Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

If I’m a prosecution witness, and typically I am, the opposing counsel will question me anyway, while enjoying the advantage of stipulating that I’m an expert before the jury hears the laundry list of qualifications that might prove it. In fact, Jill Donoghue’s modus operandi in every encounter I’ve had with her is to shut me up before I can so much as say where I went to medical school or if I did while addressing me as Mrs. Scarpetta and ma’am, to encourage those deciding her client’s fate not to take me seriously.

I don’t know what to expect right now, except I worry that Dan Steward won’t be helpful. After the scolding he just witnessed, he’s not likely to tamper with Judge Conry, whose presence I feel like a towering thunderhead, dark and ready to erupt again, the courtroom electrically charged the way the air is after lightning strikes.

I don’t understand why he is so angry with me, as if what I did was personal and intentional, a slight or injury I can’t fathom. I’ve been late to court before, not often, but it happens, and judges aren’t nice about it. But I’ve never been threatened or reprimanded, much less fined. I’ve never been dressed down in front of a jury. Something is terribly off, and I can’t think of a way to address it, as it’s not possible to e-mail or call a federal judge and ask him what’s wrong with our relationship.

Especially if the real reason is what Steward intimated. Jill’s buddy , he’d said, and his reference to rumors was obvious.

“Good afternoon.” Jill Donoghue smiles at me as if we are in for a pleasant time and are old friends, and only now, as we begin, will I look at her and to the left of her, between her lectern and the jury box, at the defense table. Channing Lott sits very straight, his hands clasped on top of a yellow legal pad with pages of notes folded back.

His jailwear has been traded for a double-breasted black suit with wide pinstripes that looks Versace, and a white shirt with gold cuff links, and a rusty red-and-brown silk tie that brings to mind Hermès. I’ve never met the billionaire industrialist or seen him in person, but he’s instantly recognizable, handsome in a bohemian way, with long, snow-white hair he wears in a single braid, his eyes the pale blue of faded denim, his nose and cheekbones strong and proud like a Native American chief. For a second we are staring at each other, his gaze unflinching, as if he demands something and has no fear of me, and I turn away.

“For the benefit of the jury,” Donoghue resumes in the same collegial tone, as if we work together, as if I’m on her team, “would you please state your name, occupation, and where you work?”

“My name is Kay Scarpetta.”

“Do you have a middle name?”

“I don’t.”

“You were born Kay Scarpetta, with no middle name.”

“I was.”

“Named after your father, Kay Marcellus Scarpetta the Third, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“A Miami grocer who died when you were a child.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a married name?”

“I do not.”

“But you’re married. Actually, divorced and remarried.”

“Yes.”

“Currently you’re married to Benton Wesley.” As if I might be married to someone else a month from now.

“Yes, I am,” I answer.

“But you didn’t take your first husband’s name. And you didn’t take Benton Wesley’s name when you finally got married to him.”

“I did not,” I say, as I look at men and women on the jury, who, if they are married, likely share a surname.

First box checked. Make me different so they can’t relate to me and might disapprove.

“What is your occupation, and where do you work?” Jill Donoghue says, in the same friendly tone.

“I’m a forensic radiologic pathologist employed as the chief medical examiner and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center,” I say to the jury, nine men and three women, two of them African American, five of them Asian, four of them possibly Hispanic, one white.

“When you refer to yourself as chief medical examiner and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, which from this point on I will refer to as the CFC, does this also include other areas of Massachusetts?”

“Yes, it does. All medical-examiner cases and related scientific analysis in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are managed by the CFC.”

“Dr. Scarpetta . . . ,” she starts to say, pausing, the flipping of pages amplified by the microphone. “And I call you doctor because you are in fact a medical doctor with a number of subspecialties, isn’t that right?”

She’s giving me professional credibility before she takes it away.

“Yes.”

“Dr. Scarpetta, am I correct in adding that you also serve in an official capacity with the Department of Defense?” she inquires.

Or maybe she just wants to portray me as a super-bitch.

“Yes, I am.”

“Please tell us about that.”

“In my capacity as a special reservist for the Department of Defense, I assist the Armed Forces Medical Examiners as requested or needed by them.”

“And what exactly are the Armed Forces Medical Examiners?”

“Basically, AFMEs are forensic pathologists with federal jurisdiction, similar to the FBI having federal jurisdiction in certain types of cases.”

“So you’re the FBI of medical examiners,” she says.

“I’m saying that in some instances I have federal jurisdiction.”

“An example?”

“An example would be if there were a fatal military aircraft crash in Massachusetts or near Massachusetts, the case might come to me instead of being transported to the port mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware.”

“The case being a casualty or casualties. Case by your definition meaning a dead body or dead bodies, as opposed to actually working the crash itself. You wouldn’t examine the crashed jet or helicopter.”

Jill Donoghue is one of the few defense attorneys I know who dares to ask questions she doesn’t know the answer to because she’s that smart and sure of herself. But it’s not without risks.

“It would not be my job to examine a crashed plane or helicopter for the purpose of determining mechanical or computer failure or pilot error,” I reply. “Although I might be shown the wreckage and reports to see if the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, for example, are consistent with what the body tells me.”

“Do dead bodies speak to you, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“They don’t literally speak to me.”

“They don’t speak the way you and I are talking.”

“Not audibly,” I answer. “No.”

Check box two. Make me eccentric. Make me crazy.

“But inaudibly they speak to you?”

“In the language of diseases and wounds and many other nuances, they tell me their story.”

A woman on the jury, African American, in a dark red suit, nods her head as if we’re in church.

“And your area of expertise is the human body. Specifically, the dead human body,” Jill Donoghue asks, and I can tell by her tone she doesn’t like what I just said.

“Examining the dead is one area of my expertise.” I will make it worse for her. “I examine every detail in order to reconstruct how someone died and how they lived, and offer everything I possibly can to those left behind who find the loss profoundly life-altering.”

The juror in dark red nods deeply, as if I’m preaching salvation, and Donoghue changes the subject. “Dr. Scarpetta, what is your rank as an Air Force Reservist?”

“I’m a colonel,” I answer, and a young male juror in a blue polo shirt scowls as if he doesn’t approve or is confused.