“Huh,” Marino retorted. “She takes a brand-new Crown Vic home with her every night.”
“A damn Jaguar, fire-engine red. In the garage. Looks like a ninety-eight or ninety-nine. Can’t even guess what that cost.” The detective shook his head.
“About two years of your working ass,” Marino commented.
“Tell me.”
They talked on about Bray’s tastes and wealth as if her battered dead body didn’t exist. I saw no evidence that an encounter had occurred in the living room, or that anyone even used it much or bothered to clean it thoroughly.
The kitchen was off the living room to the right, and I glanced inside it, again checking for blood or any other sign of violence and finding none. The kitchen did not feel lived in, either. Countertops and the stove were spotless. I saw no food, only a bag of Starbucks coffee and a small wine rack holding three bottles of merlot.
Marino came up from behind and edged past me through the doorway. He opened the refrigerator with gloved hands.
“Doesn’t look like she was into cooking,” he said, scanning sparsely stocked shelves.
I surveyed a quart of two-percent milk, tangerines, margarine, a box of Grape-Nuts and condiments. The freezer held no more promise.
“It’s like she was never home, or ate out all the time,” he said, stepping on a pedal to pop up the trash-can lid.
He reached inside and pulled out pieces of a torn-up Domino’s pizza box, a wine bottle and three St. Pauli Girl beer bottles. He pieced together fragments of the receipt.
“One medium pepperoni, extra cheese,” he mumbled. “Ordered last night at five fifty-three.”
He dug around some more and found crumpled napkins, three slices of the pizza and at least half a dozen cigarette butts.
“Now we’re cookin’,” he said. “Bray didn’t smoke. Looks like she had company last night.”
“When did the nine-one-one call come in?”
“Nine-oh-four. About an hour and a half ago. And it don’t look to me like she was up making coffee, reading the paper or anything else this morning.”
“I’m pretty sure she was already dead by this morning,” Butterfield offered.
We moved on, following a carpeted hallway to the master bedroom in the back of the house. When we reached the open doorway, both of us stopped. Violence seemed to absorb all light and air. Its silence was complete, its stains and destruction everywhere.
“Holy shit,” Marino said under his breath.
Whitewashed walls, floor, ceiling, overstuffed chairs, chaise longue were spattered so completely with blood it almost seemed part of a decorator’s plan. But these droplets, smears and streaks weren’t dye or paint; they were fragments from a terrible explosion caused by a psychopathic human bomb. Dried speckles and drips sullied antique mirrors, and the floor was thick with coagulated puddles and splashes. The king-size bed was soaked with blood and oddly stripped of its linens.
Diane Bray had been beaten so severely I couldn’t have told her race. She was on her back, green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor. I picked them up. They had been ripped from her body. Every inch of skin was dried wipes and smears and swirls reminding me of finger-painting again, her face a mush of splintered bone and battered tissue. On her left wrist was a smashed gold watch. On her right ring finger, a gold band was beaten into the bone.
For a long time we stared. She was naked from the waist up. Her black corduroy pants and belt didn’t seem to have been touched. The soles of her feet and her palms were chewed up, and this time Loup-Garou hadn’t bothered eradicating his bite marks. They were circles of widely spaced, narrow teeth that didn’t look human. He had bitten and sucked and beaten, and Bray’s complete degradation, her mutilation, especially of her face, instantly screamed rage. It cried out that she might have known her killer, just as Loup-Garou’s other victims had.
Only, he didn’t know them. Before he showed up at the door, he and his victims had never met except in his hellish fantasies.
“What’s wrong with Anderson?” Marino was asking Butterfield.
“She heard about it and freaked.”
“That’s kinda interesting. That mean we don’t got a detective here?”
“Marino, let me see your flashlight, please,” I said.
I shone the light all around. Blood was spattered on the headboard and a bedside lamp, caused when the impact of blows or slashes projected small droplets away from the weapon. There were low-velocity stains as well, blood that had dripped to the carpet. I got down and probed the bloody hardwood floor next to the bed, and I found more pale long hairs. They were on Bray’s body, too.
“The word we got was to secure the scene and wait for a supervisor,” one of the cops was saying.
“What supervisor?” Marino asked.
I shone light obliquely on bloody footprints close to the bed. They had a distinctive tread and I looked up at the officers in the room.
“Uh, I think the chief himself. I think he wants to assess the situation before anything’s done,” Butterfield was talking to Marino.
“Well, that’s tough shit,” Marino said. “And he shows up, he can stand out in the rain.”
“How many people have been inside this room?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” one of the officers answered.
“If you don’t know, then it’s too many,” I replied. “Did either of you touch the body? How close did you get to it?”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Whose footprints are these?” I pointed them out. “I need to know, because if they aren’t yours, then the killer hung around long enough for the blood to dry.”
Marino looked at the officers’ feet. Both men were wearing black crosstrainers. Marino squatted and looked at the faint tread pattern on the hardwood floor.
“Could it be Vibram?” he sarcastically said.
“I need to get started,” I said, getting swabs and a chemical thermometer out of my case.
