The Body Farm

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Do you mind if I handle the gun?” I asked the detective, above the whine of a Stryker saw.

  “Be my guest. I’ve already lifted prints.”

  I picked up the Smith & Wesson pistol and pulled back the slide to check for a cartridge, but the chamber was clear. I dabbed a towel over the bullet wound in the head, as my morgue supervisor, Chuck Ruffin, honed a knife with long sweeps over a sharpening stone.

  “See the black around there and the muzzle imprint?” I said as the detective and a resident leaned close. “You can see the sight here. It’s contact right-handed. The exit’s here, and you can see by the dripping he was lying on his right side.”

  “That’s how we found him,” the detective said as the saw whined on and a bony dust drifted through the air.

  “Be sure to note the caliber, make, and model,” I said as I returned to my own sad chore. “And is the ammunition ball versus hollow point?”

  “Ball. Remington nine-mill.”

  Fielding had parallel-parked another table nearby and covered it with a sheet that he had piled with the fire debris that we had already sifted through. I began measuring the lengths of her badly burned femurs in hopes I could make an estimate of height. The rest of her legs were gone from just above the knees to the ankles, but her feet had been spared by her boots. In addition, she had burn amputations of her forearms and hands. We collected fragments of fabric and drew diagrams and collected more animal hairs, doing all that we could before beginning the difficult task of removing the glass.

  “Let’s get the warm water going,” I said to Fielding. “Maybe we can loosen without tearing skin.”

  “It’s like a damn roast stuck to the pan.”

  “Why are you guys always making food analogies?” came a deep, sure voice I recognized.

  Teun McGovern, in full morgue protective garb, was walking toward our table. Her eyes were intense behind her face shield, and for an instant we stared straight at each other. I was not the least bit surprised that ATF would have sent a fire investigator to watch the postmortem examination. But I had never expected McGovern to show up.

  “How’s it going in Warrenton?” I asked her.

  “Working away,” she replied. “We haven’t found Sparkes’s body, which is a good thing, since he’s not dead.”

  “Cute,” Fielding said.

  McGovern positioned herself across from me, standing far enough back from the table to suggest to me that she had seen very few autopsies.

  “So what exactly are you doing?” she asked as I picked up a hose.

  “We’re going to run warm water between the skin and the glass in hopes we can peel the two apart without further damage,” I replied.

  “And what if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then we got a big fat mess,” Fielding said.

  “Then we use a scalpel,” I explained.

  But this was not necessary. After several minutes of a constant warm bath, I began to very slowly and gently separate the thick broken glass from the dead woman’s face, the skin pulling and distorting as I peeled, making her all the more horrible to look at. Fielding and I worked in silence for a while, gently laying shards and sections of heat-stressed glass into a plastic tub. This took about an hour, and when we were done, the stench was stronger. What was left of the poor woman seemed more pitiful and small, and the damage to her head was even more striking.

  “My God,” McGovern said as she stepped closer. “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The lower part of the face was chalky bone, a barely discernible human skull with open jaws and crumbling teeth. Most of the ears were gone, but from the eyes up, the flesh was cooked and so remarkably preserved that I could see the blond fuzz along the hairline. The forehead was intact, although slightly abraded by the removal of the glass, so that it was no longer smooth. If there had been wrinkles, I could not find them now.

  “I can’t figure out what the hell this is,” Fielding said as he examined the bits of material mingled with hair. “It’s everywhere, all the way down to her scalp.”

  Some of it looked like burned paper, while other small pieces were pristinely preserved and a neon pink. I scraped some of it onto my scalpel and placed it into another carton.

  “We’ll let the labs take a crack at it,” I said to McGovern.

  “Absolutely,” she answered.

  The hair was eighteen and three-quarters inches long, and I saved a strand of it for DNA should we ever have a premortem sample for comparison.

  “If we trace her back to someone missing,” I said to McGovern, “and you guys can get hold of her toothbrush, we can look for buccal cells. They line the mucosa of the mouth and can be used for DNA comparison. A hairbrush would be good, too.”

  She made a note of this. I moved a surgical lamp closer to the left temporal area, using a lens to painstakingly examine what appeared to be hemorrhage in tissue that had been spared.

  “It seems we have some sort of injury here,” I said. “Definitely not skin splitting or an artifact of fire. Possibly an incision with some sort of shiny debris imbedded inside the wound.”

  “Could she have been overcome by CO and fallen and hit her head?” McGovern voiced the same question others had.

  “She would have had to have hit it on something very sharp,” I said as I took photographs.

  “Let me look,” Fielding said, and I handed him the lens. “I don’t see any torn or ragged edges,” he remarked as he peered.

  “No, not a laceration,” I agreed. “This looks more like something inflicted by a sharp instrument.”

  He returned the lens to me, and I used plastic forceps to delicately scrape the shiny debris from the wound. I swiped it onto a square of clean cotton twill. On a nearby desk was a dissecting microscope, and I placed the cloth on the stage and moved the light source so that it would reflect off the debris. I looked through the eyepiece lens as I manipulated the coarse and fine adjustments.

