“It actually turned my stomach, the sound of the knife going through cartilage. And I’m thinking, if this doesn’t wake you up, lady, you really are dead.” He laughs. It is a quiet chuckle that has no joy in it. “Lend me your ear. Play it by ear. Think of all the lame clichés with the word ear in them. You never listened. If only you had listened. Why did God give ears to people who don’t listen?”
“He could have just showed up late at night and shot him, stabbed him, strangled him, but that would have been obvious. He got some of it right but not the rest of it, because he’s unable to anticipate what normal people do."
I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY A KILLER WHO HAS ELABORATE fantasies and premeditates and seems meticulous makes so little effort to hide evidence that matters. In fact, I’m baffled...
--Portrait of the Villain
I didn’t recognize the sender: BLiDedwood@stealthmail.com. There was no message, just the subject heading: ATTENTION CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER KAY SCARPETTA, in a bold uppercase Eurostile font. At first I was simply puzzled by the eighteen seconds of video with no audio, a cut-and-pasted jetboat ride in a part of the world I didn’t recognize. The film clip seemed innocent enough, and meant nothing to me as I viewed it the first time. I was sure someone had e-mailed it by mistake until the recording suddenly stopped, dissolving into a jpg, an image meant to shock. I launch another search engine into cyberspace, unable to find much useful about the pachyrhinosaurus, a thick-nosed herbivorous dinosaur with a horned bony frill and flattened boss likely used to butt and gore other animals into submission. A uniquely strange-looking beast, somewhat like a two-ton short-legged rhino wearing a grotesque bony mask, I suppose, as I look at an artist’s rendering of one. A reptile with a face that’s hard to love, but Emma Shubert did, and now the forty-eight-year-old paleontologist is missing an ear or dead or both. The anonymous e-mail was sent directly here to the CFC, the Cambridge Forensic Center, which I head, the point I can only assume to taunt and intimidate me, and I imagine a jetboat skimming over a river thousands of miles northwest of here in what looks like a lost part of the world. I study the overexposed ghostlike shape sitting in back, possibly on a bench seat, directly facing whoever was filming. Who are you? Then the steep rocky slope, what I now know is a dinosaur dig site called the Wapiti bone bed, and the image dissolves into a jpg that is violent and cruel.
One of my favorite sayings is that a book never grows old, so when I saw The Bone Bed by Patricia Cornwell, I knew I wanted to do a little catchup with one of my favorite authors... It was Cornwell and many other writers that first introduced me to the CSI type of drama that quickly caught my interest. No, I'm not a science fan, but I am a fan of details that are molded into a story. And those choosing science were ones that taunted me, with big words that I had no idea what was meant, but that were deemed important to solving a crime... Some words I ignore because I know I'll never remember. Others are those from which I gain new information... BTW, there is now a new series, Scarpetta, which will be based upon Cornwell's books!
And the first thing, that excited me most, was that she gave me a topic to discuss with my nephew, Avi, since he's now into dinosaurs of all kinds... And I learned about one that has potentially escaped extinction--at least for this book, and its evolution... As well as the devastating issue of what "man" has allowed done to our oceans and how sea animals are affected... This rescue, alone is worth reading the book related to how it had to be carefully managed...
Kay Scarpetta came into her facility prepared for a new day and only a court case at 2 is scheduled... She's upset that the courts have made it even more difficult for those who are experts in their field as it relates to court cases. As of now, there is nothing she can do but attend...
It used to be that my autopsy report was enough for the defense, my appearing in court not necessary or even desirable, but since the Melendez-Diaz decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, life has changed for every forensic expert in America. Channing Lott wants to confront his accuser. The billionaire industrialist faces a murder charge for allegedly placing a contract on his now presumed dead wife, and he’s demanded the pleasure of my company this afternoon at two.
But with death, there is no way to plan for emergencies except to respond. And that morning, Kay had been sought out to deal with a tragic situation which involves a potential loss of the important life of a leatherback turtle thought to be about 100 years old, and a potential murder victim for whom she will be responsible...
