The clarion sound of steel striking steel rang out again and again. With hammer and chisel the diggers broke the vault's coal tar seal, then lowered the lid to the earth as Marino hurried into the woods. We pretended not to notice the hideous grunts and groans and gagging sounds coming from mountain laurels as he vomited.
"Do you still have a bottle of each of the fluids you used for embalming?" I asked Lucias Ray, whose reaction to the advancing troops of media and Marino's outburst seemed more quizzical than bothered.
"I may have half a bottle left of what I used on her," he said.
"I'll need chemical controls for toxicology," I explained.
"It's just formaldehyde and methanol with a trace of lanoline oil-as common as chicken soup. Now, I did use a lower concentration because of her small size. Your detective friend sure don't look too good," he added as Marino emerged from the woods.
"You know, the flu's going around."
"I don't think he has the flu," I said.
"How did the reporters find out we were here?"
"Now, you got me on that one. But you know how folks are." He paused to spit.
"Always someone who's got to run his yap." Emily's steel casket was painted as white as the Queen Anne's lace that had grown around her plot, and the diggers did not need the winch to lift it out of the vault and gently lower it to the grass. The casket was small like the body inside it. Lucias Ray slipped a radio out of a coat pocket and spoke into it.
"You can come on now," he said.
"Ten-four," a voice came back.
"No more reporters, I sure hope like heck?"
"They're all gone."
A shiny black hearse glided through the cemetery's entrance and drove half in the woods and half on the grass, miraculously dodging graves and trees. A fat man wearing a trench coat and porkpie hat got out to open the tailgate, and the diggers slid the casket inside while Marino watched from a distance, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
"You and I need to talk." I had moved close and spoke quietly to him as the hearse went on its way.
"I don't need nothing right now." His face was pale.
"I've got to meet Dr. Jenrette at the morgue. Are you coming?"
"No," he said.
"I'm going on back to the Travel-Eze. I'm gonna drink beer until I puke again, then I'm gonna switch to bourbon. And after that I'm gonna call Wesley's ass and ask him when the shit we can get out of this armpit town, because I tell you, I don't have another decent shirt here and I just ruined this one. I don't even have a tie."
"Marino, go lie down."
"I'm living out of a bag this big," he went on, holding his hands not too far apart.
"Take Advil, drink as much water as you can hold, and eat some toast.
I'll check on you when we finish at the hospital. If Benton calls, tell him I'll have my portable phone with me or he can call my pager. "
"He's got those numbers?"
"Yes," I said. Marino glanced at me over his handkerchief as he mopped his face again. I saw the hurt in his eyes before it slipped back behind its walls.
9
Dr. Jenrette was doing paperwork in the morgue when I arrived as the hearse did shortly before ten. He smiled nervously at me as I took off my suit jacket and put a plastic apron over my clothes.
"Would you have a guess as to how the press found out about the exhumation?" I asked, unfolding a surgical gown. He looked startled.
"What happened?"
"About a dozen reporters showed up at the cemetery."
"That's a real shame."
"We need to make sure nothing more gets out," I said, tying the gown in back and doing my best to sound patient.
"What happens here needs to remain here. Dr. Jenrette." He said nothing.
"I know I am a visitor and I wouldn't blame you if you resented the hell out of my presence. So please don't think I'm insensitive to the situation or indifferent to your authority. But you can rest assured that whoever murdered this little girl keeps up with the news. Whenever something gets leaked, he finds out about it, too."
Dr. Jenrette, pleasant person that he was, did not look the least bit offended as he listened carefully.
"I'm just trying to think of who all knew," he said.
"The problem is by the time word got around that could have been a lot of people."
"Let's make sure word doesn't get around about anything we might find in here today," I said as I heard our case arrive. Lucias Ray walked in first, the man in the porkpie hat right behind him pulling the church cart bearing the white casket. They maneuvered their cargo through the doorway and parked close to the autopsy table. Ray slipped a metal crank out of his coat pocket and inserted it in a small hole at the casket's head. He began cranking loose the seal as if he were starting a Model-T.
