Flesh and Blood

by Patricia Cornwell

  “When Benton saw the glint of light the first time this morning it was early, around eight.” She sits on a bench to pull the shoe covers over her boots, and it’s obvious that he gave her details about what happened.

  “And then a second time around eleven,” I reply.

  “If someone was on the roof to spy on you and your property, this person likely was in position very early and it would have been chilly.”

  “He might have had on a cap and a jacket,” I suggest. “He also may have left and come back.”

  Jamal Nari was murdered at approximately nine-forty-five. His apartment on Farrar Street is half a mile from our house and the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  “Are you thinking it was the killer on the roof?” I ask.

  Lucy gets up from the bench and slips the apron over her head, tying it in back. “On my approach when I was going to buzz your house, he would have heard me and gone down the ladder. It’s at the back of the complex where there are woods and a busy street.”

  “And this person forgot to take the clothing.”

  “Either that or left it intentionally.”

  “You retrieved the hat and jacket from the roof and gave them to DNA.” I work my hands into a pair of gloves.

  “Yes.”

  “Because you were worried it might have been the shooter up there.” I push my point.

  “Not with the intention of hurting Benton or you. Not at that time.”

  “You say this based on what?” I push another hands-free button and the stainless steel door gently swings open.

  “Someone with a heavy sniper rifle with a bipod and rear bag rests?” She follows me into the autopsy room. “That couldn’t have been disassembled quickly and carried up and down a narrow metal ladder, and the person would have been noticed. You have to envision this logically.”

  “Help me out.”

  “A sniper selects a location, a hide. That’s the first priority,” Lucy says. “After he’s completed his mission he’s going to break down and stash his gear, possibly in a vehicle or anyplace out of sight where he can come back and retrieve it later. It’s more likely he had a spotting scope—not a gun—trained on you early in the morning and then again later. Like I said, he wanted to watch you find the pennies. Maybe he wanted to watch you get a phone call and respond to the Nari crime scene.”

  “You continue saying he.”

  “For the sake of simplicity. I have no idea who it is.”

  But the way she says it bothers me strongly.

  “Could we be talking about a woman?”

  “Sure,” Lucy says too flippantly.

  The cooler door opens. Billowing fog carries the stench of death and Anne emerges pushing a carrier with a human-shaped black pouch on top.

  SHE PARKS THE CARRIER by my table in a vast space of stainless steel wall sinks and workstations.

  Natural light fills one-way glass windows, and I flip on switches, and high intensity lamps blaze in the thirty-two-foot-high ceilings. I tie my gown in back, my hands sheathed in purple nitrile gloves, my shoe covers quiet on the recently mopped floor.

  “Can you get Gracie Smithers’s autopsy records and photos up?” I ask Lucy.

  My workstation is the closest one to the cooler, and on a counter next to the sink are a computer screen, keyboard and mouse covered with a waterproof membrane. Lucy logs on to the CFC database. The display divides in quadrants before my eyes and images of Gracie Smithers are there.

  “I didn’t want to get into anything until I saw you in person,” Anne says to me. “In the first place her T-shirt was inside out and I mentioned that to Shina when I was doing the scan.”

  “Images that you left up on your console so I could see.”

  “So I could show them to you, yes. I didn’t want to put anything in writing about it, to send you an email or anything. Someone inexperienced can easily miss subtlety. You don’t want the wrong attorneys to get wind of that.”

  “I’m not sure how subtle any of this is,” I reply.

  “Not to you.”

  “She has significant abrasions on her cheeks bilaterally and also her nose.” I click the plastic-covered mouse and more autopsy photographs appear. “Significant lacerations, skin splitting to the back of her scalp, a round area approximately four by four inches. This is inconsistent with her striking the rounded concrete edge of a pool.”

  “It’s more like her head was slammed against a flat surface,” Anne agrees.

  “That’s exactly what it’s like,” I reply. “More than once,” I add. “And she has a thin linear abrasion on the right side of her neck. She came in without jewelry?”

