Book of the Dead Read Free Page B

plausible explanation?”
         “I’ve seen it before,” Scarpetta says.
          
         The animated construction site after dark.
         Surrounding shops, pizzerias, and ristorantes are lit up and crowded. Cars and motor scooters are parked on the sides of the streets, on the sidewalks. The rumble of traffic and the sounds of footsteps and voices fill the theater.
         Suddenly, the lighted windows go dark. Then silence.
         The sound of a car, and the shape of it. A four-door black Lancia parks at the corner of Via di Pasquino and Via dell’Anima. The driver’s door opens and an animated man gets out. He is dressed in gray. His face has no features and, like his hands, is gray, from which everyone in the theater is to infer that the killer hasn’t been assigned an age, race, or any physical characteristics. For the sake of simplicity, the killer is referred to as male. The gray man opens the trunk and lifts out a body wrapped in a blue fabric with a pattern that includes the colors red, gold, and green.
         “The sheet wrapped around her is based on silk fibers collected from the body and in the mud under it,” Captain Poma says.
         Benton Wesley says, “Fibers found all over the body. Including in the hair, on the hands, the feet. Certainly an abundance of them were adhering to her wounds. From this we can conclude she was completely wrapped from head to toe. So, yes, obviously we have to consider a large piece of colorful silk fabric. Perhaps a sheet, perhaps a curtain…”
         “What’s your point?”
         “I have two of them: We shouldn’t assume it was a sheet, because we shouldn’t assume anything. Also, it’s possible he wrapped her in something that was indigenous to where he lives or works, or where he held her hostage.”
         “Yes, yes.” Captain Poma’s glasses remain fixed on the scene filling the wall. “And we know there are carpet fibers which are also consistent with carpet fibers in the trunk of a 2005 Lancia, which is consistent also with what was described driving away from that area at approximately six a.m. The witness I mentioned. A woman in a nearby apartment got up to see about her cat because it was – what is the word…?”
         “Yowling? Meowing?” the translator says.
         “She got up because of her cat yowling and happened to look out her widow to see a dark luxury sedan driving away from the construction site as if in no hurry. She said it turned right on dell’Anima, a one-way street. Continue, please.”
         The animation resumes. The gray man lifts the colorfully wrapped body out of the car trunk and carries it to a nearby aluminum catwalk that is barricaded only by a rope, which he steps over. He carries the body down a wooden plank that leads into the site. He places the body to one side of the plank, in the mud, and squats in the dark and quickly unwraps a figure that turns into the dead body of Drew Martin. This is no animation, but a three-dimensional photograph. One can see her clearly – her famous face, the savage wounds on her slender, athletic, naked body. The gray man balls up the colorful wrapping and returns to his car. He drives off at a normal rate of speed.
         “We believe he did carry the body instead of dragging it,” Captain Poma says. “Because these fibers were only on the body and on the soil beneath it. There were no others, and although this isn’t proof, it certainly does indicate he didn’t drag her. Let me remind you, this scene has been mapped with the laser mapping system, and the perspective you’re seeing and the position of objects and the body are completely precise. Obviously, only people or objects that weren’t videotaped or photographed – such as the killer and his car – are animated.”
         “How heavy was she?” the minister of the interior asks from the back row.
         Scarpetta replies that Drew Martin weighed one