When the doors slid shut behind Marino and me, I was startled to find Anderson leaning against a countertop, the gurney bearing the pouched body parked in the middle of the floor. The body is evidence. I never left an investigator alone with an unexamined body, certainly not since the badly botched O. J. Simpson trial, when it became the vogue for everyone except the defendant to be impeached in court.
“What are you doing here and where’s Chuck?” I asked Anderson.
Chuck Ruffin was my morgue supervisor and should have been here some time ago inspecting surgical instruments, labeling test tubes and making sure I had all of the necessary paperwork.
“He let me in and went off somewhere.”
“He let you in here and just left you? How long ago was that?”
“Maybe twenty minutes ago,” Anderson replied.
Her eyes were warily on Marino.
“Do I detect a little Vicks up the nose?” Marino sweetly inquired.
The petroleum jelly shone on Anderson’s upper lip.
“See that industrial-size deodorizer up there?” Marino nodded his head to the special ventilation system in the ceiling. “Guess what, Anderson? It ain’t gonna do a goddamn bit of good when this bag’s unzipped.”
“I’m not planning on staying,” she replied.
That was obvious. She hadn’t even put on a pair of surgical gloves.
“You shouldn’t be in here at all without protective wear,” I said to her.
“I just wanted to let you know I’ll be out talking to witnesses and want you to page me when you have information on what happened to him,” she said.
“What witnesses? Bray sending you over to Belgium?” Marino asked, his breath fogging up his shield.
I didn’t believe for a minute that she had come into this unpleasant place to tell me anything. Anderson had shown up with some agenda other than this case. I looked at the dark red body pouch to see if it might have been disturbed in any way, as cool fingers of paranoia touched my brain. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was almost nine.
“Call me,” Anderson said to me as if it were an order.
The doors sucked shut in her wake. I picked up the intercom phone and buzzed Rose.
“Where the hell’s Chuck?” I asked.
“God only knows,” Rose said, making no attempt to hide the disdain she felt for the young man.
“Please find him and tell him to get here now,” I said. “He’s making me crazy. And make a note of this phone call, as usual. Document everything.”
“I always do.”
“I’m going to fire him one of these days,” I said to Marino when I hung up. “As soon as I get enough on him. He’s lazy and completely irresponsible, and he didn’t used to be.”
“He’s more lazy and irresponsible than he used to be,” Marino replied. “That guy ain’t connecting the dots right, Doc. He’s up to something, and just so you know, he’s been trying to get on with the police department.”
“Good,” I said. “You guys can have him.”
“One of these wannabes who jacks off over uniforms, guns and flashing lights,” he said as I began to unzip the pouch.
Marino’s voice was losing its bluster. He was doing his best to be stoical.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
The stench slammed into us like a storm front.
“Shit!” he complained as I opened the sheets shrouding the body. “Goddamn-fucking-son-of-a-bitch!”
There were times when a body was in such horrific shape it became a surreal miasma of unnatural colors and textures and odors that could distort and disorient and drop someone to the floor. Marino fled to the counter, getting as far away from the gurney as he could, and it was all I could do not to laugh.
He looked perfectly ridiculous in surgical garb. When he wore shoe covers he tended to skate across the floor, and because the cap couldn’t get much of a purchase on his balding head, it tended to pucker up like a cupcake paper. I gave him another fifteen minutes before he snatched it off as he always did.
“He can’t help the condition he’s in,” I reminded Marino.
He was busy stuffing a Vicks inhaler up each nostril.
“Now that’s a little hypocritical,” I commented as the doors slid open again and Chuck Ruffin walked in with X rays.
“It’s not a good idea to escort someone in here and just disappear,” I let Ruffin know with far more reserve than I felt. “Especially a rookie detective.”
“I didn’t know she was a rookie,” Ruffin replied.
“Whad’d you think she was?” Marino said. “She’s never been down here before and looks about thirteen.”
