Chapter 31 #2
She suggested I become a neighborhood assistance officer for the Richmond Police Department, a volunteer cop.
I wasted no time signing up, and it was rather much a dream come true.
I couldn’t think of much I’d rather do, and began the academy in January 1985, visiting a hole-in-the-wall to be fitted for my uniform, khaki with a clip-on brown tie.
The shoes were patent leather with no arch support, and most of all I didn’t like wearing the hat, thinking I looked dorky in it.
But I was proud of my uniform and tried it on to see what Charlie thought.
He was nice, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that I didn’t cut an attractive figure.
He took several pictures of me inside our seminary apartment that was so small the front and back doors were next to each other.
I loved being a volunteer cop. Each time I showed up for duty, I would stand at somber attention as a sergeant made sure my uniform was ironed, the whistle where it should be.
I was required to log a certain number of hours each month, sometimes directing traffic during parades and floods.
I became an expert at lighting flares I carried in the trunk of the unmarked Ford LTD that I’d check out of the carpool.
I’d work foot patrols downtown and at baseball games, the police hat giving me a headache, my shiny shoes killing my feet.
Often, I was heckled, jerks wanting to know where my gun was, and I’d point at my wristwatch, implying it was some sort of stealth weapon.
When I’d direct traffic during rush hour, the carbon monoxide would make me woozy.
If I wore plainclothes and rode with the homicide detectives it counted toward my monthly hours, and I started doing that several nights each week.
I again asked Marcella about seeing an autopsy, and finally she relented.
She was doing a demo for the Richmond Police Academy on May 16 and said I could attend.
That morning, I took the elevator down to the morgue, and bumped into the gurney bearing the body of an elderly woman.
Caught by surprise, I felt my knees get weak for a moment.
Then I was fine. The body was lifted onto an autopsy table with a quiet thud, the cops gathering around, a plastic bucket handy in case someone got sick.
That and passing out weren’t uncommon, and Marcella explained this as water pounded into the steel sink attached to the table, a Stryker saw whining from the other end of the room.
She said it was important “not to fixate” on any one thing she was doing.
Then she began, making the Y-incision clavicle to clavicle and down the torso, reflecting back tissue with a scalpel.
When she snapped the rib cutter through calcified bone it sounded like dry sticks breaking.
She lifted out the bloc of organs, placing it on a cutting board, and the odor was bad even though the woman hadn’t been dead long.
I watched everything Marcella did, trying to adopt her same perspective.
If I focused on the reasons for what she was doing instead of the gore, I was fine.
That wasn’t true of the rookies. One got faint and had to step outside.
The rest of them looked like they might be sick.
Marcella sliced organs with a long knife and explained what she was checking for as a matter of routine.
Injuries. Tumors. Old scarring. Genetic anomalies.
Atherosclerotic changes to arteries that crunched when she sectioned them.
She emptied the stomach contents into a plasticized paper carton that looked suspiciously like something used for takeout barbecue.
I would learn soon enough that the state bought supplies as cheaply as possible, often surplus from other businesses.
On one occasion, the cartons had Fish Bait printed on them.
The demo autopsy lasted about an hour, ending with the Stryker saw whining through the skull, sounding like an orthopedist cutting through a plaster cast. Sections of organs were saved in a glass Ball jar filled with the formaldehyde solution called formalin.
Everything else was plopped into a big plastic bag that Marcella placed inside the chest cavity.
When she was done, she threaded a surgical needle with white cotton twine and sutured the Y-incision, returning the skull cap, pulling the scalp back over it.
The death wasn’t suspicious. But the autopsy was required by law because the woman hadn’t been in the care of a physician when she died. That usually means the person was poor.
As we headed back upstairs a little later, Marcella asked me how I did.
She wanted to know if I was okay, and I assured her I was.
By now, I was visiting her office daily, watching anything I could while cruising the forensic labs on the third and fourth floors.
I’d chauffeur Marcella to court and watch her testify in homicide trials.
I’d listen as she was deposed by lawyers.
She found out about my bad sense of direction when I was driving us from a murder trial in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County.
Busy reviewing notes in a folder, she didn’t pay attention to where we were.
