Flesh and Blood

  “The sailboat,” he says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Joe Henderson,” he answers. “He’s been found alive.”

  “THE SAME PERSON WE saw in the gray pickup truck,” Benton says, and we’re trotting back to his car, splashing through puddles in the pitch-dark. “Based on what Henderson says I don’t see how there can be any doubt.”

  At around seven P.M. Joe Henderson pulled up to the Rosado house where a gray pickup truck was parked but he saw no sign of the driver. He got out of his Tahoe and noticed the back door ajar the same way we did, and the instant he pushed it open all the way while calling out if anyone was home he was pepper sprayed. A pillowcase was yanked over his head, his wrists bound in flex-cuffs behind his back, and he felt a gun barrel jabbed into the small of his neck.

  “The only thing the person said was you don’t have to die,” Benton continues to relay what the Coast Guard told him.

  “Male or female?”

  “He told the Coast Guard he doesn’t know but assumes male.”

  “Based on?”

  “His impression.”

  “An easy one since he was overpowered. So he assumes it had to be a man.”

  “I agree.” Benton digs into his pocket, turning it inside out because it’s soaking wet.

  “How did this person get him down to the beach?” I can’t imagine being able to navigate the steep stone steps if I couldn’t see.

  “It wasn’t raining then and it wasn’t dark.” Benton points the remote and the Audi’s locks click free. “The pillowcase didn’t have holes for his eyes. But it was left open at the bottom so he could breathe and he was able to look down and see his feet.”

  “What about the other person’s feet?”

  “They were behind him. He had no further details except that this person took his phone. The bigger point is whoever it is doesn’t hesitate to kill an insurance investigator and a fourteen-year-old girl. He may have picked off three unsuspecting people with a high-power rifle. But he didn’t kill a cop.”

  “Why?” I grab open my door and duck inside. “Does Henderson have any idea?”

  “No. He was forced into a dinghy with an outboard motor and taken to the sailboat where he was locked inside the salon. He heard the dinghy leave and managed to get the pillowcase off his head. He estimates he was in the salon several hours when he heard the Guardsmen and started kicking the door and screaming.”

  “Why go to the risk and the trouble?” I ask. “Why not kill him and leave his body in the pool too or dump it in the ocean?”

  “Whoever we’re dealing with is sending a message.” Benton turns on the heat, both of us chilled despite the dramatic rise in temperature. “This person has his own code about who he kills.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I believe he wants us to believe it.”

  “He?” I have to seriously question it. “The person in the cap and glasses who was tailgating us earlier? I couldn’t tell the gender.”

  “I couldn’t either,” he admits, and then we say nothing as water drums the undercarriage of the car, the earth cooler than the air which moils with fog.

  A woman, and I don’t want to think it. Not for a moment do I believe Lucy could have transformed into such a monster but I worry what she knows. I keep my troubled thoughts to myself, back on the highway now, the wipers pumping hard. My phone rings. I glance at caller ID.

  Bryce Clark.

  “I think you need to hear this from me,” he says instantly and with self-importance that’s supposed to come across as somber.

  “What is it, Bryce?”

  “You sound as if you’re inside a metal drum being beaten with sticks.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The scrubs.”

  “What scrubs?”

  “That Lucy found on the roof. You know at the Academy of Arts and Sciences?”

  “What about them?” I ask.

  “Well due to the urgency of the situation, that someone may have been spying on you and maybe it was the same person who shot Jamal Nari? Anyway we had the jacket and cap worked up ASAP and ran the profile through the database …”

  I interrupt, “What profile?”

  “From swabbing inside the cap, there was DNA and we got a single donor profile. I don’t know how to tell you this, Doctor Scarpetta.”

  “For God’s sake, Bryce.” Of all times for his drama, and I have no patience left.

  “Before you jump to conclusions, Lucy knows how to handle evidence without contaminating it.”

  “Her DNA was on the clothing she found on the roof?” My troubled thoughts begin to throb deep inside my psyche, and my chest feels tight.

