“Where are we heading?” Katz asked me.
“The room at the end of the hall.” I relieved him of the window fan.
“How was your trip?”
“More traffic than I bargained for. Tell me what all’s been done to the body.”
“He was cut down and covered with a wool afghan. I have not examined him.”
“I promise not to delay you too much. It’s a lot easier now that I’m not bothering with a tent.”
“What do you mean, a tent?” Marino frowned as we entered the bedroom.
“I used to put a plastic tent over the body and do the fuming inside it. But too much vapor and the skin gets too frosted. Dr. Scarpetta, you can set the fan in that window.” Katz looked around.
“I might have to use a part of water. It’s a bit dry in here.”
I gave him as much history as we had at this point.
“Do you have any reason to think this is something other than an accidental auto erotic asphyxiation?” he asked.
“Other than the circumstances,” I replied, “no.”
“He was working that little Steiner girl’s case.”
“That’s what we mean by circumstances,” Marino said.
“Lord, if that hasn’t been in the news all over.”
“We were in Quantico this morning meeting about that case,” I added.
“And he comes straight home and then this.” Katz looked thoughtfully at the body.
“You know, we found a prostitute in a Dumpster the other week and got a good outline of a hand on her ankle. She’d been dead four or five days.”
“Kay?” Wesley stepped into the doorway.
“May I see you for a minute?”
“And you used this thing on her?” Marino’s voice followed us into the hall.
“I did. She had painted fingernails, and as it turns out, they’re real good, too.”
“For what?”
“Prints.”
“Where does this go?”
“Doesn’t matter much. I’m going to fume the entire room. I’m afraid it’s going to mess up the place.”
“I don’t think he’s gonna complain.” Downstairs in the kitchen, I noticed a chair by the phone where I supposed Mote had sat for hours waiting for us to arrive. Nearby on the floor was a glass of water and an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts.
“Take a look,” said Wesley, who was accustomed to searching for odd evidence in odd places. He had filled the double sink with foods he had gotten out of the freezer. I moved closer to him as he opened the folds of a small, flat package wrapped in white freezer paper. Inside were shrunken pieces of frozen flesh, dry at the edges and reminiscent of yellowed waxy parchment.
“Any chance I’m thinking the wrong thing?” Wesle/s tone was grim.
“Good God, Benton,” I said, stunned.
“They were in the freezer on top of these other things. Ground beef, pork chops, pizza.” He nudged packages with a gloved finger.
“I was hoping you’d tell me it’s chicken skin. Maybe something he uses for fish bait or who knows what.”
“There are no feather holes, and the hair is fine like human hair.”
He was silent.
“We need to pack this in dry ice and fly it back with us,” I said.
“That won’t be tonight.”
“The sooner we can get immunological testing done, the sooner we can confirm it’s human. DNA will confirm identity.” He returned the package to the freezer.
“We need to check for prints.”
“I’ll put the tissue in plastic and we’ll submit the freezer paper to the labs,” I said.
“Good.” We climbed the stairs. My pulse would not slow down. At the end of the hallway, Marino and Katz stood outside the shut door. They had threaded a hose through the hole where the doorknob had been, the contraption humming as it pumped Super Glue vapors into Ferguson’s bedroom.
Wesley had yet to mention the obvious, so finally I did.
“Benton, I didn’t see any bite marks or anything else someone may have tried to eradicate.”
“I know,” he said.
“We’re almost done,” Katz told us when we got to them.
“A room this size and you can get by with less than a hundred drops of Super Glue.”
“Pete,” Wesley said, “we’ve got an unexpected problem.”