Body of Evidence (16 page)

"Thank you," I said abstractedly.

"Looks like he was beaten about the head, cut. Maybe shot. Bird shot all over the place. You'll see in a minute. We ain't found a weapon. Appears he pulled in around quarter of seven, parked where his car is now. Best we can figure, he was attacked as he got out."

He looked over at the white Rolls-Royce. The area around it was thick with shadows cast by boxwoods older and taller than he was.

"Was the driver's door open when you got here?" I asked.

"No, ma'am," Poteat answered. "The car keys is on the ground, like he had 'em in his hand when he went down. Like I said, we ain't touched nothing, was waiting till you got here or till the weather forced us to proceed. Gonna rain."

He squinted up at the layer of dense clouds. "Could be snow. No sign of any disturbance inside the car, no sign of a struggle at all. We're figuring the assailant was waiting for him, hiding in the bushes prob'ly. All I can tell you is it happened mighty fast, Doc. His sister in there didn't hear a gun go off, nothing, she says."

I left him to talk to Marino as I ducked under the tape and approached the Rolls-Royce, my eyes instinctively probing everywhere I stepped. The car was parallel parked less than ten feet from the back steps, the driver's door toward the house. Rounding the hood with its distinctive ornament, I stopped and got out my camera.

Gary Harper was on his back, his head just inches from the car's front tire. The white fender was speckled and streaked with blood, his beige fisherman's knit sweater almost solid red. Not far from his hips was a ring of keys. In the glare of floodlights all I saw was glistening sticky red. His white hair was matted with blood, his face and scalp laid open by lacerations caused when he was struck with severe force by a blunt instrument that had split the skin. His throat was cut from ear to ear, almost severing his head from his neck, and everywhere I directed the flashlight bird shot glinted like tiny beads of pewter. There were hundreds of them on his body and around it, even a few scattered over the hood of the car. The bird shot had not been fired from any sort of gun.

I moved around taking photographs, then squatted and got out the long chemical thermometer, which I slid carefully under his sweater and wedged in the fold of his left arm. The temperature of the body was 92.4 degrees, the temperature of the air 31. The body was cooling at the rapid rate of approximately three degrees per hour because it was below freezing out and Harper wasn't heavyset or heavily dressed. Rigor had already started in the small muscles. I estimated he had been dead less than two hours.

Next I began looking for any trace evidence that might not survive the trip to the morgue. Fibers, hairs or any other debris adhering to blood could wait. I was worried about anything loose, slowly scanning his body and the area directly around it, when the narrow beam licked over something not far from his neck. I leaned closer without touching, puzzling over a small greenish lump of what looked remarkably like Play-Doh. Embedded in it were several more pellets. I was carefully sealing this inside a plastic envelope when the back door opened and I found myself staring directly up into the terrified eyes of a woman standing inside the foyer beside a police officer holding a metal clipboard.

Approaching footsteps belonged to Marino and Poteat. They ducked under the tape and were joined by the officer with the clipboard. The back door quietly shut.

"Will there be someone to stay with her?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah," the officer with the clipboard responded, his breath smoking out. "Miss Harper's got a friend coming, says she'll be okay. We'll have a couple units staked out nearby to make sure the guy doesn't come back for an encore."

"What we looking for?" Poteat asked me.

He slipped his hands in the pockets of his jacket and hunched his shoulders against the cold. Snowflakes as big as quarters were beginning to spiral down.

"More than one weapon," I replied. "The injuries to his head and face are blunt-force trauma." I pointed a bloody gloved finger. "Obviously, the injury to his neck was inflicted by a sharp instrument. As for the bird shot, the pellets aren't deformed, and it doesn't appear that any of them penetrated his body."

Marino looked positively baffled as he stared at the pellets scattered everywhere.

"That was my impression," Poteat said, nodding. "Don't appear the shot was fired, but I couldn't be sure. Then we're prob'ly not looking for a shotgun. A knife and maybe something like a tire tool?"

"Possibly but not necessarily," I answered. "All I can tell you with certainty right now is his neck was cut with something sharp, and he was beaten with something blunt and linear."

"That could be a lot of things, Doc," Poteat remarked, frowning.

"Yes, it could be a lot of things," I agreed.

Though I had my suspicions about the bird shot, I refrained from speculating, having learned the hard way from past experiences. Generalities often got interpreted literally, and at one crime scene the cops walked right past a bloody upholstery needle in the victim's living room because I had said that the weapon was "consistent with" an ice pick.

"The squad can move him," I announced, peeling off my gloves.

Harper was wrapped in a clean white sheet and zipped inside a body pouch. I stood next to Marino and watched the ambulance slowly head back down the dark, deserted drive. There were no lights or sirens--no need to rush when transporting the dead. The snow was coming down harder and it was sticking.

"You leaving?" Marino asked me.

"What are you going to do, follow me again?" I wasn't smiling.

He stared off at the old Rolls-Royce in the circle of milky light at the edge of the drive. Snowflakes melted as they hit the area of gravel stained with Harper's blood.

"I wasn't following you," Marino said seriously. "Got the radio message when I was almost back to Richmond--"

"Almost back to Richmond?" I interrupted. "Almost back from where*."

"From here," he said, fishing in a pocket for his keys. "Found out Harper was a regular at Culpeper's Tavern. I decide to buttonhole him. Was with him maybe a half hour before he basically tells me to screw myself. Then he splits. So I head out, am maybe fifteen miles from Richmond when Poteat gets a dispatcher to raise me and tell me what's gone down. I'm hauling ass back in this direction when I recognize your ride, stay with you to make sure you don't get lost."

"You're telling me you actually talked to Harper at the tavern tonight?"

