Unnatural Exposure (2 page)

'Margaret, I'm going to have to head back to the States sooner than I thought,' I said, taking a deep breath, looking about, distracted. 'I didn't sleep worth a damn last night.'

She lit a cigarette, scrutinizing me. 'I can get you copies of whatever you want. How fast do you need them? Photographs may take a few days, but they can be sent.'

'I think there is always a sense of urgency when someone like this is on the loose,' I said.

'I'm not happy if he's now your problem. And I'd hoped after all these years he had bloody quit.' She irritably tapped an ash, exhaling the strong smoke of British tobacco. 'Let's take a load off for a minute. My shoes are already getting tight from the swelling. It's hell getting old on these bloody hard floors.'

The lounge was two squat wooden chairs in a corner, where Foley kept an ashtray on a gurney. She put her feet up on a box and indulged her vice.

'I can never forget those poor people.' She started talking about her serial cases again. 'When the first one came to me, I thought it was the IRA. Never seen people torn asunder like that except in bombings.'

I was reminded of Mark in a way I did not want to be, and my thoughts drifted to him when he was alive and we were in love. Suddenly he was in my mind, smiling with eyes full of a mischievous light that became electric when he laughed and teased. There had been a lot of that in law school at Georgetown, fun and fights and staying up all night, our hunger for each other impossible to appease. Over time we married other people, divorced and tried again. He was my leitmotif, here, gone, then back on the phone or at my door to break my heart and wreck my bed.

I could not banish him. It still did not seem possible that a bombing in a London train station would finally bring the tempest of our relationship to an end. I did not imagine him dead. I could not envision it, for there was no last image that might grant peace. I had never seen his body, had fled from any chance, just like the old Dubliner who could not view his son. I realized Foley was saying something to me.

'I'm sorry,' she repeated, her eyes sad, for she knew my history well. 'I didn't mean to bring up something painful. You seem blue enough this morning.'

'You made an interesting point.' I tried to be brave. 'I suspect the killer we're looking for is rather much like a bomber. He doesn't care who he kills. His victims are people with no faces or names. They are nothing but symbols of his private, evil credo.'

'Would it bother you terribly if I asked a question about Mark?' she said.

'Ask anything you want.' I smiled. 'You will anyway.'

'Have you ever gone to where it happened, visited that place where he died?'

'I don't know where it happened,' I quickly replied.

She looked at me as she smoked.

'What I mean is, I don't know where, exactly, in the train station.' I was evasive, almost stuttering.

Still she said nothing, crushing the cigarette beneath her foot.

'Actually,' I went on, 'I don't know that I've been in Victoria at all, not that particular station, since he died. I don't think I've had reason to take a train from there. Or arrive there. Waterloo was the last one I was in, I think.'

'The one crime scene the great Dr Kay Scarpetta will not visit.' She tapped another Consulate out of the pack. 'Would you like one?'

'God knows I would. But I can't.'

She sighed. 'I remember Vienna. All those men and the two of us smoking more than they did.'

'Probably the reason we smoked so much was all those men,' I said.

'That may be the cause, but for me, there seems to be no cure. It just goes to show that what we do is unrelated to what we know, and our feelings don't have a brain.' She shook out a match. 'I've seen smokers' lungs. And I've seen my share of fatty livers.'

'My lungs are better since I quit. I can't vouch for my liver,' I said. 'I haven't given up whiskey yet.'

'Don't, for God's sake. You'd be no fun.' She paused, adding pointedly, 'Course, feelings can be directed, educated, so they don't conspire against us.'

'I will probably leave tomorrow.' I got back to that.

'You have to go to London first to change planes.' She met my eyes. 'Linger there. A day.'

'Pardon?'

'It's unfinished business, Kay. I have felt this for a long time. You need to bury Mark James.'

'Margaret, what has suddenly prompted this?' I was tripping over words again.

'I know when someone is on the run. And you are, just as much as this killer is.'

'Now, that's a comforting thing to say,' I replied, and I did not want to have this conversation.

But she was not going to let me escape this time. 'For very different reasons and very similar reasons. He's evil, you're not. But neither of you wants to be caught.'

She had gotten to me and could tell.

'And just who or what is trying to catch me, in your opinion?' My tone was light but I felt the threat of tears.

'At this stage, I expect it's Benton Wesley.'

I stared off, past the gurney and its protruding pale foot tied with a tag. Light from above shifted by degrees as clouds moved over the sun, and the smell of death in tile and stone went back a hundred years.

'Kay, what do you want to do?' she asked kindly as I wiped my eyes.

'He wants to marry me,' I said.

I flew home to Richmond and days became weeks with the weather getting cold. Mornings were glazed with frost and evenings I spent in front of the fire, thinking and fretting. So much was unresolved and silent, and I coped the way I always did, working my way deeper into the labyrinth of my profession until I could not find a way out. It was making my secretary crazy.

'Dr Scarpetta?' She called out my name, her footsteps loud and brisk along the tile floor in the autopsy suite.

'In here,' I answered over running water.

It was October 30. I was in the morgue locker room, washing up with antibacterial soap.

'Where have you been?' Rose asked as she walked in. 'Working on a brain. The sudden death from the other day.'

She was holding my calendar and flipping pages. Her gray hair was neatly pinned back, and she was dressed in a dark red suit that seemed appropriate for her mood. Rose was deeply angry with me and had been since I' d left for Dublin without saying good-bye. Then I forgot her birthday when I got back. I turned off the water and dried my hands.

'Swelling, with widening of the gyri, narrowing of the sulci, all good for ischemic encephalopathy brought on by his profound systemic hypotension,' I cited.

'I've been trying to find you,' she said with strained patience.

'What did I do this time?' I threw up my hands.

'You were supposed to have lunch at the Skull and Bones with Jon.'

'Oh, God,' I groaned as I thought of him and other medical school advisees I had so little time to see.

'I reminded you this morning. You forgot him last week, too. He really needs to talk to you about his residency, about the Cleveland Clinic.'

'I know, I know.' I felt awful about it as I looked at my watch. 'It's one-thirty. Maybe he can come by my office for coffee?'

'You have a deposition at two, a conference call at three about the Norfolk-Southern case. A gunshot wound lecture to the Forensic Science Academy at four, and a meeting at five with Investigator Ring from the state police.' Rose went down the list.

I did not like Ring or his aggressive way of taking over cases. When the second torso had been found, he had inserted himself into the investigation and seemed to think he knew more than the FBI.

'Ring I can do without,' I said, shortly.

My secretary looked at me for a long moment, water and sponges slapping in the autopsy suite next door.

'I'll cancel him and you can see Jon instead.' She eyed me over her glasses like a stern headmistress. 'Then rest, and that's an order. Tomorrow, Dr Scarpetta. Don't come in. Don't you dare let me see you darken the door.'

I started to protest and she cut me off.

'Don't even think of arguing,' she firmly went on. 'You need a mental health day, a long weekend. I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it.'

She was right, and as I thought about having a day to myself, my spirits lifted.

'There's not a thing I can't reschedule,' she added. 'Besides.' She smiled. 'We're having a touch of Indian summer and it's supposed to be glorious, in the eighties with a big blue sky. Leaves are at their peak, poplars an almost perfect yellow. Maples look like they're on fire. Not to mention, it's Halloween. You can carve a pumpkin.'

I got suit jacket and shoes out of my locker. 'You should have been a lawyer,' I said.

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.