Dust by Patricia Cornwell
He’s typing something on his phone.
“He had a fight with his wife?” I repeat this to Bryce. “Do we know where that detail came from?”
“It’s on the call sheet,” he says. “When he didn’t come home his wife called nine-one-one all teary and described his car. She said they’d had a disagreement and he left the house angry. And, well, look at this. Dr. Schoenberg was an expert witness in several lawsuits with big verdicts over the past few years and guess who the trial lawyer was? So maybe Carin Hegel was calling because it’s personal. She just lost a friend and a consultant who helps her make a lot of money.”
“We don’t take personal calls from lawyers,” I reply. “No information goes to her or anyone else about this case or any of our cases. We don’t do those types of favors.”
“Granby wants to meet at three.” Benton places his hands on my shoulders from where he stands behind my chair.
“I’m sure he does.”
“What should I tell him?”
“With the way my day is looking, it will have to be here.” I turn around to answer him. “I’ll reserve the war room or the PIT, depending on what we’ll be looking at.”
The PIT is our Progressive Immersion Theater, where we review cases in three-dimension or virtual reality. One of Lucy’s latest innovations as she continues her efforts to rid the world of paper, it features a HAPTIC and a Lidar data tunnel among other far-flung things.
“I need to replace a projector in the multi-touch table,” she lets me know as DNA scientist Gloria walks in.
I hand over evidence to her.
“After you it goes to Ernie,” I say as she initials the package. “As fast as you can.”
In her thirties, with spiky black hair and a pierced left nostril, she specializes in low copy number DNA and is used to my wanting everything yesterday.
“I’ll move it to the head of the line,” she says to me.
“You may be getting lab reports from Dr. Venter’s office in Baltimore,” I say next.
“I’ve already forwarded them,” Lucy informs me.
Gloria gives me a lingering, curious look as she heads to the door. A DNA profile from one of the Capital Murderer cases and my top molecular biologist isn’t ignorant or out of touch. Something big and bad is going on and she knows it.
“Needless to say…” I meet her eyes.
“Of course, and I’ll have something by tomorrow morning but will shoot for sooner.” And then she’s gone, out the door, on the other side of the window, walking fast down the corridor toward the elevator, like everybody else glued to her phone.
“When did Benton get back from Washington?” Anne asks me. “Is he doing okay because he looks like he could use a little meat on his bones. Did you get a load of that tank Lucy drove up in? When she pulled into the bay it sounded like she flew her helicopter in.”
“I’m standing right here.” Lucy sets the pizza box on a desk. “There’d better be vegan or I really will kill you, Bryce.”
“Wish Anne a good morning for Benton, who’s standing right behind you,” Bryce says to me. “I mean, really?” He directs this at Anne. “Sauce, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach, eggplant.” He counts on his fingers for Lucy’s benefit. “And let’s see. Presto!” He opens the lid. “Two boring slices just for you.” He hands her a paper plate, making sure he flaunts his leather bracelets. “Do you like?” He holds up his wrist. “Totally made by hand with a dragon clasp. In brown and royal blue because, what can I say? Ethan is way generous. And Anne? Lucy says good morning to you through me and I’m wishing you a good morning through her. Point taken?”
Anne is unable to refrain from talking about people as if they’re not in the room but it’s hard to take offense. She’s one of the least provocative people I’ve ever met, with her gentle face and demeanor and her plain-speaking and practical manner. No amount of ragging by Marino has ever gotten a rise out of her and even Bryce’s silly compulsive blather doesn’t pluck at her nerves.
She opens Gail Shipton’s scan for me, 3-D images of the head and thorax appearing on a flat screen.
“J.Crew,” Bryce shows off more bling. “And this one is almost over the top, but far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth.” He plucks at a black leather cuff with a stainless-steel chain. “To go with…” He pulls a necklace out of his sweater, black leather with some sort of tribal metalwork, and then he places a slice of pizza on a plate and presents it to me.
