Book of the Dead Read Free Page A

pressing against it or constricting it, such as tight clothing. Can we see the autopsy photograph, please?” She checks a list on the podium. “Number twenty-one.”
         The wall fills with Drew’s body on a steel table in the morgue at Tor Vergata University. She is facedown. Scarpetta moves the laser’s red dot over the back, over the purplish-red areas and blanching caused by lividity. The shocking wounds that look like dark red craters she has yet to address.
         “Now, if you’ll put the scene up, please. The one that shows her being placed into the body bag,” she says.
         The three-dimensional photograph of the construction site fills the wall again, but this time there are investigators in white Tyvek suits, gloves, and shoe covers lifting Drew’s limp, naked body into a sheet-lined black pouch on top of a stretcher. Around them, other investigators hold up additional sheets to block the view from the curious and the paparazzi at the perimeter of the scene.
         “Compare this to the photograph you just saw. By the time she was autopsied some eight hours after she was found, her lividity was almost completely set,” Scarpetta says. “But here at the scene, it’s apparent that lividity was in its early stages.” The red dot moves over pinkish areas on Drew’s back. “Rigor was in its early stages as well.”
         “You rule out the early onset of rigor mortis due to a cadervic spasm? For example, if she strenuously exerted herself right before death? Maybe she struggled with him? Since you’ve not mentioned this phenomenon so far?” Captain Poma underlines something on his legal pad.
         “There’s no reason to talk about a cadervic spasm,” Scarpetta says. Why don’t you throw in the kitchen sink? she’s tempted to ask. “Whether she strenuously exerted herself or not,” she says, “she wasn’t fully rigorous when she was found, so she didn’t have a cadervic spasm….”
         “Unless rigor came and went.”
         “Impossible, since it became fully fixed in the morgue. Rigor doesn’t come and go and then come again.”
         The translator suppresses a smile as she relays this in Italian, and several people laugh.
         “You can see from this” – Scarpetta points the laser at Drew’s body being lifted onto the stretcher – “her muscles certainly aren’t stiff. They’re quite flexible. I estimate she’d been dead less than six hours when she was found, possibly considerably less.”
         “You’re a world expert. How can you be so vague?”
         “Because we don’t know where she’d been, what temperatures or conditions she was exposed to before she was left in the construction site. Body temperature, rigor mortis, livor mortis can vary greatly from case to case and individual to individual.”
         “Based on the condition of the body, are you saying it’s impossible she was murdered soon after she had lunch with her friends? Perhaps while she was walking alone to Piazza Navona to join them?”
         “I don’t believe that’s what happened.”
         “Then once again, please. How do you explain her undigested food and point-two alcohol level? They imply she died soon after she ate lunch with her friends – not some fifteen, sixteen hours later.”
         “It’s possible not long after she left her friends, she resumed drinking alcohol and was so terrified and stressed, her digestion quit.”
         “What? Now you’re suggesting she spent time with her killer, possibly as much as ten, twelve, fifteen hours with him – that she was drinking with him?”
         “He might have forced her to drink, to keep her impaired and easier to control. As in drugging somebody.”
         “So he forced her to drink alcohol, perhaps all afternoon, all night, and into the early morning, and she was so frightened her food didn’t digest? That’s what you’re offering us as a