Blow Fly

  “You don’t know what you’re messing with here,” Rocco says.

  The agent doesn’t bother answering him, his eyes darting around the room. Rocco wipes his face with his greasy napkin, his attention wandering to the steak knife on his plate.

  “Try it,” the agent says, looking at the steak knife. “Go ahead. Please try it. Make my life a hell of a lot easier.”

  “I wasn’t gonna do nothing. Just let me go and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  “I can’t let you go. Truth is, this isn’t my idea of fun. So I’m in a bad mood already. Don’t piss me off. You want to help yourself? Well, you know what they say about coming clean at the end.”

  “No. What the hell do they say?”

  “Where’s Jay Talley, and don’t tell me another fucking lie, asshole.”

  “I don’t know,” Rocco whines. “I swear to God I don’t. I’m scared of him, too. He’s crazy. He don’t play the game, and every one of us stay clear of him. He marches to his own beat, swear to God. Can’t I please change my pants? You can watch me. I won’t try nothing.”

  Rudy gets off the bed and opens the closet door, the Colt casually by his side, indicating to an increasingly defeated and terrified Rocco that this man is not afraid of anything. There are maybe half a dozen flashy suits hanging on the rod, and he pulls off a pair of pants and tosses them to Rocco.

  “Go on.” The agent opens the bathroom door and sits back down on the bed.

  Rocco trembles as he walks inside the bathroom and peels off his pants and briefs. He tosses them into the tub, douses a towel with tap water and wipes himself.

  “Jay Talley,” the agent says again. “Real name, Jean-Paul Chandonne.”

  “Ask me something else.” Rocco means it as he sits in a different chair.

  “Okay. We’ll get back to Talley later. You got plans to take out your father?” The agent’s stare is cold. “It’s no secret you hate him.”

  “I don’t claim him.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Rocco. You ran away from home. You changed your name from Marino to Caggiano. What’s the plan and who’s involved?”

  Rocco hesitates for the longest time, thoughts jumping behind his bloodshot eyes. The agent gets up, breathing through his mouth as if to avoid the stench. He presses the barrel of the Colt against Rocco’s right temple.

  “Who, what, when and where?” he says, tapping the barrel of the pistol against Rocco’s head with each word. “Don’t fuck with me!”

  “I was gonna do it. In a couple months when he goes fishing. He always goes fishing at Buggs Lake the first week of August. Nail him in his cabin, make it look like a burglary gone bad.”

  “So you would kill your own father when he’s on a fishing trip. You know what you are, Rocco? You’re the worst shit I ever met.”

  WHENEVER NIC ROBILLARD drives past the Sno Depot in downtown Zachary, she feels like crying.

  Tonight, the stand, with its handpainted signs advertising snow cones, is dark and deserted. If Buddy were with her, he’d be staring out the window and begging, not caring that the Sno Depot is closed and it isn’t possible for his mother to buy him a treat. That boy loves snow cones more than anybody Nic’s ever heard of, and despite her efforts to steer him away from sweets, he demands a snow cone—cherry or grape—every time she takes him anywhere in the car.

  Buddy is with his grandfather in Baton Rouge right now, where he always is when Nic has to work late, and ever since she returned from Knoxville, she works constantly. Scarpetta inspired her. The need to impress Scarpetta dominates Nic’s life. She is determined to bring about the arrest of the serial killer. She is frantic about the abducted women, knowing it absolutely will happen again if the maniac isn’t caught. She is tormented by grief and guilt because she is neglecting her son after she was away from him for two and a half months.

  If Buddy ever stopped loving her or turned out wrong, Nic would want to die. Some nights when she finally returns to her tiny Victorian house around the corner from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on Lee Street, she lies in bed, staring at dark shapes inside her small room, and listens to the silence as she imagines Buddy sound asleep at her father’s house in Baton Rouge. Thoughts about her son and ex-husband, Ricky, flit about like moths. She contemplates whether she would shoot herself in the heart or the head if she were to lose everything that matters.

