Chapter 8

EVEN DURING MY MOST BURDENED, DISTRACTED moments, I appreciate where I work. I am always aware that the medical examiner system I head is probably the finest in the country, if not the world, and that I co-direct the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, the first training academy of its kind. I am able to do all of this in one of the most advanced forensic facilities I have ever seen.

Our new thirty-million-dollar, one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-square-foot building is called Biotech II and is the center of the Biotechnology Research Park, which has stunningly transformed downtown Richmond by relentlessly replacing abandoned department stores and other boarded-up shells with elegant buildings of brick masonry and glass. Biotech has reclaimed a city that continued to be bullied long after those Northern aggressors fired their last shot.

When I moved here in the late eighties, Richmond consistently topped the list of cities with the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. Businesses fled to neighboring counties. Virtually no one went downtown after hours. That can be said no more. Remarkably, Richmond is on its way to becoming a city of science and enlightenment, and I confess I never thought it possible. I confess, I hated Richmond when I first moved here for reasons that reach far deeper than Marino's nastiness to me or what I missed about Miami.

I believe cities have personalities; they take on the energy of the people who occupy and rule them. During its worst era, Richmond was stubborn and small-minded, and bore itself with the wounded arrogance of a has-been now ordered about by the very people it once dominated, or in some instances owned. There was a maddening exclusivity that caused people like me to feel looked down on and alone. Through it all, I detected the traces of old injuries and indignities as surely as I find them on bodies. I found a spiritual sadness in the mournful haze that during summer months clings like battle smoke over swamps and endless stands of scrawny pines and drifts along the river, swathing the wounds of brick pilings and foundries and prison camps left from that awful war. I felt compassion. I did not give up on Richmond. This morning, I struggle with my growing belief that it has given up on me.

The tops of buildings in the downtown skyline have vanished in clouds, the air thick with snow. I stare out my office window, distracted by big flakes drifting past as phones ring and people move along the corridor. I worry that state and city government will shut down. This can't happen on my first day back.

"Rose?" I call out to my secretary in the adjoining office. "Are you keeping up with the weather?"

"Snow," her voice sails back.

"I can see that. They aren't closing anything yet, are they?" I reach for my coffee and silently marvel over the unrelenting white storm that has seized our city. Winter wonderlands typically grace the commonwealth west of Charlottesville and north of Fredericksburg, and Richmond is left out. The explanation I have always heard is that the James River in our immediate area warms up the air just enough to replace snow with freezing rains that sweep in like Grant's troops to paralyze the earth.

"Accumulation of possibly eight inches. Tapering off by later afternoon with lows in the twenties." Rose must have logged on to an Internet weather update. "Highs not to get above freezing for the next three days. It looks like we'll have a white Christmas. Isn't that something?"

"Rose, what are you doing for Christmas?"

"Nothing much," her response comes back.

I scan stacks of case files and death certificates and push around phone message slips, mail and interoffice memos. I can't see the top of my desk and don't know where to start. "Eight inches? They'll declare a national emergency," I comment. "We need to find out if anything's closing besides schools. What's on my schedule that hasn't already been canceled?"

Rose is tired of yelling through the wall at me. She walks into my office, looking sharp in a gray pants suit and white turtleneck sweater, her gray hair pinned up in a French twist. She is rarely without my big calendar and opens it. She runs her finger over what is written in it for today, peering through half-moon reading glasses. "The obvious is we now have six cases and it's not even eight o'clock yet," she lets me know. "You're on call for court, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen."

"Which case?"

"Let's see. Mayo Brown. Don't believe I remember him."

"An exhumation," I remember. "A homicidal poisoning, a rather shaky one." The case is on my desk, somewhere. I start looking for it as muscles tense in my neck and shoulders. The last time I saw Buford Righter in my office it was over this very case, which was destined to create nothing but confusion in court even after I spent four hours explaining to him the dilution effect on drug levels when the body has been embalmed, that there is no satisfactory method to quantitate the rate of degradation in embalmed tissue. I went over the toxicology reports and prepared Righter for the defense of dilution. Embalming fluid displaces blood and dilutes drug levels, I drilled into him. So if the decedent's codeine level is at the low end of the acutely lethal dose range, then prior to embalming, the level could only have been higher. I meticulously explained that this is what he needs to focus on because the defense is going to muddy the waters with heroin versus codeine.

