The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I didn’t suppose you’re wearing examination gloves because you’re afraid of being sued.”

  Benton returned the card and its FedEx pouch back inside the evidence bag and resealed it. He pulled off his gloves and dropped them in the trash.

  “When was she discharged from McLean?” Dr. Clark asked.

  “This past Sunday afternoon.”

  “Did you interview her, talk to her before she left?”

  “Two days earlier on that Friday I did,” Benton said.

  “And she gave you no token of affection, no holiday greeting at that time, when she could actually have done so in person and experienced the gratification of watching your reaction?”

  “She didn’t. She talked about Kay.”

  “I see.”

  Of course he did. He knew damn well the sorts of things Benton had to worry about.

  Dr. Clark said, “Possible Dodie selected McLean because she knew a priori that you, the prominent husband of the prominent Kay Scarpetta, are on staff there? Possible Dodie chose McLean so she could spend some quality time with you?”

  “I wasn’t her first choice.”

  “Who was?”

  “Someone else.”

  “Anyone I might know?” Dr. Clark asked, as if he had a suspicion.

  “You’d know the name.”

  “Possible you have doubts that her first choice was really her first choice, since Dodie’s motives and truthfulness seem to be a question? Was McLean her first choice?”

  “McLean was.”

  “That’s significant, since some other first choices might not have privileges there, not unless they’re on staff.”

  “Which is what happened,” Benton said.

  “She have money?”

  “Allegedly from all the husbands she’s been through. She stayed in the Pavilion, which is self-pay, as you know. She paid in cash. Well, her lawyer did.”

  “What is that now? Three thousand a day?”

  “Something like that.”

  “She paid more than ninety thousand dollars in cash.”

  “A deposit upon admission, then the balance in full when she was discharged. A bank wire transfer. Done through her Detroit lawyer,” Benton said.

  “She live in Detroit?”

  “No.”

  “But she has a lawyer there.”

  “So it appears,” Benton said.

  “What was she doing in Detroit? Besides getting arrested.”

  “Says she was visiting. On vacation. Staying at the Grand Palais,” Benton said. “Working her magic on the slot machines and roulette table.”

  “She’s a big gambler?”

  “She’ll sell you a few lucky amulets, if you’d like.”

  “You seem to dislike her rather intensely,” Dr. Clark observed with the same keen look in his eyes.

  “I’m not stating as a fact that I didn’t factor into her choice of hospitals. Or that Kay didn’t,” Benton replied.

  “What I’m hearing is you’ve begun to fear it,” Dr. Clark said, taking off his glasses, cleaning them with his gray silk tie. “Any chance that events of late are making you anxious and disproportionately suspicious of those around you?”

  “Any particular events you’re thinking of ?”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Dr. Clark said.

  “I’m not paranoid.”

  “Which is what all paranoid people say.”

  “I’ll interpret that as your special vintage of dry humor,” Benton said.

  “How are you doing? Besides this? Been a lot going on, hasn’t there,” Dr. Clark said. “A lot happening all at once this past month.”

  “There’s always a lot going on.”

  “Kay’s been on TV and in the public eye.” Dr. Clark put his glasses back on. “So has Warner Agee.”

  Benton had been anticipating for a while that Dr. Clark was going to say something about Agee. Benton probably had been avoiding Dr. Clark. Not probably. He had been. Until today.

  “It’s occurred to me that you must have a reaction to seeing Warner in the news, this man who sabotaged your career with the FBI, sabotaged your entire life because he wanted to be you,” Dr. Clark said. “Now he’s publicly playing the role of you—metaphorically speaking—taking on the persona of the forensic expert, the FBI profiler, at last his chance for stardom.”

  “There are a lot of people who make claims that are exaggerated or untrue.”

