Isle of Dogs (31 page)

Andy and Regina followed Dr. Scarpetta out into the corridor.

“Then he didn’t just burn up for no reason—not if something entered his chest,” Andy said as Regina faithfully took notes.

“No weapon found at the scene?” the chief inquired.

“No, ma’am.”

“How do you spell
accelerant
?” Regina was struggling, and the chief had not even gotten to the really big words yet.

“This suspicious individual who witnessed the death, did he mention to you what color the flames were or their intensity?” Dr. Scarpetta asked. “If they were an intense white, or blue, or red, for example?”

“Is
midline
one or two words?” Regina’s voice was getting strained and petulant.

“No. I also wouldn’t expect him to be reliable,” Andy answered the chief.

“One word,” she said to Regina.

“How do you spell
posteriorly
?”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Andy said in a tone that suggested Regina should not butt in again to volunteer indiscretions or to question spellings.

“Most significant is a whitish-gray lumpy residue inside the chest cavity, which is certainly consistent with some
incendiary device or other material burning inside the body.” Dr. Scarpetta stopped before the ladies’ locker-room door. “You’ll have to go in through the men’s room,” she instructed Andy. “Officer Reggie and I will meet you in the changing room and we’ll get started.”

“Insedentary?” Regina was beginning to panic, and her reaction to insecurity and fear was always unfortunate. “What kind of device? What the hell’s a insedentary device?” Her disposition turned ugly. “I can’t write this fast and it’s not fair! Why should I know how to spell words like this? I’m not used to them. It’s not like I hear them every day at the mansion!”

Dr. Scarpetta gave Regina a quizzical look. “Maybe this isn’t a good time for you to see your first autopsy,” the chief decided.

Andy got on his portable radio and raised Trooper Macovich on the air. “Can you return the package to its origin?” he asked in the code language of the EPU. “And I need you to check out an ID number with AFIS.”

“Ten-fo,” Macovich’s voice came back, decidingly lacking in enthusiasm.

“Ten-twenty-five us in the morgue bay.”

“Ten-fo. Be there in fifteen.”

“Now you’ve really done it,” Andy complained to Regina minutes later as they waited inside the frigid bay, sitting in plastic chairs by the Coke machine.

Two Swifty’s Removal Service attendants were carrying a pouched body on a stretcher, making their way slowly and with difficulty down the ramp. The attendants, a man and a woman dressed in dark suits, seemed to be having a hard time getting the stretcher’s legs to unfold.

“I didn’t do a thing,” Regina retorted. “You’re not nice to me!”

“I told you to be quiet and mind your p’s and q’s and you didn’t,” Andy said.

The attendants were in a bind. They couldn’t open the stretcher’s legs, which meant they couldn’t set down the dead person, who clearly was very big, and so there wasn’t a free hand to open the van’s tailgate.

“Look at that,” Regina said, pointing at the attendants. “Why don’t you go help those poor people instead of sitting here picking on me.”

“As long as you stay in your chair and behave,” said Andy, who didn’t trust Regina for a minute.

He trotted over to the van.

“Here, let me help,” he said to the female attendant.

“That’s mighty nice of you,” she replied, and gave him her end of the stretcher.

“I thought you got this thing fixed, Sammy,” she irritably said to her partner as she tugged on the stuck stretcher legs.

“It just needed oiling, Maybeline.”

“Then why ain’t it working? These legs are froze stiff and one of the wheels was sticking the other day. Bet you didn’t get that fixed, neither.”

Sammy was silent as Andy held on with one hand and tried the van door with the other.

“How many times I got to tell you, don’t say you getting something fixed and then I find out you didn’t.” Maybeline was furious. “Breaking my back doing this stinking job and you sitting around all the time watching the TV.”

“I think the tailgate’s locked,” Andy said as the stretcher fishtailed and moved around perilously. “I think it’s best you forget the legs and let’s unlock the van. Then we can just slide the body in. We won’t need to roll it.”

“Can’t roll it anyway, not with that stuck wheel Sammy couldn’t bother to fix. What did you do with the keys?” Maybeline yanked at the stretcher’s legs.

“In my pocket. I can’t get ’em right this minute. I don’t exactly have a hand free.” Sammy was about to lose his temper. “Quit tugging on the legs before we drop the damn body on the floor!”