We were seated at the oval table in my private conference room, paperwork spread before us. Righter tends to blow out a lot when he is confused, frustrated or just pissed off. He continued to pluck up reports and frown at them, and then put them back down, all the while blowing like a whale breaking surface. "Greek," he kept saying. "How the hell do you make the jury understand things like 6-mono-acetylmorphine is a marker for heroin, and since it wasn't detected, then it doesn't necessarily mean heroin wasn't present, but if it was present, then that would mean heroin was, too? Versus telling if codeine is medicinal?" I told him that was my point, the very thing he didn't want to focus on. Stick to the dilution offense_that the level had to have been higher before the person was embalmed, I coached him. Morphine is a metabolite of heroin. Morphine is also a metabolite of codeine, and when codeine is metabolized in the blood we get very low levels of morphine. We can't tell anything definitively here, except we have no marker for heroin, and we do have levels of codeine and morphine, indicating the man took something_willingly or unwillingly_before he died, I painted the scenario for him. And it was a much higher dose than is indicated now because of the embalming, I stressed again. But do these results prove the man's wife poisoned him with Tylenol Three, for example? No. Don't get gummed up in the tar baby of 6-mono-acetylmorphine, I told Righter repeatedly.

I realize I am obsessing. I am sitting at my desk, angrily going through stacks of backed-up work as I anguish over how much trouble I went to preparing Righter for yet another case, promising I would be there for him, just as I always have been. It is a shame he does not seem inclined to return the favor. I am a free lunch. All of Chandonne's Virginia victims are free lunches. I just can't accept it and am beginning to resent the hell out of Jaime Berger, too. "Well, check with the courts," I say to Rose. "And by the way, he's being released from MCV this morning." I resist saying Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's name. "Expect the usual phone calls from the media."

"I heard on the news this New York prosecutor's in town." Rose flips through my date book. She doesn't look up at me. "Wouldn't that be something if she gets snowed in?"

I get up from my desk, take off my lab coat and hang it on the back of my chair. "I don't guess we've heard from her."

"She hasn't called here, not for you." My secretary hints she knows that Berger did track down Jack or at least someone besides me.

I am very skilled at becoming prepossessed with business and deflecting any effort on another person's part to probe an area I choose to avoid. "To expedite things," I say before Rose can give me one of her pregnant looks, "we'll skip the staff meeting. We need to get these bodies out of here before the weather gets any worse."

Rose has been my secretary for ten years. She is my office mother. She knows me better than anyone but doesn't abuse her position by pushing me in directions I don't want to go in. Curiosity about Jaime Berger fizzes on the surface of Rose's thoughts. I can see questions rising in her eyes. But she won't ask. She knows damn well how I feel about trying the case in New York instead of here, and that I don't want to talk about it. "I think Dr. Chong and Dr. Fielding are already in the morgue," she is saying. "I haven't seen Dr. Forbes yet."

It occurs to me that even if the Mayo Brown case goes forward today_even if the courts don't close because of snow_Righter isn't going to call me. He will stipulate my report and resort to putting the toxicologist on the stand, at best. There is no way in hell Righter is going to face me after I called him a coward, especially since the accusation is true and a part of him must know it. He will probably figure out a way to avoid me the rest of his life, and that unpleasant thought leads to another one as I cross the hallway. What does all this bode for me?

I push through the ladies' room door and make the transition from civilized paneling and carpeting, through a series of changing rooms, into a world of biological hazards, starkness and violent attacks on the senses. Along the way, one sheds shoes and outer clothing, stowing them safely in teal-green lockers. I keep a special pair of Nikes parked near the door that leads inside the autopsy suite. The shoes are not destined to walk through the land of the living ever again, and when it is time to get rid of them, I will burn them. I clumsily arrange my suit jacket, slacks and white silk blouse on hangers, my left elbow throbbing. I straggle into a full-length Mega Shield gown that has viral-resistant front panels and sleeves, sealed seams and a gripper neck, which is a snug stand-up collar. I pull on shoe covers, then an O.R. cap and surgical mask. The final touch of my fluid-proofing is a face shield to protect my eyes from splashes that might carry such frights as hepatitis or HIV.

Stainless steel doors automatically open, and my feet make paper sounds over the tan vinyl floor of the biohazard epoxy-finished autopsy suite. Doctors in blue hover over five shiny stainless steel tables fastened to steel sinks, water running, hoses sucking, X rays on light boxes a black-and-white gallery of organ-shaped shadows and opaque bones and tiny, bright bullet fragments that, like loose metal chips in flying machines, break things and cause leaks and vital gears to seize. Hanging from clips inside safety cabinets are DNA specimen cards that have been stained with blood. They look oddly like a bunting of tiny Japanese flags as they air-dry beneath a hood. From closed-circuit television monitors mounted in corners a car engine rumbles loudly in the bay, a funeral home here to deliver or take away. This is my theater. It is where I perform. As unwelcome as the average person might find the morbid odors, sights and sounds that rush to greet me, I am suddenly and immensely relieved. My heart lifts as doctors glance up at me and nod good morning. I am in my element. I am home.

