Unnatural Exposure

Chapter Two

The next day, the weather was just what Rose predicted, and I woke up thrilled. As stores were opening, I set out to stock up for trick-or-treaters and dinner, and I drove far out on Hull Street to my favorite gardening center. Summer plantings had long since faded around my house, and I could not bear to see their dead stalks in pots. After lunch, I carried bags of black soil, boxes of plants and a watering can to my front porch.

I opened the door so I could hear Mozart playing inside as I gently tucked pansies into their rich, new bed. Bread was rising, homemade stew simmering on the stove, and I smelled garlic and wine and loamy soil as I worked. Marino was coming for dinner, and we were going to hand out chocolate bars to my small, scary neighbors. The

world was a good place to live until three-thirty-five when my pager vibrated against my waist.

'Damn,' I exclaimed as it displayed the number for my answering service.

I hurried inside, washed my hands and reached for the phone. The service gave me a number for a Detective Grigg with the Sussex County Sheriff's Department, and I immediately called.

'Grigg,' a man answered in a deep voice.

'This is Dr Scarpetta,' I said as I stared dismally out windows at large terra cotta pots on the deck and the dead hibiscus in them.

'Oh good. Thank you for getting back to me so quick. I'm out here on a cellular phone, don't want to say much.' He spoke with the rhythm of the old South, and took his time.

'Where, exactly, is here?' I asked.

'Atlantic Waste Landfill on Reeves Road, off 460 East. They've turned something up I

think you're going to want to take a look at.'

'Is this the same sort of thing that has turned up in similar places?' I cryptically asked as the day seemed to get darker.

'Afraid that's what it's looking like,' he said.

'Give me directions, and I'm on my way.'

I was in dirty khakis, and an FBI tee shirt that my niece, Lucy, had given to me, and did not have time to change. If I didn't recover the body before dark, it would have to stay where it was until morning, and that was unacceptable. Grabbing my medical bag, I hurried out the door, leaving soil, cabbage plants and geraniums scattered over the porch. Of course my black Mercedes was low on gas. I stopped at Amoco first and pumped my own, then was on my way.

The drive should have taken an hour, but I sped. Waning light flashed white on the underside of leaves, and rows of corn were brown in farms and gardens. Fields were ruffled green seas of soybeans, and goats grazed unrestrained in the yards of tired homes. Gaudy lightning rods with colored balls tilted from every peak and corner, and I always wondered what lying salesman had hit like a storm and played on fear by preaching more.

Soon grain elevators Grigg had told me to look for came into view. I turned on

Reeves Road, passing tiny brick homes and trailer courts with pickup trucks and dogs, with no collars. Billboards advertised Mountain Dew arid the Virginia Diner, and I bumped over railroad tracks, red dust billowing up like smoke from my tires. Ahead, buzzards in the road picked at creatures that had been too slow, and it seemed a morbid harbinger.

At the entrance of the Atlantic Waste Landfill, I slowed my car to a stop and looked out at a moonscape of barren acres where the sun was setting like a planet on fire.

Flatbed refuse trucks were sleek and white with polished chrome, crawling along the summit of a growing mountain of trash. Yellow Caterpillars were striking scorpions. I sat watching a moiling storm of dust heading away from the landfill, rocking over ruts at a high rate of speed. When it got to me it was a dirty red Ford Explorer driven by a young man who felt at home in this place.

'May I help you, ma'am?' he said in a Southern drawl, and he seemed anxious and excited.

'I'm Dr Kay Scarpetta,' I replied, displaying the brass shield in its small black wallet that I always pulled at scenes where I did not know anyone.

He studied my credentials, then his eyes were dark on mine. He was sweating through his denim shirt, hair wet at his neck and temples.

'They said the medical examiner would get here, and for me to watch for him,' he said to me.

'Well, that would be me,' I blandly replied.

'Oh yes, ma'am. I didn't mean anything…' His voice trailed off as his eyes wandered over my Mercedes, which was coated in dust so fine and persistent that nothing could keep it out. 'I suggest you leave your car here and ride with me,' he added.

I stared up at the landfill, at Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile

on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.

'Okay,' I said. 'Let's do it.'

Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver's seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that

I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.

'I can't say that I blame you,' my driver said. 'The smell's pretty rough. I can tell you that.'

'It's not the smell,' I said. 'Microorganisms are what make me worry.

'Gee,' he said, anxiously. 'Maybe I should wear one of those things.'

'You shouldn't be getting close enough to have a problem.' He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.

'I sure am sorry about the dust,' he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. 'You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.' He nervously paused before going on. 'We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.'

'From where?' I asked.

'Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.'

'What about Boston?' I asked, for the first four cases were believed to be from as far away as that.

'No, ma'am.' He shook his head. 'Maybe one of these days. We're so much less per ton down here. Twenty-five dollars compared to sixty-nine in New Jersey or eighty in

New York. Plus, we recycle, test for hazardous waste, collect methane gas from decomposing trash.'

'What about your hours?'

'Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,' he said with pride.

'And you have a way to track where the trucks come from?'

'A satellite system that uses a grid. We can at least tell you which trucks would have dumped trash during a certain time period in the area where the body was found.' We splashed through a deep puddle near Porta-Johns, and rocked by a powerwash

where tracks were being hosed off on their way back out to life's roads and highways.

'I can't say we've ever had anything like this,' he said. 'Now, they've had body parts at the Shoosmith dump. Or at least, that's the rumor.'

He glanced at me, assuming I would know if such a rumor were true. But I did not verify what he had just said as the Explorer sloshed through mud strewn with rubber chips, the sour stench of decomposing garbage drifting in. My attention was riveted to the small truck I had been watching since I had gotten here, thoughts racing along a thousand different tracks.

'By the way, my name's Keith Pleasants.' He wiped a hand on his pants and held it out to me. 'Pleased to meet you.'

My gloved hand shook his at an awkward angle as men holding handkerchiefs and rags over their noses watched us pull up. There were four of them, gathered around the back of what I now could see was a hydraulic packer, used for emptying Dumpsters and compressing the trash. Cole's Trucking Co. was painted on the doors.

'That guy poking garbage with a stick is the detective for Sussex,' Pleasants said to me. He was older, in shirtsleeves, wearing a revolver on his hip. I felt I'd seen him somewhere before.

'Grigg?' I guessed, referring to the detective I had spoken to on the phone.

'That's right.' Sweat was rolling down Pleasants' face, and he was getting more keyed up. 'You know, I've never had any dealings with the sheriff's department, never even got a speeding ticket around here.'

We slowed down to a halt, and I could barely see through the boiling dust. Pleasants grabbed his door handle.

'Sit tight just a minute,' I told him.

I waited for dust to settle, looking out the windshield and surveying as I always did when approaching a crime scene. The loader's bucket was frozen midair, the packer beneath it almost full. All around, the landfill was busy and full of diesel sounds,

work stopped only here. For a moment, I watched powerful white trucks roar uphill as Cats clawed and grabbed, and compactors crushed the ground with their chopper wheels.

The body would be transported by ambulance, and paramedics watched me through dusty windows as they sat in air conditioning, waiting to see what I was going to do. When they saw me fix the surgical mask over my nose and mouth and open my door, they climbed out, too. Doors slammed shut. The detective immediately walked to meet me.

'Detective Grigg, Sussex Sheriff's Department,' he said. 'I'm the one who called.'

'Have you been out here the entire time?' I asked him.

'Since we were notified at approximately thirteen hundred hours. Yes, ma'am. I've been right here to make sure nothing was disturbed.'

'Excuse me,' one of the paramedics said to me. 'You going to want us right now?'

'Maybe in fifteen. Someone will come get you,' I said as they wasted no time returning to their ambulance. 'I'm going to need some room here,' I said to everybody else.

Feet crunched as people stepped out of the way, revealing what they had been guarding and gawking at. Flesh was unnaturally pale in the dying light of the autumn afternoon, the torso a hideous stub that had tumbled from a scoop of trash and landed on its back. I thought it was Caucasian, but was not sure, and maggots teeming in the genital area made it difficult for me to determine gender at a glance. I could not even say with certainty whether the victim was pre- or postpubescent. Body fat was abnormally low, ribs protruding beneath flat breasts that may or may not have been female.

