Patricia Cornwell - Black Notice

"Were there flies when the container was first opened?" I asked Shaw.

"Not like this," he said.

"How close did you get?" I asked as Marino and Anderson caught up with us.

"Close enough," Shaw said.

"No one went inside it?" I wanted to make sure.

"I can guarantee you that, ma'am." The stench was getting to him.

Marino seemed unfazed. He shook out another cigarette and mumbled around it as he fired the lighter.

"So, Anderson," he said. "I don't guess it could be livestock, you know, since you didn't look. Hell, maybe a big dog that accidentally got locked up in there. Sure would be a shame to drag the doc here and get the media all in a lather and then find out it's just some poor of wharf dog rotted in there."

He and I both knew there was no dog or pig or horse or any other animal in there. I opened my scene case while Marino and Anderson went on carping at each other. I dropped my car key inside and pulled on several layers of gloves and a surgical mask. I fitted my thirty-fivemillimeter Nikon with a flash and a twenty-eightmillimeter lens. I loaded four-hundred-speed film so the photographs wouldn't be too grainy, and slipped sterile booties over my shoes.

"It's just like when we get bad smells coming from a closed-up house in the middle of July. We look through the window. Break in if we have to. Make sure what's in there's human before we call the M.E.," Marino continued to instruct his new protйgd.

I ducked under the tape and stepped inside the dark container, relieved to find it was only half full of neatly stacked white cartons, leaving plenty of room to move around. I followed the beam of my flashlight deeper, sweeping it from side to side.

Near the back, it illuminated a bottom row of cartons soaked with the reddish purge fluid that leaks from the nose and mouth of a decomposing body. My light followed shoes and lower legs,.and a bloated, bearded face jumped out of the dark. Bulging milky eyes stared, the tongue so swollen it protruded from the mouth as if the dead man were mocking me. My covered shoes made sticky sounds wherever I stepped.

The body was fully clothed and propped up in the corner, the container's metal walls bracing it, from two sides. Legs were straight out, hands in the lap beneath a carton that apparently had fallen. I moved it out of the way and checked for defense injuries, or for abrasions and broken nails that might suggest he had tried to claw his way out. I saw no blood on his clothes, no sign of obvious injuries or that a struggle had taken place. I looked for food or water, for any provisions or holes made through the container's sides for ventilation, and found nothing.

I made my way between every row of boxes, squatting to shine oblique light on the metal floor, looking for shoe prints. Of course, they were everywhere. I moved an inch at a time, my knees about to give out. I found an empty plastic wastepaper basket. Then I found two silvery coins. I bent close to them. One was a deutsche mark. I didn't recognize the other one and touched nothing.

Marino seemed a mile away, standing in the container's opening.

"My car key's in my case," I called out to him through 'the surgical mask.

"Yeah?" he said, peering inside.

"Could you go get the Luma-Lite? I need the fiber-optic attachment and the extension cord. Maybe Mr. Shaw can help you find somewhere to plug it in. Has to be a grounded receptacle, one-fifteen VAC."

"I love it when you talk dirty," he said.

The Luma-Lite is an alternate light source with a high intensity arc tube that emits fifteen watts of light energy at 450 uanometers with a twenty-nanometer bandwidth. It can detect body fluids such as blood or semen as well as expose drugs, fingerprints, trace evidйnce and unexpected surprises not evident to the naked eye.

Shaw found a receptacle inside the warehouse, and I slipped disposable plastic covers on the Luma-Lite's aluminumfeet to make sure nothing from a previous scene would be transferred to this one. The alternate light source looked very much like a home projector, and I set it inside the- container on top of a carton and ran the fan for,a minute before turning on the power switch.

While I waited for the lamp to reach its maximum output, Marino appeared with the amber-tinted glasses needed to protect our eyes from the strong energy light. Flies were getting thicker. They drunkenly knocked against us and droned loudly in our ears.

"Goddamn, I hate those things!" Marino complained, swatting wildly.

I noticed he didn't have on a jumpsuit, only shoe covers and gloves.

"You going to drive home in a closed car like that?" I asked.

"I got another uniform in the trunk. In case something gets spilled on me or whatever."

"In case you spill something on you or whatever," I said, looking at my watch. "We got one more minute."

"Notice how Anderson's conveniently disappeared? 'I knew she would the minute I heard about this one. I just didn't figure on nobody else being here. Shit, something really weird's going on."

"How in the world did she become a homicide detective?"

"She kisses Bray's ass. I hear she even runs errands for her, takes her brand-new fбncy-schmansy black Crown Vic to the car wash, probably sharpens her pencils and shines her shoes:' "We're ready," I said.

I began scanning with a 450-nanometer filter that was capable of detecting a large variety of residues and stains. Through our tinted glasses, the inside of the container became an impenetrably black outer space scattered with shapes that fluoresced white and yellow in different shades and intensities whenever I pointed the lens. The projected blue light exposed hairs on the floor and fibers everywhere, just as I would expect in a high-traffic area used to store cargo handled by many people. White cardboard cartons glowed a soft white, like the moon.

I moved the Luma-Lite deeper inside the container. Purge fluid didn't fluoresce, and the body was a dejected dark shape sitting in the corner.

"If he died naturally," Marino said, "then why's he sitting up like that with his hands in his lap like he's in church or something?"

"If he died of suffocation, dehydration, exposure, he could have died sitting up:' "It sure looks wacko to me."

"I'm just saying it's possible. It's getting tight in here. Can you hand me the fiber optics, please?"

He bumped into cartons as he made his way in my direction.

"You might want to take off your glasses until you get here," I suggested, because one couldn't see anything through them except the high-energy light, which wasn't in Marino's line of sight at the moment.

"No friggin' way," he said. "I hear all it takes is one quick look. And zap. Cataracts, cancer, the whole nine yards."

"Not to mention turning to stone."

"Hub?"

"Marino! Careful!"

He bumped into me and 'I wasn't sure what happened after that, but suddenly cartons were caving in and he almost knocked me over as he fell.

"Marino?" I was disoriented and frightened. "Marino!"

I cut the power on the Luma-Lite And took-off my glasses so I could see:

"Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!" he yelled as if he'd been bitten by a snake.

He was flat on his back on the floor, shoving and kicking boxes out of the way. The plastic bucket sailed through the air. I got down next to him.

"Stay still," I firmly told him. "Don't go thrashing around until we're sure you're all right."

"Oh God! Oh shit! I got this shit all over me!" he yelled in a panic.

"Are you hurting anywhere-?"

"Oh, Jesus, I'm gonna puke. Oh Jesus, oh4esus."

He rushed to his feet and knocked boxes out of the way as he stumbled toward the container's opening. I heard him vomit. He groaned and vomited again.

"That should make you feel better," I said.