Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)(45)

“I found a puncture in the foil and the cork that are visible under low magnification.” Rex’s voice inside the car as we turn left onto H Street. “Possibly random product tampering but based on what I know, it’s more likely what we’re talking about is a targeted attempt.”

“Are the punctures visible to the naked eye?” I remember lifting the bottle out of the refrigerator, carrying it upstairs.

But I didn’t examine the foil or the cork carefully. Truth is, I scarcely looked at them, period.

“They’d be really easy to miss,” Rex says. “You’d almost have to be expecting them.”

It’s a good thing I happened to use a nondestructive two-prong puller, he adds. Otherwise the injection site would have been obliterated by the more typical corkscrew’s metal helix, the worm.





CHAPTER 18

CONCRETE BARRIERS AND IRON fencing have turned the White House grounds and its immediate surrounds into a fortress or a prison. Rising high above it all, the Washington Monument seems to give terrorists the finger.

“The poison was injected through the foil and the cork,” Rex summarizes, and I should have paid closer attention to the bottle when I was getting ready to open it.

“I don’t remember it looking tampered with in the least,” I reply, and Benton shakes his head no as he drives.

He didn’t, either. But of course the Bordeaux looked perfectly fine. That’s the reason for using some type of syringe to sabotage it. No one is supposed to notice that they’re about to die.

“I admit that tampering was the furthest thing from my mind. And as expertly done as it was, I might have missed it anyway,” I explain without making excuses. “An injection site isn’t going to jump out at anyone, I don’t care who it is. But more important moving forward is the tox screen. Do we have any idea what we’re dealing with, Rex?”

“That’s the bad news,” he says, and Lafayette Square is fenced in and empty, military trucks lining the street. “It’s an unknown substance so far.”

“What about carfentanil?”

The synthetic opioid is ten thousand times stronger than morphine, and I’ve worked many overdose fatalities where it’s been added to heroin and other street drugs.

“The Russians are quite facile with carfentanil.” Benton speaks up again.

He reminds us that in 2002 they pumped what’s believed to be an aerosolized version of it into a Moscow theater seized by armed Chechens. The so-called sleeping gas did the trick but not without killing more than a hundred hostages.

“Based on how quickly you were overcome, Kay,” Rex replies, “that’s the first thing that came to mind for me as well. But like I said, the conventional screens didn’t pick up anything. And specifically, I checked for carfentanil.”

It was negative, he repeats, and unfortunately what that suggests is there’s something new we need to be extremely concerned about. That may take a while to determine, difficult toxicology cases often dragging on endlessly, and Officer Fruge’s mother comes to mind.

She may not have been my favorite person when we worked together years ago. But she’s gifted. She thinks out side the box. As I’m pondering this I’m telling Rex that we’ll want the bottle, the foil, the cork checked for fingerprints and DNA.

“Then everything goes to the trace evidence lab,” I add to the list.

Also, samples of the wine, and I explain we’ll want to focus especially on any particulate that might have settled to the bottom of the bottle.

“Thanks, and keep me updated, but I probably won’t be available for the next few hours,” I let him know, and as a rule it wouldn’t be up to the chief toxicologist to examine evidence first the way he did.

I wouldn’t be instructing him where it goes next, to whom and why, and we’d better hope chain of custody never becomes a question. Because when Marino stopped at Rex’s house in the middle of the night, that was the end of anything remotely resembling proper procedures.

Driving slowly along 17th Street, we’re getting close, and I dig in my briefcase for my lipstick, giving myself a quick touch-up in the visor mirror. The Hay-Adams hotel is coming up grandly on our right, one of Benton’s and my favorite places to stay. I look out wistfully at its columned portico, the four flags fluttering over it in the fog.

National guardsmen and police on every corner are ready for war, armored vehicles strategically placed. The Ellipse is fenced-in like most everything else, the national Christmas tree up but not lighted yet. I know where we’re going but not who we’re meeting or why. Benton hasn’t said anything that might give me a heads-up about what’s expected of us.

But it’s hopeless quizzing him further as we near the first checkpoint, the White House complex gleaming like an eggshell in the overcast.

Across from it is the soaring gray granite Louvre-like Eisenhower Executive Office Building with its cast-iron roof sculptures and window frames.

We stop in front of barricades, the windows humming down again. National guardsmen in camouflage are no-nonsense as we show our IDs while a K-9 sniffs around. More radio calls are made, and we’re allowed to move on, not getting very far before going through the same routine again.

At last, we’re on the White House grounds behind thirteen-foot-high black iron fencing, the security more extreme than I remember. The guard shack ahead has pop-up steel barricades and tire shredders, plenty of ominous warning signs posted. I can see the parking places where we’re going, and from here all of them look full.