The Body Farm

by Patricia Cornwell

  “We got one other person who came in right after you did,” the private said, putting on Ray-Bans. “From Washington, the FBI.”

  He seemed to be very impressed with this and clearly had no idea what Lucy was, nor did the expression change on her face when I asked, “What does he do with the FBI?”

  “Some scientist or something. Pretty hot stuff,” he said, eyeing Lucy, who was striking-looking even when she’d been up all night.

  The scientist was Nick Gallwey, head of the Bureau’s Disaster Squad, and a forensic expert of considerable reputation. I had known him for years, and when he walked into the lobby, we gave each other a hug, and Lucy shook his hand.

  “A pleasure, Special Agent Farinelli. And believe me, I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said to her. “So Kay and I are going to do the dirty work while you play with the computer.”

  “Yes, sir,” she sweetly said.

  “Is there anywhere to have breakfast around here?” Gallwey asked the private, who was tangled in confusion and suddenly shy.

  He drove us in the base commander’s Suburban beneath an endless sky. Unsettled western mountain ranges surrounded us in the distance, high desert flora like sage, scrub pine and firs, dwarfed by lack of rain. The nearest traffic was forty miles away in this Home of the Mustangs, as the base was called, with its ammunition bunkers, weapons from World War II and air space restricted and vast. There were traces of salt from receding ancient waters, and we spotted an antelope and an eagle.

  Stark Road, aptly named, led us toward the test facilities, which were some ten miles from the living area on base. The Ditto diner was on the way, and we stopped long enough for coffee and egg sandwiches. Then it was on to the test facilities, which were clustered in large, modern buildings behind a fence topped with razor wire.

  Warning signs were everywhere, promising that trespassers were unwelcome and deadly force used. Codes on buildings indicated what was inside them, and I recognized symbols for mustard gas and nerve agents, and those for Ebola, Anthrax and Hantavirus. Walls were concrete, the private told us, and two feet thick, refrigerators inside explosion-proof. The routine was not so different from what I had experienced before. Guards led us through the toxic containment facilities, and Lucy and I went into the women’s changing room while Gallwey went into the men’s.

  We stripped and put on house clothes that were Army green, and over these went suits, which were camouflage with goggled hoods, and heavy black rubber gloves and boots. Like the blue suits at CDC and USAMRIID, these were attached to air lines inside the chamber, which in this case was stainless steel from ceiling to floor. It was a completely closed system with double carbon filters, where contaminated vehicles like tanks could be bombarded with chemical agents and vapors. We were assured we could work here as long as we needed without placing anyone at risk.

  It might even be possible that some evidence could be decontaminated and saved. But it was hard to say. None of us had ever worked a case like this before. We started by propping open the camper’s door and arranging lights directed inside. It was peculiar moving around, the steel floor warping loudly like saw blades as we walked. Above us, an Army scientist sat in the control room behind glass, monitoring everything we did.

  Again, I went in first because I wanted to thoroughly survey the crime scene. Gallwey began photographing tool marks on the door and dusting for fingerprints, while I climbed inside and looked around as if I had never been there before. The small living area that normally would have contained a couch and table had been gutted and turned into a laboratory with sophisticated equipment that was neither new nor cheap.

  The rabbit was still alive, and I fed him and set his cage on top of a counter neatly built of plywood and painted black. Beneath it was a refrigerator, and in it I found Vero and human embryonic lung fibroblast cells. They were tissue cultures routinely used for feeding poxviruses, just as fertilizers are used for certain plants. To maintain these cultures, the mad farmer of this mobile lab had a good supply of Eagle minimal essential medium, supplemented with ten percent fetal calf serum. This and the rabbit told me that deadoc was doing more than maintaining his virus, he was still in the process of propagating it when disaster had struck.

  He had kept the virus in a liquid nitrogen freezer that did not need to be plugged in, but refilled every few months. It looked like a ten-gallon stainless steel thermos, and when I unscrewed the lid, I pulled out seven cryo-tubes so old that instead of plastic, they were made of glass. Codes that should have identified the disease were unlike anything I’d ever seen, but there was a date of 1978, and the location of Birmingham, England, tiny abbreviations written in black ink, neatly, and in lowercase. I returned the tubes of living, frozen horror to their frigid place, and rooted around more, finding twenty sample sizes of Vita facial spray, and tuberculin syringes that the killer, no doubt, had used to inoculate the canisters with the disease.

  Of course, there were pipettes and rubber bulbs, petri dishes, and the flasks with screw caps where the virus was actually growing. The medium inside them was pink. Had it begun to turn pale yellow, the PH balance would indicate waste products, acidity, meaning the virus-laden cells had not been bathed in their nutrient-rich tissue culture medium in a while.

  I remembered enough from medical school and my training as a pathologist to know that when propagating a virus, the cells must be fed. This is done with the pink culture medium, which must be aspirated off every few days with a pipette, when the nutrients have been replaced by waste. For the medium still to be pink meant this had been done recently, at least within the last four days. Deadoc was meticulous. He had cultivated death with love and care. Yet there were two flasks broken on the floor, perhaps due to an infected rabbit hopping about, somehow accidentally out of its cage. I did not sense suicide here, but an unforeseen catastrophe that had caused deadoc to run.

