{"id":3176,"date":"2026-01-03T23:10:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T23:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/scarpetta-12-cornwell-patricia\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T23:10:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T23:10:52","slug":"scarpetta-12-cornwell-patricia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/scarpetta-12-cornwell-patricia\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarpetta 12 – Cornwell, Patricia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Book Preview<\/h3>\n
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Blow Fly<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kay Scarpetta (12)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

by Patricia Cornwell<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 1<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

DR. KAY SCARPETTA moves the tiny glass vial close to candlelight, illuminating a maggot drifting in a poisonous bath of ethanol.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>At a glance, she knows the exact stage of metamorphosis before the creamy carcass, no larger than a grain of rice, was preserved in a specimen vessel fitted with a black screw cap. Had the larva lived, it would have matured into a bluebottle Calliphora vicina, <\/span>a blow fly. It might have laid its eggs in a dead human body’s mouth or eyes, or in a living person’s malodorous wounds.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Thank you very much,” Scarpetta says, looking around the table at the fourteen cops and crime-scene technicians of the National Forensic Academy’s class of 2003. Her eyes linger on Nic Robillard’s innocent face. “I don’t know who collected this from a location best not to contemplate at the dinner table, and preserved it with me in mind . . . but…”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Blank looks and shrugs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I have to say that this is the first time I’ve been given a maggot as a gift.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No one claims responsibility, but if there is a fact Scarpetta has never doubted, it is a cop’s ability to bluff and, when necessary, outright lie. Having noticed a tug at the corner of Nic Robillard’s mouth before anyone else realized that a maggot had joined them at the dinner table, Scarpetta has a suspect in mind.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The light of the flame moves over the vial in Scarpetta’s fingertips, her nails neatly filed short and square, her hand steady and elegant but strong from years of manipulating the unwilling dead and cutting through their stubborn tissue and bone.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Unfortunately for Nic, her classmates aren’t laughing, and humiliation finds her like a frigid draft. After ten weeks with cops she should now count as comrades and friends, she is still Nic the Hick from Zachary, Louisiana, a town of twelve thousand, where, until recently, murder was an almost unheard-of atrocity. It was not unusual for Zachary to go for years without one.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Most of Nic’s classmates are so jaded by working homicides that they have come up with their own categories for them: real murders, misdemeanor murders, even urban renewal. Nic doesn’t have her own pet categories. Murder is murder. So far in her eight-year career, she has worked only two, both of them domestic shootings. It was awful the first day of class when an instructor went from one cop to another, asking how many homicides each of their departments averaged a year. None, <\/span>Nic said. Then he asked the size of each cop’s department. Thirty-five, <\/span>Nic said. Or smaller than my eighth-grade class, <\/span>as one of her new classmates put it. From the beginning of what was supposed to be the greatest opportunity of her life, Nic quit trying to fit in, accepting that in the police way of defining the universe, she was a them, <\/span>not an us.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her rather whimsical maggot mischief, she realizes with regret, was a breach of something (she’s not sure what), but without a doubt she should never have decided to give a gift, serious or otherwise, to the legendary forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Nic’s face heats up, and a cold sweat dampens her armpits as she watches for her hero’s reaction, unable to read it, probably because Nic is stunned stupid by insecurity and embarrassment.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“So I’ll call her Maggie, although we really can’t determine gender yet,” Scarpetta decides, her wire-rim glasses reflecting shifting candlelight. “But a good enough name for a maggot, I think.” A ceiling fan snaps and whips the candle flame inside its glass globe as she holds up the vial. “Who’s going to tell me which instar Maggie is? What life stage was she in before someone”\u2014she scans the faces at the table, pausing on Nic’s again\u2014”dropped her in this little bottle of ethanol? And by the way, I suspect Maggie aspirated and drowned. Maggots need air the same way we do.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What asshole drowned a maggot?” one of the cops snipes.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yeah. Imagine inhaling alcohol …”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What’cha talking about, Joey? You been inhaling it all night.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A dark, ominous humor begins to rumble like a distant storm, and Nic doesn’t know how to duck out of it. She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms at her chest, doing her best to look indifferent as her mind unexpectedly plays one of her fathers worn-out storm warnings: Now, Nic, honey, when there’s lightning, don’t stand alone or think you’ll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can. <\/span>At the moment, she has no place to hide but in her own silence.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hey Doc, we already took our last test.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who brought homework to our party?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yeah, we’re off duty.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Off duty, I see,” Scarpetta muses. “So if you’re off duty when the dead body of a missing person has just been found, you’re not going to respond. Is that what you’re saying?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’d have to wait until my bourbon wears off,” says a cop whose shaved head is so shiny it looks waxed.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“That’s a thought,” she says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Now the cops are laughing\u2014everyone but Nic.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It can happen.” Scarpetta sets the vial next to her wineglass. “At any given moment, we can get a call. It may prove to be the worst call of our careers, and here we are, slightly buzzed from a few drinks on our time off, or maybe sick, or in the middle of a fight with a lover, a friend, one of the kids.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She pushes away her half-eaten yellowfin tuna and folds her hands on top of the checkered tablecloth.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“But cases can’t wait,” she adds.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Seriously. Isn’t it true that some can?” asks a Chicago detective his classmates call Popeye because of the anchor tattooed on his left forearm. “Like bones in a well or buried in a basement. Or a body under a slab of concrete. I mean, they ain’t going anywhere.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The dead are impatient,” Scarpetta says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 2<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

NIGHT ON THE BAYOU reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain’s chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn’t cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn’t abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn’t struggle.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No point in struggling, anyway,” he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. “And I’m not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering yes <\/span>when, of course, she meant no. <\/span>But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are terrified, <\/span>a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she anticipates <\/span>horror and death. The anticipation <\/span>creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A frisson <\/span>of horror.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jay’s determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine\u2014adrenaline\u2014is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb’s past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But the word. The perfect word. <\/span>It eludes him tonight.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb’s rapid, shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the perfect word) <\/span>shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“One-eighty, more or less,” he tells her. “Don’t have a heart attack. I had one who did.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I mean it. Don’t have a heart attack.” He is serious.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is an order.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Take a deep breath.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She does, her lungs shaky.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Better?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yes. Please …”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’m sorry,” she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Now, there you go again.” He sits back in his throne of the captain’s chair. “Do you really, really <\/span>believe that being polite is going to change my plans?” The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. “Do you know what politeness means to me?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He expects an answer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in there.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No.” She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Weakness,” he says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner’s nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray, chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta’s, and finally becomes furious because it can’t, furious because Scarpetta wouldn’t be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn’t weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can’t find the perfect word, the word.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn’t come with the others.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’m getting bored,” he tells his lamb. “I’ll ask you again. One last chance. What is the word?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t understand. I’m sorry . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What is the word? Tell me what you feel. <\/span>And don’t say scared. <\/span>You’re a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I feel … I feel acceptance,” she says, sobbing.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You feel what?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You’re not going to let me go,” she says. “I know it now.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 3<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

SCARPETTAS SUBTLE WIT reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn’t rip and crack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He takes pictures of everything you’re doing, Nic, so you’d better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Investigator Robillard?” Scarpetta is saying.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Tell us what you’d do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you’d had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene,” Scarpetta presents to her. “Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there’s a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don’t like to admit that, but it’s true.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Lordy, where’d you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What I mean is, I really can’t because I have a five-year-old son …” Nic’s voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she’s ever been away from him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name’s Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony …”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>About a dozen hands go up.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work\u2014or shall I call it a mission\u2014is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch, <\/span>Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She’s gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she’s kind and gentle.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Oh yeah! Now I ‘member. Lucy. She’s been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Stupid, drunk idiot, <\/span>Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won’t stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>ATF, you stupid drunk. <\/span>Thunder cracks in the back of Nic’s mind.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I dunno. Wasn’t there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what’s she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn’t answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Isn’t that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she’s something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn’t she?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Fucking dyke. Shut up.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That’s how her father always explained it. You see, Nic, <\/span>he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade. There’s tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There’s tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You’ve had enough whiskey for one night.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Well, ‘scuse me, Miss Teacher’s Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic feels Scarpettas eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba’s outrageous display.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpettas subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn’t know she had. She feels inferior to her hero’s super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic’s. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic’s healing broken arm every time the splint came off.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Hurting’s good, baby. If you didn’t feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn’t want that, would you?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No, Mama. I’m sorry for what I did.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Why, Nicci, that’s the silliest thing. You didn’t hurt yourself on purpose!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But I didn’t do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that’s when I tripped. . . .<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We all make mistakes when we’re scared, baby. Maybe it’s a good thing you fell down<\/span>\u2014you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 4<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

