Cruel and Unusual

6

The next three days were typical for the holiday season. No one was in or returning telephone calls. Parking lots had spaces to spare, lunch hours were long, and office errands involved clandestine stops at stores, the bank, and the post office. For all practical purposes, the Commonwealth had shutdown before the official holiday began. But Neils Vander was not typical by any standard. He was oblivious to time and place when he called me Christmas Eve morning.

“I'm getting started on an image enhancement over here that I think you might be interested in,” he said. “The Jennifer Deighton case.”

“I'm on my way,” I said.

Heading down the hallway, I almost ran into Ben Stevens as he emerged from the men's room.

“I have a meeting with Vander” I said.”

I shouldn't be long, and I've got my paper.”

“I was just coming to see you,” he said.

Reluctantly, I paused to hear what he had on his mind. I wondered if he detected that it was a struggle for me to act relaxed around him. Lucy continued to monitor our computer from my terminal at home to see if anyone attempted to access my directory again. So far, no one had.

“I had a talk with Susan this morning,” Stevens said.

“How is she?”

“She's not coming back to work, Dr. Scarpetta.”

I was not surprised, but I was stung that she could not tell me this herself. By now I had tried at least half a dozen times to get hold of her, and either no one answered or, her husband did and offered some excuse for why Susan couldn't come to the phone.

“That's it?” I asked him. “She's simply not coming back? Did she give a reason?”

“I think she's having a tougher time with the pregnancy than she thought. I guess the job's just too much right now.”

“She'll need to send a letter of resignation,” I said, unable to keep the anger from my voice. “And I'll leave it to you to work out the details with Personnel. We'll need to begin looking for a replacement immediately.”

“There's a hiring freeze,” he reminded me as I walked off.

Outside, snow plowed along roadsides had frozen into mounds of filthy ice impossible to park on or walk across, and the sun burned wanly through portentous clouds. A streetcar carried a small brass band past, andI climbed granite steps gritty with salt as “Joy to the World” moved on. A Forensics police officer let me inside the Seaboard Building, and upstairs I found Vander inside a room bright with color monitors and ultraviolet lights. Seated at the image enhancer's workstation, he was staring intensely at something on the screen as he manipulated a mouse.

“It's not blank,” he announced without so much as a “how are you.”

“Someone wrote something on a piece of paper that was on top of this one, or close to on top of this one. If you look hard, you can barely make out impressions.”

Then I began to understand. Centered on the light table to his left was a clean sheet of white paper, and I leaned closer to take a look. The impressions were so faint that I wasn't sure if I was imagining them.

“The sheet of paper found under the crystal on Jennifer Deighton's bed?”

I asked, getting excited.

He nodded, moving the mouse some more, adjusting the gray tones.

“Is this live?”

“No. The video camera's already captured the impressions and they're saved on the hard disk. But don't touch the paper. I haven't processed it for prints yet. Im just getting started, keep your fingers crossed. Come on, come on.” He was talking to the enhancer now. “I know the camera saw it fine. You gotta help us out here.”

Computerized methods of image enhancement are a lesson in contrasts and conundrums. A camera can differentiate more than two hundred shades of gray, the human eye less than forty. Just because something isn't there doesn't mean it isn't there.

“Thank God with paper you don't have to worry about background noise,” Vander went on as he worked. “Speeds things up considerably when you don't have to worry about that. Had a time of it the other day with a bloody print left on a bed sheet. The weave of the fabric, you know. Not so long ago the print would have been worthless. Okay.”

Another tint of gray washed over the area he was working on. “Now we're getting somewhere. You see it?”

He pointed at slender, ghostly shapes on the upper half of the screen.

“Barely.”

“What we're trying to enhance here is shadow versus eradicated writing, because nothing was written and erased here. The shadow was produced when oblique light hit the flat surface of this paper and the indentations in it- at least the video camera perceived shadow loud and clear. You and I can't see it without help. Let's try a little more enhancement of the verticals.”

He moved the mouse. “Darken the horizontals just a tad. Good. It's coming. Two-oh-two, dash. We've got part of a phone number.”

I pulled a chair close to him and sat down. “The area code for D.C.,” I said.

“I'm making out a four and a three. Or is that an eight?”

I squinted. “I think it's a three.”

“That's better. You're right. Definitely a three.”

He continued to work for a while and more numbers and words became visible on the screen. Then he sighed and said, “Rats. I can't get the last digit. It's just not there, but look at this before the D.C. area code. 'To' followed by a colon. And right under it is 'from' followed by another colon and another number. Eight-oh-four. That's local. This number's very unclear. A five and maybe a seven, or is that a nine?”