"That should do it," he said, dropping the crank back into his pocket.
"Hope you don't mind my waiting around to check on my work. It's an opportunity I don't usually get, since we're not in the habit of digging up people after we bury'em." He started to open the lid, and if Dr. Jenrette hadn't placed his hands on top of it to stop him, I would have.
"Ordinarily that wouldn't be a problem, Lucias," Dr. Jenrette said.
"But it's really not a good idea for anyone else to be here right now."
"I think that's being a might bit touchy." Ray's smile got tight.
"It's not like I haven't seen this child before. Why I know her inside and out better than her own mama."
"Lucias, we need you to go on now so Dr. Scarpetta and I can get this done," Dr. Jenrette spoke in his same sad soft tone.
"I'll call you when we're finished."
"Dr. Scarpetta" -Ray fixed his eyes on me"-I must say it does appear folks are a little less friendly since the Feds came to town."
"This is a homicide investigation, Mr. Ray," I said.
"Perhaps it would be best not to take things personally since nothing has been intended that way."
"Come on. Billy Joe," the funeral director said to the man in the porkpie hat.
"Let's go get something to eat."
They went out. Dr. Jenrette locked the door.
"I'm sorry," he said, pulling on gloves.
"Lucias can be overbearing sometimes, but he really is a good person."
I was suspicious we would find that Emily had not been properly embalmed or had been buried in a fashion that did not reflect what her mother had paid.
But when Jenrette and I opened the casket's lid, I saw nothing that immediately struck me as out of order. The white satin lining had been folded over her body, and on top of it I found a package wrapped in white tissue paper and pink ribbon. I started taking photographs.
"Did Ray mention anything about this?" I handed the package to Jenrette.
"No." He looked perplexed as he turned it this way and that. The smell of embalming fluid wafted up strongly as I opened the lining. Beneath it Emily Steiner was well preserved in a long-sleeve, high-collar dress of pale blue velveteen, her braided hair in bows of the same material.
A fuzzy whitish mold typically found on bodies that have been exhumed covered her face like a mask and had started on the tops of her hands, which were on her waist, clasped around a white New Testament. She wore white knee socks and black patent leather shoes. Nothing she had been dressed in looked new.
I took more photographs; then Jenrette and I lifted her out of the casket and placed her on top of the stainless steel table, where we began to undress her. Beneath her sweet, little girl clothes hid the awful secret of her death, for people who die gracefully do not bear the wounds she had. Any honest forensic pathologist will admit that autopsy artifacts are ghastly. There is nothing quite like the Y incision in any pre mortem surgical procedure, for it looks like its name. The scalpel goes from each clavicle to sternum, runs the length of the torso, and ends at the pubis after a small detour around the navel. The incision made from ear to ear at the back of the head before sawing open the skull is not attractive, e
ither.
Of course, injuries to the dead do not heal. They can only be covered with high lacy collars and strategically coiffed hair. With heavy makeup from the funeral home and a wide seam running the length of her small body, Emily looked like a sad rag doll stripped of its frilly clothes and abandoned by its heartless owner. Water drummed into a steel sink as Dr. Jenrette and I scrubbed away mold, makeup, and the flesh-colored putty filling the gunshot wound to the back of the head and the areas of the thighs, upper chest, and shoulders where skin had been excised by her killer. We removed eye caps beneath eyelids and took out sutures. Our eyes watered and noses began to run as sharp fumes rose from the chest cavity. Organs were breaded with embalming powder, and we quickly lifted them out and rinsed some more. I checked the neck, finding nothing that my colleague hadn't already documented. Then I wedged a long thin chisel between molars to open the mouth.
"It's stubborn," I said in frustration.
"We're going to have to cut the masseters. I want to look at the tongue in its anatomical position before getting at it through the posterior pharynx. But I don't know. We may not be able to. " Dr. Jenrette fitted a new blade into his scalpel.
