The Body Farm

by Patricia Cornwell

Shaw watched the rude exchange without a word.

  “I don’t believe we call female officers babe anymore,” Anderson said.

  “I’ve got a body to look at,” I said.

  “We’ve got to go through the warehouse to get there,” Shaw told me.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  He walked Marino and me to a warehouse door that faced the river. Inside was a huge, dimly lit, airless space that was sweet with the smell of tobacco. Thousands of bales of it were wrapped in burlap and stacked on wooden pallets, and there were tons of magfilled sand and orifet that I believed were used in processing steel, and machine parts bound for Trinidad, according to what was stamped on crates.

  Several bays down, the container had been backed up to a loading dock. The closer we got to it, the stronger the odor. We stopped at the crime-scene tape draped across the container’s open door. The stench was thick and hot, as if every molecule of oxygen had been replaced by it, and I willed my senses to have no opinion. Flies had begun to gather, their ominous noise reminding me of the high-pitched buzzing of a remote-control toy plane.

  “Were there flies when the container was first opened?” I asked Shaw.

  “Not like this,” he said.

  “How close did you get?” I asked as Marino and Anderson caught up with us.

  “Close enough,” Shaw said.

  “No one went inside it?” I wanted to make sure.

  “I can guarantee you that, ma’am.” The stench was getting to him.

  Marino seemed unfazed. He shook out another cigarette and mumbled around it as he fired the lighter.

  “So, Anderson,” he said. “I don’t guess it could be livestock, you know, since you didn’t look. Hell, maybe a big dog that accidentally got locked up in there. Sure would be a shame to drag the doc here and get the media all in a lather and then find out it’s just some poor ol’ wharf dog rotted in there.”

  He and I both knew there was no dog or pig or horse or any other animal in there. I opened my scene case while Marino and Anderson went on carping at each other. I dropped my car key inside and pulled on several layers of gloves and a surgical mask. I fitted my thirty-five-millimeter Nikon with a flash and a twenty-eight-millimeter lens. I loaded four-hundred-speed film so the photographs wouldn’t be too grainy, and slipped sterile booties over my shoes.

  “It’s just like when we get bad smells coming from a closed-up house in the middle of July. We look through the window. Break in if we have to. Make sure what’s in there’s human before we call the M.E.,” Marino continued to instruct his new protégé.

  I ducked under the tape and stepped inside the dark container, relieved to find it was only half full of neatly stacked white cartons, leaving plenty of room to move around. I followed the beam of my flashlight deeper, sweeping it from side to side.

  Near the back, it illuminated a bottom row of cartons soaked with the reddish purge fluid that leaks from the nose and mouth of a decomposing body. My light followed shoes and lower legs, and a bloated, bearded face jumped out of the dark. Bulging milky eyes stared, the tongue so swollen it protruded from the mouth as if the dead man were mocking me. My covered shoes made sticky sounds wherever I stepped.

  The body was fully clothed and propped up in the corner, the container’s metal walls bracing it from two sides. Legs were straight out, hands in the lap beneath a carton that apparently had fallen. I moved it out of the way and checked for defense injuries, or for abrasions and broken nails that might suggest he had tried to claw his way out. I saw no blood on his clothes, no sign of obvious injuries or that a struggle had taken place. I looked for food or water, for any provisions or holes made through the container’s sides for ventilation, and found nothing.

  I made my way between every row of boxes, squatting to shine oblique light on the metal floor, looking for shoe prints. Of course, they were everywhere. I moved an inch at a time, my knees about to give out. I found an empty plastic wastepaper basket. Then I found two silvery coins. I bent close to them. One was a deutsche mark. I didn’t recognize the other one and touched nothing.

  Marino seemed a mile away, standing in the container’s opening.

  “My car key’s in my case,” I called out to him through the surgical mask.

  “Yeah?” he said, peering inside.

