“We had a discussion about what would be best. We thought you’d want the canopied tent, and we recommended that to Marino.” Harold always sounds a little unctuous, as if he’s greeting people at the chapel door or giving a tour of a casket showroom or a slumber parlor. “We know the area of course. But we also pulled up a map.”
I glance up at Eliot House’s upper-story student apartments, and I can see several people looking out the lighted windows. I look at the bridge, and there’s a steady stream of cars on it in both directions. Aluminum clinks and clacks, and I hear the sound of bags shoved around on the ground.
“Will you post her tonight?” Rusty asks.
“Usually I would wait until the morning. But this isn’t usual,” I reply.
“Because I’m wondering if Anne should come in.” He lifts out another folded frame that’s cumbersome but lightweight, and his headlamp is a blazing Cyclops eye. “If so, she should be heading back to the CFC now, in other words.”
The scaffolding of tent sections going up around us brings to mind a crazed Stonehenge fashioned of silver tubes.
“I’ll get a van for transporting her when it’s time.” Rusty is talking about the body now.
“How do you plan on handling that?” I ask. “Without driving right through the middle of the scene.”
“I think we pull in as close as we can without messing up anything,” Rusty says. “Then by the time you’re ready for us to carry her out, she’ll be pouched with an evidence seal. And that’s all anybody’s going to catch on camera, just the usual pouched body on a stretcher. I’m thinking we’ll have her in the receiving area by nine P.M. if all goes well.” The two of them look at each other, and nod.
“I can notify Anne,” Harold says.
She’s the CFC’s chief forensic radiologist, and I’m going to want the victim in the CT scanner as soon as possible. I reply that yes, Anne needs to come back in if she can. It would be wise to mobilize now, I couldn’t agree more.
“You’re thinking she was murdered,” Rusty says.
“I don’t know what I think yet.”
“To play devil’s advocate,” he adds, “I’m wondering if she could be a heat-exposure death. Like she’s riding her bike, faints, wrecks and hits her head. We sure have had our share of heat-related fatalities of late, a lot of them weird-ass stuff.”
“A bike accident wouldn’t explain her belongings strewn everywhere,” Harold says thoughtfully.
“It depends on who touched her stuff and when it happened,” Rusty disagrees. “You know, like if somebody was looting? Like in small-plane crashes? If you don’t get there fast, people steal everything.”
“But not out here. That’s not going to happen here,” Harold says somberly.
“Stealing happens everywhere.” Rusty unrolls another section of black polyurethane siding.
I tell them more about the twins who found the body, and that we can’t be certain who did what. Kids don’t always understand consequences, Rusty drawls in his slow amicable way, the headlamp cushioned by the do-rag over his long shaggy hair.
“They move something, take something. They don’t know any better at first.” He interlocks the frame of a large panel. “Then maybe they freak out and lie because they’re afraid of getting in trouble.”
“We’ll build the components here out of the way,” Harold says to me as I survey the trolleys and what I want from them now. “Then we’ll finish the final assembly in the target area when you’re ready and feel it’s safe for us to work over there.”
“We’ll mark off a perimeter, and you can set up the tent right over the bicycle and the body.” I add that Marino will use spray paint to clearly designate the footprint for the tent, a safe zone for laying something down.
I take off the ill-fitting gloves he gave to me, and the huge shoe covers fitted with rubber bands. I drop them into a bright red biohazard trash bag.
I COLLECT MY GEAR, grabbing a scene case, what’s essentially a large tough plastic tool chest. I pick a box of purple nitrile gloves size small, several pairs of shoe covers with traction soles, and packaged hooded coveralls. I leave Rusty and Harold to their construction project, and follow the path, reentering the clearing.
I direct the flashlight downward and slightly ahead of me, careful I don’t step on any possible evidence even though Marino and I already have been over this area. I never stop looking down and around because it’s quite possible to walk past something several times without noticing it. So far I’ve seen nothing except the victim’s scattered personal effects that we’ve already marked with cones. The park is clean. Any scrap of litter I notice appears to have been out here for a while.
