The Body Farm

by Patricia Cornwell

  “You figured right,” I said, and my fingernails had turned blue. “You know anything about this Henrico case, the forty-five cartridge case that seems to have been fired by the same Sig P220 that killed Danny?” I asked as I continued to lean against the cold concrete wall and stare out at the city.

  “What makes you think I’d find anything out that fast?”

  “Because everybody’s scared of you.”

  “Yeah, well they sure as hell should be.”

  Marino moved closer to me. He leaned against the wall, only facing the other way, for he did not like having his back to people, and this had nothing to do with manners. He adjusted his belt again and crossed his arms at his chest. He avoided my eyes, and I could tell he was angry.

  “On December eleventh,” he said, “Henrico had a traffic stop at 64 and Mechanicsville Turnpike. As the Henrico officer approached the car, the subject got out and ran, and the officer pursued on foot. This was at night.” He got out his cigarettes. “The foot pursuit crossed the county line into the city, eventually ending in Whitcomb Court.” He fired his lighter. “No one’s real sure what happened, but at some point during all this, the officer lost his gun.”

  It took a moment for me to remember that several years ago the Henrico County Police Department had switched from nine-millimeters to Sig Sauer P220 .45 caliber pistols.

  “And that’s the pistol in question?” I uneasily asked.

  “Yup.” He inhaled smoke. “You see, Henrico’s got this policy. Every Sig gets entered into DRUGFIRE in the event this very thing happens.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Right. Cops lose their guns and have them stolen like anybody else. So it’s not a bad thing to track them after they’re gone, in case they’re used in the commission of crimes.”

  “Then the gun that killed Danny is the one this Henrico officer lost,” I wanted to make sure.

  “It would appear that way.”

  “It was lost in the projects about a month ago,” I went on. “And now it’s been used for murder. It was used on Danny.”

  Marino turned toward me, flicking an ash. “At least it wasn’t you in the car outside the Hill Cafe.”

  There was nothing I could say.

  “That area of town ain’t exactly far from Whitcomb Court and other bad neighborhoods,” he said. “So we could be talking about a carjacking, after all.”

  “No.” I still would not accept that. “My car wasn’t taken.”

  “Something could have happened to make the squirrel change his mind,” he said.

  I did not respond.

  “It could have been anything. A neighbor turns a light on. A siren sounds somewhere. Someone’s burglar alarm accidentally goes off. Maybe he got spooked after shooting Danny and didn’t finish what he started.”

  “He didn’t have to shoot him.” I watched traffic slowly rolling past on the street below. “He could have just stolen my Mercedes outside the cafe. Why drive him off and walk him down the hill into the woods?” My voice got harder. “Why do all of that for a car you don’t end up taking?”

  “Things happen,” he said again. “I don’t know.”

  “What about the tow lot in Virginia Beach,” I said. “Has anybody checked with them?”

  “Danny picked up your ride around three-thirty, which is the time they told you it would be ready.”

  “What do you mean, the time they told me?”

  “The time they told you when you called.”

  I looked at him and said, “I never called.”

  He flicked an ash. “They said you did.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Danny called. That was his job. He dealt with them and my office’s answering service.”

  “Well, someone who claimed to be Dr. Scarpetta called. Maybe Lucy?”

  “I seriously doubt she would say she was me. Was this person who called a woman?”

  He hesitated. “Good question. But you probably should ask Lucy, just to make sure she didn’t call.”

  Firefighters were emerging from the building, and I knew that soon we would be allowed to return to our offices. We would spend the rest of the day checking everything, speculating and complaining as we hoped that no more cases came in.

  “The ammo’s the thing that’s really eating at me,” Marino then said.

  “Frost should be back in his lab within the hour,” I said, but Marino did not seem to care.

  “I’ll call him. I’m not going up there in all this mess.”

  I could tell he did not want to leave me and his mind was on more than this case.

  “Something’s troubling you,” I said.

  “Yeah, Doc. Something always is.”

  “What this time?”

  He got out his pack of Marlboros again, and I thought of my mother, whose constant companion now was an oxygen tank, because she once had been as bad as him.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he warned as he fished for his lighter again.

  “I don’t want you to kill yourself. And today you seem to be really trying.”

  “We’re all going to die.”

  “Attention,” blared a fire truck’s P.A. system. “This is the Richmond Fire Department. The emergency has ended. You may reenter the building,” sounded the mechanical broadcast with its jarring repetitive beeps and monotonous tones. “Attention. The emergency has ended. You may reenter the building . . .”

  “Me,” Marino went on, unmindful of the commotion, “I want to croak while I’m drinking beer, eating nachos with chili and sour cream, smoking, downing shots of Jack Black and watching the game.”

  “You may as well have sex while you’re at it.” I did not smile, for I found nothing amusing about his health risks.

  “Doris cured me of sex.” Marino was serious, too, as he referred to the woman he had been married to most of his life.

  “When did you hear from her last?” I asked, as I realized she was probably the explanation for his mood.

