Cruel and Unusual ks-4

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Don't sound like a very pleasant assignment,” Marino commented.

  “It's not an assignment, it's a choice,” Roberts replied with the machismo and inscrutability of coaches interviewed after the big game.

  “It don't bother you?” Marino asked. “I mean, come on, I saw Waddell, go to the chair. It's got to bother you.”

  “Doesn't bother me in the least. I go home afterward, drink a few beers, go to bed.”

  He reached in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, “Now, according to Donahue, you want to know everything that, happened. So I'm going to walk you,through it.”

  He sat on top of the desk, smoking. “On the day of it, December thirteenth, Waddell was allowed a two-hour contact visit with members of his immediate family, which in this case was his mother. We put him in waist chains, leg irons; and cuffs and led him over to the visitors' side around one P.M.

  “At five P.M., he ate his last meal. His request was sirloin steak, salad, a baked potato, and pecan pie, which we had prepared for him at Bonanza Steak House. He didn't pick the restaurant. The inmates don't get to do that. And, as is the routine, there were two identical meals ordered. The inmate eats one, a member of the death team eats the other. And this is all to make sure some overly enthusiastic chef doesn't decide to speed up the inmate's journey to the Great Beyond by spicing the food with something extra like arsenic.

  “Did Waddell eat his meal?” I asked, thinking about his empty stomach “He wasn't real hungry - asked us to save it for him to eat the next day.”

  “He must have thought Governor Norring was going to pardon him,” Marino said.

  “I don't know what he thought. I'm just reporting to you what Waddell said when he was served his meal. Afterward, at seven-thirty, personal property officers came to his cell to take an inventory of his property and ask him what he wanted done with it. We're talking about one wristwatch, one ring, various articles of clothing and mail, books, poetry. At eight P.M., he was taken from his cell. His head, face, and right ankle were shaved. He was weighed, showered, and dressed in the clothing he would wear to the chair. Then he was returned to his cell.

  “At ten-forty-five, his death warrant was read to him, witnessed by the death team.”

  Roberts got up from the desk “Then he was led, without restraints, to the adjoining room.”

  “What was his demeanor at this point?” Marino asked as Roberts unlocked another door and opened it.

  “Let's just say that his racial affiliation did not permit him to be white as a sheet. Otherwise, he would've been.”

  The room was smaller than I had imagined. About six from the back wall and centered on the shiny brown cement floor was the chair, a stark, rigid throne of dark polished oak Thick leather straps were looped around high slatted back, the two front legs, and the arm rests.

  “Waddell was seated and the first strap fastened-was the chest strap,” Roberts continued in the same indifferent tone. “Then the two arm straps, the belly strap, and the straps for the legs.”

  He roughly plucked at each strap as he talked. “It took one minute to strap him in. His face was covered with the leather mask - and I'll show you that in a minute. The helmet was placed on his head, the leg piece attached to his right leg.”

  I got out my camera, a ruler, and photocopies of Waddell's body diagrams.

  “At exactly two minutes past eleven, he received the first current - that's twenty-flue hundred volts and six and a half amps. Two amps will kill you, by the way.”

  The injuries marked on Waddell's body diagrams correlated nicely with the construction of the chair and its restraints.

  “The helmet attaches to this.” Roberts pointed out a pipe running from the ceiling and ending with a copper wing nut directly over the chair.

  I began taking photographs of the chair from every angle. - “And the leg piece attaches to this wing nut here.”

  The flashbulb going off gave me a strange sensation. I was getting jumpy.

  “All this man was, was one big circuit breaker.”

  “When did he start to bleed?” I asked.

  “The minute he was hit the first time, ma'am. And he didn't stop until it was completely over, then a curtain was drawn, blocking him from the view of the witnesses. Three members of the death team undid his shirt and the doc listened with his stethoscope and felt the carotid and pronounced him. Waddell was placed on a gurney and taken into the cooling room, which is where we're headed next.”

  “Your theory about the chair allegedly malfunctioning?” I said.

