Livid: a Scarpetta Novel Read online

  They fought often and violently. It would seem she had a habit of encouraging attention from other men, and in general creating drama. It’s Bose Flagler’s contention that the night of her death, Hooke was in a jealous fury. While he and April argued as they sat on the boat drinking beer in the heat, he plotted how to get away with the perfect murder.

  Most important was how to dispose of her body, Flagler explains in the cadence of an evangelist. The defendant had to make sure it wouldn’t be found.

  CHAPTER 2

  Have you seen these?” Flagler asks me over the upset noise around us.

  He waves his hand around the courtroom like a game show host, indicating the gruesome images on the multiple big-screen displays.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “Do these images accurately depict the condition April Tupelo’s body was in when she washed up on the beach?”

  “Yes, as best I know,” I reply. “I wasn’t there but have reviewed the photographs and videos taken by police and death investigators.”

  “And you don’t think she looks like a victim of violence, ma’am?”

  “What I’m seeing is common when dead bodies are recovered from water—”

  “Common? As if anything we might be looking at is common?”

  “Objection! Argumentative commenting on the testimony!”

  “Sustained.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am,” Flagler says to me. “You were talking about how common April Tupelo’s death was.”

  “I was saying that usually a dead body will float facedown and partially submerged, the extremities and head hanging lower than the torso.” I explain this to the jury and not Flagler. “Often it’s run over by ships or motorboats.”

  Those aboard them rarely have a clue, I continue painting the gory picture. Or if they do, they don’t want to get involved, and keep going. They leave the gruesome discovery for someone else to manage, meaning we don’t always have a history that might correlate with postmortem injuries.

  “When human remains have been preyed upon by marine animals and slashed up by a boat propeller, you can understand why one might assume the death was violent.” I summarize for the jury as if Flagler is invisible. “To someone untrained or no longer thinking rationally, it’s easy to attribute such postmortem artifacts to torture, mutilation and murder.”

  “Isn’t it also possible, ma’am, that a murder victim might look exactly like what we’re seeing in these photographs and videos?” He again indicates the disturbing images brightly displayed on big flat screens.

  “Yes, it’s possible, but—”

  “You can’t look at these pictures and from them alone tell us that April Tupelo wasn’t murdered, can you, ma’am?”

  “No, not at a glance,” I reply as he continues moving around strategically.

  This moment I’m confronted with his dark blue crocodile belt, and the diamond eyes of the silver rampant eagle buckle. I can make out the pearly buttons of his powder-blue cotton shirt, and the gray spots where his flat belly is sweating through it.

  “Of course, you weren’t at that Wallops Island scene. You’ve been clear about that, haven’t you? You… weren’t… there…,” he slowly drawls while pacing in front of me. “I mean it’s important the jury’s reminded of that point. You were living in Massachusetts, busy with your life up there. You weren’t even in Virginia, and never saw April Tupelo’s body in person, so to speak, correct?”

  “That’s correct.” I’m increasingly uneasy about getting out of here alive.

  Enclosed by cherrywood-paneled partitions with a waist-high door, I’m mindful there’s no quick way out as Flagler continues working the courtroom into a frenzy. I steal a glance at Pete Marino, seated up front on the aisle where he can get to me in a hurry. His big sun-weathered face is stony as he takes in everything around him without making it obvious.

  “What about the defendant, Gilbert Hooke?” Flagler starts his next tactic, and the rumbling around me is ominous. “How many times have you met with him, ma’am?”

  “I haven’t,” I reply.

  “The two of you have never been introduced?”

  “No.”

  “You never visited Mister Hooke while he was locked up in Norfolk jail prior to being transported to Alexandria?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’ve spoken to him by phone?” Flagler persists, and what he’s implying is absurd.

  “I haven’t. It wouldn’t be a normal thing for me to do in this case or any other.”

  “Why’s that?” He stops pacing, stares at me, shrugging. “Why wouldn’t it be normal?”

  “Determining guilt or innocence of the accused isn’t up to the medical examiner,” I reply.

  “Then the only time you’ve had any direct exposure to the defendant is this afternoon inside this courtroom? Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “That’s correct.” I know better than to let my eyes wander to the defense table.

  But it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of Gilbert Hooke seated with his lawyers. He watches me intensely, not reacting to much, the legal pad and pen in front of him remaining untouched.

  “And ma’am?” Flagler keeps ramping it up. “Since you haven’t spoken to or met with the defendant, you don’t have an informed opinion about what kind of human being he might really be, now do you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You have no direct knowledge about whether he’s capable of cruel acts, including murder and mutilation? You couldn’t possibly know if he’s the cold-blooded monster people say he is, now could you?”

  “I have no direct knowledge—”

  “Objection!”

  “You wouldn’t have personal knowledge about whether Gilbert Hooke is pathologically jealous? Of if he’d been violent and psychologically sadistic with April on other occasions—?”

  “I object!”

  “… You have no personal knowledge of him being out of control and vindictive when he doesn’t get his way or isn’t the center of attention? Especially when he’s drinking, correct—”

  “Objection! Asked and answered!”

