From Potter's Field ks-6

by Patricia Cornwell

'He gives an invaluable service,' I said.

  'Yes, yes, I know, and you do, too. But in his case, it poses a serious difficulty. He is supposed to be commanding First Precinct, not working other cities' crimes, and I am trying to run a police department.'

  'When violence occurs anywhere, it is everybody's problem,' I said. 'No matter where your precinct or department is.'

  Tucker stared thoughtfully ahead at the shut steel bay door. He said, 'I sure as hell couldn't do what you do when it's this late at night and there's nobody around except the people in the refrigerator.'

  'It isn't them I fear,' I matter-of-factly stated.

  'Irrational as it may be, I would fear them a great deal.'

  Headlights bored into dingy stucco and steel all painted the same insipid beige. A red sign on a side door announced to visitors that whatever was inside was considered a biological hazard and went on to give instruction about the handling of dead bodies.

  'I've got to ask you something,' Colonel Tucker said.

  The wool fabric of his uniform whispered against upholstery as he shifted positions, leaning closer to me. I smelled Hermes cologne. He was handsome, with high cheekbones and strong white teeth, his body powerful beneath his skin as if its darkness were the markings of a leopard or a tiger.

  'Why do you do it?' he asked.

  'Why do I do what, Colonel?'

  He leaned back in the seat. 'Look,' he said as lights danced across the scanner. 'You're a lawyer. You're a doctor. You're a chief and I'm a chief. That's why I'm asking. I don't mean disrespect.'

  I could tell he didn't. 'I don't know why,' I confessed.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again. 'My father was a yardman and my mother cleaned houses for rich people in Baltimore.' He paused. 'When I go to Baltimore now I stay in fine hotels and eat in restaurants at the harbor. I am saluted. I am addressed "The Honorable" in some mail I get. I have a house in Windsor Farms.

  'I command more than six hundred people who wear guns in this violent town of yours. I know why I do what I do, Dr. Scarpetta. I do it because I had no power when I was a boy. I lived with people who had no power and learned that all the evil I heard preached about in church was rooted in the abuse of this one thing I did not have.'

  The tempo and choreography of the snow had not changed. I watched it slowly cover the hood of his car.

  'Colonel Tucker,' I said, 'it is Christmas Eve and Sheriff Santa has allegedly just shot someone to death in Whitcomb Court. The media must be going crazy. What do you advise?'

  'I will be up all night at headquarters. I will make sure your building is patrolled. Would you like an escort home?'

  'I would imagine that Marino will give me a ride, but certainly I will call if I think an additional escort is necessary. You should be aware that this predicament is further complicated by the fact that Brown hates me, and now I will be an expert witness in his case.'

  'If only all of us could be so lucky.'

  'I do not feel lucky.'

  'You're right.' He sighed. 'You shouldn't feel lucky, for luck has nothing to do with it.'

  'My case is here,' I said as the ambulance pulled into the lot, lights and sirens silent, for there is no need to rush when transporting the dead.

  'Merry Christmas, Chief Scarpetta,' Tucker said as I got out of his car.

  I entered through a side door and pressed a button on the wall. The bay door slowly screeched open, and the ambulance rumbled inside. Paramedics flung open the tailgate. They lifted the stretcher and wheeled the body up a ramp as I unlocked a door that led inside the morgue.

  Fluorescent lighting, pale cinder block and floors gave the corridor an antiseptic ambience that was deceptive. Nothing was sterile in this place. By normal medical standards, nothing was even clean.

  'Do you want him in the fridge?' one of the squad members said to me.

  'No. You can wheel him into the X-ray room.' I unlocked more doors, the stretcher clattering after me, leaving drips of blood on tile.

  'You going solo tonight?' asked a paramedic who looked Latin.

  'I'm afraid so.'

  I opened a plastic apron and slipped it over my head, hoping Marino would show up soon. In the locker room, I fetched a green surgical gown off a shelf. I pulled on shoe covers and two pairs of gloves.

  'Can we help you get him on the table?' a paramedic asked.

  'That would be terrific.'

  'Hey, guys, let's get him on the table for the Doc.'

  'Sure thing.'

  'Shoot, this pouch is leaking, too. We gotta get some new ones.'

  'Which way do you want his head to go?'

  'This end for the head.'

  'On his back?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you.'

  'Okay. One-two-three heave.'

  We lifted Anthony Jones from the stretcher to the table, and one of the paramedics started to unzip the pouch.

  'No, no, leave him in,' I said. 'I'll X-ray him through it.'

  'How long will it take?'

  'Not long.'

  'You're going to need some help moving him again.'

  'I'll take all the help I can get,' I told them.

  'We can hang around a few more minutes. Were you really going to do all this alone?'

  'I'm expecting someone else.'

  A little later, we moved the body into the autopsy suite and I undressed it on top of the first steel table. The paramedics left, returning the morgue to its usual sounds of water running into sinks and steel instruments clattering against steel. I attached the victim's films to light boxes where the shadows and shapes of his organs and bones brightly bared their souls to me. Bullets and their multitude of ragged pieces were lethal snowstorms in liver, lungs, heart and brain. He had an old bullet in his left buttock and a healed fracture of his right humerus. Mr. Jones, like so many of my patients, had died the way he had lived.

  I was making the Y-incision when the buzzer sounded in the bay. I did not pause. The security guard would take care of whoever it was. Moments later I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor, and Marino walked in.

  'I would've got here sooner but all the neighbors decided to come out and watch the fun.'

  'What neighbors?' I looked quizzically at him, scalpel poised midair.

  'This drone's neighbors in Whitcomb Court. We were afraid there was going to be a friggin' riot. Word went down he was shot by a cop, and then it was Santa who whacked him, and next thing there's people crawling out of cracks in the sidewalk.'

  Marino, still in dress uniform, took off his coat and draped it over a chair. 'They're all gathered around with their two-liter bottles of Pepsi, smiling at the television cameras. Friggin' unbelievable.' He slid a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket.

  'I thought you were doing better with your smoking,' I said.

  'I am. I get better at it all the time.'

  'Marino, it isn't something to joke about.' I thought of my mother and her tracheotomy. Emphysema had not cured her habit until she had gone into respiratory arrest.

  'Okay.' He came closer to the table. I'll tell you the serious truth. I've cut it down by half a pack a day, Doc.'

  I cut through ribs and removed the breastplate.

  'Molly won't let me smoke in her car or house.'

  'Good for Molly,' I said of the woman Marino began dating at Thanksgiving. 'How are the two of you doing?'

  'Real good.'

  'Are you spending Christmas together?'

  'Oh yeah. We'll be with her family in Urbana. They do a big turkey, the whole nine yards.' He tapped an ash to the floor and fell silent.

  'This is going to take a while,' I said. 'The bullets have fragmented as you can see from his films.'

  Marino glanced around at the morbid chiaroscuro displayed on light boxes around the room.

  'What was he using? Hydra-Shok?' I asked.

  'All the cops around here are using Hydra-Shok these days. I guess you can see why. It does the trick.'

  'His kidneys hav
e a finely granular surface. He's very young for that.'

  'What does that mean?' Marino looked on curiously.

  'Probably an indication of hypertension.'

  He was quiet, probably wondering if his kidneys looked the same, and I suspected they did.

  'It really would help if you'd scribe,' I said.

  'No problem, as long as you spell everything.'

  He went to a counter and picked up clipboard and pen. He pulled on gloves. I had just begun dictating weights and measurements when his pager sounded.

  Detaching it from his belt, he held it up to read the display. His face darkened.

  Marino went to the phone at the other end of the autopsy suite and dialed. He talked with his back to me and I caught only words now and then. They drifted through the noise at my table, and I knew whatever he was being told was bad.

  When he hung up, I was removing lead fragments from the brain and scribbling notes with a pencil on an empty, bloody glove packet. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him.

  'What's going on?' I said, assuming the call was related to this case, for certainly what had happened tonight was bad enough.

  Marino was perspiring, his face dark red. 'Benton sent me a 911 on my pager.'

  'He sent you what?' I asked.

  That's the code we agreed to use if Gault hit again.'

  'Oh God,' I barely said.

  'I told Benton not to bother calling you since I'm here to tell you the news in person.'

  I rested my hands on the edge of the table. 'Where?' I said tensely.

  'They've found a body in Central Park. Female, white, maybe in her thirties. It looks like Gault decided to celebrate Christmas in New York.'

  I had feared this day. I had hoped and prayed Gault's silence might last forever, that maybe he was sick or dead in some remote village where no one knew his name.

  'The Bureau's sending a chopper for us,' Marino went on. 'As soon as you finish up this case, Doc. We gotta get out of here. Goddam son of a bitch!' He started pacing furiously. 'He had to do this Christmas Eve!' He glared. 'It's deliberate. His timing's deliberate.'

  'Go call Molly,' I said, trying to remain calm and work more quickly.

  'And wouldn't you know I'd have this thing on.' He referred to his dress uniform.

  'You have a change of clothes?'

  'I'll have to stop by my house real fast. I gotta leave my gun. What are you going to do?'

  'I always keep things here. While you're out, would you mind calling my sister's house in Miami? Lucy should have gotten down there yesterday. Tell her what's happened, that I'm not going to make it down, at least not right now.' I gave him the number and he left.

  At almost midnight, the snow had stopped and Marino was back. Anthony Jones had been locked inside the refrigerator, his every injury, old and new, documented for my eventual day in court.

  We drove to the Aero Services International terminal, where we stood behind plate glass and watched Benton Wesley descend turbulently in a Belljet Ranger. The helicopter settled neatly on a small wooden platform as a fuel truck glided out of deep shadows. Clouds slid like veils over the full face of the moon.

  I watched Wesley climb out and hurry away from flying blades. I recognized anger in his bearing and impatience in his stride. He was tall and straight and carried himself with a quiet power that made people afraid.

  'Refueling will take about ten minutes,' he said when he got to us. 'Is there any coffee?'

  'That sounds like a good idea,' I said. 'Marino, can we bring you some?'

  'Nope.'

  We left him and walked to a small lounge tucked between rest rooms.

  'I'm sorry about this,' Wesley said softly to me.

  'We have no choice.'

  'He knows that, too. The timing is no accident.' He filled two Styrofoam cups. 'This is pretty strong.'

  'The stronger the better. You look worn out.'

  'I always look that way.'

  'Are your children home for Christmas?'

  'Yes. Everyone is there - except, of course, me.' He stared off for a moment. 'His games are escalating.'

  'If it's Gault again, I agree.'

  'I know it's him,' he said with an iron calm that belied his rage. Wesley hated Temple Brooks Gault. Wesley was incensed and bewildered by Gault's malignant genius.

  The coffee was not very hot and we drank it fast.

  Wesley made no show of our familiarity with each other except with his eyes, which I had learned to read quite well. He did not depend on words, and I had become skilled at listening to his silence.

  'Come on,' he said, touching my elbow, and we caught up with Marino as he was heading out the door with our bags.

  Our pilot was a member of the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT. In a black flight suit and watchful of what went on around him, he looked at us to acknowledge he was aware we existed. But he did not wave, smile or say a word as he opened the helicopter's doors. We ducked beneath blades, and I would forever associate the noise and wind caused by them with murder. Whenever Gault struck, it seemed, the FBI arrived in a maelstrom of beating air and gleaming metal and lifted me away. '

  We had chased him now for several years, and a complete inventory of the damage he had caused was impossible to take. We did not know how many people he had savaged, but there were at least five, including a pregnant woman who once had worked for me and a thirteen-year-old boy named Eddie Heath. We did not know how many lives he had poisoned with his machinations, but certainly mine was one of them.

  Wesley was behind me with his headset on, and my seat back was too high for me to see him when I glanced around. Interior lights were extinguished and we began to slowly lift, sailing sideways and nosing northeast. The sky was scudded with clouds, and bodies of water shone like mirrors in the winter night.

