Identity Unknown

Book 0: Kay Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

The next installment in the popular Kay Scarpetta series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell.

Summoned to an unnerving, abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once loved. While teaching in Rome during the early days of her career, Scarpetta had an intense love affair with Sal Giordano that led to a lifelong friendship.
 
The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue.
 
As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil . . .

Release date: October 15, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

A Stryker saw grinds through bone, a knife rasping across a whetstone as water drums into deep metal sinks. Doctors call out organ weights, wound measurements and other findings as those assisting scribe. Rock and roll blares from the vintage boom box on a shelf, the autopsy suite not the quiet place one might expect.

Our caseload is heavy this Tuesday morning, the weather beautiful in Northern Virginia, the sun shining, the temperature in the seventies. People have been flocking to the parks, the nature trails, the waterfront, and with the good comes the awful. Violence, accidents and other senseless deaths escalate when the weather is nice, my idea of spring fever different from most.

I’m finishing a complicated case that I find especially disturbing, and there’s nothing more I can do for now. What’s needed is time for elusive injuries to creep out of hiding. When contusions occur close to death, the skin discoloration is subtle like shadows and easily missed. But with additional days in the cooler, the injuries become obvious like the bruised flesh of a peach turning brown.

I’m suspicious that faint marks on the victim’s upper arms and neck were caused by violent gripping and throttling. If I’m right, that will be incriminating for her parents, Ryder and Piper Briley. My decisions could result in them charged with child abuse and murder. Based on what I’ve witnessed at their home and during the autopsy, they’re a monstrous couple.

But it’s not up to me to judge. I’m not supposed to care about punishment. The forensic pathologist’s job is to present the facts with no interest in the outcome. That’s impossible unless you’re a robot or cold-blooded. Luna Briley’s death is outrageous and infuriating. It was all I could do to keep my cool when I was at the scene yesterday.

I have no doubt that her entire short life was hellish, her influential parents unaccustomed to facing consequences. I’m sealing bullet fragments inside an evidence container when the old-style wall phone begins to clangor near my workstation. I wonder who it is. Few people have this number.

“Someone expecting a call down here?” I raise my voice above the din.

My medical examiners are deep in their cases, scarcely glancing in my direction as the ringing continues.

“No problem. I’ll get it.” I mutter this to no one in particular.

Taking off my surgical mask and bloody gloves, I toss them into the biohazard trash. The floor is sticky beneath my Tyvek-covered feet as I step over to the countertop. Taped to the cinderblock wall is a sign demanding CLEAN HANDS ONLY! and I grab the phone, the long cord hopelessly snarled.

“Doctor Scarpetta,” I answer, and there’s no response. “Hello?” I detect the murmur of a talk show playing in the background. “Anybody there? Hello?”

Sensing someone on the line, I hang up. I’m returning to my table when the ringing starts again. This time I’m not as pleasant.

“Morgue,” I announce.

“Hate to interrupt. I know you’re slammed.” It’s my niece, Lucy Farinelli, a U.S. Secret Service agent and helicopter pilot.

I can tell by the noise of throbbing engines and thudding rotor blades that she’s flying somewhere. She wouldn’t call like this unless it’s urgent.

“The phone just rang, and no one said anything. That wasn’t you by chance?” I ask her.

“It wasn’t, and I have bad news, Aunt Kay.”

Lucy never calls me that anymore unless no one else is listening. She must be flying alone, and I imagine her in the right seat of a cockpit that reminds me of a space shuttle.

“We’ve got a bizarre death that I suspect is somehow related to the little girl likely on your table as we speak,” she tells me somberly, and I detect an undercurrent of anger.

“I’m just finishing up with Luna Briley if that’s who you mean.” Rolling out a chair from the countertop, I sit down with my back to the room.

“I’m betting she’s not an accident,” Lucy says ominously.

“What bizarre death are you thinking might be related to her?” I slide a clipboard close, a pen attached by a plastic string.

“Her scumbag billionaire father owns the Oz theme park you and I are familiar with. It’s abandoned now, and a couple of hours ago we found the body of a missing person there,” Lucy informs me in a reluctant tone, and I sense something coming I won’t want to hear. “I’m afraid it’s someone we know. You especially know,” she adds awkwardly, and I’m touched by dread.

