It is Sunday afternoon and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is in her office at the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, where clouds are building, promising another thunderstorm. It’s not supposed to be this rainy and hot in February.
Gunfire pops, and voices yell things she can’t make out. Simulated combat is popular on the weekends. Special Ops agents can run around in black fatigues, shooting up the place, and nobody hears them, only Scarpetta, and she barely notices. She continues reviewing an emergency certificate issued by a coroner in Louisiana, an examination of a patient, a woman who later went on to murder five people and claims to have no memory of it.
The case probably isn’t a candidate for the Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsivity research study known as PREDATOR, Scarpetta decides, vaguely aware of a motorcycle getting louder on the Academy grounds.
She writes forensic psychologist Benton Wesley an e-mail:
A woman in the study would be interesting, but wouldn’t the data be irrelevant? I thought you were restricting PREDATOR to males.
The motorcycle blasts up to the building and stops right below her window. Pete Marino harassing her again, she thinks irritably as Benton sends her an Instant Message:
Louisiana probably wouldn’t let us have her anyway. They like to execute people too much down there. Food’s good, though.
She looks out the window as Marino kills the engine, gets off his bike, looks around in his macho way, always wondering who’s watching. She is locking PREDATOR case files in her desk drawer when he walks into her office without knocking and helps himself to a chair.
“You know anything about the Johnny Swift case?” he asks, his huge, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless denim vest with the Harley logo on the back.
Marino is the Academy’s head of investigations and a part-time death investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. Of late, he looks like a parody of a biker thug. He sets his helmet on her desk, a scuffed black brain bucket with bullet-hole decals all over it.
“Refresh my memory. And that thing’s a hood ornament.” She indicates the helmet. “For show, and worthless if you have an accident on that donor cycle of yours.”
He tosses a file onto her desk. “A San Francisco doctor with an office here in Miami. Had a place in Hollywood on the beach, he and his brother. Not far from the Renaissance, you know, those twin high-rise condo buildings near John Lloyd State Park? About three months ago at Thanksgiving while he was at his place down here, his brother found him on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest. By the way, he’d just had wrist surgery and it didn’t go well. At a glance, a straightforward suicide.”
“I wasn’t at the ME’s office yet,” she reminds him.
She was already the Academy’s director of forensic science and medicine then. But she didn’t accept the position of consulting forensic pathologist at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office until this past December when Dr. Bronson, the chief, started cutting back his hours, talking about retiring.
“I remember hearing something about it,” she says, uncomfortable in Marino’s presence, rarely happy to see him anymore.
“Dr. Bronson did the autopsy,” he says, looking at what’s on her desk, looking everywhere but at her.
“Were you involved?”
“Nope. Wasn’t in town. The case is still pending, because the Hollywood PD was worried at the time there might be more to it, suspicious of Laurel.”
“Laurel?”
“Johnny Swift’s brother, identical twins. There was nothing to prove anything, and it all went away. Then I got a phone call Friday morning about three a.m., a weird-ass phone call at my house that we’ve traced to a pay phone in Boston.”
“Massachusetts?”
“As in the Tea Party.”
“I thought your number’s unlisted.”
“It is.”
Marino slides a folded piece of torn brown paper from the back pocket of his jeans and opens it.
“I’m going to read you what the guy said, since I wrote it down word for word. He called himself Hog.”
“As in pig? That kind of hog?” She studies him, halfway wondering if he’s leading her on, setting her up for ridicule.
He’s been doing that a lot these days.
“He just said, I am Hog. Thou didst send a judgment to mock them. Whatever the hell that means. Then he said, There’s a reason certain items were missing from the Johnny Swift scene, and if you have half a brain, you’ll take a good look at what happened to Christian Christian. Nothing is coincidence. You’d better ask Scarpetta, because the hand of God will crush all perverts, including her dyke bitch niece. ”
Scarpetta doesn’t let what she feels register in her voice when she replies. “Are you sure that’s exactly what he said?”
“Do I look like a fiction writer?”
“Christian Christian?”
“Who the hell knows. The guy wasn’t exactly interested in me asking questions like how to spell something. He talked in a soft voice, like someone who feels nothing, kind of flat, then hung up.”
“Did he actually mention Lucy by name or just—?”
“I told you exactly what he said,” he cuts her off. “She’s your only niece, right? So obviously he meant Lucy. And HOG could stand for Hand of God, in case you haven’t connected those dots. Long story short, I contacted the Hollywood police and they’ve asked us to take a look at the Johnny Swift case ASAP. Apparently, there’s some other shit about the evidence showing he was shot from a distance and from close range. Well, it’s one or the other, right?”
“If there was only one shot, yes. Something must be skewed with the interpretation. Do we have any idea who Christian Christian is? Are we even talking about a person?”
“So far nothing in our computer searches that’s helpful.”
“Why are you just telling me now? I’ve been around all weekend.”
“Been busy.”
“You get information about a case like this, you shouldn’t wait two days to tell me,” she says as calmly as she can.
“Maybe you’re not one to talk about withholding information.”
“What information?” she asks, baffled.
“You should be more careful. That’s all I got to say.”
“It’s not helpful when you’re cryptic, Marino.”
“I almost forgot. Hollywood’s curious about what Benton’s professional opinion might be,” he adds as if it is an afterthought, as if he doesn’t care.
He typically does a poor job hiding how he feels about Benton Wesley.
“Certainly they can ask him to evaluate the case,” she replies. “I can’t speak for him.”
“They want him to figure out if the call I got from this wacko Hog was a crank, and I said that would be kind of hard when it’s not recorded, when all he’d get is my own version of shorthand scribbled on a paper bag.”
He gets up from his chair, and his big presence seems even bigger, and he makes her feel even smaller than he used to make her feel. He picks up his useless helmet and puts on his sunglasses. He hasn’t looked at her throughout their entire conversation, and now she can’t see his eyes at all. She can’t see what’s in them.
“I’ll give it my complete attention. Immediately,” she says as he walks to the door. “If you’d like to go over it later, we can.”
“Huh.”
“Why don’t you come to the house?”
“Huh,” he says again. “What time?”
“Seven,” she says.
Chapter 2
Inside the MRI suite, Benton Wesley watches his patient through a partition of Plexiglas. The lights are low, multiple video screens illuminated along the wraparound counter, his wristwatch on top of his briefcase. He is cold. After several hours inside the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory, even his bones are cold, or at least that’s how it feels.
Tonight’s patient goes by an identification number, but he has a name. Basil Jenrette. He is a mildly anxious and intelligent thirty-three-year-old compulsive murderer. Benton avoids the term serial killer. It has been so overused, it means nothing helpful and never did except to loosely imply that a perpetrator has murdered three or more people over a certain period of time. The word serial suggests something that occurs in succession. It suggests nothing about a violent offender’s motives or state of mind, and when Basil Jenrette was busy killing, he was compulsive. He couldn’t stop.
The reason he is getting his brain scanned in a 3-Tesla MRI machine that has a magnetic field sixty thousand times more powerful than the earth’s is to see if there is anything about his gray and white matter and how it functions that might hint at why. Benton has asked him why numerous times during their clinical interviews.
I would see her and that was it. I had to do it.
Had to do it right that minute?
Not right there on the street. I might follow her until I figured it out, came up with a plan. To be honest, the more I calculated, the better it felt.
And how long would this take? The following, the calculating. Can you approximate? Days, hours, minutes?
Minutes. Maybe hours. Sometimes days. Depends. Stupid bitches. I mean, if it was you and you realized you were being abducted, would you just sit there in the car and not even try to get away?
Is that what they did, Basil? They sat in the car and didn’t try to get away?
Except for the last two. You know about them because that’s why I’m here. They wouldn’t have resisted, but my car broke down. Stupid. If it was you, would you rather be killed right there in the car or wait to see what I’m going to do to you when I get you to my special spot?
Where was your special spot? Always the same place?
All because my damn car broke down.
So far, the structure of Basil Jenrette’s brain is unremarkable except for the incidental finding of a posterior cerebellar abnormality, an approximately six-millimeter cyst that might affect his balance a little, but nothing else. It is the way his brain functions that isn’t quite right. It can’t be right. If it were, he wouldn’t have been a candidate for the PREDATOR research study, and he probably wouldn’t have agreed to it. Everything is a game to Basil, and he is smarter than Einstein, thinks he is the most gifted person on earth. He has never suffered one moment of remorse for what he’s done and is quite candid in saying that he would kill more women given the opportunity. Unfortunately, Basil is likeable.
The two prison guards inside the MRI suite vacillate from confused to curious as they stare through the glass at the seven-foot-long tube, the bore of the magnet, on the other side. The guards wear uniforms but no guns. Weapons aren’t allowed in here. Nothing ferrous, including handcuffs and shackles, is permitted, and only plastic flex-cuffs restrain Basil’s ankles and wrists as he lies on the table inside the magnet, listening to the jarring knocks and wonks of radio frequency pulses that sound like infernal music played on high-voltage power lines—or that’s what Benton imagines.
“Remember, this next one is color blocks. All I want you to do is name the color,” Dr. Susan Lane, the neuropsychologist, says into the intercom. “No, Mr. Jenrette, please don’t nod your head. Remember, the tape is on your chin to remind you not to move.”
“Ten-four,” Basil’s voice sounds through the intercom.
It is half past eight at night and Benton is uneasy. He has been uneasy for months, not so much worried that the Basil Jenrettes of the world are going to suddenly explode into violence inside the gracious old brick walls of McLean Hospital and slaughter everything in sight, but that the research study is doomed to failure, that it is a waste of grant money and a foolish expenditure of precious time. McLean is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and neither the hospital nor the university is gracious about failure.
“Don’t worry about getting all of them right,” Dr. Lane is saying over the intercom. “We don’t expect you to get all of them right.”
A researcher marks down results on a data-entry sheet while the MRI technician checks images on his video screen.
Dr. Lane pushes the talk button again. “Mr. Jenrette? You’re doing an excellent job. Can you see everything okay?”
“Ten-four.”
“Very good. Every time you see that black screen, you are nice and still. No talking, just look at the white dot on the screen.”
“Ten-four.”
She releases the talk button and says to Benton, “What’s with the cop jargon?”
“He was a cop. That’s probably how he was able to get his victims into his car.”
“Dr. Wesley?” the researcher says, turning around in her chair. “It’s for you. Detective Thrush.”
Benton takes the phone.
“What’s up,” he asks Thrush, a homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police.
“I hope you weren’t planning on an early bedtime,” Thrush says. “You hear about the body found this morning out by Walden Pond?”
“No. I’ve been locked up in this place all day.”
“White female, unidentified, hard to tell her age. Maybe in her late thirties, early forties, shot in the head, the shotgun shell shoved up her ass.”
“News to me.”
“She’s been autopsied already, but I thought you might want to take a look. This one ain’t the average bear.”
“I’ll be finished up in less than an hour,” Benton says.
“Meet me at the morgue.”
The house is quiet and Kay Scarpetta walks from room to room, turning on every light, unsettled. She listens for the sound of a car or a motorcycle, listens for Marino. He is late and hasn’t returned her phone calls.
Unsettled and anxious, she checks to make sure that the burglar alarm is armed and the floodlights are on. She pauses at the video display on the kitchen phone to make sure the cameras monitoring the front, back and sides of her house are operating properly. Her property is shadowy in the video display, and dark images of citrus trees, palms and hibiscus move in the wind. The dock behind her swimming pool and the waterway beyond are a black plain dabbed with blurred lights from lamps along the seawall. She stirs tomato sauce and mushrooms in copper pots on the stove. She checks dough rising and fresh mozzarella soaking in covered bowls by the sink.
It is almost nine, and Marino was supposed to be here two hours ago. Tomorrow she is tied up with cases and teaching, and she doesn’t have time for his rudeness. She feels set up. She has had it with him. She has worked nonstop on the Johnny Swift alleged suicide for the past three hours, and now Marino can’t bother to show up. She is hurt, then angry. It is easier to be angry.
She is very angry as she walks into her living room, still listening for a motorcycle or a car, still listening for him. She picks up a twelve-gauge Remington Marine Magnum from her couch and sits down. The nickel-plated shotgun is heavy in her lap, and she inserts a small key in the lock. She turns the key to the right and pulls the lock free from the trigger guard. She racks the pump back to make sure there are no cartridges in the magazine.
Chapter 3
“We’re going to do word reading now,” Dr. Lane is telling Basil over the intercom. “Just read the words from left to right. Okay? And remember, don’t move. You’re doing great.”
“Ten-four.”
“Hey, want to see what he really looks like?” the MRI technician says to the guards.
His name is Josh. He majored in physics at MIT, is working as a tech while working on his next degree, is bright but eccentric with a twisted sense of humor.
“I already know what he looks like. I got to escort him to the showers earlier today,” one of the guards says.
“Then what?” Dr. Lane asks Benton. “What would he do to them after he got them into his car?”
“Red, blue, blue, red…”
The guards wander closer to Josh’s video screen.
“Take them someplace, stab them in the eyes, keep them alive a couple days, rape them repeatedly, cut their throats, dump their bodies, pose them to shock people,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane matter-of-factly, in his clinical way. “The cases we know about. I’m suspicious he killed others. A number of women vanished in Florida during the same time frame. Presumed dead, bodies never found.”
“Take them where? A motel, his house?”
“Hold on a second,” Josh says to the guards as he selects the menu option 3D, then SSD, or Surface Shading Display. “This is really cool. We never show it to patients.”
