Cause of Death by Patricia Cornwell
"Thank you. I'll be fine."
But I wasn't, really. The drive was longer and darker than I remembered, and I felt unusually unskilled at everything I tried to do. Even rolling down the window at the toll booth and finding the right change was hard. Then the token I tossed missed the bin, and when someone behind me honked, I jumped. I was so out of sorts I could think of nothing that might calm me down, not even whiskey. I returned to my neighborhood at nearly one A.m., and the guard who let me through was grim, and I expected he had heard the news, too, and knew where I had been. When I pulled up to my house, I was stunned to see Lucy's Suburb an parked in the drive.
She was up and seemed recovered, stretched out on the couch in the gathering room. The fire was on, and she had a blanket over her legs, and on TV, Robin Williams was hilarious at the Met.
"What happened?" I sat in a chair nearby. "How did your car get here'?"
She had glasses on and was reading some sort of manual that had been published by the FBI. "Your answering service called," she said. "This guy who was driving my car arrived at your office downtown and your assistant never showed up. What's his name, Danny? So the guy in my car calls, and next thing the phone's ringing here. I had him drive to the guard booth, and that's where I met him."
"But what happened'?" I asked again. "I don't even know the name of this person. He was supposed to be an acquaintance of Danny's. Danny was driving my car. They were supposed to park both vehicles behind my office." I stopped and simply stared. "Lucy, do you have any idea what's going on? Do you know why I'm home so late?"
She picked up the remote control and turned the television off. "All I know is you got called out on a case. That's what you said to me right before you left."
So I told her. I told her who Danny was and that he was dead, and I explained about my car. I gave her every detail.
"Lucy, do you have any idea who this person was who dropped off your car?" I then said.
"I don't know." She was sitting up now. "Some Hispanic guy named Rick. He had an earring, short hair and looked maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. He was very polite, nice."
"Where is he now?" I said. "You didn't just take your car from him."
"Oh no. I drove him to the bus station, which George gave me directions to."
"George?"
"The guard on duty at the time. At the guard gate. I guess this would have been close to nine."
"Then Rick's gone back to Norfolk."
"I don't know what he's done," she said. "He told me as we were driving that he was certain Danny would show up. He probably has no idea."
"God. Let's hope he doesn't unless he heard it on the news. Let's hope he wasn't there," I said.
The thought of Lucy alone with this stranger in her car filled me with terror, and in my mind I saw Danny's head.
I felt shattered bone beneath gloves slippery with his blood.
"Rick's considered a suspect?" She was surprised.
"At the moment, just about anybody is."
I picked up the phone at the bar. Marino had just gotten home, too, and before I could say anything, he butted in.
"We found the cartridge case."
"Great," I said, relieved. "Where?"
"If you're on the road looking down toward the tunnel, it was in a bunch of undergrowth about ten feet to the right of the path where the blood starts."
"A right port ejector," I said.
"Had to be, unless both Danny and his killer were going downhill backwards. And this asshole meant business. He was shooting a forty-five. The ammo's Winchester."
"Overkill," I said.
"You got that right. Someone wanted to make sure he was dead."
"Marino," I said, "Lucy met Danny's friend tonight."
"You mean the guy driving her car?"
"Yes," and I explained what I knew.
"Maybe this thing's making a little more sense," he said. "The two of them got separated on the road, but in Danny's mind it didn't matter because he'd given his pal directions and a phone number."
"Can someone try to find out who Rick is before he disappears? Maybe intercept him when he gets off the bus?" I asked.
"I'll call Norfolk P.D. I got to anyway because somebody's got to go over to Danny's house and notify his family before they hear about this from the media."
"His family lives in Chesapeake," I told him the bad news, and I knew I would need to talk to them, too.
"Shit," Marino said.
"Don't talk to Detective Roche about any of this, and I don't want him anywhere near Danny's family."
"Don't worry. And you'd better get hold of Dr. Mant."
I tried the number for his mother's flat in London, but there was no answer, and I left an urgent message. There were so many calls to make, and I was drained. I sat next to Lucy on the couch.
"How are you doing?" I said.
"Well, I looked at the catechism but I don't think I'm ready to be confirmed."
"I hope someday you will be."
"I have a headache that won't go away."
"You deserve one."
"You're absolutely right." She rubbed her temples.
"Why do you do it after all you've been through?
could not help but ask.
"I don't always know why. Maybe because I have to be such a tight-ass all the time. Same thing with a lot of the agents. We run and lift and do everything right. Then we blow it off on Friday night."
"Well, at least you were in a safe place to do that this time."
"Don't you ever lose control?" She met my eyes. "Because I've never seen it."
