Unnatural Exposure (3 page)

I stared up at the landfill, at Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.

'Okay,' I said. 'Let's do it.'

Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver's seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.

'I can't say that I blame you,' my driver said. 'The smell's pretty rough. I can tell you that.'

'It's not the smell,' I said. 'Microorganisms are what make me worry.

'Gee,' he said, anxiously. 'Maybe I should wear one of those things.'

'You shouldn't be getting close enough to have a problem.' He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.

'I sure am sorry about the dust,' he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. 'You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.' He nervously paused before going on. 'We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.'

'From where?' I asked.

'Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.'

'What about Boston?' I asked, for the first four cases were believed to be from as far away as that.

'No, ma'am.' He shook his head. 'Maybe one of these days. We're so much less per ton down here. Twenty-five dollars compared to sixty-nine in New Jersey or eighty in New York. Plus, we recycle, test for hazardous waste, collect methane gas from decomposing trash.'

'What about your hours?'

'Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,' he said with pride.

'And you have a way to track where the trucks come from?'

'A satellite system that uses a grid. We can at least tell you which trucks would have dumped trash during a certain time period in the area where the body was found.'

We splashed through a deep puddle near Porta-Johns, and rocked by a powerwash where tracks were being hosed off on their way back out to life's roads and highways.

'I can't say we've ever had anything like this,' he said. 'Now, they've had body parts at the Shoosmith dump. Or at least, that's the rumor.'

He glanced at me, assuming I would know if such a rumor were true. But I did not verify what he had just said as the Explorer sloshed through mud strewn with rubber chips, the sour stench of decomposing garbage drifting in. My attention was riveted to the small truck I had been watching since I had gotten here, thoughts racing along a thousand different tracks.

'By the way, my name's Keith Pleasants.' He wiped a hand on his pants and held it out to me. 'Pleased to meet you.'

My gloved hand shook his at an awkward angle as men holding handkerchiefs and rags over their noses watched us pull up. There were four of them, gathered around the back of what I now could see was a hydraulic packer, used for emptying Dumpsters and compressing the trash. Cole's Trucking Co. was painted on the doors.

'That guy poking garbage with a stick is the detective for Sussex,' Pleasants said to me.

He was older, in shirtsleeves, wearing a revolver on his hip. I felt I'd seen him somewhere before.

'Grigg?' I guessed, referring to the detective I had spoken to on the phone.

'That's right.' Sweat was rolling down Pleasants' face, and he was getting more keyed up. 'You know, I've never had any dealings with the sheriff's department, never even got a speeding ticket around here.'

We slowed down to a halt, and I could barely see through the boiling dust. Pleasants grabbed his door handle.

'Sit tight just a minute,' I told him.

I waited for dust to settle, looking out the windshield and surveying as I always did when approaching a crime scene. The loader's bucket was frozen midair, the packer beneath it almost full. All around, the landfill was busy and full of diesel sounds, work stopped only here. For a moment, I watched powerful white trucks roar uphill as Cats clawed and grabbed, and compactors crushed the ground with their chopper wheels.

The body would be transported by ambulance, and paramedics watched me through dusty windows as they sat in air conditioning, waiting to see what I was going to do. When they saw me fix the surgical mask over my nose and mouth and open my door, they climbed out, too. Doors slammed shut. The detective immediately walked to meet me.

'Detective Grigg, Sussex Sheriff's Department,' he said. 'I'm the one who called.'

'Have you been out here the entire time?' I asked him.

'Since we were notified at approximately thirteen hundred hours. Yes, ma'am. I've been right here to make sure nothing was disturbed.'

'Excuse me,' one of the paramedics said to me. 'You going to want us right now?'

'Maybe in fifteen. Someone will come get you,' I said as they wasted no time returning to their ambulance. 'I'm going to need some room here,' I said to everybody else.

Feet crunched as people stepped out of the way, revealing what they had been guarding and gawking at. Flesh was unnaturally pale in the dying light of the autumn afternoon, the torso a hideous stub that had tumbled from a scoop of trash and landed on its back. I thought it was Caucasian, but was not sure, and maggots teeming in the genital area made it difficult for me to determine gender at a glance. I could not even say with certainty whether the victim was pre- or postpubescent. Body fat was abnormally low, ribs protruding beneath flat breasts that may or may not have been female.

I squatted close and opened my medical bag. With forceps, I collected maggots into a jar for the entomologist to examine later, and decided upon closer inspection that the victim was, in fact, a woman. She had been decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. Stumps were dry and dark with age, and I knew right away that there was a difference between this case and the others.

This woman had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur, versus the joints. Getting out a scalpel, I could feel the men staring as I made a half-inch incision on the torso's right side, and inserted a long chemical thermometer. I rested a second thermometer on top of my bag.

'What are you doing?' asked a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, who looked like he might get sick.

'I need the body's temperature to help determine time of death. A core liver temperature is the most accurate,' I patiently explained. 'And I also need to know the temperature out here.'

'Hot, that's what it is,' said another man. 'So, it's a woman, I guess.'

'It's too soon to say,' I replied. 'Is this your packer?'

