“Stomach contents?” Scarpetta asked.
“A small amount of brownish fluid, about twenty cc’s. She hadn’t eaten for hours, at least,” Dr. Lester said.
“You kept it?”
“No point. I’m having the usual body fluids screened for drugs.”
“I wasn’t thinking about drugs as much as the possibility of semen,” Scarpetta said. “If she was orally sodomized, you might find semen in the stomach. Might even find it in the lungs. Unfortunately, we have to think creatively.”
She retrieved a scalpel from a cart and snapped in a new blade. She began incising contusions on Terri’s knees, and could feel the broken patellae beneath the abraded skin. Each kneecap was fractured into several pieces—a typical injury in car accidents where knees impact the dashboard.
“If you’ll make sure I have electronic images of all x-rays,” she said.
She incised contusions on the thighs and discovered ruptured blood vessels more than an inch deep, all the way to muscle. Using a six-inch ruler as a scale, she got Benton to help with photographs, and she made notes on body diagrams she retrieved from cubbyholes above the counter.
With forceps, she removed splinters from the knees and the tops of the feet and placed them on several dry slides. Seating herself before the compound microscope, she manipulated light and contrast and moved the slide on the stage. At a magnification of 100X, she could see the tracheids, the water-conducting cells of the wood, and determine that areas of them had been roughly crushed at bondline surfaces where veneers had been glued together with a very strong adhesive.
The splinters had come from abrasively planed plyboard. She and Benton looked again at the eight-by-ten photograph of Terri’s nude body on the bathroom floor. In the background was the white marble countertop that included the built-in vanity and a small gold metal chair with heart-shaped back and black satin-upholstered bottom. On top of the vanity was a mirrored tray of perfumes, a brush, and a comb. Everything was perfectly neat and straight except for the oval mirror, and as Scarpetta looked closely at the photo and studied it under a lens, she confirmed that the edge of the countertop was squared off where the vanity was built in. It was sharp.
She looked through more photographs of the bathroom, taken from different angles.
“It’s all one unit.” She showed a photograph to Benton. “The counter built around the sink, cabinets, and the vanity with its drawer are one unit. And if you look here, this picture taken at floor level, you can see the counter has a white-painted plyboard back that’s against the tile wall. Very similar to desks built into kitchen counters. However, often with plyboard built-ins, the underside that’s not visible isn’t painted. It’s possible the underside of the vanity drawer isn’t, in other words. Microscopically, we can tell the splinters recovered from her knees and the tops of her feet are from unpainted plyboard. We need to go to the scene.”
Dr. Lester was behind them, looking on silently.
Scarpetta explained, “I think it’s possible he forced her to sit in the chair and watch herself in the mirror while he garroted her, and when she struggled—kicking violently—her legs struck the edge of the counter, causing the linear abrasions, the deep contusions on her thighs. Her knees struck the underside of the vanity so violently her patellae were shattered. If the underside of the vanity is unpainted plyboard, that would explain the splinters in the knees, and also the tops of her feet. As short as her legs are, her feet wouldn’t have reached the wall. They would have struck the underside of the drawer.”
“If you’re right,” Dr. Lester conceded, “it will have a bearing. If she was kicking and struggling that hard, and someone was making her sit and look in the mirror, that’s a different story.”
“An important question is what the bathroom was like when Oscar first got there and found the body,” Benton said. “Assuming his story is true.”
“I think we can get some measurements and figure out if his story is true,” Scarpetta said. “Depending on the chair. If Terri was sitting in it and Oscar was standing behind her, I don’t believe he could have pulled up high enough with the ligature to achieve the angle of the mark on her neck. But we need to go to the scene. We need to go there quickly.”
“First thing I’m going to do is outright ask him,” Benton said. “Maybe he’ll talk to me if he thinks new evidence has turned up and it’s in his best interest to cooperate. I’ll call the ward, see if he’ll be reasonable.”
Lucy was going through e-mail as Scarpetta explained over speakerphone why she wanted swabs from Terri Bridges’s orifices, and an entire chair, to be flown to the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
“I have friends at Y-Twelve,” Scarpetta said to Berger, whose approval she wanted. “I think we could get a very rapid turnaround on this. Once they have the evidence, it’s just a matter of hours. The longest part will be vacuuming down the chamber, because that’s going to be slower than usual. The petroleum-based lubricant has a lot of moisture.”
“I thought they made nuclear weapons,” Berger said. “Didn’t they process the uranium for the first atomic bomb? You’re not suggesting Terri Bridges had connections that might have to do with terrorism or something like that?”
Scarpetta said that while it was true that Y-12 produced components for every weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal and also had the largest stockpile of enriched uranium, her interest in the place was because of its engineers, chemists, physicists, and especially its materials scientists.
“Are you familiar with their Visitec Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope?” she asked.
“I assume what you’re getting at is we don’t have one here,” Berger said.
