Predator Read online

  They watch Basil Jenrette. They watch him sleep, shower, eat. They watch him use the steel toilet. They watch him turn his back to the closed-circuit camera and relieve his sexual tension beneath the sheets of his narrow steel bed.

  He imagines them laughing at him. He imagines what they say inside the control room as they watch him on the monitors. They make fun of him to the other guards. He can tell by the smirks on their faces when they bring him his meals or let him out so he can exercise or make a phone call. Sometimes they make comments. Sometimes they show up outside his cell just as he is relieving his sexual tension, and they imitate the noise and laugh and bang on the door.

  Basil sits on his bed, looking up at the camera mounted high on the opposite wall. He flips through this month’s copy of Field&Stream as he thinks back to the first time he met with Benton Wesley and made the mistake of answering one of his questions honestly.

  Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?

  I’ve already hurt others so I guess that means I think about it, Basil said.

  What thoughts do you have, Basil? Can you describe what you envision when you think about hurting other people and yourself?

  I think of doing what I used to. Seeing a woman and getting the urge. Getting her into my police car and pulling out my gun and maybe my badge and telling her I’m arresting her, and if she resists arrest, so much as touches the door, I’ll have no choice but to shoot her. They all cooperated.

  None of them resisted you.

  Just the last two. Because of car trouble. It’s so stupid.

  The others, before the last two, did they believe you were the police and you were arresting them?

  They believed I was a cop. But they knew what was happening. I wanted them to know. I’d get hard. I’d show them I was hard, make them put their hand on it. They were going to die. It’s so stupid.

  What’s stupid, Basil?

  So stupid. I’ve said it a thousand times. You’ve heard me say it, right? Wouldn’t you rather I shoot you right then in my car or get you off somewhere so I can take my time with you? Why would you let me get you to some secret place and tie you up?

  Tell me how you would tie them up, Basil. Always the same way?

  Yeah. I have a really cool method. It’s absolutely unique. I invented it when I started making my arrests.

  By arrests you mean abducting and assaulting women.

  When I first started, yeah.

  Basil smiles as he sits on his bed, remembering the thrill of twisting wire coat hangers around their ankles and wrists and threading rope through them so he could string them up.

  They were my puppets, he explained to Dr. Wesley during that first interview, wondering what it would take to get a reaction out of him.

  No matter what Basil said, Dr. Wesley kept his steady gaze, listening, not letting anything he felt register on his face. Maybe he didn’t feel anything. Maybe he’s like Basil.

  See, in this place I had, there were exposed rafters where the ceiling had come down, especially in this one room in the back. I would throw the ropes over the rafters, and I could tighten or loosen them however I wanted, give them a long leash or a short one.

  And they never resisted, even when they realized what was in store for them when you got them into this building? What was it? A house?

  I don’t remember.

  Did they resist, Basil? Seems as if it might have been difficult to restrain them in such an elaborate fashion while you’re still holding them at gunpoint.

  I’ve always had this fantasy of having someone watch. Basil didn’t answer the question. Then having sex after it was over. Having sex for hours with the body right there on the same mattress.

  Sex with the dead body or sex with another person?

  I was never into that. That’s not for me. I like to hear them. I mean, it had to hurt like hell. Sometimes their shoulders got dislocated. Then I’d give them enough slack to use the bathroom. That was the part I didn’t like. Emptying the bucket.

  What about their eyes, Basil?

  Well, let’s see. No pun intended.

  Dr. Wesley didn’t laugh, and that annoyed Basil a little.

  I’d let them dance around at the end of their rope, no pun intended. Don’t you ever smile? I mean, come on, some of this is funny.

  I’m listening to you, Basil. I’m listening to every word you say.

  That was good, at least. And he was. Dr. Wesley was listening and thought every word was important and fascinating, thought Basil was the most interesting, original person he had ever interviewed.

  As soon as I was going to have sex with them, he continued, that’s when I’d do their eyes. You know, if I’d been born with a decent-sized dick, none of this would have been necessary.

  They were conscious when you blinded them.

  If I could have given them some gas and knocked them out while I was performing the surgery, I would have. I didn’t particularly like them screaming and jerking all over the place. But I couldn’t have sex with them until they were blind. I explained it to them. I’d say, I’m really sorry I got to do this to you, okay? I’ll be as quick as I can. It’s going to hurt a little.

  Isn’t that funny? It’s going to hurt a little. Every time somebody says that to me, I know it’s going to hurt like a bitch. Then I’d tell them I was going to untie them so we could have sex. I said if they tried to get away or do anything stupid, I was going to do even worse things to them than I already did. That’s it. We had sex.

  How long would this go on?

  You mean the sex?

  How long did you keep them alive and have sex with them?

