From Potter's Field (6 page)

I glanced sharply at her as we walked. 'A reporter?'

'Well, he's really a copy editor or some such with the Times - one of these nutcakes who jogs no matter the weather. So he happens to be out in the park yesterday morning and takes a turn through Cherry Hill. It was very cold and snowy and deserted. He nears the fountain and there the poor woman is. Needless to say, the description in the morning paper is very detailed and people are frightened out of their wits.'

We passed through several doorways, then she poked her head inside the chief's office to gently announce us so we would not startle him. Dr. Horowitz was getting on in years and was getting hard of hearing. His office was scented with the light perfume of many flowering plants, for he loved orchids, African violets and gardenias, and they thrived in his care.

'Good morning, Kay.' He got up from his desk. 'Did you bring someone with you?'

'Captain Marino is supposed to meet us.'

'Emily will make certain he is shown the way. Unless you'd rather wait.'

I knew Horowitz did not want to wait. There was not time. He commanded the largest medical examiner's office in the country, where eight thousand people a year - the population of a small city -were autopsied on his steel tables. A fourth of the victims were homicides, and many would never have a name. New York had such a problem with identifying their dead that the NYPD's detective division had a missing persons unit in Horowitz's building.

The chief picked up the phone and spoke to someone he did not name.

'Dr. Scarpetta's here. We're on our way down,' he said.

I'll make sure I find Captain Marino,' Emily said. 'Seems like I know his name.'

'We've worked together for many years,' I told her. 'And he's been assisting the FBI's Investigative Support Unit at Quantico for as long as it has existed.'

'I thought it was called the Behavioral Science Unit, like in the movies.'

'The Bureau changed the name, but the purpose is the same,' I said of the small group of agents who had become famous for their psychological profiling and pursuit of violent sex offenders and killers. When I recently had become the consulting forensic pathologist for the unit, I had not believed there was much left that I had not seen. I had been wrong.

Sunlight filled windows in Horowitz's office and was caught in glass shelves of flowers and miniature trees. I knew that in the bathroom orchids grew in the steamy dark from perches around the sink and tub, and that at home he had a greenhouse. The first time I had met Horowitz he had reminded me of Lincoln. Both men had gaunt, benevolent faces shadowed by a war that was ripping society apart. They bore tragedy as if they had been chosen to, and had large, patient hands.

We went downstairs to what the N.Y. office called their mortuary, an oddly genteel appellation for a morgue set in one of the most violent cities in America. Air seeping in from the bay was very cold and smelled of stale cigarettes and death. Signs posted on aqua walls asked people not to throw bloody sheets, shrouds, loose rags or containers into Dumpsters.

Shoe covers were required, eating was prohibited and red biological hazard warnings were on many of the doors. Horowitz explained that one of his thirty deputy chiefs would be performing the autopsy on the unknown woman we believed was Gault's latest victim.

We turned into a locker room where Dr. Lewis Rader was dressed in scrubs and attaching a battery pack to his waist.

'Dr. Scarpetta,' Horowitz said, 'have you and Dr. Rader met?'

'We've known each other forever,' Rader said with a smile.

'Yes, we have,' I said warmly. 'But the last time we saw each other, I guess, was San Antonio.'

'Gee. Has it been that long?'

This had been at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Bring Your Own Slide session, an evening once a year when people like us got together for show and tell. Rader had presented the case of a bizarre lightning death involving a young woman. Because the victim's clothing had been blown off and her head injured when she had fallen and struck concrete, she had come into the ME's office as a sexual assault. The cops were convinced until Rader showed them that the woman's belt buckle was magnetized and she had a small burn on the bottom of one foot.

I remembered after the presentation Rader had poured me a Jack Daniel's, neat and straight up in a paper cup, and we had reminisced about the old days when there were few forensic pathologists and I was the only woman. Rader was getting close to sixty and was much acclaimed by his peers. But he would not have made a good chief. He did not relish warfare with paperwork and politicians.

