Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 2

He had been on death row nine years. His victim had not been my case because she had been murdered before I had been appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia and had moved to Richmond. But I had reviewed her records. I was well aware of every savage detail. On the morning of September fourth, ten years before, Robyn Naismith called in sick at Channel 8, where she was an anchorwoman. She went out to buy cold remedies and returned home. The next day, her nude, battered body was found in her living room, propped against the TV. A bloody thumbprint recovered from the medicine cabinet was later identified as Bonnie Joe Waddell's.

There were a number of cars parked behind the morgue when I pulled in. My deputy chief, Fielding, was already there. So was my administrator, Ben Stevens, and morgue supervisor, Susan Story. The bay door was open, lights inside dimly illuminating the tarmac beyond, and a capitol police officer was sitting in his marked car smoking. He got out as I parked.

“Safe to keep the bay door open?” I asked. He was a tall, gaunt man with thick white hair. Though I had talked to him many times in the past, I couldn't remember his name.

“Appears okay at the moment, Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, zipping up his heavy nylon jacket. “I haven't seen any troublemakers around. But as soon as Corrections gets here I'll close it and make sure it stays closed.”

“Fine. As long as you'll be right here in the meantime.”

“Yes, ma'am. You can count on that. And we'll have a couple more uniform men back here in case there's a problem. Apparently there's a lot of protesters. I guess you read in the paper about that petition all those people signed and took to the governor. And I heard earlier today some bleeding hearts as far away as California are on a hunger strike.”

I glanced around the empty parking lot and across Main Street. A car rushed past, tires swishing over wet pavement. Streetlights were smudges in the fog.

“Hell, not me. I wouldn't even miss a coffee break for Waddell.”

The officer cupped his hand around his lighter and began puffing on a cigarette. “After what he done to that Naismith girl. You know, I remember watching her on TV. Now, I like my women the same way I like my coffee - sweet and white. But I have to admit, she was the prettiest black girl I ever seen.”

I had quit smoking barely two months ago, and it still made me crazy to watch someone else doing it.

“Lord, that must've been dose to ten years ago,” he went on. “I'll never forget the uproar, though. One of the worst cases we've ever had around here. You'd've thought a grizzly bear got hold of -” I interrupted him. “You'll let us know what's going on?”

“Yes, ma'am. They'll radio me and I'll give you the word.”

He headed back to the shelter of his car. Inside the morgue, fluorescent light bleached the corridor of color, the smell of deodorizer cloying. I passed the small office where funeral homes signed in bodies, then the X-ray room, and the refrigerator, which was really a large refrigerated room with doubledecker gurneys and two massive steel doors. The autopsy suite was lit up, stainless steel tables polished bright. Susan was sharpening a long knife and Fielding was labeling blood tubes. Both of them looked as tired and unenthusiastic as I felt.

“Ben's upstairs in the library watching TV,” Fielding said to me. “He'll let us know if there are any new developments.”

“What's the chance this guy had AIDS?” Susan referred to Waddell as if he already were dead.

“I don't know,” I said. “We'll double-glove, take the usual precautions.”

“I hope they'll say something if he had it,” she persisted. “You know, I don't trust it when they send these prisoners in. I don't think they care if they're HIV positive because it's not their problem. They're not the ones doing the posts and worrying about needle sticks.”

Susan had become increasingly paranoid about such occupational hazards as exposure to radiation, chemicals, and diseases. I could not blame her. She was several months pregnant, though it barely showed.

Slipping on a plastic apron, I went back into the locker room and put on greens, covered my shoes with booties, and got two packets of gloves. I inspected the surgical cart parked beside table three. Everything was labeled with Waddell's name, the date, and an autopsy number. The labeled tubes and cartons would go in the trash if Governor Norring interceded at the last minute. Ronnie Waddell would be deleted from the morgue log, his autopsy number assigned to whoever came in next.

At eleven P.M. Ben Stevens came downstairs and shook his head. All of us looked up at the clock. No one spoke. Minutes ticked by.

The capitol police officer walked in, portable radio in hand. I finally remembered his name was Rankin.

“He was pronounced at eleven-oh-five,” he said. “Will be here in about fifteen minutes.”

The ambulance beeped a warning as it backed into the bay, and when its rear doors swung open, enough Department of Corrections guards hopped out to control a small prison riot. Four of them slid out the stretcher bearing Ronnie Waddell's body. They carried it up the ramp and inside the morgue, metal clacking, feet scuffing, all of us getting out of the way. Lowering the stretcher to the tile floor without bothering to unfold the legs, they propelled it along like a sled on wheels, its passenger strapped in and covered with a bloodstained sheet.

“A nosebleed,” one of the guards offered before I could ask the question.

“Who had a nosebleed?” I inquired, noting that the guard's gloved hands were bloody.

“Mr. Waddell did.”

“In the ambulance?”

I puzzled, for Waddell should not have had a blood pressure by the time he was loaded inside the ambulance.

But the guard was preoccupied with other matters and I did not get an answer. It would have to wait.

We transferred the body to the gurney positioned on top of the floor scale. Busy hands fumbled with unfastening straps and opening the sheet. The door to the autopsy suite quietly shut as the Department of Corrections guards left just as abruptly as they had appeared.

Waddell had been dead exactly twenty-two minutes. I could smell his sweat, his dirty bare feet, and the faint odor of singed flesh. His right pant leg was pushed up above his knee, his calf dressed in fresh gauze applied postmortem to his burns. He was a big, powerful man. The newspapers had called him the gentle giant, poetic Ronnie with soulful eyes. Yet there had been a time when he had used the large hands, the massive shoulders and arms before me to rip the life from another human being.

I pulled apart the Velcro fasteners of his light blue denim shirt, checking pockets as I undressed him. Searching for personal effects is pro forma and usually fruitless. Inmates are not supposed to carry anything with them to the electric chair, and I was very surprised when I discovered what appeared to be a letter in the back pocket of his jeans. The envelope had not been opened. Written in bold block letters across the front of it was EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE BURY WITH ME!! “Make a copy of the envelope and whatever's inside and submit the originals with his personal effects,” I said, handing the envelope to Fielding.

He tucked it under the autopsy protocol on a clipboard, mumbling, 'Jesus. He's bigger than I am.”

“Amazing that anyone mold be bigger than you are, “ Susan said to my bodybuilder deputy chief.

“Good thing he's not been dead long,” he added. “Otherwise we'd need the jaws of Life.”

When muscle-bound people have been dead for hours, they are as uncooperative as marble statues. Rigor had not begun to set in. Waddell was limber as in life. He could have been asleep.

It required all of us to transfer him, facedown, to the autopsy table. He weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. His feet protruded over the table's edge. I was measuring the burns to his leg when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Susan went to see who it was, and shortly Lieutenant Pete Marino walked in, trench coat unbuttoned, one end of the belt trailing along the tile floor.