19
The morgue was located at the lowest level, where it was convenient for vans and rescue vehicles to park in the bay as they brought in the dead and took them away.
The smell of industrial deodorizer was heavy on the air in a silent passageway of abandoned gurneys. Behind locked doors they passed were stored skeletal remains and specimens of brains, and then the grim conveyance of a dull steel elevator that lifted bodies upstairs, where they could be looked at from behind glass. Scarpetta had a special sympathy for those whose last image of someone they loved was that. In every morgue she’d ever managed, glass was unbreakable, and viewing rooms were civilized, with hints of life such as prints of landscapes and real plants, and the bereft were never unchaperoned.
Dr. Lester led them to the decomp room, usually restricted to remains that were badly decomposed, radioactive, or infectious, and a faint, lingering stench reached out to Scarpetta as if a special brand of misery was inviting her inside. Most doctors weren’t eager to work in there.
“Is there a reason you’ve got this body in isolation?” she said. “If so, now would be a good time to let us know.”
Dr. Lester flipped a switch. Overhead lights flickered on, illuminating one stationary stainless-steel autopsy table, several surgical carts, and a gurney bearing a body covered by a disposable blue sheet. A large flat-screen monitor on a countertop was split into six quadrants that were filled with rotating video images of the building and the bay.
Scarpetta told Benton to wait in the corridor while she stepped into the adjoining locker room and retrieved face masks, shoe and hair covers, and gowns. She pulled purple nitrile gloves from a box as Dr. Lester explained she was keeping the body in the decomp room because its walk-in refrigerator happened to be empty at the moment. Scarpetta barely listened. There was no excuse for why she hadn’t bothered to roll the gurney a brief distance away into the autopsy suite, which was much less of a biohazard and had no odor.
The sheet rustled when Scarpetta pulled it back, exposing a pale body with the long torso, large head, and stunted limbs that were characteristic of achondroplasia. What she noticed immediately was the absence of body hair, including pubic hair. She suspected laser removal, which would have required a series of painful treatments, and this was consistent with what Oscar Bane had said about Terri’s phobias. She thought about the dermatologist he had mentioned.
“I’m assuming she came in like this,” Scarpetta said, repositioning one of the legs to get a better look. “That you didn’t shave her.”
She, of course, couldn’t repeat information Oscar had given to her, and her frustration was acute.
“I certainly didn’t,” Dr. Lester said. “I didn’t shave any part of her. There was no reason.”
“The police say anything about it? They find anything at the scene, find out anything from Oscar, maybe from witnesses, about her hair removal or any other procedures she might have been getting?”
“Only that they noticed it,” Dr. Lester said.
Scarpetta said, “So there was no mention of someone she may have gone to, an office where she got this done. A dermatologist, for example.”
“Mike did say something about that. I have the name written down. A woman doctor here in the city. He said he was going to call her.”
“He found out about this doctor how?” Benton asked.
“Bills inside the apartment. As I understand it, he carried out a lot of bills, mail, things like that, and started going through them. The usual things. And it goes without saying, that leads to another speculation, that the boyfriend’s a pedophile. Most men who want a woman to remove all her pubic hair are pedophiles. Practicing or not.”
“Do we know for a fact the hair removal was the boyfriend’s idea?” Benton said. “How do you know it wasn’t her idea, her preference?”
“It makes her look prepubescent,” Dr. Lester said.
“Nothing else about her looks prepubescent,” Benton said. “And pubic hair removal could also be about oral sex.”
Scarpetta moved a surgical lamp closer to the gurney. The Y incision ran from clavicle to clavicle, intersecting at the sternum, and ending at the pelvis, and had been sutured with heavy twine in a pattern that always reminded her of baseballs. She repositioned the head to get a better look at the face, and felt the sawed skull cap move beneath the scalp. Terri Bridges’s complexion was a dark dusky red, the petechiae florid, and when Scarpetta opened the eyelids, the sclera were solid red from hemorrhage.
She had not died mercifully or fast.
Ligature strangulation affects the arteries and veins that carry oxygenated blood to the brain and deoxygenated blood away. As the ligature had been tightened around Terri’s neck, occluding the veins that drain blood away, blood continued to flow into her head but had nowhere to go. Increasing pressure ruptured blood vessels, resulting in congestion and masses of tiny hemorrhages. The brain was starved of oxygen, and she died of cerebral hypoxia.