  “Yes and no.”

  “Low copy number DNA and she could have breathed on the clothing and that would explain it,” I reply in a steady voice I have to force. “What do you mean yes and no?”

  “Skin cells on the band inside the cap and Lucy says it’s impossible they came from her,” Bryce says.

  “Then the simple way to resolve this is to get a buccal swab and do the comparison that way instead of using a database match.”

  “We did and it’s not hers,” he replies. “That’s what I mean by yes and no.”

  “Now I’m really confused.”

  “It matches in our computer but not when you do a direct comparison in our lab.”

  “Are you suggesting that something’s wrong in CODIS?”

  “We didn’t get as far as the FBI’s database. I’m talking about ours. Everyone who works here has their DNA in our database for exclusionary purposes,” he says. “We do that so …”

  “I know why we do it,” I almost snap at him.

  “Lucy’s DNA profile in our database is wrong,” he says. “Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “It can’t be a corrupted data file because that would assume a false positive, a false match with evidence turned in.” I know exactly what he’s getting at.

  A corrupted file wouldn’t have gotten a match with the clothing found on the roof or with anything else for that matter. Corrupted data result in a nonmatch and not a false one, and there’s another thought that begins to nag at me. If someone’s agenda is to sabotage or frame Lucy then this person isn’t trying very hard.

  “You’re implying our database has been tampered with,” I say to Bryce.

  “And Lucy swears nobody could do that.”

  “It sounds like somebody did.”

  “She says with all of the encryption …? Well I can’t explain it the way she does. I mean, hello? Greek? Half the time I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about but she swears the only person who would know how to access those DNA files and alter them the way it was done is her.”

  “That’s probably not a smart thing to say,” I reply. “And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t start a rumor like that.”

  “Me start rumors?”

  “I mean it, Bryce.”

  “Are you coming in tomorrow?”

  “It depends on if we can get out—”

  “I checked earlier,” he interrupts much too cheerfully. “And the weather’s perfect in Florida and nothing has been canceled out of Logan. You can still make it for your birthday on the seven A.M. flight. I mean a tad late but you know what they say? Better late than never.”

  “Not Miami, not my birthday, I’m talking about getting out on Lucy’s helicopter.” My God, does he have no EQ at all? “We’re meeting with Jack Kuster at the Morris County Sheriff’s Department, a firearms expert. We’ve got to figure out exactly how the killer is doing it.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying it? All the screwy stuff with Lucy? Maybe she shouldn’t—”

  “I do mind you saying it,” I reply.

  CHAPTER 38

  TWO DAYS LATER

  MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY

  ROTOR WASH AGITATES THE green canopies of trees, their heavy limbs thrashing beneath our skids. The pale undersides of leaves flash like
the palms of upset hands and the wooded hillside abruptly opens, leveling into the airfield.

  It’s Saturday, June 14. The late afternoon is clear and hot, the storm front having finally moved out around two P.M. We got delayed because of weather and reasons I don’t trust and silently obsess about. My mind is caught on the search of Rand Bloom’s apartment and what turned up, the sniper rifle with a powerful scope, the solid copper ammunition and a jar full of old pennies including ones dated 1981, the year Lucy was born.

  The cartridges weren’t hand-loaded. They weren’t polished. Neither were the pennies and there was no sign of a tumbler. Bloom’s apartment door was open because the lock had been picked by someone skilled who left scarcely a tool mark. Marino believes what he found inside was planted, the scenario a familiar one like the teal green scrubs on the roof, like Lucy’s tampered-with DNA profile in the CFC database.

  Someone didn’t try very hard.

  Test fires and analysis will verify the rifle isn’t the one we’re looking for, Marino is quite sure, and that’s not the bigger problem. The manipulations are relentless now and although no one is offering it outright there are darkening suspicions about Lucy. She hasn’t been herself of late. Even Benton says it and we’re not the only ones aware that she’s been acting oddly and in secret, her whereabouts unaccounted for much of the time. Janet has confirmed it.