  “… My point is, you don’t personally have a clue what the defendant’s really like, do you, ma’am?” Flagler says to me while Annie watches with stunning silence.

  “No,” I answer. “I have no personal knowledge.”

  “And you wouldn’t know whether any of us are safe should the jury come back with a not guilty verdict, and Gilbert Hooke is out and about, free again? You have no direct knowledge of that either, do you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, the courts seem to think the defendant is plenty dangerous, bringing to mind Hannibal Lecter—”

  “Objection!” Gallo shouts, and I’ve never seen him this offended. “For God’s sake, Your Honor!”

  “It’s no accident that Gilbert Hooke has been held in isolation without bail since his arrest almost two years ago,” Flagler continues unimpeded. “It’s clear why he should remain behind bars for the rest of his destructive and hateful life…”

  All eyes are on Gilbert Hooke, clean-shaven with pale skin and short mousy hair, in a drab cheap suit several sizes too big. He could pass for a young attorney were it not for his jail-issue orange sneakers, and the shackles around his wrists and ankles.

  This in vivid contrast to how he looked at the time of April Tupelo’s death almost two years ago when he was muscular and darkened by the sun. In every image I’ve seen of him displayed in the courtroom so far, he’s wearing a tactical combat knife on his belt and a large-caliber pistol.

  He’s shirtless, sporting tattoos and a cocky grin, usually with a beer in hand. We see him baiting outriggers, filleting fish, blood and guts everywhere. Or shooting his gun at a shark he’s gaffed while laughing maniacally, ejected cartridge cases glinting in the sun. All of this is a deliberate and effective ploy on the prosecution’s part.

  “Again, I’m just reminding the jury that what you see with Gilbert Hooke isn’t what you’re getting.” Flagler aggressively points at the defense table’s team of pricey lawyers, and the upset murmuring is louder. “Don’t be fooled by his mild-mannered appearance!”

  “Objection!” Gallo complains.

  “Mister Flagler, that’s enough,” Annie finally says.

  He digs his hands in his trouser pockets, parking himself squarely in front of me. I’m staring at the champs de fleurs pattern on his blue silk tie, picking up his bright scent again.

  “Ma’am? I don’t care how many fancy degrees you have, you can’t undo death, now can you?” he asks me.

  “No.”

  “You can’t restore to April Tupelo’s loved ones what they’ve lost, correct? So what choice does someone like you have except to become desensitized, isn’t that right, ma’am?”

  “No, that’s not right—”

  “In fact, your earliest memories are of your father sick and dying,” he says. “I regret the necessity of bringing up such a delicate subject. Because how could it have done anything but ruin your formative years…?”

  “I object! Relevance!”

  “While also making it difficult for you to have relationships, to connect with people. Living ones, I mean—”

  “Objection, Your Honor!”

  “Sustained. What’s your question, Mister Flagler?”

  “What type of cancer did you say?” He directs this at me.

  “My father died from chronic myeloid leukemia.”

  “Sadly, you got started young learning how to make yourself bulletproof emotionally. Of course, growing up in a bad neighborhood in Miami, you probably needed to be bulletproof in more ways than one,” he adds to derisive laughter around me. “Neither of your parents were born in this country and barely spoke English, isn’t that true?”

  “I’m just going to keep objecting!” Gallo shakes his head in disgust, and I’m more incensed than he is but no one would know it.

  By bringing up details about my childhood and Italian ethnicity, the well-heeled Flagler with his prominent pedigree is reminding the jurors and everyone else that I’m an outsider. He’s painting me as a coldhearted female who’s barely American, and I can feel the hostility in the air like static electricity.

  “Let me rephrase,” he replies while Annie looks on without interfering. “From an early age you were taking care of your terminally ill father, weren’t you, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had to learn not to feel, isn’t that true.”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  He stalls again, flipping through his notes, and people are making ugly comments that I’d rather not hear.

  “Quiet in the courtroom,” Annie says.

  “Ma’am?” Flagler looks at me. “You’ve decided that April Tupelo wasn’t murdered because…? Um, strike that. I’ll start over… Now, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Your opinion is based on these little snowflakey-looking things that the jury heard testimony about earlier from someone who works at a museum… Diatoms. Am I pronouncing that right?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “And diatoms are basically algae, the scummy stuff we see on ponds and in fish tanks.”

  “You can’t see diatoms with the unaided eye unless there are a lot of them, a bloom as it’s known,” I reply.

  “So, you happened to notice these teeny-tiny things called diatoms even though they’re invisible to the rest of us unless there’s a bloom of them?”

  “The individual unicellular algae can be seen easily with a microscope.” I keep my attention on the nine women and three men in the jury box, most of them retired and college educated.

  “And ma’am, you were looking through that microscope in hopes of getting lucky. Sort of like finding the prize in the Cracker Jack box, is that right?”

