From Potter's Field

by Patricia Cornwell

  Outside that door, we could hear the inferno on the other side. I placed my hand on the knob. It was very hot.

  Marino stepped in front of me, turned the knob and shoved the door open with his foot. His pistol was combat ready in both hands as if the oven were a brute he might have to shoot.

  'Jesus,' he said.

  Flames showed in spaces around the monstrous old iron door, and the floor was littered with bits and chunks of chalky burned bone. A gurney was parked nearby. I picked up a long iron tool with a crook at one end and hooked it through a ring on the oven door.

  'Stand back,' I said.

  We were hit with a blast of enormous heat, and the roar sounded like a hateful wind. Hell was through that square mouth, and the body burning on the tray inside had not been there long. The clothes had incinerated, but not the leather cowboy boots. They smoked on Detective Jakes's feet as flames licked the skin off his bones and inhaled his hair. I shoved the door shut.

  I ran out and found towels in the embalming room while Marino got sick near a pile of metal drums. Wrapping my hands, I held my breath and went past the oven, throwing the switch that turned off the gas. Flames died immediately, and I ran back out of the room. I grabbed Marino's radio as he gagged.

  'Mayday!' I yelled to the dispatcher. 'Mayday!'

  13

  I spent the rest of the morning working on two homicide cases I had not counted on while a SWAT team swarmed my building. Police were on the lookout for the hot-wired blue van. It had vanished while everyone was looking for Detective Jakes.

  X-rays revealed he had received a crushing blow to the chest prior to death. Ribs and sternum were fractured, his aorta torn, and a STAT carbon monoxide showed he was no longer breathing when he was set on fire.

  It seemed Gault had delivered one of his karate blows, but we did not know where the assault had occurred. Nor could we come up with a reasonable scenario that might explain how one person could have lifted the body onto a gurney. Jakes weighed 185 pounds and was five foot eleven, and Temple Brooks Gault was not a big man.

  'I don't see how he could do it,' Marino said.

  'I don't either,' I agreed.

  'Maybe he forced him at gunpoint to lie down on the gurney.'

  'If he was lying down, Gault could not have kicked him like that.'

  'Maybe he gave him a chop.'

  'It was a very powerful blow.'

  Marino paused. 'Well, it's more likely he wasn't alone.'

  'I'm afraid so,' I said.

  It was almost noon, and we were driving to the house of Lamont Brown, also known as Sheriff Santa, in the quiet neighborhood of Hampton Hills. It was across Gary Street from the Country Club of Virginia, which would not have wanted Mr. Brown for a member.

  'I guess sheriffs get paid a whole lot more than I do,' Marino said ironically as he parked his police car.

  'This is the first time you've seen his house?' I asked.

  'I've been by it when I've been back here on patrol. But I've never been inside.'

  Hampton Hills was a mixture of mansions and modest homes tucked in woods. Sheriff Brown's brick house was two stories with a slate roof, a garage and a swimming pool. His Cadillac and Porsche 911 were still parked in the drive, as were a number of police vehicles. I stared at the Porsche. It was dark green, old, but well maintained.

  'Do you think it's possible?' I started to say to Marino.

  'That's bizarre,' he said.

  'Do you remember the tag?'

  'No. Dammit.'

  'It could have been him,' I went on as I thought about the black man tailing us last night.

  'Hell, I don't know.' Marino got out of the car.

  'Would he recognize your truck?'

  'He sure could know about it if he wanted to.'

  'If he recognized you he might have been harassing you,' I said as we followed a brick sidewalk. That might be all there was to it.'

  'I got no idea.'

  'Or it simply could have been your racist bumper sticker. A coincidence. What else do we know about him?'

  'Divorced, kids grown.'

  A Richmond officer neat and trim in dark blue opened the front door and we stepped into a hardwood foyer.

  'Is Neils Vander here?' I asked.

  'Not yet. ID's upstairs,' the officer said, referring to the police department's Identification Unit, which was responsible for collecting evidence.

  'I want the alternate light source,' I explained.

  'Yes, ma'am.'

  Marino spoke gruffly, for he had worked homicide far too many years to be patient with other people's standards. 'We need more backups than this. When the press catches wind, all hell's gonna break loose. I want more cars out front and I want a wider perimeter secured. The tape's got to be moved back to the foot of the driveway. I don't want anybody walking or driving on the driveway. And tape's got to go around the backyard. This whole friggin' property's got to be treated like a crime scene.'

  'Yes, sir, Captain.' He snapped up his radio.

  The police had been working out here for hours. It had not taken them long to determine that Lamont Brown was shot in bed in the master suite upstairs. I followed Marino up a narrow staircase covered with a machine-made Chinese rug, and voices drew us down a hallway. Two detectives were inside a bedroom paneled in dark-stained knotty pine, the window treatments and bedding reminiscent of a brothel. The sheriff was fond of maroon and gold, tassels and velvet, and mirrors on the ceiling.

