Detective Joe Trent would have looked quite youthful were it not for a beard and receding blond hair that was turning gray. He was trim and tall, a crisp trench coat belted tightly around his waist, his shoes perfectly shined. He blinked nervously as we shook hands and introduced ourselves on the sidewalk in front of Henrico Doctor's Emergency Center. I could tell he was upset by Eddie Heath's case.
“You don't mind if we talk out here a minute,” he said, his breath turning white. “For privacy reasons.”
Shivering, I tucked my elbows close to my sides as a Medflight helicopter made a terrific noise taking off from the helipad on a grassy rise not far from where we stood. The moon was a shaving of ice melting in the slate-gray sky, cars in the parking lots dirty from road salt and frigid winter rains. The early morning was stark and without color, the wind sharp like a slap, and I observed all this more keenly because of the nature of my business here. Had the temperature suddenly risen forty degrees and the sun begun to blaze I do not think I could have felt warm.
“What we got here is real bad, Dr. Scarpetta.”
He blinked. “I think you'll agree we don't want the details getting out.”
“What can you tell me about this boy?” I asked.
“I've talked to his family and several other people who know him. As best I can ascertain, Eddie Heath is just your average kid - likes sports and has a paper route, has never gotten into any trouble with the police. His father works for the phone company and his mother sews for people out of the home. Apparently, last night, Mrs. Heath needed a can of cream of mushroom soup for a casserole she was fixing for dinner and asked Eddie to run over to the Lucky Convenience Store to get it.'
“The store is how far from their house?” I asked.
“A couple of blocks, and Eddies been there any number of times. The people working the counter know him by name.”
“He was last seen at what time?”
“Around five-thirty P.M. He was in the store a few minutes and left.”
“It would have been dark out,” I said.
“Yes, it was.”
Trent stared off at the helicopter transfigured by distance into a white dragonfly softly thudding through clouds. “At approximately eight-thirty, an officer on routine patrol was checking the back of buildings along Pattersom and saw the kid propped up against the Dumpster.”
“Do you have photographs?”
“No, ma'am. When the officer realized the boy was alive, his first priority was getting help. We don't have pictures. But I've got a pretty detailed description based on the officer's observations. The boy was nude, and he was propped up, with his legs straight out and arms by his sides and head bent forward. His clothing was in a moderately neat pile on the pavement, along with a small bag containing a can of cream of mushroom soup and a Snickers bar. It was twenty-eight degrees out. We're thinking he may have been left there anywhere from minutes to half an hour before he was found.”
An ambulance halted near us. Doors slammed and metal grated as attendants quickly lowered the legs of a stretcher to the ground and wheeled an old man through opening glass doors. We followed and in silence walked through a bright, antiseptic corridor busy with medical personnel and patients dazed by the misfortunes that had brought them here. As we rode the elevator up to the third floor, I wondered what trace evidence had been scrubbed away and tossed in the trash.
“What about his clothes? Was a bullet recovered?” I asked Trent as the elevator doors parted.
“I've got his clothes in my car and will drop them and his PERK off at the lab this afternoon. The bullet's still in his brain. They haven't gone in there yet. I hope like hell they swabbed him good.”
The pediatric intensive care unit was at the end of a polished hallway, panes of glass in the double wooden doors covered with friendly dinosaur paper. Inside, rainbows decorated sky blue walls, and animal mobiles were suspended over hydraulic beds in the eight rooms arranged in a semicircle around the nurses' station. Three young women worked behind monitors, one of them typing on a keyboard and another talking on the phone. A slender brunette dressed in a red corduroy jumper and turtleneck sweater identified herself as the head nurse after Trent explained why we were here.
“The attending physician's not in yet,” she apologized.
“We just need to look at Eddies injuries. It won't take long,” Trent said. “His family still in there?”
“They stayed with him all night.”
We followed her through soft artificial light, past code carts and green tanks of oxygen that would not be parked outside the rooms of little boys and girls were the world the way it ought to be. When we reached Eddies room, the nurse went inside and shut the door most of the way…
“Just for a few minutes,” I overheard her say to the Heaths. “While we do the exam.”
“What kind of specialist is it this time?” the father asked in an unsteady voice.
“A doctor who knows a lot about injuries. She's sort of like a police surgeon.”
The nurse diplomatically refrained from saying I was a medical examiner, or worse, a coroner.
After a pause, the father quietly said, “Oh. This is for evidence.”
“Yes. How about some coffee? Maybe something to eat?”
Eddie Heath's parents emerged from the room, both of them considerably overweight, their clothes badly wrinkled from having been slept in. They had the bewildered look of innocent, simple people who have been told the world is about to end, and when they glanced at us with exhausted eyes I wished there were something I could say that would make it not so or at least a little better. Words of comfort died in my throat as the couple slowly walked off.
Eddie Heath did not stir on top of the bed, his head wrapped in bandages, a ventilator breathing air into his lungs while fluids dripped into his veins. His complexion was milky and hairless, the thin membrane of his eyelids a faint bruised blue in the low light. I surmised the color of his hair by his strawberry blond eyebrows. He had not yet emerged from that fragile prepubescent stage when boys are full-tipped and beautiful and sing more sweetly than their sisters. His forearms were slender, the body beneath the sheet small. Only the disproportionately large, still hands tethered by intravenous lines were true to his fledgling gender. He did not look thirteen.