“I think that's going to be Jennifer Deighton's number, “I said. “Her fax machine and telephone are on the same line - she had a fax machine in her office, a single sheet feed that uses ordinary typing paper. It appears she wrote out a fax on top of this sheet of paper. What did she send? A separate document? There's no message here.”

“We're not finished yet. We're getting what looks like the date now. An eleven? No, that's a seven. December seventeenth. I'm going to move down.”

He moved the mouse and the arrows slid down the screen. Hitting a key, he enlarged the area he wanted to work on, then began painting it with shades of gray. I sat very still while shapes began to slowly materialize out of a literary limbo, curves here, dots there, and t's boldly crossed. Vander worked silently. We barely blinked or breathed. We sat like this for an hour, words gradually getting sharper, one shade of gray contrasting with another, molecule by molecule, bit by bit. He willed them, coaxed them into existence. It was incredible. It was all there.

Exactly one week ago, barely two days before her murder, Jennifer Deighton had faxed the following message to a number in Washington, D.C.:

Yes, I'll cooperate, but it's too late, too late, too late. Better you should come here. This is all so wrong!

When I finally looked up from the screen as Vander hit the print button, I was light-headed. My vision was temporarily blurred, adrenaline surging.

“Marino needs to see this immediately. Hopefully, we can figure out whose fax number this is, the Washington number. We've got all but the last digit. How many fax numbers can there be in Washington that are exactly like this except for the last digit?”

“Digits zero through nine.”

Vander raised his voice above the printer's rat-a-tat-tat. “At the most, there could be only ten. Ten numbers, fax or otherwise, exactly like this one except for the last digit” He gave me a printout. “I'll dean it up some more and get you a beer copy later,” he said. “And there's one more thing. I'm not having any luck getting my hands on Ronnie Waddell's print, the photo of the bloody thumbprint recovered from Robyn Naismith's house. Every time I call Archives, I'm told they're still looking for his file.”

“Remember what time of year it is. I'll bet there's hardly anybody there,” I said, unable to dispel a sense of foreboding.

Back in my office, I got hold of Marino and explained what the image enhancer had discovered.

“Hell, you can forget the phone company,” he said. “My contact there's already left for the vacation, and nobody else is going to do shit on Christmas Eve.”

“There's a chance we can figure out who she sent the fax to on our own,” I said.

“I don't know how, short of sending a fax that reads 'Who are you?' and then hoping you get a fax back that reads 'Hi, I'm Jennifer Deighton's killer.'“

“It depends on if be person has a label programmed into his fax machine,” I said.

“A label?”

“Your more sophisticated fax machines allow you to program your name or company name into the system. This label will be printed on anything you fax to someone else. But what's more significant is that the label of the person receiving the fax will also appear in the character display window of the machine sending the fax. In other words, if I send a fax to you, in the character display of my fax machine I'll see 'Richmond Police Department' right above the fax number I've just dialed.”

“You got access to a fancy fax machine? The one we got in the squad room sucks.”

“I've got one here at the office.”

“Well, tell me what you find out. I've gotta hit the street.”

Quickly, I made up a list of ten telephone numbers, each one beginning with the six digits Vander and I had been able to make out on the sheet of paper found on Jennifer Deighton's bed. I completed each number with a zero, a one, a two, a three, and so on, then began trying them out. Only one of them was answered by an inhuman, high-pitched tone.

The fax machine was located in my computer analyst's office, and Margaret, fortunately, had begun her holiday early, too. I shut her door and sat down at her desk, thinking as the minicomputer hummed and modem lights blinked. Labels worked both ways. If I began a transmission, the label for my office was going to appear in the character-display window of the fax machine I had dialed. I would have to kill the process fast, before the transmission was completed. I hoped that by the time anyone checked the machine to see what was going on, “Office of the Chief Medical Examiner” and our number would have vanished from the window.

Inserting a blank sheet of paper into the tray, I dialed the Washington number and waited as the transmission began. Nothing materialized in the character-display window. Damn. The fax machine I had dialed did not have a label So much for that I killed the process and returned to my office, defeated.

I had just sat down at my desk when the telephone rang.

“Dr. Scarpetta, “I answered.

“Nicholas Grueman here. Whatever you just tried to fax, it didn't transmit.”

“Excuse me?”

I said, stunned.

“I got nothing on this end but a blank sheet of paper with the name of your office stamped on it. Uh, error code zero-zero-one, 'please send again; it says.”

“I see,” I said as the hairs on my arms raised.

