Dust (25 page)

“Obviously it sounds silly when you put it like that.” I press the wall button with my elbow and the steel doors swing open wide. “It may be one of those questions that’s never answered but I can’t stand what it’s doing to him.”

“You know what I have no doubt about?” Anne follows me inside. “He looks stressed. He looks tired and strung-out and a little bit down. Sometimes when I get that way I think everything’s my fault. I worry something’s hiding in my closet and under my bed. I get weird, to be honest.”

“Yes, well, Granby’s certainly doing his best to make Benton feel that way.”

“You need to sort it out for him, Dr. Scarpetta. Or he’ll torture himself.”

“I’m trying to figure out how to do that.”

“Ask Lucy,” she says. “Just ask her who she may have told and then you’ll know for sure.”

“I don’t want her to feel I’m blaming her.”

“You’re not blaming her or anyone and you need to stop being responsible for everybody’s feelings.”

“That will never happen,” I reply.

I excise the puncture wound and wait for Lucy to respond to a question that’s uncomfortable for her. It’s a question I didn’t ask earlier because there was so much to ask and now priorities have shifted and I also know how she’ll react.

Lucy hesitates before deciding, “In passing, I think I did. I wouldn’t have supposed it mattered.”

My brilliant, clever niece is obvious when she perceives that I think she screwed up. It’s as if she suddenly has on wooden shoes. I pick up forceps from the surgical cart.

“Vaguely I remember saying something,” she adds, not defensively but indifferently, and she doesn’t like what I’m asking and I knew she wouldn’t.

So she rationalizes out loud that it would make sense if she referenced Benton’s birthday surprise during the telephone conversation with Gail when she was behind the Psi Bar. Lucy had just flown into Dulles when she made that call. She was there to pick up Benton and bring him home the next day.

“I said where I was and why,” she adds from the other side of the steel table, talking to me while she stares at her dead former friend, someone she once trusted, someone who was lying to her and robbing her, someone she won’t miss.

“You’re sure it didn’t come up before.” I drop the sectioned wound into a bottle of formalin.

“It probably did,” Lucy admits and that doesn’t bother her but she resents the question.

The helicopter flight to pick up Benton was a subject that could have been introduced earlier. In fact, she’s fairly certain it did. Lucy does her best not to show what she feels. Anger, embarrassment, picked on, and hurt that I don’t trust her. If I did, I wouldn’t ask questions like this. That’s how it goes through her mind, the way she thinks and reacts as if I’m her mother belittling her and I’m certainly not. A circle of emotions as old as her history, one causing the next one and the next. A circle I know like the circles in my building, like the corridors that begin where they end in this place of life and death.

What she doesn’t feel is responsible. Whatever I’m implying isn’t something she caused and she’s not going to pretend to care that this woman who intended to screw her isn’t around anymore. Lucy doesn’t give a damn about what she might have said to her and I’d always rather that Lucy be honest, but when I witness her most basic programming it’s sobering. It’s close to unbearable. I call her a little sociopathic and Benton never fails to remind me you can’t be a little of that. Like a little pregnant or a little raped or a little dead.

She goes on to mention that Gail visited her this past Sunday, the day the birthday surprise was decided. Gail, Lucy, and Carin Hegel met that late morning at Lucy’s Concord home to discuss the upcoming trial and review depositions and other documents. It’s possible that during this visit she mentioned Benton’s birthday and her concern about me being home alone after returning from Connecticut.

“I just think it’s significant she was killed soon after that.” Lucy shrewdly makes what she believes is the most important point and one I’ve completely missed. “It was all over the news that you helped out the ME’s office in Connecticut.”

“Bryce and his big mouth,” Anne says.

He had to mention it to the Armed Forces chief medical examiner, my ultimate boss, and then the public information officer decided it would be good PR. The CFC is subsidized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Department of Defense and I get reminded from time to time that the buck doesn’t stop with me unless something goes wrong.

“It went viral on the Internet last Friday that you responded to the school and assisted with the autopsies.” Lucy doesn’t take her eyes off the wan dead face, lips drying, eyes duller.

Gail Shipton’s rigor is beginning to relax. Soon it will pass like a fist too tired to clench anymore.

“I don’t believe this is about me,” I reply.

“And I don’t believe we should assume it’s about Benton,” Lucy says. “Or if it is, maybe that’s just part of it. Maybe your role in Connecticut is the rest of it.”

“I see what she’s getting at.” Anne agrees with a theory that is new and not what I expected. “Benton’s worried the timing is about him when it may very well be about you.”

Creating a spectacle,
Benton keeps saying. A violent drama that I don’t want to imagine for a moment could include me.

