Displayed are peculiar shapes illuminated in black and white, some in the nano range and magnified two hundred thousand times. I’m confronted by spectra that are puzzling as I recognize the atomic symbols for nickel and aluminum recovered from the burn on the scalp, and also the presence of silica and iron.
I’m not sure why titanium would show up, and I’m baffled by the presence of zirconium and scandium. They aren’t everyday metals. One is commonly used in nuclear reactors, the other in the aerospace industry.
“I didn’t want to tell you what I’d found,” Ernie says, “until I’d verified it with a buddy of mine at ORNL.”
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is one place we turn when we have extraordinarily unusual questions in the field of materials science. In other words, if we can’t figure out what something is made of and why, then we reach out to ORNL, MIT, Caltech, even NASA. A good example is the very thing I’m supposed to talk about tonight—the Columbia space shuttle tragedy. A typical crime lab wasn’t going to determine why a heat shield failed.
“And he literally just called me as you were on your way down to see me,” Ernie is saying. “You’ve heard me mention Bill. He works in the superconductor lab they’ve got down there and sleeps about as much as you do,” he adds because it’s not even four in the morning. Do you know what panguite is?”
“I don’t think so,” I reply. “In fact, I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about.”
“This.” He indicates a black-and-white image on a monitor that at 500X looks white and lumpy like misshapen molars.
CHAPTER 41
PANGUITE WAS DISCOVERED SEVERAL years ago when geologists at Caltech were analyzing pieces of a meteorite that fell in northern Mexico in 1969.” Ernie leans over to pull up a sock that’s been eaten by his cowboy boot.
“I’ve never heard of a mineral called panguite,” I reply.
“Named after Pangu, the god that split Ying from Yang or something,” he says as my incredulity grows. “And what Bill says is just because panguite was recently discovered doesn’t mean it’s not present in other meteorites that have struck the earth. You’d have to go around testing space rocks in every museum in the world to know.”
“How can you tell we’re talking about a meteorite?” I indicate the monitors across the top of the room. “And you do realize how completely illogical this is? Molly Hinders certainly wasn’t struck by a meteorite while she was watering her yard on Labor Day. Not that there’s a case on record of anyone being struck by a meteorite but had she been? I would expect a lot more than a small burn on her scalp, and she certainly didn’t die of blunt-force trauma. She’s clearly an electrical death.”
“The metals we’re seeing are significant,” Ernie points out. “Especially zirconium and scandium, but also iron, titanium et cetera.”
“But there could be other explanations for finding them.”
“But not for panguite. It doesn’t naturally exist on earth.” He points out peaks for Ti4+, Sc, Al, Mg, Zr, Ca—the elemental components of what he goes on to explain is a new form of titania.
It occurs as fine crystals that at a magnification of 200,000X are reminiscent of pitted white bone or coral. I can see strange areas of red patina, and also irregular surface features including cracks, pits and crystal inclusions mixed with shiny fibers, what Ernie informs me are bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes.
“Now you see our problem,” he says.
“I certainly do.”
“Mother Nature has been tampered with.”
“You’re thinking someone has built a weapon from a meteorite and carbon nanotubes?”
“Possibly.”
Nanotubes are lightweight, incredibly strong, and structures made of these extremely fine fibers can be superfast and efficient at conducting electricity and heat. It’s believed and feared that molecular nanotechnology is the future of everything, including war.
“Imagine making a small powerful bomb out of nanothermite or super-thermite?” Ernie is saying. “Or how about mini-nukes? Or God forbid bioterrorism delivered in the nano range? Scary shit.”
“Yes it is, and I understand the utility of building something out of nanotubes, but what would anyone use panguite for?”
“That was my question too. And the possibility Bill came up with is if it’s like titanium then maybe it’s an undercoating, some sort of thermal protection.”
“Then why not use titanium? And where might someone get hold of a meteorite, assuming the person doesn’t work with them?”
