Trace ks-13 Read online

  "What do you mean, 'when she gets here'? I'm assuming she might be stuck here for a while."

  "She needs to call me."

  "Extreme caution?" Marino complains. "Shit, you would have to say something like that."

  "While she's there, you stay with her."

  "Huh."

  "Stay with her, am I clear?"

  "She won't like it," Marino says.

  Benton looks out at the harsh slopes of the snow-laced Rockies, at a beauty shaped by cruel, scouring winds and the brute force of glaciers. Aspens and evergreens are a stubble on the faces of mountains that surround this old mining town like a bowl, and to the east, beyond a ridge, a distant gray shroud of clouds is slowly spreading across the intense blue sky. Later today, it will snow again.

  "No, she never does," Benton says.

  "She said you got a case."

  "Yes." Benton can't discuss it.

  "Veil, it's too bad, being in Aspen and all, and you got a case and uo\ she does. So you'll just stay there and work your case, I guess."

  "For now I will," Benton says.

  "Must be something serious if you're on it during your vacation in Aspen," Marino fishes.

  "I can't get into it."

  "Huh. These damn phones," Marino says. "Lucy ought to invent something that can't be tapped into or picked up on a scanner. She could make a fortune."

  "I believe she's already made a fortune. Maybe several fortunes."

  "No kidding."

  "Take care," Benton says. "If I don't talk to you in the next few days, take care of her. Watch your back and hers, I mean it."

  "Tell me something I don't already do," Marino says. "Don't hurt yourself out there playing in the snow."

  Benton ends the call and returns to a couch that faces the windows near the fire. On the wormy chestnut coffee table is a legal pad filled with his almost indecipherable scrawl and near that is a Clock.40caliber pistol. Slipping a pair of reading glasses out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt, he settles against the armrest and begins flipping through the legal pad. Each lined page is numbered and in the upper right-hand corner is a date. Benton rubs his angular jaw, remembering that he hasn't shaved in two days, and his rough, graying beard reminds him of the bristly trees on the mountains. He circles the words "shared paranoia" and tilts his head up as he peers through the reading glasses on the tip of his straight, sharp nose.

  In the margin he scribbles, "Will seem to work when fills in gaps. Serious gaps. Can't last. L is real victim, not H. H is narcissist," and he underlines "narcissist" three times. He jots "histrionic" and underlines it twice, and he turns to a different page, this one with the heading "Post Offense Behavior," and he listens for the sound of running water, puzzled that he hasn't heard it yet. "Critical mass. Will reach no later than Xmas. Tension unbearable. Will kill by Xmas if not sooner," he writes, quietly looking up as he senses her before he hears her.

  "Who was that?" asks Henri, which is short for Henrietta. She stands on the stairway landing, her delicate hand resting on the railing. Henri Walden stares across the living room at him.

  "Good morning," Benton says. "You usually take a shower. There's coffee."

  Henri pulls a plain red flannel robe more tightly around her thin body, her green eyes sleepy and reticent as she takes in Benton, studying him as if a preexisting argument or encounter stands between them. She is twenty-eight and attractive in an off-tilt way. Her features aren't perfect, because her nose is strong and, according to her own warped beliefs, too big. Her teeth aren't perfect either, but right now nothing would convince her that she has a beautiful smile, that she is disturbingly alluring even when she doesn't try to be. Benton hasn't tried to convince her and won't. It is too dangerous.

  "I heard you talking to someone," she says. "Was it Lucy?"

  "No," he replies.

  "Oh," she says and disappointment tugs her lips and anger flashes in her eyes. "Oh. Well. Who was it then?"

  "It was a private conversation, Henri." He takes off his reading glasses. "We've talked a lot about boundaries. We've talked about them every day, haven't we?"

  "I know," she says from the landing, her hand on the railing. "If it wasn't Lucy, who was it? Was it her aunt? She talks too much about her aunt."

  "Her aunt doesn't know you're here, Henri," Benton says very patiently. "Only Lucy and Rudy know you're here."

  "I know about you and her aunt."

