Trace Page 12

  “Oh yeah,” Fielding says. “Weird, right? Like someone held her, maybe. But to do what?” He untwists a tie around the top of the bag, opening it, and the stench from the tan mush inside is horrific. “Shewww. Don’t know what you’re going to accomplish by going through this. But be my guest.”

  “Just leave it on the table and I’ll pick through it in the bag. Somebody may have restrained her. How was she found? Describe the position of her body when she was found,” Scarpetta says, walking over to the sink and finding a pair of thick rubber gloves that will reach almost to her elbows.

  “Not sure. When Mom got home she tried to revive her. She says she can’t remember whether Gilly was facedown, on her back, on her side, whatever, and she hasn’t a clue about her hands.”

  “What about livor?”

  “Not a chance. She wasn’t dead long enough.”

  When the blood is no longer circulating, it settles according to gravity and creates a pattern of deep pinkness and blanching where the surfaces of the body touch whatever is pressing against them. As much as one always hopes to get to the dead in a hurry, there are advantages with delays. A few hours will do, and livor mortis and rigor mortis set in and reveal the position the body was in when it died, even if the living come along later and move things around or change their stories.

  Scarpetta gently pulls open Gilly’s bottom lip, checking for any injuries that might have been caused by someone pressing a hand over her mouth to silence her or by pushing her face into the bed to smother her.

  “Help yourself, but I looked,” Fielding says. “No other injuries that I could find.”

  “And her tongue?”

  “She didn’t bite herself. Nothing like that. I hate to tell you where her tongue is.”

  “I think I can guess,” she says, dipping her hands inside the bag of frigid, soupy organ sections and feeling her way through them.

  Fielding is rinsing his gloved hands in the vigorous stream of water thundering into the metal sink. He dries them with a towel. “I notice Marino didn’t come along for the ride.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she says, not particularly happy about it.

  “He never was much for decomposed bodies.”

  “I would worry about anybody who likes them.”

  “And kids. Anybody who likes dead kids,” Fielding adds, leaning against the edge of the counter, watching her. “I hope you find something, because I can’t. Frustrates the hell out of me.”

  “What about petechial hemorrhages? Her eyes are in grim shape, too grim for me to tell anything at this point.”

  “She was pretty congested when she came in,” Fielding replies. “Hard to tell if she had petechial hemorrhages, but I didn’t notice any.”

  Scarpetta envisions Gilly’s body when it first arrived at the morgue, when she had been dead only hours, her face congested red, her eyes red. “Pulmonary edema?” she asks.

  “Some.”

  Scarpetta has found the tongue. She walks over to the sinks and rinses it, patting it dry with a small white terry-cloth towel from an especially cheap batch purchased by the state. Rolling a surgical lamp close, she turns it on and bends it near the tongue. “You got a lens?” she asks, patting the tongue again with the towel and adjusting the light.

  “Coming up.” He opens a drawer, finds a magnifying glass, and gives it to her. “See anything? I didn’t.”

  “Does she have any history of seizures?”

  “Not according to what I’ve been told.”

  “Well, I don’t see any injury.” She is looking for evidence that Gilly might have bitten her tongue. “And you swabbed her tongue, the inside of her mouth?”

  “Oh yeah. I swabbed her everything,” Fielding says, returning to the counter and leaning against it again. “I didn’t find anything obvious. Preliminarily, the labs haven’t found anything to indicate sexual assault. I don’t know about whatever else they’ve found, if anything yet.”

  “It says in your CME-1 that her body was clothed in pajamas when it came in. The top was inside out.”

  “That sounds right.” He picks up the file and starts flipping through it.

  “You photographed the hell out of everything.” She doesn’t ask, simply verifies what should be accepted as routine.

  “Hey,” he says, laughing. “Who taught my sorry ass?”

  She gives him a quick look. She taught him better than this, but she doesn’t say it. “I’m happy to report you didn’t miss anything on the tongue.” She drops it back into the bag, where it rests on top of the other tan pieces and parts of Gilly Paulsson’s rotting organs. “Let’s turn her over. We’re going to have to take her out of the pouch.”

  They do this in stages. Fielding grips the body under the arms and lifts while Scarpetta pulls the pouch out from under it, and then he rolls the body over on its face as she works the pouch out of the way, its heavy vinyl complaining in heavy rumbles as she folds it up and sets it back on the gurney. She and Fielding see the bruise on Gilly’s back at the same time.

  “I’ll be damned,” he says, unnerved.

  It is a faint blush, somewhat round, and about the size of a silver dollar on the left side of the back, just below the scapula.

  “I swear that wasn’t here when I posted her,” he says, leaning close, adjusting the surgical light to get a better look. “Shit. I can’t believe I missed it.”

  “You know how it is,” Scarpetta replies, and she doesn’t tell him what she thinks. There is no point in criticizing him. It’s too late for that. “Contusions always show up better after the body’s been autopsied,” she says.