“I’m afraid at present there’s no forensic lab on the planet that has a ten-ton microscope with a magnification of two hundred thousand X, and detectors for EDX and FTIR, energy dispersive X-ray detection, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy,” Scarpetta said. “One-stop shopping to get the morphology, and elemental and chemical compositions, of a sample as small as a macromolecule or as large as an engine block. It’s possible I might want to put an entire chair in the chamber. But we need to see. I’m not going to ask Lucy if she’ll let us borrow her jet and have police fly evidence down to Tennessee and receipt it to one of my scientist friends in the middle of the night unless I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“Tell me more about the chair,” Berger said. “Why you think it’s so important?”
“From her bathroom,” Scarpetta said. “I believe she was sitting in it when she was murdered—a theory at this point that I can’t begin to verify without a hands-on examination. I have reason to believe she was nude when she was sitting on it, and since we know the lubricant is contaminated with an admixture of DNA, it may be contaminated with traces of other organic and inorganic substances as well. We don’t know what the lubricant originally was used for, where it came from, or what’s in it. But the LC-SEM might help tell us, and tell us quickly. I’d like to go to the scene, to Terri’s apartment, as soon as possible.”
“There’s an officer in her apartment around the clock,” Berger said. “So it’s not a problem getting you inside. But I’d like an investigator with you. I also need to ask you again if you had any prior connection to Terri or Oscar.”
“None.”
“We’re finding things on a computer from her apartment that make it appear you did. At least with her.”
“I didn’t. We’ll be finished up here in fifteen, twenty minutes,” Scarpetta said. “Then all we have to do is drop by Benton’s office to pick up a few things. If someone could meet us in front of the hospital.”
“How would you feel if that someone is Pete Marino?” Berger was deliberately bland.
“If what I’m considering might have happened to Terri Bridges is right,” Scarpetta said, and she was bland, too, as if she had been expecting Berger to suggest what she did, “we’re dealing with a sexual sadist who may have killed bef
ore. Possibly two other people in 2003. Benton’s gotten e-mails, the same ones you’ve seen, from Marino.”
“I haven’t looked at my e-mail in the past few hours,” Berger said. “We’re actually just getting started on Terri Bridges’s e-mail right now. Hers and Oscar Bane’s.”
“If my suspicion’s correct, I don’t see how he could have done what I’m thinking the killer did. Of course, his DNA hasn’t been run through CODIS yet. But what I can say is if he was standing behind Terri while she was sitting, they would have been almost the same height. Unless he was standing on top of something like a step stool, and for him to maintain his balance while doing all the rest of it would have been difficult, if not impossible.”
“What did you just say?”
“Because of their achondroplasia,” Scarpetta said. “Their torsos are a normal length but their arms and legs aren’t. I’ll have to show you with measurements, but if someone suffering achondroplasia is four-foot-one, let’s say, and is sitting in front of someone standing who’s about the same height, their heads and shoulders will be almost level with each other.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. It sounds like a riddle.”
“Does anybody know where he is? Someone should check on him, to make sure he’s safe. He may have good reason to be paranoid if he’s not the killer, and I’m having my doubts. Serious doubts.”
“Jesus,” Berger said. “What do you mean ‘where he is’? Don’t tell me he’s left Bellevue.”
Scarpetta said, “Benton just called the prison ward. I assumed you knew.”
21
Tell-Tail Hearts’s flagship pet store was on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks west of Grace’s Marketplace, and as Shrew walked through the blustery dark, she kept thinking of the column she’d posted several weeks ago.
She recalled descriptions of cleanliness, and a staff in lab coats who offered the highest level of care, whether it was a nutritious diet, medical attention, or affection. All of the chain’s pet shops were open seven days a week, from ten in the morning until nine at night, ensuring that the puppies, in particular, with their delicate constitutions, weren’t left alone for long periods. After hours, the heat or air-conditioning wasn’t turned down to save on oil or electricity, and music was piped in to keep the little babies company. Shrew had done plenty of research after Ivy died and knew how critical it was for puppies to be kept hydrated and warm, and not to languish from loneliness.
When the store came in view just up on the left, it wasn’t at all what Shrew expected, much less what had been described in the column the Boss had written. The display window was filled with untidy shredded newspaper, and a red plastic fire hydrant was precariously tilted to one side. There were no puppies or kittens in the window, and the glass was dirty.
Tell-Tail Hearts was sandwiched between In Your Attic, which by the looks of it sold junk, and a music store called Love Notes, which was having a going-out-of-business sale. A sign hanging on the pet store’s dingy white front door read Closed, but all the lights were blazing, and on the counter was a big foil bag of take-out barbecue from Adam’s Ribs, three doors down. Parked in front was a black Cadillac sedan, with a driver in it and the engine on.
The driver seemed to be watching Shrew as she opened the front door and walked into an invisible fog of air freshener, the spray can on top of the cash register.
“Hello?” she called out, not seeing anyone.
Puppies began to bark and stir and stare at her. Kittens snoozed in beds of wood shavings, and fish fluttered lazily in tanks. A counter wrapped around three walls, and behind it, reaching almost to the water-stained ceiling, were wire cages filled with tiny representatives of every breed of pet imaginable. She avoided making eye contact with any of them. She knew better.
