Black Notice

38

Concorde flight 2 left Charles de Gaulle airport at eleven and arrived in New York at 8:45 A.M., Eastern Standard time, which was before we'd left; in a sense. I walked into my house mid-afternoon terribly out of, sorts, my body confused about time, my emotions screaming. The weather was getting bad, with predictions of freezing rain and sleet again, and I had errands to run. Marino went home. He had that big truck, after all.

Ukrops grocery store was mobbed because whenever sleet or snow was predicted, Richmonders lost their minds. They envisioned starving to death or having nothing to drink, and by the time I got to the bread section, there wasn't a single loaf left. There was no turkey or ham in the deli. I bought whatever I could, because I expected Lucy to stay with me for a while.

I headed home a little past six and didn't have the energy to negotiate a peace settlement with my garage. So I parked my car out front. Wispy white clouds over the moon looked exactly like a skull, then shifted and were formless, rushing on as the wind blew harder,'trees shivering and whispering. I felt achy and woozy as if I might be getting sick, and I got increasingly worried when once again Lucy didn't call or come home.

I assumed she was at MCV, but when I contacted the Orthopedic Unit, I was told she hadn't been there since yesterday morning. I began to get frantic. I paced the great room and thought hard. It was almost ten o'clock when I got back in my car and drove toward downtown, tension stringing me so tight I thought I might snap.

I knew it was possible Lucy had gone on to D.C., but I couldn't imagine her doing that without at least leaving me a note. Whenever she disappeared without a word, it never meant anything good. I turned off on the Ninth Street exit and drove through downtown's vacant streets and wandered through several levels of the hospital's parking deck before I found a space. I grabbed a lab coat off the backseat of my car.

The orthopedic unit was in the new hospital, on the second floor, and when I got to the room I slipped my lab coat on and opened the door. A couple I assumed was Jo's parents were inside, sitting by the bed, and I walked over to them. Jo's head was bandaged, her leg in traction, but she was awake and her eyes immediately fixed on me.

"Mr. and Mrs. Sanders?" I said. "I'm Dr. Scarpetta."

If my name meant anything to them, they didn't acknowledge it, but Mr. Sanders politely stood and shook my hand.

"Nice to meet you," he said.

He wasn't at all what I'd envisioned. I suppoqed after Jo's description of her parents' rigid attitudes, I expected stern faces and eyes that judged everything they saw. But Mr. and Mrs. Sanders were overweight and frumpy, not formidablelooking in the least. They were very polite, even shy, as I asked them about their daughter. Jo continued to stare at me, a look in her eyes that called out to me to help.

"Would you mind if I speak to the patient in private for a moment?" I asked them.

"That would be fine," Mrs. Sanders said.

"Now, Jo, you do what the doctor says;" Mr. Sanders told his daughter in a dispirited way.

They went out and the instant I shut the door, Jo's eyes filled with tears. I bent over and kissed her week.

"You've had all of us worried sick," I said.

"How's Lucy?" she whispered as sobs began to shake her and tears flowed.

I placed tissues in a hand that was tethered by IV tubes.

"I don't know. I don't know where she is, Jo. Your parents told her you didn't want to see her and..:'

Jo started shaking her head.

"I knew they'd do that," she said in a dark, depressed tone. "I knew they would. They told me she didn't want to see me. She was too upset, because of what happened. I didn't believe them. I know she would never do something like that. But they ran her off and now she's gone. And maybe she believes what they said."

"She feels what happened to you is her fault," I said. "It's very possible the bullet in your leg came from her gun:"

"Please bring her to me. Please."

"Do you have any idea where she might be?" I asked. "Is there any place she might go when she's upset like this? Maybe back to Miami?"

"I'm sure she wouldn't go there."

I sat down in a chair by the bed and blew out a long, exhausted breath.

"A hotel maybe?" I asked. "A friend?"

"Maybe New York;" Jo said. "There's a bar in Greenwich Village. Rubyfruit."

"You think she went to New York?" I asked, dismayed.

"The owner's name is Ann, a former cop;" her voice shook. "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. She scares me when she runs away. She doesn't think right when she gets like that."

