Patricia Cornwell - Cruel and Unusual

Then this man, who later would claim he did not remember killing “the lady on TV,” suddenly woke up, in a sense. He got off her body and had second thoughts about what he had done. The absence of drag marks near the couch suggested that Waddell carried the body from the couch and laid it on the floor on the other side of the room. He dragged it into an upright position and propped it against the TV. Then he set about to clean up. The ring marks that glowed on the floor, I believed, were left by the bottom of a bucket that he carried back and forth from the body to the bathtub down the hall. Each time he returned to the living room to mop up more blood with towels, or perhaps to check on his victim as he continued raiding her belongings and drinking her booze, he again bloodied the bottom of his shoes. This explained the profusion of shoe prints wandering peripatetically throughout her house. The activities themselves explained something else. Waddell's post-offense behavior was inconsistent with that of someone who felt no remorse.

“Here he is, this uneducated farm boy who's living in the big city,” Wesley explained. “He's stealing to support a drug habit that's rotting his brain. First marijuana, then heroin, coke, and finally PCP. And one morning he suddenly comes to and finds himself brutalizing the corpse of a stranger.”

Logs shifted in the fire as we stared at big handprints glowing as white as chalk on the dark television screen.

“The police never found vomit in the toilet or around it,” I said.

“He probably cleaned that up, too. Thank God he didn't wipe down the wall above the john. You don't lean against a wall like that unless you're commode-hugging sick.”

“The prints are fairly high above the back of the toilet,” I observed. “I think he vomited, and when he stood up got dizzy, lurched forward, and raised his hands just in time to prevent his head from slamming into the wall. What do you think? Remorse or was he just stoned out of his mind?”

Wesley looked at me. “Let's consider what he did with the body. He sat it upright, tried to dean it with towels, and left the clothes in a moderately neat stack on the floor near her ankles. Now, you can look at that two ways. He was lewdly displaying the body and thereby showing contempt. Or he was demonstrating what he considered caring. Personally, I think it was the latter.”

“And the way Eddie Heath's body was displayed?”

“That feels different. The positioning of the boy mirrors the positioning of the woman, but something's missing.”

Even as he spoke, I suddenly realized what it was. “A mirror image,” I said to Wesley in amazement. “A mirror reflects things backward or in reverse.”

He looked curiously at me.

“Remember when we were comparing Robyn Naisznith's scene photographs with the diagram depicting the position of Eddie Heath's body?”

“I remember vividly.”

“You said that what was done to the boy - from the bite marks to the way his body was propped against a boxy object to his clothing being left in a tidy pile nearby - was a mirror image of what had been done to Robyn. But the bite marks on Robyn's inner thigh and above her breast were on the left side of her body. While Eddie's injuries - what we believe are eradicated bite marks - were on the right. His right shoulder and right inner thigh.”

“Okay.” Wesley still looked perplexed.

“The photograph that Eddie's scene most closely resembles is the one of her nude body propped against the console TV.”

“True.”

“What I'm suggesting is that maybe Eddie's killer saw the same photograph of Robyn that we did. But his perspective is based on his own body's left and right. And his right would have been Robyn's left, and his left would have been her right, because in the photograph she's facing whoever is looking on.”

“That's not a pleasant thought,” Wesley said as the telephone rang.

“Aunt Kay?”

Lucy called out from the kitchen. “It's Mr. Vander.”

“We got a confirmation,” Vander's voice came over the line.

“Waddell did leave the print in Jennifer Deighton's house?”

I asked.

“No, that's just it. He definitely did not.”

Over the next few days, I retained Nicholas Grueman, delivering to him my financial records and other information he requested, the health commissioner summoned me to his office to suggest that I resign, and the publicity would not end. But I knew much that I had not known even a week before.

It was Ronnie-Joe Waddell who died in the electric chair the night of December 13. Yet his identity remained alive and was wreaking havoc in the city. As best as could be determined, prior to Waddell's death his SID number in AFIS had been swapped with another's. Then the other person's SID number was dropped completely from the Central Computerized Records Exchange, or CCRE. This meant there was a violent offender at large who had no need of gloves when he committed his crimes. When his prints were run through AFIS, they would come back as a dead man's every time. We knew this nefarious individual left a wake of feathers and flecks of paint, but we could surmise almost nothing about him until January 3 of the new year.

On that morning, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a planted story about highly prized eiderdown and its appeal to thieves. At one-fourteen P.m., Officer Tom Lucero, head of the fictitious investigation, received his third call of the day.

“Hi. My name's Hilton Sullivan,” the voice said loudly.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

Lucero's deep voice asked.

“It's about the cases you're investigating. The eiderdown clothes and things that are supposedly hot with thieves. There was this article about it in the paper this morning. It said you're the detective.”

“Right”

“Well, it really pisses me off that the cops are so stupid.”

He got louder. “It said in the paper that since Thanksgiving this and that have been stolen from stores, cars, and homes in the greater Richmond metropolitan area. You know, comforters, a sleeping bag, three ski jackets, blah, blah, blah. And the reporter quoted several people.”

“What is your point, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Well, obviously the reporter got the victims' names from the cops. In other words, from you.”

"It's public information.”

"I don't really give a shit about that. I just want to know how come you didn't mention this victim, yours truly? You don't even remember my name, do you?”

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't say that I do.”

"Figures. Some fucking asshole breaks into my condo and wipes me out, and other than smearing black powder everywhere - on a day when I was dressed in white cashmere, I might add - the cops don't do a thing. I'm one of your fucking cases.”

"When was your condo broken into?”

"Don't you remember? I'm the one who raised such a stink about my down vest. If it wasn't for me, you guys would never have even heard of eiderdown! When I told the cop that among other things my vest had been taken and it had cost me five hundred bucks on sale, you know what he said?”

"I have no idea, sir.”

"He said, What's it stuffed with, cocaine?’

And I said, 'No, Sherlock. Eider duck down.’

And he looked around nervous as hell and dropped his hand close to his nine-mil. The dumb-shit really thought there was some other person in my place named Eider and I'd just yelled at this person to duck down, like I was going to pull a gun or something. At that point I just left and-"

Wesley switched off the tape recorder.

We sat in my kitchen. Lucy was working out at my club again.

"The B-and-E this Hilton Sullivan's talking about was in fact reported by him on Saturday, December eleventh. Apparently, he'd been out of town, and when he returned to his condo that Saturday afternoon, he discovered that he'd been burglarized," Wesley explained.