  “Nothing. Not even earrings.”

  Gracie Smithers was pretty but one has to imagine it. One has to somehow get past the way she looked at death, the angry abraded skin bright red, the inside of her lips shredded. Long blond hair, blue eyes, and black polish that is chipped and scraped on her fingernails, and I don’t know what Dr. Kato was thinking. Five feet tall, ninety-one pounds, pale and bloodless after the autopsy, and fingertip-shaped bruises are vivid on her shoulders. I can see where someone’s thumbs dug into her upper back on either side of her spine. There are more abrasions and bruises on her knees and buttocks.

  “Do you want me to get Shina on the phone?” Lucy asks.

  “I’ll let Gracie Smithers speak for herself,” I answer and I feel hard inside.

  I don’t forgive incompetence and carelessness.

  “And what was Doctor Kato’s explanation about the T-shirt, the injuries and the sand?” I ask Anne.

  “A lot of kids wear their T-shirts inside out because they think it’s cool.”

  “And no underwear?”

  “Some kids don’t.”

  “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “It’s what Doctor Kato said.”

  “The first thing I teach our fellows is not to make assumptions,” I reply impatiently.

  “The abrasions are from scraping the bottom of the pool according to her.”

  “Nonsense.” Now I’m getting really mad.

  “And the pool was dirty, the filter, skimmer and everything else turned off or removed for the winter and there was a runoff of dirt from the yard onto the deck. So dirt had gotten into the pool.” Anne sums up Dr. Kato’s hasty conclusions. “Added to it was what Jen said. The pool had sediment on the bottom explaining the particulate we see in the scan. Some of it was recovered from her lungs. Grit, a brownish sand it seems, and there was some in her hair.”

  “Did we get a sample of the so-called sediment?”

  “Apparently not.” It’s Lucy who answers. “It’s not been logged as evidence turned into the labs. Only the clothing, a shoe and samples for toxicology.”

  “Then we can’t know if the sediment is the same particulate she aspirated.”

  “Not unless we go back and collect a sample.”

  “This is bad.” I have the autopsy report displayed and I scroll through it.

  No obvious injury to the genitalia but there isn’t always when healthy young females are sexually assaulted.

  “What about the investigator?” I ask. “A Marblehead detective I presume?”

  “I doubt the case was assigned to anyone,” Anne replies, “since there wasn’t a question that she was anything other than an accidental drowning. Even though someone prominent is involved.”

  “Congressman Rosado,” Lucy says. “No foul play and we’re talking a civil case. A detective isn’t going to care who owns the house or who gets sued.”

  “See who you can get hold of for me.” I log on to Jamal Nari’s autopsy records next. “Maybe Bryce can track down someone before more time is lost or more is staged. I’m amending the manner of death to homicide.”

  I instantly see what Luke Zenner found interesting about Nari’s gastric contents. A crowding of vague round shapes in the gastrointestinal track, grape size, dozens of them, and they can be only one thing.

  “Condoms turn
ed into capsules. Luke said he counted eighty of them that weighed about five pounds,” Anne says and I recall Nari’s distended belly. “He said a lot of it was fluid. Tox will confirm but it appears Jamal Nari was smuggling drugs.”

  “He’s driving around like that?” Lucy asks. “Why the hell would he take the risk? All you need is one to leak.”

  We go through the chronology. Nari left his residence early this morning to shop. He went to Whole Foods, a liquor store and CVS, and time stamps on receipts verify this. Moments after he’d returned home and was carrying bags into his apartment he was murdered.

  “In the first place why was he carrying the bags into the house only to move them again this afternoon to the new place in Dorchester?” Lucy points out.

  “I suspect his wife alerted him that the lease was falling through,” I reply. “Apparently when Joanna Cather showed up at the rental house with more boxes the Realtor told her to cease and desist, to move everything out. Then Joanna placed a call, possibly to her husband. Hopefully it can be determined by phone records but it would make sense that she called immediately.”

