“How old are your children?” I asked.
“Well, my wife and I keep trying.” He cleared his throat and averted his eyes, but not before I saw his pain.
“How about you? You got children?”
“I’m divorced and have a niece who’s like my own,” I said.
“She’s a senior at UVA and currently doing an internship at Quantico.”
“You must be mighty proud of her.”
“I am,” I replied, my mood shadowed again by images and voices, by secret fears about Lucy’s life.
“Now I know you want to talk to me some more about Emily Steiner, and I’ve still got her brain here if you want to see it.”
“I very much do.” It is not uncommon for pathologists to fix brains in a ten percent solution of formaldehyde called formalin. The chemical process preserves and firms tissue. It makes further studies possible, especially in cases involving trauma to this most incredible and least understood of all human organs. The procedure was sadly utilitarian to the point of indignity, should one choose to view it like that. Jenrette went to a sink and retrieved from beneath it a plastic bucket labeled with Emily Steiner’s name and case number. The instant Jenrette removed her brain from its formalin bath and placed it on a cutting board, I knew the gross examination would tell me only more loudly that something was very wrong with this case.
“There’s absolutely no vital reaction,” I marveled, fumes from the formalin burning my eyes. Jenrette threaded a probe through the bullet track.
“There’s no hemorrhage, no swelling. Yet the bullet didn’t pass through the pons. It didn’t pass through the basal ganglia or any other area that’s vital.” I looked up at him.
“This is not an immediately lethal wound.”
“I can’t argue that one.”
“We should look for another cause of death.”
“I sure wish you’d tell me what. Dr. Scarpetta. I’ve got tox testing going on. But unless that turns up something significant, there’s nothing I can think of that could account for her death. Nothing but the gunshot to her head.”
“I’d like to look at a tissue section of her lungs,” I said.
“Come on to my office.”
I was considering that the girl might have been drowned, but as I sat over Jenrette’s microscope moments later moving around a slide of lung tissue, questions remained unanswered.
“If she drowned,” I explained to him as I worked, “the alveoli should be dilated. There should be edema fluid in the alveolar spaces with disproportionate autolytic change of the respiratory epithelium.” I adjusted the focus again.
“In other words, if her lungs had been contaminated by fresh water, they should have begun decomposing more rapidly than other tissues. But they didn’t.”
“What about smothering or strangulation?” he asked.
“The hyoid was intact. There were no petechial hemorrhages.”
“That’s right.”
“And more importantly,” I pointed out, “if someone tries to smother or strangle you, you’re going to fight like hell. Yet there are no nose or lip injuries, no defense injuries whatsoever.”
He handed me a thick case file.
“This is everything,” he said. While he dictated Max Ferguson’s case, I reviewed every report, laboratory request, and call sheet pertaining to Emily Steiner’s murder. Her mother, Denesa, had called Dr. Jenrette’s office anywhere from one to five times daily since Emily’s body had been found. I found this rather remarkable.
“The decedent was received inside a black plastic pouch sealed by the Black Mountain Police. The seal number is 445337 and the seal is intact” — “Dr. Jenrette?” I interrupted. He removed his foot from the pedal of the dictating machine.
“You can call me Jim,” he said again.
“It seems her mother has called you with unusual frequency.”
“Some of it is us playing telephone tag. But yes.” He slipped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“She’s called a lot.”
“Why?”
“Mostly she’s just terribly distraught. Dr. Scarpetta. She wants to make sure her daughter didn’t suffer.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I told her with a gunshot wound like that, it’s probable she didn’t.
I mean, she would have been unconscious. uh, probably was when the other things were done. ” He paused for a moment. Both of us knew that Emily Steiner had suffered. She had felt raw terror. At some point she must have known she was going to die.