Dust

29

Inside the anteroom I grab protective clothing from shelves. It’s half past noon.

I put on booties, a face shield, and gloves. Lucy and Benton do the same but I know when he doesn’t plan to stay long. He’ll learn what he can from Gail Shipton’s body and then he’s got Bureau swords to clash with and maybe something more. I can always sense when a dark front has rolled through him. It’s as if the air has shifted the way it does before a storm, and I think about the DNA and what Dr. Venter told me.

“Is there anything on the news?” I ask Lucy.

“Just what he mentioned.” She looks at Benton to see if he has anything to add. “About an hour and a half ago nine-one-one got a call about an active shooter in Concord. Police responded and said there’s no gunman and nothing further.”

“Where in Concord?”

“Minute Man Park, where there were a bunch of schoolkids.”

“And Medflight responded?”

“That’s pretty much all there is to it,” Benton speaks up. “A suspicious person in dark clothing was spotted running through the park. Supposedly a car backfire on Liberty Street was mistaken for gunshots. Kids were screaming, teachers panicking, thinking it was another Newtown.”

“Did they catch the person?” I ask.

“They didn’t.”

“And that’s the whole story.” I look at him.

“I doubt it. Area-wide emergency radio communications between departments tell me NEMLEC is responding to something but the FBI hasn’t been called. I don’t know what it is. They might not know what it is at this point. Granby’s being pushy about meeting with you.”

“Why is he going through you?” I feel myself getting stubborn. “He needs to call my office.”

“He’s decided I shouldn’t be there,” Benton says. “That’s the latest.”

“You schedule a meeting and then aren’t invited,” I reply. “That’s choice.”

“He should work on not being so subtle,” Lucy says. “What a tool.”

I push a hands-free button with my elbow and steel doors automatically swing open to the sounds of running water and steel instruments clicking and clacking against cutting boards. An oscillating saw whines, then grinds loudly through bone. Voices of doctors and autopsy technicians blend in a low murmur and I detect decomposing blood and fermentation. I smell burnt flesh.

Natural light filters through one-way glass windows and banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceilings blaze as my staff works at stainless-steel sinks and portable tables along a wall. Luke Zenner is finishing an autopsy at his station, number 2, next to mine, where Gail Shipton’s body holds its rigid pose still wrapped in plasticized sheets. The bag was removed from her head, probably by Dr. Adams when he charted her teeth.

She’s not looking quite as pristine now that she’s in a warmer place and tampered with by a forensic dentist who had to break the rigor in her jaw to force open her mouth. Her lips are drying, beginning a slow retraction as if she’s snarling at the violation, what couldn’t be a more necessary or degrading one.

“Glad to see you’re still in the land of the living,” Luke’s vivid blue eyes look at me through large safety glasses, his blond hair covered with a colorful surgical cap.

“It’s not exactly the land of the living in here,” Lucy says. “’Tis the season.” She stares at the charred body on Luke’s table, the chest cavity empty and bright cherry red, the ribs showing through curved and white.

“What about a CO level?” I ask him.

“Sixty percent. Ja, in der Tat, meine Freundin,” says Luke, whose first language is German. “He was still breathing when he caught his house on fire. Smoking and drinking, his STAT alcohol point-two-nine.”

“That will do it.”

“The thought is he passed out and the cigarette started smoldering on the couch.” Luke wipes his bloody gloved hands on a bloody towel and calls out to Rusty on the other side of the room, asking him to close up for him. “One big drunk tank in here today, what I’ve come to expect right before the holidays.” Luke pulls off his bloody apron and drops it in the biohazard trash. “Dr. Schoenberg is up next. How’s that for a twist of fate? A shrink with poor coping skills.”

I signal Harold that I need some help.

“I’m not sure there isn’t some cause and effect at work.” Moving a surgical cart close, I retrieve a pair of scissors and begin cutting through tape. “You took care of one of his patients last week, Sakura Yamagata, the woman who jumped off the roof of her apartment building.”

“Good Lord.” Luke’s eyes widen. “The twenty-two-year-old so-called fashion designer, thanks to her biopreneur molecular millionaire daddy who basically bought a career for her? Most recently he paid half a million dollars to some reality star to make a personal appearance at a fashion show and endorse his daughter’s label, which is a horror. In the inimitable words of Bryce, all high-tech drama and no story, or the Jetsons meet Snooki.”

“How do we know all this?” I ask.

“Googled it,” Luke says. “Amazing what’s out there about our patients.”

“I’ve notified tox to check for hallucinogens such as mephedrone, methylone, MDPV in her case.”

“Good idea, and we’re going to need to talk when you’ve got a minute. I fear this Dr. Schoenberg’s going to be high-maintenance.”

“Vitreous, blood, urine, liver, no stone unturned.” I fold the sheets and hand them to Harold. “Not to mention his gastric. Had he eaten recently? Did he order food at the pub? Maybe he didn’t go there to drink but to eat alone and calm down before he went back home to patch things up with his wife. Maybe he was trying to sort through why it wasn’t his fault that a patient killed herself right in front of him.”

I remove the ivory cloth from Gail Shipton’s body, nude except for the pale peach panties she has on, an expensive, high-thread-count cotton, Swiss-made. The wound on her left upper chest is so faint it easily could have been missed.

The circular skin discoloration is a very faint pink and no bigger than a dime. Under a hand lens I can see the puncture in the middle of it made by a barbed shank that penetrated her right lung, collapsing it.

“Have you come across this before?” I ask Benton as if my question is hypothetical, a teaching exercise, nothing more than a quiz.

What I can’t allude to is the D.C. murders. I don’t want to alert any members of my staff that Gail Shipton likely is the victim of a serial killer who has terrorized our nation’s capital for the past eight months. It will be up to Benton to open that door.

“It looks like an insect bite.” He studies the magnified wound, his disposable gown rustling against me. I feel his warmth. I sense his intensity.

Then his hazel eyes peer at me above his surgical mask and I see what’s in them. He hasn’t encountered this before. The injury is new to him.

“I don’t know what it is, not firsthand,” he says. “Obviously an insect couldn’t penetrate her lung. Do you think it could be an injection site?” he asks and I don’t think that.

We may have discovered how the killer controls his victims. It’s possible this attention-seeking psychopath has inadvertently left a peephole into his modus operandi. I see what the bastard did. I have a better idea what kind of cowardly brute he is.

“It’s not an injection site.” I hold Benton’s gaze and it’s my way of communicating that I’m not going to tell him what caused the wound. Not in front of an audience.

Gail Shipton was shot with an electrical weapon, a stun gun, and not the type the average person can buy on the Internet for home protection. She may have been shot more than once but this wound to her chest is where one of the probes struck her bare skin and the dart penetrated her chest wall and lung. If other probes struck clothed areas of her body, I might not see any injury. Since we don’t have what she was wearing at the bar last night I can’t look for tears.

Stun-gun shocks are silent. The victim is completely incapacitated while wire-attached darts deliver 50,000 volts. It’s like going into a cadaveric spasm or instant rigor mortis while you’re alive, if such a gruesome thing were possible. You can’t speak and you can’t stand up. The most threatening injury can come from dropping like a falling tree and striking your head.

“Do you mind if I borrow your office?” Benton holds my stare. “I’ve got some calls I need to make and then maybe Bryce could drop me by the house so I can get my car.”

“Harold?” I push up my face shield. “If you’ll get Anne in here, please? I’ll be right back and we’ll get started.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”