Body of Evidence (kay Scarpetta, #2)

The second novel in Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series opens with two letters written by Beryl Madison, a novelist hiding in Key West, Florida, from an unknown stalker who has been making threatening phone calls for months. Addressed to "M," the letters describe her days writing at a seaside restaurant called Louie's, her nights with two friends named PJ and Walt, and the terror that follows her after dark. She is running out of money, her book is unfinished, and she dreads returning to Richmond, Virginia.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, examines Beryl's body in the morgue: multiple stab wounds, defensive cuts, and a throat slashed nearly to the spine. Beryl was terrified, owned a .380 handgun, and had fled for months, yet she apparently let her killer into her home the night she returned to Richmond and even reset the burglar alarm behind him. On Halloween afternoon, Lieutenant Pete Marino, a homicide detective, drives Scarpetta to Beryl's house in the affluent Windsor Farms neighborhood. Blood traces a prolonged chase from the living room upstairs to a guest bedroom where Beryl collapsed and died. Her blouse and undergarments are missing, taken as souvenirs. Her loaded handgun sat untouched on the kitchen counter. In the garage, the name "BERYL" is gouged inside a heart on her car door, graffiti that triggered her panicked flight to Key West in mid-July.

That night, Mark James, Scarpetta's former lover from law school, calls unexpectedly and drives down from Washington, D.C. He reveals he is a lawyer with the firm Orndorff & Berger and that the firm's entertainment lawyer, Robert Sparacino, represented Beryl. Beryl was the protégée of Cary Harper, a reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist living at Cutler Grove, an eighteenth-century plantation near Williamsburg. Years earlier, Harper forced Beryl to sign a contract barring her from writing about him or their relationship during his or his sister Sterling's lifetime. Beryl wanted to write something autobiographical, and Sparacino was maneuvering to break her contract, creating a bitter dispute.

At the FBI field office, Scarpetta meets with Marino and FBI profiler Benton Wesley, who profiles the killer as a white male, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, intelligent, and obsessive-compulsive but notes that the stalking pattern suggests a stranger while the personal facial mutilation suggests someone who knew Beryl. Scarpetta pursues Beryl's background independently, visiting Mrs. McTigue, the elderly widow of construction magnate Joseph McTigue, who confirms that Beryl lived with the Harpers as a kind of adopted daughter. Forensic analysis turns up synthetic fibers and vehicular debris on Beryl's body, including a distinctive bright orange acrylic fiber.

Mark lures Scarpetta to New York, warning that Sparacino is targeting her office over the missing manuscript. Sparacino appears at the restaurant where they dine, ostensibly by coincidence. The next day, he confronts Scarpetta directly, accusing her of stealing the manuscript and producing old newspaper clippings about items that went missing from her office in unrelated cases. Afterward, Scarpetta calls Orndorff & Berger and is told no one named Mark James works there. Back in Richmond, Marino shows her an interrogation of Al Hunt, a car wash attendant who pointed out the heart-shaped graffiti on Beryl's car during her last visit, causing Beryl to turn white and flee.

Cary Harper is beaten to death outside Cutler Grove, his throat slashed. Scarpetta finds bird shot pellets scattered over the body, apparently from a homemade slapjack: a metal pipe packed with shot and sealed with a putty-like substance. Harper's gold medallion necklace is missing. Stranded when her car battery dies, Scarpetta spends the night with Sterling Harper, Cary's sister, who speaks of her love for Beryl and her brother's failings. In the middle of the night, Scarpetta finds Miss Harper dead on the library sofa. An intruder named Jeb Price, sent by Sparacino, is caught rifling through Scarpetta's filing cabinets and photographing the Harper bodies in the morgue. Attorney General Thomas Ethridge reveals that Mark James was convicted of racketeering, served prison time, and was disbarred.

Al Hunt appears at Scarpetta's door claiming intuitive knowledge of the killer: The murderer loved Beryl but was inadequate and obsessive, killing her as a displaced act of rage against his own mother. Hunt whispers the name "Jim Jim," admits he was a patient at Valhalla Hospital, a psychiatric facility, and shortly after leaving, dies by suicide. Scarpetta investigates Valhalla and learns that a social worker named Jim Barnes was fired for sexually abusing patients. She realizes "Jim Jim" was how Hunt's fellow patient Frankie, who stuttered when agitated, said Barnes's name. Records identify Frankie as Frank Ethan Aims, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After discharge, Aims ran away from home, and his mother was later beaten to death in an unsolved case in Maine.

The killer escalates, leaving Harper's stolen gold medallion on Scarpetta's door knob and firebombing Marino's car in her driveway. A stuttering voice on her answering machine warns her not to have other men in her house. Terrified, Scarpetta flees to Key West, reasoning that Beryl likely left the manuscript with a trusted friend. At Louie's, she befriends the bartender, who reveals himself as PJ. He retrieves Beryl's complete manuscript: nearly a thousand typed pages and four computer diskettes. PJ explains that "M" stood for "Myself," as the letters were Beryl's private diary.

Mark reappears in Scarpetta's hotel room, sent by Benton Wesley. He proves his claim by calling Wesley on the phone and reveals he is an undercover FBI agent whose criminal record was fabricated by the Bureau to infiltrate Sparacino's operations. Sparacino is suspected of laundering money for organized crime. Together, Scarpetta and Mark read Beryl's manuscript, which discloses that Harper raped Beryl when she was 16 and continued molesting her, that Sterling Harper knew but retreated into denial, and that Beryl wrote the book to preserve Sterling's memory after Sterling's cancer diagnosis. Scarpetta also pieces together evidence from Sterling's train trips to Baltimore for leukemia treatments and her prescription for levomethorphan, an experimental painkiller undetectable in routine toxicology, concluding that Miss Harper died by a deliberate overdose.

Scarpetta flies home, but her suitcase containing her loaded revolver is lost by the airline. Late that night, a pale young man appears at her door with the missing suitcase, identifying himself as a courier. She accepts the bag before realizing she wrote her office address, not her home address, on the claim form. The courier could not legitimately know where she lives. She realizes Frankie Aims works for a courier service delivering lost luggage, the same ruse he used to enter Beryl's home. Scarpetta strikes him and flees to the kitchen, where she fights him off with a fire extinguisher and a cast-iron skillet, retrieves her revolver from the suitcase, and shoots him dead.

In the aftermath, police find Beryl's bloody clothes, a copy of her manuscript, and bird-shot pellets in Frankie's apartment. His car seat is covered with an airline blanket whose fibers match the distinctive orange acrylic found on Beryl's body. Phone records confirm that Frankie and Hunt maintained contact after Valhalla, explaining Hunt's eerily accurate portrait of the killer and his subsequent suicide. Frankie, employed as an airport luggage courier, first encountered Beryl when he delivered Harper's missing bags to the McTigues' house during an overnight visit by Beryl and the Harpers, and later used airport computers to track her flights and obtain her phone number. Mark sends Scarpetta two dozen red roses with a card signed "I love you," offering a note of hope.