The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

  "She was several feet inside the door," I say. "See this void area here?" I point out a space on the wall where there is no blood, just spatters in an aura all around it. "Her body or his blocked blood from hitting that part of the wall. She was upright. Or he was. And if he was upright, we can assume she was because you don't stand straight up and beat someone who is on the floor." I stand straight up and show her. "Not unless you have arms six feet long. Also, the point of origin is more than five feet off the floor, implying this is where the blows were connecting with their target. Her body. Most likely, her head." I move several feet closer to the bed. "Now she's down."

  I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

  "Did he kick or stomp?" Berger asks.

  "Nothing I found would tell me that." It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emotions of the crime.

  "Hands are more personal than feet," Berger remarks. "That's been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping."

  I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satellite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood several feet from the bed. "She bled out here," I tell her. "This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra."

  Berger shuffles through photographs and finds the one of Bray's green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor several feet from the bed.

  "This close to the bed and we begin finding brain tissue." I keep deciphering the gory hieroglyphics.

  "He places her body on the bed," Berger interpolates. "Versus forcing her on it. Question is, is she still conscious when he gets her on the bed?"

  "I really don't think so." I point out tiny bits of blackened tissue adhering to the headboard, the walls, a bedside lamp, the ceiling over the bed. "Brain tissue. She doesn't know what's going on anymore. That's just an opinion," I offer.

  "Still alive?"

  "She's still bleeding out." I indicate dense black areas of the mattress. "That's not an opinion. That's a fact. She still has a blood pressure, but it's very unlikely she's conscious."

  "Thank God." Berger has gotten out her camera and begins taking photographs. I can tell she is skilled and has been properly trained. She walks out of the room and starts shooting as she comes back in, recreating what I have just walked her through and capturing it on film. "I'll get Escudero back here and videotape it," she lets me know.

  "The cops videoed it."

  "I know," she replies as the flash goes off again and again. She doesn't care. Berger is a perfectionist. She wants it done her way. "I'd love to have you on tape explaining all this, but can't do it."

  She can't, not unless she wants opposing counsel to have access to the same tape. Based on the resounding absence of note-taking, I am certain that she doesn't want Rocky Caggiano to have access to a single word_written or spoken_that goes beyond what is on my standard reports. Her caution is extreme. I am shaded by suspicions that I have a hard time taking seriously. It really hasn't penetrated that anyone might seriously think I murdered the woman whose blood is all around us and under our feet.

  BERGER AND I FINISH WITH THE BEDROOM. NEXT WE explore other areas of the house that I paid little if any attention to when I was working the scene. I did go through the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom. I always do that. What people keep to alleviate bodily discomforts tells quite a story. I know who has migraines or mental illness or is obsessive about health. I know that Bray's chemicals of choice, for example, were Valium and Ativan. I found hundreds of pills that she had put in Nuprin and Tylenol PM bottles. She had a small amount of BuSpar, too. Bray liked sedatives. She craved soothing. Berger and I explore a guest bedroom down the hall. It is a room I have never stepped inside, and unsurprisingly, it is unlived-in. It isn't even furnished, but instead is cluttered with boxes that Bray apparently never unpacked.

  "Are you getting the sensation that she wasn't planning on staying here long?" Berger is beginning to talk to me as if I am part of her prosecution team, her second seat in the trial.

  "Because I sure am. And you don't take on a major position in a police department without assuming you're going to stick it out for at least a few years. Even if the job is nothing but a stepping stone."

  I look around inside the bathroom and note there is no toilet paper, no tissues, not even soap. But what I find inside the medicine cabinet surprises me. "Ex-Lax," I announce. "At least a dozen boxes."

  Berger appears in the doorway. "Well, I'll be damned," she says. "Maybe our vain friend had an eating disorder."

  It is not uncommon with people who suffer from bulimia to use laxatives to purge themselves after bingeing. I lift the toilet seat and find evidence of vomit that has splashed up on the inside of the rim and the bowl. It is a reddish color. Bray supposedly ate pizza before she died, and I recall that she had very little stomach contents: traces of ground meat and vegetables.

  "If someone threw up after eating and then died maybe a half hour or hour later, would you expect his stomach to be totally empty?" Berger follows what I am piecing together.

  "There would still be traces of food clinging to the stomach lining." I lower the toilet seat. "A stomach isn't totally empty or clean unless the person has drunk huge amounts of water and purged. Like a lavage or a repeated infusion of water to wash out a poison, let's say." Another section of footage plays before my eyes. This room was Bray's dirty, shameful secret. It is closed off from the regular flow of the house and no one but Bray ever came back here, so there was no fear of discovery, and I know enough about eating disorders and addictions to be very aware of the person's desperate need to hide his shameful ritual from others. Bray was determined that no one would ever catch even the slightest hint that she was bingeing and purging, and perhaps her problem explains why she kept so little food in the house. Perhaps the medications helped control the anxiety that is inevitably part of any compulsion.

  "Maybe this is one of the reasons she was so quick to run Anderson off after eating," Berger conjectures. "Bray wanted to get rid of the food and wanted privacy."

