The Body Farm

I left the hospital and went to my office, where I had not been for more than a week. My desk looked rather much as I feared it would, and I spent the next few hours trying to clear it while I tried to track down the state police officer who worked Lucy's accident. I left a message, then called Gloria Loving at Vital Records.

"Any luck?" I asked.

"I can't believe I'm getting to talk to you twice in one week. Are you across the street again?"

"I am." I couldn't help but smile.

"No luck so far, Kay," she said.

"We haven't found any record in California of a Mary Jo Steiner who died of SIDS. We're trying to code the death several other ways. Is it possible you could get a date and place of death?"

"I'll see what I can do," I said.

I thought of calling Denesa Steiner and ended up just staring at the phone.

I was about to do it when State Police Officer Reed, whom I had been trying to reach, returned my call.

"I wonder if you could fax me your report," I said to him.

"Actually, Hanover's got a lot of that."

"I thought the accident occurred on Ninety-five," I said, for the interstate was state police jurisdiction, no matter the locale.

"Officer Sinclair rolled up just as I did, so he gave me a hand. When the tags came back to you, I thought it was important to check that out." Oddly, it had not crossed my mind before this moment that tags coming back to me would have created quite a stir.

"What is Officer Sinclair's first name?" I asked.

"His initials are A. D." I believe. "

I was very fortunate that Officer Andrew D. Sinclair was in his office when I called him next. He told me Lucy was involved in a single-car accident that occurred while she was driving at a high rate of speed southbound on Ninety-five just north of the Henrico County line.

"How high a rate of speed?" I asked him.

"Seventy miles per hour."

"What about skid marks?"

"We found one thirty-two feet long where it appears she tapped her brakes and then went off the road."

"Why would she tap her brakes?"

"She was traveling at a high rate of speed and under the influence, ma'am. Could be she drifted off to sleep and suddenly was on somebody's bumper."

"Officer Sinclair, you need a skid mark of three hundred and twenty-nine feet to calculate that someone was driving seventy miles an hour. You have a thirty-two-foot skid mark here. I don't see how you can possibly calculate that she was driving seventy miles an hour."

"The speed limit on that stretch is sixty-five" was all he had to say.

"What was her blood alcohol?"

"Point one-two."

"I wonder if you could fax me your diagrams and report as soon as possible and tell me where my car was towed."

"It's at Covey's Texaco in Hanover. Off Route One. It's totaled, ma'am. If you can give me your fax number, I'll get you those reports right away."

I had them within the hour, and by using an overlay to interpret the codes I determined that Sinclair basically assumed Lucy was drunk and fell asleep at the wheel. When she suddenly awoke and tapped her brakes, she went into a skid, lost control of the car, left the pavement, and over corrected This resulted in her jerking back onto the road and flipping across two lanes of traffic before crashing upside down into a tree.

I had serious problems with his assumptions and one important detail. My Mercedes had anti lock brakes. When Lucy hit the brakes she should not have gone into the sort of skid Officer Sinclair had described.

I left my office and went downstairs to the morgue. My deputy chief. Fielding, and two young female forensic pathologists I had hired last year had cases on the three stainless steel tables. The sharp noise of steel against steel rose above the background thunder of water drumming into sinks, air blowing, and generators humming. The huge stainless steel refrigerator door opened with a loud suck as one of the morgue assistants rolled out another body.

"Dr. Scarpetta, can you look at this?" Dr. Wheat was a woman from Topeka. Her intelligent gray eyes peered out at me from behind a plastic face shield speckled with blood.

I went to her table.

"Does this look like soot in the wound?" She pointed a bloody gloved finger at a bullet wound to the back of the neck.

I bent close.

"It's got burned edges, so maybe it's searing. Was there clothing?"

"He didn't have a shirt on. It happened in his residence."

"Well, this is an ambiguous one. We need to get a microscopic."

"Entrance or exit?" Fielding asked as he studied a wound from his own case.

"Let me get your vote while you're here."

"Entrance," I said.

"Me, too. Are you going to be around?"

"In and out."

"In and out of town or in and out of here?"

"Both. I've got my Skypager."

"It's going all right?" he asked, his formidable biceps bunching as he cut through ribs.

"It's a nightmare, really," I said. It took half an hour to get to the Texaco gas station with the twenty-four-hour towing service that had taken care of my car. I spotted my Mercedes in a corner near a chain link fence, and the sight of its destruction tightened my stomach. I got-weak in the knees. The front end was crumpled up against the windshield, the driver's side gaping like a toothless mouth. Hydraulic tools had forced open the doors, which had been removed along with the center post. My heart beat hard as I got close, and I jumped when a deep drawl sounded behind me.

"May I help ya?"

I turned to face a grizzled old man wearing a faded red cap with purina over the bill.

"This is my car," I told him.

"I sure as hell hope you wasn't the one driving it."

I noticed the tires were not flat and both air bags had deployed.

"It sure is a shame." He shook his head as he stared at my hideously mangled Mercedes-Benz.

"Believe this is the first one of these I've seen. A 500E. Now, one of the boys here knows Mercedes and tells me Porsche helped design the engine in this one and there aren't but so many around. What is it? A '93? I don't reckon your husband got it around here."

I noticed that the left taillight was shattered, and near it was a scrape that was smudged with what appeared to be greenish paint. I bent over to get a closer look as my nerves began to tensely hum. The man talked on.

"Course, with as few miles as you had on it, it's more'n likely a '94. If you don't mind my asking, about how much would one like this cost? About fifty?"

"Did you tow this in?" I straightened up, my eyes darting over details that were sending off alarms, one right after another.

"Toby brought it in last night. I don't guess you'd know the horsepower."

"Was it exactly like this at the scene?"

The man looked slightly befuddled.

"For example," I went on, "the phone's off the hook."

"I guess so when a car's been flipping and slams into a tree."

"And the sunscreen's up."

He leaned over and peered in at the back windshield. He scratched his neck.

"I just figured it was dark because the glass is tinted. I didn't notice the screen was up. You wouldn't think someone'd put it up at night."

I carefully leaned inside to look at the rearview mirror. It had been flipped up to reduce the glare of headlights from the rear. I got keys out of my pocketbook and sat sidesaddle on the driver's seat.

"Now I wouldn't be doing that if I was you. That metal's like bunches of knives in there. And there's an awful lot of blood on the seats and ever' where I hung up the car phone and turned on the ignition. The phone sounded its tone to tell me it was working, and red lights went on warning me not to run down the battery. The radio and the CD player were off. Headlights and fog lamps were on. I picked up the phone and hit redial. It began to ring and a woman's voice answered.