Chaos

CHAPTER 18

RUSTY AND HAROLD ARE THE CFC’s Odd Couple. My two top autopsy technicians are so different from each other they shouldn’t get along.

Rusty in his surf pants and hoodies looks like a hippy leftover from the golden era of tie-dye and Woodstock while Harold is a former Army man who eventually became a funeral-home director. He has thinning gray hair, a neat mustache, and lives in suits, single-button conservative ones in solid subdued shades of black and gray.

“How long are we talking about?” I look at what they have to assemble with nothing to guide them but flashlights. “Can we be up and running in twenty minutes max?”

“I think so.” Harold crouches, and then Rusty does, their headlamps flicking over the roller storage bags unzipped and spread open all around us.

Inside are folded aluminum frames, polyurethane-coated black sidewalls and an awning fabricated of heavy-duty black polyester. Still tied down on the trolleys are the requisite sandbags, ground stakes, the scene cases, the boxes of gloves, and the plastic-wrapped packages of disposable protective clothing.

Any additional supplies we might need including water and nonperishable food such as protein bars will be inside the big truck. And I plan to head that way soon. I need something to drink and to get out of the heat for even a few minutes. More importantly, I want to call Lucy, and I don’t intend for anyone to hear our conversation. I’m going to ask her about a twenty-three-year-old woman named Elisa Vandersteel whose driver’s license lists a London address. I want to see what Lucy can find out about her, and we need to start now.

It doesn’t matter that the identity isn’t certain. At the moment and after what I’ve seen so far, a confirmation will be little more than a formality. The rest of the story is a baffling mystery, as are other disturbing events that continue to unfold, and we should get started on any line of inquiry that might be helpful.

Who was Elisa Vandersteel? Why was she in the United States? What was she doing in Cambridge, and was riding her bicycle along the river at sunset a habit? If she did it routinely, then a stalker or some other dangerous person could know.

“I’m sorry to make this so inconvenient,” I explain. “But the thing we really have to worry about is up there, and I don’t mean God.” I point up, indicating the bridge, the surrounding buildings, and also news helicopters that will show up the minute the word is out. “We have exposure from every direction including overhead.”

“That’s what we get paid the big bucks for,” Rusty says, and he says it a lot.

“Do you know what killed her?” Harold asks.

“I’ve not examined her because I don’t want to get that close until we have privacy and adequate light. But from a distance I can see signs of trauma. It appears her body was repositioned and moved.”

“Well that’s bad,” Harold says. “You’re sure she’s been tampered with?”

“There are drag marks.”

“Crap,” Rusty replies. “A couple kids found her?”

“And who knows what all they did before the police got here,” Harold adds somberly.

“Some of her belongings also appear to be unaccounted for. Others are scattered, and possibly a necklace was broken and whatever might have been on it is missing at the moment.” I don’t mention the gold skull.

I don’t want to tell anybody what to look for. I continue to remind myself to be careful about influencing the investigation because of a personal theory I might have based on an experience that may be nothing more than a fluke. So what if I met Elisa Vandersteel-if that’s what turns out to be the undisputed truth? What does that have to do with her death or anything we may or may not find here?

Even as I try to dismiss the encounter as irrelevant I know it’s not. If nothing else, it won’t be helpful if it comes out in court that I met her not long before she was murdered. It won’t make the case stronger. Quite the opposite. The defense will use it against me. I’ll be accused of not being objective, of being influenced and distracted by crossing the path of the victim not once but twice just hours before her death.

“Forcibly removed,” Harold assumes about the broken chain I mentioned.

“Assuming the jewelry is hers, that’s what it looks like,” I reply.

“Sounds like there was a violent struggle and the perpetrator tried to stage something after the fact,” he suggests, and their headlamps are blinding when they turn toward me.

“There was violence,” I reply. “But I can’t say if there was a struggle because I don’t know enough yet. As soon as we have the enclosure up, I’ll know a lot more.”

“We had a discussion about what would be best. We thought you’d want the canopied tent, and we recommended that to Marino.” Harold always sounds a little unctuous, as if he’s greeting people at the chapel door or giving a tour of a casket showroom or a slumber parlor. “We know the area of course. But we also pulled up a map.”