But not right away.
Scarpetta retrieved a hand lens and a ruler from a cart and studied abrasions on the neck. They were U-shaped, high under the jaw, and angled up behind her head, sharply up on either side of it, and she noted a subtle pattern of linear marks overlapping one another. Whatever was used to strangle her was smooth, with no distinct edges, and its width ranged from three-eighths to five-eighths of an inch. She had seen this before when the ligature was an article of clothing or some other elastic material that became narrower as it was pulled hard, and wider as it was released. She indicated for Benton to come closer.
“This looks more like a garroting,” she said to him.
She traced the partially abraded horizontal marks around the neck and where they stopped just behind the jawbones.
“The angle indicates her assailant was positioned behind and above her, and didn’t use a slipknot or some type of handle to twist the ligature tighter,” she said. “He held the ends of it and pulled back and up with force, and did so multiple times. Rather much like a car moving backwards and forwards when it’s stuck in the snow. It’s running over its own tracks, but not a perfect overlay, and you may or may not be able to count how many times this went on. Note the tremendous florid petechiae and congestion, also consistent with garroting.”
He looked through the lens, his gloved fingers touching the marks on the neck, moving it from one side to the other to get a better view. Scarpetta felt him against her as they looked on together, and she was distracted by an argument of odors and sensations. The chilly, unpleasant dead air contrasted palpably with the warmth of him, and she felt the tension of life in him as she continued to make her case that Terri Bridges had been garroted multiple times.
“Based on the marks I’m seeing—three times, at least,” she added.
Dr. Lester stood back from the other side of the gurney, her arms folded, her face uneasy.
“How long before she was unconscious each time he did it?” Benton asked.
“Could have occurred in as few as ten seconds,” Scarpetta replied. “Death would have followed in minutes unless the ligature was loosened, and that’s what I believe happened. The killer allowed her to regain consciousness, then strangled her into unconsciousness again, and repeated his routine until she could no longer survive it. Or perhaps he got tired of it.”
“Or possibly was interrupted,” Benton suggested.
“Maybe. But this repetitive ritual explains the profound congestion of her face, the abundance of pinpoint hemorrhages.”
“Sadism,” he said.
Dr. Lester stepped closer and said, “Or S-and-M that went too far.”
“Did you check her neck for fibers?” Scarpetta asked her. “Anything that might give us a clue as to the type of ligature we’re dealing with?”
“I recovered fibers from her hair and other areas of her body, sent them to the labs for trace evidence. No fibers from the abrasions on her neck.”
Scarpetta said, “I would expedite everything you can. This isn’t S-and-M gone bad. The reddish, dry deep furrows on her wrists indicate they were lashed together very tightly in a single loop with a binding that had sharp edges.”
“The flex-cuff will be checked for DNA.”
“These marks weren’t made by a flex-cuff,” Scarpetta said. “Flex-cuffs have rounded edges to prevent injury. I’m assuming you’ve already sent—”
Dr. Lester cut her off. “Everything went to the labs. Of course, the binding was brought here first. Mike showed it to me so I could correlate it with the furrows on her wrists and possibly with the marks around her neck, then he took it. But there are several photographs included in the ones I gave you.”
Scarpetta was disappointed. She wanted to see the actual binding, see if it reminded her of anything she’d ever come across before. She found the photographs, and the close-ups told her nothing more than the scene photographs had. The binding Oscar allegedly cut from Terri’s wrists was a colorless nylon strap exactly one-quarter of an inch wide, and twenty and one-half inches long from the pointed tip to the ratchet case lock. One side was scored, the other smooth, the edges sharp. There was no serial number or any other type of marking that might indicate a manufacturer.
“Looks like a cable tie of some sort,” Benton said.
“It’s definitely not a flex-cuff or PlastiCuff, anything that would be used as a type of handcuff,” Scarpetta said.
“Except a lot of cable ties are black,” Benton pondered as he looked at several photographs. “Anything that would be outdoors and could be degraded by UV is going to be black. Not clear or a light color.”
“Possibly a single-use bag tie of some sort,” Scarpetta speculated. “For indoors, since it’s colorless. But we’re talking a large, sturdy bag. This isn’t a typical trash-bag tie.”
She looked across the room at a biohazard waste bag, bright red with the universal symbol, attached to a stainless-steel holder next to a sink.