The first bite is an explosion of pleasure. My God, I’m starved. I’ve eaten half the slice before I can talk.
“This is what’s significant.” I wipe my fingers on a napkin. “Starting with a fairly dense material that fluoresces in UV. Some kind of dust that was all over her.”
I point out intense white areas on Gail Shipton’s scan, the residue in her nostrils and mouth. The vague, dark, air-filled space in the pleural cavity is the small pneumothorax in the upper lobe of the right lung, I go on to explain. Clicking on a different image, a cross section of the thorax and a coronal section, I can see the problem more clearly.
“The buildup of air in the closed space would have put pressure on the lung, making it impossible to expand,” I explain to Benton and Lucy.
“Making it harder to breathe,” she says.
“Even I know that,” Bryce exclaims.
“She already had some problems breathing,” Lucy informs me. “She would get winded. She sighed a lot as if it were hard to catch her breath.”
“I’m not sure I see what you’re talking about.” Benton puts on his reading glasses. “And would a pneumothorax kill someone?”
“If left untreated, it would have caused her severe respiratory distress,” I reply. “It would have put pressure on her heart and other major vessels.”
“I’m still trying to see it.” Benton leans over me, peering at the flat screen, and I feel his breath in my hair.
“This black area here,” Anne helps him out. “That’s air density. See? It’s the same inside and outside the chest. And it’s not supposed to be like that.”
“There should be no black area at all in the pleural space,” I add. “This lighter area here in the soft tissue of the chest is hemorrhage. She suffered some type of trauma that collapsed her lung. The first order of business is to find out how she got that.”
29
Inside the anteroom I grab protective clothing from shelves. It’s half past noon.
I put on booties, a face shield, and gloves. Lucy and Benton do the same but I know when he doesn’t plan to stay long. He’ll learn what he can from Gail Shipton’s body and then he’s got Bureau swords to clash with and maybe something more. I can always sense when a dark front has rolled through him. It’s as if the air has shifted the way it does before a storm, and I think about the DNA and what Dr. Venter told me.
“Is there anything on the news?” I ask Lucy.
“Just what he mentioned.” She looks at Benton to see if he has anything to add. “About an hour and a half ago nine-one-one got a call about an active shooter in Concord. Police responded and said there’s no gunman and nothing further.”
“Where in Concord?”
“Minute Man Park, where there were a bunch of schoolkids.”
“And Medflight responded?”
“That’s pretty much all there is to it,” Benton speaks up. “A suspicious person in dark clothing was spotted running through the park. Supposedly a car backfire on Liberty Street was mistaken for gunshots. Kids were screaming, teachers panicking, thinking it was another Newtown.”
“Did they catch the person?” I ask.
“They didn’t.”
“And that’s the whole story.” I look at him.
“I doubt it. Area-wide emergency radio communications between departments tell me NEMLEC is responding to something but the FBI hasn’t been called. I don’t know what it is. They might not know what it is at this point. Granby’s being pushy about meeting with you.”
“Why
“He’s decided I shouldn’t be there,” Benton says. “That’s the latest.”
“You schedule a meeting and then aren’t invited,” I reply. “That’s choice.”
“He should work on not being so subtle,” Lucy says. “What a tool.”
I push a hands-free button with my elbow and steel doors automatically swing open to the sounds of running water and steel instruments clicking and clacking against cutting boards. An oscillating saw whines, then grinds loudly through bone. Voices of doctors and autopsy technicians blend in a low murmur and I detect decomposing blood and fermentation. I smell burnt flesh.
Natural light filters through one-way glass windows and banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceilings blaze as my staff works at stainless-steel sinks and portable tables along a wall. Luke Zenner is finishing an autopsy at his station, number 2, next to mine, where Gail Shipton’s body holds its rigid pose still wrapped in plasticized sheets. The bag was removed from her head, probably by Dr. Adams when he charted her teeth.