I squatted close and opened my medical bag. With forceps, I collected maggots into a jar for the entomologist to examine later, and decided upon closer inspection that the victim was, in fact, a woman. She had been decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. Stumps were dry and dark with age, and I knew right away that there was a difference between this case and the others.

This woman had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur, versus the joints. Getting out a scalpel, I could feel the men staring as I made a half-inch incision on the torso's right side, and inserted a long chemical thermometer. I rested a second thermometer on top of my bag.

'What are you doing?' asked a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, who looked like he might get sick.

'I need the body's temperature to help determine time of death. A core liver temperature is the most accurate,' I patiently explained. 'And I also need to know the temperature out here.'

'Hot, that's what it is,' said another man. 'So, it's a woman, I guess.'

'It's too soon to say,' I replied. 'Is this your packer?'

'Yeah.'

He was young, with dark eyes and very white teeth, and tattoos on his fingers that I usually associated with people who have been in prison. A sweaty bandanna was tied around his head and knotted in back, and he could not look at the torso long without averting his gaze.

'In the wrong place at the wrong time,' he added, shaking his head with hostility.

'What do you mean?' Grigg had his eye on him.

'Wasn't from me. I know that,' the driver said as if it were the most important point he would ever make in his life. 'The Cat dug it up while it was spreading my load.'

'Then we don't know when it was dumped here?' I scanned faces around me.

It was Pleasants who replied, 'Twenty-three trucks unloaded in this spot since ten

A.M., not counting this one.' He looked at the packer.

'Why ten A.M.?' I asked, for it seemed like a rather arbitrary time to start counting trucks.

'Because that's when we put down the last cover of tire chips. So there's no way it could have been dumped before then,' Pleasants explained, staring at_ the body. 'And in my opinion, it couldn't have been out long, anyway. It doesn't exactly look the way you'd expect if it's been run over by a fifty-ton compactor with chopper wheels; trucks or even this loader.'

He stared off at other sites where compacted trash was being gouged off trucks as huge tractors crushed and spread. The driver of the packer was getting increasingly agitated and angry.

'We got big machines all over the place up here,' Pleasants added. 'And they pretty much never stop.'

I looked at the packer, and the bright yellow loader with its empty cab. A tatter of black trash bag fluttered from the raised bucket.

'Where's the driver of the loader?' I asked.

Pleasants hesitated before answering, 'Well, I guess that would be me. We had somebody out sick. I was asked to work on the hill.'

Grigg moved closer to the loader, looking up at what was left of the trash bag as it moved in the hot, barren air.

'Tell me what you saw,' I said to Pleasants.

'Not much. I was unloading him.' He nodded at the driver. 'And my bucket caught the garbage bag, the one you see there. It tore and the body fell out to where it is now.' He paused, wiping his face on his sleeve and swatting at flies.

'But you don't know for sure where this came from,' I tried again, while Grigg listened, even though he probably had already taken their statements.

'I could've dug it up,' Pleasants conceded. 'I'm not saying it's impossible. I just don't think I did.'

'That's 'cause you don't want to think it.' The driver glared at him.

'I know what I think.' Pleasants didn't flinch. 'The bucket grabbed it off your packer when I was unloading it.'

'Man, you don't know it came from me,' the driver snapped at him.

'No, I don't know it for a fact. Makes sense, that's all.'

'Maybe to you.' The driver's face was menacing.

'Believe that will be about enough, boys,' Grigg warned, moving close again, his presence reminding them he was big and wore a gun.

'You got that right,' said the driver. 'I've had enough of this shit. When can I get out of here? I'm already late.'

'Something like this inconveniences everyone,' Grigg said to him with a steady look. Rolling his eyes and muttering profanity, the driver stalked off and lit a cigarette.

I removed the thermometer from the body, and held it up. The core temperature was eighty-four degrees, the same as the ambient air. I turned the torso over to see what

else was there and noted a curious crop of fluid-filled vesicles over the lower buttocks. As I checked more carefully, I found evidence of others in the area of the shoulders

and thighs, at the edges of deep cuts.

'Double-pouch her,' I directed. 'I need the trash bag it came in, including what's caught on the bucket up there. And I want the trash immediately around and under her, send all of it in.'

Grigg unfolded a twenty-gallon trash bag and shook it open. He pulled gloves out of a pocket, squatted and started grabbing up garbage by the handful while paramedics opened the back of the ambulance. The driver of the packer was leaning against his cab, and I could feel his fury like heat.

'Where was your packer coming from?' I asked him.

'Look at the tags,' he replied in a surly tone.

'Where in Virginia?' I refused to be put off by him.

It was Pleasants who said, 'Tidewater area, ma'am. The packer belongs to us. We got a lot of them we lease.'

The landfill's administrative headquarters overlooked the fire pond and was quaintly out of sync with the loud, dusty surroundings. The building was pale peach stucco, with flowers in window boxes and sculpted shrubs bordering the walk. Shutters were

painted cream, a brass pineapple knocker on the front door. Inside, I was greeted by clean, chilled air that was a wonderful relief and I knew why Investigator Percy Ring had chosen to conduct his interviews here. I bet he had not even been to the scene. He was in the break room, sitting with an older man in shirtsleeves, drinking Diet Coke and looking at computer-printed diagrams.

'This is Dr Scarpetta. Sorry,' Pleasants said, adding to Ring, 'I don't know your first name.'

Ring gave me a big smile and a wink. 'The doc and I go way back.'

He was in a crisp blue suit, blond and exuding pure youthful innocence that was easy to believe. But he had never fooled me. He was a big-talking charmer who basically was lazy, and it had not escaped me that the moment he had become involved in these cases, we had been besieged by leaks to the press.

'And this is Mr Kitchen,' Pleasants was saying to me. 'The owner of the landfill.' Kitchen was simple in jeans and Timberland boots, his eyes gray and sad as he offered a big rough hand.

'Please sit down,' he said, pulling out a chair. 'This is a bad, bad day. Especially for whoever that is out there.'

'That person's bad day happened earlier,' Ring said. 'Right now, she's feeling no pain.'

'Have you been up there?' I asked him.

'I just got here about an hour ago. And this isn't the crime scene, just where the body ended up,' he said. 'Number five.' He peeled open a stick of Juicy Fruit. 'He's not waiting as long, only two months in between 'em this time.'

I felt the usual rush of irritation. Ring loved to jump to conclusions and voice them with the certainty of one who doesn't know enough to realize he could be wrong. In part this was because he wanted results without work.

'I haven't examined the body yet or verified gender,' I said, hoping he would remember there were other people in the room. 'This is not a good time to be making assumptions.'

'Well, I'll leave ya,' Pleasants said nervously, on his way out the door.

'I need you back in an hour so I can get your statement,' Ring loudly reminded him. Kitchen was quiet, looking at diagrams, and then Grigg walked in. He nodded at us and took a chair.

'I don't think it's an assumption to say that what we got here is a homicide,' Ring said to me.

'That you can safely say.' I held his gaze.

'And that it's just like the other ones.'

'That you can't safely say. I haven't examined the body yet,' I replied.

Kitchen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'Anybody want a soda. Maybe coffee?' he asked. 'We got rest rooms in the hall.'

'Same thing,' Ring said to me as if he knew. 'Another torso in a landfill.'

Grigg was watching with no expression, restlessly tapping his notebook. Clicking his pen twice, he said to Ring, 'I agree with Dr Scarpetta. Seems we shouldn't be connecting this case to anything yet. Especially not publicly.'

'Lord help me. I could do without that kind of publicity,' Kitchen said, blowing out a deep breath. 'You know, when you're in my business, you accept this can happen, especially when you're getting waste from places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago. But you never think it's going to land in your yard.' He looked at Grigg. 'I'd like to offer a reward to help catch whoever did this terrible thing. Ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest.'

'That's mighty generous,' Grigg said, impressed.

'That include investigators?' Ring grinned.

'I don't care who solves it.' Kitchen wasn't smiling as he turned to me. 'Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma'am.'

'I understand you use a satellite tracking system,' I said. 'Is that what these diagrams are?'

'I was just explaining them,' Kitchen said.

He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.