NIC’S MEMORIES OF HER childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn’t pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Thou shalt not covet.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic’s excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy’s visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic’s acute embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn’t of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta’s name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hi, I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. “And let me guess, you’re Nicole Robillard.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. “How . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, “I requested copies of everyone’s application, including photographs.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You did?” Not only was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn’t fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. “Guess that means you know my Social Security number,” Nic tried to be funny.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Now, I don’t remember that,” Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. “But I know enough.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 5<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“SECOND INSTAR.” Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn’t quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“That’s very good, Nic,” Scarpetta commends her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who invited smarty pants?” Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn’t nodding off into her plate.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I think Nic hasn’t been drinking enough and is having the D.T. s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere,” says the detective with the shiny shaved head.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic wants to be funny but can’t escape the gravity of her mood. “See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Ah! At last she confesses.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It’s second instar.” Nic knows she should stop. “Already shed its skin once since it hatched.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?” the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Nic’s got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends,” someone else says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I would if I needed to.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she’s dropping by the old folks’ home and checking on her relatives.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Bet Nic’s got a name for every maggot, fly, beetle and buzzard out there.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The quips and gross-out jokes continue until Reba drops her fork with a loud clatter.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Not while I’m eating rare steak!” she protests much too loudly.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The spinach adds a nice touch of green, girlfriend.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Too bad you didn’t get no rice . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hey, it ain’t too late! Waitress! Bring this lady a nice bowl of rice. With gravy.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And what are these tiny black dots that look like Maggie’s eyes?” Scarpetta lifts the vial to the candlelight again, hoping her students will settle down before they all get kicked out of the restaurant.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Eyes,” says the cop with the shaved head. “They’re eyes, right?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Reba begins to sway in her chair.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No, they’re not eyes,” Scarpetta replies. “Come on. I already gave you a hint a few minutes ago.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Look like eyes to me. Little beady black eyes like Magillas.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In the past ten weeks, Sergeant Magil from Houston has become “Magilla the Gorilla” because of his hairy, muscle-bound body.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hey!” he protests. “You ask my girlfriend if I got maggot eyes. She looks deep into these eyes of mine”\u2014he points to them\u2014”and faints.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Exactly what we’re saying, Magilla. I looked into those eyes of yours, I’d pass out cold, too.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“They gotta be eyes. How the hell else does a maggot see where it’s going?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“They’re spiracles, not eyes,” Nic answers. “That’s what the little black dots are. Like little snorkels so the maggot can breathe.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Snorkels?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Wait a minute. Hey, hand that thing over, Dr. Scarpetta. I wanna see if Maggie’s wearing a mask and fins.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A skinny state police investigator from Michigan has her head on the table, she is laughing so hard.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Next time we find a ripe one, just look for little snorkels sticking up …”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The guffaws turn to fits, Magilla sliding off his chair, prone on the floor. “Oh, shit! I’m gonna throw up,” he shrieks with laughter.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Snorkels!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta surrenders, sitting back in silence, the situation out of her control.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hey, Nic! Didn’t know you were a Navy SEAL!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This goes on until the manager of Ye Old Steak House silently appears in the doorway\u2014his way of indicating that the party in his back room is disturbing the other diners.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Okay, boys and girls,” Scarpetta says in a tone that is slightly scary. “Enough.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The hilarity is gone as quickly as a sonic boom, the maggot jokes end, and then there are other gifts for Scarpetta: a space pen that can supposedly write in “rain, blizzards, and if you accidentally drop it in a chest cavity while you’re doing an autopsy”; a Mini Maglite “to see in those hard-to-reach places”; and a dark blue baseball cap embellished with enough gold braid for a general.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“General Dr. Scarpetta. Salute!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Everybody does as they eagerly look for her response, irreverent remarks flying around again like shotgun pellets. Magilla tops off Scarpetta’s wine glass from a gallon paper carton with a push-button spout. She figures the cheap Chardonnay is probably made from grapes grown at the lowest level of the slopes, where the drainage is terrible. If she’s lucky, the vintage is four months old. She will be sick tomorrow. She is sure of it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 6<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING in New York’s Kennedy Airport, a security guard recommends that Lucy Farinelli remove her oversized stainless-steel Breitling watch, empty her pockets of coins and place them in a tray.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is not a suggestion but an order when she is asked to remove her running shoes, jacket and belt and place them and her briefcase on the conveyor that will carry them through the X-ray machine, where nothing but a cell phone, a hairbrush and a tube of lipstick will fluoresce. British Air attendants are friendly enough in their dark blazers and navy blue dresses with red and white checks, but airport police are especially tense. Although she doesn’t set off the doorframe-shaped scanner as she walks through in her athletic socks, her jeans hanging loose, she is searched with the hand scanner, and her underwire bra sets it off with a beep-beep-beep.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hold up your arms,” the hefty female officer tells her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Lucy smiles and holds out her arms crucifixion-style, and the officer pats her down quickly, her hands fluttering under Lucy’s arms, under her breasts, up and down her thighs, all the way to her crotch\u2014very professionally, of course. Other passengers pass by unmolested, and the men, in particular, find the good-looking young woman with arms and legs spread of keen interest. Lucy could care less. She has lived through too much to waste energy in being modest and is tempted to unbutton her shirt and point out the underwire bra, assuring the officer that no battery and tiny\u2014very tiny\u2014explosive device are attached.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It’s my bra,” she casually says to the startled guard, who is far more unnerved than her suspect. “Damn it, I always forget to wear a bra without wire in it, maybe a sports bra, or no bra. I’m really sorry to inconvenience you, Officer Washington.” She’s already read her name tag. “Thank you for doing your job so well. What a world we live in. I understand the terrorist alert is orange again.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Lucy leaves the bewildered guard and plucks her watch and coins out of the tray and collects her briefcase, jacket and belt. Sitting on the cold, hard floor, out of the way of traffic, she puts on her running shoes, not bothering to lace them. She gets up, still polite and sweet to any police or British Air employees watching her. Reaching around to her back pocket, she slips out her ticket and passport, both of them issued to one of her many false names. She strolls nonchalantly, laces flopping, deep inside the winding carpeted gate 10, and ducks inside the small doorway of Concorde flight 01. A British Air attendant smiles at her as she checks Lucy’s boarding pass.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Seat one-C.” She points the way to the first row, the bulkhead aisle seat, as if Lucy has never traveled on the Concorde before.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Last time she did, it was under yet another name, and she was wearing glasses and green contact lenses, her hair dyed funky blue and purple, easily washed out and matching the photograph on that particular passport. Her occupation was “musician.” Although no one could possibly have been familiar with her nonexistent techno band, Yellow Hell, there were plenty of people who said, “Oh yes, I’ve heard of it! Cool!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Lucy counts on the dismal observation skills of the general masses. She counts on their fear of showing ignorance, on their accepting lies as familiar truths. She counts on her enemies noticing all that goes on around them, and like them, she notices all that goes on around her, too. For example, when the customs agent studied her passport at great length, she recognized his behavior and understood why security is at a feverish pitch. Interpol has sent a Red Notice screaming over the Internet to approximately 182 countries, alerting them to look out for a fugitive named Rocco Caggiano, wanted in Italy and France for murder. Rocco has no idea he is a fugitive. He has no idea that Lucy sent information to Interpol’s Central Bureau in Washington, D.C., her credible tip thoroughly checked out before it was relayed through cyberspace to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, where the Red Notice was issued and rocketed to law enforcement all around the world. All this in a matter of hours.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Rocco does not know Lucy, although he knows who she is. She knows him very well, although they have never met. At this moment, as she straps herself into her seat and the Concorde starts its Rolls Royce engines, she can’t wait to see Rocco Caggiano, her anticipation fueled by intense anger that will evolve into a nervous dread by the time she finally gets to Eastern Europe.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 7<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“I SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT FEELING as bad as I am,” Nic says to Scarpetta.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>They sit inside the living room of Scarpetta’s suite at the Marriott, waiting for room service. It is nine a.m., and twice now Nic has inquired about Scarpetta’s health, her banality partly due to her flattered disbelief that this woman she admires so intensely invited her to have breakfast.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Why me? The <\/span>question bounces inside Nic’s head like a bingo ball. Maybe she feels sorry for me.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’ve felt better,” Scarpetta replies with a smile.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Popeye and his wine. But he’s brought worse poison than that.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t know how anything could be worse,” Scarpetta says as a knock sounds on the door. “Unless it really is poison. Excuse me.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She gets up from the couch. Room service has arrived on a table wheeled inside. Scarpetta signs the check and tips in cash. Nic notes that she is generous.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Popeye’s room\u2014room one-oh-six\u2014is the watering hole,” Nic says. “Any night, just go on in with your six-pack and dump it in the bathtub. Starting around eight p.m., he does nothing but haul twenty-pound bags of ice to his room. Good thing he’s on the first floor. I went once.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Only once in ten weeks?” Scarpetta watches her closely, probing.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>When Nic returns to Louisiana, she will face the worst homicide cases she may ever have in her life. So far, she hasn’t said a word about them, and Scarpetta is concerned about her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins,” Scarpetta offers as she pours coffee, “I was one of three women in my class. If there was a bathtub full of beer anywhere, I can assure you I was never told. What do you take?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Lots of cream and sugar. You shouldn’t be serving me. Here I am, just sitting.” She pops up from her wing chair.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Sit down, sit down.” Scarpetta sets Nic’s coffee on a table. “There are croissants and rather inedible-looking bagels. I’ll let you help yourself.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“But when you were in medical school, you weren’t a small-town …” Nic catches herself before saying hick. <\/span>“Miami’s not exactly some little mud puddle in Louisiana. All these guys in my class are from big cities.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She fixes her attention on Scarpetta’s coffee cup, on how perfectly steady it is as she lifts it to her lips. She drinks her coffee black and seems uninterested in food.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“When my chief told me the department was offered a fully funded slot at the Academy and would I go, I can’t tell you what I felt like,” Nic goes on, worrying that she’s talking too much about herself. “I really couldn’t believe it and had to go to a world of trouble to make it possible for me to leave home for close to three months. Then I got here to Knoxville and found myself with Reba as a roommate.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I can’t say it’s been fun, and I feel terrible sitting here and complaining.” She nervously drinks her coffee, setting it down, then picking it up again, clenching her napkin tightly in her lap. “Especially to you.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Why especially to me?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Truth is, I guess I was hoping to impress you.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You have.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And you don’t seem the sort to appreciate whining.” Nic looks up at her. “It’s not like people are always nice to you, either.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta laughs. “Shall I call that an understatement?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“That didn’t come out right. People are jealous out there. You’ve had your battles. What I’m saying is, you don’t complain.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Ask Rose about that.” Scarpetta is quite amused.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic’s mind locks, as if she should know who Rose is but can’t make a connection.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“My secretary,” Scarpetta explains, sipping her coffee.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>An awkward silence follows, and Nic asks, “What happened to the other two?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta is confused.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The other two women in your medical class.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“One dropped out. I think the other got married and never practiced medicine.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I wonder what they’re feeling now. Probably regret.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“They probably wonder about me, too,” Scarpetta replies. “They probably think I feel regret.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic’s lips part in disbelief. “You?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Everything comes with sacrifices. And it’s human nature to have a hard time accepting anyone who’s different. Usually, you don’t figure that out until you get what you asked for in life and are shocked that in some instances your reward is hatred instead of applause.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t see myself as different or hated. Maybe picked on a lot, but not back home,” Nic quickly replies. “Just because I’m with a small department instead of LAPD doesn’t mean I’m stupid.” Her spirit rises, her voice heating up. “I’m not some mudbug swamp-rat redneck . . .” “Mudbug. <\/span>“Scarpetta frowns. “I don’t believe I know what that is.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“A crawfish.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Did someone in the class call you a crawfish?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic can’t help but lighten up. “Oh, hell. None of them have ever even eaten a crawfish. They probably think it’s a fish that crawls along the bottom of the ocean or something.