Dust Read online

“I’m just fine but thanks for asking. Did he happen to mention why he was checking out earlier than planned? He was supposed to be there until this weekend, last I heard.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m looking. Checkout was scheduled for Saturday.”

  “Yes, three more days. Well, I’m puzzled. You don’t know why he suddenly left at midnight?” I’m rambling a bit, trying to work through what doesn’t make sense.

  “Mr. Wesley didn’t say. I’ve been reading about the cases around here his unit’s working, what little there is, the FBI being so hush-hush, which only makes it worse, you ask me, because I’d rather know what we’re dealing with. You know there are those of us who don’t wear guns and badges and travel in packs and we have to worry about even going to the mall or a movie. It would be nice to know what’s going on around here, and I got to tell you, Dr. Scarpetta, there are a lot of nervous people, a lot of people really scared including me. If I had my way, my wife wouldn’t leave the house anymore.”

  I thank him and extricate myself as politely as I can, contemplating the possibility that there’s been another awful case somewhere. Perhaps Benton has been deployed to a new location. But it’s not like him not to let me know. I check to see if he’s e-mailed me. He hasn’t.

  “He probably didn’t want to wake me up,” I say to my lazy old dog. “That’s one of the perks if you’re sick. You already feel bad enough and then people make you feel worse because they don’t want to bother you.”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I pass, pale in rumpled black silk pajamas, blond hair plastered to my head, blue eyes glassy. I’ve lost a few pounds and look haunted from dreams that seem a replay of a past I miss and don’t. I need a shower but it will have to wait.

  Opening dresser drawers, I find underwear, socks, black cargo pants, and a black long-sleeved shirt with the CFC crest embroidered in gold. I retrieve my Sig nine-millimeter from the bedside table and zip the pistol inside a quick-release fanny pack as I wonder, Why bother? Nobody cares what I wear to a muddy death scene. I don’t need a concealed weapon if Marino is picking me up.

  Even the smallest decision seems overwhelming, possibly because I haven’t had to make any important ones over recent days. Heat up chicken broth and refill Sock’s water bowl, feed him, don’t forget his glucosamine chondroitin. Drink fluids, as much as you can stand. Don’t touch the cases on the floor by the bed, the autopsy and lab reports awaiting your review and initialing, not when you have a fever. And of course I’ve done a lot of online shopping with so much time to drift in and out of thoughts and dreams and spend money on all the people I want to make happy and am grateful for, even if they disappoint me like my mother and my sister Dorothy and maybe Marino, too.

  Confined to the bedroom, with Benton some 450 miles south of here, and it’s a good thing I’ve reminded myself until I almost believe it. Most physicians really are bad patients and I might be the worst. When I got home from Connecticut he wanted to leave Washington, D.C., right then and I knew that wasn’t what he should do. He was trying to be a good husband. He said he’d catch the next flight but I wouldn’t hear of it. When he’s in pursuit of a predator there’s no room for anything else, not even me. It doesn’t matter what I’m going through and I told him no.

  “I’m not dying but other people are.” I was adamant on the phone with him. “I’ve seen enough death. I just saw more of it than anyone ever should. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people.”

  “I’m coming home. A few days early and it’s not going to matter. You can trust me on that. Things are bad here, Kay.”

  “A mother has a son with severe developmental problems so she teaches him how to use a damn Bushmaster assault rifle, for God’s sake?”

  “You need me with you and I need to come home.”

  “Then maybe he can massacre an entire elementary school so he feels powerful for a moment before he takes his own life.”

  “I can understand how angry you must feel.”

  “Anger doesn’t do any damn good at all.”

  “I’ll catch a plane or Lucy can pick me up.”

  I told him that the top priority was for him and his colleagues at the BAU to catch a killer the media has dubbed the Capital Murderer. “Stop the infamia bastardo before he kills someone else,” I said. “I’m okay. I can manage. I have the flu, Benton.” I brushed it off. “I won’t be pleasant to be around and I don’t want you or anyone else catching what I’ve got. Don’t come home.”