Regina, sensing an emergency, made her way over to the stretcher at the same time the buzzer sounded and the bay door began to screech open.

“I’ll get the keys out for you,” she told Sammy as she began to pat him down the way she saw cops search people on TV.

Regina had no reason to know that Sammy was extremely ticklish. When she started digging in the right front pocket of his pants, he shrieked and jumped six inches into the air. What Macovich witnessed when he drove into the bay was a crazy white man in a dark suit screaming with laughter and begging that ugly Crimm daughter to “Stop!” Next, the man grabbed
himself, and the end of the stretcher he had been holding crashed to the floor and the huge black body pouch thudded on concrete. Andy, meanwhile, was shouting at Regina, and a woman attendant howled in pain as the stretcher pinched her hand and knocked her in the face, leaving her bleeding and holding her nose and a finger.

Macovich thought it wise to remain inside his unmarked car and observe the altercation, which was quickly turning violent. Let’s see what the pretty white boy does about this, he unkindly thought. That’s what you get for being the teacher pet and babysitting the guv’s nasty daughter. Ha. Ha. Yeah, I ain’t seen a good fight in a while. Wait ’til Doc Sca’petta see what you doing out here. Huh. She kick your butt to the moon and complain to Sup’intendent Hammer.

“You idiot!” Andy shouted at Regina.

“You’re the idiot!” she fired back at the top of her lungs.

“Now look at what you did!” Sammy bellowed at her. “You better hope this dead lady’s family don’t see her body all banged up! Wait ’til the funeral home find it with bruises and busted bones!”

“Dead bodies don’t get bruises,” Andy told him. “And I doubt any bones were broken.”

Sammy was enraged by the sight of Maybeline bleeding, and he shoved Regina against the van and snatched his keys from her. She shoved him back and kicked his ankle. Then she socked him in the eye and bit his hand when he grabbed her by the arm. Andy got between them and was putting Sammy in a chokehold as the door leading inside the building flew open and Dr. Scarpetta, dressed in a surgical gown and gloves, emerged to see what all the commotion was about.

“That’s enough,” she announced in a voice that commanded attention. “Stop it right now!”

 By high noon, Fonny Boy had finally figured out how many turns to the left and right would spring open the padlock if he used the combination 7360, which was nautical, he supposed, for 7-Up.

As he had expected, the secret compartment contained a pint of Bowman’s vodka, a pack of cigarettes, and, thank goodness, an Orion flare gun that was made of plastic and had a range of twenty-one miles. There were three cartridges, each with a candlepower of 15,000, and Fonny Boy fired all of them straight up into the air. He and Dr. Faux held their breath for a minute as they drifted in the bateau, still out in the middle of nowhere, the crab pot doggedly following them.

“You shouldn’t have shot them all at once,” Dr. Faux said, discouraged and peckish. “Why did you do that, Fonny Boy? It would have made more sense to fire one and wait for a while, then try a second round and eventually the last one. Now we’re right back where we started from, lost at sea with no food or water. Put that pint of vodka back. All it will do is make you silly and more dehydrated.”

What neither he nor Fonny Boy could possibly know at the time was that three Coast Guard pilots and an engineer were out in a bright orange Jayhawk helicopter on routine maneuvers. They were flying at an altitude of five hundred feet when
three small fiery rockets streaked past their windshield and startled them considerably.

“Jesus Christ! What was that?” the pilot in command exclaimed into his microphone.

“Someone’s shooting at us!” the engineer blurted out over the intercom from his bench seat in back.

“No, no, I think they’re distress signals. Flares.” The co-pilot calmed down his buddies. “Did you see how bright they were, like they were phosphorous?”

“We’re not in a restricted area, are we?”

“No way.”

“Gotta be flares, then.”

The flares went out quickly but left rapidly fading white streaks across the sky that were easy to trace back to the source, providing one moved fast. The huge helicopter turned on an eastern heading and within minutes spotted a bateau with two people on board, who began waving their arms frantically. The Coast Guard pilots and crew also noticed a buoy that most likely was attached to a crab pot.

“Shit. Tangierians,” the co-pilot said.

“Yup. And guess what? They’re in the crab sanctuary,” retorted the engineer. “Look at that bright yellow buoy. A crab pot.”