“That’s not hard,” Ernie says. “You can buy all sorts of pieces and parts of meteorites off the Internet.”
“But would they have panguite in them?”
“That’s what I’m saying. We don’t know. We can’t know if they’ve not been analyzed. But I’m going to assume that this is rare.” He means finding panguite is rare. “If the mineral was only recently discovered, it’s hard for me to believe it’s turned up often in the past or you might think it would have been discovered a long time ago.”
“We’re also talking about someone familiar with nanotechnology,” I reply. “And if this person is actually modifying materials at the atomic level? Then we’re not talking about the average bear.”
“What do I say if the FBI wanders in here and starts asking me what I’m doing?” Ernie asks.
“Keep your door locked and they won’t be wandering in. If you’re quiet they’ll never find you down here.”
“Because if something like this got out, Kay? It would create a panic if the public thinks meteorites are killing people or some new death-ray-like weapon is.”
“Discretion is imperative right now.” I get up from my chair.
AFTER I LEAVE ERNIE, I return to the CT-scan room but it’s empty now. I head back to the receiving area, where two FBI agents are drinking coffee near the door that leads out to the bay.
“I tried to call you,” I say to Georgia as I pause by her desk.
“I bet you did right about the time I was out in the bay telling them they can’t park in there. You see how much good it did. That big-ass SUV’s still sitting in there, isn’t it?”
“If it gets scraped by a stretcher they have no one to blame but themselves.” I’m always warning Lucy about that.
She doesn’t listen and nobody dings or sideswipes her cars. It hasn’t happened once. But there’s always a first time for everything, and I head in the direction of the autopsy room, which is dark and silent as I walk past its shut door. Beyond it is another autopsy room, what’s really an isolation area for badly decomposed or possibly infected cases, and the two agents on either side of the steel door leading inside don’t look happy to be here.
Using my elbow, I press a hands-free steel button on the wall and the door automatically swings open on a cloud of stench that sends both agents scurrying out of the way.
“How are we doing in here?” I ask cheerfully as I take my time holding the door open wide, and the foulness is thick and bristles like something alive.
Mahant, Anne, Harold and Luke are swathed in protective clothing and clustered around the only table in a room with a thirty-foot ceiling and banks of high-intensity lights, and I note that the observation window in the upper wall is empty and dark. Anne didn’t think to tell our FBI visitors that they could sit behind glass in a teaching lab and avoid unnecessary unpleasantness if they preferred. They could drink coffee up there and monitor everything we’re doing on a live audio-video feed. But Anne accidentally on purpose forgot to mention it, I guess.
Luke snaps a new blade into a scalpel. The paper bags have been removed from Elisa Vandersteel’s hands, feet and head, and her sports bra, blue shorts, and socks are off and spread out on a white-paper-covered countertop. He begins to run the blade through her flesh, from clavicle to clavicle, then down her torso.
“It’s looking like she has cardiac damage, possibly a torn posterior pericardium, and hemorrhage in the area of the left myocardiu
m,” he tells me what he observed on the CT scan. “Plus what looks like suffusion of blood in the interventricular septum.”
“What about her head injury?” I reach for rib cutters on the nearby surgical cart, and situate myself across the table from Luke.
I’m shoulder to shoulder with Mahant.
“No skull fracture,” Luke says as I cut through ribs, removing the breastplate, exposing the thoracic organs, and the putrid odor blooms up our nostrils like a dark deadly flower.
Mahant’s face shield isn’t going to save him, and I watch as he turns a tint of grayish green. Luke lifts the bloc of organs out of the chest cavity and sets it on a big cutting board with a wet heavy sound.
“Is something wrong with the air in here?” Mahant has inched back from the table, and he’s staring at me without blinking.
“Too cold? Too hot?” Anne innocently inquires.
“I mean the ventilation.” He swallows hard.
“It could be worse. We had a floater in here the other day.” She looks at me as I snip open the stomach with surgical scissors. “In fact that’s when the ventilation didn’t seem to be working all that well.”