  “It’s not going well here, from bad to worse,” he said. “I’m worried he’s gone somewhere else and is killing again or will be soon, and everyone at the BAU disagrees with me about everything.”

  “You’re still convinced he’s not local to the D.C. area.”

  “I believe he’s in and out, which would explain why there were no murders between April and Thanksgiving. Seven months of silence and then two in a row. This is someone intimately familiar with certain geographic areas because he has a job that requires travel.”

  What he’s told me makes sense but what doesn’t is why he’s being ignored. Benton has always gotten the respect he deserves but not now in the Washington cases, and I know he’s fed up and aggravated as hell but what he can’t do is worry about me. I know he’s had his fill of sitting around with a group of criminal investigative analysts, what people still call profilers, and listening to theories and psychological interpretations that are being run from Boston and not the BAU. Ed Granby has his fingerprints all over this case and that’s the biggest problem, and Benton needs to deal with all that and not his wife.

  Sock follows me into the bathroom and I squint in the overhead light, old subway tile shiny and bright. White bath sheets folded on top of a hamper near the tub remind me of the dead body wrapped in white at MIT.

  Then I think again about the victims in Washington, D.C., and my review of their cases last month after two more women were murdered one week apart. I deliberate whether I should e-mail the MIT photograph to Benton but it’s not for me to do. It’s for Marino to do and it’s premature, and it’s also not up to me to divulge details to him about Benton’s cases. In fact, I can’t possibly.

  I wash my face, freshening up, as I remind myself what he said about repetitive behavior that goes beyond the killing, the bags, the duct tape, each victim wearing the previous victim’s underwear except in the first case, Klara Hembree. She was originally from Cambridge and that’s bothering me, too.

  In the midst of an acrimonious divorce from her wealthy real estate developer husband, she moved to D.C. last spring to be near her family and barely a month later was abducted and dead. DNA on the panties she was wearing came back to an unknown female of European descent, and Benton feels strongly this indicates there are other victims.

  But there’s no opportunity for cases to be compared or connected because the FBI has been miserly about releasing information. Nothing about the bags or the duct tape has made it into the news. There’s not even been a mention of the white cloths or sheets, certainly not about the bags, clear plastic with the hologram of an octopus, an iridescent oblong head and tentacles that shimmer in rainbow hues depending on the angle of light.

  Klara Hembree was murdered last April, and then this past month before Thanksgiving there were two more – Sally Carson, a professor, and Julianne Goulet, a concert pianist. Each of the women, like the first one, is believed to have been suffocated with a plastic bag from the D.C. spa store called Octopus that was burglarized about a year ago, cases of the customized bags and other inventory stolen from the loading dock. Benton is certain the killer is escalating out of control but the FBI’s not listening to him or his repeated suggestion that certain details of the crimes should be released publicly.

  Maybe some police department somewhere has had a similar crime but Benton’s argument continues to be overruled by his boss Ed Granby. He’s ordered that there can be absolutely no sharing of investigative information about former Cambridge resident Klara Hembre
e and that means there can’t be information released about the other two recent cases. Details will get leaked and might inspire a copycat and Granby’s not going to budge from that opinion. While he’s got a valid point, he’s ground the investigation to a halt, according to Benton.

  Since Granby took over the Boston division last summer Benton has felt increasingly ostracized and marginalized, and I’ve continued to remind him that some people are jealous, controlling, and competitive. It’s an ugly fact of life. By now the two of them cordially despise each other and this is probably a hidden reason why my husband wanted to come home. It wasn’t just about my being sick or that his birthday is tomorrow or that the holidays are here. He was extremely unhappy when I talked to him last and I’ve been halfway expecting him any minute, or that might be wishful thinking. He left for D.C. almost a month ago and I miss him terribly.

