Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(69)

“Imagine my surprise when I discovered her daughter is an Alexandria police officer,” I add.

“What do you need Greta for?” My secretary’s face is granite. “Why would you want to stir up that hornet’s nest?”

“Which hornet’s nest are we talking about?”

“Exactly. There have been so many. That’s what happens when your ego is as big as the great outdoors.”

“The information I have for Greta probably isn’t good anymore.” I’m learning not to answer Maggie’s impertinent observations and probes. “But I’ll share what I have with you anyway.” As I’m saying this I do it from my phone’s contact list. “Please see if you can track her down.”

I pass along the name of the biotech company Officer Fruge mentioned when we were going through Gwen Hainey’s townhome.

“Why don’t you ask Officer Fruge yourself how to get hold of her mother? That would be the quickest way to get the information,” Maggie suggests as if I’d never think of such a thing on my own.

“I don’t want to discuss the matter with anyone else at the moment.”

“Well, commonsense would dictate that Greta Fruge is best avoided.”

“She’s extremely good at what she does,” I reply. “More to the point, in the private sector she’s going to be familiar with new technologies that labs like ours might not have access to for years.”

Because of our prior relationship, I’m hoping Greta might help me out, especially since we’re in the midst of an ongoing opioid crisis that the public seems to have forgotten about during the pandemic. She’s also not na?ve about the potential for drugs being weaponized, and I remind Maggie that we’re having an uptick in overdoses that come up negative in toxicology testing.

“The fear is some new designer drug might be in the area.” I’m reminded unpleasantly that we don’t know what was laced into the Bordeaux I tasted.

My toxicology screen would have been negative had my blood been tested after I was poisoned last night. I could have been the fourth pending overdose of the day, one of those pouched dead bodies headed to a funeral home or crematorium.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to run back to things that didn’t serve you well.” Maggie means more than one thing.

She was by Elvin Reddy’s side for twenty years, and it must have devastated her when he resigned. I suspect she was just as upset when I took his place.

“I personally think reaching out to Doctor Fruge is reckless,” she says. “Unless you’re not worried about her talking all over Christendom.”

“I’m far more concerned about people dying from some new potent synthetic drug making the rounds. If you get hold of her, please give her my cell phone number. Ask her to call me as soon as possible,” I reply, and I open the Cammie Ramada file as Maggie returns to her office.

I begin skimming the initial report of investigation, and the medical examiner assigned to the case wasn’t my predecessor. It was one of my assistant chiefs, Doug Schlaefer, a highly competent forensic pathologist I’ve had no complaints about since starting here. But I don’t know him well enough to trust him.

In paperwork I’m reviewing, Elvin Reddy lists himself as a witness to the autopsy. But I don’t believe for a moment he was looking on, much less helping as Doug spent almost five hours at the table, and that’s a long haul. A straightforward external examination and dissection can be done in an hour, maybe two.

But to spend more than double that time tells me that Doug never treated the case as routine. From the start he had his share of concerns and doubts, finding the death complicated, perhaps deeply troubling. Or maybe he figured he’d end up in court for one reason or another and was careful to cover all bases.

Meanwhile his illustrious boss made himself scarce most of the time, passing through the morgue while playing host to the FBI, escorting agents in and out. Not witnessing the autopsy but fraternizing, in other words, based on what Wyatt told me a few minutes ago.

I have a pretty good idea what Elvin Reddy’s agenda was that morning beyond hobnobbing with the Feds or anyone else he might find beneficial. He was protecting his political ass after dropping by Daingerfield Island the night before.





CHAPTER 28


CHIEFS USUALLY DON’T RESPOND in person or involve themselves in investigations beyond lending oversight. Our staffs are supposed to enable us to run our offices appropriately, and it’s a sad fact that advancement in life can be inversely proportional to passion.

Or in the case of Elvin Reddy, some people never cared to begin with. During my Richmond years when I had the misfortune of supervising him, I recognized early on what he was. He had a heart of stone then and still does, never shedding a tear or getting his hands dirty. Yet for some reason he decided to make an appearance on the night of April 10.

Afterward, he passed along the hot potato to Doug Schlaefer, who conducted the postmortem examination. He decided Cammie Ramada’s death was an accidental drowning “due to an exercise-induced seizure due to temporal lobe epilepsy,” he wrote in his provisional report, dated April 12.

According to his detailed handwritten narrative, the fatal event occurred while the young Brazilian woman was jogging along the Mount Vernon Trail. This was something she did at the same time daily, a routine just like Gwen Hainey’s, and there are disturbing similarities in their violent deaths.