Autopsy (kay Scarpetta, #25)

The 25th installment in Patricia Cornwell's long-running Scarpetta series finds forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta back in Virginia, less than a month into her second stint as the state's chief medical examiner. She replaced her former trainee, Dr. Elvin Reddy, who was supposed to leave government service but instead was appointed Virginia's health commissioner, making him Scarpetta's boss. Her Alexandria office is staffed partly by people loyal to Reddy, particularly her British secretary, Maggie Cutbush.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Scarpetta is preoccupied by an unidentified murder victim found the previous Friday night on Daingerfield Island. A commuter train engineer spotted the woman's body by the railroad tracks. Her throat was slashed to the spine, her skull fractured from behind, and her hands severed postmortem, leaving no fingerprints. U.S. Park Police Investigator August Ryan calls Scarpetta to Colonial Landing, a gated waterfront townhome development in Old Town Alexandria, where a missing person report may be linked to the victim.

Pete Marino, Scarpetta's longtime colleague and now her brother-in-law through his marriage to her sister Dorothy, intercepts Scarpetta and drives her to the scene. The missing woman, Gwen Hainey, is a 33-year-old biomedical engineer at Thor Laboratories who lived at Colonial Landing near Marino and Dorothy. Gwen claimed she had moved from Boston to escape an abusive ex-boyfriend named Jinx Slater. Scarpetta hires Marino as a forensic operations specialist to legitimize his involvement. She shares case details, including a flattened penny found near the body, which her husband, Benton Wesley, a forensic psychologist with the Secret Service, considers potentially symbolic. Marino confirms that the victim's jellyfish tattoo matches one Gwen was known to have.

Inside Gwen's townhome, Scarpetta finds a nearly empty residence despite six weeks of occupancy: an inflatable mattress, minimal clothing, and large amounts of cash suggesting Gwen was prepared to flee at any moment. A kettlebell near the front door is consistent with the skull fracture, and a shattered mug on the floor suggests Gwen was interrupted while eating. Water-soluble fabric markers and dissolvable notepaper at a workstation raise suspicions of espionage. August reports that the security gate cameras were covered for roughly an hour on Friday evening. During this interval, eerie organ music played as the gates opened and closed, and a nearly silent vehicle was captured on the recordings. Gwen's birth-year code was used to enter. Blood drops and tire tracks in the garage suggest the killer loaded the body into a vehicle, and the blanket from Gwen's bed is missing.

Alexandria police Officer Blaise Fruge drives Scarpetta home and raises a troubling earlier case: The previous April, a Brazilian immigrant named Cammie Ramada was found dead near the same park while jogging, and despite suspicious injuries, Reddy's office ruled the death accidental. Fruge believes it was a homicide.

At home, Scarpetta checks on her niece Lucy, who has been isolated since losing her partner, Janet, and their adopted son, Desi, to COVID-19 in London. Lucy has been developing an AI avatar of Janet using open-source language-generating technology, creating a digital entity that looks, sounds, and converses like her deceased partner. The avatar identifies the music from the security recording as the theme from Shock Theater, a 1940s-era horror television program. Scarpetta then opens a bottle of 1996 Bordeaux she carried home from Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, a gift from Secretary General Gabriella Honoré. Upon tasting it, she collapses, unable to breathe. Benton administers naloxone, an opioid-reversal medication, from her scene case, barely saving her life. Marino arrives, collects the wine bottle as evidence, and delivers it to chief toxicologist Rex Bonetta.

The next morning, the Secret Service summons Scarpetta and Benton to the White House. Benton reveals that Gwen failed to appear for a Department of Defense meeting and that her ex-boyfriend, Slater, alleged she had been stealing proprietary technologies. Scarpetta's DNA lab has confirmed Gwen's identity through rapid testing. In the Situation Room, officials brief Scarpetta on a disaster aboard Thor Orbiter One, a top secret commercial laboratory in low-Earth orbit housing biomedical research including stem cell work and three-dimensional organ printing. One of three crewmates, American scientist Jared Horton, fled alone in the only available spacecraft, claiming space debris struck the orbiter during a spacewalk. Benton explains the connection: Horton called Gwen's missing phone from orbit hours after the incident, speaking Russian, suggesting their espionage partnership. Benton believes Horton panicked when news of Gwen's murder broke.

