Predator Page 6

  Scarpetta is caught for a minute. She can’t imagine how Dave could know this.

  What she says is, “It’s been my practice to pay little attention to rumors, Dave.”

  “His brother owns one of my favorite restaurants in South Beach. Called Rumors, ironically,” he says. “You know, Laurel’s had some problems.”

  “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Someone who works there is passing around the story that Laurel killed Johnny for money, for whatever Johnny might have left him in his will. Says Laurel’s got habits he can’t afford.”

  “Sounds like hearsay. Or maybe someone who has a grudge.”

  Dave walks to the door.

  “I haven’t talked to her. Every time I try, she’s not there. I personally think Laurel’s a really nice guy, by the way. I just find it a bit coincidental that I start hearing stories and then Johnny’s case is reopened.”

  “I’m not aware it was ever closed,” Scarpetta says.

  Snowflakes are icy and sharp, the sidewalks and streets frosted white. Few people are out.

  Lucy walks briskly, sipping from a steaming hot latte, heading to the Anchor Inn, where she checked in several days ago under a fictitious name so she could hide her rented Hummer. She hasn’t parked it at the cottage once, never interested in strangers knowing what she drives. She veers off on a narrow drive that winds around to the small parking lot on the water where the Hummer is covered with snow. She unlocks the doors, starts the engine and turns on the defrost, and the white-blanketed windows give her the cool, shady sensation of being inside an igloo.

  She is calling one of her pilots when a gloved hand suddenly begins wiping snow off her side window and a black-hooded face fills the glass. Lucy aborts the call and drops the phone on the seat.

  She stares at Stevie for a long moment, then lowers the window as her mind races through possibilities. It isn’t a good thing that she was followed here. It is a very bad thing that she didn’t notice she was being followed.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy asks.

  “I just wanted to tell you something.”

  Stevie’s face has an expression that is hard to read. Maybe she is near tears and extremely upset and hurt, or it could be the cold, sharp wind blowing in from the bay that is making her eyes so bright.

  “You’re the most awesome person I’ve ever met,” Stevie says. “I think you’re my hero. My new hero.”

  Lucy isn’t sure if Stevie is mocking her. Maybe she isn’t.

  “Stevie, I’ve got to get to the airport.”

  “They haven’t started canceling flights yet. But it’s supposed to be terrible the rest of the week.”

  “Thanks for the weather update,” Lucy says, and the look in Stevie’s eyes is fierce and unnerving. “Look, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt your feelings.”

  “You didn’t,” Stevie says, as if this is the first she’s heard of it. “Not at all. I didn’t think I’d like you so much. I wanted to find you to tell you that. Tuck it away in some part of that clever head of yours, maybe remember it on a rainy day. I just never thought I would like you so much.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “It’s intriguing. You come across so sure of yourself, arrogant really. Hard and distant. But I realize it’s not who you are inside. Funny how things turn out so differently from what you expect.”

  Snow is blowing inside the Hummer, dusting the interior.

  “How did you find me?” Lucy asks.

  “I went back to your place but you were gone. I followed your footprints in the snow. They led right here. You wear what? Size eight? It wasn’t hard.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for…”

  “Please,” Stevie says intensely, strongly. “I know I’m not just another notch on your belt, as they say.”

  “I’m not into that,” Lucy says, but she is.

  She knows it, even if she would never describe it like that. She feels bad for Stevie. She feels bad for her aunt, for Johnny, for everyone she has failed.

  “Some might argue you’re a notch on mine,” Stevie says playfully, seductively, and Lucy doesn’t want to have the feeling again.

  Stevie is sure of herself again, full of secrets again, amazingly attractive again.

  Lucy shoves the Hummer into reverse as snow blows in and her face stings from the snow and the wind blowing off the water.

  Stevie digs in her coat pocket, pulls out a slip of paper, hands it to her through the open window.

  “My phone number,” she says.

  The area code is 617, the Boston area. She never told Lucy where she lived. Lucy never asked.

  “That’s all I wanted to say to you,” Stevie says. “And happy Valentine’s Day.”

  They look at each other through the open window, the engine rumbling, snow coming down and clinging to Stevie’s black coat. She’s beautiful and Lucy feels what she felt at Lorraine’s. She thought it was gone. She is feeling it.

  “I’m not like all the rest,” Stevie says, looking into Lucy’s eyes.

  “You’re not.”

  “My cell phone number,” Stevie says. “I actually live in Florida. After I left Harvard, I never bothered to change my cell phone number. It doesn’t matter. Free minutes, you know.”

  “You went to Harvard?”

  “I usually don’t mention it. It can be rather off-putting.”

  “Where in Florida?”

  “Gainesville,” she says. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says again. “I hope it turns out to be the most special one you’ve ever had.”

