Point of Origin

14

THE ATLANTA BRAVES were staying at the Sheraton Hotel on Society Hill when McGovern dropped me off at almost seven P.M. Groupies, old and young, were dressed in baseball jackets and caps, prowling hallways and bars with huge photographs in hand to be signed by their heroes. Security had been called, and a desperate man stopped me as I was coming through the revolving door.

'Have you seen them?' he asked me, his eyes wildly darting around.

'Seen who?' I said.

'The Braves!'

'What do they look like?' I asked.

I waited in line to check in, not interested in anything but a long soak in the tub. We had been held up two hours in traffic just south of Philadelphia, where five cars and a van had smashed into each other, sending broken glass and twisted metal across six lanes. It was too late to drive another hour to the Lehigh County morgue. That would have to wait until morning, and I took the elevator to the fourth floor and slid in my plastic card to open the electronic lock. I opened curtains and looked out at the Delaware River, and masts of the Moshulu moored at Penn's Landing. Suddenly, I was in Philadelphia with a turn-out bag, my aluminum case, and my purse.

My message light was blinking, and I listened to Benton's recorded voice saying that he was staying at my same hotel, and should be arriving as soon as he could break free of New York and its traffic. I was to expect him around nine. Lucy had left me her new phone number and didn't know if she'd see me or not. Marino had an update that he would relay when I called, and Fielding said the Quinns had gone on the television news earlier this evening to say they were suing the medical examiner's office and me for violating the separation of church and state and causing irreparable emotional damage.

I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes. My pantyhose had a run, and I wadded them and hurled them into the trash. My clothes had bitten into me because I had worn them too long, and I imagined the stench of cooking human bones lingering in my hair.

'Shit!' I exclaimed under my breath. 'What kind of goddamn life is this?'

I snatched off my suit, blouse, and slip and flung them inside out on the bed. I made sure the deadbolt was secure and began filling the tub with water as hot as I could stand it. The sound of it pouring on top of itself began to soothe me, and I dribbled in foaming bath gel that smelled like sun-ripened raspberries. I was confused about seeing Benton. How had it all come to this? Lovers, colleagues, friends, whatever we were supposed to be had blended into a mixture, like paintings in sand. Our relationship was a design of delicate colors, intricate and dry and easily disturbed. He called as I was drying off.

'I'm sorry it's so late,' he said.

'How are you?' I asked.

'Are you up for the bar?'

'Not if the Braves are there. I don't need a riot.'

'The Braves?' he asked.

'Why don't you come to my room? I have a mini-bar.'

'In two minutes.'

He showed up in his typical uniform of dark suit and white shirt. Both showed the harshness of his day, and he needed to shave. He gathered me in his arms and we held each other without speaking for a very long time.

'You smell like fruit,' he said into my hair.

'We're supposed to be in Hilton Head,' I muttered. 'How did we suddenly end up in Philadelphia?'

'It's a bloody mess,' he said.

Benton gently pulled away from me and took off his jacket. He draped it over my bed and unlocked the mini-bar.

'The usual?' he asked.

'Just some Evian.'

'Well, I need something stronger.'

He unscrewed the top of a Johnnie Walker.

'In fact, I'll make that a double, and the hell with ice,' he let me know.

He handed me the Evian, and I watched him as he pulled out the desk chair and sat. I propped up pillows on the bed and made myself comfortable as we visited each other from a distance.

'What's wrong?' I asked. 'Besides everything.'

'The usual problem when ATF and the Bureau are suddenly thrown together on a case,' he said, sipping his drink. 'It makes me glad I'm retired.'

'You don't seem very retired,' I said wryly.

'That's the damn truth. As if Carrie isn't enough for me to worry about. Then I'm called in on this homicide, and to be honest, Kay, ATF has its own profilers and I don't think the Bureau should be poking its nose into this at all.'