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I see.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I know what you mean, though. Sort of,” Nic says. “In Zachary, only two street cops are women. I’m the only female investigator, and it’s not that the chief dislikes women or anything like that. In fact, the mayor’s a woman. But most times when I’m in the break room, getting coffee or eating or whatever, I’m the only woman in there. Truth is, I rarely think about it. But I have thought about it a lot here at the Academy. I realize I try too hard to prove I’m really not a hick, and then I annoy everyone. Well, I know you need to go. You probably have to pack, and I don’t want you to miss your plane.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Not so fast,” Scarpetta replies. “I don’t think we’re finished talking.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic relaxes, her attractive face more animated, her slender body less rigid in the chair. When she speaks this time, she doesn’t sound as nervous.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I will tell you the nicest thing anybody’s said to me during this entire ten weeks. Reba said I look a little bit like you. ‘Course, it was when she was drunk. Hope I didn’t just insult you.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You may have insulted yourself,” Scarpetta modestly replies. “I’m somewhat older than you, if what I read on your application is to be trusted.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Thirty-six in August. It’s amazing what you pick up about people.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I make it my business to know as much about people as I can. It’s important to listen. Most people are too busy making assumptions, too self-absorbed to listen. And in the morgue, my patients speak very quietly and are unforgiving if I don’t listen and find out everything I can about them.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Sometimes I don’t listen to Buddy like I should\u2014when I’m frantic or just too tired.” Sadness crosses her eyes. “I of all people ought to know how that feels, since Ricky hardly ever listened to me, which is one reason we didn’t get along. One of many reasons.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta has suspected that Nic’s marriage is in trouble or has ended.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>People who are unhappy in relationships carry about them a distinct air of discontent and isolation. In Nic’s case, the signs are there, especially the anger that she thinks she hides.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How bad?” Scarpetta asks her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Separated, well on our way to divorce.” Nic reaches for her coffee cup again but changes her mind. “Thank God my father lives nearby in Baton Rouge or I don’t know what I’d do about Buddy. I know damn well Ricky would take him from me just to pay me back.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Pay you back? For what?” Scarpetta inquires, and she has a reason for all these questions.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“A long story. Been going on more than a year, from bad to worse, not that it was ever all that good.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“About as long as these women have been disappearing from your area.” Scarpetta finally gets to her point. “I want to know how you’re handling that, because it will get you if you let it. When you least expect it. It’s not escaped my notice that you haven’t brought up the cases once, not once, not while I’ve been here. Ten women in fourteen months. Vanished, from their homes, vehicles, parking lots, all in the Baton Rouge area. Presumed dead. I can assure you they are. I can assure you they were murdered by the same person, who is shrewd\u2014very shrewd. Intelligent and experienced enough to gain trust, then abduct, then dispose of the bodies. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again. The latest disappearance was just four days ago\u2014in Zachary. That makes two cases in Zachary, the first one several months ago. So you’re going home to that, Nic. Serial murders. Ten of them.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Not ten. Just the two in Zachary. I’m not on the task force,” Nic replies with restrained resentment. “I don’t run with the big boys. They don’t need help from little country cops like me, at least that’s the way the U.S. Attorney looks at it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What’s the U.S. Attorney got to do with it?” Scarpetta asks. “These cases aren’t the jurisdiction of the feds.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Weldon Winn’s not only an egotistical asshole, but he’s stupid. Nothing worse than someone who’s stupid and arrogant and has power. The cases are high-profile, all over the news. He wants to be part of them, maybe end up a federal judge or senator someday.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And you’re right. I know what I’m going home to, but all I can do is work the two disappearances we’ve had in Zachary, even if I know damn well they’re connected to the other eight.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Interesting the abductions are now happening farther north of Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says. “He may be finding his earlier killing field too risky.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The only thing good I can say about that is Zachary may be in the East Baton Rouge Parish, but at least it isn’t the jurisdiction of the Baton Rouge police. So the high and mighty task force can’t boss me around about my cases.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Tell me about them.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Let’s see. The most recent one. What I know about it. What anybody knows about it. Two days after Easter, just four nights ago,” she begins. “A forty-year-old schoolteacher named Glenda Marler. She’s a teacher at the high school\u2014same high school I went to. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, very smart. Divorced, no children. This past Tuesday night, she goes to the Road Side Bar Be Q, gets pulled pork, hush puppies and slaw to go. She has a ’94 Honda Accord, blue, and is observed driving away from the restaurant, south on Main Street, right through the middle of town. She vanishes, her car found abandoned in the parking lot of the high school where she taught. Of course, the task force is suggesting she was having a rendezvous with one of her students, that the case isn’t related to the others, that it’s a copycat. Bullshit.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Her own high school parking lot,” Scarpetta thoughtfully observes. “So he talked to her, found out about her after he had her in his car, maybe asked her where she worked, and she told him. Or else he stalked her.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Which do you think it is?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t know. Most serial killers stalk their victims. But there’s no set rule, despite what most profilers would like to think.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The other victim,” Nic continues, “vanished right before I came here. Ivy Ford. Forty-two years old, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, worked as a bank teller. Kids are off in college, and her husband was up in Jackson, Mississippi, on a business trip, so she was home alone when someone must have showed up at her door. As usual, no sign of a struggle. No nothing. And she’s gone without a trace.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Nothing is ever without a trace,” Scarpetta says as she envisions each scenario, contemplating the obvious: The victim has no reason to fear her attacker until it is too late.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Is Ivy Ford’s house still secured?” Scarpetta doubts it after all this time.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Family’s still living in it. I don’t know how people return to homes where such awful things have happened.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic starts to say that she wouldn’t. But that isn’t true. Earlier in her life, she did.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The car in this most recent case, Glenda Marler’s case, is impounded and was thoroughly examined?” Scarpetta asks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hours and hours we . . . well, as you know, I was here.” This detail disappoints her. “But I’ve gotten the full report, and I know we spent a lot of time on it. My guys lifted every print they could find. Entered the useable ones in AFIS, and no matches. Personally, I don’t think that matters because I believe that whoever grabbed Glenda Marler was never inside her car. So his prints wouldn’t be in there, anyway. And the only prints on the door handles were hers.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What about her keys and wallet and any other personal effects?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Keys in the ignition, her pocketbook and wallet in the high school parking lot about twenty feet from the car.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Money in the wallet?” Scarpetta asks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nic shakes her head. “But her checkbook and charge cards weren’t touched. She wasn’t one to carry much cash. Whatever she had, it was gone, and I know she had at least six dollars and thirty-two cents because that was the change she got when she gave the guy at the barbeque a ten-dollar bill to pay for her food. I had my guys check, because oddly, the bag of food wasn’t inside her car. So there was no receipt. We had to go back to the barbeque and have him pull her receipt.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Then it would appear that the perpetrator took her food, too.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This is odd, more typical of a burglary or robbery, certainly not the usual in a psychopathic violent crime.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“As far as you know, is robbery involved in the cases of the other eight missing women?” Scarpetta asks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Rumor has it that their billfolds were cleaned out of cash and tossed not far from where they were snatched.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No fingerprints in any of the cases, as far as you know?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t know for a fact.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Perhaps DNA from skin cells where the perpetrator touched the billfold?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t know what the Baton Rouge police have done, because they don’t tell anybody shit. But the guys at my department swabbed everything we could, including Ivy Ford’s wallet, and did get her DNA profile\u2014and another one that isn’t in the FBI’s database, CODIS. Louisiana, as you know, is just getting started on a DNA database and is so backed up on entering samples, you may as well forget it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“But you do have an unknown profile,” Scarpetta says with interest. “Although we have to accept right off that it could be anybody’s. What about her children, her husband?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The DNA’s not theirs.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta nods. “Then you have to start wondering who else would have had good reason to touch Ivy Ford’s wallet. Who else besides the killer.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I wonder about that twenty-four hours a day.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And this most recent case, Glenda Marler?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The state police labs have the evidence. The tests results will be a while, even though there’s a rush on them.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“An alternate light source used on the inside of the car?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yes. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” Nic says in frustration. “No crime scenes, no bodies, like it’s all a bad dream. If even just one body would show up. The coroner’s great. You’ve heard of him? Dr. Sam Lanier.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta doesn’t know him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 8<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

THE EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH Coroner’s Office overlooks a long straight reach of the Mississippi River and the former art deco state capitol where the wily, fearless and despotic Huey Long was assassinated.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Muddy, sluggish water carries Dr. Sam Lanier’s eye to a riverboat casino and past the USS Kidd <\/span>battleship to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, as he stands before his office window on the fifth floor of the Governmental Building. He is a fit man in his early sixties with a head of gray hair that naturally parts neatly on the right side. Unlike most men of his power, he shuns suits except when he is in court or attending the political functions he cannot avoid.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>His may be a political office, but he despises politics and virtually all people involved in it. Contrary by nature, Dr. Lanier wears the same outfit pretty much every day, even if he’s meeting with the mayor: comfortable shoes capable of walking him into unpleasant places, dark slacks and a polo shirt embroidered with the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner’s crest.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Deliberate man that he is, he ponders how to handle the bizarre communication he received yesterday morning, a letter enclosed in a National Academy of Justice postage-paid mailing. Dr. Lamer has been a member of the organization for years. The large white NAJ envelope was sealed. It did not look tampered with in any way until Dr. Lanier opened it and found another envelope, also sealed. It was addressed to him by hand in block printing, the return address the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. A search on the Internet revealed that the Polunsky Unit is death row. The letter, also written by hand in block printing, reads:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Greetings Monsieur Lanier,<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Of course you remember Madame Charlotte Dard, whose untimely, sad death occurred on 14 September 1995. You witnessed her autopsy, and I do envy you for that delicious experience, having never seen one myself, not in person. I will be executed soon and am relieving myself of secrets.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Madame Dard was murdered very cleverly.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Mais non! Not by me.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A person of interest, as they stupidly refer to possible suspects these days, fled to Palm Desert shortly after Madame Dard’s death. This person is not there now. This persons location and identity you must discover for yourself. I very much encourage you to seek assistance. Might I suggest the great skills of Detective Pete Marino? He knows me very well from my joyous Richmond days. Surely you must have heard of the great Marino?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Your surname, mon cher monsieur, implies you are of French descent. Perhaps we are related.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00c0bient\u00f4t, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Lanier has heard of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. He has not heard of Pete Marino but is introduced to him easily enough by sending out a few search engines to chug through cyberspace and find him. It is true.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino led the investigation when Chandonne was murdering women in Richmond. What interests Dr. Lanier more, however, is that Marino is best known for his close professional relationship with Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a gifted forensic pathologist. Dr. Lanier has always respected her and was more than a little impressed when he heard her lecture at a regional meeting of coroners. Most forensic pathologists, particularly ones with her status, look down on coroners, think they’re all funeral home directors who got voted into office. Of course, some of them are.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Trouble stuck out its big foot and tripped Dr. Scarpetta, hurting her badly, several years back. For that she has Dr. Lanier’s sympathy. Not a day goes by when trouble doesn’t stomp around looking for him, too.