Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

F abian heads in my direction as the buzzer sounds again from the wall-mounted security monitors at either end of the autopsy suite. On live video the vehicle bay’s huge door is clanking open to let in what looks like a windowless white cargo van with a rooftop ladder.

“I need you to finish up here,” I say when Fabian reaches me. “Do you think you can manage? I’m headed out of town.”

“No problem.” He can barely look at seven-year-old Luna Briley’s body, gutted of every organ, the curved ribs gleaming white.

Her face is pulled down like a tragic rubber mask, the top of her fractured skull sawn off. Supposedly, she was alone in her bedroom playing with her father’s pistol yesterday afternoon. He and the mother were outside in the yard when they heard the gun go off. But I have good reason to doubt the story.

They claim Luna removed the trigger lock, and that’s hard for me to fathom. Where did she find the key? And was the gun already cocked? If she shot herself, why was the trajectory pointed downward? Those are but a few of my questions, and when I attempt to envision what the parents claim, it doesn’t make sense.

“Believe me, I know how hard this is, Fabian. But if you can’t control your emotions, it will be your undoing.” I’m firm but kind. “It’s something all of us have to learn. We have to work at it constantly.”

“Ryder Briley’s a fucker. I know he did it.” Fabian’s eyes are glassy behind his face shield. “He thinks with all his power and money he doesn’t have to play by the rules or even be a decent person.”

“Don’t get caught up in this…”

“The whole time we were there yesterday he was sneering at us like we’re stupid. His daughter’s dead body is on the bedroom floor and he’s practically laughing. Plus, the shit he said about you behind your back. Asking me what it was like working for a C-word.”

“He’s a calculating bully, his goal to distract and intimidate. Don’t let him.” I take off the Tyvek gown covering my scrubs. “I need you to begin tracking down Luna Briley’s medical records. I want all details of visits to the doctor or hospital for any reason. I won’t be satisfied until her every injury old and new is accounted for.”

“When can she be picked up? Shady Acres is already checking on her.”

“That’s too bad, and it figures the Brileys would use them.” I’m no fan of the greedy funeral service.

“Jesse Spanks.” Fabian tells me who’s been leaving messages.

“I’m not releasing the body for several days.” I take off my safety glasses. “Please make a note of it in the electronic case log right away. I don’t want any confusion. Certainly not when Shady Acres and the Brileys are involved.”

“What really got me was the mother boohooing the entire time we were there.” Anger flashes as Fabian lifts the plastic bag of sectioned organs out of the bucket under the table. “Probably the same thing she did while looking the other way. What kind of person could do that? She’s just as guilty as the father.”

“I’m guessing she’s abused too. That’s usually how these things work.”

“I don’t give a shit.” He places the bag inside the empty chest cavity. “There’s no excuse. It’s evil.”

“I agree it’s unforgivable.” I pluck off my hair cover and Tyvek booties.

“In Louisiana, it’s not unusual to have cases related to the occult, Satan worship, voodoo, as you might imagine.” He’s sweating and breathing fast, his surgical mask sucking in and out. “I used to go with my dad to some of the scenes and could feel the dark forces. That’s what I felt yesterday in the Briley house. I felt evil.”

He’s talking at top speed while threading a surgical needle with cotton twine. I notice his hands are trembling slightly.

“Are you all right, Fabian?”

“Was too wound up to sleep much after I got home last night. Whenever I’d close my eyes, I’d see things I didn’t want to see. I started thinking that something evil followed me from the Briley house. Faye could feel it too.”

Faye Hanaday is the top tool marks and firearms examiner, her lab upstairs. She and Fabian live together in a converted carriage house that they swear is haunted.

“We walked around burning sage. And that seems to have cleared out the negativity.” He wipes his forehead with a towel.

“Do you need to sit down?”

“Way too much coffee, and my adrenaline’s going bonkers. Plus, I’ve got a headache. Maybe it’s my blood sugar dropping.”

“Easy does it,” I tell him. “Slow, deep breaths. We don’t want you hyperventilating.”

“Last night I kept thinking, if only I’d been her big brother. Or her neighbor. It wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have allowed anyone to hurt her.” His eyes are bright with tears as he talks about Luna Briley. “She had nobody.”