'This is a picture of the landfill face,' Kitchen explained. 'We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.' He tapped the paper. 'Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.' Looking up at me, he added, 'I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.'

'Suffer is the operative word.' I smiled at him. 'Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill's face changes from load to load.'

He nodded. 'Yes, ma'am. That's it in a nutshell.'

'And what have you determined?'

He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the faces of the same person.

'Each line, basically, is a depth,' he said. 'So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.'

Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.

'This body could not have been buried deep,' I said. 'It's very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.'

'That's pretty much it.' Kitchen eyed me with interest. 'You want a job?'

I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was intact.

'Hard to find good women,' Kitchen was saying.

'You ain't kidding, brother,' Ring said as Grigg watched him with growing disgust.

'Seems like a good point,' Grigg said. 'If that body had been on the ground for any time at all, it would be pretty chewed up.'

'The first four were,' Ring said. 'Mangled like cube steak.' He eyed me. 'This one look compacted?'

'The body doesn't appear crushed,' I replied.

'Now that's interesting, too,' he mused. 'Why wouldn't it be?'

'It didn't start out at a transfer station where it was compacted and baled,' Kitchen said.

'It started in a Dumpster that was emptied by the packer.'

'And the packer doesn't pack?' Ring dramatically asked. 'Thought that's why they were called packers.' He shrugged and grinned at me.

'It depends on where the body was in relation to the other garbage when the compacting was done,' I said. 'It depends on a lot of things.'

'Or if it was compacted at all, depending on how full the truck was,' Kitchen said. 'I'm thinking it was the packer. Or at most, one of the two trucks before it, if we're talking about the exact coordinates where the body was found.'

'I guess I'm going to need the names of those trucks and where they're from,' Ring said. 'We gotta interview the drivers.'

'So you're looking at the drivers as suspects,' Grigg said, coolly, to him. 'Got to give you credit, that's original. The way I look at it, the trash didn't originate with them. It originated with the folks who pitched it. And I expect one of those folks is who we need to find.'

Ring stared at him, not the least bit perturbed. 'I'd just like to hear what the drivers have to say. You never know. It'd be a good way to stage something. You dump a body in a place that's on your route and make sure you deliver it yourself. Or, hell, you load it into your own truck. No one suspects you, right?'

Grigg pushed back his chair. He loosened his collar and worked his jaw as if it hurt. His neck popped, then his knuckles. Finally, he slapped his notebook down on the table and everybody looked at him as he glared at Ring.

'You mind if I work this thing?' he said to the young investigator. 'I'd sure hate not to do what the county hired me for. And I believe this is my case, not yours.'

'Just here to help,' Ring said easily as he shrugged again.

'I didn't know I needed help,' Grigg replied.

'The state police formed the multijurisdictional task force on homicides when the second torso showed up in a different county than the first one,' Ring said. 'You're a little late in the game, good buddy. Seems like you might want some background from somebody who's not.'

But Grigg had tuned him out, and he said to Kitchen, 'I'd like that vehicle information, too.'

'How about I get it for the last five trucks that were up there, to be safe,' Kitchen said to all of us.

'That will help a lot,' I said as I got up from the table. 'The sooner you could do that, the better.'

'What time you going to work on it tomorrow?' Ring asked me, remaining in his chair, as if there were little to do in life and so much time.

'Are you referring to the autopsy?' I asked.

'You bet.'

'I may not even open this one up for several days.'

'Why's that?'

'The most important part is the external examination. I will spend a very long time on that.' I could see his interest fade. 'I'll need to go through trash, search for trace, degrease and deflesh bones, get with an entomologist on the age of the maggots to see if I can get an idea of when the body was dumped, et cetera.'

'Maybe it's better if you just let me know what you find,' he decided.

Grigg followed me out the door and was shaking his head as he said in his slow, quiet way, 'When I got out of the army a long time ago, state police was what I wanted to be. I can't believe they got a bozo like that.'

'Fortunately, they're not all like him,' I said.

We walked out into the sun as the ambulance slowly made its way down the landfill in clouds of dust. Trucks were chugging in line and getting washed, as another layer of shredded modern America was added to the mountain. It was dark out when we reached our cars. Grigg paused by mine, looking it over.

