Unnatural Exposure ks-8

by Patricia Cornwell

  'It's unfinished business, Kay. I have felt this for a long time. You need to bury Mark

  James.'

  'Margaret, what has suddenly prompted this?' I was tripping over words again.

  'I know when someone is on the run. And you are, just as much as this killer is.'

  'Now, that's a comforting thing to say,' I replied, and I did not want to have this conversation.

  But she was not going to let me escape this time. 'For very different reasons and very similar reasons. He's evil, you're not. But neither of you wants to be caught.'

  She had gotten to me and could tell.

  'And just who or what is trying to catch me, in your opinion?' My tone was light but I

  felt the threat of tears.

  'At this stage, I expect it's Benton Wesley.'

  I stared off, past the gurney and its protruding pale foot tied with a tag. Light from above shifted by degrees as clouds moved over the sun, and the smell of death in tile and stone went back a hundred years.

  'Kay, what do you want to do?' she asked kindly as I wiped my eyes.

  'He wants to marry me,' I said.

  I flew home to Richmond and days became weeks with the weather getting cold. Mornings were glazed with frost and evenings I spent in front of the fire, thinking and fretting. So much was unresolved and silent, and I coped the way I always did, working my way deeper into the labyrinth of my profession until I could not find a way out. It was making my secretary crazy.

  'Dr Scarpetta?' She called out my name, her footsteps loud and brisk along the tile floor in the autopsy suite.

  'In here,' I answered over running water.

  It was October 30. I was in the morgue locker room, washing up with antibacterial soap.

  'Where have you been?' Rose asked as she walked in. 'Working on a brain. The sudden death from the other day.'

  She was holding my calendar and flipping pages. Her gray hair was neatly pinned back, and she was dressed in a dark red suit that seemed appropriate for her mood. Rose was deeply angry with me and had been since I' d left for Dublin without saying good-bye. Then I forgot her birthday when I got back. I turned off the water and dried my hands.

  'Swelling, with widening of the gyri, narrowing of the sulci, all good for ischemic encephalopathy brought on by his profound systemic hypotension,' I cited.

  'I've been trying to find you,' she said with strained patience.

  'What did I do this time?' I threw up my hands.

  'You were supposed to have lunch at the Skull and Bones with Jon.'

  'Oh, God,' I groaned as I thought of him and other medical school advisees I had so little time to see.

  'I reminded you this morning. You forgot him last week, too. He really needs to talk to you about his residency, about the Cleveland Clinic.'

  'I know, I know.' I felt awful about it as I looked at my watch. 'It's one-thirty. Maybe he can come by my office for coffee?'

  'You have a deposition at two, a conference call at three about the Norfolk-Southern case. A gunshot wound lecture to the Forensic Science Academy at four, and a meeting at five with Investigator Ring from the state police.' Rose went down the list. I did not like Ring or his aggressive way of taking over cases. When the second torso had been found, he had inserted himself into the investigation and seemed to think he knew more than the FBI.

  'Ring I can do without,' I said, shortly.

  My secretary looked at me for a long moment, water and sponges slapping in the autopsy suite next door.

  'I'll cancel him and you can see Jon instead.' She eyed me over her glasses like a stern headmistress. 'Then rest, and that's an order. Tomorrow, Dr Scarpetta. Don't come in. Don't you dare let me see you darken the door.'

  I started to protest and she cut me off.

  'Don't even think of arguing,' she firmly went on. 'You need a mental health day, a long weekend. I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it.'

  She was right, and as I thought about having a day to myself, my spirits lifted.

  'There's not a thing I can't reschedule,' she added. 'Besides.' She smiled. 'We're having a touch of Indian summer and it's supposed to be glorious, in the eighties with a big blue sky. Leaves are at their peak, poplars an almost perfect yellow. Maples look like they're on fire. Not to mention, it's Halloween. You can carve a pumpkin.'

  I got suit jacket and shoes out of my locker. 'You should have been a lawyer,' I said.

  Chapter Two

  The next day, the weather was just what Rose predicted, and I woke up thrilled. As stores were opening, I set out to stock up for trick-or-treaters and dinner, and I drove far out on Hull Street to my favorite gardening center. Summer plantings had long since faded around my house, and I could not bear to see their dead stalks in pots. After lunch, I carried bags of black soil, boxes of plants and a watering can to my front porch.

  I opened the door so I could hear Mozart playing inside as I gently tucked pansies into their rich, new bed. Bread was rising, homemade stew simmering on the stove, and I smelled garlic and wine and loamy soil as I worked. Marino was coming for dinner, and we were going to hand out chocolate bars to my small, scary neighbors. The

  world was a good place to live until three-thirty-five when my pager vibrated against my waist.

  'Damn,' I exclaimed as it displayed the number for my answering service.

  I hurried inside, washed my hands and reached for the phone. The service gave me a number for a Detective Grigg with the Sussex County Sheriff's Department, and I immediately called.

  'Grigg,' a man answered in a deep voice.