“It’s the heat wave,” Luke says.
“How would that affect the ventilation?”
“It affects everything.”
“You can imagine how hard our air-handling system has to work in this weather.” I dribble the gastric contents into a plastic carton, and I’m surprised to find undigested peanuts and raisins.
“Obviously she had a snack not long before she died,” I show Mahant the palm of my glove as he backs up another several inches.
“Maybe a trail mix or something like that?” Anne suggests as I snip through the connective tissue of the bowels, dropping sections into a plastic bucket on the floor while Luke removes a kidney from the scale.
“You might want to find out about that,” I say to Mahant as Luke begins sectioning the kidney and Harold makes an incision around the top of the skull.
Then Bryce walks in, and he couldn’t be more oblivious to what’s normal for him and for all of us.
“Taking breakfast orders,” he announces cheerily, and I resist looking at Anne, who clearly has gotten to him with her evil plan. “How many takers do we have for pizza?”
“Jesus,” Mahant stares wide-eyed at him, and Harold pulls the body’s face down like a collapsed rubber mask so he can access the top of the skull, gleaming white and round like an egg.
“Meat or veggie?” Bryce asks as Harold plugs the Stryker saw into an overhead cord reel. “And we have gluten-free.” Bryce raises his voice over the loud whining of the oscillating blade cutting through bone. “But nothing glutton-free,” he can’t resist his favorite pun. “Because you can’t stop eating it,” he says.
Harold picks up a chisel to pop off the skullcap.
“The trick is to cut a little notch right here,” he shows Mahant, who isn’t blinking and hardly breathing anymore. “Then I insert the chisel and give it a little quick turn like a skate key.” Harold does it as he talks, and then he’s catching the ASAC as he topples like a tree to the tile floor.
“Oh dear. Let’s get him some air.” Harold holds him up and walks him to the door, and he’s done this quite a lot in his career. “Here.” He opens it and leads him out. “Let’s find you a chair,” he says in his best funeral-director voice. “Can one of you gentlemen please find a chair? He just needs a little air,” he says to the agents in the corridor, and I must be a bad person.
I stay inside the decomp room and do nothing to help Mahant. As long as he doesn’t throw up on the body or crack his head on the floor, I don’t care if he’s faint or queasy. I pretend I do but I know it’s not true, and maybe he and his merry band of agents will leave and not come back.
“Take a look.” Luke is slicing the heart on the cutting board.
He uses a towel to pat dry a section, and the fresh myocardial contusion is a tiny bluish-black spot on the pale heart muscle.
“Basically the electrical current walloped her heart and stopped it,” he says.
“Do you think the injury to her head would have knocked her out?” Anne asks. “On CT she definitely has subarachnoid hemorrhage.”
“It might have,” I reply, “but it doesn’t matter because the head injury didn’t contribute to her death. Maybe it would have but there wasn’t a chance. She was already dying when she hit the ground.”
“Taking everything into account?” Luke adds as he takes photographs. “Death resulted from respiratory arrest due to electrocution. She probably didn’t survive longer than several minutes, and I doubt she knew what hit her.”
CHAPTER 42
ACROSS THE RIVER THE rooftops of Boston are a gray dragon’s back of slate tiles and chimney pots. I watch the darkness lifting on the horizon, the sun rising before my eyes.
From my office with a view I witness dawn touch the new day, the river turning variegated shades of blue with greenish hues. Iron lamps blink off along the pale gash of the fitness path where people are out riding bikes and jogging. The world is waking up as usual, as if nothing at all happened last night not even a mile downriver from here. The death in John F. Kennedy Park has hit the news but you’d never know it to look out my windows.
I walk across the carpet carrying a large very strong coffee I just made at the espresso bar. I sit down at my U-shaped desk with its bunker of large computer monitors, and I’ve been translating and transcribing for the better part of an hour.