“She needs to see the areas on his shoulder and leg,” Trent told the nurse in a low voice.
She got two packet of gloves, one for her and one forme, and we put them on. The boy was naked beneath the sheet, his skin grimy in creases and fingernails dirty. Patients who are unstable cannot be thoroughly bathed.
Trent tensed as the nurse removed the wet-to-dry dressings from the wounds. “Christ,” he said under his breath. “It looks even worse than it did last night. Jesus.”
He shook his head and backed up a step.
If someone had told me that the boy had been attacked by a shark, I might have gone along with it were it not for the neat edges of the wounds, which clearly had been inflicted by a sharp, linear instrument, such as a knife or razor. Sections of flesh the size of elbow patches had been excised from his right shoulder and right inner thigh. Opening my medical bag, I got out a ruler and measured the wounds without touching them, then took photographs.
“See the cuts and scratches at the edges?”
Trent pointed. “That's what I was telling you about. It's like he cut some sort of pattern on the skin and then removed the whole thing.”
“Did you find any anal tearing?” I asked the nurse.
“When I did a rectal temperature I didn't notice any tears, and no one noticed anything unusual about his mouth or throat when he was intubated. I also checked for old fractures and bruises.”
“What about tattoos?”
“Tattoos?” she asked as if she'd never seen a tattoo.
“Tattoos, birthmarks, scars. Anything that someone may have removed for some reason,” I said.
“I have no idea,” the nurse said dubiously.
“I'll go ask his parents.”
Trent wiped sweat from his forehead.
“They may have gone to the cafeteria.”
“I'll find them,” he said as he passed through the doorway.
“What are his doctors saying?” I asked the nurse.
“He's very critical and unresponsive.”
She stated the obvious without emotion.
“May I see where the bullet went in?” I asked.
She loosened the edges of the bandage around his head and pushed the gauze up until I could see the tiny black hole, charred around the edges. The wound was through his right temple and slightly forward.
“Through the frontal lobe?”
I asked.
“Yes.”
“They've done an angio?”
“There's no circulation to the brain, due to the swelling. There's no electroencephalic activity, and when we put cold water in his ears there was no caloric activity. It evoked no brain potentials.”
She stood on the other side of the bed, gloved hands by her sides and expression dispassionate as she continued to relate the various tests conducted and maneuvers instigated to decrease intracranial pressure. I had paid my dues in ERs and ICUs and knew very well that it is easier to be clinical with a patient who has never been awake. And Eddie Heath would never be awake. His cortex was gone. That which made him human, made him think and feel, was gone and was never coming back. He had been left with vital functions, left with a brain stem. He was a breathing body with a beating heart maintained at the moment by machines.
I began looking for defense injuries. Concentrating on getting out of the way of his lines, I was unaware I was holding his hand until he startled me by squeezing mine. Such reflex movements are not uncommon in people who are cortically dead. It is the equivalent of a baby grabbing your finger, a reflex involving no thought process at all. I gently released his hand and took a deep breath, waiting for the ache in my heart to subside.
“Did you find anything?” the nurse asked.
“It's hard to look with all these lines,” I said.
She replaced his dressings and pulled the sheet up to his chin. I took off my gloves and dropped them in the trash as Detective Trent returned, his eyes a little wild.
“No tattoos,” he said breathlessly, as if he had sprinted to the cafeteria and back. “No birthmarks or scars, either.”
Moments later we were walking to the parking deck. The sun slipped in and out, and tiny snowflakes were blowing. I squinted as I stared into the wind at heavy traffic on Forest Avenue. A number of cars had Christmas wreaths affixed to their grilles.
“I think you'd better prepare for the eventuality of his death,” I said.
“If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bothered you to come out. Damn, it's cold.”
“You did exactly the right thing. In several days his wounds would have changed.”
“They say all of December's going to be like this. Cold as hell and a lot of snow.”
He stared down at the pavement. “You have kids?”
“I have a niece,” I said.
“I've got two boys. One of 'em's thirteen.”
I got out my keys. “I'm over here,” I said.
Trent nodded, following me. He watched in silence as I unlocked my gray Mercedes. His eyes took in the details of the leather interior as I got in and fastened my seat belt. He looked the car up and down as if appraising a gorgeous woman.
“What about the missing skin?” he asked. “You ever seen anything like that?”
“It's possible we're dealing with someone predisposed to cannibalism,” I said.
I returned to the office and checked my mailbox, initialed a stack of lab reports, filled a mug with the liquid tar left in the bottom of the coffeepot, and spoke to no one. Rose appeared so quietly as I seated myself behind my desk that I would not have noticed her immediately had she not placed a newspaper clipping on top of several others centering the blotter.
“You look tired,” she said. “What time did you come in this morning? I got here and found coffee made and you had already gone out somewhere.”
“Henrico's got a tough one,” I said. “A boy who probably will be coming in.”
'Eddie Heath.”
“Yes,” I said, perplexed. “How did you know?”
“He's in the paper, too,” Rose replied, and I noticed that she had gotten new glasses that made her patrician face less haughty.
“I like your glasses,” I said. “A big improvement over the Ben Franklin frames perched on the end of your nose. What did it say about him?”
“Not much. The article just said that he was found off Patterson and that he had been shot. If my son were still young, no way I'd let him have a paper route.”
“Eddie Heath was not delivering papers when he was assaulted.”
