“Might we converse without speaking in cliches, at least for a minute or two?”
“Hey I can say it in Portuguese or Chinese and you're not going to listen to me.”
“If you speak Portuguese or Chinese, I promise I'll listen. In fact, if you ever decide to speak English I promise I'll listen.”
“Comments like that don't win you any fans. That's just what I'm talking about.”
“I said it with a smile.”
“I've seen you cut open bodies with a smile.”
“Never. I always use a scalpel.”
“Sometimes there isn't a difference between the two. I've seen your smile make defense attorneys bleed.”
“If I'm such a dreadful person, why are we friends?”
“'Because I've got more walls up than you do. The fact is, there's a squirrel in every tree and the water's full of sharks. All of them want a piece of us.”
“Marino, you're paranoid.”
“You're damn right, which is why I wish you'd lay low for a while, Doc. Really,” he said.
“I can't.”
“You want to know the truth, it's going to start looking like a conflict of interests for you to have anything to do with these cases. It's going to make you come off looking worse.”
I said, “Susan is dead. Eddie Heath is dead. Jennifer Deighton is dead. There is corruption in my office, and we aren't certain who went to the electric chair the other week. You're suggesting I just walk away until everything somehow magically self-corrects?”
Marino reached for the salt but I got it first.
”Nope. But you can have all the pepper you want,” I said, sliding me pepper shaker closer.
“This health crap is going to kill me,” he warned.
“Because one of these days I'm going to get so pissed I'm going to do everything at once. Five cigarettes going, a bourbon in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, baked potato loaded with butter, sour cream, salt and then I'm going to blow every circuit in the box.”
“No, you're not going to do any of those things,” I said. “You're going to be kind to yourself and live at least as long as I do.”
We were silent for a while, picking at our food.
“Doc, no offense, but just what do you think you're going to find out about damn feather parts?”
“Hopefully, their origin.”
“I can save you the trouble. They came from birds, “he said.
I left Marino at close to seven P.M. and returned downtown The temperature had risen above forty, the night dark and lashing out in fits of rain violent enough to stop traffic. Sodium vapor lamps were pollen-yellow fudges behind the morgue, where the bay door was shut, every parking space vacant. Inside the building, my pulse quickened as I followed the brightly lit corridor past the autopsy suite to Susan's small office.
As I unlocked the door, I did not know what I expected to find, but I was drawn to her filing cabinet and desk drawers, to every book and old telephone message Everything looked the same as it had before she died. Marino was quite skilled at going through someone's private space without disturbing the natural disorder of things. The telephone was still askew on the right corner of the desk, the cord twisted like a corkscrew. Scissors and two pencils with broken points were on the green paper blotter, her lab coat draped over the back of her chair.
A reminder of a doctor's appointment was still taped to her computer monitor, and as I stared at the shy curves and gentle slant of her neat script, I trembled inside. Where had she gone adrift? Was it when she married Jason Story? Or was her destruction setup much earlier than that, when she was the young daughter of a scrupulous minister, the twin left behind when her sister was killed? Sitting in her chair, I rolled it closet to the filing cabinet and began slipping out one file after another and glancing through the contents. Most of what I perused was brochures and other printed information pertaining to surgical supplies and miscellaneous items used in the morgue. Nothing struck me as curious until I discovered that she had saved virtually every memo she had ever gotten from Fielding, but not one from Ben Stevens or me, when I knew that both of us had sent her plenty. Further searching through drawers and bookshelves produced no files for Stevens or me, and that's when I concluded that someone had taken them.
My first thought was that Marino might have carried them off. Then something else occurred to me with a jolt, and I hurried upstairs. Unlocking the door to my office, I went straight to the file drawer where I kept mundane administrative paperwork such as telephone call sheets, memos, printouts of electronic mail communications I had received, and drafts of budget proposals and long-term plans. Frantically, I rifled through folders 'drawers. The thick file I was looking for was simply labeled “Memos,” and in it were copies of every memo I'd sent to my staff and various other agency personnel over the past several years. I searched Rose's office and carefully checked my office again. The file was gone.
“You son of a bitch,” I said under my breath as I headed furiously down the hall. “You goddam son of a bitch.”
Ben Stevens's office was impeccably neat and so carefully appointed that it looked like a display in a discount furniture store. His desk was a Williamsburg reproduction with bright brass pulls and a mahogany veneer, and he had brass floor lamps with dark green shades. The door was covered with a machine-made Persian rug, the walls arranged with large prints of alpine skiers and men on thundering horses swinging polo sticks and sailors racing through snarling seas. I began by pulling Susan's personnel file. The expected job description, resume, and other documents were inside. Absent were several memos of commendation I had written since hiring her and had added to her file myself. I began opening desk drawers, and discovered in one of them a brown vinyl kit containing toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, and a small bottle of cologne.
Perhaps it was the barely perceptible shift of air when the door was silently pulled open wider, or perhaps I simply sensed a presence the way an animal would. I happened to look up to find Ben Stevens standing in the doorway as I sat at his desk screwing the cap back on a bottle of Red cologne. For a long, icy moment, our eyes held and neither of us spoke. I did not feel fear. I did not feel the least bit concerned by what he had caught me doing I felt rage “You're keeping unusually late hours, Ben.”