  “And then he drove back to their apartment in Cambridge?” Lucy says. “That would suggest the killer might have missed his opportunity if Nari had gone to the house in Dorchester instead.”

  “Exactly,” I reply. “Suggesting the killer might have had knowledge that the lease was going to fall through. Certainly Rand Bloom knew it was inevitable since he’s the one who gave Mary Sapp information that would justify her deciding Nari and his wife were people of questionable character. Have you started going through their laptops?”

  “Barely.”

  “I suggest you check to see if he might have booked a plane ticket,” I reply. “That would explain the smuggling. Driving from Cambridge to Boston wouldn’t.”

  “How far along was digestion?” Lucy asks.

  “The capsules are still in the stomach. None have passed into the small and large intestines.” I show her on the flat screen.

  “How long since he’d swallowed them?”

  “It depends. The digestive system slows down with stress, especially if he wasn’t eating or drinking and was taking certain medications such as ones that treat diarrhea. A side effect of that can be constipation.”

  I envision the Imodium in the bathroom cabinet, and the unlubricated condoms, boxes of them that luminesced whitish blue when sprayed with a reagent. Nari may have packed them in a Bankers Box. Then they were moved back into the bathroom cabinet, perfectly, obsessively arranged with the labels facing out. Why? But I might know, and something dark stirs inside me again. It’s like the guitars returned to their stands, and I think of what Benton continues to say about taunting.

  Nari was very busy early this morning, diluting whatever street drug he was photographed picking up at Jumpin’ Joes, and cocaine is highly soluble. So is heroin but I’ve not heard of mules swallowing it in liquid form. He filled the condoms, then cleaned up the apartment, wiping the inside of drawers. Swallowing the grape-size capsules was probably the last thing he did before he got into his car. He had errands to run and a bigger plan.

  I move over to the steel carrier bearing his body. I think contemptuously of surveillance and harassment motivated by cheating people out of what they’re due. For months he felt he was being spied on and followed. He was terrified the police were going to show up any minute to arrest his wife. Worst of all were photographs that may have caused him to be convinced his arrest on drug charges was imminent.

  “It’s unlikely he was using drugs again,” I explain. “Rarely are drug smugglers also users. It sounds to me this was about money.”

  I work the plastic zipper down the black pouch and it rustles as I spread it.

  CHAPTER 28

  A DEADLY COPPER FLOWER THAT gleams like rose gold, the bullet has very little damage. It entered the body and plowed through vertebral bone and soft tissue before its kinetic energy was completely spent. I think about what Lucy said.

  A light load.

  After Luke removed the projectile at autopsy he took a one-to-one or life-size photograph of it on a blue towel. I notice how substantial it looks displayed on my station’s computer screen, and I think about the long-range hunting bullet Lucy called an LRX.

  “You can’t see the engraving on it with the unaided eye or a light microscope,” I’m explaining to Benton, who joined Anne and me moments ago.

  Lucy has left, returning upstairs to her cyber lab and I sense that Benton is restless. He wants to head out to Cambridge PD with me but I’m not ready. He doesn’t know about the drug smuggling and he doesn’t know the oddity of a bullet that should have passed through Jamal Nari’s body and fragmented but did neither. Maybe it had a lighter than usual powder load. Maybe it slowed because it was fired from an extraordinary distance. Maybe it’s both.

  “Not even a shadow of the number three unless you have the depth of field that SEM affords,” I add. “We don’t know that there wasn’t engraving on other bullets. If there had been anything left maybe the same thing would have been found.”

  “It wasn’t on them,” Benton says.

  “How can you be sure if there was nothing but frag so small some of it was powder?” Anne asks.

  “Because it wouldn’t have been. Nineteen eighty-one and now a number three engraved on a bullet,” Benton says more to himself than to us.

  “I’m beginning to think the person’s getting unhinged,” Anne replies.