"What are we looking for?"
"I want to make certain she didn't bite her tongue." Minutes later I discovered that she had.
"She's got marks right there at the margin," I pointed out.
"Can you get a measurement?"
"An eighth of an inch by a quarter."
"And the hemorrhages are about a quarter of an inch deep. It looks like she might have bitten herself more than once. What do you think?"
"It looks to me like maybe she did."
"So we know she had a seizure associated with her terminal episode."
"The head injury could do that," he said, fetching the camera.
"It could, but then why doesn't the brain show that she survived long enough to have a seizure?"
"I guess we've got the same unanswered question."
"Yes," I said.
"It's still very confusing." When we turned the body, I absorbed myself in studying the peculiar mark that was the point of this grim exercise as the forensic photographer arrived and set up his equipment. For the better part of the afternoon we took rolls of infrared, ultraviolet, color, high-contrast, and black-and-white film, with many special filters and lenses.
Then I went into my medical bag and got out half a dozen black rings made of acrylonitrile-butadiene- styrene plastic, or more simply, the material that commonly composes pipes used for water and sewage lines. Every year or two I got a forensic dentist I knew to cut the three-eighth-inch-thick rings with a band saw and sand them smooth for me. Fortunately, it wasn't often I needed to pull such an odd trick out of my bag, for rarely was it necessary to remove a human bite mark or other impression from the body of someone murdered. Deciding on a ring three inches in diameter, I used a machinist's die punch to stamp Emily Steiner's case number and location markers on each side.
Skin, like a painter's canvas, is on a stretch, and in order to support the exact anatomical configuration of the mark on Emily's left buttock during and after its removal, I needed to provide a stable matrix.
"Have you got Super Glue?" I asked Dr. Jenrette. |j "Sure." He brought me a tube.
"Keep taking photographs of every step, if you don't mind," I instructed the photographer, a slight Japanese man who never stood still. Positioning the ring over the mark, I fixed it to the skin with the glue and further secured it with sutures. Next I dissected the tissue around the ring and placed it en bloc in formalin. All the while I tried to figure out what the mark meant. It was an irregular circle incompletely filled with a strange brownish discoloration that I believed was the imprint of a pattern.
But I could not make out what, no matter how many Polaroids we looked at from how many different angles. We did not think about the package wrapped in white tissue paper until the photographer had left and Dr. Jenrette and I had notified the funeral home that we were ready for their return.
"What do we do about this?" Dr. Jenrette asked.
"We have to open it." He spread dry towels on a cart and set the gift on top of them.
Carefully slicing the paper with a scalpel, he exposed an old box from a pair of size-six women's loafers. He cut through many layers of Scotch tape and removed the top.
"Oh my," he said under his breath as he stared in bewilderment at what someone had intended for a little girl's grave. Shrouded in two sealed freezer bags inside the box was a dead kitten that could not have been but a few months old. It was as stiff as plyboard when I lifted it out, its delicate ribs protruding. The cat was a female, black with white feet, and she wore no collar. I saw no evidence of what had killed her until I took her into the X-ray room, and a little later was mounting her films on a light box.
"Her cervical spine is fractured," I said as a chill pricked up the hair on the back of my neck. Dr. Jenrette frowned as he moved closer to the light box.
"It looks like the spine's been moved out of the usual position here." He touched the film with a knuckle.
"That's weird. It's displaced laterally? I don't think that could happen if she got hit by a car."
"She wasn't hit by a car," I told him.
"Her head's been twisted clockwise by ninety degrees."
I found Marino eating a cheeseburger in his room when I returned to the Travel-Eze at almost seven p. m. His gun, wallet, and car keys were on top of one bed and he was on the other, shoes and socks scattered across the floor as if he had walked out of them. I could tell he had probably gotten back here not too long before I did. His eyes followed me as I went to the television and turned it off.
"Come on," I said.