  “Pure crap. Waddell was six-foot-four, weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. He was cooking long before he sat in the chair, his blood pressure probably out of sight. After he was pronounced, because of the bleeding, the deputy director came over to take a look at him. His eyeballs hadn't popped out. His eardrums hadn't popped out. Waddell had a damn nosebleed, same thing people get when they strain too hard on the toilet.”

  I silently agreed with him. Waddell's nosebleed was due to the Valsalva maneuver, or an abrupt increase in intrathoracic pressure. Nicholas Grueman would not be pleased with the report I planned to send him.

  “What tests had you run to make sure the chair was operating properly?” Marino asked.

  “Same ones we always do. First, Virginia Power looks at the equipment and checks it out.”

  He pointed to a large circuit box enclosed in gray steel doors in the wall behind the chair. “Inside this is twenty two-hundred-watt light bulbs attached to plyboard for running tests. We test this during the week before the execution, three times the day of it, and then once more in front of the witnesses after they've assembled.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” Marino said, staring at the glass-enclosed witness booth no more than fifteen feet away. Inside were twelve black plastic chairs arranged in three neat rows.

  “Everything worked like a charm,” Roberts said.

  “Has it always?” I asked.

  “To my knowledge, yes, ma'am.”

  “And the switch, where is that?”

  He directed my attention to a box on the wall to the right of the witness booth. “A key cuts the power on. But the button's in the control room. The warden or a designee turns the key and pushes the button. You want to see that?”

  “I think I'd better.”

  It wasn't much to look at, just a small cubicle directly behind the back wall of the room housing the chair. Inside was a large G.E. box with various dials to raise and lower the voltage, which went as high as three thousand volts. Rows of small lights affirmed that everything was fine or warned that things were not.

  “At Greensville, it will all be computerized, “ Roberts added.

  Inside a wooden cupboard were the helmet, leg piece, and two thick cables, which, he explained as he held them up, “attach to the wing nuts above and to one side of the chair, and then to this wing nut on top of the helmet and the one here on the leg piece.”

  He did this without effort, adding, “Just like hooking up a VCR” The helmet and leg piece were copper riddled with holes, through which cotton string was woven to secure the sponge lining inside. The helmet was surprisingly light, a patina of green tarnish at the edges of the connecting plates. I could not imagine having such a thing placed on top of my head. The black leather mask was nothing more than a wide, crude belt that buckled behind the inmate's head, a small triangle cut in it for the nose. It could have been on display in the Tower of London and I would not have questioned its authenticity.

  We passed a transformer with coils leading to the ceiling, and Roberts unlocked another door. We stepped inside another room.

  “This is the cooling room,” he said. “We wheeled Waddell in here and transferred him to this table.”

  It was steel, rust showing at the joints.

  “We let him cool down for ten minutes, put sandbags on his leg. That's them right there.”

  The sandbags were stacked on the floor at
the foot of the table.

  “Ten pounds each. Call it a knee-jerk reaction; but the leg's severely bent. The sandbags straighten it out. And if the burns are bad, like Waddell's were, we dress them with gauze. All done, and we put Waddell back on the stretcher and carried him out the same way you came in. Only we didn't bother with the stairs. No point in anybody getting a hernia. We used the food elevator and carried him out the front door, and loaded him in the ambulance. Then we hauled him into your place, just like we always do after our children ride the Sparky.”

  Heavy doors slammed. Keys jangled. Locks clicked. Roberts continued talking boisterously as he led us back to the lobby. I barely listened and Marino did not say a word. Sleet mixed with rain beaded grass and walls with ice. The sidewalk was wet, the cold penetrating. I felt queasy. I was desperate to take a long, hot shower and change my clothes.

  “Lowlifes like Roberts are just one level above the inmates,” Marino said as he started the car. “In fact, some of them aren't any better than the drones they lock up.”

  Moments later he stopped at a red light. Drops of water on the windshield shimmered like blood, were wiped away and replaced by a thousand more. Ice coated trees like glass.