  Not one person has any idea that Nic gets depressed. Not one person would ever imagine that there are times when she entertains thoughts of suicide. What keeps her from the unthinkable is her belief that self-murder is one of the most selfish sins a person can commit, and she envisions the dire consequences of such an act, pushing the fatal fantasy far out of reach until the next time she dives into a dead man’s spin of powerlessness, loneliness and despair.

  “Shit,” she whispers as she drives south on Main Street, leaving the Sno Depot behind in her emotional wake. “I’m so sorry, Buddy-Boy, my Buddy-Boy.” What a decision she faces: choosing between doing nothing about women being murdered and doing nothing about her son.

  MON PETIT AGNEAU PRISÉ!” My little treasured lamb, Scarpetta translates as her heart freezes at the sight of Chandonne’s handwriting and she feels his presence in his letter to her.

  She has been sitting in the same position for so long—in the straight-backed wooden chair by her bedroom’s open door—that her lower back aches and the small glass table is sweating from the humid sea air. As she remembers to breathe, she realizes that every muscle is tense, her entire body like a clenched fist.

  The letter, the letter, the letter.

  It stuns her that his handwriting is beautiful, a practiced calligraphy penned in black ink, not a single word crossed through, not a single mistake that she can see at a glance. He must have spent a lot of time writing this letter to her, as if it was a loving endeavor, and the idea of that just adds to the horror. He thinks of her. He is telling her so by the very act of his artistic penmanship.

  She reads his words:

  Do you know about the Red Stick yet and that you must go there?

  But not until you come to see me first. In the Longhorn State, as they say!

  You see, I direct you.

  You have no will of your own. You may think you do, but I am the current running through your body, every impulse coming from me. I am inside you. Feel it!

  Do you remember that night? You eagerly opened your door and then attacked me because you could not face your longing for me. I have forgiven you for taking my eyes, but you could not take my soul. It follows you constantly. If you try, you can touch it.

  Maintenant! Maintenant! It is time. The Red Stick awaits you.

  You must come to me first or it will be too late to hear my stories.

  Only for you will I tell them.

  I know what you want, mon petit agneau prisé! I have what you want.

  In two weeks I will be dead and have nothing to say. Ha!

  Will you release me to the ecstasy?

  Or will I release you? Sinking my teeth into your soft, round loveliness.

  If you do not find me, I will find you.

  Love and rapture,

  Jean-Baptiste

  In the old-style bathroom with its plain white toilet, its plain plastic shower curtain around the plain white tub, its mildew-stained white walls, Scarpetta vomits. She drinks a glass of water from the tap and returns to the bedroom, to the table, to that blighted piece of paper, which she suspects will offer her no evidence. He is too clever to leave evidence.

  She sits in the chair, trying to fight the images of the filthy beast flying through her front door like an evil spirit crackling out of hell. Scarcely can she recall in detail the pursuit, that terrible pursuit around her living room, as he swung an iron hammer, the same iron hammer he had used before to shatter women’s heads and bodies to battered flesh and splintered bone, especially their faces.

  At the time she was the medical examiner for the Richmond murders, it never occurre
d to her that she might be the next one. Since that near-death experience, she struggles to will away her imagined destruction of her own body and face. He would not have raped her. He isn’t capable of rape. Jean-Baptiste’s revenge on the world is to cause death and disfigurement, to re-create others in his own image. He is the ultimate embodiment of self-hate.

  If it is true that she saved her life by permanently blinding him, then he should be so lucky as to be spared his own reflection in the polished metal mirror he must look at every day inside his death row cell.

  Scarpetta goes to a hallway closet and moves the vacuum cleaner out of the way. She rolls out a suitcase.

  IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, CALL me on my cell phone,” Nic says, standing in the front doorway of her father’s white brick house in the Old Garden District, where homes are large and spreading canopies of magnolias and live oaks keep much of the city’s old establishment in the shade.

  Even on the brightest days, Nic finds her childhood home dark and foreboding.

  “Why, you know I’m not calling that newfangled little phone of yours,” her father says, winking at her. “Even if you don’t make the call, you have to pay for it, isn’t that right? Or does unlimited mileage, I mean minutes, apply?”

