Chaos

CHAPTER 31

THE BURN IS SHAPED like a skull.

“You can see the face. Well almost,” I show Marino as we change our gloves, and we have a red biohazard trash bag full of soiled ones by now. “You can make out an eye and part of the grin, at any rate.”

“Was she wearing the necklace backward when you ran into her?” He blots sweat on his chin with a paper towel, careful not to drip anywhere important, including the body.

“I wouldn’t think so because I noticed the gold pendant was a skull with a whimsical face.”

“Then it had to be turned over when it burned her, and it had to be inside her shirt so it was directly against her skin.” He states what he wants to be true.

Marino doesn’t want to think anything that might feed into his phobia of things that creak, groan and go clank in the night. He’s getting spooked. I would expect as much after today, and it seems far from over.

“If you saw an injury like this and had no idea?” He goes on and on about it. “In the Salem days this would get you hung as a witch. They’d say it had to be a witch who zapped this person, and you’d better hope you never gave whoever it was the evil eye.”

“Well fortunately we don’t live in those days. But you’re right. I probably would have been hanged as a witch.” I pick up my hand lens, and he takes close-up photographs of the burn.

Dry and dark reddish brown, the partial impression of the skull’s grinning face was caused by sparing when the metal pendant got extremely hot. The debossed or depressed mouth and an eye weren’t in contact with skin, and those areas aren’t burned. They’ve remained pale, explaining what looks somewhat like a grotesque emoji in the middle of Elisa Vandersteel’s upper back. Even I would be the first to say that it’s bizarre.

“It looks like a dead head.” Marino’s eyes race around. “Like something supernatural, like a stigma.”

He means a death’s-head and a stigmata, and the burn only looks like that if one knows what caused it.

“Can you help me hold her please?” Sweat runs down my chest, my belly, between my thighs, and the scrubs under my coveralls are soaking wet.

Squatting across from me, Marino steadies the body as I turn it completely on one side to give me a better look from head to toe, front and back.

“That’s weird too,” he says about the delicate whitish linear burns I find on the right shoulder and posterior base of the neck. “More of the same thing she’s got on her stiff right wrist, and they’re on the same side of her body. But if they’re burns, they don’t look anything like the one here.” He indicates the angry red wound caused by the pendant.

I explain that when burns look leathery and white it usually indicates full thickness or third degree. I suspect that these whitish linear marks are from direct contact with whatever may have electrocuted her.

“Such as wires.” I give him a hypothetical. “Except they would have to be very fine, almost hairlike.”

“What wires?” Marino looks around nervously as if they might be close enough to get him.

“I have no idea-assuming that’s what we’re dealing with,” as I notice she has something in the interior pocket of her blue running shorts. “The other burn is from the gold pendant making contact with this same electrical source. That’s my guess.”

Digging my fingers under the waistband, I find the small interior pocket and the hard flat shape inside it. I pull out a black plastic fob that appears to have a serial number on it.

“Bingo. Maybe it’s the key to where she lives,” Marino says as I drop the fob in an evidence bag I hand to him.

I get up and look around at the trees, the lamp, the trail of exploded glass. I try to come up with what could have been long and linear like fine wires that she might have come in contact with as she rode her bicycle out here. I think of her pedaling through the shadows, through the stifling heat, perhaps getting anxious and weary as it got later and darker.

Then suddenly something sears her bare right shoulder, the back of her neck, scorching her between her shoulder blades. It must have been excruciatingly painful and terrifying as she frantically grabbed at whatever it was, burning and shocking her right hand. It must have felt as if she were being attacked by an invisible swam of hornets, and that might be the last thing she was conscious of as her bike went down and she was thrown clear.

Such a scenario could explain the linear burns, and it could account for her asymmetrical rigor. A powerful electrical current striking a gold pendant and passing through her body would have heated up moisture, turning it to steam, and that could have blown off and damaged her shoes and clothing. Heat could have broken the gold chain we recovered, and I check her neck again, looking for any sign the chain burned her before it broke free.

Using a magnifying lens and moving her hair, I find what look like several red hash marks, tiny red burns no bigger than dashes on the right and left sides of her neck. There’s nothing in front, and then I envision Elisa Vandersteel again, hot and sweaty but alive and friendly on the sidewalk in front of the Faculty Club. She was wearing a neckerchief.

A blue paisley print, I’m fairly sure, and I recall having the impression it was somewhat faded, possible a little frayed as if it might be something old. I ask Marino if a neckerchief has shown up, and I describe it. Did the twins possibly have it in a knapsack, and he didn’t realize where it came from?

“Nope,” he says. “I didn’t see anything like that but I’ll have Flanders double-check while she still has them in the daisy room.”

