Unnatural Exposure Read online

  This woman had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur, versus the joints. Getting out a scalpel, I could feel the men staring as I made a half-inch incision on the torso’s right side, and inserted a long chemical thermometer. I rested a second thermometer on top of my bag.

  “What are you doing?” asked a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, who looked like he might get sick.

  “I need the body’s temperature to help determine time of death. A core liver temperature is the most accurate,” I patiently explained. “And I also need to know the temperature out here.”

  “Hot, that’s what it is,” said another man. “So, it’s a woman, I guess.”

  “It’s too soon to say,” I replied. “Is this your packer?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was young, with dark eyes and very white teeth, and tattoos on his fingers that I usually associated with people who have been in prison. A sweaty bandanna was tied around his head and knotted in back, and he could not look at the torso long without averting his gaze.

  “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” he added, shaking his head with hostility.

  “What do you mean?” Grigg had his eye on him.

  “Wasn’t from me. I know that,” the driver said as if it were the most important point he would ever make in his life. “The Cat dug it up while it was spreading my load.”

  “Then we don’t know when it was dumped here?” I scanned faces around me.

  It was Pleasants who replied, “Twenty-three trucks unloaded in this spot since ten A.M., not counting this one.” He looked at the packer.

  “Why ten A.M.?” I asked, for it seemed like a rather arbitrary time to start counting trucks.

  “Because that’s when we put down the last cover of tire chips. So there’s no way it could have been dumped before then,” Pleasants explained, staring at the body. “And in my opinion, it couldn’t have been out long, anyway. It doesn’t exactly look the way you’d expect if it’s been run over by a fifty-ton compactor with chopper wheels, trucks or even this loader.”

  He stared off at other sites where compacted trash was being gouged off trucks as huge tractors crushed and spread. The driver of the packer was getting increasingly agitated and angry.

  “We got big machines all over the place up here,” Pleasants added. “And they pretty much never stop.”

  I looked at the packer, and the bright yellow loader with its empty cab. A tatter of black trash bag fluttered from the raised bucket.

  “Where’s the driver of the loader?” I asked.

  Pleasants hesitated before answering, “Well, I guess that would be me. We had somebody out sick. I was asked to work on the hill.”

  Grigg moved closer to the loader, looking up at what was left of the trash bag as it moved in the hot, barren air.

  “Tell me what you saw,” I said to Pleasants.

  “Not much. I was unloading him.” He nodded at the driver. “And my bucket caught the garbage bag, the one you see there. It tore and the body fell out to where it is now.” He paused, wiping his face on his sleeve and swatting at flies.

  “But you don’t know for sure where this came from,” I tried again, while Grigg listened, even though he probably had already taken their statements.

  “I could’ve dug it up,” Pleasants conceded. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. I just don’t think I did.”

  “That’s ’cause you don’t want to think it.” The driver glared at him.

  “I know what I think.” Pleasants didn’t flinch. “The bucket grabbed it off your packer when I was unloading it.”

  “Man, you don’t know it came from me,” the driver snapped at him.

  “No, I don’t know it for a fact. Makes sense, that’s all.”

  “Maybe to you.” The driver’s face was menacing.

  “Believe that will be about enough, boys,” Grigg warned, moving close again, his presence reminding them he was big and wore a gun.

  “You got that right,” said the driver. “I’ve had enough of this shit. When can I get out of here? I’m already late.”

  “Something like this inconveniences everyone,” Grigg said to him with a steady look.

  Rolling his eyes and muttering profanity, the driver stalked off and lit a cigarette.

  I removed the thermometer from the body, and held it up. The core temperature was eighty-four degrees, the same as the ambient air. I turned the torso over to see what else was there and noted a curious crop of fluid-filled vesicles over the lower buttocks. As I checked more carefully, I found evidence of others in the area of the shoulders and thighs, at the edges of deep cuts.

  “Double-pouch her,” I directed. “I need the trash bag it came in, including what’s caught on the bucket up there. And I want the trash immediately around and under her, send all of it in.”

  Grigg unfolded a twenty-gallon trash bag and shook it open. He pulled gloves out of a pocket, squatted and started grabbing up garbage by the handful while paramedics opened the back of the ambulance. The driver of the packer was leaning against his cab, and I could feel his fury like heat.

  “Where was your packer coming from?” I asked him.

  “Look at the tags,” he replied in a surly tone.

  “Where in Virginia?” I refused to be put off by him.

  It was Pleasants who said, “Tidewater area, ma’am. The packer belongs to us. We got a lot of them we lease.”