"I've never wanted you to see it," I said. "That's all you ever saw with your mother, and you've needed someone to feel safe with."
"But you didn't answer my question." She held my gaze.
"What? Have I ever been drunk?"
She nodded.
"It isn't something to be proud of, and I'm going to bed." I got up.
"More than once?" Her voice followed me as I walked off.
I stopped in the doorway and faced her. "Lucy, throughout my long, hard life there isn't much I haven't done. And I have never judged you for anything you've done. I've only worried when I thought your behavior placed you in harm's way." I spoke in understatements yet again.
"Are you worried about me now?"
I smiled a little. "I will worry about you for the rest of my life."
I went to my room and shut the door. I placed my Browning by my bed and took a Benadryl because otherwise I would not sleep the few hours that were left. When I awakened at dawn, I was sitting up with the lamp on, the latest Journal of the American Bar Association still in my lap. I got up and walked out into the hall where I was surprised to find Lucy's door open. her bed unmade. She was not in the gathering room on the couch, and I hurried into the dining room at the front of the house. I stared out windows at an empty expanse of frosted brick pavers and grass , and it was obvious the Suburban had been gone for some time.
"Lucy," I muttered as if she could hear me. "Damn you, Lucy," I said.
I WAS TEN MINUTES LATE FOR STAFF MEETING, WHICH WAS unusual, but no one commented or seemed to care. The murder of Danny Webster was heavy in the air as if tragedy might suddenly rain down on us all. My staff was slowmoving and stunned, no one thinking very clearly. After all these years, Rose had brought me coffee and had forgotten I drink it black.
The conference room, which had been recently refurbished, seemed very cozy with its deep blue carpet, long new table and dark paneling. But anatomical models on tables and the human skeleton beneath his plastic shroud were reminders of the hard realities discussed in here. Of course, there were no windows, and art consisted of portraits of previous chiefs, all of them men who stared sternly down at us from the walls.
Seated on either side of me this morning were my chief and assistant chief administrators, and the chief toxicologist from the Division of Forensic Science upstairs. Fielding, to my left, was eating plain yogurt with a plast
"I know you've heard the terrible news about Danny Webster," I somberly proceeded from the head of the table.
where I always sat. "Needless to say, it is impossible to describe how a senseless death like this affects each one of us.
"Dr. Scarpetta," said the assistant chief, "is there anything new?"
"At the moment we know the following," I said, and I repeated all that I knew. "It appeared at the scene last night that he had at least one gunshot wound to the back of the head," I concluded.
"What about cartridge cases?" Fielding asked.
"Police recovered one in woods not too far from the street."
"So he was shot there at Sugar Bottom versus in or near the car."
"It does not appear he was shot inside or near the car," I said.
"Inside whose car?" asked the fellow, who had gone to medical school late in life and was far too serious.
"Inside my car. The Mercedes."
The fellow seemed very confused until I explained the scenario again. Then she made a rather salient comment.
"Is there any possibility you were the intended victim?"
"Jesus." Fielding irritably set down the yogurt cup.
"You shouldn't even say something like that."
"Reality isn't always pleasant," said the fellow, who was very smart and just as tedious. "I'm simply suggesting that if Dr. Scarpetta's car was parked outside a restaurant she has gone to numerous times before, maybe someone was waiting for her and got surprised. Or maybe someone was following and didn't know it wasn't her inside, since it was dark by the time Danny was on the road heading here."
"Let's move on to this morning's other cases," I said, as I took a sip of Rose's saccharine coffee whitened with nondairy creamer.
Fielding moved the call sheet in front of him and in his usual impatient northern tone went down the list. In addition to Danny, there were three autopsies. One was a fire death, another a prisoner with a history of heart disease, and a seventy-year-old woman with a defibrillator and pacemaker.
"She has a history of depression, mostly over her heart problems," Fielding was saying, "and this morning at about three o'clock her husband heard her get out of bed.
Apparently she went into the den and shot herself in the chest."
Possible views were of other poor souls who during the night had died from myocardial infarcts and wrecks in cars.
I turned down an elderly woman who clearly was a victim of cancer, and an indi-ent man who had succumbed to his t, coronary disease. Finally, we pushed back chairs and I went downstairs. My staff was respectful of my space and did not question what I was going through. No one spoke on the elevator as I stared straight ahead at shut doors, and in the locker room we put on gowns and washed our hands in silence. I was pulling on shoe covers and gloves when Fielding got close to me and spoke in my ear, "Why don't you let me take care of him?" His eyes were earnest on mine.
"I'll handle it," I said. "But thank you."
"Dr. Scarpetta, don't put yourself through it, you know'?
