Patricia Cornwell - Unnatural Exposure

In the morgue, Fielding and the troopers were looking at the pedestrian on table one, and there wasn't the usual banter because the victim was the nine-year-old daughter of a city councilman. She had been walking to the bus stop early this morning when someone had swerved off the road at a high rate of speed. Based on the absence of skid marks, the driver had hit the girl from the rear and not even slowed.

'How are we doing?' I asked when I got to them.

'We got us a real tough one here,' said one of the troopers, his expression grave.

'The father's going ape shit,' Fielding told me as he went over the clothed body with a lens, collecting trace evidence.

'Any paint?' I asked, for a chip of it could identify the make and model of the car.

'Not so far.' My deputy chief was in a foul mood. He hated working on children.

I scanned torn, bloody jeans and a partial grille mark imprinted in fabric at the level of the buttocks. The front bumper had struck the back of the knees, and the head had hit the windshield. She had been wearing a small red knapsack. The bagged lunch, and books, papers and pens that had been taken out of it pricked my heart. I felt heavy inside.

'The grille mark seems pretty high,' I remarked.

'That's what I'm thinking, too,' another trooper spoke. 'Like you associate with pickup trucks and recreational vehicles. About the time it happened, a black Jeep Cherokee was observed in the area traveling at a high rate of speed.'

'Her father's been calling every half hour.' Fielding glanced up at me. 'Thinks this was more than an accident.'

'Implying what, exactly?' I asked.

'That it's political.' He resumed work, collecting fibers and bits of debris. 'A

homicide.'

'Lord, let's hope not,' I said, walking away. 'What it is now is bad enough.'

On a steel counter in a remote corner of the morgue was a portable electric heater where we defleshed and degreased bones. The process was decidedly unpleasant requiring the boiling of body parts in a ten-percent solution of bleach. The big, rattling steel pot, the smell, were dreadful, and I usually restricted this activity to nights and weekends when we were unlikely to have visitors.

Yesterday, I had left the bone ends from the torso to boil overnight. They had not required much time, and I turned off the heater. Pouring steaming, stinking water into a sink, I waited until the bones were cool enough to pick up. They were clean and white, about two inches long, cuts and saw marks clearly visible. As I examined each segment carefully, a sense of scary disbelief swept over me. I could not tell which saw marks had been made by the killer and which had been made by me.

'Jack,' I called out to Fielding. 'Could you come over here for a minute?' He stopped what he was doing and walked to my corner of the room.

'What's up?' he asked.

I handed him one of the bones. 'Can you tell which end was cut with the Stryker saw?' He turned it over and over, looking back and forth, at one end and then the other, frowning. 'Did you mark it?'

'For right and left I did,' I said. 'Beyond that, no. I should have. But usually it's so obvious which end is which, it's not necessary.'

'I'm not expert, but if I didn't know better, I'd say all these cuts were made with the same saw.' He handed the bone back to me and I began sealing it in an evidence bag.

'You got to take them to Canter anyway, right.'

'He's not going to be happy with me.' I said.

My house was built of stone on the edge of Windsor Farms, an old Richmond neighborhood with English street names, and stately Georgian and Tudor homes that some would call mansions. Lights were on in windows I passed, and beyond glass I could see fine furniture and chandeliers, and people moving or watching TV. No one seemed to close their curtains in this city, except me. Leaves had begun to fall. It was cool and overcast, and when I pulled into my driveway, smoke was drifting from the chimney, my niece's ancient green Suburban parked in front.

'Lucy?' I called out as I shut the door and turned off the alarm.

'I'm in here,' she replied from the end of the house where she always stayed.

As I headed for my office to deposit my briefcase and the pile I had brought home to work on tonight, she emerged from her bedroom, pulling a bright orange UVA sweatshirt over her head.

'Hi.' Smiling, she gave me a hug, and there was very little that was soft about her. Holding her at arm's length, I took a good look at her, just like I always did.

'Uh oh,' she playfully said. 'Inspection time.' She held out her arms and turned around, as if about to be searched.

'Smarty,' I said.

In truth, I would have preferred it had she weighed a little more, but she was keenly pretty and healthy, with auburn hair that was short but softly styled. After all this time, I still could not look at her without envisioning a precocious, obnoxious ten-year-old who had no one, really, but me.

'You pass,' I said.

'Sorry I'm so late.'

'Tell me again what it was you were doing?' I asked, for she had called earlier in the day to say she could not get here until dinner.

'An assistant attorney general decided to drop in with an entourage. As usual, they wanted HRT to put on a show.'

We headed to the kitchen.

'I trotted out Toto and Tin Man,' she added. They were robots.

'Used fiber optics, virtual reality. The usual things, except it's pretty cool. We parachuted them out of a Huey, and I maneuvered them to burn through a metal door with lasers.'

'No stunts with the helicopters, I hope,' I said.

'The guys did that. I did my shit from the ground.' She wasn't happy about it.

The problem was, Lucy wanted to do stunts with helicopters. There were fifty agents on the HRT. She was the only woman and had a tendency to overreact when they wouldn't let her do dangerous things that, in my opinion, she had no business doing anyway. Of course, I wasn't the most objective judge.

'It suits me fine if you stick with robots,' I said, and we were in the kitchen now.

'Something smells good. What did you fix your tired, old aunt to eat?'

'Fresh spinach sauteed in a little garlic and olive oil, and filets that I'm going to throw on the grill. This is my one day a week to eat beef, so tough luck if it's not yours. I even sprung for a bottle of really nice wine, something Janet and I discovered.'

'Since when can FBI agents afford nice wine?'

'Hey,' she said, 'I don't do too bad. Besides, I'm too damn busy to spend money.' Certainly, she didn't spend it on clothes. Whenever I saw her, she was either in khaki fatigues or sweats. Now and then she wore jeans and a funky jacket or blazer, and

made fun of my offers of hand-me-downs. She would not wear my lawyerly suits and blouses with high collars, and frankly, my figure was fuller than her firm, athletic one. Probably nothing in my closet would fit.

The moon was huge and low in a cloudy, dark sky. We put on jackets and sat out on the deck drinking wine while Lucy cooked. She had started baked potatoes first, and they were taking a while, so we talked. Over recent years, our relationship had become less mother-daughter as we evolved into colleagues and friends. The transition was not an easy one, for often she taught me and even worked on some of my cases. I felt oddly lost, no longer certain of my role and power in her life.

'Wesley wants me to track this AOL thing,' she was saying. 'Sussex definitely wants

CASKU's help.'

'Do you know Percy Ring?' I asked as I thought of what he had said in my office, infuriated again.

'He was in one of my classes and was obnoxious, wouldn't shut up.' She reached for the bottle of wine. 'What a peacock.'

She began filling our glasses. Raising the hood of the grill, she poked potatoes with a fork.