Brain tissue clung like wet, gray lint to the sleeves of Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s surgical gown, and the front of it was splashed with blood. Stryker saws whined, running water drummed, and bone dust sifted through the air like flour. Three tables were full. More bodies were on the way. It was Tuesday, January 1, New Year’s Day.
She didn’t need to rush toxicology to know her patient had been drinking before he pulled the shotgun’s trigger with his toe. The instant she’d opened him up, she detected the putrid, pungent smell of booze as it breaks down in the body. When she was a forensic pathology resident long years ago, she used to wonder if giving substance abusers a tour of the morgue might shock them into sobriety. If she showed them a head opened up like an egg cup, let them catch the stench of postmortem champagne, maybe they’d switch to Perrier. If only it worked that way.
She watched her deputy chief, Jack Fielding, lift the shimmering block of organs from the chest cavity of a university student robbed and shot at an ATM, and waited for his outburst. During this morning’s staff conference, he’d made the incensed comment that the victim was the same age as his daughter, both of them track stars and pre-med. Nothing good happened when Fielding personalized a case.
“We not sharpening knives anymore?” he yelled.
The oscillating blade of a Stryker saw screamed, the morgue assistant opening a skull and yelling back, “Do I look busy?”
Fielding tossed the surgical knife back on his cart with a loud clatter. “How am I supposed to get anything fucking done around here?”
“Good God, somebody get him a Xanax or something.” The morgue assistant pried off the skull cap with a chisel.
Scarpetta placed a lung on a scale, using a smartpen to jot down the weight on a smart notepad. There wasn’t a ballpoint pen, clipboard, or paper form in sight. When she got upstairs, all she’d have to do is download what she wrote or sketched into her computer, but technology had no remedy for her fluent thoughts, and she still dictated them after she was done and her gloves were off. Hers was a modern medical examiner’s office, upgraded with what she considered essential in a world she no longer recognized, where the public believed everything “forensic” it saw on TV, and violence wasn’t a societal problem but a war.
She began sectioning the lung, making a mental note that it was typically formed with smooth, glistening visceral pleurae, and an atelectatic dusky red parenchyma. Minimal quantity of pink froth. Otherwise lacked discrete gross lesion, and the pulmonary vasculature was without note. She paused when her administrative assistant, Bryce, walked in, a look of disdain and avoidance on his youthful face. He wasn’t squeamish about what went on in here, just offended for every reason one might be, and he snatched several paper towels from a dispenser. Covering his hand, he picked up the receiver of the black wall phone, where line one was lit up.
“Benton, you still with me?” he said into the phone. “She’s right here holding a very big knife. I’m sure she told you today’s specials? The Tufts student is the worst, her life worth two hundred bucks. The Bloods or the Crips, some gang piece of shit, you should see him on video surveillance. All over the news. Jack shouldn’t be doing that case. Does anybody ask me? About to blow an aneurysm. And the suicide, yup. Comes home from Iraq without a scratch. He’s fine. Have a happy holiday and a nice life.”
Scarpetta pushed back her face shield. She pulled off her bloody gloves and dropped them in a bright red biohazard can. She scrubbed her hands in a deep steel sink.
“Bad weather inside and out,” Bryce chatted to Benton, who wasn’t fond of chatting. “A full house and Jack’s irritable depression, did I mention that? Maybe we should do an intervention. Maybe a weekend getaway at that Harvard hospital of yours? We probably could qualify for a family plan . . . ?”
Scarpetta took the receiver from him, removed the paper towels, and dropped them into the trash.
“Stop picking on Jack,” she said to Bryce.
“I think he’s on steroids again, and that’s why he’s so cranky.”
She turned her back to him and everything else.
“What’s happened?” she said to Benton.
They had talked at dawn. For him to call again several hours later while she was in the autopsy suite didn’t bode anything good.
“I’m afraid we’ve got a situation,” he said.
It was the same way he’d phrased it last night when she’d just gotten home from the ATM homicide scene and found him putting on his coat, headed to Logan to catch the shuttle. NYPD had a situation and needed him immediately.
“Jaime Berger’s asking if you can get here,” he added.
Hearing her name always unnerved Scarpetta, gave her a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the New York prosecutor personally. Berger would always be linked to a past that Scarpetta preferred to forget.
Benton said, “The sooner the better. Maybe the one-o’clock shuttle?”
The wall clock said it was almost ten. She’d have to finish her case, shower, change, and she’d want to stop by the house first. Food, she thought. Homemade mozzarella, chickpea soup, meat-balls, bread. What else? The ricotta with fresh basil that Benton loved on homemade pizza. She’d prepared all that and more yesterday, having no idea she was about to spend New Year’s Eve alone. There would be nothing to eat in their New York apartment. When Benton was by himself, he usually got take-out.
“Come straight to Bellevue,” he said. “You can leave your bags in my office. I have your crime scene case ready and waiting.”
She could barely hear over the rhythmic rasping of a knife being sharpened in long, aggressive sweeps. The buzzer from the bay blared, and on the closed-circuit video screen on the countertop, a dark-sleeved arm emerged from the driver’s window of a white van as attendants from a delivery service buzzed.
“Can someone please get that?” Scarpetta said at the top of her voice.
On the prison-ward floor of the modern Bellevue Hospital Center, the thin wire of Benton’s headset connected him to his wife some hundred and fifty miles away.
He explained that late last night a man was admitted to the forensic psychiatric unit, making the point, “Berger wants you to examine his injuries.”
“What’s he been charged with?” Scarpetta asked.
In the background, he could hear the indistinguishable voices, the noise of the morgue—or what he wryly called her “deconstruction site.”
“Nothing yet,” he said. “There was a murder last night. An unusual one.”
He tapped the down arrow on his keyboard, scrolling through what was on his computer screen.
“You mean there’s no court order for the examination?” Scarpetta’s voice moved at the speed of sound.
“Not yet. But he needs to be looked at now.”
“He should have been looked at already. The minute he was admitted. If there was any trace evidence, by now it’s likely been contaminated or lost.”
Benton kept tapping the down arrow, re-reading what was on the screen, wondering how he was going to approach her about it. He could tell by her tone she didn’t know, and he hoped like hell she didn’t hear it from someone else first. Lucy Farinelli, her niece, had damn well better abide by his wish to let him handle it. Not that he was doing a good job so far.
Jaime Berger had seemed all business when she’d called him a few minutes earlier, and from that he’d inferred she wasn’t aware of the trashy gossip on the Internet. Why he didn’t say something to her while he’d had the chance, he wasn’t sure. But he hadn’t, and he should have. He should have been honest with Berger long before now. He should have explained everything to her almost half a year ago.
“His injuries are superficial,” Benton said to Scarpetta. “He’s in isolation, won’t talk, won’t cooperate unless you come. Berger doesn’t want anyone coercing him into anything and decided the exam could wait until you got here. Since that’s what he wants . . .”
