Predator Read online

  Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns in a terrifying novel

  that demonstrates once more why

  Patricia Cornwell has few peers…

  Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, digs into a case more bizarre than any she has ever faced, one that has produced not only unusual physical evidence, but also tantalizing clues about the inner workings of an extremely cunning and criminal mind.

  She and her team—Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and her niece, Lucy—track the odd connections between several horrific crimes and the people who are the likely suspects. As one psychopath, safely behind bars and the subject of a classified scientific study at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital, teases Scarpetta with tips that could be fact—or fantasy—the number of killers on the loose seems to multiply. Are these events related or merely random? And what can the study of one man’s brain tell them about the methods of a psychopath still lurking in the shadows?

  “A fine psychological thriller…recalls the work of writers like Minette Walters or Thomas Harris.”

  —The Denver Post

  “[Readers] will find themselves entertained and surprised by the ending.”

  —The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News

  “There is a steely authority to the prose.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “Cornwell and her original heroine Kay Scarpetta are both back in top form.”

  —Birmingham Post-Herald

  Praise for the novels of Patricia Cornwell

  Trace

  “Dr. Kay Scarpetta…is back with a vengeance.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Cornwell gets her Hitchcock on…[She] can generate willies with subtle poetic turns.”

  —People

  “Fun [and] flamboyant.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Trace is rich and satisfying, with Cornwell sprinkling a trail of tantalizing bread crumbs for the Scarpetta faithful, who are always hungry for the next installment.”

  —The Associated Press

  “Cornwell’s latest is hard to put down…Trace is solid and tightly paced, which should appeal to her legions of fans.”

  —BookPage

  “Will cheer fans…the old Scarpetta comes through.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The mystery is intriguing, there’s plenty of forensic detail, and the ending…opens the way for Scarpetta and her associates to proceed in any direction that calls to them.”

  —Booklist

  Blow Fly

  “[A] grisly fast-paced thriller…utterly chilling.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Patricia Cornwell is on target—and spectacularly so—with her latest Kay Scarpetta thriller, a story so compelling that even longtime readers will be stunned by its twists and turns.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Gruesome and suspenseful.”

  —New York Daily News

  The Last Precinct

  “Ignites on the first page…Cornwell has created a character so real, so compelling, so driven that this reader has to remind herself regularly that Scarpetta is just a product of an author’s imagination.”

  —USA Today

  “Plots within plots, fraught atmosphere and unrelenting suspense keep readers on tenterhooks while one trap after another springs under unwary feet. Cunningly designed, ingeniously laid out, composed with Corn-wellian skill, this far-from-the-Last Precinct is a model of the art.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “The most unexpected of the Kay Scarpetta novels so far…Compelling…Terrific.”

  —The Miami Herald

  Black Notice

  “Brainteasing…one of the most savage killers of her career…[a] hair-raising tale with a French twist.”

  —People

  “The author’s darkest and perhaps best…a fast-paced, first-rate thriller.”

  —The San Francisco Examiner

  Point of Origin

  “Cornwell lights a fire under familiar characters—and sparks her hottest adventure in years.”

  —People

  “Packed with action and suspense.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  Titles by Patricia Cornwell

  SCARPETTA SERIES

  Predator

  Trace

  Blow Fly

  The Last Precinct

  Black Notice

  Point of Origin

  Unnatural Exposure

  Cause of Death

  From Potter’s Field

  The Body Farm

  Cruel & Unusual

  All That Remains

  Body of Evidence

  Postmortem

  NONFICTION

  Portrait of a Killer:

  Jack the Ripper—Case Closed

  ANDY BRAZIL SERIES

  Isle of Dogs

  Southern Cross

  Hornet’s Nest

  BIOGRAPHY

  Ruth, a Portrait:

  The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

  OTHER WORKS

  Food to Die For:

  Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen

  Life’s Little Fable

  Scarpetta’s Winter Table

  PREDATOR

  PATRICIA CORNWELL

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PREDATOR

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

  Copyright © 2005 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-1011-5593-6

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To Staci

  SPECIAL THANKS

  Harvard Medical School–affiliated McLean Hospital is the nation’s top psychiatric hospital and is world renowne
d for its research programs, especially in the field of neuro-science. The most challenging and significant frontier isn’t outer space. It is the human brain and its biological role in mental illness. McLean not only sets the standard for psychiatric research, but offers a compassionate alternative to debilitating suffering.

  I am extremely grateful to the extraordinary doctors and scientists who so kindly shared their remarkable world with me:

  Especially

  DR. BRUCE M.C OHEN,

  President and Psychiatrist in Chief

  and also

  DR. DAVID P.O LSON,

  Clinical Director, Brain Imaging Center

  and most of all

  DR. STACI A. GRUBER,

  Associate Director, Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  1

  It is Sunday afternoon and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is in her office at the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, where clouds are building, promising another thunderstorm. It’s not supposed to be this rainy and hot in February.

  Gunfire pops, and voices yell things she can’t make out. Simulated combat is popular on the weekends. Special Ops agents can run around in black fatigues, shooting up the place, and nobody hears them, only Scarpetta, and she barely notices. She continues reviewing an emergency certificate issued by a coroner in Louisiana, an examination of a patient, a woman who later went on to murder five people and claims to have no memory of it.