Zipping up his toilet kit, I returned it to its drawer. I laced my fingers on top of the blotter, my movements, my speech, deliberate and slow.
“The thing I've always liked about working after hours is there is no one else around,” I said. “No distractions. No risk of someone walking in and interrupting whatever it is you are doing. No eyes or ears. Not a sound, except on rare occasion when the security guard happens to wander through. And we all know that doesn't happen often unless his attention is solicited, because he hates coming into the morgue at any time. I've never known a security guard who didn't hate that. Same goes for the cleaning crew. They won't even go downstairs, and they do as little up here as they can get away with. But that point is moot, isn't it? It's close to nine o'clock. The cleaning crew is always gone by seven-thirty.
“What intrigues me is that I did not guess before now. It never crossed my mind. Maybe that is a sad comment about how preoccupied I've been. You told the police you did not know Susan personally, yet you frequently gave her rides to and from work, such as on the snowy morning I autopsied Jennifer Deighton. I remember that man was very distracted on that occasion. She left the body in the middle of the corridor, and she was dialing a number on the phone and quickly hung up when I walked into the autopsy suite. I doubt she was placing a business call at seven-thirty in the morning on a day when most people weren't going to venture out of their homes because of the weather. And there was no one in the office to call - no one had gotten in yet, except you. If she were dialing your number, why would her impulse be to hide that from me? Unless you were more than her direct supervisor.
“Of course, your relationship with me is equally intriguing. We seem to get
along fine, then suddenly you claim that I am the worst boss in Christendom. It makes me wonder if Jason Story is the only person talking to reporters. It's amazing, this persona I suddenly have. This image. The tyrant. The neurotic. The person who is somehow responsible for the violent death of my morgue supervision. Susan and I had a very cordial working relationship, and until recently, Ben, so did we. But it's my word against yours, especially now, since any scrap of paper that might document what I'm saying has conveniently disappeared. And my prediction is that you have already leaked to someone that important personnel files and memoranda have vanished from the office, thus implying that I'm the one who took them.
When files and memos disappear, you can say anything you want about the contents of them, can't you?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Ben Stevens said. He moved away from the doorway but did not come close to the desk or take a chair. His face was flushed, his eyes hard with hate. “I don't know anything about any missing files or memos, but if it's true, then I can't hide that fact from the authorities, just as I can't hide the fact that I happened to stop by the office tonight to get something I'd left and discovered you rummaging through my desk.”
“What did you leave, Ben?”
“I don't have to answer your questions.”
“Actually, you do. You work for me, and if you come into the building late at night and I happen to know about it, I have the right to question you.”
“Go ahead and put me on leave. Try to fire me. That will certainly look good for you right now.”
“You are a squid, Ben.”
His eyes widened and he wet his lips.
“Your efforts to sabotage me are just a lot of ink you're squirting into the water because you're panicking and want to divert attention from yourself. Did you kill Susan?”
“You're losing your goddam mind.” His voice shook.
“She left her house early afternoon on Christmas Day, allegedly to meet a girlfriend. In truth, the person she was meeting was you, wasn't it? Did you know that when she was dead in her car, her coat collar and scarf smelled like men's cologne, like the Red cologne you keep in your desk so you can freshen up before you hit the bars in the Slip after work?”
“I don't know what you're talking about”
“Who was paying her?”
“Maybe you were.”
“That's ridiculous,” I said calmly. “You and Susan were involved in some money-making scheme, and my guess is that you are the one who initially got her involved because you knew her vulnerabilities. She probably had confided in you. You knew how to convince her to go along, and Lord knows you could use the money. Your bar tabs alone have got to blow your budget. Partying is very expensive, and I know what you get paid.”
“You don't know anything.”
“Ben.”
I lowered my voice. “Get out of it. Stop while there's still time to tell me who's behind It.”
He would not look me in the eye.
“The stakes are too high when people start dying. Do you think ft you killed Susan that you'll getaway with it?”
He said nothing.
“If someone else killed her, do you think you're immune, that the same thing can't happen to you?”
“You're threatening me.”
“Nonsense.”
“You can't prove that the cologne you smelled on Susan was mine. There's no test for something like that.
You can't put a smell in a test tube; you can't save it;' he said.
“I'm going to ask you to leave now, Ben.”
He turned and walked out of his office. When I heard the elevator doors shut, I went down the hall and peered out a window overlooking the parking lot in back. I did not venture out to my car until Stevens had driven away.
The FBI Building is a concrete fortification at 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of D.C., and when I arrived the following morning, it was in the wake of at least a hundred noisy schoolchildren. They brought to mind Lucy at their age as they stomped up steps, dashed to benches, and flocked restlessly about huge shrubs and potted trees. Lucy would have loved touring the laboratories, and I suddenly missed her intensely.