'Tell me something I don't know, Benton. And I don't see how they're justifying their involvement, for that matter, unless they're saying this lady's death is an act of terrorism.'

'The potential link to the Warrenton homicide,' he told me. 'As you know. And it wasn't hard for the unit chief to call state police investigators to let them know the Bureau would do anything to help. So then the Bureau's invited in, and here I am. There were two agents at the fire scene earlier today, and already everybody's pissed off.'

'You know, Benton, supposedly we're all on the same side,' I said, and this same old subject made me angry again.

'Apparently this one FBI guy who's with the Philly field office hid a nine-millimeter cartridge at the scene to see if Pepper would hit on it.'

Benton slowly swirled Scotch in his glass.

'Of course Pepper didn't because he hadn't even been told to go to work yet,' he went on. 'And the agent thought this was funny, saying something about the dog's nose needing to go back to the shop.'

'What kind of fool would do something like that?' I asked, incensed. 'He's lucky the handler didn't beat the hell out of him.'

'So here we are,' he went on with a sigh. 'Same old shit. In the good ole days, FBI agents had better sense than that. They weren't always flashing their shields in front of the camera and taking over investigations they aren't qualified to handle. I'm embarrassed. I'm more than embarrassed, I'm enraged that these new idiots out there are ruining my reputation along with their own, after I worked twenty-five years… Well. I just don't know what I'm going to do, Kay.'

He met my eyes as he drank.

'Just do your good job, Benton,' I said to him quietly. 'Trite as that may sound, it's all any of us can do. We're not doing it for the Bureau, not for ATF or the Pennsylvania state police. It's for the victims and potential victims. Always for them.'

He drained his glass and set it on the desk. The lights of Penn's Landing were festive outside my window, and Camden, New Jersey, glittered on the other side of the river.

'I don't think Carrie's in New York anymore,' he then said as he stared out into the night.

'A comforting thought.'

'And I have no evidence for that beyond there being no sightings or any other indicators that she is in the city. Where is she getting money, for example? Often that's how the trail begins. Robbery, stolen credit cards. Nothing so far to make us think she's out there doing things like that. Of course, that doesn't mean she isn't. But she has a plan, and I feel quite confident that she's following it.'

His profile was sharp in shadows as he continued staring out at the river. Benton was depressed. He sounded worn out and defeated, and I got up and went to him.

'We should go to bed,' I said, massaging his shoulders. 'We're both tired, and everything seems worse when we're tired, right?'

He smiled a little and closed his eyes as I worked on his temples and kissed the back of his neck.

'How much do you charge per hour?' he muttered.

'You can't afford me,' I said.

We did not sleep together because the rooms were small and both of us needed rest. I liked my shower in the morning and he liked his, and that was the difference between being new with each other versus comfortable. There had been a time when we stayed up all night consuming each other, because we worked together and he was married and we could not help our hunger. I missed feeling that alive. Often when we were with each other now, my heart was dull or felt sweet pain, and I saw myself getting old.

The skies were gray and the streets were wet from washing when Benton and I drove through downtown on Walnut Street a little past seven the following morning. Steam rose from grates and manholes, the morning damp and cool. The homeless slept on sidewalks or beneath filthy blankets in parks, and one man looked dead beneath a No Loitering sign across from the police department. I drove while Benton went through his briefcase. He took notes on a yellow legal pad and thought about matters beyond my ken. I turned onto Interstate 76 West, where taillights were strung like red glass beads as far ahead as I could see, and the sun behind us was bright.

'Why would someone pick a bathroom as a point of origin?' I asked. 'Why not some other area of the house?'

'Obviously, it means something to him, if we're talking about serial crimes,' he said, flipping a page. 'Symbolic, perhaps. Maybe convenient for some other reason. My guess is that if we're dealing with the same offender, and the bathroom is the point of origin that all of the fires have in common, then it is symbolic. Represents something to him, perhaps his own point of origin for his crimes. If something happened to him in a bathroom when he was a young child, for example. Sexual abuse, child abuse, witnessing something terribly traumatic.'

