Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  “But that was a couple years ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Wounds heal slowly.” He stared out the window at darkness gathering. “And more to the point, France would not appreciate our exporting a serial killer to them. I can only suppose that is what deadoc is implying. Cops from France and other nations have been worrying for years that our problem would eventually become theirs. As if violence is a disease that can spread.”

  “Which it is.”

  He nodded, reaching for his coffee again.

  “Maybe that would make more sense if we believed the same person killed ten people here and in Ireland,” I said.

  “Kay, we can’t rule out anything.” He sounded tired as he said that again.

  I shook my head. “He’s taking credit for someone else’s murders and now threatening us. He probably has no idea how different his M.O. is from what we’ve seen in the past. Of course, we can’t rule out anything, Benton. But I know what my findings tell me, and I believe identifying this recent victim is going to be the key.”

  “You always believe that.” He smiled, playing with his coffee stirrer.

  “I know who I work for. Right this minute, I work for that poor woman whose torso is in my freezer.”

  It was now completely dark out, the Boardroom filling fast with healthy, clean-living men and women in color-coded fatigues. The noise was making it difficult to talk, and I needed to see Lucy before I left.

  “You don’t like Ring.” Wesley reached around to the back of his chair and collected his suit jacket. “He’s bright and seems sincerely motivated.”

  “You definitely profiled the last part wrong,” I said as I got up. “But you are right about what you said first. I don’t like him.”

  “I thought that was rather obvious by your demeanor.”

  We moved around people who were looking for chairs and setting down pitchers of beer.

  “I think he’s dangerous.”

  “He’s vain and wants to make a name for himself,” Wesley said.

  “And you don’t think that’s dangerous?” I looked over at him.

  “It describes almost everyone I’ve ever worked with.”

  “Except for me, I hope.”

  “You, Dr. Scarpetta, are an exception to just about everything I can think of.”

  We were walking through a long corridor, heading to the lobby, and I did not want to leave him right now. I felt lonely and wasn’t sure why.

  “I would love for us to have dinner,” I said, “but Lucy’s got something to show me.”

  “What makes you think I don’t already have plans?” He held the door for me.

  The thought bothered me, even though I knew he was teasing.

  “Let’s wait until I can get away from here,” he said, and we were walking toward the parking lot now. “Maybe over the weekend, when we can relax a little more. I’ll cook this time. Where are you parked?”

  “Over here.” I pointed the key’s remote control.

  Doors unlocked and the interior light went on. Typically, we did not touch. We never had when someone might see.

  “Sometimes I hate this,” I said as I got into my car. “It’s fine to talk about body parts, rape and murder all day long, but not to hug each other, hold hands. God forbid anybody should see that.” I started the engine. “Tell me how normal that is? It’s not like we’re still having an affair or committing a crime.” I yanked my seatbelt across my chest. “Is there some don’t-ask-don’t-tell FBI rule no one’s let me in on?”

  “Yes.”

  He kissed me on the lips as a group of agents walked by. “So don’t tell anyone,” he said.

  Moments later, I parked in front of the Engineering Research Facility, or ERF, a huge, space age–looking building where the FBI conducted its classified technical research and development. If Lucy knew all of what went on in the labs here, she did not tell, and there were few areas of the building where I was allowed, even when escorted by her. She was waiting by the front door as I pointed the remote control at my car, which was not responding.

  “It won’t work here,” she said.

  I looked up at the eerie rooftop of antennae and satellite dishes, sighing as I manually locked doors with the key.

  “You’d think I’d remember after all these times,” I muttered.

  “Your investigator friend, Ring, tried to walk me over here after the consultation,” she said, scanning her thumb in a biometric lock by the door.

  “He’s not my friend,” I told her.

  The lobby was high-ceilinged and arranged with glass cases displaying clunky, inefficient radio and electronic equipment used by law enforcement before ERF was built.

  “He asked me out again,” she said.

  Corridors were monochromatic and seemed endless, and I was forever impressed with the silence and sense that no one was here. Scientists and engineers worked behind shut doors in spaces big enough to accommodate automobiles, helicopters and small planes. Hundreds of Bureau personnel were employed at ERF, yet they had virtually no contact with any of us across the street. We did not know their names.

  “I’m sure there are a million people who would like to ask you out,” I said as we boarded an elevator, and Lucy scanned her thumb again.

  “Usually not after they’ve been around me very long,” she said.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t gotten rid of you yet.”

  But she was very serious. “Once I start talking shop, the guys turn off. But he likes a challenge, if you know the type.”

  “I know it all too well.”

  “He wants something from me, Aunt Kay.”

  “Would you like to hazard a guess? And where are you taking me, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. But I just have this feeling.” She opened a door to the virtual environment lab, adding, “I have a rather interesting idea.”

  Lucy’s ideas were always more than interesting. Usually they were frightening. I followed her into a room of virtual system processors and graphic computers stacked on top of each other, and countertops scattered with tools, computer boards, chips and peripherals like DataGloves and helmet-mounted displays. Electrical cords were bundled in thick hanks and tied back from the blank expanse of linoleum flooring where Lucy routinely lost herself in cyberspace.