“We got too damn many people in here!” Marino announced. “Cooper, Jenkins, go find something useful to do.”
He jerked his thumb at the open doorway. They stared at him. One of them started to say something.
“Swallow it, Cooper,” Marino told him. “And give me the camera. And maybe you followed orders by securing the scene, but you weren’t told to work the damn scene. What? Couldn’t resist seeing your deputy chief like this? That the deal? How many other assholes been in here gawking?”
“Wait a minute . . .” Jenkins protested.
Marino snatched the Nikon out of his hands.
“Give me your radio,” Marino snapped.
Jenkins reluctantly detached it from his duty belt and handed that over to him, too.
“Go,” Marino said.
“Captain, I can’t leave without my radio.”
“I just gave you permission.”
No one dared remind Marino that he had been suspended. Jenkins and Cooper left in a hurry.
“Sons of bitches,” Marino declared in their wake.
I turned Bray’s body on its side. Rigor mortis was complete, suggesting she had been dead at least six hours. I pulled down her pants and swabbed her rectum for seminal fluid before inserting the thermometer.
“I need a detective and some crime-scene techs,” Marino was saying on the air.
“Unit nine, what’s the address?”
“The one in progress,” Marino cryptically replied.
“Ten-four, unit nine,” said the dispatcher, a woman.
“Minny,” Marino said to me.
I waited for an explanation.
“We go way back. She’s my radio room snitch,” he said.
I withdrew the thermometer and held it up.
“Eighty-eight-point-one,” I said. “The body usually cools about one and a half degrees an hour for the first eight hours. But she’s going to cool a little quicker because she’s partially unclothed. It’s what? Maybe seventy degrees in
here?”
“I don’t know. I’m burning up,” he said. “For sure she was murdered last night, that much we know.”
“Her stomach contents may tell us more,” I said. “Do we have any idea how the killer got in?”
“I’m gonna check out the doors and windows after we finish up in here.”
“Long linear lacerations,” I said, touching her wounds and looking for any trace evidence that might not make it to the morgue. “Like a tire iron. Then there are these punched-out areas, too. Everywhere.”
“Could be the end of the tire iron,” Marino said, looking on.
“But what made this?” I asked.
In several places on the mattress, blood had been transferred from some object that left a striped pattern reminiscent of a plowed field. The stripes were approximately an inch and a half long with maybe an eighth of an inch of space between them, the total surface area of each transfer about the size of my palm.
“Make sure we check the drains for blood,” I said as voices sounded down the hall.
“Hope that’s the Breakfast Boys,” Marino said, referring to Ham and Eggleston.
They showed up carrying large Pelican cases.
“You got any idea what the hell’s going on?” Marino asked them.
The two crime-scene technicians stared.
“Mother of God,” Ham finally said.
“Does anyone have any idea what happened here?” Eggleston asked, his eyes fixed on what was left of Bray on the bed.
“You know about as much as we do,” Marino replied. “Why weren’t you called earlier?”
“I’m surprised you found out,” Ham said. “No one told us until now.”
“I got my sources,” Marino said.
“Who tipped the media?” I asked.
“I guess they got their sources, too,” said Eggleston.
He and Ham began opening the cases and setting up lights. Marino’s unit number blared from his purloined radio, startling both of us.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “Nine,” he said over the air.
Ham and Eggleston put on gray binocular magnifiers, or “Luke Skywalkers,” as the cops called them.
“Unit nine, ten-five three-fourteen,” the radio came back.
“Three-fourteen, you out there?” Marino said.
“Need you to step outside,” a voice returned.
“That’s a ten-ten,” Marino said, refusing.
The techs began taking measurements in millimeters with additional magnifiers that looked rather much like jeweler’s lenses. The binocular headsets alone could magnify only three-and-a-half, and some blood spatters were too small for that.
“There’s someone who needs to see you. Now,” the radio went on.
“Man, there’s castoff all over the place.” Eggleston was referring to blood thrown off during the backswing of a weapon, creating uniform trails or lines on whatever surface it impacted.
“Can’t do it,” Marino answered the radio.
Three-fourteen didn’t respond, and I unhappily suspected what this was all about, and I was right. In minutes, more footsteps sounded in the hall, and then Chief Rodney Harris was standing in the doorway, his face stone.
“Captain Marino,” Harris said.
“Yes, sir, Chief.” Marino studied an area of floor near the bathroom.
Ham and Eggleston in their black fatigues, latex gloves and binocular headsets only added to the cold horror of the scene as they worked with angles and axes and points of convergence to reconstruct, through geometry, where in space each blow was struck.
“Chief,” they both said.
Harris stared at the bed, jaw muscles bunching. He was short and homely, with thinning red hair and an ongoing battle with his weight. Maybe these misfortunes had shaped him. I didn’t know. But Harris had always been a tyrant. He was aggressive and made it obvious he didn’t like women who strayed from their proper place, which was why I’d never understood his hiring Bray, unless it was simply that he thought she’d make him look good.
“With all due respect, Chief,” Marino said, “don’t step one damn inch closer.”