  She plucks a scalpel off the surgical cart and makes deep linear incisions in the reddish area, checking to see if the discoloration might be a postmortem artifact, and therefore superficial, but it’s not. Blood in the underlying soft tissue is diffuse, usually meaning some trauma broke blood vessels while the body still had a blood pressure, and that’s all a bruise or contusion is, just lots of little blood vessels that get smashed and leak. Fielding places a six-inch plastic rule next to the incised area of reddish flesh and starts taking photographs.

  “What about her bed linens?” Scarpetta asks. “You checked them?”

  “Never seen them. The cops took them, handed them over to the labs. Like I said, no seminal fluid. Damn, I can’t believe I missed this bruise.”

  “Let’s ask if they see any pulmonary edema fluid on the sheets, the pillow, and if so, have the stain scraped for ciliated respiratory epithelium. You find that, it supports a death by asphyxia.”

  “Shit,” he says. “I don’t know how I missed that bruise. Then you’re thinking this is a homicide, for sure.”

  “I’m thinking someone got on top of her,” Scarpetta says. “She’s facedown and the person has a knee in her upper back, leaning on her with all his weight and holding her hands up and out above her head, palms down on the bed. That would explain the bruises on the tops of her hands and on her back. I’m thinking she’s a mechanical asphyxia, a homicide, absolutely. Someone sits on your chest or back, and you can’t breathe. It’s a horrible way to die.”

  14.

  THE LADY NEXT DOOR lives in a flat-roofed house of curved white concrete and glass that interacts with nature and reflects the water, earth, and sky, and reminds Lucy of buildings she has seen in Finland. At night her neighbor’s house looks like an immense lantern lit up.

  There is a fountain in the front courtyard, where tall palms and cacti have been wound with strands of colorful lights for the holidays. An inflated green Grinch scowls near the soaring double glass doors, a festive touch that Lucy would find comical if someone else lived inside. In the upper left side of the door frame is a camera that is supposed to be invisible, and as she presses the doorbell she imagines her image filling a closed-circuit video screen. No response, and she presses the button again. Still there is no answer.

  Okay. I know you’re home because you picked up your newspaper and the flag is up on you
r mailbox, she thinks. I know you’re watching me, probably sitting right there in the kitchen staring at me on your video screen, got the Ai-phone up to your ear to see if I’m breathing or talking to myself, and it just so happens I’m doing both, idiot. Answer your damn door or I’ll stand out here all day.

  This goes on for maybe five minutes. Lucy waits in front of the heavy glass doors, imagining what the lady is seeing on the video screen and deciding she can’t look threatening in jeans, T-shirt, fanny pack, and running shoes. But she has to be annoying as she keeps pressing the bell. Maybe the lady is in the shower. Maybe she isn’t looking at the video monitor at all. Lucy rings once more. She’s not going to come to the door. I knew you wouldn’t, idiot, Lucy silently says to the lady. I could be standing out here having a heart attack on camera and you couldn’t be bothered. I guess I’m going to have to make you come to the door. She envisions Rudy pulling out his fake ID to scare the hell out of the Hispanic not even two hours earlier, and she decides, All right then, let’s try this and see what you do now. Slipping a thin black wallet out of the back pocket of her tight-fitting jeans, she flashes a badge up close to the not-so-secret camera.

  “Hello,” she says out loud. “Police. Don’t be alarmed, I live next door, but I’m a cop. Please come to the door.” She rings the bell again and continues holding up her fake credentials directly in front of the pinhole camera.

  Lucy blinks in the sunlight, sweating. She waits and listens but doesn’t hear a sound. Just when she is about to flash her fake badge again, suddenly there is a voice, as if God is a bitchy woman.

  “What do you want?” asks the voice through an invisible speaker near the so-called invisible camera on the upper door frame.

  “I’ve had a trespasser, ma’am,” Lucy replies. “I think you might want to know what’s happened next door at my house.”

  “You said you’re the police,” the unfriendly voice accuses, and the accent is deeply southern.

  “I’m both.”

  “Both what?”

  “Both the police and your neighbor, ma’am. My name’s Tina. I wish you’d come to the door.”

  Silence, then in less than ten seconds, Lucy sees a figure floating toward the glass doors from the inside, and that figure becomes a woman in her forties dressed in a tennis warm-up suit and jogging shoes. It seems to take her forever to get all the locks undone, but the neighbor does and deactivates the alarm and opens one of the glass doors. At first, she doesn’t seem to have any intention of inviting Lucy in, but stands in the doorway, staring at her without a trace of warmth.

  “Make this quick,” says the lady. “I don’t like strangers and have no interest in knowing my neighbors. I’m here because I don’t want neighbors. In case you haven’t figured it out, this isn’t a neighborhood, anyhow. It’s where people come to be private and left alone.”

  “What isn’t?” Lucy warms up to her task. She recognizes the tribe of the self-consumed, curdled rich and plays a little naive. “Your house isn’t or the neighborhood isn’t?”

  “Isn’t what?” The woman’s hostility is briefly supplanted by bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s happened next door at my house. He was back,” Lucy replies, as if the woman knows exactly what she means. “Could have been early this morning, but I’m not sure because I was out of town most of yesterday and last night and just landed in Boca on the helicopter. I’m sure I know who he’s after but I’m worried about you. It certainly wouldn’t be fair if you got caught in the wake, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh,” she says, and she has a very nice boat docked off the seawall behind her house and knows exactly what wake is and how unfortunate and possibly destructive it is to be caught in it. “How can you be police and live in a house like that?” she asks without looking in the direction of Lucy’s salmon-colored Mediterranean mansion. “What helicopter? Don’t tell me you have a helicopter too.”