“Damn sure is flat-chested. Not the way I like ’em, let me tell you.” Ruffin’s words swaggered. “Lesbo alert! RWIRR-RWIRR-RWIRR!” He imitated a siren, flashing his hands like emergency lights.
“We don’t leave unauthorized people alone with unexamined bodies. That includes cops. Experienced or not.” I wanted to fire him on the spot.
“I know.” He tried to be cute. “O. J. and the planted leather glove again.”
Ruffin was a tall, slender young man with sleepy brown eyes and undisciplined blond hair that seemed to grow in many different directions, giving him a tousled, just-out-of-bed look that women seemed to find irresistible. He could not charm me and no longer tried.
“What time did Detective Anderson show up this morning?” I asked him.
His answer was to go around flipping on light boxes. They glowed blankly along the upper walls.
“Sorry I’m late. I was on the phone. My wife’s sick,” he went on.
He had used his wife as an excuse so many times by now that she was chronically ill or a hypochondriac, had Mun-chausen syndrome, or was almost dead.
“I guess Rene decided not to stay . . .” he said, referring to Anderson.
“Rene?” Marino interrupted him. “Didn’t know the two of you was close.”
Ruffin began slipping films out of their big manila envelopes.
“Chuck, what time did Anderson get here?” I tried again.
“To be exact?” He thought for a moment. “I guess she got here about quarter after.”
“After eight,” I said.
“Yup.”
“And you let her in the morgue when you knew everybody would be in staff meeting?” I said as he slapped films on the light boxes. “When you knew the morgue would be deserted. Paperwork, personal effects and bodies all over the place.”
“She’d never seen all of it, so I gave her the quick tour . . .” He talked on. “Plus, I was here. Trying to catch up on counting pills.”
He referred to the endless supply of prescription drugs that came in with most of our cases. Ruffin had the tedious chore of counting pills and disposing of them down the sink.
“Wow, look at that,” he said.
X rays of different angles of the skull showed metal sutures in the left side of the jaw. They were as vivid as the stitches in a baseball.
“The Container Man’s got a busted jaw,” Ruffin said. “That right there’s enough to I.D. him, isn’t it, Dr. Scarpetta?”
“If we can ever get hold of his old films,” I replied.
“That’s always the big if,” Ruffin said, and he was doing all he could to distract me because he knew he was in trouble.
I scanned the radio-opaque shadows and shapes of sinus and bone and saw no other fractures, no deformities or oddities. However, when I cleaned off the teeth, there was an accessory cusp of the Carabelli. All molars have four cusps, or protrusions. This one had had five.
“What’s a Carabelli?” Marino wanted to know.
“Some person. I don’t know who.” I pointed out the tooth in question. “Upper maxilla. Lingual and mesial or toward the tongue and forward.”
“I guess that’s good,” Marino said. “Not that I have a friggin’ clue what you just said.”
“An unusual feature,” I said. “Not to m
ention his sinus configuration, fractured jaw. We got enough to I.D. him about half a dozen times if we find something premortem for comparison.”
“We say that all the time, Doc,” Marino reminded me. “Hell, you’ve had people in here with glass eyes, artificial legs, plates in their heads, signet rings, braces on their teeth, you name it, and we still never figure out who the hell they are because they’re never reported missing. Or maybe they were and the case got lost in space. Or else we couldn’t find a single damn X ray or medical record.”
“Dental restorations here and here,” I said, pointing to several metal fillings that showed up brilliant white on the opaque shapes of two molars. “Looks like he had pretty good dental care. Fingernails neatly trimmed. Let’s get him on the table. We need to move along. He’s only getting worse.”
12
Eyes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin. His head lolled and he leaked what little fluid was left in him as I grabbed him around the knees and Ruffin got him under the arms. We struggled to lift him onto the portable table as Marino steadied the gurney.
“The whole point of these new tables,” I gasped, “is so we don’t have to do this!”
