Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(96)

“I’m here at the office, safe and sound,” I tell her as I walk past the empty autopsy suite. “And Marino and your mother are going out to dinner.”

“The helicopter is on its way back to the hangar, and I’m headed home,” Lucy says in my wireless earpiece. “How long will you be?”

“Not terribly long, and it’s going to be just you and me for dinner if you don’t mind waiting a bit.” I walk past the anthropology lab, the bones in their big pot softly clattering.

“We’ve got everything for tacos,” Lucy volunteers, and she’s not offered to help with a meal in a while.

“That sounds wonderful.” I open the fire-exit door, heading upstairs to an isolated wing that houses the scanning electron microscope.

Momentarily, I’m following the second-floor corridor, wondering who knows I’m about to be a thing of the past. Through observation windows, I glance at preoccupied scientists in the DNA clean rooms and labs with their airlocks and special ventilation, everybody covered in PPE. A few look up at me as I walk past, and it’s possible they don’t know the news.

Most assuredly they will by morning when I return to clear out my office. Ahead is the latent fingerprints lab, and I may as well check on one of my cases while I’m in the area. Veteran examiner Andy Patient is working under a chemical hood, gloved up and masked, trying to rehydrate the shriveled tips of fingers removed from mummified remains.

They were discovered in an abandoned barn not long after I started here, and I’ve yet to find evidence of violence. But the victim, an older white male, was naked when he died, his clothing strewn about as if he disrobed in a hurry. While that might look suspicious, it’s not necessarily.

As irrational as it seems, often that’s what people do when they’re freezing to death. They have the false sense of being too warm and begin to undress. I’m suspicious he may have sought shelter in the barn during cold weather and died from exposure. But who was he, and what was he doing on a deserted farm?

“Hi, Andy.” I stop in the doorway. “How are things going?”

“I’m optimistic.” He turns around, a wizened fingertip gripped in the forceps he holds in one hand, a syringe in the other.

If he knows I’ve been fired, he doesn’t let on.

“I think we’ll have prints with enough characteristics to run through IAFIS.” He refers to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

“Let’s hope we get lucky since we weren’t with DNA,” I reply as he injects a sodium carbonate solution into what might be the tip of a thumb as best I can tell from where I’m standing.

I examined the remains days ago, noting that muscles and ligaments had decomposed but there was cutaneous tissue and visible friction ridges. Recommending we try restoring the fingertips, I cut them off at the middle phalanges. Since then Andy has been working on the desiccated digits, trying to get prints, still to no avail.

“We do have an update, a possibility of who this might be.” He places the fingertip in a petri dish. “The police say an eighty-three-year-old man wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester almost two years ago.”

A widower suffering from dementia, he has kids who don’t live here or care, it seems. Delusional and paranoid, he believed the government was after him, and had tried to escape multiple times in the past.

“Well, I think you may have figured it out,” I say to Andy. “And that would explain why his DNA’s not in CODIS.”

“What’s really bad is the barn where he was found isn’t even two miles from the nursing home.” Taking off his gloves and mask, he walks over to me, his blue eyes tired behind his glasses, the stubble on his chin salty white. “I’m getting the impression nobody looked all that hard. What it sounds like is he wandered off in his confused state and sought shelter.”

“What time of year was it?”

“February during a cold snap,” he says, and how terribly sad. “Do you think you’ll sign him out as an accident?” he asks, and I don’t answer.

I won’t be around to do that. The next chief will have to but I act as if business will go on as usual.

“We’ll see what else we find out,” I reply.

“I have a feeling this is going to end up in a lawsuit.” He takes off his lab coat.

“Yes, I’m sure the kids who had no use for him will go after the nursing home,” I reply, walking off.





CHAPTER 38


WHERE I’M HEADED IS in a wing of its own for good reason.

The lab is windowless, its walls, floor and ceiling thick concrete reinforced with steel to minimize vibrations or anything else that might interfere with highly sensitive instruments. When I walk in, Rex is seated at the scanning electron microscope (SEM) with trace evidence examiner Lee Fishburne.

“She’s never been known for her modesty,” Rex says instantly, and I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Greta Fruge,” he explains. “I was on the phone with her a little while ago.”

“She can be a showboat but is one hell of a toxicologist,” Lee volunteers, and I remember him from my early years when I was in Richmond.

His thick black hair is now a white crescent around the back of his head, and he’s thinner, a little stooped.