(worth the detour and back to YouTube)
The fireman named Jack scans the water with field glasses. “One hell of a story. Like capturing Nessie, and the media doesn’t even know the half of it yet.” “What does the media know, exactly?” I ask him. “Well, they know we’re out here, obviously, and the sooner we get this big boy back in the water, the better.” “Should be releasing him in a few, which is damn good, for a lot of reasons,” Klemens says to me. “You can see how low we are.” The dive platform is level with the bay because of the weight of the turtle and the rescuers attending to it, water rolling around them as the boat lifts and settles on swells. “Rated for twenty-five hundred pounds and maxed out, never seen anything like the size of this one,” Klemens says. “We run into entanglements and strandings all the time, and it’s almost always too late, but this one’s got a real good chance. What a monster.” Klemens balances himself against the tender, a rigid-inflatable rescue RIB with a gray tube hull and a 60-horsepower engine. I note that on the other side and still under its red tarp is the A-frame and hydraulic winch that can be used to retrieve people or other deadweight from the water, including a monster turtle. Obviously the winch isn’t what got this creature on board, I remark to Klemens, and I’m not surprised. Whether it’s an eight-hundred-pound gray seal or a huge loggerhead or dolphin, marine rescuers won’t run the risk of causing further injury and typically refuse the help of a winch. “Anything that might cause the slightest transfer of trace evidence or artifacts.” I remind Klemens I need to know everything that’s been done. “Well, I don’t think the turtle killed anyone,” he says, with mock seriousness. “Probably not, but all the same.” “No machinery was used,” he confirms. “Of course, my feeling about it is if we can sling human beings on board without hurting them, we sure as hell can do a turtle. But they did it their usual way, pulled him in close, harnessed him, got a ramp under him, and inflated the float bag. Then it took all of them and us to pull him on the platform. That was after they got his flippers restrained, obviously. He gets going with those things, he could tear the damn boat apart and knock a few of us into last year.” I direct his attention to a yellow boat fender. Not far from the boat, it’s attached to a buoy line, and I ask if that was what the turtle was entangled with. I notice that nothing has been cleated off. “Nope,” he says. “Some kind of fishing gear, possibly snoods from a longline or a trolling line that got wrapped around his left-front flipper.” “He wasn’t entangled with the same line the body is attached to?” I don’t understand. “Not directly. What he got wrapped up in was about fifty feet of monofilament lines, three of them, and wire leaders with rusty hooks. I’m guessing the rig got free of its fisherman float at some point, drifted on the current, and got snagged up with that buoy line.” He points to the one attached to the yellow boat fender. “And then the turtle got snagged in the fishing line. But like I said, that’s just a guess,” Klemens says. “We won’t know until everything’s recovered, and I’m assuming it will be you doing that?” “Yes. When we’re done here and he’s safely back in the water and out of range.” “Seems like he’s got very minor injuries, so they won’t be trying to transport him, not that they could have,” Klemens says. “You’d need a flatbed truck, and he probably wouldn’t have survived rehab anyway. There’s never been a leatherback from around here that did. All they know is the open ocean, swimming from continent to continent. You put them in a tank and they just keep swimming into the side of it until they beat themselves to death. Pelagic creatures don’t understand what a wall is. Kind of like my sixteen-year-old son.”
I watch the rescue team in green Windbreakers and latex gloves, the leatherback puffing out his throat and making ominous sounds, whistling and clucking, and I scan the bright choppy water. I think about what I need to do. There must be at least a dozen boats around us now, people attracted by the strobing red lights and the stunning creature on board, and no telling what’s already hit the Internet. I don’t want an audience when I recover the body, and I sure as hell don’t want it filmed by smartphones and the media. What terrible timing for me to retrieve a dead body from water, and I think uncomfortably of Mildred Lott and my idiotic comment about her turning into soap.
