“We aren’t supposed to use any block that isn’t valid. So I’m constantly checking the calibration and trying to perfect it. That requires me to spend a lot of time in the firearms lab. It’s not my choice.”
Joe looks at Scarpetta.
“Ordnance gelatin is one of my assignments.”
He looks at her again.
“I hope you remembered to use stopper blocks before you started pounding the back wall with a lot of firepower,” Vince says. “I’ve asked you before.”
“You know the rules, Dr. Amos,” Scarpetta says.
In front of his colleagues, she always calls him Dr. Amos instead of Joe. She shows him more respect than he deserves.
“We have to enter everything in the log,” she adds. “Every firearm removed from the reference collection, every round, every test-fire. Our protocols must be followed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There are legal implications. Most of our cases end up in court,” she adds.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right.” She tells them about Johnny Swift.
She tells them that in early November he had surgery on his wrists, and soon after came toHollywoodto stay with his brother. They were identical twins. The day before Thanksgiving, the brother,Laurel, went out shopping and returned to the house at approximatelyfour thirty p.m.After carrying in the groceries, he discovered Dr. Swift on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest.
“I sort of remember this case,” Vince says. “It was in the news.”
“Well, I happen to remember Dr. Swift very well,” Joe says. “He used to call Dr. Self. Once when I was on her show, he called in, gave her hell about Tourette’s syndrome, and I happen to agree with her, usually nothing more than an excuse for bad behavior. He rambled on about neurochemical dysfunction, about abnormalities of the brain. Quite the expert,” he says sarcastically.
Nobody is interested in Joe’s appearances on Dr. Self’s show. Nobody is interested in his appearances on any show.
“What about an ejected shell and the weapon?” Vince asks Scarpetta.
“According to the police report, Laurel Swift noted a shotgun on the floor some three feet behind the back of the couch. No shell casing.”
“Well, that’s a bit unusual. He shoots himself in the chest and then somehow manages to toss the shotgun over the back of the couch?” It is Joe talking again. “I’m not seeing a scene photograph with the shotgun.”
“The brother claims he saw the shotgun on the floor behind the couch. I say claims. We’ll get to that part in a minute,” Scarpetta says.
“What about gunshot residue on him?”
“I’m sorry Marino isn’t here, since he’s our investigator in this case and working closely with theHollywoodpolice,” she replies, keeping her feelings about him barricaded. “All I know is thatLaurel’s clothing wasn’t tested for GSR.”
“What about his hands?”
“Positive for GSR. But he claims he touched him, shook him, got blood on him. So theoretically, that could explain it. A few more details. His wrists were in splints when he died, his blood alcohol point-one, and according to the police report, there were numerous empty wine bottles in the kitchen.”
“We sure he was drinking alone?”
“We’re not sure of anything.”
“Sounds like holding a heavy shotgun might not have been easy for him if he’d just had surgery.”
“Possibly,” Scarpetta says. “And if you can’t use your hands, then what?”
“Your feet.”
“It can be done. I tried it with my twelve-gauge Remington. Unloaded,” she adds a little humor.
She tried it herself because Marino didn’t show up. He didn’t call. He didn’t care.
“I don’t have photographs of the demonstration,” she says, diplomatic enough not to add that the reason she doesn’t have them is because Marino didn’t show up. “Suffice it to say the blast would have kicked the gun back, or maybe his foot jerked and kicked the gun back, and the shotgun would have fallen off the back of the couch. Saying he killed himself. No abrasions on either of his big toes, by the way.”
“A contact wound?” Vince asks.
“Density of soot on his shirt, the abraded margin and diameter and shape of the wound, the absence of petal marks from the wad, which was still in the body, are consistent with a contact wound. Problem is, we have a gross inconsistency, which, in my opinion, is due to the medical examiner relying on a radiologist for a distance determination.”
“Who?”
“It’s Dr. Bronson’s case,” she says, and several of the scientists groan.