'Too bad we can't search prison records for that.'

'Problem is, you'd come up with half the prison population. Most of these people come from abuse. Then they do unto others.'

'They do worse unto others,' I said. 'They weren't murdered.'

'They were, in a sense. When you are beaten and raped as a child, your life is murdered even if your body isn't. Not that any of this really explains psychopathy. Nothing I know of does, unless you believe in evil and that people make choices.'

'That's exactly what I believe.'

He looked over at me and said, 'I know.'

'What about Carrie's childhood? How much do we know about why she's made the choices she has?' I asked.

'She would never let us interview her,' he reminded me. 'There isn't much in her psychiatric evaluations, except whatever her manipulation of the moment was. Crazy today, not tomorrow. Disassociating. Depressed and noncompliant. Or a model patient. These squirrels have more civil rights than we do, Kay. And prisons and forensic psychiatric centers are often so protective of their wards that you would think we're the bad guys.'

The morning was getting lighter and the sky was streaked violet and white in perfect horizontal bands. We drove through farmland and intermittent cliffs of pink granite corrugated with drill holes from the dynamite that had blasted in the roads. Mist rising from ponds reminded me of pots of simmering water, and when we passed tall smokestacks with steamy plumes, I thought of fire. In the distance, mountains were a shadow, and water towers dotted the horizon like bright balloons.

It took an hour to reach Lehigh Valley Hospital, a sprawling concrete complex still under construction, with a helicopter hangar and level one trauma center. I parked in a visitor's lot, and Dr Abraham Gerde met us inside the bright, new lobby.

'Kay,' he said warmly, shaking my hand. 'Who would have ever thought you'd be visiting me here some day? And you must be Benton? We have a very good cafeteria here if you'd like coffee or something to eat first?'

Benton and I politely declined. Gerde was a young forensic pathologist with dark hair and startling blue eyes. He had rotated through my office three years earlier, and was still new enough at his profession to rarely have his status as an expert witness stipulated in court. But he was humble and meticulous, and those attributes were far more valuable to me than experience, especially in this instance. Unless Gerde had changed dramatically, it was unlikely he had touched the body after learning I was coming.

'Tell me where we are in this,' I said as we walked down a wide, polished gray hallway.

'I had her weighed, measured and was doing the external exam when the coroner called. As soon as he said ATF was involved and you were on the way, I stopped the presses.'

Lehigh County had an elected coroner who decided which cases would be autopsied and then determined the manner of death. Fortunately for Gerde, the coroner was a former police officer who did not interfere with the forensic pathologists and usually deferred to the decisions they made. But this was not true in other states or other counties in Pennsylvania, where autopsies were sometimes performed on embalming tables in funeral homes, and some coroners were consummate politicians who did not know an entrance from an exit wound, or care.

Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and at the bottom, Gerde pushed through double doors and we found ourselves in a warehouse stacked with collapsed cardboard boxes and busy with people in hard hats. We passed through to a different part of the building and followed another hallway to the morgue. It was small, with a pink tile floor and two stationary stainless steel tables. Gerde opened a cabinet and handed us sterile single-use surgical gowns, plastic aprons, and full coverage disposable boots. We pulled these over our clothes and shoes and then donned latex gloves and masks.

The dead woman had been identified as Kellie Shephard, a thirty-two-year-old black female who had worked as a nurse at the very hospital where she was now being stored with the dead. She was inside a black pouch on top of a gurney inside a small walk-in refrigerator that held no other guests this day except bright orange packages of surgical specimens and stillborn infants awaiting cremation. We rolled the dead woman into the autopsy room and unzipped the pouch.

'Have you X-rayed her?' I asked Gerde.

'Yes, and we've gotten her fingerprints. The dentist charted her teeth yesterday, as well, and matched them with premortem records.'