I glance up at Eliot House’s upper-story student apartments, and I can see several people looking out the lighted windows. I look at the bridge, and there’s a steady stream of cars on it in both directions. Aluminum clinks and clacks, and I hear the sound of bags shoved around on the ground.

“Will you post her tonight?” Rusty asks.

“Usually I would wait until the morning. But this isn’t usual,” I reply.

“Because I’m wondering if Anne should come in.” He lifts out another folded frame that’s cumbersome but lightweight, and his headlamp is a blazing Cyclops eye. “If so, she should be heading back to the CFC now, in other words.”

The scaffolding of tent sections going up around us brings to mind a crazed Stonehenge fashioned of silver tubes.

“I’ll get a van for transporting her when it’s time.” Rusty is talking about the body now.

“How do you plan on handling that?” I ask. “Without driving right through the middle of the scene.”

“I think we pull in as close as we can without messing up anything,” Rusty says. “Then by the time you’re ready for us to carry her out, she’ll be pouched with an evidence seal. And that’s all anybody’s going to catch on camera, just the usual pouched body on a stretcher. I’m thinking we’ll have her in the receiving area by nine P.M. if all goes well.” The two of them look at each other, and nod.

“I can notify Anne,” Harold says.

She’s the CFC’s chief forensic radiologist, and I’m going to want the victim in the CT scanner as soon as possible. I reply that yes, Anne needs to come back in if she can. It would be wise to mobilize now, I couldn’t agree more.

“You’re thinking she was murdered,” Rusty says.

“I don’t know what I think yet.”

“To play devil’s advocate,” he adds, “I’m wondering if she could be a heat-exposure death. Like she’s riding her bike, faints, wrecks and hits her head. We sure have had our share of heat-related fatalities of late, a lot of them weird-ass stuff.”

“A bike accident wouldn’t explain her belongings strewn everywhere,” Harold says thoughtfully.

“It depends on who touched her stuff and when it happened,” Rusty disagrees. “You know, like if somebody was looting? Like in small-plane crashes? If you don’t get there fast, people steal everything.”

“But not out here. That’s not going to happen here,” Harold says somberly.

“Stealing happens everywhere.” Rusty unrolls another section of black polyurethane siding.

I tell them more about the twins who found the body, and that we can’t be certain who did what. Kids don’t always understand consequences, Rusty drawls in his slow amicable way, the headlamp cushioned by the do-rag over his long shaggy hair.

“They move something, take something. They don’t know any better at first.” He interlocks the frame of a large panel. “Then maybe they freak out and lie because they’re afraid of getting in trouble.”

“We’ll build the components here out of the way,” Harold says to me as I survey the trolleys and what I want from them now. “Then we’ll finish the final assembly in the target area when you’re ready and feel it’s safe for us to work over there.”

“We’ll mark off a perimeter, and you can set up the tent right over the bicycle and the body.” I add that Marino will use spray paint to clearly designate the footprint for the tent, a safe zone for laying something down.

I take off the ill-fitting gloves he gave to me, and the huge shoe covers fitted with rubber bands. I drop them into a bright red biohazard trash bag.

I COLLECT MY GEAR, grabbing a scene case, what’s essentially a large tough plastic tool chest. I pick a box of purple nitrile gloves size small, several pairs of shoe covers with traction soles, and packaged hooded coveralls. I leave Rusty and Harold to their construction project, and follow the path, reentering the clearing.

I direct the flashlight downward and slightly ahead of me, careful I don’t step on any possible evidence even though Marino and I already have been over this area. I never stop looking down and around because it’s quite possible to walk past something several times without noticing it. So far I’ve seen nothing except the victim’s scattered personal effects that we’ve already marked with cones. The park is clean. Any scrap of litter I notice appears to have been out here for a while.

I’m aware of my breathing, of the sound of my feet on the gritty path, then the swishing as I walk through grass. I hear the steady rush of traffic on the bridge, the rumble of trucks and cars, and the whine of a motorcycle on John F. Kennedy Street. The air is hot and heavy. It doesn’t move. I slow down as a figure materializes in the darkness up ahead, striding toward me. The female officer I saw earlier approaches me with purpose.

