Point of Origin

'Dr Scarpetta, we just got another case. Possible homicide,' a resident said loudly as he hung up a phone that was designated for clean hands.

'We may have to hold it until tomorrow,' I responded as our work load worsened.

'We've got the gun from the murder-suicide,' one of my assistant chiefs called out.

'Unloaded?' I answered back.

'Yeah.'

I walked over to make sure, for I never made assumptions when firearms came in with bodies. The dead man was big and still dressed in Faded Glory jeans, the pockets turned inside out by police. Potential gunshot residue on his hands was protected by brown paper bags, and blood trickled from his nose when a wooden block was placed beneath his head.

'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.'