Predator

52

The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.

“Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up toBenton.

“Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.

She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It’sBenton.

“This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can’t you please come down? I’m cooking. Things are going to hell inFlorida. I need to talk to you.”

She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.

“And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.

How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.

“This is ridiculous,” she says again.

“Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”

“Wood splinters?”

“A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”

“If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.

“If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn’t she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I wish you’d come upstairs.”

“Any defense injuries?”

“Why don’t you come up?”

“As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”

“No evidence of it, but it’s certainly sexually motivated. I’m not hungry at the moment.”

She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.

“Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”

“Seriously.”

“Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”

“Why don’t we talk about this up here.”

Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.

“I’m hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.

“Glad you didn’t walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”

“Good thing you weren’t in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”

She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.

“Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.

Bentonenlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.

“To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it’s possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don’t guess we have histology.”

“If there are slides, I wouldn’t know,”Bentonreplies.

“Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”

“The state police labs have everything.”

“What I’d like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper.”

Bentonlooks at her, shrugs. “Why?”

“It’s possible we’re finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”

“TheQuincyfamily was in the landscaping business. I would assume a lot of commercial citrus growers use copper sprays. Maybe the family tracked it into the back of The Christmas Shop.”

“And possibly bodypaint in there, too-in the storage area where we found blood.”

Bentonfalls silent, something else coming to him.

“A common denominator in Basil’s murders,” he says. “All of the victims, at least the ones whose bodies were recovered, had copper. The trace had copper in it, also citrus pollen, which didn’t mean much. There’s citrus pollen all over the place inFlorida. Nobody thought about copper sprays. Maybe he took them someplace where copper sprays were used, someplace with citrus trees.”

He looks out the window at the gray sky as a snowplow works loudly on his street.

“What time do you need to head out?” Scarpetta clicks on a photograph of the abraded area on the dead woman’s back.

“Not until late afternoon. Basil’s coming in at five.”

“Wonderful. See how inflamed it is just in that one discrete area?” She points it out. “An area where there’s been a removal of the epithelial layer of the skin by rubbing against some sort of rough surface. And if you zoom in”-she does-“you can see that before she was cleaned up, there’s serosanguineous fluid on the surface of the abrasion. See it?”

“Okay. What looks like a little bit of scabbing. But not the entire area.”

“If an abrasion is deep enough, you get leakage of fluid from the vessels. And you’re right, the entire area isn’t scabbing, which makes me suspect that the abraded area is actually several scrape abrasions of differing age, injuries caused by repeated contact with a rough surface.”

“That’s strange. I’m trying to imagine it.”

“I wish I had the histology. Polymorphonuclear white cells would indicate the injury is maybe four to six hours old. As for the brownish-reddish scabs, you generally start seeing those in a minimum of eight hours. She lived for at least a little while after she got this injury, these scrapes.”

She studies more photographs, studies them closely. She makes notes on a legal pad.

She says, “If you look at photographs thirteen through eighteen, you’ll see, just barely, areas of what looks like localized red swelling on the backs of her legs and buttocks. What they look like to me are insect bites that have begun to heal. And if you go back to the picture of the abrasion, there’s some localized swelling and barely visible petechial hemorrhaging, which can be associated with spider bites.

“If I’m right, microscopically you should see a congestion of blood vessels and an infiltration of white blood cells, mainly eosinophils, depending on her response. It’s not very accurate, but we could look for tryptase levels, too, in the event she had an anaphylactic response. But I would be surprised. Certainly she didn’t die of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite. I wish I had the damn histology. Could be more in there than splinters. Urticating hairs. Spiders-tarantulas, specifically-flick them, part of their defense system. Ev and Kristin’s church is next door to a pet store that sells tarantulas.”

“Itching?”Bentonasks.

“If she got flicked, she would have itched like hell,” Scarpetta says. “She might have rubbed up against something, scratching herself raw.”