“Doctor Scarpetta?” She’s keyed up, almost breathless, stopping several feet from me, directing her flashlight at the ground. “You ever notice how you find something when you’re not looking for it?” The shiny steel nameplate on her short-sleeved dark blue uniform shirt reads N. E. FLANDERS.

“It happens all the time,” I reply. “What did you find?”

“I was walking over to check on your guys, see if they needed anything.” She stares off in the direction of Rusty and Harold. “And I noticed something. It’s probably nothing but it’s a little strange. I think someone was sick in the bushes over there. I’m pretty sure it’s recent.” She turns and points behind her. “In the woods just off the path and not very far from the bike and the body.”

“Investigator Barclay mentioned that one of the girls might have been sick,” I reply, and I get the feeling Officer Flanders knows nothing about this because he didn’t bother sharing information. “He told me that when he first got here he saw one of them coming out of the bushes, and that it appeared she might have thrown up.”

“Someone did for sure.”

“I’m happy to look if that’s what you’re asking. I was headed that way.”

“What time frame are we talking about for getting some lights on out here?”

I tell her it shouldn’t be long for the tent. After that, I’ll get the body to my office as quickly as I can.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, it doesn’t seem right to just leave her lying there out in the middle of everything.”

“I’d do her a far greater disservice if I compromised evidence in any way,” I reply.

“We can’t put anything over her? A sheet or something?”

“I’m afraid not. I can’t risk dislodging or losing evidence, especially trace evidence. If I cover her before going over her carefully with a lens, I won’t have any idea what I might be messing up.”

“Well if she’s been out here for a while anyway, I guess waiting an extra half hour isn’t going to change anything,” Officer Flanders decides.

“What makes you think she’s been out here for a while?”

“Well that’s what Barclay thinks.”

“It would be best if we don’t circulate rumors,” I reply, and she shines her flashlight on what I’m carrying.

“Can I help with something? It’s too hot to be hauling anything heavy.”

“I’m fine. And if any of you need water or to step out of the heat, we have our truck.”

“As long as there’s nothing dead in there,” she jokes.

“You’ll be happy to know that we don’t transport bodies in the same truck where we rest, drink, eat, and work. We’ll have a van here for the body,” I explain, and Officer Flanders has a broad face that’s neither pretty nor unattractive.

She’s what my mother used to call “plain,” by which she meant an unremarkable-looking girl who was worse off than “the ugly ones.” That’s how she would say it, and her explanation for such a vile statement couldn’t have been more logical. At least in her limited way of thinking, and also in Dorothy’s because she shares the same point of view. Pretty girls don’t try at all because they don’t have to. Ugly girls try harder for obvious reasons.

That leaves plain girls, which usually is synonymous with smart girls, and they need to try but don’t know any better or can’t be bothered. So plain girls have the distinction of finishing first and last in the categories of accomplishment and attractiveness respectively. It’s my mother’s own weird version of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” I suppose, only there’s no moral and no one really wins.

N. E. Flanders is the brand of plain that Dorothy wouldn’t have a single kind word to say about. I estimate the officer’s age is mid- to late forties, her chunky short-waisted figure not helped by her creaking black leather duty belt and low-riding trousers. Her dark hair is tucked behind her ears in a pageboy, and a white T-shirt peeks out of the open neck of her uniform shirt.

“I’ll show you.” She motions me to follow her. “It’s a rag, a cloth, a towel, I don’t know. But someone threw up on it as best I can tell. I mean I didn’t get more than a few feet from it, and I didn’t touch it of course.”

We light our way as we walk, looping around the bicycle, and stopping at the edge of the woods between the path and the river. I recognize the clump of rhododendron bushes Barclay pointed out earlier, and as Officer Flanders probes the dark dense shadows with her light, I smell the evidence before I see it.

“There.” She points the beam of light at what looks like a wadded-up cloth caught in branches near the ground as if shoved there.

