"This is fine." He had turned off lamps inside the room, and beyond us the barely discernible shapes of trees began to move in concert the longer I stared at them. Headlights were small and sporadic along the distant highway.
"On a scale of one to ten, how awful would you rank this day?" he spoke quietly in the dark.
I hesitated, for I had known many awful days in my career.
"I suppose I'd give it a seven."
"Assuming ten's the worst."
"I have yet to have a ten."
"What would that be?" I felt him look at me.
"I'm not sure," I said, superstitious that naming the worst might somehow manifest it. He fell silent and I wondered if he was thinking about the man who had been my lover and his best friend. When Mark had been killed in London several years before, I had believed there could be no pain worse than that. Now I feared I was wrong. Wesley said, "You never answered my question, Kay."
"I told you I wasn't sure."
"Not that question. I'm talking about Marino now. I asked you what his problem is."
"I think he's very unhappy," I answered.
"He's always been unhappy."
"I said very." He waited.
"Marino doesn't like change," I added.
"His promotion?"
"That and what's going on with me."
"Which is?" Wesley poured more Scotch into our glasses, his arm brushing against me.
"My position with your unit is a significant change." He did not agree or disagree but waited for me to say more.
"I think he somehow perceives that I've shifted my alliances." I realized I was getting only more vague.
"And that is unsettling. Unsettling for Marino, I mean. " Still, Wesley offered no opinion, ice cubes softly rattling as he sipped his drink. We both knew very well what part of Marino's problem was, but it was nothing that Wesley and I had done. Rather, it was something Marino sensed.
"It's my opinion that Marino's very frustrated with his personal life," Wesley said.
"He's lonely."
"I believe both of those things are true," I said.
"You know, he was with Doris for thirty-some years and then suddenly finds himself single again. He's clueless, has no idea how to go about it."
"Nor has he ever really dealt with her leaving. It's stored up. Waiting to be ignited by something unrelated. "
"I've worried about that. I've worried about what that something unrelated might be."
"He still misses her. I believe he still loves her," I said, and the hour and the alcohol made me feel sad for Marino. I rarely could stay angry with him long. Wesley shifted his position in his chair.
"I guess that would be a ten. At least for me."
"To have Connie leave you?" I looked over at him.
"To lose someone you're in love with. To lose a child you're at war with. To not have closure." He stared straight ahead, his sharp profile softly backlit by the moon.
"Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think I could take almost anything as long as there's resolution, an ending, so I can be free of the past."
"We are never free of that."
"I agree that we aren't entirely." He continued staring ahead when he next said, "Marino has feelings for you that he can't handle, Kay. I think he always has."
"They're best left unacknowledged."
"That sounds somewhat cold."
"I don't mean it coldly," I said.
"I would never want him to feel rejected."
"What makes you assume he doesn't already feel that way?"
"I'm not assuming he doesn't." I sighed.
"In fact, I'm fairly certain he's feeling pretty frustrated these days."
"Actually, jealous is the word that comes to mind."
"Of you."
"Has he ever tried to ask you out?" Wesley went on as if he had not heard what I just said.
"He took me to the Policeman's Ball."
"Umm. That's pretty serious."
"Benton, let's not joke about him."
"I wasn't joking," he said gently.
"I care very much about his feelings and I know you do." He paused.
"In fact, I understand his feelings very well."
"I understand them, too." Wesley set down his drink.
"I guess I should go in and try to get at least a couple hours' sleep," I decided without moving. He reached over and placed his good hand on my wrist, his fingers cool from holding his glass.
"Whit will fly me out of here when the sun is up."
I wanted to take his hand in mine. I wanted to touch his face.
"I'm sorry to leave you."
"All I need is a car," I said as my heart beat harder.
"I wonder where you rent one around here. The airport, maybe?"
"I guess that's why you're an FBI agent. You can figure out things like that." His fingers worked their way down to my hand and he began to stroke it with his thumb. I had always known our path one day would lead to this. When he had asked me to serve as his consultant at Quantico, I had been aware of the danger. I could have said no.
"Are you in much pain?" I asked him.
"I will be in the morning, because I'm going to have a hangover."
"It is the morning."
I leaned back and shut my eyes as he touched my hair. I felt his face move closer as he traced the contours of my throat with his fingers, then his lips. He touched me as if he had always wanted to, while darkness swept in from the far reaches of my brain and light danced across my blood. Our kisses were stolen like fire. I knew I had found the unforgivable sin I had never been able to name, but did not care. We left our clothes where they landed and went to bed. We were tender with his wounds but not deterred by them, and made love until dawn began to around the horizon's edge. Afterward I sat watching the sun spill over the mountains, coloring the leaves. I imagined his helicopter lifting and turning like a dancer in air.
6
In the center of downtown, across the street from the Exxon station, was Black Mountain Chevrolet, where Officer Baird delivered Marino and me at 7:45 a. m. Apparently, the local police had been spreading word throughout the business community that the "Feds" had arrived and were staying "under cover" at the Travel-Eze. Though I did not feel quite the celebrity, neither did I feel anonymous when we drove off in a new silver Caprice while it seemed that everyone who had ever thought of working for the dealership stood outside the showroom and watched.