  The landfill’s administrative headquarters overlooked the fire pond and was quaintly out of sync with the loud, dusty surroundings. The building was pale peach stucco, with flowers in window boxes and sculpted shrubs bordering the walk. Shutters were painted cream, a brass pineapple knocker on the front door. Inside, I was greeted by clean, chilled air that was a wonderful relief, and I knew why Investigator Percy Ring had chosen to conduct his interviews here. I bet he had not even been to the scene.

  He was in the break room, sitting with an older man in shirtsleeves, drinking Diet Coke and looking at computer-printed diagrams.

  “This is Dr. Scarpetta. Sorry,” Pleasants said, adding to Ring, “I don’t know your first name.”

  Ring gave me a big smile and a wink. “The doc and I go way back.”

  He was in a crisp blue suit, blond and exuding pure youthful innocence that was easy to believe. But he had never fooled me. He was a big-talking charmer who basically was lazy, and it had not escaped me that the moment he had become involved in these cases, we had been besieged by leaks to the press.

  “And this is Mr. Kitchen,” Pleasants was saying to me. “The owner of the landfill.”

  Kitchen was simple in jeans and Timberland boots, his eyes gray and sad as he offered a big, rough hand.

  “Please sit down,” he said, pulling out a chair. “This is a bad, bad day. Especially for whoever that is out there.”

  “That person’s bad day happened earlier,” Ring said. “Right now, she’s feeling no pain.”

  “Have you been up there?” I asked him.

  “I just got here about an hour ago. And this isn’t the crime scene, just where the body ended up,” he said. “Number five.” He peeled open a stick of Juicy Fruit. “He’s not waiting as long, only two months in between ’em this time.”

  I felt the usual rush of irritation. Ring loved to jump to conclusions and voice them with the certainty of one who doesn’t know enough to realize he could be wrong. In part this was because he wanted results without work.

  “I haven’t examined the body yet or verified gender,” I said, hoping he would remember there were other people in the room. “This is not a good time to be making assumptions.”

  “Well, I’ll leave ya,” Pleasants said nervously, on his way out the door.

  “I need you back in an hour so I can get your statement,” Ring loudly reminded him.

  Kitchen was quiet, looking at diagrams, and then Grigg walked in. He nodded at us and took a chair.

  “I don’t think it’s an a
ssumption to say that what we got here is a homicide,” Ring said to me.

  “That you can safely say.” I held his gaze.

  “And that it’s just like the other ones.”

  “That you can’t safely say. I haven’t examined the body yet,” I replied.

  Kitchen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Anybody want a soda. Maybe coffee?” he asked. “We got rest rooms in the hall.”

  “Same thing,” Ring said to me as if he knew. “Another torso in a landfill.”

  Grigg was watching with no expression, restlessly tapping his notebook. Clicking his pen twice, he said to Ring, “I agree with Dr. Scarpetta. Seems we shouldn’t be connecting this case to anything yet. Especially not publicly.”

  “Lord help me. I could do without that kind of publicity,” Kitchen said, blowing out a deep breath. “You know, when you’re in my business, you accept this can happen, especially when you’re getting waste from places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago. But you never think it’s going to land in your yard.” He looked at Grigg. “I’d like to offer a reward to help catch whoever did this terrible thing. Ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest.”

  “That’s mighty generous,” Grigg said, impressed.

  “That include investigators?” Ring grinned.

  “I don’t care who solves it.” Kitchen wasn’t smiling as he turned to me. “Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma’am.”

  “I understand you use a satellite tracking system,” I said. “Is that what these diagrams are?”

  “I was just explaining them,” Kitchen said.

  He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.

  “This is a picture of the landfill face,” Kitchen explained. “We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.” He tapped the paper. “Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.” Looking up at me, he added, “I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.”

  “Suffer is the operative word.” I smiled at him. “Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill’s face changes from load to load.”

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “And what have you determined?”

  He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the face of the same person.

  “Each line, basically, is a depth,” he said. “So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.”

  Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.

  “This body could not have been buried deep,” I said. “It’s very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.”

  “That’s pretty much it.” Kitchen eyed me with interest. “You want a job?”

  I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was intact.

  “Hard to find good women,” Kitchen was saying.

  “You ain’t kidding, brother,” Ring said as Grigg watched him with growing disgust.

  “Seems like a good point,” Grigg said. “If that body had been on the ground for any time at all, it would be pretty chewed up.”

  “The first four were,” Ring said. “Mangled like cube steak.” He eyed me. “This one look compacted?”

  “The body doesn’t appear crushed,” I replied.

  “Now that’s interesting, too,” he mused. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “It didn’t start out at a transfer station where it was compacted and baled,” Kitchen said. “It started in a Dumpster that was emptied by the packer.”