She’s not looking quite as pristine now that she’s in a warmer place and tampered with by a forensic dentist who had to break the rigor in her jaw to force open her mouth. Her lips are drying, beginning a slow retraction as if she’s snarling at the violation, what couldn’t be a more necessary or degrading one.
“Glad to see you’re still in the land of the living,” Luke’s vivid blue eyes look at me through large safety glasses, his blond hair covered with a colorful surgical cap.
“It’s not exactly the land of the living in here,” Lucy says. “’Tis the season.” She stares at the charred body on Luke’s table, the chest cavity empty and bright cherry red, the ribs showing through curved and white.
“What about a CO level?” I ask him.
“Sixty percent. Ja, in der Tat, meine Freundin,” says Luke, whose first language is German. “He was still breathing when he caught his house on fire. Smoking and drinking, his STAT alcohol point-two-nine.”
“That will do it.”
“The thought is he passed out and the cigarette started smoldering on the couch.” Luke wipes his bloody gloved hands on a bloody towel and calls out to Rusty on the other side of the room, asking him to close up for him. “One big drunk tank in here today, what I’ve come to expect right before the holidays.” Luke pulls off his bloody apron and drops it in the biohazard trash. “Dr. Schoenberg is up next. How’s that for a twist of fate? A shrink with poor coping skills.”
I signal Harold that I need some help.
“I’m not sure there isn’t some cause and effect at work.” Moving a surgical cart close, I retrieve a pair of scissors and begin cutting through tape. “You took care of one of his patients last week, Sakura Yamagata, the woman who jumped off the roof of her apartment building.”
“Good Lord.” Luke’s eyes widen. “The twenty-two-year-old so-called fashion designer, thanks to her biopreneur molecular millionaire daddy who basically bought a career for her? Most recently he paid half a million dollars to some reality star to make a personal appearance at a fashion show and endorse his daughter’s label, which is a horror. In the inimitable words of Bryce, all high-tech drama and no story, or the Jetsons meet Snooki.”
“How do we know all this?” I ask.
“Googled it,” Luke says. “Amazing what’s out there about our patients.”
“I’ve notified tox to check for hallucinogens such as mephedrone, methylone, MDPV in her case.”
“Good idea, and we’re going to need to talk when you’ve got a minute. I fear this Dr. Schoenberg’s going to be high-maintenance.”
“Vitreous, blood, urine, liver, no stone unturned.” I fold the sheets and hand them to Harold. “Not to mention his gastric. Had he eaten recently? Did he order food at the pub? Maybe he didn’t go there to drink but to eat alone and calm down before he went back home to patch things up with his wife. Maybe he was trying to sort through why it wasn’t his fault that a patient killed herself right in front of him.”
I remove the ivory cloth from Gail Shipton’s body, nude except for the pale peach panties she has on, an expensive, high-thread-count cotton, Swiss-made. The wound on her left upper chest is so faint it easily could have been missed.
The circular skin discoloration is a very faint pink and no bigger than a dime. Under a hand lens I can see the puncture in the middle of it made by a barbed shank that penetrated her right lung, collapsing it.
“Have you come across this before?” I ask Benton as if my question is hypothetical, a teaching exercise, nothing more than a quiz.
What I can’t allude to is the D.C. murders. I don’t want to alert any members of my staff that Gail Shipton likely is the victim of a serial killer who has terrorized our nation’s capital for the past eight months. It will be up to Benton to open that door.
“It looks like an insect bite.” He studies the magnified wound, his disposable gown rustling against me. I feel his warmth. I sense his intensity.
Then his hazel eyes peer at me above his surgical mask and I see what’s in them. He hasn’t encountered this before. The injury is new to him.
“I don’t know what it is, not firsthand,” he says. “Obviously an insect couldn’t penetrate her lung. Do you think it could be an injection site?” he asks and I don’t think that.
