“Preoccupied. Staying up too late. Tell me how our boy Basil’s brain works. I’m on pins and needles,”Bentonsays.
She hands him his copy of the structural and functional imaging analysis and begins to explain, “Increased amygdalar activity in response to affective stimuli. Especially faces, overt or masked that were fearful or had any negative content.”
“Continues to be an interesting point,”Bentonsays. “May eventually tell us something about how they select their victims. An expression on someone’s face that we might interpret as surprise or curiosity, they might interpret as anger or fear. And it sets them off.”
“Rather unnerving to think about.”
“I need to pursue that more vigorously when I talk to them. Starting with him.”
He opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of aspirin.
“Let’s see. During the Stroop interference task,” she says, looking at the report, “he has decreased activity of the anterior cingulate in both dorsal and subgenual regions, accompanied by increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity.”
“Give me the upshot, Susan. I’ve got a headache.”
He shakes three aspirin into his palm and swallows them without water.
“How in the world do you do that?”
“Practice.”
“So.” She resumes the analysis of Basil’s brain. “Overall, the findings certainly reflect anomalous connectivity of frontal-limbic structures, suggesting anomalous response inhibition that may be due to deficits in a number of frontally mediated processes.”
“Implicating his ability to monitor and inhibit behavior,”Bentonsays. “We’re seeing a lot of that with our lovely guests fromButler. Consistent with bipolar disorder?”
“Certainly can be. That and other psychiatric disorders.”
“Excuse me a minute,”Bentonsays as he picks up his phone and dials his study coordinator’s extension.
“Can you check your in-log and tell me the number Kenny Jumper called from?” he asks.
“No ID.”
“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not aware that pay phones show up as No ID.”
“Actually I just got off the line withButler,” she says. “Apparently, Basil isn’t doing well. He wonders if you could come see him.”
It ishalf past five p.m.and the parking lot of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Laboratory amp; Office is almost empty. Employees, particularly nonmedical ones, rarely linger at the morgue after hours.
This one is onSouthwest 31st Avenue, in the midst of relatively undeveloped land thick with palms, live oak trees and pines, and scattered with mobile homes. Typical ofSouth Floridaarchitecture, the one-story building is stucco and coral stone. It backs up to a narrow brackish canal where mosquitoes are a menace and alligators sometimes wander where they don’t belong. Next door to the morgue is thecountyFireand Rescue service where emergency medical technicians are constantly reminded of where their less-fortunate patients end up.
The rain has almost stopped, and there are puddles everywhere as Scarpetta and Joe walk out to a silver H2 Hummer, not her choice but quite adept at handling off-road death scenes and hauling bulky equipment. Lucy is fond of Hummers. Scarpetta always worries where to park them.
“I just can’t understand how someone managed to walk in with a shotgun in the middle of the day,” Joe says, and he has been saying it for the past hour. “Must be a way to tell if it was sawed off.”
“If the barrel wasn’t smoothed after it was sawn, there could be tool marks on the wad,” Scarpetta replies.
“But the absence of tool marks doesn’t mean it wasn’t sawn.”
“Correct.”
“Because he might have smoothed off the sawed-off barrel. If he did that, there’s no way for us to tell without recovering the weapon. A twelve-gauge. We know that much.”
They know that much from the Remington plastic four-petaled Power Piston wad that Scarpetta recovered from the inside of Daggie Simister’s devastated head. Beyond that fact, there are only a few more Scarpetta can state with certainty, such as the nature of the attack on Mrs. Simister, which the autopsy revealed to be different from what everyone presumed. Had she not been shot, there is a good chance she would have died anyway. Scarpetta is fairly certain Mrs. Simister was unconscious when her killer stuck the shotgun barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t an easy conclusion to determine.
Examinations of massive gaping injuries to the head can mask wounds that may have occurred before the final mutilating trauma. Sometimes forensic pathology requires plastic surgery, and in the morgue, Scarpetta did what she could to repair Mrs. Simister’s head, fitting pieces of bone and scalp back together, then shaving off the hair. What she found was a laceration on the back of the head and a skull fracture. The point of impact correlated with a subdural hematoma in an underlying part of her brain that had been left relatively intact after the shotgun blast.
If the stains on the carpet by the window in Mrs. Simister’s bedroom turn out to be her blood, then it’s likely this was where she was first attacked and would also explain the dirt and bluish fibers on the palms of her hands. She was struck hard from behind with a blunt object and went down. Then her assailant picked her up, all eighty-six pounds of her, and placed her on the bed.
“I mean, you could easily carry a sawed-off shotgun in a knapsack,” Joe is saying.
Scarpetta points the remote at the Hummer and unlocks the doors and replies wearily, “Not necessarily.”
Joe makes her tired. He annoys her more each day.
“Even if you sawed twelve or even eighteen inches off the barrel and six inches off the stock,” she remarks, “you’re still left with an eighteen-inch-long gun, at least. Assuming we’re talking about an autoloader.”
She thinks of the big black bag the citrus inspector was carrying.
“If we’re talking about a pump, you’re likely to have a longer gun than that,” she adds. “Neither scenario works with a knapsack, unless it’s a big one.”
