Patricia Cornwell - Unnatural Exposure

'Good morning!' Wingo said with a surprised grin. 'You're early.'

'Thanks for bringing the wagon in out of the rain,' I said.

'No more cases coming in that I know of, so I didn't think it would hurt to stick it in the bay.'

'Did you see anybody out there when you drove it?' I asked. He looked puzzled. 'No. But that was about an hour ago.'

Wingo was the only member of my staff who routinely got to the office earlier than I did. He was lithe and attractive, with pretty features and shaggy dark hair. An obsessive-compulsive, he ironed his scrubs, washed the wagon and anatomical vans several times a week, and was forever polishing stainless steel until it shone like mirrors. His job was to run the morgue, and he did so with the precision and pride of a military leader. Carelessness and callousness were not allowed down here by either one of us, and no one dared dispose of hazardous waste or make sophomoric jokes about the dead.

'The landfill case is still in the fridge,' Wingo said to me. 'Do you want me to bring it out?'

'Let's wait until after staff meeting.' I said. 'The longer she's refrigerated, the better, and I don't want anybody wandering in here to look.'

'That won't happen,' he said as if I had just implied he might be delinquent in his duties.

'I don't even want anybody on the staff wandering in out of curiosity.'

'Oh.' Anger flashed in his eyes. 'I just don't understand people.' He never would, because he was not like them.

'I'll let you alert security,' I said. 'The media's already in the parking lot.'

'You got to be kidding. This, early?'

'Channel Eight was waiting for me when I pulled in.' I handed him the key to my car.

'Give them a few minutes, and then let them go.'

'What do you mean, let them go?' He frowned, staring at the remote control key in his hand.

'They're in my parking place.' I headed toward the elevator.

'They're what?'

'You'll see.' I boarded. 'If they so much as touch my car, I'll charge them with trespassing and malicious property damage. Then I'm going to have the A.G.'s office

call their station's general manager. I might sue.' I smiled at him through shutting doors.

My office was on the second floor of the Consolidated Lab Building, which had been constructed in the seventies and was soon to be abandoned by us and the scientists upstairs. At last, we were to get spacious quarters in the city's new Biotech Park just off Broad Street, not far from the Marriott and the Coliseum.

Construction was already under way, and I spent far too much time arguing over details, blueprints and budgets. What had been home to me for years was now in disarray, stacks of boxes lining hallways, and clerks not wanting to file, since everything would have to be packed anyway. Averting my gaze from more boxes, I followed the hallway to my office, where my desk was in its usual state of avalanche. I checked my e-mail again, almost expecting another anonymous file like the last, but

only the same messages were there, and I scanned through them, sending brief replies. The address deadoc quietly waited in my mailbox, and I could not resist opening it

and the file with the photograph. I was concentrating so hard, I did not hear Rose walk in.

'I think Noah had better build another ark,' she said.

Startled, I looked up to see her in the doorway adjoining my office and hers. She was taking off her raincoat, and looked worried.

'I didn't mean to scare you,' she said. Hesitating, she stepped inside, scrutinizing me.

'I knew you'd be here, despite all advice,' she said. 'You look like you've seen a ghost.'

'What are you doing here so early?' I asked.

'I had a feeling you'd have your hands full.' She took off her coat. 'You saw the paper this morning?'

'Not yet.'

She opened her pocketbook and got out her glasses. 'All this Butcher business. You can imagine the uproar. While I was driving, I heard on the news that since these

cases started, more handguns are being sold than you can shake a stick at. I sometimes wonder if the gun shops aren't behind things like this. Frighten us out of our wits so we all make a mad dash for the nearest.38 or semiautomatic pistol.'

Rose had hair the color of steel that she always wore up, her face patrician and keen. There was nothing she had not seen, and she was not afraid of anyone. I lived in the uneasy shadow of her retirement, for I knew her age. She did not have to work for me. She stayed only because she cared and had no one left at home.

'Take a look,' I said, pushing back my chair.

She came around to my side of the desk and stood so close I could smell White Musk, the fragrance of everything she had concocted at the Body Shop, where they were against testing with animals. Rose had recently adopted her fifth retired greyhound. She bred Siamese cats, kept several aquariums and was one step short of being dangerous to anyone who wore fur. She stared into my computer screen, and did not seem to know what she was looking at. Then her demeanor stiffened.

'My God,' she muttered, looking at me over the top of her bifocals. 'Is this what's downstairs?'

'I think an earlier version of it,' I said. 'Sent to me on AOL.' She did not speak.

'Needless to say,' I went on, 'I will trust you to keep an eagle eye on this place while I'm downstairs. If anybody comes into the lobby we don't know or aren't expecting, I want security to intercept them. Don't you even think about going out to see what they want.' I looked pointedly at her, knowing what she was like.

'You think he would come here?' she matter-of-factly stated.

'I'm not sure what to think except that he clearly had some need to contact me.' I

closed the file and got up. 'And he has.'

At not quite half past eight, Wingo rolled the body onto the floor scale, and we began what I knew would be a very long and painstaking examination. The torso weighed forty-six pounds and was twenty-one inches in length. Livormortis was faint posteriorly, meaning when her circulation had quit, blood had settled according to gravity, placing her on her back for hours or days after death. I could not look at her without seeing the savaged image on my computer screen, and believed it and the torso before me were the same.

'How big do you think she was?' Wingo glanced at me as he parallel parked the gurney next to the first autopsy table.

'We'll use heights of lumbar vertebrae to estimate height, since we obviously don't have tibias, femurs,' I said, tying a plastic apron over my gown. 'But she looks small. Frail, actually.'

Moments later, X-rays had finished processing and he was attaching them to light boxes. What I saw told a story that did not seem to make sense. The faces of the pubic symphysis, or the surfaces where one pubis joins the other, were no longer rugged and ridged, as in youth. Instead, bone was badly eroded with irregular, lipped margins. More X-rays revealed sternal rib ends with irregular bony growths, the bone very

thin-walled with sharp edges, and there were degenerative changes to the lumbosacral vertebrae, as well.

Wingo was no anthropologist, but he saw the obvious, too.

'If I didn't know better, I'd think we got her films mixed up with somebody else's,' he said.

'This lady's old,' I said.

'How old, would you guess?'

'I don't like to guess.' I was studying her X-rays. 'But I'd say seventy, at least. Or to play it really safe, between sixty-five and eighty. Come on. Let's go through trash for a while.'

The next two hours were spent sifting through a large garbage bag of trash from the landfill that had been directly under and around the body. The garbage bag I believed she had been in was black, thirty-gallon size, and had been sealed with a yellow plastic-toothed tie. Wearing masks and gloves, Wingo and I picked through shredded tire and the fluff from upholstery stuffing that was used as a cover in the landfill. We examined countless tatters of slimy plastic and paper, picking out maggots and dead flies and dropping them into a carton.