All That Remains ks-3 Page 7

  I paused, groping to explain: what would never be clear. "Maybe I'm just set in my "You can't be with someone and continue to live you always did, Kay."

  How many times had Mark and I said that to each other? It got to where we rarely said anything new.

  "Is maintaining your autonomy worth the price you're paying, the price both of you are paying?"

  There were days when I was no longer so sure, but I did not tell Abby this.

  She lit a cigarette and reached for the bottle of Cognac.

  "Did the two of you ever try counseling?"

  "No."

  What I told her was not entirely true. Mark and I had never gone to counseling, but I had gone alone and was still seeing a psychiatrist, though infrequently now.

  "Does he know Benton Wesley?"

  Abby asked.

  "Of course. Benton trained Mark in the Academy long before I came to Virginia," I replied. "They're very good friends."

  "What's Mark working on-in Denver?"

  "I have no idea. Some special assignment."

  "Is he aware of the cases here? The couples?"

  "I would assume so."

  Pausing, I asked, "Why?"

  "I don't know. But be careful what you say to Mark."

  "Tonight was the first time he's called in months. Obviously, I say very tittle to him."

  She got up and I led her to her room.

  As I gave her a gown and showed her the bath, she went on, the effects of the Cognac becoming apparent, "He'll call again. Or you're going to call him. So be careful."

  "I'm not planning on calling him," I said.

  "You're just as bad as he is, then," she said. "Both of you hardheaded and unforgiving as hell. So there. That's my assessment of the situation, whether you like it or not."

  "I have to be at the office by eight," I said. "I'll make sure you're up by seven."

  She hugged me good night and kissed my cheek: The following weekend I went out early and bought the Post and could not find Abby's story. It did not come out the next week or the week after that, and I thought this strange. Was Abby all right? Why had I not heard a word from her since our visit in Richmond? In late October I called the Post's newsroom.

  "I'm sorry," said a man who sounded harried. "Abby's on leave. Won't be back until next August."

  "Is she still in town?" I asked, stunned.

  "Got no idea."

  Hanging up, I flipped through my address book and tried her home number. I was answered by a machine - Abby did not return that call or any of the others I made during the next few weeks. It wasn't until shortly after Christmas that I began to realize what was going on.

  On Monday, January sixth, I came home to find a letter in my mailbox. There was no return address, but the handwriting was unmistakable. Opening the envelope, discovered inside a sheet of yellow legal paper scribbled with "FYI. Mark," and a short article clipped from recent issue of the New York Times. Abby Turnbull, I read with disbelief, had signed a book contract to write about the disappearance of Fred Cheney and Deborah Harvey, and the "frightening parallels" between their cases and those of four other couples in Virginia who had vanished and turned up dead.

  Abby had warned me about Mark, and now he was warning me about her. Or was there some other reason for his sending me the article? For a long interval I sat in my kitchen, tempted to leave an outraged message on Abby's machine or to call Mark. I finally decided to call Anna, my psychiatrist.

  "You feel betrayed?"

  she asked when I got her on the phone.

  "To put it mildly, Anna."

  "You've known Abby is writing a newspaper story. Is writing a book so much worse?"

  "She never told me she was writing a book," I said.

  "Because you feel betrayed doesn't mean you truly have been," Anna said. "This is your perception at the moment, Kay. You will have to wait and see. And as for why Mark sent you the article, you may have to wait and see about that, too. Perhaps it was his way of reaching out."

  "I'm wondering if I should consult a lawyer," I said. "See if there's something 1 should do to protect myself. I have no idea what might end up in Abby's book."

  "I think it would be wiser to take her words at face value," Anna advised. "She said your conversations were off the record. Has she ever betrayed you before?"

  "No."

  "Then I suggest you give her a chance. Give her an opportunity to explain. Besides," she added, "I'm not sure how much of a book she can write. There have been no arrests, and there is no resolution as to what happened to the couple. They have yet to turn up."