"I know. And with all that's gone on, she can't be thinking right anyway. Jo, you should be getting out of here in another day or so if you behave," I said with a smile. "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't want to go home. You'll find her, won't you?"

"Would you like to stay with me?" I asked.

"My parents aren't bad people," she muttered as morphine dripped. "They don't understand. They think… Why is it wrong…?"

"It's not," I said. "Love is never wrong."

I left the room as she drifted.

Her parents were outside the door. Both looked exhausted and sad.

"How is she?" Mr. Sanders asked.

"Not too well," I said.

Mrs. Sanders began to cry.

"You have a right to believe the way you do," I said. "But preventing Lucy and Jo from seeing each other is the last thing your daughter needs right now. She doesn't need more fear and depression. She doesn't need to lose her will to live, Mr. and Mrs. Sanders."

Neither of them replied.

"I'm Lucy's aunt," I said.

"She's about back in this world anyway, I guess," Mr. Sanders said.. "Can't keep anybody from her. We were just trying to do what's best:' "Jo knows that," I replied. "She loves you."

They didn't say good-bye but watched me as I got on the elevator. I called Rubyfruit the minute I got -home and asked for Ann over the loud noise of voices and a band.

"She's not in great shape," Ann said to me, and I knew what that meant.

"Will you take care of her?" I asked.

"I already am," she said. "Hold on. Let me get her."

"I saw Jo," I said when Lucy got on the phone.

"Oh," was all. she said, and it was obvious from one word that she was drunk.

"Lucy!"

"I don't want to talk right now," she said.

"Jo loves you," I said. "Come home."

"Then what do I do?"

"We bring her to my house from the hospital and you take care of her," I said. "That's what you do."

I barely slept. At 2:00 A.M. I finally got up and went into the kitchen to fix a cup of herbal tea. It was still raining hard, water running off the roof and splashing on the patio, and I couldn't seem to get warm. I thought about the swabs and hair and photographs of bite marks locked inside my briefcase, and it almost seemed the killer was inside my house.

I could feel his presence, as if those parts of him emanated evil. I thought about the awful irony. Interpol summoned me to France and after all was said and done, the only legal evidence I had was an Advil bottle filled with water and silt from the Seine.

When it got to be 3:00 A.M., I sat up in bed writing draft after draft of a letter to Talley. Nothing sounded right. I was frightened by how much I missed him and what I had done to him. Now he was striking back and it was exactly what I deserved..

I crumpled another sheet of stationery and looked at the phone. I calculated what time it was in Lyon and imagined him at his desk in one of his fine suits. I thought of him on the phone and in meetings or maybe escorting someone else around and not giving me a thought. I thought of his hard, smooth body and I wondered where he had learned to be such a lover.

I. went on to work. When it was almost two in the afternoon in France, I decided to call Interpol.

"… Bonjour, hello…"

"Jay Talley, please," I said.

I was transferred.

"HIDTA," a man answered.

I paused, confused. "Is this Jay Talley's extension?"

"Who is this?"

I told him..

"He's not here," the man said.

Fear shot through me. I didn't believe him.

"And to whom am I speaking?" I inquired.

"Agent Wilson. I'm the FBI liaison. We didn't meet the other day. Jay's out."

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

"I'm not really sure." - "I see," I said. "Is it possible for me to reach him? Or can you ask him to call me?"

I knew I sounded nervous.

"I really don't know where he is," he replied. "But if he checks in, I'll let him know you called. Is there something I can help you with?"

"No," I said.

I hung up and felt panicky. I was certain Talley didn't want any contact with me and had instructed people that if I called, he wasn't there.

"Oh, God, oh, God," I whispered as I walked past Rose's desk. "What have I done?"

"Are you talking to me?" She looked up from her keyboard, peering at me over her glasses. "Did you lose something again?"

"Yes," I said.

At half past eight, I walked into the staff meeting and took my usual place at the head of the table.

"What have we got?" I asked.