  When I got her on the phone several hours ago she told me that Lucy has been gone often in recent months with no explanation and making large purchases without discussion. The Ferrari and before that she got rid of one helicopter and bought a different one. She said that what Lucy told me about not wearing the ring anymore wasn’t quite true. Yes, Janet’s father got it back—because Lucy returned it to Janet.

  Added to that are other escalating events. Someone figured out a way to send tweets that couldn’t be traced, committed fraud with my credit card, hacked into the CFC computer. Now Rand Bloom is dead and items inside his apartment are supposed to make us leap to more conclusions or fill us with more doubt about a former federal agent, my niece. I look over at her. She’s the master of her own ship, her fine motor skills impeccable, her focus keen and unflinching.

  I don’t know what I would do if her seat were empty, if wherever I looked I didn’t see her anymore. Should something happen … I don’t finish the thought.

  “I’ll tell them we’re overnighting. A top-off with Jet-A no prist,” I say into my mic and Lucy doesn’t answer.

  We hover taxi over frantic grass, an orange wind sock twitching wildly as we churn lower and slower toward runways that intersect in an irregular X. There is no wind except ours. The afternoon is hot and dead calm in Morristown, where I’ve been many times before, never imagining one day it would be for this.

  But you should have imagined it. The sotto voce that comes from some deep part of me intrudes upon my consciousness again. If someone wants to get you badly enough it will happen. I imagine a weapon trained on us even as I’m thinking this, ready to shoot us out of the sky with no qualms or regrets as I lightly hold the grip of the cyclic, what most people call the stick.

  Black and gracefully curved between my knees, it controls the pitch and roll of the rotor blades, the slightest pressure moving the helicopter up, down, sideways, backward. If I didn’t have a gentle touch, I wouldn’t be sitting in the copilot’s seat. Lucy would have relegated me to the back cabin of cognac leather and carbon fiber trim where our only passenger, Marino, is isolated.

  I can’t see him. I’ve made sure I can’t hear him and he can’t hear us. He’s done nothing intentional to piss me off but I no longer pretend when I don’t have the emotional fortitude to listen to him anymore. Now of all times I don’t. Speculating, hypothesizing nonstop since we took off from Boston. Marino and his bold statements and questions and utter lack of discretion.

  He didn’t care what Lucy heard. In fact he was picking on her as if it’s funny, giving her shit is the way he thinks of it. The killer has got to be someone who knows us, and by the way where was she yesterday? What were she and Janet up to? What kind of arsenal must she have at her indoor firing range? Have I been shooting there recently? His humor is about as tasteful and subtle as his favorite coffee mug, black with a white chalk body outline and the caption MY DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS.

  I listened to his boisterousness until we got close to New York airspace when I switched the intercom to crew only. He was aware of it when I did it. I doubt he took it personally. He figures it’s a busy airspace and knows I’m industrious about monitoring multiple towers and self-announcing our presence to other pilots at every checkpoint along various routes such as the Hudson River. He knows I consider it my inflight job to enter radio frequencies, to talk to air traffic control and tune in the most recent ATIS update about weather, wind, notices to airmen, potential restrictions, and hazards like ground fog or birds.

  By aviation standards I can’t be trusted with much more than this although I’m confident I could land in an emergency. The helicopter might not fare well but I’d get us down safely. The entire flight I’ve replayed engine failures, bird strikes, every worst-case scenario and how I would respond. It’s easier to think about.

  So damn much easier.

  I press the radio trigger switch without disturbing the cyclic as Lucy skims over grass, holding a speed of sixty knots on a heading that will bisect the mile of grooved asphalt just ahead. The shorter of the airport’s two runways, it’s oriented north-south some two hundred feet above sea level, as straight and flat as a rolled-out black carpet, heat shimmering on it like a glaze of water.

  “NINER LIMA CHARLIE CROSSING thirteen,” I announce to the tower, a small white building with a control room on top that looks like the bridge of a ship.