A rescue crew from the International Space Station docks with the silent orbiter and finds both remaining crewmates dead. Scarpetta directs the astronauts remotely through an unprecedented examination. Ultrasound reveals fragmented copper, deformed lead, and a hollow silver sphere inside the wound tracks, components of Glaser Safety Slugs, a rare prefragmented ammunition designed for confined spaces. The orbiter's cameras and radios, supposedly damaged, function normally when reactivated. The rescue astronauts detect no distinctive odor on the spacesuits; since vacuum-exposed suits carry a recognizable scent, the absence proves the spacewalk never occurred. The crewmates were shot inside the airlock after suiting up. Horton stole research materials before fleeing, and the bodies are placed in pouches and jettisoned into orbit.

Back in Virginia, retired toxicologist Greta Fruge, Officer Fruge's mother, identifies the likely poison in the wine as isotoniazene, a synthetic opioid 60 times more potent than morphine that evades standard drug screens. That evening, Scarpetta and Marino visit Daingerfield Island. Using luminol, a chemical that reveals hidden bloodstains, Scarpetta finds multiple flattened pennies buried in the railroad ballast, most heavily tarnished and old, unlike the shiny 2020 penny found near Gwen. They examine where Cammie died, and Scarpetta concludes she was chased off the running trail, suffered a stress-induced seizure, and was beaten and drowned. Fruge arrives and reports that Gwen's severed hands, the missing blanket, and cut-off clothing have been found in a dumpster.

Reddy summons Scarpetta to Richmond and fires her. She confronts him about covering up Cammie's death, revealing she knows he appeared at the scene intoxicated, with Maggie driving, and ensured the case was ruled accidental. The news is leaked as a voluntary resignation. Meanwhile, DNA analyst Clark Givens reports that Slater's DNA was found on the blanket, but an unknown profile from under Gwen's fingernails does not match him. Benton heads to Boston to interview Slater, who lied about his holiday whereabouts.

Trace evidence on the poisoned wine bottle, including centuries-old paint pigments and periwinkle pollen, suggests the tampering may have occurred in Scarpetta's own basement. She goes downstairs to inspect her remaining bottles. A muscular, scratch-covered arm pushes through the locked cat door using a radio-frequency identification collar, monitored by the home's security system, stolen from Lucy's cat, Merlin. Scarpetta kicks the intruder's elbow, breaking it, and runs upstairs. Lucy, alerted by a serial number mismatch flagged by her AI system, has already rushed outside with a shotgun. Unable to fire safely, Lucy beats the man to death with the weapon's stock. The dead intruder is Boone Cotton, a 52-year-old construction worker who had been doing jobs on Scarpetta's property and at Colonial Landing, someone familiar to Gwen, the neighborhood, and the security systems.

Three days later, the household gathers for Lucy's belated birthday dinner. Cotton is confirmed as the killer of both Gwen and Cammie. His DNA and fingerprints were found throughout Gwen's townhome, and his quiet Honda minivan matches the nearly silent vehicle captured on the gate recordings. As a child, Cotton was sexually abused by his uncle at the Daingerfield Island railroad tracks during rituals involving pennies placed on the rails and the Shock Theater theme; his murders recreated elements of that trauma. Interpol's Honoré calls with further news: The Russians have surrendered Horton, and the wine was tampered with not by foreign intelligence but by a disgruntled French winemaker trying to destroy a competitor. The isotoniazene was injected through the cork in France, not in Scarpetta's basement. Reddy reverses his decision, and Scarpetta remains chief medical examiner. She hosts the dinner with family and new allies, toasting Lucy and looking ahead.