Patricia Cornwell - Cause Of Death

"Those bodies we'll cremate?"

"I would recommend that. Which is another reason why they need to come here to Richmond. We can use the crematorium in the anatomical division. Marino stuck his head inside the conference room.

"Doc?" He motioned me out.

I got up and we spoke in the hall.

"Benton wants us at Quantico now," he said.

"Well, it won't be now," I said.

I glanced back at the conference room. Through the doorway I could see Fielding making some point, while one of the other doctors looked tense and unhappy.

"You got an overnight bag with you?" Marino went on, and he knew I always kept one here, "is this really necessary?" I complained.

"I'd tell you if it wasn't."

"Give me just fifteen minutes to finish up this meeting."

I brought confusion and fear to closure as best I could, and told the other doctors I could be gone for days because I'd just been summoned to Quantico. But I would wear my pager. Then Marino and I took my car instead of his, since he had already made arrangements for repairs to the bumper Roche had hit. We sped north on 95 with the radio on, and by now we had heard the story so many times we knew it as well as the reporters.

In the past two hours, no one else had died at Old Point, at least not that anybody knew of, and the terrorists had let dozens of people go. These fortunate ones had been allowed to leave in twos and threes, according to the news.

Emergency medical personnel, state police and the FBI were intercepting them for examinations and interviews.

We arrived at Quantico at almost five, and Marines in camouflage were vigorously blasting the rapid approach of night. They were crowded in trucks and behind sandbags on the range, and when we passed close to a knot of them gathered by the road, I was pained by their young faces. I rounded a bend, where tall tan brick buildings suddenly rose above trees. The complex did not look military, and in fact, could have been a university were it not for the rooftops of antennae. A road leading to it stopped midway at an entrance gate where tire shredders bared teeth to people going the wrong way.

An armed guard emerged from his booth and smiled because we were no strangers, and he let us through. We parked in the big lot across from the tallest building, called Jefferson, which was basically the Academy's selfcontained downtown. Inside were the post office, the indoor range, dining hall and PX, with upper floors for dormitory rooms, including security suites for protected witnesses and spies.

New agents in khaki and dark blue were honing weapons in the gun-cleaning room. It seemed I had smelled the solvents all of my life, and could hear compressed air blasting through barrels and other parts whenever I wanted to in my mind. My history had become entwined with this place.

There was scarcely a corner that did not evoke emotion, for I had been in love here, and had brought into this building my most terrible cases. I had taught and consulted in their classrooms, and inadvertently given them my niece.

"God knows what we're about to walk into," Marino said as we got on the elevator.

"We'll just take it one inch at a time," I said as the new agents in their FBI caps vanished behind shutting steel doors, He pressed the button for the lower level, which had been intended as Hoover's bomb shelter in a different age. The profiling unit, as the world still called it, was sixty feet below ground, with no windows or any other relief from the horrors it found, I frankly had never understood how Wesley could endure it year after year, for whenever I sat in consultations that lasted more than a day, I was crazed.

I had to walk or drive my car. I had to get away.

"An inch at a times" Marino repeated as the elevator stopped. "There ain't no inch or mile that's going to help this scenario. We re a day late and a dollar short. We started putting the pieces together after the game was goddamn over."

"it isn't over," I said.

We walked past the receptionist and around a corner, where a hallway led to the unit chief's office.

"Yeah, well, let's hope it don't end with a bang. Shit, If only we had figured it out sooner." His stride was long and angry.

"Marino, we couldn't have known. There isn't a way."

"Well, I think we should have figured out something sooner. Like in Sandbridge, when you got the weird phone call and then everything else."

"Oh for God's sake," I said. "What? A phone call should have tipped us off that terrorists were about to seize a nuclear power plant?"

Wesley's secretary was new and I could not remember her name.

"Good afternoon," I said to her. "Is he in?"

"May I tell him who you are?" she asked with a smile.

We told her, and were patient as she rang him. They did not speak long.

When she looked back at us she said, "You may go in."

Wesley was behind his desk, and when we walked in he stood. He was typically preoccupied and somber in a gray herringbone suit and black and gray tie.

"We can go in the conference room," he said.

"Why?" Marino took a chair. "You got some other people coming?"

"Actually, I do," he replied.

I stood where I was and would not give him my eyes any longer than was polite.

"I'll tell you what," he reconsidered. "We can stay in here. Hold on." He walked to the door. "Emily, can you find another chair?"

We got settled while she brought one in, and Wesley was having a hard time keeping his thoughts in one place and making decisions. I knew what he was like when he was overwhelmed. I knew when he was scared.

"You know what's going on," he said as if we did.

"We know what everybody else does," I replied.

"We've heard the same news on the radio probably a hundred times."

"So how about starting from the beginning," Marino said. -CP amp;L has a district office in Suffolk," Wesley began.

"At least twenty people left there this afternoon in a bus for an alleged in-service in the mock control room of the Old Point plant. They were men, white, thirties to early forties, posing as employees, which they obviously are not.

And they managed to get into the main building where the control room is located."

"They were armed," I said.

"Yes. When it was time for them to go through the x-ray machines and other detectors at the main building, they pulled out semiautomatic weapons. As you know, people have been killed-we think at least three CP amp;L employees, including a nuclear physicist who just happened to be paying a site visit today and was going through security at the wrong time."

"What are their demands?" I asked, and I wondered how much Wesley had known and for how long. "Have they said what they want?"

He met my eyes. "That's what worries us the most. We don't know what they want."

"But they're letting people go," Marino said.

"I know. And that worries me, too," Wesley stated.

"Terrorists generally don't do that." His telephone rang.

"This is different." He picked up the receiver. "Yes," he said. "Good. Send him in."

Major General Lynwood Sessions was in the uniform of the Navy he served when he entered the office and shook hands with each of us. He was black, maybe forty-five and handsome in a way that was not to be dismissed. He did not take off his jacket or even loosen a button as he formally took a chair and set a fat briefcase beside him.

"General, thank you for coming," Wesley began.

"I wish it were for a happier reason," he said as he bent over to get out a file folder and legal pad.

"Don't we all," Wesley said. "This is Captain Pete Marino with Richmond, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia." He looked at me and held my gaze. "They work with us. Dr. Scarpetta, as a matter of fact, is the medical examiner in the cases that we believe are related to what is happening today."