“You look tired,” she said. “What time did you come in this morning? I got here and found coffee made and you had already gone out somewhere.”
“Henrico’s got a tough one,” I said. “A boy who probably will be coming in.”
‘Eddie Heath.”
“Yes,” I said, perplexed. “How did you know?”
“He’s in the paper, too,” Rose replied, and I noticed that she had gotten new glasses that made her patrician face less haughty.
“I like your glasses,” I said. “A big improvement over the Ben Franklin frames perched on the end of your nose. What did it say about him?”
“Not much. The article just said that he was found off Patterson and that he had been shot. If my son were still young, no way I’d let him have a paper route.”
“Eddie Heath was not delivering papers when he was assaulted.”
“Doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t permit it, not these days. Let’s see.”
She touched a finger to the side of her nose. “Fielding’s downstairs doing an autopsy and Susan’s off delivering several brains to MCV for consultation. Other than that, nothing happened while you were out except the computer went down.”
“Is it still down?”
“I think Margaret’s working on it and is almost done,” Rose said.
“Good. When it’s up again, I need her to do a search for me. Codes to look for would be cutting, mutilation, cannibalism, bite marks. Maybe a free-format search for the words excised, skin, fresh – a variety of combination of them. You might try dismemberment, too, but I don’t think that’s what we’re really after.”
“For what part of the state and what time period?” Rose took notes.
“All of the state for the past five years. I’m particularly interested in cases involving children, but let’s not restrict ourselves to that. And ask her to see what the Trauma Registry’s got. I spoke with the director at a meeting last month and he seemed more than willing for us to share data.”
“You mean you also want to check victims who have survived?”
“If we can, Rose. Let’s check everything to see if we find any cases similar to Eddie Heath’s.”
“I’ll tell Margaret now and see if she can get started,” my secretary said on her way out.
I began going through the articles she had clipped from a number of morning newspapers. Unsurprisingly, much was being made of Ronnie Waddell’s allegedly bleeding from “his eyes, nose, and mouth.”
The local chapter of Amnesty International was claiming that his execution was no less inhumane than any homicide. A spokesman for the ACLU stated that the electric chair “may have malfunctioned, causing Waddell to suffer terribly,” and went on to compare the incident to the execution in Florida in which synthetic sponges used for the first time had resulted in the condemned man’s hair catching fire.
Tucking the news stories inside Waddell’s file, I tried to anticipate what pugilistic rabbits his attorney, Nicholas Grueman, would pull out of his hat this time. Our confrontations, though infrequent, had become predictable. His true agenda, I was about to believe, was to impeach my professional competence and in general make me feel stupid. But what bothered me most was that Grueman gave no indication that he remembered I had once been his student at Georgetown. To his credit, I had despised my first year of law school, had made my only B, and missed out on Law Review. l would never forget Nicholas Grueman as long as I lived, and it did not seem right that he should have forgotten me.
I heard from him on Thursday, not long after I had been informed that Eddie Heath was dead.
“Kay Scarpetta?” Grueman’s voice came over the line.
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes and knew from the pressure behind them that a raging front was rapidly advancing.
“Nicholas Grueman here. I’ve been looking over Mr. Waddell’s provisional autopsy report and have a few questions.”
I said nothing.
“I’m talking about Ronnie Joe Waddell.”
“What can I help you with?”
“Let’s start with his so-called almost tubular stomach. An interesting description, by the way. I’m wondering if that’s your vernacular or a bona fide medical term? Am I correct in assuming Mr. Waddell wasn’t eating?”