  "That would be at least one reason," I reply. "People with this affliction are so overwhelmed by the impulse it tends to override anything else that might be going on. So yes, she might have wanted to be alone to take care of her problem. And she might have been back here in this bathroom when Chandonne showed up."

  "Thus adding to her vulnerability." Berger takes photographs of the Ex-Lax inside the medicine cabinet.

  "Yes. She would have been alarmed and paranoid if she was in the middle of her ritual. And her first thought would have been about what she was doing_not about any imminent danger."

  "Distracted." Berger bends over and photographs the toilet bowl.

  "Extremely distracted."

  "So she hurries to finish what she's doing, vomiting," Berger reconstructs. "She rushes out of here and shuts the door and goes to the front door. She's assuming it's Anderson who's out there knocking three times. Very possibly, Bray's rattled and annoyed and might even start saying something angry as she opens the door and…" Berger steps back out in the hallway, her mouth grimly set. "She's dead."

  She lets this scenario hang pregnantly as we seek out the laundry room. She knows I can relate to the distraction and mind-searing horror of opening the front door and having Chandonne suddenly rush in from the darkness like a creature out of hell. Berger opens hall closet doors, then finds a door that leads to the basement. The laundry area is down here, and I feel strangely unsettled and unnerved as we walk about in the harsh glare of naked overhead lightbulbs that are turned on by tugging strings. I have never been in this part of
the house, either. I have never seen the bright red Jaguar I have heard so much about. It is absurdly out of place in this dark, cluttered, dismal space. The car is gorgeously bold and an on-the-nose symbol of the power Bray craved and flaunted. I am reminded of what Anderson angrily said about her being Bray's "gofer." I seriously doubt Bray ever drove to the carwash herself.

  The basement garage looks the way I imagine it did when Bray bought the house: a dusty, dark, concrete space frozen in time. There is no sign of improvements. Tools hanging on a pegboard and a push lawn mower are old and rusting. Spare tires lean against a wall. The washer and dryer are not new and although I feel certain the police checked them, I see no sign of it. Both machines are full. Whenever Bray did laundry last, she didn't bother to empty either the washer or dryer, and lingerie, jeans and towels are hopelessly wrinkled and smell sour. Socks, more towels and work-out clothes in the washer were never put through the cycle. I pull out a Speedo running shirt. "Did she belong to a gym?" I ask.

  "Good question. Vain and obsessive as she was, I suspect she did something to keep in shape." Berger digs through clothes in the washer and pulls out a pair of panties that are spotted with blood in the crotch. "Talk about airing someone's dirty laundry," she ruefully comments. "Even I feel like a voyeur sometimes. So maybe she had her period recently. Not that it necessarily has anything to do with the price of tea in China."

  "It might have," I reply. "Depends on how it affected her moods. PMS could certainly make her eating disorder worse, and mood swings couldn't have helped her volatile relationship with Anderson."

  "Pretty amazing to think about the common, mundane things that can lead to catastrophe." Berger drops the panties back into the machine. "I had a case one time. This man has to pee and decides to pull off Bleecker Street and relieve himself in an alleyway. He can't see what he's doing until another car goes by and illuminates the alleyway just enough for the poor old guy to realize he's peeing on a bloody dead body. The guy peeing has a heart attack. A little later, a cop investigates this car illegally parked, goes in the alleyway and finds a dead Hispanic with multiple stab wounds. Next to him is a dead older white male with his dick hanging out of his unzipped pants." Berger goes to a sink and rinses her hands, shakes them dry. "Took a little while to figure that one out," she says.

  Chapter 27

  WE FINISH WITH BRAY'S HOUSE AT HALF PAST nine, and although I am tired, it would be impossible for me to even think about sleeping. I am energized in a strung-out way. My mind is lit up like a huge city at night and I almost feel feverish. I would never want to admit to anyone how much I actually enjoy working with Berger. She misses nothing. She keeps even more to herself. She has me intrigued. I have tasted the forbidden fruit of straying from my bureaucratic boundaries and I like it. I am flexing muscles I rarely get to use because she is not limiting my areas of expertise, and she is not territorial or insecure. Maybe I also want her to respect me, too. She has encountered me at my lowest point, when I am accused. She returns the house key to Eric Bray, who has no questions for us. He doesn't even seem curious but just wants to be on his way.

  "How are you feeling?" Berger asks me as we drive off. "Holding up?"

  "Holding up," I affirm.

  She turns on an overhead light and squints at a Post-it on the dash. She dials a number on her car phone, leaving it on speaker. Her own recorded announcement comes on and she hits a code to see how many messages she has. Eight. And she picks up the handset so I can't hear them. This seems odd. Is there some reason she wanted me to know how many messages she has? I am alone with my thoughts for the next few minutes as she drives through my neighborhood, the phone against her ear. She goes through messages quickly and I suspect we share the same impatient habit. If someone is long-winded, I tend to delete the message before it is finished. Berger, I bet, does the same thing. We follow Sulgrave Road through the heart of Windsor Farms, passing the Virginia House and Agecroft Hall_ancient Tudor mansions that were dismantled and crated in England and shipped over here by wealthy Richmonders back in an era when this part of the city was one huge estate.

