Chapter 42
IT HAD BEEN ALMOST A DECADE SINCE CHARLIE AND I SEPARATED.
I never heard from him unless it was a snippy note asking me not to talk about his marriage, as he’d put it.
I would write back that it had been my marriage too.
I’d heard that he was most upset with me.
It must have been jolting that I finally got published and began making a lot of money.
“Please tell me I didn’t turn you into this,” he said.
He worried it was his fault I was with women. As if he’d driven me to it.
“You don’t have the power to do that to me,” I replied. “And I don’t have power over it either. We are what we are, Charlie.”
“I’m very relieved to hear you say it’s not my fault.”
I think he would have had a much harder time if I’d replaced him with another man.
I never did. During our reunion in 1997, it was as if we’d never been estranged.
He’d just returned from a vacation in Mexico with the lovely artist Marty Whaley Adams, famous in Charleston for her paintings and historic garden.
He’d been seeing her for a while, and they planned to get married.
Soon enough, I met her too, and the three of us became fast friends.
Charlie had quit the ministry, telling me he didn’t believe anything he’d preached.
Burying his robes, he gave up his ordination because he didn’t want to do weddings or funerals anymore.
Or that was his rationale, and I asked if he would like to be my private editor.
“I couldn’t have done the Ruth book without you,” I reminded him.
Long years after those early days at the seminary, I’d quote his editorial insights. He had no patience for unnecessary verbiage, and most of all for writing that was self-indulgent. He was ruthless about slashing through whatever he deemed “purple” or “sentimental.”
“Too many words!” he’d declare.
“If you love a metaphor too much, throw it out,” he’d advise.
Whenever I’d get a manuscript back from him, I braced myself for his critical marginalia. Most of the time he was right. Now and then he’d go after Scarpetta herself.
“Bitchy!” he’d scribble, and other smackdowns.
She was too driven, too cold, too forceful, and even unlikable, as if they were former intimates who no longer got along. His view of her was very different from mine, and at times I wondered who he was really talking about.
“Don’t get mad at Scarpetta because you’re really mad at me,” I once told him.
At the time we met in Charleston, I had begun working with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), learning about arson and explosions. I attended post-blast and fire investigation schools at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia.
While I was there, ATF agents taught me how to make a pipe bomb.
I went shopping with them for PVC, end caps, double-stranded wire, duct tape, nine-volt batteries, gunpowder, nails, and ball bearings.
Of course, we didn’t add gunpowder, the pipe bomb we built inert.
All the same, it looked like the real thing.
Unfortunately, I left it in my hotel room when I checked out.
God only knows what housekeeping thought.
I’d done something similar when working on biohazards, leaving a box marked as such in yet another hotel room.
Often, I was given props by the experts I worked with, and it’s a wonder I didn’t get into serious trouble. These days, I would for sure.
In Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., ATF investigators would pick me up in the middle of the night to ride along while they worked suspicious fires.
I hung out with firefighters and got to ride in their trucks.
I watched ATF investigate the fire at the Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky where warehouses filled with barrels of bourbon created an inferno hot enough to melt glass and metal.
I’d write down what I was seeing while following investigators through burned-out buildings that were treacherous with alligatored wood, exposed wires, broken glass, and detritus floating in sooty water that constantly dripped.
Some of my notes are impossible to read, the writing huge and slanted, the ink smeared as I wrote in the illumination of flashlights.
One night I went with a crowd of ATF agents to a favorite watering hole in Washington, D.C.
Drinks were on me, and everybody overindulged.
The Italian owner of the restaurant was lamenting about his father recently dying.
The body needed to be shipped to Italy, but it wasn’t affordable.
I volunteered to pay for it and added the amount to my tab.
After I’d finished Point of Origin, I began spending a lot of time in France.
My American-born editor Nina Salter lived in Paris, her French flawless.
Otherwise, I couldn’t have managed. When I’d show up for publicity events, we’d take in all sorts of sights that I might want to use in my latest story.
