Four Scarpetta Novels (68 page)

My diagnosis this morning is one of exclusion. Having found no obvious, pathological cause of death, I am left with one that is based on whispers. Tiny hemorrhages on heart and lungs and burns and abrasions from bondage suggest Mitch Barbosa died from stress-induced arrhythmia. I also postulate that at some point he was holding his breath or his airway was obstructed—or for some reason his breathing was compromised to the extent that he partially asphyxiated. Perhaps the gag, which would have gotten wet from saliva, is to blame. Whatever the truth, I am getting a picture that is simple and ghastly and calls for demonstration. Terry and Marino are handy.

First I cut off several lengths of the thick white twine that we routinely use to suture up Y-incisions. I tell Marino to push up the sleeves of his surgical gown and hold out his hands. I tie one segment of twine around one wrist and a second strand around the other, not too tight, but snug. I instruct him to hold his arms up in the air and direct Terry to grab the loose ends of twine and pull up. Terry is tall enough to do this without a chair or footstool. The bindings immediately dig into the underside of Marino's wrists and are angled up toward the knots. We try this in different positions, with variations of the arms close together and spread wide crucifixion-style. Of course, Marino's feet remain squarely on the floor. In no instance is he hanging or even dangling.

“The weight of a body on outstretched arms interferes with exhalation,” I explain. “You can inhale but it's difficult exhaling because the intercostal muscles are compromised. Over a period of time, this would lead to asphyxia. You add that to the shock of pain from torture, you add fear and panic, and you could certainly suffer from an arrhythmia.”

“What about the nosebleed?” Marino holds out his wrists and I examine the indentations the twine has left in his skin. They are angled up similarly to those on the dead man.

“Increased intracranial pressure,” I say. “In a breath-holding situation, you can get nosebleeds. In the absence of injury, that's a good guess.”

“My question is whether someone
meant
to kill him?” Terry poses.

“Most people aren't going to string someone up and torture him and then let him go to tell the story,” I reply. “I'll pend his cause and manner for now until we see what tox has to say.” My eyes light on Marino's. “But I believe you'd best treat this as a homicide, a very awful one.”

We contemplate this later in the morning as we drive toward James City County. Marino wanted to take his truck, and I suggested we follow Route 5 east along the river, through Charles City County where eighteenth-century plantations fan out from the roadside in vast fallow fields that lead to the awesome brick mansions and outbuildings of Sherwood Forest, Westover, Berkeley, Shirley and Belle Air. There isn't a tour bus in sight, no logging trucks or roadwork, and country stores are closed. It is Christmas Eve. The sun shines through endless arches of
old trees, shadows dapple pavement and Smoky the Bear asks for help from a sign in a gracious part of the world where two men have died barbarically. It does not seem that anything so heinous could happen here until we get to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Tucked off Route 5 in the woods, it is a hodgepodge of cabins, trailers and motel buildings that are rusting and paint-peeled, reminding me of Hogan's Alley at the FBI Academy: cheaply constructed facades where shady people are about to get raided by the law.

The rental office is in a small frame house overwhelmed by scrubby pines that have carpeted the roof and earth in brown tags. Soft-drink and ice machines in front glow through overgrown bushes. Children's bicycles lie wounded in leaves, and ancient seesaws and swings aren't to be trusted. A homely mixed-breed dog that sags with a history of chronic breeding rises to her old feet and stares at us from the sloping porch.

“I thought Stanfield was meeting us here.” I open my door.

“Go figure.” Marino climbs out of the truck, his eyes moving everywhere.

A veil of smoke drifts out the chimney and streams almost horizontally with the wind, and through a window I catch winking, gaudy Christmas lights. I feel eyes on us. A curtain moves, the sounds of a television muted from deep within the house as we wait on the porch and the dog sniffs my hand and licks me. Marino announces our arrival with a fist pounding the door, and finally calls out, “Anybody home? Hey!” Banging his fist hard. “Police!”

“I'm coming, I'm coming,” an impatient woman's voice sings out. A hard, tired face fills the space of the opening door, the burglar chain still anchored and taut.

“You Mrs. Kiffin?” Marino asks her.

“Who are you?” she asks him back.

“Captain Marino, Richmond P.D. This is Dr. Scarpetta.”

