She laughed. I began pulling the jumpsuit over my clothes.
“Nobody’s even gotten close;” she told me. “No volunteers for that one.”
“You don’t have to go inside the thing to know what’s there,” Shaw added.
I changed into the black Reeboks and put on the baseball cap. Anderson was staring at-my Mercedes.,
“Maybe I should go work for the state,” she said.
I looked her up and down.
“I suggest you cover up if you’re going in there,” I said to her.
“I gotta make a couple calls,” she said, walking off.
“I don’t mean to tell people how to do their jobs,” Shaw said to me. “But what the hell’s going on here? We got a dead body right over there and the cops send in a little shit like that?”
His jaw muscles were clenching, his face bright red and dripping sweat.
“You know, you don’t make a dime in this business unless things are moving,” he went on. “And not a darn thing’s moved for more than two and a half hours:”
He was working so hard not to swear around me.
“Not that I’m not sorry about someone being dead,” he went on. “But I sure would like you folks to do your business and leave.” He scowled up at the sky again. “And that includes the media.”
“Mr. Shaw, what was being shipped inside the container?” I asked him.
“German camera equipment. You should know the seal on the container’s latch wasn’t broken. So it appears the cargo wasn’t tampered with:’
“Did the foreign shipper affix the seal?”
“That’s right.”
“Meaning the body, alive or dead, most likely was inside the container before it was sealed”’ I said.
“That’s what it looks like. The number matches the one on the entry filed by the Customs broker, nothing the least out of the ordinary. In fact, this cargo’s already been released by Customs. Was five days ago,” Shaw told me. “Which is why it was loaded straight on a chassis. Then we got a whiff and no way that container was going anywhere.”
I looked around, taking in the entire scene at once. A light breeze clinked heavy chains against cranes that had been offloading steel beams from the Eurocl#p, three hatches at a time, when all activity stopped. Forklifts and flatbed trucks had been abandoned. Dockworkers and crew had nothing to do and kept their eyes on us from the tarmac.
Some looked on from the bows of their ships and through the windows of deckhouses. Heat rose from oilstained asphalt scattered with wooden frames, spacers and
skids, and a CSX train clanked and scraped through a crossing beyond the warehouses. The smell of creosote was strong but could not mask the stench of rotting human flesh that drifted like smoke on the air.
. “Where did the ship set sail from?” I asked Shaw as I noticed a marked car parking next to my Mercedes.
“Antwerp, Belgium, two weeks ago;” he replied as he looked at the Sirius and the Euroclip. “Foreign flag vessels like all the rest we get. The only American flags we see anymore are if someone raises one as a courtesy,” he added with a trace of disappointment.
A man on the Euroclip was standing by the starboard side, looking back at us with binoculars. I thought it strange he was dressed in long sleeves and long pants, as warm as it was.
Shaw squinted. “Darn, this sun is bright.”
“What about stowaways?” I asked. “Although I can’t imagine anyone choosing to hide inside a locked container for two weeks on high seas.”
“Never had one that I know of. Besides, we’re not the first port of call. Chester, Pennsylvania, is. Most of our ships go from Antwerp to Chester to here, and then straight back to Antwerp. A stowaway’s most likely going to bail out in Chester instead of waiting till he gets to Richmond.
“We’re a niche port, Dr. Scarpetta,” Shaw went on.
I watched in disbelief as Pete Marino climbed out of the cruiser that had just parked next to my car.
“Last year, maybe a hundred and twenty oceangoing ships and barges called in the port,” Shaw was saying.