  'What kind of shape's she in?' Marino's voice sounded abruptly in my headset.

  Wesley answered, 'She's frozen.'

  'Meaning, she could've been out for days and not started decomposing. Right, Doc?'

  'If she's been outside for days,' I said, 'you would think someone would have found her before now.'

  Wesley said, 'We believe she was murdered last night. She was displayed, propped against…'

  'Yo, the squirrel likes that. That's his thing.'

  'He sits them up or kills them while they're sitting,' Wesley went on. 'Every one so far.'

  'Every one we know about so far,' I reminded them.

  'The victims we're aware of.'

  'Right. Sitting up in cars, a chair, propped against a Dumpster.'

  'The kid in London.'

  'Yes, he wasn't.'

  'Looks like he was just dumped near railroad tracks.'

  'We don't know who did that one.' Wesley seemed certain. 'I don't believe it was Gault.'

  'Why do you think it's important to him that the bodies are sitting?' I asked.

  'It's his way of giving us the finger,' said Marino.

  'Contempt, taunting,' Wesley said. 'It's his signature. I suspect there is a deeper meaning.'

  I suspected there was, too. All of Gault's victims were sitting, heads bowed, hands in their laps or limply by their sides, as if they were dolls. The one exception was a woman prison guard named Helen. Though her body, dressed in uniform, was propped up in a chair, she was missing her head.

  'Certainly the positioning…' I started to say, and the voice-activated microphones were never quite in sync with the tempo of conversation. It was an effort to talk.

  The bastard wants to rub our noses in it.'

  'I don't think that's his only…'

  'Right now, he wants us to know he's in New York…'

  'Marino, let me finish. Benton? The symbolism?'

  'He could display the bodies any number of ways. But so far he's always chosen the same position. He sits them up. It's part of his fantasy.'

  'What fantasy?'

  'If I knew that, Pete, maybe this trip wouldn't be happening.'

&nb
sp; Sometime later our pilot took the air: 'The FAA's issued a SIGMET.'

  'What the hell is that?' Marino asked.

  'A warning about turbulence. It's windy in New York City, twenty-five knots gusting at thirty-seven.'

  'So we can't land?' Marino, who hated to fly, sounded slightly panicky.

  'We're going to be low and the winds are going to be much higher.'

  'What do you mean low? You ever seen how high the buildings are in New York?'

  I reached back between my seat and the door and patted Marino's knee. We were forty nautical miles from Manhattan, and I could just barely make out a light winking on top of the Empire State Building. The moon was swollen, planes moving in and away from La Guardia like floating stars, and from smokestacks steam rose in huge white plumes. Through the chin bubble at my feet I watched twelve lanes of traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and everywhere lights sparkled like jewels, as if Faberge had crafted the city and its bridges.

  We flew behind the Statue of Liberty's back, then passed Ellis Island, where my grandparents' first introduction to America was a crowded immigration station on a frigid winter day. They had left Verona, where there had been no future for my grandfather, born the fourth son of a railroad worker.

  I came from a hearty, hardworking people who emigrated from Austria and Switzerland in the early eighteen hundreds, thus explaining my blond hair and blue eyes. Despite my mother's assertion that when Napoleon I ceded Verona to Austria, our ancestors managed to keep the Italian bloodline pure, I believed otherwise. I suspected there was genetic cause for some of my more Teutonic traits.

  Macy's, billboards and the golden arches of McDonald's appeared, as New York slowly became concrete and parking lots and street sides banked high with snow that looked dirty even from the air. We circled the VIP Heliport on West Thirtieth Street, lighting up and ruffling the Hudson's murky waters as a bright wind sock stood on end. We swayed into a space near a gleaming Sikorsky S-76 that made all other birds seem common.

  'Watch out for the tail rotor,' our pilot said.

  Inside a small building that was only vaguely warm, we were greeted by a woman in her fifties with dark hair, a wise face and tired eyes. Bundled in a thick wool coat, slacks, lace-up boots and leather gloves, she introduced herself as Commander Frances Penn of the New York Transit Police.