Dust

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’m looking at what we have and we definitely weren’t notified about a DNA match,” Dr. Venter says darkly. “We should have been sent the suspect’s profile to compare with our records and we weren’t.”

  “A suspect’s profile from DNA analysis that I have reason to suspect was originally done in Virginia seventeen years ago,” I say. “A male who hasn’t been seen since, I’m told.”

  “A male?” he exclaims. “A male certainly didn’t leave vaginal fluid and menstrual blood.”

  “Exactly. Now you see the problem.”

  “Virginia also should have been notified for a verification,” Dr. Venter says.

  “I’m not checking with Virginia. Last summer their former lab director was hired as the new director of the FBI’s national labs. She got quite a promotion. I don’t know her personally.”

  “This is extraordinarily disturbing,” Dr. Venter says. “I did the Goulet autopsy myself and frankly have had some concerns about the way it’s being handled even before knowing any of this. The one who used to be with the D.C. division back in your Virginia days and now is in Boston…Well, you might not have encountered him back then.”

  “Ed Granby.”

  Lucy hasn’t taken her eyes off me.

  “In not so uncertain terms he threatened me,” Dr. Venter replies. “He said I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the DOJ and I would be if I leaked a word about the Goulet case, that he was taking extreme measures to prevent copycat crimes.”

  “So he continues to say.” Then I bring up the fluorescing residue in Gail Shipton’s case that doesn’t seem to have been found in the others. “I’m just making certain you didn’t see anything like that,” I add.

  “A grayish viscous material I found in her mouth and nose.” He opens that report next. “A mineral fingerprint on SEM, halite, calcite, and argonite that lit up a rather spectacular vivid red, a deep bluish purple, and emerald green when exposed to ultraviolet light.”

  “I remember a mention of this viscous material in records I’ve reviewed. Something grayish in Goulet’s teeth and on her tongue.” I don’t go into more detail than that.

  But he knows who I’m married to and can well imagine where I got the information. Lucy gets up from her chair and stands closer to me, staring, making no attempt to hide what she’s overhearing.

  “There was no mention of these minerals fluorescing in UV. But that wouldn’t necessarily be included in the elemental report,” I add.

  “It wouldn’t be.”

  “I found a residue that lights up like that all over the body in my case from this morning.” I watch the two funeral home attendants in formal suits open the tailgate of the hearse.

  They smile and wave as if their business is happy.

  “It showed up fairly dense on CT,” Dr. Venter says. “But there was no evidence she aspirated whatever it is. I didn’t find this material in her sinuses, airway or lungs.”

  “In the Virginia case, Sally Carson, there’s no reference to a material like this. But they don’t have a CT scanner.”

  “Few facilities do. So it wouldn’t have been seen readily and very well may have been overlooked during the autopsy,” Dr. Venter says.

  “If you can send me whatever you can electronically. Time is of the essence.”

  “I’m doing it as we speak.”

  I thank him and end the call.

  “Is everything all right?” Based on what Lucy listened to she knows it couldn’t possibly be.

  “Reports will be coming in from the chief in Maryland, Dr. Venter,” I say to her. “Maybe you can help by checking my e-mail and making sure they get routed to the proper labs as quickly as possible. And I’m expecting a case from Benton.” I don’t mention the name Gabriela Lagos in front of the two funeral home attendants. I’m not going to say another word and Lucy knows not to either.

  She’s already checking e-mails with her phone to see if any reports are landing as we head up a ramp to the door leading inside. I scan my thumb in the lock and the attendants roll the stretcher up to us, small wheels clattering.

  “How you doing, Chief? I heard you had the weekend from hell.”

  “Doing fine.” I hold the door for them.

  “The world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”

  “You might be right.” I shut the door behind us.

  “That was quite a storm we had. We may get snow in another day or two.”

  They push the stretcher inside the receiving area, where massive shiny steel walk-in refrigerators and freezers fill the far wall.

