The Scarpetta Factor

6

If Toni’s murder was a hit by an intelligence-gathering agency, then whoever was responsible wasn’t going to leave a data device on her wrist.

Benton made the point in the flat tone he used when talking to people he really didn’t like. An arid tone, a bland tone, that reminded Scarpetta of parched earth, of stone, as she sat on the sofa inside a guest room he’d converted into his office at the rear of the apartment, a handsome space with a city view.

“Propaganda. To make us think something. In other words, planted,” Marino sounded from the VoiceStation next to Benton ’s computer. “I’m just responding to your suggestion that it might be part of some classified project.”

Benton listened impassively from his leather chair, a wall of books behind him, organized by topic, hardbound, a number of them first editions, some very old. Marino had gotten annoyed and finally had flared up because Benton had made him feel foolish, and the more Marino talked, the more foolish he sounded. Scarpetta wished the two of them would stop acting like adolescent boys.

“So, if you’re going down that road? Then maybe they wanted us to find the watch because whatever’s on it is disinformation,” Marino said.

“Who’s ‘they’?” Benton said in a decidedly unpleasant voice.

Marino no longer felt he had a right to defend himself, and Benton no longer pretended he’d forgiven him. It was as if what had happened in Charleston a year and a half ago was between the two of them and had nothing to do with Scarpetta anymore. Typical of assaults, she no longer was the victim. Everyone else was.

“I don’t know, but truth be told, we shouldn’t discount anything.” Marino’s big invasive voice filling Benton ’s small private space. “The longer you do this, the more you learn to keep an open mind. And we got a lot of shit going on in this country with terrorism, counterterrorism, spying, counterspying, the Russians, the North Koreans, you name it.”

“I’d like to move away from the CIA suggestion.” Berger was no-nonsense, and the turn the conversation had taken was trying her patience. “There’s no evidence we’re dealing with some organized hit that’s politically motivated or related to terrorism or spying. In fact, plenty of evidence to the contrary.”

“I want to ask about the position of the body at the scene,” said Detective Bonnell, soft-spoken but confident and at times wry and hard to read. “Dr. Scarpetta, did you find any indication that she might have been pulled by her arms or dragged? Because I found the positioning strange. Almost a little ridiculous, like she was dancing ‘Hava Nagila,’ the way her legs were bent froglike and her arms straight up. I know that probably sounds strange to say, but it did cross my mind when I first saw her.”

Benton was looking at the scene photographs on his computer, and he answered before Scarpetta could. “The position of the body is degrading and mocking.” Clicking on more photographs. “She’s exposed in a sexually graphic manner that’s intended to show contempt and to shock. No effort was made to conceal the body but exactly the opposite. The position she’s in was staged.”

“Other than the position you’ve described, there was no evidence she’d been dragged.” Scarpetta answered Bonnell’s question. “No abrasions posteriorally, no bruises around her wrists, but you need to bear in mind that she wasn’t going to have a vital response to injuries. She wasn’t going to have bruising if she was grabbed by the wrists after death. In the main, the body was relatively injury-free, except for her head wound.”

“Let’s assume you’re right about her having been dead for a while.” It was Berger talking, broadcasting forcefully from the sleek black speaker Benton used for conference calling. “I’m thinking there might be some explanation for this.”

“The explanation is what we know happens to the body after death,” Scarpetta said. “How rapidly it cools, the way uncirculating blood settles to the dependent regions due to gravity and what that looks like, and the characteristic stiffening of the muscles due to the decline of adenosine triphosphate.”

“There can be exceptions, though,” Berger said. “It’s well established that these types of artifacts associated with time of death can greatly vary depending on what the person was doing right before he or she died, the weather conditions, body size, and how the person was dressed, and even what sort of drugs someone might have been on. Am I correct?”

“Time of death isn’t an exact science.” Scarpetta wasn’t at all surprised that Berger was debating her.

It was one of those situations when truth made everything immeasurably harder.

