Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “What are you doing?” Berger asked.

  “A year later,” Lucy went on, “you and Greg take the same flight to Sedona on the same weekend, rent the same car, stay in the same room of the same hotel, but the experience isn’t going to be identical. It’s altered by what has gone on in your life since then, altered by your emotions, your relationship, your health, his health, by what preoccupies you, preoccupies him, altered by the weather, the economy, road detours, renovations, every detail right down to the flower arrangements and chocolates on your pillows. Without being aware of it, you’re overlaying old files with new ones that aren’t identical, even if consciously you don’t notice the difference.”

  “I’ll state this clearly,” Berger said. “I don’t like people snooping into my life or violating my boundaries.”

  “Read what’s out there about you. Some nice, some not so nice. Read Wikipedia.” Lucy held her gaze. “I’m not saying anything that isn’t public information. You spent your honeymoon with Greg in Sedona. It’s one of your favorite places. How is he, by the way?”

  “You have no right to research me.”

  “I have every right. I wanted to know exactly what I’m dealing with. And I think I do. Even though you haven’t offered much in the way of honesty.”

  “What have I said that you think is dishonest?”

  “You haven’t said. You haven’t said anything,” Lucy replied.

  “You have no reason to distrust me, and you shouldn’t,” Berger said.

  “I’m not going to abort what I’m doing because of boundaries or a possible conflict of interest. Even if you order me to,” Lucy said. “I’ve downloaded everything onto my server, so if you want to take the laptops and walk out of here, go right ahead. But you won’t stop me.”

  “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “It wouldn’t be smart.”

  “Please don’t threaten me.”

  “I’m not. I understand how threatened you might feel and how reason might dictate that you should try to remove me from this case, from everything. But the fact is, you don’t have the capabilities to stop me from what I’m doing. You really don’t. Information about my aunt was inside an apartment where a woman was just murdered. A thesis that Terri or someone was constantly working on and revising. I’d use the word obsessively. That should be what you and I are worried about. Not what other people think or whether they’re going to accuse us.”

  “Accuse us of what?”

  “Of having a conflict of interest. Because of my aunt. Because of anything.”

  “I care what people think far less than you imagine,” Berger said. “Because I learned it’s better to make them think what I want them to think than to care about it. I’m pretty good at that. I’ve had to be. I’ve got to be certain Kay isn’t even remotely aware of what’s going on. I need to talk to her.”

  “She would have told Benton,” Lucy said. “She would have told you. She never would have agreed to examine Oscar Bane if she was somehow acquainted with him or with Terri Bridges.”

  “When I requested that she examine him, she was given virtually no information about the case. Including the name of the victim. So maybe she was acquainted with Terri but didn’t realize it until she got in that room with Oscar.”

  “I’m telling you, by now she would have said something.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Berger said, “but I find it unusual that a student didn’t make at least some effort to contact sources for a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. Terri Bridges was writing about Kay and never contacted her or tried? Are we sure? Maybe she did, and Kay just doesn’t remember because she wasn’t interested.”

  “She would remember and at the very least would have politely declined. Aunt Kay didn’t know this lady.”

  “Do you really think you can be objective? That you can handle this? Or that you want to?”

  “I can. And I want to,” Lucy said, her attention suddenly distracted by what was on a video screen.

  SCARPETTA by Terri Bridges streamed by, the same words repeatedly, in different fonts and different sizes.

  “It’s begun sorting by title page,” Lucy said. “Was she fucking crazy?”

  19

  The morgue was located at the lowest level, where it was convenient for vans and rescue vehicles to park in the bay as they brought in the dead and took them away.

  The smell of industrial deodorizer was heavy on the air in a silent passageway of abandoned gurneys. Behind locked doors they passed were stored skeletal remains and specimens of brains, and then the grim conveyance of a dull steel elevator that lifted bodies upstairs, where they could be looked at from behind glass. Scarpetta had a special sympathy for those whose last image of someone they loved was that. In every morgue she’d ever managed, glass was unbreakable, and viewing rooms were civilized, with hints of life such as prints of landscapes and real plants, and the bereft were never unchaperoned.

  Dr. Lester led them to the decomp room, usually restricted to remains that were badly decomposed, radioactive, or infectious, and a faint, lingering stench reached out to Scarpetta as if a special brand of misery was inviting her inside. Most doctors weren’t eager to work in there.

  “Is there a reason you’ve got this body in isolation?” she said. “If so, now would be a good time to let us know.”

  Dr. Lester flipped a switch. Overhead lights flickered on, illuminating one stationary stainless-steel autopsy table, several surgical carts, and a gurney bearing a body covered by a disposable blue sheet. A large flat-screen monitor on a countertop was split into six quadrants that were filled with rotating video images of the building and the bay.

