Book of the Dead Read online

  “Nope. With stuff like this, the secret rule don’t count.”

  “Oh, yes it does. Better hurry, I’m turning as cold as a dead body in here.”

  “Because if the Doc ever found out…”

  “There you go again. Scared of her like she fucking owns you. What’s so bad you don’t think I can handle it?” Shandy says furiously, almost screaming as she holds herself because of the cold. “I bet he doesn’t stink as bad as that old lady.”

  “He’s been skinned and his eyeballs are gone,” Marino tells her.

  “Oh, no,” Benton says, rubbing his face.

  Shandy exclaims, “Don’t mess with me! Don’t you dare joke with me! You let me see him right now! I’m sick and tired of you always turning into a damn wimp when she tells you something!”

  “Nothing funny about it, you got that right. What goes on in this place ain’t no joke. I keep trying to tell you that. You got no idea what I deal with.”

  “Well, isn’t that something. To think your Big Chief would do something like that. Skinning a little kid and cutting out his eyes. You always said she treats the dead real nice.” Hatefully. “Sounds like a Nazi to me. They used to skin people and make lampshades.”

  “Sometimes the only way you can tell if darkish or reddish areas are really bruises is to look at the underside of the skin so you can make sure what you’re looking at is broken blood vessels—in other words, bruises or what we call contusions—instead of it being from livor mortis,” Marino pontificates.

  “This is unreal.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear. “So now he’s the chief medical examiner.”

  “Not unreal,” Benton says. “Massively insecure. Threatened. Resentful. Overcompensating and decompensating. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  “You and Aunt Kay are what’s going on with him.”

  “From what?” Shandy stares at the little black pouch.

  “From when your circulation stops, and the blood settles and can make your skin look red in places. Can look a whole lot like fresh bruises. And there can be other reasons for things that look like injuries, what we call postmortem artifacts. It’s complicated,” Marino says with self-importance. “So to make sure, you peel back the skin, you know, with a scalpel”—he makes swift cutting motions in the air—“to see the underside of it, and in this case, they were bruises, all right. The little guy’s covered with them from head to toe.”

  “But why would you take out his eyeballs?”

  “Further study, looking for more hemorrhages like you find in shaking baby syndrome, things like that. Same with his brain. It’s fixed in formalin in a bucket, not here but at a medical school where they do special studies.”

  “Oh my God. His brain’s in a bucket?”

  “It’s just what we do. Fixing it in this chemical so it don’t decompose and can be looked at better. Sort of like embalming.”

  “You sure know a lot. You should be the doctor around here, not her. Let me look.”

  All this inside the cooler, the door wide open.

  “I’ve been doing this practically longer than you’re old,” Marino says. “Sure, I could’ve been a doctor, but who the hell wants to go to school that long? Who’d want to be her, either? She’s got no life. Nobody but dead people.”

  “I want to see him,” Shandy demands.

  “Damn, don’t know what it is,” Marino says. “Can’t be inside a damn cooler without dying for a cigarette.”

  She digs in a pocket of the leather vest under her gown, pulls out a pack, a lighter. “I can’t believe someone would do that to a little kid. I have to see him. I’m here, so show me.” She lights up two cigarettes and they smoke.

  “Manipulative, borderline,” Benton says. “He’s picked real trouble this time.”

  Marino rolls out the tray, rolls it out of the cooler.

  Unzipping the pouch. Plastic rustling. Lucy zooms in tight on Shandy blowing out smoke, staring wide-eyed at the dead little boy.

  An emaciated little body sliced in neat straight lines from chin to genitals, from shoulders to hands, from hips to toes, his chest open like a hollowed-out watermelon. His organs are gone. His skin is reflected back from his body and spread out in flaps that reveal scores of dark purple hemorrhages of varying ages and severity, and tears and fractures to cartilage and bone. His eyes are empty holes, and through them is the inside of his skull.