“Actually,” she said. “Where I have seen this type of tie is right there. For those.”
She pointed to the biohazard waste holder.
“Ours use a twist tie,” Dr. Lester snapped, as if Scarpetta was actually suggesting the binding used on Terri Bridges had come from the morgue.
“What’s important in this,” Scarpetta said, “is people into S-and-M generally don’t bind each other so tightly as to cut off circulation, and they aren’t likely to use sharp-edged straps or mechanical restraints that can’t be easily loosened or removed with a key. And this type of tie”—she indicated the photograph—“can never be loosened once it’s applied. It can only be pulled tighter. She would have been in pain. There was no way to free her without forcing a knife or some other sharp instrument under the ligature. And you can see a small cut here by her left wrist bone. That might be how it happened. Could be from the kitchen scissors, if it’s true that’s what was used. Was there any blood on her body when she was brought in, besides blood from the injuries on her legs?”
“No.” Dr. Lester’s dark eyes stared at her.
“Well, if she was dead when the binding was removed and that’s when she was cut, she wouldn’t have bled, or at least not much,” Scarpetta said. “This was no game. There was too much pain for this to be a game.”
“Seems to me pain is the point of S-and-M.”
“No pleasure was derived from this pain,” Scarpetta said. “Except by the person inflicting it.”
The title page belonged to a revision dated about three weeks ago, December 10.
“A really big file that we’re far from completely recovering yet,” Lucy said. “But this partial chapter gives you the picture.”
She had spooled it into a text file, and Berger began reading to Lucy’s tap-taps of the down-arrow key:
. . . While I’ve got my hands in a dead body, I imagine how I
could have killed the person better. With all I know? Of course I
could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues
and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with
scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or
mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!
I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.
Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish
whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.
Never heard of either.
Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish
whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars.
And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and
costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.
How can you afford to drink such expensive
whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so
many people losing their homes and unable to fill their
cars with gas?
My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill
your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the
finer labels—whether it’s a Château Pétrus, a single-malt
whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to
your liver and brain.
So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t
as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve
never heard.
How many human livers and brains have you seen and
sectioned?
How about some other examples from the dark
side? What else do you say behind the scenes,
especially when you’re with your colleagues?
We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us
secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess
Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the
case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I
want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the
severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through
the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by
Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial.
Hell, I would have loved to have done his autopsy after he was
executed.
Share some sensational cases you have worked.
I’ve been fortunate to have a number of them. For example,
lightning strikes, where nobody else could figure out the cause of
death, because you’ve got this body lying in a field, her clothes
ripped off and scattered. First thought? Sexual assault. But no
sign of injury at autopsy. Dead giveaways, excuse the pun? The
branching pattern known as the Lichtenberg figures or electrical
treeing. Or if the person was wearing anything ferrous, such as
a steel belt buckle, it would have become magnetized, or the
wristwatch might have stopped at the time of death—I always
check for things like that. Most medical examiners don’t because
they’re inexperienced or naïve or just not very good at what
they do.
You don’t sound as compassionate as I expected.
Let’s face it. Dead is dead. I can show all the empathy in the
world and move any jury to tears. But do I really feel that my
heart has been snatched out of my chest when the latest
tragedy’s rolled in? Do I really care when the cops make
comments that the public never hears?
Such as?
Typically, comments with sexual overtones. The size of the
deceased’s penis—especially if it’s small or huge. The size of the
deceased’s breasts—especially if they’re what I’d call centerfold
material. I know plenty of medical examiners who take souvenirs.
Trophies. An artificial hip from someone famous. A tooth. A
breast implant, and it’s always the men who want those. (Don’t
ask me what they do with them, but they’re usually within easy
reach.) A penile implant—those are amusing.
Have you ever kept a souvenir?
Only one. This was twenty years ago, a case early in my
career, serial murders in Richmond, where I was the brand-new
chief. But the trophy wasn’t from a dead body. It was from
Benton Wesley. The first time we met was in my conference
room. When he left, I kept his coffee cup. You know, one of
these tall Styrofoam cups from a 7-Eleven? I was totally in lust
with him the first minute I saw him.
What did you do with his coffee cup?
I took it home with me and ran my tongue along the rim of it,
as if by tasting it, I was tasting him.
But you didn’t actually sleep with him until, what?
About five years later?
