Cruel & Unusual

by Patricia Cornwell

  Despair pressed against my heart. “I think you want friends more than anyone I know, Lucy.”

  “I'm sure you think that. And you probably also think I should get married in a couple of years.”

  “Not at all. In fact, I sincerely hope you won't.”

  “While I was roaming around inside your computer today, I saw the file called 'flesh.'

  Why do you have a file called that?” my niece asked.

  “Because I'm in the middle of a very difficult case.”

  “The little boy named Eddie Heath? I saw his record in the case file. He was found with no clothes on, next to a Dumpster. Someone had cut out parts of his skin.”

  “Lucy, you shouldn't read case records,” I said as my pager went off. I unclipped it from the waistband of my abs and glanced at the number.

  “Excuse me for a moment” I said, getting up from the table as our drinks arrived.

  I found a pay phone. It was almost eight P.M..

  “I need to talk to you,” said Neils Vander, who was still at the office. “You might want to come down here and bring by Ronnie Waddell's ten print cards.”

  “Why?”

  “We've got an unprecedented problem. I'm about to call Marino, too.”

  “All right. Tell him to meet me at the morgue in a half hour.”

  When I returned to the table, Lucy knew by the look on my face that I was about to ruin another evening.

  “I'm so sorry,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To my office, then to the Seaboard Building.”

  I got out my billfold.

  “What's in the Seaboard Building?”

  “It's where the serology, DNA, and fingerprint labs moved not so long ago. Marino's going to meet us,” I said. “Its been a long time since you've seen him.”

  “Jerks like him don't change or get better with time.”

  “Lucy, that's unkind. Marino is not a jerk.”

  “He was last time I was here.”

  “You weren't exactly nice to him, either.”

  “I didn't call him a smartass brat.”

  “You called him a number of other names, as I recall, and were continually correcting his grammar.”

  A half hour later, I left Lucy inside the morgue office while I hurried upstairs. Unlocking the credenza, I retrieved Waddell's case file, and no sooner had I boarded the elevator when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Marino was dressed in jeans and a dark blue parka, his balding head warmed by a Richmond Braves baseball cap.

  “You two remember each other, don't you?”

  I said. “Lucy's visiting me for Christmas and is helping out with a computer problem,” I explained as we walked out into the cold night air.

  The Seaboard Building was across the street from the parking lot behind the morgue and cater-cornered to the front of Main Street Station, where the Health Department's administrative offices had relocated while its former building was being stripped of asbestos. The cock in Main Street Station's tower floated high above us like a hunter's moon, and red lights atop high buildings blinked slow warnings to low-flying planes. Somewhere in the dark, a train lumbered along its tracks, the earth rumbling and creaking like a ship at sea.

  Marino walked ahead of us, the tip of his cigarette glow glowing at intervals. He did not want Lucy here, and I knew she sensed it. When he reached the Seaboard Building, where supplies had been loaded onto boxcars around the tithe of the Civil War, I rang the bell outside the door. Vander appeared almost immediately to let us in He did not greet Marino or ask who Lucy was. If a creature from outer space were to accompany someone he trusted, Vander would not ask any questions or expect to be introduced. We followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor, where old corridors and offices had been repainted in shades of gunmetal gray and refurnished with cherry-finished desks and bookcases and teal upholstered chairs.

  “What are you working on so late?” I asked as we entered the room housing the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS.

  “Jennifer Deighton's case,” he said.

  “Then what do you want with Waddell's ten print cards?” I asked, perplexed.

  “I want to be sure it was Waddell you autopsied last week,” Vander said bluntly.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Marino looked at him in astonishment.

  “I'm getting ready to show you.”

  Vander seated himself before the remote input terminal, which looked like an everyday PC. It was connected by modem to the State Police computer, on which resided a data base of more than six million fingerprints. He hit several keys, activating the laser printer.

  “Perfect scores are few and far between, but we got one here.”

  Vander began typing, and a bright white fingerprint filled the seen. “Right index finger, plain whorl.”

  He pointed to the vortex of lines swirling behind glass. “A damn good partial recovered from Jennifer Deighton's house.”

  “Wherein her house?” I asked.

  “From a dining room chair. At first I wondered if there was some mistake. But apparently not.”

  Vander continued staring at the screen, then resumed typing as he talked. “The print comes back to Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

  “That's impossible,” I said, shocked.

  “You would think so,” Vander replied abstractedly.