“How come?”
“Totally freak them out.”
“We don’t know where,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane as he keeps a check on Josh, ready to intervene if he gets too carried away. “But it’s interesting. The bodies he dumped. They all had microscopic particles of copper on them.”
“What on earth?”
“Mixed in with dirt and whatever else was adhering to blood, their skin, in their hair.”
“Blue, green, blue, red…”
“That’s very strange.”
She pushes the talk button. “Mr. Jenrette? How are we doing in there? You okay?”
“Ten-four.”
“Next, you’re going to see words printed in a different color from what they spell. I want you to name the color of the ink. Just name the color.”
“Ten-four.”
“Isn’t this awesome?” Josh says as what looks like a death mask fills his screen, a reconstruction of one-millimeter-thick high-resolution slices that make up the MRI scan of Basil Jenrette’s head, the image pale, hairless and eyeless, ending raggedly just below the jaw as if he has been decapitated.
Josh rotates the image so the guards can see it from different angles.
“Why’s his head look cut off?” one of them asks.
“That’s where the signal from the coil stopped.”
“His skin doesn’t look real.”
“Red uh green, blue I mean red, green…” Basil’s voice enters the room.
“It’s not really skin. How to explain… well, what the computer’s doing is volume reconstruction, a surface rendering.”
“Red, blue uh green, blue I mean green…”
“Only thing we really use it for is Power Points, mainly, to overlay structural with functional. Just an MRI analysis package where you can put data together and look at it any way you want, have fun with it.”
“Man, he’s ugly.”
Benton has heard enough. The color naming has stopped. He gives Josh a sharp look.
“Josh? You ready?”
“Four, three, two, one, ready,” Josh says, and Dr. Lane begins the interference test.
“Blue, red I mean… shit, uh red I mean blue, green, red…” Basil’s voice violates the room as he gets all of them wrong.
“He ever tell you why?” Dr. Lane asks Benton.
“I’m sorry,” he says, distracted. “Why what?”
“Red, blue shit! Uh red, blue-green…”
“Why he gouged their eyes out.”
“He said he didn’t want them to see how small his penis is.”
“Blue, blue-red, red, green…”
“He didn’t do so well on this one,” she says. “In fact, he missed most of them. What police department did he work for, so I remember not to get pulled for speeding in that part of the world?” She pushes the talk button. “You okay in there?”
“Ten-four.”
“Dade County PD.”
“Too bad. I’ve always liked Miami. So that’s how you managed to conjure this one up. Because of your South Florida connections,” she replies, pushing the talk button again.
“Not exactly.” Benton stares through the glass at Basil’s head in the far end of the magnet, imagining the rest of him dressed like a normal person in jeans and a button-up white shirt.
The inmates are not allowed to wear prison fatigues on the hospital campus. It’s bad public relations.
“When we began querying state penitentiaries for study subjects, Florida thought he was just the guy for the job. He was bored. They were happy to get rid of him,” Benton says.
“Very good, Mr. Jenrette,” Dr. Lane says into the intercom. “Now, Dr. Wesley is going to come in and give you the mouse. You’re going to see some faces next.”
“Ten-four.”
Ordinarily, Dr. Lane would go into the MRI room and deal with the patient herself. But women doctors and scientists are not allowed physical contact with the subjects of PREDATOR. Male doctors and scientists have to be cautious, too, while inside the MRI suite. Outside of it, restraining research study subjects during interviews is up to the clinician. Benton is accompanied by the two prison guards as he turns on the lights inside the MRI room and shuts the door. The guards hover near the magnet and pay attention as he plugs in the mouse and places it in Basil’s restrained hands.
He is nothing much to look at, a short, slight man with thinning blond hair and small gray eyes closely spaced. In the animal kingdom, lions, tigers and bears—the predators—have closely spaced eyes. Giraffes, rabbits, doves—the preyed upon—have eyes more widely spaced and oriented toward the sides of their heads, because they need their peripheral vision to survive. Benton has always wondered if the same evolutionary phenomenon applies to humans. That’s a research study nobody’s going to fund.
“You doing all right, Basil?” Benton asks him.
“What kind of faces?” Basil’s head talks from the end of the magnet, bringing to mind an iron lung.
“Dr. Lane will explain it to you.”
“I’ve got a surprise,” Basil says. “I’ll tell you when we’re done.”
He has an odd gaze, as if a malignant creature is looking out through his eyes.
“Great. I love surprises. Just a few more minutes and you’re done,” Benton says with a smile. “Then we’ll have a follow-up chat.”
The guards accompany Benton back outside the MRI room and return to the suite as Dr. Lane begins to explain over the intercom that all she wants Basil to do is click the left side of the mouse if the face is male and right if it is female.
“Nothing for you to do or say, just press the button,” she reiterates.
There are three tests, and the point of them is not the patient’s ability to distinguish between the two genders. What is actually measured in this series of functional scanning is affective processing. The male and female faces appearing on the screen are behind other faces that flash too quickly for the eye to detect, but the brain sees all. Jenrette’s brain sees the faces behind the masks, faces that are happy, angry or afraid, faces that are provocative.
After each set, Dr. Lane asks him what he saw, and if he had to attach an emotion to the faces, what was it. The male faces are more serious than the female, he answers. He says basically the same thing for each set. It means nothing yet. None of what has gone on in these rooms will mean anything until the thousands of neuroimages are analyzed. Then the scientists can visualize which areas of his brain were most active during the tests. The point is to see if his brain works differently from someone who supposedly is normal, and to learn something besides the fact that he has an incidental cyst that is completely unrelated to his predatory proclivities.
“Anything jump out at you?” Benton asks Dr. Lane. “And by the way, thanks, as always, Susan. You’re a good sport.”
They try to schedule inmate scans late in the day or on the weekend, when few people are around.
“Just from the localizers, he looks okay—I don’t see any gross abnormalities. Except for his incessant chatting. His hyper fluency. He ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”
“His evaluations and history make me wonder. But no. Never diagnosed. Unmedicated for any psychiatric disorders, in prison only a year. A dream subject.”
“Well, your dream subject didn’t do well suppressing interfering stimuli, made a huge number of errors by commission on the interference test. My bet is he doesn’t stay in set, which is certainly consistent with bipolar disorder. We’ll know more later.”
She pushes the talk button again and says, “Mr. Jenrette? We’re all done. You did an excellent job. Dr. Wesley’s coming back in to get you out. I want you to sit up very slowly, okay? Very slowly so you don’t get dizzy. Okay?”
“That’s all? Just these stupid tests? Show me the pictures.”
She gives Benton a look and releases the talk button.
“You said you’d look at my brain when I’m looking at the pictures.”
“Autopsy pictures of his victims,” Benton explains to Dr. Lane.
“You promised me pictures! You promised I’d get my mail!”
“All righty,” she says to Benton. “He’s all yours.”
The shotgun is heavy and cumbersome, and she has trouble lying on the couch and pointing the barrel at her chest while trying to pull the trigger with her left toe.
Scarpetta lowers the shotgun and imagines attempting the same thing after wrist surgery. Her shotgun weighs about seven and a half pounds and starts to shake in her hands when she holds it up by its eighteen-inch barrel. She lowers her feet to the floor and takes off her right running shoe and sock. Her left foot is dominant, but she will have to try her right, and she wonders what Johnny Swift was, right-foot-dominant or left. It would make a difference, but not necessarily a significant one, especially if he was depressed and determined, but she’s not sure he was either, not sure of much.
She thinks about Marino, and the more her thoughts shift back to him, the more upset she gets. He has no right to treat her this way, no right to disrespect her the same way he did when they first met, and that was many years ago, so many years ago she is surprised he can even remember how to treat her the way he once did. The aroma of her homemade pizza sauce is in the living room. It fills the house, and resentment speeds up her heart and makes her chest tight. She lies back down on her left side, props the stock of the shotgun on the back of the couch, positions the barrel at the center of her chest and pulls the trigger with her right big toe.
Chapter 4
Basil Jenrette is not going to hurt him.
Unrestrained, he sits across the table from Benton inside the small examination room, the door shut. Basil is quiet and polite in his chair. His outburst inside the magnet lasted maybe two minutes, and when he calmed down, Dr. Lane was already gone. He didn’t see her when he was escorted out, and Benton will make sure he never does.
“You’re sure you’re not lightheaded or dizzy,” Benton says in his calm, understanding way.
“I feel great. The tests were cool. I’ve always loved tests. I knew I’d get everything right. Where are the pictures? You promised.”
“We never discussed anything like that, Basil.”
“I got everything right, straight A’s.”
“So you enjoyed the experience.”
“Next time show me the pictures like you promised.”
“I never promised you that, Basil. Did you find the experience exciting?”
“I guess I can’t smoke in here.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“What did my brain look like? Did it look good? Did you see anything? Can you tell how smart someone is by looking at their brain? If you showed me the pictures you’d see they match the ones I have in my brain.”
He is talking quietly and rapidly now, his eyes bright, almost glassy, as he goes on and on about what the scientists might expect to find in his brain, assuming they are able to decipher what is there, and there is definitely a there there, he keeps saying.
“A there there?” Benton inquires. “Can you explain what you mean, Basil?”
“My memory. If you can see into it, see what’s in there, see my memories.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Really. I’ll bet all kinds of pictures came up when you were doing the beep-beep, bang-bang, knock-knock. Bet you saw the pictures and don’t want to tell me. There were ten of them, and you saw them. Saw their pictures, ten of them, not four. I always say ten-four as a joke, a real big ha-ha. You think it’s four and I know it’s ten, and you would know if you showed me the pictures, because you’d see they matched the pictures in my brain. You’d see my pictures when you’re inside my brain. Ten-four.”
“Tell me which pictures you mean, Basil.”
“I’m just messing with you,” he says with a wink. “I want my mail.”
“What pictures might we see inside your brain?”
“Those foolish women. They won’t give me my mail.”
“You’re saying you killed ten women?” Benton asks this without shock or judgment. Basil smiles as if something has occurred to him.
“Oh. I can move my head now, can’t I. No more tape on my chin. Will they tape my chin down when they give me the needle?”
“You won’t be getting the needle, Basil. That’s part of the deal. Your sentence has been commuted to life. You remember us talking about that?”
“Because I’m crazy,” he says with a smile. “That’s why I’m here.”
“No. We’ll go over this again, because it is important you understand. You’re here because you’ve agreed to participate in our study, Basil. The governor of Florida allowed you to be transferred to our state hospital, Butler, but Massachusetts wouldn’t agree to it unless he commuted your sentence to life. We don’t have the death penalty in Massachusetts.”
“I know you want to see the ten ladies. See them as I remember them. They’re in my brain.”
He knows it isn’t possible to scan someone and see his thoughts and memories. He is being his usual clever self. He wants the autopsy photographs so he can fuel his violent fantasies, and as is true of narcissistic sociopaths, he thinks he is quite entertaining.
“Is that the surprise, Basil?” he asks. “That you committed ten murders instead of the four you were charged with?”
He shakes his head and says, “There’s one you want to know about. That’s the surprise. Something special just for you because you’ve been so nice to me. But I want mail. That’s the deal.”
“I’m very interested in hearing about your surprise.”
“The lady in The Christmas Shop,” he says. “Remember that one?”
“Why don’t you tell me about it,” Benton replies, and he doesn’t know what Basil means. He isn’t familiar with a murder that occurred in a Christmas shop.
“What about my mail?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“I’ll look into it.”
“I can’t remember the exact date. Let me see.” He stares at the ceiling, his unrestrained hands restless in his lap. “About three years ago in Las Olas, I think it was around July. So maybe two and a half years ago. Why would anyone want to buy Christmas shit in July in South Florida? She sold little Santas and his elves and nutcrackers and baby Jesuses. I went in on this particular morning after staying up all night.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“I never knew her name. Well, I might have. But I forgot it. If you showed me the pictures, it might jog my memory, you might see her in my brain. Let me see if I can describe her. Let me see. Oh, yes. She was a white woman with long, dyed hair the color of I Love Lucy. Sort of fat. Maybe thirty-five or forty. I went in and locked the door and pulled a knife on her. I raped her in the back, in the storage area, cut her throat from here to here in one cut.”
He makes a slicing motion across his neck.
“It was funny because there was one of those oscillating fans in there and I turned it on because it was hot and stuffy and it blew blood all the fuck over the place. Quite a mess to clean up. Then, let’s see”—he looks up at the ceiling again, the way he often does when he’s lying—“I wasn’t in my cop car that day, had taken my bike and parked it in a pay lot behind the Riverside Hotel.”
“Your motorcycle or a bicycle?”
“My Honda Shadow. Like I would ride a bicycle when I was going to kill someone.”
“So you planned on killing someone that morning?”
“It seemed like a good idea.”
“You planned on killing her or just planned on killing someone?”
“I remember there were all these ducks in the parking lot hanging out around the puddles because it had been raining for days. Mommy ducks and little baby ducks everywhere. That’s always bothered me. Poor little ducks. They get run over a lot. You see little babies squashed in the road and mommy walking round and around her dead little baby, looking so sad.”
“Did you ever run over the ducks, Basil?”
“I would never hurt an animal, Dr. Wesley.”
“You said you killed birds and rabbits when you were a child.”
“That was a long time ago. You know, boys and their BB guns. Anyway, to go on with my story, all I got was twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents. You have to do something about my mail.”
“So you’ve said repeatedly, Basil. I told you I’ll do my best.”