  “You got time for me to show you something?” Marino wiped condensation off the windshield with his coat sleeve.

  “Depending on how important it is, I suppose I could make time.”

  I hoped my obvious reluctance would inspire him to take me home instead.

  “I want to retrace Eddie Heath's last steps for you.”

  He flipped on the turn signal. “In particular, I think you need to see where his body was found.”

  The Heaths lived east of Chamberlayne Avenue, or on the wrong side of it, in Marino's words. Their small brick house was but several blocks from a Golden Skillet fried chicken restaurant and the convenience store where Eddie had walked to buy his mother a can of soup. Several cars, large and American, were parked in -the Heaths' driveway, and smoke drifted out the chimney and disappeared in the smoky gray sky. Aluminum glinted dully as the front screen door opened and an old woman bundled in a black coat emerged, then paused to speak to someone inside. Clinging to the railing as if the afternoon threatened to pitch her overboard, she made her way down the steps, glancing blankly at the white Ford LTD cruising past.

  Had we continued east for another two miles, we would have entered the war zone of the federal housing projects.

  “This neighborhood used to be all white,” Marino said. “I remember when I first came to Richmond this was a good area to live. Lots of decent, hardworking folks who kept their yards real nice and went to church on Sunday. Times change. Me, I wouldn't let any kid of mine walk around out here after dark. But when you live in a place, you get comfortable. Eddie was comfortable walking around, delivering his papers, and running errands for his mother.

  “The night it happened he came out the front door of his crib, cut through to Azalea, then took a right like we're doing as I speak. There's Lucky's on our left, next to the gas station.”

  He pointed out a convenience store with a green horseshoe on the lighted sign. “That corner right over there is a popular hangout for drug drones. They trade crack for cash and fade. We catch the cockroaches, and two days later they're on another corner doing the same thing.”

  “A possibility Eddie was involved in drugs?”

  My question would have been somewhat farfetched back in the days when I began my career, but no longer. Juveniles now comprised approximately ten percent of all narcotics trafficking arrests in Virginia.

  “No indication of it so far. My gut tells me he wasn't,” Marino said.

  He pulled into the convenience store's parking lot, and we sat gazing out at advertisements taped to plate glass and lights shining garishly through fog. Customers formed a long line by the counter as the harried clerk worked the cash register without looking up. A young black man in high tops and a leather coat stared insolently at our car as he sauntered out with a quart of beer and dropped change in a pay phone near the front door. A man, red-faced and in paint-spattered jeans, peeled cellophane off a pack of cigarettes as he trotted to his truck.

  “I'm betting this is where he met up with his assailant,” Marino said.

  “How?” I said.

  “I think it went down simple as hell. I think he came out of the store and this animal came right up to him and fed him a line to gain his confidence. He said something and Eddie went with him and got in the car.”

  “His physical findings would certainly support that,” I said. “He had no defense injuries, nothing to indicate a struggle. No one inside the convenience store saw him with anyone?”

  “No one I've talked to so far. But you see how busy this joint is, and it was dark out. If anybody saw anything, it was probably a customer coming in or returning to his car. I plan to get the media to run something so we can appeal to anyone who might have stopped here between five and six that night. And Crime Stoppers is going to do a segment on it, too.”

  “Was Eddie streetwise?”

  “You get a squirrel who's smooth and even kids who know better can fall for it. I had a case back in New York where a ten-year-old girl walked to the local store to buy a pound of sugar. As she's leaving, this pedophile approaches her and says her father's sent him. He says her mom's just been rushed to the hospital and he's supposed to pick the girl up and take her there. She gets in his car and ends up a statistic.”

  He glanced over at me. “All right, white or black?”

  “In which case?”

  “Eddie Heath's.”

  “Based on what you've said, the assailant is white.”

  Marino backed up and waited for a break in traffic. “No question the MO fits for white. Eddies old man don't like blacks and Eddie didn't trust them, either, so it's unlikely a black guy gained Eddies confidence. And if people notice a white boy walking with a white man even if the boy looks unhappy - they think big brother and little brother or father and son.”