"Black female, thirty-two years old, from Albemarle County," Chong began. "Ran off the road and flipped her car. Apparently she just veered off the road and lost control. She has a fracture of the right leg, a basilar skull fracture, and the M.E. for Albemarle County, Dr. Richards, wants to us to do a post." He looked up at me. "I'm just wondering why? Her cause and manner seem pretty clear."

"Because the code says we supply services to the local M.E.," I replied. "They ask, we do it. We can take an hour to post her now, or we can take ten hours later on to sort it out if there's a problem."

"Next is an eighty-year-old white female last seen yesterday morning around nine A.m. Her boyfriend found her last night at six-thirty…"

I had to work very hard not to tune in and out.

"… no known drug abuse or foul play," Chong droned уn. "Nitroglycerin present at scene."

Talley made love as if he were starving. I couldn't believe I was having erotic thoughts in the middle of a staff meeting.

"She needs a look-see for injury, and toxicology," Fielding was saying. "Needs a view."

"Anybody know what I'm teaching at the Institute next week?" toxicologist Tim Cooper asked.

"Toxicology, probably."

"Really." Cooper sighed "I need a secretary."

"I've got three court appearances today;" Assistant Chief Riley was saying. "Which is, impossible since they're all over the place."

The door opened and Roae stuck her head inside and motioned to me to come out into the hall.

"Larry Posner's got to leave in a little while," she said. "And he's wondering if you could stop by his lab right now?"

"On my way," I said.

When I walked in, he was making a permanent slide, using a pipette to touch a drop of Cargille melt mount on the edge of a cover slip while other slides warned up on a hot plate.

"I don't know if it adds up to much," he said right off. "Take a look in the scope. Diatoms from your un-I.D: d guy. Keep in mind the only thing an individual diatom will tell you, with rare exception, is if it's saltwater, brackish or fresh."

I peered into the lens at little organisms that looked as if they were made of clear glass, in all sorts of shapes that brought to mind boats, chains and zigzags and slivered moons and tiger stripes and crosses and even stacks of poker chips. There were pieces and parts that reminded me of confetti and grains of sand and other particles of different colors that probably were minerals.

Posner removed the slide from the stage and replaced it with another.

"The sample you brought back from the Seine," he said. "Cymbella, Melosira, Navicula, Fragilaria. On and уn. Common as dust. All freshwater, so at least that's good, but they really tell us nothing in and of themselves."

I leaned back in the chair and looked at him.

"You ordered me here to tell me that?" I said, disappointed.

"Well, I'm no Robert McLaughlin," he dryly said, referring to the world-renowned diatomist who had trained him.

He leaned over the microscope and adjusted the magnification to 1000X and began moving slides around.

"And no, I didn't ask you to drop by for nothing," he went on. "Where we lucked out is in the frequency of occurrence of each species in the flora."

Flora was a botanical listing of plants by species, or in this case, diatoms by species.

"Fifty-one percent occurrence of Melosira, fifteen percent occurrence of Fragilaria. I won't bore you with all of it, but the samples are very consistent with each other. So much so, actually, I would almost call them identical, which I find rather miraculous, since the flora where you, dipped in your Advil bottle might be totally different a hundred feet away."

It chilled me to think of he Saint-Louis's shore, of the stories of the nude man swimming after dark so close tу the Chandonne house. I imagined him dressing without showering or drying off, and transferring diatoms to the inside of his clothes.

"If he swims in the Seine and these diatoms are all over his clothes," I said, "he isn't washing off before he dresses. What about Kim Luong's body?"

"Definitely not the same flora as the Seine," Posner said. "But I did take a sample of water from the James River, close to where you live, as a matter of fact. Again, nearly the same frequency distribution."

"Flora on her body and flora in the James, consistent with each other?" I had to make sure.

"One question I do have is whether diatoms from the James are going to be everywhere around here," Posner said.

"Well, let's see," I said.

I got Q-tips and swabbed my forearm, my hair and the bottoms of my shoes, and Posner made more slides. There wasn't a single diatom.

"In tap water maybe?" I asked.

Posner shook his head.

"So they shouldn't be all over a person, I wouldn't think, unless that person has been in the river, lake, ocean..:'

I paused as an odd thought came to me.