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Now some notorious serial killer seems to think Dr. Lanier needs the help of her colleague Marino. Maybe he does. Maybe he’s being set up. With the election not even six months away, Dr. Lanier is suspicious of any deviation from routine, and a letter from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes him as leery as hell. The only reason he can’t dismiss it is simple: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, if the letter is really from him, knows about Charlotte Dard. Her case has been forgotten by the public and was never all that newsworthy outside of Baton Rouge. Her cause of death was undetermined. Dr. Lanier has always entertained the possibility that she was murdered.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He’s always believed that the best way to identify a cottonmouth is to poke at it. If the inside of its mouth is white, whack off its head. Otherwise, the critter’s nothing more than a harmless water snake.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He may as well poke at the truth and see what he finds. While sitting at his desk, he picks up the phone and discovers Marino doesn’t care who finds him\u2014he has what Dr. Lanier calls a bring-’em-on attitude. He envisions Marino as the type who would ride a Fat Boy Harley, probably without a helmet. The cop’s answering machine doesn’t say he can’t <\/span>answer the phone because he’s not in <\/span>or is on the other line, <\/span>which is what most professional, polite people record as greetings. The recorded gruff male voice says, “Don’t call me at home,” and offers another number for the person to try.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Lanier tries the other number. The voice that answers sounds like the recorded one.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Detective Marino?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who wants to know?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He’s from New Jersey and doesn’t trust anyone, probably doesn’t like hardly anyone, either.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Lanier introduces himself, and he’s careful about what he says, too. In the trust and like department, Marino’s met his match.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“We had a death down here about eight years ago. You ever heard of a woman named Charlotte Dard?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Nope.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Lanier gives him a few details of the case.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Nope.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Lanier gives him a few more.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Let me ask you something. Why the hell would I know anything about some drug overdose in Baton Rouge?” Marino’s not at all nice about it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Same question I have.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Huh? What is this? Are you some asshole bullshitting me?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“A lot of people think I’m an asshole,” Dr. Lanier replies. “But I’m not bullshitting you.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He debates whether he should tell Marino about the letter from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. He decides that no useful purpose would be served. He’s already found out what he needed to know: Marino is clueless about Charlotte Dard and annoyed at being bothered by some coroner.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“One other quick question, and then I won’t take up any more of your time,” Dr. Lanier says. “You have a long history with Dr. Kay Scarpetta. . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What’s she got to do with this?” Marino’s entire demeanor changes. Now he’s just plain hostile.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I understand she’s doing private consulting.” Dr. Lanier had read a brief mention of it on the Internet.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino doesn’t respond.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“What do you think of her?” Dr. Lanier asks the question that he feels sure will trigger a volcanic temper.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Tell you what, asshole. I think enough of her not to talk about her with some shitbag stranger!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The call ends with a dial tone.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In Sam Lanier’s mind, he couldn’t have gotten a stronger validation of Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s character. She’s welcome down here.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 9<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

SCARPETTA WAITS IN LINE at the Marriott’s front desk, her head throbbing, her central nervous system shorted out by wine so terrible it ought to have a skull and crossbones on the label.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her malady, her malaise, is far more serious than she ever let on to Nic, and with each passing minute, her physical condition and mood worsen. She refuses to diagnose her illness as a hangover (after all, she barely had two glasses of that goddamn wine), and she refuses to forgive herself for even considering an alcoholic beverage sold in a cardboard box.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Painful experience has proven for years that when she suffers such merry misadventures, the more coffee she drinks, the more awful she’s going to feel, but this never stops her from ordering a large pot in her room and flying by the seat of her pants instead of trusting her instruments, as Lucy likes to say when her aunt ignores what she knows and does what she feels and crash-lands.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>When she finally reaches the front desk, she asks for her bill and is handed an envelope.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“This just came in for you, ma’am,” the harried receptionist says as he tears off the printout of her room charges and hands it to her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Inside the envelope is a fax. Scarpetta walks behind the bellman pushing her cart. It is loaded with bags and three very large hard cases containing carousels of slides that she has not bothered to convert to PowerPoint presentations because she can’t stand them. Showing a picture of a man who has blown off the top of his head with a shotgun or a child scalded to death does not require a computer and special effects. Slide presentations and handouts serve her purposes just as well now as they did when she started her career.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The fax is from her secretary, Rose, who must have called about the same time Scarpetta was miserably making her way from the elevator to the lobby. All Rose says is that Dr. Sam Lanier, the coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, very much needs to speak to her. Rose includes his home, office and cell telephone numbers. Immediately, Scarpetta thinks of Nic Robillard, of their conversation not even an hour ago.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She waits until she is inside her taxi before calling Dr. Lanier’s office number. He answers himself.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How did you know who my secretary is and where to reach her?” she asks right off.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Your former office in Richmond was kind enough to give me your number in Florida. Rose is quite charming, by the way.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I see,” she replies as the taxi drives away from the hotel. “I’m in a taxi on the way to the airport. Can we make this quick?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her abruptness is more about her annoyance with her former office than with him. Giving out her unlisted phone number is blatant harassment\u2014not that it hasn’t happened before. Some people who still work at the Chief Medical Examiners Office remain loyal to their boss. Others are traitors and bend in the direction that power pulls.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Quick it will be,” Dr. Lanier says. “I’m wondering if you would review a case for me, Dr. Scarpetta\u2014an eight-year-old case that was never successfully resolved. A woman died under suspicious circumstances, apparently from a drug overdose. You ever heard of Charlotte Dard?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’ve just gotten information\u2014don’t know if it’s good or not\u2014but I don’t want to discuss it while you’re on a cell phone.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“This is a Baton Rouge case?” Scarpetta digs in her handbag for a notepad and pen.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Another story for another day. But yes, it’s a Baton Rouge case.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Your case?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It was. I’d like to send you the reports, slides and all the rest. Looks like I’d better dig back into this thing.” He hesitates. “And as you might suspect, I don’t have much of a budget. . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Nobody who calls me has consultants built into the budget,” she interrupts him. “I didn’t either when I was in Virginia.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She tells him to FedEx her the case and gives him her address.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She adds, “Do you happen to know an investigator in Zachary named Nic Robillard?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A pause, then, “Believe I talked to her on the phone a few months back. I’m sure you know what’s going on down here.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I can’t help but know. It’s all over the news,” Scarpetta cautiously replies over the noise of the taxi and rush-hour traffic.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Neither her tone nor her words betray that she has any personal information about the cases, and her trust of Nic slips several notches as she frets that perhaps Nic called Dr. Lanier and talked about her. Why she might have done that is hard to say, unless she simply volunteered that Scarpetta could be a very useful resource for him, should he ever need her. Maybe he really does need her for this cold case he’s just told her about. Maybe he’s trying to develop a relationship with her because he’s not equipped to handle these serial murders by himself.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How many forensic pathologists work for you?” Scarpetta asks him. One.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Did Nic Robillard call you about me?” She doesn’t have time for subtlety.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Why would she?” 1 hat s no answer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hell no,” he says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 10<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

AN AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT rattles in a dusty window, the afternoon hotter than usual for April, as Jay Talley hacks meat into small pieces and drops them into a bloody plastic bucket below the scarred wooden table where he sits.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The table, like everything else inside his fishing shack, is old and ugly, the sort of household objects people leave at the edges of their driveways to be picked up by garbage collectors or spirited away by scavengers. His work space is his special place, and he is patient as he repeatedly adjusts torn bits of clothing that he jams under several of the table legs in his ongoing attempt to keep the table level. He prefers not to chop on a surface that moves, but balance is virtually impossible in his warped little world, and the graying wood floor slopes enough to roll an egg from the kitchenette right out to the dock, where some planks are rotted, others curled like dull dead hair flipped up at the ends.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Swatting at sea gnats, he finishes a Budweiser, crushes the can and hurls it out the open screen door, pleased that it sails twenty feet past his boat and plops into the water. Boredom gives pleasure to the most mundane activities, including checking on the crab pots suspended below floats in the murky freshwater. It doesn’t matter that crabs aren’t found in freshwater. Crawfish are, and they’re in season, and if they don’t pick the pots clean, something bigger usually comes along.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Last month, a large log turned into an alligator gar weighing at least a hundred pounds. It moved like a torpedo, speeding off with a trotline and its makeshift float of an empty Clorox bottle. Jay sat calmly in his boat and tipped his baseball cap to the carnivorous creature. Jay doesn’t eat what he catches in the pots, but out here in the middle of this hellish nowhere he now calls home, his only acceptable fresh choices are catfish, bass, turtles and as many frogs as he can gig at night. Otherwise, his food comes in bags and cans from various grocery stores on the mainland.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He brings down a meat cleaver, cutting through muscle and bone. More pieces of foul flesh land in the bucket. It doesn’t take long for meat to rot in this heat.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Guess who I’m thinking about right now,” he says to Bev Kiffin, his woman.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Shut up. You just say that to get to me.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No, ma ch\u00e9rie, <\/span>I say it because I’m remembering fucking her in Paris.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jealousy flares. Bev can’t control herself when she is forced to think of Kay Scarpetta, who is fine-looking and smart\u2014plenty fine-looking, and smart enough for Jay. Rarely does it occur to Bev that she has no good reason to compete with a woman Jay fantasizes about chopping up and feeding to the alligators and crawfish in the bayou outside their door. If Bev could cut Scarpetta’s throat, she sure as hell would, and her own dream is to one day get her chance. Then Jay wouldn’t talk about the bitch anymore. He wouldn’t stare out at the bayou half the night, thinking about her.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How come you have to always talk about her?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Bev moves closer to him and watches sweat trickle down his perfectly sculpted, smooth chest, soaking the waistband of his tight cutoff jeans. She stares at his muscular thighs, the hair on them fine and shiny as gold. Her fury heats to flashover and erupts.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You got a damn hard-on. You chop away and get a stiff dick! Put down that meat ax!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It’s a cleaver, <\/span>honey. If only you weren’t so stupid.” His handsome face and blond hair are wet with sweat, his cold blue eyes bright against his tan.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She bends over and cups her thick, stubby hand around the bulge between his thighs as he calmly spreads his legs wide and leans back in the chair long enough for her to get started on his zipper. She wears no bra, her cheap flower-printed blouse halfway unbuttoned, offering him a view of heavy, flaccid breasts that arouse nothing beyond his need to manipulate and control. He rips open her blouse, buttons lightly clattering against wood, and begins fondling her the way she craves.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Oh,” she moans. “Don’t stop,” she begs, moving his head closer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Want more, baby?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Oh.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He sucks her, disgusted by her salty, sour taste, and shoves her hard with his bare feet.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The thud of her body hitting the floor, her shocked gasp, are familiar sounds in the fishing shack.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 11<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

