Dust

13

The scene is a churned-up muddy vacancy in the middle of an academic empire that has begun to stir. It is a few minutes past eight, the body transported to my office a while ago as it began to get light.

The sun is low behind brick buildings where the Charles runs languidly into the river basin and then becomes the Boston Harbor and empties into the sea. Patches of blue peek through cumulus clouds as they change shape and move and the wind has died down. There is no threat of rain as I wait in the parking lot by the open gate, waiting for Benton. I won’t leave while he’s here doing what he does, alone and in the place he gets, a painful place, a barely tolerable one.

I pace the wet asphalt, on and off my phone as I witness his isolation while he works, and I remember why I’ve always been drawn to him even when I didn’t know I was. I watch him and feel how much I love him. I no longer remember not loving him, and it didn’t start out like that. My dislike of him was intense at first when I was the brand-new chief medical examiner of Virginia and he was the Wizard of Odd as Marino snidely called him. I found Benton Wesley’s handsomeness and acumen a little too sharp, instantly deciding he was austere like his expensive, understated suits, his demeanor lightly starched like his shirts.

At that time of my life I was into wash-and-wear men who required no effort to maintain with no harm done. I wanted men who were easy to clean up after, cheap men, simple men to have sex with, to be served and serviced by, so I could forget what I know for a while. I had no interest in a Bureau big-shot profiler, certainly not an elitist married one whose legend preceded him through the door like the earthy fragrance of his aftershave.

I’d been in Richmond but a brief time, up against odds I couldn’t possibly have foreseen, when I took the job in a commonwealth overrun by men in charge. I was prepared to dislike and dismiss Benton Wesley. I’d heard about his privileged New England upbringing. He was considered gifted and glib, the gun-toting special agent with a crystal ball who was quoted in Time magazine as saying that violent sexual psychopaths are the Rembrandts of killers.

The analogy was offensive to me. I remember thinking What a pedantic narcissist, and in retrospect it surprises me we didn’t become lovers sooner. It took the first time we worked a case together out of town, hundreds of miles southwest in rural Blue Ridge foothills, in a cheap motel where I would go back with him a thousand times were it still there and exactly as I remember it.

Our lying and sneaking was worthy of drug addicts and drunks. We stole any private moment we could find, shameless and bold, extremely skilled at getting away with our crime. We rendezvoused in parking lots. We used pay phones. We didn’t leave voice mails or write letters. We conferred on cases we didn’t need to discuss, attended the same conferences, invited each other to lecture at academies we ran, and checked into hotels under pseudonyms. We left no evidence and created no scenes, and after he was divorced and his daughters no longer spoke to him we continued our addictive relationship as if it were illegal.

On Vassar Street now, Benton disappears inside Simmons Hall, a honeycomb of cubed windows that brings to mind a metal sponge. I have no idea what he’s doing or why, although I suspect he wants to get an emotional reading of the galactic-looking monolith. He wants it to tell him if it’s involved in what I don’t doubt is a homicide, one that could easily mislead, but I know her death wasn’t quiet or gentle. I can see it in her bloodred eyes and imagine the roaring in her head and the building of pressure.

I glance down at my phone as a text lands from my technician Anne, a sensible, pleasant radiologic expert who has managed to cross-train herself in many disciplines. The body is in the CT scanner and Anne has discovered a curiosity.

“A small right-sided pneumothorax,” she explains right off when she answers my call. “Her scan shows air trapped in the pleural space of the upper lobe, suggesting some type of trauma.”

“I didn’t notice anything here at the scene, no injury to her chest,” I reply. “But it wasn’t the best conditions at the time. Basically, I had a flashlight.”

“Something caused her lung to collapse.”

“Do we have an idea what?”

“I can’t examine her externally unless you want me to unwrap her, Dr. Scarpetta.”

“Not until I get there.” I watch Marino and Machado work on their awkward evidence collection of a fence post. “What about soft tissue damage? Do you see any internal hemorrhage?”

“There’s very minimal bleeding into the upper-right chest,” she tells me as I slowly walk around the parking lot, restless and with too much to think about. “Slightly above and to the left of her breast.”

“You’re not seeing any rib fractures,” I assume.

“No fractures period. I don’t guess we have her clothes.”

“We have one shoe that might be hers. Nothing else so far.”

“That’s too bad. Really too bad. I sure wish we had her clothes.”

“You and me both. Any other radiologic abnormalities?” I can judge the lifting of the overcast by the brightening of the white tennis bubble several playing fields away.

The temperature is in the low fifties, on its way to almost warm.

“There are dense areas of some material inside her nose and mouth,” Anne replies.

“What about in her sinuses, her airway, her lungs? Was any of this material aspirated?”

“It doesn’t appear that it was.”

“Well, that’s significant. If she were smothered with something that has this fluorescing residue on it, I would expect that she aspirated some of it.” The findings are perplexing and seem contradictory.

“Whatever it is, it has a Hounsfield on average of three hundred — or the typical radiodensity of small kidney stones, for example,” Anne says. “I’ve got no idea what it could be.”

“I found high concentrations around her nose and mouth and also in her eyes.” I watch Marino retrieve a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters from his toolbox. “But if she didn’t aspirate any of it, that’s perplexing. It continues to make me wonder if this material was transferred postmortem.”

“I think that’s possible. I can see it inside her nose and mouth. But not very far inside so it may have gotten there after she was no longer breathing. There’s also a fair amount of it between her lips and teeth, what looks like clots of it,” Anne says. “It shows up very clearly on CT.”

“Clots?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it. There are irregular shapes that are denser than blood but not nearly as dense as bone.”

“I didn’t notice any of these clots, as you put it. There was nothing like that externally. The residue that fluoresces is a very fine material like dust that I doubt you can see without magnification. Possibly it’s a trace of the denser material inside her nose and mouth.”