“Jesus, he’s as old as the damn Pope. When the hell’s he going to retire?”
“The Pope died,” Joe jokes.
“Thank you, CNN news flash.”
“The radiologist decided the shotgun wound is a, quote, distant wound,” Scarpetta resumes. “A distance of at least three feet. Uh-oh. Now we have a homicide, because you couldn’t possibly hold the barrel of a shotgun three feet from your own chest, now could you?”
Several clicks of the mouse, and a digital x-ray of Johnny Swift’s fatal shotgun blast is sharply displayed on the smart board. Shotgun pellets look like a storm of tiny white bubbles floating through the ghostly shapes of ribs.
“The pellets are spread out,” Scarpetta points out, “and to give the radiologist a little credit, the spread of the pellets inside the chest is consistent with a range of three or four feet, but what I think we’re dealing with here is a perfect example of the billiard-ball effect.”
She clears the x-ray off the smart board and collects several styluses, different ones for different colors.
“The leading pellets slowed when they entered the body and were then hit by the trailing pellets, causing colliding pellets to ricochet and spread out into a pattern that simulates distant-range fire,” she explains, drawing red ricocheting pellets hitting blue pellets like billiard balls. “Therefore simulating a distant gunshot wound, when in fact, it wasn’t a distant shot at all but a contact wound.”
“None of the neighbors heard a shotgun blast?”
“Apparently not.”
“Maybe a lot of people were out on the beach or out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
“Maybe.”
“What kind of shotgun, and whose was it?”
“All we can tell is it’s a twelve-gauge, based on the pellets,” Scarpetta says. “Apparently, the shotgun disappeared before the police showed up.”
18
Ev Christian is awake and sitting on a mattress that is black with what she by now believes is old blood.
Scattered about the filthy floor inside the small, filthy room with its caving ceiling and water-stained wallpaper are magazines. She sees poorly without her glasses and can barely make out the pornographic covers. She barely makes out soda-pop bottles and fast-food wrappers scattered about. Between the mattress and the splintery wall is a small pink Keds tennis shoe, a girl’s size. Ev has picked it up countless times and held it, wondering what it means and who it once belonged to, worried the girl is dead. Sometimes Ev tucks the shoe behind her when he comes in, fearful he will take it from her. It is all she has.
She never sleeps longer than an hour or two at a stretch and has no idea how much time has passed. There is no such thing as time. Gray light fills the broken window on the other side of the room, and she can’t see the sun. She smells rain.
She doesn’t know what he has done with Kristin and the boys. She doesn’t know what he has done to them. She dimly remembers the first hours, those awful, unreal hours when he brought her food and water and stared at her from the darkness, and he was as dark as the darkness, dark like a dark spirit, hovering in the doorway.
“How does it feel?” He said to her in a soft, cold voice. “How does it feel to know you’re going to die?”
It is always dark inside the room. It is so much darker when he is in it.
“I’m not afraid. You can’t touch my soul.”
“Say you’re sorry.”
“It’s not too late to repent. God will forgive even the most vile sin if you humble yourself and repent.”
“God is a woman. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.”
“Blasphemy. Shame on you. I’ve done nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’ll teach you shame. You’ll say you’re sorry just like she did.”
“Kristin?”
Then he was gone, and Ev heard voices from another part of the house. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was talking to Kristin, must have been. He was talking to a woman. Ev really couldn’t hear it, but she heard them talking. She could not make out what they said, and she remembers feet scuffing and voices on the other side of the wall, and then she heard Kristin, knew it was her. When Ev thinks about it now, she wonders if she dreamed it.
Kristin! Kristin! I’m right here! I’m right here! Don’t you dare hurt her!
She hears her own voice in her head, but it might have been a dream.
Kristin? Kristin? Answer me! Don’t you dare hurt her!