  I walk back into the bedroom with Sock on my heels, and Marino’s just going to have to wait a minute or two longer. Retrieving my iPad from the bed, I log on to my office database and find what Benton scanned to me last month, quickly scrolling through the files. The three homicides play out in my mind as if they’re happening before my eyes and the details are just as perplexing as when I first looked at them. I envision what I’ve envisioned before, reconstructing the way I know biology works or doesn’t, and I watch them die as I’ve watched them die before. I see it.

  A woman with a clear plastic bag over her head and duct tape around her neck, a designer duct tape with a black lacy pattern, and clear plastic rapidly sucks in and out, her eyes panicked as her face turns a deep blue-red. Pressure builds, causing a light scattering of petechial hemorrhages across the cheeks and eyelids, tiny pinpricks blooming bright red as vessels rupture. Fighting to stay alive but restrained somehow and then all goes silent and still, and the final act, a bow fashioned from the same designer duct tape is attached under her chin, the killer wrapping his gift to inhumanity.

  Yet the physical findings don’t add up to what I would expect. They tell a truth that seems a lie. The victims would have struggled violently. They would have frantically fought to breathe when they were being suffocated but there’s no evidence they did. As Benton put it, they seemed to comply as if they wanted to die and I know damn well they didn’t.

  These aren’t suicides. They’re sadistic murders and I believe the killer is restraining them, possibly with a ligature that leaves no mark. But I can’t figure out what that might be. Even the softest material will leave a bruise or abrasion if someone is tightly bound with it and panics and fights. I can’t fathom why the duct tape left no injury. How do you suffocate someone and leave virtually no sign of it?

  Each body was found in a northern Virginia or southern Maryland public park, and I continue to quickly skim through what Benton sent to me the end of November, knowing I’ve got to hurry up and I can’t tell Marino what’s on my mind. Three different parks, two with a lake, another with a golf course, all of them very close to railroad tracks and within twenty miles of Washington, D.C. In the scene photographs the victims were clad only in panties that were identified as belonging to a previous victim except in the case of the former Cambridge resident Klara Hembree. A DNA profile recovered from the panties she had on is the unknown female of European descent – in other words, white.

  I click through photographs of dead faces staring through plastic bags from the bath and body boutique called Octopus near Lafayette Square, mere blocks from the White House. There’s no evidence of sexual assault, nothing significant recovered from the bodies except two types of Lycra fibers, one blue-dyed and the other white. The morphology of the fibers in each of the three cases is slightly different. It’s been speculated they might be from athletic clothing the killer wears or possibly from furniture upholstery in his residence.

  I sit down on the sofa to dress, conserving strength, before venturing out to MIT’s playing fields where I will examine a dead human being whose truth must be coaxed and cut out of her, as I have done thousands of times in my career. Sock jumps up and rests his grizzled muzzle on my lap. I stroke his head and velvety long snout, careful with his ears, tattered and scarred from his former cruel life at the racetrack.

  “You need to get up,” I tell him. “I have to take you out, then I’ve got work to do. I don’t want you to get into a state about it. Promise?” I reassure him our housekeeper Rosa will be here soon and will keep him company. “Come on. Then you’ll eat breakfast and take a nap. I’ll be home before you know it.”

  I hope dogs don’t know when we lie. Rosa won’t be here soon and I won’t be home before Sock knows it. It’s very early and will be a very long day. The message alert dings on my phone.

  “You coming or what?” Marino texts me.

  “Ready,” I reply.

  I clip the fanny pack’s nylon strap around my waist, tightening it as I move a curtain aside.

  5

  Veils of rain billow past streetlights in front of our Federal-style antique home in central Cambridge, close to Harvard’s Divinity School and the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  I watch Marino climb out of an SUV that doesn’t belong to him personally. The Ford Explorer is black or dark blue, parked in my puddled driveway, the old brick boiling with heavy rain. He opens a passenger door, unaware that I’m staring down at him from a second-floor window, oblivious to what I feel when I see him, indifferent to how anything might affect me.