“The blond girl there.” Klemens nods at Dr. Pamela Quick. “She says he’s the biggest one they’ve ever seen, maybe even the biggest on record, close to ten feet long and more than a ton, and could be a hundred years old. Take a good look, Doc, because you’re not likely to ever see something like this again. They don’t survive long enough to get this big anymore because of boat strikes and entanglements and ingesting trash like plastic bags and party balloons they confuse with jellies. It’s just one more example of us wrecking the planet.” Two transom steps lead from the dive platform up to the recovery deck under us, which is crowded with four marine biologists, and piles of towels and sheets, and tough plastic cases, ski bags, and other field kits containing emergency drugs and rescue and medical equipment. From where I’m standing, downwind of the leatherback, I detect his briny smell and hear him scraping the platform as he strains against his yellow harness, his every movement slow and heavy and suggestive of enormous physical power. The loud blasts of his breaths remind me of air moving through a scuba regulator, and then his throat expands again and he emits a deep guttural roar that makes me think of lions and dragons and King Kong. “You hear that behind you on a dark beach, it would be a heart attack,” Klemens says. “What else have they done so far?” I ask. “Cut the lines off of him.” “I hope they saved them.” “I’m not sure what you could tell from them.” “You never know until you look,” I reply. “PIT tagged him right before you got here, and I can tell you he doesn’t like needles,” he adds. Pamela Quick works a spinal needle deep into the neck for a blood draw, while a second rescuer, a young man with brown shaggy hair, reads a digital thermometer and announces, “Temp’s up two degrees. He’s starting to overheat.” “Let’s get him covered and wet him down,” Dr. Quick decides, and she glances up at me and for a moment we are eye to eye. They drape the ridged carapace with a wet white sheet, and I recall her tone to me on the phone earlier, her adamant way of telling me what she needed to do. It was my distinct impression that she didn’t believe she required my permission and didn’t want my involvement, and now she just looked at me resentfully it seemed, as if I have something personal with her that I know nothing about. She squeezes ultrasound gel on the turtle’s neck, moving around a handheld Doppler probe with a built-in loudspeaker to monitor the heart rate. The sound of the massive reptile’s blood flowing is like the roaring of a river or a rushing wind. “Normosol to replenish his electrolytes.” She tears open the packet of a solution set, a twenty-gauge needle attached to an IV line. “Ten drops per one mil. He’s stressed.” “Well, I would be, too. He’s probably never been around humans before,” Klemens observes, and I’m aware of the weird familiarity I feel that isn’t about him. A sad curiosity runs through me like a low-voltage current, then is gone, and I imagine my father seeing such a marvel. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think of the person I’ve become. “They say a turtle like this one’s been on land only once in his life. Right after he was hatched on some beach halfway around the world and crawled across the sand and into the water. And he’s been swimming ever since.” Klemens talks expressively with his hands the way my father did until he was too weak from cancer to lift them from the bed. “So he’s not happy resting on top of something, in this case, the platform. Not to be crude about it, but the only other time he’s got something under him is when he mates.
What do you want to do about her?” He looks at the heaving water where the large yellow sausage fender bobs, which strikes me as quite odd, and I say so. “You think it’s attached to a conch pot or cinder blocks?” I point out. “Why?” “When they were pulling the buoy line close with the grappler to cut the fishing line and get the turtle on board?” he says. “For a couple of minutes the body was at the surface. Her head was.” “Jesus. I hope we’re not going to see that on TV.” I look up at a second helicopter that has moved in, hovering directly over us, a white twin-engine, with what appears to be a gyrostabilized camera system mounted on the nose. “I think all they’re interested in is the turtle and got no clue what else is on the line.” He follows my gaze up. “The first chopper got here just as we were pulling him on board, so I don’t think they filmed the body or know about it. At least not yet.”
“And what’s gone out over the radio?” I ask. “Not a distress call, for obvious reasons.” He means any calls about the dead body didn’t go out over the usual channels that might be monitored by mariners and the media. “Did anybody touch it with the grappler or disturb it in any way?” “Nobody got anywhere near it, and we recorded the whole thing with our onboard cameras, Doc. So you got that if you need proof in court.” “Perfect,” I tell him. “When the body was just at the surface you could barely make out the shape of a wire mesh pot about four foot square, I’m guessing.” He continues staring at the sausage buoy, as if he can still see the pot he’s describing. “It’s attached by maybe twenty, thirty feet of rope and obviously has something in it that’s heavy as hell. Rocks, cinder blocks, I couldn’t tell.” “And the body’s tethered to this line? We’re sure it still is? We’re sure there’s no way it got loose when they were pulling the turtle in and cutting him free?”