  “Did you find anything in Jennifer Deighton's house that might indicate she and Waddell were acquainted?”

  I asked Marino as I opened Waddell's case file.

  “No.”

  “If you've got Waddell's prints from the morgue,” Vander said to me, “we'll see how they compare to what's in AFIS.”

  I pulled out two manila envelopes, and it struck me wrong immediately that both weren't heavy and thick. I felt my face get hot as I opened each and found the expected photographs inside and nothing else. There was no envelope containing Waddell's ten print cards. When I looked up, everybody was looking at me.

  “I don't understand this,” I said, conscious of Lucy's uneasy stare.

  “You don't have his prints?” Marino asked in disbelief.

  I rifled through the file again. “They're not here.”

  “Susan usually does it, right?” he said.

  “Yes. Always. She was supposed to make two sets. One for Corrections and one for us. Maybe she gave them to Fielding and he forgot to give them to me.”

  I got out my address book and reached for the phone. Fielding was home and knew nothing about the fingerprint cards.

  “No, I didn't notice her printing him, but I don't notice half of what other people are doing down there,” he said. “I just assumed she'd given the cards to you.”

  Dialing Susan's number next, I tried to remember seeing her get out the spoon and print cards, or rolling Waddell's fingers on the ink pad.

  “Do you remember seeing Susan print Waddell?” I asked Marino as Susan's phone continued to ring.

  “She didn't do it while I was there. I would have offered to help if she had.”

  “No answer.”

  I hung up.

  “Waddell was cremated,” Vander said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  We were silent for a moment.

  Then Marino said to Lucy with unnecessary brusqueness, “You mind? We need to talk alone for a minute.”

  “You can sit in my office,” Vander said to her. “Down the hall, last one on the right.”

  When she was gone, Marino said, “Waddell's supposedly been locked up ten years, and there's no way the print we got from Jennifer Deighton's chair was left ten years ago. She didn't even move into her house on Southside until a few months ago, and the dining room furniture looks brand-new. Plus, there were indentations on the carpet in the living room that make it appear a dining room chair was carried in there, maybe on the night she died. That's why I wanted the chairs dusted to begin with.”

  “An uncanny possibility,” Vander said. “At this moment
, we can't prove that the man who was executed last week was Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

  “Perhaps there is some other explanation for how Waddell's print ended up on a chair in Jennifer Deighton's house,” I said. “For example, the penitentiary has a wood shop that makes furniture.”

  “Unlikely as hell,” Marino said. “For one thing, they don't do woodworking or make license plates on death row. And even if they did, most civilians don't end up with prison-made furniture in their house.”

  “All the same,” Vander said to Marino, “it would be interesting if you could track down who and where she bought her dining room set from.”

  “Don't worry. It's a top priority.”

  “Waddell's complete past arrest record, including his prints, should all be in one file at the FBI,” Vander added. “I'll get a copy of their print card and retrieve the photograph of the thumbprint from Robyn Naismith's case. Where else was Waddell arrested?”

  “Nowhere else,” Marino said. “The only jurisdiction that will have his records should be Richmond.”

  “And this print found on a dining room chair is the only one you've identified?”

  I asked Vander.

  “Of course, a number of those lifted came back to Jennifer DOW” he said. “Particularly on the books by her bed and the folded sheet of paper - the poem. And a couple of unknown partials from her car, as you might expect, maybe left by whoever loaded groceries into her trunk or filled her tank with gas. That's all for now.”

  “And no luck with Eddie Heath?”

  I asked.

  “There wasn't much to examine. The paper bag, can of soup, candy bar. I tried the Luma-Lite on his shoes and clothes. No luck.”

  Later, he walked us out through the bay, where locked freezers stored the blood of enough convicted felons to fill a small city, the samples awaiting entry into the Commonwealth's DNA data bank. Parked in front of the door was Jennifer Deighton's car, and it looked more pathetic than I remembered, as if it had gone into a dramatic decline since the murder of its owner. Metal along the sides was creased and dented from being repeatedly struck by other car doors. Paint was rusting in spots and Scraped and gouged in others, and the vinyl top was peeling. Lucy paused to peer inside a sooty window.

  “Hey, don't touch nothing,” Marino said to her.

  She looked levelly at him without a word, and all of us went outside.

  Lucy drove off in my car and went straight to the house without waiting for Marino or me. When we walked in, she was already in my study with the door shut.