  He turned right, heading west. “Keep going; Doc. What else?”

  Marino loved this game. It gave him just as much pleasure when I echoed his thoughts as it did when he believed I was flat-out wrong.

  “If the assailant is white, then the next conclusion I'd make is he's not from the projects, despite their close proximity.”

  “Race aside, why else might you conclude that the peril's not from the projects?”

  “The MO again,” I said simply. “Shooting someone in the head - even a thirteen-year-old - would not be unheard of in a street killing, but aside from that, nothing fits. Eddie was shot with a twenty-two, not with a nine or ten millimeter of large-caliber revolver. He was nude and he was mutilated, suggesting the violence was sexually motivated. As far as we know, he had nothing worth stealing and did not appear to have a life-style that put him at risk.”

  It was raining hard now, and streets were treacherous with cars moving at imprudent rates of speed with their headlights on. I supposed many people were headed to shopping malls, and it occurred to me that I had done little to prepare for Christmas.

  The grocery store on Patterson Avenue was just ahead on our left. I could not remember its former name, and signs had been removed, leaving nothing but a bare brick shell with a number of windows boarded up. The space it occupied was poorly lit, and I suspected the police would not have bothered to check behind the building at all were there not a row of businesses to the left of it. I counted five of them: pharmacy, shoe repair, dry cleaner, hardware store, and Italian restaurant, all closed and deserted the night Eddie Heath was driven here and left for dead.

  “Do you recall why this grocery store went out of business?” I asked.

  “About the same time a bunch of other places did. When the war started in the Persian Gulf,” Marino said.

  He cut through an alleyway, the high beams of his headlights licking brick walls and rocking when the unpaved ground got rough. Behind the store a chainlink fence sepa
rated an apron of cracked asphalt from a wooded area stirring darkly in the wind. Through the limbs of bare trees I could see streetlights in the distance and the illuminated sign for a Burger King.

  Marino parked, headlights boring into a brown Dumpster cancerous with blistered paint and rust, beads of water running down its sides. Raindrops smacked against glass and drummed the roof, and dispatchers were busy dispatching cars to the scenes of accidents.

  Marino pushed his hands against the steering wheel and hunched his shoulders. He massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I'm getting old,” he complained. “I got a rain slicker in the trunk.”

  “You need it more than I do. I won't melt,” I said, opening my door.

  Marino fetched his navy blue police raincoat and I turned my collar up to my ears. The rain stung my face and coldly tapped the top of my head. Almost instantly, my ears started getting numb. The Dumpster was near the fence, at the outer limits of the pavement, perhaps twenty yards from the back of the grocery store. I noted that the Dumpster opened from the top, not the side.

  “Was the door to the Dumpster open or shut when the police got here?” I asked Marino.

  “Shut.”

  The hood of his raincoat made it difficult for him to look at me without turning his upper body. “You notice there's nothing to step up on.”

  He shone a flashlight around the Dumpster. “Also, it was empty. Not a damn thing in it except rust and the carcass of a rat big enough to saddle up and ride.”

  “Can you lift the door?”

  “Only a couple inches. Most of the ones made like this have a latch on either side. If you're tall enough, you can lift the lid a couple inches and slide your hand down along the edge, continuing to raise the lid by bumping the latches in place a little at a time. Eventually you can get it open far enough to stuff a bag of trash inside. Problem is, the latches on this one don't catch. You'd have to open the lid all the way and let it flop over on the other side, and no way you're going to do that unless you climb up on something.”

  “You're what? Six-one or two?”

  “Yeah. If I can't open the Dumpster, he couldn't either. The favorite theory at the moment is he carried the body out of the car and leaned it up against the Dumpster while he tried to open the door - the same way you put a bag of garbage down for a minute to free your hands. When he can't get the door open, he hauls ass, leaving the kid and his crap right here on the pavement.”