I set down the scene case, and as I bend closer and shine my light I decide what the officer has discovered isn’t a rag or a towel. It’s a shirt, off-white, possibly beige, and I can make out a portion of a date, a partial image of a silkscreened face. I remember the woman on the bicycle was wearing a beige Sara Bareilles concert tank top.

“I assume this hasn’t been photographed.” I unfasten the clasps of my scene case.

“No. All I did is notice it with my light. And then I saw you coming.”

“We need to get Marino here.” I balance on one leg at a time, pulling the shoe covers with traction soles over pumps that are still damp and sticky against the bare skin of my feet.

I work my hands into a pair of gloves, small ones that fit this time. I open a transparent plastic evidence bag, and next retrieve a pair of sterile disposable forceps. I explain that typically I wouldn’t store anything in plastic unless the item is completely dry. Blood and other body fluids including vomit will degrade and rot as bacteria and fungus proliferate, and any evidence such as DNA will be lost.

I’m explaining this to Officer Flanders when I hear Marino before I see him. His big bootie-covered feet are getting closer on the path.

“What’s up?” his voice booms in the dark, and I show him what we’ve found. “What makes you think it’s hers?” He directs this at me, and I’m relieved he makes no allusion to what I told him a little while ago.

He doesn’t ask me if the shirt looks familiar. He doesn’t come right out and confront me with what I remember about how the cyclist looked or was dressed when I encountered her twice earlier.

“It’s a T-shirt, and it’s wet, apparently covered with vomit,” is what I say. “It would appear to be recent since nothing would stay wet out here for very long.”

As he takes photographs I explain that the shirt is too messy for a paper bag. I’m going to package it in plastic but only temporarily. I’ll have the CFC truck deliver the evidence directly to my headquarters. I’ll make sure everything is properly preserved. We’ll recover any evidence from the shirt and hang it in a drying cabinet-I spell out exactly what we’ll do. Then I cover my nose and mouth with a surgical mask.

“How ’bout you go over and hang out with the two girls,” Marino says to Officer Flanders. “Keep everybody away from them, and don’t ask them nothing. Just stay with them, and the Doc and me will be right there.”

She walks off, and I hand Marino a mask. He puts it on and starts taking photographs.

“Shit,” he complains, and underbrush crackles and snaps beneath his feet as he moves around. “Some things you never get used to. Goddamn it!”

“Are you all right?”

“It’s like when some kid throws up on the bus. Then everybody does.”

“Well don’t unless you’re going to do it in a bag. Would you like one?”

“Hell no. I’ve been around worse shit than this.”

I hand him the pair of disposable forceps and he grips the shirt with them, extracting it from the rhododendron bush. He guides it over the transparent plastic bag I hold open, and I can see at a glance that the T-shirt is from a Sara Bareilles concert and it’s damaged. There are tears in the cotton fabric but I don’t notice blood. If the victim was wearing the shirt when she was attacked or injured, there should be blood on it.

Marino and I discuss this briefly because it doesn’t make sense.

“I’m not getting how her shirt came off.” He continues to poke around in the bushes. “And there’s no blood on it?”

“I need to examine it carefully, which I’m not going to do out here.”

“Unless the girls did it. Maybe they took it off the body because they wanted it.”

“Then why does it have tears in it? Why is it damaged?” I pinch the bag’s seal closed with my fingertips.

“How do we know it wasn’t already torn?” Marino says.

I don’t recall that the cyclist’s T-shirt was torn. But I wasn’t looking carefully. At the time I had no reason to make a mental note of her every detail as if I were filling out an investigative report in advance.

“We’ll figure that out when we get it to the labs,” I reply. “But what I can tell you with certainty right now is there are multiple tears in the shirt and it’s covered with vomit.”

“Then what? How did it end up in the bushes? The answer is: It didn’t walk here by itself. And there’s a lot of disturbed dead leaves and soil back here.”

He looks in the direction of the twin sisters. I can see Officer Flanders’s back, and the moving beam of her flashlight as she’s about to reach them.

“Come on.” Marino steps out of the bushes, onto the grass. “Let’s go find out what the hell they did.”