  “What?” Nic frowns, then laughs. “Never mind. My new number’s taped to the refrigerator, whether you decide to call it or not. If I don’t call back right away, you know it’s because I’m busy. Now you be good, Buddy-Boy. You’re my big man, right?”

  Her five-year-old son peeks out from behind his grandfather and makes a face.

  “Got it!” Nic pretends to snatch his nose and tries the old trick of sticking her thumb up between two fingers. “Do you want your nose back or not?”

  Buddy looks like the proverbial towheaded choir boy, dressed in overalls that are an inch too short. He touches his nose and sticks out his tongue.

  “You keep sticking out that tongue of yours and one day it won’t fit in your mouth anymore,” his grandfather warns him.

  “Shhhh,” Nic says. “Don’t be saying things like that, Papa. He’ll believe you.”

  She peeks around him and grabs her son. “Gotcha!” She lifts him up and covers his face with kisses. “Looks like it’s time to go shopping, my big man. You’re outgrowing your clothes again. How come you keep doing that, huh?”

  “I dunno.” He hugs her tightly around the neck.

  “Do you think it’s possible you might wear something besides overalls?” she whispers in his ear.

  He vigorously shakes his head. She gently puts him down.

  “Why can’t I come?” Buddy pouts.

  “Mama has to work. By the time you wake up, I’ll be back, okay? You go on to bed like my big man and I’ll bring you a surprise.”

  “What surprise?”

  “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?” Nic kisses the top of his head again, and he irritably musses his hair as if swatting away bugs. “Uh-oh,” she says to her father. “I believe someone’s getting grumpy.”

  Buddy gives her a look, a mixture of anger and hurt that never fails to make Nic feel as though she has betrayed and failed him. Ever since her salesman ex-husband Ricky got the promotion he always wanted, he got more impossible to live with, traveling all the time, complaining and unkind. He’s gone, and Nic’s glad, relieved, but deeply wounded in ways she can’t define. Hardships in life are always for the best if you do God’s will, according to the doctrine of her father, who loves her but won’t take her side in her failed marriage.

  “You ought to know that being a cop doesn’t mix with holding on to a man, if you ever get married,” he told her when she got accepted to the police academy eight years ago, after a dreary career of working as a bookkeeper at the Ford dealership in Zachary, where she eventually met Ricky. They dated three months and moved in together. Another sin. At last she was free of her haunted house.

  “Mama had her own business,” Nic reminded her father every time he made his comments.

  “Honey, that’s not the same. She didn’t carry a gun.”

  “Maybe if she had . . .”

  “Now, you hush your mouth!”

  She finished the sentence only once. This was after she filed for divorce and her father berated her for an entire afternoon, pacing in his living room, his face a storm of disbelief, fear and anger. He’s a big, lanky man, and every upset stride seemed to carry him from one wall to the other and jostled the antique crystal lamp on the table next to the couch until it finally fell over and broke.

  “Now look what you did!” he cried out. “You broke your mother’s lamp.”

  “You broke it.”

  “Girls don’t need to be chasing criminals and shooting guns. That’s why you lost Ricky. He married a pretty woman, not an Annie Oakley. And what kind of mother . . .”

  That was when Nic said it. “If Mama had a gun, maybe she wouldn’t have been butchered by some fucking asshole right here in our own house!”

  “Don’t you dare use words like that,” he told her, emphasizing each stony word with a violent stab of his finger, stabs that reminded her of what was done to her mother.

  They never touched the subject again. It remains a stalled storm front between them. No matter how often they see each other, she can’t feel his warmth or get too close. After two premature babies who didn’t survive, Nic was born and is the only child her father has. After he retired from teaching high school sociology, he got bored and pretty much quit life. He spends his mornings working crossword puzzles when he’s not baby-sitting, and taking obsessively long, brisk walks.

