Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  Pleasants grabbed a chair, almost falling.

  “Does he really need to be cuffed?” I said to the deputy. “He’s here for a traffic violation.”

  “Ma’am, he’s out of the secure area. That’s why he’s cuffed. Be back in twenty minutes,” he said as he left.

  “I’ve never been through anything like this before. You mind if I smoke?” Pleasants laughed with a nervousness that bordered on hysteria as he sat.

  “Help yourself.”

  His hands were shaking so badly, I had to light it for him.

  “Doesn’t look like they got an ashtray. Maybe you’re not supposed to smoke up here.” He worried, eyes darting around. “They got me in this cell with this guy who’s a drug dealer? He’s got all these tattoos and won’t leave me alone? Picking on me, calling me sissy names?” He inhaled a lot of smoke and briefly shut his eyes. “I wasn’t eluding anybody.” He looked at me.

  I spotted a Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor and retrieved it for him to use as an ashtray.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Keith, tell me what happened.”

  “I was just driving home like I always do, from the landfill, and all of a sudden there’s this unmarked car behind me with sirens and lights on. So I pulled over right away. It was that asshole investigator who’s been driving me crazy.”

  “Ring.” My fury began to pound.

  Pleasants nodded. “Said he’d been following me for more than a mile and I wouldn’t heed to his lights. Well I’m telling you, that’s just a flat-out lie.” His eyes were bright. “He’s got me so jumpy these days there’s no way in hell I wouldn’t know if he was behind my car.”

  “Did he say anything else to you when he pulled you?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, he did. He said my troubles had just begun. His exact words.”

  “Why did you want to see me?” I thought I knew, but I wanted to hear what he would say.

  “I’m in a world of trouble, Dr. Scarpetta.” He teared up again. “My mama’s old and got no one to care for her but me, and there are people thinking I’m a murderer! I never killed anything in my life! Not even birds! People don’t want to be around me at work anymore.”

  “Is your mother bedridden?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. But she’s almost seventy and has emphysema. From doing these things.” He sucked on the cigarette again. “She doesn’t drive anymore.”

  “Who’s looking after her now?”

  He shook his head and wiped his eyes. His legs were crossed, one foot jumping like it was about to take off.

  “She has no one to bring her food?” I said.

  “Just me.” He choked on the words.

  I looked around again, this time for something to write with, and found a purple crayon and a brown paper towel.

  “Give me her address and phone number,” I said. “And I promise someone will check in with her to make sure she’s all right.”

  He was vastly relieved as he gave me the information and I scribbled it down.

  “I called you because I didn’t know where else to go,” he started talking again. “Can’t somebody do something to get me out of here?”

  “I understand your bond has been set at five thousand dollars.”

  “That’s just it! Like ten times what it usually is for this, according to the guy in my cell. I don’t have any money or any way to get it. Means I got to stay here until court, and that could be weeks. Months.” Tears welled in his eyes again, and he was terrified.

  “Keith, do you use the Internet?” I said.

  “The what?”

  “Computers.”

  “At the landfill I do. Remember, I was telling you about our satellite system.”

  “Then you do use the Internet.”

  He did not seem to know what that was.

  “E-mail,” I tried again.

  “We use GPS.” He looked confused. “And you know the truck that dumped the body? I’m pretty sure now it was definitely Cole’s, and the Dumpster may have come from a construction site. They pick up at a bunch of construction sites on South Side in Richmond. That would be a good place to get rid of something, on a construction site. Just pull up your car after hours and who’s to see?”

  “Did you tell Investigator Ring this?” I asked.

  Hate passed over his face. “I don’t tell him anything. Not anymore. Everything he’s been doing is just to set me up.”

  “Why do you think he would want to set you up?”

  “He’s got to arrest someone for this. He wants to be the hero.” He was suddenly evasive. “Says everybody else doesn’t know what they’re doing.” He hesitated. “Including you.”

  “What else has he said?” I felt myself turning to cold, hard stone, the way I did when I had moved from anger to determined rage.

  “See, when I was showing him around the house and all, he would talk. He really likes to talk.”

  He took his cigarette butt and clumsily set it end-up on the table, so it would go out without burning Styrofoam. I helped him light another one.

  “He told me you have this niece,” Pleasants went on. “And that she’s a real fox but has no more business in the FBI than you have being a chief medical examiner. Because. Well.”

  “Go on,” I said in a controlled voice.

  “Because she’s not into men. I guess he thinks you aren’t, either.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “He was laughing about it, said he knew from personal experience that neither of you dated because he’d been around both of you. And that I should just sit back and watch what happens to perverts. Because the same thing was about to happen to me.”

  “Wait one minute.” I stopped him. “Did Ring actually threaten you because you’re gay or he thinks you are?”

  “My mama doesn’t know.” He hung his head. “But some people do. I’ve been in bars. In fact, I know Wingo.”

  I hoped not intimately.

  “I’m worried about Mama.” He teared up again. “She’s upset about what’s happening to me, and that’s not good for her condition.”