A sour, smoky stench taints the long, high-ceilinged room, and I spot the slender, naked, sooty body on a sheet-covered gurney that has been rolled out of the way of traffic. Alone, cold and silent, the dead man waits his turn. He waits for me. I am the last person he will ever talk to in a language that matters. The name on the toe tag scrawled in permanent Magic Marker, pitifully, is John Do. Someone couldn't spell Doe right. I tear open a packet of latex gloves and am gratified I can stretch one over my cast, which is further protected by the fluidproof sleeve. I am not wearing the sling and will have to resort to doing autopsies with my right hand for a while. Although being left-handed in a right-handed world has its difficulties, it is not without advantages. Many of us are ambidextrous or at least reasonably functional on both sides. My aching fractured bones radiate reminders that all isn't right in my world, no matter how tenaciously I go about my business, no matter how intensely I focus on my work.

I slowly circle my patient, leaning close, looking. A syringe is still embedded in the crook of his right arm, and second-degree burns blister his upper body. They have bright red margins, and his skin is streaked black with soot that is thick inside his nose and mouth. He is telling me he was alive when the fire started. He had to be breathing to inhale smoke. He had to have a blood pressure for fluid to be pumped into his burns, causing them to blister and have a bright red margin. The circumstances of a set fire and the needle in his arm certainly could suggest suicide. But on his right upper thigh, he has a contusion that is swollen to the size of a tangerine and crimson. I palpate it. Indurated, hard as a rock. It appears recent. How did it happen? The needle is in his right arm, suggesting that if he injected himself, he most likely is left-handed, yet his right arm is more muscular than his left one, hinting he is right-handed. Why is he nude?

"We still don't have an ID on him?" I raise my voice to Jack Fielding.

"No further info." He snaps a new blade into a scalpel. "The detective's supposed to be here."

"Found unclothed?"

"Yup."

I run my gloved fingers through the dead man's thick, carbon-dusted hair to see what color it is. I won't be certain until I wash him, but his body and pubic hair are dark. He is clean-shaven with high cheekbones, a sharp nose and square jaw. Burns on his forehead and chin will need to be covered up with funeral home makeup before we can circulate a pho- tograph of him for identification purposes, if it comes to that. He is fully rigorous, arms straight by his sides, fingers slightly curled. Livor mortis, or the blood settling to dependent regions of the body due to gravity, is also fixed, causing the sides of his legs and buttocks to be a deep red, the backs of them blanched wherever they rested against the wall or the floor after death. I hold him tilted on his side to check for injuries to his back and find parallel linear abrasions over the scapula. Drag marks. There is a burn between his shoulder blades and another one at the base of the back of his neck. Clinging to one of the burns is a fragment of a plastic-like material, narrow, about two inches long, white with small blue type on it, such as you might see on the back of a food product's packaging. I remove the fragment with forceps and hold it up to the surgical lamp. The paper is more like thin, pliable plastic, a material I associate with candy or snack wrappers. I make out the words this product, and 9-4 EST and a toll-free number and part of a website address. The fragment goes inside an evidence bag.

"Jack?" I summon him and begin collecting blank forms and body diagrams, attaching them to a clipboard.

"I can't believe you're going to work with that damn cast on." He walks across the autopsy suite, his bulging biceps straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. My deputy chief may be famous for his body, but no amount of weightlifting or chocolate cream Myoplex high-protein meals in a glass can stop him from losing his hair. It is eerie, but in recent weeks his light brown hair has started falling out before our very eyes, clinging to his clothing, drifting through the air like down, as if he is molting.

He frowns at the misspelling on the toe tag. "The guy from the removal service must be Asian. John Dooo."

"Who's the detective?" I ask.

"Stanfield. Don't know him. Just don't get a puncture in your glove or you'll be wearing a biological hazard for the next few weeks." He indicates my latex-coated cast. "Actually, what would you do, now that I think of it?"

"Cut it off and put on a new one."

"So maybe we should have disposable casts down here."

"I feel like cutting it off anyway. This guy's burn pattern isn't making sense to me," I tell him. "Do we know how far the body was from the fire?"

"About ten feet from the bed. I was told the bed's the only thing that burned and only partially. He was nude, sitting on the floor, back against the wall."

"I wonder why only his upper body got burned." I point out discrete burns the size and shape of silver dollars. "Arms, chest. One here on his left shoulder. And these on his face. And he has several on his back, which should have been spared if he was leaning against the wall. What about the drag marks?"

