Authors: Patricia Cornwell
"I didn't label it, sir," he addresses Fielding, his superior officer. "I just know it was here when we started working on her. And she didn't have no teeth in her mouth, not when we started on her."
"Here? Where is here?"
"On her cart." The soldier indicates the cart bearing the surgical instruments for table four, also known as the Green Table. Dr. Marcus's morgue still uses the Scarpetta system of keeping track of instruments with strips of colored tape, ensuring that a pair of forceps or rib cutters, for example, don't end up elsewhere in the morgue. "This carton was on her cart, then somehow it got moved over there with her paperwork." He looks across the room to the countertop where the dead woman's paperwork is still neatly spread out.
"There was a view on this table earlier," Fielding says.
"That's right, sir. An old man who died in bed. So maybe the teeth are his?" says the soldier in purple. "So it was his teeth on the cart?"
Fielding looks like an angry blue jay flapping across the autopsy suite and yanking open the enormous stainless-steel door of the cooler.
He vanishes inside a rush of cold dead-smelling air and reemerges al-most instantly with a pair of dentures that he apparently removed from the old man's mouth. Fielding holds them in the palm of a gloved hand stained with the blood of the tractor driver who ran over himself.
"Anybody can see these are too damn small for that guy's mouth," Fielding complains. "Who stuck these in that guy's mouth without checking that they fit?" he asks the noisy, crowded epoxy-sealed room with its four bloody wet steel tables, and x-rays of projectiles and bones on bright light boxes, and steel sinks and cabinets, and long countertops covered with paperwork, personal effects, and streamers of computer-generated labels for cartons and test tubes.
The other doctors, the students, soldiers, and today's dead have nothing at all to say to Dr. Jack Fielding, second in command to the chief. Scarpetta is shocked in a sick, disbelieving way. Her former flagship office is out of control and so is everybody in it. She glances at the dead tractor driver, half undressed on his red-clay-stained sheet, on top of a gurney, and she stares at the dentures in Fielding's bloodstained gloved hands.
"Scrub those things before you put them in her mouth," she can't help but say as Fielding hands the misplaced dentures to the soldier in purple. "You don't need another person's DNA, or other people's DNA, in her mouth," she tells the soldier. "Even if this isn't a suspicious death. So scrub her dentures, his dentures, everybody's dentures."
She snaps off her gloves and drops them in a bright orange bio-hazard trash bag. As she walks off, she wonders what has become of Marino, and she overhears the soldier in purple saying something, asking something, apparently wanting to know exactly who Scarpetta is and why she is visiting and what just happened.
"She used to be the chief here," Fielding says, failing to explain that the OCME wasn't run anything like this back then.
"Holy shit!" the soldier exclaims.
Scarpetta hits a large wall button with her elbow, and stainless-steel doors swing open wide. She walks into the dressing room, past cabinets of scrubs and gowns, then through the women's locker with its toilets and sinks and fluorescent lights that make mirrors unkind. She pauses to wash her hands, noticing the neatly written sign, one she posted herself when she was here, that reminds people not to leave the morgue with the same shoes on that they wore in it. Don't track biological menaces onto the corridor carpet, she used to remind her staff, and she feels sure nobody cares about that or anything else anymore. She takes off her shoes and washes the bottoms of them with antibacterial soap and hot water and dries them off with paper towels before walking through another swinging door to the not-so-sterile grayish-blue-carpeted corridor.
Directly across from the women's locker room is the glass-enclosed chief medical examiner's suite. At least Dr. Marcus exerted the energy to redecorate. His secretary's office is an attractive collection of cherry-stained furniture and colonial prints, and her computer's screensaver shows several tropical fish swimming endlessly on a vivid blue screen. The secretary is out, and Scarpetta knocks on the chief's door.
"Yes," his voice faintly sounds from the other side.
She opens the door and walks into her former corner office, and avoids looking around but can't help taking in the tidiness of the bookcases and the top of Dr. Marcus's desk. His work space looks sterile. It is only the rest of the medical examiner's wing that is in chaos.
"Your timing is perfect," he says from his leather swivel chair behind the desk. "Please sit and I'll brief you on Gilly Paulsson before you take a look at her."
"Dr. Marcus, this isn't my office anymore," Scarpetta says. "I realize that. It's not my intention to intrude, but I'm concerned."
"Don't be." He looks at her with small, hard eyes. "You weren't brought here as some sort of accreditation team." He folds his hands on top of the ink blotter. "Your opinion is sought in one case and one case only, the Gilly Paulsson case. So I strongly encourage you not to overtax yourself with how different you might find things here. You have been gone a long time. What? Five years. And during most of that period of time, there was no chief, just an acting chief. Dr. Fielding, as a matter of fact, was the acting chief when I got here just a few months ago. So yes, of course, things are very different. You and I have very different management styles, which is one of the reasons the Commonwealth hired me."
"It's been my experience that if a chief never spends time in the morgue, there will be problems," she says, whether he wants to hear it or not. "If nothing else, the doctors sense a lack of interest in their work, and even doctors can get careless, lazy, or dangerously burned out and undone by the stress of what they see every day."