I’m aware of my breathing, of the sound of my feet on the gritty path, then the swishing as I walk through grass. I hear the steady rush of traffic on the bridge, the rumble of trucks and cars, and the whine of a motorcycle on John F. Kennedy Street. The air is hot and heavy. It doesn’t move. I slow down as a figure materializes in the darkness up ahead, striding toward me. The female officer I saw earlier approaches me with purpose.
“Doctor Scarpetta?” She’s keyed up, almost breathless, stopping several feet from me, directing her flashlight at the ground. “You ever notice how you find something when you’re not looking for it?” The shiny steel nameplate on her short-sleeved dark blue uniform shirt reads N. E. FLANDERS.
“It happens all the time,” I reply. “What did you find?”
“I was walking over to check on your guys, see if they needed anything.” She stares off in the direction of Rusty and Harold. “And I noticed something. It’s probably nothing but it’s a little strange. I think someone was sick in the bushes over there. I’m pretty sure it’s recent.” She turns and points behind her. “In the woods just off the path and not very far from the bike and the body.”
“Investigator Barclay mentioned that one of the girls might have been sick,” I reply, and I get the feeling Officer Flanders knows nothing about this because he didn’t bother sharing information. “He told me that when he first got here he saw one of them coming out of the bushes, and that it appeared she might have thrown up.”
“Someone did for sure.”
“I’m happy to look if that’s what you’re asking. I was headed that way.”
“What time frame are we talking about for getting some lights on out here?”
I tell her it shouldn’t be long for the tent. After that, I’ll get the body to my office as quickly as I can.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, it doesn’t seem right to just leave her lying there out in the middle of everything.”
“I’d do her a far greater disservice if I compromised evidence in any way,” I reply.
“We can’t put anything over her? A sheet or something?”
“I’m afraid not. I can’t risk dislodging or losing evidence, especially trace evidence. If I cover her before going over her carefully with a lens, I won’t have any idea what I might be messing up.”
“Well if she’s been out here for a while anyway, I guess waiting an extra half hour isn’t going to change anything,” Officer Flanders decides.
“What makes you think she’s been out here for a while?”
“Well that’s what Barclay thinks.”
“It would be best if we don’t circulate rumors,” I reply, and she shines her flashlight on what I’m carrying.
“Can I help with something? It’s too hot to be hauling anything heavy.”
“I’m fine. And if any of you need water or to step out of the heat, we have our truck.”
“As long as there’s nothing dead in there,” she jokes.
“You’ll be happy to know that we don’t transport bodies in the same truck where we rest, drink, eat, and work. We’ll have a van here for the body,” I explain, and Officer Flanders has a broad face that’s neither pretty nor unattractive.
She’s what my mother used to call “plain,” by which she meant an unremarkable-looking girl who was w
orse off than “the ugly ones.” That’s how she would say it, and her explanation for such a vile statement couldn’t have been more logical. At least in her limited way of thinking, and also in Dorothy’s because she shares the same point of view. Pretty girls don’t try at all because they don’t have to. Ugly girls try harder for obvious reasons.
That leaves plain girls, which usually is synonymous with smart girls, and they need to try but don’t know any better or can’t be bothered. So plain girls have the distinction of finishing first and last in the categories of accomplishment and attractiveness respectively. It’s my mother’s own weird version of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” I suppose, only there’s no moral and no one really wins.
N. E. Flanders is the brand of plain that Dorothy wouldn’t have a single kind word to say about. I estimate the officer’s age is mid- to late forties, her chunky short-waisted figure not helped by her creaking black leather duty belt and low-riding trousers. Her dark hair is tucked behind her ears in a pageboy, and a white T-shirt peeks out of the open neck of her uniform shirt.