BLOOD SEEPS FROM A SCRAPE on Bev’s dimpled left knee, and she stares at the wound.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How come you don’t want me no more, baby?” she says. “You used to want me so bad I couldn’t keep you off me.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Her nose runs. She shoves back her short, frizzy, graying brown hair and pulls her torn blouse together, suddenly humiliated by her ugly nakedness.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Want is when \/want.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He resumes the blows with the meat cleaver. Tiny bits of flesh and bone fly out from the thick, shiny blade and stick to the stained wooden table and to Jay’s sweaty bare chest. The sweet, sour stench of rotting flesh is heavy in the stifling air, and flies drone in lazy zigzags, lumbering airborne like fat cargo planes. They hover over the gory mother lode inside the bucket, their black and green swarming bodies shimmering like spilled gasoline.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Bev collects herself off the floor. She watches Jay hacking and tossing flesh into the bucket, flies darting up and greedily dive-bombing back to their feast. They buzz loudly, bumping against the side of the bucket.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And now we’re supposed to eat off that table.” Hers is an old line.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>They never eat off it. The table is Jay’s private space and she knows not to touch it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He swats furiously at the sea gnats. “Goddamn, I hate these fucking things! When the fuck are you going shopping? And next time, don’t come back here with only two bottles of insect repellent and no pups.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Bev disappears into the lavatory. It is no bigger than the head on a small boat, and there is no tank to chemically store and treat human waste, which slops through a hole into a washtub between pilings that support the shack. Once a day, she empties the tub into the bayou. Her persistent nightmare is that a water moccasin or alligator is going to get her while she sits on the wooden box toilet, and at especially uneasy times, she squats above it, peering down at the black hole, her fat thighs shaking from fear and the strain of supporting her weight.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She was fleshy when Jay first met her at a campsite near Williamsburg, Virginia, where his family business brought them together by accident, really. He needed a place, and hers was out of the way, an overgrown, garbage-strewn, densely wooded property with abandoned, rusting campers and a motel mostly patronized by prostitutes and drug dealers. When Jay appeared at Bev’s door, she was thrilled by his power and was instantly attracted to him. She came on to him the same way she did with all men, rough raw sex her only means of gratifying her lonely, angry needs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The rain was driving down that night, reminding her of shiny nails, and she fixed Jay a bowl of Campbell’s vegetable beef soup and a grilled cheese sandwich while her young children hid and watched their mother involving herself with yet another stranger. Bev paid her little ones no mind at the time. She tries not to think about them now or wonder how big they’re getting. They are wards of the state and far better off without her. Ironically, Jay was nicer to them than she was. He was so different then, when he took her to bed that first night.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Three years ago she was more attractive and had not gained weight from eating snack foods and processed cheeses and meats that don’t spoil.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She can’t do push-ups and squats all day long the way Jay does, and she gets no exercise. Behind the shack, grass flats thick with mussels and rich black muck stretch for miles. There is no dry ground to walk on except the pier. Maneuvering Jay’s boat through narrow waterways burns few calories.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A small outboard motor would do, but Jay will have nothing less than a 200-horsepower Evinrude with a stainless-steel prop to speed through channels, heading to his secret spots, and drift silently beneath cypress trees, waiting perfectly still like a possum if a helicopter or small plane flies low overhead. He helps Bev with nothing, his distinctive looks impossible to disguise because he is too vain to ruin his beauty. When he goes to shore, it is to get money at a family hideaway and not to run errands. Bev can venture out for provisions because she scarcely resembles her photograph on the FBI’s most-wanted list, her skin withered by the sun, her body overblown, her face puffy and hair cut short.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Why can’t we close the door?” Bev asks as she walks out of the tiny, dirty bathroom.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He goes to the refrigerator, rounded and white with spots of rust, left over from the sixties. Swinging open the door, he grabs another beer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I like being hot,” he says, his footsteps heavy on the old planking.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The air-conditioning’s going right out the door.” Hers is the usual complaint. “We only got so much gasoline for the generator.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Then you’ll just have to go out and get more. How many times do I have to tell you to get your fat ass out to get more?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He stares at her, his eyes weird, the way they get when he is engrossed in his ritual. His arousal strains against his zipper, and soon he will relieve it\u2014again, at a time of his choosing. Body odor and a rotten stench waft past her as he carries the bucket outside, flies storming after it in a loud buzzing blitzkrieg. He busies himself, pulling up crab pots by their yellow nylon ropes. He has dozens of pots. He simply tosses pieces too big to fit inside them into the water, where gators will drag them to the bottom and feed off them at their pleasure. Skulls pose the biggest problem, because they make identity certain. Another ritual of his is to pound skulls into dust, which he mixes with powdered white chalk that he stores in empty paint cans. Chalky, bony dust reminds him of the catacombs that wind twenty-five meters below the streets of Paris.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Now inside and flopping on the narrow bed against a wall, he puts his hands behind his head.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Bev slips out of her torn blouse, teasing him like a stripper. A master at the waiting game, he does not react as she brushes against his lips. She throbs unbearably. This might go on for a very long time, never mind her begging, and when he is ready, and only then, he bites, but not hard enough to leave a mark because he can’t abide the idea of being anything like Jean-Baptiste, his brother.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jay used to smell and taste so good. Now that he is a fugitive, he rarely bathes, and when he does, he simply dumps buckets of bayou water over his body. Bev dares not complain or react in the slightest way to the strong stench of his breath and groin. The one and only time she gagged, he broke her nose and forced her to finish, her blood and small cries of pain giving him pleasure.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>When she cleans the shack, she obsessively scrubs that spot below the bed, but the bloodstains are stubborn, like something out of a horror movie, she thinks. Bleach has left a mottled whitish-brown area the size of a doormat that Jay constantly complains about, as if he had nothing to do with how it got there.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 12<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

JEAN-BAPTISTE CHANDONNE is Rodin’s The Thinker<\/span> on the stainless-steel toilet, his white pants drooping around his furry knees.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Corrections officers make fun of him. It never stops. He can sense it as he perches on the toilet, staring at the locked steel door of his cell. The iron bars in its tiny window are drawn to the iron in Jean-Baptiste’s blood. Animal magnetism is a scientific fact scarcely heard of now and, for the most part, not accepted centuries ago, even though there are documented cases of magnetized materials having been applied to diseased and damaged parts of the body, causing all symptoms to cease, the patient’s health restored. Jean-Baptiste is well schooled in the doctrine of the famous Dr. Mesmer, whose system of treatment is eloquently laid out in his Memoir sur la D\u00e9couverte du Magn\u00e9tisme Animal.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The original work, first published in French in 1779, is Jean-Baptiste’s Bible. Before his books and radio were confiscated, he memorized long sections of Mesmer, and he is devout in his belief that a universal magnetic fluid influences the tides and people.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I possessed the usual knowledge about the magnet: its action on iron, the ability of our body fluids to receive that mineral. . .” Mesmer wrote, and Jean-Baptiste quotes under his breath as he thinks on the toilet. “I prepared the patient by the continuous use of chalybeates.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A chalybeate is an iron tonic, and who but Jean-Baptiste knows this? If only he could find a chalybeate, just the right one, he would be healed. Before he was in prison, he tried soaking iron nails in drinking water, eating rust, sleeping with pieces of iron under his bed and pillow, and carrying nuts and bolts and magnets in the pockets of his pants. He came to believe that his chalybeate is the iron in human blood, but he could not get enough of it before he went to prison, and he can’t get it at all now. When, on rare occasion, he bites himself and sucks, it makes no difference but is the equivalent of one drinking his own blood to cure himself of anemia.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Franz Anton Mesmer was mocked by the religious and scientific community, just as Jean-Baptiste has always been mocked. True believers publicly feigned skepticism\u2014or if they were believers, used pseudonyms to avoid being labeled as quacks. The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, <\/span>published in 1837, for example, was written by “A Gentleman in Philadelphia,” who some suspect was Edgar Allan Poe. Such books ended up in universities and were eventually discarded by their libraries, allowing Jean-Baptiste to acquire a small but amazing collection for a pittance.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He obsesses about what has happened to his books. His pulse pounds in his neck as he strains on the toilet. The books he brought here from France were taken from him as punishment when the prison’s classification team demoted him from a level-one status to a level-three, supposedly because he masturbates and commits food infractions. Jean-Baptiste spends much of the time on the toilet, and the officers call this masturbating.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Twice in one day\u2014he forgets how long ago\u2014he fumbled his meal trays as they were shoved through the slot at the bottom of his door. Food splattered everywhere, and the incidents were deemed deliberate. He has been deprived of all commissaries, including, of course, his books. He is allowed only one hour of recreation per week. It doesn’t matter. He can write letters. The guards are baffled.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“He can write fucking letters when he’s blind?” they say.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Don’t know for sure he is. Seems like sometimes he is, and sometimes he ain’t.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Faking?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Fucking crazy, man.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste can do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks whenever he pleases inside his sixty-four-square-foot cell. His number of visits from the outside world has been limited. That doesn’t matter, either. Who asks to see him except reporters and those physicians, profilers and academic types who wish to study him as if he is a new strain of virus? Jean-Baptiste’s incarceration, abuse and imminent death have condensed his soul into a bright light scattered with white specks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He’s perpetually magnetized and somnambulous, and his clairvoyance gives him clear-sightedness without eyes. He has ears but does not need them to hear. He can know without knowing and go anywhere without the body that has punished him since birth. Jean-Baptiste has never known anything but hate. Before he attempted to murder the lady forensic pathologist in Virginia and was finally captured by police, intense hatred flowed through others, through him, and returned to others, the circuit complete and infinite. His violent rampages were inevitable, and he does not hold his body responsible for them and suffers no remorse.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>After two years on death row, Jean-Baptiste exists in a perpetual state of magnetism and no longer suffers from negativity toward any living being. This does not imply that he would no longer kill. Given the opportunity, he would rip women apart as he did in the past, but his electricity is not charged by hate and lust. He would destroy beautiful females to answer his higher calling, to complete a pure circuit that is necessary and godly. His delicious ecstasy would flow through his chosen ones. Their pain and deaths would be beautiful, and his chosen ones would be eternally grateful to him as their minds detached from their bodies.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who’s there?” he demands of the stale, foul air. He pushes the roll of toilet paper toward his small bunk, watching the unfurling of a soft white highway that will take him beyond his cinder-block walls. Today, perhaps, he will go to Beaune and visit his favorite twelfth-century cave at the domain of Monsieur Cambrai and taste Burgundies from casks of his choosing and not bother pulling air into his mouth and spitting the wine into a stone bowl, as is proper when tasting the treasures of le terroire. <\/span>He cannot waste a drop! Ha! Let’s see, which grand vins de Bourgogne <\/span>this time? He touches an index finger to his deformed lips.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>His father, Monsieur Chandonne, owns vineyards in Beaune. He owns wine makers and exporters. Jean-Baptiste is very knowledgeable about wines, even if they were denied him when he was confined to the basement and then banished from his family home. His intimacy with Beaune is a rich fantasy projected from his charming brother’s detailed stories of wines to remind Jean-Baptiste of his deprivation and nonexistence. Ha! Jean-Baptiste does not need a tongue to taste. He knows the confident Clos de Vougeot, and the soft, complex and elegant red Clos de Mouches.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nineteen ninety-seven was a very good year for red Clos de Mouches, and the 1980 white wine hints of hazelnuts and is so special. And, oh, the harmony of the Echezeaux! But it is the king of Burgundies that he loves most, the muscular and bigger-built Chambertins. Of the 280 bottles produced in 1999, Monsieur Chandonne acquired 150 for his cave. Of those 150, Jean-Baptiste got not a sip. But after one of his murders in Paris, he robbed her and celebrated with a 1998 Chambertin that tasted of roses and minerals and reminded him of her blood. As for Bordeaux? A Premier Grand Cru Class\u00e9, perhaps the 1984 Chateau Haut-Brion.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who’s there?” he calls out.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Shut up and quit fucking with the toilet paper! Pick it up.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste does not have to look to see the angry eyes peering through the bars in the door.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Roll it up nice and neat, and quit playing with your Mini-Me dick!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The eyes disappear, leaving cool air. Jean-Baptiste must leave for Beaune, where there are no eyes. He must find his next chosen one and rip away her flawed sight and beat her brains into forgetfulness so she will not remember her revulsion when she saw him. Then her domain is his. Her hillsides and luscious clusters of grapes belong to him. Her cave is his to explore, to feel his way along dark, damp walls that become cooler the longer he takes. Her blood is fine red wine, whichever vintage he craves. Reds, reds, splashing and running down his arms, turning his hair red and sticky, making his teeth ache with joy!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who’s there?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Rarely is he answered.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>After two years, the corrections officers assigned to death row are weary of the mutant madman Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. They look forward to the end of him. The French wolfman with his deformed penis and hairy body is repulsive. His face is asymmetrical, as if the two sides were not lined up when they were put together in the womb, one eye lower than the other, his tiny baby teeth widely spaced and pointed. Until recently, he shaved daily. Jean-Baptiste doesn’t shave now. This is his right. The last four months before execution, the condemned inmate doesn’t have to shave. He can go to the death chamber with long hair and a beard.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Other inmates do not have baby-fine swirls of hair that cover every inch of their bodies except for the mucous membranes and the palms and the soles of their feet. Jean-Baptiste has not shaved himself in two months, and three-inch-long hair covers his lean, ropy body, his entire face and neck, even the back of his hands. Other death-row inmates joke that Jean-Baptiste’s victims died of fright before he had a chance to beat and bite them into hamburger.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hamburger! Help her!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The taunts are meant for Jean-Baptiste to hear, and he receives written cruelties, too, in the form of notes\u2014or kites, <\/span>as they are called\u2014that are passed through cracks beneath the doors, cell to cell, like chain letters, until he is the final recipient. He chews the notes to pulp and swallows them. Some days as many as ten. He can taste each word, they say.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Too bad we won’t be strapping his hairy ass in a chair, then he’d be cooked well-done. Fried.” He has overheard officers say words to that effect.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The whole joint would smell like burning hair.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It ain’t right that we don’t get to shave them bald as a cue ball before they get the needle.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It ain’t right they don’t get fried anymore. Now it’s too fuckin’ easy. A little needle prick and nighty-night.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“We’ll chill the juice extra good for the Wolfman.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 13<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

