The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Dr. Scarpetta.” The judge halts me from what feels like miles away. “You were supposed to be here an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I reply, with appropriate humility, looking directly at him and avoiding Jill Donoghue standing at a lectern to my left. “And I deeply apologize.”

  “Why are you late?”

  I know he knows why, but I reply, “I was at a scene several miles south of the city in the Massachusetts Bay, Your Honor. Where a woman’s body was found.”

  “So you were working?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” I feel eyes fastened to me like darts, the courtroom as still as an empty cathedral.

  “Well, Dr. Scarpetta, I was here by nine o’clock this morning, as is required of me so I can do my job in this case.” He is hard and unforgiving, not at all the man I know from swearing-ins and retirements, from the unveilings of judicial portraits and the countless Federal Bar Association receptions I’ve attended.

  Joseph Conry, whose name is frequently confused with the English novelist Joseph Conrad, is strikingly handsome, tall, with jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes, the black Irish judge with a heart of darkness, as he has been described, a no-nonsense brilliant jurist who always has treated me kindly and with respect. I wouldn’t call us personal friends. But I would say we are warmly acquainted, Conry always going out of his way to get me a drink and to chat about the latest in forensics or to ask my advice about his daughter in medical school.

  “All of the lawyers and jurors were here by nine o’clock this morning, as required of them, so they can do their jobs in this case,” he is saying in the same severe voice, as I listen with growing dismay. “And because you decided to put your job first, we’ve been forced to wait for you, implying you’re obviously the most important person in this trial.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I never meant to imply that.”

  “You’ve wasted the court’s precious time. Yes, I said wasted,” he stuns me by saying. “Time wasted not just by you but also by Mr. Steward, because he doesn’t fool me when he malingers with a witness to buy you time to get here because you’re too busy or too important to obey an order of this court.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I hadn’t thought of it as my intentionally defying anything. I’ve been consumed with . . .”

  “Dr. Scarpetta, you were subpoenaed by the defense to testify in this courtroom at two p.m. today, right?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” I can’t believe he’s doing this while the jury is seated.

  “You’re a doctor and a lawyer, are you not?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” He should have asked the jury to leave before he started ripping into me.

  “I assume you know what the term subpoena means.”

  “I do, Your Honor.”

  “Please tell the court what your understanding of a subpoena is.”

  “It’s a writ by a government agency, Your Honor, that has the authority to compel someone to testify under a penalty for failure to do so.”

  “A court order.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I answer in disbelief I don’t show.

  He’s going to make an example out of me, and I can feel Jill Donoghue’s stare and can only imagine her immense satisfaction as she watches one of the most eminent judges in Boston dismantle me one piece at a time in front of the jury, in front of her client, Channing Lott.

  “And you violated that court order because you put your work ahead of the court’s, didn’t you?” the judge asks in the same demanding tone.

  “I guess that’s right, Your Honor. I apologize.” I meet his cold blue gaze from our impossible distance.

  “Well, you’re going to have to do more than apologize, Dr. Scarpetta. I’m going to fine you in an amount that will cover the hourly costs of everyone whose time you’ve wasted for the past hour and fifteen minutes. Actually, an hour and a half, if we include the time it’s taking for me to handle this unnecessary and unfortunate matter. And more time will be added, because now we’re going to run late, run past five and into the night. I’m going to guesstimate what you’ve cost the court is twenty-five hundred dollars. Now please take the witness stand so we can move forward.”

  The courtroom is deathly still as I climb wooden steps and settle into a black leather chair, and the clerk asks me to raise my right hand. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as Jill Donoghue waits patiently at a lectern with a laptop and microphone in the midst of a vast space filled with wooden tables and Windsor benches, and so many flat video screens I’m reminded of a satellite’s silvery solar panels.

  I glance at the prosecution, three of them seated side by side and flipping through notes or writing them, and I can tell by the dazed expression on Dan Steward’s face he wasn’t expecting the blistering admonishment I just got. He’s rapidly calculating the damage that’s been done.

  seventeen

  RARELY AM I CALLED BY THE DEFENSE. IT’S ALMOST NEVER necessary or even helpful to “the bad guys,” as Marino unfairly calls attorneys who represent people indicted for murder.

  If I’m a prosecution witness, and typically I am, the opposing counsel will question me anyway, while enjoying the advantage of stipulating that I’m an expert before the jury hears the laundry list of qualifications that might prove it. In fact, Jill Donoghue’s modus operandi in every encounter I’ve had with her is to shut me up before I can so much as say where I went to medical school or if I did while addressing me as Mrs. Scarpetta and ma’am, to encourage those deciding her client’s fate not to take me seriously.

  I don’t know what to expect right now, except I worry that Dan Steward won’t be helpful. After the scolding he just witnessed, he’s not likely to tamper with Judge Conry, whose presence I feel like a towering thunderhead, dark and ready to erupt again, the courtroom electrically charged the way the air is after lightning strikes.