“Sort of disappointing after all that. Twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents.”
“From the cash drawer.”
“Ten-four.”
“You must have had a lot of blood on you, Basil.”
“She had a bathroom in the back of the shop.” He looks up at the ceiling again. “I poured Clorox on her, just now remembered it. To kill my DNA. Now you owe me. I want my fucking mail. Get me out of the suicide cell. I want a normal cell where they don’t spy on me.”
“We’re making sure you’re safe.”
“Get me a new cell and the pictures and my mail, and I’ll tell you more about The Christmas Shop,” he says and his eyes are very glassy now and he is very restless in the chair, clenching his fists, tapping his foot. “I deserve to be rewarded.”
Chapter 5
Lucy sits where she can see the front door, where she can see who is coming in or leaving. She watches people without them knowing. She watches and calculates even when she is supposed to be relaxing.
The last few nights, she has wandered into Lorraine’s and talked to the bartenders, Buddy and Tonia. Neither knows Lucy’s real name, but both remember Johnny Swift, remember him as that hot-looking doctor who was straight. A brain doctor who liked Provincetown and unfortunately was straight, Buddy says. What a shame, Buddy says. Always alone, too, except for the last time he was here, Tonia says. She was working that night and remembers that Johnny had splints on his wrists. When she asked him about it, he said he’d just had surgery and it hadn’t gone very well.
Johnny and a woman sat at the bar and were very friendly with each other, talking as if no one else was there. Her name was Jan and she seemed really smart, was pretty and polite, very shy, not the least bit stuck on herself, young, dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, Tonia recalls. It was obvious Johnny hadn’t known her long, maybe had just met her, found her interesting, obviously liked her, Tonia says.
Liked her as in sexually? Lucy asked Tonia.
I didn’t get that impression. He was more, well, it’s like she had some sort of problem and he was helping her out. He was a doctor, you know.
That doesn’t surprise Lucy. Johnny was unselfish. He was extraordinarily kind.
She sits at the bar in Lorraine’s and thinks about Johnny walking in the same way she just did and sitting at the same bar, maybe on the same stool. She imagines him with Jan, someone he may have just met. It wasn’t like him to pick up women, to have casual encounters. He wasn’t into one-night stands and may very well have been helping her, counseling her. But about what? Some medical problem? Some psychological problem? The story about the shy young woman named Jan is puzzling and disconcerting. Lucy isn’t quite sure why.
Maybe he wasn’t feeling good about himself. Maybe he was scared because the carpal tunnel surgery wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. Maybe counseling and befriending a shy, pretty young woman made him forget his fears, feel powerful and important. Lucy drinks tequila and thinks about what he said to her in San Francisco when she was with him last September, the last time she saw him.
Biology is cruel, he said. Physical liabilities are unforgiving. Nobody wants you if you’re scarred and crippled, useless and maimed.
My God, Johnny. It’s just carpal tunnel surgery. Not amputation.
I apologize, he said. We’re not here to talk about me.
She thinks about him as she sits at the bar in Lorraine’s, watching people, mostly men, enter and leave the restaurant as snow gusts in.
It has begun to snow in Boston as Benton drives his Porsche Turbo S past the Victorian brick buildings of the university medical campus and remembers the early days when Scarpetta used to summon him to the morgue at night. He always knew the case was bad.
Most forensic psychologists have never been to a morgue. They have never seen an autopsy and don’t even want to look at the photographs. They are more interested in the details of the offender than in what he did to his victim, because the offender is the patient and the victim is nothing more than the medium he used to express his violence. This is the excuse many forensic psychologists and psychiatrists give. A more likely explanation is they don’t have the courage or the inclination to interview victims or, worse, spend time with their mauled dead bodies.
Benton is different. After more than a decade of Scarpetta, there is no way he couldn’t be different.
You have no right to work any case if you won’t listen to what the dead have to say, she told him some fifteen years ago when they were working their first homicide together. If you can’t be bothered with them, then, frankly, I can’t be bothered with you, Special Agent Wesley.
Fair enough, Dr. Scarpetta. I’ll trust you to make introductions.
All right then, she said.Come with me.
That was the first time he had ever been inside a morgue refrigerator, and he can still hear the loud clack of the handle pulling back and the whoosh of cold, foul air. He would know that smell anywhere, that dark, dead stench, foul and flat. It hangs heavy in the air, and he has always imagined that if he could see it, it would look like filthy ground fog slowly spreading out from whatever has died.
He replays his conversation with Basil, analyzes every word, every twitch, every facial expression. Violent offenders promise all sorts of things. They manipulate the hell out of everybody to get what they want, promise to reveal the locations of bodies, admit to crimes that were never solved, confess the details of what they did, offer insights into their motivation and psychological state. In most cases, it is lies. In this case, Benton is concerned. Something about at least some of what Basil confessed strikes him as true.
He tries Scarpetta on his cell phone. She doesn’t answer. Several minutes later, he tries again and still can’t get her.
He leaves a message: “Please call me when you get this,” he says.
The door opens again and a woman comes in with the snow, as if blown in by the blizzard.
She wears a long, black coat and is brushing it off as she pushes back her hood, and her fair skin is rosy from the cold, her eyes quite bright. She is pretty, remarkably pretty, with dark blond hair and dark eyes and a body that she flaunts. Lucy watches her glide to the back of the restaurant, glide between tables like a sexy pilgrim or a sensuous witch in her long, black coat, and it swirls around her black boots as she heads straight back to the bar where there are plenty of empty stools. She chooses one next to Lucy’s and folds her coat and sits on it without a word or a glance.
Lucy drinks tequila and stares at the TV over the bar as if the latest celebrity romance is interesting. Buddy makes the woman a drink as if he knows what she likes.
“I’ll have another,” Lucy tells him soon enough.
“Coming up.”
The woman with the black hooded coat gets interested in the colorful tequila bottle that Buddy lifts from a shelf. She keenly watches the pale amber liquor pour in a delicate stream, filling the bottom of the brandy snifter. Lucy slowly swirls the tequila, and the smell of it fills her nose all the way up to her brain.
“That stuff will give you the headache from Hades,” the woman with the black hooded coat says in a husky voice that is seductive and full of secrets.
“It’s much purer than regular liquor,” Lucy says. “Haven’t heard the word Hades in a while. Most people I know say hell.”
“The worst headaches I ever got were from margaritas,” the woman offers, sipping a Cosmopolitan that is pink and lethal-looking in a champagne glass. “And I don’t believe in hell.”
“You’ll believe in it if you keep drinking that shit,” Lucy replies, and in the mirror behind the bar, she watches the front door open again and more snow blow into Lorraine’s.
Wind gusting in from the bay sounds like silk whipping, reminding her of silk stockings whipping on a clothesline, although she has never seen silk stockings on a clothesline or heard what they sound like in the wind. She is aware of the woman’s black stockings because tall stools and short, slitted skirts are not a safe combination unless a woman is in a bar where the men are interested only in one another, and in Provincetown, this is usually the case.
“Another Cosmo, Stevie?” Buddy asks, and now Lucy knows her name.
“No,” Lucy answers for her. “Let Stevie try what I’m having.”
“I’ll try anything,” Stevie says. “I think I’ve seen you at the Pied and the Vixen, dancing with different people.”
“I don’t dance.”
“I’ve seen you. You’re hard to miss.”
“You come here a lot?” Lucy asks, and she has never seen Stevie before, not at the Pied or the Vixen or any other club or restaurant in P town.
Stevie watches Buddy pour more tequila. He leaves the bottle on the bar, steps away and busies himself with another customer.
“This is my first time,” Stevie says to Lucy. “A Valentine’s Day present to myself, a week in P town.”
“In the dead of winter?”
“Last I checked, Valentine’s Day was always in the winter. It happens to be my favorite holiday.”
“It’s not a holiday. I’ve been here every night this week and never seen you.”
“What are you? The bar police?” Stevie smiles and looks into Lucy’s eyes so intensely it has an effect.
Lucy feels something. No, she thinks. Not again.
“Maybe I don’t come in here only at night like you do,” Stevie says, reaching for the tequila bottle, brushing Lucy’s arm.
The feeling gets stronger. Stevie studies the colorful label, sets the bottle back on the bar, taking her time, her body touching Lucy. The feeling intensifies.
“Cuervo? What’s so special about Cuervo?” Stevie asks.
“How would you know what I do?” Lucy says.
She tries to make the feeling go away.
“Just guessing. You look like a night person,” Stevie says. “Your hair is naturally red, isn’t it. Maybe mahogany mixed with deep red. Dyed hair can’t look like that. You haven’t always worn it long, as long as it is now.”
“Are you some kind of psychic?”
The feeling is awful now. It won’t go away.
“Just guessing,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “So, you haven’t told me. What’s so special about Cuervo?”
“Cuervo Reserva de la Familia. It’s special enough.”
“Well, that’s something. It looks like this is my night for first times,” Stevie says, touching Lucy’s arm, her hand resting on it for a minute. “First time in P town. First time for one hundred percent agave tequila that costs thirty dollars a shot.”
Lucy wonders how Stevie can know it costs thirty dollars a shot. For someone unfamiliar with tequila, she seems to know a lot.
“I believe I’ll have another,” Stevie calls out to Buddy, “and you really could pour a little more in the glass. Be sweet to me.”
Buddy smiles as he pours her another, and two shots later, Stevie leans against Lucy and whispers in her ear, “You got anything?”
“Like what?” Lucy asks, and she gives herself up to it.
The feeling is fueled by tequila and plans to stay for the night.
“You know what,” Stevie’s voice says quietly, her breath touching Lucy’s ear, her breast pressed again her arm. “Something to smoke. Something that’s worth it.”
“What makes you think I’d have something?”
“Just guessing.”
“You’re remarkably good at it.”
“You can get it anywhere here. I’ve seen you.”
Lucy made a transaction last night, knows just where to do it, at the Vixen, where she doesn’t dance. She doesn’t remember seeing Stevie. There weren’t that many people, never are this time of year. She would have noticed Stevie. She would notice her in a huge crowd, on a busy street, anywhere.
“Maybe you’re the one who’s the bar police,” Lucy says.
“You have no idea how funny that is,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “Where you staying?”
“Not far from here.”
Chapter 6
The state Medical Examiner’s Office is located where most are, on the fringe of a nicer part of town, usually at the outer limits of a medical school. The red-brick-and-concrete complex backs up to the Massachusetts Turnpike, and on the other side of it is the Suffolk County House of Corrections. There is no view and the noise of traffic never stops.
Benton parks at the back door and notes only two other cars in the lot. The dark-blue Crown Victoria belongs to Detective Thrush. The Honda SUV probably belongs to a forensic pathologist who doesn’t get paid enough and probably wasn’t happy when Thrush persuaded him to come in at this hour. Benton rings the bell and scans the empty back parking lot, never assuming he is safe or alone, and then the door opens and Thrush is motioning him inside.
“Jeez, I hate this place at night,” Thrush says.
“There’s not much to like about it any time of day,” Benton remarks.
“I’m glad you came. Can’t believe you’re out in that,” he says, looking out at the black Porsche as he shuts the door behind them. “In this weather? You crazy?”
“All-wheel drive. It wasn’t snowing when I went to work this morning.”
“These other psychologists I’ve worked with, they never come out, snow, rain or shine,” Thrush says. “Not the profilers, either. Most FBI I’ve met have never seen a dead body.”
“Except for the ones at headquarters.”
“No shit. We got plenty of them at state police headquarters, too. Here.”
He hands Benton an envelope as they follow a corridor.
“Got everything on a disk for you. All the scene and autopsy pictures, whatever’s written up so far. It’s all there. It’s supposed to snow like a bitch.”
Benton thinks of Scarpetta again. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and they’re supposed to spend the evening together, have a romantic dinner on the harbor. She’s supposed to stay through Presidents’ Day weekend. They haven’t seen each other in almost a month. She may not be able to get here.
“I heard light snow showers are predicted,” Benton says.
“A storm’s moving in from the Cape. Hope you got something to drive other than that million-dollar sports car.”
Thrush is a big man who has spent his life in Massachusetts and talks like it. There isn’t a single R in his vocabulary. In his fifties, he has military-short gray hair and is dressed in a rumpled brown suit, has probably worked nonstop all day. He and Benton follow the well-lit corridor. It is spotless and scented with air deodorizer and lined with storage and evidence rooms, all of them requiring electronic passes. There is even a crash cart—Benton can’t imagine why—and a scanning electron microscope, the facility the most spacious and best equipped of any morgue he has ever seen. Staffing is another story.
The office has suffered crippling personnel problems for years because of low salaries that fail to attract competent forensic pathologists and other staff. Added to this are alleged mistakes and misdeeds resulting in scathing controversies and public-relations problems that make life and death difficult for everyone involved. The office isn’t open to the media or to outsiders, and hostility and distrust are pervasive. Benton would rather come here late at night. To visit during business hours is to feel unwelcome and resented.
He and Thrush pause outside the closed door of an autopsy room that is used in high-profile cases or those that are considered a biohazard or bizarre. His cell phone vibrates. He looks at the display. No ID is usually her.
“Hi,” Scarpetta says. “I hope your night’s been better than mine.”
“I’m at the morgue.” Then, to Thrush, “One minute.”
“That can’t be good,” Scarpetta says.
“I’ll fill you in later. Got a question. You ever heard of something that happened at a Christmas shop in Las Olas maybe two and a half years ago?”