  “No, that’s not right. It wasn’t luck or happenstance that I found diatoms,” I reply. “I checked for them specifically in lung tissue preserved during April Tupelo’s postmortem examination twenty-one months ago on October seventeenth—”

  “Like I’ve said, you had a hunch, and wanted to prove it by experimenting with body parts,” he says. “Ones that had been preserved in glass jars like canned peaches all this time…?”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained. Mister Flagler, let the witness fully answer the questions. We need to speed this along,” Annie adds, to a distant rumble of thunder as a late afternoon storm rolls in.

  “During autopsies,” I continue, “it’s standard to preserve sections of organs and other biological tissue in a colorless solution of formaldehyde and water called formalin.”

  As I give the jurors a brief morgue primer, Flagler constantly shifts his position. Moving my head this way and that, I must look ridiculous as I try to see past him.

  “This is basically the same fixative that funeral homes use in embalming, and has no effect on diatoms being present or not,” I explain. “Formalin wouldn’t have destroyed the diatoms, in other words. The problem is they weren’t looked for at the time of April Tupelo’s death. This should have happened but didn’t.”

  There’s nothing I’ve seen in reports or been told that would make me think the subject came up. I’m sure the reason it didn’t was that Dr. Bailey Carter had become incompetent. According to those he was closest to, the sixty-four-year-old forensic pathologist was suffering from rapid onset dementia. He’d become forgetful, erratic and resistant to suggestions.

  Performing April Tupelo’s postmortem examination and in charge of the medico-legal investigation, he didn’t consider drowning as the likely cause of death or a possibility. She died from manual strangulation according to what he filled in on the final autopsy report and death certificate. I have no idea why he thought this unless it was a guess. Much of her throat’s soft tissue was gone, decomposed and fed upon by marine life.

  There was no apparent evidence of injury to the structures of the neck, and no reason to rule that strangulation killed her. It didn’t. She may have sustained injuries that were gone or not found. But she drowned, and Bailey Carter missed the telltale signs. He disposed of the “watery brownish” gastric contents without checking for diatoms.

  Had he done so, he would have found them the same way I eventually did when I examined preserved sections of the victim’s lungs, I explain to the jury.

  “Because of the wave action in ocean drownings,” I’m saying, “victims often swallow water in addition to inhaling it. Especially if the surf is rough—”

  I’m interrupted again, this time by a matronly juror waving her hand in a spirited fashion. Heavily made up and flashing big rings, she has zany winged glasses and lavender-tinted hair, reminding me of the British comedian Dame Edna.

  CHAPTER 3

  Do you have a question for the witness?” Annie asks the juror.

  “If it’s all right. Yes, please,” she says in an accent that sounds more like South Carolina than Virginia.

  “Go ahead.” Annie nods at her.

  “I guess I’m still a little confused why these diatoms are so important. For example, if the victim had gone swimming earlier in the day, could that explain your finding them?” the juror asks me.

  “Not in her lungs,” I reply. “Not inside intact organs, in other words.”

  “Well, I’m wondering if you would mind explaining what these diatoms might actually tell us that matters in this trial. And are they dangerous? If I filled a glass with tap water would they be in that too? Are they in this?”

  She lifts her plastic bottle of water up to the light. Reflexively, the other jurors do the same.

  “How would I know? And what if I drank them? What if my schnoodle did?” she asks with all sincerity.

  “That’s highly unlikely unless you’re talking about drinking water from a well, a lake, maybe a stream or pond,” I reply as she writes it down with pencil and paper supplied by the court. “But neither you nor your pets would want to ingest diatoms because some produce toxins.”

  The microscopic organisms are ubiquitous, I go on to describe. They’re in rivers, bays, oceans and other bodies of water all over the planet. Like different types of pollens, diatoms can vary enormously depending on location.

  “That’s why they’re important in an investigation,” I add, and the juror who asked the question is nodding her head. “They might tell us what happened and where.”

  Finding diatoms in lung tissue would confirm the victim inhaled water, and that’s what I discovered. When I reviewed slides under the microscope, the single-celled creatures were in abundance, bringing to mind tiny bits of sea glass and the symmetrical shapes in a kaleidoscope.

  “I also had samples of ocean water taken from the area where it’s believed the victim went overboard.” I give the jurors the upshot of measures I took. “And those diatoms are consistent with the ones in her lungs—”

  “Okay, okay, assuming you’re right about all that?” Flagler has heard enough. “It wouldn’t mean April Tupelo wasn’t murdered, now would it? Maybe water got into her lungs while she was floating in the ocean for three days, isn’t that possible?”

  “She inhaled water. That couldn’t happen unless she was still breathing, still alive when she went into the ocean.” I repeat what I’ve been saying to him all along. “It means she couldn’t have been dead on a boat for hours, and then cut up and thrown overboard to chum the waters.”

  As I counter the false claims in the prosecution’s case, I can tell that Flagler is about to lose his temper. I recognize the warning signs. His cheeks turn red, and his right hand starts twitching like a gunslinger about to draw his weapon.

  “Are you trying to let someone get away with murder, ma’am?” Flustered, he’s beginning to sputter, angrily raking his fingers through his dark wavy hair.

  “Objection!”