“Perhaps you were trying to send an amendment to your record? I understand you took a look at the electric chair.”

I did not reply.

“Very thorough of you, Dr. Scarpetta. Perhaps you learned something new about those injuries we discussed, the abrasions to the inner aspects of Mr. Waddell's arms? The antecubitalfossas?”

“Please give me your fax number again,” I said quietly.

He recited it for me. The number matched the one on my list.

“Is the fax machine in your office or do you share it with other attorneys, Mr. Grueman?”

“It's right next to my desk. No need to mark anything for my attention. Just send it on - and do put a rush on it please, Dr. Scarpetta. I was thinking of going home soon.”

I left the office a little later, frustration having driven me out the door. I could not get Marino. There was nothing more I could do. I felt caught in a web of bizarre connections, clueless as to the point in common they shared.

On impulse I pulled into a lot of West Cary where an old man was selling wreaths and Christmas trees. He looked like a lumberjack from a fable as he sat on a stool in the midst of his small forest, the cold air fragrant with evergreen. Perhaps my shunning of the Christmas spirit finally had gotten to me. Or maybe I simply wanted a distraction. At this late date, there wasn't much of a selection, those trees passed over, misshapen or dying, each destined to sit out the season, I suspected, except for the one I chose. It would have been lovely were it not scoliotic. Decorating it proved more an orthopedic challenge than a festive ritual, but with ornaments and strands of lights strategically hung and wire straightening the problem places, it stood proudly in my living room.

“There,” I said to Lucy as I stepped back to admire my work. “What do you think?”

“I think it's weird that you suddenly decided to get a tree on Christmas Eve. When was the last time you had one? “I suppose when I was married.”

“Is that where the ornaments came from?”

“Back then I went to a lot of trouble at Christmas.”

“Which is why you don't anymore.”

“I'm much busier than I was back then,” I said.

Lucy opened the fireplace screen and rearranged logs with the poker. “Did you and Mark ever spend Christmas together?”

“Don't you remember? We came down to see you last Christmas.”

“No, you didn't. You came for three days after Christmas and flew home on New Year's Day.”

“He was with his family on Christmas Day.”

“You weren't invited?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Mark came from an old Boston family. They had certain ways of doing things. What did you decide about this evening? Did my jacket with the black velvet collar fit?”

“I haven't tried anything. Why do we have to go to all these places?”

Lucy sail. “I won't know anybody.”

“It's not that bad. I simply have to drop off a present to someone who's pregnant and probably not coming back to work. And I need to show the flag at a neighborhood party. I accepted the invitation before I knew you were going to be visiting. You certainly don't have to come with me.”

“I'd rather stay here,” she said. “I wish I could get started on AFIS.”

“Patience,” I told her, though I did not feel patient at all.

In the late afternoon, I left another message with the dispatcher and decided that either Marino's pager wasn't working or he was too busy to find a pay phone. Candles glowed in my neighbors' windows, an oblong moon shining high above trees. I played that Christmas music of Pavarotti and the New York Philharmonic, doing what I could to get into the proper frame of mind as I showered and dressed. The party I was to attend did not begin until seven. That gave me enough time to drop off Susan's gift and have a word with her.

She surprised me by answering the phone, and sounded reluctant and tense when I asked if I could drop by.

“Jason's out,” she said, as if that mattered somehow. “He went to the mall.”

“Well, I have a few things for you,” I explained.

“What things?”

“Christmas things. I'm supposed to go to a party, so I won't stay long. Is that all right?”

“I guess. I mean, that's nice.”

I had forgotten she lived in Southside, where I rarely went and was inclined to get lost. Traffic was worse than I had feared, the Midlothian Turnpike choked with last minute shoppers prepared to run you off the road as they ran their Happy Holidays errands. Parking lots swarmed with cars, stores and malls so garishly lit up it was enough to make you blind. Susan's neighborhood was very dark and twice I had to pull over and turn on the interior light to read her directions. After much riding around, I finally found her tiny ranch-style house sandwiched between two others that looked exactly like it.

“Hi,” I said, peering at her through leaves of the pink poinsettia in my arms.

She nervously locked the door and showed me to the living room. Pushing books and magazines aside, she set the poinsettia on the coffee table.

“How are you feeling?”

I asked.

“Better. Would you like something to drink? Here, let me take your coat.”

“Thanks. Nothing to drink. I can't stay but a minute.”

I handed her a package. “A little something I picked up when I was in San Francisco last summer.”

I sat on the couch.

“Wow. You really do your shopping early.”