  She knows he blames himself. Her mother was murdered eight years ago in the middle of the day while he and Nic were both at work. Maybe she blames herself, too, not so much for her mother’s death, she tells herself, but because if Nic hadn’t gone out with friends after work, her father might not have been the one to find his wife’s body and blood all over the house, from where she fought her killer, running from room to room. By the time Nic got home, slightly drunk from beer, police were swarming the property, her mother’s body already removed. Nic never saw it. It was a closed-casket funeral. She’s never been able to bring herself to get a copy of the police report, and because the case remains unsolved, the coroner’s office won’t give her a copy of the autopsy records. All she knows is that her mother was stabbed and slashed and bled to death. Knowing that was enough. But for some reason, it isn’t anymore.

  On this particular night, Nic is determined to talk, but that can’t happen unless Buddy is occupied.

  “You want to watch TV for a few minutes before bed?” she asks him.

  It is a special privilege indeed.

  “Yes,” he says, still pouting.

  He runs inside the house, and the TV goes on.

  She nods at her father, and he accompanies her outside.

  “Come on,” she whispers to him, and they pick their usual spot beneath the ancient live oak tree at the edge of the yard.

  “This had better be good.” He has his lines and never tires of reusing them.

  She catches the gleam of his teeth as he talks and knows he’s pleased when she drags him out in the middle of the night to have a secret conversation, one not meant for a toddler’s ears.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Nic begins, “but it’s about Mama.” She feels him jerk and withdraw, as if his spirit has suddenly fled from his body. “I need to know more, Papa. Not knowing is doing something to me. Maybe because of what’s happening around here now, with these women disappearing. I’m feeling something. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’m feeling something. Something terrible.” Her voice trembles. “And it’s scaring me, Papa. The way I’m feeling sometimes is scaring me bad.”

  His silence is as formidable as the tree they stand under.

  “Remember when I got the ladder and propped it against this very tree.” She looks heavenward, her vision caught in thick, dark branches and leaves. “Next thing I k
now, I’m stuck up there, too scared to climb higher or come back down. And you had to get me.”

  “I remember.” His voice sounds as if nobody is home.

  “Well, that’s the way I feel right now,” she goes on, trying to appeal to the part of him that shut down after his wife was murdered. “I can’t climb up or down, and I need you to help me, Papa.”

  “There’s nothing I can do,” he says.

  SZCZECIN’S SKYLINE IS PIERCED by antennas, the streets quiet, the downtown shabby.

  Not one of the stores looks inviting, especially at this late hour, and the few cars out are old and worse for the wear. The Radisson is built of brick, the courtyard gray and red pavers, and a large blue banner out front welcomes a Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics meeting, and that is fortunate.

  The more people in the hotel, the better, and Lucy used to program robots and can talk technology with anybody if need be. But it won’t be necessary. She has a plan, a very good one in all respects. She finds a spot to park several streets down from a Fila store, just past a delikatesy.

  Flipping down the mirror on the visor, she quickly applies makeup and puts on gold hoop earrings. She yanks off her tennis shoes and pulls on black satin cowboy boots that are disgustingly necessary should someone spot her inside the hotel. She struggles into a black blouse, linen and wrinkled, and tucks her tactical baton up its sleeve. She unbuttons it low enough to show off cleavage. Transformed into a sexy young woman who is staying in the hotel, Lucy is sufficiently disheveled and alluring to pass for a typical convention attendee who has been out having a good time half the night. Throwing on a windbreaker and cursing her boots, she walks quickly to the hotel beneath the dim auras of streetlights.

  This Radisson is self-service, as Lucy calls hotels where she carries her own bags, uses her magnetized room key to let herself into the gym and fills her own ice bucket, and where the housekeepers are shocked when left a tip. There is no doorman or bellman at this hour, only a young woman reading a Polish magazine behind the front desk. Lucy stays outside in the dark, glancing around, making certain no one suddenly walks up and sees her. In that unlikely event, she will dig inside the small leather satchel looped over her shoulder, pretending to look for her room key. She waits restlessly for ten minutes before the bored, weary desk clerk gets up and walks off, perhaps to the ladies’ room, perhaps to find coffee. Lucy strolls across the lobby and disappears inside the elevator, pushing the button for the fifth floor.