  The bitter irony of that remark would hit me exactly two weeks later, on January twentieth, when I was on the capitol grounds waiting to see what happened when a bill authorizing the Forensic Science Bureau to create a DNA data bank went before the Virginia General Assembly.

  I was returning from the snack bar, cup of coffee in hand, when I spotted Pat Harvey, elegant in a navy cashmere suit, a zip-up black leather portfolio under her arm. She was talking to several delegates in the hall, and glancing my way, she immediately excused herself.

  "Dr. Scarpetta," she said, offering her hand. She looked relieved to see me, but drawn and stressed.

  I wondered why she wasn't in Washington, and then she answered my unspoken question. "I was asked to lend my support to Senate Bill One-thirty," she said, smiling nervously. "So I suppose both of us are here today for the same reason."

  "Thank you. We need all the support we can get."

  "I don't think you have a worry," she replied.

  She was probably right. The testimony of the national drug policy director and the publicity it would generate would put considerable pressure on the Courts of Justice Committee.

  After an awkward silence, with both of us glancing at the people milling about, I asked her quietly, "How are you?"

  For an instant her eyes teared up. Then she gave me another quick, nervous smile and stared off down the hall. "If you'll please excuse me, I see someone I need to have a word with."

  Pat Harvey was barely out of earshot when my pager went off.

  A minute later I was on the phone.

  "Marino's on his way," my secretary was explaining.

  "So am I," I said. "Get my scene kit, Rose. Make sure everything's in order. Flashlight, camera, batteries, gloves."

  "Will do."

  Cursing my heels and the rain, I hurried down steps and along Governor Street, the wind tearing at my umbrella as I envisioned Mrs. Harvey's eyes that split second when they had revealed her pain. Thank God she had not been standing there when my pager had sounded its dreadful alert.

  5

  The odor was noticeable from a distance. Heavy drops of rain smacked loudly against dead leaves, the sky as dark as dusk, winter-bare trees drifting in and out of the fog.

  "Jesus," Marino muttered as he stepped over a log. "They must be ripe. No other smell like it. Always reminds me of pickled crabs."

  "It gets worse," promised Jay Morrell, who was leading the way.

  Black mud sucked at our feet, and every time Marino brushed against a tree I was showered with freezing water. Fortunately, I kept a hooded Gore-Tex coat and heavy rubber boots in the trunk of my state car for scenes like this one. What I had been unable to find were my thick leather gloves, and it was impossible to navigate through the woods and keep branches out of my face if my hands were in my pockets.

  I had been told there were two bodies, suspected to be a male and a female. They were less than four miles from the rest stop where Deborah Harvey's Jeep had been found last fall.

  You don't know that it's them, I thought to myself with every step.

  But when we reached the perimeter of the scene, my heart constricted. Benton Wesley was talking to an officer working a metal detector, and Wesley would not have been summoned unless the police were sure. He stood with military erectness, exuding the quiet confidence of a man in charge. He seemed bothered neither by the weather nor by the stench o
f decomposing human flesh. He was not looking around and taking in the details the way Marino and I were, and I knew why. Wesley had already looked around. He had been here long before, I was called.

  The bodies were lying next to each other, facedown in, a small clearing about a quarter of a mile from the muddy logging road where we had left our cars. They were so badly decomposed they were partially skeletonized. The long bones of arms and legs protruded like dirty gray sticks from rotted clothing scattered with leaves. Skulls were detached and had been nudged or rolled, probably by small predators, a foot or two away.

  "Did you find their shoes and socks?"

  I asked, not seeing either.

  "No, ma'am. But we found a purse."

  Morrell pointed to the body on the right. "Forty-four dollars and twenty-six cents in it. Plus a driver's license, Deborah Harvey's driver's license."

  He pointed again, adding, "We're assuming the body there on the left is Cheney."

  Yellow crime scene tape glistened wetly against the dark bark of trees. Twigs snapped beneath the feet of men moving about, their voices blending into an indistinguishable babble beneath the relentless, dreary rain. Opening my medical bag, I got out a pair of surgical gloves and my camera.

