Patricia Cornwell - Cruel and Unusual

Eddie Heath did not stir on top of the bed, his head wrapped in bandages, a ventilator breathing air into his lungs while fluids dripped into his veins. His complexion was milky and hairless, the thin membrane of his eyelids a faint bruised blue in the low light. I surmised the color of his hair by his strawberry blond eyebrows. He had not yet emerged from that fragile prepubescent stage when boys are full-tipped and beautiful and sing more sweetly than their sisters. His forearms were slender, the body beneath the sheet small. Only the disproportionately large, still hands tethered by intravenous lines were true to his fledgling gender. He did not look thirteen.

“She needs to see the areas on his shoulder and leg,” Trent told the nurse in a low voice.

She got two packet of gloves, one for her and one forme, and we put them on. The boy was naked beneath the sheet, his skin grimy in creases and fingernails dirty. Patients who are unstable cannot be thoroughly bathed.

Trent tensed as the nurse removed the wet-to-dry dressings from the wounds. “Christ,” he said under his breath. “It looks even worse than it did last night. Jesus.”

He shook his head and backed up a step.

If someone had told me that the boy had been attacked by a shark, I might have gone along with it were it not for the neat edges of the wounds, which clearly had been inflicted by a sharp, linear instrument, such as a knife or razor. Sections of flesh the size of elbow patches had been excised from his right shoulder and right inner thigh. Opening my medical bag, I got out a ruler and measured the wounds without touching them, then took photographs.

“See the cuts and scratches at the edges?”

Trent pointed. “That's what I was telling you about. It's like he cut some sort of pattern on the skin and then removed the whole thing.”

“Did you find any anal tearing?” I asked the nurse.

“When I did a rectal temperature I didn't notice any tears, and no one noticed anything unusual about his mouth or throat when he was intubated. I also checked for old fractures and bruises.”

“What about tattoos?”

“Tattoos?” she asked as if she'd never seen a tattoo.

“Tattoos, birthmarks, scars. Anything that someone may have removed for some reason,” I said.

“I have no idea,” the nurse said dubiously.

“I'll go ask his parents.”

Trent wiped sweat from his forehead.

“They may have gone to the cafeteria.”

“I'll find them,” he said as he passed through the doorway.

“What are his doctors saying?” I asked the nurse.

“He's very critical and unresponsive.”

She stated the obvious without emotion.

“May I see where the bullet went in?” I asked.

She loosened the edges of the bandage around his head and pushed the gauze up until I could see the tiny black hole, charred around the edges. The wound was through his right temple and slightly forward.

“Through the frontal lobe?”

I asked.

“Yes.”

“They've done an angio?”

“There's no circulation to the brain, due to the swelling. There's no electroencephalic activity, and when we put cold water in his ears there was no caloric activity. It evoked no brain potentials.”

She stood on the other side of the bed, gloved hands by her sides and expression dispassionate as she continued to relate the various tests conducted and maneuvers instigated to decrease intracranial pressure. I had paid my dues in ERs and ICUs and knew very well that it is easier to be clinical with a patient who has never been awake. And Eddie Heath would never be awake. His cortex was gone. That which made him human, made him think and feel, was gone and was never coming back. He had been left with vital functions, left with a brain stem. He was a breathing body with a beating heart maintained at the moment by machines.

I began looking for defense injuries. Concentrating on getting out of the way of his lines, I was unaware I was holding his hand until he startled me by squeezing mine. Such reflex movements are not uncommon in people who are cortically dead. It is the equivalent of a baby grabbing your finger, a reflex involving no thought process at all. I gently released his hand and took a deep breath, waiting for the ache in my heart to subside.

“Did you find anything?” the nurse asked.

“It's hard to look with all these lines,” I said.

She replaced his dressings and pulled the sheet up to his chin. I took off my gloves and dropped them in the trash as Detective Trent returned, his eyes a little wild.

“No tattoos,” he said breathlessly, as if he had sprinted to the cafeteria and back. “No birthmarks or scars, either.”

Moments later we were walking to the parking deck. The sun slipped in and out, and tiny snowflakes were blowing. I squinted as I stared into the wind at heavy traffic on Forest Avenue. A number of cars had Christmas wreaths affixed to their grilles.

“I think you'd better prepare for the eventuality of his death,” I said.

“If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bothered you to come out. Damn, it's cold.”

“You did exactly the right thing. In several days his wounds would have changed.”

“They say all of December's going to be like this. Cold as hell and a lot of snow.”

He stared down at the pavement. “You have kids?”

“I have a niece,” I said.

“I've got two boys. One of 'em's thirteen.”

I got out my keys. “I'm over here,” I said.

Trent nodded, following me. He watched in silence as I unlocked my gray Mercedes. His eyes took in the details of the leather interior as I got in and fastened my seat belt. He looked the car up and down as if appraising a gorgeous woman.

“What about the missing skin?” he asked. “You ever seen anything like that?”

“It's possible we're dealing with someone predisposed to cannibalism,” I said.

I returned to the office and checked my mailbox, initialed a stack of lab reports, filled a mug with the liquid tar left in the bottom of the coffeepot, and spoke to no one. Rose appeared so quietly as I seated myself behind my desk that I would not have noticed her immediately had she not placed a newspaper clipping on top of several others centering the blotter.

“You look tired,” she said. “What time did you come in this morning? I got here and found coffee made and you had already gone out somewhere.”

“Henrico's got a tough one,” I said. “A boy who probably will be coming in.”

'Eddie Heath.”

“Yes,” I said, perplexed. “How did you know?”

“He's in the paper, too,” Rose replied, and I noticed that she had gotten new glasses that made her patrician face less haughty.

“I like your glasses,” I said. “A big improvement over the Ben Franklin frames perched on the end of your nose. What did it say about him?”

“Not much. The article just said that he was found off Patterson and that he had been shot. If my son were still young, no way I'd let him have a paper route.”

“Eddie Heath was not delivering papers when he was assaulted.”

“Doesn't matter. I wouldn't permit it, not these days. Let's see.”

She touched a finger to the side of her nose. “Fielding's downstairs doing an autopsy and Susan's off delivering several brains to MCV for consultation. Other than that, nothing happened while you were out except the computer went down.”

“Is it still down?”

“I think Margaret's working on it and is almost done,” Rose said.

“Good. When it's up again, I need her to do a search for me. Codes to look for would be cutting, mutilation, cannibalism, bite marks. Maybe a free-format search for the words excised, skin, fresh - a variety of combination of them. You might try dismemberment, too, but I don't think that's what we're really after.”