  He moved away from the wall and smoothed back his thinning hair. He tugged at his belt again, as if he hated the accoutrements of his profession and the layers of fat that had rudely inserted themselves into his life. I had seen photographs of him when he was a New York cop astride a motorcycle or horse, when he had been powerful and lean, with thick dark hair and tall leather boots. There had been a day when Doris must have found Pete Marino handsome.

  “Last night. You know, she calls now and then. Mostly to talk about Rocky,” he said of their son.

  Marino was scanning state employees as they began to make their way toward the stairs. He stretched his fingers and arms, then took in a large volume of air. He rubbed the back of his neck as people exited the parking deck, most of them cold and cranky and trying to salvage what a false alarm had done to their day.

  “What does she want from you?” I felt compelled to ask.

  He looked around some more. “Well, it seems she’s gotten married,” he said. “That’s the headline of the day.”

  I was quite taken aback. “Marino,” I quietly said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Her and the drone with the big car with leather seats. Don’t you love it? One minute she leaves. Then she wants me back. Then Molly quits dating me. Then Doris gets married, just like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “You better get back inside before you catch pneumonia,” he said. “I got to get back to the precinct and call Wesley about what’s going on. He’s going to want to know about the gun, and to be honest with you”—he glanced over at me as we walked—“I know what the Bureau’s going to say.”

  “They’re going to say that Danny’s death is random,” I said.

  “And I’m not so sure that ain’t exactly right. It’s looking more like Danny might have been trying to score a little crack or something and ran into the wrong guy who happened to have found a policeman’s gun.”

  “I still don’t believe that,” I said.

  We crosse
d Franklin Street, and I looked down it to the north, where the imposing old Gothic red brick train station with its clock tower blocked my view of Church Hill. Danny had strayed very little from the area where he was supposed to have been last night when he was to deliver my car. I had found nothing that might hint he intended to do drugs. I had found no physical indication that he used drugs, for that matter. Of course, his toxicology reports were not in yet, although I did know he had not been drinking.

  “By the way,” Marino said as he unlocked his Ford. “I stopped by the substation at Seventh and Duval, and you should get your Mercedes back this afternoon.”

  “They’ve already processed it?”

  “Oh yeah. We did that last night and had everything in by the time the labs opened this morning ’cause I’ve made it clear we ain’t shitting around with this case. Everything else moves to the back of the line.”

  “What did you find?” I asked, and the thought of my car and what had happened inside it was almost more than I could stand.

  “Prints, we don’t know whose. We got vacuumings. That’s really it.” He climbed in and left the door open. “Anyway, I’ll make sure it’s here so you have a way home.”

  I thanked him, but as I walked inside my building, I knew I could not drive that car. I knew I could not drive it ever. I did not believe I could even unlock its doors or sit inside it again.

  Cleta was mopping the lobby while the receptionist wiped down furniture with towels, and I tried explaining to them that this wasn’t necessary. The point of an inert gas like halon, I patiently said, was that it did not damage paper or sensitive instruments.

  “It evaporates and doesn’t leave a residue,” I promised. “You don’t have to clean up. But paintings on the walls will need to be straightened, and it looks like Megan’s desk is a terrible mess.”

  In the receptionist’s area, requests for anatomical donations and a variety of other forms were scattered all over the floor.

  “I still think some of it smells funny,” Megan said.

  “Yeah, magazines, that’s what you smell, you goofball,” said Cleta. “They always have a funny smell.” She asked me, “What about the computers?”

  “They shouldn’t be affected in the least,” I said. “What worries me more are the floors that you’re getting wet. Let’s go ahead and dry them off so nobody slips.”

  With a growing sense of hopelessness, I carefully walked over slippery tile while they mopped and wiped. As my office came in sight, I braced myself, then stopped inside my doorway. My secretary was already at work inside.

  “Okay,” I said to Rose. “How bad is it?”

  “Not a problem except some of your paperwork’s blown to Oz. I’ve already straightened out your plants.” She was an imperious woman old enough to retire, and she peered at me over reading glasses. “You’ve always wanted to keep your in and out baskets empty, well, now they are.”

  Wherever I looked, death certificates, call sheets and autopsy reports had blown about like autumn leaves. They were on the floor, in bookshelves and caught in the branches of my ficus tree.

  “I also believe you shouldn’t assume that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. So I think you ought to let this paperwork air out. I’m going to rig up a clothesline here with paper clips.” She talked as she worked, gray hair straying from her French twist.

  “I don’t think we’re going to need anything like that,” I started the same old speech again. “Halon disappears when it dries.”

  “I noticed you never got your hard hat off the shelf.”

  “I didn’t have time,” I said.

  “Too bad we don’t have windows.” Rose said this at least once a week.

  “Really, all we need to do is pick things up,” I said. “You’re paranoid, every last one of you.”

  “You ever been gassed by this stuff before?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said as she set a stack of towels nearby. “Then we can’t be too careful.”

  I sat at my desk and opened the top drawer, where I pulled out several boxes of paper clips. Despair fluttered in my breast and I feared I would dissolve right there. My secretary knew me better than my mother, and she caught my every expression, but she did not stop working.

