Four Scarpetta Novels

  It doesn’t require special search engines or Interpol to type in a telephone number and find out whose it is. Lucy logs on to Google. The name that comes up on the computer screen is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. Included is a map.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Rudy says, still flirting but completely cognizant of the importance of a call from Polunsky.

  “Why would I marry you if you’re dead?” she mutters, scarcely listening to him.

  “Because you can’t live without me.”

  “I can’t believe this.” She stares at the screen. “What the hell is going on? Get Zach to call my aunt, make sure she is safe. Have him tell her it’s possible Chandonne might be out. Goddamn it! He’s fucking with us!”

  “Why don’t you call her yourself?” Rudy puzzles.

  “That piece of shit is fucking with us!” Her eyes blaze.

  “Why don’t you call Scarpetta?” Rudy asks again.

  Lucy instantly becomes somber.

  “I can’t talk to her right now. I just can’t.” She looks at him. “How are you doing?”

  “Awful,” he says.

  BENTON DID NOT CALL on a landline, because he did not want the inaudible conversation taped.

  The technical tools that Lucy most likely has and can’t live without would not include a cell phone that automatically tapes a live conversation, especially since very few people have her cell phone number, and those who do are not the sort she would secretly tape. This ploy was far simpler than the last one, and there is no risk that Lucy can try voice analysis to decipher what Jean-Baptiste’s nonsensical taped voice had to say, which was nothing.

  Benton simply spliced fragments of Jean-Baptiste’s taped voice with static, to give the impression of an attempt to talk when one is in a very bad cell. Already she will have traced the call—just as she did the last one—to Polunsky. She will have no satellite capabilities, because the garbled call is gone, lost in space—again, because Benton did not call any of her office lines.

  She will be angry. When she gets sufficiently irritated, nothing can stop her. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is fucking with her. This is what she will think, and Benton knows Lucy well enough to be certain she has made the mistake of hating Chandonne. Hate interferes with clear thinking. She will wonder how Chandonne can be calling her from Polunsky and from New York, if her satellite technology is to be trusted.

  In the end, Lucy always trusts her technology.

  A second call from Polunsky, and now she will begin to believe, seriously believe, that Chandonne must have a phone with a Texas Department of Criminal Justice billing address. She is no more than a breath away from believing that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has escaped.

  Scarpetta will decide she must encounter him face-to-face, behind protective glass, inside the Polunsky Unit. Chandonne will refuse to see anybody else, and that is his right.

  Yes, Kay, yes. It’s for you, it’s for you. Please. Face him before it’s too late. Let him talk!

  Benton is getting frantic.

  Baton Rouge, Lucy!

  Chandonne said Baton Rouge, Lucy!

  Are you listening to me, Lucy?

  A RADIO WITH A DIPOLE antenna is not required for Jean-Baptiste Chandonne to know the breaking news.

  “Hey, Hair Ball!” Beast yells. “You heard? Guess not, since you don’t got no fucking radio, like I do. Guess what? Guess what I just heard? Your lawyer ate his gun in Poland.”

  Jean-Baptiste carefully moves his pen with the skilled hand of a surgeon, tracing over the words on death row and on the front row of life. He brushes his fingertips over the indentations on white paper as he composes a letter to Scarpetta that will be forwarded to her by his lawyer, who now Jean-Baptiste learns is supposedly dead. If Rocco is dead, Jean-Baptiste has no emotions about it, but he is curious to know whether the death is significant or simply a random suicidal whim that carried Rocco away.

  The news of the suicide creates an uproar of the usual obscenities, cruel remarks and questions.

  Information.

  On death row, information is precious. Anything new to hear is devoured. The men are starved for rumors, gossip, information, information. So this is a big day for them. None of the inmates ever met Rocco Caggiano, but whenever Jean-Baptiste’s name has been mentioned on the news, Rocco has been mentioned too, and vice versa. A simple deduction is enough for Jean-Baptiste to accept that Rocco’s death is of interest to the press only because he represents the notorious Jean-Baptiste, alias Le Loup-Garou, alias Hair Ball, Mini-Me Dick and Wolfman and oh . . . What was the newest appellation that Beast—the ever-clever Beast—conjured up earlier today?