"The Dead Sea, the Jordan River," I said.

"What?" Posner asked, baffled.

"The spring at Lourdes," I said, getting more excited. "The Sacred River. Ganges, all believed to be places of miracles where the blind, the lame and the paralyzed could enter the water to be healed."

"He's swimming in the James this time of year?" Posner said. "The guy must be nuts."

"There's no cure for hypertrichosis," I said.

"What the hell's that?"

"A horrible, extremely rare disorder, hair all over your body when you're bone. A baby-fine hair that can get up to six, seven, nine inches long. Among other anomalies."

"Ehhh!"

"Maybe he bathed nude in the Seine hoping he might be miraculously healed. Maybe now he's doing the same thing in the James," I said.

"Jesus!" Posner said. "Now that's a creepy thought."

When I returned to my office, Marino was sitting in a chair by my desk.

"You look like you been up all night," he said to me, slurping coffee.

"Lucy ran off to New York. I talked to Jo and her parents."

"Lucy did what?"

"She's on her way back. It's all right."

"Well, she'd better mind her p's and q's. This ain't a good time for her to be acting squirrelly."

"Marino," I quickly said, "it's possible the killer bathes in rivers with some notion it might cure his disorder. I'm wondering if he's staying someplace near the James."

He thought about this for a minute, an odd expression spreading over his face. Running footsteps sounded in the hall.

"Let's hope there ain't some old estate along there where the owner ain't been heard from for a while," Marino said. "I have a bad feeling."

Then Fielding was in my office yelling at Marino.

"What the hell's wrong with you!"

Veins and arteries were bulging in Fielding's neck, his face bright red. I'd never heard him raise his voice to anyone.

"You let the fucking press find out before we can even get to the goddamn scene!" he accused.

"Hey," Marino said. "Calm down. Let the fucking press know what?"

"Diane Bray's been murdered," Fielding said. "It's all over the news. They've got a suspect in custody. Detective Anderson."

39It was very overcast and rain had begun to fall when we reached Windsor Farms, and it seemed bizarre to be driving the office's black Suburban past Georgian brick and Tudor homes on gracious acres beneath old trees.

I'd never known my neighbors to worry much about crime. It seemed that old family money and genteel streets with English names had created a fortress of false security. I had no doubt that was about to change.

Diane Bray's address was at the outer limits of the neighborhood, where the Downtown Expressway ran loudly and continuously on the other side of a brick wall. When I turned onto her narrow street, I was dismayed. Reporters were everywhere. Their cars and television trucks blocked traffic and outnumbered police vehicles three to one in front of a white Cape Cod with a gambrel roof that looked like it belonged in New England.

"This is as close as I can get," I said to Marino:

"We'll see about that," he replied, jerking up his door handle.

He got out in heavy rain and stalked over to a radio van that was halfway on the lawn in front of Bray's house. The driver rolled down his window and was foolish enough to poke his microphone Marino's way.

"Move!" Marino said with violence in his voice.

"Captain Marino, can you verify…?"

"Move your fucking van, now!"

Tires spun, clawing up grass and mud as the driver of the van pulled out. He stopped in the center of the street and Marino kicked the back tire.

"Move!" he ordered.

The van driver rolled away, windshield wipers flying. He' parked on someone's lawn two houses away. Rain whipped my face and strong gusts of wind pushed me like a hand as I got my scene case out of the back of the Suburban.

"I hope your latest act of graciousness doesn't make it on the air," I said when I reached Marino.

"Who the hell's working this thing?"

"I hope you are," I said, walking fast with head bent.

Marino grabbed my arm. A dark blue Ford Contour was parked in Bray's driveway. A patrol car was parked behind it, an officer in front, another in back with Anderson. She looked angry and hysterical, shaking her head and talking fast in words I couldn't hear.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" A television reporter headed toward me, the cameraman on his heels.

"Recognize our rental car?" Marino quietly said to me, water running down his face as he stared at the dark blue Ford with the familiar number RGG-7112 on the license plate.

"Dr. Scarpetta?"