  “The temperature’s dropped ten degrees in the past hour. Blowing off the water on the South Shore, it was pretty frigid but not so bad here, sort of in between needing a winter coat and not. A sad one we got. It seems like a lot of people kill themselves this time of year.”

  “It seems that way because nobody should.” I check the tag attached to the outer body bag, fake blue leather with the name of the funeral home embroidered on it. “You can have this back.” I unzip it, revealing the flimsy white pouch underneath, the dead woman’s rigorous arms pushing against it, raised and bent at the elbows like a pugilistic boxer.

  “Only thirty-two years old,” an attendant tells me as we remove the pleather-like outer bag. “Dressed for church with makeup on and dead in bed. Empty pill bottles on the table. Ativan and Zoloft. No note.”

  “Often they don’t,” I reply. “Their actions speak louder.”

  27

  At the security desk Ron is seated amid flat-paneled security displays, his office behind bulletproof glass. He slides open his window as I pick up the big black case log to sign in the latest. I copy what’s written on the body bag’s tag.

  Heather Woodworth, F 32, Scituate, MA. Unresponsive in bed. Poss OD suicide.

  An old South Shore name scribbled in ballpoint pen, a young woman who decided to end her life in her quaint seaside town, and I check the log for what else has come in. Five other cases in the CT scanner and on steel tables, in different stages of undress and dissection. Polysubstance abuse, an accidental shooting, a jump from the Zakim Bridge, an elderly woman who died alone in her house a hoarder, and the motor vehicle fatality I’ve heard about and I pause at the name.

  Franz Schoenberg, M 63, Cambridge, MA. MVA.

  The psychiatrist I noticed in the photographs I reviewed earlier this morning, I recall, slightly startled. His patient committed suicide days ago, jumped off a building right in front of him. Maybe that’s why he was out drinking and driving. More senseless tragedies. Most people dying the way they lived.

  “What about her meds?” I ask the attendants.

  “In a bag inside the pouch,” one of them says. “The empty bottles that were on the bedside table. Her kids had spent the night at her mother’s, thank God. Little ones, the oldest only five, the father killed exactly a year ago on his motorcycle. A neighbor she was supposed to give a music lesson to found her. She didn’t answer the door and it was unlocked. This was at exactly ten a.m.”

  “She planned it, thought it out.” I slide the log through the window so Ron can enter the information into his computer and program the RFID bracelet that will go around the dead woman’s wrist.

  “She didn’t want anyone home when she did it. She didn’t want to hurt anyone,” an attendant offers.

  “Think again,” I reply. “Now the kids have no parents and will probably hate Christmas for the rest of their lives.”

  “Apparently she’d been depressed.”

  “I’m sure she was and now a lot of people will be, too. If you’ll lock this up for me…” I hand Ron my fanny pack.

  “Yes, ma’am, Chief.” He bends down to enter the combination and gives me an update without my asking. “All is quiet, pretty much. A news van drove real slow past the front of the building several times.”

  “Just leave her over there on the floor scale,” I tell the attendants. “Ron, can you let Harold or Rusty know a case just came in? She needs to be weighed
and measured and gotten into the cooler until Anne can scan her. I’m not sure which doc. Whoever’s the least busy.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Chief.” Ron tucks the fanny pack inside the safe and slams shut the heavy steel door. “That anchor lady you don’t like was here.”

  “Barbara Fairbanks,” Lucy says. “She was filming the front of the building when I pulled in. She may have gotten footage of my SUV while I was waiting for the gate to open.”

  “And she was hanging around out back after that, too, probably hoping to sneak in again while the gate is shutting,” Ron says. “She did that a few weeks ago and I threatened to have her arrested for trespassing.”

  Former military police, he’s built like a granite wall, with dark eyes that are always moving. He walks out of his office and waits for the attendants to leave.

  “We’ll need the stretcher back…?” one of them says.

  “Yes, sir. When you pick her up.”

  “Later today,” I promise them.

  Through another door and down a ramp is the evidence bay, a windowless open space where scientists are covered from head to toe in white Tyvek protective clothing.

