Four Scarpetta Novels (2 page)

T
en days later. April 27, 2007. A Friday afternoon.

Inside the virtual-reality theater are twelve of Italy's most powerful law enforcers and politicians, whose names, in the main, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta can't keep straight. The only non-Italians are herself and forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, both consultants for International Investigative Response (IIR), a special branch of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI). The Italian government is in a very delicate position.

Nine days ago, American tennis star Drew Martin was murdered while on vacation, her nude, mutilated body found near Piazza Navona, in the heart of Rome's historic district. The case is an international sensation, details about the sixteen-year-old's life and death replayed nonstop on television, the crawls at the bottom of the screen doing just that—crawling by slowly and tenaciously, repeating the same details the anchors and experts are saying.

“So, Dr. Scarpetta, let's clarify, because there seems to be much confusion. According to you, she was dead by two or three o'clock that afternoon,” says Captain Ottorino Poma, a medico legale in the Arma dei Carabinieri, the military police heading the investigation.

“That's not according to me,” she says, her patience beginning to fray. “That's according to you.”

He frowns in the low lighting. “I was so sure it was you, just minutes ago, talking about her stomach contents and alcohol level. And the fact they indicate she was dead within hours of when she was seen last by her friends.”

“I didn't say she was dead by two or three o'clock. I believe it is you who continues to say that, Captain Poma.”

At a young age he already has a widespread reputation, and not an entirely good one. When Scarpetta first met him two years ago in the Hague at the ENFSI's annual meeting, he was derisively dubbed the Designer Doctor and described as extraordinarily conceited and argumentative. He is handsome—magnificent, really—with a taste for beautiful women and dazzling clothes, and today he is wearing a uniform of midnight blue with broad red stripes and bright silver embellishments, and polished black leather boots. When he swept into the theater this morning, he was wearing a red-lined cape.

He sits directly in front of Scarpetta, front row center, and rarely takes his eyes off her. On his right is Benton Wesley, who is silent most of the time. Everyone is masked by stereoscopic glasses that are synchronized with the Crime Scene Analysis System, a brilliant innovation that has made the Polizia Scientifica Italiana's Unità per l'Analisi del Crimine Violento the envy of law enforcement agencies worldwide.

“I suppose we need to go through this again so you completely understand my position,” Scarpetta says to Captain Poma, who now rests his chin on his hand as if he is having an intimate conversation with her over a glass of wine. “Had she been killed at two or three o'clock that afternoon, then when her body was found at approximately eight-thirty the following morning, she would have been dead at least seventeen hours. Her livor mortis, rigor mortis, and algor mortis are inconsistent with that.”

She uses a laser pointer to direct attention to the three-dimensional muddy construction site projected on the wall-size screen. It's as if they are standing in the middle of the scene, staring at Drew Martin's mauled, dead body and the litter and earthmoving equipment around it. The red dot of the laser moves along the left shoulder, the left buttock, the left leg and its bare foot. The right buttock is gone, as is a portion of her right thigh, as if she had been attacked by a shark.

“Her lividity…” Scarpetta starts to say.

“Once again I apologize. My English isn't so good as yours. I'm not sure of this word,” Captain Poma says.

“I've used it before.”

“I wasn't sure of it then.”

Laughter. Other than the translator, Scarpetta is the only woman present. She and the translator don't find the captain amusing, but the men do. Except Benton, who hasn't smiled once this day.

“Do you know the Italian for this word?” Captain Poma asks Scarpetta.

“How about the language of ancient Rome?” Scarpetta says. “Latin. Since most medical terminology is rooted in Latin.” She doesn't say it rudely, but is no-nonsense because she's well aware that his English becomes awkward only when it suits him.

His 3-D glasses stare at her, reminding her of Zorro. “Italian, please,” he says to her. “I never was so good in Latin.”

“I'll give you both. In Italian, ‘livid' is
livido,
which means bruised. ‘Mortis' is
morte,
or death. Livor mortis suggests an appearance of bruising that occurs after death.”