  Depended. If I liked having sex with them, sometimes I’d keep them around for days. I think the longest time was ten days. But that didn’t turn out to be a good thing because she got infected real bad and it was disgusting.

  Did you do anything else to them? Anything besides blinding them and having sex?

  I experimented. Some.

  Did you ever engage in torture?

  I’d say stabbing somebody’s eyes out…well, Basil replied, and now he wishes he hadn’t said it.

  It opened a whole new line of questioning. Dr. Wesley started in on knowing right from wrong and comprehending the suffering Basil was causing another human being, that if he knew something was torture, then he was cognizant of what he was doing at the time he was doing it and also upon reflection. That’s not exactly the way he said it, but that’s what he was getting at. Just the same old song and dance he heard in Gainesville when the shrinks were trying to figure out if he was competent to stand trial. He never should have let them know he was. That was stupid, too. A forensic psychiatric hospital is a five-star hotel compared to prison, especially if you’re on death row, sitting around in your tiny, claustrophobic cell feeling like Bozo the clown in your blue-and-white-striped pants and orange T-shirt.

  Basil gets up from his steel bed and stretches. He pretends he’s not interested in the camera high up on the wall. He never should have admitted that sometimes he fantasized about killing himself, that his preferred way would be to cut his wrists and watch himself bleed, drip, drip, drip, watch the puddle form on the floor, because it would remind him of his former pleasant preoccupations with how many women? He’s lost count. It might have been eight. He told Dr. Wesley eight. Or was it ten?

  He stretches some more. He uses the steel toilet and returns to the bed. He opens the most recent Field & Stream, looks at page 52, at what’s supposed to be a column about a hunter’s first .22 rifle and happy memories of rabbit and possum hunting, of fishing in Missouri.

  This page 52 isn’t the real one. The real page 52 was torn out and scanned into a computer. Then, in an identical font and identical format, a letter was embedded into the magazine’s text. The scanned page 52 was carefully reinserted into the magazine, a little glue used, and what looks like a chatty column on hunting and fishing is a clandestine communication intended for Basil.

  Th
e guards don’t care about inmates getting fishing magazines. They aren’t likely to even flip through them, not boring magazines that are completely devoid of sex and violence.

  Basil gets under the covers, turning on his left side diagonally on the bed, his back to the camera, just like he always does when he needs to relieve his sexual tension. He reaches under the thin mattress and pulls out strips of white cotton from two pairs of white boxer shorts that he has been ripping up all week.

  Under the sheets, he begins a tear with his teeth, then rips. Each strip gets tightly tied to what has become a six-foot-long knotted rope. He has enough fabric left for two more strips. He tears with his teeth and rips. He breathes heavily and rocks himself a little as if relieving his sexual tension, and he rips and he ties a strip to the rope, and then he ties on the last one.

  62

  Inside the Academy’s computer center, Lucy sits before three large video screens, reading e-mails as she restores them to the server.

  What she and Marino have discovered so far is that before he began his fellowship, Joe Amos was communicating with a television producer who claimed to be interested in developing yet another forensic show for one of the cable networks. For his input, Joe was promised five thousand dollars per episode, assuming the shows ever make it on the air. Apparently, Joe started getting brilliant ideas in late January, about the time Lucy got sick while testing new avionics in one of her helicopters, fled to the ladies’ room and forgot her Treo. At first he was subtle about it, plagiarizing hell scenes. Then he became blatant, outright stealing them as he went into databases to his heart’s content.

  Lucy restores another e-mail, this one dated February 10, a year ago. It is from last summer’s intern, Jan Hamilton, who got the needle stick and threatened to sue the Academy.

  Dear Dr. Amos,

  I heard you on Dr. Self’s radio show the other night and was fascinated by what you had to say about the National Forensic Academy. Sounds like an amazing place, and by the way, congratulations on being awarded a fellowship. That’s incredibly impressive. I wonder if you could help me get an internship there for the summer. I am studying nuclear biology and genetics at Harvard and want to be a forensic scientist, specializing in DNA. I’m attaching a file that has my photograph and other personal information.

  Jan Hamilton.

  P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.

  “Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.

  Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles and whatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.

  Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.

  “What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.

  “Body Farm,” Marino says.

  She finds the video file and opens it.

  They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.

  The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling—yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.

  Stevie.

  Lucy tries to reach Benton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, and Dr. Susan Lane answers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.

  “I’m e-mailing a video clip to you,” Lucy says. “About three years ago, you scanned a young female patient named Helen Quincy. I’m wondering if it might be the same person in the video clip.”

  “Lucy, I’m not supposed to.”

  “I know, I know. Please. It’s really important.”

  WONK…WONK…WONK…WONK…

  Dr. Lane has Kenny Jumper in the magnet. She is in the middle of his structural MRI, and the lab is full of the usual racket.