“I want to know, did you bring the media, Captain?” Harris said in a tone that would have frightened most people I knew. “Are you responsible for that, too? Or did you just directly counter my orders?”
“I guess it’s the latter, Chief. I had nothing to do with the media. They was already here when the doc and I pulled up.”
Harris looked at me as if he’d just now noticed I was in the room. Ham and Eggleston climbed up on their stepladders, hiding behind their task.
“What happened to her?” Harris asked me, and his voice faltered a little. “Christ.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Beaten to death with some sort of instrument, maybe a tool. We don’t know,” I said.
“I mean, is there anything . . . ?” he started to say, and his iron facade was rapidly slipping away. “Well . . .” He cleared his throat, his eyes pinned to Bray’s body. “Why would someone do this? Who? Anything?”
“That’s what we’re working on, Chief,” Marino said. “Don’t have a single damn answer right now, but maybe you can answer a few questions for me.”
The crime-scene techs had begun painstakingly taping bright pink surveyor’s string above droplets of blood spattered on the white ceiling. Harris looked ill.
“You know anything about her personal life?” Marino asked.
“No,” Harris said. “In fact, I didn’t know she had one.”
“She had someone over last night. They ate pizza, maybe drank a little. Appears her guest smoked,” Marino said.
“I never heard her say anything about going out with someone.” Harris tore his attention away from the bed. “We weren’t really what I’d call friendly with each other.”
Ham stopped what he was doing, the string he held connected only to air. Eggleston peered up through his Optivi-sor at blood droplets on the ceiling. He moved a measuring magnifier over them and wrote down millimeters.
“What about neighbors?” Harris then asked. “Did anyone hear anything, see anything?”
“Sorry, but we ain’t had time to canvas the neighborhood yet, especially since nobody called any detectives or techs until I finally did,” Marino said.
Harris abruptly walked off. I looked at Marino and he avoided my eyes. I was certain he had just lost what was left of his job.
“How’re we doing here?” he asked Ham.
“Already running out of shit to hang this on.” Ham taped one end of string over a blood droplet the size and shape of a comma. “Okay, so where do I tape the other end? How about you move that floor lamp over here. Thanks. Set it right there. Perfect,” Ham said, taping the string to the lamp’s finial.
“You ought to quit your day job, Captain, and come work with us.”
“You would hate it,” Eggleston promised.
“You got that right. Nothing I hate more than wasting my time,” Marino said.
Stringing wasn’t a waste of time, but it was a nightmare of tedium unless one was fond of protractors and trigonometry and had an anal-retentive mind. The point was that each droplet of blood has its individual trajectory from the impact site, or wound, to a target surface such as a wall, and depending on velocity, distance traveled and angles, droplets have many shapes that tell a gory story.
Although these days computers could come up with the same results, the scene work required just as much time, and all of us who had testified in court had learned that jurors would rather see brightly colored string in a tangible, three-dimensional model than hatch lines on a chart.
But calculating the exact position of a victim when each blow was struck was superfluous unless inches mattered, and they didn’t matter here. I didn’t need measurements to tell me this was a homicide versus a suicide or that the killer had been enraged and frenzied and all over the place.
“We need to get her downtown,” I said to Marino. “Le
t’s get the squad up here.”
“I just can’t figure how he got in,” Ham said. “She’s a cop. You’d think she’d know better than to open the door to a stranger.”
“Assuming he was a stranger.”
“Hell, he’s the same damn maniac who killed the girl in the Quik Cary. Gotta be.”
“Dr. Scarpetta?” Harris’s voice came from the hall.
I turned around with a start. I’d thought he was gone.
“Where’s her gun? Has anybody found it?” Marino asked.
“Not so far.”
“Could I see you for a minute, please?” Harris asked me.
Marino threw Harris a dirty look and stepped into the bathroom, calling out a little too loudly, “You guys know to check the drains and pipes, right?”
“We’ll get there, boss.”
I joined Harris in the hall and he moved us away from the door where no one could hear what he had to say. Richmond’s police chief had surrendered to tragedy. Anger had turned to fear, and that, I suspected, was what he didn’t want his troops to see. His suit jacket was draped over an arm, his shirt collar open and tie loose. He was having a hard time breathing.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Asthma.”
“You have your inhaler?”
“Just used it.”
“Take it easy, Chief Harris,” I calmly said, because asthma could get dangerous fast and stress made everything worse.
“Look,” he said, “there’ve been rumors. That she was involved in certain activities in D.C. I didn’t know anything about it when I hired her. Where she gets her money,” he added, as if Diane Bray weren’t dead. “And I know Anderson follows her around like a puppy.”
“Maybe followed her when Bray didn’t know it, as well,” I said.
“We’ve got her in a patrol car,” he said, as if this were news to me.
“As a rule, it’s not my place to voice opinions about who’s guilty of murder,” I replied, “but I don’t think Anderson committed this one.”
He got out his inhaler again and took two puffs.
“Chief Harris, we’ve got a sadistic killer out there who murdered Kim Luong. The M.O. here is the same. It’s too unique to be someone else. There aren’t enough details known for it to be a copycat—many details are known only by Marino and me.”
The Body Farm Page 126