Then she heard talking again, so maybe it was all right. But Ev’s not sure. She might have dreamed it. She might have dreamed she heard his boots moving down the hallway and the front door shutting. All this might have taken place in minutes, maybe hours. Maybe she heard a car engine. Maybe it was a dream, a delusion. Ev sat in the dark, her heart flying as she listened for Kristin and the boys and heard nothing. She called out until her throat was on fire and she could barely see or breathe.
Daylight came and went, and his dark shape would appear with paper cups of water and something to eat, and his shape would stand and watch her, and she could not see his face. She has never seen his face, not even the first time, when he came into the house. He wears a black hood with holes cut in it for his eyes, a hood like a black pillowcase, long and loose around his shoulders. His hooded shape likes to poke her with the barrel of the shotgun as if she is an animal in the zoo, as if he is curious about what she will do if he pokes her. He pokes her in her private places and watches what she will do.
“Shame on you,” Ev says when he pokes her. “You can harm my flesh but you can’t touch my soul. My soul belongs to God.”
“She isn’t here. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.”
“My God is a jealous God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.””
“She isn’t here,” and he pokes her with the gun barrel, sometimes pokes her so hard it leaves perfect blackish-blue circles on her flesh.
“Say you’re sorry,” he says.
Ev sits on the stinking, rotting mattress. It has been used before, used horribly, stiff and stained black, and she sits on it inside the stinking, airless, trash-strewn room, listening and trying to think, listening and praying and screaming for help. No one answers. No one hears her, and she wonders where she could be. Where is she that no one can hear her scream?
She can’t escape because of the clever way he bent and twisted coat hangers around her wrists and ankles with ropes through them and looped over a rafter in the falling-down ceiling, as if she is some sort of grotesque marionette, bruised and covered with insect bites and rashes, her naked body itching and racked with pain. With effort, she can get to her feet. She can move off the mattress to relieve her bladder and bowels. When she does, the pain is so searing, she almost faints.
He does everything in the dark. He can see in the dark. She hears his breathing in the dark. He is a black shape. He is Satan.
“Help me God,” she says to the broken window, to the gray sky beyond, to the God beyond the sky, somewhere in His heaven. “Please God help me.”
19
Scarpetta hears the distant roar of a motorcycle with very loud pipes.
She tries to concentrate as the motorcycle gets closer, cruising past the building toward the faculty parking lot. She thinks about Marino and wonders if she is going to have to fire him. She’s not sure she could.
She is explaining that there were two phones inside Laurel Swift’s house and both of them were unplugged, the cords missing.Laurelhad left his cell phone in his car and says he was unable to find his brother’s cell phone, so he had no way to call for help. Panicking,Laurelfled and flagged somebody down. He didn’t return to the house until the police arrived, and by then the shotgun was gone.
“This is information I got from Dr. Bronson,” Scarpetta says. “I’ve talked to him several times and I’m sorry I don’t have a better grasp of the details.”
“The phone cords. Have they ever shown up?”
“I don’t know,” Scarpetta says, because Marino hasn’t briefed her.
“Johnny Swift could have removed them to make sure no one could call for help in case he didn’t die right away, assuming he’s a suicide,” Joe offers another one of his creative scenarios.
Scarpetta doesn’t answer because she knows nothing about the phone cords beyond what Dr. Bronson relayed to her in his vague, somewhat disjointed way.
“Anything else missing from the house? Anything besides the phone cords, the decedent’s cell phone and the shotgun? As if that’s not enough.”
“You’ll have to ask Marino,” she says.
“I believe he’s here. Unless someone else has a motorcycle as loud as the space shuttle.”
“I’m surprisedLaurelhasn’t been charged with murder, you want my opinion,” Joe says.
“You can’t charge someone with murder when the manner of death hasn’t been determined,” Scarpetta replies. “The manner is still pending, and there isn’t sufficient evidence to change it to suicide or homicide or accident, although I certainly fail to see how this is an accident. If the death isn’t resolved to Dr. Bronson’s satisfaction, he’ll eventually change the manner to undetermined.”