  I don’t understand why he is so angry with me, as if what I did was personal and intentional, a slight or injury I can’t fathom. I’ve been late to court before, not often, but it happens, and judges aren’t nice about it. But I’ve never been threatened or reprimanded, much less fined. I’ve never been dressed down in front of a jury. Something is terribly off, and I can’t think of a way to address it, as it’s not possible to e-mail or call a federal judge and ask him what’s wrong with our relationship.

  Especially if the real reason is what Steward intimated. Jill’s buddy, he’d said, and his reference to rumors was obvious.

  “Good afternoon.” Jill Donoghue smiles at me as if we are in for a pleasant time and are old friends, and only now, as we begin, will I look at her and to the left of her, between her lectern and the jury box, at the defense table. Channing Lott sits very straight, his hands clasped on top of a yellow legal pad with pages of notes folded back.

  His jailwear has been traded for a double-breasted black suit with wide pinstripes that looks Versace, and a white shirt with gold cuff links, and a rusty red-and-brown silk tie that brings to mind Hermès. I’ve never met the billionaire industrialist or seen him in person, but he’s instantly recognizable, handsome in a bohemian way, with long, snow-white hair he wears in a single braid, his eyes the pale blue of faded denim, his nose and cheekbones strong and proud like a Native American chief. For a second we are staring at each other, his gaze unflinching, as if he demands something and has no fear of me, and I turn away.

  “For the benefit of the jury,” Donoghue resumes in the same collegial tone, as if we work together, as if I’m on her team, “would you please state your name, occupation, and where you work?”

  “My name is Kay Scarpetta.”

  “Do you have a middle name?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You were born Kay Scarpetta, with no middle name.”

  “I was.”

  “Named after your father, Kay Marcellus Scarpetta the Third, correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “A Miami gr
ocer who died when you were a child.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a married name?”

  “I do not.”

  “But you’re married. Actually, divorced and remarried.”

  “Yes.”

  “Currently you’re married to Benton Wesley.” As if I might be married to someone else a month from now.

  “Yes, I am,” I answer.

  “But you didn’t take your first husband’s name. And you didn’t take Benton Wesley’s name when you finally got married to him.”

  “I did not,” I say, as I look at men and women on the jury, who, if they are married, likely share a surname.

  First box checked. Make me different so they can’t relate to me and might disapprove.

  “What is your occupation, and where do you work?” Jill Donoghue says, in the same friendly tone.

  “I’m a forensic radiologic pathologist employed as the chief medical examiner and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center,” I say to the jury, nine men and three women, two of them African American, five of them Asian, four of them possibly Hispanic, one white.

  “When you refer to yourself as chief medical examiner and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, which from this point on I will refer to as the CFC, does this also include other areas of Massachusetts?”

  “Yes, it does. All medical-examiner cases and related scientific analysis in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are managed by the CFC.”

  “Dr. Scarpetta . . . ,” she starts to say, pausing, the flipping of pages amplified by the microphone. “And I call you doctor because you are in fact a medical doctor with a number of subspecialties, isn’t that right?”

  She’s giving me professional credibility before she takes it away.

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Scarpetta, am I correct in adding that you also serve in an official capacity with the Department of Defense?” she inquires.

  Or maybe she just wants to portray me as a super-bitch.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Please tell us about that.”

  “In my capacity as a special reservist for the Department of Defense, I assist the Armed Forces Medical Examiners as requested or needed by them.”

  “And what exactly are the Armed Forces Medical Examiners?”

  “Basically, AFMEs are forensic pathologists with federal jurisdiction, similar to the FBI having federal jurisdiction in certain types of cases.”

  “So you’re the FBI of medical examiners,” she says.

  “I’m saying that in some instances I have federal jurisdiction.”

  “An example?”

  “An example would be if there were a fatal military aircraft crash in Massachusetts or near Massachusetts, the case might come to me instead of being transported to the port mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware.”

  “The case being a casualty or casualties. Case by your definition meaning a dead body or dead bodies, as opposed to actually working the crash itself. You wouldn’t examine the crashed jet or helicopter.”

  Jill Donoghue is one of the few defense attorneys I know who dares to ask questions she doesn’t know the answer to because she’s that smart and sure of herself. But it’s not without risks.

  “It would not be my job to examine a crashed plane or helicopter for the purpose of determining mechanical or computer failure or pilot error,” I reply. “Although I might be shown the wreckage and reports to see if the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, for example, are consistent with what the body tells me.”

  “Do dead bodies speak to you, Dr. Scarpetta?”

  “They don’t literally speak to me.”

  “They don’t speak the way you and I are talking.”

  “Not audibly,” I answer. “No.”

  Check box two. Make me eccentric. Make me crazy.

  “But inaudibly they speak to you?”

  “In the language of diseases and wounds and many other nuances, they tell me their story.”