“Doesn't matter. I wouldn't permit it, not these days. Let's see.”
She touched a finger to the side of her nose. “Fielding's downstairs doing an autopsy and Susan's off delivering several brains to MCV for consultation. Other than that, nothing happened while you were out except the computer went down.”
“Is it still down?”
“I think Margaret's working on it and is almost done,” Rose said.
“Good. When it's up again, I need her to do a search for me. Codes to look for would be cutting, mutilation, cannibalism, bite marks. Maybe a free-format search for the words excised, skin, fresh - a variety of combination of them. You might try dismemberment, too, but I don't think that's what we're really after.”
“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?”
“Dried seminal fluid, for one thing,” I said.
“1n his axilla?”
“There, in any crease in skin, any orifice, anywhere.”
“You don't usually look in all those places.”
“I don't usually look for zebras.”
“For what?”
“We used to have a saying in medical school. If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses. But in a case like this I know we're looking for zebras,” I said. I began going over every inch of the body with a lens.
When I got to his wrists, I slowly turned his hands the way and that, studying them for such a long time that Susan stopped what she was doing. I referred to the diagrams on my clipboard, correlating each mark of therapy with the ones I had drawn “Where are his charts?” I glanced around.
“Over here.”
Susan fetched paperwork from a countertop. I began flipping through charts, concentrating particularly on emergency room records and the report filled in by the rescue squad. Nowhere did it indicate that Eddie Heath's hands had been bound. I tried to remember what Detective Trent had said to me when describing the scene where the boy's body had been found. Hadn't Trent said that Eddie's hands were by his sides? “You find something?”
Susan finally asked.
“You have to look through the lens to see. There. The undersides of his wrists and here on the left one, to the left of the wrist bone. You see the gummy residue? The traces of adhesive? It looks like smudges of grayish dirt.”
“Just barely. And maybe some fibers sticking to it,” Susan marveled, her shoulder pressed against mine as slue stared through the lens.
“And the skin's smooth,” I continued to point out. “Less hair in this area than here and here.”
“Because when the tape was removed, hairs would have been pulled out.”
“Exactly. We'll take wrist hairs for exemplars. The adhesive and fibers can be matched back to the tape, if the tape is ever recovered. And if the tape that bound him is recovered, it can be matched back to the roll.”
“I don't understand.”
She straightened up and looked at me. “His IV lines were held in place with adhesive tape. You sure that's not the explanation?”
“There are no needle marks on these areas of his wrists that would indicate marks of therapy,” I said to her. “And you saw what was taped to him when he came in. Nothing to account for the adhesive here.”
“True.”
“Let's take photographs and then I'm going to collect this adhesive residue and let Trace see what they find.”
“His body was outside next to a Dumpster. Seems like that would be a Trace nightmare.”
“It depends on whether this residue on his wrists was in contact with the pavement.”
I began gently scraping the residue off with a scalpel.
“I don't guess they did a vacuuming out there.”
“No, I'm sure they wouldn't have. But I think we can still get sweepings if we ask nicely. It can't hurt to try.”
I continued examining Eddie Heath's thin forearms and wrists, looking for contusions or abrasions I might have missed. But I did not find any.
“His ankles look okay,” Susan said from the far end of the table. “I don't see any adhesive or areas where the hair is gone. No injuries. It doesn't look like he was taped around his ankles. just his wrists.”
I could recall only a few cases in which a victim's tight bindings had left no mark on skin. Clearly, the strapping tape, had been in direct contact with Eddies skin. He should have moved his hands, wriggled as his discomfort had grown and his circulation had been restricted. But he had not resisted. He had not tugged or squirmed or tried to get away.
I thought of the blood drips on the shoulder of his jacket and the soot and stippling on the collar. I again checked around his mouth, looked at his tongue, and glanced over his charts. If he had been gagged, there was no evidence of it now, no abrasions or bruises, no traces of adhesive. I imagined him propped against the Dumpster, naked and in the bitter cold, his clothing piled by his side, not neatly, not sloppily, but casually from the way it had been described to me. When I tried to sense the emotion of the crime, I did not detect anger, panic, or fear.
“He shot him first, didn't he?”
Susan's eyes were alert like those of a wary stranger you pass on a desolate, dark street. “Whoever did this taped his wrist, together after he shot him.”
“I'm thinking that.”
“But that's so weird,” she said. “You don't need to bind someone you've just shot in the head.”
“We don't know what this individual fantasizes about.”
The sinus headache had arrived and I had fallen like a city under siege. My eyes were watering; my skull was two sizes too small.
Susan pulled the thick electrical cord down from its reel and plugged in the Stryker saw. She snapped new blades in scalpels and checked the knives on the surgical cart. She disappeared into the X-ray room and returned with Eddies films, which she fixed to light boxes. She scurried about frenetically and then did something she had never done before. She bumped hard against the surgical cart she had been arranging and sent two quart jars of formalin crashing to the floor.
I ran to her as she jumped back, gasping, waving fumes from her face and sending broken glass skittering across the floor as her feet almost went out from under her.
“Did it get your face?”
I grabbed her arm and hurried her toward the locker room.
“I don't think so. No. Oh, God. It's on my feet and legs. I think on my arm, too.”
“You're sure it's not in your eyes or mouth?”
I helped her strip off her greens.
“I'm sure.”