"As I understand it, when the fire department got there, they dragged his body out into the parking lot. One thing's for sure, he must've been unconscious or incapacitated when the fire started," Jack says. "Sure as hell don't know why else someone would just sit there getting burned and breathing in smoke. Obviously that happy-holiday time of year." My second-in-command is cloaked in a hung-over weariness that causes me to suspect he had a very bad night. I wonder if he and his ex-wife had another one of their explosions. "Everybody killing themselves. That woman over there." He points to the body on table 1, where Dr. Chong is busy taking photographs from a stepladder. "Dead on the kitchen floor, a pillow, a blanket. The neighbor heard one shot. Mother found her. There's a note. And behind door number two"_Jack stares at table 2_"a motor vehicle death the state police are suspicious is a suicide. She has extensive injuries. Plowed right into a tree."

"Did her clothes come in?"

"Yup."

"Let's X-ray her feet and get the labs to check the bottom of her shoes to see if she was braking or accelerating when she hit the tree." I shade areas of a body diagram, indicating soot.

"And we got a known diabetic with a history of overdose,"

Jack recites our guest list of the morning. "Was found outside in the yard. Question is drugs, alcohol or exposure."

"Or a combination of the above."

"Right. I see what you mean about the burns, though." He leans closer to look, blinking often, reminding me he wears contact lenses. "And it's weird they're all about the same size and shape. You want me to help with this?"

"Thanks. I'll manage. How are you?" I glance up from my clipboard.

His eyes are tired, his boyish good looks strained. "Maybe we can grab some coffee sometime," he says. "One of these days. And I should be asking about you."

I pat his shoulder to let him know I am okay. "As well as can be expected, Jack," I add.

I begin the external examination of John Doe with a PERK. This is a physical evidence recovery kit, a decided unpleasantness that includes swabbing orifices, clipping fingernails and plucking head, body and pubic hair. We PERK all bodies when there is any reason to suspect something other than a natural death, and I will always PERK a body that is nude, unless there is an acceptable reason for the person's not being clothed when he died_in the bathtub or on the operating table, for example. For the most part, I don't spare my patients indignities. I can't. Sometimes the most important evidence lurks in the darkest, most delicate hollows, and clings underneath nails and in hair. During my violation of this man's most private places I discover healing tears of his anal ring. He has abrasions at the angles of his mouth. Fibers adhere to his tongue and the inside of his cheeks.

I go over every inch of him with a lens and the story he tells grows more suspicious. His elbows and knees are slightly abraded and covered with dirt and fibers, which I mundanely collect by pressing them with the adhesive backs of Post-its, which I seal inside plastic bags. Over the bony prominences of both wrists are incomplete circumferential dry, reddish-brown abrasions and minute skin tags. I draw blood from the iliac veins and vitreous fluid from the eyes, and test tubes ride up on the dumbwaiter to the third-floor toxicology lab for STAT alcohol and carbon monoxide tests. At half past ten, I am reflecting back tissue from the Y incision when I notice a tall, older man heading toward my station. He has a wide, tired face and maintains a safe distance from my table, gripping a grocery-size brown paper bag, the top folded over and sealed with red evidence tape. I have a flash of my bagged clothing on my red Jarrah Wood dining room table.

"Detective Stanfield, I hope?" I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.

"Good morning." He catches himself as he stares at the body. "Well, I guess not for him."

Stanfield hasn't bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word "chicken." "Denial" is her word. I don't care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don't watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.

"Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma'am," Stanfield says. "Hope you got chains on your tires, 'cause I didn't and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that's why I wasn't here earlier. You found out anything?"

"His CO's seventy-two percent." Vernacular for carbon monoxide. "Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO." I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. "STAT alcohol's zero."

"So it was the fire that got him, for sure?"

"We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn't tell us much, I'm afraid." I cut through ribs. ''He's got anal tunneling_evidence of homosexual activity, in other words_and his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged." I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the cor- ners of the mouth. Stanfield's eyes pop open, "The abrasions on his wrists aren't crusty," I go on. "They don't look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death." I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. "Fresh injection sites," I explain. "But what's interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I'll put a block of liver through to check for triaditis_mild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we'll see what comes back on his tox."

"Guess he could have AIDS." This is foremost on Detective Stanfield's mind.

"We'll do an HIV on him," I reply.

Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as "Chief." I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn't.

"Ready for me to open up the skull, Chief?" Her question is an announcement that requires no answer. Turk is like a lot of the military women we get in here_tough, eager, quick to eclipse the men, who often, truthfully, are the squeamish ones. 'That lady Dr. Chong's working on," Turk says as she plugs the Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel, "she's got a living will and even wrote her own obituary. Got all her insurance papers in order, everything. Put 'em all in a binder and left it and her wedding band on the kitchen table before she laid herself down on the blanket and shot herself in the head. Can you imagine? Really, really sad."