“If not, then it should be around here somewhere,” I reply, “unless she took it off after I saw her on Quincy Street. The important point is if she were wearing something like that it might have protected the front of her neck if the fabric was under or partially under the chain when it got heated up. If we find the neckerchief there may be burns that would verify this.”

Then I tell him we also need to check on whether there might have been thunderstorm activity reported in the area early this evening. And I add that flipping the necklace around to her back may have been the worst thing she could have done.

“Even though she would have been sweaty and electricity loves sweat. But even so, skin isn’t the best conductor,” I explain. “But finding a chunk of gold is another story, and that may be why she’s dead.”

“Because the current would have hit her heart.” Marino watches me work a small brown paper bag over one of the hands. “And there’s a lot of resistance to pass through, which is why some victims have nothing more than burns after the fact. I know a guy who lost a finger but that was it.”

“If the electrical charge didn’t pass through her body, it’s possible she would have survived,” I agree. “And I’m betting we’re going to discover her head injury isn’t what killed her.”

“That’s why I’m careful about wearing jewelry when I’m around anything that can shock me. It used to piss off Doris because first I wouldn’t wear the big clunky silver ID bracelet she gave me. Then I wouldn’t wear my wedding ring, and she’d say it was so I could screw around on her.” Marino confides this as if it’s a new story, and at this stage of things very few of them are.

He hasn’t stopped talking about his ex-wife in all the years they’ve been apart, which is at least twenty. Doris was his high school sweetheart, an uncomplicated woman, long-suffering until she wasn’t anymore and ran off with another man. I know Marino hasn’t gotten over her. I just hope he doesn’t finally do it now because of my sister, and I try to block out what Benton said at the Faculty Club.

I secure the bags at the wrists and ankles with masking tape, making sure no evidence is added or lost during the trip to my headquarters.

“Now what?” Marino says at the sound of male voices outside the entrance of the tent.

I turn around as Velcro rips, and it’s Investigator Barclay again, poking his head inside.

“You need anything?” he calls out.

“Yeah as a matter of fact, Clay?” Marino yells back. “I need you to stop coming in here and asking us that!” He rolls his eyes, and slowly shakes his head.

He waits until Barclay is gone to ask about the “freaky pattern” we sometimes see in lightning strikes, usually on a victim’s chest or back. It reminds him of flying over the Low Country in Lucy’s helicopter, he says. All those tidal creeks branching out everywhere through the salt marshes and mud flats, and what Marino refers to is arborization.

Also called Lichtenberg figures, it’s the peculiar reddish pattern a lightning strike often leaves on the surface of the skin. If you don’t know what you’re looking at it’s a freakish sight, and what causes it isn’t completely understood. A good possibility is capillaries rupturing along the path the electric discharge takes through the body. And Elisa Vandersteel doesn’t have a hint of this.

What bothers me more is if she were struck in her back and a thousand volts passed through the gold pendant, stopping her heart, then where’s the exit? Lightning is predictable and it’s not. It’s as if it has a mind of its own, as if it’s alive. It wants to race to the ground like some wild beast burrowing, and it’s not uncommon to find an exit burn on the bottom of a victim’s foot.

She doesn’t have that either, nothing but dirt on her socks. There’s not an exit anywhere I can find, and I tell Marino I’d like to see the pendant Anya and Enya picked up. He walks back to his big scene case.

PAPER RATTLES AS I open what looks like a plain brown grocery bag, and I work it over the hair, the entire head, all the way to the base of the neck, using more masking tape. I tear it with my gloved hands instead of using a blade.

I like something I can remove easily once the body is on the table in the autopsy room. A hair, a fleck of paint, a fiber, DNA-it could be anything. I’ll move heaven and earth not to lose or contaminate it. But if one doesn’t understand my reasoning, what I’ve just done looks like an appalling way to treat a dead body. It’s what Marino calls a whack and sack. That’s your reward for getting hit by a train, killed in a plane crash, for being murdered. Dr. Death comes along and bags your pieces and parts like trash collected along the highway, according to him.

At least I repositioned her arms from straight up over her head to down by her sides so we can fit her into a final bag, the biggest one, a body pouch, and I’m reminded that death and dignity don’t belong in the same sentence. Opening drawers in my scene case, I find a sterile needle, and then Marino is back. I recognize the thickly contoured gold skull with its deep-set blackened eyes and gap-toothed grin.

I feel the weight of it inside its labeled bag, noting that the pendant doesn’t look damaged, just dusty. I touch the needle to it through clear plastic and feel the faint magnetic tug.