  “Have you read his bio on Wikipedia?” Dr. Clark asked. “He’s cited as one of the founding fathers of profiling and your mentor. It says during the period you were at the FBI Academy, the unit chief of Behavioral Science, and just beginning your adulterous affair, and I quote, with Kay Scarpetta, he worked a number of notorious cases with her. Is it true he worked with Kay? It’s my understanding Warner was never a profiler for the FBI or anyone else.”

  “I didn’t realize you considered Wikipedia a reliable source,” Benton said, as if Dr. Clark was the one spreading these lies.

  “I took a look because often the anonymous individuals who contribute alleged factual information to online encyclopedias and other Internet sites also happen to have a vested and not so unbiased interest in the subject they’re stealthily writing about,” Dr. Clark said. “Curiously, it appears that in the past few weeks, his bio has been heavily edited and expanded. I wonder by whom?”

  “Perhaps by the person it’s about.” Benton’s stomach was tight with resentment and rage.

  “I imagine Lucy could find that out or already knows and could have this misinformation removed,” Dr. Clark said. “But maybe she hasn’t thought to check on certain details the way I have because you haven’t shared with her what you’ve shared with me about your past.”

  “There are better things to spend our time on than limited individuals desperately seeking attention. Lucy doesn’t need to waste her forensic computer investigative resources on Internet gossip. You’re right. I haven’t told her everything I’ve told you.” Benton couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this threatened.

  “If you hadn’t called me this afternoon, it wouldn’t have been long before I would have trumped up some reason to talk to you so we could get it out on the table,” Dr. Clark said. “You have every reason to want to destroy Warner Agee. I have every reason to hope you’ll get over wanting that.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with what we were talking about, Nathan.”

  “Everything has to do with everything, Benton.” Watching him, reading him. “But let’s return to the subject of your former patient Dodie Hodge, because I have a feeling she’s connected anyway. I’m struck by a number of things. The first being the card itself, the obvious suggestion of domestic violence, of a man degrading a woman by calling her a whore, the wife chasing the husband with the intent of beating him with a rolling pin, the sexual overtones. In other words, one of those jokes that isn’t funny. What is she saying to you?”

  “Projection.” Benton had to will his fury toward Warner Agee to leave the room. “It’s what she’s projecting,” he heard himself say in a reasonable tone.

  “All right. What is she projecting, in your view? Who is Santa? Who is Mrs. Claus?”

  “I’m Santa,” Benton said, and the wave was passing. It had seemed as big as a tsunami and then receded and was almost gone. He relaxed a little. “Mrs. Claus is hostile toward me for something she perceives I did that was unkind and degrading. I, Santa, said, ‘ho, ho, ho,’ and Mrs. Claus interpreted it as my calling her a whore.”

  “Dodie Hodge perceives that she is falsely accused, degraded, unappreciated, trivialized. Yet she knows her perception is false,” Dr. Clark said. “That’s the histrionic personality disorder kicking in. The obvious message of the card is poor Santa is about to take a drubbing because Mrs. Claus grossly misunderstood what he said, and obviously Dodie gets the joke or she wouldn’t have picked the card.”

  “Assuming she picked it.”

  “You keep alluding to
that. To the possibility she might have had some help. Possibly an accomplice.”

  “The technical part of it,” Benton said. “Knowing about the recorders, ordering them, assembling the damn thing. Dodie’s impulsive and seeks instant gratification. There’s a degree of deliberation that is inconsistent with what I saw when she was at the hospital. And when did she have time? As I said, she was discharged just this past Sunday. The FedEx was sent yesterday, Wednesday. How did she know to send it here? The handwritten address on the FedEx label is odd. The whole thing is odd.”

  “She craves drama, and the singing card is dramatic. You don’t think that’s consistent with her histrionic proclivities?”

  “You yourself pointed out she didn’t witness the drama,” Benton said. “Drama’s no fun if there’s no audience. She didn’t see me open the card, doesn’t know for a fact I did. Why not give it to me before she was discharged, do it in person?”

  “So someone else put her up to it. Her accomplice.”