  'This is Dr Scarpetta,' I said as I stared dismally out windows at large terra cotta pots on the deck and the dead hibiscus in them.

  'Oh good. Thank you for getting back to me so quick. I'm out here on a cellular phone, don't want to say much.' He spoke with the rhythm of the old South, and took his time.

  'Where, exactly, is here?' I asked.

  'Atlantic Waste Landfill on Reeves Road, off 460 East. They've turned something up I

  think you're going to want to take a look at.'

  'Is this the same sort of thing that has turned up in similar places?' I cryptically asked as the day seemed to get darker.

  'Afraid that's what it's looking like,' he said.

  'Give me directions, and I'm on my way.'

  I was in dirty khakis, and an FBI tee shirt that my niece, Lucy, had given to me, and did not have time to change. If I didn't recover the body before dark, it would have to stay where it was until morning, and that was unacceptable. Grabbing my medical bag, I hurried out the door, leaving soil, cabbage plants and geraniums scattered over the porch. Of course my black Mercedes was low on gas. I stopped at Amoco first and pumped my own, then was on my way.

  The drive should have taken an hour, but I sped. Waning light flashed white on the underside of leaves, and rows of corn were brown in farms and gardens. Fields were ruffled green seas of soybeans, and goats grazed unrestrained in the yards of tired homes. Gaudy lightning rods with colored balls tilted from every peak and corner, and I always wondered what lying salesman had hit like a storm and played on fear by preaching more.

  Soon grain elevators Grigg had told me to look for came into view. I turned on

  Reeves Road, passing tiny brick homes and trailer courts with pickup trucks and dogs, with no collars. Billboards advertised Mountain Dew arid the Virginia Diner, and I bumped over railroad tracks, red dust billowing up like smoke from my tires. Ahead, buzzards in the road picked at creatures that had been too slow, and it seemed a morbid harbinger.

  At the entrance of the Atlantic Waste Landfill, I slowed my car to a stop and looked out at a moonscape of barren acres where the sun was setting like a planet on fire.

  Flatbed refuse trucks were sleek and white with polished chrome, crawling along the summit of a growing mountain of trash. Yellow Caterpillars were striking scorpions. I sat watching a moiling storm of dust heading away from the landfill, rocking over ruts at a high rate o
f speed. When it got to me it was a dirty red Ford Explorer driven by a young man who felt at home in this place.

  'May I help you, ma'am?' he said in a Southern drawl, and he seemed anxious and excited.

  'I'm Dr Kay Scarpetta,' I replied, displaying the brass shield in its small black wallet that I always pulled at scenes where I did not know anyone.

  He studied my credentials, then his eyes were dark on mine. He was sweating through his denim shirt, hair wet at his neck and temples.

  'They said the medical examiner would get here, and for me to watch for him,' he said to me.

  'Well, that would be me,' I blandly replied.

  'Oh yes, ma'am. I didn't mean anything…' His voice trailed off as his eyes wandered over my Mercedes, which was coated in dust so fine and persistent that nothing could keep it out. 'I suggest you leave your car here and ride with me,' he added.

  I stared up at the landfill, at Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile

  on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.

  'Okay,' I said. 'Let's do it.'

  Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver's seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that

  I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.

  'I can't say that I blame you,' my driver said. 'The smell's pretty rough. I can tell you that.'

  'It's not the smell,' I said. 'Microorganisms are what make me worry.

  'Gee,' he said, anxiously. 'Maybe I should wear one of those things.'

  'You shouldn't be getting close enough to have a problem.' He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.

  'I sure am sorry about the dust,' he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. 'You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.' He nervously paused before going on. 'We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.'

  'From where?' I asked.

  'Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.'

  'What about Boston?' I asked, for the first four cases were believed to be from as far away as that.

  'No, ma'am.' He shook his head. 'Maybe one of these days. We're so much less per ton down here. Twenty-five dollars compared to sixty-nine in New Jersey or eighty in

  New York. Plus, we recycle, test for hazardous waste, collect methane gas from decomposing trash.'

  'What about your hours?'

  'Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,' he said with pride.

  'And you have a way to track where the trucks come from?'

  'A satellite system that uses a grid. We can at least tell you which trucks would have dumped trash during a certain time period in the area where the body was found.' We splashed through a deep puddle near Porta-Johns, and rocked by a powerwash

  where tracks were being hosed off on their way back out to life's roads and highways.

  'I can't say we've ever had anything like this,' he said. 'Now, they've had body parts at the Shoosmith dump. Or at least, that's the rumor.'

  He glanced at me, assuming I would know if such a rumor were true. But I did not verify what he had just said as the Explorer sloshed through mud strewn with rubber chips, the sour stench of decomposing garbage drifting in. My attention was riveted to the small truck I had been watching since I had gotten here, thoughts racing along a thousand different tracks.

  'By the way, my name's Keith Pleasants.' He wiped a hand on his pants and held it out to me. 'Pleased to meet you.'