“Then it’s within the realm of possibility there were circumstances that could explain why Toni’s rigor and livor seemed so well advanced,” Berger said. “For example, if she was exerting a lot of energy, was running, perhaps running away from her assailant, when he hit her on the back of the head. Couldn’t that account for an unusually rapid onset of rigor mortis? Or even instantaneous rigor, what’s known as a cadaveric spasm?”

“No,” Scarpetta answered. “Because she didn’t die immediately after she was struck in the head. She survived for a while, and in fact would have been anything but physically active. She would have been incapacitated, basically in a coma and dying.”

“But if we’re objective about it,” as if hinting Scarpetta might not be, “her livor, for example, can’t tell you exactly when she died. There are many variables that can affect lividity.”

“Her livor’s not telling me exactly when she died, but an estimation. It does, however, tell me unequivocally that she was moved.” Scarpetta was beginning to feel as if she was on the witness stand. “Possibly this was when she was transported to the park, and likely whoever is responsible didn’t realize that by positioning her arms the way he did, he offered an obvious inconsistency. Her arms were not above her head while her livor was forming, but closer to her sides, palms down. Also, there are no indentations or marks from clothing, yet there is blanching under the band of her watch, indicating it was on her wrist after livor was intensifying and becoming fixed. I’m suspicious that for at least twelve hours after death she was completely nude, except for her watch. She wasn’t even wearing her socks, which were an elastic material that would have left marks. When she was dressed before her body was transported to the park, her socks were put on the wrong feet.”

She told them about Toni’s anatomically correct running socks, adding that typically when assailants dress their victims after the fact, there are telltale signs of it. Often mistakes are made. For example, clothing is twisted or inside out. Or in this case, an inadvertent reversal of left and right.

“Why leave the watch on?” Bonnell asked.

“Unimportant to whoever undressed her.” Benton was looking at scene photos on his screen, zooming in on the BioGraph watch on Toni’s left wrist. “Removing jewelry, except for purposes of taking souvenirs, isn’t as sexually charged as removing clothing, exposing bare flesh. But it’s all a matter of what’s symbolic and erotic to the offender. And whoever was with her body wasn’t in a hurry. Not if he had her for a day and a half.”

“Kay, I’m wondering if you’ve ever had a case when someone has been dead only eight hours but it looks like he or she’s been dead almost five times that long?” Berger had her mind made up and was doing her damnedest to lead the witness.

“Only in cases where the onset of decomposition is dramatically escalated, such as in a very hot tropical or subtropical environment,” Scarpetta said. “When I was a medical examiner in South Florida, escalated decomposition wasn’t uncommon. I saw it often.”

“In your opinion, was she sexually assaulted in the park, or perhaps in a vehicle and then moved and displayed as Benton has described?” Berger asked.

“I’m curious. Why a vehicle?” Benton said, leaning back in his chair.

“I’m posing the possible scenario that she was sexually assaulted and murdered in a vehicle, then dumped and displayed where she was found,” Berger said.

“There’s nothing I observed during the external examination or during the autopsy that would tell me she was assaulted inside a vehicle,” Scarpetta answered.

“I’m thinking about the injuries she might have if she’d been sexually assaulted in the park, on the ground,” Berger said. “I’m asking if it’s been your experience when someone is sexually assaulted on a hard surface, such as the ground, that there would be bruises, abrasions.”

“Often I will find that.”

“As opposed to being raped, for example, in the backseat of a car, where the surface under the victim is more forgiving than frozen earth that’s covered with stones and sticks and other debris,” Berger continued.

“I can’t tell from the body whether she was assaulted in a vehicle,” Scarpetta repeated.

“Possible she got into a vehicle, was hit in the head, and then the person sexually assaulted her, was with her for a period of time before dumping her body where she was found.” Berger wasn’t asking. She was telling. “And her livor, her rigor, her temperature are, in fact, confusing and misleading because her body was barely clothed and exposed to near-freezing conditions. And if it’s true she died a lingering death, perhaps lingered for hours because of her head injury-that maybe livor was advanced because of that.”

“There are exceptions to the rules,” Scarpetta said. “But I don’t think I can offer the exceptions you seem to be looking for, Jaime.”

