Unnatural Exposure Read online

  I pushed back my chair. “We need to set the table.”

  He got out dishes and opened wine as I arranged chilled shrimp on plates and spooned Bev’s Kicked By A Horse Cocktail Sauce into a bowl. I halved lemons and wrapped them in gauze diapers, and fashioned crab cakes. Wesley and I ate shrimp cocktail as night drew closer and cast its shadow over the east.

  “I’ve missed this,” he said. “Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.”

  I did not say anything because I did not want to get into another big discussion that went on for hours, leaving both of us drained.

  “Anyway.” He set his fork on his plate the way polite people do when they are finished. “Thank you. I have missed you, Dr. Scarpetta.” He smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Special Agent Wesley.”

  I smiled back at him as I got up. Turning on the stove, I heated oil in a pan while he cleared dishes.

  “I want to tell you what I thought of the photograph that was sent to you,” he said. “First, we need to establish that it is, in fact, of the victim you worked on today.”

  “I’m going to establish that on Monday.”

  “Assuming it is,” he went on, “this is a very dramatic shift in the killer’s M.O.”

  “That and everything else.” Crab cakes went into the pan and began to sizzle.

  “Right,” he said, serving coleslaw. “It’s very blatant this time, as if he’s really trying to rub our noses in it. And, of course, the victimology’s all wrong, too. That looks great,” he added, watching what I was cooking.

  When we were seated again, I said with confidence, “Benton, this is not the same guy.”

  He hesitated before replying, “I don’t think it is, either, if you want to know the truth. But I’m not prepared to rule him out. We don’t know what games he might be into now.”

  I was feeling the frustration again. Nothing could be proven, but my intuition, my instincts, were screaming at me.

  “Well, I don’t think this murdered old woman has anything to do with the earlier cases from here or Ireland. Someone just wants us to assume she does. I think what we’re dealing with is a copycat.”

  “We’ll get into it with everybody. Thursday. I think that’s the date we set.” He tasted a crab cake. “This is really incredibly good. Wow.” His eyes watered. “Now that’s cocktail sauce.”

  “Staging. Disguising a crime that was committed for some other reason,” I said. “And don’t give me too much credit. This was Bev’s recipe.”

  “The photograph bothers me,” he said.

  “You and me both.”

  “I’ve talked to Lucy about it,” he said.

  Now he really had my interest.

  “You tell me when you want her here.” He reached for his wine.

  “The sooner the better.” I paused, adding, “How is she doing? I know what she tells me, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

  I remembered we needed water, and got up for it. When I returned, he was quietly staring at me. Sometimes it was hard for me to look at his face, and my emotions began clashing like instruments out of tune. I loved his chiseled nose with its clean straight bridge, his eyes, which could draw me into depths I had never known, and his mouth with its sensuous lower lip. I looked out the window, and could not see the river anymore.

  “Lucy,” I reminded him. “How about a performance evaluation for her aunt?”

  “No one’s sorry we hired her,” he dryly said of someone we all knew was a genius. “Or maybe that’s the understatement of the century. She’s simply terrific. Most of the agents have come to respect her. They want her around. I’m not saying there aren’t problems. Not everybody appreciates having a woman on HRT.”

  “I continue to worry that she’ll try to push it too far,” I said.

  “Well, she’s fit as hell. That’s for sure. No way I’d take her on.”

  “That’s what I mean. She wants to keep up with them, when it really isn’t possible. You know how she is.” I gave him my eyes again. “She’s always got to prove herself. If the guys are fast-roping and running through the mountains wearing sixty-pound packs, she thinks she’s got to keep up, when she should just be content with her technical abilities, her robots and all the rest of it.”

  “You’re missing her biggest motivation, her biggest demon,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You. She feels she has to prove herself to you, Kay.”

  “She has no reason to feel that way.” What he said was piercing. “I don’t want to feel I’m the reason she takes her life into her hands with all of these dangerous things she feels she must do.”

  “This is not about blame,” he said, getting up from the table. “This is about human nature. Lucy worships you. You’re the only decent mother figure she’s ever had. She wants to be like you, and she feels people compare her to you, and that’s a pretty big act to follow. She wants you to admire her, too, Kay.”

  “I do admire her, for God’s sake.” I got up, too, and we began clearing dishes. “Now you really have me worried.”

  He began rinsing, and I loaded the dishwasher.

  “You probably should worry.” He glanced at me. “I will tell you this, she’s one of these perfectionists who won’t listen to anyone. Other than you, she’s the most stubborn human being I’ve ever come across.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  He smiled and put his arms around me, not caring that his hands were wet. “Can we sit and talk for a while?” he said, his face, his body close to mine. “Then I’ve got to hit the road.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’m going to talk to Marino in the morning, and in the afternoon I’ve got another case coming in. From Arizona. I know it’s Sunday, but it can’t wait.”

  He continued talking as we carried our wine into the great room.

  “A twelve-year-old girl abducted on her way home from school, body dumped in the Sonora desert,” he said. “We think this guy’s already killed three other kids.”