Eye contact led straight to the heart, and the next thing she knew, she was carrying someone home she hadn’t intended to get, and she couldn’t have all of them. And she wanted all of them, the poor, pitiful things. She needed to research her selection intelligently, ask questions, and be convinced of what would be the best choice before anyone removed a puppy from its cage and placed it in her arms. She needed to talk to the manager.
“Hello?” she called out again.
She walked tentatively toward a door in back that was slightly ajar.
“Anybody here?”
She opened the door the rest of the way. Wooden stairs led down to the basement, where she could hear a dog barking, then several others began barking. She started down, one slow step at a time, careful because the lighting was poor and she’d had too much bourbon. Walking all the way here had helped a little but not nearly enough. Her thoughts were dull and sluggish, and her nose felt numb the way it got when she was tipsy.
She found herself in a storage area that was thick with shadows and stunk like sickness, feces, and urine. Amid piled boxes of pet supplies and bags of dry food were cages filled with filthy shredded paper, and then she saw a wooden table with glass vials and syringes, and red bags with Biohazard Infectious Waste stamped on them in black, and a pair of heavy black rubber gloves.
Just beyond the table was a walk-in freezer.
Its steel door was open wide, and she saw what was inside. A man in a dark suit and a black cowboy hat and a woman in a long gray frock coat had their backs to her, their voices muffled by loud blowing air. Shrew saw what they were doing, and she wanted to get out as fast as she could, but her feet seemed stuck to the concrete floor. She stared in horror, and then the woman saw her and Shrew turned around and ran.
“Hold on!” a deep voice yelled after her. “Whoa now!”
Heavy footsteps sounded after her, and she missed a step on the stairs and whacked her shin hard. A hand grabbed her elbow, and the man in the cowboy hat was escorting her back into the bright lights of the store. Then the lady in the gray frock coat was there, too. She glared disapprovingly at her but looked too worn-out to do anything about Shrew’s transgression.
The man in the cowboy hat demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking around in here like that?”
His eyes were dark and bloodshot in his dissipated face, and he had big white sideburns and plenty of flashy gold jewelry.
“I wasn’t sneaking,” Shrew said. “I was looking for the manager.”
Her heart pounded like a kettledrum.
“We’re closed,” the man said.
“I came in to buy a puppy,” she said, and she started to cry.
“There’s a closed sign in the door,” he said while the woman mutely stood by.
“Your door’s unlocked. I came downstairs to tell you. Anybody could walk right in.” Shrew couldn’t stop crying.
She couldn’t stop envisioning what she’d seen in the freezer.
The man looked at the woman, as if demanding an explanation. He walked over to the front door and checked, then muttered something. It probably dawned on him that Shrew had to be telling the truth. How else would she have gotten in?
“Well, we’re closed. It’s a holiday,” he said, and she guessed him to be about sixty-five years old, maybe seventy. He had a Midwest drawl that seemed to crawl off his tongue.
She had a feeling he’d been doing the same thing she was a little earlier, drinking, and she noticed that the big gold ring he wore was shaped like a dog’s head.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I saw the lights on and came in, thinking you were open. I really am sorry. I thought I might buy a puppy, and some food and toys and things. Sort of a New Year’s present to myself.”
She picked up a can of food off a shelf.
Before she could stop herself, she said, “Wasn’t this banned in that Chinese-import melamine scare?”
“Believe you have that confused with toothpaste,” the man said to the woman in the gray frock coat, who had a lifeless jowly face and long dyed black hair straying from a barrette.
“That’s right. Toothpaste,” she said, and she had the same accent. “A lot of peop
le got liver damage from it. Of course, they never tell you the rest of the story. Like maybe they were alcoholics, and that’s why they had liver damage.”
Shrew wasn’t uninformed. She knew about the toothpaste that had killed several people because it had diethylene glycol in it, and the man and woman knew that wasn’t what Shrew was talking about. This was a bad place—maybe the worst in the world—and she’d come at a bad time, the worst time imaginable, and she’d seen something so awful she’d never be the same.
What was she thinking? It was the evening of New Year’s Day, and no pet store in the city was going to be open, including this one. So why were they here?
After being down in the basement, she knew why they were here.
“It’s important to clear up confusion,” the man said to Shrew. “You had no business down there.”
“I didn’t see anything.” A clear indication she’d seen everything.
The man in the cowboy hat and gold jewelry said, “If an animal dies from something contagious, you do what you got to do, and you got to do it fast to make sure the other animals don’t catch it. And once you do the merciful thing, you have to deal with temporary storage. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
Shrew noticed six empty cages with their doors open wide. She wished she’d noticed them when she first walked in. Maybe she would have left. She remembered the other empty cages in the basement, and what was on the table, and then what was in the freezer.
She started to cry again and said, “But some of them were moving.”
The man said to her, “You live around here?”
“Not really.”
“What’s your name?”
She was so scared and upset, she stupidly told him, and then stupidly said, “And if you’re thinking I’m some kind of inspector for the Department of Agriculture or some animal group?” She shook her head. “I just came in to get a puppy. I forgot it’s a holiday, that’s all. I understand about pets getting sick. Kennel cough. Parvovirus. One gets it, they all get it.”
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