  He never announced his news and of course he didn’t need to because I already knew. The Cambridge Police Department wouldn’t have cared about his petition for exemption, and no number of glowing advisory letters was going to matter if I didn’t personally recommend him for a lateral transfer into their investigative unit. I got him his damn new job. That’s the truth of it and the irony.

  I lobbied on his behalf to the Cambridge police commissioner and the local district attorney, telling them with authority that Marino is the perfect candidate. With his vast experience and training he shouldn’t be obliged to go through the academy with rookies, and the hell with age limitations. He’s gold, a treasure. I made my case for him because I want him to be happy. I don’t want him to resent me anymore. I don’t want him to blame me.

  I feel a twinge of sadness and anger as he unlatches the dog crate in the backseat to let out his German shepherd, a rescue he named Quincy. He snaps a leash on the harness and I hear the muffled thud of the car door shutting in the hard rain. Through the bare branches of the big oak tree on the other side of the glass I watch this man I’ve known most of my professional life lead his dog, still a puppy, to shrubbery.

  They follow the brick walk, and motion-sensor lights blink on as if saluting Cambridge police detective Pete Marino’s approach. His large stature is exaggerated by the shadow he casts, on the front porch steps now in the glow of old iron gas lamps. Sock’s nails click on the hardwood floor, following me to the stairs.

  “My opinion is it won’t work out the way he thinks,” I continue talking to a dog as silent as a mime. “He’s doing it for the wrong reason.”

  Of course Marino doesn’t see it. He has it in his head that he left policing ten years ago because it was my idea and completely against his will. Were he asked “Is your every disappointment Kay Scarpetta’s fault?” he’d say yes and pass a polygraph.

  I turn on lights that fill the French stained-glass windows over the landings, wildlife scenes in rich, brilliant hues.

  In the entryway I disarm the alarm system and open the front door, and Marino looms large on the front porch mat, his dog all legs and paws tugging desperately to give Sock and me a playful, sloppy hello.

  “Come in. I’ve got to let Sock out and feed him.” In the entryway closet I begin collecting my gear.

  “You look like hell.” Marino pushes back the hood of his dripping rain slicker, his dog wearing a working vest, in training on one side and do not pet on the other in big white letters.

  I drag out my field case, a large, heavy-duty plas
tic toolbox I picked up for a bargain like a lot of medicolegal necessities I find at Walmart, Home Depot, wherever I can. There’s no point in paying hundreds of dollars for a surgical chisel or rib cutters if I can pick up tools for a song that do the job just fine.

  “I don’t want to get your floor wet.” Marino watches me from the porch, staring the same unblinking stare as he did in my dream.

  “Don’t worry about it. Rosa’s coming. The place is a mess. I haven’t even gotten a tree yet.”

  “Looks like Scrooge lives here.”

  “Maybe he does. Come in out of the weather.”

  “It’s supposed to clear off pretty soon.” Marino wipes his feet on the mat, his leather boots thudding and scraping.

  I sit down on the rug as he steps inside and shuts the door. Quincy pulls toward me, his tail wagging furiously, loudly thumping the umbrella stand. Marino the dog handler, or what Lucy calls “the dog chauffeur,” chokes up on the lead and commands Quincy to sit. He doesn’t.

  “Sit,” Marino repeats firmly. “Down,” he adds hopelessly.

  “What else do we know about this case beyond what you described to me on the phone?” Sock is in my lap, trembling because he knows I’m leaving. “Anything further about Gail Shipton, if that’s who we’re dealing with?”

  “There’s an alley in back of the bar with a small parking area, deserted, some of the lights burned out,” Marino describes. “Obviously it’s where she went to use her phone. I located it and a shoe that are hers.”

  “Are we sure they’re hers?” I begin putting on ankle-high boots, black nylon, insulated and waterproof.

  “The phone definitely.” He digs in a pocket for a biscuit, breaks off a piece, and Quincy sits in what I call his lunging position. Ready to pounce.

  “What about those treats I gave you? Sweet-potato ones, a case of them.”

  “I ran out.”

  “Then you’re giving him too many.”