  “I tell you what. I’m going to check on her myself, on my way home,” I said, coughing again.

  A tear slid down his cheek and he roughly wiped it with the backs of cuffed hands.

  “One other thing I’m going to do,” I said as footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “I’m going to see what I can do about you. I don’t believe you killed anyone, Keith. And I’m going to post your bond and make sure you have a lawyer.”

  His lips parted in disbelief as the deputies loudly entered the room.

  “You really are?” Pleasants asked as he almost staggered to his feet, his eyes wide on mine.

  “If you swear you’re telling the truth.”

  “Oh yes, ma’am!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” a deputy said. “You and all the rest of ’em.”

  “It will have to be tomorrow,” I said to Pleasants. “I’m afraid the magistrate’s gone home for the night.”

  “Come on. Downstairs.” A deputy grabbed his arm.

  Pleasants said one last thing to me. “Mama likes chocolate milk with Hershey’s syrup. Not much else she keeps down anymore.”

  Then he was gone, and I was led back downstairs and through the women’s section of the jail again. Inmates were sullen this time, as if I no longer were fun. It occurred to me someone had told them who I was, when they turned their backs on me and someone spat.

  Thirteen

  Sheriff Rob Roy was a legend in Sussex County and ran uncontested every election year. He had been to my morgue many times, and I thought he was one of the finest law enforcement officers I knew. At half-past six, I found him at the Virginia Diner, where he was sitting at the local table, which literally was where the locals gathered.

  This was in a long room of red-checked cloths and white chairs, and he was eating a fried ham sandwich and drinking coffee, black, his portable radio upright on the table and full of chatter. />
  “Can’t do that, no sir. Then what? They just keep selling crack, that’s what,” he was saying to a gaunt weathered man in a John Deere cap.

  “Let ’em.”

  “Let ’em?” Roy reached for his coffee, as wiry and bald as he ever was. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I sure as hell can.”

  “Might I interrupt?” I said, pulling out a chair.

  Roy’s mouth fell open, and for an instant he did not believe whom he was looking at. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He stood and shook my hand. “What in tarnation are you doing out in these parts?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “If you’ll excuse me.” The other man tipped his hat to me and got up to leave.

  “Don’t you tell me you’re out here on business,” the sheriff said.

  “What else would it be?”

  He was sobered by my mood. “Something I don’t know about?”

  “You know,” I said.

  “Well, what then? What do you want to eat? I recommend the fried chicken sandwich,” he said as a waitress appeared.

  “Hot tea.” I wondered if I would ever eat again.

  “You don’t look like you’re feeling too good.”

  “I feel like shit.”

  “There’s this bug going around.”

  “You don’t even know the half of it,” I said.

  “What can I do?” He leaned closer to me, his attention completely focused.

  “I’m posting bond for Keith Pleasants,” I said. “Now this obviously won’t happen before tomorrow, I’m sorry to say. But I think you need to understand, Rob, that this is an innocent man who has been set up. He’s being persecuted because Investigator Ring is on a witch hunt and wants to make a name for himself.”

  Roy looked baffled. “Since when are you defending inmates?”

  “Since whenever they aren’t guilty,” I said. “And this guy is no more a serial killer than you or I. He didn’t try to elude the police and probably wasn’t even speeding. Ring’s hassling him and lying. Look how high the bond was set for a traffic violation.”

  He was silent, listening.

  “Pleasants has an old, infirm mother who has no one to take care of her. He’s about to lose his job. Now I know Ring’s uncle is the secretary of public safety, and he’s also a former sheriff,” I said. “And I know how that goes, Rob. I need you to help me out here. Ring has got to be stopped.”

  Roy pushed his plate away as his radio called him. “You really believe that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “This is fifty-one,” he said into the radio, adjusting his belt and the revolver on it.

  “We got anything on that robbery yet?” a voice came back.

  “Still waiting for it.”

  He signed off and said to me, “You got no doubt in your mind that this boy didn’t commit any crime.”

  I nodded again. “No doubt. The killer who dismembered that lady communicates with me on the Internet. Pleasants doesn’t even know what that is. There’s a very big picture that I can’t get into now. But believe me, what’s going on has nothing to do with this kid.”

  “You’re sure about Ring. I mean, you got to be if I’m going to do this.” His eyes were steady on mine.

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  He slammed his napkin down on the table. “Now, this really makes me mad.” He scooted back his chair. “I don’t like it when an innocent person’s locked up in my jail and some cop’s out there making the rest of us look bad.”

  “Do you know Kitchen, the man who owns the landfill?” I said.

  “Oh sure. We’re in the same lodge.” He pulled out his wallet.

  “Someone needs to talk to him so Keith doesn’t lose his job. We have to make this thing right,” I said.

  “Believe me, I’m going to.”

  He left money on the table and strode angrily out the door. I sat long enough to finish my tea, looking around at displays of striped candy, barbecue sauce and peanuts of every description. My head hurt and my skin was hot when I found a grocery store on 460 and stopped for milk, Hershey’s syrup, fresh vegetables and soup.

