“About two miles over that way.” He pointed east.
“In the church cemetery.”
“This is the church where her meeting was?”
“Third Presbyterian. If you view the lake area as being sort of like the Washington Mall, you got the church at one end and the Steiner crib at the other with about two miles in between.”
I recognized the ranch-style house from the photographs I had reviewed at Quantico yesterday morning. It seemed smaller, as so many edifices do when you finally see them in life. Situated on a rise far back from the street, it was nestled on a lot thick with rhododendrons, laurels, sour-woods, and pines. The gravel sidewalk and front porch had been recently swept, and clustered at the edge of the driveway were bulging bags of leaves. Denesa Steiner owned a green Infiniti sedan that was new and expensive, and this rather surprised me. I caught a glimpse of her arm in a long black sleeve holding the screen door for Marino as I drove away. The morgue in Asheville Memorial Hospital was not unlike most I had seen. Located in the lowest level, it was a small bleak room of tile and stainless steel with but one autopsy table that Dr. Jenrette had rolled close to a sink. He was making the Y incision on Ferguson’s body when I arrived at shortly after nine. As blood became exposed to air, I detected the sickening sweet odor of alcohol.
“Good morning. Dr. Scarpetta,” Jenrette said, and he seemed pleased to see me.
“Greens and gloves are in the cabinet over there.”
I thanked him, though I would not need them, for the young doctor would not need me. I expected this autopsy to be all about finding nothing, and as I looked closely at Ferguson’s neck, I got my first validation. The reddish pressure marks I had observed late last night were gone, and we would find no deep injury to underlying tissue and muscle. As I watched Jenrette work, I was humbly reminded that pathology is never a substitute for investigation. In fact, were we not privy to the circumstances, we would have no idea why Ferguson had died, except that he had not been shot, stabbed, or beaten, nor had he succumbed to some disease.
“I guess you noticed the way the socks smell that he had stuffed in his bra,” Jenrette said as he worked.
“I’m wondering if you found anything to correspond with that, like a bottle of perfume, some sort of cologne?” He lifted out the block of organs. Ferguson had a mildly fatty liver.
“No, we didn’t,” I replied.
“And I might add that fragrances are generally used in scenarios like this when there’s more than one person involved.” Jenrette glanced up at me.
“Why?”
“Why bother if you’re alone?”
“I guess that makes sense.” He emptied the stomach contents into a carton.
“Just a little bit of brownish fluid,” he added.
“Maybe a few nut like particles. You say he flew back to Asheville not long before he was found?”
“That’s right.”
“So maybe he ate peanuts on the plane. And drank. His STAT alcohol’s point one-four.”
“He probably also drank when he got home,” I said, recalling the glass of bourbon in the bedroom.
“Now, when you talk about there being more than one person in some of these situations, is this gay or straight?”
“Often gay,” I said.
“But the pornography is a big clue.”
“He was looking at nude women.”
“The magazines found near his body featured nude women,” I restated his remark, for we had no way of knowing what Ferguson had been looking at. We knew only what we had found.
“It’s also important that we didn’t see any other pornography or sexual paraphernalia in his house,” I added.
“I guess I would assume there would be more of it,” Jenrette said as he plugged in the Stryker’s saw.
“Usually, these guys keep trunk loads of it,” I said.
“They never throw it out. Frankly, it bothers me quite a lot that we found only four magazines, all of them current issues.”
“It’s like he was really new at this.”
“There are many factors that suggest he was inexperienced,” I replied.