Gerde and I unzipped the pouch and opened it, and we unwrapped bloody sheets, exposing the mutilated body to the harsh glare of surgical lamps. She was rigid and cold, her blind eyes half open in a gory face. Gerde had not washed her yet, and her skin was crusty with blackish-red blood, her hair stiff with it like a Brillo pad. Her wounds were so numerous and violent that they radiated an aura of rage. I could feel the killer's fury and hate, and I began to envision her fierce struggle with him.

The fingers and palms of both hands had been cut to the bone when she had tried to protect herself by grabbing the knife blade. She had deep cuts to the backs of her forearms and wrists, again from trying to shield herself, and slashes to her legs that most likely were from her being down on the floor and trying to kick the swings of the knife away. Stab wounds were clustered in a savage constellation over her breasts, abdomen, and shoulders, and also on her buttocks and back.

Many of the wounds were large and irregular, and caused by the knife twisting as the victim moved or from the blade being withdrawn. The pattern of the individual wound configurations suggested a single-edged knife with a guard that had left squared-off abrasions. A somewhat superficial cut ran from her right jaw up to her cheek, and her throat had been laid open in a direction that began below the right ear and went downward, and then across the midline of the neck.

'Consistent with her throat being cut from behind,' I said as Benton looked on silently and took notes. 'Head pulled back, throat exposed.'

'I'm assuming cutting her throat was his grand finale,' Gerde said.

'If she had received an injury like this in the beginning, she would have bled out too quickly to put up any kind of fight. So yes, it's very possible he cut her throat last, perhaps when she was face down on the floor. What about clothing?'

'I'll get it,' Gerde said. 'You know, I get the strangest cases here. All these awful car crashes that turn out to be from some guy having a heart attack while he's driving. So he ends up airborne and takes out three or four other people. We had an Internet murder not so long ago. And husbands don't just shoot their wives around here, either. They strangle and bludgeon and decapitate them.'

He kept talking as he headed to a distant corner where clothing dried from hangers over a shallow basin. The garments were separated by sheets of plastic, to insure that trace evidence and body fluids from one weren't inadvertently transferred to another. I was covering the second autopsy table with a sterile sheet when Teun McGovern was shown in by a morgue assistant.

'Thought I'd check by before heading out to the scene,' she said.

She was dressed in BDUs and boots, and carrying a manila envelope. McGovern did not bother with gown or gloves as she slowly surveyed the carnage.

'Good Lord,' she said.

I helped Gerde spread out a pair of pajamas on top of the table I had just covered. Tops and bottoms reeked of dirty smoke and were so sooty and saturated with blood that I could not tell their color. The cotton fabric was cut and punctured front and back.

'She came in clothed in these?' I wanted to make sure.

'Yes,' Gerde replied. 'Everything buttoned and snapped. And I have to wonder if possibly some of the blood is his. In a fight like this, I wouldn't be surprised if he cut himself.'

I smiled at him. 'Someone taught you well,' I said.

'Some lady in Richmond,' he answered.

'At a glance this would seem domestic.' It was Benton who spoke. 'She's home in her pajamas, perhaps late at night. A classic case of overkill, such as you often find in homicides where the two people had a relationship. But what's a little unusual' - he stepped closer to the table - 'is her face. Other than this one cut here.' He pointed. 'There doesn't appear to be any injury. Typically, when the assailant has a relationship with the victim, he directs much of his violence at the face, because the face is the person.'

'The cut to her face is shallower than the others,' I noted, gently spreading open the wound with my gloved fingers. 'Deepest at her jaw, and then tapering off as it travels up her cheek.'

I stepped back and looked at the pajamas again.

'It's interesting that none of the buttons or snaps are missing,' I said. 'And no tears, such as you might expect after a struggle like this when the assailant grabs the victim and tries to control her.'

'I think control is the important word here,' Benton said.

'Or lack of it,' said McGovern.

