The Scarpetta Factor

“I’m curious. Why a vehicle?” Benton said, leaning back in his chair.

“I’m posing the possible scenario that she was sexually assaulted and murdered in a vehicle, then dumped and displayed where she was found,” Berger said.

“There’s nothing I observed during the external examination or during the autopsy that would tell me she was assaulted inside a vehicle,” Scarpetta answered.

“I’m thinking about the injuries she might have if she’d been sexually assaulted in the park, on the ground,” Berger said. “I’m asking if it’s been your experience when someone is sexually assaulted on a hard surface, such as the ground, that there would be bruises, abrasions.”

“Often I will find that.”

“As opposed to being raped, for example, in the backseat of a car, where the surface under the victim is more forgiving than frozen earth that’s covered with stones and sticks and other debris,” Berger continued.

“I can’t tell from the body whether she was assaulted in a vehicle,” Scarpetta repeated.

“Possible she got into a vehicle, was hit in the head, and then the person sexually assaulted her, was with her for a period of time before dumping her body where she was found.” Berger wasn’t asking. She was telling. “And her livor, her rigor, her temperature are, in fact, confusing and misleading because her body was barely clothed and exposed to near-freezing conditions. And if it’s true she died a lingering death, perhaps lingered for hours because of her head injury-that maybe livor was advanced because of that.”

“There are exceptions to the rules,” Scarpetta said. “But I don’t think I can offer the exceptions you seem to be looking for, Jaime.”

“I’ve done a lot of literature searches over the years, Kay. Time of death is something I deal with and argue in court fairly frequently. I’ve found a couple of interesting things. Cases of people who die lingering deaths, let’s say from cardiac failure or cancer, and livor mortis begins before they’re even dead. And again, there are cases on record of people going into instantaneous rigor. So, hypothetically, if for some reason Toni’s livor was already developing right before she died and she went into instantaneous rigor for some very unusual reason? And I believe that can happen in as phyxial deaths, and she did have a scarf tied around her neck, appears to have been strangled in addition to being hit with a blunt object. Wouldn’t it be possible that she’d really been dead a much shorter period than you’re assuming? Maybe dead for just a few hours? Fewer than eight hours?”

“In my opinion, that’s not possible,” Scarpetta said.

“Detective Bo

“Doing it now,” Bo

Benton turned up the volume on the VoiceStation as the recording began:

“Police operator five-one-nine, what is the emergency?”

“Um, my emergency is about the lady they found in the park this morning, the north side of the park off One hundred and tenth Street?” The voice was nervous, scared. A man who sounded young.

“What lady are you referring to?”

“The lady, um, the jogger who was murdered. I heard about it on the news…”

“Sir, is this an emergency?”

“I think so because I saw, I think I saw, who did it. I was driving by that area around five this morning and saw a yellow cab pulled over and a guy was helping what looked like a drunk woman out of the back. The first thing I thought was it was her boyfriend, like they’d been out all night. I didn’t get a good look. It was pretty dark and foggy.”

“It was a yellow cab?”

“And she was, like, drunk or passed out. It was real quick and, like I said, dark and a lot of mist and fog, really hard to see. I was driving toward Fifth Avenue and caught a glimpse. I had no reason to slow down, but I know what I saw, and it was definitely a yellow cab. The light on the roof was turned off, like when cabs are in use.”

“Do you have a tag number or the identification number painted on the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see a reason, um, but I saw on the news, they said it’s a jogger and I do remember this lady looked like she had on some type of ru

The WAV file stopped.

“I was contacted by dispatch, and I did speak to this gentleman over the phone and will follow up in person, and we’ve run a background on him,” Bo

Scarpetta envisioned the yellow paint chip she had recovered from Toni Darien’s hair, in the area of her head wound. She remembered thinking in the morgue when she was looking at the paint under a lens that the color reminded her of French’s mustard and yellow cabs.

“Harvey Fahley, a twenty-nine-year-old project manager at Kline Pharmaceuticals in Brooklyn, has an apartment in Brooklyn,” Bo

Scarpetta certainly didn’t know if the paint was automotive. It could be architectural, aerosol, from a tool, a bicycle, a street sign, from almost anything.

“What he told me is consistent with what he said on the nine-one-one recording,” Bo

It made sense why Berger was resistant to what Scarpetta believed was Toni’s time of death. If a cabdriver was the killer, it seemed more plausible that he was cruising and spotted Toni while she was out, possibly walking or jogging late last night. It seemed implausible that a cabdriver would have picked her up at some point on Tuesday, perhaps in the afternoon, and then kept her body until almost five o’clock this morning.

As Bo

The body doesn’t lie. Scarpetta reminded herself of what she’d learned during her earliest days of training: Don’t try to force the evidence to fit the crime. Toni Darien wasn’t murdered last night. She wasn’t murdered yesterday. No matter what Berger wanted to believe or any witness said.

“Did Harvey Fahley offer a more detailed description of the man who was allegedly helping the drunk-looking woman out of the taxi?” Benton asked, looking up at the ceiling, hands together, impatiently tapping his fingertips together.

“A man in dark clothing, a baseball cap, maybe glasses. He got the impression the man was slender, maybe an average-size person,” Bo

“What about the taxi driver?” Benton asked.

“He didn’t get a look but assumed there was one,” Bo

“Why would he assume that?” Benton asked.

“The only door open was the back door on the right side, as if the driver was still up front and the man and woman had been in the back. Harvey said if it had been the driver helping her out at a location like that, he probably would have stopped. He would have assumed the lady was in trouble. You don’t just leave a drunk passed-out person on the roadside.”