“I’ll show you.” She motions me to follow her. “It’s a rag, a cloth, a towel, I don’t know. But someone threw up on it as best I can tell. I mean I didn’t get more than a few feet from it, and I didn’t touch it of course.”
We light our way as we walk, looping around the bicycle, and stopping at the edge of the woods between the path and the river. I recognize the clump of rhododendron bushes Barclay pointed out earlier, and as Officer Flanders probes the dark dense shadows with her light, I smell the evidence before I see it.
“There.” She points the beam of light at what looks like a wadded-up cloth caught in branches near the ground as if shoved there.
I set down the scene case, and as I bend closer and shine my light I decide what the officer has discovered isn’t a rag or a towel. It’s a shirt, off-white, possibly beige, and I can make out a portion of a date, a partial image of a silkscreened face. I remember the woman on the bicycle was wearing a beige Sara Bareilles concert tank top.
“I assume this hasn’t been photographed.” I unfasten the clasps of my scene case.
“No. All I did is notice it with my light. And then I saw you coming.”
“We need to get Marino here.” I balance on one leg at a time, pulling the shoe covers with traction soles over pumps that are still damp and sticky against the bare skin of my feet.
I work my hands into a pair of gloves, small ones that fit this time. I open a transparent plastic evidence bag, and next retrieve a pair of sterile disposable forceps. I explain that typically I wouldn’t store anything in plastic unless the item is completely dry. Blood and other body fluids including vomit will degrade and rot as bacteria and fungus proliferate, and any evidence such as DNA will be lost.
I’m explaining this to Officer Flanders when I hear Marino before I see him. His big bootie-covered feet are getting closer on the path.
“What’s up?” his voice booms in the dark, and I show him what we’ve found. “What makes you think it’s hers?” He directs this at me, and I’m relieved he makes no allusion to what I told him a little while ago.
He doesn’t ask me if the shirt looks familiar. He doesn’t come right out and confront me with what I remember about how the cyclist looked or was dressed when I encountered her twice earlier.
“It’s a T-shirt, and it’s wet, apparently covered with vomit,” is what I say. “It would appear to be recent since nothing would stay wet out here for very long.”
As he takes photographs I explain that the shirt is too messy for a paper bag. I’m going to package it in plastic but only temporarily. I’ll have the CFC truck deliver the evidence directly to my headquarters. I’ll make sure everything is properly preserved. We’ll recover any evidence from the shirt and hang it in a drying cabinet—I spell out exactly what we’ll do. Then I cover my nose and mouth with a surgical mask.
“How ’bout you go over and hang out with the two girls,” Marino says to Officer Flanders. “Keep everybody away from them, and don’t ask them nothing. Just stay with them, and the Doc and me will be right there.”
She walks off, and I hand Marino a mask. He puts it on and starts taking photographs.
“Shit,” he complains, and underbrush crackles and snaps beneath his feet as he moves around. “Some things you never get used to. Goddamn it!”
“Are you all right?”
“It’s like when some kid throws up on the bus. Then everybody does.”
“Well don’t unless you’re going to do it in a bag. Would you like one?”
“Hell no. I’ve been around worse shit than this.”
I hand him the pair of disposable forceps and he grips the shirt with them, extracting it from the rhododendron bush. He guides it over the transparent plastic bag I hold open, and I can see at a glance that the T-shirt is from a Sara Bareilles concert and it’s damaged. There are tears in the cotton fabric but I don’t notice blood. If the victim was wearing the shirt when she was attacked or injured, there should be blood on it.
Marino and I discuss this briefly because it doesn’t make sense.
“I’m not getting how her shirt came off.” He continues to poke around in the bushes. “And there’s no blood on it?”
“I need to examine it carefully, which I’m not going to do out here.”
“Unless the girls did it. Maybe they took it off the body because they wanted it.”
“Then why does it have tears in it? Why is it damaged?” I pinch the bag’s seal closed with my fingertips.