At the same time they spotted the buoy, Fonny Boy and the dentist heard the unmistakable thudding of helicopter blades. Fonny Boy had been conditioned to resent the Coast Guard, which, he thought, did nothing but persecute watermen. But he was feeling unusually optimistic because of the rusting piece of iron in his pocket. Didn’t his mother always say there was a reason for things? Had he not helped the dentist escape, run out of gas, and been rescued by the Coast Guard, he never would have discovered a sunken ship that was plainly marked with a crab pot that, unbeknownst to Fonny Boy and Dr. Faux, was drifting with the current because the rope was too short.

“Thank God,” the dentist said as he stared up at the fast-approaching Jayhawk. “We’ve been found! And it’s a good thing because it doesn’t look to me as if we’re moving at all—the crab pot is right here next to the bateau and it would be farther away from us by now if we were moving.”

“I can’t believe the nerve of them to so blatantly fish in the
crab sanctuary,” the Coast Guard engineer said, shaking his head.

The pilot steadied the helicopter into a low hover that whipped up a whirlpool of water around the bateau. The two stranded men lowered their heads and covered their eyes, their clothing flapping like a scarecrow in a hurricane as the rescue basket was lowered.

C
RUZ
Morales also needed to be rescued and was becoming desperate. Maybe he should turn himself in to the authorities. At least he could get out of the chilly morning and eat a hot meal. He was exhausted from walking around Richmond’s West End, having wisely decided to ditch his car since all the police in Virginia and the military seemed to be looking for him. On top of everything else, he worried that he was going to be blamed for the 7-Eleven robbery and murder he had witnessed late last night.

Cruz had never committed a violent crime, but as he wandered around the University of Richmond campus pretending to be a student, he began to plot and think thoughts that alarmed him. All he had to do was find someone he could overpower—a woman, especially one who didn’t look athletic or assertive—and he could scare her into giving him money and the keys to her car. Then Cruz would flee, ditch that car (as soon as possible), and then steal another one so he could get back to New York. Or better yet, he reasoned as he approached a small squat brick building in a wooded area near a lake in the heart of the campus, he could abandon the car at the Amtrak station and take the train home.

A sign in front of the brick building read
BAPTIST CAMPUS MINISTRY
. Because Cruz couldn’t read English beyond a second-grade level, he made the mistake of assuming that
Baptist
was close enough to
Baptista
to suggest that maybe someone inside spoke Spanish. He ran his fingers through his hair and scrubbed his teeth with his coat sleeve, trying to tidy himself up a bit, and his heart picked up speed. He opened the front door at the very moment Barbie Fogg was walking a female student to the waiting area, where there was a coffee table piled with magazines and an abundance of silk plants that
Barbie had picked up for a song at neighborhood yard sales.

“I can only imagine,” Barbie was sympathizing with the student, who had acne. “I’ve always had dry skin, so blemishes have never been a problem, but I can certainly understand how you feel. Just give my doctor a try and I just know he can help.”

“I sure hope so, Mrs. Fogg. Like I said, it’s all I think about, and I’m so down on myself.”

Neither woman paid any attention to Cruz, who quickly sat on a sofa and absorbed himself in a magazine he could not comprehend.

“My mother used to always say that soap does the trick. You dab Ivory soap on the problem areas and it helps dry them out,” Barbie went on, patting the young lady’s shoulder. “I’ve never tried it because it would not be helpful in my case. Maybe a peel would do the trick.”

“A peel?”

“My doctor does chemical peels. Ask him about it.”

“I sure will. Thank you so much, Mrs. Fogg. It helps just to, you know, talk to somebody.”

“I’m the world’s biggest believer in girlfriends talking,” Barbie agreed with feeling. “And don’t you worry about none of these college boys asking you out. One of these days you’ll find your prince and live happily ever after—with beautiful skin!”

Barbie felt a heaviness settle over her as she said words that rang hollow in her soul. That girl was never going to have beautiful skin. Already it was pitted and dented with angry red and purple scars and would certainly require laser surgery if there was ever a hope of undoing years of damage. As for living happily ever after, Barbie didn’t know of anyone who could honestly make such a claim. Life with Lennie was flat and disconnected, and Barbie couldn’t wait for a moment of quiet this morning so she could write another letter to her NASCAR lover.

“I’ll see you soon,” she promised him under her breath.

