Sharp Force, page 3
“We can do nitrogen and protein analysis,” she suggests. “It might give us further information on how long she’d been buried. Assuming genealogical DNA doesn’t give us the answer.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and can reconnect her with descendants, anyone she might be related to,” I reply.
“It sure would be nice if we could get our hands on old hospital records, assuming she was a patient on Mercy Island,” Cate says.
“Forget it.” I take off my gloves. “I can’t even get them to give us records when a patient dies now. We’re lucky they provided a list of who’s buried in the cemetery and supposedly why.”
“Well, some family out there knows this lady disappeared, never to be found.” She stares down at the bones. “What’s going to happen when this becomes public, Doctor Scarpetta? Doesn’t matter how long ago it happened; the hospital’s reputation will be in the toilet.”
“It already is if you ask me,” I reply. “It’s probably best we keep this quiet until you’ve finished your examination. And we get the genealogical DNA results.”
“Oh dear. That’s going to be hard,” she says, a shadow crossing her face.
She’s already talked.
“Who knows besides me?” I ask.
“Maggie Cutbush has an idea,” Cate says after a pause.
“How did that happen?” I don’t let my outrage register.
“When she was here earlier today dropping off Christmas presents,” Cate explains. “The big tins of popcorn for us and the labs.”
Apparently, Maggie stopped by to wish Cate a happy holiday, noticing the skeletal remains on her table. But that’s not why my former secretary showed up. As usual, she was on the prowl, looking to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong. Most times when that happens, someone has put her up to it.
“She said she’d heard a rumor that I was finding something interesting,” Cate explains.
“A rumor from whom?”
“I don’t know,” she replies. “But she said the Department of Emergency Prevention must be kept updated about cases going on in the medical examiner system. For demographic and epidemiological reasons. She kept reminding me it’s the law.”
“Yes, that’s what she tells everyone,” I reply. “Governor Dare in her infinite wisdom created the Department of Emergency Prevention and appointed Maggie Cutbush and Elvin Reddy to run what’s nothing more than a pork barrel bureaucracy if I ever saw one. But don’t quote me.”
“I understand.” Cate looks worried.
“We have to live with their useless agency,” I add. “But we don’t cooperate when it interferes with our patients. I don’t care how long they’ve been dead. The investigation comes first.”
“Oh dear,” Cate again says.
“How much did you tell Maggie?”
“Pretty much what I told you.”
“I’m sure she was quite interested,” I reply blandly as I think, Dear God.
“She wanted to know how many other Mercy Island patients from long ago appear to have died violently.”
“Does anybody else have a clue what we’ve started finding?” I ask, and she hesitates again.
“Well, Bose Flagler always wants to know what I’m working on. I figure since he’s the commonwealth’s attorney, he has a right to know…” Cate looks at me. “I hope I didn’t create a mess, Doctor Scarpetta.”
“There isn’t much you can do when it’s Flagler,” I reply. “But Maggie’s another story.”
“How am I supposed to handle it when she shows up claiming her department has a right to information about whatever I’m working on?”
“Refer her to me. We have a long history.” A most unpleasant one, but I’m not going to say that either. “Have a Merry Christmas, Cate. Stay safe.”
“You too.” She cranks up the CD player’s volume as I leave.
A waltz is playing now, fading in a minor key.
I round a bend in the corridor, the EXIT sign ahead glowing red. Pushing through the metal fire door, I begin watching the Dana Diletti video that Wyatt emailed.
The TV journalist is scantily clad in stretchy workout shorts, a sports bra and socks that flaunt her stunning beauty when wearing no makeup or much else. She explains that she was on the Nordic Track in her bedroom late afternoon when the Phantom Slasher’s hologram levitated through a window.
“… Passing through the glass like it was air without triggering the alarm or anything else. I had earbuds in, listening to tunes when it happened…” she’s saying.
I’ve paused on the stairs to watch as she paces in her living room gaudy with Christmas baubles and lights. She passes a lighted showcase displaying her many broadcasting awards, including several Emmys.