  “It’s hard to feel very optimistic, isn’t it,” I said bitterly as we sat on the couch. “It never stops.”

  “No,” he replied. “And I’m afraid it never will. As long as there are people on the planet. What are you going to do with what’s left of the weekend?”

  “Paperwork.”

  One side of my great room was sliding glass doors, and beyond, my neighborhood was black with a full moon that looked like gold, clouds gauzy and drifting.

  “Why are you so angry with me?” His voice was gentle, but he let me know his hurt.

  “I don’t know.” I would not look at him.

  “You do know.” He took my hand and began to rub it with his thumb. “I love your hands. They look like a pianist’s, only stronger. As if what you do is an art.”

  “It is,” I simply said, and he often talked about my hands. “I think you have a fetish. As a profiler, that should concern you.”

  He laughed, kissing knuckles, fingers, the way he often did. “Believe me, I have a fetish for more than your hands.”

  “Benton.” I looked at him. “I am angry with you because you are ruining my life.”

  He got very still, shocked.

  I got up from the couch and began to pace. “I had my life set up just the way I wanted it,” I said as emotions rose to a crescendo. “I am building a new office. Yes, I’ve been smart with my money, made enough smart investments to afford this.” I swept my hand over my room. “My own house that I designed. For me, everything was in its proper place until you . . .”

  “Was it?” He was watching me intensely, wounded anger in his voice. “You liked it better when I was married and we were always feeling rotten about it? When we were having an affair and lying to everyone?”

  “Of course I didn’t like that better!” I exclaimed. “I just liked my life being mine.”

  “Your problem is you’re afraid of commitment. That’s what this is about. How many times do I have to poin
t that out? I think you should see someone. Really. Maybe Dr. Zenner. You’re friends. I know you trust her.”

  “I’m not the one who needs a psychiatrist.” I regretted the words the instant I said them.

  He angrily got up, as if ready to leave. It was not even nine o’clock.

  “God. I’m too old and tired for this,” I muttered. “Benton, I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. Please sit back down.”

  He didn’t at first, but stood in front of sliding glass doors, his back to me.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you, Kay,” he said. “I don’t come around to see how badly I can fuck up your life, you know. I admire the hell out of everything you do. I just wish you’d let me in a little bit more.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave.”

  Blinking back tears, I sat down and stared up at the ceiling with its exposed beams and trowel marks visible on plaster. Wherever I looked there were details that had come from me. For a moment, I shut my eyes as tears rolled down my face. I did not wipe them away and Wesley knew when not to touch me. He knew when not to speak. He quietly sat beside me.

  “I’m a middle-aged woman set in her ways,” I said as my voice shook. “I can’t help it. All I have is what I’ve built. No children. I can’t stand my only sister and she can’t stand me. My father was in bed dying my entire childhood, then gone when I was twelve. Mother’s impossible, and now she’s dying of emphysema. I can’t be what you want, the good wife. I don’t even know what the hell that is. I only know how to be Kay. And going to a psychiatrist isn’t going to change a goddamn thing.”

  He said to me, “And I’m in love with you and want to marry you. And I can’t seem to help that, either.”

  I did not reply.

  He added, “And I thought you were in love with me.”

  Still, I could not speak.

  “At least you used to be,” he went on as pain overwhelmed his voice. “I’m leaving.”

  He started to get up again, and I put my hand on his arm.

  “Not like this.” I looked at him. “Don’t do this to me.”

  “To you?” He was incredulous.

  I dimmed the lights until they were almost out, and the moon was a polished coin against a clear black sky scattered with stars. I got more wine and started the fire, while he watched everything I did.

  “Sit closer to me,” I said.

  He did, and I took his hands this time.

  “Benton, patience. Don’t rush me,” I said. “Please. I’m not like Connie. Like other people.”

  “I’m not asking you to be,” he said. “I don’t want you to be. I’m not like other people, either. We know what we see. Other people couldn’t possibly understand. I could never talk to Connie about how I spend my days. But I can talk to you.”

  He kissed me sweetly, and we went deeper, touching faces, tongues and nimbly undressing, doing what we once did best. He gathered me in his mouth and hands, and we stayed on the couch until early morning, as light from the moon turned chilled and thin. After he drove home, I carried wine throughout my house, pacing, wandering with music on and flowing out speakers in every room. I landed in my office, where I was a master at distraction.

  I began going through journals, tearing out articles that needed to be filed. I began working on an article I was due to write. But I was not in the mood for any of it, and decided to check my e-mail to see if Lucy had left word about when she might make it to Richmond. AOL announced I had mail waiting, and when I checked my box I felt as if someone had struck me. The address deadoc awaited me like an evil stranger.

  His message was in lowercase, with no punctuation except spaces. It said, you think you re so smart. I opened the attached file and once again watched color images paint down my screen, severed feet and hands lined up on a table covered with what appeared to be the same bluish cloth. For a while I stared, wondering why this person was doing this to me. I hoped he had just made a very big mistake as I grabbed the phone.

  “Marino!” I exclaimed when I got him on the line.