  A woman on the jury, African American, in a dark red suit, nods her head as if we’re in church.

  “And your area of expertise is the human body. Specifically, the dead human body,” Jill Donoghue asks, and I can tell by her tone she doesn’t like what I just said.

  “Examining the dead is one area of my expertise.” I will make it worse for her. “I examine every detail in order to reconstruct how someone died and how they lived, and offer everything I possibly can to those left behind who find the loss profoundly life-altering.”

  The juror in dark red nods deeply, as if I’m preaching salvation, and Donoghue changes the subject. “Dr. Scarpetta, what is your rank as an Air Force Reservist?”

  “I’m a colonel,” I answer, and a young male juror in a blue polo shirt scowls as if he doesn’t approve or is confused.

  “But you never actively served in the military.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “It wasn’t a question, Dr. Scarpetta.” She’s not happy with me. “I’m stating that you were never active in the Air Force, didn’t enlist, weren’t deployed to Iraq, for example.”

  “When I was actively serving time in the military, we weren’t at war with Iraq,” I reply.

  “You’re saying no Air Force Reservists were deployed to Iraq?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “Good, because that wouldn’t be true, now, would it?” she says.

  Check box three. Imply I have to be encouraged to tell the truth.

  “It wouldn’t be correct to say no Air Force Reservists were deployed to Iraq,” I agree.

  “I was using a deployment to Iraq as an example of what someone active in the military might be involved in.” She winds up for her next spitball. “As opposed to someone who signs on with a branch of service simply to get his or her medical school education paid for by the government. Which is what you did, isn’t it?”

  Check box four. I’m entitled. I’m an elitist.

  “After medical school I served on the staff of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and my medical school tuition eventually was forgiven.”

  “So when you served your time you weren’t actually deployed anywhere at all. You served as a forensic pathologist, mostly doing paperwork.”

  “Forensic pathologists do a lot of paperwork.” I smile at the jurors, and several of them smile back.

  “The AFME is part of the AFIP, correct?”

  “It was,” I answer. “The AFIP was disestablished several years ago.”

  “While it still existed and you were on its staff, were you involved in the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission?”

  “I was not.”

  Jesus Christ. Why the hell isn’t Steward objecting? I resist looking back at him.

  Don’t look at anything or anyone but the jury.

  “Well, some of your colleagues were on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, were they not?”

  “I believe a few of them had been involved in that,” I reply. “A few of the senior forensic pathologists who were still at the AFIP when I was.”

  “Why weren’t you involved with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission?” she asks.

  Goddammit.

  Why the hell is Steward letting her get away with this? I can’t imagine the judge wouldn’t sustain an objection that this line of questioning has nothing to do with this case or me. She’s trying to inflame the Asian jurors, to prejudice them against me.

  Like implying I might have had something to do with the holocaust in front of a jury of Jews.

  “That was before my time with the AFIP.” I keep my eyes on the jury.

  I’m talking to them, not to Jill Donoghue.

  “For a while the AFIP was studying autopsy specimens from Japanese people killed by the atomic bomb, correct?” She’s not going to relent.

  “That’s correct.”

  “And this place where you served the time you owed the military for paying for your medical school edu
cation—the AFIP—was forced to return those ancestral autopsy materials to the Japanese because it was deemed disrespectful for the U.S. military to be a repository of Japanese human remains. Especially since it was the U.S. military that killed these Japanese civilians by bombing the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  You aren’t going to say a damn thing, are you, you coward?

  I resist glancing at Steward. I’m on my own.

  “World War Two was before I was born, Ms. Donoghue. It ended some forty years before I was on the staff of the AFIP. I wasn’t involved in any studies related to deaths caused by atomic bombs.”

  “Well, let me ask you this, Dr. Scarpetta. Were you ever a member of the American Society of Experimental Pathology?”

  “No.”

  “No? You’ve never attended a meeting?”

  “No.”

  “What about the American Society of Investigative Pathology? Have you ever attended one of their meetings?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same group, isn’t it?”

  “Essentially.”

  “I see. So if the name changes, then your answer changes?”

  “The American Society of Experimental Pathology no longer exists, and I never attended a meeting or was involved with it. It’s now the American Society of Investigative Pathology.”

  “Are you a member of the American Society of Investigative Pathology, the ASIP, Dr. Scarpetta?”

  “Yes.”

  “So whatever one might call this group, the fact is you’re involved in experimental medicine?”

  “The ASIP investigates the mechanisms of diseases.”

  Silence. I watch the faces of the jurors. They are alert but skeptical of me. An older man with short gray hair and a big belly looks intrigued but baffled. Jill Donoghue is squirting the ink of confusion into the water and lacing it with negativity, with insidious hints that I’m accustomed to getting a free ride that’s financed by tax dollars and that I’m reckless and inhumane and a bigot and possibly don’t like men.