I jot down today’s date, April 16. The time is 11:40 A.M. as she explains that Nobel laureate Sal Giordano was abducted last night near the Virginia and West Virginia border. He’s been violently killed, she says to my shock and horror, my inner voice already arguing.

It can’t be him.

“I’m really sorry, Aunt Kay. I know you two were close…”

There must be some mistake.

An acclaimed astrophysicist, he’s an advisor to the White House and other top officials in the U.S. and internationally. Sal and I serve on several of the same government task forces and committees. We see each other regularly and have a history.

This can’t be right.

“You got how close to the body?” I hear myself asking the right questions.

“Close enough to get a good look without disturbing anything. He’s nude with no sign of personal effects so far, and I don’t think he’s been dead all that long…”

It could be someone else.

“Are we sure it’s him? Let’s start with that.” I envision his compelling face. I hear his lyrical voice and easy laugh.

“Average height, slender, with long wavy gray hair. A tattoo of a pi sign on his left inner wrist,” Lucy describes, and I go hollow inside. “There was a pungent odor that I could vaguely smell through my face mask. Sort of vinegary. Sharply acidic like white vinegar.”

“Any guesses about the source?” I hear myself asking as I try to quell my inner turmoil.

“Only that I smelled it all around the body.”

“What about obvious injuries?”

“A lot of trauma, especially to his face and head…”

No. No. No…

“His skin is strangely red,” she says. “Maybe from some type of radiation, and there’s a vortex of apple blossom petals around him like a crop circle…”

“A what?”

“It appears he was dropped out of the sky by a UAP…”

“Excuse me…?” I’ve paused my pen on the call sheet.

“A UAP,” Lucy repeats. “An Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. A UFO. Whatever you want to call it.”

Pressing the old phone’s handset close to one ear, I cover the other with my free hand, trying to block out the racket behind me. Members of my staff are talking in loud voices. A blaring buzzer announces the morgue’s vehicle bay door is opening. Water pounds in every sink, the cooler door slamming with a thud.

Lucy explains that at around six o’clock this morning, a UAP was detected on radar flying low and slow near the Oz theme park. After the Secret Service was notified that Sal was missing, my niece conducted an aerial search for him. Not having any luck, she decided to follow the flightpath the mysterious object had been on and was led directly to the body.

“Whatever the thing was, it flew over the very spot in the middle of the Haunted Forest,” Lucy explains. “The low-flying craft had a signature that doesn’t match any algorithm. And since it wasn’t witnessed by anyone that we know of, we don’t have any clues as to what the UAP might have looked like to an observer.”

“A UAP as in a spaceship from another planet?” I glance around, making sure no one can hear me.

“What I know is that Sal Giordano was jettisoned from some type of flying object identity unknown,” Lucy states. “It was unrecognizable to radar. And to electro-optical, telemetric and other sensors. Also to spectrum monitoring. That doesn’t mean it was from outer space. But we can’t assume it wasn’t.”

“I’ll plan knowing that’s a possibility.” My mind races through how best to handle this.

“I need to ask a couple of questions,” Lucy then says, another Stryker saw whining and grinding behind me.

“Of course.”

“You saw him yesterday.”

“Yes. It was his birthday.” I push away what I’m feeling.

Guilt. I should have asked more questions.

I envision him squinting in the sun and smiling at me as we chatted on his driveway, both of us in a hurry. He was eager to get on the road, and I’d dropped by after a court hearing. He was dressed in cargo shorts, a loose white linen shirt like an ad for Banana Republic. I remember he seemed preoccupied as if something weighed heavily, but I didn’t pry. I never have. I assumed he was in a mood because he wasn’t happy turning sixty.

“Sounds like you were one of the last to see him alive.” Lucy’s voice over the phone, her helicopter thud-thudding. “What can you tell me?”

I explain that I dropped by his house late yesterday morning with a gift basket he could take on the road. I knew he was on his way to West Virginia’s Green Bank Observatory, its steerable radio telescope the largest in the world. He’s been a frequent visitor since graduate school, the place important to his work.

“Did he mention having trouble with anyone? Anything unusual going on?” Lucy asks.

“Nothing jumps out except he was a bit melancholy about his birthday.” I ward off another wave of remorse and disbelief. “He didn’t say much about what he would be doing during his trip, and that was typical. We never quizzed each other about our work, most of it not up for discussion.”