"I heard some guy call you Quincy," Marino said as he opened a steak biscuit from Hardee's.
"I've been called worse. Do you have any idea how much sodium and fat you're ingesting right now?"
"Yeah. About one third of what I'm going to ingest. I got three biscuits here, and I plan to eat every damn one of them. In case you've got a problem with your short-term memory, I missed dinner last night."
"You don't need to be rude."
"When I miss food and sleep, I get rude."
I did not volunteer that I had gotten less sleep than Marino, but I suspected he knew. He would not look me in the eye this morning, and I sensed that beneath his irritability he was very depressed.
"I didn't sleep worth a damn," he went on.
"The acoustics in that joint suck."
I pulled down the visor as if that somehow would alleviate my discomfort, then turned the radio on and switched stations until I landed on Bonnie Raitt. Marino's rental car was being equipped with a police radio and scanner and would not be ready until the end of the day. I was to drop him off at Denesa Steiner's house and someone would pick him up later. I drove while he ate and gave directions.
"Slow down," he said, looking at a map.
"This should be Laurel coming up on our left. Okay, you're going to want to hang a right at the next one." We turned again to discover a lake directly ahead of us that was no bigger than a football field and the color of moss. Its picnic areas and tennis courts were deserted, and it did not appear that the neatly maintained clubhouse was curre
ntly in use. The shore was lined with trees beginning to brown with the wane of fall, and I imagined a little girl with guitar case in hand heading home in the deepening shadows. I imagined an old man fishing on a morning like this and his shock at what he found in the brush.
"I want to come out here later and walk around," I said.
"Turn here," Marino said.
"Her house is at the next corner."
"Where is Emily buried?"
"About two miles over that way." He pointed east.
"In the church cemetery."
"This is the church where her meeting was?"
"Third Presbyterian. If you view the lake area as being sort of like the Washington Mall, you got the church at one end and the Steiner crib at the other with about two miles in between."
I recognized the ranch-style house from the photographs I had reviewed at Quantico yesterday morning. It seemed smaller, as so many edifices do when you finally see them in life. Situated on a rise far back from the street, it was nestled on a lot thick with rhododendrons, laurels, sour-woods, and pines. The gravel sidewalk and front porch had been recently swept, and clustered at the edge of the driveway were bulging bags of leaves. Denesa Steiner owned a green Infiniti sedan that was new and expensive, and this rather surprised me. I caught a glimpse of her arm in a long black sleeve holding the screen door for Marino as I drove away. The morgue in Asheville Memorial Hospital was not unlike most I had seen. Located in the lowest level, it was a small bleak room of tile and stainless steel with but one autopsy table that Dr. Jenrette had rolled close to a sink. He was making the Y incision on Ferguson's body when I arrived at shortly after nine. As blood became exposed to air, I detected the sickening sweet odor of alcohol.
"Good morning. Dr. Scarpetta," Jenrette said, and he seemed pleased to see me.
"Greens and gloves are in the cabinet over there."
I thanked him, though I would not need them, for the young doctor would not need me. I expected this autopsy to be all about finding nothing, and as I looked closely at Ferguson's neck, I got my first validation. The reddish pressure marks I had observed late last night were gone, and we would find no deep injury to underlying tissue and muscle. As I watched Jenrette work, I was humbly reminded that pathology is never a substitute for investigation. In fact, were we not privy to the circumstances, we would have no idea why Ferguson had died, except that he had not been shot, stabbed, or beaten, nor had he succumbed to some disease.
"I guess you noticed the way the socks smell that he had stuffed in his bra," Jenrette said as he worked.
"I'm wondering if you found anything to correspond with that, like a bottle of perfume, some sort of cologne?" He lifted out the block of organs. Ferguson had a mildly fatty liver.
"No, we didn't," I replied.
"And I might add that fragrances are generally used in scenarios like this when there's more than one person involved." Jenrette glanced up at me.
"Why?"
"Why bother if you're alone?"
"I guess that makes sense." He emptied the stomach contents into a carton.
"Just a little bit of brownish fluid," he added.
"Maybe a few nut like particles. You say he flew back to Asheville not long before he was found?"
"That's right."
"So maybe he ate peanuts on the plane. And drank. His STAT alcohol's point one-four."
"He probably also drank when he got home," I said, recalling the glass of bourbon in the bedroom.
"Now, when you talk about there being more than one person in some of these situations, is this gay or straight?"
"Often gay," I said.
"But the pornography is a big clue."
"He was looking at nude women."
"The magazines found near his body featured nude women," I restated his remark, for we had no way of knowing what Ferguson had been looking at. We knew only what we had found.
"It's also important that we didn't see any other pornography or sexual paraphernalia in his house," I added.
"I guess I would assume there would be more of it," Jenrette said as he plugged in the Stryker's saw.
"Usually, these guys keep trunk loads of it," I said.
"They never throw it out. Frankly, it bothers me quite a lot that we found only four magazines, all of them current issues."
"It's like he was really new at this."
"There are many factors that suggest he was inexperienced," I replied.