“I don’t think it’s possible that poor lady’s going anywhere. Tied around the lower part, possibly the legs, the ankles.” He stares at the yellow bumper moving brightly on the water and the yellow line dropping taut and straight below it, disappearing into the dark blue bay. “An older woman with white hair is what it looked like to me, and then when they got the turtle cut free, she dropped below the surface again, the weighted conch pot pulling her back down.” “She’s tethered to the buoy line, which is tied around her legs, possibly? Yet she’s upright?” I’m having a hard time envisioning what he’s describing. “Don’t know.” “If her head appeared first, she’s upright.” “Well, she definitely was headfirst,” he says. “If the conch pot, the body, and the buoy are all part of the same line or rig, I find that very curious,” I insist. “It’s contradictory. One is pulling her down while the other is pulling her up.” “I’ve got everything on video if you want to duck into the wheelhouse and take a look.” “If you could get me a copy, I’d really appreciate it,” I reply.
“What I need to do now is to take a look at the turtle.” It isn’t mere curiosity on my part. From where we are on the upper deck I can see a wound near the leatherback’s black-and-grayish-white mottled neck, on a ridge at the upper edge of its carapace, an area of bright pink abrasion that Pamela Quick is wiping with Betadine pads. “I’ll leave the body in the water until I’m ready to recover it and transport it to shore,” I tell Klemens, as Marino climbs up the ladder with white Tyvek coveralls, boot covers, and gloves. “The longer it stays cold the better,” I add. “I’m certainly no aficionado of fishing tackle,” I then say, as I take off my down jacket, “but why would someone pick a boat bumper as opposed to fishing floats for a conch or lobster pot?” “These watermen are like magpies and collect all sorts of things,” Klemens says. “We don’t know that a waterman has anything to do with this,” I remind him. “Detergent and soda pop,” he continues, “and Clorox bottles, Styrofoam, bumpers that come loose from docks, anything you can think of that will float and is easy to find, not to mention cheap or, better yet, free. But you’re right. That’s assuming this has anything to do with fishing.”
“It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with fishing,” Marino says bluntly. “More likely, the point was to use a line with a lot of weight and dump her overboard,” Klemens agrees. “You wouldn’t use a float of any type if that’s what you were up to.” Marino has no doubt about it as we suit up in protective clothing. “You sure as hell wouldn’t attach a big yellow bumper unless maybe you wanted her to be found damn fast.” “And hopefully she has been,” I comment, because the better shape the body is in, the better chance I have of finding out what I need to know. “Using a bumper or float at all? I agree. I think someone wants her found,” asserts the firefighter named Jack. “And I bowled against you before,” he says to Marino. “You’re not half bad.” “Don’t remember you, and I would if you were half decent.” “The Firing Pins. Right?” “That’s us. Oh, yeah, now I’m remembering. You’re the Shootin’ Blanks.” Marino picks on him. “Naw.” “Could’ve sworn it.” “You mind I ask why?” Klemens watches me pull on heavy-duty black nitrile gloves. “How come you’re treating my fireboat like a crime scene?” “He’s part of one.” I mean the turtle is, and that I intend to handle him like evidence...
~~~~~~
This series has a set of ongoing characters so it was fun getting reacquainted to their ongoing story, even if there is one lead character who Scarpetta has decided has both good and bad points. For me, at first at least, I was ready to have this character be disappeared... But he was right there at the end, when needed, so be prepared to decide how you feel about these main characters, just for the fun of it...
