Patricia Cornwell - The Body Farm

On the sixteenth of October, shadowy deer crept to the edge of dark woods beyond my window as the sun peeked over the cover of the night.

Plumbing above and below me groaned, and one by one other rooms went bright as sharp tattoos from ranges I could not see riddled the dawn.

I had gone to sleep and gotten up to the sound of gunfire. It is a noise that never stops in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Academy is an island surrounded by Marines. Several days a month I stayed on the Academy's security floor, where no one could call me unless I wanted them to or follow me after too many beers in the Boardroom.

Unlike the Spartan dormitory rooms occupied by new agents and visiting police, in my suite were TV, kitchen, telephone, and a bathroom I did not have to share. Smoking and alcohol were not allowed, but I suspected that the spies and protected witnesses typically sequestered here obeyed the rules about as well as I did.

As coffee heated in the microwave, I opened my briefcase to retrieve a file that had been waiting for me when I had checked in last night. I had not reviewed it yet for I could not bring myself to wrap my mind around such a thing, to take such a thing to bed. In that way I had changed.

Since medical school, I had been accustomed to exposing myself to any trauma at any hour. I had worked around the clock in emergency rooms and performed autopsies alone in the morgue until dawn. Sleep had always been a brief export to some dark, vacant place I rarely later recalled. Then gradually over the years something perniciously shifted. I began to dread working late at night, and was prone to bad dreams when terrible images from my life popped up in the slot machine of my unconscious.

Emily Steiner was eleven, her dawning sexuality a blush on her slight body, when she wrote in her diary two Sundays before, on October 1:

Oh, I'm' so happy! Its almost 1 in the morning and Mom doesnt know I'm' writing in my diary because I'm' in bed with the flash light. We went to the cover dish supper at the church and Wren was there! I could tell he noticed me. Then he gave me a fireball! I saved it while he wasn't looking. Its in my secret box. This afternoon we have youth group and he wants me to meet him early and not tell anyone!

At three-thirty that afternoon, Emily left her house in Black Mountain, just east of Asheville, and began the two-mile walk to the church. After the meeting, other children recalled seeing her leave alone as the sun slipped below the foothills at six p. m. She veered off the main road, guitar case in hand, and took a shortcut around a small lake. Investigators believed it was during this walk she encountered the man who hours later would steal her life. Perhaps she stopped to talk to him. Perhaps she was unaware of his presence in the gathering shadows as she hurried home.

In Black Mountain, a western North Carolina town of seven thousand people, local police had worked very few homicides or sexual assaults of children.

They had never worked a case that was both. They had never thought about Temple Brooks Gault of Albany, Georgia, though his face smiled from Ten Most Wanted lists posted across the land.

Notorious criminals and their crimes had never been a concern in this picturesque part of the world known for Thomas Wolfe and Billy Graham.

I did not understand what would have drawn Gault there or to a frail child named Emily who was lonely for her father and a boy named Wren.

But when Gault had gone on his murderous spree in Richmond two years before, his choices had seemed just as devoid of rationality. In fact, they still did not make sense.

Leaving my suite, I passed through sun-filled glass corridors as memories of Gault's bloody career in Richmond seemed to darken the morning. Once he had been within my reach. I literally could have touched him, for a flicker, before he had fled through a window and was gone. I had not been armed on that occasion, and it was not my business to go around shooting people anyway. But I had not been able to shake the chill of doubt that had settled over my spirit back then.

I had not stopped wondering what more I could have done.

Wine has never known a good year at the Academy, and I regretted drinking several glasses of it in the Boardroom the night before. My morning run along J. Edgar Hoover Road was worse than usual. Oh, God, I thought. I'm not going to make it. Marines were setting up camouflage canvas chairs and telescopes on roadsides overlooking ranges. I felt bold male eyes as I slowly jogged past, and knew the gold Department of Justice crest on my navy T-shirt was duly noted.

The soldiers probably assumed I was a female agent or visiting cop, and it disturbed me to imagine my niece running this same route. I wished Lucy had picked another place to intern. Clearly, I had influenced her life, and very little frightened me quite as much as that did. It had become my habit to worry about her during workouts when I was in agony and aware of growing old.

HRT, the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, was out on maneuvers, helicopter blades dully batting air. A pickup truck hauling shot-up doors roared past, followed by another caravan of soldiers. Turning around, I began the one-and-a-half-mile stretch back to the Academy, which could have passed for a modern tan brick hotel were it not for its rooftops of antennas and location out in the middle of a wooded nowhere.

When at last I reached the guard booth, I veered around tire shredders and lifted my hand in a weary salute to the officer behind glass.

Breathless and sweating, I was contemplating walking the rest of the way in when I sensed a car slowing at my rear.

"You trying to commit suicide or something?" Captain Pete Marino said loudly across the Armor-Ailed front seat of his silver Crown Victoria.

Radio antennas bobbed like fishing rods, and despite countless lectures from me, he wasn't wearing his seat belt.

"There are easier ways than this," I said through his open passenger's window.

"Not fastening your seat belt, for example."

"Never know when I might have to bail out of my ride in a hurry."

"If you get in a wreck, you'll certainly bail out in a hurry," I said. "Probably through the windshield."

An experienced homicide detective in Richmond, where both of us were headquartered, Marino recently had been promoted and assigned to the First Precinct, the bloodiest section of the city. He had been involved with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VI CAP for years.

In his early fifties, he was a casualty of concentrated doses of tainted human nature, bad diet, and drink, his face etched by hardship and fringed with thinning gray hair. Marino was overweight, out of shape, and not known for a sweet disposition. I knew he was here for the Steiner consultation, but wondered about the luggage in his backseat.

"Are you staying for a while?" I asked.

"Benton signed me up for Street Survival."

"You and who else?" I asked, for the purpose of Street Survival was not to train individuals but task forces.

"Me and my precinct's entry team."

"Please don't tell me part of your new job description is kicking in doors."

"One of the pleasures of being promoted is finding your ass back in uniform and out on the street. In case you haven't noticed. Doc, they ain't using Saturday Night Specials out there anymore."

"Thank you for the tip," I said dryly.

"Be sure to wear thick clothing."

"Huh?" His eyes, blacked out by sunglasses, scanned mirrors as other cars crept past.