  They’re setting up cyanoacrylate fuming equipment around a vintage green Jaguar that is under a blue tent. The roadster is twisted and smashed in, the roof peeled off, the long hood buckled, the shattered driver’s-side window streaked and spattered with dried blood, the trunk and bashed-in doors open wide. Trace evidence examiner Ernie Koppel is leaning in the driver’s side.

  He looks up at me, his eyes masked by orange goggles, an alternate light source set up on a nearby cart. He holds the wand in his gloved hand, processing the car as if it’s connected to a homicide.

  “Good morning, glad to see you back. One nasty bug. My wife had it.” His cheeks are rosy and round, tightly framed by white polyethylene, the same flashspun material used to wrap buildings, boats, and cars.

  “Don’t catch it.”

  “I’ve been spared so far, thank you, God. I saw what’s parked in the bay. That’s some ride you’ve got,” he says this to Lucy. “I was looking for the gun turret.”

  “You have to order it special,” she says.

  “When you get a minute?” I grab disposable gowns and shoe covers off a cart. “Obviously this isn’t a routine motor vehicle fatality. It’s quite the workup.”

  “One more pass of the driver’s seat and you can fume it for prints,” he calls out to other scientists as he dims the lights.

  “Did he have his seat belt on?” I tie my gown in back.

  “Side impact – being belted wasn’t going to help him. Take a look at the left rear tire,” Ernie says.

  I slip on shoe covers that make papery sounds as I move close to the car to see what he’s talking about. The tire is flat. That’s as much as I can tell.

  “It was punctured with some type of sharp tool,” he explains.

  “Are we sure it didn’t happen during the accident? For example, if he ran over a sharp piece of metal? Tires often are flat in bad accidents.”

  “It’s too clean a puncture for that and it’s in the sidewall, not the tread,” Ernie says. “I’m thinking something like an ice pick that caused a slow leak and he lost control of his car. There’s a transfer of paint on the rear bumper, which I also find interesting. Unless the damage was already there? And I doubt that as meticulous as this car was.”

  I see what he’s talking about, a small dent with a transfer of what looks like a reflective red paint.

  “He may have had a flat tire and been swiped by someone,” I suggest.

  “I don’t think so, not as low to the ground as this car is.” Lucy pulls shoe covers on. “If it was hit, it was by something else low to the ground or maybe a larger vehicle with a bumper guard. Some of them are reflective.” She takes a closer look. “Especially with gangs who trick their cars out like crazy, usually SUVs.”

  “Give me one sec.” Ernie bends back inside the car, moving the wand, and I resume talking to Lucy about Gail Shipton.

  It’s a subject I’m not finished with yet.

  “A notebook was recovered from her purse,” I begin.

  “Which was where?”

  “The killer left it near the scene. Obviously he wanted it to be found. There was no money in her wallet but it’s hard to know if anything else was missing. Apparently he wasn’t interested in her notebook.”

  I open the photograph I took at the construction site and show her the page with the odd encryption.

  61: INC 12/18 1733 (<18m) REC 20-8-18-5-1-20.

  “The last entry she made in it,” I explain. “Apparently right after she got off the phone with you, possibly moments before she was abducted. A small black notebook with pages that look like graph paper and there were stickers, red ones with an X in the middle. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Sure.” Lucy works her arms into the sleeves of the gown, the synthetic material making slippery, crinkly sounds. “It’s a note in her rudimentary code that a first grader could break.”

  “Sixty-one?” I start at the beginning of the encrypted string, standing shoulder to shoulder with Lucy, both of us looking at the picture on my phone.

  “It’s her code for me,” she says as if it’s perfectly reasonable that Gail would have assigned a code to her. “The letters in my name correspond to numbers. L-U-C-Y is twelve, twenty-one, three, and twenty-five. If you add them up it equals sixty-one.”

  “Did she inform you she had a code for you?”

  “Nope.”