She avoided my eyes as she curled up in a wing chair. “You want me to open it now?'

“Whatever you'd like.”

She carefully sliced through tape with a thumbnail and slipped off the satin ribbon intact. Smoothing the paper into a neat rectangle, as if she planned to reuse it, she placed it in her lap and opened the black box.

“Oh,” she said under her breath, unfolding the red silk scarf.

“I thought it would look good with your black coat,” I said. “I don't know about you, but I don't like wool against my skin.”

“This is beautiful. It's really thoughtful of you, Dr. Scarpetta. I've never had anybody bring me something from San Francisco before.”

The expression of her face pricked my heart, and suddenly my surroundings came into sharper focus. Susan was wearing a yellow terry cloth robe, frayed at the cuffs, and a pair of black socks that I suspected belonged to her husband. Furniture was scarred and cheap, upholstery shiny. The artificial Christmas tree near the small TV was scanty decorated and missing several limbs. There were few presents underneath. Propped against a wall was a folded crib that was dearly secondhand.

Susan caught me glancing around and looked ill at ease.

“Everything is so immaculate,” I said.

“You know how I am. Obsessive-compulsive.”

“Thankfully. If a morgue can look terrific, ours does.”

She carefully folded the scarf and returned it to its box. Pulling her robe more tightly around her, she stared silently at the poinsettia.

“Susan,” I said gently, “do you want to talk about what's going on?”

She did not look at me.

“It's not like you to get upset as you did the other morning. It's not like you to miss work and then quit without so much as calling me.”

She took a deep breath. “I'm really sorry. I just can't seem to handle things too well these days. I really react. Like when I was reminded of Judy.”

“I know your sister's death must have been terrible for you.”

“We were twins. Not identical. Judy was a lot prettier than me. That was part of the problem. Doreen was jealous of her.”

I liked Susan and I felt hurt and deeply troubled. She was not being honest with me.

“Is there anything else you'd like to tell me about?”

I asked, my eyes not leaving her.

She glanced at me and I saw fear. “I can't think of anything.”

I heard a car door shut.

“Jason's home,” she barely said.

Our conversation had ended, and as I got up I said quietly to her, “Please contact me if you need anything, Susan. A reference, or just to talk. You know where I am.”

I spoke to her husband only briefly on my way out. He was tall and well built, with curly brown hair and distant eyes. Though he was polite, I could tell he was not pleased to discover me in his house. As I drove across the river, I was shaken by the image that this struggling young couple must have of me. I was the boss dressed in a designer suit arriving in her Mercedes to deliver token gifts on Christmas Eve. The alienation of Susan's loyalty touched my deepest insecurities. I was no longer sure of my relationships or how I was perceived. I feared I had faked some test after Mark was killed, as if my reaction to that loss held the answer to a question in the lives of those around me. After all, I was supposed to handle death better than anyone. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the expert. Instead, I had withdrawn, and I knew others felt the coolness around my edges no matter how friendly or thoughtful I tried to be. My staff no longer confided in me. Now it appeared security in my office had been violated, and Susan had quit.

Taking the Cary Street exit; I turned left into my neighborhood and headed for the home of Bruce Carter, a district court judge. He lived on Sulgrave, several blocks from me, and suddenly I was a child in Miami again, staring at what had seemed mansions to me then. I remembered going door-to-door with a wagon full of citrus fruit, knowing that the elegant hands doling out change belonged to unreachable people who felt pity. I remembered returning home with a pocket full of pennies and smelling the sickness in the bedroom where my father lay dying.

Windsor Farms was quietly rich, with Georgian and Tudor houses neatly arranged along streets with English names, and estates shadowed by trees and surrounded by serpentine brick walls. Private security jealously guarded the privileged, for whom burglar alarms were as common as sprinklers. Unspoken covenants were more intimidating than those in print. You did not offend your neighbors by putting up clotheslines or dropping by unannounced. You did not have to drive a Jaguar, but if your means of transportation was a rusting pickup truck or a morgue wagon, you kept it out of sight inside the garage.

At quarter past seven, I parked behind a long line of cars in front of a white-painted brick house with a slate roof. White lights were caught like tiny stars in boxwoods and spruces, and a fragrant fresh wreath hung on the red front door. Nancy Carter embraced my arrival with a gorgeous smile and arms extended to take my coat. She talked nonstop above the indecipherable language of crowds as light winked off the sequins of her long red gown. The judge's wife was a woman in her fifties refined by money into a work of well-bred art. In her youth, I suspected, she had not been pretty.

“Bruce is somewhere…”

She glanced about. “The bar's over there.”