We looked like we were suiting up for outer space as we put on air packs, face shields and hoods. AIDS was a worry if one got a needle stick or cut while working on an infected body, but a bigger threat were infections borne on air, such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and meningitis. These days we double-gloved, breathed purified air and covered ourselves with greens and gowns that could be thrown away. Some medical examiners like Rader wore stainless steel mesh gloves reminiscent of chain mail.

I was pulling the hood over my head when O'Donnell, the detective I had met last night, walked in with Marino, who looked irritable and hungover. They put on surgical masks and gloves, no one meeting anybody's eyes or speaking. Our nameless case was in steel drawer 121, and as we filed out of the locker room, mortuary assistants hoisted the body out and set it on top of a gurney. The dead woman was nude and pitiful on her cold, steel tray.

Areas of flesh excised from her shoulder and inner thighs were ghastly patches of darkened blood. Her skin was bright pink from cold livor mortis, typical in frozen bodies or people who have died of exposure. The gunshot wound to her right temple was large caliber, and I could see at a glance the distinct muzzle mark stamped into her skin when Gault had pressed the pistol's barrel against her head and pulled the trigger.

Men in scrubs and masks rolled her into the X-ray room, where each of us was given a pair of orange-tinted plastic glasses to add to our armor. Rader set up a light energy source called a Luma-Lite, which was a simple black box with an enhanced blue fiber-optic cable. It was another set of eyes that could see what ours could not, a soft white light that turned fingerprints fluorescent and caused hairs, fibers and narcotic and semen stains to glare like fire.

'Someone hit the lights,' Rader said.

In the dark, he began going over the body with the Luma-Lite, and multiple fibers lit up like fine-gauge hot wire. With forceps, Rader collected evidence from pubic hair, feet, hands and the stubble on her scalp. Small areas of yellow got bright like the sun as he passed the light over the finger pads of her right hand.

'She's got some chemical here,' Rader said.

'Sometimes semen lights up like that.'

'I don't think that's it.'

'It could be street drugs,' I offered my opinion.

'Let's get it on a swab,' said Rader. 'Where's the hydrochloric acid?'

'Coming up.'

The evidence was recovered and Rader moved on. The small white light passed over the geography of the woman's body, into the dark recessed areas where her flesh had been removed, over the flat plain of her belly and gentle slopes of her breasts. Virtually no trace evidence clung to her wounds. This corroborated our theory that Gault had killed and maimed her where she was found, because had she been transported after the assault, debris would have adhered to drying blood. Indeed, her injuries were the cleanest areas of her body.

We worked in the dark for more than an hour, and she was revealed to me inches at a time. Her skin was fair and seemed a stranger to the sun. She was poorly muscled, thin, and five foot eight. Her left ear had been pierced three times, her right ear twice, and she wore studs and small loops, all in gold. She was dark blond with blue eyes and even features that may not have been so bland had she not shaved her head and were she not dead. Her fingernails were unpainted and chewed to the quick.

The only sign of old injuries were healed scars on her forehead and the top of her head over the left parietal bone. The scars were linear, one and a half to two inches long. The only visible gunshot residue on her hands was an ejector port mark on her right palm between her index finger and thumb, which I believed placed that hand in a defensive position when the pistol was fired. The residue most likely ruled out suicide even if all other evidence had pointed to it, which of course it did not.

'I guess we don't know which was her dominant hand.' Horowitz's voice sounded in the dark somewhere behind me.

'Her right arm is slightly more developed than her left,' I observed.

'Right-handed, then, my guess is. Her hygiene, nutrition were poor,' Horowitz said.

'Like a street person, a prostitute. That's going to be my guess,' offered O'Donnell.

'No hooker I know's gonna shave her head.' Marino's gruff voice sounded from darkness across the table.

'Depends on who she was trying to attract,' said O'Donnell. 'The plainclothes officer who spotted her in the subway thought at first she was a man.'

'This was when she was with Gault,' Marino said.

'When she was with the guy you think was Gault.'

'I don't think it,' Marino said. 'That's who she was with. I can almost smell the son of a bitch, like he leaves a bad odor everywhere he's been.'

'I think what you smell is her,' O'Donnell said.

'Move it down, right about here. Good, thanks.' Rader collected more fibers as disembodied voices continued to converse in a darkness as thick as velvet.

Finally, I confessed, 'I find this very unusual. Generally I associate so much trace with someone who has been wrapped in a dirty blanket or transported in the trunk of a car.'

'It's obvious she hasn't bathed lately, and it's winter,' Rader said as he moved the fiber-optic cable, illuminating a faint childhood scar from a smallpox inoculation. 'She may have been wearing the same clothing for days, and if she traveled on the subway or by bus, she could have collected a lot of debris.'

What this added up to was an indigent woman who had not been reported missing as far as we could tell because she had no home, no one who knew or cared she was gone. She was the tragically typical street person, we assumed, until we got her on table six in the autopsy room, where forensic dentist Dr. Graham waited to chart her teeth.

A broad-shouldered young man with an air of abstraction that I associated with medical school professors, he was an oral surgeon on Staten Island when he worked on the living. But today was his day to work on those who complained with silent tongues, which he did for a fee that probably would not cover his taxi fare and lunch. Rigor mortis was set, and like an obstinate child who hates the dentist, the dead woman would not cooperate. He finally pried her jaws open with a thin file.

'Well Merry Christmas,' he said, moving a bright light close. 'She's got a mouth full of gold.'

'Most curious,' Horowitz said, like a mathematician pondering a problem.

'These are gold foil restorations.' Graham began "pointing out kidney bean-shaped gold fillings near the gum line of each front tooth. 'She has them here and here and here.' He pointed again and again. 'Six in all. This is just very rare. In fact, I've never seen it. Not in a morgue.'

'What the hell is gold foil?' Marino asked.

'It's a pain in the ass, is what it is,' said Graham. 'A very difficult, unattractive restoration.'

'I believe in the old days, they were required to pass your dental license exam,' I said.

'That's right.' Graham continued to work. 'The students hated them.'

He went on to explain that gold foil restorations required the dentist to pound gold pellets into a tooth, and the slightest bit of moisture would cause the filling to fall out. Although the restorations were very good, they were labor intensive, painful and expensive.

'And not many patients,' he added, 'want gold showing, especially on the facial surface of their front teeth.'

He continued charting various repairs, extractions, shapes and misshapes that made this woman who she was. She had a slightly open bite and a semicircular wear pattern to her front teeth possibly consistent with her biting down on a pipe, since it was reported to him that she had been seen with a pipe.

'If she was a chronic pipe smoker, wouldn't you expect her teeth to be stained from tobacco?' I said, for I saw no evidence of it.

'Possibly. But look at how eroded her tooth surfaces are - these scooped-out areas at the gum line that required the gold foil.' He showed us. 'The major damage to her teeth is consistent with obsessive overbrushing.'

'So if she brushed the hell out of her teeth ten times a day, she's not going to have tobacco stains,' Marino said.

'Brushing the hell out of her teeth doesn't fit with her poor hygiene,' I commented. 'In fact, her mouth seems inconsistent with everything else about her.'

'Can you tell when she had this work done?' Rader asked.

'Not really,' Graham said as he continued probing. 'But it is consistently good. I'd say it was probably the same dentist who did all of it, and about the only area in the country where you find gold foil restorations still being done is the West Coast.'

'I'm wondering how you can know that,' Detective O'Donnell said to him.

'You can only get these restorations done where there are dentists who still do them. I don't do them. I personally don't know anybody who does them. But there is an organization called the American Academy of Gold Foil Operators that has several hundred members - dentists who pride themselves on still doing this particular restoration. And the largest concentration of them is in Washington State.'

'Why would someone want a restoration like this?' O'Donnell then asked.

'Gold lasts a long time.' Graham glanced up at him. 'There are people who are nervous about what is put into their mouths. The chemicals in composite white fillings supposedly can cause nerve damage. They stain and wear out more quickly. Some people believe silver causes everything from cystic fibrosis to hair loss.'