Unnatural Exposure

The eighth installment in Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series follows Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Virginia's chief medical examiner, as she confronts a killer who weaponizes disease and taunts her through the internet.

The novel opens with Scarpetta in Dublin, where she has been giving lectures at Trinity College and investigating five unsolved dismemberment cases with Dr. Margaret Foley, the coroner. The Dublin victims, all unidentified torsos found in landfills, closely mirror four unsolved Virginia cases in dismemberment pattern, victim profile, and disposal method. Scarpetta calls Pete Marino, commander of the Richmond police homicide squad, to share her suspicion that a single killer is responsible. Marino urges her to return home and brief Benton Wesley, head of the FBI's Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit (CASKU). Both Marino and Foley press Scarpetta about avoiding Wesley, whose recent divorce opens the door for a serious relationship, and about her unresolved grief over Mark James, a former lover killed in a London bombing.

On Halloween, Scarpetta is called to the Atlantic Waste Landfill in Sussex County, where Keith Pleasants, a young employee, discovered a torso while operating a loader. She examines the torso on site, finding arms and legs severed through the bones rather than the joints and fluid-filled vesicles on the skin. Investigator Percy Ring of the Virginia State Police arrives late, declares the case the serial killer's work without examining the scene, and begins leaking misinformation to the press. That evening, Scarpetta receives an email from an unknown user called "deadoc" containing the word "ten" and a photograph of a bloody torso on a table draped with pale blue cloth. If the Dublin and Virginia cases are counted together, this would be the tenth victim. Only the killer or an accomplice could have sent the image.

The next day, Scarpetta begins the autopsy with the help of Wingo, her morgue assistant. X-rays reveal the victim is an elderly woman between sixty-five and eighty years old, a stark departure from the young victims in previous cases. Fabric fragments embedded in bone ends suggest she was wrapped in pale blue material when dismembered. Blood in the airway indicates a head injury sustained while she was still alive. Wesley agrees the victimology does not match the serial killer's profile, and Scarpetta voices her conviction that this is a copycat. Ring targets Pleasants as a suspect based on flimsy circumstantial evidence and leaks the false claim that the victim is a prepubescent Asian female. During this period, Wingo confides to Scarpetta that he is HIV positive, and she promises to protect his privacy and support him.

Deadoc sends a second email with a photograph of severed hands and feet on the same blue cloth. Lucy, Scarpetta's niece and an FBI technical specialist, examines deadoc's online profile and discovers it mirrors Scarpetta's own identity. The account was opened using a credit card stolen from a retired teacher in Norfolk. Fiber analysis determines the blue material is a polyester drop cloth, not clothing. In Memphis, saw-mark expert Dr. David Canter confirms the killer used a Stryker autopsy saw with a different blade than Scarpetta's, establishing that this is not the same person responsible for the earlier cases.

At a CASKU consultation at the FBI Academy in Quantico, deadoc sends an email to the White House demanding an apology and threatening escalation. Using virtual reality equipment at the FBI's Engineering Research Facility, Lucy immerses Scarpetta in the crime scene photograph. Scarpetta notices the room is a domestic space stripped of furniture and concludes the victim was brought there to be photographed.

The investigation shifts when Dr. Hoyt, a medical examiner in Norfolk, reports a death on Tangier Island, a tiny fishing community in the Chesapeake Bay. The victim, Lila Pruitt, a reclusive widow, is covered in pustular eruptions consistent with smallpox, a disease officially eradicated since 1977. Scarpetta examines smears from the landfill torso's vesicles and finds Guarnieri bodies, cytoplasmic inclusions indicative of a poxvirus. Dr. Phyllis Crowder, a microbiologist colleague at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV), confirms the findings. On Tangier Island, Scarpetta examines Pruitt's body and notices a sample-size Vita aromatherapy facial spray on the nightstand. USAMRIID (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) deploys a medical evacuation team, and Scarpetta is placed in quarantine at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

During quarantine, Scarpetta engages deadoc in online chat rooms, hoping he will stay connected long enough for the FBI to trace his signal. He sends cryptic messages quoting scripture and referencing disease transmission, then disconnects before the trace completes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the virus matches smallpox on two of three genetic primers but not the third, making it an unknown mutant against which the existing vaccine is unlikely to work.

Released from quarantine, Scarpetta returns to her office and discovers that sample-size Vita facial sprays have arrived in mailing tubes addressed to her staff. Testing reveals the sprays are contaminated with the virus. Twelve were delivered, one for each staff member. She then learns that Wingo used a Vita spray that arrived at his home. Given his compromised immune system, the exposure is potentially fatal. The Coast Guard quarantines Tangier Island, where additional cases have emerged.

While Scarpetta communicates with deadoc online, Lucy and FBI Squad 19 trace his signal to a campground on Janes Island State Park in Maryland. Inside a travel trailer registered under a stolen identity, Scarpetta and Marino find a makeshift virus laboratory with tissue cultures, a nitrogen freezer, and a disease-scarified rabbit. A dead man lies in the back bedroom, shot in the chest with a shotgun. Fingerprints identify him as a drifter who broke into the camper; he is not deadoc. The camper is airlifted to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where Scarpetta finds cryotubes of frozen virus labeled "Birmingham, England" and dated 1978, along with additional Vita spray canisters.

The recovered vehicle identification number traces the camper to Newport News. Scarpetta calls Crowder, who says she has been at her mother's house there. When Scarpetta visits, she recognizes the dining room from the crime scene photograph: exposed wires from a removed chandelier, putty-colored walls with stripped wallpaper, and hallway photographs of Crowder's father wearing a pale blue hat and holding a corncob pipe, items that match those found in the camper.

Confronted, Crowder confesses. She worked at a Birmingham laboratory in 1978 when a smallpox accident killed a photographer and drove the lead virologist to suicide. Blamed and forced out, she stole the mutant virus she had created by splicing monkeypox DNA into the smallpox genome. Her resentment deepened when she was recently passed over for department chairman. She infected her own elderly, ailing mother with the virus, then killed and dismembered her with an autopsy saw to disguise the death as the serial killer's work. She contaminated Vita sprays and sent them to Tangier Island and Scarpetta's office, driven by jealousy of Scarpetta's prominence and rage at a system she felt had wronged her. Scarpetta tells Crowder the virus is a dead end: It kills the primary victim but does not spread person to person. FBI agents arrest Crowder. Twenty-one days later, she dies in the hospital. Wingo also dies from the disease.

On New Year's Eve, Scarpetta tells Wesley she needs to visit Victoria Station. He accompanies her in February. There, Wesley reveals the truth he long concealed: Mark was not meeting an intelligence contact the day he died but was with a woman named Julie McFee, a London solicitor, leaving the Grosvenor Hotel when the IRA bomb detonated. The revelation is painful but liberating. Walking through the damp London streets, Scarpetta takes Wesley's arm and tells him she loves him.