  “And the packer doesn’t pack?” Ring dramatically asked. “Thought that’s why they were called packers.” He shrugged and grinned at me.

  “It depends on where the body was in relation to the other garbage when the compacting was done,” I said. “It depends on a lot of things.”

  “Or if it was compacted at all, depending on how full the truck was,” Kitchen said. “I’m thinking it was the packer. Or at most, one of the two trucks before it, if we’re talking about the exact coordinates where the body was found.”

  “I guess I’m going to need the names of those trucks and where they’re from,” Ring said. “We gotta interview the drivers.”

  “So you’re looking at the drivers as suspects,” Grigg said, coolly, to him. “Got to give you credit, that’s original. The way I look at it, the trash didn’t originate with them. It originated with the folks who pitched it. And I expect one of those folks is who we need to find.”

  Ring stared at him, not the least bit perturbed. “I’d just like to hear what the drivers have to say. You never know. It’d be a good way to stage something. You dump a body in a place that’s on your route and make sure you deliver it yourself. Or, hell, you load it into your own truck. No one suspects you, right?”

  Grigg pushed back his chair. He loosened his collar and worked his jaw as if it hurt. His neck popped, then his knuckles. Finally, he slapped his notebook down on the table and everybody looked at him as he glared at Ring.

  “You mind if I work this thing?” he said to the young investigator. “I’d sure hate not to do what the county hired me for. And I believe this is my case, not yours.”

  “Just here to help,” Ring said easily as he shrugged again.

  “I didn’t know I needed help,” Grigg replied.

  “The state police formed the multijurisdictional task force on homicides when the second torso showed up in a different county than the first one,” Ring said. “You’re a little late in the game, good buddy. Seems like you might want some background from somebody who’s not.”

  But Grigg had tuned him out, and he said to Kitchen, “I’d like that vehicle information, too.”

  “How about I get it for the last five trucks that were up there, to be safe,” Kitchen said to all of us.

  “That will help a lot,” I said as I got up from the table. “The sooner you could do that, the better.”

  “What time you going to work on it tomorrow?” Ring asked me, remaining in his chair, as if there were little to do in life and so much time.

  “Are you referring to the autopsy?” I asked.

  “You bet.”

  “I may not even open this one up for several days.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The most important part is the external examination. I will spend a very long time on that.” I could see his interest fade. “I’ll need to go through trash, search for trace, degrease and deflesh bones, get with an entomologist on the age of the maggots to see if I can get an idea of when the body was dumped, et cetera.”

  “Maybe it’s better if you just let me know what you find,” he decided.

  Grigg followed me out the door and was shaking his head as he said in his slow, quiet way, “When I got out of the army a long time ago, state police was what I wanted to be. I can’t believe they got a bozo like that.”

  “Fortunately, they’re not all like him,” I said.

  We walked out into the sun as the ambulance slowly made its way down the landfill in clouds of dust. Trucks were chugging in line and getting washed, as another layer of shredded modern America was added to the mountain. It was dark out when we reached our cars. Grigg paused by mine, looking it over.

  “I wondered whose this was,” he said with admirati
on. “One of these days I’m going to drive something like that. Just once.”

  I smiled at him as I unlocked my door. “Doesn’t have the important things like a siren and lights.”

  He laughed. “Marino and me are in the same bowling league. His team’s the Balls of Fire, mine’s the Lucky Strikes. That ole boy’s about the worst sport I ever seen. Drinks beer and eats. Then thinks everybody’s cheating. He brought a girl the last time.” He shook his head. “She bowled like the damn Flintstones, dressed like them, too. In this leopard-skin thing. All that was missing was a bone in her hair. Well, tell him we’ll talk.”

  He walked off, his keys jingling.

  “Detective Grigg, thanks for your help,” I said.

  He gave me a nod and climbed into his Caprice.

  When I designed my house, I made sure the laundry room was directly off the garage because after working scenes like this one, I did not want to track death through the rooms of my private life. Within minutes of my getting out of my car, my clothes were in the washing machine, shoes and boots in an industrial sink, where I scrubbed them with detergent and a stiff brush.

  Wrapping up in a robe I kept hanging on the back of the door, I headed to the master bedroom and took a long, hot shower. I was worn out and discouraged. Right now, I did not have the energy to imagine her, or her name, or who she had been, and I pushed images and odors from my mind. I fixed myself a drink and a salad, staring dismally at the big bowl of Halloween candy on the counter as I thought of plants waiting to be potted on the porch. Then I called Marino.

  “Listen,” I said to him when he answered the phone. “I think Benton should be here for this in the morning.”

  There was a long pause. “Okay,” he said. “Meaning you want me to tell him to get his ass to Richmond. Versus your telling him.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind. I’m beat.”