Cruel & Unusual Read online

  “There might be some abrasions here,” Susan said, looking at the tongue.

  “Take it out.”

  I inserted the thermometer into the liver.

  “Jesus,” Marino said under his breath.

  “Now?”

  Susan's scalpel was poised.

  “No. Photograph the burns around his head. We need to measure those. Then remove the tongue.”

  “Shit,” she complained. “Who used the camera last?”

  “Sorry,” Fielding said. “There was no film in the drawer. I forgot. By the way, it's your job to keep film in the drawer.”

  “It would help if you d tell me when the film drawer's empty.”

  Women are supposed to be intuitive. I didn't think I needed to tell you.”

  “I got the measurement of these burns around his head;” Susan reported, ignoring his remark.

  “Okay.” - Susan gave him the measurements, then started work on the tongue.

  Marino backed away from the table. “Jesus,” he said again. “That always gets me.”

  “Liver temp's one hundred and five,” I reported to Fielding.

  I glanced up at the clock. Waddell had been dead for an hour. He hadn't cooled much. He was big. Electrocution heats you up. The brain temperatures of smaller men I had autopsied were as high as a hundred and ten. Waddell's right calf was at least that, hot to the touch, the muscle in total tetanus.

  “A little abrasion at the margin. But nothing big time,” Susan pointed out to me.

  “He bite his tongue hard enough to bleed that much?”

  Marino asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, they're already raising a stink about it.”

  His voice rose. “I thought you'd want to know.”

  I paused, resting the scalpel on the edge of the table as it suddenly occurred to me. “You were a witness.”

  “Yeah. I told you I was going to be.”

  Everybody looked at him.

  “Trouble's brewing out there,” he said. “I don't want no one leaving this joint alone.”

  “What sort of trouble?” Susan asked.

  “A bunch of religious nuts have been hanging out at Spring Street since this morning. Somehow they got word about his bleeding, and when the ambulance drove off with his body they started marching in this direction like a bunch of zombies.”

  “Did you see it when he started bleeding?” Fielding asked him.

  “Oh, yeah. They juiced him twice. The first time he made this loud hiss, like steam coming out of a radiator, and the blood started pouring out from under his mask. They're saying the chair might have malfunctioned.”

  Susan started the Stryker saw and no one competed with its loud buzzing as she cut through the skull. I continued examining the organs. Heart was good, coronaries terrific. When the saw stopped, I resumed dictating to Fielding.

  “You got the weight?” he asked.

  “Heart weighs five-forty, and he's got a single adhesion of the left upper lobe to the aortic arch. Even found four parathyroids, in case you didn't already get that.”

  “I got it.” I placed the stomach on the cutting board. “It's almost tubular.” “You sure?”

  Fielding moved closer to inspect. “That's bizarre. A guy this big needs a minimum of four thousand calories a day.”

  “He wasn't getting it, not lately,” I said. “He doesn't have any gastric contents. His stomach is absolutely empty and clean.”

  “He didn't eat his last meal?” Marino asked me.

  “It doesn't appear that he did.”

  “Do they usually?”

  “Yes,” I said, “usually.”

  We were finished by one A.M., and followed the funeral home attendants out to the bay, where the hearse was waiting. As we walked out of the building, darkness throbbed with red and blue lights. Radio static drifted on the cold, damp air, engines rumbled, and beyond the chain-link fence enclosing the parking lot was a ring of fire. Men, women, and children stood silently, faces wavering in candlelight.

  The attendants wasted no time sliding Waddell's body into the back of the hearse and slamming the tailgate shut.

  Somebody said something I did not get, and suddenly candles showered over the fence like a storm of falling stars and landed softly on the pavement.

  “Goddam squirrels!” Marino exclaimed. Wicks glowed orange and tiny flames dotted the tarmac. The hearse hastily began to back out of the bay. Flashguns were going off. I spotted the Channel 8 news van parked on Main Street. Someone was running along the sidewalk. Uniformed men wed stamping out the candles, moving toward the fence, demanding that everyone clear the area.

  “We don't want any problems here,” an officer said. “Not unless some of you want to spend the night in lockup -” “Butchers,” a woman screamed.

  Other voices joined in and hands grabbed the chain-link fence, shaking it.

  Marino hurried me to my car.

  A chant rose with tribal intensity. “Butchers, butchers, butchers...”

  I fumbled with my keys, dropped them on the floor mat, snatched them up, and managed to find the right one.

  “I'm following you home,” Marino said.

  I turned the heater on high but could not get warm. Twice I checked to make sure my doors were locked. The night took on a surreal quality, a strange asymmetry of light and dark windows, and shadows moved in the corners of my eyes.

  We drank Scotch in my kitchen because I was out of bourbon “I don't know how you stand this stuff,” Marino said rudely.