JEAN-BAPTISTE STRAINS on the toilet, as if he is hearing these derisive comments now, although it is silent outside his door.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Chilling the juice is a dirty secret of tie-down and IV teams who want their little bit of sadistic fun at each execution. Whoever is in charge of the lethal drugs places them in an ice chest when transporting them from a locked refrigerator to the death chamber. Jean-Baptiste has overheard death-row inmates claim that the drugs are chilled beyond what’s necessary, almost to the freezing point. The teams think it only fair that the condemned inmate feel the frigid intravenous hit, as enough poison to kill four horses rushes through the needle and shocks the blood. If the inmate doesn’t exclaim, “Oh, God!” or, “Jesus!” or some utterance when he feels his icy, imminent death, the members of the execution teams are disappointed and a bit pissed off.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“That last ol’ boy sure as hell had an ice-cream headache,” voices yell and bounce off steel doors as inmates retell the stories.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“A screamin’ one. You hear how he puckered when the shit hit?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No way that was on the radio.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“He begged for his mama.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“A lot of the whores I done begged for their mama. Last one screamed, ‘Mama! Mama! Mama!'” The man the other inmates call Beast is bragging again.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He thinks his anecdotes are funny.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You’re a fucker. Can’t believe the governor gave you another month, you fucker!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Beast is the source of most of the execution stories circulating through the cells in the death-row pod. Beast was transported by van the forty-three miles to Huntsville and was already eating his last meal of fried shrimp, steak, fries and pecan pie in the barred cage next to the death chamber when the governor suddenly granted him a stay of execution so further DNA tests could be run. Beast knows damn well the tests are a waste of time, but he continues to milk what he can out of his last days on Earth now that he has been returned to the Polunsky Unit. He goes on and on about a process that is supposed to be secret. He even knows the names of the members of the tie-down and IV teams and the doctor who was scheduled to start the IV and pronounce Beast dead.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“If I ever get out, I’m going to do every one of the bitches and videotape it!” Beast brags some more.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Wish I videotaped the ones I did. Hell, I’d pay all I got for even one videotape. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time. Give those shrinks and FBI assholes an eyeful to worry about when they go home to their little wives and kiddies.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste never filmed his murders. There wasn’t time, and stupidly, the idea never occurred to him. For that he continually rebukes himself. How rare it is for him to be so stupid . . .<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Esp\u00e8ce de sale gorille . . .<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Stupid monkey mutant.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste covers his ears with his hands.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who’s there?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>If only he had filmed his bloody art or at least had taken photographs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Uh, the longing, the longing, the anxiety he cannot relieve because he cannot relive, relive, relive their ecstasy as they died. The thought turns the key on an unbearable pressure in his groin. He can’t relieve the misery. He was born with an ignition that doesn’t work, sexual pistons that spark but will not fire. He breathes hard, straining on the toilet, sweat dripping from his face.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 14<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“WHAT YOU DOING in there?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>An officer bangs on the door. Two mocking dark eyes are there again, between the bars in the window.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Playing ring-around-the-ass again. Man, your guts are gonna come out one of these days.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste hears footsteps on metal catwalks and other death-row inmates yelling their usual complaints and obscenities. Not including Jean-Baptiste, 245 men wait their turn while lawyers continue appeals and do what they can to persuade district supreme courts or the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a sentence or at least convince a judge to rule in their favor and allow DNA tests or some other trickery. Jean-Baptiste knows what he did and pled guilty, despite the histrionics of his attorney, Rocco Caggiano, also owned by the Chandonne family.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Rocco Caggiano s feigned vigorous opposition to Jean-Baptiste s pleading guilty before the judge was very poor acting. Caggiano abides by his instructions, just as Jean-Baptiste seems to do, only Jean-Baptiste is a very good actor. The Chandonne family believes it best for their shameful, disgusting son to die.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Why would you want to sit on death row for ten years? they <\/span>reasoned with him. Why would you want to be released back into a society that will hunt you down like a monster?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>At first Jean-Baptiste could not accept that his family would want him to die. He accepts it now. It makes sense. Why would his family care if he dies when they never cared that he lived? He has no choice. It is clear. If he didn’t plead guilty, his father would have seen to it that Jean-Baptiste was murdered while awaiting trial.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Prison is such a dangerous place, <\/span>his father softly told him in French over the phone. Remember what happened to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? He was beaten to death with a mop, or maybe it was a broom.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste was emotionally beaten to death, all hope gone, when his father said that. Jean-Baptiste relied on his mind and meticulously began to study his predicament as he was flown to Houston. He vividly remembers the Welcome to Humble <\/span>sign and a Holiday Inn with a Hole in One Caf\u00e9, which made no sense, since he saw no golf courses in the area, only parched leaves and dead trees and what seemed to be an endless stretch of slack telephone lines, scrubby pines, feed stores, mobile homes, decapitated buildings and prefabricated houses on cinder blocks. His motorcade turned off North 59, all those federal and local agents treating Jean-Baptiste like Frankenstein.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He sat, perfectly well behaved, in the backseat of a white Ford LTD, manacled like Houdini. The motorcade turned onto a deserted road overgrown with brush that thickened into dense forests on either side, and when they reached the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Polunsky Unit, he felt the sun reclaim gray skies, and the day turned bright. Jean-Baptiste took it as a sign.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He waits patiently. He imagines meteor showers and great battalions marching because he wills it. How simple! People are fools! They set up such foolish rules! Prison officials can take away his radio and punish him by grinding up his meals and cooking them into food loaves, but no one can neutralize his magnetism and legal right to send and receive uncen-sored mail. If he marks an envelope or package Legal Mail or Media Mail, <\/span>no prison employee can open it. Jean-Baptiste sends mail to Rocco Caggiano whenever he pleases. Now and then he receives mail the same way. That is the most special treat of all, especially when Madame Scarpetta wrote him recently because she cannot forget him. She was so close to ecstasy and by her own foolishness robbed herself, cheated herself, of Jean-Baptiste’s benevolence. His selfless intention was to make her lovely body let go of her soul. Her passing would have been perfect. Finally, she realizes her terrible mistake and now makes an excuse to see him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\/ will see you again.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste has enough information to topple the entire Chandonne cartel.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>If that is what she wants, why not? When she comes, he will find a way to finish her release, to bless her with what she wants. The ecstasy. The ecstasy!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He tore her letter into small pieces and ate each word, chewing so hard he cut his gums.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Jean-Baptiste lifts himself off the toilet and doesn’t bother flushing. He yanks up his pants.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who’s there?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The white V-neck shirt has DR <\/span>for Death Row in large letters stenciled in black on the back. It is the abbreviation for doctor. Another sign. He is hers for now, and she is his forever. His prison fatigues are soaking wet with sweat. They stink. He sweats constantly and smells like a dirty animal. He smiles as he thinks of the last inmate executed several weeks ago, an old man named Pitt who killed a policeman in Atlanta. Pitt murdered prostitutes for years without mishap, dumping his victims in parking lots or the middle of the road. He broke the code when he stabbed a policeman thirteen times.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The rumor in the pod is that when the doctor sent the fatal cocktail speeding through Pitt’s IV tube like a train through a tunnel, death occurred in exactly two minutes and fifty-six seconds. Three physicians take turns working the executions\u2014again, more stories from the media and from inmates who have returned from Huntsville after stays of execution. There is a pediatrician, a heart surgeon, and a woman who set up a family practice in Lufkin a few years ago. She is the coldest executioner of all. She comes in with her black bag, does her job and leaves, indifferent and arrogant, speaking to no one.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It arouses Jean-Baptiste to fantasize about a woman doctor invisible in a small secret room, waiting for the signal to kill his strapped-down body. He does not fear the death of his body, for his mind is his soul and cannot be destroyed. He is electric. He is a fluid. He can detach his mind from his body. He is part of God. Jean-Baptiste sighs in his bunk, where he lies on his back, staring up at a ceiling that is incapable of preventing his clairvoyant journeys. Most of the time, he transports his spirit back to Paris and flies unnoticed, acutely aware of sounds in a way he never was before. He visited Paris just the other day, right after a light rain, and tires swished on wet pavement, and distant traffic was surprisingly guttural, reminding him of his stomach growling. Raindrops were diamonds scattered over the seats of parked motorcycles, and a woman carrying lilies walked past him, and he floated in perfume.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>How observant he has become! Whenever his soul visits Paris, the most beautiful city on Earth, he discovers another old building wrapped in green netting, and men blasting limestone with air hoses to clean away centuries of pollution. It has taken years to restore Notre Dame’s creamy complexion. Monitoring the work is how Jean-Baptiste measures time. He never stays in Paris more than a few days, and each night he sets out toward the Gare de Lyon, then to the Quai de la Rap\u00e9e to gaze at the Institut M\u00e9dico-L\u00e9gal, where some of his earlier chosen ones were autopsied. He can see the women’s faces and bodies, and he remembers their names. He waits until the last Bateau-Mouche thrums by, until the last ripple of wake laps over his shoes before he strips naked on the cold stones of the Quai de Bourbon.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>All his life he has braved the murky cold currents of the Seine to wash away the curse of le Loup-Garou.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The werewolf.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>His nocturnal bathing has not cured his hypertrichosis, the extremely rare birth defect that causes babylike hair to cover his body, and continues its cruelty by adding a deformed face, abnormal teeth and stunted genitalia. Jean-Baptiste immerses himself in the river. He drifts along the Quai d’Orl\u00e9ans and the Quai de B\u00e9thune to the eastern tip of the Ile St.-Louis. There on the Quai d’Anjou is the seventeenth-century four-story town house with its carved front doors and gilded drainpipes, the hotel particulier <\/span>where his prominent parents live in obscene luxury. When chandeliers are ablaze with crystal and silver, his parents are in, but often they socialize with friends or drink their nightcaps in a sitting room that cannot be seen from the street.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>During Jean-Baptiste’s disembodied travels, he can go into any room of the hotel particulier. <\/span>He moves about as he pleases. The other night when he visited the Ile St.-Louis, his obese mother had several more folds of fat beneath her chin, and her eyes were as small as raisins in her bloated face. She had wrapped herself in a black silk robe and wore matching slippers on her stubby feet. She smoked strong French cigarettes nonstop as she complained and chattered to her husband while he watched the news, talked on the phone and went through paperwork.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will. It is no wonder he seeks relief and pleasure in the arms of many beautiful young women and only remains married to Madame Chan-donne because that is the way it must be. At a young age, Jean-Baptiste was told hypertrichosis is congenital, but he is certain it was caused by his mother’s alcoholism. She made no effort to curtail her drunkenness while she was pregnant with him and his twin brother, who calls himself Jay Talley and had the good fortune to emerge from their mother’s womb less than three minutes after Jean-Baptiste. His brother was born a perfect specimen of maleness, a golden sculpture with an exquisite body touched by blond hair that catches light, his face formed by a master. He dazzles everyone he meets, and the only satisfaction Jean-Baptiste finds in the injustice of their births is that Jay Talley, whose real name is Jean-Paul Chandonne, does not look like what he is. For that reason, he is worse than Jean-Baptiste.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother’s is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it. “Who’s there!” <\/span>he screams.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 15<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