  My gloved hand shook his at an awkward angle as men holding handkerchiefs and rags over their noses watched us pull up. There were four of them, gathered around the back of what I now could see was a hydraulic packer, used for emptying Dumpsters and compressing the trash. Cole's Trucking Co. was painted on the doors.

  'That guy poking garbage with a stick is the detective for Sussex,' Pleasants said to me. He was older, in shirtsleeves, wearing a revolver on his hip. I felt I'd seen him somewhere before.

  'Grigg?' I guessed, referring to the detective I had spoken to on the phone.

  'That's right.' Sweat was rolling down Pleasants' face, and he was getting more keyed up. 'You know, I've never had any dealings with the sheriff's department, never even got a speeding ticket around here.'

  We slowed down to a halt, and I could barely see through the boiling dust. Pleasants grabbed his door handle.

  'Sit tight just a minute,' I told him.

  I waited for dust to settle, looking out the windshield and surveying as I always did when approaching a crime scene. The loader's bucket was frozen midair, the packer beneath it almost full. All around, the landfill was busy and full of diesel sounds,

  work stopped only here. For a moment, I watched powerful white trucks roar uphill as Cats clawed and grabbed, and compactors crushed the ground with their chopper wheels.

  The body would be transported by ambulance, and paramedics watched me through dusty windows as they sat in air conditioning, waiting to see what I was going to do. When they saw me fix the surgical mask over my nose and mouth and open my door, they climbed out, too. Doors slammed shut. The detective immediately walked to meet me.

  'Detective Grigg, Sussex Sheriff's Department,' he said. 'I'm the one who called.'

  'Have you been out here the entire time?' I asked him.

  'Since we were notified at approximately thirteen hundred hours. Yes, ma'am. I've been right here to make sure nothing was disturbed.'

  'Excuse me,' one of the paramedics said to me. 'You going to want us right now?'

  'Maybe in fifteen. Someone will come get you,' I said as they wasted no time returning to their ambulance. 'I'm going to need some room here,' I said to everybody else.

  Feet crunched as people stepped out of the way, revealing what they had been guarding and gawking at. Flesh was unnaturally pale in the dying light of the autumn afternoon, the torso a hideous stub that had tumbled from a scoop of trash and landed on its back. I thought it was Caucasian, but was not sure, and maggots teeming in the genital area made it difficult for me to determine gender at a glance. I could not even say with certainty whether the victim was pre- or postpubescent. Body fat was abnormally low, ribs protruding beneath flat breasts that may or may not have been female.

  I squatted close and opened my medical bag. With forceps, I collected maggots into a jar for the entomologist to examine later, and decided upon closer inspection that the victim was, in fact, a woman. She had been decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. Stumps were dry and dark with age, and I knew right away that there was a difference between this case and the others.

  This woman had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur, versus the joints. Getting out a scalpel, I could feel the men staring as I made a half-inch incision on the torso's right side, and inserted a long chemical thermometer. I rested a second thermometer on top of my bag.

  'What are you doing?' asked a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, who looked like he might get sick.

  'I need the body's temperature to help determine time of death. A core liver temperature is the most accurate,' I patiently explained. 'And I also need to know the temperature out her
e.'

  'Hot, that's what it is,' said another man. 'So, it's a woman, I guess.'

  'It's too soon to say,' I replied. 'Is this your packer?'

  'Yeah.'

  He was young, with dark eyes and very white teeth, and tattoos on his fingers that I usually associated with people who have been in prison. A sweaty bandanna was tied around his head and knotted in back, and he could not look at the torso long without averting his gaze.

  'In the wrong place at the wrong time,' he added, shaking his head with hostility.

  'What do you mean?' Grigg had his eye on him.

  'Wasn't from me. I know that,' the driver said as if it were the most important point he would ever make in his life. 'The Cat dug it up while it was spreading my load.'

  'Then we don't know when it was dumped here?' I scanned faces around me.

  It was Pleasants who replied, 'Twenty-three trucks unloaded in this spot since ten

  A.M., not counting this one.' He looked at the packer.

  'Why ten A.M.?' I asked, for it seemed like a rather arbitrary time to start counting trucks.

  'Because that's when we put down the last cover of tire chips. So there's no way it could have been dumped before then,' Pleasants explained, staring at_ the body. 'And in my opinion, it couldn't have been out long, anyway. It doesn't exactly look the way you'd expect if it's been run over by a fifty-ton compactor with chopper wheels; trucks or even this loader.'

  He stared off at other sites where compacted trash was being gouged off trucks as huge tractors crushed and spread. The driver of the packer was getting increasingly agitated and angry.

  'We got big machines all over the place up here,' Pleasants added. 'And they pretty much never stop.'

  I looked at the packer, and the bright yellow loader with its empty cab. A tatter of black trash bag fluttered from the raised bucket.

  'Where's the driver of the loader?' I asked.

  Pleasants hesitated before answering, 'Well, I guess that would be me. We had somebody out sick. I was asked to work on the hill.'

  Grigg moved closer to the loader, looking up at what was left of the trash bag as it moved in the hot, barren air.