“By something I assume you mean a homicide.”
“Right.”
“Not offhand. Maybe Lucy can try to track it down. I hear it’s snowing up there.”
“I’ll get you here if I have to hire Santa’s reindeer.”
“I love you.”
“Me, too,” he says.
He ends the call and asks Thrush, “Who are we dealing with?”
“Well, Dr. Lonsdale was nice enough to help me out. You’ll like him. But he didn’t do the autopsy. She did.”
She is the chief. She got where she is because she’s a she.
“You ask me,” Thrush says, “women got no business doing this anyway. What kind of woman would want to do this?”
“There are good ones,” Benton says. “Very good ones. Not all of them get where they are because of their gender. More likely, in spite of it.”
Thrush is unfamiliar with Scarpetta. Benton never mentions her, not even to people he knows rather well.
“Women shouldn’t see shit like this,” Thrush says.
The night air is penetrating and milky-white up and down Commercial Street. Snow swarms in lamplight and lights the night until the world glows and seems surreal as the two of them walk in the middle of the deserted silent street east along the water to the cottage Lucy began renting several days ago after Marino got the strange phone call from the man named Hog.
She builds a fire, and she and Stevie sit in front of it on quilts and roll a joint with very good stuff from British Columbia, and they share it. They smoke and talk and laugh, and then Stevie wants more.
“Just one more,” she begs as Lucy undresses her.
“That’s different,” Lucy says, staring at Stevie’s slender nude body, at the red hand prints on it, maybe tattoos.
There are four of them. Two on her breasts as if someone is grabbing them, two on her upper inner thighs as if someone is forcing her legs apart. There are none on her back, none where Stevie couldn’t reach and apply them herself, assuming they are fake. Lucy stares. She touches one of the hand prints, places her hand over one of them, fondling Stevie’s breast.
“Just checking to see if it’s the right fit,” Lucy says. “Fake?”
“Why don’t you take off your clothes.”
Lucy does what she wants, but she won’t take off her clothes. For hours, she does what she wants in the firelight, on the quilts, and Stevie lets her, is more alive than anyone Lucy has ever touched, smooth with soft contours, lean in a way Lucy isn’t anymore, and when Stevie tries to undress her, almost fights her, Lucy won’t allow it, then Stevie gets tired and gives up and Lucy helps her to bed. After she is asleep, Lucy lies awake listening to the eerie whining of the wind, trying to figure out exactly what it sounds like, deciding it doesn’t sound like silk stockings after all, but like something distressed and in pain.
Chapter 7
The autopsy room is small with a tile floor and the usual surgical cart, digital scale, evidence cabinet, autopsy saws and various blades, dissecting boards and a transportable autopsy table latched to the front of a wall-mounted dissecting sink. The walk-in refrigerator is built into a wall, the door partially open.
Thrush hands Benton a pair of blue nitrile gloves, asks him, “You want booties or a mask or anything?”
“No thanks,” Benton says as Dr. Lonsdale emerges from the refrigerator, pushing a stainless-steel cadaver carrier bearing the pouched body.
“We need to make this quick,” he says as he parks near the sink and locks two of the swivel casters. “I’m already in deep shit with my wife. It’s her birthday.”
He unzips the pouch and spreads it open. The victim has raggedly cut short, black hair that is damp and still gory with bits of brain and other tissue. There is almost nothing left of her face. It looks as if a small bomb blew up inside her head, which is rather much what happened.
“Shot in the mouth,” Dr. Lonsdale says, and he is young with an intensity that borders on impatience. “Massive skull fractures, brain pulpifaction, which of course we usually associate with suicides, but nothing else about this case is consistent with suicide. It appears to me that her head was tilted pretty far back when the trigger was pulled, explaining why her face is basically shot off, some of her teeth blown out. Again, not uncommon in suicides.”
He switches on a magnifying lamp and positions it close to the head.
“No need to pry open her mouth,” he comments. “Since she has no face left. Thank God for small favors.”
Benton leans close and smells the sweet, putrid stench of decomposing blood.
“Soot on the palate, the tongue,” Dr. Lonsdale continues. “Superficial lacerations of the tongue, the perioral skin and nasolabial fold due to the bulging-out effect when gases from the shotgun blast expand. Not a pretty way to die.”
He unzips the pouch the rest of the way.
“Saved the best for last,” Thrush says. “What do you make of it? Reminds me of Crazy Horse.”
“You mean the Indian?” Dr. Lonsdale gives him a quizzical look as he unscrews the lid from a small glass jar filled with a clear liquid.
“Yeah. I think he put red hand prints on his horse’s ass.”
There are red hand prints on the woman, on her breasts, abdomen and upper inner thighs, and Benton positions the magnifying lamp closer.
Dr. Lonsdale swabs the edge of a hand print and says, “Isopropyl alcohol, a solvent like that will get it off. Obviously, it’s not water-soluble and brings to mind the sort of stuff people use for temporary tattooing. Some type of paint or dye. Could also have been done in permanent Magic Marker, I suppose.”
“I’m assuming you haven’t seen this in any other cases around here,” Benton says.
“Not at all.”
The magnified hand prints are well defined with clean margins, as if made with a stencil, and Benton looks for feathering strokes of a brush, for anything that might indicate how the paint, ink or dye was applied. He can’t tell, but based on the density of color, he suspects the body art is recent.
“I suppose she could have gotten this at some point earlier. In other words, it’s unrelated to her death,” Dr. Lonsdale adds.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Thrush agrees. “There’s a lot of witchcraft around here with Salem and all.”
“What I’m wondering is how quickly something like this begins to fade,” Benton says. “Have you measured them to see if they’re the same size as her hand?” He indicates the body.
“They look bigger to me,” Thrush says, holding out his own hand.
“What about her back?” Benton asks.
“One on each buttock, one between her shoulder blades,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “Look like a man’s size, the hands do.”
“Yeah,” Thrush says.
Dr. Lonsdale pulls the body partially on its side, and Benton studies the hand prints on the back.
“Looks like she has some sort of abrasion here,” he says, noting a scraped area on the hand print between the shoulder blades. “Some inflammation.”
“I’m not clear on all the details,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “It’s not my case.”
“Looks as if it was painted after she got the scrape,” Benton says. “Am I seeing welts, too?”
“Maybe some localized swelling. Histology should answer that. It’s not my case,” he reminds them. “I didn’t participate in her autopsy,” he is sure to remind them. “I glanced at her. That was it before I just now rolled her out. I did look over the autopsy report.”
Should the chief’s work be negligent or incompetent, he’s not about to take the blame.
“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” Benton asks.
“Well, the cold temperatures would have slowed rigor.”
“Frozen when she was found?”
“Not yet. Apparently, her body temperature when she got here was thirty-eight degrees. Fahrenheit. I didn’t go to the scene. I can’t give you those details.”
“The temperature at ten o’clock this morning was twenty-one degrees,” Thrush tells Benton. “The weather conditions are on the disk I gave you.”
“So the autopsy report has already been dictated,” Benton says.
“It’s on the disk,” Thrush answers.
“Trace evidence?”
“Some soil, fibers, other debris adhering to blood,” Thrush replies. “I’ll get them run in the labs as quick as I can.”
“Tell me about the shotgun shell you recovered,” Benton says to him.
“Inside her rectum. You couldn’t see it from the outside, but it showed up on x-ray. Damnedest thing. When they first showed me the film, I thought maybe the shell was under her body on the x-ray tray. Had no idea the damn thing was inside her.”
“What kind?”
“Remington Express Magnum, twelve-gauge.”
“Well, if she shot herself, she’s certainly not the one who shoved the shell up her rectum after the fact,” Benton says. “You running it through NIBIN?”
“Already in the works,” Thrush says. “The firing pin left a nice drag mark. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Chapter 8
Early the next morning, snow blows sideways over Cape Cod Bay and melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy’s windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.
Lucy shouldn’t have gone to Lorraine’s last night. She wishes she hadn’t and can’t stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here to Provincetown a week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. She watches Stevie’s regular breathing.
“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”
She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren’t frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can’t believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.
“Stevie, wake up. I’ve got to get going,” she says loudly.
Stevie doesn’t stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself no more, and then nights like last night happen and it isn’t smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?
How could Johnny be dead?
She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.
I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.
“You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.
Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang .380 pistol on the table by the bed.
“Come on, wake up.”
Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God, no.
When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.
Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.
He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.
He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.
That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.
“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”
“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.
Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.
“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”
The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.
“Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.
The wide plank floor is cold beneath Lucy’s bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol’s magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.
“Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”
Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.
“What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.
“I’ve got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.
Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”
“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”
“I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you’ve ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”
Lucy told her she is a Boston attorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren’t true.
“How did you know I like my coffee black?”
“I didn’t,” Lucy says. “There’s no milk or cream in the house. I’ve really got to go.”
“I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That’s a first.”
“Seems like a lot of things were your first.”
“You didn’t take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That’s a first, all right.”
“You weren’t exactly with it.”
“I was with it enough to try. It’s not too late to try again.”
She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn’t believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.
“God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn’t do that.”
“You mixed it with vodka.”
Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red hand prints again.
“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.
“You asked me a lot of things last night.”
“I asked you where you got them done.”
“Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.
“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”
“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”
“What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the hand prints.
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Then whose?”
“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”
Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.
“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.
“We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.
She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.
“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”
Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.
“It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”
“It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”
“You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just… Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”
Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.
“God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”
“At least call me the right thing!”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”
“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.
Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.
Chapter 9
Half an hour later, Lucy zips up her ski jacket and tucks the pistol and two extra magazines in a pocket.
She locks the cottage and climbs down the snow-covered wooden steps to the street as she thinks about Stevie and her inexplicable behavior, feeling guilty. She thinks about Johnny and feels guilty, remembering San Francisco, when he took her to dinner and reassured her that everything would be all right.
You’re going to be fine, he promised.
I can’t live like this, she said.
It was women’s night at Mecca on Market Street, and the restaurant was crowded with women, attractive women who looked happy and confident and pleased with themselves. Lucy felt stared at, and it bothered her in a way it never had before.
I want to do something about it now, she said.Look at me.
Lucy, you look great.
I haven’t been this fat since I was ten.
You stop taking your medicine and…
It makes me sick and exhausted.
I’m not going to let you do anything rash. You have to trust me.
He held her gaze in the candlelight, and his face will always be in her mind, looking at her the way he did that night. He was handsome, with fine features and unusual eyes the color of tiger eyes, and she could keep nothing from him. He knew all there was to know in every way imaginable.
Loneliness and guilt follow her as she follows the snowy sidewalk west along the Cape Cod Bay. She ran away. She remembers when she heard about his death. She heard about it the way no one should, on the radio.
A prominent doctor was found shot to death in a Hollywood apartment in what sources close to the investigation say is a possible suicide…
She had no one to ask. She wasn’t supposed to know Johnny and had never met his brother, Laurel, or any of their friends, so who could she ask?
Her cell phone vibrates, and she tucks the earpiece in her ear and answers.
“Where are you?” Benton says.
“Walking through a blizzard in P town. Well, not literally a blizzard. It’s starting to taper off.” She is dazed, a little hung-over.
“Anything interesting come up?”
She thinks of last night and feels bewildered and ashamed.
What she says is, “Only that he wasn’t alone when he was here last, the week before he died. Apparently, he came here right after his surgery, then went down to Florida.”
“Laurel with him?”
“No.”
“How did he manage alone?”
“As I said, it appears he wasn’t alone.”
“Who told you?”
“A bartender. Apparently, he met someone.”
“We know who?”
“A woman. Someone a lot younger.”
“A name?”
“Jan, don’t know the rest of it. Johnny was upset about the surgery, which wasn’t all that successful, as you know. People do a lot of things when they’re scared and don’t feel good about themselves.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” she lies.
She was a coward. She was selfish.
“You don’t sound okay,” Benton says to her. “What happened to Johnny isn’t your fault.”
“I ran away from it. I didn’t do a damn thing.”
“Why don’t you spend some time with us. Kay’s going to be up here for a week. We’d love to see you. You and I will find some private time to talk,” Benton the psychologist says.
“I don’t want to see her. Somehow make her understand.”
“Lucy, you can’t keep doing this to her.”
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” she says, thinking of Stevie again.
“Then tell her the truth. It’s that simple.”
“You called me.” She abruptly changes the subject.
“I need you to do something for me as soon as possible,” he replies. “I’m on a secured phone.”
“Unless there’s anyone around here with an intercept system, I am too. Go ahead.”
He tells her about a murder that supposedly occurred at some sort of Christmas shop, supposedly in the Las Olas area about two and a half years ago. He tells her everything Basil Jenrette told him. He says Scarpetta is unfamiliar with any case that sounds similar, but she wasn’t working in South Florida back then.
“The information came from a sociopath,” he reminds her, “so I’m not holding my breath that there’s anything to it.”
“The alleged victim in the Christmas shop have her eyes gouged out?”
“He didn’t tell me that. I didn’t want to ask him too many questions until I check out his story. Can you run it in HIT, see what you can find?”
“I’ll get started on the plane,” she says.
Chapter 10
The clock on the wall above the bookcase reads half past noon, and the attorney representing a kid who probably murdered his baby brother is taking his time going through paperwork on the other side of Kay Scarpetta’s desk.