  She picked up a remote control and two video displays blinked on, and I recognized the photographs deadoc had sent to me. They were big and in color on the screens, and I began to get nervous.

  “What are you doing?” I asked my niece.

  “The basic question has always been, does an immersion into an environment actually improve the operator’s performance,” she said, typing computer commands. “You never got a chance to be immersed in this environment. The crime scene.”

  Both of us stared at the bloody stumps and lined-up body parts on the monitors, and a chill crept through me.

  “But suppose you could have that chance now?” Lucy went on. “What if you could be inside deadoc’s room?”

  I started to interrupt, but she would not let me.

  “What else might you see? What else might you do?” she said, and when she got like this, she was almost manic. “What else might you learn about the victim and him?”

  “I don’t know if I can use something like this,” I protested.

  “Sure you can. Now what I haven’t had time to do is add the synthetic sound. Well, except for the typical canned auditory cues. So a squelch is something opening, a click’s a switch being turned on or off, a ding usually means you’ve just bumped into something.”

  “Lucy,” I said as she took my left arm, “what the hell are you talking about?”

  She carefully pulled a DataGlove over my left hand, making sure it was snug.

  “We use gestures for human communication. And we can use gestures, or positions as we call them, to communicate with the computer, too,” she explained.

  The glove was black Lycra with fiber-optic sensors mounted on the back of it.
These were attached to a cable that led to the high-performance host computer that Lucy had been typing on. Next she picked up a helmet-mounted display that was connected to another cable, and fear fluttered through my breast as she headed my way.

  “One VPL Eyephone HRX,” she cheerfully said. “Same thing they’re using at NASA’s Ames Research Center, which is where I discovered it.” She was adjusting cables and straps. “Three hundred and fifty thousand color elements. Superior resolution and wide field of vision.”

  She placed the helmet on top of my head, and it felt heavy and covered my eyes.

  “What you’re looking into are liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, your basic video displays. Glass plates, electrodes and molecules doing all kinds of cool things. How does it feel?”

  “Like I’m going to fall down and suffocate.”

  I was beginning to panic the way I had when I’d first learned how to scuba dive.

  “You’re not going to do either.” She was very patient, her hand steadying me. “Relax. It’s normal to be phobic at first. I’ll tell you what to do. Now you stand still and take deep breaths. I’m going to put you in.”

  She made adjustments, tightening the display around my head, then returned to the host computer. I was blind and off balance, a tiny TV in front of each eye.

  “Okay, here we go,” she said. “Don’t know if it will do any good, but can’t hurt to try.”

  Keys clicked, and I was thrown inside that room. She began instructing me about what to do with my hand to fly forward or faster, or in reverse, and how to release and grab. I moved my index finger, made clicking motions, brought my thumb near my palm and moved my arm across my chest as I broke out in a sweat. I spent a good five minutes on the ceiling and walking into walls. At one point, I was on top of the table where the torso lay on its bloody blue cover, stepping on evidence and the dead.

  “I think I might throw up,” I said.

  “Just hold still for a minute,” Lucy said. “Catch your breath.”

  I gestured as I started to say something more, and was instantly on the virtual floor, as if I had fallen from the air.

  “That’s why I told you to hold still,” she said as she watched what I was doing on the monitors. “Now move your hand in and point with your first two fingers toward where you hear my voice coming from. Better?”

  “Better,” I said.

  I was standing on the floor in the room, as if the photograph had come to life, three-dimensional and large. I looked around and did not actually see anything I hadn’t before when Vander had done the image enhancement. It was what this made me feel, and what I felt changed what I saw.

  Walls were the color of putty, with faint discolorations that until now I had attributed to water damage, which might be expected in a basement or garage. But they seemed different now, more uniformly distributed, some so faint I could barely see them. Paper had once covered the putty paint on these walls. It had been removed but not replaced, as had the cornice box or drapery rod. Above a window covered with shut Venetian blinds were small holes where brackets once had been.

  “This isn’t where it happened,” I said as my heart beat harder.

  Lucy was silent.

  “She was brought in here after the fact to be photographed. This is not where the killing and dismemberment took place.”

  “What are you seeing?” she asked.

  I moved my hand and walked closer to the virtual table. I pointed at the virtual walls, to show Lucy what I saw. “Where did he plug in the autopsy saw?” I said.

  I could find but one electrical outlet, and it was at the base of a wall.

  “And the drop cloth is from here, too?” I went on. “It doesn’t fit with everything else. No paint, no tools.” I kept looking around. “And look at the floor. The wood’s lighter at the border as if there once was a rug. Who puts rugs in workshops? Who has wallpaper and drapes? Where are the outlets for power tools?”

  “What do you feel?” she asked.