She directed me to the living room, where the bright holiday attire of guests blended wonderfully with a large vibrant Persian rug that I suspected cost more than the house I had just visited on the other side of the river. I spotted the judge talking to a man I did not know. I scanned faces, recognizing several physicians and attorneys, a lobbyist, and the governor's chief of staff. Somehow I ended up with a Scotch and soda, and a man I had never seen before was touching my arm.

“Dr. Scarpetta? Frank Donahue,” he introduced himself loudly. “A Merry Christmas to you.”

“And to you,” I said.

The warden, who allegedly had been ill the day Marino and I had toured the penitentiary, was small, with coarse features and thick graying hair. He was dressed like a parody of an English toastmaster in bright red tails, a ruffled white dress shirt, and a red bow tie twinkling with tiny electric lights. A glass of straight whiskey tilted perilously one hand as he offered me the other.

He leaned close to my ear. “I was disappointed I was unable to show you around the day you came to the pen.”

“One of your officers took good care of us. Thank you.”

“I guess that would have been Roberts.”

“I think that was his name.”

“Well, it's unfortunate that you had to go to the trouble.”

His eyes roamed the room and he winked at someone behind me. “A lot of horse crap was what it was. You know, Waddell'd had a couple of nosebleeds in the past, and high blood pressure. Was always complaining about something. Headaches. Insomnia.”

I bent my head, straining to hear.

“These guys on death row are consummate con artists. And to be honest, Waddell was one of me worst” “I wouldn't know,” I said, looking up at him.

“That's the trouble, nobody knows. No matter what you say, nobody knows except those of us who are around these guys every day.”

“I'm sure.”

“Waddell's so-called reformation, him turning into such a sweetheart. Sometime let me tell you about that, Dr. Scarpetta, about the way he used to brag to other inmates about what he did to that poor Naismith girl. Thought he was a real cock of the walk because he did a celebrity.”

The room was airless and too warm. I could feel his eyes crawl over my body.

“Of course, I don't guess much surprises you, either,” he said.

“No, Mr. Donahue. There isn’t much that surprises me.”

“To be honest, I don't know how you look at what you do every day. Especially this time of year, people killing each other and themselves, like that poor lady who committed suicide in her garage the other night after opening her Christmas presents early.”

His remark caught me like an elbow in the ribs. There had been a brief story in the morning paper about Jennifer's Deighton's death, and a police source had been quoted as saying that it appeared she had opened her Christmas presents early. This might imply she had committed suicide, but there had been no statement to that effect.

“Which lady are you referring to?”

I asked.

“Don't recall the name.”

Donahue sipped his drink, his face flushed, eyes bright and constantly moving. “Sad, real sad. Well, you'll have to visit us at our new digs in Greensville one of these days.”

He smiled broadly, then left me for a bosomy matron in black. He kissed her on the mouth and both of them started laughing.

I went home at the earliest opportunity, to find a fire blazing and my niece stretched out on the couch, reading. I noted several new presents under the tree.

“How was it?” she asked with a yawn.

“You were wise to stay home,” I said. “Has Marino called?”

“Nope.”

I tried him again, and after four rings he answered irritably.

“I hope I didn't get you too late,” I apologized.

“I hope not, either. What's wrong now?”

“A lot of things are wrong. I met your friend Mr. Donahue at a party this evening.”

“What a thrill.”

“I wasn't impressed, and maybe I'm just paranoid, but I thought it odd he brought up Jennifer Deighton's death.”

Silence.

“The other little twist,” I went on, “is it appears Jennifer Deighton faxed a note to Nicholas Grueman less than two days before her murder. In it she sounded upset, and I got the impression he wanted to meet with her. She suggested he come to Richmond.”

Still Marino said nothing.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“I'm thinking”

“Glad to hear it. But maybe we should think together. Sure I can't change your mind about dinner tomorrow?”

He took a deep breath. “I'd like to, Doc. But I… “ A female voice in the background said, “Which drawer's it in?”

Marino evidently placed his hand over the receiver and mumbled something. When he got back to me he cleared his throat.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't know you had company.”

“Yeah.”

He paused.

“I would be delighted if you and your friend would come to dinner tomorrow,” I offered.

“The Sheraton's got this buffet. We was going to go to that.”

“Well, there's something for you under the tree. If you change your mind, give me a call in the morning.”

“I don't believe it. You broke down and got a tree? Bet it's an ugly little sucker.”

“The envy of the neighborhood, thank you very much,” I said.”

Wish your friend a Merry Christmas for me.”