Chaos

CHAPTER 29

THE AMBIENT TEMP’S EIGHTY-SEVEN degrees,” Marino says, and I spot the thermometer he placed on top of my scene case near the body.

I pull on purple nitrile gloves, and already I’m sweating through my scrubs.

“Thanks.” I find my notepad.

“What are you going to do about taking her temp?” he asks. “I’m worried we should have just gone ahead and done it when we first got here.”

“With flashlights in the dark when we don’t know what evidence we might be disturbing or contaminating?”

“I know. And I’m with you, Doc. But just saying I’ve heard some comments, you know, cops talking about you sitting in the cool truck and not bothering.”

“And we’ve heard such comments before, and we’ll hear them again.”

“Should we turn her over or something? Because I don’t see how you’re going to put a thermometer in her armpit when both arms are straight up.” He lifts his arms above his head, and when he’s swathed in white protective clothing I’m reminded why Bryce sometimes calls him The Yeti.

“We’re fine at the moment. I won’t need to turn her to take her temp.”

“Okay. But it seems like the longer she’s out here…?”

“I know how it seems,” I reply. “But as you’ve pointed out, her arms are straight up over her head. Even if I reposition her, it wouldn’t be ideal for getting a core temperature.”

That leaves the option of using the rectum. But there’s no way I’m inserting a thermometer and possibly introducing injury or have some pugilistic defense attorney accuse me of it. I’ll opt for the less convenient technique of making a small incision in the right upper abdomen to get the temperature of the liver.

I’ll do this before anything else, and I return to the body. Kneeling close with a sterile disposable scalpel, I get a whiff of decomposition and another odor that’s most noticeable near her head. The stench from blood breaking down is mixed with something else, and I try to isolate what it is.

“I’m smelling something acrid,” I say to Marino as dark red blood oozes from the tiny buttonhole incision I make.

“I don’t smell anything.” He looks away as I push in the long thermometer.

Marino’s not squeamish until he is. Then some things really bother him. I reposition myself closer to Elisa Vandersteel’s head to find the source, getting down on my knees, leaning close to look carefully.

“Not me,” Marino says. “All I smell is rotting blood.”

“This.” I show him singed hair near her neck and right jaw.

“Shit. I swear you’re part bloodhound.”

I also notice tiny fragments of glass. They shine like grains of sand in her disarranged ponytail, but I see nothing like that on her clothing, skin or adhering to the dried reddish-brown blood in her right ear.

“So maybe she has a head injury,” Marino says as he follows where I’m touching and looking. “That can make you bleed out of your ears.”

“It depends on what type of head injury.”

“How about one caused by a gun?” he proposes, and he’s not being funny. “We don’t know that she wasn’t shot.” His eyes are hidden by his camera again as he takes more photographs. “We’ve sure as hell seen our share of cases where you don’t know they’ve been shot until you get them to the morgue.”

“At the moment we don’t know much,” I agree, and I have little doubt that at this early stage of things Marino wishes the victim had been blasted with a shotgun, had a knife in her back or an ax buried in her head.

Then he’d know exactly what he’s dealing with, and most of all he wants to work the case because he’s already working it. It’s natural to want to fit facts with a gut feeling, and that’s the problem I routinely face because it’s hard for cops to back off. There’s no conquest, commendation or adrenaline rush if Elisa Vandersteel died from natural causes or an accident.

“She could have been shot.” Marino doesn’t stop but he will eventually. “And if you were shot in the ear at close range you could get burned hair from the muzzle flash.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s not what we’re seeing.” I study wisps and stubble that remind me of melted nylon as I think about what Anya and Enya said they noticed when they were close to the body.

They mentioned an odor that reminded them of their mother’s overheated blow dryer, and possibly what they were detecting was burned hair. If so they were telling the truth about that, and the more I observe at close range, the more reality shifts right in front of me.

What began as the scene of an attempted mugging, robbery or sexual assault turned deadly is quickly becoming something else entirely. Marino won’t want to hear it. Not at first. But after spending most of my professional life with him, I’m used to talking him down from the ledge, and he returns the favor. Now and then I’m guilty of bias too. I don’t know anybody who isn’t.

Marino probably is the most relentless cop I’ve ever worked with, and his kneejerk reaction will be to resist the track my thoughts are taking. When a detective worth his salt sinks his teeth into a theory, he doesn’t want to let go. If one isn’t careful, an investigation becomes a competition, a contest when it shouldn’t be about winning. It should be about truth.

“Maybe she burned her hair when she was drying it after the shower this morning,” he suggests. “It’s important to remember we don’t know when it happened. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with what killed her.”

“She dried her hair after the shower this morning?” I call attention to what he just said. “Do we know that’s what she did?”

“Negatory since we barely know who the hell she is. But what I’m trying to say is we have no idea when it happened. I’ve seen people burn their hair from grills, the stove, cigarette lighters,” he reminds me.

But what he’s really referring to is that he’s experienced each of the above more than once. Marino hasn’t changed much. He still makes me crazy when he starts squirting lighter fluid during backyard barbecues. I can’t count the times I’ve said to him: What is it you don’t understand about more not always being better?