  After a long silence, she said, “Dr. Scarpetta, why don’t you go home? I’ll take care of this.”

  “Rose, we will take care of this together,” I stubbornly replied.

  “I can’t believe that stupid security guard.”

  “What security guard?” I stopped what I was doing and looked at her.

  “The one who set off the system because he thought we were going to have some sort of radioactive meltdown upstairs.”

  I stared at her as she lifted a death certificate from the carpet. With paper clips, she hung it from the twine while I continued to rearrange the top of my desk.

  “What in the world are you talking about?” I asked.

  “That’s all I know. They were discussing it on the parking deck.” She pressed the small of her back and looked around. “I can’t get over how fast this stuff dries. It’s like something out of a science fiction movie.” She hung another death certificate. “I think this is going to work out just fine.”

  I did not comment as I thought again of my car. I was honestly terrified of seeing it, and I covered my face with my hands. Rose did not quite know what to do because she had never seen me cry.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “This is like a big windstorm blew through. Tomorrow it will be like it never happened.” She tried to make me feel better.

  I was grateful when I heard her leave. She quietly shut both of my doors, and I leaned back in my chair and was spent. I picked up the phone and tried Marino’s number, but he was not in, so I looked up McGeorge Mercedes and hoped that Walter wasn’t off somewhere.

  He wasn’t.

  “Walter? It’s Dr. Scarpetta,” I said with no preamble. “Can you please come get my car?” I faltered, “I guess I need to explain.”

  “No explanation necessary. How much was it damaged?” he asked, and he clearly had been following the news.

  “For me it’s totaled,” I said. “For someone else, it’s as good as new.”

  “I understand and I don’t blame you,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Can you trade it for something right now?”

  “I got almost the identical car. But it’s used.”

  “How used?”

  “Barely. It belonged to my wife. An S-500, black with saddle interior.”

  “Can you have someone drive it to my parking space in back and we’ll swap?”

  “My dear, I’m on the way.”

  He arrived at half past five, when it was already dark out, which was a good time for a salesman to show a used car to someone as desperate as me. But, in truth, I had dealt with Walter for years and really would have bought the car sight unseen because I trusted him that much. He was a very distinguished-looking man with an immaculate mustache and close-cropped hair. He dressed better than most lawyers I knew, and wore a gold Medic Alert bracelet because he was allergic to bees.

  “I’m really sorry about all this,” he said as I cleaned out my trunk.

  “I’m sorry about it, too.” I made no attempt at being friendly or hiding my mood. “Here is one key. Consider the other one lost. And what I’d like to do, if you don’t mind, is to drive off this minute. I don’t want to see you get into my car. I just want to leave. We’ll worry about the radio equipment later.”

  “I understand. We’ll get into the details another time.”

  I did not care about them at all. At the moment I was not interested in the cost-effectiveness of what I had just done, or if it was true that the condition of this car was as good as the one I had traded away. I could have been driving a cement truck and that would have been fine. Pushing a button on t
he console, I locked the doors and tucked my pistol between the seats.

  I drove south on Fourteenth Street and turned off on Canal toward the interstate I usually took home, and several exits later I got off and turned around. I wanted to follow the route I suspected Danny had taken last night, and if he were coming from Norfolk he would have taken 64 West. The easiest exit for him would have been the one for the Medical College of Virginia, for this would have brought him almost to the OCME. But I did not think this was what he had done.

  By the time he reached Richmond, he would have been thinking about food, and there was nothing much to interest him close to my office. Danny obviously would have known that since he had spent time with us before. I suspected he had exited at Fifth Street, as I was doing now, and had followed it to Broad. It was very dark as I passed construction and empty lots that would soon be Virginia’s Biomedical Research Park, where my division would be moved one day.

  Several police cruisers quietly floated past, and I stopped behind one of them at a traffic light next to the Marriott. I watched the officer ahead as he turned on an interior light and wrote something on a metal clipboard. He was very young with light blond hair, and he unhooked the microphone of his radio and began to speak. I could see his lips move as he gazed out at the dark shape of the mini-precinct on the corner. He got off the air and sipped from a 7-Eleven cup, and I knew he had not been a cop long, because he had not read his surroundings. He did not seem aware that he was being watched.

  I moved on and turned left on Broad, past a Rite Aid and the old Miller & Rhoads department store that had permanently closed its doors as fewer people shopped downtown. The old city hall was a granite Gothic fortress on one side of the street, and on the other was the campus of MCV, which may have been familiar to me, but not to Danny. I doubted he would have known about The Skull & Bones, where medical staff and students ate. I doubted he would have known where to park my car around here.

  I believed he had done what anyone would do if he were relatively unfamiliar with a city and driving his boss’s expensive car. He would have driven straight and stopped at the first decent place he found. That, quite literally, was the Hill Cafe. I circled the block, as he had to have done to park southbound, where we had found his bag of leftovers. Pulling over beneath that magnificent magnolia tree, I got out as I slid the pistol into a pocket of my coat. Instantly, the barking behind the chain-link fence began again. The dog sounded big and as if we had a history that had filled him with hate. Lights went on in the upstairs of his owner’s small home.