  I charged up and down aisles, and next thing I knew my cart was full of everything from toilet paper to deli meats. Then I got out a map and the address Pleasants had given to me. His mother was not too far off the main route, and when I arrived she was asleep.

  “Oh dear,” I said from the porch. “I didn’t mean to get you up.”

  “Who is it?” She peered blindly into the night as she unhooked the door.

  “Dr. Kay Scarpetta. You have no reason . . .”

  “What kind of doctor?”

  Mrs. Pleasants was wizened and stooped, her face wrinkled like crepe paper. Long gray hair floated like gossamer, and I thought of the landfill and the old woman deadoc had killed.

  “You can come on in.” She shoved open the door and looked frightened. “Is Keith all right? Nothing happened to him, did it?”

  “I saw him earlier, and he’s fine,” I assured her. “I brought groceries.” I had the bags in my hands.

  “That boy.” She shook her head, motioning me into her small, tidy home. “What would I do? You know, he’s all I’ve got in this world. When he was born I said, ‘Keith, it’s just you.”’

  She was scared and upset and didn’t want me to know.

  “Do you know where he is?” I gently said.

  We entered her kitchen with its old, squat refrigerator and gas stove, and she did not answer me. She started putting groceries away, fumbling with cans and dropping celery and carrots to the floor.

  “Here. Let me help,” I tried.

  “He didn’t do anything wrong.” She began to cry. “I know he didn’t. And that policeman won’t leave him be, always coming over, banging on the door.”

  She stood in the middle of her kitchen, wiping her face with her hands.

  “Keith says you like chocolate milk, and I’m going to make you one. It’s just what the doctor ordered.”

  I fetched a glass and a spoon from the drain board.

  “He’ll be home tomorrow,” I said. “And I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing from Investigator Ring anymore.”

  She stared at me as if I were a miracle.

  “I just wanted to make sure you have everything you need until your son gets here,” I said, handing her the glass of chocolate milk mixed medium dark.

  “I’m just trying to figure out who you are,” she finally said. “This is mighty good. Nothing in life any better.” She sipped and smiled and took her time.

  I briefly explained how I knew Keith and what I did professionally, but she did not understand. She assumed I was sweet on him and issued medical licenses for a living. On my way home, I played CDs loudly to keep me awake as I drove through thick darkness, where for long stretches there was not a single light except stars. I reached for the phone.

  Wingo’s mother answered and told me he was sick in bed. But she got him on the line.

  “Wingo, I’m worried about you,” I said with feeling.

  “I feel terrible.” He sounded like it. “I guess you can’t do anything for the flu.”

  “You’re immunosuppressed. When I talked to Dr. Riley last, your CD4 cell count was not good.” I wanted him to face reality. “Describe your symptoms to me.”

  “My head’s killing me, my neck and back are killing me. Last time my temperature was taken it was a hundred and four. I’m so thirsty all the time.”

  Everything he said was setting off alarms in my head, for the symptoms also described the early stages of smallpox. But if his exposure was the torso, I was surprised he hadn’t gotten sick before now, especially in light of his compromised condition.

  “You haven’t touched one of those sprays we got at the office,” I said.

  “What sprays?”

  “The Vita facial sprays.”

  He was clueless, and then I remembered that he was out of the office much of today. I explai
ned what had happened.

  “Oh my God,” he said suddenly, as fear shot through both of us. “One came in the mail. Mom had it on the kitchen counter.”

  “When?” I said in alarm.

  “I don’t know. A few days ago. When was that? I don’t know. We’d never seen anything so fancy. Imagine, something sweet to cool your face.”

  That made twelve canisters deadoc had delivered to my staff, and twelve had been his message to me. It was the number of full-time people in my central office, if I included myself. How could he know such trivia as the size of my staff, and even some of their names and where they lived, if he were far away and anonymous?

  I dreaded my next question because I already thought I knew. “Wingo, did you touch it in any way?”

  “I tried it. Just to see.” His voice was shaking badly and he was choking from coughing fits. “When it was sitting there. I picked it up one time, just to see. It smelled like roses.”

  “Who else in your house has tried it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want you to make certain no one touches that canister. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” He was sobbing.

  “I’m going to send some people to your house to pick it up and take care of you and your family, okay?”

  He was crying too hard to answer.

  When I got home, it was minutes past midnight, and I was so out of sorts and sick that I did not know what to do first. I called Marino and Wesley, and Fujitsubo. I told everybody what was happening and that Wingo and his family needed a team at their home immediately. My bad news was returned by theirs. The girl on Tangier who had gotten sick had died, and now a fisherman had the disease. Depressed and feeling like hell, I checked my e-mail, and deadoc was there in his small, mean way. I was glad. His message had been sent while Keith Pleasants was in jail.

  mirror mirror on the wall where have you been “You bastard,” I screamed at him.

  The day was too much. All of it was too much, and I was achy and woozy and completely fed up. So I should not have gone into that chat room, where I waited for him as if this were the O.K. Corral. I should have left it for another time. But I made my presence known and paced in my mind as I waited for the monster to appear. He did.