Dave is young, dark, nicely built, one of those men whose irregular features somehow fit together in a very appealing way. He is known for his flamboyance in the malpractice arena, and whenever he comes to the Academy, the secretaries and female students suddenly find reasons to walk past Scarpetta’s door, except Rose, of course. She has been Scarpetta’s secretary for fifteen years, is well past retirement age and isn’t particularly vulnerable to male charm unless it is Marino’s. He is probably the only man whose flirtations she welcomes, and Scarpetta picks up the phone to ask her where he is. He is supposed to be here for this meeting.
“I tried him last night,” Scarpetta says over the phone to Rose. “Several times.”
“Let me see if I can find him,” Rose says. “He’s been acting rather odd lately.”
“Not just lately.”
Dave studies an autopsy report, his head tilted back as he reads through the horn-rimmed glasses low on his nose.
“The last few weeks have been worse. I have a funny feeling it’s about a woman.”
“See if you can find him.”
She hangs up and looks across her desk to see if Dave is ready to get on with his prejudicial questions about another difficult death that he is convinced can be resolved for a substantial fee. Unlike most police departments that invite the assistance of the Academy’s scientific and medical experts, lawyers usually pay, and, as a rule, most clients who can pay are representing people who are as guilty as hell.
“Marino not coming?” he asks.
“We’re trying to find him.”
“I’ve got a deposition in less than an hour.” He turns a page of the report. “Seems to me when all is said and done, the findings are in favor of an impact and nothing more.”
“I’m not going to say that in court,” she replies, looking at the report, at the details of an autopsy she didn’t perform. “What I can say is that while a subdural hematoma can be caused by an impact—in this case, the alleged fall off the couch onto the tile floor—it is highly unlikely, was more likely caused by violent shaking that causes shearing forces in the cranial cavity and subdural bleeding and injury to the spinal cord.”
“As for the retinal hemorrhages, aren’t we in agreement those can also be caused by trauma, such as his head striking the tile floor, resulting in a subdural?”
“Not at all in a short fall like this. Again, was more likely caused by the head whipping back and forth. Just as the report makes clear.”
“I don’t think you’re helping me out much here, Kay.”
“If you don’t want an unbiased opinion, you should find another expert.”
“There is no other expert. You’re unrivaled.” He smiles. “What about a vitamin K deficiency?”
“If you have antemortem blood that revealed protein-induced vitamin K deficiency,” she replies. “If you’re looking for leprechauns.”
“Problem is, we don’t have antemortem blood. He didn’t survive long enough to get to the hospital.”
“That’s a problem.”
“Well, shaken baby syndrome can’t be proved. It’s definitely unclear and improbable. You can at least say that.”
“What’s clear is you don’t have mama’s fourteen-year-old son babysit his newborn brother when the son has already been to juvenile court twice for assault on other children and is legendary for his explosive temper.”
“And you won’t say that.”
“No.”
“Look, all I ask is you point out there’s no definitive evidence that this baby was shaken.”
“I will also point out there’s no definitive evidence that he wasn’t, that I can find no fault with the autopsy report in question.”
“The Academy’s great,” Dave says, getting up from his chair. “But you guys are roughing me up. Marino’s a no-show. Now you’re leaving me hanging out to dry.”
“I’m sorry about Marino,” she says.
“Maybe you need to control him better.”
“That’s not exactly possible.”
Dave tucks in his bold striped shirt, straightens his bold silk tie, puts on his tailored silk jacket. He arranges his paperwork inside his crocodile briefcase.
“Rumor has it you’re looking into the Johnny Swift case,” he then says, snapping shut the silver clasps.
Scarpetta is caught for a minute. She can’t imagine how Dave could know this.
What she says is, “It’s been my practice to pay little attention to rumors, Dave.”
“His brother owns one of my favorite restaurants in South Beach. Called Rumors, ironically,” he says. “You know, Laurel’s had some problems.”
“I don’t know anything about him.”
“Someone who works there is passing around the story that Laurel killed Johnny for money, for whatever Johnny might have left him in his will. Says Laurel’s got habits he can’t afford.”
“Sounds like hearsay. Or maybe someone who has a grudge.”
Dave walks to the door.
“I haven’t talked to her. Every time I try, she’s not there. I personally think Laurel’s a really nice guy, by the way. I just find it a bit coincidental that I start hearing stories and then Johnny’s case is reopened.”
“I’m not aware it was ever closed,” Scarpetta says.
Snowflakes are icy and sharp, the sidewalks and streets frosted white. Few people are out.
Lucy walks briskly, sipping from a steaming hot latte, heading to the Anchor Inn, where she checked in several days ago under a fictitious name so she could hide her rented Hummer. She hasn’t parked it at the cottage once, never interested in strangers knowing what she drives. She veers off on a narrow drive that winds around to the small parking lot on the water where the Hummer is covered with snow. She unlocks the doors, starts the engine and turns on the defrost, and the white-blanketed windows give her the cool, shady sensation of being inside an igloo.
She is calling one of her pilots when a gloved hand suddenly begins wiping snow off her side window and a black-hooded face fills the glass. Lucy aborts the call and drops the phone on the seat.
She stares at Stevie for a long moment, then lowers the window as her mind races through possibilities. It isn’t a good thing that she was followed here. It is a very bad thing that she didn’t notice she was being followed.
“What are you doing?” Lucy asks.
“I just wanted to tell you something.”
Stevie’s face has an expression that is hard to read. Maybe she is near tears and extremely upset and hurt, or it could be the cold, sharp wind blowing in from the bay that is making her eyes so bright.
“You’re the most awesome person I’ve ever met,” Stevie says. “I think you’re my hero. My new hero.”
Lucy isn’t sure if Stevie is mocking her. Maybe she isn’t.
“Stevie, I’ve got to get to the airport.”
“They haven’t started canceling flights yet. But it’s supposed to be terrible the rest of the week.”
“Thanks for the weather update,” Lucy says, and the look in Stevie’s eyes is fierce and unnerving. “Look, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t,” Stevie says, as if this is the first she’s heard of it. “Not at all. I didn’t think I’d like you so much. I wanted to find you to tell you that. Tuck it away in some part of that clever head of yours, maybe remember it on a rainy day. I just never thought I would like you so much.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It’s intriguing. You come across so sure of yourself, arrogant really. Hard and distant. But I realize it’s not who you are inside. Funny how things turn out so differently from what you expect.”
Snow is blowing inside the Hummer, dusting the interior.
“How did you find me?” Lucy asks.
“I went back to your place but you were gone. I followed your footprints in the snow. They led right here. You wear what? Size eight? It wasn’t hard.”
“Well, I’m sorry for…”
“Please,” Stevie says intensely, strongly. “I know I’m not just another notch on your belt, as they say.”
“I’m not into that,” Lucy says, but she is.
She knows it, even if she would never describe it like that. She feels bad for Stevie. She feels bad for her aunt, for Johnny, for everyone she has failed.
“Some might argue you’re a notch on mine,” Stevie says playfully, seductively, and Lucy doesn’t want to have the feeling again.
Stevie is sure of herself again, full of secrets again, amazingly attractive again.
Lucy shoves the Hummer into reverse as snow blows in and her face stings from the snow and the wind blowing off the water.
Stevie digs in her coat pocket, pulls out a slip of paper, hands it to her through the open window.
“My phone number,” she says.
The area code is 617, the Boston area. She never told Lucy where she lived. Lucy never asked.
“That’s all I wanted to say to you,” Stevie says. “And happy Valentine’s Day.”
They look at each other through the open window, the engine rumbling, snow coming down and clinging to Stevie’s black coat. She’s beautiful and Lucy feels what she felt at Lorraine’s. She thought it was gone. She is feeling it.
“I’m not like all the rest,” Stevie says, looking into Lucy’s eyes.
“You’re not.”
“My cell phone number,” Stevie says. “I actually live in Florida. After I left Harvard, I never bothered to change my cell phone number. It doesn’t matter. Free minutes, you know.”
“You went to Harvard?”
“I usually don’t mention it. It can be rather off-putting.”
“Where in Florida?”
“Gainesville,” she says. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says again. “I hope it turns out to be the most special one you’ve ever had.”
Chapter 11
The smart board inside classroom 1A is filled with a colorful photograph of a man’s torso. His shirt is unbuttoned, a large knife plunged into his hairy chest.
“Suicide,” one of the students volunteers from his desk.
“Here’s another fact. Although you can’t tell from this picture,” Scarpetta says to the sixteen students who make up this session’s Academy class, “he has multiple stab wounds.”
“Homicide.” The student quickly changes his answer and everybody laughs.
Scarpetta flashes up the next slide, this one of multiple wounds clustered near the fatal one.
“They look shallow,” another student says.
“What about the angle? They should be angled up if he did it to himself?”
“Not necessarily, but here’s a question,” Scarpetta says from the podium in the front of the classroom. “What might his unbuttoned shirt tell you?”
Silence.
“If you were going to stab yourself, would you do it through your clothing?” she asks. “And, by the way, you’re right.” She directs this to the student who made the comment about shallow stab wounds. “Most of these”—she points them out on the smart board—“barely broke the skin. What we call hesitation marks. ”
The students take notes. They are a bright, eager bunch, different ages, different backgrounds, from different areas of the country, two of them from England. Several are detectives who want intensive forensic training in crime-scene investigation. Others are death investigators who want the same thing. Some are college graduates working on master’s degrees in psychology, nuclear biology and microscopy. One is an assistant district attorney who wants more convictions in court.
She displays another slide on the smart board, this one an especially gruesome photograph of a man with his intestines spilling out of a gaping incision to his abdomen. Several students groan. One says “ouch.”
“Who’s familiar with seppuku?” Scarpetta asks.
“Hari-kari,” a voice sounds from the doorway.
Dr. Joe Amos, this year’s forensic pathology fellow, walks in as if it is his class. He is tall and gangly, with an unruly shock of black hair, a long, pointed chin and dark, glittering eyes. He reminds Scarpetta of a black bird, a crow.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” he says, then he does it anyway. “This guy”—he nods at the gruesome image on the smart board—“took a big hunting knife, stabbed it into one side of his abdomen and slashed across to the other. That’s called motivation.”
“Was it your case, Dr. Amos?” a student asks, this one female and pretty.
Dr. Amos moves closer to her, looks very serious and important. “No. What you need to remember, though, is this: The way you can tell suicide versus homicide is if it’s a suicide, the person will slash the knife across his abdomen and then cut upwards, making the classic L shape that you see in hari-kari. Which is not what you see here.”
He directs the students’ attention to the smart board.
Scarpetta holds in her temper.
“Be kind of hard to do that in a homicide,” he adds.
“This one’s not L-shaped.”
“Precisely,” he says. “Who wants to vote for homicide?”
A few students raise their hands.
“My vote, too,” he says with confidence.
“Dr. Amos? How quickly would he have died?”
“You might survive a few minutes. You’re going to bleed out really fast. Dr. Scarpetta, I wonder if I could see you for a minute. I’m sorry to interrupt,” he says to the students.
She and Joe walk into the hallway.
“What is it?” she asks.
“The hell scene we have scheduled for later this afternoon,” he says. “I’d like to spice it up a little.”
“This couldn’t wait until after class?”
“Well, I thought you could get one of the students to volunteer. They’ll do anything you ask.”
She ignores the flattery.
“Ask if one of them will help out with this afternoon’s hell scene, but you can’t tell the details in front of everyone.”
“And what are the details, exactly?”
“I was thinking of Jenny. Maybe you’ll let her skip your three o’clock class so she can help me.” He refers to the pretty student who asked him if the evisceration was his case.
Scarpetta has seen them together on more than one occasion. Joe is engaged, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from being quite friendly with attractive female students, no matter how much the Academy discourages it. So far, he hasn’t been caught committing an unredeemable infraction, and, in a way, she wishes he had been. She’d love to get rid of him.
“We get her to play the perp,” he explains quietly, excitedly. “She looks so innocent, so sweet. So we take two students at a time, have them work a homicide, the victim shot multiple times while on the toilet. This is in one of the motel rooms, of course, and Jenny comes in acting all broken up, hysterical. The dead guy’s daughter. We’ll see if the students let their guard down.”
Scarpetta is silent.
“Of course, there’ll be a few cops at the scene. Let’s say they’re looking around, assuming the perp’s fled. Point is, we’ll see if anybody’s smart enough to make sure this pretty young thing isn’t the person who just blew the guy away, her father, while he was taking a dump. And guess what? She is. They let their guard down, she pulls a gun and starts shooting, gets taken out. And voilà. A classic suicide by police.”
“You can ask Jenny yourself after class,” Scarpetta says as she tries to figure out why the scenario seems familiar.
Joe is obsessed with hell scenes, an innovation of Marino’s, extreme mock crime scenes that are supposed to mirror the real risks and unpleasantries of real death. She sometimes thinks Joe should give up forensic pathology and sell his soul to Hollywood. If he has a soul. The scenario he has just proposed reminds her of something.
“Pretty good, huh?” he says. “It could happen in real life.”
Then she remembers. It did happen in real life.
“We had a case in Virginia like that,” she recalls. “When I was chief.”
“Really?” he says, amazed. “Guess there’s nothing new under the sun.”
“And by the way, Joe,” she says. “In most cases of seppuku, of hari-kari, the cause of death is cardiac arrest due to sudden cardiac collapse due to a sudden drop in intra-abdominal pressure due to sudden evisceration. Not exsanguination.”
“Your case? The one in there?” He indicates the classroom.
“Marino’s and mine. From years back. And one other thing,” she adds. “It’s a suicide, not a homicide.”