  What I saw in the circle of reflected illumination were several silvery segments that had the striated, flattened surfaces of metal shavings, such as the turnings made by a lathe. I fitted a Polaroid MicroCam to the microscope and took high-resolution instant color photographs.

  “Take a look,” I said.

  Fielding, then McGovern, bent over the microscope.

  “Either of you ever seen anything like that?” I asked.

  I peeled open the developed photographs to make certain they had turned out all right.

  “It reminds me of Christmas tinsel when it gets old and wrinkled,” Fielding said.

  “Transferred from whatever cut her,” was all McGovern had to say.

  “I would think so,” I agreed.

  I removed the square of white cloth from the stage and preserved the shavings between cotton balls, which I sealed inside a metal evidence button.

  “One more thing for the labs,” I said to McGovern.

  “How long will it take?” McGovern said. “Because if there’s a problem, we can do the work at our labs in Rockville.”

  “There won’t be a problem.” I looked at Fielding and said, “I think I can handle it from here.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get started on the next one.”

  I opened up the neck to look for trauma to those organs and muscles, beginning with the tongue, which I removed while McGovern looked on with stoicism. It was a grim procedure that separated the weak from the strong.

  “Nothing there,” I said, rinsing the tongue and blotting it dry with a towel. “No bite marks that might be indicative of a seizure. No other injuries.”

  I looked inside the glistening smooth walls of the airway and found no soot, meaning she was no longer breathing when heat and flames had reached her. But I also found blood, and this was further ominous news.

  “More premortem trauma,” I said.

  “Possible something fell on her after she was dead?” McGovern asked.

  “It didn’t happen that way.”


  I noted the injury on a diagram and dictated it into the transmitter.

  “Blood in the airway means she inhaled it—or aspirated,” I explained. “Meaning, obviously, that she was breathing when the trauma occurred.”

  “What sort of trauma?” she then asked.

  “A penetrating injury. The throat stabbed or cut. I see no other signs of trauma to the base of the skull or lungs or to the neck, no contusions or broken bones. Her hyoid’s intact, and there’s fusion of the greater horn and body, possibly indicating she’s older than twenty and most likely wasn’t strangled manually or with a ligature.”

  I began to dictate again.

  “The skin under the chin and superficial muscle are burned away,” I said into the small mike on my gown. “Heat-coagulated blood in the distal trachea, primary, secondary, and tertiary bronchi. Hemoaspiration, and blood in the esophagus.”

  I made the Y incision to open up the dehydrated, ruined body, and for the most part, the rest of the autopsy proved to be rather routine. Although the organs were cooked, they were within normal limits, and the reproductive organs verified the gender as female. There was blood in her stomach, too; otherwise it was empty and tubular, suggesting she hadn’t been eating very much. But I found no disease and no other injuries old or new.

  Height I could not positively ascertain, but I could estimate by using Trotter and Gleser regression formula charts to correlate femur length to the victim’s stature. I sat at a nearby desk and thumbed through Bass’s Human Osteology until I found the appropriate table for American white females. Based on a 50.2 millimeter, or approximately twenty-inch, femur, the predicted height would have been five-foot-ten.

  Weight was not so exact, for there was no table, chart, or scientific calculation that might tell me that. In truth, we usually got a hint of weight from the size of clothing left, and in this case, the victim had been wearing size eight jeans. So based on the data I had, I intuited that she had been between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty pounds.

  “In other words,” I said to McGovern, “she was tall and very slim. We also know she had long blond hair, was probably sexually active, may have been comfortable around horses, and was already dead inside Sparkes’s Warrenton house before the fire got to her. I also know that she received significant premortem injury to her upper neck and was cut right here on her left temple.” I pointed. “How these were inflicted, I can’t tell you.”

  I got up from my chair and gathered paperwork while McGovern looked at me, her eyes shadowed by thought. She took off her face shield and mask and untied her gown in back.

  “If she had a drug problem, is there any way you might be able to tell that?” she asked me as the phone rang and rang.

  “Toxicology will certainly tell us if she had drugs on board,” I said. “There may also be crystals in her lungs or foreign body granulomas from cutting agents like talc, and fibers from the cotton used to strain out impurities. Unfortunately, the areas where we might be most likely to find needle tracks are missing.”

  “What about her brain? Would chronic drug abuse cause any damage that you might be able to see? For example, if she started having severe mental problems, was getting psychotic and so on? It sounds like Sparkes thought she had some sort of mental illness,” McGovern then said. “For example, what if she were depressive or manic-depressive? Could you tell?”

  By now the skull had been open, the rubbery, fire-shrunken brain sectioned and still on the cutting board.

  “In the first place,” I answered, “nothing is going to be helpful postmortem because the brain is cooked. But even if that were not the case, looking for a morphological correlate to a particular psychiatric syndrome is, in most cases, still theoretical. A widening of the sulci, for example, and reduced gray matter due to atrophy might be a signpost if we knew what the weight of the brain originally was when she was healthy. Then maybe I could say, Okay, her brain weighs a hundred grams less now than it did, so she might have been suffering from some sort of mental disease. Unless she has a lesion or old head injury that might suggest a problem, the answer to your question is no, I can’t tell.”