“It must be gold-plated steel or there’s some other alloy present. Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity but it wouldn’t get magnetized unless it’s not pure.” I return the bag to Marino, and my fatigue is on its way to crushing.

I don’t feel very good. I should take a break but there’s not time.

“If it was lightning,” Marino counters, “how come I didn’t hear any thunder around here late this afternoon or early evening? You can’t have lightning without thunder.”

What he says is true because lightning causes thunder. One can’t exist without the other. I propose that we might not detect so much as a rumble if the storm is twenty or thirty miles from here. We might not have a clue there’s anything to worry about as we step outdoors for a walk, a swim, a game of golf. But a flash of lightning can travel a great distance from the storm generating it.

“That’s where we get the expression a bolt out of the blue.” My tongue is making sticky sounds as I talk. “And when you look at a chaotic scene like this you can understand people coming up with such ridiculous things as an act of God or spontaneous human combustion. When what they probably were dealing with was a damn lightning strike.” I’m beginning to get irritable, to have sharp corners. “It would have been especially confusing if the nearest storm was many miles away, having already moved through.”

“Except no storm has moved through,” Marino says as Tailend Charlie violates my thoughts again, and I remember looking into the etymology after receiving the first mocking audio clip from him.

I say him but I don’t know if the person is male. For the sake of convenience I refer to him as such, and Benton believes it to be true. My profiler husband says my cyber-stalker-poet is a man, an older intelligent and highly educated one, and the question from the start is why he gave himself a handle that’s archaic British slang.

A tail-end Charlie, as it’s more typically spelled with a hyphen, can mean the last batsman in cricket. But it also can also refer to a gunner in the rear of a fighter plane or the last thunderstorm in a squall line. As I pass this along to Chicken Little Marino, I realize all I’m probably doing is reinforcing his fear that the sky really might fall on our heads.

“In other words, just when you think something’s over, the freakin’ worst is yet to come,” he complains as a whiff of rubbing alcohol fills my nostrils.

I watch him open packets of antimicrobial wipes, cleaning the six-inch plastic rulers we use as a scale when photographing evidence.

“One more curious coincidence in a day full of them.” I’m aware that my stomach is somewhat unsettled.

“Yeah but is it really a coincidence?” Marino places each disinfected ruler into a sterile bag, returning all of them to a labeled drawer in his photography case. “You’re saying it is, right? Because you only started getting those recordings a week ago. And now here we are.” His eyes dart around as sweat trickles down his shiny red face framed in Tyvek.

I’m not saying anything one way or another, and I don’t answer him as my patience rubs thinner. Everything is catching up with me. It’s as if I feel the earth shift beneath my feet, a sinkhole about to open up.

“And if you think about it, Doc, a bolt out of the blue is a tail-end Charlie because it’s the last part of a storm that’s moved on, right? Kind of like a last flash for good measure.”

I watch him drop wadded sanitizing wipes into the trash.

“What I’m saying is a rogue thunderbolt, in other words literally a tail-end Charlie, might be what killed this lady. Sure it could just be coincidental in a day full of shit like this-to quote you. It may have nothing to do with your rhyming troll.” His bloodshot eyes look at me. “But what if it does?”

I don’t reply because that’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t want to give my fear a name or form. I don’t want to think or say it.

“What if it’s all connected somehow?” Marino continues poking a stick at it. “What if it’s all coming from the same source somehow? I mean we sure as hell have to consider it on top of everything else that’s been going on.”

It’s overwhelming to contemplate a link between Tailend Charlie and Elisa Vandersteel since both are linked to me. It might imply that Carrie Grethen is behind all of it. Behind everything, and I’m too worn down to read tea leaves, to speculate anymore. Instead I suggest to Marino that we rely on science. Since nothing else seems very trustworthy, I advise that he check with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“NOAA should be able to tell us everything that’s gone on weatherwise.” I unlock my phone and my vision is bleary. “We’ll find out if there was any thunderstorm activity within fifty miles of here.” I feel whoozy and peckish as I text Rusty and Harold that we’re ready to transport the body.

It’s getting close to midnight and time to clear out. I’ve done as much as I can at the moment. The tent was a Rubik’s Cube to set up, and we stopped taking breaks as the work dragged on stressfully, miserably. We’re behind and overheated. I feel dehydrated, my mood deteriorating precipitously, and I have a headache that’s getting worse.

When I hear familiar voices and Velcro ripping again, I’m dizzy and jumpy as I turn around. I almost lose my balance.

“… They’re just finishing up…” Investigator Barclay pushes through the tent’s opening.

I can’t see Benton but I hear him mention something about blocking in several police cars. He’ll be out of their way in a few minutes, he says in a commanding serious voice, and I feel a nudge of dread.