Trace Page 6

  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 yesterday 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.

  WATER DRUMS in sinks and X rays are illuminated on every light box 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?”

  “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. 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 becaus
e 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, T. 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 right over him and kept going.” 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.”

  When Fielding was starting out, he was one of her forensic fellows. She taught him forensic pathology. She taught him how to perform not just competent but meticulous and aggressive medico-legal scene investigations and autopsies, and it saddens her to remember how unabashedly eager he was to work across the table from her and take it all in, to go with her to court when time allowed and listen to her testify, to sit down in her office and go over his reports, to learn. Now he is worn out and has a skin condition and she is fired and both of them are here.

  “I should have called you,” she says, and she unbuckles Mr. Whitby’s cheap leather belt and unbuttons and unzips his torn olive pants. “We’ll work on Gilly Paulsson and figure her out.”

  “Oh yeah,” Fielding says, and he didn’t used to say “Oh yeah” so often, either.

  7.

  HENRI WALDEN wears fleece-lined suede slippers that make no sound on the carpet as she drifts like a black apparition toward the tan leather wing chair across from the couch.

  “I took my shower,” she says, perching on the chair and drawing her slender legs under her.

  Benton catches the deliberate flash of young flesh, the pale recesses of high inner thighs. He does not look or react the way most men would.

  “Why do you care?” she asks him, and she has asked him this every morning since she got here.

  “It makes you feel better, doesn’t it, Henri?”

  She nods, staring at him like a cobra.

  “Little things are important. Eating, sleeping, being clean, exercise. Regaining control.”

  “I heard you talking to someone,” she says.

  “That’s a problem,” he replies, his eyes steady on hers over the rim of his glasses, the legal pad in his lap as before, but there are more words on it, the words “Black Ferrari” and “without permission” and “was followed from the camp, likely” and “point of contact, the black Ferrari.”

  He says, “Private conversations are supposed to be just that. Private. So we need to go back to our original agreement, Henri. Do you remember what it was?”

  She pulls off her slippers and drops them on the carpet. Her delicate bare feet are on the chair cushion, and when she bends over to study them, the red robe falls open slightly. “No.” Her voice is barely audible and she shakes her head.

  “I know you remember, Henri.” Benton repeats her name often to remind her who she is, to personalize what has been depersonalized and, in some regards, irrevocably damaged. “Our agreement was respect, remember?”

  She bends more deeply and picks at an unpainted toenail, her stare fixed on what she is doing, her nakedness beneath her robe offered to him.

  “Part of having respect is allowing each other privacy. And modesty,” he says, quietly. “We’ve talked about boundaries a lot. Violating modesty is a violation of boundaries.”

  Her free hand crawls up to her chest and gathers the robe together while she continues to study and manipulate her toes. “I just woke up,” she says, as if this explains her exhibitionism.

  “Thank you, Henri.” It is important for her to believe that Benton does not want her sexually, not even in his fantasies. “But you didn’t just get up. You got up, came in, and we talked, and then you took a shower.”

  “My name isn’t Henri,” she says.

  “What would you like me to call you?”

  “Nothing.”

&n
bsp; “You have two names,” he says. “You have the name you were christened at birth and the name you used in your acting career and still use.”

  “Well, I’m Henri, then,” she says, looking down at her toes.

  “So I’ll call you Henri.”

  She nods, looking at her toes. “What do you call her?”

  Benton knows who she means but he doesn’t answer.

  “You sleep with her. Lucy’s told me all about it.” She emphasizes the word “all.”

  Benton feels a flash of anger but he doesn’t show it. Lucy would not have told Henri all about his relationship with Scarpetta. No, he reminds himself. This is Henri goading him again, testing his boundaries again. No, crashing through his boundaries again.

  “How come she’s not here with you?” Henri asks. “It’s your vacation, isn’t it? And she’s not here. A lot of people don’t have sex after a while. That’s one reason I don’t want to be with anyone, not for long. No sex. Usually after six months, people stop having sex. She’s not here because I am.” Henri stares at him.

  “That’s correct,” he replies. “She’s not here because you are, Henri.”

  “She must have been mad when you told her she couldn’t come.”

  “She understands,” he says, but now he isn’t being entirely honest.

  Scarpetta understood and she didn’t. You can’t come to Aspen right now, he told her after he got Lucy’s panicked phone call. I’m afraid a case has come up and I have to deal with it.

  You’re leaving Aspen, then, Scarpetta said.

  I can’t talk about the case, he replied, and for all he knows, she thinks he is anywhere but in Aspen right now.

  This really isn’t fair, Benton, she said. I set aside these two weeks for us. I have cases, too.