"It's very sad." The organs are a shimmering bloc as I lift them out en masse and set them on a cutting board. "If you're going to be in here, you really should cover up." I direct this at Stanfield. "Did anybody show you where things are in the locker room?"

He blankly stares at the cuffs of my blood-soaked sleeves, at the blood splashed on the front of my gown. "Ma'am, if you don't mind, I'd like to go over what I got," he says. "If we could maybe sit down for a minute? Then I need to head on back before the weather gets any worse. Pretty soon, you're gonna need Santa's sleigh to get anywhere."

Turk picks up a scalpel and makes an incision around the back of the head, ear to ear. She reflects back the scalp and pulls it forward, and the face goes slack, collapsing into tragic protest before it is inside out like a folded-down sock. The exposed dome of the skull glistens pristinely white, and I take a good look at it. No hematomas. No indentations or fractures. The whir of the electric saw sounds like a hybrid of a table saw and a dentist's drill as I pull off my gloves and drop them in a red biohazard trash can. I motion Stanfield to follow me to the long countertop that runs the length of the wall opposite the autopsy stations. We pull out chairs.

"I gotta be honest with you, ma'am," Stanfield begins with a slow, negative shake of his head. "We don't got a clue where to start on this one. All I can tell you right now is this man"_ he indicates the body on the table_"checked into The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground yesterday at three P.M."

"Where exactly is The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground?"

"On Route Five West, no more than ten minutes from William and Mary."

"You talked to the clerk at this motel, The Fort James Motel?"

"The lady in the office, yes ma'am, I did." He opens a large manila envelope and scoops out a handful of Polaroid photographs. "Her name's Bev Kiffin." He spells it for me, slipping reading glasses out of an inner jacket pocket, hands trembling slightly as he flips through a notepad. "She said the young man come in and said he wants the sixteen-oh-seven special."

"I'm sorry. The what?" I rest my ballpoint pen on the notes I am making.

"One hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents Monday through Friday. That's five nights. Sixteen-oh-seven. The usual rate's forty-six dollars a night, which is mighty high for a place like that, you ask me. But you know tourist traps."

"Sixteen-oh-seven? As in the date Jamestown was founded?" It seems odd to hear a reference to Jamestown. I just mentioned Jamestown to Anna last night when I was talking about Benton.

Stanfield nods deeply. "As in Jamestown. Sixteen-oh-seven. That's the business rate, or so they call it. The amount for the business week, and let me add, ma'am, this isn't a very nice motel, not at all, no ma'am. A fleabag is what I would call it."

"Does it have a history of crime?"

"Oh no. No ma'am. No history of crime I'm aware of, not at all."

"Just seedy."

"Just seedy." He nods deeply.

Detective Stanfield has a distinct way of speaking with emphasis, as if he is used to teaching a slow child who needs important words repeated or emphasized. He neatly arranges photographs in a lineup on the countertop and I look at them. "You took these?" I assume.

"Yes ma'am, I sure did."

Like him, what he has captured on film is emphatic and to the point: the motel door with the number 14 on it, the view of the room through the open doorway, the scorched bed, the smoke damage to the curtains and walls. There is a single chest of drawers and an area to hang clothes that is nothing more than a rod in a recessed area just inside the door. I note that the mattress on the bed has remnants of a cover and white sheets but nothing else. I ask Stanfield if perhaps he submitted the bedcovers to the labs to test for accelerants. He replies that there was nothing on the bed, nothing to submit except burned areas of the mattress, which he placed inside a tightly sealed aluminum paint can_"according to procedure" are his exact words, the words of someone very new at detective work. But he does agree it is odd that the bedcovers were missing.

"They were on the bed when he checked in?" I ask.

"Mrs. Kiffin says she didn't accompany him to the room, but is sure the bed was properly made because she cleaned it up herself after the last guest checked out several days ago," he replies, so that is good. At least he thought to ask her about it.

"What about luggage?" I ask next. "Did the victim have luggage?"

"Didn't find any luggage."

"And the fire department got there when?"

"They were called at five-twenty-two P.M."

"Who called?" I am making notes.

"Someone anonymous driving by. Saw smoke and called from his car phone. This time of year, the motel doesn't do a lot of business, according to Mrs. Kiffin. She says about three fourths of the rooms was empty yesterday, being as how it's almost Christmas and the weather and all the rest. You can see by looking at the bed, the fire wasn't going nowhere." He touches several of the photographs with a thick, rough finger. "It pretty much had put itself out by the time the fire trucks got there. All they needed was fire extinguishers, didn't need to hose things down, which is a good thing for us. This here's his clothes."