I ducked inside the shower and turned on the water as she practically tore off the rest of her clothes.
I made her stand beneath a blast of tepid water for a very long time as I donned mask, safety glasses, and thick rubber gloves. I soaked up the hazardous chemical with formalin pillows, supplied by the state for biochemical emergencies like this. I swept up glass and tied everything inside double plastic bags. Then I hosed down the floor, washed myself, and changed into fresh greens. Susan eventually emerged from the shower, bright pink and scared.
“Dr. Scarpetta, I'm so sorry,” she said.
“My only concern is you. Are you all right?”
“I feel weak and a little dizzy. I can still smell the fumes.”
“I'll finish up here,” I said. “Why don't you go home.”
“I think I'll just rest for a while first. Maybe I'd better go upstairs.”
My lab coat was draped over the back of a chair, and I reached inside a pocket and got out my keys. “Here,” I said, handing them to her. “You can lie down on the couch in my office. Get on the intercom immediately if the dizziness doesn't go away or you start feeling worse.”
She reappeared about an hour later, her winter coat on and buttoned up to her chin.
“How do you feel?” I asked as I sutured the Y incision.
“A little shaky but okay.”
She watched me in silence for a moment, then added, “I thought of something while I was upstairs. I don't think you should list me as a witness in this case.”
I glanced up at her in surprise. It was routine for anyone present during an autopsy to be listed as a witness on the official report. Susan's request wasn't of great importance, but it was peculiar.
“I didn't participate in the autopsy,” she went on. “I mean, I helped with the external exam but wasn't present when you did the post. And I know this is going to be a big case - if they ever catch anyone. If it ever goes to court. And I just think it's better if I'm not listed, since, like I said, I really wasn't present.”
“Fine,” I said. “I have no problem with that.”
She placed my keys on a counter and left.
Marino was home when I tried him from my car phone as I slowed at a tollbooth about an hour later.
“Do you know the warden at Spring Street?” I asked him.
“Frank Donahue. Where are you?”
“In my car.”
“I thought so. Probably half the truckers in Virginia are listening to us on their CBs.”
“They won't hear much.”
“I heard about the kid,” he said. “You finished with him?”
“Yes. I'll call you from home. There's something you can do for me in the meantime. I need to look over a few things at the pen right away.”
“The problem with looking over the pen is it looks back.”
“That's why you're going with me,” I said.
If nothing else, after two miserable semesters of my former professor's tutelage I had learned to be prepared. So it was on Saturday afternoon that Marino and I were en route to the state penitentiary. Skies were leaden, wind thrashing trees along the roadsides, the universe in a state of cold agitation, as if reflecting my mood.
“You want my private opinion,” Marino said to me as we drove, “I think you're letting Grueman jerk you around.”
“Not at all.”
“Then why is it every time there's an execution and he's involved, you act jerked around?”
“And how would you handle the situation?”
He pushed in the cigarette lighter. “Same way you are. I'd take a damn look at death row and the chair, document everything, and then tell him he's fall of shit. Or better yet, tell the press he's full of shit.”
In this morning's paper Grueman was quoted as saying that Waddell had not been receiving proper nourishment and his body bore bruises I could not adequately explain.
“What's the deal, anyway?” Marino went on. “Was he defending these squirrels when you was in law school?”
“No. Several years ago he was asked to run Georgetown's Criminal Justice Clinic. That's when he began taking on death penalty cases pro bono.”
“The guy must have a screw loose.”
“He's very opposed to capital punishment and has managed to turn whoever he represents into a cause celebre. Waddell in particular.”
“Yo. Saint Nick, the patron saint of dirtbags. Ain't that sweet,” Marino said. “Why don't you send him color photos of Eddie Heath and ask if he wants to talk to the boy's family? See how he feels about the pig who committed that crime.”
“Nothing will change Grueman's opinions.”
“He got kids? A wife? Anybody he cares about?”
“It doesn't make any difference, Marino. I don't guess you've got anything new on Eddie.”
“No, and neither does Henrico. We've got his clothes and a twenty-two bullet. Maybe the labs will get lucky with the stuff you turned in.”
“What about VICAP?” I asked, referring to the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, in which Marino and FBI profiler Benton Wesley were regional team partners.
“Trent's working on the forms and will send them off in a couple days,” Marino said. “And I alerted Benton about the case last night.”
“Was Eddie the type to get into a stranger's car?”
“According to his parents, he wasn't. We're either dealing with a blitz attack or someone who earned the kid's confidence long enough to grab him.”
“Does he have brothers and sisters?”
“One of each, both more than ten years older than him. I think Eddie was an accident,” Marino said as the penitentiary came into view.
Years of neglect had faded its stucco veneer to a dirty, diluted shade of Pepto Bismol pink. Windows were dark and covered in thick plastic, tugged and torn by the wind. We took the Belvedere exit, then turned left on Spring Street, a shabby strip of pavement connecting two entities that did not belong on the same map. It continued several blocks past the penitentiary, then simply quit at Gambles Hill, where Ethyl Corporation's white brick headquarters roosted on a rise of perfect lawn like a great white heron at the edge of a landfill.
Drizzle had turned to sleet when we parked and got gut of the car. I followed Marino past a Dumpster, then ramp leading to a loading dock occupied by a number of cats, their insouciance flickering with the wariness of the wild. The main entrance was a single glass door, and stepping inside what purported to be the lobby, we found ourselves behind bars. There were no chairs; the air was frigid and stale. To our right the Communication Center was accessible by a small window, which a sturdy woman in a guard's uniforms took her time sliding open.