  Shandy screams, “I hate that woman! I hate her! How could she do this to him! Gutted and skinned like a shot deer! How can you work for that psycho bitch!”

  “Calm down. Quit yelling.” Marino zips up the pouch and rolls it back inside the cooler. He shuts the door. “I warned you. There’s some things people don’t need to see. They can get a post-trauma stress condition from stuff like this.”

  “Now I’ll see him forever in my head, looking just like that. Sicko bitch. Damn Nazi.”

  “You keep your mouth shut about this, you hear me?” Marino says.

  “How can you work for someone like that?”

  “Shut up. I mean it,” Marino says. “I helped with the autopsy, and I’m sure as hell no Nazi. That’s what happens. People get fucked over twice when they get murdered.” He takes Shandy’s surgical gown, hastily folds it. “That little kid was probably murdered the day he was born. No one giving a rat’s ass about him, and this is the result.”

  “What do you know about life? You people think you know everything about everyone when all you see is what’s left when you cut them up like a butcher.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to come in here.” Marino is getting angry. “So shut up about it, and don’t call me a butcher.”

  He leaves Shandy in the hallway, returns the gown to Scarpetta’s locker. He sets the alarm. The camera in the bay captures them, the huge bay door screeching and clanking up.

  Lucy’s voice. Benton will have to be the one to inform Scarpetta about Marino’s tour, about a betrayal that could destroy her if the media ever found out. Lucy’s headed to the airport, won’t be back until late tomorrow. Benton doesn’t ask. He’s pretty sure she already knows, even if she hasn’t told him. Then she tells him about Dr. Self, about her e-mails to Marino.

  Benton doesn’t comment. He can’t. On his video screen, Marino and Shandy Snook ride off on their motorcycles.

  Chapter 5

  The clatter of metal wheels on tile.

  The walk-in freezer door opens with a reluctant suck. Scarpetta is impervious to the frigid air, the stench of frozen death as she rolls in the steel cart bearing the small black body bag. Attached to the zipper pull is a toe tag, and written on it in black ink: Unknown, with the date, 4/30/07, and the signature of the funeral home attendant who transported the body. In the morgue log Scarpetta entered Unknown as a male, five to ten years old, a homicide from Hilton Head Island, a two-hour drive from Charleston. His race is mixed: thirty-four percent sub-Saharan African and sixty-six percent European.

  Entries into the log are always made by her, and she is outraged by what she discovered when she arrived hours earlier and found this morning’s case had already been entered, presumably by Lucious Meddick. Unbelievably, he took it upon himself to decide the elderly woman he transported is a natural death caused by cardiac and respiratory arrest. The presumptuous moron. Everybody dies of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Whether shot or hit by a car or a baseball bat, death occurs when the heart and lungs quit. He had no right or reason to conclude the death is natural. She hasn’t done the autopsy yet, and it isn’t his responsibility or legal jurisdiction to determine a goddamn thing. He’s not a forensic pathologist. He should never have touched the morgue log. She can’t fathom why Marino would have allowed him to enter the autopsy suite and then left him unattended.

  Her breath fogs out as she removes a clipboard from a cart and fills in Unknown’s information and the time and date. Her frustration is as palpable as the cold. Despite her obsessive efforts, she doesn’t know where the little boy died, although she suspects i
t isn’t far from where he was found. She doesn’t know his exact age. She doesn’t know how his killer transported the body but hypothesizes it was by boat. No witnesses have come forward, and the only trace evidence she recovered is white cotton fibers assumed to be from the sheet the Beaufort County coroner wrapped him in before zipping him inside a pouch.