  Marino did not voice an opinion as he looked around. His judgment of this man had been made before now. I stepped closer to the king-size bed.

  'Has this been rearranged in any way?' I asked one of the detectives as Marino and I put on gloves.

  'Not really. We've photographed everything and looked under the covers. But what you see is pretty much how we found it.'

  'Were the doors locked when you got here?' Marino asked.

  'Yeah. We had to break the glass out of the one in back.'

  'So there was no sign of forced entry whatsoever.'

  'Nothing. We found traces of coke downstairs on a mirror in the living room. But that could have been there for a while.'

  'What else have you found?'

  'A white silk handkerchief with some blood on it,' said the detective, who was dressed in tweed, and chewing gum. 'It was right there on the floor, about three feet from the bed. And looks like the shoelace used to tie the trash bag around Brown's head came from a running shoe there in the closet.' He paused. 'I heard about Jakes.'

  'It's real bad.' Marino was distracted.

  'He wasn't alive when . . .'

  'Nope. His chest was crushed.'

  The detective stopped chewing.

  'Did you recover a weapon?' I asked as I scanned the bed.

  'No. We're definitely not dealing with a suicide.'

  'Yeah,' said the other detective. 'It'd be a little hard to commit suicide and then drive yourself to the morgue.'

  The pillow was soaked with reddish-brown blood that had clotted and separated from serum at the margins. Blood dripped down the side of the mattress, but I saw none on the floor. I thought of the gunshot wound to Brown's forehead. It was a quarter of an inch with a burned, lacerated and abraded margin. I had found smoke and soot in the wound and burned and unburned powder in the underlying tissue, bone and dura. The gunshot wound was contact, and the body had no other injuries that might indicate a defensive gesture or struggle.

  'I believe he was lying on his back in bed when he was shot,' I said to Marino. 'In fact, it's almost as if he were asleep.'

  He came closer to the bed. 'Well, it'd be kind of hard to stick a gun between the eyes of somebody awake and not have them react.'

  'There's no evidence he reacted at all. The wound is perfectly centered. The pistol was placed snugly against his skin and it doesn't seem he moved.'

  'Maybe he was passed out,' Marino said.

  'His blood alcohol was .16. He could have been passed out but not necessarily. We ne
ed to go over the room with the Luma-Lite to see if we find blood we might be missing,' I said.

  'But it would appear he was moved from the bed directly into the body pouch.' I showed Marino the drips on the side of the mattress. 'If he had been carried very far, there would be more blood throughout the house.'

  'Right.'

  We walked around the bedroom, looking. Marino began opening drawers that had already been gone through. Sheriff Brown had a taste for pornography. He especially liked women in degrading situations involving bondage and violence. In a study down the hall we found two racks filled with shotguns, rifles and several assault weapons.

  A cabinet underneath had been pried open, and it was difficult to determine how many handguns or boxes of ammunition were missing since we did not know what had been there originally. Remaining were nine-millimeters, ten-millimeters, and several .44 and .357 Magnums. Sheriff Brown owned a variety of holsters, extra magazines, handcuffs, and a Kevlar vest.

  'He was into this big time,' Marino said. 'He's got to have had heavy connections in DC, New York, maybe Miami.'

  'Maybe there were drugs in those cabinets,' I said. 'Maybe the guns weren't what Gault was after.'

  'I'm thinking they,' Marino said as feet sounded on the stairs. 'Unless you think Gault could have handled that body pouch all by himself. What did Brown weigh?'

  'Almost two hundred pounds,' I replied as Neils Vander rounded the corner, holding the Luma-Lite by its handle. An assistant followed with cameras and other equipment.

  Vander wore an oversize lab coat and white cotton gloves that looked ridiculously incongruous with his wool trousers and snow boots. He had a way of looking at me as if we had never met. He was the mad scientist, as bald as a lightbulb, always in a rush and always right. I was terribly fond of him.

  'Where do you want me to set up this thing?' he asked nobody in particular.

  'The bedroom,' I said. 'Then the study.'

  We returned to the sheriff's bedroom to watch Vander shine his magic wand around. Lights out and glasses on, and blood dully lit up, but nothing else important did until several minutes later. The Luma-Lite was set to its widest beam and looked like a flashlight shining through deep water as it worked its way around the room. A spot on a wall, high above a chest of drawers, luminesced like a small, irregular moon. Vander got close and looked.

  'Someone get the lights, please,' he said.

  Lights went on and we took our tinted glasses off. Vander was standing on his tiptoes, staring at a knothole.

  'What the hell is it?' Marino asked.

  'This is very interesting,' said Vander, who rarely got excited about anything. 'There's something on the other side.'

  'The other side of what?' Marino moved next to him and stared up, frowning. 'I don't see anything.'

  'Oh yes. There's something,' Vander said. 'And somebody touched this area of paneling while they had some type of residue on their hands.'