Chapter 12
The Citation X flies south at just under mach one as Lucy uploads files on a virtual private network that is so firewall-protected not even Homeland Security can break in.
At least, she believes her information infrastructure is secure. She believes that no hacker, including the government, can monitor the transmissions of classified data generated by the Heterogenous Image Transaction database management system that goes by the acronym HIT. She developed and programmed HIT herself. The government doesn’t know about it, she is sure of it. Few people do, she is sure of it. HIT is proprietary, and she could sell the software easily, but she doesn’t need the money, having made her fortune years ago from other software development, mostly from some of the same search engines she is conducting through cyberspace this minute, looking for any violent deaths that might have occurred in a South Florida business of any description.
Other than homicides in the expected convenience and liquor stores, massage parlors and topless clubs, she has found no violent crime, unsolved or otherwise, that might verify what Basil Jenrette told Benton. However, there once was a business called The Christmas Shop. It was located at the intersection of A1A and East Las Olas Boulevard, along a strip of tacky touristy boutiques and cafés and ice-cream joints on the beach. Two years ago, The Christmas Shop was sold to a chain called Beach Bums that specializes in T-shirts, swimwear and souvenirs.
It is hard for Joe to believe how many cases Scarpetta has worked in what is a relatively brief career. Forensic pathologists rarely land their first job until they are thirty, assuming their arduous educational track is continuous. Added to her six years of postgraduate medical training were three more for law school. By the time she was thirty-five, she was the chief of the most prominent medical examiner system in the United States. Unlike most chiefs, she wasn’t just an administrator. She did autopsies, thousands of them.
Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence—sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence—all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.
Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In the real case, the trigger-happy daughter is facedown in a pool of blood on the living-room floor. She was shot three times, once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and he thinks about the way she was dressed when she killed her daddy while he was on the toilet and then put on an act in front of the police before pulling out her pistol again. She died barefoot, in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing panties or a bra. He clicks to her autopsy photographs, not as interested in what she looked like with a Y incision as in how she looked naked on the cold, steel table. She was only fifteen when the police shot her dead, and he thinks of Jenny.
He looks up, smiles at her from the other side of his desk. She has been sitting patiently, waiting for instructions. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a Glock nine-millimeter, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, drops out the magazine and pushes the pistol across the desk to her.
“You ever shot a gun before?” he asks his newest teacher’s pet.
She has the cutest turned-up nose and huge eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he imagines her naked and dead like the girl in the scene photograph on his screen.
“I grew up with guns,” she says. “What’s that you’re looking at, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“E-mail,” he says, and not telling the truth has never bothered him.
He rather likes not telling the truth, likes it far more than dislikes it. Truth isn’t always truth. What is true? What is true is what he decides is true. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Jenny cranes her head to get a better look at what’s on his screen.
“Cool. People e-mail entire case files to you.”
“Sometimes,” he says, clicking to a different photograph, and the color printer behind his desk starts up. “What we’re doing is classified,” he then says. “Can I trust you?”
“Of course, Dr. Amos. I completely understand classified. If I didn’t, I’m training for the wrong profession.”
A color photograph of the dead girl in a pool of blood on the living-room floor slides into the printer tray. Joe turns around to get it, looks it over, hands it to her.
“That’s going to be you this afternoon,” he says.
“I hope not literally,” she teases.
“And this is your gun.” He looks at the Glock in front of her on the desk. “Where do you propose you hide it?”
She looks at the photograph, not fazed by it, and asks, “Where did she hide it?”
“You can’t see it in the photograph,” he replies. “A pocketbook, which, by the way, should have cued somebody. She finds her father dead, supposedly, calls nine-one-one, opens the door when the cops get there and has her pocketbook. She’s hysterical, never left the house, so why’s she walking around with her pocketbook?”
“That’s what you want me to do.”
“The pistol goes in your pocketbook. At some point, you reach in for tissues because you’re boo-hooing, and you pull the gun and start shooting.”
“Anything else?”
“Then you’re going to get killed. Try to look pretty.”
She smiles. “Anything else?”
“The way she’s dressed.” He looks at her, tries to show it in his eyes, what he wants.
She knows.
“I don’t have the exact same thing,” she replies, playing him a little, acting naïve.
She’s anything but, probably been fucking since kindergarten.
“Well, Jenny, see if you can approximate. Shorts, T-shirt, no shoes or socks.”
“She doesn’t have on underwear, looks to me.”
“Then there’s that.”
“She looks like a slut.”
“Okay. Then look like a slut,” he says.
Jenny thinks this is very funny.
“I mean, you are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”
“You don’t need someone else.”
“Oh, really.”
“Really,” she says.
She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.
“We could get in trouble,” she says.
“We won’t.”
“I don’t want to get kicked out,” she says.
“You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”
She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.
“I’m a grown-up,” she says.
“You’re from Texas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big in Texas, don’t they.”
“Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.
He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their corkboards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.
“You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”
“You’re also engaged.”
“She’s at a conference in Chicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”
Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.
“Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.
“You’re special,” he says.
Chapter 13
An hour out from Signature Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.
She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries of Broward County tax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper from West Palm Beach.
Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in The Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up in Chicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.
“Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country of Alberta, Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”
Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy…
Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.
She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.
“I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.
“When you going to learn to fly that thing?”
“Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”
She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.
“I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.
“I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”
“From who?” he says suspiciously.
“Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”
She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR. Benton doesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.
“Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.
Marino knows that McLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.
“The what?” Marino asks.
She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”
“Trees or kids?”
“Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”
Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail to Benton.
“Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”
“You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.
“Hello? Is this better? Marino?”
“I can hear you.”
“That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”
“So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.
“Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”
“The Fort Lauderdale cops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”
“Let’s find out what it is,” she says.
At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.
“It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”
“Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”
“Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.
There must be a mistake.
“Yes, today.”
“That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”
“Well, someone did.”
“Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.
“The flight’s full. I can wait list you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”
Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.
“Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”
“Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”
“I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking about Benton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.
Chapter 14
The yellow moon is misshapen like an overripe mango, hanging heavy over scrubby trees and weeds and dense shadows. In the uneven light of the moon, Hog can see well enough to make out the thing.
He sees it coming because he knows where to look. For several minutes, he has detected its infrared energy in the Heat Stalker he moves horizontally in the dark in a slow scan, like a wand, like a magic wand. A line of bright-red hatch marks marches across the rear LED window of the lightweight olive-green PVC tube as it detects differences in the surface temperatures of the warm-blooded thing and the earth.
He is Hog, and his body is a thing, and he can leave it on demand and no one can see him. No one can see him now in the middle of the empty night holding the Heat Stalker like a leveler while it detects warmth radiating from living flesh and alerts him with small bright-red marks that flow in single file across the dark glass.
Probably the thing is a raccoon.
Stupid thing. Hog silently talks to it as he sits cross-legged on sandy soil and scans. He glances down at the bright red marks moving across the lens at the rear end of the tube, the front end pointed at the thing. He searches the shadowy berm and feels the ruined old house behind him, feels its pull. His head is thick because of the earplugs, his breathing loud, the way it sounds when you breathe through a snorkel, submerged and silent, nothing but the sound of your own rapid, shallow breaths. He doesn’t like earplugs, but it is important to wear them.
You know what happens now, he silently says to the thing. I guess you don’t know.
He watches the dark, fat shape creep along, low to the ground. It moves like a thick, furry cat, and maybe it is a cat. Slowly, it moves through ragged Bermuda and torpedo grass and sedge, moving in and out of thick shadows beneath the spiny silhouettes of spindly pines and the brittle litter of dead trees. He scans, watching the thing, watching the red marks flow across the lens. The thing is stupid, the breeze blowing the wrong way for it to pick up his scent and be anything but stupid.
He turns off the Heat Stalker and rests it in his lap. He picks up the camouflage finished Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump, the stock hard and cool against his jaw as he lines up the tritium ghost ring with the thing.
Where’d you think you’re going? he mocks it.
The thing doesn’t run. Stupid thing.
Go on. Run. See what happens.
It continues its oblivious lumbering pace, low to the ground.
He feels his own heart thud hard and slow, and hears his own rapid breathing as he follows the thing with the glowing green post and squeezes the trigger and the shotgun blast cracks open the quiet night. The thing jerks and goes still in the dirt. He removes the earplugs and listens for a cry or grunt but hears nothing, just distant traffic on South 27 and the gritty sound of his own feet as he gets up and shakes out the cramps in his legs. He slowly ejects the shell, catches it, stuffs it in a pocket and walks through the berm. He pushes the pressure pad on the shotgun’s slide and the SureFire WeaponLight shines down on the thing.
It is a cat, furry and striped with a swollen belly. He nudges it over. It is pregnant, and he considers shooting it again as he listens. There is nothing, not a movement, not a sound, not a sign of any life left. The thing was probably slinking toward the ruined house, looking for food. He thinks about it smelling food. If it thought there was food in the house, then recent occupation is detectable. He ponders this possibility as he presses in the safety and shoulders the shotgun, draping his forearm over the stock like a lumberjack shouldering an ax. He stares at the dead thing and thinks of the carved wooden lumberjack in The Christmas Shop, the big one by the door.
“Stupid thing,” he says, and there is no one to hear him, only the dead thing.
“No, you’re the stupid thing,” God’s voice sounds from behind him.
He takes out the earplugs and turns around. She is there in black, a black, flowing shape in the moonlit night.
“I told you not to do that,” she says.
“No one can hear it out here,” he replies, shifting the shotgun to his other shoulder and seeing the wooden lumberjack as if it is right in front of him.
“I’m not telling you again.”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“You know where I am if I choose for you to know.”
“I got you the Field & Stream’s. Two of them. And the paper, the glossy laser paper.”
“I told you to get me six in all, including two Fly Fishing, two Angling Journal’s.”
“I stole them. It was too hard to get six at once.”
“Then go back. Why are you so stupid?”
She is God. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.
“You will do what I say,” she says.
God is a woman, and she is it, and there is no other. She became God after he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent very far away where it was cold and kept snowing, and then he came back and by then, she had somehow become God and she told him he is her Hand. The Hand of God. Hog.
He watches God go away, dissolving in the night. He hears the loud engine as she flies away, flying down the highway. And he wonders if she’ll ever have sex with him again. All the time he thinks about it. When she became God, she wouldn’t have sex with him. Theirs is a holy union, she explains it. She has sex with other people but not with him, because he is her Hand. She laughs at him, says she can’t exactly have sex with her own Hand. It would be the same thing as having sex with herself. And she laughs.
“You were stupid, now weren’t you?” Hog says to the dead pregnant thing in the dirt.
He wants to have sex. He wants it right now as he stares at the dead thing and nudges it with his boot again and thinks about God and what she looks like naked with hands all over her.
I know you want it, Hog.
I do, he says. I want it.
I know where you want to put your hands. I’m right, aren’t I?
Yes.
You want to put them where I let other people put them, don’t you?
I wish you wouldn’t let anybody. Yes, I want it.
She makes him paint the red hand prints in places he doesn’t want other people to touch, places where he put his hands when he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent to the cold place where it snows, the place where they put him in the machine and rearranged his molecules.
Chapter 15
The next morning, Tuesday, clouds pile up from the distant sea and the pregnant dead thing is stiff on the ground and flies have found it.
“Now look what you did. Killed all your children, didn’t you? Stupid thing.”
Hog nudges it with his boot. Flies scatter like sparks. He watches as they buzz back to the gory, coagulated head. He stares at the stiff, dead thing and the flies crawling on it. He stares at it, not bothered by it. He squats beside it, getting close enough to craze the flies again and now he smells it. He gets a whiff of death, a stench that in several days will be overpowering and noticeable an acre away, depending on the wind. Flies will lay their eggs in orifices and the wounds, and soon the carcass will team with maggots, but it won’t bother him. He likes to watch what death does.
He walks off toward the ruined house, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He listens to the distant rumble of traffic on South 27, but there is no reason for anybody to come out here. Eventually, there will be. But now there isn’t. He steps up on the rotting porch and a curling plank gives under his boots, and he shoves open the door, entering a dark, airless space thick with dust. Even on a clear day, it is dark and suffocating inside the house, and this morning it is worse because a thunderstorm is on the way. It is eight o’clock and almost as dark as night inside the house, and he begins to sweat.
“Is that you?” The voice sounds from the darkness, from the rear of the house, where the voice ought to be.
Against a wall is a makeshift table of plywood and cinder blocks, and on top is a small glass fish tank. He points the shotgun at the tank and pushes the pressure pad on the slide, and the xenon light flashes brilliantly on glass and illuminates the black shape of the tarantula inside. It is motionless on sandy dirt and wood chips, poised like a dark hand next to its water sponge and favorite rock. In a corner of the tank, small crickets stir in the light, disturbed by it.
“Come talk to me,” the voice calls out, demanding but weaker than it was not even a day ago.
He isn’t sure if he is glad the voice is alive, but he probably is. He takes the lid off the tank and talks quietly, sweetly, to the spider. Its abdomen is balding and crusty with dried glue and pale yellow blood, and hatred wraps around him as he thinks about why it is bald and what caused it to almost bleed to death. The spider’s hair won’t grow back until he molts, and maybe he will heal and maybe he won’t.
“You know whose fault it is, don’t you?” he says to the spider. “And I did something about it, didn’t I?”
“Come here,” the voice calls out. “Do you hear me?”
The spider doesn’t move. He might die. There’s a good chance he will.