  “Could you go get the Luma-Lite? I need the fiber-optic attachment and the extension cord. Maybe Mr. Shaw can help you find somewhere to plug it in. Has to be a grounded receptacle, one-fifteen VAC.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” he said.

  4

  The Luma-Lite is an alternate light source with a high-intensity arc tube that emits fifteen watts of light energy at 450 nanometers with a twenty-nanometer bandwidth. It can detect body fluids such as blood or semen as well as expose drugs, fingerprints, trace evidence and unexpected surprises not evident to the naked eye.

  Shaw found a receptacle inside the warehouse, and I slipped disposable plastic covers on the Luma-Lite’s aluminum feet to make sure nothing from a previous scene would be transferred to this one. The alternate light source looked very much like a home projector, and I set it inside the container on top of a carton and ran the fan for a minute before turning on the power switch.

  While I waited for the lamp to reach its maximum output, Marino appeared with the amber-tinted glasses needed to protect our eyes from the strong energy light. Flies were getting thicker. They drunkenly knocked against us and droned loudly in our ears.

  “Goddamn, I hate those things!” Marino complained, swatting wildly.

  I noticed he didn’t have on a jumpsuit, only shoe covers and gloves.

  “You going to drive home in a closed car like that?” I asked.

  “I got another uniform in the trunk. In case something gets spilled on me or whatever.”

  “In case you spill something on you or whatever,” I said, looking at my watch. “We got one more minute.”

  “Notice how Anderson’s conveniently disappeared? I knew she would the minute I heard about this one. I just didn’t figure on nobody else being here. Shit, something really weird’s going on.”

  “How in the world did she become a homicide detective?”

  “She kisses Bray’s ass. I hear she even runs errands for her, takes her brand-new fancy-schmansy black Crown Vic to the car wash, probably sharpens her pencils and shines her shoes.”

  “We’re ready,” I said.

  I began scanning with a 450-nanometer filter that was capable of detecting a large variety of residues and stains. Through our tinted glasses, the inside of the container became an impenetrably black outer space scattered with shapes that fluoresced white and yellow in different shades and intensities wherever I pointed the lens. The projected blue light exposed hairs on the floor and fibers everywhere, just as I would expect in a high-traffic area used to store cargo handled by many people. White cardboard cartons glowed a soft white, like the moon.

  I moved the Luma-Lite deeper inside the container. Purge fluid didn’t fluoresce, and the body was a dejected dark shape sitting in the corner.

  “If he died naturally,” Marino said, “then why’s he sitting up like that with his hands in his lap like he’s in church or something?”

  “If he died of suffocation, dehydration, exposure, he could have died sitting up.”

  “It sure looks wacko to me.”

  “I’m just saying it’s possible. It’s getting tight in here. Can you hand me the fiber optics, please?”

  He bumped into cartons as he made his way in my direction.

  “You might want to take off your glasses until you get here,” I suggested, because one couldn’t see anything through them except the high-energy light, which wasn’t in Marino’s line of sight at the moment.

  “No friggin’ way,” he said. “I hear all it takes is one quick look. And zap. Cataracts, cancer, the whole nine yards.”

  “Not to mention turning to stone.”

  “Huh?”

  “M
arino! Careful!”

  He bumped into me and I wasn’t sure what happened after that, but suddenly cartons were caving in and he almost knocked me over as he fell.

  “Marino?” I was disoriented and frightened. “Marino!”

  I cut the power on the Luma-Lite and took off my glasses so I could see.

  “Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!” he yelled as if he’d been bitten by a snake.

  He was flat on his back on the floor, shoving and kicking boxes out of the way. The plastic bucket sailed through the air. I got down next to him.

  “Stay still,” I firmly told him. “Don’t go thrashing around until we’re sure you’re all right.”

  “Oh God! Oh shit! I got this shit all over me!” he yelled in a panic.

  “Are you hurting anywhere?”

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m gonna puke. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

  He rushed to his feet and knocked boxes out of the way as he stumbled toward the container’s opening. I heard him vomit. He groaned and vomited again.