  For a while I did not move as I surveyed the shrunken, almost fleshless bodies before me. Determining the sex and race of skeletal remains cannot always be done at a glance. I would not swear to anything until I could look at the pelvis, which were obscured by what appeared to be dark blue or black denim jeans. But based on the characteristics of the body to my right - small bones, small skull with small mastoids, non-prominent brow ridge, and strands of long blondish hair dinging to rotted fabric - 1 had no reason to think anything other than white female. The size of her companion, the robustness of the bones, prominent brow ridge, large skull, and flat face were good for white male.

  As for what might have happened to the couple, 1 could not tell. There were no ligatures indicating strangulation. I saw no obvious fractures or holes that might have meant blows or bullets. Male and female were quietly together in death, the bones of her left arm slipped under his right as if she had been holding on to him in the end, empty eye sockets gaping as rain rolled over their skulls.

  It wasn't until I moved in close and got down on my knees that I noticed a margin of dark soil, so narrow it was barely perceptible, on either side of the bodies. If they had died Labor Day weekend, autumn leaves would not have fallen yet. The ground beneath them would be relatively bare. I did not like what was going through my mind. It was bad enough that the police had been tramping around out here for hours. Dammit. To move or disturb a body in any way before the medical examiner arrives is a cardinal sin, and every officer out here knew that.

  "Dr. Scarpetta?"

  Morrell was towering over me, his breath smoking. "Was just talking to Phillips over there."

  He glanced in the direction of several officers searching thick underbrush about twenty feet east of us. "He found a watch and an earring, some change, all right about here where the bodies are. The interesting thing is, the metal detector kept going off. He had it right over the bodies and it was beeping. Could be from a zipper or something. Maybe a metal snap or button on their jeans. Thought you should know."

  I looked up into his thin, serious face. He was shivering beneath his parka.

  "Tell me what you did with the bodies in addition to running the metal detector over them, Morrell. I can see they've been moved. I need to know if this is the exact position they were in when they were discovered this morning."

  "I don't know about when the hunters found them, though they claim they didn't get very close," he said, eyes probing the woods. "But yes, ma'am, this is the way they looked when we got here. All we did was check for personal effects, went into their pockets and her purse."

  "I assume you took photographs before you moved anything," I said evenly.

  "We started taking pictures as soon as we arrived."

  Getting out a small flashlight, I began the hopeless task of looking for trace evidence. After bodies have been exposed to the elements for so many months, the chance of finding significant hairs, fibers, or other debris was slim to none. Morrell watched in silence, uneasily shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  "Have you found out anything else from your investigation that might be of assistance, assuming this is Deborah Harvey and Fred Cheney?"

  I asked, for I had not seen Morrell or talked to him since the day Deborah's Jeep had been found.

  "Nothing but a possible drug connection," he said. "We've been told Cheney's roommate at Carolina was into cocaine. Maybe Cheney fooled around with cocaine too. That's one of the things we're considering, if maybe he and the Harvey girl met up with someone who was selling drugs and came out here."

  That didn't make any sense.

  "Why would Cheney leave the Jeep at a rest stop and go off with a drug dealer, taking Deborah with him, and come out here?"

  I asked. "Why not just buy the drugs at the rest stop and be on their way?"

  "They may have come out here to party."

  "Who in his right mind would come out here after dark to party or do anything else? And where are their shoes, Morrell? Are you suggesting they walked through the woods barefoot?"

  "We don't know what happened to their shoes," he said.

  "That's very interesting. So far, five couples have been found dead and we don't know what happened to their shoes. Not one shoe or sock has turned up. Don't you find that rather odd?"

  "Oh, yes, ma'am. I think it's odd, all right," he said, hugging himself to get warm. "But right now I've got to work these two cases here without thinking about the other four couples. I've got to go with what I've got. And all I've got at the moment is a possible drug connection. I can't allow myself to get sidetracked by this serial murder business or who the girl's mother is, or I might be wrong and miss the obvious."