  I can vaguely make out the shapes of people inside the glaring glass. The sky is the faded blue of old denim, reminding me of favorite jeans I wore until they literally fell apart, and the past continues sneaking through the back door of my thoughts. I sense the inevitable, a tragedy I can’t stop as my life parades behind my eyes when I least expect it. There is something about to happen like an Old Testament judgment. We should have stayed in Massachusetts. There isn’t time for this. It’s too predictable that we’d come here and I’m seething inside.

  You’re being manipulated like a goddam pawn.

  “Roger niner Lima Charlie,” the controller comes back, a woman whose voice I’ve heard before when I worked in Manhattan and would come to New Jersey on cases that had an ambiguous or shared jurisdiction, usually floaters carried by the current in the Hudson River.

  “They already cleared us,” Lucy’s voice sounds inside my flight helmet.

  “Correct,” I answer.

  “You didn’t need to tell them again.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Don’t want them thinking we forgot,” she says from the right seat, her hands gentle on the controls, her tinted visor blacking out the upper half of her face.

  All I can see is the tip of her narrow nose, her strong jaw firmly set and her attitude, which is all-business and as hard as metal. The word rude comes to mind. It often does with her especially when things are as dangerous as they are right now. But there’s more. She’s self-absorbed and distant, and something else is there that I can’t access.

  “Redundancy,” I say into the mic against my lips. “Never hurts.”

  “Does when controllers are busy.”

  “Then they can disregard.” If there’s another thing I’m an expert at it’s not letting her outwardly rile me, especially when she’s right and in this instance she is.

  There are no aircraft taking off. There’s no traffic in the pattern, nothing moving out here except shimmering heat. The tower granted permission minutes ago for us to enter its class D airspace, cross the active runway and land on the ramp near Signature flight service. In summary my radio call wasn’t necessary and Lucy is chiding me. I let it go. I don’t trust my mood. I don’t want to lose my temper
with her or anyone, and it occurs to me that beneath anger is fear. I should get in touch with my fear so I’m not angry.

  I’m going to find out this is all my fault.

  No it isn’t dammit, and when I peel back anger I find more of it. Under more of it is rage. Beneath rage is a black pit I’ve never climbed inside. It’s the hole in my soul that would take me to the place where I might do something I shouldn’t.

  “Talking to controllers, the less said the better,” Lucy is saying as if I haven’t flown with her hundreds of times, as if I don’t know a damn thing.

  “Roger that,” I repeat blandly as I stare straight ahead.

  I keep my scan going for other aircraft and most of all for him. I think him but I don’t know who or what, and as of this morning the press has dubbed the killer Copperhead. Marino volunteered the name to some reporter, and it will stick as names always do in big cases that seem destined never to be solved. Or if they are it’s much too late. The Boston Strangler. The Monster of Florence. The Zodiac Killer. The Doodler. Bible John.

  I recheck the intercom switch, making sure Marino can’t hear a word Lucy and I say to each other. He’d like nothing better than to eavesdrop on us having a personal moment.

  You’re a bad mother.

  It’s as if Copperhead occupies my subconscious now, hissing ugliness, its fangs filled with poison from buried wounds.

  “You got to relax, Aunt Kay.” Lucy’s twin-engine helicopter is as steady as a rock, directly over the taxiway’s yellow centerline that she follows with the precision of a gymnast on a balance beam. “Take care of what’s in front of you and don’t think too much.”

  “We don’t know what’s in front of us. Or behind us. Or next to us.”

  “There you go again.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But I’m not. My vigilance is about to overtorque and while she understands the reason, she can’t relate to it, not really. Lucy doesn’t perceive danger the way other people do. It doesn’t enter her brilliant mind that no matter how accomplished, brazen and rich she is, one day she’s going to die. Everyone does. That’s my job security as a forensic expert and chief medical examiner, and it’s the burden I bear. Long ago I lost the gift of denial. I’m not sure I ever had it.