  The sand and salt and bits of shells and plant debris in the boy’s orifices and on his skin are indigenous to the marshland where his nude decomposing body was facedown in pluff mud and saw grass. After days of using every procedure she can conjure up to make his body talk to her, he has offered but a few painful revelations. His tubular stomach and emaciation say he was starved for weeks, possibly months. Mildly deformed nails indicate new growth of different ages and suggest repeated blunt-force trauma or some other type of torture to his tiny fingers and toes. Subtle reddish patterns all over his body tattle to her that he was brutally beaten, most recently with a wide belt that had a large square buckle. Incisions, a reflecting back of skin, and microscopic analysis revealed hemorrhaging into soft tissue from the crown of his head to the soles of his little feet. He died of internal exsanguination—bled to death without externally shedding a drop—a metaphor, it seems, for his invisible and miserable life.

  She has preserved sections of his organs and injuries in jars of formalin and sent off his brain and eyes for special examination. She’s taken hundreds of photographs, and notified Interpol in the event he’s been reported missing in another country. His fingerprints and footprints have been entered into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and his DNA profile into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)—all of his information entered into the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database. Of course, now Lucy is searching the Deep Web. So far, there are no leads, no matches, suggesting he wasn’t abducted, wasn’t lost, didn’t run away and end up in the hands of a sadistic stranger. Most likely he was beaten to death by a parent or some other relative, guardian, or so-called caregiver who left his body in a remote area to hide his or her crime. It happens all the time.

  Scarpetta can do nothing more for him medically or scientifically, but she won’t give him up. There will be no defleshing and packing his bones in a box—no pauper’s grave. Until he’s identified, he will stay with her, transferred from the cooler to a time capsule of sorts, a polyurethane insulated freezer chilled to minus-sixty-five degrees centigrade. If need be, he can stay with her for years. She shuts the freezer’s heavy steel door and walks out into the bright deodorized hallway, untying her blue surgical gown and pulling off her gloves. Her disposable shoe covers make a quick, quiet whish on the spotless tile floor.

  From her room with a view, Dr. Self talks to Jackie Minor again, since Benton has yet to bother returning her call and it is now almost two p.m.

  “He’s well aware we need to take care of this. Why do you think he’s here this weekend and asked you to come in? Do you get overtime, by the way?” Dr. Self doesn’t show her ire.

  “I knew there was a VIP all of a sudden. That’s all any of us are usually told when it’s somebody famous. We get a lot of famous people here. How did you find out about the study?” Jackie inquires. “I’m supposed to ask because I’m supposed to keep track so we can figure out what’s the most effective form of advertising. You know, newspaper and radio ads, posting notices, word of mouth.”

  “The recruitment notice in the admissions building. I saw it first thing when I checked in what now seems a very long time ago. And it occurred to me, why not? I’ve decided to leave soon, very soon. It’s a pity your weekend is ruined,” Dr. Self says.

  “Truth be told, it’s a good thing. It’s hard finding volunteers who meet the criteria, especially the normals. Such a waste. At least two out of three turn out not to be normal. But think about it. If you were normal, why would you want to come here and…”

  “Be part of a science project.” Dr. Self finishes Jackie’s lamebrain thought. “I don’t believe you can sign up as a normal.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to say you’re not…”

  “I’m always open to learning something new, and I have an unusual reason for being here,” Dr. Self says. “You’re aware of how confidential this is.”

  “I heard you’re sort of hiding here for security reasons.”

  “Did Dr. Wesley tell you that?”

  “A rumor. And confidentiality is a given, according to HIPAA, which we have to abide by. It must be safe for you to leave, if you are.”

  “One can only hope.”

  “Are you aware of the details of the study?”

  “What I vaguely recall from the recruitment notice,” Dr. Self says.

  “Dr. Wesley hasn’t gone over it with you?”

  “He was just notified Friday when I informed Dr. Maroni, who’s in Italy, that I wanted to volunteer for the study, but it would have to be taken care of immediately because I’ve decided to check out. I’m sure Dr. Wesley intends to brief me thoroughly. I don’t know why he hasn’t called. Perhaps he hasn’t gotten your message yet.”

  “I told him, but he’s a very busy, important person. I know he has to tape the VIP’s mother today, meaning your mother. So I’m assuming he plans to do that first. Then I’m sure he’ll talk to you.”