“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so much. I know you must be lonely,” he says to the spider. “I couldn’t take you with me because of your condition. It was a very long drive. Cold, too.”
He reaches inside the glass tank and gently strokes the spider. It barely moves.
“Is that you?” The voice is weaker and hoarse but demanding.
He tries to imagine what it will be like when the voice is gone, and he thinks about the dead thing, stiff and fly-infested on the dirt.
“Is that you?”
He keeps his finger pressed against the pressure pad, and the light points where the shotgun points, illuminating wooden flooring filthy with dirt and the hulls of dried-out insect eggs. His boots move behind the moving light.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Chapter 16
Inside the firearm sand tool marks lab, Joe Amos zips a Harley-Davidson black leather jacket around an eighty-pound block of ordnance gelatin. On top is a smaller block weighing twenty pounds, and it wears a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a black do-rag with a skull-and-bones pattern.
Joe steps back to admire his work. He is pleased but a little tired. He stayed up late with his newest teacher’s pet. He drank too much wine.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” he says to Jenny.
“Funny but disgusting. You’d better not let him know. I hear he’s not somebody to tangle with,” she says, sitting on a countertop.
“The person not to tangle with is me. I’m thinking of putting red food coloring in a batch. To look more like blood.”
“Cool.”
“Add a little brown, and maybe it will look like it’s decomposing. Maybe find a way to make it stink.”
“You and your hell scenes.”
“My mind never stops. My back hurts,” he says, admiring his work. “I hurt my damn back and I’m suing her.”
The gelatin, an elastic transparent material comprised of denatured animal bone and connective-tissue collagen, isn’t easy to handle, and the blocks he has dressed up were hard as hell to transfer from the ice chests to the back padded wall of the indoor firing range. The lab door is locked. The red light on the wall outside is on, warning that the range is hot.
“All dressed up with no place to go,” he says to the unappetizing mass.
More properly known as gelatin hydrolysate, it is also used in shampoos and conditioners, lipsticks, protein drinks, arthritis relief formulas and many other products that Joe will never touch the rest of his life. He won’t even kiss his fiancée if she is wearing lipstick, not anymore. Last time he did, he closed his eyes as her lips pressed against his and suddenly he imagined cow, pig and fish shit boiling in a huge pot. He reads labels now. If hydrolyzed animal protein is listed in the ingredients, the item goes into the trash or back on the shelf.
Properly prepared, ordnance gelatin simulates human flesh. It is almost as good a medium as swine tissue, which Joe would prefer. He’s heard of firearms labs that shoot up dead swine to test bullet penetration and expansion in a multitude of different situations. He would rather shoot up a hog. He would rather dress up a big hog carcass to look like a person and let the students riddle it with bullets from different distances and with different weapons and ammunition. That would be a good hell scene. A more hellish one would be to shoot a live hog, but Scarpetta would never allow it. She wouldn’t even hear of the students shooting a dead one.
“It won’t do any good to try to sue her,” Jenny is saying. “She’s also a lawyer.”
“Big shit.”
“Well, from what you tell me, you tried that before and didn’t get anywhere. Anyway, Lucy’s the one with all the money. I hear she thinks she’s something. I’ve never met her. None of us have.”
“You’re not missing anything. One of these days, someone will put her in her place.”
“Like you?”
“Maybe I already am.” He smiles. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not leaving here without my share. I deserve something after all the shit she’s put me through.” And now he’s thinking about Scarpetta again. “She treats me like shit.”
“Maybe I’ll meet Lucy before I graduate,” Jenny says thoughtfully, sitting on the counter, staring at him and the gelatin man he has dressed up like Marino.
“They’re all crap,” he says. “The fucking trinity. Well, I’ve got a little surprise for them.”
“What?”
“You’ll see. Maybe I’ll share it with you.”
“What is it?”
“Put it this way,” he says. “I’m getting something out of this. She underestimates me, and that’s a huge mistake. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of laughs.”
Part of his fellowship entails his assisting Scarpetta in the Broward County morgue, where she treats him like a common laborer, forcing him to suture up the bodies after autopsies and count the pills in bottles of prescription drugs that come in with the dead and catalogue personal effects as if he is a lowly morgue assistant and not a doctor. She has made it his responsibility to weigh, measure, photograph and undress the bodies, and to sift through any disgusting mess that might linger in the bottom of a body bag, especially if it is putrid, maggot-infested slop from a floater, or rancid flesh and bones from partially skeletonized remains. Most insulting is the chore of mixing up ten percent ordinance gelatin for the ballistic gelatin blocks used by the scientists and students.
Why? Give me one good reason, he said to Scarpetta when she gave him the assignment last summer.
It’s part of your training, Joe, she replied in her typically unflappable way.
I’m training to be a forensic pathologist, not a lab tech or a cook, he complained.
My method is to train forensic fellows from the ground up, she said. There isn’t anything you shouldn’t be able or willing to do.
Oh. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve made ordnance jelly blocks, that you used to do that when you were getting started, he said.
I still do it and am happy to pass along my favorite recipe, she replied. I prefer Vyse but Kind & Knox Type two-fifty-A will do just fine. Always start with cold water, between seven and ten degrees centigrade, and add the gelatin to the water and not the other way around. Keep stirring, but not vigorously, because you don’t want to introduce air. Add two-point-five milliliters of Foam Eater per twenty-pound block and make sure the mold pan is whistle-clean. For the pièce de résistance, add point-five milliliters of cinnamon oil.
That’s cute.
Cinnamon oil prevents fungus growth, she said.
She wrote out her personal recipe and then an equipment list that included a triple-beam balance, graduated pitcher, paint stirrer, 12cc hypodermic syringe, propionic acid, aquarium hose, aluminum foil, large spoon and so on, and next gave him a Martha Stewart demonstration in the lab kitchen, as if that makes it all fine and dandy when he’s scooping animal-pieces-and-parts powder out of twenty-five-pound drums and weighing and curing and lifting or dragging huge, heavy pans and placing them inside ice chests or the walk-in refrigerator and then making sure the students gather at the indoor range or outdoor rifle deck before the damn things start deteriorating, because they do. They melt like Jell-O and are best when served no longer than twenty minutes after removal from refrigeration, depending on the ambient temperature of the test environment.
He retrieves a window screen from a storage closet and props it flush against the Harley-outfitted blocks of ordnance gelatin, then puts on hearing protectors and protective glasses. He nods for Jenny to do the same. He picks up a stainless-steel Baretta 92, a top-of-the-line double-action pistol with a tritium front post sight. He loads a magazine with 147-grain Speer Gold Dot ammunition, which has six serrations around the rim of the hollow point so the projectile will expand or blossom even after passing through clothing as heavy as four layers of denim or a thick leather motorcycle jacket.
What will be different in this test-fire is the mesh pattern produced when the bullet passes through the window screen before ripping through the Harley jacket and buzz-sawing a swath through the chest of Mr. Jell-O, as he calls his ordnance-gelatin test dummies.
He racks back the slide and fires fifteen rounds, imagining Mr. Jell-O is Marino.
Chapter 17
Palm trees thrash in the wind beyond the conference-room windows. It will rain, Scarpetta thinks. It looks like a bad thunderstorm is headed her way, and Marino is late again and still hasn’t returned her phone calls.
“Good morning and let’s get going,” she says to her staff. “We’ve got a lot to go over, and it’s already quarter of nine.”
She hates being late. She hates it when someone else causes her to be late, and in this instance, it’s Marino. Again, it’s Marino. He is ruining her routines. He is ruining everything.
“This evening, hopefully, I’ll be on a plane, heading to Boston,” she says. “Providing my reservation isn’t magically cancelled again.”
“The airlines are so screwed up,” Joe says. “No wonder they’re all going bankrupt.”
“We’ve been asked to take a look at a Hollywood case, a possible suicide that has some disturbing circumstances associated with it,” she begins.
“There’s one thing I’d like to bring up first,” says Vince, the firearms examiner.
“Go ahead.” Scarpetta slides eight-by-ten photographs out of an envelope and begins passing them around the table.
“Someone was test-firing in the indoor range about an hour ago.” He looks pointedly at Joe. “It wasn’t on the schedule.”
“I meant to reserve the indoor range last night but forgot,” Joe says. “No one was waiting for it.”
“You’ve got to reserve it. It’s the only way we can keep track of…”
“I was trying out a new batch of ballistic gelatin, where I used hot water instead of cold to see if it made any difference in the calibration test. A difference of one centimeter. Good news. It passed.”
“There’s probably a difference of plus or minus one centimeter every time you mix up the damn stuff,” Vince says irritably.
“We aren’t supposed to use any block that isn’t valid. So I’m constantly checking the calibration and trying to perfect it. That requires me to spend a lot of time in the firearms lab. It’s not my choice.”
Joe looks at Scarpetta.
“Ordnance gelatin is one of my assignments.”
He looks at her again.
“I hope you remembered to use stopper blocks before you started pounding the back wall with a lot of firepower,” Vince says. “I’ve asked you before.”
“You know the rules, Dr. Amos,” Scarpetta says.
In front of his colleagues, she always calls him Dr. Amos instead of Joe. She shows him more respect than he deserves.
“We have to enter everything in the log,” she adds. “Every firearm removed from the reference collection, every round, every test-fire. Our protocols must be followed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There are legal implications. Most of our cases end up in court,” she adds.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right.” She tells them about Johnny Swift.
She tells them that in early November he had surgery on his wrists, and soon after came to Hollywood to stay with his brother. They were identical twins. The day before Thanksgiving, the brother, Laurel, went out shopping and returned to the house at approximately four thirty p.m. After carrying in the groceries, he discovered Dr. Swift on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest.
“I sort of remember this case,” Vince says. “It was in the news.”
“Well, I happen to remember Dr. Swift very well,” Joe says. “He used to call Dr. Self. Once when I was on her show, he called in, gave her hell about Tourette’s syndrome, and I happen to agree with her, usually nothing more than an excuse for bad behavior. He rambled on about neurochemical dysfunction, about abnormalities of the brain. Quite the expert,” he says sarcastically.
Nobody is interested in Joe’s appearances on Dr. Self’s show. Nobody is interested in his appearances on any show.
“What about an ejected shell and the weapon?” Vince asks Scarpetta.
“According to the police report, Laurel Swift noted a shotgun on the floor some three feet behind the back of the couch. No shell casing.”
“Well, that’s a bit unusual. He shoots himself in the chest and then somehow manages to toss the shotgun over the back of the couch?” It is Joe talking again. “I’m not seeing a scene photograph with the shotgun.”
“The brother claims he saw the shotgun on the floor behind the couch. I say claims. We’ll get to that part in a minute,” Scarpetta says.
“What about gunshot residue on him?”
“I’m sorry Marino isn’t here, since he’s our investigator in this case and working closely with the Hollywood police,” she replies, keeping her feelings about him barricaded. “All I know is that Laurel’s clothing wasn’t tested for GSR.”
“What about his hands?”
“Positive for GSR. But he claims he touched him, shook him, got blood on him. So theoretically, that could explain it. A few more details. His wrists were in splints when he died, his blood alcohol point-one, and according to the police report, there were numerous empty wine bottles in the kitchen.”
“We sure he was drinking alone?”
“We’re not sure of anything.”
“Sounds like holding a heavy shotgun might not have been easy for him if he’d just had surgery.”
“Possibly,” Scarpetta says. “And if you can’t use your hands, then what?”
“Your feet.”
“It can be done. I tried it with my twelve-gauge Remington. Unloaded,” she adds a little humor.
She tried it herself because Marino didn’t show up. He didn’t call. He didn’t care.
“I don’t have photographs of the demonstration,” she says, diplomatic enough not to add that the reason she doesn’t have them is because Marino didn’t show up. “Suffice it to say the blast would have kicked the gun back, or maybe his foot jerked and kicked the gun back, and the shotgun would have fallen off the back of the couch. Saying he killed himself. No abrasions on either of his big toes, by the way.”
“A contact wound?” Vince asks.
“Density of soot on his shirt, the abraded margin and diameter and shape of the wound, the absence of petal marks from the wad, which was still in the body, are consistent with a contact wound. Problem is, we have a gross inconsistency, which, in my opinion, is due to the medical examiner relying on a radiologist for a distance determination.”
“Who?”
“It’s Dr. Bronson’s case,” she says, and several of the scientists groan.
“Jesus, he’s as old as the damn Pope. When the hell’s he going to retire?”
“The Pope died,” Joe jokes.
“Thank you, CNN news flash.”
“The radiologist decided the shotgun wound is a, quote, distant wound,” Scarpetta resumes. “A distance of at least three feet. Uh-oh. Now we have a homicide, because you couldn’t possibly hold the barrel of a shotgun three feet from your own chest, now could you?”
Several clicks of the mouse, and a digital x-ray of Johnny Swift’s fatal shotgun blast is sharply displayed on the smart board. Shotgun pellets look like a storm of tiny white bubbles floating through the ghostly shapes of ribs.
“The pellets are spread out,” Scarpetta points out, “and to give the radiologist a little credit, the spread of the pellets inside the chest is consistent with a range of three or four feet, but what I think we’re dealing with here is a perfect example of the billiard-ball effect.”
She clears the x-ray off the smart board and collects several styluses, different ones for different colors.
“The leading pellets slowed when they entered the body and were then hit by the trailing pellets, causing colliding pellets to ricochet and spread out into a pattern that simulates distant-range fire,” she explains, drawing red ricocheting pellets hitting blue pellets like billiard balls. “Therefore simulating a distant gunshot wound, when in fact, it wasn’t a distant shot at all but a contact wound.”