THE CHARLES RIVER reflects the fledgling green of spring along Bostons embankment, and Benton Wesley watches young men row a racing shell in perfect rhythm.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Muscles ripple like the gentle current, paddles dip in whispered plashes. He could watch and say nothing all afternoon. The day is perfect, without a cloud, the temperature seventy-five degrees. Benton has become a close companion of isolation and silence, and craves them to the extreme that conversation fatigues him and is weighted by long pauses that intimidate some people and irritate others. He rarely has more to say than the homeless people who sleep in rag piles beneath the Arthur Fiedler footbridge. He even managed to offend the loud, gregarious Max, who works in the Caf\u00e9 Esplanade, where Benton on occasion buys root-beer and Cracker Jacks or a soft pretzel. The first comment Benton ever made to Max was taken the wrong way.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Change.” That was all Benton muttered with a shake of his head.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Max, who is German and often mistranslates English and takes umbrage easily, interpreted the cryptic remark to mean that that smart-ass in running clothes and dark sunglasses thinks all foreigners are inferior and dishonest and was demanding the change due him from the five-dollar bill Max tucked inside the till. In other words, the hardworking Max is a thief.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>What Benton meant was that Cracker Jacks at the Caf\u00e9 Esplanade are served in bags, not boxes, and cost a dollar instead of a quarter. The toy-surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IQ of a pigeon. Gone are the days of Benton s childhood, when his sticky fingers dug through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know what people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The irony isn’t lost on him that he grew up to wear a special ring\u2014 this one gold and engraved with the FBI crest\u2014and became the champion of decoding the thoughts, motivations and actions of people the public calls monsters. Benton was born with a special gift for channeling his intuition and intellect into the neurological and spiritual abysses of the worst of the worst. His quarry was the elusive offenders whose violent sexual acts were so heinous that panicking police from the United States and abroad used to wait in line to review their cases with him in the FBI Academy’s Profiling Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Benton Wesley was the legendary unit chief who wore conservative suits and a large gold ring.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It was believed that from reports and nightmarish photographs, he could divine some clue that investigators missed, as if there was a magic prize to be rooted out during sessions inside the dank, windowless space where the only sounds were grim voices, papers sliding across the conference room table, and distant muffled shots from the indoor firing range. Benton’s world for most of his FBI career was J. Edgar Hoover’s former bomb shelter, an airless bunker belowground where pipes from the Academy’s upper-level toilets sometimes leaked on worn carpet or ran in stinking trickles down cinder-block walls.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton is fifty and has reached the bitter belief that psychological profiling isn’t psychological in the least, but is nothing more than forms and assumptions based on decades-old data. Profiling is propaganda and marketing. It is hype. It is just one more sales pitch that helps rake in federal dollars as FBI lobbyists stalk Capitol Hill. The very word profiling <\/span>makes Wesley grit his teeth, and he can’t abide the way what he used to do is misunderstood, abused, has become a hackneyed Hollywood device drawn from worn-out and faulty behavioral science, anecdotes and deductive assumptions. Modern profiling is not inductive. It is as specious and misleading as physiognomy and anthropometry\u2014or the dangerous and ridiculous beliefs from centuries past that murderers looked like cavemen and could be unequivocally identified by the circumference of their heads or the length of their arms. Profiling is fool’s gold, and for Benton to come around to that conviction is akin to a priest deciding there is no God.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. <\/span>Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton’s change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the “Schei\u00dfe Arsch.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He talks about Benton every chance he gets.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The other day he buy a pretzel,” Max told Nosmo King, the delivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking <\/span>divided into No Smo king <\/span>when
\n<\/span>double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“He eats his pretzel there”\u2014Max stabbed his cigarette toward a canopy of old oaks\u2014”and schtared up like some schzombie at that schtuck kite”\u2014pointing the cigarette again and nodding at the tattered red kite high in the branches of an oak tree\u2014”like it some schientific phenomenal or a schymbol from God. Maybe a UFO!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Nosmo King was stacking cases of Fiji bottled water inside the Caf\u00e9 Esplanade kiosk and paused, shielding his eyes from the sun as he followed the line of Max’s cigarette up to the wrecked kite.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I remember how that used to piss me off as a kid,” Nosmo King recalled. “Get yourself a brand new kite and five minutes later it’s hung up in power lines or a fucking tree. That sure is life. One minute things are moving along good, the next, the wind blows your ass to ruination.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dark preoccupations and shadows from the past are what Benton feels and sees, no matter where he is or what he does. He lives inside a steel box of isolation that depresses and frustrates him so profoundly that there are moments, hours, days and weeks when he does not care about anything, has no appetite and sleeps too much. He needs sun and dreads winter. He is grateful that this early afternoon is polished so brightly that he cannot look across the Charles or up at the intense blue sky unless his eyes are blacked out, as they usually are, by sunglasses. He casually turns away from the young athletes who rule the river, pained that half a century has passed and he is no longer consumed by courage and conquest but by nonexistence, powerlessness and irrevocable loss.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I<\/span>
\nam dead, <\/span>he says to himself every morning as he shaves. No matter what, I am dead.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>My name is Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland, born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 20,1955, parents both from Salem, Massachusetts. A psychologist, retired, sick of listening to people’s problems, Social Security number yada yada yada, unmarried, homosexual, HIV-positive, like to eye gorgeous boys eying themselves in the mirrors at the gym but don’t pursue, don’t strike up conversations, don’t cruise gay bars or date. Ever, ever, ever.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is all a lie.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton Wesley has lived with falsehoods and exile for six years.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He walks to a picnic table and sits on top of it, rests his arms on his knees, tightly laces his tapered fingers. His heart begins to beat rapidly with excitement and fear. Decades of a well-meant pursuit of justice have been rewarded by banishment, by a forced acceptance of the nonexistence of himself and all he has ever known. Some days, he can scarcely remember who he used to be, as he spends most of his time living in his mind, distracted by and even content with reading philosophical and spiritual books, history and poetry, and feeding the pigeons in the Public Garden, around the Frog Pond, or wherever he can blend with the locals and tourists.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He no longer owns a suit. He shaves his thick, silver hair to the scalp and wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, but his body and bearing belie his attempt to look sloppy and older than his years. His face is tan but smooth, his posture military-straight. He is fit and muscular, with so little body fat that his veins run under his flesh like slender tree roots pushing through soil. Boston has many health clubs and places to jog and run sprints, and he is relentless about fitness and staying light on his feet. Physical pain reminds him that he is alive. He does not allow himself patterns for when and where he runs or works out or shops or eats in restaurants.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He turns to his right as his keen peripheral vision catches the lumbering form of Pete Marino strolling in his direction. Benton’s breath catches. He is electrified by anxiety and joy but does not wave or smile. He has not communicated with his old friend and former colleague since he supposedly died and vanished into what is called a level-one protected-witness program designed uniquely for him and jointly controlled by London’s Metropolitan Police, Washington and Interpol.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino settles next to Benton on top of the picnic table, checking first for bird shit as he taps an unfiltered Lucky Strike from a soft pack and lights up after several sparked attempts with a disposable lighter low on fluid. Benton notes that Marino’s hands are shaking. The two men are hunched over, staring out at a sailboat gliding away from the boathouse.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You ever go to the band shell here?” Marino asks, overcome by emotions he strangles in his throat with repeated coughs and loud sucks of smoke.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I heard the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July,” Benton softly says. “You can’t help but hear them from where I live. How are you?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“But you don’t come down in person.” Marino does his best to sound normal, just like the old days. “Yeah, I can understand that. Me, I probably wouldn’t, either, all those mobs of idiots, and I hate mobs of people. Like in the malls. It’s gotten to where I can’t take shopping malls no more.” He blows out a large volume of smoke, the unfiltered cigarette trembling in his thick fingers. “Least you ain’t so far away you can’t hear the music, pal. Could be worse. That’s what I always say, could be worse.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton’s lean, handsome face does not register the volatile mix of thoughts and feelings inside his hidden places. His hands betray nothing. He controls his nerves and facial expressions. He is nobody’s pal and never has been, and acute grief and anger heat up powerfully. Marino called him pal <\/span>because he doesn’t know what else to call him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I suppose I should ask you not to call me pal,” <\/span>Benton comments in a bland voice.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Sure. What the fuck.” Marino shrugs, stung.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>For a big, tough cop, he is overly sensitive and takes the world personally. His capacity for interpreting an honest remark as an insult wearies those who know him and terrifies those who don’t. Marino has a temper from hell, and his fury knows no bounds when he is sufficiently pissed off. The only reason he hasn’t been killed during one of his outbursts is that his physical strength and survival skills are mixed with a strong dose of experience and luck. Even so, chance is never favorable forever. As Benton takes in every detail of Marino’s appearance, he entertains the same worries from the past. He’s going to be dropped by a bullet or a stroke one of these days.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I sure as hell can’t call you Tom” <\/span>Marino counters. “Not to your face.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Be my guest. I’m used to it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino’s jaw muscles flex as he smokes.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You taking care of yourself better or worse since I saw you last?” Ben-ton stares down at his relaxed hands between his knees. His fingers slowly toy with a splinter he picks off the picnic table. “Although I think the answer is obvious,” he adds with a slight smile.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Sweat rolls down Marino’s balding head. He shifts his position, conscious of the 40-caliber Glock pistol strapped under his huge left arm and his desire to snatch off his bowling team windbreaker. Beneath it he is soaking wet, his heart beating hard, the dark-blue nylon absorbing sunlight like a sponge. He exhales a cloud of smoke, hopes it doesn’t drift in Benton’s direction. It does. Right in his face.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Thanks.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Don’t mention it. I can’t call you Tom.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino ogles a young woman in spandex shorts and sports bra trotting by, breasts bobbing. He can’t get used to females running around in bras, and for a veteran homicide detective who has seen hundreds of naked women in his day\u2014most of them in strip joints or on top of autopsy tables\u2014he is surprisingly awed when he sees a female so scantily clad in public that he knows exactly what she looks like naked, right down to the size of her nipples.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“My daughter ran around like that, I’d kill her,” he mutters, staring at the retreating pumping buttocks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The world is grateful you don’t have a daughter, Pete,” Benton remarks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No shit. Especially if she got my looks. Probably would’ve ended up some dyke professional wrestler.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I don’t know about that. Rumor has it, you used to be quite the hunk.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton has seen photographs of Marino when he was a uniformed cop for NYPD in the long-ago days of his fledgling career. He was broad-shouldered and fine-looking, a real stud, before he let himself go to hell, unrelenting in his self-abuse, as if he hates his own flesh, as if he wants to kill it off and get it out of his way.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton climbs down from the picnic table. He and Marino start walking toward the footbridge.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Oops.” Marino smiles slyly. “Forgot you was gay. Guess I should be more sensitive about queers and dyke wrestlers, huh? But you try to hold my hand, I’ll tear your head off.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino has always been homophobic, but never as uncomfortable and confused as he is at this stage in his life. His conviction that gay men are perverts and that lesbians can be cured by sex with men has evolved from clear as air to dark as ink. He can see neither in nor out of what he believes about people who lust for their own gender, and his cynical, ugly comments have the flat ring of a bell cast in lead. Not much is plain to him anymore. Not much seems unquestionably true. At least when he was devoutly bigoted, he didn’t have to question. In the beginning, he lived by the gospel according to Marino. Over recent years, he has become an agnostic, a compass with no magnetic north. His convictions wobble all over the place.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“So what’s it feel like to have people think you’re . . . you know?” Marino asks. “Hope nobody’s tried to beat you up or nothing.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I feel nothing about what people think of me,” Benton says under his breath, conscious of people passing them on the footbridge, of cars speeding below them on Storrow Drive, as if any person within a hundred feet of them might be watching and listening. “When’s the last time you went fishing?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 16<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