That’s what everybody thinks. But that’s not what really
happened. I called him after that first meeting and invited him
over for a drink—allegedly so we could continue discussing the
cases in private, and the instant my front door shut behind us,
we were all over each other.
Who started it?
I seduced him. That made it less of a moral struggle for him.
He was married. I was divorced and not seeing anyone. His poor
wife. Benton and I had been lovers for almost five years before
he finally admitted it to her, feigning that his adultery had just
begun because their marriage had gotten stale, lifeless.
And nobody knew? Pete Marino? Lucy? Your
secretary, Rose?
I’ve always wondered if Rose suspected it. Just something
about the way she’d act when Benton would show up for yet
another case discussion, or when I was on my way to Quantico
for yet another consultation. She died of cancer last summer. So
you can’t ask her.
Doesn’t sound as if working with the dead makes
you sexually inhibited.
Quite the opposite. When you’ve explored every inch of the
human body so many times that you haven’t the least bit of self-consciousness or revulsion about it, there isn’t anything out of
bounds sexually, and there’s plenty of experimentation to be had. . . .
“Can you forward this to Kay?” Berger said when the section of text abruptly stopped. “So when she gets a chance, maybe she can give it her attention. Maybe she’ll have thoughts, insights we don’t.”
“Supposedly from one of the interviews this past Thanksgiving,” Lucy said. “Which I know she didn’t give. Not that she’d ever talk like this to anyone.”
“I’m noticing a creative use of fonts. Your opinion?”
“The writer, Terri or whoever, does a lot with fonts,” Lucy agreed.
She was doing her best to be calm, but she was outraged. Berger sensed it, and she was waiting. In the past, Lucy’s anger was something to be feared.
“And in my opinion, there’s symbolism involved,” Lucy was saying. “In this phony interview, for example, when Terri’s asking questions, I’m going to say it’s Terri, the font is Franklin Gothic and it’s in bold. Arial in smaller type for my aunt’s phony answers.”
“Then symbolically, Terri has superseded Kay in importance,” Berger said.
“It’s worse than that. For your purists in the word-processing world, Arial has a very bad rep.” Lucy studied text as she talked. “It’s been called homely, common, lacking in character, and is considered a shameless imposter. There are plenty of articles about it.”
She avoided Berger’s eyes.
“An imposter?” Berger prodded her. “As in plagiarism, copyright violation? What are you talking about?”
“It’s considered a rip-off of Helvetica, which was developed in the nineteen-fifties and became one of the most popular typefaces in the world,” Lucy said. “To the untrained eye, there’s no difference between Helvetica and Arial. But to a purist, a professional printer or print designer, Arial’s a parasite. The irony? Some young designers think Helvetica is based on Arial instead of the other way around. Do you see the significance symbolically? Because it’s scary, at least to me.”
“Of course I see it,” Berger said. “It could suggest that Terri and Kay have switched places in terms of their being world-renowned forensic experts. Rather much what Mark David Chap-man did before he killed John Lennon. He was wearing a name tag with Lennon’s name on it. Rather much what Sirhan Sirhan did when he allegedly made the comment that by assassinating Bobby Kennedy, he’d become more famous.”
“The change in fonts is a progression,” Lucy said. “The more recent the drafts, the more pronounced it is, the prominence of Terri’s name and an implied negativity toward my aunt.”
“A change that suggests Terri’s emotional attachment to Kay was turning hostile, dismissive. I should say the author. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll keep saying Terri,” Berger speculated. “Rather much what happened between Kay and Marino, now that I think of it. He worshipped her. Then wanted to destroy her.”
“It’s not that simple, and it’s not the same,” Lucy said. “Marino had a reason to be in love with my aunt. He knew her. Terri didn’t have a reason to feel anything about her. It was delusional.”
“We’re assuming she was an aficionado of typefaces. Let’s go back to that,” Berger said, continuing her assessment.
Lucy was different—genuinely so. Fiery, yes. But not reactive the way she used to be, and in Berger’s opinion, Lucy used to teeter on the edge of violence. That used to be her default, and it had made her completely unsafe.
“I definitely think she was well versed in fonts,” Lucy said. “She uses different ones for footnotes, the bibliography, chapter headings, table of contents. Most people don’t do that when they’re writing a thesis. They might change point size and use italics but not all this artsy use of fonts. In fact, the most common typeface is usually the default on a number of word-processing packages, including the one Terri was using. For the most part, the actual text is in Times New Roman.”