“Can I help you?” Marino displayed his badge and laconically explained that we had an appointment with Frank Donahue, the warden. She told us to wait. The window shut again.
“That's Helen the Hun,” Marino said to me. “I've been down here more times than I can count and she always acts like she don't know me. But then, I'm not her type. You'll get better acquainted with her in a minute.”
Beyond barred gates were a dingy corridor of tan tile and cinder block, and small offices that looked like cages. The view ended with the first block of cells, tiers painted institutional green and spotted with rust. They were empty.
“When will the rest of the inmates be relocated?” I asked.
“By the end of the week.”
“Who's left?”
“Some real Virginia gentlemen, the squirrels with segregation status. They're all locked up tight and chained to their beds in C Cell, which is that way.”
He pointed west. “We won't be walking through there, so don't get antsy. I wouldn't put you through that. Some of these assholes haven't seen a woman in years - and Helen the Hun don't count.”
A powerfully built young man dressed in Department of Corrections blues appeared down the corridor and headed our way. He peered at as through bars, his face attractive but hard, with a strong jaw and cold gray eyes. A dark red mustache hid an upper lip that I suspected could turn cruel.
Marino introduced us, adding, “We're here to see the chair.”
“My name's Roberts and I'm here to give you the royal tour.” Keys jingled against iron as he opened the heavy gates. “Donahue's out sick today.”
The clang of doors shutting behind us echoed off walls. “I'm afraid we got to search you first. If you'll step over there, ma'am.”
He began running a scanner over Marino as another barred door opened and “Helen” emerged from the Communication Center. She was an unsmiling woman built like a Baptist church, her shiny Sam Browne belt the only indication she had a waist. Her close-cropped hair was mannishly styled and dyed shoe-polish black, her eyes intense when they briefly met mine. The name tag pinned on a formidable breast read “Grimes.”
“Your bag,” she ordered.
I handed over my medical bag. She rifled through it, then roughly turned me this way and that as she subjected me to a salvo of probes and pats with the scanner and her hands. In all, the search couldn't have lasted more than twenty seconds, but she managed to acquaint herself with every inch of my flesh, crushing me against her stiffly armored bosom like a wide-bodied spider as thick fingers lingered and she breathed loudly through her mouth. Then she brusquely nodded that I checked out okay as she returned to her lair of cinder block and Liron.
Marino and I followed Roberts past bars and more bars, through a series of doors that he unlocked and relocked, the air cold and ringing with the dull chimes of unfriendly metal. He asked us nothing about ourselves and made no references that I would call remotely friendly. His preoccupation seemed to be his role, which this afternoon was tour guide or guard dog, I wasn't sure which.
A right turn and we entered the first cell block, a huge drafty space of green cinder block and broken windows, with four tiers of cells rising to a false roof topped by toils of barbed wire. Sloppily piled along the middle of the brown tile floor were dozens of narrow, plastic covered mattresses, and scattered about were brooms, mops, and ratty red barber chairs. Leather tennis shoes, blue jeans, and other odd personal effects littered high windowsills, and left inside many of the cells were televisions, books, and footlockers. It appeared that when the inmates had been evacuated they had not been allowed to take all of their possessions with them, perhaps explaining the obscenities scrawled in Magic Marker on the walls.
More doors were unlocked, and we found ourselves outside in the yard, a square of browning grass surrounded by ugly cell blocks. There were no trees. Guard towers rose from each corner of the wall, the men inside wearing heavy coats and holding rifles. We moved quickly and in silence as sleet stung our cheeks. Down several steps, we turned into another opening leading to an iron door more massive than any of the others I had seen.
“The east basement,” Roberts said, inserting a key in the lock. “This is the place where no one wants to be.”
We stepped inside death row.
Against the east wall were five cells, each furnished with an iron bed and a white porcelain sink and toilet. In the center of the room were a large desk and several chairs where guards sat around the clock when death row was occupied.
“Waddell was in cell two.” Roberts pointed. “According to the laws of the Commonwealth, an inmate must be transferred here fifteen days prior to his execution.”
“Who had access to him while he was here?” Marino asked.
“Same people who always have access to death row. legal representatives, the clergy, and members of the death team.”
“The death team?” I asked.
“It's made up of Corrections officers and supervisors, the identities of which are confidential. The team becomes involved when an inmate is shipped here from Mecklenburg. They guard him, set up everything from beginning to end.”
“Don't sound like a very pleasant assignment,” Marino commented.
“It's not an assignment, it's a choice,” Roberts replied with the machismo and inscrutability of coaches interviewed after the big game.
“It don't bother you?” Marino asked. “I mean, come on, I saw Waddell, go to the chair. It's got to bother you.”
“Doesn't bother me in the least. I go home afterward, drink a few beers, go to bed.”
He reached in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, “Now, according to Donahue, you want to know everything that, happened. So I'm going to walk you,through it.”
He sat on top of the desk, smoking. “On the day of it, December thirteenth, Waddell was allowed a two-hour contact visit with members of his immediate family, which in this case was his mother. We put him in waist chains, leg irons; and cuffs and led him over to the visitors' side around one P.M.