  “INC is an incoming call,” I assume, “and twelve-eighteen is the date, which was yesterday, and the military time of seventeen-thirty-three.”

  “Correct,” Lucy answers. “We talked for less than eighteen minutes, and REC means received, and in this case the rest of the numbers are the code for Threat. Same thing, the numbers correspond to letters of the alphabet. In summary I called her and she recorded the conversation as a threat. I threatened her. That’s the takeaway message, which of course is a lie.”

  “Who was supposed to get this takeaway message?”

  “It’s intended for whoever she might sic on me eventually. Her encryption isn’t meant to be secure,” Lucy says as if it’s nothing, as if Gail Shipton was a simpleton. “In fact, just the opposite. She wanted someone to find this and figure it out. She wanted it to be evidence at some point. She was cutting pages out of the notebook in case I ever got my hands on it. I wouldn’t find the incriminating entries, so she assumed. I wouldn’t know she was making false entries about me in a record she was keeping.”

  “The notebook entries were meant to be evidence in her lawsuit or a different one?” I don’t understand.

  “She probably wanted to intimidate me eventually and I just sat back and watched. She’d get a settlement from Double S and then she’d want what’s next. She’d make the claim she’d invented every aspect of the drone phone. She wouldn’t have to pay a dime, would simply own all of it.” Lucy speaks calmly, matter-of-factly. “And she’d claim credit for work she could never do on her own. That would have been almost as valuable as the money. She wasn’t exactly feeling great about herself. The whole thing’s pathetic.”

  “If she was cutting out the negative entries about you,” I reply, “then what was the evidence she intended to intimidate you with?”

  “First of all, it’s a joke.”

  “I fail to see anything funny about it.”

  “It’s no damn wonder she got taken advantage of,” Lucy says. “The reason the pages look like graph paper is because they’re from a smart notebook. What she would do is photograph every page, digitizing her entries, including her fraudulent ones, so they could be searched by keywords or tags like the sticker with the X. Then she’d remove the paper and ink false entries about me by cutting out the pages she’d photographed so that the only record to turn up would be the electronic one.”

  “Which you were aware of.” I know what that means.

  It’s exactly as I su
spect. Whatever Gail was up to, no matter how clever she believed she was, Lucy was onto all of it. She wouldn’t hesitate to search Gail’s pocketbook or her car or apartment for that matter. It would be business as usual for her to hack into whatever she wanted, and I recall what Marino said about there being not a single photograph on Gail’s phone. Lucy had deleted them, including ones Gail had taken of the lies she recorded in her notebook.

  “She was building a case against me and had been for months. Pretty soon she would have what she wanted and I needed to be out of her way, or at least that was what she’d fooled herself into believing,” Lucy says in a measured way that is meant to hide what hurt must be buried somewhere. “You know what Nietzsche said. Be careful who you pick as an enemy because that’s who you become most like.”

  “I’m sorry she became your enemy.”

  “I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about Gail and Double S. She was well on her way to becoming just as bad as they are.”

  I watch a fingerprint examiner work dials on a distribution box connected to thick bright red power cords snaking over the epoxy-painted floor. Cyanoacrylate humidifiers, evaporators, and fans begin to whir as Ernie heads in our direction, pulling off his gloves and dropping them into the trash. I hand him packaged evidence and a pen.

  “I can see you’re up to your ears today,” I say as he initials what I’m receipting to his lab. “I apologize for adding to it.”

  “Another unfortunate story that may get even more unfortunate.” Ernie indicates the mangled Jaguar as he takes off his goggles. “A psychiatrist has a fight with his wife and heads to the pub, which is about to get sued for serving him alcohol when he was impaired. Supposedly. Luke says his STAT alcohol is below the legal limit. What killed this man is somebody punctured his tire and he swerved out of control into a guardrail and an autopsy’s not going to tell you that. The skid marks do. And the hole in the tire. Question is, did the damage occur while he was parked at the pub or while his car was at his house? Who had access? Or did someone puncture his tire and then follow him to add an extra shove, explaining the paint transfer?”