“I didn’t sleep much either. But if I’m emotionally bent out of shape, I’m no help to her or anyone, and neither are you.”

“What else do you want me to do?” He takes off his face shield, wiping his eyes.

“When her pajamas have air-dried, please receipt them and the bullet fragments to the firearms lab.” I’m filling out the evidence analysis request forms that he’ll take upstairs. “Tell Faye we’ll want test fires for trajectory and distance as soon as possible. While you’re at it, check with trace evidence on the status of the GSR swabs. Especially the ones for the hands.”

As I’m telling him this, the wall phone begins to ring again. Off go my gloves again.

“Who this time?” Reluctantly, I grab the receiver.

“Morgue.” My blunt greeting isn’t answered, a talk show faintly playing in the background again. “Hello?” Nothing.

I hang up. The push-button phone down here is ancient. It’s not used often and doesn’t display caller ID.

“That’s twice now in the past few minutes, and it definitely didn’t feel like a wrong number,” I say to Fabian. “It felt like someone playing creepy games.”

“I’ve had a couple of the same sort of calls this morning, someone calling my direct number, waiting a few seconds, then disconnecting. The caller ID was out of area .”

“The number for investigations is public,” I point out. “This one isn’t.”

“I keep telling you we need to update the phone down here. It must go back to the days of the Beatles.”

“Not quite, but it needs replacing like so many things that aren’t in the budget and have to be approved.” I spray my case notes with Lysol before unclamping them from the clipboard. “If the calls continue, we’ll get the police involved.”

“Where are you headed?” Fabian sutures the Y-incision with long sweeps of the needle and twine.

“Marino and I are flying to the western part of the state, and communication will be a challenge.” I wash my hands with disinfectant soap. “While we’re gone I need you to start tracking down Luna Briley’s medical information. We can expect the parents to interfere at every opportunity, and all of us need to be very careful. The Brileys aren’t to be trifled with.”

“I hope they rot in jail.” Fabian returns the fractured cranium to the top of the skull.

He covers it with the scalp, the short red hair shaved in spots where I found contusions several days old. I can hear the mother sobbing about her accident-prone daughter.

Always knocking her head on something or falling down. Piper Briley made sure I knew.

For someone so slow? She had to be watched every minute. That’s what the father told me, as if the child was impossible.

“I hope they get treated the same way they treated her,” Fabian is saying.

“Remember, we’re not supposed to take sides.”

“You take sides all the time and just pretend you don’t.”

“Get better at pretending.” I pat his shoulder as I walk by.

Outside the autopsy suite, the long white tile corridor is like the river Styx, the dead ferried along it, day in and out. Walls smudged with dried blood are scuffed and scraped from run-ins with gurneys. Fluorescent lights flicker in the water-stained ceiling, the stench of death pervasive like a painful memory.

The bug zapper electrocutes flies with an unpleasant hiss as I walk past the dark windows of the anthropology lab. I’m headed toward the fire exit, preferring to take the stairs when I can after long hours of standing and sitting. Emotions bubble up from the deep, and I can’t imagine Sal not in my life anymore. He’s been in it so long, practically my entire career.

The summer we connected I was one of a few female forensic pathologists in the United States. Having a law degree made me even more of an anomaly at the age of thirty. I was na?ve with much to prove when I was appointed the first woman chief medical examiner of Virginia, not realizing that my being picked for the job had little to do with training or ability.

Hiring me was a political stunt to show the progressiveness of the administration. It also was assumed that a woman would be easy to manipulate, the daughter of Italian immigrants even better. I was sure relocating to Richmond had been a terrible mistake. On leave without pay, I was making plans to move back to Miami when the University of Rome’s medical school invited me to lecture for the summer.

A visiting professor of forensic medicine had canceled at the last minute, and I’d been recommended as a replacement. My sister, Dorothy, and I grew up speaking Italian, and I didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. Teaching while living the aesthetic life in faculty housing seemed like just the remedy for my failures and disappointments. But as my father used to say, Il destino ha la sua idea. Fate has its own idea.

I’d been in Rome but a few days when Sal and I literally collided in a bistro near the Campo de’ Fiori. Replacing our glasses of spilled Chianti, he told me he was an astrophysics professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. On sabbatical in Rome for a year, he was writing a book while staying in the home where he grew up. A quaint little place but old, as he described it.