When we ended up in North Carolina, she wasn’t happy.
It would take us almost three hours to get back to Richmond.
She still laughs about me heading south on the interstate instead of north.
Arriving at the OCME every morning in time for the eight o’clock staff conference, I’d hear about the cases awaiting in the morgue.
I’d accompany Marcella downstairs and watch while taking notes.
I’d follow her as she made her evidence rounds, learning about serology, fingerprints, tool marks, toxicology, firearms, footwear impressions.
I couldn’t have ended up at a better place.
Dr. Paul Ferrara was the director of the forensic labs that took up most of the building, and he invited me to attend the Forensic Science Academy that was open only to professionals.
For a while I was in class twenty hours a week.
The rest of the time I went to court, watched autopsies, and put in my police hours.
Charlie was just as busy, seminary all-consuming.
Meanwhile, I was finishing The Stick Doll Murders, and giving talks now and then when someone wanted to hear about Ruth Graham.
I’d bring copies of the biography and sell them.
It was a great way to pocket a little extra money.
In June I attended a fire school, and visited the FBI Academy at Quantico, where I began to learn about criminal profiling.
I was at it every day, and for the first time in a decade no longer struggled with the eating disorder.
It completely went away without my trying.
I can’t explain that. But many years later my partner, Staci, would offer a theory that makes sense.
A prominent neuroscientist who works in psychiatry, she suggested that my research gave me control over my life.
I had a purpose, a direction, and felt empowered.
Working on The Stick Doll Murders, I’d created a fictional female chief medical examiner.
I needed a name for her and thought of Charlie’s landlady while he was in graduate school at the University of Virginia.
Her last name was Scarpetta, and he told me funny stories about her.
I decided my character would be Kay Scarpetta with no middle name.
Because I loved making pizza, I figured she should be Italian.
I made her a tough, chainsmoking forensic pathologist in her early thirties, and already a legend in law enforcement.
But she isn’t the main character in my early attempts.
Perhaps inspired by P. D. James, I’d created an erudite male detective.
I gave him the silly name Joe Constable, and it isn’t long before he has the hots for Scarpetta.
When big cases happened, she’s summoned. One of the local medical examiners hears she’s on the way and “had known it was coming.” He’s annoyed that the intrepid chief was dropping “the curtain on his private drama.”
Detective Constable warns, “Dr. Scarpetta has a thing about messing with the body.”
She arrived in my mind full blown not long after I began hanging out at the OCME every day, and I now see what was happening.
It was a takeover that I didn’t recognize at the time.
In my early unpublished novels, the Scarpetta character eclipses all others, including Joe Constable, who’s single and a loner.
He’s handsome, introverted, independently wealthy, a dapper dresser, and drives an expensive BMW.
In other words, he’s the precursor to FBI criminal profiler Benton Wesley, who one day would be Scarpetta’s husband.
The Stick Doll Murders involves a voodoo doll, and I made one of those too from an apple I dried in the oven.
Painting the face with Liquid Paper, I glued on black yarn for hair, the body made from burlap. The book opens with a scene that took place decades earlier in the Belgian Congo:
“The three of them passed beneath the green canopy of the rain forest while the children of the trees watched with invisible eyes…”
That book and the next two I wrote had the fatal flaws of structure that didn’t work.
It wasn’t the stories themselves. The engineering morphed from a traditional whodunit into a procedural.
Scarpetta and her forensic tricks were incompatible with the format of a traditional murder mystery.
She’s mentioned 117 times in The Stick Doll Murders, what I’d created was a hybrid.
In August 1985, I sent off the manuscript to my new agent, Sallie Gouverneur.
She couldn’t sell it, but I wouldn’t know that for a while.
In those days, by the time I’d gotten a final rejection letter for one book, I was well into the next.
By now I’d become a part-time employee at the OCME.
The chief, Dr. David Wiecking, had asked me to do technical writing for his medico-legal bulletin.
I gave tips about the best way to deal with the press.
Another article I wrote explained DNA and how it can help with identification.
The serology lab upstairs was using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) to analyze genomic sequences, but the technology was new and hard for people to understand.