“I’ve done a lot of literature searches over the years, Kay. Time of death is something I deal with and argue in court fairly frequently. I’ve found a couple of interesting things. Cases of people who die lingering deaths, let’s say from cardiac failure or cancer, and livor mortis begins before they’re even dead. And again, there are cases on record of people going into instantaneous rigor. So, hypothetically, if for some reason Toni’s livor was already developing right before she died and she went into instantaneous rigor for some very unusual reason? And I believe that can happen in as phyxial deaths, and she did have a scarf tied around her neck, appears to have been strangled in addition to being hit with a blunt object. Wouldn’t it be possible that she’d really been dead a much shorter period than you’re assuming? Maybe dead for just a few hours? Fewer than eight hours?”

“In my opinion, that’s not possible,” Scarpetta said.

“Detective Bonnell,” Berger said. “Do you have that WAV file? Perhaps you can play it on Marino’s computer. Hopefully we’ll be able to hear it over speakerphone. A recording of a nine-one-one call that came in at around two p.m. today.”

“Doing it now,” Bonnell said. “Let me know if you can’t hear it.”

Benton turned up the volume on the VoiceStation as the recording began:

“Police operator five-one-nine, what is the emergency?”

“Um, my emergency is about the lady they found in the park this morning, the north side of the park off One hundred and tenth Street?” The voice was nervous, scared. A man who sounded young.

“What lady are you referring to?”

“The lady, um, the jogger who was murdered. I heard about it on the news…”

“Sir, is this an emergency?”

“I think so because I saw, I think I saw, who did it. I was driving by that area around five this morning and saw a yellow cab pulled over and a guy was helping what looked like a drunk woman out of the back. The first thing I thought was it was her boyfriend, like they’d been out all night. I didn’t get a good look. It was pretty dark and foggy.”

“It was a yellow cab?”

“And she was, like, drunk or passed out. It was real quick and, like I said, dark and a lot of mist and fog, really hard to see. I was driving toward Fifth Avenue and caught a glimpse. I had no reason to slow down, but I know what I saw, and it was definitely a yellow cab. The light on the roof was turned off, like when cabs are in use.”

“Do you have a tag number or the identification number painted on the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see a reason, um, but I saw on the news, they said it’s a jogger and I do remember this lady looked like she had on some type of running clothes. A red bandana or something? I thought I saw something red around her neck, and she had on a light-colored sweatshirt or something like that instead of a coat, because I noticed right away she didn’t look all that warmly dressed. According to the time they said she was found, well, it wasn’t long at all after I drove past that spot…”

The WAV file stopped.

“I was contacted by dispatch, and I did speak to this gentleman over the phone and will follow up in person, and we’ve run a background on him,” Bonnell said.

Scarpetta envisioned the yellow paint chip she had recovered from Toni Darien’s hair, in the area of her head wound. She remembered thinking in the morgue when she was looking at the paint under a lens that the color reminded her of French’s mustard and yellow cabs.

“Harvey Fahley, a twenty-nine-year-old project manager at Kline Pharmaceuticals in Brooklyn, has an apartment in Brooklyn,” Bonnell continued. “And his girlfriend does have an apartment in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights.”

Scarpetta certainly didn’t know if the paint was automotive. It could be architectural, aerosol, from a tool, a bicycle, a street sign, from almost anything.

“What he told me is consistent with what he said on the nine-one-one recording,” Bonnell said. “He’d spent the night with his girlfriend and was driving home, was headed to Fifth Avenue, planning to cut over on Fifty-ninth to the Queensboro Bridge so he could get ready for work.”

It made sense why Berger was resistant to what Scarpetta believed was Toni’s time of death. If a cabdriver was the killer, it seemed more plausible that he was cruising and spotted Toni while she was out, possibly walking or jogging late last night. It seemed implausible that a cabdriver would have picked her up at some point on Tuesday, perhaps in the afternoon, and then kept her body until almost five o’clock this morning.

As Bonnell continued to explain, “There was nothing suspicious about anything he said to me, nothing about his background. Most important, the description about the way the woman was dressed, his description of her as she was being helped out of the taxi? How could he possibly know those details? They haven’t been made public.”