He shows me a photograph of a dark pile of clothing on the floor just beyond the open bathroom door. I make out pants, a T-shirt, a jacket and shoes. Next I look at photographs taken inside the bathroom. On the sink is a coppertone plastic ice bucket, plastic glasses covered with cellophane and a small bar of soap still in its wrapper. Stanfield fishes in a pocket for a small knife, opens a blade and slits the evidence tape sealing the paper bag he brought with him. "His clothes," he explains. "Or at least I assume they're his."

"Hold on," I tell him. I get up and cover a gurney with a clean sheet, and put on fresh gloves and ask him if a wallet or any other personal effects were recovered. He tells me no. I smell urine as I pull out clothing from the bag, careful that if any trace evidence is dislodged, it will fall on the sheet. I examine black bikini briefs and black Giorgio Armani cashmere trousers, both soaked with urine.

"He wet his pants," I tell Stanfield.

He just shakes his head and shrugs, and doubt crosses his eyes_maybe doubt tainted by fear. None of this is making much sense, but the feeling I have is clear. This man may have checked in alone, but at some point, another person entered the picture, and I am wondering if the victim lost control of his bladder because he was terrified. "Does the lady in the office, Mrs. Kiffin, remember him dressed like this when he checked in?" I ask as I pull pockets inside out to see if there is anything in them. There isn't.

"Didn't ask her that," Stanfield responds. "So he's got nothing in his pockets. That's kind of unusual."

"No one checked them at the scene?"

"Well, I didn't bag the clothes, to tell you the truth. Another officer did that, but I'm sure nobody dug in the pockets, or at least no personal effects was found or I would know and have them with me," he says.

"Well, how about you call Mrs. Kiffin right now and see if she remembers him wearing this clothing when he checked in?" I politely tell Stanfield to do his job. "And what about a car? Do we know how he got to the motel?"

"No vehicle's turned up so far."

"The way he was dressed is certainly inconsistent with a low-budget motel, Detective Stanfield." I am drawing pants on a clothing diagram form.

The black jacket and black T-shirt as well as the belt, shoes and socks are expensive designer labels, and this makes me think about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose unique baby-fine hair was found all over Thomas's decomposing body when it showed up in the Richmond Port earlier this month. I comment on the similarity of the clothes to Stanfield. The prevailing theory, I go on to explain to him, is that Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother, Thomas, probably in Antwerp, Belgium, and switched clothing with him before sealing the body inside a cargo container bound for Richmond.

"Because you found all those hairs I been reading about in

the paper?" Stanfield is trying to understand what would be difficult for even the most experienced investigator who has seen it all.

"That and microscopic findings that relate to diatoms_algae_consistent with an area of the Seine near the Chandonne house in lie Saint-Louis, in Paris." I talk on. Stanfield is completely lost. "Look, all I can tell you, Detective Stanfield, is this man"_I refer to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne_"has a very rare congenital disorder and allegedly has been known to bathe in the Seine, maybe thinking it might cure him. We have reason to believe the clothing on his brother's body was originally Jean-Baptiste's. Make sense?" I am drawing a belt and noting from the indentation in the leather which notch was used the most.

"Well, to tell you the truth," Stanfield replies, "I been hearing about nothing but this weird case and this Werewolf fellow. I mean, ma'am, that really is all you hear when you turn on the TV or pick up the paper, and I guess you know that, and by the way, I'm really sorry for what you been through and to tell you the truth, can't figure how you can even be in here or thinking straight. Godalmighty!" He shakes his head. "The wife said if something like that showed up at our door, he wouldn't have to do a thing to her. She'd die right off of a heart attack."

I catch a spark of his misgivings about me. He is wondering if I am completely rational right now, if I might just be projecting_if somehow everything I experience becomes tainted by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. I slip the clothing diagram off the clipboard and place it with John Doe's paperwork as Stanfield dials a number he reads from his notepad. I watch him insert a finger in his free ear, squinting as if Turk's sawing open another skull hurts his eyes. I can't hear what Stanfield is saying. He hangs up and comes back over to me as he reads the video display of his pager.

"Well, we got good news and bad news," he announces. "The lady, Mrs. Kiffin, remembers him dressed real nice in a dark suit. That's the good news. The bad news is, she also remembers he had a key in his hand, one of those remote kinds that a lot of new, expensive cars have."

"But there's no car," I reply.

"No ma'am, no car. No key, either," he says. "Sure looks

like whatever happened to him, he had some help. You think maybe somebody drugged him and then tried to burn him up to hide the evidence?"

"I think we'd better seriously consider homicide." I state the obvious. "We need to get him printed and see if he matches up with anybody in AFIS."