  “I can see she's still Miss Congeniality,” Marino said.

  “You don't win any prizes tonight, either.”

  I opened the fireplace screen and added several logs.

  “She'll keep her mouth shut about what we were talking about?”

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “Of course.”

  “Yeah, well, I know you trust her, since you're her aunt. But I'm not sure it was a good idea for her to hear all that, Doc.”

  “I do trust Lucy. She means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. I hope the two of you will become friends. The bar is open, or I'll be glad to put on a pot of coffee.”

  “Coffee would be good.”

  He sat on the edge of the hearth and got out his Swiss Army knee. While I made coffee, he trimmed his nails and tossed the shavings into the fire. I tried Susan's number again, but there was no answer.

  “I don't think Susan took his prints,” Marino said when I set the coffee tray on the butler's table.”

  I've been thinking while you were in the kitchen. I know she didn't do it while I was at the morgue that night, and I was there most of the time. So unless it was done right when the body was brought in, forget it.”

  “It wasn't done then,” I said, getting more unnerved. “Corrections was out of there in minutes. The entire scene was very distracting. It was late and everybody was tired. Susan forgot, and I was too busy with what I was doing to notice.”

  “You hope she forgot.”

  I reached for my coffee.

  “Something's going on with her, based on what you've been telling me. I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her,” he said.

  Right now I didn't.

  “We need to talk to Benton,” he said.

  “You saw Waddell on the table, Marino. You saw him executed. I can't believe we can't say it was him.”

  “We can't say it. We could compare mug shots and your morgue photos and still not say it. I hadn't seen him since he got popped more than ten years ago. The guy they walked out to the chair was about eighty pounds heavier. His beard, mustache, and head had been shaved. Sure, there was enough resemblance that I just assumed. But I can't swear it was him.”

  I recalled Lucy's walking off the plane the other night. She was my niece. I had seen her but a year ago, and still I almost had not recognized her. I knew all too well how unreliable visual identifications can be.

  “If someone switched inmates,” I said. “And if Waddell is free and someone else was put to death, please tell me why.”

  Marino spooned more sugar into his coffee.

  “A motive, for God's sake. Marino, what would it be?”

  He looked up. “I don't know why.”

  Just then, the door to my study opened and both of us turned as Lucy walked out. She came into the living room and sat on the side of the hearth opposite Marino, who had his back to the fire, elbows on his knees.

  “What can you tell me about AFIS?” she asked me as if Marino were not in the room.

  “What is it you wish to know?” I said.

  “The language. And is it run on a mainframe.”

  “I don't know the technical details. Why?”

  “I can find out if files have been altered.”

  I felt Marino's eyes on me.

  “You can't break into the State Police computer, Lucy.”

  “I probably could, but I'm not necessarily advocating that. There may be some other way to gain access.”

  Marino turned to her. “You're saying you could tell if Waddell's records was changed in AFIS?”

  “Yes. I'm saying I could tell if his records were changed.”

  Marino's jaw muscles flexed. “Seems to me if someone was slick enough to do it, they'd be slick enough to make sure some computer nerd didn't catch on.”

  “I'm not a computer nerd. I'm not a nerd of any description.”

  They fell silent, parked on either end of the hearth like mismatched bookends.

  “You can't go into AFIS,” I said to Lucy.

  She looked impassively at me.

  “Not alone,” I added. “Not unless there is a safe way to grant you access. And even if there is, I think I'd rather you stay out of it.”

  “I don't think you'd really rather that. If something was tampered with, you know I'd find out, Aunt Kay.”

  “The kid's got a god complex.”

  Marino got up from the hearth.

  Lucy said to him, “Could you hit the twelve on the clock over there on the wall? If you drew your gun right this minute and took aim?”

  “I ain't interested in shooting up your aunt's house in order to prove something to you.”

  “Could you hit the twelve from where you're standing?”

  “You're damn right.”

  “You're positive.”

  “Yeah, I'm positive.”

  “The lieutenant's got a god complex,” Lucy said to me.

  Marino turned to the fire, but not before I caught a flicker of a smile.

  “All Neils Vander has is a workstation and printer,” Lucy said. “He's connected to the State Police computer by modem. Has that always been the case?”

  “No,” I replied. “Before he moved into the new building, there was much more equipment involved.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Well, there were several different components. But the actual computer was much like the one Margaret has in her office.”

  Realizing Lucy had not bee
n inside Margaret's office, I added, “A mini.”