I dug in my satchel and got out my portable phone and called Fielding.
"Her body just got here," he told me. "Do you want me to start on her?"
"No," I said. "Do you know where Chuck is?"
"He didn't come in."
"I just bet he didn't," I 'said. "And if he does, sit him in your office and don't let him go anywhere."
41
At not quite 2:00 P.m. I pulled into the enclosed bay and parked out of the weather as two funeral home attendants loaded a pouched body into an old-model black hearse with blinds over the windows in back.
"Good afternoon," I said.
"Yes, ma'am. How are you?"
"Who you got here?" I asked.
"The construction worker from Petersburg."
They shut the tailgate and peeled off latex gloves.
"One who got hit by that train," they went on, both talking at once. "Can't imagine that. Not the way I want to go. You have a nice day."
I used my card to unlock a side door and entered the well-lit corridor, where the floor was finished in biohazard epoxy and all activity was monitored by.closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the walls. Rose was irritably pushing the Diet Coke button on the drink machine when I walked into the break room in search of coffee.
"Damnation;" she blurted out. "I thought we'd gotten it fixed."
She worked the change return in vain.
"Well, it's doing the same damn thing. Doesn't anybody do anything right anymore?" she complained away. "Do this, do that and still nothing works, just like state employees."
She exhaled a loud, frustrated breath.
"Everything's going to be all right," I said with no conviction. "It's okay, Rose."
"I wish you could get some rest," Rose sighed.
"I wish we all could."
Staff mugs were hung on a peg board next to the coffee machine, and I looked for mine with no success.
"Try your bathroom, on the sink, that's where you usually leave it," Rose said. The reminder of the mundane minutiae of our normal. worlds was a welcome relief, no matter how brief it might be.
"Chuck won't be back," I said. "He's going to be arrested, if he hasn't already been."
"The police have already been here. I won't be shedding any tears."
"I'll be in the morgue. You know what I'll be doing, so no phone calls unless it's urgent," I told her.
"Lucy called. She's picking up Jo tonight."
"I wish you'd come stay with me, Rose."
"Thank you. I need to stay put."
"It would make me feel better if you came home with me: " 'Dr. Scarpetta, if it's not him, it's always someone, isn't it? Always someone evil out there. I have to live my life. I can't be held hostage by fear and old age."
In the locker room, I changed into a plastic apron and surgical gown. My fingers were clumsy with ties and I kept dropping things. I felt chilled and achy, as if I were coming down with the flu. I was grateful I could suit up in a face shield, mask, cap, booties, layers of gloves, and all that protected me from biological hazards and my emotions. I wanted no one to see me now. It was bad enough that Rose had.
Fielding was photographing Bray's body when I walked into the autopsy room, where my two assistant chiefs and three residents were working on new cases because the day kept bringing in the dead. There was then the noise of running water and steel instruments against steel, muted voices and sounds. The telephones wouldn't stop ringing.
There was no color in this steel place except the hues of death. Contusions and suffusion were purple-blue and livor mortis was pink. Blood was bright against the yellow of fat. Chest cavities were open like tulips and organs were in scales and on cutting boards, the smell of decay strong this day.
Two other cases were juveniles, one Hispanic, one white, both of them etched with crude tattoos and stabbed multiple times. Their faces of hate and anger were relaxed into those of the boys they might have been had life landed them on a different doorstep, perhaps with different genes. A gang had been their family, the street their home. They had died the way they lived.
"… deep penetration. Four inches over the left lateral back, through twelfth rib and- aorta, over a liter of blood in left and right chest cavity," Dan Chong was dictating into the microphone clipped to his scrubs as Amy Forbes worked across the table from him.
"Did he hemoaspirate?"
"Very minimally."
"And an abrasion on the left arm. Maybe from the terminal fall? Did I tell you I'm learning to scuba dive?"
"Huh. Good luck around here. Wait until you do your open water dive in the quarry. That's real fun. Especially in winter."
"God," Fielding said. "Je-sus Christ."
He was spreading open the body bag and bloody sheet inside it. I went to him and felt the shock all over again as we freed her from her wrappings:
"Jesus Christ," Fielding kept saying under his breath.
We lifted her onto the table and she stubbornly resumed the same position she'd had on the bed. We broke the rigor mortis in her arms and legs, relaxing those rigid muscles.
"What the fuck's wrong with people?" Fielding loaded film into a camera.
"Same thing that's always been wrong with them:' l said.
We lock-attached her transportable autopsy table to one of the wall-mounted dissecting sinks. For a moment, all work in the room stopped as the other doctors came over to look. They couldn't help themselves.
"Oh, my God;" Chong muttered.
Forbes could not speak as she stared in shock.
"Please," I said, searching their faces. "This is not a demo autopsy and Fielding and I will handle it."
I began going over the body with a lens, collecting more of that long, fine hellish hair.
"He doesn't care," I said. "He doesn't care if we know all about him."
"You think he knows you went to Paris?"
"I don't know how," I said. "But I suppose he could be in touch with his family. Hell, they probably know everything."
I envisioned their big house and its chandeliers and myself scooping water out of the Seine in possibly the very spot where the killer waded in to cure his affliction. I thought of Dr. Stvan and hoped she was safe.
"He's got a dusky brain, too." Chong had gotten back tohis own work in progress.
"Yeah, so does the other one. Heroin again, maybe. 'Fourth case in six weeks, all in the city."
"Must be some good stuff going around. Dr. Scarpetta?" Chong called over to me as if this were any other afternoon, and I was working any other case. "Same tattoo, tike a homemade rectangle. In the web of the left hand, must of hurt like hell. Same gang?"
"Photograph it," I said.
There were distinctive pattern injuries, especially on Bray's forehead and left cheek, where the crushing force of the blows had lacerated the skin and. left striated impact abrasions that I had seen before.
"Possibly the threads of a pipe?" Fielding ventured.
"It doesn't quite fit a pipe," I answered.
The external examination of Bray took two more hours as Fielding and I meticulously, measured, drew and photographed every wound. Her facial bones were crushed, the flesh lacerated over bony prominences. Her teeth were broken. Some were knocked out with such force they were halfway down her throat. Her lips, ears and the flesh of her chin were avulsed off the bone, and X rays revealed hundreds of fractures and punched-out areas in bone, especially the bone table of the skull.
I was taking a- shower at 7:00 P.m., and the water running off of me was pale red because I had gotten so bloody. I felt weak and light-headed, because I hadn't eaten since early morning. There was no one left in the office but me. I walked out of the locker room drying my hair with a towel, and Marino suddenly emerged from my office. I almost screamed. I placed a hand on my chest as adrenaline shocked me.