Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)(9)

He’s right but not without a few rules and conditions. I let him know how this would have to be engineered. He’s worked for me in the past, and as scary as it may sound to both of us, he needs to work for me again. It’s that simple if he’s to legitimize driving me around.

“Or showing up at the morgue. Or the labs. Or court,” I’m saying. “Anywhere except the privacy of our homes and family gatherings.”

This is nothing new but it’s been years since we’ve been professionally connected. For sure it will complicate our lives now more than ever with my sister in the mix.

“I’m not talking about a position that requires you to have an office in my building or spend much time there,” I con tinue. “I don’t want either one of us feeling controlled or crowded.” I don’t need that again.

“Except what if I want an office? You know, so I have a quiet workspace when I’m helping out, and people can’t hear every word I say over the phone,” Marino says, his eyes scanning the mirrors.





CHAPTER 4

I DON’T HAVE TO BE a mind reader to realize what Marino is angling for, a private space, a slice of his old life back. Maybe a place of his own where he can get away from his wife now and then.

“And you need someone around who’s got your back,” he adds, and he’s not wrong.

“We can hire you as a private contractor, a forensic operations specialist.” I make up the title as I’m sitting in my heated leather seat. “You can help give oversight to the investigators. But you answer to me, working as needed and paid accordingly.”

“How much?”

“As little as possible. Pro bono is much appreciated.”

“Sure.” He shrugs, the rain billowing in sheets, and we have a deal.

Effective immediately, he has an official role that’s reason able and defensible. I begin sharing what I know about Friday night’s homicide, finding the video clip the commuter train’s engineer gave me. The brief seconds of footage were recorded by the outward-facing camera as the two-hundred-ton locomotive sped through the dark wooded park on Daingerfield Island.

Shoulder to shoulder, Marino and I look at my phone’s display as we wait at a red light behind an endless line of traffic. I detect the citrusy scent of his Acqua di Parma cologne as we watch the train’s headlamp illuminate the tracks around a bend . . . barreling down at more than a hundred miles an hour . . . suddenly braking to the deafening noise of screeching steel and compressed air . . .

As a flash of the body goes past, naked and exposed, sprawled on the rocky ballast next to the tracks, arms and legs spread like a snow angel . . . Then nothing but the black hulking shapes of trees, of distant lights blurring past as the train comes to a hissing, clanking stop like a petulant dragon.

“I can’t tell if that’s her but it looks like she has a tattoo on her belly?” Marino creeps ahead in his truck as the light turns green. “I can’t make it out but that’s not good. Gwen’s got a tattoo. She and her ex got the same one together.”

“A tattoo of what?” I ask, the wipers thump-thumping, thunder percussing.

Looming over us in the roiling mist is the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, its soaring tower up-lit red and green, and barely visible.

“A jellyfish,” Marino says.

“I’m going to show you a few pictures I took with my phone right before you picked me up.”

Skimming through the photographs I took inside the cooler, I find a close-up of the dead woman’s tattoo. The jellyfish is multicolored with cartoon eyes, its long tentacles salaciously trailing down her belly. I was careful not to cut through them when making a small incision in her upper abdomen.

No matter what new technologies come down the pike, I’m still going to insert a thermometer into the liver. It’s the most reliable way to get a core body temperature at the scene.

“Crap.” Marino glances at the photograph, scowling as he drives. “I mean, it’s not like there are many people around here with something like that.”

Then I show him a close-up of her dead face.

“I think so,” he says. “I’m pretty sure.”

“No releasing anything until we confirm identity with dental records or DNA,” I remind him. “And of course, her next of kin will have to be notified. But it’s likely that your neighbor Gwen Hainey is the woman who was murdered last Friday night.”

“This is bad,” is all he says.

Looking out at the stormy darkness, I halfway listen to the quiet chatter on the scanner, catching codes and phone numbers. I’ve been around long enough to know when the police are more guarded than usual about who might be eavesdropping. But anybody paying close attention can glean that something serious has happened.

“How long do you think she’d been dead by the time you got there?” Marino asks.

“Unclothed, slender with very little body fat, and she’d lost most of her blood,” I reply.

Flipping back pages in my notebook, I illuminate my small snarly writing with the flashlight app on my phone.

“She was going to cool more quickly anyway, especially in conditions similar to refrigeration,” I begin to explain.

For the most part, postmortem changes would have been slowed by the cold. It was forty-eight degrees when I examined the body at the scene, and rigor and livor mortis were in the early stages. As I fill in the details, I’m texting August Ryan that I’m caught in terrible traffic. Creeping along in Marino’s strobing war wagon with its oversize tires and multiple fog lamps, we might look formidable but we’re not getting anywhere any faster than anyone else.