“What you bringing a doctor for?” Brow furrowing, she glances at me from her shadowy crack. A stirring at her feet, and a child peeks out at us and smiles like an imp. “Zack, you go back inside.” Small bare arms,
hands with dirty nails wrap around mama's knee. She shakes him loose. “Go on!” He disconnects and is gone.

“Going to need you to show us the room where the fire was,” Marino tells her. “Detective Stanfield with James City County should be here. You seen him?”

“No police been here this morning.” She pushes the door shut and the burglar chain rattles as she removes it, then the door opens again, this time wide, and she steps out on the porch, pushing her arms into the sleeves of a lumberjack's red plaid coat, a ring of keys jingling in her hand. She yells into the house, “Y'all stay! Zack, don't you get into the cookie dough! I'll be right back.” She shuts the door. “Never seen anybody love cookie dough like that boy,” she tells us as we go down the steps. “Sometimes I buy the premade in rolls and one day I catch Zack eating one, wrapper peeled down like a banana. Ate half of it by the time I caught him. I told him, You know what's in it?
Raw eggs
, that's what.”

Bev Kiffin is probably no more than forty-five, her prettiness hard and garish like truck-stop cafes and late-night diners. Her hair is dyed bright blond and is curly like a French poodle, her dimples deep, her figure ripe on the way to matronly. She has a defensive, obstinate air about her that I associate with people who are used to being worn down and in trouble. I would also call her shifty. I am about to distrust every word she says.

“I don't want problems out here,” she lets us know. “As if I don't have enough going on, especially this time of year,” she says as she walks. “All these people pulling in here morning, noon and night to gawk and take pictures.”

“What people?” Marino asks her.

“Just people in cars, pulling up in the drive, staring. Some of them getting out and roaming around. Last night I woke up when someone drove through. It was two
A
.
M
.”

Marino lights a cigarette. We follow Kiffin through the shade of pines along an overgrown path of churned-up snow, past old campers that list like unseaworthy ships. Near a picnic table is a nest of personal
belongings that at first glance look like trash from a campsite someone didn't clean up. But then I see the unexpected: an odd collection of toys, dolls, paperback books, sheets, two pillows, a blanket, a double baby carriage—items that are soggy and dirty not because they were worthless and deliberately pitched but because they have been inadvertently exposed to the elements. Scattered throughout are shredded plastic wrappers that instantly connect with the fragment I found clinging to the first victim's burned back. The fragments are white, blue and bright orange and are ripped in narrow strips, as if whoever did it has a nervous habit of picking things to pieces.

“Someone sure left in a hurry,” Marino comments.

Kiffin is watching me.

“Maybe skipped without settling the bill?” Marino says.

“Oh no.” She seems in a hurry to move on to the small tawdry motel showing through trees ahead. “They paid up front like everyone else. A family with two little ones staying in a tent and all of a sudden they hightailed it out of here. Don't know why they left all that. Some of it, like the baby buggy's pretty nice. Course, then it snowed on everything.”

A gust of wind scatters several bits of wrappers like confetti. I wander closer and nudge a pillow with my foot, turning it over. A pungent, sour odor rises to my nostrils as I squat and take a closer look. Clinging to the underside of the pillow is hair—long, pale hair, very fine hair that has no pigmentation. My heart thuds like the sudden, unexpected kick of a bass drum. I move the shredded wrappers around with my finger. The plasticized material is pliable but tough, so it doesn't tear easily unless you start at a crinkled edge where the wrapper was heat-sealed together. Some of the fragments are large and easily recognizable as having come from PayDay peanut-caramel candy bars. I can even make out the website address for Hershey's Chocolate. More hair on the blanket, short, dark hair, a pubic hair. And several more of the long, pale hairs.

“PayDay candy bars,” I say to Marino. I look at Kiffin as I open my satchel. “Know anybody out here who eats a lot of PayDay candy bars and picks apart the wrappers?”

“Well, it didn't come from my house.” As if we have accused her, or maybe Zack and his sweet tooth.