'Exactly,' Benton agreed. 'This is a blitz attack. Something set this guy off and he went berserk. I seriously doubt he intended for this to go down anything like it did, which is also evidenced by the fire. It appears he lost control of that, too.'

'In my mind, the guy didn't hang around very long after he killed her,' McGovern said. 'He torched the place on his way out, thinking it would cover up his dirty work. But you're absolutely right. He didn't do a good job. And added to that, when the lady's fire alarm went off at one-fifty-eight A.M., trucks got there in less than five minutes. So the damage was minimal.'

Kellie Shephard had second-degree burns to her back and feet, and that was all.

'What about a burglar alarm?' I asked.

'Wasn't armed,' McGovern replied.

She opened the manila envelope and began spreading scene photographs over a desk. Benton, Gerde, and I took our time studying them. The victim in her bloody pajamas was facedown in the bathroom doorway, one arm under her body, the other straight out in front of her as if she had been reaching for something. Her legs were straight and close together, her feet almost reaching the toilet. Sooty water on the floor made it impossible to find bloody drag marks, had they existed, but close-ups of the door frame and surrounding wall showed obvious cuts to the wood that appeared fresh.

'The fire's point of origin,' McGovern said, 'is right here.'

She pointed to a photograph of the interior of the scorched bathroom.

'This corner near the tub where there's an open window with a curtain,' she said. 'And in that area, as you can see, are burned remnants of wooden furniture and pillows from a couch.'

She tapped the photograph.

'So we've got an open door and an open window, or a flue and a chimney, so to speak. Just like a fireplace,' she went on. 'The fire starts here on the tile floor, and involves the curtains. But the flames didn't quite have the energy this time to fully engage the ceiling.'

'Why do you suppose that is?' I asked.

'Can only be one good reason,' she replied. 'The damn thing wasn't built right. I mean, it's clear as day the killer piled furniture, couch cushions, and whatever into the bathroom to build his fire. But it just never got going the way it needed to. The initial fire was unable to involve the piled fuel load because of the open window and the flame bending toward it. He also didn't stand around and watch, either, or he would have realized he screwed up. This time his fire didn't do much more than lick over the body like a dragon's tongue.'

Benton was so silent and still he looked like a statue as his eyes traveled over photographs. I could tell he had much on his mind, but typically, he was guarded in his words. He had never worked with McGovern before, and he did not know Dr Abraham Gerde.

'We're going to be a long time,' I said to him.

'I'm heading out to the scene,' he replied.

His face was stony, the way it got when he felt evil like a cold draft. I gave him my eyes, and his met mine.

'You can follow me,' McGovern offered him.

'Thanks.'

'One other thing,' McGovern said. 'The back door was unlocked, and there was an empty cat pan in the grass by the steps.'

'So you think she went outside to empty the cat pan?' Gerde asked both of them. 'And this guy was waiting for her?'

'It's just a theory,' said McGovern.

'I don't know,' Wesley said.

'Then the killer knew she had a cat?' I said dubiously. 'And that she eventually was going to let it out that night or clean out the cat pan?'

'We don't know that she didn't empty the litter box earlier that evening and leave it in the yard to air out,' Wesley pointed out as he ripped off his gown. 'She may have turned off her alarm and opened the door late that night or in the early morning hours for some other reason.'

'And the cat?' I asked. 'Has it shown up?'

'Not yet,' McGovern said, and she and Benton left.

'I'm going to start swabbing,' I said to Gerde.

He reached for a camera and started shooting as I adjusted a light. I studied the cut to her face, and collected several fibers from it, and a wavy brown hair, four and a half inches long, that I suspected was her own. But there were other hairs, red and short, and I could tell they had been recently dyed because one-sixteenth of an inch at the root was dark. Of course, cat fur was everywhere, most likely transferred to bloody surfaces of the body when the victim was on the floor.

'A Persian, maybe?' Gerde asked. 'Long, very fine fur?'

'Sounds good to me,' I said.