  "I certainly wouldn't want you to miss the obvious."

  He was silent.

  "Did you find any drug paraphernalia inside the Jeep?"

  "No. Nothing out here so far to suggest drugs, either. But we've got a lot of soil and leaves to go through - " "The weather's awful. I'm not sure it's a good idea to begin sifting through the soil."

  I sounded impatient and irritable. I was put out with him. I was put out with the police. Water was trickling down the front of my coat. My knees hurt. I was losing feeling in my hands and feet. The stench was overpowering, and the loud smacking of the rain was getting on my nerves.

  "We haven't started digging or using the sieves. Thought we might wait on that. It's too hard to see. The metal detector's all we've used so far, that and our eyes."

  "Well, the more all of us walk around out here, the more we risk destroying the scene. Small bones, teeth, other things, get stepped on and pushed down into the mud."

  They had already been here for hours. It was probably too damn late to preserve the scene.

  "So, you want to move them today or hold off until the weather clears?" he asked.

  Under ordinary circumstances, I would have waited until the rain stopped and there was more light. When bodies have been in the woods for months, leaving them covered with plastic and in place for another day or two isn't going to make any difference. But when Marino and I had parked on the logging road, there were already several television news trucks waiting. Reporters were sitting in their cars, others braving the rain and trying to coax information out of police officers standing sentry. The circumstances were anything but ordinary. Though I had no right to tell Morrell what to do, by Code I had jurisdiction over the bodies.

  "There are stretchers and body bags in the back of my car," I said, digging out my keys. "If you could have somebody get them, we'll move the bodies shortly and I'll take them on in to the morgue."

  "Sure thing. I'll take care of it."

  "Thanks."

  Then Benton Wesley was crouching next to me.

  "Ho
w did you find out?"

  I asked. The question was ambiguous, but he knew what I meant.

  "Morrell reached me in Quantico. I came right away."

  He studied the bodies, his angular face almost haggard in the shadow of his dripping hood. "You seeing anything that might tell us what happened?"

  "All I can tell you at the moment is their skulls weren't fractured and they weren't shot in the head."

  He did not respond, his silence adding to my tension.

  I began unfolding sheets as Marino walked up, hands jammed into his coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold and rain.

  "You're going to catch pneumonia," Wesley remarked, getting to his feet. "Is Richmond PD too cheap to buy you guys hats?"

  "Shit," Marino said, "you're lucky they put gas in your damn car and furnish you with a gun. The squirrels in Spring Street got it better than we do."

  Spring Street was the state penitentiary. It was true that it cost the state more money each year to house some inmates than a lot of police officers got paid for keeping them off the street. Marino loved to complain about it.

  "I see the locals drug your ass out here from Quantico. Your lucky day," Marino said.

  "They told me what they'd found. I asked if they'd called you yet."

  "Yeah, well, they got around to it eventually."

  "I can see that. Morrell told me he's never filled out a VICAP form. Maybe you can give him a hand."

  Marino stared at the bodies, his jaw muscles flexing.

  "We need to get this into the computer," Wesley went on as rain drummed the earth.

  Tuning out their conversation, I arranged one of the sheets next to the female's remains and turned her on her back. She held together nicely, joints and ligaments still intact. In a climate like Virginia's, it generally takes at least a year of being exposed to the elements before a body is fully skeletonized, or reduced to disarticulated bones. Muscle tissue, cartilage, and ligaments are tenacious. She was petite, and I recalled the photograph of the lovely young athlete posed on a balance beam. Her shirt, I noted, was some sort of pullover, possibly a sweatshirt, and her jeans were zipped up and snapped. Unfolding the other sheet, I went through the same procedure with her companion. Turning over decomposed bodies is like turning over rocks. You never know what you'll find underneath, except that you can usually count on insects. My flesh crawled as several spiders skittered off, vanishing beneath leaves.