  “Lord, you’re getting warm,” Lucy says with a resigned sigh. “It’s a long story. It’s all connected to Hollywood, you know. I just moved here from L.A., you know. I should have stayed in Beverly Hills where I belong, but this damn movie, excuse my French. Well, I’m sure you’ve heard all about what happens when you make a movie deal, and all that goes into it when they plan on filming on location.”

  “Next door?” Her eyes open wide. “They’re filming a movie next door at your house?”

  “I really don’t think it’s a good idea for us to have this conversation out here.” Lucy looks around cautiously. “Do you mind if I come in? But you’ve got to promise this is all between us chickens. If word got out…well, you can imagine.”

  “Ha!” The woman points a finger at Lucy and gives her a toothy smile. “I knew you were a celebrity.”

  “No! Please don’t tell me I’m that transparent!” Lucy says with horror as she walks into a minimally furnished living room, all in white, with a two-story-high glass wall that overlooks the granite-paved patio, the pool, and the twenty-seven-foot speedboat that she seriously doubts her spoiled, vain neighbor knows how to start, much less sail. The name of the boat is It’s Settled, the port of call supposedly Grand Cayman, a Caribbean island that has no income tax.

  “That’s quite a boat,” Lucy says as they sit on white furniture that seems suspended between the water and sky. She sets a cell phone on the glass coffee table.

  “It’s Italian.” The woman smiles a secretive, not-so-nice smile.

  “Reminds me of Cannes,” Lucy says.

  “Oh yes! The film festival.”

  “No, not that so much. The Ville de Cannes, the boats, oh the yachts. Just past the old clubhouse you turn on Quai Number One, very near the Poseidon and Amphitrite boat rentals out of Marseilles. Nice fellow who works there, Paul, drives this bright yellow old Pontiac, a strange sight to see in the South of France. You just keep walking past the storage units, turn on Quai Number Four, and go to the end toward the lighthouse. I’ve never seen so many Mangustas and Leopards in my life. I once had a Zodiac with a pretty muscular Suzuki engine, but a big boat? Who has the time? Well, maybe you do.” She gazes at the dry-docked speedboat. “Of course, the sheriff’s department and Customs will nail you good if you go more than ten miles an hour in that thing through here.”

  The lady is clueless. She is pretty but not in a way that Lucy finds appealing. She looks very rich and pampered and addicted to Botox, collagen, thermal treatments, whatever new magic is offered by the dermatologist. It may have been years since she was able to frown. But then, she doesn’t need negative facial gestures. For her face to look angry and mean would be redundant.

  “As I said, I’m Tina. And you are…?”

  “You can call me Kate. That’s what my friends call me,” the spoiled rich lady replies. “I’ve been in this house for seven years and never once has there been a problem, except with Jeff, who I am happy to report is off living his life in the Cayman Islands, among other places. I guess what you’re telling me is you’re not really a police officer.”

  “I really apologize if I slightly misled you, but I didn’t know what else to do to get you to come to the door, Kate.”

  “I saw a badge.”

  “Yes, I held it up so you would. It’s not real—not really. But when I’m in training for a part, I live it as much as I can, and my director suggested that I not only move into the house where we’re shooting, but go ahead and carry a badge and drive the same cars the special agent does, and all the rest.”

  “I knew it!” Kate shoots that finger at her again. “The sports cars. Ah! It’s all part of your role, isn’t it?” She settles her long-legged thin body back into the depths of her big white chair and plumps a pillow in her lap. “You don’t look familiar, though.”

  “I try not to.”

  Kate attempts a frown. “But I would think you would look at least a little familiar. And I can’t think who you are, anyway. Tina who?”

  “Mangusta.” She offers the name o
f her favorite boat, fairly certain the neighbor won’t directly connect Mangusta with earlier comments about Cannes, but rather will think that Mangusta sounds familiar, somewhat familiar.

  “Actually, yes, I have heard the name. It seems. Maybe,” Kate says, encouraged.

  “I haven’t been in much, not big roles although some of the films have been big. This is my break, you might say. I started out on off-off-Broadway and then made the jump to off-off-movies, whatever I could get. And I just hope it won’t drive you crazy when all the trucks and everything roll in, but fortunately that’s not until summer, and it may not happen at all because of this crazy person who seems to have followed us here.”

  “What a pity.” She leans forward in the big white chair.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Oh dear.” Kate’s eyes darken and she looks worried. “From the West Coast? That’s where he followed y’all from? You said you have a helicopter?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Lucy answers. “If you’ve never been stalked, you can’t really understand what a nightmare it is. I would never wish it on anyone. I thought coming here would be the best thing we ever did. But somehow he found us and followed us. I’m sure it’s him, pretty sure. God help me if we now have two stalkers, so I hope it’s him, oddly. And yes, I travel in helicopters when needed, but not all the way from the West Coast.”