Chapter 32 #2
We’d start out with Scotch and peanuts, progressing to one of my pizzas and a salad. We never missed Masterpiece Theatre, both of us addicted to series like Caligula and Brideshead Revisited. Charlie was a huge fan of Jeremy Irons, who I’d become acquainted with much later in life.
If anyone ever made a movie or TV show about me, Charlie hoped Jeremy would play him. That’s what Charlie told me not long before he died. Maybe I could ask Jeremy about it, and I did. I emailed him, passing along the message.
Witnessing hundreds of autopsies while making notes, I was careful to leave out the names of the dead.
An exception was twenty-eight-year-old Anne Keller Vaden, autopsied Monday morning, November 19, 1985.
When her nude body arrived at the morgue, it was bound with multiple pairs of different-colored pantyhose the killer found in her bedroom.
Beaten with a liquor bottle, she’d been stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen.
The detective said she was a business broker who’d graduated with honors from William & Mary.
Recently, she’d separated from her husband and was living alone in a new upscale Chesterfield County apartment building on the other side of the James River.
That past Friday, she’d attended an evening class at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
On her way home, she stopped to pick up a fried chicken dinner for two.
The next morning, she was supposed to be up early, she and her parents headed out of town.
The plan was for her to leave at 5:30 a.m., meeting at their house.
Her father called at 4:50 making sure she was up.
When she answered the phone, she sounded strange.
He felt something was wrong, and her mother called next.
This time Anne ominously said, “I’ll be all right,” and the line was disconnected.
Alarmed, the father raced over to her apartment.
When he arrived, he found the door unlocked, his daughter’s bound nude body on the living room floor.
In the kitchen was the takeout box of chicken for two, and all of it had been eaten.
The receipt showed the food had been purchased the night before at around 9 p.m. On the living room floor were scrapbooks.
It appeared she or someone had been looking at them.
Because there was no sign of forcible entry, it was assumed the killer was an acquaintance, possibly her estranged husband.
Marcella wasn’t buying it. What she saw would be extremely atypical for a domestic homicide.
She and I wheeled the body into the X-ray room, and fingerprints examiner Wally Forst arrived with the big boxy laser on a cart.
For the next hour or so he and Marcella went over the body an inch at a time, the skin lighting up eerily in the thin beam of pulsing laser light.
Looking on while taking notes, I noticed that the body was amazingly clean.
There was nothing on it but fibers that likely were from the sheet she was covered in before being placed inside the body bag.
Her legs were perfectly smooth, and I thought that odd.
There was no trace of stubble, as if she’d just shaved them.
I supposed she might have had them waxed. We’ll never know, but I wondered aloud if the killer had made her shower or bathe after he raped her. While Marcella was performing the autopsy, she cut open the stomach, noting it contained an unusual amount of food that was completely undigested.
It was assumed Anne Vaden had eaten fried chicken with someone the night before. How could that be the case if the food was undigested at least eight hours later?
“Fight or flight,” Marcella said as she emptied the stomach contents into a container. “When someone is sufficiently stressed, their digestion quits. This lady was extremely stressed all night.”
Marcella instructed the detective to drive to the fast-food chicken restaurant and buy the same dinner for two.
I watched as she took the chicken off the bones, and everything went into a blender.
The amount was the same as the gastric contents.
The victim had eaten both dinners herself.
Marcella told police to search the apartment for laxatives, and they found plenty.
A year later the police would arrest Ronald Bennett, a maintenance worker in Anne’s building.
Making a copy of the master key, he’d let himself into her apartment.
He’d been there before when her air-conditioning had a problem.
I remember the detective telling us that she’d offered Bennett iced tea while he worked. She was a nice person.
It was speculated that she’d just eaten the takeout food when Bennett came out of hiding.
Likely, he was already inside looking for money to buy cocaine.
He would give his girlfriend the jewelry he stole, and later she turned him in after they broke up.
Ronald Bennett would die in the electric chair eleven years later at the age of forty-two.
Anne Vaden was an overachiever, on her way to a promising career as a businesswoman.
I suspect that during the endless hours she was held hostage, she tried to make her killer view her as a person.
Perhaps she was showing him her family scrapbooks for that reason.
I imagined her using her intelligence and decency on a brute who had neither.
Her murder had a powerful impact on me. It’s one I can’t forget.
By the end of 1985, publishers were rejecting The Stick Doll Murders.
I was crushed but well along in my second mystery that focused on archaeology.
I participated in a dig in Williamsburg, not finding anything but a lot of clay pipe stems. Touring the magnificent eighteenth-century Westover Plantation, I was intrigued by the secret tunnel that ran from the main house to the James River.
A new plot was swirling in my head. I would call my second attempt Murder in the Lost Hundred.
“It was November in Carter’s Towne, Virginia, and the late afternoon sky was as hazy as an ice cube…,” the novel begins.
Once again, Scarpetta is a forceful presence, mentioned 111 times. As soon as I’d sent off the manuscript, I started writing The Queen’s Pawn. She’s mentioned 221 times in that one.
“Some stories should never be told, and Joe Constable supposed that this was one of them. But it was early spring, the exact same time of year that it all happened…,” chapter one begins.
More rejection letters, and it was obvious that my first two efforts were dead on arrival. I sent out The Queen’s Pawn in late 1986, and it began making the rounds of New York publishers. More rejections followed. There was no respite from bad news.