MARINO’S DEMEANOR SOURS as they follow a cobblestone walk in the shade of double rows of Japanese cherry trees, maples and blue spruce.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>During his most venomous moods, usually late at night when he is alone and throwing back beers or shots of bourbon, he resents Benton Wesley, almost despises him for how much he has damaged the lives of everyone who matters. If Benton really were dead, it would be easier. Marino tells himself he would have gotten over it by now. But how does he recover from a loss that didn’t happen and live with its secrets?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>So when Marino is alone and drunk and has worked himself into a rabid state, he swears out loud at Benton while crushing one beer can after another and hurling them across his small, slovenly living room.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Look what you’ve done to her!” he rails to the walls. “Look what you’ve done to her, you fucking son of a bitch!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Kay Scarpetta is an apparition between Marino and Benton as they walk. She is one of the most brilliant and remarkable women Marino has ever met, and Benton’s torture and murder ripped off her skin. She stumbles over Benton’s dead body everywhere she goes, and all along\u2014from day one\u2014Marino has known that Benton’s gruesome homicide was faked right down to the autopsy and lab reports, death certificate and the ashes Scarpetta scattered into the wind at Hilton Head Island, a seaside resort she and Benton loved.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The ashes and bits of bone were scraped from the bottom of a crematorium oven in Philadelphia. Leftovers. God knows whose. Marino presented them to Scarpetta in a cheap little urn given to him at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, and all he could think to say was, “Sorry, Doc. I sure am sorry, Doc.” Sweating in a suit and tie and standing on wet sand, he watched her fling those ashes into the wind of a hovering helicopter piloted by Lucy. In a hurricane of churning water and flying blades, the supposed remains of Scarpetta’s lover were hurled as far out of reach as her pain. Marino stared at Lucy’s hard face staring back at him through Plexiglas as she did exactly what her aunt had asked her to do, and all the while, Lucy knew, too.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Scarpetta trusts Lucy and Marino more than anyone else in her life. They helped plan Benton’s staged murder and disappearance, and that truth is a brain infection, a sickness they battle daily, while Benton lives his life as a nobody named Tom.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I guess no fishing,” Benton goes on in the same light tone.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“They ain’t biting.” But Marino’s anger is. His fury bares its fangs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I see. Not a single fish. And bowling? Last I remember, you were second in your league. The Firing Pins. I believe that was the name of your team.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Last century, yeah. I don’t spend time in Virginia. Only when I get dragged back down to Richmond for court. I’m not with their PD anymore. In the process of moving to Florida and signing on with the Hollywood PD, south of Lauderdale.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“If you’re in Florida,” Benton points out, “when you go to Richmond, it’s up <\/span>to Richmond, not down <\/span>to Richmond. One thing you’ve always had is an amazing sense of direction, Pete.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino’s caught in a lie, and he knows it. He constantly thinks of moving from Richmond. It shames him that he doesn’t have the nerve. It is all he knows, even if there is nothing left for him in that city of old battles that continue to rage.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I didn’t come here to bother you with long stories,” Marino says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton’s dark glasses glance in his direction as the two of them continue their leisurely pace.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Well, I can tell you’ve missed me,” Benton comments, a splinter of ice in his tone.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“It ain’t fucking fair,” Marino hisses, his fists clenched by his sides. “And I can’t take it no more, pal. <\/span>Lucy can’t take it no more, pal. <\/span>I wish you could be a fucking fly on the wall and see what you done to her. The Doc. Scarpetta. Or maybe you don’t remember her, either.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Did you come here to project your own anger onto me?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I just thought while I was in the neighborhood I’d point out, now that I got your attention, that I don’t see how dying can be worse than the way you live.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Be quiet,” Benton quietly says with flinty self-control. “We’ll talk inside.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 17<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

IN AN AREA OF BEACON HILL lined with proud old brick homes and graceful trees, Benton Wesley managed to find an address to suit his present, peculiar needs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>His apartment building is ugly beige precast with plastic lawn chairs on balconies and a rusting wrought-iron fence that encloses a front yard, overgrown and depressingly dark. He and Marino take dimly lit stairs that smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Shit!” Marino gasps for breath. “Couldn’tcha at least find a joint with an elevator? I didn’t mean nothing by what I said. About dying. Nobody wants you to die.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>On the fifth landing, Benton unlocks the scratched gray metal door to apartment 56.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Most people already think I did.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Shit. I can’t say anything right.” Marino wipes sweat off his face.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I’ve got Dos Equis and limes.” Benton’s voice seems to mimic the flip of the dead-bolt lock. “And, of course, fresh juice.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No Budweiser?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Please make yourself comfortable.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You got Budweiser, don’t you?” Pain sounds in Marino’s voice. Benton doesn’t remember anything about him.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Since I knew you were coming, of course I have Budweiser,” Benton says from the kitchen. “An entire refrigerator full of it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino looks around and decides on a floral printed couch, not a nice one. The apartment is furnished and bears the dingy patina of many threadbare and careless lives that have come and gone. Benton probably hasn’t lived in a decent place since he died and became Tom, and Marino sometimes wonders how the meticulous, refined man stands it. Benton is from a wealthy New England family and has always enjoyed a privileged life, although no amount of money would be enough ransom to free him from the horrors of his career. To see Benton living in an apartment typically occupied by partying college students or the lower middle class\u2014to see him with a shaved head, facial hair, baggy jeans and sweatshirt, and to know he doesn’t even own a car\u2014is unimaginable to Marino.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“At least you’re in good shape,” Marino remarks with a yawn.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“At least, <\/span>meaning that’s the best you can say about me.” Benton ducks inside the old white refrigerator and emerges with two beers.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The cold bottles clank together in one hand as he opens a drawer, rooting around for a church key, as Marino calls any gadget that flips the cap off a beer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Mind if I smoke?” Marino asks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yes.” Benton opens and shuts a cabinet door.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Okay, so I’ll go into fits and swallow my tongue.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I didn’t say you couldn’t smoke.” Benton walks across the dim, shabby living room and hands Marino a Budweiser. “I said I minded.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He hands him a water glass that will have to do for an ashtray.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yeah, so maybe you’re in shape and don’t smoke and all the rest”\u2014 Marino gets back to that as he takes a slug of beer and sighs contentedly\u2014 “but your life sucks.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton takes a seat across from Marino, the space between them occupied by a scratched Formica-topped coffee table neatly lined with news magazines and the television remote control.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t need you to drop out of the sky to tell me my life sucks,” he says. “If that’s why you’re here, I wish to hell you’d never come. You’ve violated the program, put me at risk . . .”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“And put myself at risk,” Marino snaps.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I was about to point that out.” Benton’s voice heats up, his eyes burning. “We know damn well my being Tom <\/span>isn’t just about me. If it was just about me, I would let them take their best shot.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino begins picking at his beer bottle label. “No-Nuts Wolfman has agreed to spill the beans on his family, the great Chandonnes.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton reads the papers several times a day, excavating the Internet, sending out queries on search engines to recover pieces of his past life. He knows all about Jean-Baptiste, the deformed, murderous son of Chandonne\u2014the great Monsieur Chandonne, intimate friend of the noblesse <\/span>in Paris, the head of the largest, most dangerous organized crime cartel in the world. Jean-Baptiste knows enough about his family business and those who carry out its terrible tasks to put everyone who matters behind bars or on a death-chamber gurney.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>So far, Jean-Baptiste has bided his time in a maximum-security Texas prison, saying nothing to anyone. It was the Chandonne family and its massive web that Benton tangled with, and now, from thousands of miles away, Monsieur Chandonne sips his fine wines and never doubts that Benton has paid the ultimate price, a terrible price. Monsieur Chandonne was foiled, but in a way, he wasn’t. Benton died a fake death to save himself and others from dying real ones. But the price he pays is Promethean. He may as well be chained to rocks. He cannot heal because his guts are torn out daily.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Wolfman,” as Marino usually refers to Jean-Baptiste, “says he’ll finger everyone from his daddy on down to the butlers, but only under certain conditions.” He hesitates. “He ain’t fucking with us, either, Benton. He means it.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“You know that for a fact,” Benton blandly says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Yeah. A fact.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“How has he communicated this to you?” Benton’s eyes take on a familiar intensity as he goes into his mode.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Letters.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Do we know who he’s been writing, besides you?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The Doc. Her letter was sent to me. I haven’t given it to her, see no point.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who else?” Lucy.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Hers also sent to you?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“No. Directly to her office. I got no idea how he got the address or knew the name The Last Precinct, when she doesn’t list it. Everybody thinks her business is called Infosearch Solutions.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Why would he know that people like Lucy and you refer to her business as The Last Precinct? If I logged on to the Internet right now, would I find any mention of The Last Precinct?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Not the one we’re talking about, you wouldn’t.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Would I find Infosearch Solutions?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Sure.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Is her office phone number listed?” Benton asks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Infosearch Solutions is.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“So maybe he also knows the listed name of her business. Called directory assistance and got the address that way. Actually, you can find just about anything on the Internet these days and for less than fifty bucks, even buy unlisted and cell phone numbers.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t think Wolfman has a computer in his death-row cell,” Marino says in annoyance.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Rocco Caggiano could have fed him all kinds of information,” Benton reminds him. “At one time he had to have Lucy’s business number, since he planned to depose her. Then, of course, Jean-Baptiste pled.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Sounds like you keep up with the news.” Marino tries to divert the conversation away from the subject of Rocco Caggiano.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Did you read the letter he wrote to Lucy?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“She told me about it. Didn’t want to fax or e-mail it.” This bothers Marino, too. Lucy didn’t want him to see the letter.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Any letters to anybody else?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino shrugs, sips his beer. “Not a clue. Obviously, he ain’t writing to you.” He thinks this is funny.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton doesn’t smile.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Because you’re dead, right?” Marino assumes Benton doesn’t catch the joke. “Well, in prison, if an inmate marks his outgoing letters Legal Mail <\/span>or Media Mail, <\/span>it’s illegal for officials to open them. So if Wolfman’s got any legal and media pen pals, the information’s privileged.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He begins picking at the label on his beer bottle, talking on as if Benton knows nothing about the inner workings of penitentiaries, where he has interviewed hundreds of violent criminals during his career.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“The only place to look is his visitors list, since a lot of the people these squirrels write also come visit. Wolfman’s got a list. Let’s see, the governor of Texas, the president…”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“As in president of the United States?” Benton’s trademark is to take all information seriously.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino says, “Yup.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It unnerves him to see gestures and reactions that are the Benton of the past, the Benton he worked with, the Benton who was his friend.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Who else?” Benton gets up and collects a legal pad and pen from tidy stacks of paperwork and magazines next to the computer on the kitchen table.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He slips on a pair of wire-rim glasses, very small, John Lennon-style, nothing he would have worn in his former life. Sitting back down, he writes the time, date and location on a clean sheet of paper. From where Marino sits, he makes out the word “offender,” but beyond that, he can’t read Benton’s small scrawl, especially upside down.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino answers, “His father and mother are on the list. Now that’s a real joke, right?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Benton’s pen pauses. He glances up. “What about his lawyer? Rocco Caggiano?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marino swills beer in the bottom of the bottle.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Rocco?” Benton says with more emphasis. “You going to tell me?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Fury and shame dart across Marino’s face. “Just remember, he ain’t mine, didn’t grow up with me, don’t know him, don’t want to know him, would blow his fuckin’ brains out just as easy as any other dirtbag’s.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“Genetically, he’s your son, whether you like it or not,” Benton replies matter-of-factly.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>“I don’t even remember when his birthday is.” Marino dismisses his only child with a wave of a hand and a last slug of Budweiser.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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Book Preview Blow Fly Kay Scarpetta (12) by Patricia Cornwell Chapter 1 DR. KAY SCARPETTA moves the tiny glass vial close to candlelight, illuminating a maggot drifting in a poisonous bath of ethanol. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At a glance, she knows the exact stage of metamorphosis before the creamy carcass, no larger than a grain of rice, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[172],"class_list":["post-3176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-patricia-cornwell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}