I wasn't here the week he came in. I never met him."
"It's okay, Jack." I walked away.
This was not the first time I had autopsied people I knew, and most police and even the other doctors did not always understand. They argued that the findings were more objective if someone else did the case, and this simply wasn't true as long as there were witnesses. Certainly, I had not known Danny intimately or for long, but he had worked for me, and in a way had died for me. I would give him the best that I had.
He was on a gurney parked next to table one, where I usually did my cases, and the sight of him this morning was worse and hit me with staggering force. He was cold and in full rigor, as if what had been human in him had given up during the night, after I had left him. Dried blood smeared his face, and his lips were parted as if he had tried to speak when life had fled from him. His eyes stared the slitted dull stare of the dead, and I saw his red brace and remembered him mopping the floor. I remembered his t, cheerfulness, and the sad look on his face when he talked about Ted Eddings and other young people suddenly gone.
"Jack." I motioned for Fielding.
He almost trotted to my side. "Yes, ma'am," he said.
"I'm going to take you up on your offer." I began labeling test tubes on a surgical cart. "I could use your help i f you're sure you're up to it."
"What do you want me to do?"
"We'll do him together."
"Not a problem. You want me to scribe?"
"Let's photograph him as he is but cover the table with a sheet first," I said.
Danny's case number was ME-3096, which meant he was the thirtieth case of the new year in the central district of Virginia. After hours of refrigeration he was not cooperative, and when we lifted him onto the table, arms and legs loudly banged against stainless steel as if protesting what we were about to do. We removed dirty, bloody clothing. Arms resisted coming out of sleeves, and tight-fitting jeans were Stubborn. I dipped my hands in pockets, and came up with twenty-seven cents in change, a Chap Stick and a ring of keys.
"That's weird," I said as we folded garments and placed them on top of the gurney covered by a disposable sheet.
"What happened to my car key?"
"Was it one of those remote-control ones?"
"Right." Velcro ripped as I removed the knee brace.
"And obviously, it wasn't anywhere at the scene."
"We didn't find it. And since it wasn't in the ignition, I assumed Danny would have had it." I was pulling off thick athletic socks.
"Well, I guess the killer Could have taken it, or it could have gotten lost."
I thought of the helicopter making a bigger mess, and I had heard that Marino had been on the news. He was shaking his fist and yelling for all the world to see, and I was there, too.
"Okay, he's got tattoos." Fielding picked up the clipboard.
Danny had a pair of dice inked into the top of his feet.
"Snake eyes," Fielding said. "Ouch, that must have hurt."
I found a faint scar from an appendectomy, and another old one on Danny's left knee that may have come from an accident when he was a child. On his right knee, scars from recent arthroscopic surgery were purple, the muscles in that leg showing minimal atrophy. I collected samples of his fingernails and hair, and at a glance saw nothing indicative of a struggle. I saw no reason to assume he had resisted whomever he had encountered outside the Hill Cafe when he had dropped his bag of leftovers.
"Let's turn him," I said.
Fielding held the legs while I gripped my hands under the arms. We got him on his belly and I used a lens and a strong light to examine the back of his head. Long dark hair was tangled with clotted blood and debris, and I palpated the scalp some more.
"I need to shave this here so I can be sure. But it looks like we've got a contact gunshot wound behind his right ear. Where are his films?"
"They should be ready." Fielding looked around.
"We need to reconstruct this."
"Shit." He helped me hold together what was a profound stellate wound that looked more like an exit, because it was so huge.
"It's definitely an entrance," I said as I used a scalpel blade to carefully shave that area of the scalp. "See, we've got a faint muzzle mark up here. Very faint. Right there."
I traced it with a gloved bloody finger. "This is very destructive. Almost like a rifle."
"Forty-five?"
"A half-inch hole," I said almost to myself as I used a ruler. "Yes, that's definitely consistent with a forty-five."
I was removing the skull cap in pieces to look at the brain when the autopsy technician appeared and slapped films up on a nearby light box. The bright white shape of the bullet was lodged in the frontal sinus, three inches from the top of the head.
"My God," I muttered as I stared at it.
"What the hell is that?" Fielding a
The deformed bullet was big with sharp petals folded back like a claw.
"Hydra-Shok doesn't do that," my deputy chief said.
. "No, it does not. This is some kind of special highperformance ammo."
"Maybe Starfire or Golden Sabre?"
"Like that, yes," I answered, and I had never seen this ammunition in the morgue. "But I'm thinking Black Talon because the cartridge case recovered isn't PMC or Remington. It's Winchester. And Winchester made Black Talon until it was taken off the market."