  "Only Lucy and Rudy know you're here," he repeats.

  "It was Rudy then. What did he want? I always knew he liked me." She smiles and the look on her face is peculiar and unsettling. "Rudy is gorgeous. I should have gotten with him. I could have. When we were out in the Ferrari I could have. I could have with anybody when I was in the Ferrari. Not that I need Lucy to have a Ferrari."

  "Boundaries, Henri," Benton says, and he refuses to accept the abysmal defeat that is a dark plain in front of him, nothing but darkness that has spread wider and deeper ever since Lucy flew Henri to Aspen and entrusted her to him.

  You won't hurt her, Lucy said to him at the time. Someone else will hurt her, take advantage of her, and find out things about me and what I do.

  I'm not a psychiatrist, Benton said.

  She needs a post-incident stress counselor, a forensic psychologist. That's what you do. You can do it. You can find out what happened. We have to know what happened, Lucy said, and she was beside herself. Lucy never panics, but she was panicking. She believes Benton can figure out anyone. Even if he could, that doesn't mean all people can be fixed. Henri is not a hostage. She could leave anytime. It profoundly unsettles him that she seems to have no interest in leaving, that she just might be enjoying herself.

  Benton has figured out a lot in the four days he has spent with Henri Walden. She is a character disorder and was a character disorder before the attempted murder. If it wasn't for the scene photographs and the fact that someone really was inside Lucy's house, Benton might believe there was no attempted murder. He worries that Henri's personality now is simply an exaggeration of what it was before the assault, and that realization is extremely disturbing to him and he can't imagine what Lucy was thinking when she met Henri. Lucy wasn't thinking, he decides. That's the likely answer.

  "Did Lucy let you drive her Ferrari?" he asks.

  "Not the black one."

  "What about the silver one, Henri?"

  "It's not silver. It's California blue. I drove it whenever I wanted." She looks at him from the landing, her hand on the railing, her long hair messy and her eyes sultry with sleep as if she is posing for a sexy photo shoot.

  "You drove it by yourself, Henri." He wants to make sure. A very important missing piece is how the perpetrator found Henri, and Benton does not believe the attack was random, the luck of the draw, a pretty young woman in the wrong mansion or in the wrong Ferrari at the wrong time.

  "I told you I did," Henri says, her face pale and lacking in expression. Only her eyes are alive and the energy in them is volatile and unsettling. "But she's selfish with the black one."

  "When was the last time you drove the California blue Ferrari?" Benton asks in the same mild, steady voice, and he has learned to get information when he can. It doesn't matter if Henri is sitting or walking or standing on the other side of the room with her hand on the railing, if something comes up, he tries to dislodge it from her before it is out of sight again. No matter what happened or happens to her, Benton wants to know who went inside Lucy's house and why. The hell with Henri, he is tempted to think. What he really cares about is Lucy.

  "I'm something in that car," Henri replies, her eyes bright and cold in her expressionless face.

  "And you drove it often, Henri."

  "Whenever I wanted." She stares at him.

  "Every day to the training camp?"

  "Whenever I damn well wanted." Her impassive pale face stares at him and anger shines in her eyes.

  "Can you remember the last time you drove it? When was that, Henri?"

>   "I don't know. Before I got sick."

  "Before you got the flu, and that was-when? About two weeks ago?"

  "I don't know." She has become resistant and will not say anything else about the Ferrari right now, and he doesn't push her because her denials and avoidance have their own truths to tell.

  Benton is quite adept at interpreting what isn't said, and she has just indicated that she drove the Ferrari whenever she pleased and was aware of the attention she attracted and enjoyed it because she has to be the eye of the storm. Even on her best days, Henri has to be the center of chaos and the creator of chaos, the star of her own crazy drama, and for this reason alone most police and forensic psychologists would conclude that she faked her own attempted murder and staged the crime scene, that the attack never happened. But it did. That's the irony, this bizarre, dangerous drama is real, and he worries about Lucy. He has always worried about Lucy, but now he is really worried.

  "Who were you talking to on the phone?" Henri gets back to that. "Rudy misses me. I should have gotten with him. I wasted so much time down there."