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allows us to scan fingerprints into a computer and compare them with those in a database that can be linked state to state. If this dead man has a criminal record in this country, or if his prints are in the database for some other reason, we most likely will get a hit. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves, doing my best to cover the plaster looped around my left lower palm and thumb. Fingerprinting dead bodies requires a simple tool called a spoon. It is nothing more than a curved metal implement shaped much like a hollow tube cut in half lengthwise. A strip of white paper is threaded through slits in the spoon so that the paper's surface is curved to accommodate the contours of fingers no longer flexible or compliant to their owner's will. With each print, the strip is advanced ahead to the next clean square. The procedure isn't hard. It doesn't require great intelligence. But when I tell Stanfield where the spoons are, he frowns as if I have just spoken to him in a foreign language. I ask him if he has ever printed a dead body before. He admits he has not.

"Hold on," I say, and I go to the phone and dial the extension for the fingerprints lab. No one answers. I try the switchboard. Everyone is gone for the day because of the weather, I am told. I get a spoon and ink pad from a drawer. Turk wipes off the dead man's hands and I ink his fingers, pressing them one at a time against the curved paper strip. "What I can do if you have no objection," I tell Stanfield, "is see if Richmond City will pop these into AFIS so we can get that going." I press a thumb inside the spoon while Stanfield watches with an unpleasant expression on his face. He is one of these people who hates the morgue and can't get out of it fast enough. "Doesn't look like there's anyone in the labs to help us right now, and the sooner we can figure out who this guy is, the bet- ter," I explain. "And I'd like to get the prints and other information to Interpol in the event this man has international connections."

"Okay," Stanfield says with another nod as he glances at his watch.

"Have you ever dealt with Interpol?" I ask him.

"Can't say I have, ma'am. They're sort of like spies, aren't they?"

I page Marino to see if he can help. He drops by forty-five minutes later, by which time Stanfield is long gone and Turk is tucking John Doe's sectioned organs inside a heavy plastic bag that she will place in the body cavity before she sews up the Y incision.

"Yo Turk," Marino hails her when he passes through opening steel doors. "Freezing leftovers again?"

She glances up at him with one raised eyebrow and a cocked smile. Marino likes Turk. He likes her so much he is rude to her at every opportunity. Turk doesn't look like what one might conjure up from her nickname. She is petite, with a clean prettiness and creamy complexion, her long blond hair tied back and clipped up high like a show horse's tail. She threads heavy white waxed twine into a twelve-gauge suture needle as Marino continues to pick on her. "I tell ya," he says, "I ever get cut, I ain't coming to you for stitches, Turk." She smiles, dipping the big, angled needle into flesh and tugging twine through.

Marino looks hung over, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. Despite his quips, he is in a foul mood. "You forget to go to bed last night?" I ask him.

"More or less. It's a long story." He tries to ignore me, watching Turk and oddly distracted and ill at ease. I untie my gown and take off my face shield, mask and O.R. cap. "See how quickly you guys can get these into the computer," I tell him, all business and not especially friendly. He is keeping secrets from me and I am pissed off by his peacock display of adolescent behavior. "We've got a bad situation here, Marino."

His attention lifts off Turk and lights on me. He gets sen- ous. He drops the childish act. "How 'bout you tell me what's going on while I smoke," he says to me, meeting my eyes for the first time in days.

Mine is a nonsmoking building, which has not stopped various people high in the pecking order from lighting up inside their offices if they are surrounded by people who won't snitch on them. In the morgue, I don't care who asks. I don't allow smoking, period. It isn't that our clientele need to worry about inhaling secondhand smoke, but my concern is for the living who should do nothing in the morgue that requires them to have hand-to-mouth contact. No eating, drinking or smoking, and I discourage chewing gum or sucking on candies or lozenges. Our designated smoking area is two chairs by an upright ash can near the soda machines in the bay. This time of year, this is not a warm, cozy place to sit, but it is private. The James City County case isn't Marino's jurisdiction, but I need to tell him about the clothes. "It's a feeling I have," I sum it up.

He flicks an ash toward the can, his legs splayed in the plastic chair. We can see our breath.

"Yeah, well I don't like it, either," he replies. "Fact is, it may be coincidence, Doc. But another fact is, the Chandonne family's scary shit. What we don't know is what the hell the fallout's going to be now that their ugly duckling son's locked up in the U.S. for murder_now that he's managed to draw so much attention to his Godfather daddy and all the rest. These are bad people capable of anything, you ask me. Believe me, I'm just beginning to see how really, really bad they are," he cryptically adds. "I don't like the mob, Doc. No sir. When I was coming along, they ran everything." His eyes get hard as he says this. "Fuck, they probably still do, only difference is, there ain't any rules, any respect anymore. I don't know what the hell this guy was doing out near Jamestown, but it wasn't to sightsee, that's for sure. And Chandonne's just sixty miles

away in the hospital. Something's going on."