  PUBIC Enemy Number One.

  He wrote it on a folded note that was slid under Jean-Baptiste’s door, complete with a pubic hair, Beast’s pubic hair. Jean-Baptiste ate the note, tasting the words, and blew the pubic hair out his barred window. It drifted to the floor outside his cell.

  “If I was Wolfman’s lawyer, I’d eat my gun, too!” Beast calls out.

  Laughter, and the bang, bang of inmates kicking their steel doors.

  “Shut up! What the hell’s going on in here?”

  The mayhem doesn’t last long. Corrections officers restore order to the pod immediately, and a pair of brown eyes appear in the barred window of Jean-Baptiste’s door.

  Jean-Baptiste feels the low energy of the stare. He never stares back.

  YOU NEED TO MAKE a phone call, Chandonne?” the voice belonging to the eyes asks. “Your lawyer’s dead, committed suicide. They found his body in a hotel room in some Polish city I can’t pronounce. Looks like he’d been dead a while. Killed himself because he was a fugitive. Figures that you’d be represented by a criminal. That’s all I know.”

  Jean-Baptiste sits on his bunk, tracing over words on white paper. “Who are you?”

  “Officer Duck.”

  “Monsieur Canard? Coin-coin. That is French for quack-quack, Monsieur Duck.”

  “You want to make a phone call or not?”

  “No, merci.”

  Officer Duck is never sure how to describe or define the subtleties that ignite his temper every time Jean-Baptiste speaks, but the result is belittlement and powerlessness, as if the mutant murderer is superior and indifferent to death row and those who have complete control of him. The Wolfman manages to make Officer Duck feel as though he is nothing but a shadow in a uniform. He looks forward to Jean-Baptiste’s execution and wishes it could be painful.

  “Got that right. No mercy’s what your ass is gonna get in ten short days,” Officer Duck mouths off. “Sorry about your lawyer’s blowing his brains out and rotting inside a hotel room. I can tell you feel real bad about it.”

  “Lies,” Jean-Baptiste replies as he gets up from his bunk and moves to the door, wrapping fingers with their swirls of pale, downy hair around the iron bars in the tiny window.

  His Halloween face fills the space and startles Officer Duck, who almost panics at the close proximity of his inch-long filthy thumbnail—the only nail that, for some reason, Jean-Baptiste never cuts.

  “Lies,” Jean-Baptiste repeats.

  It is never easy to know where his asymmetrical eyes are directed or how much they see, and the hair covering his forehead and neck and protruding in tufts from his ears overwhelms Officer Duck with fright.

  “Move back. Goddamn, you stink worse than a dog that’s been rolling around in the juice of something dead. We’re gonna cut that fucking thumbnail of yours.”

  “It’s my legal right to grow my nails and my hair,” Jean-Baptiste replies softly, with a gaping smile that reminds the officer of a widemouthed fish.

  He imagines those widely spaced, pointed baby teeth ripping into female flesh, biting breasts like a frenzied shark while hairy fists pound beautiful faces to pulp. Chandonne targeted only gorgeous, successful women with sexy bodies. He has a fetish for large breasts and nipples that, according to a forensic psychologist who is in and out of the pod, denotes
an obsession with a body part that compels Jean-Baptiste to annihilate it.

  “For some offenders, it’s shoes and feet,” the forensic psychologist explained over coffee, perhaps a month ago.

  “Yeah, I know about the shoe thing. These wackos break into houses and steal some lady’s shoes.”

  “It happens more than you might expect. The shoe itself is sexually arousing to the offender. Frequently, he then feels the need to kill the woman wearing the fetish or whose body part is the fetish. Many serial killers got their starts as fetish burglars, going into homes, stealing shoes, underwear, other objects that mean something to them sexually.”

  “So Wolfman was probably stealing bras when he was a hairy little kid.”

  “Could very well have been. He certainly enters homes with ease, and that is consistent with a serial burglar who has progressed to a serial murderer. The problem with fetish burglary is often the victim has no clue that her home has been entered and that anything was taken. How many women who can’t find a shoe or even several shoes, or lingerie, would assume a burglar has been inside her home?”