  "Let's start the day with a reminder of our boundaries, Henri," Benton patiently says the same thing he said yestetday morning and the morning before that, when he was making notes on the couch.

  "Okay," she replies from the landing. "Rudy called. That's who it was," she says.

  6

  ~V7~7"ater drums in sinks and x-rays are illuminated on every light box W as Scarpetta leans close to a gash that almost severed the dead tractor driver's nose from his face.

  "I'd do a STAT alcohol and CO on him," she says to Dr. Jack Fielding, who is on the other side of the stainless-steel gurney, the body between them.

  "You noticing something?" he asks.

  "I don't smell alcohol, and he's not cherry-pink. But just to be on the safe side. I'm telling you, cases like this are trouble, Jack."

  The dead man is still clothed in his olive green work pants, which are dusted with red clay and ripped open at the thighs. Fat and muscle and shattered bones protrude from split skin. The tractor ran over the middle of his body, but not while she was watching. It could have happened one minute, maybe five minutes, after she turned the corner, and she is certain that the man she saw was Mr. Whitby. She tries not to envision him alive but every other minute he is there in her mind, standing in front of the huge tractor tire, poking at the engine, doing something to the engine.

  "Hey," Fielding calls out to a young man whose head is shaved, probably a soldier from Fort Lee's Graves Registration Unit. "What's your name?"

  "The» "I "

  Bailey, sir.

  Scarpetta picks out several other young men and women in scrubs, shoe and hair covers, face masks and gloves who are probably interns from the Army and here to learn how to-handle dead bodies. She wonders if they are destined for Iraq. She sees the olive green of the Army and it is the same olive green of Mr. Whitby's ripped work pants.

  "Do the funeral home a favor, Bailey, and tie off the carotid," Fielding says gruffly, and when he worked for Scarpetta, he wasn't so unpleasant. He didn't boss people around and loudly find fault with them.

  The soldier is embarrassed, his muscular tattooed right arm frozen midair, his gloved fingers around a long crooked surgical needle threaded with #7 cotton twine. He is helping a morgue assistant suture up the Y incision of an autopsy that was begun prior to staff meeting, and it is the morgue assistant and not the soldier who should know about tying off the carotid. Scarpetta feels sorry for the soldier, and if Fielding still worked for her, she would have a word with him and he would not treat anyone rudely in her morgue.

  "Yes, sir," the soldier says with a stricken look on his young face. "Just getting ready to do that, sir."

  "Really?" Fielding asks, and everyone in the morgue can hear what he is saying to the poor young soldier. "You know why you tie off the carotid?"

  "No, sir."

  'It's polite, that's why," Fielding says. "You tie string around a major blood vessel such as the carotid so funeral home embalmers don't have to dig around for it. It's the polite thing to do, Bailey."

  Yes sir.

  "Jesus," Fielding says. "I put up with this every day because he lets everyone and their brother in here. You see him in here?" He resumes making notes on his clipboard. "Hell no. He's been here almost four damn months and hasn't done one autopsy. Oh. And in case you haven't figured it out, he likes to make people wait. His favorite thing. Obviously, nobody gave you the rundown on him. Excuse the pun." He indicates the dead man between them who managed to run himself down with a tractor. "If you'd called me, I'd have told you not to bother coming here."

  "I should have called you," she says, watching five people struggle to roll an enormous woman off a gurney onto a stainless-steel table. Bloody fluid trickles from her nose and mouth. "She's got a huge panniculus." Scarpetta refers to the fold or drape of fat that people as obese as the dead woman have over their bellies, and what Scarpetta is really saying to Fielding is that she won't engage in comments about Dr. Marcus when she is standing in his morgue and surrounded by his staff.

  "Well, it's my fucking case," Fielding says, and now he is talking about Dr. Marcus and Gilly Paulsson. "The asshole never even stepped foot in the morgue when her body came in, for Christ's sake, and everyone knew the case was going to cause a stink. His first big stink. Oh, don't give me one of your looks, Dr. Scarpetta." He never could stop calling her that, even though she encouraged him to call her Kay because they respected each other and she considered him a friend, but he wouldn't call her Kay when he worked for her and he still won't. "No one here is listening, not that I give a damn. You got dinner plans?"