“It's helpful when you speak Italian,” he says. “And you do it so well.”

She doesn't intend to do it here, although she speaks enough Italian to get by. She prefers English during these professional discussions because nuances are tricky, and the translator intercepts every word anyway. This difficulty with language, along with political pressure, stress, and Captain Poma's relentless and enigmatic antics, add to what already is rather much a disaster that has nothing to do with any of these things. But rather, the killer in this case defies precedents and the usual profiles. He confounds them. Even the science has become a maddening source of debate—it seems to defy them, lie to them, forcing Scarpetta to remind herself and everyone else that science never tells untruths. It doesn't make mistakes. It doesn't deliberately lead them astray or taunt them.

This is lost on Captain Poma. Or perhaps he pretends. Perhaps he isn't serious when he refers to Drew's dead body as uncooperative and argumentative, as if he has a relationship with it and they are squabbling. He asserts that her postmortem changes may say one thing, and her blood alcohol and stomach contents say another, but contrary to what Scarpetta believes, food and drink should always be trusted. He is serious, at least about that.

“What Drew ate and drank is revealing of truth.” He repeats what he said in his impassioned opening statement earlier today.

“Revealing of a truth, yes. But not
your
truth,” Scarpetta replies, in a tone more polite than what she says. “Your truth is a misinterpretation.”

“I think we've been over this,” Benton says from the shadows of the front row. “I think Dr. Scarpetta has made herself perfectly clear.”

Captain Poma's 3-D glasses—and rows of other 3-D glasses—remain fixed on her. “I regret if I bore you with my reexamination, Dr. Wesley, but we need to find sense in this. So please indulge me. April seventeenth, Drew ate very bad lasagna and drank four glasses of very bad Chianti between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty at a tourist trattoria near the Spanish Steps. She paid the bill and left, then at the Piazza di Spagna parted company with her two friends, who she promised to rejoin at Piazza Navona within the hour. She never appeared. That much we know to be true. What remains a mystery is everything else.” His thick-framed glasses look at Scarpetta, then he turns in his seat and speaks to the rows behind him. “Partly because our esteemed colleague from the United States now says she's convinced Drew didn't die shortly after lunch or even that same day.”

“I've been saying this all along. Once again, I'll explain why. Since it seems you are confused,” Scarpetta says.

“We need to move on,” Benton says.

But they can't move on. Captain Poma is so respected by the Italians, is such a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants. In the press he is called the Sherlock Holmes of Rome, even though he is a physician, not a detective. Everyone, including the Comandante Generale of the Carabinieri, who sits in a back corner and listens more than he speaks, seems to have forgotten that.

“Under normal circumstances,” Scarpetta says, “Drew's food would have been fully digested several hours after she ate lunch, and her alcohol level certainly wouldn't have been as high as the point-two determined by toxicological testing. So, yes, Captain Poma, her stomach contents and toxicology suggest she died shortly after lunch. But her livor mortis and rigor mortis suggest—rather emphatically, let me add—that she died possibly twelve to fifteen hours after she ate lunch at the trattoria, and these postmortem artifacts are the ones we should pay the most attention to.”

“So here we are. Back to lividity.” He sighs. “This word I have so much trouble with. Please explain it again, since I seem to have so much trouble with what you call postmortem
artifacts
. As if we are archaeologists digging up ruins.” Captain Poma's chin rests on his hand again.

“Lividity, livor mortis, postmortem hypostasis, all the same thing. When you die, your circulation quits and the blood begins to accumulate in the small vessels due to gravity, rather much like sediment settling in a sunken ship.” She feels Benton's 3-D glasses looking at her. She dares not look at him. He isn't himself.

“Continue, please.” Captain Poma underlines something several times on his legal pad.

“If the body remains in a certain position long enough after death, the blood will settle accordingly—a postmortem artifact we call livor mortis,” Scarpetta explains. “Eventually, livor mortis becomes fixed, or set, turning that area of the body purplish-red, with patterns of blanching from surfaces pressing against it or constricting it, such as tight clothing. Can we see the autopsy photograph, please?” She checks a list on the podium. “Number twenty-one.”