  Scarpetta told Benton to wait in the corridor while she stepped into the adjoining locker room and retrieved face masks, shoe and hair covers, and gowns. She pulled purple nitrile gloves from a box as Dr. Lester explained she was keeping the body in the decomp room because its walk-in refrigerator happened to be empty at the moment. Scarpetta barely listened. There was no excuse for why she hadn’t bothered to roll the gurney a brief distance away into the autopsy suite, which was much less of a biohazard and had no odor.

  The sheet rustled when Scarpetta pulled it back, exposing a pale body with the long torso, large head, and stunted limbs that were characteristic of achondroplasia. What she noticed immediately was the absence of body hair, including pubic hair. She suspected laser removal, which would have required a series of painful treatments, and this was consistent with what Oscar Bane had said about Terri’s phobias. She thought about the dermatologist he had mentioned.

  “I’m assuming she came in like this,” Scarpetta said, repositioning one of the legs to get a better look. “That you didn’t shave her.”

  She, of course, couldn’t repeat information Oscar had given to her, and her frustration was acute.

  “I certainly didn’t,” Dr. Lester said. “I didn’t shave any part of her. There was no reason.”

  “The police say anything about it? They find anything at the scene, find out anything from Oscar, maybe from witnesses, about her hair removal or any other procedures she might have been getting?”

  “Only that they noticed it,” Dr. Lester said.

  Scarpetta said, “So there was no mention of someone she may have gone to, an office where she got this done. A dermatologist, for example.”

  “Mike did say something about that. I have the name written down. A woman doctor here in the city. He said he was going to call her.”

  “He found out about this doctor how?” Benton asked.

  “Bills inside the apartment. As I understand it, he carried out a lot of bills, mail, things like that, and started going through them. The usual things. And it goes without saying, that leads to another speculation, that the boyfriend’s a pedophile. Most men who want a woman to remove all her pubic hair are pedophiles. Practicing or not.”

  “Do we know for a fact the hair removal was the boyfriend’s idea?” Benton said. “H
ow do you know it wasn’t her idea, her preference?”

  “It makes her look prepubescent,” Dr. Lester said.

  “Nothing else about her looks prepubescent,” Benton said. “And pubic hair removal could also be about oral sex.”

  Scarpetta moved a surgical lamp closer to the gurney. The Y incision ran from clavicle to clavicle, intersecting at the sternum, and ending at the pelvis, and had been sutured with heavy twine in a pattern that always reminded her of baseballs. She repositioned the head to get a better look at the face, and felt the sawed skull cap move beneath the scalp. Terri Bridges’s complexion was a dark dusky red, the petechiae florid, and when Scarpetta opened the eyelids, the sclera were solid red from hemorrhage.

  She had not died mercifully or fast.

  Ligature strangulation affects the arteries and veins that carry oxygenated blood to the brain and deoxygenated blood away. As the ligature had been tightened around Terri’s neck, occluding the veins that drain blood away, blood continued to flow into her head but had nowhere to go. Increasing pressure ruptured blood vessels, resulting in congestion and masses of tiny hemorrhages. The brain was starved of oxygen, and she died of cerebral hypoxia.

  But not right away.

  Scarpetta retrieved a hand lens and a ruler from a cart and studied abrasions on the neck. They were U-shaped, high under the jaw, and angled up behind her head, sharply up on either side of it, and she noted a subtle pattern of linear marks overlapping one another. Whatever was used to strangle her was smooth, with no distinct edges, and its width ranged from three-eighths to five-eighths of an inch. She had seen this before when the ligature was an article of clothing or some other elastic material that became narrower as it was pulled hard, and wider as it was released. She indicated for Benton to come closer.

  “This looks more like a garroting,” she said to him.

  She traced the partially abraded horizontal marks around the neck and where they stopped just behind the jawbones.

  “The angle indicates her assailant was positioned behind and above her, and didn’t use a slipknot or some type of handle to twist the ligature tighter,” she said. “He held the ends of it and pulled back and up with force, and did so multiple times. Rather much like a car moving backwards and forwards when it’s stuck in the snow. It’s running over its own tracks, but not a perfect overlay, and you may or may not be able to count how many times this went on. Note the tremendous florid petechiae and congestion, also consistent with garroting.”

  He looked through the lens, his gloved fingers touching the marks on the neck, moving it from one side to the other to get a better view. Scarpetta felt him against her as they looked on together, and she was distracted by an argument of odors and sensations. The chilly, unpleasant dead air contrasted palpably with the warmth of him, and she felt the tension of life in him as she continued to make her case that Terri Bridges had been garroted multiple times.

  “Based on the marks I’m seeing—three times, at least,” she added.

  Dr. Lester stood back from the other side of the gurney, her arms folded, her face uneasy.

  “How long before she was unconscious each time he did it?” Benton asked.