  “The lyrics bother me,” Benton said.

  “Which part?”

  “Stick mistletoe where it ought to go and hang an angel from your tree,” Benton said.

  “Who’s the angel?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It could be Kay.” Dr. Clark held his gaze. “ ‘Your tree’ could be a reference to your penis, to your sexual relationship with your wife.”

  “And an allusion to a lynching,” Benton said.

  The chief medical examiner of New York City was bent over his microscope when Scarpetta lightly knocked on his open door.

  “You know what happens when you absent yourself from a staff meeting, don’t you?” Dr. Brian Edison said without looking up as he moved a slide on the stage. “You get talked about.”

  “I don’t want to know.” Scarpetta walked into his office and sat in an elbow chair on the other side of his partner’s desk.

  “Well, I should qualify. The topic of discussion wasn’t about you, per se.” He swiveled around so he faced her, his white hair unruly, his eyes intense, hawklike. “But tangentially. CNN, TLC, Discovery, every cable network under the sun. You know how many calls we get each day?”

  “I’m sure you could hire an extra secretary for that alone.”

  “When in fact we’re having to let people go. Support staff, technicians. We’ve cut back on janitorial services and security,” he said. “Lord knows where it will end if the state does what it threatens and slashes our budget by another thirty percent. We’re not in the entertainment business. Don’t want to be, can’t afford to be.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m causing problems, Brian.”

  He was probably the finest forensic pathologist Scarpetta personally knew and was perfectly clear about his mission, which was somewhat different from hers, and there was no way around it. He viewed forensic medicine as a public health service and had no use for the media in any manifestation beyond its role of informing the public about matters of life and death, such as hazards and communicable diseases, whether it was a potentially deadly crib design or an outbreak of the hantavirus. It wasn’t that his perception was wrong. It was simply that everything else was. The world had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

  “I’m trying to navigate my way along a road I didn’t choose,” Scarpetta said. “You walk the highest of roads in a world of low roads. So, what do we do?”

  “Stoop to their level?”

  “I hope you don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”

  “How do you feel about your career with CNN?” He picked up a briarwood pipe that he was no longer allowed to puff inside the building.

  “I certainly don’t think of it as a career,” she said. “It’s something I do to disseminate information in a way that I deem is necessary in this day and age.”

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  “I’ll stop if you want, Brian. I’ve told you that from the start. I would never do anything, at least not intentionally, to embarrass this office or compromise it in the slightest.”

  “Well, we don’t need to go round and around this topic again,” he said. “In theory, I don’t disagree with you, Kay. The public is as badly misinformed about criminal justice and all things forensic as it has ever been. And yes, it’s fouling up crime scenes and court cases and legislation and where tax dollars are allocated. But in my heart I don’t believe that appearing on any of these shows is going to solve the problem. Of course, that’s me, and I’m rather set in my ways and from time to time feel compelled to remind you of the Indian burial grounds you must step around. Hannah Starr being one of them.”

  “I assume that was the point of the discussion at the staff meeting. The discussion that wasn’t about me, per se,” Scarpetta replied.

  “I don’t watch these shows.” He idly toyed with the pipe. “But the Carley Crispins, the Warner Agees of the world, seem to have made Hannah Starr their hobbyhorse, the next Caylee Anthony or Anna Nicole Smith. Or God forbid you’re asked about our murdered jogger when you’re on TV tonight.”

  “The agreement with CNN is I don’t talk about active cases.”

  “What about your agreement with this Crispin woman? She doesn’t seem to be known for playing by the rules, and it will be her shooting off her mouth live on the air tonight.”

  “I’ve been asked to discuss microscopy, specifically the analysis of hair,” Scarpetta said.

  “That’s good, probably helpful. I do know a number of our colleagues in the labs are worried their scientific disciplines are fast being viewed as nonessential because the public, the politicians, think DNA is the magic lamp. If we rub it enough, all problems are solved and the hell with fibers, hair, toxicology, questioned documents, even fingerprints.” Dr. Edison placed his pipe back in an ashtray that hadn’t been dirty in years. “We’re comfortable with Toni Darien’s identification, I presume. I know the police want to release that information to the public.”