“… I had no forewarning at all, making it all the more shocking…”
Glowing in the background like a nuclear power plant is a tall aluminum Christmas tree that looks spun of silvery glass. It’s over-decorated with ornaments and lights, brightly wrapped presents piled underneath.
“… Suddenly this horrible ghost was right in front of me…”
She strolls by electric candles and caroling figurines on the mantel. An illuminated Santa and his reindeer appear to be flying off a shelf.
“… Enough to give someone a heart attack, let me tell you…”
An elaborate nativity scene centers the mirrored-top coffee table, and a mobile of dancing elves twirls from the ceiling. Multiple poinsettias are placed about, probably artificial like everything else.
“… So, now we’re getting an idea what the Slasher’s victims experienced before he broke in, butchering them in their own beds…”
As she’s saying this, I think how foolish. It almost seems she’s goading the violent psychopath, daring him to show up and do to her what he’s done to others.
“… Just watch. I swear this is real…”
She plays the recording she made with her phone, the phantomlike hologram outfitted in a black frock coat and hat from an earlier century. Waving a big Bowie knife, he hovers in front of her, his face chalky white, his eyes neon red. He moves his mouth, repeatedly hissing “death becomes you,” his teeth vampirish.
Dana Diletti goes on to mention Blaise Fruge and Pete Marino responding to her house. As I suspected, the TV news star is giving validity to her story by including them in the narrative as if my office and the Alexandria Police Department are working closely with her.
“… I’m cooperating fully with officials, and they’re encouraging me to relocate. But that’s not happening, folks…” Dana is saying when my phone starts ringing, my niece calling.
“I’m in the stairwell and might lose you,” I tell Lucy right off. “As soon as I clean up, I’m heading home. Where are you?”
“Quantico inside the OTD,” she says in my earpiece. “Had planned on heading out long before now, but no bueno.”
Since Lucy started working for the FBI, she spends much of her time at their training academy and labs in Quantico. Her office is inside a top-secret area of the Operational Technology Division, the OTD as we refer to it.
“I won’t be home for a while either,” I tell her as I climb the stairs. “Have to clean up first. Then I’ve got a quick stop to make along the way.”
“You shouldn’t be stopping anywhere. The snow’s already sticking, the wind gusting at more than thirty knots. Not to mention we have a serial killer on the loose who’s playing games with us, doing everything he can to cause a public panic.”
“I need to deliver something to a family. A mother and two little kids.” I tell her which case.
“Not a good idea for you to drop off anything. We’re talking about complete strangers,” she disapproves. “At least take Marino with you.”
“He’s busy and not here,” I reply, and Lucy is just as stubborn as I am. “I’m hoping you’re still on for dinner with Benton and me.”
“It’s not looking good,” she says.
“I was afraid that might be the case with all that’s going on.” I don’t let on how disappointed I am. “It worries me that your mom is home alone. She left me a message a few hours ago, saying she didn’t want to join us and stay over.”
“I just talked to her before calling you, and she’s well into the Chablis, watching an old movie.”
“After my errand I can stop and pick her up?” I again offer, my feet quietly scuffing on the concrete steps. “Are we sure we can’t change her mind?”
“She doesn’t want to venture out in the bad weather.” Lucy repeats what Dorothy told me in a voice mail. “She’s worn out from all her social media influencing and podcasting, yada-yada-yada.”
“That’s not the real reason,” I reply.
“I suspect she and Marino have been having their usual fireworks. Not the fun kind,” Lucy adds.
“I just watched the video of the Slasher’s hologram that Dana Diletti claims to have recorded inside her bedroom.” I unlock the heavy metal door opening onto the second floor. “Benton says you think it’s credible.”
“It is,” Lucy says as I follow the corridor, my corner office at the far end of it.
“Are we sure it’s not some sort of publicity stunt on her part as usual, her way of inserting herself into the drama?”
