Depraved Heart

  “She’ll make it look like I had it all along when in fact she did.” Lucy is talking about Carrie stealing the machine gun I saw slung around her neck in the first video. “She restored it to its original condition, turned it into a deadly little Valentine on February fourteenth, 1998, for her vapid former beauty queen. And then nine years later and we know what happened.”

  “Erin didn’t come right out and say that to you.” Janet seems to be building a case.

  “She said enough for me to get the drift.”

  “And of course she didn’t record the conversation.”

  “They never do.”

  “Did you ever see Erin with the machine gun in question? Think hard, Lucy.”

  “No. After I told Carrie to stay away from me she bragged. She claimed she got the MP5K back into working order and that she taught Erin how to shoot it, clean it, that sort of thing. That was her Valentine’s Day present, a day on the range with a dangerous weapon, and Erin was such a damn ditz. She couldn’t even reload a damn pistol magazine. She couldn’t push the cartridges down unless she used a speed loader or had someone load it for her. I can’t imagine her shooting a machine gun.”

  “But she did. Carrie taught her how to shoot a gun that Erin now claims came from you. In other words Erin is lying. And she’s planting evidence.” Janet is open and bold about Erin Loria, and it’s deliberate but I don’t think Lucy has caught on.

  “That’s what Carrie said at the time,” Lucy replies and I have no doubt that Janet has seen the Depraved Heart videos. “Erin was talking about the former prime minister of Pakistan being assassinated. I knew exactly who she meant. Who else could it be? And that can mean only one thing. Carrie’s talking to the damn FBI. She’s talking to Erin. She may have turned over the MP5K to her for that matter, possibly recently.”

  “And then suddenly frag from a bullet magically matches,” Janet makes her next comment a matter of record, a damning record depending on who she’s targeting. “Why was the comparison even made? Especially now?”

  “It’s the very sort of thing Carrie would orchestrate. If nothing else all she has to do is tamper with various databases such as the NSA, the FBI, Interpol, whatever strikes her fancy. She could falsify a forensic report, fake a hit,” Lucy says as I think of what Jill Donoghue asked me this morning.

  She wondered if I’d ever heard of data fiction. And that seems to be what Lucy is describing.

  “She could do that easily and she also knows people in the intelligence community. Now it’s making sense why DoD showed up at your house pretending to be the tax collector,” Janet says and I envision the dark man in the cheap suit who claimed to be a revenue officer for the IRS.

  “Carrie reenters the U.S. finally and makes sure she’s going to drop a bombshell,” Lucy says. “She hacks into databases and creates political pandemonium.”

  We don’t get badges, guns, nothing fun like that, said the man who introduced himself as Doug Wade.

  He lied to Jill Donoghue and me. Everyone is lying.

  “Carrie finds a way to ensure that frag recovered from the assassination is a match with a machine gun that was once in the custody of the FBI,” Lucy says. “You realize how long she’s been sitting on this?”

  “And that’s classic,” Janet says.

  “It’s what she does. She gathers things as they happen and holds on to them for as long as it takes. Then she launches her next attack.”

  “The timing’s not an accident.” Janet stares at Lucy and avoids looking anywhere else.

  “Of course it’s not an accident.”

  “Suddenly there’s a match between the MP5K and bullet frag. Suddenly Erin Loria transfers to Boston and is chasing you to the gates of hell.”

  “Which is what Carrie always threatened. She said when I reach the gates of hell don’t let them slam me in the ass on my way in,” Lucy says and I hope I’m misunderstanding what she and Janet are implying.

  They seem to be suggesting that the missing MP5K may have found its way to Pakistan by late December of 2007. The gun could link the United States to the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

  ULTIMATELY SCOTLAND YARD got involved in the case. I remember it was determined that Bhutto died from blunt force trauma caused by a terrorist attack on her vehicle.