"But mostly what I'm seeing is inconsistency."
"Such as?" He incised the scalp behind the ears, folding it down to expose the skull, and the face suddenly collapsed into a sad, slack mask.
"Just as we found no bottle of perfume to account for the fragrance he had on, we found no women's clothing in the house except what he had on," I said.
"There was only one condom missing from the box. The rope was old, and we found nothing, including other rope, that might be the origin of it. He was cautious enough to wrap a towel around his neck, yet he tied a knot that's extremely dangerous."
"As the name suggests," said Jenrette.
"Yes. A hangman's knot pulls very smoothly and won't let go," I said.
"Not exactly what you want to use when you're intoxicated and perched on top of a varnished bar stool, which you're more likely to fall off of than a chair, by the way."
"I wouldn't think many people would know how to tie a hangman's knot," Jenrette mused.
"The question is, did Ferguson have reason to know?" I said.
"I guess he could have looked it up in a book."
"We found no books about knot tying, no nautical- type books or anything like that in his house."
"Would it be hard to tie a hangman's knot? If there were instructions, let's say?"
"It wouldn't be impossible, but it would take a little practice."
"Why would someone be interested in a knot like that? Wouldn't a slip knot be easier?"
"A hangman's knot is morbid, ominous. It's neat, precise. I don't know. " I added," How is Lieutenant Mote? "
"Stable, but he'll be in the I.C.U for a while." Dr. Jenrette turned on the Stryker's saw. We were silent as he removed the skull cap. He did not speak again until he had removed the brain and was examining the neck.
"You know, I don't see a thing. No hemorrhage to the strap muscles, hyoid's intact, no fractures of superior horns of the thyroid cartilage. The spine's not fractured, but I don't guess that happens except in judicial hangings."
"Not unless you're obese, with arthritic changes of the cervical vertebrae, and get accidentally suspended in a weird way," I said.
"You want to look?"
I pulled on gloves and moved a light closer.
"Dr. Scarpetta, how do we know he was alive when he was hanged?"
"We can't really know that with certainty," I said.
"Unless we find another cause of death."
"Like poisoning."
"That's about the only thing I can think of at this point. But if that's the case, it had to be something that worked very fast. We do know he hadn't been home long before Mote found him dead. So the odds are against the bizarre and in favor of his death being caused by asphyxia due to hanging."
"What about manner?"
"Pending," I suggested. When Ferguson's organs had been sectioned and returned to him in a plastic bag placed inside his chest cavity, I helped Jenrette clean up. We hosed down the table and floor while a morgue assistant rolled Ferguson's body away and tucked it into the refrigerator. We rinsed syringes and instruments as we chatted some more about what was happening in an area of the world that initially had attracted the young doctor because it was safe. He told me he had wished to start a family in a place where people still believed in God and the sanctity of life. He wanted his children in church and on athletic fields. He wanted them untainted by drugs, immorality, and violence on TV.
"Thing is. Dr. Scarpetta," he went on, "there really isn't any place left. Not even here. In the past week I've work
ed an eleven-year-old girl who was sexually molested and murdered. And now a State Bureau of Investigation agent dressed in drag. Last month I got a kid from Oteen who overdosed on cocaine. She was only seventeen. Then there are the drunk drivers. I get them and the people they smash into all the time."
"Dr. Jenrette?"
"You can call me Jim," he said, and he looked depressed as he began to collect paperwork from a countertop.
"How old are your children?" I asked.
"Well, my wife and I keep trying." He cleared his throat and averted his eyes, but not before I saw his pain.
"How about you? You got children?"
"I'm divorced and have a niece who's like my own," I said.
"She's a senior at UVA and currently doing an internship at Quantico."
"You must be mighty proud of her."
"I am," I replied, my mood shadowed again by images and voices, by secret fears about Lucy's life.
"Now I know you want to talk to me some more about Emily Steiner, and I've still got her brain here if you want to see it."
"I very much do." It is not uncommon for pathologists to fix brains in a ten percent solution of formaldehyde called formalin. The chemical process preserves and firms tissue. It makes further studies possible, especially in cases involving trauma to this most incredible and least understood of all human organs. The procedure was sadly utilitarian to the point of indignity, should one choose to view it like that. Jenrette went to a sink and retrieved from beneath it a plastic bucket labeled with Emily Steiner's name and case number. The instant Jenrette removed her brain from its formalin bath and placed it on a cutting board, I knew the gross examination would tell me only more loudly that something was very wrong with this case.
"There's absolutely no vital reaction," I marveled, fumes from the formalin burning my eyes. Jenrette threaded a probe through the bullet track.
"There's no hemorrhage, no swelling. Yet the bullet didn't pass through the pons. It didn't pass through the basal ganglia or any other area that's vital." I looked up at him.
"This is not an immediately lethal wound."
"I can't argue that one."
"We should look for another cause of death."
"I sure wish you'd tell me what. Dr. Scarpetta. I've got tox testing going on. But unless that turns up something significant, there's nothing I can think of that could account for her death. Nothing but the gunshot to her head."
The Body Farm ks-5 Page 7