  “Or wants us to think we are.” Benton stares down at Nari’s body surrounded by black vinyl on top of the stainless steel carrier. “Ideas of reference are the interpretation of events as highly personal when they’re not. A date, a number on a bullet, a certain number of coins left on a wall, and it gets to the point that you don’t know if you’re assuming all of it is intended with you in mind or if it’s completely random. You start thinking you’re crazy.”

  “Do you think what’s happening is random?” I ask.

  “It isn’t. Including the atypical flight path.”

  “Almost an impossible flight path,” I agree. “The bullet entered here.” I touch the back of Benton’s neck where the cervical spine meets the base of his skull, and I feel his warmth. “And lodged here.” I touch the left side of his lower chest at the level of the sixth rib.

  As I smell his earthy cologne I’m reminded of our backyard this morning in the sun. Then I smell death. I’m aware of my nitrile-sheathed hands, of his fine attire and perfect grooming, unprotected beyond the blue papery booties he slipped on before he entered the autopsy room. Benton is comfortable in places where it doesn’t appear he belongs. He always seems untouched by the ugliness around him.

  “The bullet traveled in an acutely downward direction, penetrating the left lung and chest wall and lodging under the skin,” I explain to him. “Bilateral fractures of pars interarticularis and complete disruption of the C-two, C-three junction with transection of the spinal cord, and no swelling of surrounding tissue, and no wonder. He didn’t live long enough to have a vital response. Death was due to traumatic spondylolisthesis, or hangman’s fracture.”

  “Maybe the bullet was deflected and that’s how it ended up where it did?” Benton is trying to envision it and having the same problem I am.

  No matter how many different ways I reconstruct the shooter’s and Nari’s positions in relation to each other, I can’t make sense of a bullet entering at the base of his skull and traveling straight down before lodging beneath the skin of his chest.

  “Based on what you can see here on CT”—I open a scan on the display—“the wound track doesn’t show any sort of deflection. The trajectory is a fairly straightforward path downward and slightly to the left of the midline where the bullet stopped.”

  “Obviously the shooter was elevated. Typically one might expect on a rooftop.” Benton looks at the scan, at the plane of the wound track, which shows the presence of hemorrhage downward through the neck to the left lung apex. “Ex
cept there’s a problem with that considering the location,” he adds.

  I open a drawer and find a bullet probe, thirty inches long, black, made of a flexible fiberglass. I tell Anne we need Tyvek coveralls. What I intend to do next is going to be messy.

  “I suspect his head was bent as he lifted bags of groceries from the back of his car at the instant the bullet struck him,” I say to Benton. “Otherwise it likely would have exited from the front of his neck, in and out, and we probably wouldn’t have found it or what was left of it after it struck pavement, a tree, a building. A lighter powder charge or not. Have you heard from Marino?”

  “He and Leo Gantz are at the station and almost ready for us. We need to figure out exactly where the shooter was when he killed Nari. There aren’t many high-rises in Cambridge and nothing like that near Farrar Street. The tallest apartment building around there is three stories. I doubt that would be high enough.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “It’s important we find that out because I believe the flight path isn’t a fluke,” he says.

  “Lucy has suggested this particular bullet may have been hand-loaded with the intention of remaining largely intact and not exiting the body.” I pass that along and he has no discernible reaction.

  Anne gives me a pair of white coveralls and I lean against the edge of the carrier and pull them on.

  Then Benton says, “The shootout in Miami in 1986. The FBI outnumbered the suspects four to one, the two bank robbers shot multiple times with one hundred and ten grain hollowpoints that didn’t have sufficient stopping power. Two of ours dead and five wounded because we didn’t have the firepower, which began the big debate of light and fast ammo versus heavy and deep. The shooter who murdered Nari understands the concept and with this one particular round implemented the best of both. That’s my theory.”

  “The recovered bullet is one-ninety grain,” I tell him. “Certainly that’s heavy.”

  “But if a lighter powder charge was used the bullet’s not going to have the penetration required for exiting the body,” he says. “The engraving on it and the lighter powder charge were different from what was used in New Jersey.”