“How do we know it wasn’t already torn?” Marino says.
I don’t recall that the cyclist’s T-shirt was torn. But I wasn’t looking carefully. At the time I had no reason to make a mental note of her every detail as if I were filling out an investigative report in advance.
“We’ll figure that out when we get it to the labs,” I reply. “But what I can tell you with certainty right now is there are multiple tears in the shirt and it’s covered with vomit.”
“Then what? How did it end up in the bushes? The answer is: It didn’t walk here by itself. And there’s a lot of disturbed dead leaves and soil back here.”
He looks in the direction of the twin sisters. I can see Officer Flanders’s back, and the moving beam of her flashlight as she’s about to reach them.
“Come on.” Marino steps out of the bushes, onto the grass. “Let’s go find out what the hell they did.”
CHAPTER 19
I INTRODUCE MYSELF AS KAY Scarpetta, which means nothing to them.
I don’t say I’m a doctor, a Ms. or a Mrs. Maybe I’m a cop. Maybe I work with social services. I suppose I could pass for Marino’s girlfriend. I can’t tell what the twins think of me or what assumptions they might make about my reason for showing up to chat with them about a dead body they stumbled upon.
“How are you both holding up?” I set down my scene case and smile.
“Fine.”
They look flushed and tired but from what I understand they’ve refused every opportunity to sit in an air-conditioned car. They’re content to stand outside in the hot dark night, and it occurs to me they might crave attention. I have a feeling they spend much of their time picked on or ignored, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they put up with more than their share of being ostracized and bullied.
“She’d like to ask you a few things,” Marino says to them about me. “Then we’ll get you someplace where you can get cool, have a nice drink, a snack. How would you like to see what a real police department looks like?”
“Okay,” one of them says.
“Where are the TV cameras?” the other asks. “How come this isn’t on the news? It should be on the news!”
“We don’t want any TV cameras or reporters here right now,” Marino replies.
“But why aren’t they?”
“Because I’m in charge,” Marino says flatly. “That nice lady officer you were with a few minutes ago? Officer Flanders is going t
o give you a ride to my headquarters in her police car.”
“Are we in trouble?”
“Why would you be in trouble?” Marino asks.
“Because somebody’s dead.”
“Because somebody did something bad.”
As Marino and I were walking here, he informed me that the girls are fourteen years old. Their names are Anya and Enya Rummage—as in the ROOMage and not the RUMmage sisters, God help them, I can’t help but think. What unfortunate names for identical twins. As if they don’t get ridiculed enough, I’m guessing. I give them another reassuring, sympathetic look as if all of us are out in the miserable heat and in this mess together, which of course couldn’t be further from the truth.
“I’m wondering exactly where you were when you noticed the body,” I say to them as if I’m perplexed and need their help.
“There.” Anya in pink points toward the distant trees behind us where Rusty and Harold are assembling the tent scaffolding.
“So you were walking through the woods, following the path toward the clearing,” I reply.
“Yes, and we saw the bike on the ground.”
“Then we saw her.”
“When you were entering the park from John F. Kennedy Street, did you see anyone? Hear anything at all? I’m wondering how long she might have been here when you found her.”
They say they didn’t hear or see anything unusual as they cut through the park. They didn’t hear anyone talking and certainly they didn’t hear shrieks or someone yelling for help. As both of them continue to recount what happened, I get a picture of them walking along the fitness path the same way Marino and I did a while ago.
When they reached the clearing they saw what they at first assumed was a bicycle accident. It was almost completely dark by then, and there was no one else around. The park was empty as far as they could tell except for “animals,” they continue to say. A squirrel, possibly a deer, they tell me. I ask what time it was when they discovered the bicycle and the woman’s body, and the girls shake their heads. They don’t know.
“Then what did you do? Do you think you can describe for me exactly what happened next?” I ask, and both of them look at Marino for approval, and he nods. “How close did you get to her?” I inquire.