'I wondered whose this was,' he said with admiration. 'One of these days I'm going to drive something like that. Just once.'

I smiled at him as I unlocked my door. 'Doesn't have the important things like a siren and lights.'

He laughed. 'Marino and me are in the same bowling league. His team's the Balls of Fire, mine's the Lucky Strikes. That ole boy's about the worst sport I ever seen. Drinks beer and eats. Then thinks everybody's cheating. He brought a girl the last time.' He shook his head. 'She bowled like the damn Flintstones, dressed like them, too. In this leopard-skin thing. All that was missing was a bone in her hair. Well, tell him we'll talk.'

He walked off, his keys jingling.

'Detective Grigg, thanks for your help,' I said. He gave me a nod and climbed into his Caprice.

When I designed my house, I made sure the laundry room was directly off the garage because after working scenes like this one, I did not want to track death through the rooms of my private life. Within minutes of my getting out of my car, my clothes were in the washing machine, shoes and boots in an industrial sink, where I scrubbed them with detergent and a stiff brush.

Wrapping up in a robe I kept hanging on the back of the door, I headed to the master bedroom and took a long, hot shower. I was worn out and discouraged. Right now, I did not have the energy to imagine her, or her name, or who she had been, and I pushed images and odors from my mind. I fixed myself a drink and a salad, staring dismally at the big bowl of Halloween candy on the counter as I thought of plants waiting to be potted on the porch. Then I called Marino.

'Listen,' I said to him when he answered the phone. 'I think Benton should be here for this in the morning.'

There was a long pause. 'Okay,' he said. 'Meaning you want me to tell him to get his ass to Richmond. Versus your telling him.'

'If you wouldn't mind. I'm beat.' 'No problem. What time?'

'Whenever he wants. I'll be down there all day.'

I went back to the office in my house to check e-mail before I went to bed. Lucy rarely called when she could use the computer to tell me how and where she was. My niece was an FBI agent, the technical specialist for their Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT. She could be sent anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.

Like a fretful mother, I found myself frequently checking for messages from her, dreading the day her pager went off, sending her to Andrews Air Force Base with the boys, to board yet another C-141 cargo plane. Stepping around stacks of journals waiting to be read and thick medical tomes that I recently had bought but had not yet shelved, I sat at my desk. My office was the most lived-in room in my house, and I had designed it with a fireplace and large windows overlooking a rocky bend in the James River.

Logging on to America Online, or AOL, I was greeted by a mechanical male voice announcing that I had mail. I had e-mail about various cases, trials, professional meetings and journal articles, and one message from someone I did not recognize. His user name was deadoc. Immediately, I was uneasy. There was no description of what this person had sent, and when I opened what he had written to me, it simply said, ten. A graphic file had been attached, and I downloaded and decompressed it. An image began to materialize on my screen, rolling down in color, one band of pixels at a time. I realized I was looking at a photograph of a wall the color of putty, and the edge of a table with some sort of pale blue cover on it that was smeared and pooled with something dark red. Then a ragged, gaping red wound was painted on the screen, followed by flesh tones that became bloody stumps and nipples.

I stared in disbelief as the horror was complete, and I grabbed the phone.

'Marino, I think you'd better get over here,' I said in a scared tone.

'What's wrong?' he said, alarmed.

'There's something here you need to see.'

'Are you okay?'

'I don't know.'

'Sit tight, Doc.' He took charge. 'I'm coming.'

I printed the file and saved it on my A drive, fearful it would somehow vanish before my eyes. While I waited for Marino, I dimmed the lights in my office to make details and colors brighter. My mind ran in a terrible loop as I stared at the butchery, the blood forming a vile portrait that for me, ordinarily, wasn't rare. Other physicians, scientists, lawyers and law enforcement officers frequently sent me photographs like this over the Internet. Routinely, I was asked, via e-mail, to examine crime scenes, organs, wounds, diagrams, even animated reconstructions of cases about to go to court.