I asked in amazement.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Then he leaves me and gets whacked about five minutes later."

Agitated and restless, he started moving toward his car. "Gonna meet with Poteat, see what all I can find out. And I'll be by in the morning to look in on the post if you've got no objections."

I watched him walk off, shaking snow out of his hair. He was gone by the time I turned the key in the Plymouth's ignition. The wipers pushed back a thin layer of snow, then stopped cold in the middle of the windshield. The engine of my state car made one last sick attempt before it became the second DOA of the night.

The Harper library was a warm, vibrant room of red Persian rugs and antiques crafted from the finest woods. I was fairly certain the sofa was a Chippendale, and I had never touched, much less sat on, a genuine Chippendale anything before. The high ceiling was ornamented in rococo molding, the walls lined with books, most of them leatherbound. Directly across from me was a marble fireplace recently stoked with split logs.

Leaning forward, I stretched my hands toward the flames and resumed studying the oil portrait over the mantel. The subject was a lovely young girl in white seated on a small bench, her hair long and very blond, her hands loosely curled around a silver hairbrush in her lap. She shimmered darkly in the rising heat, her eyes heavy lidded, her moist lips parted, the deeply scooped neckline of her dress exposing a porcelain-white, undeveloped bosom. I was wondering why this peculiar portrait was so prominently displayed when Gary Harper's sister came in and shut the door as quietly as she had opened it.

"I thought this might warm you," she said, handing me a glass of wine.

Setting the tray on the coffee table, she seated herself on the red velvet cushion of a baroque side chair, tucking her feet to one side the way proper ladies are taught to sit by their proper female elders.

"Thank you," I said, and again I apologized.

The battery in my state car was no longer in this world, and jumper cables were not going to bring it back. The police had radioed for a wrecker, and had promised to give me a lift back to Richmond as soon as they finished processing the scene. There was no choice. I wasn't going to stand outside in the snow or sit for an hour inside a squad car. So I had knocked on Miss Harper's back door.

She sipped her wine and stared vacantly into the fire. Like the expensive objects surrounding her, she was beautifully crafted, one of the most elegant women I thought I had ever seen. Silver-white hair softly framed her patrician face. Her cheekbones were high, her features refined, her figure lithe but shapely in a beige cowl-necked sweater and corduroy skirt. When I looked at Sterling Harper, the word "spinster" definitely did not enter my mind.

She was silent. Snow coldly kissed the windows and the wind moaned around the eaves. I could not imagine living alone in this house.

"Do you have any other family?" I asked.

"None living," she said.

"I'm sorry, Miss Harper ..."

"Really. You must stop saying that, Dr. Scarpetta."

A large cut-emerald ring flashed in the firelight as she lifted her glass again. Her eyes focused on me. I remembered the terror in those eyes when she opened the door while I was examining her brother. She was remarkably steady now.

"Gary knew better," she suddenly commented. "I suppose what surprises me most is the way it happened. I wouldn't have expected someone to be so bold as to wait for him at the house."

"And you didn't hear anything?" I asked.

"I heard him drive up. I heard nothing after that. When he didn't come inside the house, I opened the door to check. I immediately called 911."

"Did he frequent any other places besides Culpeper's?" I asked.

"No. No other place. He went to Culpeper's every night," she said, her eyes drifting away from me. "I warned him about going to that place, about the dangers in this day and age. He always carried cash, you see, and Gary was quite skilled at offending people. He never stayed at the tavern long. An hour, at the most two hours. He used to tell me it was for inspiration, to mingle with the common man. Gary had nothing else to say after The fagged Corner."

I had read the novel at Cornell and remembered only impressions: a gothic South of violence, incest, and racism as seen through the eyes of a young writer growing up on a Virginia farm. I remembered it had depressed me.

"My brother was one of these unfortunate talents who had but one book in him," Miss Harper added.

"There have been other very fine writers like that," I said.

"He lived only what he was forced to live when he was young," she went on in the same unnerving monotone. "After that he became the hollow man, the life of quiet desperation. His writing was a series of false starts that he would eventually toss into the fire, scowling as he watched the pages burn. Then he would roam about the house like a angry bull until he was ready to try again. That is the way it has been for more years than I care to recall."

"You seem awfully hard on your brother," I remarked quietly.

"I'm awfully hard on myself, Dr. Scarpetta," she said as our eyes met. "Gary and I are cut from the same cloth. The difference between the two of us is I don't feel compelled to be analytical about what can't be altered. He was constantly excavating his nature, his past, the forces that shaped him. It won him a Pulitzer Prize. As for me, I have chosen not to fight what has always been so clear."

"Which is?"

"The Harper family is at the end of its line, overbred and barren. There will be no one after us," she said.

The wine was an inexpensive domestic burgundy, dry with a faint metallic bite. How much longer until the police finished? I thought I'd heard the rumble of a truck a while ago, the wrecker coming to tow away my car.

"I accepted it as my lot in life to take care of my brother, to ease the family into extinction," Miss Harper said. "I will miss Gary only because he was my brother. I'm not going to sit here and lie about how wonderful he was."

She sipped her wine again. "I'm sure I must sound cold to you."

Cold wasn't the word for it. "I appreciate your honesty," I said.

"Gary had imagination and volatile emotions. I have little of either, and were this not the case I couldn't have managed. Certainly, I wouldn't have lived here."

"Living in this house would be isolating." I supposed this was what Miss Harper meant.

"It isn't the isolation I mind," she said.

"What is it you mind, then, Miss Harper?" I queried, reaching for my cigarettes.

"Would you like another glass of wine?" she asked, one side of her face obscured by the shadow of the fire.

"No, thank you."