“It’s not looking like that’s the case this time,” Lucy explains. “We’re doing forensics on the video that’s now all over the internet thanks to her. People are freaking out as you’d expect, which is a shame. Causing more of a panic doesn’t help anything.”
“We both know she doesn’t give a damn who she hurts,” I remark, the staff offices I pass empty and dark.
CHAPTER 4
The breakroom is ahead, and I smell coffee brewing. I hear Wyatt on his phone, chatting to a funeral home delivering a suicide I was informed about earlier. Jeopardy! plays on TV, the microwave oven beeping.
Lucy explains in my earpiece that she’s been going through Dana Diletti’s hologram video frame by frame. The red-eyed apparition is the same projection that’s been spotted and caught on security cameras in the first three Slasher murders.
“Dana’s video wasn’t copied off the internet,” Lucy says as I reach the end of the corridor. “I’m not seeing anything to make me think her clip was edited.”
“Then the hologram really did appear inside her bedroom? The Phantom Slasher projected it in there?” I unlock my office door, flipping on the lights. “That’s an awful thought. An extremely disturbing one.”
“Yeah, it is.” Lucy’s voice is somber.
“Dana Diletti should be very concerned.”
“Yeah, she should be,” Lucy says. “So far, when someone’s been visited by the hologram, that person ends up dead. It would seem the Slasher is stalking Dana, starting in on her the way he has with his other victims. And unfortunately, she’s enjoying all the attention from it instead of focusing on what it means.”
“She needs to get out of that house and stay someplace safe.” I’m moving window to window closing the shades. “But instead, she’s going to exploit the situation for publicity, for her damn ratings.”
“The Slasher’s addicted to the spectacles he causes,” Lucy says. “The more attention he gets, the more he wants it. And as Benton has pointed out repeatedly, the violence is escalating.”
I’ve paused in front of bookcases crowded with medical and legal tomes, many of them old and filled with my notations.
“And who better to give him more attention, right?” Lucy adds over speakerphone.
I pick up the spray bottle of distilled water from a shelf.
“He projects his hologram through the bedroom window,” she goes on, “and what do you think Dana’s going to do?”
“She’s going to talk about it on TV. And probably end up on all the big shows, maybe win another award or two.” I’m spritzing my orchids, the areca palm, the fiddle-leaf fig tree. “I hope the police are telling her not to stay in her house anymore until the Slasher is caught. I hope Marino and Fruge told her that.”
“She’s bragging about not letting a serial killer or anyone else chase her from her home. Especially not on Christmas Eve,” Lucy says as I pluck off dead blossoms and leaves, dropping them in the trash. “And of course, she’s making a big thing about the difficulties of being a major celebrity, and how stressful it is to be stalked.”
“She’s acting just plain stupid.” I walk into my office bathroom and shut the door.
As I begin undressing, I tell Lucy what Cate Kingston was explaining to me a few minutes ago.
“A female in her twenties was murdered, but we don’t know when,” I explain. “Unlike the other graves from the old Mercy Island asylum, there’s no record of who this person might have been.”
“And it sounds like someone went to the trouble to move a grave marker,” Lucy says. “Giving the impression it was a hospital burial. When maybe it wasn’t.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” I drop my scrubs on the floor.
Lucy explains that she can use AI to search satellite images and those from open-source platforms. Possibly, we can find before and after images of the cemetery and determine when the marker was moved. That would tell us when the victim was buried there.
“Maybe her death wasn’t all that long ago,” Lucy suggests.
“It’s hard to tell,” I reply. “She wasn’t in a coffin and would have skeletonized quickly depending on the time of year and soil conditions. But based on what I just saw in the anthropology lab, the remains certainly weren’t in the ground a century or more. The bones are more recent. I hate to think how recent they might be.”
Lucy says she’ll let me know what she finds in data searches, and we end the call. I finish undressing, and as I move about, I catch a whiff of Rowdy O’Leary, my olfactory glands more sensitive than I often wish. The stench lingers deep in my sinuses, some of it remembered or imagined.