  Bullet fragments would have been analyzed. They would have been compared with any weapons recovered, and maybe one of them was an unusual machine gun once in the FBI’s possession. Benton had it. Then Erin Loria did, even if only briefly. It would be like Carrie Grethen to make sure the gun creates havoc, especially if the biggest loser is the American government, specifically the Department of Justice.

  What a terrible thing to do to an FBI agent who’s not particularly bright or formidable, and as much as I dislike Erin Loria I wouldn’t wish that on her. I can only imagine the international outrage. Even the Bureau might suffer damage if it came out that former beauty queen Special Agent Loria now married to a federal judge was at one time in possession of a machine gun used in the murder of a former world leader. Maybe she’s trying to save her own ass at my niece’s expense. If someone has to go it won’t be Erin Loria. Or that’s what she thinks.

  “Carrie has to be talking to someone in government,” Lucy is saying. “How else would they know about the kurz?”

  “You’re basing this on a few vague questions Erin asked,” Janet replies. “That’s my impression since I wasn’t present.”

  She says it as if she’s creating documentation, and I wonder who Janet is really talking to right now. Lucy? Or the FBI? Or is Janet talking to me?

  “Why else would Erin want to know where I was on December twenty-seventh, 2007? She asked me about the machine gun I had quote stolen and hidden in my dorm room. So where’d that come from if not from Carrie?” Lucy works the curved edge of the pry bar between the edges of two tiles.

  “I can imagine her saying something like that.”

  “Erin asked me what happened to what she called an MP5K prototype, which it wasn’t. It was just a very early model, so early it has a single-digit serial number.”

  “It would be just like Carrie to let Erin play around with something long enough to taint her,” Janet says. “Carrie has created a liability. But not just for Erin.”

  “Also Benton.” Lucy doesn’t hesitate to say his name.

  But so far Janet hasn’t so much as alluded to him. I continue to sense she’s being careful. She’s talking as if she knows the conversation isn’t private.

  “Imagine if a gun you’d once had illegally even if only for a day was implicated in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto?” Janet adds.

  “Even if Carrie’s lying and planted false reports it’s still a bad story if it gets out.”

  “Forgetting the PR nightmare,” Janet says, “there’s not going to be any statute of limitations loophole in a case like that, and that’s exactly why that DoD idiot was here. The FBI is a stalking horse for the DoD, and we’ve seen our share of cases like that. You think you’re doing one thing when you’re really doing something else.”

  “Now it’s the Pentagon after me,” Lucy says, and she sounds more annoyed than anything else.

  “Something is.” Janet has yet to look at a camera or in the direction of one.

  I can’t stop replaying in my mind the first thing I saw when I clicked on this video link. Janet clipped her phone back to the waistband of her scrubs. She’d been doing something with it. Then it didn’t seem to work anymore. I called it and it didn’t ring.

  She activated the surveillance system. Then she turned off her phone, making sure no one could reach her.

  “This is funny though. Was I right?” Lucy pries up another tile. “Their ground-penetrating radar in their overkill chopper wasn’t going to find anything down here.”

  I hear stone rubbing against stone as she slides tiles out of the way, and then she lifts out three more. Under them are a sheet of steel and a control box of some type.
Lucy enters a code and presses a button. An electric motor hums to life. The metal subflooring begins to move, to open like a hatch.

  She drops in the pry bar, the shovel, and they disappear in the void and clatter loudly at the bottom. There’s a ladder, and Lucy climbs down into a subterranean hideaway that I’ve never known about before now. It’s like her sound-masking boathouse and her Cone of Silence rock garden. It’s like so much I’m finding out. I hear the shovel scraping. Who else is seeing this or will? It’s an incredible thought that Janet might be the one spoofing Lucy’s ICE phone number and making sure I’m watching.

  If only I could talk to Lucy right now.

  “Everything all right?” Janet calls down to her. “You okay?”

  “Roger that.” Lucy’s voice is muffled, and she’s out of range inside this secret place where she stashes possessions that are on the warrant but were missed.