“Anybody keeping up with the news would have known when you were in Connecticut and when you came back,” Lucy points out. “The second-worst school shooting in U.S. history, second only to Virginia Tech. That would turn the head of some psycho who craves attention.”

A narcissist with borderline traits,
Benton said. The killer has to watch the drama he creates.

“All of the publicity might have lit his powder keg,” Lucy adds.

“Gail Shipton wasn’t murdered because I helped out in Connecticut,” I state flatly. “That makes no sense at all.”

“Would you rather blame it on Benton?” She looks coolly at me.

“I’d rather blame it on the person who did it.”

“I didn’t say it’s why.” Lucy’s face is bright as if she’s found an answer. “I said the mass murder and your part in it —”

“My part in it?”

“Try not to be defensive, please,” Lucy says very calmly. “I’m saying it could have exacerbated what was already going to happen. That’s what I mean. I think Gail was targeted but maybe he decided to kill her now because what’s been all over the news excited him and fed into his sick shit.”

“I saw it on CNN that you were there and then it was mentioned that you’d returned to Cambridge.” Anne agrees and I don’t want to hear it. “The killer could be interested in you. It’s not your fault if it influenced him.”

“Are we about ready?” I say to her as I envision the young man behind my wall in the rainy dark. “We need to move quickly.”

For the next half hour we take photographs.

We fill in anatomical diagrams and recover trace evidence from the body’s surfaces and orifices, and I find more bluish-colored fibers. They’re inside her nose and mouth and in her hair. They’re on her tongue and caught between her teeth and inside her nostrils as far up as I can reach. I puzzle over how they got there.

They didn’t come from the white stretchy cloth she was wrapped in and it would make no sense that they’re from whatever clothing she had on when she was abducted and killed. Dr. Venter’s comments resurface as I work. He suspects Julianne Goulet inhaled fibers from a Lycra material that might be a blue, and I very well may be looking at something similar.

“On autopsy we need to check her airway and lungs for these,” I say to Anne, and I use forceps to lift a fiber as delicate as gossamer.

I place it on a slide, protecting it with a cover slip.

“She might have aspirated fibers? That would seem unusual unless it was something that shed like crazy.” Anne opens a Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, a PERK.

“I doubt it,” I reply. “If it shed like crazy, they’d be everywhere. But if a blue fabric covered her face while she was violently gasping for breath, that could be an explanation.”

“Like when people are smothered with a pillow,” she considers. “I’ve seen tiny particles of feathers and fibers in their airways and lungs.”

“But usually there’s no significant injury because a pillow is soft.”

“I’ve always thought it’s an explanation for some cases of SIDS. Postpartum depression, and Mama uses a soft baby blanket or a baby pillow.”

“Jesus, the two of you are depressing,” Lucy says.

I carry the slide to a counter where there’s a polarizing light microscope, and, turning the objective lens to 100×, I adjust the focus and peer through the binocular eyepiece. The fiber is actually a group of them fused together, multicolored, like bundles of electrical wiring, pale green and peach but predominantly blue.

“Synthetic.” I return to the table. “Beyond that, Ernie will have to figure it out,” I add as I continue to think of the bluish Lycra fibers recovered in Dr. Venter’s case. “In her hair, in her teeth, up into her sinuses.” I remove a plastic speculum from its sterile wrapper. “That makes me strongly suspect she was suffocated with a fabric that’s stretchy and a multifilament synthetic weave is going to have some flexibility.”

“Like the polyester pants I used to wear as a kid.” Anne clips fingernails, collecting them in an envelope. “Just stretchy enough to show every roll of flab, and, yes, as hard as it is to believe, I was a bit of a butterball and never went to the prom. So the fibers aren’t from the cloth she was wrapped in because it’s white.”

“No, they’re definitely not from that,” I answer. “The white cloth was the finishing touch after she was dead. He kept her someplace where he could pose her body, leaving her in the position she’s in now until rigor was fixed enough to move her.”

“You can tell that how?” Lucy stands back from the table, watching us.

“Her postmortem artifacts,” I reply. “The position she’s in now was the one she was in as she cooled and began to stiffen as her livor and rigor formed.”

“He positioned her arm out like that deliberately.” Lucy holds hers out and drops her wrist.

“Yes.”

“Like a clay sculpture hardening,” Anne says.

“That’s bizarre.” Lucy ponders such a detail. “Why?”

“Why do any of these people do what they do?” Anne replies.

“It must mean something.”

“I think for people like this they don’t even know what it means.” Anne hands me an envelope to initial. “They do these awful things but if you asked them why, they have no idea.”