  The case probably isn’t a candidate for the Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsivity research study known as PREDATOR, Scarpetta decides, vaguely aware of a motorcycle getting louder on the Academy grounds.

  She writes forensic psychologist Benton Wesley an e-mail:

  A woman in the study would be interesting, but wouldn’t the data be irrelevant? I thought you were restricting PREDATOR to males.

  The motorcycle blasts up to the building and stops right below her window. Pete Marino harassing her again, she thinks irritably as Benton sends her an Instant Message:

  Louisiana probably wouldn’t let us have her anyway. They like to execute people too much down there. Food’s good, though.

  She looks out the window as Marino kills the engine, gets off his bike, looks around in his macho way, always wondering who’s watching. She is locking PREDATOR case files in her desk drawer when he walks into her office without knocking and helps himself to a chair.

  “You know anything about the Johnny Swift case?” he asks, his huge, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless denim vest with the Harley logo on the back.

  Marino is the Academy’s head of investigations and a part-time death investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. Of late, he looks like a parody of a biker thug. He sets his helmet on her desk, a scuffed black brain bucket with bullet-hole decals all over it.

  “Refresh my memory. And that thing’s a hood ornament.” She indicates the helmet. “For show, and worthless if you have an accident on that donorcycle of yours.”

  He tosses a file onto her desk. “A San Francisco doctor with an office here in Miami. Had a place in Hollywood on the beach, he and his brother. Not far from the Renaissance, you know, those twin high-rise condo buildings near John Lloyd State Park? About three months ago at Thanksgiving while he was at his place down here, his brother found him on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest. By the way, he’d just had wrist surgery and it didn’t go well. At a glance, a straightforward suicide.”

  “I wasn’t at the ME’s office yet,” she reminds him.

  She was already the Academy’s director of forensic science and medicine then. But she didn’t accept the position of consulting forensic pathologist at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office until this past December when Dr. Bronson, the chief, started cutting back his hours, talking about retiring.

  “I remember hearing something about it,” she says, uncomfortable in Marino’s presence, rarely happy to see him anymore.

  “Dr. Bronson did the autopsy,” he says, looking at what’s on her desk, looking everywhere but at her.

  “Were you involved?”

  “Nope. Wasn’t in town. The case is still pending, because the Hollywood PD was worried at the time there might be more to it, suspicious of Laurel.”

  “Laurel?”

  “Johnny Swift’s brother, identical twins. There was nothing to prove anything, and it all went away. Then I got a phone call Friday morning about three a.m., a weird-ass phone call at my house that we’ve traced to a pay phone in Boston.”

  “Massachusetts?”

  “As in the Tea Party.”

  “I thought your number’s unlisted.”

  “It is.”

  Marino slides a folded piece of torn brown paper from the back pocket of his jeans and opens it.

  “I’m going to read you what the guy said, since I wrote it down word for word. He called himself Hog.”

  “As in pig? That kind of hog?” She studies him, halfway wondering if he’s leading her on, setting her up for ridicule.

  He’s been doing that a lot these days.

  “He just said, I am Hog. Thou didst send a judgment to mock them. Whatever the hell that means. Then he said, There’s a reason certain items were missing from the Johnny Swift scene, and if you have half a brain, you’ll take a good look at what happened to Christian Christian. Nothing is coincidence. You’d better ask Scarpetta, because the hand of God will crush all perverts, including her dyke bitch niece.”

  Scarpetta doesn’t let what she feels register in her voice when she replies. “Are you sure that’s exactly what he said?”

  “Do I look like a fiction writer?”

  “Christian Christian?”

  “Who the hell knows. The guy wasn’t exactly interested in me asking questions like how to spell something. He talked in a soft voice, like someone who feels nothing, kind of flat, then hung up.”

  “Did he actually mention Lucy by name or just—?”

  “I told you exactly what he said,” he cuts her off. “She’s your only niece, right? So obviously he meant Lucy. And HOG could stand for Hand of God, in case you haven’t connected those dots. Long story short, I contacted the Hollywood police and they’ve asked us to take a look at the Johnny Swift case ASAP. Apparently, t
here’s some other shit about the evidence showing he was shot from a distance and from close range. Well, it’s one or the other, right?”

  “If there was only one shot, yes. Something must be skewed with the interpretation. Do we have any idea who Christian Christian is? Are we even talking about a person?”

  “So far nothing in our computer searches that’s helpful.”

  “Why are you just telling me now? I’ve been around all weekend.”

  “Been busy.”

  “You get information about a case like this, you shouldn’t wait days to tell me,” she says as calmly as she can.

  “Maybe you’re not one to talk about withholding information.”

  “What information?” she asks, baffled.

  “You should be more careful. That’s all I got to say.”

  “It’s not helpful when you’re cryptic, Marino.”

  “I almost forgot. Hollywood’s curious about what Benton’s professional opinion might be,” he adds as if it is an afterthought, as if he doesn’t care.

  He typically does a poor job hiding how he feels about Benton Wesley.

  “Certainly they can ask him to evaluate the case,” she replies. “I can’t speak for him.”

  “They want him to figure out if the call I got from this wacko Hog was a crank, and I said that would be kind of hard when it’s not recorded, when all he’d get is my own version of shorthand scribbled on a paper bag.”