Patricia Cornwell - Cruel and Unusual

“For what part of the state and what time period?” Rose took notes.

“All of the state for the past five years. I'm particularly interested in cases involving children, but let's not restrict ourselves to that. And ask her to see what the Trauma Registry's got. I spoke with the director at a meeting last month and he seemed more than willing for us to share data.”

“You mean you also want to check victims who have survived?”

“If we can, Rose. Let's check everything to see if we find any cases similar to Eddie Heath's.”

“I'll tell Margaret now and see if she can get started,” my secretary said on her way out.

I began going through the articles she had clipped from a number of morning newspapers. Unsurprisingly, much was being made of Ronnie Waddell's allegedly bleeding from “his eyes, nose, and mouth.”

The local chapter of Amnesty International was claiming that his execution was no less inhumane than any homicide. A spokesman for the ACLU stated that the electric chair “may have malfunctioned, causing Waddell to suffer terribly,” and went on to compare the incident to the execution in Florida in which synthetic sponges used for the first time had resulted in the condemned man's hair catching fire.

Tucking the news stories inside Waddell's file, I tried to anticipate what pugilistic rabbits his attorney, Nicholas Grueman, would pull out of his hat this time. Our confrontations, though infrequent, had become predictable. His true agenda, I was about to believe, was to impeach my professional competence and in general make me feel stupid. But what bothered me most was that Grueman gave no indication that he remembered I had once been his student at Georgetown. To his credit, I had despised my first year of law school, had made my only B, and missed out on Law Review. l would never forget Nicholas Grueman as long as I lived, and it did not seem right that he should have forgotten me.

I heard from him on Thursday, not long after I had been informed that Eddie Heath was dead.

“Kay Scarpetta?” Grueman's voice came over the line.

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes and knew from the pressure behind them that a raging front was rapidly advancing.

“Nicholas Grueman here. I've been looking over Mr. Waddell's provisional autopsy report and have a few questions.”

I said nothing.

“I'm talking about Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“What can I help you with?”

“Let's start with his so-called almost tubular stomach. An interesting description, by the way. I'm wondering if that's your vernacular or a bona fide medical term? Am I correct in assuming Mr. Waddell wasn't eating?”

“I can't say that he wasn't eating at all. But his stomach had shrunk. It was empty and clean.”

“Was it, perhaps, reported to you that he may have been on a hunger strike?”

“No such thing was reported to me.”

I glanced up at the clock and light stabbed my eyes. I was out of aspirin and had left my decongestant at home.

I heard pages flip.

“It says here that you found abrasions on his arms, the inner aspects of both upper arms,” Grueman said.

“That's correct.”

“And just what, exactly, is an inner aspect?”

“The inside of the arm above the antecubital fossa.”

A pause. “The antecubital fossa,” he said in amazement.

“Well, let me see. I've got my own arm turned palm up and am looking at the inside of my elbow. Or where the arm folds, actually. That would be accurate, wouldn't it? To say that the inner aspect is the side where the arm folds, and the antecubual fossa, therefore, is where the arm folds?”

“That would be accurate.”

“Well, well, very good. And to what do you attribute these injuries to the inner aspects of Mr. Wadden's “Possibly to restraints,” I said testily.

“Restraints?”

“Yes, as in the leather restraints associated with the electric chair.”

“You said possibly. Possibly restraints?”

“That's what I said.”

“Meaning, you can't say with certainty, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“There's very little in this life that one can say with certainty, Mr. Grueman.”

“Meaning that it would be reasonable to entertain the possibility that the restraints that caused the abrasions could have been of a different variety? Such as the human variety? Such as marks left by human hands?”

“The abrasions I found are inconsistent with injuries inflicted by human hands,” I said.

“And are they consistent with the injuries inflicted by the electric chair, with the restraints associated with it?”

“It is my opinion that they would be.”

“Your opinion, Dr. Scarpetta'?”

“I haven't actually examined the electric chair' I said sharply.

This was followed by a long pause, for which Nicholas Grueman had been famous in the classroom when he wanted a student's obvious inadequacy to hang in the air. I envisioned him hovering over me, hands clasped behind his back, his face expressionless as the clock ticked loudly on the wall. Once I had endured his silent scrutiny for more than two minutes as my eyes raced blindly over pages of the casebook opened before me. And as I sat at my solid walnut desk some twenty years later, a middle-aged chief medical examiner with enough degrees and certificates to paper a wall, I felt my face begin to burn. I felt the old humiliation and rage.

Susan walked into my office as Grueman abruptly ended the encounter with “Good day” and hung up…

“Eddie Heath's body is here.”

Her surgical gown was untied in back and clean, the expression on her face distracted. “Can he wait until the morning?”

“No,” I said. “He can't.”

The boy looked smaller on the cold steel table than he had seemed in the bright sheets of his hospital bed. There were no rainbows in this room, no walls or windows decorated with dinosaurs or color to cheer the heart of a child. Eddie Heath had come in naked with IV needles, catheter, and dressings still in place. They seemed sad remnants of what had held him to this world and then disconnected him from it, like string tailing a balloon blowing forlornly through empty air. For the better part of an hour I documented injuries and marks of therapy while Susan took photographs and answered the phone.

We had locked the doors leading into the autopsy suite, and beyond I could hear people getting off the elevator and heading home in the rapidly descending dark. Twice the buzzer sounded in the bay as funeral home attendants arrived to bring a body or take one away. The wounds to Eddies shoulder and thigh were dry and a dark shiny red.

“God,” Susan said, staring. “God, who would do something like that? Look at all the little cuts to the edges, too. It's like somebody cut crisscrosses and then removed the whole area of skin.”

“That's precisely what I think was done.”

“You think someone carved some sort of pattern?”

“I think someone attempted to eradicate something. And when that didn't work, he removed the skin.”

“Eradicate what?”

“Nothing that was already there,” I said. “He had no tattoos, birthmarks, or scars in those areas. If something wasn't already there, then perhaps something was added and had to be removed because of the potential evidentiary value.”

“Something like bite marks.”

“Yes,” I said.

The body was not yet fully rigorous and was still slightly warm as I began swabbing any area that a washcloth might have missed. I checked axillas, gluteal folds, behind ears and inside them, and inside the navel. I clipped fingernails into clean white envelopes and looked for fibers and other debris in hair.

Susan continued to glance at me, and I sensed her tension. Finally she asked, “Anything special you're liking for?”