  McGovern was silent, and it was not lost on her that I was clinical and not the least bit friendly. Even though I was aware of my rather brittle demeanor around her, I could not seem to soften it. I looked around for Ruffin. He was at the first dissecting sink, suturing a Y incision in long strokes of needle and twine. I motioned to him and walked over. He was too young to worry about turning thirty anytime soon, and had gotten his training in an O.R. and a funeral home.

  “Chuck, if you can finish up here and put her back in the fridge,” I said to him.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He returned to his station to finish his present task while I peeled off gloves and dropped them and my mask into one of many red biological hazard containers scattered around the autopsy room.

  “Let’s go to my office and have a cup of coffee,” I suggested to McGovern in an attempt to be a little more civil. “And we can finish this discussion.”

  In the locker room, we washed with antibacterial soap and I got dressed. I had questions for McGovern, but in truth, I was curious about her, too.

  “Getting back to the possibility of drug-induced mental illness,” McGovern said as we followed the corridor. “Many of these people self-destruct, right?”

  “In one way or another.”

  “They die in accidents, commit suicide, and that gets us back to the big question,” she said. “Is that what happened here? Possible she was whacked out and committed suicide?”

  “All I know is, she has injury that was inflicted before death,” I pointed out again.

  “But that could be self-inflicted if she were not in her right mind,” McGovern said. “God knows the kinds of self-mutilation we’ve seen when people are psychotic.”

  This was true. I had worked cases in which people had cut their own throats, or stabbed themselves in the chest, or amputated their limbs, or shot themselves in their sexual organs, or walked into a river to drown. Not to mention leaps from high places and self-immolations. The list of horrendous things people did to themselves was much too long, and whenever I thought I’d seen it all, something new and awful was rolled into our bay.

  The phone was ringing as I unlocked my office, and I grabbed it just in time.

  “Scarpetta,” I said.

  “I’ve got some results for you,” said Tim Cooper, the toxicologist. “Ethanol, methanol, isopropanol, and acetone are zero. Carbon monoxide is less than seven percent. I’ll keep working on the other screens.”

  “Thanks. What would I do without you?” I said.

  I looked at McGovern as I hung up, and I told her what Cooper had just said.

  “She was dead before the fire,” I explained, “her cause of death exsanguination and asphyxia due to aspiration of blood due to acute neck injury. As for manner, I’m pending that until further investigation, but I think we should work this as a homicide. In the meantime, we need to get her identified, and I’ll do what I can to get started on that.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to imagine that this woman torched the place and maybe cut her own throat before the fire got her first?” she said as anger flickered.

  I did not answer as I measured coffee for the coffeemaker on a nearby countertop.

  “Don’t you think that’s rather far-fetched?” she went on.

  I poured in bottled water and pressed a button.

  “Kay, no one’s going to want to hear homicide,” she said. “Because of Kenneth Sparkes and what all of this may imply. I hope you realize what you’re up against.”

  “And what ATF is up against,” I said, sitting across my hopelessly piled desk from her.

  “Look, I don’t care who he is,” she replied. “I do every job like I fully intend to make an arrest. I’m not the one who has to deal with the politics around here.”

  But my mind wasn’t on the media or Sparkes right now. I was th
inking that this case disturbed me at a deeper level and in ways I could not fathom.

  “How much longer will your guys be at the scene?” I asked her.

  “Another day. Two at the most,” she said. “Sparkes has supplied us and the insurance company with what was inside his house, and just the antique furniture and old wood flooring and paneling alone were a massive fuel load.”

  “What about the master bath?” I asked. “Saying this was the point of origin.”

  She hesitated. “Obviously, that’s the problem.”

  “Right. If an accelerant wasn’t used, or at least not a petroleum distillate, then how?”

  “The guys are beating their brains out,” she said, and she was frustrated. “And so am I. If I try to predict how much energy would be needed in that room for a flashover condition, the fuel load isn’t there. According to Sparkes, there was nothing but a throw rug and towels. Cabinets and fixtures were customized brushed steel. The shower had a glass door, the window had sheer curtains.”

  She paused as the coffeemaker gurgled.

  “So what are we talking about?” she went on. “Five, six hundred kilowatts total for a ten-by-fifteen-foot room? Clearly, there are other variables. Such as how much air was flowing through the doorway . . .”

  “What about the rest of the house? You just said there was a big fuel load there, right?”

  “We’re only concerned with one room, Kay. And that’s the room of origin. Without an origin, the rest of the fuel load doesn’t matter.”

  “I see.”

  “I know a flame was impinged on the ceiling in that bathroom, and I know how high that flame had to be and how many kilowatts of energy were needed for flashover. And a throw rug and maybe some towels and curtains couldn’t even come close to causing something like that.”

  I knew her engineering equations were pristinely mathematical, and I did not doubt anything she was saying. But it did not matter. I was still left with the same problem. I had reason to believe that we were dealing with a homicide and that when the fire started, the victim’s body was inside the master bath, with its noncombustible marble floors, large mirrors, and steel. Indeed, she may have been in the tub.