“Like if she was held facedown in something,” Anne suggests.

“There are no abrasions or contusions on her face or neck. Usually when someone has been held facedown in dirt, mud, shallow water, there’s significant injury to the lips, the nose, the cheeks. And there’s aspiration as the person struggles to breathe. Typically, we find the dirt, water inside the sinuses, in the airway, sometimes in the stomach and lungs.”

“All I can tell you with certainty based on what I’m seeing on her scan, Dr. Scarpetta, is her collapsed lung isn’t what killed her.”

“Of course,” I agree. “But if her breathing was already compromised, then she was going to be more vulnerable to asphyxia.”

My suspicions are getting stronger that the fluorescent material all over Gail Shipton was deposited after she was dead. Why? And where was she? And is the residue an accidental transfer of evidence or did her killer want it found? The glittery substance isn’t indigenous to the muddy playing field. It came from someplace else.

“For sure a collapsed lung in isolation didn’t kill her,” I continue to explain. “Right now I don’t know what did but her death isn’t due to natural causes. I’m working this as a homicide and provisionally that’s what I’m calling it, a possible suffocation with contributing complications. I’d appreciate it if you’d pass that along to Bryce to keep him updated but please remind him we’re not releasing anything to the media yet. We need to positively ID her first.”

“That reminds me, Lucy says her dentist is Barney Moore, whom we’ve dealt with once before. That floater from last summer, he told me. As if there was only one.”

“Gail Shipton’s dentist?” I puzzle.

“Right. He’s sending her charts. We should have them any minute.”

“That’s probably the quickest way to confirm her ID,” I agree as I wonder why Lucy would know a detail as personal as who Gail Shipton’s dentist is. “Can you get Bryce to line up Dr. Adams ASAP?”

Ned Adams is a local dentist on call for us, a certified odontologist, an eccentric obsessed with the minutiae of teeth. There’s nothing he likes better than a mouth that can’t talk back, he quips every time I see him.

I search for Benton as Anne and I talk. He’s still inside Simmons Hall, some of its residents emerging, slinging backpacks, grabbing bicycles or walking.

They seem oblivious or only mildly curious now that the body is gone. There is nothing left but two plainclothes cops doing battle with a fence post, a German shepherd puppy barking on and off inside a car, and a woman forensic pathologist on her phone in a parking lot.

“Do you want me to leave her in the scanner until you get here?” Anne asks me.

“No. Let’s move her to my table because I’m going to need to prep her for angiography,” I explain. “I want to see if we can figure out what might have caused her collapsed lung and also check the vessels of her heart since it’s obvious she had a significant rise in her blood pressure that resulted in florid minute hemorrhages. Let’s get the test contrast agent ready. Four hundred and eighty MLs of embalming fluid.”

“Plasmol twenty-five arterial? Hand injection or the machine?”

“By hand. The standard five-F angiocatheters and an embalming trocar, plus the usual thirty MLs of Optiray three-twenty.”

“You’ll be here when?”

“Within the hour, hopefully.” I watch Marino cut through chain link, the metal snapping and jingling. “If they don’t finish up here soon, Benton and I will leave without them. We’ll walk back to the office. I think the two of them might be at it for a while,” I decide as an area of fencing spills loudly to the ground in a metal waterfall. “You’d think they were archaeologists approaching King Tut’s tomb the way they’re deliberating.”

The gouged fence post has proven more stubborn than supposed, set in concrete and buried deep. For the past hour I’ve listened to Marino and Machado debate hacksawing off the area of galvanized steel tubing in question as opposed to uprooting the entire tall pole, and maybe taking the gate with its scratched fork latch while they’re at it. Several times during all this, Marino has let Quincy out for walks involving mini — training sessions that are comical or pathetic, depending on one’s point of view.

These exercises have been going on for weeks, ever since he decided Quincy would be a working dog. Marino hides a bit of cloth saturated with human decomposition fluids that he no doubt got from a CFC refrigerator at some point, and Quincy sniffs out this foul-smelling rag and urinates or rolls on it, a behavior not appropriate for a cadaver dog. Three times this morning I’ve witnessed him darting about, snuffling, digging, rolling, and peeing, while Marino the handler rewards him by blowing a whistle.

I’ve observed the absurd carnival of Marino tilting at a fence post and hiding bits of putrid cloth but mostly I’ve watched Benton wander and prowl. It’s rare we’re at a scene together and I’m moved and amazed in a deeply unsettled way. He seems guided by what the rest of us can’t see as if he’s his own divining rod, walking purposefully here and there with his suit pants tucked inside a pair of orange rubber boots several sizes too big. First he slogged out to the body before it was wrapped up like statuary and carried away on the spine board. Speaking to no one, not even to me, Benton slowly circled the dead woman like a big cat sizing up a kill.

He didn’t offer opinions about the glittery residue or what it might be. He made no comment and asked no questions as he listened silently, inscrutably, to what I said about her postmortem artifacts, about her time of death, which I project was within three hours of her disappearance at most, possibly around eight or nine o’clock last night. He barely looked at the curious crowd assembling in front of Simmons Hall, dazed young students in every state of dress on the other side of the fence. It was as if he’d already made up his mind about them, as if he already knows the devil in the dance with him.

I watched in a mixture of amazement and unsettledness, mesmerized by Benton’s dark theater, his behavior as ritualized as the evil people he pursues. He stalked after the body as it was carried across the field, through the open gate, and loaded into the back of the van, which he followed on rubber-booted feet to Memorial Drive. From there he retraced his steps, reentering the campus alone in the gray day’s first light, along the alley, back to the empty parking lot, where he stood perfectly still for a while, taking in the vista from the perspective of the “subject,” as he calls those he hunts.