“Examples,” Berger said, writing on her legal pad. “What fonts does she use, and for what and why? Theoretically.”
“For footnotes, Palatino Linotype, which is highly legible both on a computer screen and when printed. For the bibliography, Bookman Old Style. Also legible. Chapter headings, she picked MS Reference Sans Serif, which is typically used in headlines. Again, it’s rare to find this many different typefaces, especially in an academic paper. What it suggests to me is her writing was highly personalized. It wasn’t just about the writing.”
Berger looked at her for a long moment.
“How the hell do you know all this off the top of your head?” she said. “Fonts? I never even pay attention to them. I can’t even tell you what font I use when I’m writing my briefs.”
“You use the same default for text that Terri did. Times New Roman, designed for the London Times. A typeface that’s narrow, so it’s economical, but very readable. I saw printouts on your desk when I was in your office earlier today. In forensic computer work, what seems the most trivial detail might be significant.”
“Which may be the case here.”
“I can tell you this much with certainty,” Lucy said. “These different fonts were deliberate choices, because she had to select them. Now whether she attached symbolism to them in terms of how she felt about herself or someone else, such as my aunt? Don’t know. But my opinion? The whole thing is sick, and it was well on its way to becoming sicker. If Terri really is the author and she were still around, I would consider her dangerous to my aunt. Maybe even physically dangerous. At the very least, she’s defaming someone she never even met.”
“Kay would have to prove it was untrue. And how would she prove that the anecdote about the coffee cup isn’t true, for example? How do you know it isn’t true?”
“Because she would never do anything like that.”
“I don’t believe you’re in a position to know what Kay does in private,” Berger said.
“Of course I’m in a position to know.” Lucy met her eyes. “So are you. Ask anyone if she’s ever made fun of dead bodies or allowed anyone else to. Ask anyone who’s ever been in the morgue with her or at a crime scene if she enjoys gruesome cases and wishes she’d autopsied people like Ted Bundy. I hope this doesn’t all come out in court.”
“I was talking about the coffee cup. Why does it disturb you to imagine Kay as a sexual person? Have you ever allowed her to be human? Or is she the perfect mother, or worse, one who isn’t perfect enough?”
“I admit I used to have a problem with that, competing for her attention, not allowing her to have flaws or real feelings,” Lucy said. “I was a tyrant.”
“No more?”
“Maybe Marino was the final radiation, the last dose of chemo. Unintentionally, he cured something somewhat malignant in me, and actually, my aunt and I are better off. I realized she has a life quite apart from mine, and that’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s better. It’s not that I didn’t know it before. But in retrospect, I didn’t feel it. And now she’s married. If Marino hadn’t done what he did, I don’t think Benton would have gotten around to getting married.”
“You act as if the decision was his alone. She had no input?” Berger studied her.
“She’s always let him be what he is. She would have continued to. She loves him. She probably couldn’t be with anybody else, in truth, because there are three things she can’t abide and won’t tolerate. Being controlled, betrayed, or bored. Any one of them, and she’d rather be alone.”
“Sounds like a few other suspects I know,” Berger said.
“Probably true,” Lucy said.
“Well,” Berger said, returning her attention to what was on the computer screen. “Unfortunately, what’s on these laptops is evidence, and people involved in the case will read it. And yes, it could become public.”
“It would destroy her.”
“It won’t destroy her,” Berger said. “But we’ve got to find out where this information came from. I don’t think it was fabricated from whole cloth. Terri, or whoever wrote this, knows too much. Benton and Kay’s first meeting in Richmond twenty years ago, for example.”
“They didn’t start their affair then.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I was staying in her house that summer,” Lucy said. “Benton never came over, not once. And when she wasn’t at the office or at a scene, she was with me. I was a screwed-up pudgy little brat, mad as hell and desperate for her attention. In other words, just looking to get into trouble, and not in a position to really understand that the kind of trouble she dealt with caused people to end up raped and murdered. She didn’t run around and leave me alone, not for a minute, not with a serial killer terrorizing the city. I never saw a Seven-Eleven coffee cup, just so you know.”
“It means nothing that you didn’t see one,” Berger said. “Why would she show it to you, much less explain why she’d carried it home from her office conference room?”
“She wouldn’t have,” Lucy said. “But I’m sort of sorry I didn’t see one. She was really all alone back then.”