  Slowly, I moved around some more, through the kitchen, where a single bowl and fork had been washed and neatly left to dry on a dish towel by the sink. Cupboards were orderly, too, with rows of simple spices, boxes of cereal and rice and cans of vegetable soup. In the refrigerator was skim milk, apple juice, onions and carrots, but no meat. I closed the door as my mystification grew. Who was he? What did he do in this camper day after day besides make his viral bombs? Did he watch TV? Did he read?

  I began to look for clothes, pulling open drawers with no luck. If this man had spent a lot of time here, why had he nothing to wear except what he had on? Why no photographs or personal mementos? What about books, catalogues for ordering cell lines, tissue cultures, reference material for infectious diseases? Most obvious of all, what had happened to the vehicle that had towed this? Who had driven off in it and when?

  I stayed in the bedroom longer, the carpet black from blood that had been tracked through other rooms when we had removed the body. I could not smell or hear anything but air circulating in my suit as I paused to change my four-hour battery. This room, like the rest of the camper, was generic, and I pulled back the flower-printed spread, discovering the pillow and sheets on one side were wrinkled from having been slept on. I found one short gray hair, and collected it with forceps as I remembered that the dead man’s hair was longer and black.

  A print of a seaside on the wall was cheap, and I took it down to see if I could tell where it had been framed. I tried the love seat beneath a window on the other side of the bed. It was covered in bright green vinyl, and on top was a cactus plant that had to be the only thing alive in the camper except for what was in the cage, the incubator and the freezer. I stirred the soil with my finger and it was not too dry, then I placed it on the carpet and opened up the love seat.

  Based on cobwebs and dust, no one had been inside in many years, and I sifted through a rubber cat toy, a faded blue hat and a chewed-on corncob pipe. I did not sense that any of this belonged to the person who lived here now, or had even been noticed by him. I wondered if the camper had been used or in the family, and got down on my hand
s and knees and crawled around until I found the shot shell and the wad. These, too, I sealed inside an evidence bag.

  Lucy was just sitting down at the laptop computer when I returned to the laboratory area.

  “Screen saver password,” she said into her voice-activated microphone.

  “I was hoping you’d get something difficult,” I said.

  She was already rebooting and going into DOS. Knowing her, she would have that password removed in minutes, as I’d seen her do before.

  “Kay,” Gallwey’s voice sounded inside my hood. “Got something good out here.”

  I went down the steps, careful to keep my air line from tangling. He was in front of the camper, squatting by the area of the tongue where the VIN had been obliterated. Having polished the metal mirror-smooth with fine grit sandpaper, he was now applying a solution of copper chloride and hydrochloric acid to dissolve scarred metal and restore the deeply stamped number underneath that the killer thought he had filed away.

  “People don’t realize how difficult it is to get rid of one of these things,” his voice filled my ears.

  “Unless they’re professional car thieves,” I said.

  “Well, whoever did this didn’t do a very good job.” He was taking photographs. “I think we got it.”

  “Let’s hope the camper’s registered,” I said.

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “What about prints?”

  The door and aluminum around it were smudged with black dusting powder.

  “Some, but God knows whose,” he said, getting up and straightening his back. “In a minute, I’ll tear up the inside.”

  Meanwhile, Lucy was tearing up the computer, and like me, not coming up with anything that might tell us who deadoc was. But she did find files he had saved of our conversations in the chat rooms, and it was chilling to see them on screen, and wonder how often he had reread them. There were detailed lab notes documenting the propagation of the virus cells, and this was interesting. It appeared work had begun as recently as early in the fall, less than two months before the torso had turned up.

  By late afternoon, we had done all we could do with no startling revelations. We took chemical showers as the camper was blasted with formalin gas. I stayed in my army-green house clothes because I did not want my suit after what it had been through.

  “Kind of hell on your wardrobe,” Lucy commented as we left the changing room. “Maybe you should try pearls with that. Dress it up a little.”

  “Sometimes you sound like Marino,” I said.

  • • •

  Days crept into the weekend, and next I knew that was gone too with no developments that were anything but maddening. I had missed my mother’s birthday. Not once had it crossed my mind.

  “What? You got Alzheimer’s now?” she unkindly told me over the phone. “You don’t come down here. Now you don’t even bother to call. It’s not like I’m getting younger.”

  She began to cry, and I felt like it.

  “Christmas,” I said what I did every year. “I’ll work something out. I’ll bring Lucy. I promise. It’s not that far away.”

  I drove downtown, uninspired and weary to the bone. Lucy had been right. The killer’s only use of the phone line at the campground was to dial into AOL, and in the end, all that came back to was Perley’s stolen credit card. Deadoc did not call anymore. I had gotten obsessive about checking and sometimes found myself waiting in that chat room when I could not even be sure the FBI was watching anymore.