It was my habit to do research when I traveled on tour, and often I was invited to visit the local police department. Or a plague pit. And most often, the medical examiner’s facility. Morgues aren’t all the same. In Poland, I was proudly shown the head of a dead Nazi soldier in a tank of formalin.
In Buenos Aires were more heads, these of decapitated prisoners, their milky eyes staring out of glass tanks lining the top of the lobby wall.
From there I flew to Salta in the Andes Mountains.
I’d been invited to see the five-hundred-year-old mummies of an Inca Indian girl and boy drugged with coca and alcohol, then buried alive as sacrifices to the gods.
They were in remarkable condition, the expressions on their faces seeming to capture the panic they must have felt.
The girl’s arms were bound with a woven rope, and white fur was wrapped around her ankles.
She wore a silver bracelet, and pins in her braided hair.
The bodies were wrapped in red-and-brown blankets.
They had on decorative leather moccasins.
I found the experience painful and depressing, imagining those poor children and what it must have been like for them.
I’m expected to do a lot of things that aren’t necessarily what I consider fun or even safe.
Touching a snake or holding a tarantula come to mind.
Shooting a pump-action shotgun while running toward a target is a bad accident waiting to happen.
I don’t enjoy being around death, and neither does Scarpetta.
But it’s necessary to answer questions and bring about justice.
When I walk into the lobby of a medical examiner’s office, I always remember that few people choose to be there.
For most, walking through those doors is the worst day of their lives.
While in Paris in 1998 researching Black Notice, I visited the Institut médico-légal on the Seine River.
In front on benches, people waited to go inside, staring with vacant eyes.
I spent time with Scarpetta’s French counterpart, Professor Dominique Lecomte.
This was a year after she prepared Princess Diana’s body for transport back to London after her death.
On August 31, 1997, Diana and Dodi Fayed were killed while evading the paparazzi, their car slamming into a pillar inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.
In 2002 I would do an ABC Primetime Live show on their deaths.
One of the questions was their driver Henri Paul’s high carbon monoxide level.
Five percent is normal. His was four times that.
It was suggested that his postmortem blood tubes had been switched in the lab.
Or perhaps his deploying air bag had caused the high CO level, and I doubted that was the case.
I thought we should test the hypothesis and bought a 1994 Mercedes-Benz S280.
It was the same make and model of the car they died in but theirs was armored.
I also bought an air bag of that vintage and had it installed in the car.
Scientists in the Richmond labs deployed the air bag on camera, and as I suspected, no carbon monoxide was released.
My guess is that Henri Paul’s CO level was caused by exhaust from the engine gushing through the crumpled hood and broken windshield while he was slumped over the steering wheel.
If that wasn’t the reason, then possibly a mistake was made with the toxicology analysis.
It’s conceivable the test tubes were mislabeled either accidentally or deliberately.
Four years after their deaths I would be recruited to help in the investigation when my book tour was canceled because of 9/11.
Harrods department store in London insisted I come speak at a luncheon.
I was promised security and anything needed to make it easy to say yes.
After I’d given my talk, a security guard told me that the owner of Harrods, Mohamed al-Fayed, wanted to see me.
He lived in a sprawling apartment on his store’s top floor, and I was apprehensive about going up there.
When I sat down with him, I discovered that the reason I’d been invited to speak was his intention of talking to me alone and in person.
He asked me to investigate his son’s and Princess Diana’s “murders.” He wanted to hire me to write a book about it.
I politely explained I didn’t write books for hire and couldn’t do as he wished.
Instead, I proposed a television show about it. When I returned to the U.S., Mohamed al-Fayed called me and agreed to an investigative piece on Primetime Live. He promised to give me access to whatever we needed, including Dodi’s apartment that had been sealed like a time capsule.
We filmed there, also on Mohamed’s yacht, and in his home in the south of France where a Monet painting hung over the sofa where I sat. I interviewed Henri Paul’s family, and they told me he was a fixed-wing pilot. They talked about how much he loved to fly, and I asked to see his flight log.