'Yeah.'

He was young, with dark eyes and very white teeth, and tattoos on his fingers that I usually associated with people who have been in prison. A sweaty bandanna was tied around his head and knotted in back, and he could not look at the torso long without averting his gaze.

'In the wrong place at the wrong time,' he added, shaking his head with hostility.

'What do you mean?' Grigg had his eye on him.

'Wasn't from me. I know that,' the driver said as if it were the most important point he would ever make in his life. 'The Cat dug it up while it was spreading my load.'

'Then we don't know when it was dumped here?' I scanned faces around me.

It was Pleasants who replied, 'Twenty-three trucks unloaded in this spot since ten A. M., not counting this one.' He looked at the packer.

'Why ten A. M.?' I asked, for it seemed like a rather arbitrary time to start counting trucks.

'Because that's when we put down the last cover of tire chips. So there's no way it could have been dumped before then,' Pleasants explained, staring at_ the body. 'And in my opinion, it couldn't have been out long, anyway. It doesn't exactly look the way you'd expect if it's been run over by a fifty-ton compactor with chopper wheels; trucks or even this loader.'

He stared off at other sites where compacted trash was being gouged off trucks as huge tractors crushed and spread. The driver of the packer was getting increasingly agitated and angry.

'We got big machines all over the place up here,' Pleasants added. 'And they pretty much never stop.'

I looked at the packer, and the bright yellow loader with its empty cab. A tatter of black trash bag fluttered from the raised bucket.

'Where's the driver of the loader?' I asked.

Pleasants hesitated before answering, 'Well, I guess that would be me. We had somebody out sick. I was asked to work on the hill.'

Grigg moved closer to the loader, looking up at what was left of the trash bag as it moved in the hot, barren air.

'Tell me what you saw,' I said to Pleasants.

'Not much. I was unloading him.' He nodded at the driver. 'And my bucket caught the garbage bag, the one you see there. It tore and the body fell out to where it is now.' He paused, wiping his face on his sleeve and swatting at flies.

'But you don't know for sure where this came from,' I tried again, while Grigg listened, even though he probably had already taken their statements.

'I could've dug it up,' Pleasants conceded. 'I'm not saying it's impossible. I just don't think I did.'

'That's 'cause you don't want to think it.' The driver glared at him.

'I know what I think.' Pleasants didn't flinch. 'The bucket grabbed it off your packer when I was unloading it.'

'Man, you don't know it came from me,' the driver snapped at him.

'No, I don't know it for a fact. Makes sense, that's all.'

'Maybe to you.' The driver's face was menacing.

'Believe that will be about enough, boys,' Grigg warned, moving close again, his presence reminding them he was big and wore a gun.

'You got that right,' said the driver. 'I've had enough of this shit. When can I get out of here? I'm already late.'

'Something like this inconveniences everyone,' Grigg said to him with a steady look.

Rolling his eyes and muttering profanity, the driver stalked off and lit a cigarette.

I removed the thermometer from the body, and held it up. The core temperature was eighty-four degrees, the same as the ambient air. I turned the torso over to see what else was there and noted a curious crop of fluid-filled vesicles over the lower buttocks. As I checked more carefully, I found evidence of others in the area of the shoulders and thighs, at the edges of deep cuts.

'Double-pouch her,' I directed. 'I need the trash bag it came in, including what's caught on the bucket up there. And I want the trash immediately around and under her, send all of it in.'

Grigg unfolded a twenty-gallon trash bag and shook it open. He pulled gloves out of a pocket, squatted and started grabbing up garbage by the handful while paramedics opened the back of the ambulance. The driver of the packer was leaning against his cab, and I could feel his fury like heat.

'Where was your packer coming from?' I asked him.

'Look at the tags,' he replied in a surly tone.

'Where in Virginia?' I refused to be put off by him.

It was Pleasants who said, 'Tidewater area, ma'am. The packer belongs to us. We got a lot of them we lease.'

The landfill's administrative headquarters overlooked the fire pond and was quaintly out of sync with the loud, dusty surroundings. The building was pale peach stucco, with flowers in window boxes and sculpted shrubs bordering the walk. Shutters were painted cream, a brass pineapple knocker on the front door. Inside, I was greeted by clean, chilled air that was a wonderful relief and I knew why Investigator Percy Ring had chosen to conduct his interviews here. I bet he had not even been to the scene.

He was in the break room, sitting with an older man in shirtsleeves, drinking Diet Coke and looking at computer-printed diagrams.

'This is Dr Scarpetta. Sorry,' Pleasants said, adding to Ring, 'I don't know your first name.'

Ring gave me a big smile and a wink. 'The doc and I go way back.'

He was in a crisp blue suit, blond and exuding pure youthful innocence that was easy to believe. But he had never fooled me. He was a big-talking charmer who basically was lazy, and it had not escaped me that the moment he had become involved in these cases, we had been besieged by leaks to the press.

'And this is Mr Kitchen,' Pleasants was saying to me. 'The owner of the landfill.'

Kitchen was simple in jeans and Timberland boots, his eyes gray and sad as he offered a big rough hand.