  The frozen virus source I found in the camper’s nitrogen freezer remained unknown. Attempts at mapping its DNA continued, and scientists at CDC knew how the virus was different, but not what it was, and thus far, vaccinated primates remained susceptible to it. Four other people, including two watermen who turned up in Crisfield, had come down with only mild cases of the disease. No one else seemed to be getting sick as the quarantine of the fishing village continued and its economy foundered. As for Richmond, only Wingo was ill, his willowy body and gentle face ravaged by pustules. He would not let me see him, no matter how often I tried.

  I was devastated, and found it hard to worry about other cases because this one would not end. We knew the dead man in the trailer could not be deadoc. Fingerprints had come back to a drifter with a long arrest record of crimes mostly involving theft and drugs, and two counts of assault and attempted rape. He was out on parole when he had used his pocketknife to pry open the camper door, and no one doubted that his shotgun death was a homicide.

  I walked into my office at eight-fifteen. When Rose heard me, she came through her doorway.

  “I hope you got some rest,” she said, more worried about me than I’d ever seen.

  “I did. Thanks.” I smiled, and her concern made me feel guilty and shamed, as if I were bad somehow. “Any new developments?”

  “Not about Tangier.” I could see the anxiety in her eyes. “Try to get your mind off it, Dr. Scarpetta. We’ve got five cases this morning. Look at the top of your desk. If you can find it. And I’m at least two weeks behind on correspondence and micros because of your not being here to dictate.”

  “Rose, I know, I know,” I said, not unkindly. “First things first. Try Phyllis again. And if they still say she’s out sick, get a number where she can be reached. I’ve been trying her home number for days and no one answers.”

  “If I get her, you want me to put her through?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  That happened fifteen minutes later when I was about to go into staff meeting. Rose got Phyllis Crowder on the line.

  “Where on earth are you? And how are you?” I asked.

  “This wretched flu,” she said. “Don’t get it.”

  “I did and am still getting rid of it,” I said. “I’ve tried your house in Richmond.”

  “Oh, I’m at my mother’s, in Newport News. You know, I work a four-day week and have been spending the other three days out here for years.”

  I did not know that. But we had never socialized.

  “Phyllis,” I said, “I hate to bother you when you’re not well, but I need your help with something. In 1978 there was a laboratory accident at the lab in Birmingham, England, where you once worked. I’ve pulled what I can on it, and know only that a medical photographer was working directly over a smallpox lab . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” she interrupted me. “I know all about it. Supposedly, the photographer was exposed through a ventilator duct, and she died. The virologist committed suicide. The case is cited all the time by people who argue in favor of destroying all frozen source virus.”

  “Were you working in that lab when this happened?”

  “No, thank goodness. That was some years after I left. I was already in the States by then.”

  I was disappointed, and she went into a coughing spell and could hardly talk.

  “Sorry.” She coughed. “This is when you hate living alone.”

  “You don’t have anyone looking in on you?”

  “No.”

  “What about food?”

  “I manage.”

  “Why don’t I bring you something,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “I’ll help you if you’ll help me,” I added. “Do you have any files on Birmingham? Concerning the work going on when you were there? Anything you could look up?”

  “Buried somewhere in this house, I’m sure,” she said.

  “Unbury them and I’ll bring stew.”

  I was out the door in five minutes, running to my car. Heading home, I got several quarts of my homemade stew out of the freezer, then I filled the tank with gas before going east on 64. I told Marino on the car phone what I was doing.

  “You’ve really lost it this time,” he exclaimed. “Drive over a hundred miles to take someone food? You coulda called Domino’s.”

  “That’s not the point. And believe me, I have one.” I put sunglasses on. “There may be something here. She may know
something that could help.”

  “Yo, let me know,” he said. “You got your pager on, right?”

  “Right.”

  Traffic was light this time of day, and I kept the cruise control on sixty-nine so I did not get a ticket. In less than an hour, I was bypassing Williamsburg, and about twenty minutes later, following directions Crowder had given me for her address in Newport News. The neighborhood was called Brandon Heights, where the economic class was mixed, and houses got bigger as they got nearer the James River. Hers was a modest two-story frame recently painted eggshell white, the yard and landscaping well maintained.

  I parked behind a van and collected the stew, my pocketbook and briefcase slung over a shoulder. When Phyllis Crowder came to the door, she looked like hell, her face pale, and eyes burning with fever. She was dressed in a flannel robe and leather slippers that looked like they might once have belonged to a man.

  “I can’t believe how nice you are,” she said as she opened the door. “Either that or crazy.”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  I stepped inside, pausing to look at framed photographs along the dark paneled entrance hall. Most of them were of people hiking and fishing and had been taken in long years past. My eyes were fixed on one, an older man wearing a pale blue hat and holding a cat as he grinned around a corncob pipe.

  “My father,” Crowder said. “This was where my parents lived, and my mother’s parents were here before that. That’s them there.” She pointed. “When my father’s business started doing poorly in England, they came here and moved in with her family.”

  “And what about you?” I said.

  “I stayed on, was in school.”

  I looked at her and did not think she was as old as she wanted me to believe.