  “Help yourself to whatever else there is in the bar,” I told him.

  “I'll tough it out.”

  I wasn't quite sure how to broach the subject, and it was obvious that Marino wasn't going to make it easy for me. He was tense, his face flushed. Strands of gray hair clung to his moist, balding head, and he was chain-smoking.

  “Have you ever witnessed an execution before?” I asked

  “Never had a strong urge to.”

  “But you volunteered this time. So the urge must have been pretty strong.”

  “I bet if you put some lemon and soda water in this it wouldn't be half bad.”

  “If you want me to ruin good Scotch, I'll be glad to see what I can do.”

  He slid the glass toward me and I went to the refrigerator. “I've got bottled Key Lime juice, but no lemon.” I searched shelves.

  “That's fine.”

  I dribbled Key Lime juice into his glass, then added the Schweppes. Oblivious to the strange concoction he was sipping, he said, “Maybe you've forgotten, but the Robyn Naismith case was mine. Mine and Sonny Jones's.”

  “I wasn't around then.”

  “Oh, yeah. Funny, it seems like you've been here forever. But you know what happened, right?”

  I was a deputy chief medical examiner for Dade County when Robyn Naismith was murdered, and I remembered reading about the case, following it in the news, and later seeing a slide presentation about it at a national meeting. The former Miss Virginia was a stunning beauty with a gorgeous alto voice. She was articulate and charismatic before the camera. She was only twenty-seven years old.

  The defense claimed that Ronnie Waddell's intent was burglary, and Robyn's misfortune was to walk in on it after returning home from the drugstore. Allegedly, Waddell did not watch television and was unfamiliar with her name or brilliant future when he was ransacking her residence and brutalizing her. He was so hopped up on drugs, the defense argued, that he didn't know what he was doing. The jurors rejected Waddell's temporary insanity plea and recommended the death penalty.

  'I know the pressure to catch her killer was incredible, “ I said to Marino.

  “Friggin' unbelievable. We had this great latent print We had bite marks. We had three guys doing a cold search through the files morning, noon, and night. I got no idea how many hours I put in on that damn case Then we catch the bastard because he's driving around North Carolina with an expired inspection sticker.”

  He
paused, his eyes hard when he added, “Course, Jones wasn't around by then. Too damn bad he missed out of seeing Waddell get his reward.”

  “Do you blame Waddell for what happened to Sonny Jones?” I asked.

  “Hey, what do you think?”

  “He was a close friend.”

  “We worked Homicide together, fished together, we were on the same bowling team.”

  “I know his death was hard for you.”

  “Yeah, well, the case wore him down. Working all hours, no sleep, never home, and that sure as hell didn't help matters with his wife. He kept telling me he couldn't take it no more and then he stopped telling me anything. One night he decides to eat his gun.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said gently. “But I'm not sure you can blame Waddell for that.”

  “I had a score to settle.”

  “And was it settled when you witnessed his execution?”

  At first Marino did not reply. He stared across the kitchen, his jaw rigidly set. I watched him smoke and drain his drink.

  “Can I refresh that?”

  “Yo. Why not.”

  I got up and did my thing again as I thought about the injustices and losses that had gone into the making of Marino. He had survived a loveless, impoverished childhood in the wrong part of New Jersey, and nursed an abiding distrust of anyone whose lot had been better. Not long ago his wife of thirty years had left him, and he had a son nobody seemed to know anything about. Regardless of his loyalty to law and order and his record of excellent police work, it was not in his genetic code to get along with the brass. It seemed his life's journey had placed him on a hard road. I feared that what he hoped to find at the end was not wisdom or peace but paybacks. Marino was always angry about something.

  “Let me ask you this, Doc,” he sand to me when I returned to the table. “How would you feel if they caught the assholes who killed Mark?”

  His question caught me by surprise. I did not want to think about those men.

  “Isn't there a part of you that wants to see the bastards hung?” he went on. “Doesn't a part of you want to volunteer for the firing squad so you could pull the trigger yourself?”

  Mark died when a bomb placed in a trash can inside London's Victoria Station exploded at the moment he happened to walk past. My shock and grief had catapeuted me beyond revenge.

  “It's an exercise in futility for me to contemplate punishing a group of terrorists,” I said.

  Marino stared intensely at me. “That's what's known as one of your famous bullshit answers. You'd give them free autopsies if you could. And you'd want them would cut real slow. I ever tell you what happened to Robyn Naismith's family?”

  I reached for my drink.

  “Her father was a doctor in northern Virginia, a real fine man,” he said. “About six months after the trial, he came down with cancer and a couple months after that was dead. Robyn was the only child. The mother move to Texas, gets in a car wreck, and spends her days in wheelchair with nothing but memories. Waddell killed Robyn Naismith's entire family. He poisoned every life he touched.”