“None of the neighbors heard a shotgun blast?”
“Apparently not.”
“Maybe a lot of people were out on the beach or out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
“Maybe.”
“What kind of shotgun, and whose was it?”
“All we can tell is it’s a twelve-gauge, based on the pellets,” Scarpetta says. “Apparently, the shotgun disappeared before the police showed up.”
Chapter 18
Ev Christian is awake and sitting on a mattress that is black with what she by now believes is old blood.
Scattered about the filthy floor inside the small, filthy room with its caving ceiling and water-stained wallpaper are magazines. She sees poorly without her glasses and can barely make out the pornographic covers. She barely makes out soda-pop bottles and fast-food wrappers scattered about. Between the mattress and the splintery wall is a small pink Keds tennis shoe, a girl’s size. Ev has picked it up countless times and held it, wondering what it means and who it once belonged to, worried the girl is dead. Sometimes Ev tucks the shoe behind her when he comes in, fearful he will take it from her. It is all she has.
She never sleeps longer than an hour or two at a stretch and has no idea how much time has passed. There is no such thing as time. Gray light fills the broken window on the other side of the room, and she can’t see the sun. She smells rain.
She doesn’t know what he has done with Kristin and the boys. She doesn’t know what he has done to them. She dimly remembers the first hours, those awful, unreal hours when he brought her food and water and stared at her from the darkness, and he was as dark as the darkness, dark like a dark spirit, hovering in the doorway.
How does it feel? he said to her in a soft, cold voice. How does it feel to know you’re going to die?
It is always dark inside the room. It is so much darker when he is in it.
I’m not afraid. You can’t touch my soul.
Say you’re sorry.
It’s not too late to repent. God will forgive even the most vile sin if you humble yourself and repent.
God is a woman. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.
Blasphemy. Shame on you. I’ve done nothing to be sorry about.
I’ll teach you shame. You’ll say you’re sorry just like she did.
Kristin?
Then he was gone, and Ev heard voices from another part of the house. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was talking to Kristin, must have been. He was talking to a woman. Ev really couldn’t hear it, but she heard them talking. She could not make out what they said, and she remembers feet scuffing and voices on the other side of the wall, and then she heard Kristin, knew it was her. When Ev thinks about it now, she wonders if she dreamed it.
Kristin! Kristin! I’m right here! I’m right here! Don’t you dare hurt her!
She hears her own voice in her head, but it might have been a dream.
Kristin? Kristin? Answer me! Don’t you dare hurt her!
Then she heard talking again, so maybe it was all right. But Ev’s not sure. She might have dreamed it. She might have dreamed she heard his boots moving down the hallway and the front door shutting. All this might have taken place in minutes, maybe hours. Maybe she heard a car engine. Maybe it was a dream, a delusion. Ev sat in the dark, her heart flying as she listened for Kristin and the boys and heard nothing. She called out until her throat was on fire and she could barely see or breathe.
Daylight came and went, and his dark shape would appear with paper cups of water and something to eat, and his shape would stand and watch her, and she could not see his face. She has never seen his face, not even the first time, when he came into the house. He wears a black hood with holes cut in it for his eyes, a hood like a black pillowcase, long and loose around his shoulders. His hooded shape likes to poke her with the barrel of the shotgun as if she is an animal in the zoo, as if he is curious about what she will do if he pokes her. He pokes her in her private places and watches what she will do.
Shame on you, Ev says when he pokes her. You can harm my flesh but you can’t touch my soul. My soul belongs to God.
She isn’t here. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.
My God is a jealous God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
She isn’t here, and he pokes her with the gun barrel, sometimes pokes her so hard it leaves perfect blackish-blue circles on her flesh.
Say you’re sorry, he says.
Ev sits on the stinking, rotting mattress. It has been used before, used horribly, stiff and stained black, and she sits on it inside the stinking, airless, trash-strewn room, listening and trying to think, listening and praying and screaming for help. No one answers. No one hears her, and she wonders where she could be. Where is she that no one can hear her scream?
She can’t escape because of the clever way he bent and twisted coat hangers around her wrists and ankles with ropes through them and looped over a rafter in the falling-down ceiling, as if she is some sort of grotesque marionette, bruised and covered with insect bites and rashes, her naked body itching and racked with pain. With effort, she can get to her feet. She can move off the mattress to relieve her bladder and bowels. When she does, the pain is so searing, she almost faints.
He does everything in the dark. He can see in the dark. She hears his breathing in the dark. He is a black shape. He is Satan.
“Help me God,” she says to the broken window, to the gray sky beyond, to the God beyond the sky, somewhere in His heaven. “Please God help me.”
Chapter 19
Scarpetta hears the distant roar of a motorcycle with very loud pipes.
She tries to concentrate as the motorcycle gets closer, cruising past the building toward the faculty parking lot. She thinks about Marino and wonders if she is going to have to fire him. She’s not sure she could.
She is explaining that there were two phones inside Laurel Swift’s house and both of them were unplugged, the cords missing. Laurel had left his cell phone in his car and says he was unable to find his brother’s cell phone, so he had no way to call for help. Panicking, Laurel fled and flagged somebody down. He didn’t return to the house until the police arrived, and by then the shotgun was gone.
“This is information I got from Dr. Bronson,” Scarpetta says. “I’ve talked to him several times and I’m sorry I don’t have a better grasp of the details.”
“The phone cords. Have they ever shown up?”
“I don’t know,” Scarpetta says, because Marino hasn’t briefed her.
“Johnny Swift could have removed them to make sure no one could call for help in case he didn’t die right away, assuming he’s a suicide,” Joe offers another one of his creative scenarios.
Scarpetta doesn’t answer because she knows nothing about the phone cords beyond what Dr. Bronson relayed to her in his vague, somewhat disjointed way.
“Anything else missing from the house? Anything besides the phone cords, the decedent’s cell phone and the shotgun? As if that’s not enough.”
“You’ll have to ask Marino,” she says.
“I believe he’s here. Unless someone else has a motorcycle as loud as the space shuttle.”
“I’m surprised Laurel hasn’t been charged with murder, you want my opinion,” Joe says.
“You can’t charge someone with murder when the manner of death hasn’t been determined,” Scarpetta replies. “The manner is still pending, and there isn’t sufficient evidence to change it to suicide or homicide or accident, although I certainly fail to see how this is an accident. If the death isn’t resolved to Dr. Bronson’s satisfaction, he’ll eventually change the manner to undetermined.”
Heavy footsteps sound on carpet in the hallway.
“What happened to common sense?” Joe says.
“You don’t determine manner of death based on common sense,” Scarpetta says, and she wishes he could keep his unwelcome comments to himself.
The conference-room door opens, and Pete Marino walks in carrying a briefcase and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, dressed in black jeans, black leather boots, a black leather vest with the Harley logo on the back, his usual garb. He ignores Scarpetta as he sits in his usual chair next to hers and scoots the box of donuts across the table.
“I sure wish we could test the brother’s clothing for GSR, get our hands on whatever he was wearing when he was shot,” Joe says, leaning back in his chair the way he does when he’s about to pontificate, and he tends to pontificate more than usual when Marino is around. “Take a look at them on soft x-ray, the Faxitron, SEM/spectrometry.”
Marino stares at Joe as if he might hit him.
“Of course, it’s possible to get trace amounts on your person from sources other than a gunshot. Plumbing materials, batteries, automobile greases, paints. Just like in my lab practicum last month,” Joe says as he plucks out a chocolate-iced donut that is smashed, most of its icing stuck to the box. “You know what happened to them?”
He licks his fingers as he looks across the table at Marino.
“That was quite a practicum,” Marino says. “Wonder where you got the idea.”
“What I asked is, do you know what happened to the brother’s clothes,” Joe says.
“I think you been watching too many fantasy forensic shows,” Marino says, his big face staring at him. “Too much Harry Potter policing on your big flat-screen TV. Think you’re a forensic pathologist, or almost one, a lawyer, a scientist, a crime-scene investigator, a cop, Captain Kirk and the Easter Bunny all rolled up in one.”
“By the way, yesterday’s hell scene was a screaming success,” Joe says. “Too bad all of you missed it.”
“Well, what is the story about the clothes, Pete?” Vince asks Marino. “We know what he had on when he found his brother’s body?”
“What he had on, according to him, was nothing,” Marino says. “Supposedly, he came in through the kitchen door, put the groceries on the counter, then went straight back to the bedroom to pee. Supposedly. Then he took a shower because he had to work at his restaurant that night and happened to look out the doorway and saw the shotgun on the carpet behind the couch. At this point, he was naked, so he says.”
“Sounds like a lot of crap to me.” Joe talks with his mouth full.
“My personal opinion is it’s probably a robbery that got interrupted,” Marino says. “Or something got interrupted. A rich doctor maybe gets tangled up with the wrong person. Anybody seen my Harley jacket? Black with a skull and bones on one shoulder, an American flag on the other.”
“Where did you have it last?”
“I took it off in the hangar the other day when Lucy and me were doing an aerial. Came back, it was gone.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Neither have I.”
“Shit. That thing cost me. And the patches are custom. Goddamn it. If someone stole it…”
“Nobody steals around here,” Joe says.
“Oh yeah? What about stealing ideas?” Marino glares at him. “And that reminds me,” he says to Scarpetta, “while we’re on the subject of hell scenes…”
“We’re not on the subject,” she says.
“I came here this morning with a few things to say about them.”
“Another time.”
“I got some good ones, left a file on your desk,” Marino says to her. “Give you something interesting to think about during your vacation. Especially since you’ll probably get snowed in up there, we’ll probably see you again in the spring.”
She controls her irritation, tries to keep it tucked into a secret place where she hopes no one can see it. He is deliberately disrupting staff meeting and treating her the same way he did some fifteen years ago when she was the new chief medical examiner of Virginia, a woman in a world where women didn’t belong, a woman with an attitude, Marino decided, because she has an M.D. and a law degree.
“I think the Swift case would be a damn good hell scene,” Joe says. “GSR and x-ray spectrometry and other findings tell two different stories. See if the students figure it out. Bet they’ve never heard of the billiard-ball effect.”
“I didn’t ask the peanut gallery.” Marino raises his voice. “Anybody hear me ask the peanut gallery?”
“Well, you know my opinion about your creativity,” Joe says to him. “Frankly, it’s dangerous.”
“I don’t give a shit about your opinion.”
“We’re lucky the Academy isn’t bankrupt. That would have been one hell of an expensive settlement,” Joe says, as if it never has occurred to him that one of these days Marino might knock him across the room. “Real lucky after what you did.”
Last summer, one of Marino’s mock crime scenes traumatized a student who then quit the Academy, threatened to sue and fortunately was never heard from again. Scarpetta and her staff are paranoid about allowing Marino to participate in training, whether it is mock scenes, hellish or otherwise, or even classroom lectures.
“Don’t think what happened doesn’t enter my mind when I’m creating hell scenes,” Joe goes on.
“Hell scenes you create?” Marino declares. “You mean all those ideas you stole from me?”
“I believe that’s called sour grapes. I don’t need to steal anyone’s ideas, certainly not yours.”
“Oh really? You think I don’t recognize my own shit? You don’t know enough to come up with the kind of shit I do, Dr. Almost a Forensic Pathologist.”
“That’s it,” Scarpetta says. She raises her voice. “That’s enough.”
“I happen to have a great one of a body found in what appears to be a drive-by shooting,” Joe says, “but when the bullet’s recovered, it has an unusual waffle or mesh pattern in the lead because the victim was actually shot through a window screen, his body dumped…”
“That’s mine!” Marino slams his fist down on the table.
Chapter 20
The Seminole belongs to a beat-up white pickup truck filled with ears of corn, parked some distance from the gas pumps. Hog has been watching him for a while.
“Some motherfucker took my fucking wallet, my cell phone, I think maybe when I was in the fucking shower,” the man is saying on the pay phone, standing with his back to the CITGO station and all the eighteen-wheelers rumbling in and out.
Hog doesn’t show his amusement as he listens to the man rant and rave about overnighting again, complaining and cursing because he’ll have to sleep in the cab of his truck, has no phone, no money for a motel. He doesn’t even have money for a shower, and anyway, a shower has gone up to five bucks, and that’s a lot to pay for a shower when nothing comes with it, not even soap. Some of the men double up and get a discount, disappearing behind an unpainted privacy fence on the west side of the CITGO food mart, piling their clothes and shoes on a bench inside the fence before stepping into a tiny concrete space dimly lit with a single shower head and a big, rusty drain in the middle of the floor.
It is always wet inside the shower. The shower head always drips, and the water handles screech. The men carry in their own soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, usually in plastic bags. They bring their own towels. Hog has never showered in there, but he’s looked at the men’s clothes, figuring out what might be in the pockets. Money. Cell phones. Sometimes drugs. Women shower in a similar arrangement on the east side of the food mart. They never go in two at a time, no matter the discount, and are in a nervous hurry when they shower, shamed by their nakedness and terrified that someone will walk in on them, that a man will, a big, powerful man who can do what he wants.
Hog dials the 800 number on the green card he keeps folded in his back pocket, a rectangular card maybe eight inches long with a large hole and a slit in one end so it can be attached to a door handle. Printed on the card is information and a cartoon of an animated citrus fruit wearing a tropical shirt and sunglasses. He is doing God’s will. He is the Hand of God doing God’s work. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.