"No comment."

Anderson didn't look at us as we walked past.

"Can you tell…?" Reporters were relentless.

"No," I said, hurrying up the front steps.

"Captain Marino, I understand the police were led here by a tip."

Rain smacked and engines rumbled. We ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape stretching from railing to railing. The door suddenly swung open and an officer named Butterfield let us in.

"Glad as hell to see you;" he said to both of us. "Thought you were on vacation," he added to Marino.

"Yeah. I got vacated, you're right."

We put on gloves, and Butterfield shut the door behind us. His face was tight, his attention going everywhere.

"Tell me about it," Marino said, eyes sweeping the foyer and zooming into the living room beyond.

"Got a nine-one-one call made from a phone booth not too far from here. We get here, and this is what we find. Someone beat the holy hell out of her;" Butterfield said.

"What else?" Marino asked.

"Sexual assault. Looks like robbery, too. Billfold on the floor, no money in it, everything in her purse dumped out. Watch where you step;" he added as if we didn't know better.

"Damn, she had big bucks, no kidding;" Marino marveled, looking around at the very expensive furnishings of Bray's very expensive home.

"You ain't seen nothing yet;" Butterfield replied.

What struck me first was the collection of clocks in the living room. There were wall clocks and hanging shelf clocks in rosewood, walnut and mahogany, and calendar and steeple clocks, and novelty clocks, all of them antique and perfectly synchronized. They tick-tocked loudly and would have driven me mad were I to live amidst their monotonous reminder of time.

She was fond of English antiques that were grand and unfriendly. A scroll-end sofa and a revolving bookcase with dummy leather book dividers faced the TV Placed here and there with no thought of company in mind, it seemed, were stiff armchairs with ornate upholstery and a satinwood pole-screen. A massive ebonized sideboard overpowered the room. The heavy gold damask draperies were drawn, and.cobwebs laced box-pleated valances. I saw no art, not a single sculpture or painting, and with every detail I took in, Bray's personality became colder and more overbearing. I liked her less. That was hard to acknowledge about someone who had just been beaten to death.

"Where did she get her money?" I asked.

"Got no idea," Marino answered.

"All of us been wondering that ever since she came here," Butterfield said. "You ever seen her car?"

"No,"- I replied.

"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 fingerpainting 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 Hams 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 Optivisor 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 matter, 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. "Let'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."

He struggled to breathe.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" I asked. "Do you want others to die like this? Because it will happen again. And soon. This guy's losing control at a lightning rate. Maybe because he left his safe haven in Paris and now he's like a hunted wild animal with no place to run? And he's enraged, desperate. Maybe he feels challenged and he's taunting us;" I added as I wondered what Benton would have said. "Who knows what goes on inside a mind like that."

Harris cleared his throat.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"A press release, and I mean now. We know he speaks French. He may have a congenital disorder that results in excessive hairiness. He may have long pale hair on his body. He may shave his entire face, neck and head, and have deformed dentition, widely spaced, small, pointed teeth. His face is probably going to look odd, too."

"Jesus Christ"

"Marino needs to handle this," I told him, as if it were my right to do so.

"What did you say? We're supposed to tell the public we're looking for some man with hair all over his body and pointed teeth? You want to start a panic like this city's never seen?" He couldn't catch his breath.

"Calm down. Please."

I put my fingers on his neck to check his pulse. It was running away with his life. I walked him into the living room and made him sit down. I brought him a glass of water and massaged his shoulders, talking quietly to him, gently coaxing him to be still, until he was soothed and breathing again.

"You don't need the pressure of this," I said. "Marino should be working these cases, not riding around in a uniform all night. God help you if he's not working these homicides. God help all of us."

Harris nodded. He got up and moved in slow steps back to the doorway.of that terrible scene. Marino was rooting around in the walk-in closet by now.

"Captain Marino," Harris said.

Marino stopped what he was doing and gave his chief a defiant look.

"You're in charge," Harris said to him. "Let me know if there's anything you need."

Marino's gloved hands went through a section of skirts.

"I want to talk to Anderson," he said.