Patricia Cornwell - Cruel and Unusual

“I wasn't around then.”

“Oh, yeah. Funny, it seems like you've been here forever. But you know what happened, right?”

I was a deputy chief medical examiner for Dade County when Robyn Naismith was murdered, and I remembered reading about the case, following it in the news, and later seeing a slide presentation about it at a national meeting. The former Miss Virginia was a stunning beauty with a gorgeous alto voice. She was articulate and charismatic before the camera. She was only twenty-seven years old.

The defense claimed that Ronnie Waddell's intent was burglary, and Robyn's misfortune was to walk in on it after returning home from the drugstore. Allegedly, Waddell did not watch television and was unfamiliar with her name or brilliant future when he was ransacking her residence and brutalizing her. He was so hopped up on drugs, the defense argued, that he didn't know what he was doing. The jurors rejected Waddell's temporary insanity plea and recommended the death penalty.

'I know the pressure to catch her killer was incredible, “ I said to Marino.

“Friggin' unbelievable. We had this great latent print We had bite marks. We had three guys doing a cold search through the files morning, noon, and night. I got no idea how many hours I put in on that damn case Then we catch the bastard because he's driving around North Carolina with an expired inspection sticker.”

He paused, his eyes hard when he added, “Course, Jones wasn't around by then. Too damn bad he missed out of seeing Waddell get his reward.”

“Do you blame Waddell for what happened to Sonny Jones?” I asked.

“Hey, what do you think?”

“He was a close friend.”

“We worked Homicide together, fished together, we were on the same bowling team.”

“I know his death was hard for you.”

“Yeah, well, the case wore him down. Working all hours, no sleep, never home, and that sure as hell didn't help matters with his wife. He kept telling me he couldn't take it no more and then he stopped telling me anything. One night he decides to eat his gun.”

“I'm sorry,” I said gently. “But I'm not sure you can blame Waddell for that.”

“I had a score to settle.”

“And was it settled when you witnessed his execution?”

At first Marino did not reply. He stared across the kitchen, his jaw rigidly set. I watched him smoke and drain his drink.

“Can I refresh that?”

“Yo. Why not.”

I got up and did my thing again as I thought about the injustices and losses that had gone into the making of Marino. He had survived a loveless, impoverished childhood in the wrong part of New Jersey, and nursed an abiding distrust of anyone whose lot had been better. Not long ago his wife of thirty years had left him, and he had a son nobody seemed to know anything about. Regardless of his loyalty to law and order and his record of excellent police work, it was not in his genetic code to get along with the brass. It seemed his life's journey had placed him on a hard road. I feared that what he hoped to find at the end was not wisdom or peace but paybacks. Marino was always angry about something.

“Let me ask you this, Doc,” he sand to me when I returned to the table. “How would you feel if they caught the assholes who killed Mark?”

His question caught me by surprise. I did not want to think about those men.

“Isn't there a part of you that wants to see the bastards hung?” he went on. “Doesn't a part of you want to volunteer for the firing squad so you could pull the trigger yourself?”

Mark died when a bomb placed in a trash can inside London's Victoria Station exploded at the moment he happened to walk past. My shock and grief had catapeuted me beyond revenge.

“It's an exercise in futility for me to contemplate punishing a group of terrorists,” I said.

Marino stared intensely at me. “That's what's known as one of your famous bullshit answers. You'd give them free autopsies if you could. And you'd want them would cut real slow. I ever tell you what happened to Robyn Naismith's family?”

I reached for my drink.

“Her father was a doctor in northern Virginia, a real fine man,” he said. “About six months after the trial, he came down with cancer and a couple months after that was dead. Robyn was the only child. The mother move to Texas, gets in a car wreck, and spends her days in wheelchair with nothing but memories. Waddell killed Robyn Naismith's entire family. He poisoned every life he touched.”

I thought of Waddell growing up on the farm, image from his meditation drifting through my mind. I envisioned him sitting on porch steps, biting into a tomato that tasted like the sun. I wondered what had gone through his mind the last second of his life. I wondered if he had prayed.

Marino stubbed out a cigarette. He was thinking about leaving.

“Do you know a Detective Trent with Henrico?”

“Joe Trent. Used to be with K-Nine and got transferred into the detective division after he made sergeant a couple months ago. Sort of a nervous Nellie, but he's all right.”

“He called me about a boy -”

He cut me off. “Eddie Heath?”

“I don't know his name.”

“A white male about thirteen years old. We're working on it. Lucky's is in the city.”

“Lucky'-s?”

“The convenience store where he was last seen. It's off Chamberlayne Avenue, Northside. What did Trent want?”

Marino frowned. “He gotten word that Heath ain't going to pull through and is making an appointment with you in advance?”

“He wants me to look at unusual injuries, possible mutilation.”

“Christ. I hate it when it's kids.”

Marino pushed back his chair and rubbed his temples. “Damn. Every time you get rid of one toad there's another to take his place.”

After Marino left, I sat on the hearth in the living room watching coals shift in the fireplace. I was weary and felt a dull, implacable sadness that I did not have the strength to chase away. Mark's death had left a tear in my soul. I had come to realize, incredibly, just how much of my identity had been tied to my love for him.

The last time I saw him was on the day he flew to London, and we managed a quick lunch downtown before he headed to Duller Airport. What I remembered most clearly about our last hour together was both of us glancing at our watches as storm clouds gathered and rain began to spit against the window beside our booth. He had a nick on his jaw from where he'd cut himself while shaving, and later, when I would see his face my mind, I would envision that small injury and fork some reason be undone by it.

He died in February while the war was ending in the Persian Gulf, and determined to put the pain behind me I had sold my house and moved to a new neighborhood. What I accomplished was to uproot myself without really going anywhere, and the familiar plants and neighbors that once had given me comfort were gone, Redecorating my new home or redesigning the yard only added to my stress. Everything I did provided distractions for which I had no time, and I could imagine Mark shaking his head.

“For someone so logical…” he would smile and say.

“And what would you do?” I would tell him in my thoughts some nights when I could not sleep. “Just what the hell would you do if you were still here instead me?”

Returning to the kitchen, I rinsed out my glass and went into my study to see what awaited me on my answering machine. Several reporters had called, so had. my mother and Lucy, my niece. Three other messages, were hang ups.

I would have loved an unlisted number but it was not possible. The police, Commonwealth's Attorneys, the four hundred or so appointed medical examiners statewide had legitimate reasons to reach me after hours. To counter the loss of privacy, I used my answering machine to screen calls, and anyone who left threatening or obscene messages ran the risk of being tracked by Caller ID.