  11

  The smart board inside classroom 1A is filled with a colorful photograph of a man’s torso. His shirt is unbuttoned, a large knife plunged into his hairy chest.

  “Suicide,” one of the students volunteers from his desk.

  “Here’s another fact. Although you can’t tell from this picture,” Scarpetta says to the sixteen students who make up this session’s Academy class, “he has multiple stab wounds.”

  “Homicide.” The student quickly changes his answer and everybody laughs.

  Scarpetta flashes up the next slide, this one of multiple wounds clustered near the fatal one.

  “They look shallow,” another student says.

  “What about the angle? They should be angled up if he did it to himself?”

  “Not necessarily, but here’s a question,” Scarpetta says from the podium in the front of the classroom. “What might his unbuttoned shirt tell you?”

  Silence.

  “If you were going to stab yourself, would you do it through your clothing?” she asks. “And, by the way, you’re right.” She directs this to the student who made the comment about shallow stab wounds. “Most of these”—she points them out on the smart board—“barely broke the skin. What we call hesitation marks.”

  The students take notes. They are a bright, eager bunch, different ages, different backgrounds, from different areas of the country, two of them from England. Several are detectives who want intensive forensic training in crime-scene investigation. Others are death investigators who want the same thing. Some are college graduates working on master’s degrees in psychology, nuclear biology and microscopy. One is an assistant district attorney who wants more convictions in court.

  She displays another slide on the smart board, this one an especially gruesome photograph of a man with his intestines spilling out of a gaping incision to his abdomen. Several students groan. One says “ouch.”

  “Who’s familiar with seppuku?” Scarpetta asks.

  “Hari-kari,” a voice sounds from the doorway.

  Dr. Joe Amos, this year’s forensic pathology fellow, walks in as if it is his class. He is tall and gangly, with an unruly shock of black hair, a long, pointed chin and dark, glittering eyes. He reminds Scarpetta of a black bird, a crow.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he says, then he does it anyway. “This guy”—he nods at the gruesome image on the smart board—“took a big
hunting knife, stabbed it into one side of his abdomen and slashed across to the other. That’s called motivation.”

  “Was it your case, Dr. Amos?” a student asks, this one female and pretty.

  Dr. Amos moves closer to her, looks very serious and important. “No. What you need to remember, though, is this: The way you can tell suicide versus homicide is if it’s a suicide, the person will slash the knife across his abdomen and then cut upwards, making the classic L shape that you see in hari-kari. Which is not what you see here.”

  He directs the students’ attention to the smart board.

  Scarpetta holds in her temper.

  “Be kind of hard to do that in a homicide,” he adds.

  “This one’s not L-shaped.”

  “Precisely,” he says. “Who wants to vote for homicide?”

  A few students raise their hands.

  “My vote, too,” he says with confidence.

  “Dr. Amos? How quickly would he have died?”

  “You might survive a few minutes. You’re going to bleed out really fast. Dr. Scarpetta, I wonder if I could see you for a minute. I’m sorry to interrupt,” he says to the students.

  She and Joe walk into the hallway.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “The hell scene we have scheduled for later this afternoon,” he says. “I’d like to spice it up a little.”

  “This couldn’t wait until after class?”

  “Well, I thought you could get one of the students to volunteer. They’ll do anything you ask.”

  She ignores the flattery.

  “Ask if one of them will help out with this afternoon’s hell scene, but you can’t tell the details in front of everyone.”

  “And what are the details, exactly?”

  “I was thinking of Jenny. Maybe you’ll let her skip your three o’clock class so she can help me.” He refers to the pretty student who asked him if the evisceration was his case.

  Scarpetta has seen them together on more than one occasion. Joe is engaged, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from being quite friendly with attractive female students, no matter how much the Academy discourages it. So far, he hasn’t been caught committing an unredeemable infraction, and, in a way, she wishes he had been. She’d love to get rid of him.

  “We get her to play the perp,” he explains quietly, excitedly. “She looks so innocent, so sweet. So we take two students at a time, have them work a homicide, the victim shot multiple times while on the toilet. This is in one of the motel rooms, of course, and Jenny comes in acting all broken up, hysterical. The dead guy’s daughter. We’ll see if the students let their guard down.”

  Scarpetta is silent.

  “Of course, there’ll be a few cops at the scene. Let’s say they’re looking around, assuming the perp’s fled. Point is, we’ll see if anybody’s smart enough to make sure this pretty young thing isn’t the person who just blew the guy away, her father, while he was taking a dump. And guess what? She is. They let their guard down, she pulls a gun and starts shooting, gets taken out. And voilà. A classic suicide by police.”

  “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 to Hollywood. 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 in Virginia like 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 X flies 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 a South Florida business 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 told Benton. 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 cafés 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 the United 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 gets out a Glock nine-millimeter, drops out the magazine, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, 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.