"We have to go out." The "gospel truth" according to Lucias Ray was that Denesa Steiner had placed the package in Emily's casket. He had simply assumed that beneath the gift wrapping was a favorite toy or doll.
"When did she do this?" Marino asked as we walked briskly through the motel's parking lot.
"Right before the funeral," I replied.
"Have you got your car keys?"
"Yeah."
"Then why don't you drive."
I had a nasty headache I blamed on formalin fumes and lack of food and sleep.
"Have you heard from Benton?" I asked as casually as possible.
"There should have been a bunch of messages at the desk for you."
"I came straight to your room. And how would you know if I had a lot of messages?"
"The clerk tried to give'em to me. He figured between the two of us I look like the doctor."
"That's because you look like a man." I rubbed my temples.
"It's mighty white of you to notice."
"Marino, I wish you wouldn't talk like such a racist, because I really don't think you are one."
"How do you like my ride?" His car was a maroon Chevrolet Caprice, fully loaded with flashing lights, a radio, telephone, scanner. It had even come equipped with a mounted video camera and a Winchester stainless steel Marine twelve-gauge shotgun. Pump action, it held seven rounds and was the same model the FBI used.
"My God," I said in disbelief as I got into the car.
"Since when do they need riot guns in Black Mountain, North Carolina?"
"Since now." He cranked the engine.
"Did you request all this?"
"Nope."
"Would you like to explain to me how a ten-person police force can be better equipped than the DEA?"
"Because maybe the people who live around here really understand what community policing's all about. This community's got a bad problem right now, and what's happening is area merchants and concerned citizens are donating shit to help. Like the cars, phones, the shotgun. One of the cops told me some old lady called up just this morning and wanted to know if the federal agents that had come to town to help would like to have Sunday dinner with her."
"Well, that's very nice," I said, baffled.
"Plus, the town cou
ncil's thinking about making the police department bigger, and I have a suspicion that helps explain some things."
"What things?"
"Black Mountain's gonna need a new chief."
"What happened to the old one?"
"Mote was about as close to a chief as they had."
"I'm still not clear on where you're going with this."
"Hey, maybe where I'm going is right here in this town. Doc. They're looking for an experienced chief and treating me like I'm 007 or something. It don't take a rocket scientist to figure it out."
"Marino, what in God's name is going on with you?" I asked very calmly. He lit a cigarette.
"What? First you don't think I look like a doctor? Now I don't look like a chief, either? I guess to you I don't look like nothing but a Dogtown slob who still talks like he's eating spaghetti with the mob back in Jersey and only takes out women in tight sweaters who tease their hair. " He blew out smoke furiously.
"Hey, just because I like to bowl don't mean I'm some tattooed redneck. And just because I didn't go to all these Ivy League schools like you did don't mean I'm a dumb shit."
"Are you finished?"
"And another thing," he railed on, "there's a lot of really good places to fish around here. They got Bee Tree and Lake James, and except for Montreal and Biltmore, the real estate's pretty cheap. Maybe I'm just sick as shit of drones shooting drones and serial killers costing more to keep alive in the pen than I friggin' get paid to lock their asses up. J/the assholes even stay in the pen, and that's the biggest'if of all. " We had been parked in the Steiner driveway for five minutes now. I stared out at the house lit up wondering if she knew we were here and why.
"Now are you finished?" I asked him.
"No, I ain't finished. I'm just sick of talking."
"In the first place, I didn't go to Ivy League schools…"
"Well, what do you call Johns Hopkins and Georgetown?"
"Marino, goddam it, shut up." He glared out the windshield and lit another cigarette.
"I was a poor Italian brought up in a poor Italian neighborhood just like you were," I said.
"The difference is that I was in Miami and you were in New Jersey. I've never pretended to be better than you, nor have I ever called you stupid. In fact, you're anything but stupid, even if you butcher the English language and have never been to the opera.
The Body Farm ks-5 Page 10