“At five P.M., he ate his last meal. His request was sirloin steak, salad, a baked potato, and pecan pie, which we had prepared for him at Bonanza Steak House. He didn't pick the restaurant. The inmates don't get to do that. And, as is the routine, there were two identical meals ordered. The inmate eats one, a member of the death team eats the other. And this is all to make sure some overly enthusiastic chef doesn't decide to speed up the inmate's journey to the Great Beyond by spicing the food with something extra like arsenic.
“Did Waddell eat his meal?” I asked, thinking about his empty stomach “He wasn't real hungry - asked us to save it for him to eat the next day.”
“He must have thought Governor Norring was going to pardon him,” Marino said.
“I don't know what he thought. I'm just reporting to you what Waddell said when he was served his meal. Afterward, at seven-thirty, personal property officers came to his cell to take an inventory of his property and ask him what he wanted done with it. We're talking about one wristwatch, one ring, various articles of clothing and mail, books, poetry. At eight P.M., he was taken from his cell. His head, face, and right ankle were shaved. He was weighed, showered, and dressed in the clothing he would wear to the chair. Then he was returned to his cell.
“At ten-forty-five, his death warrant was read to him, witnessed by the death team.”
Roberts got up from the desk “Then he was led, without restraints, to the adjoining room.”
“What was his demeanor at this point?” Marino asked as Roberts unlocked another door and opened it.
“Let's just say that his racial affiliation did not permit him to be white as a sheet. Otherwise, he would've been.”
The room was smaller than I had imagined. About six from the back wall and centered on the shiny brown cement floor was the chair, a stark, rigid throne of dark polished oak Thick leather straps were looped around high slatted back, the two front legs, and the arm rests.
“Waddell was seated and the first strap fastened-was the chest strap,” Roberts continued in the same indifferent tone. “Then the two arm straps, the belly strap, and the straps for the legs.”
He roughly plucked at each strap as he talked. “It took one minute to strap him in. His face was covered with the leather mask - and I'll show you that in a minute. The helmet was placed on his head, the leg piece attached to his right leg.”
I got out my camera, a ruler, and photocopies of Waddell's body diagrams.
“At exactly two minutes past eleven, he received the first current - that's twenty-flue hundred volts and six and a half amps. Two amps will kill you, by the way.”
The injuries marked on Waddell's body diagrams correlated nicely with the construction of the chair and its restraints.
“The helmet attaches to this.” Roberts pointed out a pipe running from the ceiling and ending with a copper wing nut directly over the chair.
I began taking photographs of the chair from every angle. - “And the leg piece attaches to this wing nut here.”
The flashbulb going off gave me a strange sensation. I was getting jumpy.
“All this man was, was one big circuit breaker.”
“When did he start to bleed?” I asked.
“The minute he was hit the first time, ma'am. And he didn't stop until it was completely over, then a curtain was drawn, blocking him from the view of the witnesses. Three members of the death team undid his shirt and the doc listened with his stethoscope and felt the carotid and pronounced him. Waddell was placed on a gurney and taken into the cooling room, which is where we're headed next.”
“Your theory about the chair allegedly malfunctioning?” I said.
“Pure crap. Waddell was six-foot-four, weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. He was cooking long before he sat in the chair, his blood pressure probably out of sight. After he was pronounced, because of the bleeding, the deputy director came over to take a look at him. His eyeballs hadn't popped out. His eardrums hadn't popped out. Waddell had a damn nosebleed, same thing people get when they strain too hard on the toilet.”
I silently agreed with him. Waddell's nosebleed was due to the Valsalva maneuver, or an abrupt increase in intrathoracic pressure. Nicholas Grueman would not be pleased with the report I planned to send him.
“What tests had you run to make sure the chair was operating properly?” Marino asked.
“Same ones we always do. First, Virginia Power looks at the equipment and checks it out.”
He pointed to a large circuit box enclosed in gray steel doors in the wall behind the chair. “Inside this is twenty two-hundred-watt light bulbs attached to plyboard for running tests. We test this during the week before the execution, three times the day of it, and then once more in front of the witnesses after they've assembled.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Marino said, staring at the glass-enclosed witness booth no more than fifteen feet away. Inside were twelve black plastic chairs arranged in three neat rows.
“Everything worked like a charm,” Roberts said.
“Has it always?” I asked.
“To my knowledge, yes, ma'am.”
“And the switch, where is that?”
He directed my attention to a box on the wall to the right of the witness booth. “A key cuts the power on. But the button's in the control room. The warden or a designee turns the key and pushes the button. You want to see that?”
“I think I'd better.”
It wasn't much to look at, just a small cubicle directly behind the back wall of the room housing the chair. Inside was a large G.E. box with various dials to raise and lower the voltage, which went as high as three thousand volts. Rows of small lights affirmed that everything was fine or warned that things were not.
“At Greensville, it will all be computerized, “ Roberts added.
Inside a wooden cupboard were the helmet, leg piece, and two thick cables, which, he explained as he held them up, “attach to the wing nuts above and to one side of the chair, and then to this wing nut on top of the helmet and the one here on the leg piece.”
He did this without effort, adding, “Just like hooking up a VCR” The helmet and leg piece were copper riddled with holes, through which cotton string was woven to secure the sponge lining inside. The helmet was surprisingly light, a patina of green tarnish at the edges of the connecting plates. I could not imagine having such a thing placed on top of my head. The black leather mask was nothing more than a wide, crude belt that buckled behind the inmate's head, a small triangle cut in it for the nose. It could have been on display in the Tower of London and I would not have questioned its authenticity.