“What’s he doing here this early?” I puzzle. “He decided to be on call last night and sent Toby home.” “What do you mean he decided to be on call? He just got back from Florida last night. Why would he decide to be on call? He’s never on call.” It makes no sense. “It’s just a good thing no big cases came in that required someone to go to the scene because I’m guessing Marino slept. Or maybe he was tweeting,” she says. “Which isn’t a good idea. Not after hours, when he tends to be a little less inhibited.” “I’m confused.” “Did he tell you he’s moved an inflatable AeroBed into Investigations?” she says. “We don’t allow beds. We don’t allow people on call to sleep. Since when is he on call?” I repeat. “Since he’s been having fights with what’s-her-name.” “Who?” “Or he’s ornamenting and doesn’t want to drive.” I have no idea what Lucy is talking about. “Which is rather often these days.” She looks me in the eye. “What’s-her-name he met on Twitter and had to unfollow in more ways than one. She made a real fool of him.” “‘Ornamenting’?” “Minis he turns into ornaments. After he drinks what was in them. You didn’t hear it from me.” I think back to July eleventh, Marino’s birthday, which has never been a happy occasion for him and is only worse the older he gets. “You need to ask him yourself, Aunt Kay,” Lucy adds, as I recall visiting him at his new house in West Cambridge. Wood-sided on a sliver of a lot, it has working fireplaces and genuine hardwood floors, he likes to boast, and a finished basement, where he installed a sauna, a workshop, and a speed bag he loves to show off. When I drove up with a birthday basket of homemade asparagus quiche and white chocolate sweet salami, he was on a ladder, stringing strands of lighted small glass skulls along the roofline, Crystal Head vodka minis he was ordering directly from the distillery and turning into ornaments, he volunteered before I could ask, as if to imply he’d been buying empties, hundreds of them. Getting ready for Halloween, he added boisterously, and I should have known then that he was drinking again. “I don’t remember what you’re doing today except maybe another pig farm somewhere that you intend to put out of business,” I say to Lucy, as I push away every horrible thing Marino’s ever done when he’s been drunk.
Because for the majority of the book, you'll be totally involved in a tense, fast-paced, serial-killer murder case that is compelling as well as totally impossible to identify the villain... I was stumped until the great reveal at the climaxing scene that reads as if you were right there with Scarpetta as she faces the fact that she was now his latest captive!
But that's a long way off... First, Scarpetta is caught in a major conflict of time use as she is called to help save an ancient turtle that needs to be return to the water. The thing is that it has been caught in so much debris placed in the ocean that the weight has become so heavy that the turtle cannot easily swim. And that includes a female body that has been attached in two ways which includes weighted material, so tight that special expertise is needed to free the turtle, while not damaging any part of the body.
It is from this point in the book that you will meet the heart-and-soul of Kay Scarpetta as she acts on behalf of the victim to discover and document exactly what caused her death. Almost immediately, there are major issues that causes confusion. Kay, herself, does the dive necessary to bring the woman to the surface. An almost impossible task when the weighted material is working to hold her body and move it down further. While another rope is being used to bring her to the surface. Extreme care is necessary and Kay trusts nobody but herself to accomplish this important first step...
And, then, she realizes just how badly the body has been damaged. If extreme care is not used, the body could be broken apart and begin to disintegrate. Suddenly Kate was caught between a need to give assistance to the woman who has clearly been murdered or at least hidden in the ocean. Or, attending the required court session. All I can say is that, if this part of the book is true, I have to agree with Cornwell... Yes, a judge ordering somebody to appear in court normally has priority, unless, the reason why an individual doesn't show up for court is an emergency case... in this case ensuring that the body is acted upon as quickly as possible, so that proper legal procedures can help determine what has happened. This subplot was an interesting exploration of just how laws and legal procedures should have more flexibility than is now occurring, as witness all of the court cases that take so long to accomplish their tasks... In this book, also, is a Defense Lawyer who is using the court as a means of ensuring her client is not convicted. Fortunately, Cornwell later smooths out this turn of events in the book which serves to allow the reader a better understanding of the situation. Me, right now, I'm questioning a lot about Supreme Court's actions, so I was satisfied with how it was covered in this book... But, clearly, communication by the courts has become questionable to the point of our unwillingness to accept seemingly biased actions... Meaning something is very wrong...
As either disappearances or discovery of bodies of women continues to occur, readers will be caught in such a fast-paced set of activities that I,.jpg)
for one, lost track of the who, what, when and where... of the various women, especially when, at the same time, Cornwell gives no real hints as to who the villain is. While I did miss my usual attempt to identify that villain, at the same time, the book was moving so fast that readers had only one choice, follow Kay Scarpetta's work and analysis of each of the women and forget about the villain. LOL This, then, is a true Thriller novel that keeps you involved to the very end. For me, it was a recognition that Cornwell is indeed the queen of her genre and somehow wins out over Bones... Maybe that's because Scarpetta pays more attention to the people surrounding her, while Bones' main character, Temperance Brennan, is shown to be more concerned with the work over the concerns of the involved people--at least that's my opinion, although I enjoy both programs... in different ways...
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Highly recommended!
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