The wall fills with Drew's body on a steel table in the morgue at Tor Vergata University. She is facedown. Scarpetta moves the laser's red dot over the back, over the purplish-red areas and blanching caused by lividity. The shocking wounds that look like dark red craters she has yet to address.

“Now, if you'll put the scene up, please. The one that shows her being placed into the body bag,” she says.

The three-dimensional photograph of the construction site fills the wall again, but this time there are investigators in white Tyvek suits, gloves, and shoe covers lifting Drew's limp, naked body into a sheet-lined black pouch on top of a stretcher. Around them, other investigators hold up additional sheets to block the view from the curious and the paparazzi at the perimeter of the scene.

“Compare this to the photograph you just saw. By the time she was autopsied some eight hours after she was found, her lividity was almost completely set,” Scarpetta says. “But here at the scene, it's apparent that lividity was in its early stages.” The red dot moves over pinkish areas on Drew's back. “Rigor was in its early stages as well.”

“You rule out the early onset of rigor mortis due to a cadervic spasm? For example, if she strenuously exerted herself right before death? Maybe she struggled with him? Since you've not mentioned this phenomenon so far?” Captain Poma underlines something on his legal pad.

“There's no reason to talk about a cadervic spasm,” Scarpetta says.
Why don't you throw in the kitchen sink?
she's tempted to ask. “Whether she strenuously exerted herself or not,” she says, “she wasn't fully rigorous when she was found, so she didn't have a cadervic spasm….”

“Unless rigor came and went.”

“Impossible, since it became fully fixed in the morgue. Rigor doesn't come and go and then come again.”

The translator suppresses a smile as she relays this in Italian, and several people laugh.

“You can see from this”—Scarpetta points the laser at Drew's body being lifted onto the stretcher—“her muscles certainly aren't stiff. They're quite flexible. I estimate she'd been dead less than six hours when she was found, possibly considerably less.”

“You're a world expert. How can you be so vague?”

“Because we don't know where she'd been, what temperatures or conditions she was exposed to before she was left in the construction site. Body temperature, rigor mortis, livor mortis can vary greatly from case to case and individual to individual.”

“Based on the condition of the body, are you saying it's
impossible
she was murdered soon after she had lunch with her friends? Perhaps while she was walking alone to Piazza Navona to join them?”

“I don't believe that's what happened.”

“Then once again, please. How do you explain her undigested food and point-two alcohol level? They imply she died soon after she ate lunch with her friends—not some fifteen, sixteen hours later.”

“It's possible not long after she left her friends, she resumed drinking alcohol and was so terrified and stressed, her digestion quit.”

“What? Now you're suggesting she spent time with her killer, possibly as much as ten, twelve, fifteen hours with him—that she was drinking with him?”

“He might have forced her to drink, to keep her impaired and easier to control. As in drugging somebody.”

“So he forced her to drink alcohol, perhaps all afternoon, all night, and into the early morning, and she was so frightened her food didn't digest? That's what you're offering us as a plausible explanation?”

“I've seen it before,” Scarpetta says.

 

The animated construction site after dark.

Surrounding shops, pizzerias, and ristorantes are lit up and crowded. Cars and motor scooters are parked on the sides of the streets, on the sidewalks. The rumble of traffic and the sounds of footsteps and voices fill the theater.

Suddenly, the lighted windows go dark. Then silence.

The sound of a car, and the shape of it. A four-door black Lancia parks at the corner of Via di Pasquino and Via dell'Anima. The driver's door opens and an animated man gets out. He is dressed in gray. His face has no features and, like his hands, is gray, from which everyone in the theater is to infer that the killer hasn't been assigned an age, race, or any physical characteristics. For the sake of simplicity, the killer is referred to as male. The gray man opens the trunk and lifts out a body wrapped in a blue fabric with a pattern that includes the colors red, gold, and green.