  "With you, I hope." She helps him remove Mr. Whitby's muddy leather work boots, untying the filthy laces and pulling out the dirty cowhide tongues. Rigor mortis is in the very early stages, and he is still limber and warm.

  "How the hell do these guys run over themselves, can you tell me that?" Fielding says. "I never can figure it out. Good. My house at seven. I still live in the same place."

  "I'll tell you how they often do it," she says as she remembers Mr. Whitby standing in front of the tractor tire, doing something to the engine. "They're having some sort of mechanical problem and get off the seat and stand right in front of that huge back tire and fool with the starter, possibly trying to jump it with a screwdriver, forgetting the tractor's in gear. It's their bad luck it starts. In his case, running him over midsection." She points at the dirty tire tread pattern on Mr. Whitby's olive work pants and his black vinyl jacket that is embroidered with his name, The. Whitby, in thick red thread. "When I saw him, he was standing in front of the tire."

  "Yeah. Our old building. Welcome back to town."

  "Was he found under the tire?"

  "Went ririhr over him rmd kept «:oin«:." Fielding pulls off mud-stained socks that have left the impression of their weave on the man's large white feet. "Remember that big yellow painted metal pole sticking up from the pavement near the back door? The tractor ran into it and that's what stopped it, otherwise it might have busted right through the bay door. I guess it wouldn't matter since they're tearing the place down."

  "Then he's not likely to be an asphyxia. A diffuse crush injury the width of that tire," she says, looking at the body. "Exsanguination. Expect an abdominal cavity full of blood, ruptured spleen, liver, bladder, bowels, crushed pelvis, my guess. Seven o'clock it is."

  "What about your sidekick?"

  "Don't call him that. You know better."

  "He's invited. He looks pretty goofy in that LAPD cap."

  "I warned him."

  "What do you think cut his face? Something underneath or in back of the tractor?" Fielding asks, and blood trickles down the side of Mr. Whitby's stubbly face as Fielding touches the partially severed nose.

  "It may not be a cut. As the tire progressed over his body, it pulled his skin with it. This injury," she points at the deep, jagged wound over his cheeks and the bridge of his
nose, "may be a tear, not a cut. If it's really an issue, you should be able to see rust or grease under the scope, and significant tissue bridging from the shearing effect as opposed to cutting. One thing I would do if I were you, is answer all questions."

  "Oh yeah." Fielding glances up from his clipboard, from the clothing and personal effects form he is filling out with a ballpoint pen tied to the steel clamp.

  "A very good chance this man's family is going to want relief for their suffering," she says. "Death at the workplace, a notorious workplace."

  "Oh yeah. Of all places to die."

  Fielding's latex-gloved fingers are stained red as he touches the wound on the man's face, and warm blood drips freely as he manipulates the nearly severed nose. He flips up a page on the clipboard and begins to draw the injury on a body diagram. He leans close to the face, peering intensely through plastic safety glasses. "Don't see any rust or grease," he says. "But that doesn't mean it's not there."

  "Good idea." She agrees with the direction of his thoughts. "I'd swab it, get the labs to check it out, check everything. I wouldn't be surprised if someone says this man was run over or pushed off the tractor or in front of it, or was slammed in the face with a shovel first. You never know."

  "Oh yeah. Money, money, money."

  "Not just money," she replies. "Lawyers make it all about money. But at first, it's all about shock, pain, loss, about its being somebody else's fault. No family member wants to believe this was a stupid death, that it was preventable, that any experienced tractor driver knows better than to stand in front of a back tire and fool with the starter, bypassing the default safety of a normal ignition, which allows the tractor to start only in neutral, not in gear. But what do people do? They get too comfortable, are in a hurry and don't think. And it's human nature to deny the probability that someone we care about caused his or her own death, intentionally or inadvertently. But you've heard my lectures before."