We passed a transformer with coils leading to the ceiling, and Roberts unlocked another door. We stepped inside another room.
“This is the cooling room,” he said. “We wheeled Waddell in here and transferred him to this table.”
It was steel, rust showing at the joints.
“We let him cool down for ten minutes, put sandbags on his leg. That's them right there.”
The sandbags were stacked on the floor at the foot of the table.
“Ten pounds each. Call it a knee-jerk reaction; but the leg's severely bent. The sandbags straighten it out. And if the burns are bad, like Waddell's were, we dress them with gauze. All done, and we put Waddell back on the stretcher and carried him out the same way you came in. Only we didn't bother with the stairs. No point in anybody getting a hernia. We used the food elevator and carried him out the front door, and loaded him in the ambulance. Then we hauled him into your place, just like we always do after our children ride the Sparky.”
Heavy doors slammed. Keys jangled. Locks clicked. Roberts continued talking boisterously as he led us back to the lobby. I barely listened and Marino did not say a word. Sleet mixed with rain beaded grass and walls with ice. The sidewalk was wet, the cold penetrating. I felt queasy. I was desperate to take a long, hot shower and change my clothes.
“Lowlifes like Roberts are just one level above the inmates,” Marino said as he started the car. “In fact, some of them aren't any better than the drones they lock up.”
Moments later he stopped at a red light. Drops of water on the windshield shimmered like blood, were wiped away and replaced by a thousand more. Ice coated trees like glass.
“You got time for me to show you something?” Marino wiped condensation off the windshield with his coat sleeve.
“Depending on how important it is, I suppose I could make time.”
I hoped my obvious reluctance would inspire him to take me home instead.
“I want to retrace Eddie Heath's last steps for you.”
He flipped on the turn signal. “In particular, I think you need to see where his body was found.”
The Heaths lived east of Chamberlayne Avenue, or on the wrong side of it, in Marino's words. Their small brick house was but several blocks from a Golden Skillet fried chicken restaurant and the convenience store where Eddie had walked to buy his mother a can of soup. Several cars, large and American, were parked in -the Heaths' driveway, and smoke drifted out the chimney and disappeared in the smoky gray sky. Aluminum glinted dully as the front screen door opened and an old woman bundled in a black coat emerged, then paused to speak to someone inside. Clinging to the railing as if the afternoon threatened to pitch her overboard, she made her way down the steps, glancing blankly at the white Ford LTD cruising past.
Had we continued east for another two miles, we would have entered the war zone of the federal housing projects.
“This neighborhood used to be all white,” Marino said. “I remember when I first came to Richmond this was a good area to live. Lots of decent, hardworking folks who kept their yards real nice and went to church on Sunday. Times change. Me, I wouldn't let any kid of mine walk around out here after dark. But when you live in a place, you get comfortable. Eddie was comfortable walking around, delivering his papers, and running errands for his mother.
“The night it happened he came out the front door of his crib, cut through to Azalea, then took a right like we're doing as I speak. There's Lucky's on our left, next to the gas station.”
He pointed out a convenience store with a green horseshoe on the lighted sign. “That corner right over there is a popular hangout for drug drones. They trade crack for cash and fade. We catch the cockroaches, and two days later they're on another corner doing the same thing.”
“A possibility Eddie was involved in drugs?”
My question would have been somewhat farfetched back in the days when I began my career, but no longer. Juveniles now comprised approximately ten percent of all narcotics trafficking arrests in Virginia.
“No indication of it so far. My gut tells me he wasn't,” Marino said.
He pulled into the convenience store's parking lot, and we sat gazing out at advertisements taped to plate glass and lights shining garishly through fog. Customers formed a long line by the counter as the harried clerk worked the cash register without looking up. A young black man in high tops and a leather coat stared insolently at our car as he sauntered out with a quart of beer and dropped change in a pay phone near the front door. A man, red-faced and in paint-spattered jeans, peeled cellophane off a pack of cigarettes as he trotted to his truck.
“I'm betting this is where he met up with his assailant,” Marino said.
“How?” I said.
“I think it went down simple as hell. I think he came out of the store and this animal came right up to him and fed him a line to gain his confidence. He said something and Eddie went with him and got in the car.”
“His physical findings would certainly support that,” I said. “He had no defense injuries, nothing to indicate a struggle. No one inside the convenience store saw him with anyone?”
“No one I've talked to so far. But you see how busy this joint is, and it was dark out. If anybody saw anything, it was probably a customer coming in or returning to his car. I plan to get the media to run something so we can appeal to anyone who might have stopped here between five and six that night. And Crime Stoppers is going to do a segment on it, too.”
“Was Eddie streetwise?”
“You get a squirrel who's smooth and even kids who know better can fall for it. I had a case back in New York where a ten-year-old girl walked to the local store to buy a pound of sugar. As she's leaving, this pedophile approaches her and says her father's sent him. He says her mom's just been rushed to the hospital and he's supposed to pick the girl up and take her there. She gets in his car and ends up a statistic.”
He glanced over at me. “All right, white or black?”
“In which case?”
“Eddie Heath's.”
“Based on what you've said, the assailant is white.”