Lucy informs me that last night at seven, Sal met two colleagues at the Red Caboose several miles from Green Bank. An hour and a half later a security camera caught him leaving the restaurant in his pickup truck, an old blue Chevy with a grumbly diesel engine I tease him about. Presumably, he was headed up the mountain to the Allegheny Peak Lodge where he always stayed.

“He was due at the observatory before daylight this morning to track the radio waves of the rising sun,” Lucy is saying. “When he didn’t show up, it was discovered that he never checked into the lodge last night. It seems that shortly after he drove away from the restaurant he had an encounter of the wrong kind.”

“What about his truck?” I ask, a gurney trundling past.

“About two miles from there. Apparently, it plunged off the road with no one inside and is halfway down the mountain in a ravine. First responders report that the engine was running at the time of the crash, the doors locked, the front seat belts fastened but no sign of anyone.”

“How far is that from where his body somehow ended up?” I continue writing down the details.

“Ninety miles, in Augusta County.”

“The theme park has been abandoned how long?” I ask, and Lucy was in high school the last time I took her there.

“It was permanently shuttered at the beginning of COVID,” she answers. “Since then it’s fallen to ruin and been vandalized. As you remember, it’s off the beaten track in the Blue Ridge foothills. You’d have to know about it or you wouldn’t think to leave a body there. It’s not the only stop we’ll be making, and we’ll talk more later. I’m an hour out from Washington National.”

“Marino and I will be there with our gear.”

“A bad storm front is on the way, and it’s going to get nasty later in the day,” she adds. “You can expect a lot of turbulence and tricky maneuvering. He won’t be happy.”

“That’s an understatement. Fly safe,” I tell her.

I return the handset to its cradle, the long cord twisting and coiling like something alive. Reaching for my cell phone, I write a text to Pete Marino, a former homicide detective I’ve worked with most of my career. He’s my head of investigations and hates flying in helicopters, especially when Lucy is at the stick.

Add bad weather to the equation, and he’ll be an ill-tempered mess. Introduce the subject of UAPs and I’ll never hear the end of it. An enthusiast of most things paranormal, including Bigfoot, ghosts and flying saucers, he’s quick to tell you about his close encounters. Marino will hope the UAP really is from outer space. At the same time, he’ll panic should that turn out to be the case.

I inform him that we’re needed at a scene some 150 miles west of our office here in Alexandria. Lucy will be flying us there and possibly to other locations. In addition to the usual equipment, he’s to bring Level-A hazmat protection. We’ll need total containment body pouches and a radiation detector. It would be a good idea to include toiletries and a change of clothing. I have no idea how long we’ll be gone.

You seen the weather report?! he fires back with emojis of a thunder cloud, lightning and a coffin.

Bring a rain jacket.

We’re better off driving & transporting the body ourselves.

Not an option, I answer. Lucy wants us with her. See you soon.

I work my hands into a pair of gloves as death investigator Fabian Etienne sharpens another knife on the far side of the room. In his late twenties, he’s exotically attractive, attired in his usual black scrubs, these with a spiderweb pattern. His long black hair is pinned up under a matching surgical cap, his arms and neck a tattoo gallery.

He’s been keeping busy since he got here this morning, fooling himself into thinking I don’t notice that he’s avoiding me. I understand better than most that some deaths are impossibly hard. It doesn’t matter that he grew up in the business, his father a legendary Louisiana coroner. Fabian is experienced and for the most part fearless. But he’s self-absorbed and overly sensitive. I motion for him that I could use some help.

He’ll be with me in a minute, he indicates. While waiting, I finish labeling test tubes and other evidence. I can’t stop seeing Sal Giordano’s keen eyes, his Einstein-wild hair. Thoughts enter my mind as if from him, and it won’t be the same when we’re not sitting next to each other at meetings. We won’t be grabbing lunch, a drink, or riding together and catching up.

È quello che è, amore.

It is what it is, he’d say. I imagine him telling me not to feel upset even as what I’m thinking seems heartless and disrespectful. As unlikely as it seems, I have no choice but to consider that he might have been inside a spacecraft of nonhuman origin. Possibly he was exposed to unknown pathogens or radioactive contaminants. I’ll be treating his remains like an extreme biohazard.

Fabian 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 naïve 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, l. . .