  “It must be so hard on his personal life. These studies and whatnot that keep him here on weekends. I suppose he must have a lover. A handsome, accomplished man like him certainly wouldn’t be alone.”

  “He has someone down south. In fact, her niece was here about a month ago.”

  “How interesting,” Dr. Self says.

  “She came here for a scan. Lucy. Some secret agent type, or tries to look like one anyway. I know she’s a computer entrepreneur, is friends with Josh.”

  “Involved in law enforcement,” Dr. Self ponders. “Some type of secret operative, highly technically trained. And independently wealthy, I presume. Fascinating.”

  “She didn’t even speak to me other than to introduce herself as Lucy and shake my hand and say hi and chat. She hung out with Josh, then was in Dr. Wesley’s office for quite a while. With the door shut.”

  “What did you think of her?”

  “She’s really stuck on herself. Of course, I didn’t spend time with her. She was hanging out with Dr. Wesley. With the door shut.” She makes that point again.

  Jealous. How perfect. “How nice,” Dr. Self says. “They must be very close. She sounds very unusual. Is she pretty?”

  “I thought she was rather masculine, if you get my drift. Dressed all in black and kind of muscular. A firm handshake like a guy. And she looked right into my eyes with this intense gaze. Like her eyes were these green laser beams. It made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be alone with her, now that I think about it. Women like that…”

  “I hear you saying she was attracted to you and wanted sex with you before she flew back on, what? A private jet, let me guess,” Dr. Self says. “Where did you say she lives?”

  “Charleston. Like her aunt. I think she did want sex with me. My God. How could I not have realized that at the time, when she shook my hand and looked into my eyes. And oh, yes. She asked me if I had long hours, as if maybe she wanted to know what time I got off work. She asked me where I’m from. She got personal. I just didn’t see it at the time.”

  “Perhaps because you were afraid to see it, Jackie. She does sound very appealing and charismatic, the sort who almost hypnotically lures a straight woman into bed, and after an extremely erotic experience…?” A pause. “You do understand why two women having sex, even if one of them is straight or both are, isn’t at all uncommon.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Do you read Freud?”

  “I’ve never felt an attraction to another woman. Not even my roommate in college. And we lived together. If there was that latent predisposition, a lot more would have happened.”

  “Everything is about sex, Jackie. Sexual desire goes all the w
ay back to infancy. What is it that both male and female infants get, that later is denied the female?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The nurturing at mother’s breast.”

  “I don’t want that kind of nurturing and don’t remember anything about it and only care about boobs because men like them. They’re important for that reason, and I only notice them for that reason. I think I was bottle-fed, anyway.”

  “I do agree with you, though,” Dr. Self says. “Rather odd she came all the way up here for a scan. I certainly hope there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “I just know she comes in a couple times a year.”

  “A couple times a year?”

  “That’s what one of the techs said.”

  “How tragic if there’s something wrong with her. You and I both know it isn’t routine for someone to have brain scans several times a year. If at all. What else do I need to know about my scan?”

  “Has anyone bothered to ask if you have a problem going into the magnet?” Jackie asks with the seriousness of an expert.

  “A problem?”

  “You know. If it might cause you a problem.”

  “Not unless after it’s over I can no longer tell north from south. Another very astute point you’re making, though. I do have to wonder what it does to people. I’m not sure that’s really been determined. MRI hasn’t been commonly used all that long, now has it.”

  “The study uses fMRI. Functional MRI, so we can watch your brain working while you listen to the tape.”

  “Yes, the tape. My mother will so enjoy making that tape. Now, what else do I have to look forward to?”

  “The protocol is to start with the SCID. Let me explain, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-Three-R.”

  “I’m quite familiar. Especially with DSM-Four. The latest revision.”

  “Sometimes Dr. Wesley lets me do the SCID. We can’t scan you until we get that out of the way, and it can be a lengthy process going through all those questions.”