Predator ks-14 Page 6

  “You can ask Jenny yourself after class,” Scarpetta says as she tries to figure out why the scenario seems familiar.

  Joe is obsessed with hell scenes, an innovation of Marino’s, extreme mock crime scenes that are supposed to mirror the real risks and unpleasantries of real death. She sometimes thinks Joe should give up forensic pathology and sell his soul toHollywood. If he has a soul. The scenario he has just proposed reminds her of something.

  “Pretty good, huh?” he says. “It could happen in real life.”

  Then she remembers. It did happen in real life.

  “We had a case inVirginialike that,” she recalls. “When I was chief.”

  “Really?” he says, amazed. “Guess there’s nothing new under the sun.”

  “And by the way, Joe,” she says. “In most cases of seppuku, of hari-kari, the cause of death is cardiac arrest due to sudden cardiac collapse due to a sudden drop in intra-abdominal pressure due to sudden evisceration. Not exsanguination.”

  “Your case? The one in there?” He indicates the classroom.

  “Marino’s and mine. From years back. And one other thing,” she adds. “It’s a suicide, not a homicide.”

  12

  The Citation Xflies south at just under mach one as Lucy uploads files on a virtual private network that is so firewall-protected not even Homeland Security can break in.

  At least, she believes her information infrastructure is secure. She believes that no hacker, including the government, can monitor the transmissions of classified data generated by the Heterogenous Image Transaction database management system that goes by the acronym HIT. She developed and programmed HIT herself. The government doesn’t know about it, she is sure of it. Few people do, she is sure of it. HIT is proprietary, and she could sell the software easily, but she doesn’t need the money, having made her fortune years ago from other software development, mostly from some of the same search engines she is conducting through cyberspace this minute, looking for any violent deaths that might have occurred in aSouth Floridabusiness of any description.

  Other than homicides in the expected convenience and liquor stores, massage parlors and topless clubs, she has found no violent crime, unsolved or otherwise, that might verify what Basil Jenrette toldBenton. However, there once was a business called The Christmas Shop. It was located at the intersection of A1A and East Las Olas Boulevard, along a strip of tacky touristy boutiques and cafes and ice-cream joints on the beach. Two years ago, The Christmas Shop was sold to a chain called Beach Bums that specializes in T-shirts, swimwear and souvenirs.

  It is hard for Joe to believe how many cases Scarpetta has worked in what is a relatively brief career. Forensic pathologists rarely land their first job until they are thirty, assuming their arduous educational track is continuous. Added to her six years of postgraduate medical training were three more for law school. By the time she was thirty-five, she was the chief of the most prominent medical examiner system in theUnited States. Unlike most chiefs, she wasn’t just an administrator. She did autopsies, thousands of them.

  Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence-sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence-all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.

  Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In the real case, the trigger-happy daughter is facedown in a pool of blood on the living-room floor. She was shot three times, once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and he thinks about the way she was dressed when she killed her daddy while he was on the toilet and then put on an act in front of the police before pulling out her pistol again. She died barefoot, in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing panties or a bra. He clicks to her autopsy photographs, not as interested in what she looked like with a Y incision as in how she looked naked on the cold, steel table. She was only fifteen when the police shot her dead, and he thinks of Jenny.

  He looks up, smiles at her from the other side of his desk. She has been sitting patiently, waiting for instructions. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a Glock nine-millimeter, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, drops out the magazine and pushes the pistol across the desk to her.

  “You ever shot a gun before?” he asks his newest teacher’s pet.

  She has the cutest turned-up nose and huge eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he imagines her naked and dead like the girl in the scene photograph on his screen.

  “I grew up with guns,” she says. “What’s that you’re looking at, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “E-mail,” he says, and not telling the truth has never bothered him.

  He rather likes not telling the truth, likes it far more than dislikes it. Truth isn’t always truth. What is true? What is true is what he decides is true. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Jenny cranes her head to get a better look at what’s on his screen.

  “Cool. People e-mail entire case files to you.”

  “Sometimes,” he says, clicking to a different photograph, and the color printer behind his desk starts up. “What we’re doing is classified,” he then says. “Can I trust you?”

  “Of course, Dr. Amos. I completely understand classified. If I didn’t, I’m training for the wrong profession.”