The body doesn’t lie. Scarpetta reminded herself of what she’d learned during her earliest days of training: Don’t try to force the evidence to fit the crime. Toni Darien wasn’t murdered last night. She wasn’t murdered yesterday. No matter what Berger wanted to believe or any witness said.

“Did Harvey Fahley offer a more detailed description of the man who was allegedly helping the drunk-looking woman out of the taxi?” Benton asked, looking up at the ceiling, hands together, impatiently tapping his fingertips together.

“A man in dark clothing, a baseball cap, maybe glasses. He got the impression the man was slender, maybe an average-size person,” Bonnell said. “But he didn’t get a good look, because he didn’t slow down and also because of the weather conditions. He said the taxi itself was blocking his view because the man and the woman were between it and the sidewalk, which would be true if you were driving east on One hundred and tenth, heading to Fifth Avenue.”

“What about the taxi driver?” Benton asked.

“He didn’t get a look but assumed there was one,” Bonnell answered.

“Why would he assume that?” Benton asked.

“The only door open was the back door on the right side, as if the driver was still up front and the man and woman had been in the back. Harvey said if it had been the driver helping her out at a location like that, he probably would have stopped. He would have assumed the lady was in trouble. You don’t just leave a drunk passed-out person on the roadside.”

“Sounds like he’s making excuses about why he didn’t stop,” Marino said. “He wouldn’t want to think what he actually saw was a taxi driver dumping an injured or dead woman on the roadside. Easier to think it was a couple out drinking all night.”

“The area he described in the nine-one-one recording,” Scarpetta said. “How far would that be from where the body was found?”

“About thirty feet,” Bonnell said.

Scarpetta told them about the bright-yellow paint chip she’d recovered from Toni’s hair. She encouraged them not to place too much stock in the detail, because none of the trace evidence had been examined yet and she’d also found red and black microscopic chips on Toni’s body. The paint could have been transferred from the weapon that fractured Toni’s skull. The paint could be from something else.

“So if she was in a yellow cab, how could she have been dead thirty-six hours?” Marino voiced the obvious question.

“It would have to be a cabdriver who killed her,” Bonnell replied with more confidence than any of them had a right to feel at the moment. “Either way you look at it, if what Harvey said is true, it had to be a cabdriver who picked her up last night, killed her, and dumped her body in the park early this morning. Or he had her for a while and then dumped her, if Dr. Scarpetta’s right about time of death. And the yellow cab could connect Toni Darien to Hannah Starr.”

Scarpetta had been waiting for that assumption next.

“Hannah Starr was last seen getting into a yellow cab,” Bonnell added.

“I’m not at all prepared to connect Toni’s case to Hannah Starr,” Berger said.

“Thing is, if we don’t say something and it happens again,” Bonnell said, “then we’re talking three.”

“I have no intention of making any such connection at this time.” Berger said it as a warning: Nobody else had better think of making that connection publicly, either.

“It’s not necessarily what I think, not about Hannah Starr,” Berger continued. “There are other factors about her disappearance. A lot of things I’ve been looking into point at her possibly being a very different type of case. And we don’t know that she’s dead.”

“We also don’t know that somebody else didn’t see the same thing Harvey Fahley did,” Benton said, looking at Scarpetta, saying it for her benefit. “Wouldn’t be good if some other witness did the typical thing these days and instead of going to the police went to a news network. I wouldn’t want to be within five miles of CNN or any other media outlet if this detail about the yellow cab has been leaked.”

“I understand,” Scarpetta said. “But whether it has or hasn’t, I’d be concerned that my being a no-show tonight would make matters only worse. Would only escalate the sensational value. CNN knows I’m not going to discuss Toni Darien or Hannah Starr. I don’t discuss active cases.”

“I’d stay clear.” Benton looked intensely at her.

“It’s in my contract. I’ve never had a problem,” she said to him.

“I agree with Kay. I’d conduct business as usual,” said Berger. “If you cancel at the final hour, all it will do is give Carley Crispin something to talk about.”