“Back in the days when I had hair to worry about, I scorched it when I was lighting a flare one time,” he says, and I remember that too. “Took a long damn time to live that down.” This was in Richmond, and he didn’t live it down. “Point being, we don’t know when she singed her hair and it might have nothing to do with anything.”

HER EYES STARE DULLY at me from slitted lids.

If only you could speak, I always think. She will in her own way and in her own time. The language of the dead is silent and difficult, and the message I keep getting is Elisa Vandersteel looks remarkably clean and uninjured. I haven’t turned her over yet, and I’ll know more when I can examine her internally. But already I feel confident that her singed hair is directly related to her death.

That doesn’t mean she’s a homicide. I believe she was killed by a predator but that doesn’t mean it was human. She may be an electrocution, and I’m scanning for any possible source of current. I’m looking around for something damaged, a shorted circuit that she could have come in contact with.

My attention continues going back to the obvious suspect, the iron lamp with its broken bulbs. I keep looking up at the sky only to be reminded that I can’t see it because of the canopy. I’m thinking about power lines and lightning, and I tell Marino that whatever singed her hair likely occurred at or around the time of her death. If she’d burned her hair at an earlier time I don’t believe we’d smell it now.

“Except I don’t smell it.” He bends close to the body, shrugging his broad shoulders.

“And I do,” I insist. “And if it’s this noticeable it probably was even stronger when Enya and Anya showed up a couple hours ago and found her.”

Marino looks at the body, and he looks all around the lighted area of the park boxed in by the tent.

“The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the blown-out lamp.” He comes around to the idea begrudgingly, and now we’re getting somewhere.

“That’s exactly what I’m wondering. The damage to the lamp is telling us something important,” I reply, and we start talking about power lines.

Most of them aren’t underground in Cambridge, and Marino is quick to assert that if one were down we would have found it by now.

“Probably the hard way. Or the twins would have lit themselves up,” he adds. “So tell me how it could be an electrocution, Doc? She would have had to come in contact with something electrically charged, and I’m not getting the mechanics of how it could have happened.”

He points out there are no accessible electrical panels that might have live circuits, and no cords or tools to malfunction.

“And I’m not seeing transmission wires, cables, nothing like that exposed on the ground anywhere,” he continues going down the list, and he should know.

Marino has his own machine shop. He has a monster garage, and thinks nothing of building an addition to his house or overhauling the engine of his truck. On more than one occasion in the past he’s been the jack-of-all-trades I called in a pinch when I had a problem or electrical emergency. Especially in the earliest years when I lived alone, he was always over at my house for one reason or another, installing motion-sensor lights, repairing the garage door, changing the oil in my car, swapping out the garbage disposal.

“And it’s a damn good thing, right?” he says. “Or maybe all of us would have been fried the minute we started walking around out here.”

“That’s an unpleasant thought.” I step back on the path, looking at the lamp, at the pattern of broken glass.

The lightbulbs didn’t merely crack or shatter. They were exploded with enough force to send pieces and shards many yards away. The lamppost is about ten feet tall, and I can’t see the damage to the lantern. But clearly Marino has.

“The screws are still in the sockets, the three bulbs are totally destroyed.” His face is red and sweaty as he circles the lamppost, looking up, his hands on his hips. “For the most part the filaments are gone.”

“How can you see from here?” The lantern is too far above my head for me to look inside it.

“While they finished setting up, I used a stepladder and took photographs, which I can show you later,” Marino says. “The metal latch is missing, maybe explaining why the glass door is open, and the question once again is when. Did the exploding bulbs cause the little latch, the hook, to break off? Or was it even there to begin with? We’ll keep looking but it’s not showed up so far.”

I walk over to the bicycle on its side, and the rear tire is closest to the park entrance where Marino and I came in when we first got here. Apparently Elisa Vandersteel did the same thing, and I remember her pedaling through the Harvard Yard. I imagine her turning right off John F. Kennedy Street, entering the park from the east.

From there she would have followed the fitness path to the clearing, riding west as the sun slipped behind the trees and the shadows got darker and longer. Based on the position of the bike, something happened right here where I’m standing on the path, the iron lamp but several yards to my left. Her body ended up some ten feet away with glass in her hair, and her helmet is farther away than that.

As I think of lightning deaths I’ve worked I’m reminded that at first blush it almost always seems we’re dealing with a violent assault. Clothing can be ripped, tattered or torn completely off, and I think of the T-shirt in the shrubbery. Shoes or boots will split wide open or come off like the Converse sneakers. Jewelry melts or breaks, and I envision the segments of gold chain we found. The broken ends looked shredded, and that’s consistent with an electrical discharge. The current hits a metal object, dramatically heating it up, and it disintegrates.

Often victims are critically injured when the explosive force of an electrocution or a lightning strike hurls them to the ground. It’s not unusual to die from blunt-force trauma, and it could be that’s what killed Elisa Vandersteel. But I have my doubts.