We may have discovered how the killer controls his victims. It’s possible this attention-seeking psychopath has inadvertently left a peephole into his modus operandi. I see what the bastard did. I have a better idea what kind of cowardly brute he is.
“It’s not an injection site.” I hold Benton’s gaze and it’s my way of communicating that I’m not going to tell him what caused the wound. Not in front of an audience.
Gail Shipton was shot with an electrical weapon, a stun gun, and not the type the average person can buy on the Internet for home protection. She may have been shot more than once but this wound to her chest is where one of the probes struck her bare skin and the dart penetrated her chest wall and lung. If other probes struck clothed areas of her body, I might not see any injury. Since we don’t have what she was wearing at the bar last night I can’t look for tears.
Stun-gun shocks are silent. The victim is completely incapacitated while wire-attached darts deliver 50,000 volts. It’s like going into a cadaveric spasm or instant rigor mortis while you’re alive, if such a gruesome thing were possible. You can’t speak and you can’t stand up. The most threatening injury can come from dropping like a falling tree and striking your head.
“Do you mind if I borrow your office?” Benton holds my stare. “I’ve got some calls I need to make and then maybe Bryce could drop me by the house so I can get my car.”
“Harold?” I push up my face shield. “If you’ll get Anne in here, please? I’ll be right back and we’ll get started.”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
30
I escort Benton back to the anteroom as if he needs to be shown the way or maybe people assume I want a moment alone with my husband. He removes his protective clothing, pulling apart the papery tie of his white gown, heaping it into a bright red biohazard trash can.
I tell him the truth, a cruel one with even crueler implications.
“If she was killed by the Capital Murderer, then he’s using an electrical weapon, a type of stun gun, on his victims. At least he did on this latest one,” I explain. “And not just any model. The type used on her fires cartridges with wires and weighted probes that anchor into flesh like fishhooks. In other words, he has the sort of weapon I associate with law enforcement.”
“Unless he bought it on the street.” Benton sits down on a bench and pulls off his shoe covers. “Which wouldn’t be hard. And, for that matter, there’s not much you can’t get online.”
“Certainly that’s possible. But he knew what to get and what it does.”
Benton takes off his gloves and surg
“It would be.” I return his glasses to a shelf lined with different sizes of glasses and a spray bottle of disinfectant.
“That’s why they don’t fight him.” He stares off as if seeing a vision, a horrible one.
“Paralysis lasted only as long as he squeezed the trigger unless you’re as unlucky as I suspect she was. Or maybe what happened to her was unintentionally merciful. Maybe he used an electroshock weapon and her premature death spared her from a tortured one. Maybe that’s why there’s no bag, no frilly tape or bow.”
“He didn’t get to the best part and his ritual was aborted.” Benton rests his arms on his knees and stares at his bare hands, tapered and graceful like a musician’s and pale because of where we live. He fingers his simple platinum wedding band, turning it slowly.
“We’ll see what the autopsy says but if he shot her with a stun gun while she was in the dark parking lot it might be why she suddenly got quiet when she was talking to Carin Hegel,” I add and I tell him about the recorded telephone conversation Lucy played for me.
I describe the sound of a car engine behind the Psi Bar and Gail Shipton saying “I’m sorry? Can I help you?” And then nothing. I sit down next to Benton shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, my papery cocooned feet next to his borrowed black sneakers.
“It would explain Gail not talking anymore,” I suggest. “She would have dropped her phone and been unable to say a word. But she didn’t collapse to the ground or she’d have scrapes, contusions, possibly serious injuries if she struck her head. Something prevented her from falling when her muscles locked up.”
“He may have caught her and maneuvered her into his car.” Benton plays it out, staring down at his hands solemnly as if he’s just discovered he’s been missing something important all along. “She was going to be disoriented and she wasn’t likely to struggle if it meant being shocked again. Obviously she didn’t scream or that would have been on the recording Lucy’s not supposed to have and hasn’t turned over to the police.”