  Officer Duck shrugged. “Hell, my wife can’t find nothing half the time she looks. You ought to see her closet. If anybody’s got a shoe fetish, Sally does. But it’s not like some guy can break in to a lady’s home and walk off with a breast. Well, I guess some of them are into the dismemberment thing.”

  “It’s like hair color, eye color or anything else. An offender has a fetish about whatever triggers sexual arousal that in some cases gives rise to a sadistic need to destroy that fetish. Which, in this instance, is the woman with the size and shape of breasts that are a fetish to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”

  Officer Duck understands in a limited way. He likes breasts, too. He is perversely, shamefully aroused by images, even violent ones.

  THE RINGING OF the officer’s feet on the catwalk fades.

  Jean-Baptiste resettles on his bunk, a stack of clean white paper on his lap. He taps his pen and composes another poetic phrase, unfurling it from his unique mind like a brilliant red flag that waves in rhythm with his pen. His soul brims with poetry. Molding words into images and profundities that roll together in perfect rhythm is effortless, so effortless.

  Roll together in perfect rhythm. He traces his graceful calligraphy again and again, bearing down hard with the ballpoint pen.

  Roiling together in perfect rhythm.

  That is better, he thinks, tapping the pen on the paper again, in rhythm with his inner rhythm.

  Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.

  He can slow it down or make it faster or faint or strong, depending on the music of blood he remembers from each kill.

  “Rolling,” he starts again. “Mais non.”

  It all roils together in perfect rhythm.

  “Mais non.”

  Tap, tap of the pen.

  “Dear Rocco,” Jean-Baptiste decides to write. “You did not dare to mention Poland to the wrong person, of this I can be sure. You are too much of a coward.”

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “But who? Maybe Jean-Paul,” he writes to his dead lawyer.

  Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap . . .

  “Hey, Hair Ball! I got my radio tuned in,” Beast yells. “Ohhhh, too bad you can’t hear it. Guess what? They’re talking about your lawyer again. Another itty-bitty little news flash. He left a note, see? It said having you for a client just killed him. Get it?”

  “Shut up, Beast.”

  “Get a life, Beast.”

  “Your jokes suck, man.”

  “I wanna smoke! Why the fuck don’t they let me smoke!”

  “Bad for your health, man.”

  “Smokin’ will kill ya, dumb shit. Says so right on the pack.”

  THE ATKINS DIET WORKS FINE for Lucy because she has never been keen on sweets and doesn’t mind forgoing pasta and bread. Her most dangerous indulgence is beer and wine, and she abstains from both at Jaime Berger’s penthouse apartment on Central Park West.

  “I won’t force you,” Berger says, returning the bottle of Pinot Grigio to the top shelf of the refrigerator inside her beautiful kitchen of wormy chestnut cupboards and granite countertops. “I’m better off without it myself. I can hardly remember anything anymore, as it is.”

  “I’d be better off if you would forget things now and then,” Lucy says. “I’d be a lot better off if I would, too.”

  The last time she visited Berger’s penthouse was at least three months ago. Berger’s husband got drunk, and soon enough he and Lucy went at each other until Berger asked Lucy to please leave.

  “It’s forgotten,” Berger says with a smile.

  “He’s not here, right?” Lucy makes sure. “You promised it was okay for me to come over.”

  “Would I lie to you?

  “Well . . .” Lucy kids her.

  For the moment, their light exchange belies the horror of that event. Never has Berger witnessed such a display in what was supposed to be civilized socializing. She truly worried that Lucy and her husband would resort to blows. Lucy would win.

  “He hates me,” Lucy says, pulling a packet of folded paper out of the back pocket of her cutoff jeans.

  Berger doesn’t reply as she pours sparkling water into two tall beer glasses and goes back into the refrigerator for a bowl of freshly cut wedges of lime. Even when she is casual in a soft white cotton warm-up suit and socks, as she is now, she is anything but easygoing.

  Lucy begins to fidget, stuffs the papers back into her pocket. “Do you think we can ever relax around each other, Jaime? It hasn’t been the same . . . .”

