“Not right now,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I imagined how little my readers would respect me if they knew that sometimes I just don’t feel like touring one more police department, laboratory, morgue, firing range, cemetery, penitentiary, crime scene, law-enforcement agency, or anatomical museum.
When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires, I was given a proud tour of that city’s crime museum, a room of decapitated heads preserved in formalin inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious criminals made it into this gruesome gallery, and they had gotten what was coming to them, I supposed, as they stared back at me with milky eyes. In Salta, in northwestern Argentina, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. A few years ago in London, I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.
I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses, and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who would not take their antidepressants, helped undress fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes, labeled test tubes, wiped up blood, and saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted death because the stench of it clings to the back of one’s throat.
I don’t forget the faces of or the smallest details about people who are murdered. I’ve seen so many. I couldn’t possibly count how many, and I wish I could fill a huge room with them before it happened and beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system – or at least get a dog – or not park there or stay away from drugs. I feel the prick of pain when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenaged boy showing off and deciding to stand up in the back of a pickup truck. He didn’t notice it was about to drive under a bridge. I still can’t comprehend the randomness of the death of the man struck by lightning after he was handed a metal-tipped umbrella as he got off a plane.
My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that is protective but so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems the dead want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or on top of a stainless-steel table. The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder is not a mystery, and it is my mission to fight it with my pen.
It would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to Scotland Yard and every law enforcer in Christendom for me to be “tired” the day Linda Fairstein said she could arrange a tour.
“That’s very kind of Scotland Yard,” I told her. “I’ve never been there.”
The next morning, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and, as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper’s crimes. The fabled Victorian killer interested me mildly. I had never read a Ripper book in my life. I knew nothing about his homicides. I did not know his victims were prostitutes or how they died. I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta novel, I thought. If so, I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have new insights to offer about them.
John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes – what was left of them after 113 years. I cancelled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper.