to handle Kiffin, and now she has to be handled because he also knows all too well that hypertrichotic people have unique hair, fine, unpigmented, rudimentary, baby-like hair. Only baby hair is not six or seven inches long like the hair Chandonne shed at his crime scenes. It is possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has been to this campground. “You manage this place by yourself?” Marino asks Kiffin.
“Pretty much.”
“When did the family in the tent leave? It’s not exactly tent weather.”
“They were here right before it snowed. Late last week.”
“You ever find out why they left in such a hurry?” Marino keeps probing in his bland tone.
“Haven’t heard from them, not a word.”
“We’re going to need to take a better look at what all they left behind.”
Kiffin blows on her bare hands to warm them and hugs herself, turning away from the wind. She looks back at her house and you can almost see her contemplating what kind of trouble life holds for her and her family this time. Marino motions for me to follow him. “Wait here,” he tells Kiffin. “We’ll be right back. Just gonna get something out of my truck. Don’t touch nothing, all right?”
She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chandonne appeared at my front door, Marino was out with the response team searching for him, and they discovered where he was hiding in Richmond in the mansion under major renovation on the James River, very close to my neighborhood. Since he rarely if ever went out during daylight hours, we assume, his comings and goings went undetected as he hid in the house and helped himself to whatever was there. Until this moment, it never occurred to any of us that Chandonne might have stayed anyplace else.
“You think he scared off whoever was in that tent so he could use it?” Marino unlocks his truck and reaches in the back of the cab where I know, for one thing, he keeps a pump-action shotgun. “Because I gotta tell ya, Doc. Something we noticed when we went inside that house on the James was junk food wrappers everywhere. A lot of candy bar wrappers.” He lifts out a red tool box and shuts the door of the truck. “Like he’s got a real sugar thing.”
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