His parents spent summers in the South of France, and we had the apartment to ourselves. To me it was a palace overlooking the Fontana del Moro in the Piazza Navona. We cooked lavish meals, sampling regional dishes and wines, sleeping little. Pondering our place in the cosmos, we lived out a fairy-tale romance that wasn’t meant to last.

Sal was a genius but more than that he was a good person, one of the best. He didn’t deserve to come to such a hideous end. I hope to God he didn’t suffer. But I know he did if he was abducted last night and hasn’t been dead long. What Lucy described suggests he was kept alive somewhere for many hours. I hate to think what else was done to him. I’m sickened and deeply saddened.

I hope my eyes aren’t red as I push through the fire door, exiting the stairwell on the third floor. Following the hallway, I nod at staff I encounter. Some are on their way out of the building, others in the breakroom for lunch. The aroma of warming food makes my stomach growl. I can hear the microwave oven beeping, the news playing loudly through the open doorway.

I pause to listen, hoping word about Sal hasn’t hit the media. Celebrity TV journalist Dana Diletti is broadcasting live from Mount Vernon, former home of George Washington, our nation’s first president.

“ … Today begins Historic Garden Week in Virginia, and bigger crowds than usual are expected on tours of splendid estates around the Commonwealth ,” she’s saying in her sultry voice. “ And wow are the cherry blossoms ever gorgeous, folks. But if you think this is something, just wait until tomorrow when I take you to Berkeley Plantation on the James River for a private visit to the formal gardens… ”

Walking on, I’m assured that the media knows nothing about Sal’s death yet. Otherwise, Dana Diletti would be in her news helicopter, trying to reach the scene before I do like always. I can imagine her whipping the public into a frenzy about UAPs and the entities inside them. She’ll make a big thing about Sal’s otherworldly interests, his nickname in the media the “ET Whisperer.”

A member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, he’s an icon to believers , as he calls those who accept that we aren’t the only life in the universe. Last week Sal and I were at the Pentagon together for a meeting with other experts focused on potential threats to the planet. We discussed how best to inform the public when contact is confirmed with nonhuman intelligence.

He presented a PowerPoint on ‘Oumuamua, the submarine-shaped interstellar object that visited our solar system in 2017. Reflective like metal with a reddish hue, it tumbled past Earth at speeds exceeding two hundred thousand miles an hour at times, not acting like a typical asteroid or comet. Sal proposed that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. He made international news for repeatedly attempting to contact it.

The third-floor hallway terminates at my corner office, and I open the door, turning on the light, the window shades drawn inside. I didn’t open them when I arrived at dawn and changed into my scrubs, heading downstairs to get an early start on Luna Briley. I recognize the familiar scent of Lysol that my secretary, Shannon Park, likes to spray liberally.

That and her potent floral cologne, and I can tell she’s passed through recently. Her office is connected to mine, the door shut between us, and typically I wouldn’t be able to make out what’s she saying on the phone. But she’s talking loudly, adamantly, with a spark of ire. Someone must be giving her a hard time, underestimating her as most people tend to do.

My secretary is friendly and helpful until she’s not. I don’t know anyone shrewder, and I move closer to the closed door between us. I detect the flintiness in Shannon’s tone, her Irish brogue as pronounced now as when I was chief the first time around. I catch fragments of what she’s saying…

“ … I’ve made myself clear, Mister Briley. Doctor Scarpetta isn’t available… ”

And…

“ … Will serve you no good to carry on like this. I won’t be bullied… ”

Then…

“ … You should know this call like the others is being recorded… ”

Also…

“ … I’ll just be hanging up now… ”

I suspect that Ryder Briley is calling about his dead daughter who was sickly and slow witted, I was told yesterday. She was always hurting herself, it was volunteered, because the parents knew damn well what I’d find. The ringing starts again, and I can hear Shannon impatiently snatching up the phone.

“ As I’ve said, I’m very sorry for your loss. But you really must stop this. It’s most inappropriate… ”

I step away from the door as Marino texts me the latest weather update. High winds and thunderstorms in the Appalachian Mountains could cause hail and tornado conditions.