  Lucy knows exactly how federal agents conduct searches. When she puts her mind to it she can outsmart their every procedure, protocol and technology. I watch her lifting ammunition boxes up through the opening, setting them on the floor and pushing them to one side. She lifts out a sleek assault rifle with a silvery metallic finish, a Nemo Omen Win Mag .300 that she gently sets on the tarp.

  This is followed by another one with a different finish on the receiver, and I recognize firearms that Lucy calls deadly works of art. I’ve shot them before, and I watch her continue to obstruct justice. It doesn’t matter that I don’t blame her. It’s of no consequence that what the FBI is doing to her is an outrage. Her behavior is criminal and they’d arrest her instantly if they knew, and I watch as she climbs up out of the pit. The motor starts again as she closes the hatch. A buzzer sounds loudly. Someone is at Lucy’s front gate.

  Please God let it be the police.

  “Who’s here?” Janet walks over to a security monitor.

  Lucy picks up the two assault rifles, lightweight and as precise as a laser beam. They shimmer in shades of silver, copper and green.

  “I think it’s a cop,” Janet says. “What are the cops doing here?”

  “Shit,” Lucy says. “Now what?”

  I can’t make out what’s on split screen. It’s too far away. Janet touches the display and asks how she can help the person. Next I hear a man’s voice. He sounds familiar. When he starts coughing like a chain smoker I realize it’s the same state trooper who showed up here at the Gilbert house early this morning. I thought he’d gone home sick. I guess he didn’t but it sounds as if he should have. Trooper Vogel. I still don’t know his first name.

  “Who am I speaking to, ma’am?” He coughs again as Janet answers him. “We got a report and want to make sure everything’s okay in there.”

  “We’re fine,” Janet says. “What report?”

  “Ma’am, I need you to open the gate. We’d like to come in just to be sure everyone’s okay.”

  “Open it,” Lucy tells Janet.

  “I’m opening the gate,” Janet says to the security monitor.

  “We’ll see you at the front door,” Trooper Vogel says as Lucy uses her foot to shove ammo boxes across the floor to a workbench.

  Then I see it again. Janet removes her phone from her waistband and types with her thumbs, probably unlocking the keypad. Instantly my display goes dark. The live-streaming stops. When I click on the link again it’s dead. I look up and am shocked to see Benton standing in the bedroom doorway, checking something on his phone, his earpiece winking bright blue. I stare at him, startled and alarmed. I have no idea how long he’s been there or why or how he got in.

  “They’re safe, Kay.” Benton is dressed the same way he was when I left the house this morning. “Concord P.D., the state police, our agents are on Lucy’s property as we speak or are about to be with additional backup on the way.”

  “The police are already inside the house?” I don’t believe that’s possible.

  “They’re on the way.” He walks in.

  “That’s not the same as being with them—physically being with them right this second. You know who we’re dealing with, Benton.”

  “Lucy, Janet, Desi, Jet Ranger, everyone’s accounted for and safe.” His amber eyes are locked on me and he knows damn well who I mean. “Nothing is going to happen to them.”

  “How can we be sure of that yet?”

  “Because I’m telling you, Kay. They aren’t alone and won’t be.” He looks alert and unflappable but I have no doubt he’s been through it.

  This can’t have been a good day for him and I see the hints of stress and fatigue in the messiness of his thick silver hair and the tightness around his eyes and mouth. The suit is one of my favorites, pearl gray with a very narrow cream stripe, and it’s badly wrinkled. His white shirt is wrinkled. Probably from the five-point harness he was wearing inside the helicopter it occurs to me.

  “We have to make sure they’re fine,” I persist. “She’ll want you to think they are, and when everyone is feeling safe you know what happens.”

  “I do know what happens. I know how she thinks,” he says, and I realize it’s not the FBI that has Chanel Gilbert’s house under surveillance.

  If the Bureau were spying on this place then Benton would know about it. He wouldn’t talk freely. He would talk in an off-tilt scripted way—the same way Janet has been talking. Or he’d say nothing at all. If anyone is spying it’s Carrie, and I’m fast reaching the point of not caring. She seems to know everything about us anyway.