  “That should make you feel better,” I said.

  He ripped open his white shirt, gagging and heaving as he struggled out of its sleeves. He stripped down to his undershirt, balled up what was left of his uniform shirt and hurled it out the door.

  “What if he’s got AIDS?” Marino’s voice sounded like a bell at midnight.

  “You’re not going to get AIDS from this guy,” I said.

  “Oh, fuck!” He gagged some more.

  “I can finish up in here, Marino,” I said.

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “Why don’t you go on and find a shower.”

  “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said, and I knew he was thinking about Anderson. “You know, I bet you could get a really good deal on some uh this camera shit.”

  “I bet you could.”

  “Wonder what they’re gonna do with it.”

  “Has the removal service come yet?” I asked him.

  He raised his portable radio to his lips.

  “Christ!” He spat and gagged some more.

  He vigorously wiped the radio on the front of his pants and coughed and conjured up spittle from the bottom of his throat and let it fly.

  “Unit nine,” he said on the air, holding the radio a good twelve inches from his face.

  “Unit nine.”

  The dispatcher was a woman. I detected warmth in her voice and was surprised. Dispatchers and 911 operators almost always remained calm and showed no emotion, no matter the emergency.

  “Ten-five Rene Anderson,” Marino was saying. “Don’t know her unit number. Tell her if she doesn’t mind, we sure would like removal service guys to show up down here.”

  “Unit nine. You know the name of the service?”

  “Hey, Doc,” Marino stopped transmitting and raised his voice to me. “What’s the name of the service?”

  “Capital Transport.”

  He passed that along, adding, “Radio, if she’s a ten-two, ten-ten, or ten-seven or if we should ten-twenty-two, get back to me.”

  A storm of cops keyed their mikes, their way of laughing and cheering him on.

  “Ten-four, unit nine,” the dispatcher said.

  “What did you just say that got you such an ovation? I know ten-seven is out of service, but I didn’t get the rest of it.”

  “Told her to let me know if Anderson was a weak signal or negative, or had time to get around to it. Or if we should fucking disregard her.”

  “No wonder she likes you so much.”

  “She’s a piece of shit.”

  “By chance do you know what happened to the fiber-optic cable?” I asked him.

  “I had it in my hand,” he replied.

  I found it where he had fallen and knocked over cartons.

  “What if he’s got AIDS?” He started in on that again.

  “If you’re determined to worry about something, try gram-negative bacteria. Or gram-positive bacteria. Clostridia. Strep. If you have an open wound, which you don’t as best I know.”

  I attached one end of the cable to the wand, the other to the assembly, tightening thumbscrews. He wasn’t listening.

  “No way anybody’s saying that about me! That I’m a goddamn fairy! I’ll eat my gun, don’t think I won’t.”

  “You’re not going to get AIDS, Marino,” I repeated myself.

  I turned on the source lamp again. It would have to run at least four minutes before I could turn on the power.

  “I picked a hangnail yesterday and it bled! That’s an open wound!”

  “You have on gloves, don’t you?”

  “If I get some bad disease, I’m going to kill that fucking little lazy snitch.”

  I assumed he meant Anderson.

  “Bray’s gonna get hers, too. I’ll find a way!”

  “Marino, be quiet,” I said.

  “How would you like it if it was you?”

  “I can’t tell you how many times it’s been me. What do you think I do every day?”

  “You sure as hell don’t slop around in dead juice!”

  “Dead juice?”

  “We don’t know a thing about this guy. What if they got some weird diseases in Belgium that we can’t treat here?”

  “Marino, be quiet,” I said again.

  “No!”

  “Marino . . .”

  “I got a right to be upset!”

  “All right then, leave.” My patience had walked off. “You’re interfering with my concentration. You’re interfering with everything. Go take a shower and throw back a few shots of bourbon.”

  The Luma-Lite was ready and I put on the protective glasses. Marino was quiet.

  “I’m not leaving,” he finally said.

