I head down the hallway past the break room and find Washington George in the medical library. "I just have a minute," I tell him in a distracted way.
He is scanning books on a shelf, notepad down by his side like a gun he might use. "I heard a rumor," he says. "If you know it's true, maybe you can verify it. If you don't know, well, maybe you should. Buford Righter's not going to be the prosecutor in your special grand jury hearing."
"I know nothing about it," I reply, masking the indignation I always feel when the press knows details before I do. "But we've worked a lot of cases together," I add. "I wouldn't expect him to want to deal with this himself."
"I guess so, and what I understand is a special prosecutor has been appointed. That's the part I'm getting to. You aware of this?" He tries to read my face.
"No." I am trying to read his face, too, hoping to catch a foreshadowing that might prevent me from being broadsided.
"No one's indicated to you that Jaime Berger's been appointed to get you indicted, Dr. Scarpetta?" He stares me in the eye. "From what I understand, that's one of the reasons she came to town. You've been going through the Luong and Bray cases with her and all that, but I have it from a very good source it's a setup. She's been undercover, I guess you would say. Righter set it up before Chandonne allegedly showed up at your house. I understand Berger's been in the picture for weeks."
All I can think to say is, "Allegedly?" I am shocked,
"Well," Washington George says, "I assume by your reaction that you haven't heard any of this."
"I don't guess you can tell me who your reliable source is," I respond.
"Naw." He smiles a little, somewhat sheepishly. "So you can't confirm?"
"Of course I can't," I say as I gather my wits about me.
"Look, I'm going to keep digging, but I want you to know I like you and you've always been nice enough to me." He goes on. I am barely hearing a word of it. All I can think of is Berger spending hours with me in the dark, in her car, in my house, in Bray's house, and all along she was making mental notes to use against me in the special grand jury hearing. God, no wonder she seems to know so much about my life. She has probably been through my phone records, bank statements, credit reports and interviewed everyone who knows me. "Washington," I say, "I've got the mother of some poor person who just died, and I can't stand here and talk to you any longer." I walk off. I don't care if he thinks I am rude.
I cut through the ladies' room and in the changing area I put on a lab coat and slip paper covers over my shoes. The autopsy suite is full of sounds, every table occupied with the unfortunate. Jack Fielding is splashed with blood. He has already opened up Mrs. White's son and is inserting a syringe with a fourteen-gauge needle into the aorta to draw blood. Jack gives me a rather frantic, wild-eyed look when I walk over to his table. The morning news is all over his face.
"Later." I raise my hand before he can ask a question. "His mother's in my office." I indicate the body.
"Shit," Fielding says. "Shit is all I gotta say about this entire fucking world."
"She wants to see him." I take a rag from a bag on a gurney and wipe the boy's delicately pretty face. His hair is the color of hay and, except for his suffused face, his skin is like rose milk. He has fuzz on his upper lip and the first hint of pubic hair, his hormones just beginning to stir, preparing for an adult life he was not destined to have. A narrow, dark furrow around the neck angles up to the right ear where the rope was knotted. Otherwise, his strong, young body bears no evidence of violence, no hint that he should have had any reason in the world not to live. Suicides can be very challenging. Contrary to popular belief, people rarely leave notes. People don't al- ways talk about their feelings in life and sometimes their dead bodies don't have much to say, either.
"Goddamn," Jack mutters.
"What do we know about this?" I ask him.
"Just that he started acting weird at school right about Christmas." Jack picks up the hose and rinses out the chest cavity until it gleams like the inside of a tulip. "Dad died of lung cancer a few years ago." Water slaps. "That damn Stan-field, Jesus Christ. What we got out there? Some kind of special? Three fucking cases from him in four fucking weeks." Jack rinses off the bloc of organs. They shimmer in deep hues on the cutting board, waiting for their ultimate violation. "He keeps turning up like a fucking bad penny." Jack grabs a large surgical knife from the cart. "So this kid goes to church yesterday, comes home and hangs himself in the woods."
The more times Jack Fielding uses the word "fuck," the more upset he is. He is extremely upset. "What about Stan-field?" I ask darkly. "I thought he was quitting."
"I wish he would. The guy's an idiot. He calls about this case and guess what else? Apparently, he goes to the scene. The kid's hanging from a tree and Stanfield cuts him down."
I have a feeling I know what's coming.
"He cuts through the knot''
I was right. "He took photographs first, let's hope."
"Over there." He nods at the counter on the other side of the room.
I go to look at the photographs. They are painful. It appears Benny didn't even stop to change clothes when he came home from church, but went straight into the woods, threw a nylon rope over a tree branch, looped one end and threaded the other end through it. Then he made another loop with a simple slip knot and put it over his head. In the photographs, he is dressed in a navy blue suit and a white shirt. A red-and-blue-striped clip-on tie is on the ground, either dislodged by the rope or maybe he took it off first. He is kneeling, arms dangling by his sides, his head bent, a typical position for suicidal hangings. I don't have many cases where people are fully suspended, their feet off the ground. The point is to put enough compres- sion on the blood vessels of the neck so that insufficient oxygenated blood reaches the brain. It takes only 4.4 pounds of pressure to compress the jugular veins, and a little more than twice that to occlude the carotids. The weight of the head against the noose is enough. Unconsciousness is quick. Death takes minutes.
"Let's do this." I get back to Jack. "Cover him up. We'll put some plasticized sheets over him so blood won't soak through. And let's give his mother a viewing before you do anything else to him."
He takes a deep breath and tosses his scalpel back on the cart.
"I'll go talk to her and see what else we can find out." I walk off. "Buzz Rose when you're ready. Thanks, Jack." I pause to meet his eyes. "We'll talk later? We've never had that cup of coffee. We never even wished each other Merry Christmas."
I find Mrs. White in my conference room. She has stopped crying and is in a deep, depressed space, staring without blinking, lifeless. She barely focuses on me when I walk in and shut the door. I tell her I just looked at Benny and am going to give her a chance to see him in a few minutes. Her eyes fill with tears again and she wants to know if he suffered. I tell her he would have slipped into unconsciousness rapidly. She wants to know if he died because he couldn't breathe. I reply that we don't know all the answers right now, but it is unlikely that his airway was obstructed.
Benny may have died from hypoxic brain damage, but I am more inclined to suspect that the compression of blood vessels caused a vasovagal response. In other words, his heart slowed down and he died. When I mention he was kneeling, she suggests that maybe he was praying for the Lord to take him home. Maybe, I reply. He very well could have been praying. I comfort Mrs. White as best I can. She informs me