I spray my scrubs with Lysol, stuffing them into a big black garbage bag that I tightly tie. On my way out of the building, I’ll drop off my dirty laundry in the morgue for the industrial washer and dryer. Some things I’m not going to send to the cleaners. I learned long ago that odors are persistent.
I might not always notice what lingers like an invisible contrail, but other people will. During my forensic pathology residency when I performed my first medico-legal autopsies, I learned the hard way that death is all too happy to follow me. I remember strangers moving away from me in the post office, the grocery store.
Stepping into the shower, I shut the glass door, and the hot water feels wonderful raining down as I wash and condition my hair. Brushing my teeth, I hold my face up to steamy spray that smells like lavender. I scrub every inch of me until I don’t imagine the stench anymore.
Drying off, I turn on the exhaust fan, the mirror patched with condensation, my reflection deconstructed like a Picasso painting. A blue eye. A clump of wet blond hair. An ear above the curve of a strong jaw. I find clean lingerie in my locker, dressing in the outfit I wore to work this morning.
The dark green pantsuit, red silk blouse and black suede boots with a sensible heel were my attempt at being festive. I treated my staff to a lunch of takeout barbecue and fresh lemonade. We exchanged small but thoughtful gifts. Candy, liquor, books that are recommended reading. I gave out unfiltered olive oil I order from Sicily.
As I leave the bathroom, I put on my computer-assisted “smart” ring that pesters me about everything I do wrong. High on the list is not sleeping or exercising enough. I’m also nagged about stress, and that causes more of it. Whenever the ring sends another audible alert, I appreciate it about as much as a cattle prod.
I turn on the flat-screen TV across from the bookcases to monitor the local news. I mute the sound, the captions showing as Dana Diletti’s video of the ghostlike hologram plays. She’s talking about it nonstop on TV, cutting to a clip of her interviewing me weeks ago after the most recent murder on Halloween.
“… Her cause of death was exsanguination due to sharp force injury…”
I glance at the caption crawling by as I go on to warn about “smart” homes where everything is wireless. Should an intruder knock out the Wi-Fi with a signal jammer as the Phantom Slasher does, the victim has no alarm system, no camera, no phone signal.
“… Critical to have at least one landline, especially for the security system,” I said.
My clip is followed by the news anchor talking about traffic and power outages. Also, after-Christmas sales, and a rash of burglaries in Falls Church. I glance up at an interview from earlier today when a scientist named Duke Mansoni talked about three monkeys escaping from the Primal Biodynamics research lab close to my house.
Next to it is the recycling center where I make regular visits with a trunk full of bottles, cans and flattened cardboard boxes. I’ve caught glimpses of Duke Mansoni and other scientists when I’ve driven past their lab and its wooded tract of land that’s caged in by metal fencing. Mansoni advises that Peanut is still at large.
“He’s friendly, fond of people and extremely intelligent,” the scientist is saying. “But he’s a powerful animal and potentially deadly if he feels threatened…”
Sitting down at my desk, I look through notes I made downstairs, the paper forms damp from disinfectant. I dictate the list of personal effects I removed from Rowdy O’Leary’s body. The Rolex watch I unbuckled from his wrist is still ticking like in a commercial. I removed his wedding band from his little finger.
“Engraved inside is Love never dies and the date, June tenth, two-thousand-five.”
I’m speaking into the recorder on my phone, my attention constantly tugged back to the TV on the wall. Bose Flagler is being interviewed now, and he’s beautifully appointed in a tobacco cashmere jacket and creamy turtleneck. The commonwealth’s attorney is considered the most desirable bachelor in Virginia, and it’s easy to understand why.
From a prominent local family, he’s flawlessly handsome like a young Alec Baldwin. If Shannon were here at this moment she’d be swooning as Flagler talks about a crime stoppers initiative he’s starting. It’s always something that he’s sure will play well with voters, and I stop watching, returning to Rowdy O’Leary’s autopsy details.