  I thought of Waddell growing up on the farm, image from his meditation drifting through my mind. I envisioned him sitting on porch steps, biting into a tomato that tasted like the sun. I wondered what had gone through his mind the last second of his life. I wondered if he had prayed.

  Marino stubbed out a cigarette. He was thinking about leaving.

  “Do you know a Detective Trent with Henrico?”

  “Joe Trent. Used to be with K-Nine and got transferred into the detective division after he made sergeant a couple months ago. Sort of a nervous Nellie, but he's all right.”

  “He called me about a boy -”

  He cut me off. “Eddie Heath?”

  “I don't know his name.”

  “A white male about thirteen years old. We're working on it. Lucky's is in the city.”

  “Lucky'-s?”

  “The convenience store where he was last seen. It's off Chamberlayne Avenue, Northside. What did Trent want?”

  Marino frowned. “He gotten word that Heath ain't going to pull through and is making an appointment with you in advance?”

  “He wants me to look at unusual injuries, possible mutilation.”

  “Christ. I hate it when it's kids.”

  Marino pushed back his chair and rubbed his temples. “Damn. Every time you get rid of one toad there's another to take his place.”

  After Marino left, I sat on the hearth in the living room watching coals shift in the fireplace. I was weary and felt a dull, implacable sadness that I did not have the strength to chase away. Mark's death had left a tear in my soul. I had come to realize, incredibly, just how much of my identity had been tied to my love for him.

  The last time I saw him was on the day he flew to London, and we managed a quick lunch downtown before he headed to Duller Airport. What I remembered most clearly about our last hour together was both of us glancing at our watches as storm clouds gathered and rain began to spit against the window beside our booth. He had a nick on his jaw from where he'd cut himself while shaving, and later, when I would see his face my mind, I would envision that small injury and fork some reason be undone by it.

  He died in February while the war was ending in the Persian Gulf, and determined to put the pain behind me I had sold my house and moved to a new neighborhood. What I accomplished was to uproot myself without really going anywhere, and the familiar plants and neighbors that once had given me comfort were gone, Redecorating my new home or redesigning the yard only added to my stress. Everything I did provided distractions for which I had no time, and I could imagine Mark shaking his head.

  “For someone so logical...” he would smile and say.

  “And what would you do?” I would tell him in my thoughts some nights when I could not sleep. “Just what the hell would you do if you were still here instead me?”

  Returning to the kitchen, I rinsed out my glass and went into my study to see what awaited me on my answering machine. Several reporters had called, so had. my mother and Lucy, my niece. Three other messages, were hang ups.

  I would have loved an unlisted number but it was not possible. The police, Commonwealth's Attorneys, the four hundred or so appointed medical examiners statewide had legitimate reasons to reach me after hours. To counter the loss of privacy, I used my answering machine to screen calls, and anyone who left threatening or obscene messages ran the risk of being tracked by Caller ID.

  Pressing the review button on the ID box, I began scrolling through the numbers materializing on the narrow screen. When I found the three calls I was looking for, I was perplexed and unsettled. The number was curiously familiar by now. It had been appearing on my screen several times a week of late when the caller would hang up without leaving a message. Once, I had tried dialing the number back to see who answered and had gotten the high-pitched tone of what sounded like a fax machine or a computer modem. For whatever reason, this individual or thing had called my number three times between ten-twenty and eleven P.M., while I was at the morgue waiting for Waddell's body. That didn't make sense. Computerized telephone solicitations should not occur so frequently and at such a late hour, and if one modem trying to dial another was getting me instead, shouldn't someone have figured out by now that his computer was dialing a wrong number?

  I woke up several times during the few hours left of the early morning. Every creak or shift of sound in the house made my pulse pick up. Red lights on the burglar alarm's control panel across from the bed glowed ominously, and when I turned or rearranged the covers, motion sensors I did not arm while I was home watched me silently with flashing red eyes. My dreams were strange. At five-thirty I turned on lamps and got dressed. It was dark out and there was very little traffic as I drove to the office. The parking lot behind the bay was deserted and littered with dozens of small beeswax can dies that brought to mind Moravian love feasts and other religious celebrations. But these candles had been used to protest. T
hey had been used as weapons hours before. Upstairs, I fixed coffee and began going through the paperwork Fielding had left for me, curious about, the contents of the envelope I'd found in Waddell's back pocket. I was expecting a poem, perhaps another meditation or a letter from his minister.

  Instead, I discovered that what Waddell had considered “extremely confidential” and had wanted buried with him were cash register receipts. Inexplicably, five were for tolls; three others were for meals, including a fried chicken dinner ordered at a Shoney's two weeks earlier.