I do not carry my aluminum crime scene case to scenes where there is no body. But I always keep an emergency kit in my satchel, a heavy-duty freezer bag filled with disposable gloves, evidence bags, swabs, a tiny vial of distilled water and gunshot residue (GSR) kits, among other items. I remove the cap from a GSR kit. It is nothing more than a small, clear plastic stub with an adhesive tip that I use to collect three hairs from the pillow and two from the blanket. I seal the stub and the hairs inside a small transparent plastic evidence bag.

“You don't mind my asking?” Kiffin says to me. “What are you doing that for?”

“Think I'll just bag all this crap, the whole campsite, and take it in to the labs.” Marino is suddenly low-key, calm like a seasoned poker player. He knows how to handle Kiffin, and now she has to be handled because he also knows all too well that hypertrichotic people have unique hair, fine, unpigmented, rudimentary, baby-like hair. Only baby hair is not six or seven inches long like the hair Chandonne shed at his crime scenes. It is possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has been to this campground. “You manage this place by yourself?” Marino asks Kiffin.

“Pretty much.”

“When did the family in the tent leave? It's not exactly tent weather.”

“They were here right before it snowed. Late last week.”

“You ever find out why they left in such a hurry?” Marino keeps probing in his bland tone.

“Haven't heard from them, not a word.”

“We're going to need to take a better look at what all they left behind.”

Kiffin blows on her bare hands to warm them and hugs herself, turning away from the wind. She looks back at her house and you can almost see her contemplating what kind of trouble life holds for her and her family this time. Marino motions for me to follow him. “Wait here,” he tells Kiffin. “We'll be right back. Just gonna get something out of my truck. Don't touch nothing, all right?”

She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chandonne appeared at my front door, Marino was out with the response team searching for him, and they discovered where he was hiding in Richmond in the mansion under major renovation on the James River, very close to my neighborhood. Since he rarely if ever went out during daylight hours, we assume, his comings and goings went undetected as he hid in the house and helped himself to whatever was there. Until this moment, it never occurred to any of us that Chandonne might have stayed anyplace else.

“You think he scared off whoever was in that tent so he could use it?” Marino unlocks his truck and reaches in the back of the cab where I know, for one thing, he keeps a pump-action shotgun. “Because I gotta tell ya, Doc. Something we noticed when we went inside that house on the James was junk food wrappers everywhere. A lot of candy bar wrappers.” He lifts out a red tool box and shuts the door of the truck. “Like he's got a real sugar thing.”

“Do you remember what kind of junk food?” I remember all the Pepsis Chandonne drank while Berger was interviewing him.

“Snickers bars. I don't remember if there were PayDays. But candy. Peanuts. Those little bags of Planter's peanuts, and now that I think of it, the wrappers were all tore up.”

“Christ,” I mutter, suddenly chilled to the marrow. “I wonder if he might have low blood sugar.” I try to be clinical, to regain my balance. Fear returns like a swarm of bats.

“What the hell was he doing out here?” Marino says, and he keeps staring in the direction of Kiffin in the distance, making sure she isn't tampering with anything in a campsite that has now become part of a crime scene. “And how the hell did he get here? Maybe he did have a car.”

“Any vehicles at the house where he was hiding?” I ask as Kiffin watches our return, a solitary figure in red plaid, breath emerging in smoky puffs.

“The people that own the mansion, they didn't keep any cars there while all the work was going on,” Marino tells me in a voice Kiffin can't hear. “Maybe he stole something and kept it parked somewhere it wasn't
going to be noticed. I just assumed the squirrel didn't even know how to drive, seeing as how he pretty much lived in the dungeon in his family's house in Paris.”

“Yes. More assumptions,” I mutter, remembering Chandonne's claiming he drove one of those green motorcycles to clean Paris sidewalks, doubting the story but not much else any longer. We are back at the picnic table, and Marino sets down the toolbox and opens it. He gets out leather work gloves and puts them on, then shakes open several fifty-gallon heavy-duty garbage bags and I hold them open. We fill three bags, and he cuts open a fourth and drapes sections of black plastic over the baby carriage and tapes them together. While he is doing this, he explains to Kiffin that it is possible someone scared off the family who was staying in this tent. He suggests that maybe a stranger claimed squatter's rights at this site, even if for only a night. Did she at any point have a sense of anything out of the ordinary, including an unfamiliar vehicle in the area prior to last Saturday? He poses all this as if it would never occur to him that she would tarnish the truth.