“A tote bag, then.”
She thinks of the citrus inspector, of the long picker that he disassembled and packed inside his black bag. She’s seen citrus inspectors before and never noticed them using pickers. Usually, they look at what they can reach.
“I bet he had a tote bag,” Joe says.
“I’ve got no idea.” She’s about to snap at him.
Throughout the entire autopsy, he prattled and divined and pontificated until she could scarcely think. He found it necessary to announce everything he was doing, everything he was writing on the protocol attached to his clipboard. He felt it necessary to tell her the weight of every organ and deduce when Mrs. Simister ate last based on the partially digested meat and vegetables in her stomach. He made sure Scarpetta heard the crunching sound of calcium deposits when he opened partially occluded coronaries with the scalpel and announced that maybe atherosclerosis killed her.
Ha, ha.
And, well, Mrs. Simister didn’t have much to look forward to, anyway. She had a bad heart. Her lungs had adhesions, probably from old pneumonia, and her brain was somewhat atrophied, so she probably had Alzheimer’s.
If you have to be murdered, Joe said, you may as well be in bad health.
“I’m thinking he hit her in the back of the head with the butt of the gun,” now he is saying. “You know, like this.”
He rams an imaginary head with the imaginary stock of a shotgun.
“She wasn’t even five feet tall,” he continues his scenario. “So for him to slam her head with the butt of a gun that weighs maybe six or seven pounds, assuming it wasn’t sawed off, he would need to be reasonably strong and taller than her.”
“We can’t say that at all,” Scarpetta replies, driving out of the parking lot. “So much depends on his position in relation to her. So much depends on a lot of things. And we don’t know that she was struck with the gun. We don’t know that the killer was a he. Be careful, Joe.”
“Of what?”
<
br /> “In your great enthusiasm to reconstruct exactly how and why she died, you run the risk of confusing the theoretical with the truth and turning fact into fiction. This isn’t a hell scene. This is a real human being who is really dead.”
“Nothing wrong with creativity,” he says, staring straight ahead, his thin mouth and long, pointed chin set the way they always are when he gets petulant.
“Creativity is good,” she replies. “It should suggest where to look and for what, but not necessarily choreograph the sort of reenactments you see in movies and on TV.”
32
The small guest house is tucked behind a Spanish-tile swimming pool amid fruit trees and flowering shrubs. It is not a normal place to see patients, probably not the best place to see them, but the setting is poetic and full of symbols. When it rains, Dr. Marilyn Self feels as creative as the warm, wet earth.
She tends to interpret the weather as a manifestation of what happens when patients walk through her door. Repressed emotions, some of them torrential, are released in the safety of her therapeutic environment. Weather volatilities happen all around her and are unique to her and intended for her. They are full of meaning and instruction.
Welcome to my storm. Now let’s talk about yours.
It’s a good line, and she uses it often in her practice and on her radio show and now her new television show. Human emotions are internal weather systems, she explains to her patients, to her multitude of listeners. Every storm front is caused by something. Nothing comes from nothing. Talking about the weather is neither idle nor mundane.
“I see the look on your face,” she says from her leather chair in her cozy living-room setting. “You got the look again when the rain stopped.”
“I keep telling you I don’t have a look.”
“It’s interesting that you get the look when the rain stops. Not when it starts or is even at its worst, but when it suddenly stops as it did just now,” she says.
“I don’t have a look.”
“Just now the rain stopped and you got that look on your face,” Dr. Self says again. “It’s the same look you get when our time is up.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I promise it is.”
“I don’t pay three hundred dollars a damn hour to talk about storms. I don’t have a look.”
“Pete, I’m telling you what I see.”
“I don’t have a look,” Pete Marino replies from the reclining chair across from hers. “That’s crap. Why would I care about a storm? I’ve seen storms all my life. I didn’t grow up in a desert.”
She studies his face. He is rather handsome in a very rough, masculine way. She probes the dusky gray eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses. His balding head reminds her of a newborn’s bottom, pale and naked in the soft lamplight. His fleshy, rounded pate is a tender buttock waiting to be spanked.
“I think we’re having a trust issue,” she says.
He glowers at her from his chair.
“Why don’t you tell me why you care about rainstorms, about them ending, Pete. Because I believe you do. And you have the look even as we speak. I promise. You still have it,” she says to him.
He touches his face as if it is a mask, as if it is something that doesn’t belong to him.
“My face is normal. There’s nothing about it. Nothing.”
He taps his massive jaw. He taps his big forehead.
“If I had a look, I could tell. I don’t have a look.”
For the past few minutes they have driven in silence, heading back to the Hollywood Police Department parking lot, where Joe can retrieve his red Corvette and get out of her way for the rest of the day.
Then he suddenly says, “Did I tell you I got my scuba-diving license?”
“Good for you,” Scarpetta says, not pretending to care.
“I’m buying a condo in theCayman Islands. Well, not exactly. My girlfriend and I are buying it. She makes more money than me,” he says. “How about that. I’m a doctor and she’s a paralegal, not even a real lawyer, and she earns more than me.”
“I never assumed you chose forensic pathology for the money.”