  “Could have occurred in as few as ten seconds,” Scarpetta replied. “Death would have followed in minutes unless the ligature was loosened, and that’s what I believe happened. The killer allowed her to regain consciousness, then strangled her into unconsciousness again, and repeated his routine until she could no longer survive it. Or perhaps he got tired of it.”

  “Or possibly was interrupted,” Benton suggested.

  “Maybe. But this repetitive ritual explains the profound congestion of her face, the abundance of pinpoint hemorrhages.”

  “Sadism,” he said.

  Dr. Lester stepped closer and said, “Or S-and-M that went too far.”

  “Did you check her neck for fibers?” Scarpetta asked her. “Anything that might give us a clue as to the type of ligature we’re dealing with?”

  “I recovered fibers from her hair and other areas of her body, sent them to the labs for trace evidence. No fibers from the abrasions on her neck.”

  Scarpetta said, “I would expedite everything you can. This isn’t S-and-M gone bad. The reddish, dry deep furrows on her wrists indicate they were lashed together very tightly in a single loop with a binding that had sharp edges.”

  “The flex-cuff will be checked for DNA.”

  “These marks weren’t made by a flex-cuff,” Scarpetta said. “Flex-cuffs have rounded edges to prevent injury. I’m assuming you’ve already sent—”

  Dr. Lester cut her off. “Everything went to the labs. Of course, the binding was brought here first. Mike showed it to me so I could correlate it with the furrows on her wrists and possibly with the marks around her neck, then he took it. But there are several photographs included in the ones I gave you.”

  Scarpetta was disappointed. She wanted to see the actual binding, see if it reminded her of anything she’d ever come across before. She found the photographs, and the close-ups told her nothing more than the scene photographs had. The binding Oscar allegedly cut from Terri’s wrists was a colorless nylon strap exactly one-quarter of an inch wide, and twenty and one-half inches long from the pointed tip to the ratchet case lock. One side was scored, the other smooth, the edges sharp. There was no serial number or any other type of marking that might indicate a manufacturer.

  “Looks like a cable tie of some sort,” Benton said.

  “It’s definitely not a flex-cuff or PlastiCuff, anything that would be used as a type of handcuff,” Scarpetta said.

  “Except a lot of cable ties are black,” Benton pondered as he looked at several photographs. “Anything that would be outdoors and could be degraded by UV is going to be black. Not clear or a light color.”

  “Possibly a single-use bag tie of some sort,” Scarpetta speculated. “For indoors, since it’s colorless. But we’re talking a large, sturdy bag. This isn’t a typical trash-bag tie.”

  She looked across the room at a biohazard waste bag, bright red with the universal symbol, attached to a stainless-steel holder next to a sink.

  “Actually,” she said. “Where I have seen this type of tie is right there. For those.”

  She pointed to the biohazard waste holder.

  “Ours use a twist tie,” Dr. Lester snapped, as if Scarpetta was actually suggesting the binding used on Terri Bridges had come from the morgue.

  “What’s important in this,” Scarpetta said, “is people into S-and-M generally don’t bind each other so tightly as to cut off circulation, and they aren’t likely to use sharp-edged straps or mechanical restraints that can’t be easily loosened or removed with a key. And this type of tie”—she indicated the photograph—“can never be loosened once it’s applied. It can only be pulled tighter. She would have been in pain. There was no way to free her without forcing a knife or some other sharp instrument under the ligature. And you can see a small cut here by her left wrist bone. That might be how it happened. Could be from the kitchen scissors, if it’s true that’s what was used. Was there any blood on her body when she was brought in, besides blood from the injuries on her legs?”

  “No.” Dr. Lester’s dark eyes stared at her.

  “Well, if she was dead when the binding was removed and that’s when she was cut, she wouldn’t have bled, or at least not much,” Scarpetta said. “This was no game. There was too much pain for this to be a game.”

  “Seems to me pain is the point of S-and-M.”

  “No pleasure was derived from this pain,” Scarpetta said. “Except by the person inflicting it.”

  The title page belonged to a revision dated about three weeks ago, December 10.

  “A really big file that we’re far from completely recovering yet,” Lucy said. “But this partial chapter gives you the picture.”

  She had spooled it into a text file, and Berger began reading to Lucy’s tap-taps of the down-arrow key:

  . . .
While I’ve got my hands in a dead body, I imagine how I could have killed the person better. With all I know? Of course I could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!

  I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.

  Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.

  Never heard of either.

  Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars. And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.

  How can you afford to drink such expensive whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so many people losing their homes and unable to fill their cars with gas?

  My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the finer labels—whether it’s a Château Pétrus, a single-malt whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to your liver and brain.

  So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve never heard.

  How many human livers and brains have you seen and sectioned?

  How about some other examples from the dark side? What else do you say behind the scenes, especially when you’re with your colleagues?

  We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial. Hell, I would have loved to have done his autopsy after he was executed.