  “Huh? What happened?” he blurted as he came to.

  I told him.

  “Shit. It’s three friggin’ o’clock in the morning. Don’t you ever sleep?”

  He seemed pleased, and I suspected he figured I wouldn’t have called him if Wesley had still been here.

  “Are you okay?” he then asked.

  “Listen. The hands are palm up,” I said. “The photograph was taken at close range. I can see a lot of detail.”

  “Like what kind of detail? Is there a tattoo or something?”

  “Ridge detail,” I said.

  Neils Vander was the section chief of fingerprint examination, an older man with wispy hair and voluminous lab coats perpetually stained purple and black with ninhydrin and dusting powder. Forever in a hurry and prepossessed, he was from genteel Virginia stock. Vander had never called me by my first name or referred to anything personal about me in all the years I had known him. But he had his way of showing he cared. Sometimes it was a doughnut on my desk in the morning or, in the summer, Hanover tomatoes from his garden.

  Known for an eagle eye that could match loops and whorls at a glance, he was also the resident expert in image enhancement and, in fact, had been trained by NASA. Over the years, he and I had materialized a multitude of faces from photographic blurs. We had conjured up writing that wasn’t there, read impressions and restored eradications, the concept really very simple even if the execution of it was not.

  A high-resolution image processing system could see two hundred and fifty-six shades of gray, while the human eye could differentiate, at the most, thirty-two. Therefore, it was possible to scan something into the computer and let it see what we could not. Deadoc may have sent me more than he bargained for. The first task this morning was to compare a morgue photograph of the torso with the one sent to me through AOL.

  “Let me get a little more gray over here,” Vander said as he worked computer keys. “And I’m going to tilt this some.”

  “That’s better,” I agreed.

  We were sitting side by side, both of us leaning into the nineteen-inch monitor. Nearby, both photographs were on the scanner, a video camera feeding their images to us live.

  “A little more of that.” Another shade of gray washed over the screen. “Let me bump this a tad more.”

  He reached over to the scanner and repositioned one of the photographs. He put another filter over the camera lens.

  “I don’t know,” I said as I stared. “I think it was easier to see before. Maybe you need to move it a little more to the right,” I added, as if we were hanging pictures.

  “Better. But there’s still a lot of background interference I’d like to get rid of.”

  “I wish we had the original. What’s the radiometric resolution of this thing?” I asked, referring to the system’s capability of differentiating shades of gray.

  “A whole lot better than it used to be. Since the early days, I guess we’ve doubled the number of pixels that can be digitalized.”

  Pixels, like the dots in dot matrix, were the smallest elements of an image being viewed, the molecules, the impressionistic points of color forming a painting.

  “We got some grants, you know. One of these days, I want to move us into ultraviolet imaging. I can’t even tell you what I could do with cyanoacrylate,” he went on about Super Glue, which reacted to components in human perspiration and was excellent for developing fingerprints difficult to see with the unaided eye.

  “Well, good luck,” I said, because money was always tight no matter who was in office.

  Repositioning the photograph again, he placed a blue filter over the camera lens, and dilated the lighter pixel elements, brightening the image. He enhanced horizontal details, removing vertical ones. Two torsos were now side by side. Shadows appeared, gruesome details sharper and in contrast.

  “You can see the bony ends.” I pointed. “Left leg severed just proximal to the lesser trocha
nter. Right leg”—I moved my finger on the screen—“about an inch lower, right through the shaft.”

  “I wish I could correct the camera angle, the perspective distortion,” he muttered, talking to himself, which he often did. “But I don’t know the measurements of anything. Too bad whoever took this didn’t include a nice little ruler as a scale.”

  “Then I would really worry about who we were dealing with,” I commented.

  “That’s all we need. A killer who’s like us.” He defined the edges, and readjusted the positions of the photographs one more time. “Let’s see what happens if I superimpose them.”

  He did, and the overlay was amazing, bone ends and even the ragged flesh around the severed neck, identical.

  “That does it for me,” I announced.

  “No question about it in my mind,” he agreed. “Let’s print this out.”

  He clicked the mouse and the laser printer hummed on.

  Removing the photographs from the scanner, he replaced them with the one of the feet and hands, moving it around until it was perfectly centered. As he began to enlarge images, the sight became even more grotesque, blood staining the sheet bright red, as if it had just been spilled. The killer had neatly lined up feet like a pair of shoes, hands side by side like gloves.

  “He should have turned them palm down,” Vander said. “I wonder why he didn’t?”

  Using spatial filtering to retain important details, he began eliminating interference, such as the blood and the texture of the blue table cover.

  “Can you get any ridge detail?” I asked, leaning so close, I could smell his spicy aftershave.

  “I think I can,” he said.

  His voice was suddenly cheerful, for there was nothing he liked better than reading the hieroglyphics of fingers and feet. Beneath his gentle, distracted demeanor was a man who had sent thousands of people to the penitentiary, and dozens to the electric chair. He enlarged the photograph and assigned arbitrary colors to various intensities of gray, so we could see them better. Thumbs were small and pale like old parchment. There were ridges.