  “I feel this is a room in someone’s house where the furniture has been removed. Except there is some sort of table, which has been covered with something. Maybe a shower curtain. I don’t know. The room feels domestic.”

  I reached out my hand and tried to touch the edge of the table cover, as if I could lift it and reveal what was underneath, and as I looked around, details became so clear to me, I wondered how I could have missed them before. Wiring was exposed in the ceiling directly above the table, as if a chandelier or other type of light fixture had once hung there.

  “What about my color perception right now?” I asked.

  “Should be the same.”

  “Then there’s something else. These walls.” I touched them. “The color lightens in this direction. There’s an opening. Maybe a doorway, with light coming through it.”

  “There’s no doorway in the photo,” Lucy reminded me. “You can only see what’s there.”

  It was odd, but for a moment I thought I could smell her blood, the pungency of old flesh that has been dead for days. I remembered the doughy texture of her skin, and the peculiar eruptions that made me wonder if she had shingles.

  “She wasn’t random,” I said.

  “And the others were.”

  “The other cases are nothing like this one. I’m getting double imagery. Can you adjust that?”

  “Vertical retinal image disparity.”

  Then I felt her hand on my arm.

  “Usually goes away after fifteen or twenty minutes,” she said. “It’s time to take a break.”

  “I don’t feel too good.”

  “Image rotation misalignment. Visual fatigue, simulation sickness, cybersick, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “Causing image blurring, tears, even queasiness.”

  I couldn’t wait to remove the helmet, and I was on the table again, facedown in blood before I could get the LCDs away from my eyes.

  My hands were shaking as Lucy helped me take off the glove. I sat down on the floor.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, kindly.

  “That was awful,” I said.

  “Then it was good.” She returned the helmet and glove to a counter. “You were immersed in the environment. That’s what should happen.”

  She handed me several tissues, and I wiped my face.

  “What about the other photograph? Do you want to do that one, too?” she asked. “The one with the hands and feet?”

  “I’ve been in that room quite enough,” I said.

  Eight

  I drove home haunted. I had been going to crime scenes most of my professional life, but had never had one come to me. The sensation of being inside that photograph, of imagining I could smell and feel what was left of that body, had shaken me badly. It was almost midnight by the time I pulled into my garage, and I couldn’t unlock my door fast enough. Inside my house, I turned the alarm off, then back on the instant I shut and locked the door. I looked around to make sure nothing was out of place.

  Lighting a fire, I fixed a drink and missed cigarettes again. I turned on music to keep me company, then went inside my office to see what might await me there. I had various faxes and phone messages, and another communication in e-mail. This time, all deadoc had for me was to repeat, you think you re so smart. I was printing this and wondering if Squad 19 had seen it, too, when the telephone rang, startling me.

  “Hi,” Wesley said. “Just making sure you got in okay.”

  “There’s more mail,” I said, and I told him what it was.

  “Save it and go to bed.”

  “It’s hard not to think about.”

  “He wants you to stay up all night thinking. That’s his power. That’s his game.”

  “Why me?” I was out of sorts and still felt queasy.

  “Because you’re the challenge, Kay. Even for nice people like me. Go to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow. I love you.”

  But I did not get to sleep long. At several minutes past four A.M., my phone rang again. It was Dr
. Hoyt this time, a family practitioner in Norfolk, where he had served as a state-appointed medical examiner for the last twenty years. He was pushing seventy, but spry and as lucid as new glass. I’d never known him to be alarmed by anything, and I was instantly unnerved by his tone.

  “Dr. Scarpetta, I’m sorry,” he said, and he was talking very fast. “I’m on Tangier Island.”

  All I could think of, oddly, were crab cakes. “What in the world are you doing there?”

  I arranged pillows behind me, reaching for call sheets and pen.

  “I got called late yesterday, been out here half the night. The Coast Guard had to bring me in one of their cutters, and I don’t like boats worth a damn, beaten and whipped around worse than eggs. Plus it was cold as hell.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “The last time I saw anything like this was Texas, 1949,” he went on, talking fast, “when I was doing my residency and about to get married . . .”

  I had to cut him off. “Slow down, Fred,” I said. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “A fifty-two-year-old Tangier lady. Probably been dead at least twenty-four hours in her bedroom. She’s got severe skin eruptions in crops, just covered with them, including the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet. Crazy as it sounds, it looks like smallpox.”

  “You’re right. That’s crazy,” I said as my mouth got dry. “What about chicken pox? Any way this woman was immunosuppressed?”

  “I don’t know anything about her, but I’ve never seen chicken pox look like this. These eruptions follow the smallpox pattern. They’re in crops, like I said, all about the same age, and the farther away from the center of the body, the denser they get. So they’re confluent, on the face, the extremities.”

  I was thinking of the torso, of the small area of eruptions that I had assumed were shingles, my heart filled with dread. I did not know where that victim had died, but I believed it was somewhere in Virginia. Tangier Island was also in Virginia, a tiny barrier island in the Chesapeake Bay where the economy was based on crabbing.