Not all removal services and funeral homes had caught on yet. They still clattered in with their stretchers and transferred the body to whatever old gurney they found instead of one of the new autopsy tables that we could roll right up to the sink. So far, my efforts to save our backs hadn’t amounted to much.
“Yo, Chuckie-boy,” Marino said. “I hear you want to sign on with us.”
“Who says?” Ruffin was clearly startled and instantly on the defensive.
The body thudded on stainless steel.
“That’s the word on the street,” Marino said.
Ruffin didn’t reply as he hosed off the gurney. He mopped it dry with a towel, then covered it and a countertop with clean sheets while I took photographs.
“Well, let me just tell you,” Marino said, “it ain’t all it’s cut out to be.”
“Chuck,” I said. “We need some more Polaroid film.”
“Coming up.”
“Reality’s always a little different,” Marino went on in his condescending tone. “It’s driving around all night with nothing going on, bored out of your friggin’ mind. It’s being spat at, cussed, unappreciated, driving piece-of-shit cars while little assholes play politics and kiss ass and get nice offices and play golf with the brass.”
Air blew, water drummed and flowed. I sketched the metal sutures and accessory cusp and wished the heaviness inside me would lift. Despite all I knew about how the body worked, I didn’t understand—not really—how grief could begin in the brain and spread through the body like a systemic infection, eroding and throbbing, inflaming and numbing, and ultimately destroying careers and families, or in some sad cases, a person’s physical life.
“Nice threads,” Ruffin was saying. “Ar-man-i. Never seen it up close before.”
“His crocodile shoes and belt alone probably cost a thousand dollars,” I said.
“No shit?” Marino commented. “That’s probably what killed him. His wife buys it for his birthday, he finds out what it cost and has a heart attack. You care if I light up in here, Doc?”
“Yes, I do. What about the temperature in Antwerp when the ship left? Did you ask Shaw about that?”
“Low of forty-nine, high of sixty-eight,” Marino answered. “Same weird warm weather everybody else’s been having. May as well spend Christmas with Lucy in Miami if the weather stays like this. Either that or put up a palm tree in my living room.”
The mention of Lucy’s name squeezed my heart with a hard, cold hand. She had always been difficult and complicated. Very few people knew her, even if they thought they did. Crouched behind her bunker of intelligence, over-achievement and risk-taking was a furious, wounded child who went after dragons the rest of us feared. She was terrified of abandonment, imagined or not. Lucy always did the rejecting first.
“You ever notice how most people don’t seem to be dressed very nice when they die,” Chuck said. “Wonder why that is.”
“Look, I’ll put on clean gloves and stand in the corner,” Marino said. “I need a cigarette bad.”
“Except last spring when those kids got killed on their way home from the prom,” Chuck went on. “The guy’s in this blue tux and comes in with the flower in his lapel.”
The waistband of the jeans was wrinkled inside the belt.
“Pants are too big in the waist,” I said, sketching it on a form. “Maybe by a size or two. He may have been heavier at some point.”
“Hard to tell what the hell size he was,” Marino said. “Right now he’s got a gut bigger than mine.”
“He’s full of gas,” I said.
“Too bad that’s not your excuse.” Ruffin was getting bolder.
“Sixty-eight inches and weighs one hundred pounds, meaning, when you consider fluid loss, he was probably one-forty, one-fifty in life,” I calculated. “An average-sized man who, as I just said, may have been heavier at some earlier point, based on his clothing. He’s got weird hair on his clothes. Six, seven inches long, very pale yellow.”
I turned the jeans’ left pocket inside out and found more hair and a sterling silver cigar clipper and lighter. I set them on a clean sheet of white paper, careful not to ruin potential fingerprints. In the right pocket were two five-franc coins, an English pound and a lot of folded foreign cash that I was not familiar with.
“No wallet, no passport, no jewelry,” I said.
“Definitely looks like robbery,” Marino said. “Except for the stuff in his pockets. That doesn’t make much sense. You’d think if he was robbed, the person would’ve taken that, too.”