  “Can you go into the database?” Dr. Lane asks her research assistant. “See if we might have scanned a patient named Helen Quincy. Possibly three years ago? Josh, keep going,” she says to the MRI tech. “Can you stand it without me for a minute?”

  “I’ll try.” He smiles.

  Beth, the research assistant, is typing on the keyboard of a computer on the back counter. It doesn’t take her long to find Helen Quincy. Dr. Lane has Lucy on the phone.

  “Do you have a photograph of her?” Lucy asks.

  WOP WOP WOP WOP. The sound of the gradients acquiring images reminds Dr. Lane of the sonar in a submarine.

  “Only of her brain. We don’t photograph patients.”

  “Have you looked at the video clip I just e-mailed to you? Maybe it will mean something.”

  Lucy sounds frustrated, disappointed.

  TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP…

  “Hold on. But I don’t know what you think I can do with it,” Dr. Lane says.

  “Maybe you remember her when she was there? You were working there three years ago. You or someone scanned her. Johnny Swift was doing a fellowship there at the same time. May have seen her, too. Reviewed her scans.”

  Dr. Lane isn’t sure she understands.

  “Maybe you scanned her,” Lucy persists. “Maybe you saw her three years ago, might remember her if you saw a picture….”

  Dr. Lane wouldn’t remember. She’s seen so many patients, and three years is a long time.

  “Hold on,” she says again.

  BAWN…BAWN…BAWN…BAWN…

  She moves to a computer terminal and goes into her e-mail without sitting down. She opens the file of the video clip and plays it several times, watches a pretty young woman with dark blond hair and dark eyes looking up from the dead body of an enormously fat man whose face is covered with maggots.

  “Good Lord,” Dr. Lane says.

  The pretty young woman in the video clip looks around, right into the camera, her eyes looking right at Dr. Lane, and the pretty young woman digs her gloved hand in the pocket of the fat, dead man’s gray jacket. There the clip stops, and Dr. Lane plays it again, realizing something.

  She looks through the Plexiglas at Kenny Jumper and can barely see his head at the other end of the magnet. He is small and slender in baggy, dark clothes, ill-fitting boots, sort of homeless-looking but delicately handsome with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes are dark, and Dr. Lane’s realization gets stronger. He looks so much like the girl in the photograph, they could be brother and sister, maybe twins.

  “Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”

  “On him?”

  “Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.

  63

  Benton finds it a little curious that a taxicab is parked outside the neuroimaging lab. It is a blue SUV taxi, and no one is inside it. Maybe it is the taxi that was supposed to pick up Kenny Jumper at the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home, but why is the taxi parked here, and where is the driver? Near the taxi is the white prison van that transported Basil here for his five o’clock interview. He’s not doing well. He says he’s feeling very suicidal and wants to quit the study.

  “We have so much invested in him,” Benton says to Scarpetta as they walk inside the lab. “You have no idea how bad it is when these people drop out. Especially him. Dammit. Maybe you can be a
good influence on him.”

  “I’m not even going to comment,” she says.

  Two prison guards stand outside the small room where Benton will talk to Basil, try to talk him out of quitting PREDATOR, talk him out of killing himself. The room is part of the MRI suite, the same room Ben ton has used before when he talks to Basil. Scarpetta is reminded that the guards aren’t armed.

  She and Benton walk into the interview room. Basil is sitting at the small table. He isn’t restrained, not even with plastic flex-cuffs. She likes PREDATOR even less and she didn’t think that was possible.

  “This is Dr. Scarpetta,” Benton says to Basil. “She’s part of the research study team. Do you mind if she sits in?”

  “That would be nice,” Basil says.

  His eyes seem to spin. They are eerie. They seem to spin as they look at her.

  “So tell me what’s going on with you,” Benton says as he and Scarpetta sit down at the table.

  “You two are close,” Basil says, looking at her. “I don’t blame you,” he says to Benton. “I tried to drown myself in the toilet and you know what’s funny about that? They didn’t even notice. Isn’t that something. They have this camera spying on me all the time and when I try to kill myself no one sees it.”

  He is wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a white shirt. He doesn’t have a belt. He has no jewelry. He isn’t at all what Scarpetta imagined. She thought he would be bigger. He is small and insignificant-looking, slightly built, thinning blond hair, not ugly, just insignificant. She supposes that when he approached his victims, they probably felt the way she does, at least at first. He was nothing, just some nobody with a bland smile. The only thing about him that stands out are his eyes. Right now, they are strange and unsettling.

  “Might I ask you a question?” Basil says to her.

  “Go ahead.” She isn’t particularly nice to him.

  “If I met you on the street and told you to get into my car or I would shoot you, what would you do?”