"Marino, let's get Interpol on this immediately," I say. It is up to the police to report individuals to Interpol, and to do this Marino will have to contact the liaison at State Police, who will pass on the case information to InterpoFs U.S. National Central Bureau in Washington. What we will be asking Interpol to do is to issue an international advisory notice for our case and to search their massive criminal intelligence database at their General Secretariat in Lyon. Notices are color-coded: Red is for immediate arrest with probable extradition; blue is for someone who is wanted but his identity isn't absolutely clear; green is a warning about someone who is likely to commit crimes, such as habitual offenders like child molesters and pornographers; yellow is for missing people; and black is for unidentified dead bodies; those who most likely are fugitives are also coded red. My case will be my second black notice this year, following the first one just weeks ago when the badly decomposed body of Thomas Chandonne was discovered in a cargo container at the Richmond Port.

"Okay, we'll get Interpol a mug shot, prints and your autopsy info," Marino makes a mental note. "I'll do that soon as I leave here. Just hope Stanfield don't feel I'm stepping on his toes." He says this as more of a warning. Marino doesn't care if he steps on Stanfield's toes but he doesn't want a hassle.

"He's clueless, Marino."

"A shame, too, because James City County has real good cops," Marino replies. "Problem is, Stanfield's brother-in-law is Representative Matthew Dinwiddie, so Stanfield's always gotten extra good treatment down there and has about as much business working homicides as Winnie-the-Pooh. But I guess he had that on his wish list and Dimwit, as I call him, must have sweet-talked the chief."

"See what you can do," I tell Marino.

He lights another cigarette, his eyes roving around the bay, thoughts palpable. I resist smoking. The craving is awful and I hate myself for ever resuming the habit. Somehow I always think I can have just one cigarette, and I am always wrong. Marino and I share an awkward silence. Finally, I bring up the subject of the Chandonne case and what Righter told me on Sunday.

"Are you going to tell me what's going on?" I quietly say to Marino. "I assume he was released from the hospital early this morning, and I assume you were there. And I guess you've met Berger."

He sucks on the cigarette, taking his time. "Yeah, Doc, I was there. Fucking zoo." His words drift out on smoke. "They even had reporters from Europe." He glances at me, and I sense there is much he isn't going to tell me, and this depresses me deeply. "You ask me, they ought to stick assholes like him in the Bermuda Triangle and not let nobody talk to them or take their picture," Marino goes on. "It ain't right, except at least in this case, the guy's so ugly, he probably gave everybody technical problems, broke a bunch of expensive cameras. They brought him out in enough chains to anchor a damn battleship, leading him along like he was stone-blind. He had bandages over his eyes, faking like he's in pain, the whole nine yards."

"Did you talk to him?" This is what I really want to know.

"It wasn't my show," he oddly replies, staring off across the bay, clenching his jaw muscles. "They're saying they might have to do cornea transplants. Fuck. Here we got all these people in the world who can't even afford glasses, and this piece of furry shit's gonna get new corneas. And I guess the taxpayers will bankroll his corrective surgery, just like we're paying all these doctors and nurses and God knows who to take care of his ass." He crushes out the cigarette in the ash can. "Guess I'd better get cracking." He reluctantly gets up. He wants to talk to me but for some reason won't. "The Luce and I are grabbing a beer later on. Says she's got some big news for me."

"I'll let her tell you herself," I reply.

He gives me a sidelong glance. "So you're gonna just leave me hanging, huh?"

I start to say that he is one to talk.

"Not even a hint? I mean, is it good news or bad? Don't tell me she's pregnant," he adds ironically as he holds the door for me and we leave the bay.

Inside the autopsy suite, Turk is hosing off my workstation, water slapping and steel grates clanking loudly as she sponges off the table. When she spots me, she shouts above the clamor that -Rose is trying to reach me. I go to the phone. "Courts are closed," Rose tells me. "But Righter's office says he plans to stipulate your testimony anyway. So not to worry."

"What a shock." What was it Anna called him? Ein Mann something. No backbone.

"And your bank called. A man named Greenwood wants you to call." My secretary gives me a number.

Whenever my bank tries to reach me, I am paranoid. Either investments have taken a dive or I am overdrawn because the computer is screwed up or there is a problem of one sort or another. I get hold of Mr. Greenwood in the private banking division. "I'm very sorry," he says coolly. "The message was a mistake. A misunderstanding, Dr. Scarpetta. I'm very sorry you were bothered."

"So no one needs to talk to me. No problems?" I am perplexed. I have dealt with Greenwood for years and he is acting as if he has never met me.

"It was a mistake," he repeats in the same distant tone. "Again, I apologize. Have a good day."

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