His eyes are flat and hard like tarnished copper, his mouth fixed in a thin line. Behind his balding head, the windows are as clean as air and she notices that he has replaced the bulletproof glass. The Coliseum is a brown mushroom in the distance, and a dreary drizzle has begun to fall.
"I can't turn a blind eye to what I see, not if you want my help," she says. "I don't care if it is one case and one case only, as you put it. Certainly you must know all things are used against us in court and elsewhere. Right now, it's the elsewhere that worries me."
"I'm afraid you're talking in riddles," Dr. Marcus replies, his thin face staring coldly at her. "Elsewhere? What is elsewhere?"
"Usually scandal. Usually a lawsuit. Or worst of all, a criminal case that is destroyed by technicalities, by evidence that is ruled inadmissible because of impropriety, because of flawed procedures, so there is no court. There is no trial."
"I was afraid this was going to happen," he says. "I told the commissioner what a bad idea this was."
"I don't blame you for telling him that. No one wants a former chief reappearing to straighten up ..."
"I warned the commissioner that the last thing we needed was a disgruntled former employee of the Commonwealth dropping by to fix things," he says, picking up a pen and setting it down again, his hands nervous and angry.
"I don't blame you for feeling ..."
"Especially crusaders," he says coldly. "They're the worst. Nothing worse than a crusader unless it is a wounded one."
"Now you're getting ..."
"But here we are. So let's make the best of it, shall we?"
"I would appreciate your not interrupting me," Scarpetta says. "And if you're calling me a wounded crusader, then I'll choose to accept that as a compliment and we'll move along to the subject of dentures."
He stares at her as if she has gone mad.
"I just witnessed a mix-up in the morgue," she says. "The wrong dentures with the wrong decedent. Carelessness. And too much autonomy for young Fort Lee soldiers who have no medical training and in fact are here to learn from you. Suppose some family gets their loved one returned to the funeral home, and there's an open casket and the dentures are missing or don't fit, and you have the beginning of a disintegration that is hard to stop. The press loves stories like that, Dr. Marcus. You mix up those dentures in a homicide case, and you've just given the defense attorneys quite a gift, even if the dentures have absolutely nothing to do with anything."
"Whose dentures?" he asks, scowling. "Fielding is supposed to be supervising."
"Dr. Fielding has too much to do," she replies.
"So now we get to that. Your former assistant." Dr. Marcus rises from his chair. He does not tower over the desk, not that Scarpetta ever did because she isn't tall either, but he seems small as he erupts from behind the desk and moves past the table with a microscope shrouded in plastic. "It's already ten o'clock," he says, opening his office door. "Let's get you started on Gilly Paulsson. She's in the decomp fridge and it's best you work on her in that room. No one will bother you there. I suppose you've decided to re-autopsy."
"I'm not doing this without a witness," Scarpetta says.
Chapter 12
Lucy doesn't sleep
in the third-floor master suite anymore but locks herself into a much smaller bedroom downstairs. She tells herself she has sound investigative reasons for not sleeping in that bed, the one Henri was attacked in, that huge bed with the hand-painted headboard in the center of a palatial suite that overlooks the water. Evidence, she thinks. No matter how fastidious she and Rudy are, it is always possible that evidence was missed.
Rudy has driven off in her Modena to gas it up, or at least this was his excuse when he plucked the keys off the kitchen counter. He has another agenda, Lucy suspects. He is cruising. He wants to see who follows him, assuming anybody does, and probably nobody in his right mind would follow someone as big and strong as Rudy, but the beast who drew the eye, two eyes now, is out there. He is watching. He watches the house. He might not realize Henri is gone, so he continues to watch the house and the Ferraris. He might be watching the house right now.
Lucy walks across tawny carpet, past the bed. It is still unmade, the soft, expensive covers pulled over the foot of the mattress and spilled onto the floor in a silk waterfall. Pillows are shoved to one side, exactly where they were when Lucy ran up the flights of stone steps and found Henri unconscious on the bed. At first Lucy thought she was dead. Then she didn't know what to think. She still doesn't know what to think. But at the time she was frightened enough to call 911, and what a mess that has caused. They had to deal with the local police, and the last thing Lucy ever wants is the police involved in her secret lives and activities, many of them illegal means to just ends, and of course, Rudy is still furious.
He accuses Lucy of panicking, and she did. She should never have called 911, and he's right. They could have handled the situation themselves and should have. Henri isn't Suzy-Q citizen, Rudy said. Henri is one of their agents. It didn't matter if she was out cold and naked. She was breathing, wasn't she? Her pulse and blood pressure weren't dangerously fast or low, were they? She wasn't bleeding, was she? Just a little bit of a bloody nose, right? It wasn't until Lucy flew Henri on a private jet to Aspen that Benton offered an explanation that unfortunately makes sense. Henri was attacked and may have been unconscious briefly, but after that she was faking.
"No way," Lucy argued with Benton when he told her that. "She was completely unresponsive."