Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)
Patricia Cornwell
DEDICATION
To Staci, you make it possible
&
To Mom, who couldn’t read my scary stuff
EPIGRAPH
“THE WORLD IS FULL OF OBVIOUS THINGS WHICH NOBODY BY ANY CHANCE EVER OBSERVES.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES
From the Greek autopsia: to see for oneself.
CHAPTER 1
A FIERY SUNSET BURNS OUT along the darkening horizon in Old Town Alexandria at not quite five P.M. the Monday after Thanksgiving.
The wind is kicking up and fitful, the moon shrouded by fog rolling in from the Potomac River. Trees and shrubbery shake and thrash, dead leaves swirling and skittering over the tarmac. Ominous clouds advance like an enemy army, the flags flapping wildly in front of my Northern Virginia headquarters.
I crouch down by the fireproof file cabinet, entering the combination on the fail-safe push-button lock. Opening the bottom drawer, I lift out the thick accordion folder I’ve been hauling around for many months. I smell the musty oldness of declassified government documents going back to the late 1940s, many heavily redacted and almost illegible.
I’ve got much to review before the next meeting of the National Emergency Contingency Coalition, better known as the Doomsday Commission, this time at the Pentagon. My White House–appointed responsibilities aren’t for the faint of heart. But they’re not nearly as pressing as what’s right in front of me, and I can’t stop thinking about the murdered woman downstairs in my cooler.
I envision the slashes to her neck, the bloody stumps left when her hands were severed, and I don’t know who she is. I know virtually nothing about her beyond what her dead body has to say, dumped like trash by railroad tracks on Daingerfield Island, several miles north of here. After spending the entire weekend on her, I’m no further along.
Not even a month on the job, and it’s been one ugly conundrum after another, accompanied by plenty of obstructions and hostility. It’s an understatement that my presence isn’t appreciated and I’ve been handed quite the mess. Taking off my lab coat, draping it over my office chair, I cover my microscope for the night as distant thunder cracks and reverberates, lightning shimmering.
From my second-story corner suite, I have quite the ringside seat for weather-related drama. The parking lot we share with the forensic labs has emptied quickly, streetlights blinking on blearily. Dozens of scientists, doctors and other staff hurry to their cars as rain spatters my windows.
I don’t know most people yet, and just as many don’t remember me from what seems another life ago. Millennials in particular weren’t around when I was the first woman chief medical examiner of Virginia. I ran the statewide system more than a decade before moving on. I assumed I’d left for good, never imagining I’d be back, and I hope I haven’t made the biggest mistake of my life.
On wall-mounted flat screens I can monitor live images of my building inside and out, and the night-shift security guard is walking through the cavernous vehicle bay this moment. I feel like a ghost or a spy as he yawns and scratches, unmindful of the closed-circuit TV cameras overhead. In his sixties, his first name is Wyatt but I don’t know his last.
He looks like a sheriff in his khaki uniform with brown pocket flaps, walking up the concrete ramp leading inside the morgue, pressing a button on the cinder block wall. The massive door begins rolling down in the swirling exhaust of the hearse driving out, probably the suicide from Fairfax County, based on bodies scheduled for release.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” My officious British secretary interrupts my ruminations, opening the door between her office and mine. “So sorry to disturb you.” She’s not sorry in the least, rarely bothering to knock.
“I’m about to head out, and you should do the same.” I move window to window, closing the blinds.
“I just spoke to August Ryan,” she announces. “He wanted you to know that a situation has come up requiring your assistance.”
“Is this about the woman downstairs?” I presume, and the U.S. Park Police investigator and I haven’t talked since Friday night.
I’m hoping he finally has new information. The case is getting traction in the media, and rumors and theories are on the Internet. It’s almost impossible to solve a violent crime when you don’t know the victim’s identity.
“He needs you to meet him somewhere.” My secretary acts as if I answer to her instead of the other way around.
Dressed in her typical couture of a tweedy skirt suit and loafers, her steely gray hair styled like the 1950s, Maggie Cutbush eyes me disapprovingly over the wire-rim glasses perched on the tip of her sharp nose.
“He needs to meet me for what reason—” I start to say.
“He’ll explain,” she interrupts.
“Why didn’t you just put him on the phone with me? He could have called directly for that matter. I gave him my cell number at the scene Friday night.”
“August and I have worked together for years. He was polite enough to check with me first, and will call you when he’s in his car,” she says in her lovely London accent, having zero respect for a woman in charge.
Certainly not a second-generation Italian who grew up poor in Miami. I collect my coat from the coatrack. I’m eager to get out of here, and not because of present company and the weather. Today is my niece’s birthday, a difficult one with all that’s gone on, and I’ve planned a quiet celebration at home, just family.