“That’s probably true,” I agree.

“It may go back to when they were a baby or too young to remember,” Anne says. “You know, like the time when I slammed this door and didn’t know a cat was back there and broke its tail. I never got over it, but what if that was my signature if I were a criminal? I was traumatized when I was ten and always do something to cats. I break their tails.”

“You know what?” Lucy says. “You’re sick.”

“Tell her I’m not,” Anne says to me.

We begin to swab orifices, all of them.

“She was wrapped in something else while she was alive,” Lucy returns her attention to what’s on my table.

“It would explain the fibers under her nails, in her hair and mouth,” I reply as my mind sorts through possibilities.

A way to restrain his victims without leaving a mark,
I recall thinking as I reviewed the D.C. case reports.

I remember sitting up in bed and envisioning each excruciating death, a transparent plastic bag from a spa store called Octopus taped over a victim’s head, her face turning a dusky bluish red, her eyes wide and terrified as arterial blood pumps and veins are obstructed by duct tape around her neck, a shower of pinpoint hemorrhages appearing on her lids and conjunctiva. It’s like attaching a balloon to the end of a hose. Water gushes in and has no place to go and pressure builds and the balloon ruptures, and I imagine the roaring in the victim’s head and her desperation to breathe. But Gail Shipton had no bag over her head and maybe he didn’t use the plastic bags to kill any of his victims.

Maybe Dr. Venter’s hypothesis is correct. The bags are a morbid ornament the killer incorporates into the way he symbolically poses the bodies when he leaves them displayed and he didn’t bother with that finishing touch in Gail Shipton’s case because she interrupted his ritual and fantasy by dying prematurely. It could be he actually suffocates his victims with a soft, stretchy fabric, possibly one made of Lycra, and this could explain their lack of defense injuries. It could explain the fibers deep in Gail Shipton’s nasal cavities and in Julianne Goulet’s airway and lungs.

People being smothered fight like hell and there’s no evidence these women did. As Benton says, it’s as if they died willingly, and that just isn’t possible. People don’t. In suicidal asphyxiations, biology has the final say after they have decided their lives away and set the plan into motion. They claw at the noose around their neck as they dangle and flail after they’ve kicked over what they were standing on. They rip at the bag over their head and they fight until the end when they drown. Pain and panic change their minds as every cell screams to stay alive and I imagine wrapping someone from head to toe in a synthetic fabric that has some give. Something stretchy.

The pelvic exam reveals no evidence of sexual assault, no semen, no contusions or inflammation, and I work swiftly. I have a mission in mind, an additional scientific step before the autopsy, and snapping a new blade into the scalpel I make the Y incision, running down the length of torso, detouring around the navel. I reflect back tissue but don’t remove the breastplate of ribs just yet. I find the bifurcation of the aorta in front of the sacroiliac joints at the pelvic brim. Using angiocatheters, I cannulate the left external iliac artery and begin pumping in large syringes of pink embalming fluid laced with a non-ionic contrast agent that will light up neon white on CT.

It fills out arteries and veins, and they expand visibly beneath the surface of the skin as if Gail Shipton’s blood is circulating again. She almost looks alive and yet my station in the autopsy room smells like a funeral home.

“Let’s get her back into the scanner.” I take off my gloves and face shield. “We’ll see if something was going on with her vascular structures. Let’s see if she went into cardiac arrest before he had the chance to murder her.”

“What are you thinking killed her exactly?” Lucy asks.

“This likely is going to be a diagnosis of exclusion,” I reply. “Determining what didn’t kill her might help us figure out what did. I know, for example, that at some point her blood pressure went through the roof, causing petechial hemorrhages in the conjunctiva of her eyes.”

I detach the autopsy table from the sink and release the brakes on the swivel caster wheels.

“I’m entertaining the possibility that she died of cardiac arrest while being shocked with a stun gun,” I explain, “or perhaps while he was attempting to smother her with something that left fibers in her nose and mouth. She may have been struggling to breathe but I don’t think she struggled long, not as long as it usually would take to smother someone, especially if the killer does it slowly, sadistically, enjoys drawing it out.”

“Like he waits until they pass out, then loosens the cloth so they can breathe, and does it over and over again,” Anne suggests.

“Possibly, but not with Gail. Not with a pneumothorax. Did she ever complain to you about chest pain, about any cardiac problems?” I ask Lucy.

“Not specifically. I know she complained of being really stressed. As I mentioned, sometimes she said she felt short of breath. She sighed a lot, was tired a lot, but that could have been from anxiety, and she didn’t exercise. The most she’d do was walk on a treadmill.” She stares at Gail Shipton’s face, her own a hard mask that gets more rigid with each minute that passes.