Marino backed up and waited for a break in traffic. “No question the MO fits for white. Eddies old man don't like blacks and Eddie didn't trust them, either, so it's unlikely a black guy gained Eddies confidence. And if people notice a white boy walking with a white man even if the boy looks unhappy - they think big brother and little brother or father and son.”
He turned right, heading west. “Keep going; Doc. What else?”
Marino loved this game. It gave him just as much pleasure when I echoed his thoughts as it did when he believed I was flat-out wrong.
“If the assailant is white, then the next conclusion I'd make is he's not from the projects, despite their close proximity.”
“Race aside, why else might you conclude that the peril's not from the projects?”
“The MO again,” I said simply. “Shooting someone in the head - even a thirteen-year-old - would not be unheard of in a street killing, but aside from that, nothing fits. Eddie was shot with a twenty-two, not with a nine or ten millimeter of large-caliber revolver. He was nude and he was mutilated, suggesting the violence was sexually motivated. As far as we know, he had nothing worth stealing and did not appear to have a life-style that put him at risk.”
It was raining hard now, and streets were treacherous with cars moving at imprudent rates of speed with their headlights on. I supposed many people were headed to shopping malls, and it occurred to me that I had done little to prepare for Christmas.
The grocery store on Patterson Avenue was just ahead on our left. I could not remember its former name, and signs had been removed, leaving nothing but a bare brick shell with a number of windows boarded up. The space it occupied was poorly lit, and I suspected the police would not have bothered to check behind the building at all were there not a row of businesses to the left of it. I counted five of them: pharmacy, shoe repair, dry cleaner, hardware store, and Italian restaurant, all closed and deserted the night Eddie Heath was driven here and left for dead.
“Do you recall why this grocery store went out of business?” I asked.
“About the same time a bunch of other places did. When the war started in the Persian Gulf,” Marino said.
He cut through an alleyway, the high beams of his headlights licking brick walls and rocking when the unpaved ground got rough. Behind the store a chainlink fence separated an apron of cracked asphalt from a wooded area stirring darkly in the wind. Through the limbs of bare trees I could see streetlights in the distance and the illuminated sign for a Burger King.
Marino parked, headlights boring into a brown Dumpster cancerous with blistered paint and rust, beads of water running down its sides. Raindrops smacked against glass and drummed the roof, and dispatchers were busy dispatching cars to the scenes of accidents.
Marino pushed his hands against the steering wheel and hunched his shoulders. He massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I'm getting old,” he complained. “I got a rain slicker in the trunk.”
“You need it more than I do. I won't melt,” I said, opening my door.
Marino fetched his navy blue police raincoat and I turned my collar up to my ears. The rain stung my face and coldly tapped the top of my head. Almost instantly, my ears started getting numb. The Dumpster was near the fence, at the outer limits of the pavement, perhaps twenty yards from the back of the grocery store. I noted that the Dumpster opened from the top, not the side.
“Was the door to the Dumpster open or shut when the police got here?” I asked Marino.
“Shut.”
The hood of his raincoat made it difficult for him to look at me without turning his upper body. “You notice there's nothing to step up on.”
He shone a flashlight around the Dumpster. “Also, it was empty. Not a damn thing in it except rust and the carcass of a rat big enough to saddle up and ride.”
“Can you lift the door?”
“Only a couple inches. Most of the ones made like this have a latch on either side. If you're tall enough, you can lift the lid a couple inches and slide your hand down along the edge, continuing to raise the lid by bumping the latches in place a little at a time. Eventually you can get it open far enough to stuff a bag of trash inside. Problem is, the latches on this one don't catch. You'd have to open the lid all the way and let it flop over on the other side, and no way you're going to do that unless you climb up on something.”
“You're what? Six-one or two?”
“Yeah. If I can't open the Dumpster, he couldn't either. The favorite theory at the moment is he carried the body out of the car and leaned it up against the Dumpster while he tried to open the door - the same way you put a bag of garbage down for a minute to free your hands. When he can't get the door open, he hauls ass, leaving the kid and his crap right here on the pavement.”
“He could have dragged him back there in the woods.”
“There's a fence.”
“It's not very high, maybe five feet high,” I pointed out. “At the very least, he could have left the body behind the Dumpster. As it was, if you drove back here, the body was in plain sight.”
Marino looked around in silence, shining the flashlight through the chain-link fence. Raindrops streaked through the narrow beam like a million small nails driven down from heaven. I could barely bend my fingers. My hair was soaked and icy water was trickling down my neck. We returned to the car and he switched the heater up high.
“Trent and his guys are all hung up on the Dumpster theory, the location of its door and so on,” he said. “My personal opinion is the Dumpster's only role in this is it was a damn easel for the squirrel to prop his work of art against.”
I looked out through the rain.
“The point is,” he went on in a hard voice, “he didn't bring the kid back here to conceal the body but to make sure it was found. But the guys with Henrico just don't see it. I not only see it, I feel it like something breathing down the back of my neck.”
I continued staring out at the Dumpster, the image of Eddie Heath's small body propped against it so vivid it was as if I had been present when he was found. The realization struck me suddenly and hard.
“When was the last time you went through the Robyn Naismith case?” I asked.
“It doesn't matter. I remember everything about it,” Marino said, staring straight ahead. “I was waiting to see if it would cross your mind. It hit me the first time I came out here.”