  We approach the guard booth for Lockgreen, my neighborhood. Rita steps out of the booth and I know instantly by her bland expression that she has seen this Mercedes SUV and its driver before. "Hi," Berger says to her. "I have Dr. Scarpetta."

  Rita bends over and her face shines in the open window. She is happy to see me. "Welcome back," she says with a hint of relief. "You're home for good, I hope? It doesn't seem right, you not being here. Seems real quiet these days."

  "Coming home in the morning." I experience ambivalence, even fear, as I hear myself say the words. "Merry Christmas, Rita. It looks like all of us are working tonight."

  "Gotta do what you gotta do."

  Guilt pinches my heart as we drive off. This will be the first Christmas when I haven't remembered the guards in some way. Usually, I bake bread for them or send food to whoever's sad lot it is to be sitting in that small booth when he should be home with family. I have gotten quiet. Berger senses I am troubled. "It's very important that you tell me your feelings," she quietly says. "I know it's completely against your nature and violates every rule you have laid down in your life." We follow the street toward the river. "I understand all too well."

  "Murder makes everybody selfish," I tell her.

  "No kidding."

  "It causes unbearable anger and pain," I continue. "You think only of yourself. I've done much statistical analysis with our computer database, and one day I'm trying to pull up the case of a woman who was raped and murdered. I hit on three cases with the same last name and discover the rest of her family: a brother who died of a drug overdose some years after the murder, then the father who committed suicide several years after that, and the mother who got killed in a car accident. We've begun an ambitious study at the Institute, doing an analysis of what happens to the people left behind. They get divorced. They become substance abusers. Are treated for mental illness. Lose their jobs. Move."

  "Violence certainly poisons the lake," Berger rather ba-nally replies.

  "I'm tired of being selfish. That's what I'm feeling," I say. "Christmas Eve, and what have I done for anybody? Not even for Rita. Here she's working past midnight, has several jobs because she has children. Well, I hate this. He's hurt so many people. He continues to hurt people. We've had two off-the-wall murders that I believe are related. Torture. International connections. Guns, drags. Bed covers missing." I look over at Berger. "When the hell is it going to stop?"

  She turns into my driveway, making no pretense that she doesn't know exactly which one it is. "The reality is, not soon enough," she answers me.

  Like Bray's house, mine is completely dark. Someone has turned off all the lights, including the floodlights that are politely hidden in trees or in eaves and pointed down at the ground so they don't light up my property like a baseball park and completely offend my neighbors. I don't feel welcome. I dread walking inside and facing what Chandonne, what the police, have done to my private world. I sit for a moment and stare out my window as my heart sinks lower. Anger. Pain. I am deeply offended.

  "What are you feeling?" Berger asks as she stares out at my house.

  "What am I feeling?" 1 bitterly repeat. "So much for Piu si prende epeggio si mangia" I get out and angrily shut the car door.

  Loosely translated, the Italian proverb means the more youpay, the worse you eat. Italian country life is supposed to be simple and sweet. It is supposed to be uncomplicated. The best food is made of fresh ingredients and people don't rush away from the table or care about matters that really aren't important. To my neighbors, my sturdy house is a fortress with every security system known to the human race. To me, what I built is a casa colonica, a quaint farmhouse of varying shades of creamy gray stone with brown shutters that warm me with reassuring, gentle thoughts of the people-I come from. I only wish I had roofed my house with coppi, or curved terra-cotta tiles, instead of slate, but I didn't want a red dragon's
back on top of rustic stone. If I couldn't reasonably find materials that were old, at least I chose ones that blend with the earth.

  The essence of who I am is ruined. The simple beauty and safety of my life is sullied. I tremble inside. My vision blurs with tears as I climb the front steps and stand beneath the overhead lamp that Chandonne unscrewed. The night air bites and clouds have absorbed the moon. It feels like it might snow again. I blink and take in several breaths of cold air in an effort to calm myself and shove down overwhelming emotion. Berger, at least, has the good grace to give me a moment of peace. She has dropped back as I insert my key into the dead-bolt lock. I step inside the dark, cool foyer and enter the alarm code as an awareness raises the hair on the back of my neck. I flip on lights and blink at the steel Medeco key in my hand and my pulse picks up. This is crazy. It can't be. No way. Berger is quietly coming through the door behind me. She looks around at the stucco walls and vaulted ceilings. Paintings are crooked. Rich Persian rugs are rumpled and disturbed and filthy. Nothing has been restored to its original order. It seems contemptuous that no one bothered to clean up dusting powder and tracked-in mud, but this isn't why I have a look on my face that pins Berger's complete attention.

  "What is it?" she says, her hands poised to open her fur coat.

  "I need to make a quick phone call," I tell her.

  I DON'T TELL BERGER WHAT I AM THINKING. I DON'T let on what I fear. I don't divulge that when I stepped back outside the house to use my cell phone in private, I called Marino and asked him to come here right now.