  CHAPTER 42

  HE SHUTS THE DOOR, AND WE’RE ALONE INSIDE Chanel Gilbert’s bedroom.

  Or someone’s bedroom.

  I can’t be sure whose.

  “I know you’re upset,” Benton says. “I can understand how you might feel abandoned and misinformed by me right now.”

  “I’m upset? Words I might use are unhappy, confused, concerned, manipulated.” I don’t want to sound like this. “Who was she, Benton? I saw the dive pictures in the library. Who the hell was she?”

  He doesn’t say a word.

  “I saw the tactical wet suit she had on. Black with a chest zipper, and that’s what I saw in the video my dive mask took. You and I don’t wear chest zippers. Our wet suits don’t have two white stripes on the leg but it appears hers did based on what I noticed in the framed photos of her wreck diving in the Bermuda Triangle. Do I need to refresh your memory further?” I continue to talk despite a presumed lack of privacy.

  I have to know if the person who saved my life in Fort Lauderdale this past June is dead. Murdered. Probably beaten to death by Carrie.

  “Her dental records have confirmed her identification,” I say to Benton. “But that doesn’t mean anything. Who was she?”

  “I understand how things might look,” Benton finally answers.

  “Maybe you’d like to tell me who Doug Wade is while we’re at it.”

  “I’m not sure who you mean.”

  “I mean the man I met on Lucy’s property who isn’t really with the IRS. He’s with the Department of Defense, and DoD wouldn’t be involved unless this is more about national security than some trumped-up criminal case against Lucy …”

  “We can talk about this later …”

  “But I can’t imagine why you might think I’m upset. Why should it upset me that I can’t trust a damn thing anybody does or says right now?” I’m emotional and that’s the last thing I want to be. “How did you get in here? Did you take her Range Rover and not tell the police? Or maybe a fake IRS agent took it.”

  “Her Range Rover?” Benton frowns.

  “A red one that was here earlier and now is gone.” I feel tears touch my eyes and I fight them back. “But I don’t believe the recording device in the silver box is yours.” I realize how angry I am, and I need to back off before I lose control. “It was too sloppily done even for the FBI. That was a scare tactic. It’s psychological terrorism for us to be working a case like this and worry every second that we’re being spied on. You wouldn’t wind the clocks
.”

  “I wouldn’t do what?”

  “Or leave candles. You wouldn’t play a game like that with me. Your colleagues might. But you wouldn’t and you also wouldn’t permit it.”

  “What game, Kay?”

  “There’s more than one, Benton.”

  “I don’t know anything about a silver box.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.” I don’t care who else does.

  “What candles?” Benton asks.

  “You’d have to walk into the living room to notice the scent. I assume they’re still there unless they’ve vanished right under our noses the way the kitchen trash did. New white votive candles that I suspect were recently put there, possibly while we were on Lucy’s property, and the clocks were wound. Candles scented with my favorite fragrance, Benton. The one you always get for me on my birthday.”

  “We didn’t do it. We haven’t been on this property until now.”

  “And you would know that for a fact. You know everything your colleagues are doing. Well I could tell you a lot of things they might not know that go back a very long time. Dangerous things.”

  He says nothing. He doesn’t ask me what dangerous things I might be referring to, and he watches me quietly and glances at his phone.

  “I think I know what’s happened,” I say to him, and his silence is my answer.

  He knows about the recordings. He’s seen them.

  “Of course the FBI didn’t sneak in here and set up this place with me in mind, with me in mind personally, intimately.” I feel myself getting angrier as I get more rattled.

  Benton, what have you done?

  “Why would they go to all the trouble to find special Italian candles?” A current of fear runs through me. “They didn’t …”

  “Kay?”

  “But you’re not going to share that with me. I’m sure I’ll have to find out everything on my own. I have to find out for myself what you know or don’t. You’re not going to admit it to me if you’re to blame for Lucy being raided, for Marino and me being followed by one of your damn helicopters.”

  “Are you finished, Kay?”