  “It really can’t be the same, now can it?”

  Berger makes pennies as a prosecutor. Her husband is a real estate thief, maybe one notch more highly evolved than Rocco Caggiano, in Lucy’s opinion.

  “Seriously. When will he be home? Because if it’s soon, I’m leaving,” Lucy says, staring at her.

  “You wouldn’t be here right now if he was coming home soon. He’s attending a meeting in Scottsdale. Scottsdale, Arizona. In the desert.”

  “With reptiles and cactus. Where he belongs.”

  “Stop it, Lucy,” Berger says. “My bad marriage is not somehow related to all the awful men your mother chose over you when you were growing up. We’ve been through this before.”

  “I just don’t understand why . . .”

  “Please don’t go there. The past is past.” Berger sighs, returning the bottle of San Pellegrino to the refrigerator. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Yes, the past is past. So let’s get on to what does matter.”

  “I never said it didn’t—doesn’t matter.” Berger carries their drinks into the living room. “Come on now. You’re here. I’m glad you’re here. So let’s make it all right, shall we?”

  The view overlooks the Hudson, a side of the building considered less attractive than the front of it, which has the view of the park. But Berger loves water. She loves to watch the cruise ships docking. If she wanted trees, she has told Lucy many times, she wouldn’t bother living in New York. If she wanted water, Lucy usually replies, she shouldn’t have bothered living in New York.

  “Nice view. Not bad for the cheap side of the building,” Lucy says.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “That I know,” Lucy replies.

  “How does poor Rudy put up with you?”

  “That I don’t know. I guess he loves his job.”

  Lucy sprawls on an ostrich-skin couch, her bare legs crossed, her muscles speaking their own language, responding to movements and nerves while she lives on with little awareness of how she looks. Her workouts are an addictive release from demons.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE STRETCHES OUT on the thin wool blanket he soaks with sweat each night.

  He leans against the hard, cold wall. He has decided that Rocco isn’t dead. Jean-Baptiste does not fall for yet another manipulation, although he is not certain what the purpose of this manipulation might be. Ah, of course, fea
r. His father must lurk behind this lie. He is warning Jean-Baptiste that suffering and death are the reward for betrayal, even if the traitor is the mighty Monsieur Chandonne’s son.

  A warning.

  Jean-Baptiste had better not talk now that he is about to die.

  Ha.

  Every hour of every day, the enemy attempts to make Jean-Baptiste suffer and die.

  Don’t talk.

  I will if I want. Ha! It is me, Jean-Baptiste, who rules death.

  He could kill himself easily. In minutes he could twist a sheet and tie it around his neck and a leg of the steel bed. People are misinformed about hangings. No height is necessary, only a position—such as sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning forward with all his weight, thus putting pressure on the blood vessels. Unconsciousness happens in seconds, then death. Fear would not touch him, and were he to end his biological life, he would transcend it first, and his soul would direct all that he would do from that point on.

  Jean-Baptiste would not end his biological life in this manner. He has too much to look forward to, and he joyfully leaves his small death row cell and transports his soul into the future, where he sits behind Plexiglas and stares at the lady doctor Scarpetta, hungrily takes in her entire being, relives his brilliance at tricking his way into her lovely château and raising his hammer to crush her head. She denied herself the ecstasy. She denied Jean-Baptiste by depriving him of her blood. Now she will come to him in humility and love, realizing what she did, the foolishness of it, the joy she denied herself when she further maimed him and burned his eyes with formalin, the chemical of the dead. Scarpetta dashed it into Jean-Baptiste’s face. The evil fluid demagnitized him briefly, and ever so briefly, pain forced him to suffer the hell of living only in his body.

  Madame Scarpetta will spend eternity worshipping his higher state. His higher being will direct its superiority over other humans throughout the universe, as Poe wrote under the guise of a Philadelphia Gentleman. Of course, the anonymous author is Poe. The invisible agent that is the transcendent Poe came to Jean-Baptiste in a delirium as he was restrained in the Richmond Hospital. Richmond was where Poe grew up. His soul remains there.