I’ve decided spacing and line breaks based on cadence and pauses, doing my best to infer format from what I listened to in the Tailend Charlie audio clip e-mailed to me early last night:
Back again, K.S.—
(By popular request, no less!)
What’s next
will be worse
than what was first.
(Face it Florida cracker
you were cursed at birth.)
Chaos is coming
in a stinging swarm,
a death airborne.
(Remember Sister Twister?
Bet you won’t miss her!)
Interpreting meanings in cryptic messages and symbolism is like reading tea leaves, but what strikes me most about this last communication isn’t the mentions of Florida cracker and Sister Twister. Lucy had told me about these when we talked in the trailer, and I don’t care about insults right now. It’s the threat that we need to pay attention to, and Lucy probably missed it because her Italian is inadequate.
What’s next will be worse than what was first.
Was Molly Hinders first? Is this who Tailend Charlie is alluding to? And what’s next? Would that have been Elisa Vandersteel? Or maybe he’s talking about something or someone else entirely, and I wonder how much personal information about me came from years of Carrie spying on Janet’s sister Natalie.
Carrie could have learned all sorts of things if she put her mind to it, and she could have passed on these details to an accomplice who’s now using them to taunt and belittle. Someone brilliant but deranged, it enters my mind because that’s the feeling I get when I’m subjected to his communications.
But why? There are so many things one might mock me about. Why pick silly names I was called as a child? Why not pick the much worse ones I’m called now? It’s childish. In fact it reminds me of the way my sister used to fight with me when we were little kids. I decide it must be Carrie’s new sidekick who’s having such juvenile fun with verse recited in synthesized Italian that’s supposed to be my father berating and disgracing me. I try Benton again. The call goes to voice mail again, and I leave another message:
Hey, it’s me. I sent you my best effort with the latest troll-ish communication. Without being too specific, I think certain phrases in it might be of interest, and while I’m not the expert, it seems to promise something disastrous. The word aerotrasportato or “airborne” was used, and I checked multiple times to make sure I heard the canned Italian word right. Call when you’re
able.
It’s almost seven A.M. here or about one P.M. in France, and I remember the last time I stayed at La Tour Rose in Lyon. It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I last visited Interpol’s headquarters, what looks like an intergalactic space station clandestinely situated out in the middle of nowhere along the River Rhône.
The secretary-general will be eating lunch because one thing I know about Tom Perry is he never turns down a civilized meal. So I’m not likely to get him but I try his office anyway, and his assistant Marie answers the phone.
“I’m sure he’s at lunch,” I say by way of an apology after we exchange pleasantries.
“He is,” she replies in her heavy French accent. “But he happens to be eating at his desk as he finishes a long call.”
“I want to pass on information and I could use his help with something.”
“Hold on, please. And it’s very nice to talk to you again, Madame Scarpetta. You must come back and visit soon.”
I can hear her talking to the secretary-general in French but I have no idea what they’re saying. Then he’s on the line, and I know instantly by the tone of his voice that he’s in the middle of something that is indeed serious. More serious than usual, at any rate.
“I wouldn’t bother you, Tom,” I say right off, “but I think it’s time we talk about what’s happening in Cambridge.”
“And also in Bethesda, it seems,” he says, and as I suspected he knows about Briggs.
Obviously Benton or one of his colleagues with the FBI has been in communication with Interpol, and I wonder who Perry was having the long phone conversation with right before I called. I wonder if it might have been Benton. His phone goes straight to voice mail every time I try him, and I would expect him to be informing the secretary-general of what’s going on since some murderous miscreant is using Interpol’s esteemed name in vain, basically spoofing the agency.
Possibly Carrie Grethen is. Possibly her accomplice is. Maybe both of them together are responsible for everything, but Interpol is more than a little familiar with her at least, I remind Perry as I explain why I’m reaching out to him. They got a bellyful of Carrie long years ago, and then like the rest of us believed she was dead until she decided to show us that she’s not.