This photograph could easily have been one sent by a detective, a colleague. It could have come from a Commonwealth's Attorney or CASKU. But there was one thing obviously wrong. So far we had no crime scene in this case, only a landfill where the victim had been dumped, and the trash and tattered bag that had been around her. Only the killer or someone else involved in the crime could have sent this file to me. Fifteen minutes later, at almost midnight, my doorbell rang, and I jumped out of my chair. I ran down the hall to let Marino in.

'What the hell is it now?' he said right off.

He was sweating in a gray Richmond police tee shirt that was tight over his big body and gut, and baggy shorts and athletic shoes with tube socks pulled up to his calves. I smelled stale sweat and cigarettes.

'Come on,' I said.

He followed me down the hall into my office, and when he saw what was on the computer screen, he sat in my chair, scowling as he stared.

'Is this what the shit I think it is?' he said.

'Appears the photograph was taken where the body was dismembered.' I was not used to having anyone in the private place where I worked, and I could feel my anxiety level rise.

'This is what you found today.'

'What you're looking at was taken shortly after death,' I said. 'But yes, this is the torso from the landfill.'

'How do you know?' Marino said.

His eyes were fastened to the screen, and he adjusted my chair. Then his big feet shoved books on the floor as he made himself more comfortable. When he picked up files and moved them to another corner of my desk, I couldn't stand it any longer.

'I have things where I want them,' I pointedly said as I returned the files to their original messy space.

'Hey, chill out, Doc,' he said as if it didn't matter. 'How do we know that this thing ain't a hoax?'

Again, he moved the files out of his way, and now I was really irritated.

'Marino, you're going to have to get up,' I said. 'I don't let anybody sit at my desk. You're making me crazy.'

He shot me an angry look and got up out of my chair. 'Hey, do me a favor. Next time call somebody else when you got a problem.'

'Try to be sensitive…'

He cut me off, losing his temper. 'No. You be sensitive and quit being such a friggin'

fussbudges. No wonder you and Wesley got problems.'

'Marino,' I warned, 'you just crossed a line and better stop right there.' He was silent, looking around, sweating.

'Let's get back to this.' I sat in my chair, readjusting it. 'I don't think this is a hoax, and

I believe it's the torso from the landfill.'

'Why?' He would not look at me, hands in his pockets.

'Arms and legs are severed through the long bones, not the joints.' I touched the screen.

'There are other similarities. It's her, unless another victim with a similar body type has been killed and dismembered in the same manner, and we've not found her yet. And I don't know how someone could have perpetrated a hoax like this without knowing how the victim was dismembered. Not to mention, this case hasn't hit the news yet.'

'Shit.' His face was deep red. 'So, is there something like a return address?'

'Yes. Someone on AOL with the name D-E-A-D-O-C.'

'As in Dead-Doc?' He was intrigued enough to forget his mood.

'I can only assume. The message was one word: ten.'

'That's it?'

'In lowercase letters.'

He looked at me, thinking. 'You count the ones in Ireland, this is number ten. You got a copy of this thing?'

'Yes. And the Dublin cases and their possible connection to the first four here have been in the news.' I handed him a printout. 'Anybody could know about it.'

'Don't matter. Assuming this is the same killer and he's just struck again, he knows damn well how many he's killed,' he said. 'But what I'm not getting is how he knew where to send this file to you?'

'My address in AOL wouldn't be hard to guess. It's my name.'

'Jesus, I can't believe you would do that,' he erupted again. 'That's like using your date of birth for your burglar alarm code.'

'I use e-mail almost exclusively to communicate with medical examiners, people in the Health Department, the police. They need something easy to remember. Besides,' I added as his stare continued to pass judgment on me, 'it's never been a problem.'

'Well, now it sure as hell is,' he said, looking at the printout. 'Good news is, maybe we'll find something in here that will help. Maybe he left a trail in the computer.'

'On the Web,' I said.

'Yeah, whatever,' he said. 'Maybe you should call Lucy.'

'Benton should do that,' I reminded him. 'I can't ask her help on a case just because I'm her aunt.'

'So I guess I got to call him about that, too.' He picked his way around my clutter, walking to the doorway. 'I hope you've got some beer in this joint.' He stopped and turned toward me. 'You know, Doc, it ain't none of my business, but you got to talk to him eventually.'

'You're right,' I said. 'It's none of your business.'