I dug in my satchel and got out my portable phone and called Fielding.
“Her body just got here,” he told me. “Do you want me to start on her?”
“No,” I said. “Do you know where Chuck is?”
“He didn’t come in.”
“I just bet he didn’t,” I ‘said. “And if he does, sit him in your office and don’t let him go anywhere.”
41
At not quite 2:00 p.m. I pulled into the enclosed bay and parked out of the weather as two funeral home attendants loaded a pouched body into an old-model black hearse with blinds over the windows in back.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. How are you?”
“Who you got here?” I asked.
“The construction worker from Petersburg.”
They shut the tailgate and peeled off latex gloves.
“One who got hit by that train,” they went on, both talking at once. “Can’t imagine that. Not the way I want to go. You have a nice day.”
I used my card to unlock a side door and entered the well-lit corridor, where the floor was finished in biohazard epoxy and all activity was monitored by .closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the walls. Rose was irritably pushing the Diet Coke button on the drink machine when I walked into the break room in search of coffee.
“Damnation;” she blurted out. “I thought we’d gotten it fixed.”
She worked the change return in vain.
“Well, it’s doing the same damn thing. Doesn’t anybody do anything right anymore?” she complained away. “Do this, do that and still nothing works, just like state employees.”
She exhaled a loud, frustrated breath.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” I said with no conviction. “It’s okay, Rose.”
“I wish you could get some rest,” Rose sighed.
“I wish we all could.”
Staff mugs were hung on a peg board next to the coffee machine, and I looked for mine with no success.
“Try your bathroom, on the sink, that’s where you usually leave it,” Rose said. The reminder of the mundane minutiae of our normal . worlds was a welcome relief, no matter how brief it might be.
“Chuck won’t be back,” I said. “He’s going to be arrested, if he hasn’t already been.”
“The police have already been here. I won’t be shedding any tears.”
“I’ll be in the morgue. You know what I’ll be doing, so no phone calls unless it’s urgent,” I told her.
“Lucy called. She’s picking up Jo tonight.”
“I wish you’d come stay with me, Rose.”
“Thank you. I need to stay put.”
“It would make me feel better if you came home with me: ”
‘Dr. Scarpetta, if it’s not him, it’s always someone, isn’t it? Always someone evil out there. I have to live my life. I can’t be held hostage by fear and old age.”
In the locker room, I changed into a plastic apron and surgical gown. My fingers were clumsy with ties and I kept dropping things. I felt chilled and achy, as if I were coming down with the flu. I was grateful I could suit up in a face shield, mask, cap, booties, layers of gloves, and all that protected me from biological hazards and my emotions. I wanted no one to see me now. It was bad enough that Rose had.
Fielding was photographing Bray’s body when I walked into the autopsy room, where my two assistant chiefs and three residents were working on new cases because the day kept bringing in the dead. There was then the noise of running water and steel instruments against steel, muted voices and sounds. The telephones wouldn’t stop ringing.
There was no color in this steel place except the hues of death. Contusions and suffusion were purple-blue and livor mortis was pink. Blood was bright against the yellow of fat. Chest cavities were open like tulips and organs were in scales and on cutting boards, the smell of decay strong this day.
Two other cases were juveniles, one Hispanic, one white, both of them etched with crude tattoos and stabbed multiple times. Their faces of hate and anger were relaxed into those of the boys they might have been had life landed them on a different doorstep, perhaps with different genes. A gang had been their family, the street their home. They had died the way they lived.