The babble of shrill young voices faded as if carried away from me by the wind, my step brisk and directed, for I had been here enough times to know the way. Heading toward the center of the building, I passed the courtyard, then a restricted parking area and a guard before reaching the single glass door. Inside was a lobby of tan furniture, mirrors, and flags. A photograph of the president smiled from one wall, while posted on another was a hit parade of the ten most wanted fugitives in the land.
At the escort desk, I presented my driver's license to a young agent whose demeanor was as grim as his gray suit.
“I'm Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia.”
“Who are you here to see?” I told him.
He compared me to my photograph, ascertained that I was not armed, placed a phone call, and gave me a badge. Unlike the Academy at Quantico, Headquarters had an ambience that seemed to starch the soul and stiffen the spine.
I had never met Special Agent Minor Downey, though the irony of his name had conjured up unfair images. He would be an effete, frail man with pale blond hair covering every inch of his body except for his head. His eyes would be weak, his skin rarely touched by the sun, and of course he would drift in and out of places and never draw attention to himself. Naturally, I was wrong. When a fit man in shirtsleeves appeared and looked straight at me, I got up from my chair.
“You must be Mr. Downey,” I said.
“Dr. Scarpetta.”
He shook my hand. “Please call me Minor.”
He was at the most forty, and attractive in a scholarly sort of way, with his rimless glasses, neatly clipped brown hair, and maroon-and-navy-striped tie. He exuded a prepossession and intellectual intensity immediately noticeable to anyone who has suffered through arduous years of postgraduate education, for I could not recall a professor from Georgetown or Johns Hopkins who did not commune with the uncommon and find it impossible to connect with pedestrian human beings.
“Why feathers?” I asked as we boarded the elevator.
“I have a friend who's an ornithologist at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History,” he said. “When government aviation officials started getting her help with bird strikes, I got interested. You see, birds get ingested by aircraft engines and when you're going through the wreckage on the ground, you find these feather parts and want to figure out which bird caused the problem. In other words, whatever got sucked in was chewed up pretty good. A sea gull can crash a B-1 bomber, and you lose one engine to a bird strike with a wide-bodied plane full of people and you've got a problem. Or take the case of the loon that went through the windshield of a Lear jet and decapitated the pilot. So that's part of what I do. I work on bird ingestions. We test turbines and blades by throwing in chickens. You know, can the plane survive one chicken or two? But birds figure into all sorts of things. Pigeon down in poop on the bottom of a suspect's shoes - was the suspect in the alleyway where the body was found or not? Or the guy who stole a Double Yellow Amazon during the course of a burglary, and we find down pieces in the back of his car that are identified as coming from a Double Yellow Amazon. Or the down feather recovered from the body of a woman who was raped and murdered. She was found in a Panasonic stereo speaker box in a Dumpster. The down looked like a small white mallard feather to me, same type of feather in the down comforter on the suspect's bed. That case was made with a feather and two hairs.”
The third floor was a city block of laboratories where examiners analyzed the explosives, paint chips, pollens, tools, tires, and debris used in crimes or collected from scenes. Gas chromatography detectors, microspectrophotometers, and mainframes ran morning, noon, and night, and reference collections filled rooms with automotive paint types, duct tapes, and plastics. I followed Downey through white hallways past the DNA analysis labs, then i
nto the Hairs and Fibers Unit where he worked. His office also functioned as a laboratory, with dark wood furniture and bookcases sharing space with countertops and microscopes. Walls and carpet were beige, and crayon drawings tacked to a bulletin board told me this internationally respected feather expert was a father.
Opening a manila envelope, I withdrew three smaller envelopes made of transparent plastic. Two contained the feathers collected from Jennifer Deighton's and Susan Story's homicides, while a third contained a slide of the gummy residue from Eddie Heath's wrists.
“This is the best one, it seems,” I said, pointing out the feather I had recovered from Jennifer Deighton's nightgown.
He took it out of its envelope and said, “This is down a breast or back feather. It's got a nice tuft on it. Good. The more feather you've got, the better.”
Using forceps, he stripped several of the branchlike projections or “barbs” from both sides of the shaft and, stationing himself at the stereoscopic microscope, placed them on a thin film of xylene that he had dropped on a slide. This served to separate the tiny structures, or float them out, and when he was satisfied that each barb was pristinely fanned, he touched a corner of green blotting paper to the xylene to absorb it. He added the mounting medium Flo-Texx, then a coverslip, and placed the slide under the comparison microscope, which was connected to a video camera.
“I'll start off by telling you that the feathers of all birds have basically the same structure,” he said. “You've got a central shaft, barbs, which in turn branch into hairlike barbules, and you've got a broadened base, at the top of which is a pore called the superior umbilicus. The barbs are the filaments that result in the feather's feathery appearance, and when they're magnified you'll find they're actually like minifeathers coming out of the shaft.”
He turned on the monitor. “Here's a barb.”
“It looks like a fern,” I said.
“In many instances, yes. Now we're going to magnify it some more so we can get a good look at the barbules, for it is the features of the barbules that allow for an identification. Specifically, what we're most interested in are the nodes.”
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