Heavy footsteps sound on carpet in the hallway.
“What happened to common sense?” Joe says.
“You don’t determine manner of death based on common sense,” Scarpetta says, and she wishes he could keep his unwelcome comments to himself.
The conference-room door opens, and Pete Marino walks in carrying a briefcase and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, dressed in black jeans, black leather boots, a black leather vest with the Harley logo on the back, his usual garb. He ignores Scarpetta as he sits in his usual chair next to hers and scoots the box of donuts across the table.
“I sure wish we could test the brother’s clothing for GSR, get our hands on whatever he was wearing when he was shot,” Joe says, leaning back in his chair the way he does when he’s about to pontificate, and he tends to pontificate more than usual when Marino is around. “Take a look at them on soft x-ray, the Faxitron, SEM/spectrometry.”
Marino stares at Joe as if he might hit him.
“Of course, it’s possible to get trace amounts on your person from sources other than a gunshot. Plumbing materials, batteries, automobile greases, paints. Just like in my lab practicum last month,” Joe says as he plucks out a chocolate-iced donut that is smashed, most of its icing stuck to the box. “You know what happened to them?”
He licks his fingers as he looks across the table at Marino.
“That was quite a practicum,” Marino says. “Wonder where you got the idea.”
“What I asked is, do you know what happened to the brother’s clothes,” Joe says.
“I think you been watching too many fantasy forensic shows,” Marino says, his big face staring at him. “Too much Harry Potter policing on your big flat-screen TV. Think you’re a forensic pathologist, or almost one, a lawyer, a scientist, a crime-scene investigator, a cop, Captain Kirk and the Easter Bunny all rolled up in one.”
“By the way, yesterday’s hell scene was a screaming success,” Joe says. “Too bad all of you missed it.”
“Well, what is the story about the clothes, Pete?” Vince asks Marino. “We know what he had on when he found his brother’s body?”
“What he had on,
according to him, was nothing,” Marino says. “Supposedly, he came in through the kitchen door, put the groceries on the counter, then went straight back to the bedroom to pee. Supposedly. Then he took a shower because he had to work at his restaurant that night and happened to look out the doorway and saw the shotgun on the carpet behind the couch. At this point, he was naked, so he says.”
“Sounds like a lot of crap to me.” Joe talks with his mouth full.
“My personal opinion is it’s probably a robbery that got interrupted,” Marino says. “Or something got interrupted. A rich doctor maybe gets tangled up with the wrong person. Anybody seen my Harley jacket? Black with a skull and bones on one shoulder, an American flag on the other.”
“Where did you have it last?”
“I took it off in the hangar the other day when Lucy and me were doing an aerial. Came back, it was gone.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Neither have I.”
“Shit. That thing cost me. And the patches are custom. Goddamn it. If someone stole it…”
“Nobody steals around here,” Joe says.
“Oh yeah? What about stealing ideas?” Marino glares at him. “And that reminds me,” he says to Scarpetta, “while we’re on the subject of hell scenes…”
“We’re not on the subject,” she says.
“I came here this morning with a few things to say about them.”
“Another time.”
“I got some good ones, left a file on your desk,” Marino says to her. “Give you something interesting to think about during your vacation. Especially since you’ll probably get snowed in up there, we’ll probably see you again in the spring.”
She controls her irritation, tries to keep it tucked into a secret place where she hopes no one can see it. He is deliberately disrupting staff meeting and treating her the same way he did some fifteen years ago when she was the new chief medical examiner of Virginia, a woman in a world where women didn’t belong, a woman with an attitude, Marino decided, because she has an M.D. and a law degree.
“I think the Swift case would be a damn good hell scene,” Joe says. “GSR and x-ray spectrometry and other findings tell two different stories. See if the students figure it out. Bet they’ve never heard of the billiard-ball effect.”
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