“Chuck, have you called Dr. Boatwright yet?” I asked.
He was one of the odontologists, or forensic dentists, we routinely borrowed from the Medical College of Virginia.
“Just gonna do that.”
He peeled off his gloves and went to the phone. I heard him opening drawers and cabinets.
“You seen the phone sheet?” he asked.
“You’re the one who’s supposed to keep up with things like that,” I said testily.
“I’ll be right back.” Ruffin couldn’t wait to disappear somewhere yet one more time.
He trotted off, and Marino followed him with his eyes.
“Dumb as a bag of hammers,” he said.
“I don’t know what to do about him,” I commented. “Because he really isn’t dumb, Marino. That’s part of the problem.”
“You tried asking him what the shit’s going on? Like is he having memory lapses, attention disorder or something? Maybe he hit his head on something or’s been playing with himself too much.”
“I haven’t asked him those things specifically.”
“Don’t forget last month when he lost a bullet down the sink, Doc. Then he acted like it was your fault, which was the bullshit of all time. I mean, I was standing right there.”
I was struggling with the dead man’s wet, slimy jeans, trying to work them down his hips and thighs.
“You want to give me a hand?” I asked.
We carefully pulled the jeans over the knees and feet. We pulled off black briefs, socks and the T-shirt, and I placed them on the sheet-covered gurney. I examined them carefully for tears or holes or any obvious trace evidence. I noted that the back of the trousers, especially the seat of them, was much dirtier than the front. The backs of the shoes were scuffed.
“Jeans, black briefs and T-shirt are Armani and Versace. The briefs are inside out,” I continued taking inventory. “Shoes, belt, socks are Armani. See the dirt and scuffing?” I pointed them out. “Could be consistent with him being dragged from behind, if someone had him under the arms.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Marino said.
Some fifteen minutes later, the doors slid open and Ruffin walked in, a phone sheet in hand. H
e taped it up on a cabinet door.
“I miss anything?” he cheerfully asked.
“We’ll take a look at the clothes with the Luma-Light, then let them dry and trace can do their thing with them,” I instructed Ruffin in an unfriendly tone. “Let his other personal effects air-dry, then bag them.”
He yanked on gloves.
“Ten-four,” he said with an edge.
“Looks like you’re already studying to get into the academy.” Marino picked on him some more. “Good for you, kid.”
13
I lost myself in what I was doing, my mind pulled into a body that was completely autolyzed and putrefied and hardly recognizable as human.
Death had rendered this man defenseless, and bacteria had escaped from the gastrointestinal tract, invading as it pleased, fomenting, fermenting, and filling every space with gas. Bacteria broke down cell walls and turned the blood in veins and arteries a greenish-black, making the entire circulatory system visible through the discolored skin like rivers and tributaries on a map.
Areas of the body that had been covered by clothing were in much better shape than the head and hands.
“God, how would you like to run into him when you’re skinny-dipping at night?” Ruffin said, looking at the dead man.
“He can’t help it,” I said.
“And guess what, Chuckie-boy?” Marino said. “After you die someday, you’re gonna look ugly as hell, too.”
“Do we know exactly where the container was in the ship’s hold?” I asked Marino.
“A couple rows down.”
“What about weather conditions during the two weeks it was out at sea?”
“Mostly mild, averaging around sixty with a high of seventy. Merry El Niño. People are doing Christmas shopping in their friggin’ shorts.”
“So you’re thinking maybe this guy died on board and someone stuck him inside the container?” Ruffin asked.
“No, that ain’t what I’m thinking, Chuckie-boy.”
“The name’s Chuck.”
“Depends on who’s talking to you. So here’s the daily double, Chuckie-boy. If you got tons of containers stacked like sardines in a hold, tell me how you sneak a dead body into one,” Marino said. “No way you could even open the door. Plus the seal was intact.”
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