  “I have no problem with releasing her name, but I certainly don’t intend to release any details about my findings. I’m worried her crime scene was staged, that she wasn’t murdered where she was found and may not have been jogging when she was assaulted.”

  “Based on?”

  “A number of things. She was struck on the back of the head, one blow to the posterior aspect of the left temporal bone.” Scarpetta touched her head to show him. “A survival time possibly of hours, as evidenced by the large fluctuant and boggy mass, and the hemorrhagic edematous tissues underneath the scalp. Then at some point after she died, a scarf was tied around her neck.”

  “Ideas about the weapon?”

  “A circular comminuted fracture that pushed multiple bone fragments into the brain. Whatever she was hit with has at least one round surface that is fifty millimeters in diameter.”

  “Not punched out but fragmented,” he considered. “So, we’re not talking about something like a hammer, not something round with a flat surface. And not something like a baseball bat if the surface is fifty millimeters and round. About the size of a billiard ball. Curious as to what that might have been.”

  “I think she’s been dead since Tuesday,” Scarpetta said.

  “She was beginning to decompose?”

  “Not at all. But her livor was set, the pattern consistent with her being on her back for quite some time after death, at least twelve hours, unclothed, with her arms by her sides, palms down. That’s not the way she was found, not the way her body was positioned in the park. She was on her back, but her arms were up above her head, slightly bent at the elbows, as if she might have been dragged or pulled by her wrists.”

  “Rigor?” he asked.

  “Easily broken when I tried to move her limbs. In other words, rigor had been full and was beginning to pass. Again, that takes time.”

  “She wouldn’t have been difficult to manipulate, to move, and I assume that’s what you’re implying. That her body was dumped in the park, which would be rather difficult to
do if she was stiff,” he said. “Any drying? What you might expect if she’d been somewhere cool that had kept her well preserved for a day or two?”

  “Some drying of her fingers, her lips, and tache noir—her eyes were slightly open, and the conjunctiva was brown due to drying. Her axillary temp was fifty degrees,” Scarpetta continued. “The low last night was thirty-four; the high during the day was forty-seven. The mark left by the scarf is a superficial circumferential dry brown abrasion. There’s no suffusion, no petechia of the face or conjunctiva. The tongue wasn’t protruding.”

  “Postmortem, then,” Dr. Edison concluded. “Was the scarf tied at an angle?”

  “No. Mid-throat.” She showed him on her own neck. “Tied in a double knot in front, which I didn’t cut through, of course. I removed it by cutting through it from the back. There was no vital response whatsoever, and that was true internally, as well. The hyoid, thyroid, and strap muscles were intact and free of injury.”

  “Underscoring your speculation that she might have been murdered in one location and dumped where she was found, at the edge of the park, in plain view during daylight, perhaps so she would be found quickly this morning when people were up and out,” he said. “Evidence she might have been bound at some point? What about sexual assault?”

  “No contusions or impressions from bindings that I could see. No defense injuries,” Scarpetta said. “I found two contusions on the inner aspect of each upper thigh. The posterior fourchette shows superficial abrasion with very slight bleeding and adjacent contusion. The labia are reddened. No secretions visible at the introitus or in the vaginal vault, but she has an irregular abrasion of the posterior wall. I collected a PERK.”

  She referred to a Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, which included swabs for DNA.

  “I also examined her with a forensic light and collected whatever was there, including fibers, mostly from her hair,” she went on. “A lot of dust and debris in her head hair, which I shaved at the edges of the laceration. Under a hand lens I could see several flecks of paint, some embedded in the depths of the wound. Bright red, bright yellow, black. We’ll see what trace says. I’m encouraging everyone in the labs to expedite things as much as possible.”