  'Drugs?' I inquired.

  'It certainly could be drugs.'

  All of us stared at the paneling, which looked quite normal when the Luma-Lite wasn't shining on it. But when I pulled a chair closer, I could see what Vander was talking about. The tiny hole in the center of the knothole was perfectly round. It had been drilled. On the other side of the wall was the sheriff's study, and we had just searched it.

  'That's weird,' Marino said as he and I went back out the bedroom door.

  Vander, oblivious to adventure, resumed what he was doing while Marino and I walked inside the study and went straight to the wall where the knothole should be. It was covered by an entertainment center that we had gone through once. Marino opened the doors again and slid out the television. He pulled books off shelves overhead, not seeing anything.

  'Hmmm,' he said, studying the entertainment center. 'Interesting that it's out about six inches from the wall.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'Let's move it.'

  We pulled it out more, and directly in line with the knothole was a tiny video camera with a wide-angle lens. It was simply situated on a shallow ledge, a cord running from it into the base of the entertainment center, where it could be activated by a remote control that looked like it belonged to the television set. By doing a little bit of experimentation, we discovered that the camera was completely invisible from Brown's bedroom, unless one put his eye right up to the knothole and the camera was on, a red light glowing.

  'Maybe he was doing a few lines of coke and decided to have sex with somebody,' Marino said. 'And at some point he got up close to look through the hole to make sure the camera was going.'

  'Maybe,' I said. 'How fast can we look at the tape?'

  'I don't want to do it here.'

  'I don't blame you. The camera's so small we couldn't see much anyway.'

  'I'll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.'

  There was little left for us to do at the scene. As he suspected, Vander found significant residues in the gun cabinet, but no blood anywhere else in the house. The neighbors on either side of Sheriff Brown's property were cloistered amid trees and had not heard or seen any activity late last night or early this morning.

  'If you'll just drop me by my car,' I said as we drove away.

  Marino glanced suspiciously at me. 'Where are you going?'

  'Petersburg.'

  'What the hell for?' he said.

  'I've got to talk to a friend about boots.'

  There were many trucks and much construction along a stretch of 1-95 South that I always found bleak. Even the Philip Morris plant with its building-high pack of Merits was stressful, for the fragrance of fresh tobacco bothered me. I desperately missed smoking, especially when I was driving alone on a day like this. My mind streaked, eyes constantly on mirrors as I looked for a dark blue van.

  The wind flailed trees and swamps, and snow-flakes were flying. As I got closer to Ft. Lee I began to see barracks and warehouses where breastworks once had been built upon dead bodies during this nation's cruelest hour. That war seemed close when I thought of Virginia swamps and woods and missing dead. Not a year passed when I didn't examine old buttons and bones, and Minie balls turned into the labs. I had touched the fabrics and faces of old violence, too, and it felt different from what I put my hands on now. Evil, I believed, had mutated to a new extreme.

  The US Army Quartermaster Museum was located in Ft. Lee, just past Kenner Army Hospital. I slowly drove past offices and classrooms housed in rows of white trailers, and squads of young men and women in camouflage and athletic clothes. The building I wanted was brick with a blue roof and columns and the heraldry of an eagle, crossed sword and key just left of the door. I parked and went inside, looking for John Gruber.

  The museum was the attic for the Quartermaster Corps, which since the American Revolution had been the army's innkeeper. Troops were clothed, fed and sheltered by the QMC, which also had supplied Buffalo soldiers with spurs and saddles, and General Fatten with bullhorns for his jeep. I was familiar with the museum because the corps was also responsible for collecting, identifying and burying the army's dead. Ft. Lee had the only Graves Registration Division in the country, and its officers rotated through my office regularly.

  I walked past displays of field dress, mess kits, and a World War II trench scene with sandbags and grenades. I stopped at Civil War uniforms that I knew were real and wondered if tears in cloth were from shrapnel or age. I wondered about the men who had worn them.

  'Dr. Scarpetta?'

  I turned around.

  'Dr. Gruber,' I said warmly. 'I was just looking for you. Tell me about the whistle.' I pointed at a showcase filled with musical instruments.

  'That's a Civil War pennywhistle,' he said. 'Music was very important. They used it to tell the time of day.'

  Dr. Gruber was the museum's curator, an older man with bushy gray hair and a face carved of granite. He liked baggy trousers and bow ties. He called me when an exhibit was related to war dead, and I visited him whenever unusual mil
itary objects turned up with a body. He could identify virtually any buckle, button or bayonet at a glance.

  'I take it you've got something for me to look at?' he asked, nodding at my briefcase.

  'The photographs I mentioned to you over the phone.'

  'Let's go to the office. Unless you'd like to look around a bit.' He smiled like a bashful grandfather talking about his grandchildren. 'We have quite an exhibit on Desert Storm. And General Eisenhower's mess uniform. I don't believe that was here when you were here last.'