  A color photograph of the dead girl in a pool of blood on the living-room floor slides into the printer tray. Joe turns around to get it, looks it over, hands it to her.

  “That’s going to be you this afternoon,” he says.

  “I hope not literally,” she teases.

  “And this is your gun.” He looks at the Glock in front of her on the desk. “Where do you propose you hide it?”

  She looks at the photograph, not fazed by it, and asks, “Where did she hide it?”

  “You can’t see it in the photograph,” he replies. “A pocketbook, which, by the way, should have cued somebody. She finds her father dead, supposedly, calls nine-one-one, opens the door when the cops get there and has her pocketbook. She’s hysterical, never left the house, so why’s she walking around with her pocketbook?”

  “That’s what you want me to do.”

  “The pistol goes in your pocketbook. At some point, you reach in for tissues because you’re boo-hooing, and you pull the gun and start shooting.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Then you’re going to get killed. Try to look pretty.”

  She smiles. “Anything else?”

  “The way she’s dressed.” He looks at her, tries to show it in his eyes, what he wants.

  She knows.

  “I don’t have the exact same thing,” she replies, playing him a little, acting naive.

  She’s anything but, probably been fucking since kindergarten.

  “Well, Jenny, see if you can approximate. Shorts, T-shirt, no shoes or socks.”

  “She doesn’t have on underwear, looks to me.”

  “Then there’s that.”

  “She looks like a slut.”

  “Okay. Then look like a slut,” he says.

  Jenny thinks this is very funny.

  “I mean, you are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”

  “You don’t need someone else.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Really,” she says.

  She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.

  “We could get in trouble,” she says.

  “We won’t.”

  “I don’t want to get kicked out,” she
says.

  “You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”

  She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.

  “I’m a grown-up,” she says.

  “You’re fromTexas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big inTexas, don’t they.”

  “Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.

  He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their corkboards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.

  “You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”

  “You’re also engaged.”

  “She’s at a conference inChicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”

  Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.

  “Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.

  “You’re special,” he says.

  13

  An hour out from Signature Aviation inFort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.

  She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries ofBrowardCountytax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper fromWest Palm Beach.

  Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in The Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up inChicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.

  “Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country ofAlberta,Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”

  Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy…

  Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.

  She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.

  “I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.

  “When you going to learn to fly that thing?”

  “Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”

  She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.

  “I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

  “I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

  “From who?” he says suspiciously.

  “Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

  She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR.Bentondoesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.

  “Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.

  Marino knows thatMcLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.

  “The what?” Marino asks.

  She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”

  “Trees or kids?”

  “Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”

  Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail toBenton.

  “Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”

  “You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.

  “Hello? Is this better? Marino?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”

  “So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.

  “Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”

  “TheFort Lauderdalecops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”

  “Let’s find out what it is,” she says.

  At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.

  “It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”

  “Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”

  “Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.

  There m
ust be a mistake.

  “Yes, today.”

  “That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”

  “Well, someone did.”

  “Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.

  “The flight’s full. I can waitlist you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”

  Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.

  “Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”

  “Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”

  “I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking aboutBenton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.

  14

  The yellow moonis misshapen like an overripe mango, hanging heavy over scrubby trees and weeds and dense shadows. In the uneven light of the moon, Hog can see well enough to make out the thing.

  He sees it coming because he knows where to look. For several minutes, he has detected its infrared energy in the Heat Stalker he moves horizontally in the dark in a slow scan, like a wand, like a magic wand. A line of bright-red hatch marks marches across the rear LED window of the lightweight olive-green PVC tube as it detects differences in the surface temperatures of the warm-blooded thing and the earth.

  He is Hog, and his body is a thing, and he can leave it on demand and no one can see him. No one can see him now in the middle of the empty night holding the Heat Stalker like a leveler while it detects warmth radiating from living flesh and alerts him with small bright-red marks that flow in single file across the dark glass.

  Probably the thing is a raccoon.

  Stupid thing. Hog silently talks to it as he sits cross-legged on sandy soil and scans. He glances down at the bright red marks moving across the lens at the rear end of the tube, the front end pointed at the thing. He searches the shadowy berm and feels the ruined old house behind him, feels its pull. His head is thick because of the earplugs, his breathing loud, the way it sounds when you breathe through a snorkel, submerged and silent, nothing but the sound of your own rapid, shallow breaths. He doesn’t like earplugs, but it is important to wear them.