“See you soon, too,” the acne-afflicted student said as she went out the door.

It was then that Barbie noticed the scruffy-looking Mexican boy sitting on the sofa. She frowned a little and felt a prick of
anxiety. He certainly didn’t look like one of the students, but then young people could be so slovenly these days. He also seemed a little young for college, but the older Barbie got, the younger other people looked.

“May I help you?” she said in a professional tone she had learned on the job and knew never to use at home because it annoyed Lennie.

“Sí,”
he shyly replied, barely glancing up from the magazine.

“I only speak English, I’m sorry,” she admitted. “You do speak English, don’t you?”

Her anxiety intensified. If he didn’t speak English, how could he attend the University of Richmond? And if he wasn’t a student, what in the world was he doing here at the Baptist Campus Ministry? Barbie wished Reverend Justice were here today. He hadn’t called to say where he was or when he would be in, and the secretary was out with a cold, so Barbie was all by herself in the small building.

“Sí,”
Cruz replied. “I speak a little English, but not so good.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. No appointment. I need help bad.”

Barbie sat on the other end of the sofa, keeping her distance and realizing it would not be a good idea to take this poorly groomed Mexican boy back to her private office and shut the door.

“Tell me about yourself,” Barbie used the line she always began sessions with, and wished Reverend Justice would walk through the door right this minute.

But the reverend had been busy visiting that poor beaten-up truck driver in the hospital, and there were many demands for Reverend Justice to give talks and make appearances on local television and radio shows, Barbie reminded herself. She shouldn’t be so selfish as to wish he would tear himself away from truly needy people just because Barbie was a little ill at ease.

“I don’t got no money,” Cruz told her as his criminal intentions began to weaken. “I not from here and got no money to get home. I just in town on a job, you know? And all these things happen. I scared.”

“Well, there’s nothing to be scared of at the Campus Ministry,” Barbie said with conviction and a touch of pride. “We’re here to help people and you couldn’t be in a safer place.”

“
Sí,
that good. I no felt safe and am very hungry.” Cruz blinked back tears.

He also needed to shave the black fuzz off his upper lip, and his hair needed cutting, Barbie couldn’t help noticing, and his fingernails were dirty and he had a tattoo on the back of his right hand. This was a child who had endured a hard life. Poor thing.

“How did you find us?” she wondered out loud.

“I see the sign and think maybe you family of Gustavo and Sabina or maybe Carla.”

This made no sense to Barbie.

“So I come in.” Cruz shrugged. “You know a way I can get home?”

“That depends on how you got here to begin with,” Barbie said, confused. “And where might home be?”

Cruz wasn’t terribly bright, but he realized he had New York plates on the car he had ditched, and the cops were looking for a Hispanic from New York. So maybe it was best to leave New York out of the equation at the moment.

“I just bet you’re from Florida,” Barbie said. “A lot of Spanish people live down there. My husband took me to the Everglades on our second anniversary. You know, he’d just always wanted a ride in one of those airboats, and then we spent two nights in Miami Beach in one of the few hotels that wasn’t boarded up back then, because I just love Jackie Gleason. You ever watch
The Honeymooners
?”

Cruz frowned and scratched his head.

“Well, I was just thinking, maybe you could take the bus to Florida. The Campus Ministry has a small discretionary fund we can draw on if a student needs to get home and can’t afford it.”

Cruz fell into a depression. He didn’t know anybody in Florida.

“Maybe I go to New York and look for a job,” he then said, hoping she wouldn’t assume he was from New York and
therefore the Hispanic serial killer who was running around committing hate crimes.

“That’s a mighty big city,” Barbie pointed out. “And it’s very hard to find jobs. But I tell you what I’m going to do. How about I give you some money so you can get a bus ticket and something to eat?”

Something whispered to Barbie that perhaps it wasn’t wise to talk about money or imply there might be a discretionary fund inside the Campus Ministry. But she was a bit of a pushover when it came to pitiful people, and although this boy had perfect skin, he was clearly miserable and unlucky. So maybe God was telling her to give him a little miracle, and she thought of her rainbow and felt happy inside.

“Oh
gracias, gracias,
thank you,” Cruz said with massive relief. “God bless you. You a nice lady. You save my life and I never forget.”

Barbie was fortified by his gratitude and felt better about things. She got up from the sofa.