“I didn’t go into it intending to be poor.”
“Then maybe you should consider doing something else, Joe.”
“Doesn’t look to me like you’re wanting for much.”
He turns toward her as they stop at a red light. She feels his stare.
“I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a niece who’s as rich as Bill Gates,” he adds. “And a boyfriend from some richNew Englandfamily.”
“What exactly is it that you’re implying?” she says, and she thinks of Marino.
She thinks of his hell scenes.
“That it’s easy to not care about money if you’ve got plenty. And maybe that you didn’t exactly earn it yourself.”
“Not that my finances are any of your business, but if you work as many years as I have and are smart, you can manage just fine.”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘manage.’ ”
She thinks of how impressive Joe was on paper. When he applied for the Academy’s fellowship, she thought he just might be the most promising fellow she had ever had. She doesn’t understand how she could have been so wrong.
“Nobody I’m watching in your camp is merely managing,” he says, his voice turning more snide. “Even Marino makes more than I do.”
“How would you know how much he makes?”
The Hollywood Police Department is just ahead on the left, a four-story precast building so close to a public golf course it’s not uncommon for misguided balls to fly over the fence and pelt police cars. She spots Joe’s precious red Corvette in a distant spot, tucked out of the path of anything that might so much as ding it.
“Everybody sort of knows what everybody makes,” Joe is saying. “It’s public knowledge.”
“It’s not.”
“You can’t keep secrets in a place so small.”
“The Academy’s not that small, and there should be plenty that’s confidential. Such as salaries.”
“I should be paid more. Marino’s not a damn doctor. He barely finished high school and he makes more than I do. All Lucy does is run around playing secret agent in her Ferraris, helicopters, jets, motorcycles. I want to know what the hell she does to have all that. Big shot, superwoman, what arrogance, what an attitude. It’s no wonder the students dislike her so much.”
Scarpetta stops behind his Corvette and turns to him, her face as serious as he has probably ever seen it.
“Joe?” she says. “You have one month left. Let’s get through it.”
In Dr. Self’sprofessional opinion, the cause of Marino’s biggest difficulties in life is the look he has on his face just now.
It is the subtlety of this negative facial expression, as opposed to the facial expression itself, that makes matters worse for him, as if he needs anything to make matters worse. If only he weren’t subtle about his secret fears, loathing, abandonments, sexual insecurities, bigotries and other repressed negativities. While she recognizes the tension in his mouth and eyes, other people probably don’t, not consciously. But unconsciously, they pick up on it and react.
Marino frequently is the victim of verbal abuse, rude behavior, dishonesty, rejection and betrayal. He gets into his share of fights. He claims to have killed several people during his demanding and dangerous career. Clearly, whoever is unwise enough to go after him gets quite a lot more than he bargains for, but Marino doesn’t look at it that way. People pick on him for no good reason, according to him. Some of the hostility is related to his job, according to him. Most of his problems stem from prejudice because he grew up poor inNew Jersey. He doesn’t understand why people have been shitty to him all of his life, he frequently says.
The last few weeks he has been much worse. This afternoon, he is worse yet.
“Let’s talk aboutNew Jerseyfor the few minutes we have left.” Dr. Self deliberately reminds him that the session is about to
end. “Last week, you mentionedNew Jerseyseveral times. Why do you thinkNew Jerseystill matters?”
“If you grew up inNew Jersey, you’d know why,” he says, and the look on his face intensifies.
“That’s not an answer, Pete.”
“My father was a drunk. We was on the wrong side of the tracks. People still look at me like I’m fromNew Jerseyand that starts it.”
“Maybe it’s the look on your face, Pete, and not theirs,” she says again. “Maybe you’re the one who starts it.”
The answering machine clicks from the table next to Dr. Self’s leather chair and Marino gets the look on his face, very intense now. He doesn’t like it when a call interrupts their session, even if she doesn’t answer it. He doesn’t understand why she still relies on old technology instead of voicemail that is silent, that doesn’t click when someone leaves a message, that isn’t annoying and intrusive. He reminds her of this often. Discreetly, she glances at her watch, a large, gold watch with Roman numerals that she can see without her reading glasses.
In twelve minutes, the session will end. Pete Marino has difficulties with endings, with codas, with anything that is over, finished, spent or dead. It isn’t coincidental that Dr. Self schedules his appointments for late afternoons, preferably around five, when it is beginning to get dark or afternoon thundershowers stop. He is an intriguing case. She wouldn’t see him if he wasn’t. It is just a matter of time before she coaxes him to be a guest patient on her nationally broadcast radio show or maybe her new television show. He would be impressive in front of the camera, so much better than that unattractive and foolish Dr. Amos.
She hasn’t had a cop yet. When she was the guest lecturer at theNationalForensicAcademy’s summer session and sat next to him one night at a dinner in her honor, it entered her mind then that he would be a fascinating guest on her show, possibly a frequent guest. Certainly, he needed therapy. He drank too much. He did so right in front of her, had four bourbons. He smoked. She could smell it on his breath. He was a compulsive eater, helped himself to three desserts. When she met him, he was brimming with self-destructiveness and self-hate.
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