The Scarpetta Factor

23

Inside what the DNA Building’s staff had come to call the Blood Spatter Room, Scarpetta dipped a swab inside a bottle of hexane. She swiped a residue into a petri dish she’d set on the epoxy-tile floor, and pressed the power button on the Lightweight Analyzer for Buried Remains and Decomposition Odor, a LABRADOR.

The e-nose, or sniffer, brought to mind a robotic dog that a creator for the Jetsons might have designed, an S-rod with small speakers on either side of the handle that could pass for ears, and the nose a metal honeycomb of twelve sensors that detected different chemical signatures the same way a canine recognized scents. A battery pack was attached to a strap that Scarpetta slipped over her shoulder, and she tucked the S-rod close to her side and maneuvered the nose over her sample in the petri dish. The LABRADOR responded with an illuminated bar graph on the control console and an audio signal, what sounded like synthesized strums on a harp, a harmonic pattern of tones distinctive for hexane. The e-nose was happy. It had alerted on an alkane hydrocarbon, a simple solvent, and had passed its test. Now it was on to a much more somber assignment.

Scarpetta’s premise was simple. It appeared that Toni Darien had been murdered inside the Starr mansion, and the question was where and if other victims had been lured there in the past, or was Toni the only one? She had been in one of the basements, Scarpetta presumed, based on the temperatures registered by the BioGraph device and Scarpetta’s own findings, which indicated that the body had been preserved someplace cool and out of the elements. Wherever her body had been, it had left molecules of chemicals and compounds. It had left odors that the human nose wasn’t going to pick up but the LABRADOR might, and Scarpetta turned it off and packed it inside a black nylon case. She flipped off ceiling rigs of movable lights that for an instant reminded her of a television set, reminded her of Carley Crispin. Scarpetta put on her coat. She walked out and took a glass staircase down to the lobby and left the building. It was getting close to eight p.m., and the garden in front and its granite benches were empty, windswept, and dark.

She turned right on First Avenue and followed the sidewalk past the Bellevue Hospital Center, heading back to her office, where she was supposed to meet Benton. Her building’s front door would be locked, and she took another right at 30th and noticed light spilling onto the street from one of the bays because the metal door was rolled up. Inside was a white van, the engine on and the tailgate open but no one in sight. Using her swipe card, she opened the interior door at the top of the ramp, and inside the familiar merging of white and teal tile, she heard music. Soft rock. Filene must be on duty. It wasn’t like her to leave the bay door up.

Scarpetta walked past the floor scale to the mortuary office, not seeing anyone. The chair in front of the Plexiglas window was swiveled to one side, Filene’s radio on the floor, her OCME SECURITY jacket hanging on the back of the door. She heard footsteps, and a guard in his dark-blue fatigues appeared from the area of the locker rooms, probably had been in the men’s room.

“The bay door’s open,” she said to him, and she didn’t know his name and had never seen him before.

“A delivery,” he said, and something about him was familiar.

“From where?”

“Some woman hit by a bus in Harlem.”

He was slender but strong, his hands pale and ropy with veins, and wisps of black baby-fine hair strayed from his cap, his eyes masked by gray-tinted glasses. His face was smoothly shaven, his teeth too white and straight, possibly dentures, but he was young for that, and he seemed agitated, excited or nervous, and it occurred to her he might be uneasy working in a morgue after dark. Maybe a temp. As the economy had worsened, so had staffing, and when budgets are severely cut it becomes practical to use more part-time people, more outside vendors, and a lot of staff were out with the flu. Fragmented thoughts raced through her mind at the same time she felt her scalp prickle and her pulse pick up. Her mouth went dry, and she turned to run as he grabbed her arm. The nylon bags she was carrying slipped from her shoulder as she struggled, as he pulled her with shocking force toward the bay where the white van with the open tailgate was parked with the engine on.

The sounds she made weren’t intelligible, were too primitive to be words or thoughts, but explosions of panic as she tried to get away, tried to untangle herself from the bags and their shoulder straps, kicking at him and pulling as he yanked open the door that she had just come through moments earlier, and it banged against the wall with such force it sounded like a sledgehammer against cinder block, banging more than once. The long bag with the LABRADOR inside it somehow was caught horizontally in the door frame, and she thought that was why he let go of her, collapsing at her feet, and blood pooled on the ramp and flowed down it. Benton stepped out from behind the white van, holding a carbine, and he ran to her, training the rifle on the man as she backed away from his motionless body.

Blood was pouring out of a wound in his forehead that had exited through the back of his skull, and a spray of blood was on the door frame just inches from where she’d just been. Her face and neck felt cool where they were wet, and she wiped blood and bits of brain tissue off her skin, and she dropped her bags to the white tile floor as a woman walked inside the bay, holding a pistol in both hands, the barrel pointed up. She lowered the gun as she got closer.

“He’s down,” she said, and it occurred to Scarpetta there might be someone else just shot. “Backups are on the way.”

“Make sure we’re clear out here,” Benton said to the woman as he stepped over the body and the blood on the ramp. “I’ll make sure we’re clear inside.” He said to Scarpetta as his eyes darted around, “Is there anybody else? Do you know if anybody else is inside?”

She said, “How could this happen?”

“Stay with me,” he told her.

Benton walked in front of her, checking corridors, checking the mortuary office, kicking open the doors to the men’s locker room and the women’s. He kept asking Scarpetta if she was all right. He said there were items at the Starrs’ house, clothing, caps, similar to what OCME security wore, in a room in the basement, that it was part of the plan. He repeated it was part of the plan to come here for her, and maybe Berger’s coming for him had pushed him into it. He always had a way of knowing where everyone was and everyone wasn’t, Benton kept saying that, kept talking about him, and he kept asking her if she was hurt, if she was okay.

Marino had called Benton about the clothes, about what he feared they were for, and when Lanier and Benton got here and saw the open bay door, they immediately mobilized. They were on 30th Street when Hap Judd materialized from the dark and walked into the bay to climb into the van. When he saw them, he ran, and Lanier went after him at the same time Jean-Baptiste Chandonne came out the interior door with Scarpetta.

Benton followed the white-tile corridor, checking the anteroom, checking the main autopsy room. Hap Judd was armed and he was dead, Benton said. Bobby Fuller, who Benton believed was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, was dead. At the end of the corridor, past the lift that carried bodies up for viewings, there were blood drips on the floor, and then smears, and a door leading to a stairwell, and on the landing was Filene, and next to her a bloody hammer, the kind of hammer used to assemble pine boxes. It appeared the security guard had been dragged back here, and Scarpetta got next to her and pressed her fingers against the side of her neck.

“Get an ambulance,” she said to Benton.

She felt the injury at the back of Filene’s head, on the right side, an area of swelling that was boggy and bloody. She opened Filene’s eyelids to check the pupils, and the right one was dilated and fixed. Her breathing was erratic, her pulse rapid and irregular, and Scarpetta worried the lower brain stem was getting compressed.

“I need to stay here,” she told Benton as he called for help. “She may start vomiting or have a seizure. I need to keep her airway clear. I’m right here,” she told Filene. “You’re going to be okay,” Scarpetta told her. “Help is on the way,” Scarpetta said.