“Are you hanging in there?” I ask her.

“What do you expect?”

“You don’t have to be here.”

“Yes I do. It doesn’t bother me the way you think it would.”

We wheel Gail Shipton across the autopsy room.

“She did this to herself,” Lucy says. “That’s what bothers me.”

“She didn’t do it,” I reply. “Someone else did.”

“I’m not blaming her for what he did. But I’m blaming her for what she set into motion.”

“Let’s not blame her,” I say to my niece. “No one ever deserves to be murdered, I don’t give a damn what they do.”

Back inside large-scale x-ray, we cover the scanner’s table with clean sheets and position the body on its back. I push more embalming fluid through the iliac artery and Anne presses a button and the table slides in with a quiet hum. She angles the gantry, pressing a red button to landmark where the laser lines intersect at the head.

“We’ll start the scan at the carina, the lowest tracheal cartilage, and scan to the top of the orbit,” I instruct.

We retreat to Anne’s console behind glass and turn on the bright red
X-Ray in Use
warning sign and shut the door. The level of radiation in that room is safe only if you’re dead.

“Virtual 3-D volume rendering from inside out,” I decide. “Thin, thin cuts, one-millimeter, with an increment between them. What do you think?”

“Point-seventy-five by point-five will do.” Anne uses her computer to turn on the scanner.

It begins to pulse.
Buzz-buzz-bloop-bloop
– warming up. We hear the sounds of the x-ray tube rotating, and she selects
Chest
on the menu, opening a box on the area of interest, which is the structures of the heart. That’s what we’ll start with. I want to know if Gail Shipton suffered from some vascular defect that might have made her vulnerable to a sudden death that, as Benton suggests, cheated the Capital Murderer.

When he shot her with a stun gun did she go into an arrhythmia and die before he could suffocate her? Did her heart quit while she was struggling violently to breathe and he didn’t get to finish torturing her? I have a suspicion that the pinpoint hemorrhages in the conjunctiva of her eyes might be related to a blood flow constriction, possibly a problem with one or more of her valves. The Washington, D.C., victims had a light scattering of petechiae across the cheeks and eyelids but Gail Shipton’s ruptured capillary vessels are profoundly florid.

What happened to you?
 

“If you follow the contrast agent through her vessels,” I explain to Lucy, “you can see the structures in exquisite detail, nice and bright like well-lit roads. And here’s the problem. Right here.” I point at the computer display. “In real time we’re seeing a defect she likely had no idea about.”

“Wow, that’s too bad.” Anne moves the cursor, opening a new box and grabbing the image. “It’s always scary to think what might be inside us just waiting to ruin our day.”

I show Lucy the narrowing of a coronary artery that caused an insufficient blood flow to the heart.

“Aortic valvular stenosis, which has caused thickening of the muscle wall of the left pumping chamber,” I note. “Possibly this is a congenital condition or maybe as a child she suffered a bacterial infection that caused inflammation and scarring. Strep throat, for example, that turned into rheumatic fever.” I recall what Bryce said about Gail Shipton’s teeth. “That might be why she had enamel malformation, if she was on an antibiotic such as tetracycline.”

“What would this valve problem do to her?” Lucy asks.

“Over time her heart would have continued to lose its ability to efficiently pump blood, eventually reaching a point when the muscle would no longer expand.”

“Meaning she was a candidate for heart failure. In other words, she wasn’t looking at a healthy long life,” Lucy says as if that’s what she wants to believe.

“Who knows what anybody has to look forward to?” Anne says. “Remember Jim Fixx, the running guru? He goes out for his daily jog and drops dead of a heart attack. Rich people on the golf course get struck by lightning. Patsy Cline went down in a plane crash. Elvis died on the toilet and that sure as hell wasn’t what he had in mind when he got up that morning at Graceland.”

“She would have had fatigue, shortness of breath, heart palpitations. She might have felt faint during exertion, which is consistent with what you’ve described to me,” I say to Lucy as I study the scan. “She may have had swollen ankles and feet.”

“Sometimes she complained about her shoes being tight.” Lucy sounds more entranced than somber or sad. “She liked slip-ons, sandals.”

I envision the green faux-crocodile leather flat Marino found behind the Psi Bar.

“Sounds like she was already decompensating. Did she have routine physicals?” I ask.

“I don’t know except she hated doctors.”

“Her heart had to pump harder than it should have,” I continue to explain.

“She hated people, really,” Lucy says. “She was introverted and antisocial and I should have known better when she tried to pick us up.”