  I gripped the fiber-optics wand like a soldering iron. The intense pulsing blue light was as thin as pencil lead, and I began scanning very small areas.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Not so far.”

  His sticky booties moved closer as I worked slowly, inch by inch, into places that could not be reached by the broad scan. I leaned the body forward to probe behind the back and head, then between the legs. I checked the palms of his hands. The Luma-Lite could detect body fluids such as urine, semen, sweat and saliva, and of course, blood. But again, nothing fluoresced. My back and neck ached.

  “I’m voting for him being dead before he ended up in here,” Marino said.

  “We’ll know a lot more when we get him downtown.”

  I straightened up and the rapid-fire light caught the corner of a carton Marino had displaced when he’d fallen. The tail of what looked like the letter Y blazed neon green in the dark.

  “Marino,” I said. “Look at this.”

  Letter by letter I illuminated words that were French and written by hand. They were about four inches high and an odd boxy shape, as if a mechanical arm had formed them in square strokes. It took me a moment to make out what they said.

  “Bon voyage, le loup-garou,” I read.

  Marino was leaning over me, his breath in my hair. “What the hell’s a loup-garou?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I examined the carton carefully. The top of it was soggy, the bottom of it dry.

  “Fingerprints? You see any on the box?” Marino asked.

  “I’m sure there’re prints all over the place in here,” I replied. “But no, none are popping out.”

  “You think whoever wrote this wanted someone to find it?”

  “Possibly. In some kind of permanent ink that fluoresces. We’ll let fingerprints do their thing. The box goes to the lab, and we need to sweep up some of the hair on the floor for DNA, if it’s ever needed. Then do photographs and we’re out of here.”

  “May as well get the coins while I’m at it,” he said.

  “May as well,” I said, staring toward the container’s opening.

  Someone was looking in. He was backlit by bright sunlight and a blue sky and I could not make out who it was.

&nb
sp; “Where are the crime-scene techs?” I asked Marino.

  “Got no idea.”

  “Goddamn it!” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Marino said.

  “We had two homicides last week and things weren’t like this.”

  “You didn’t go to the scenes, either, so you don’t know what they were like,” he said, and he was right.

  “Someone from my office did. I would know if there was a problem . . .”

  “Not if the problem wasn’t obvious, you wouldn’t,” he told me. “And the problem sure as hell wasn’t obvious because this is Anderson’s first case. Now it’s obvious.”

  “What?”

  “Brand spanking new detective. Hell, maybe she stashed this body in here herself so she’d have something to do.”

  “She says you told her to call me.”

  “Right. Like I can’t bother, so I dis you, and then you get pissed off at me. She’s a fucking liar,” he said.

  An hour later we were done. We walked out of the foul-smelling dark, returning to the warehouse. Anderson stood in the open bay next to ours, talking to a man I recognized as Deputy Chief Al Carson, head of investigations. I realized it was he whom I had seen at the mouth of the container earlier. I moved past her without a word and greeted him as I looked out to see if the removal service had shown up yet. I was relieved to see two men in jumpsuits standing by their dark blue van. They were talking to Shaw.

  “How are you, Al?” I said to Deputy Chief Carson.

  He’d been around as long as I had. He was a gentle, quiet man who had grown up on a farm.

  “Hangin’ in, Doc,” he said. “Looks like we got a mess on our hands.”

  “Looks like it,” I agreed.

  “I was out and thought I’d drop by to make sure everything’s all right.”

  Carson didn’t just “drop by” scenes. He was uptight and looked depressed. Most important, he paid no more attention to Anderson than the rest of us did.

  “We’ve got it covered,” Anderson outrageously broke rank and answered Deputy Chief Carson. “I’ve been talking to the port director . . .”

  Her voice trailed off when she saw Marino. Or maybe she smelled him first.

  “Hey, Pete,” Carson said, cheering up. “What you know, old boy? They got some new dress code in the uniform division I don’t know about?”