Four Scarpetta Novels

  Rudy stared at her as she shut down the formidable twin-engine machine and climbed out, wearing a dark blue Battle Dress Uniform and soft black ankle-high boots. Rudy was surprised by her fiery beauty as he watched the way she walked with confidence and grace and not a trace of masculinity. He began entertaining the possibility that what he had heard about her wasn’t true. Her body intrigued him as she moved. She seemed to ripple like an exotic animal, a tiger, he thought as she walked straight to the Attorney General, or whoever it was on that show-and-tell day, and politely shook his hand.

  Lucy is athletic but definitely feminine and very pleasing to touch. Rudy has learned not to love her too much. He knows when to back away.

  In minutes, the helicopter is up to full power, avionics and headsets on, the loud, fast beating of blades the music she and Rudy dance to and adore. He feels Lucy’s spirits joyfully lift as the helicopter does.

  “We’re on the go,” she says into her mike. “Hudson traffic, helicopter four-zero-seven Tango, Lima, Papa is southbound at thirty-fourth.”

  Hovering is what she likes most, and she can hold the chopper perfectly still, even in a stiff tailwind. Nosing around to the water, she pulls in power and takes off.

  SCARPETTA CAUGHT THE EARLIEST FLIGHT to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and, factoring in the hour time difference, landed at 10:15 a.m.

  From there, the drive almost due north to Livingston was a tense hour and forty minutes. She had no interest in renting a car and finding her way to the prison. That was a wise decision. Although she hasn’t counted, the route has taken numerous turns, the longest stretch of US-59 that rolls on forever. Scarpetta’s thoughts are clipped, as if she is a new recruit taking orders.

  She is in her most dispassionate mode, a persona she steps into when she testifies in court as defense attorneys poise themselves like carnivores, waiting for the first scent of her blood. Rarely is she wounded. Never fatally. Deep inside the refuge of her analytical mind, she has remained silent throughout the trip. She hasn’t spoken to the driver, except to give her instructions. The driver is the sort who wants to be chatty, and Scarpetta told her as she was climbing into the black Lincoln at the beginning of the trip that she didn’t want to talk. She had work to do.

  “You got it,” said the woman, who is dressed in a black livery suit that includes a cap and tie.

  “You can take your cap off,” Scarpetta told her.

  “Why, thank you,” the driver said with relief, taking it off immediately. “I can’t tell you how much I hate this thing, but most of my passengers want me to look like a proper chauffeur.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Scarpetta said.

  The prison looms ahead, a modern fortress that looks like a monstrous freighter built of concrete with a hatchmark of windows running below the flat roof, where two workmen are busy talking and gesturing and looking around. Surrounding the expansive grass grounds are thick coils of razorwire that shine like fine sterling in the sun. Guards high up in their towers scan with binoculars.

  “Schweeeew,” the driver mutters. “I have to admit this makes me a little bit nervous.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Scarpetta assures her. “They’ll show you where to park, and you’ll stay in the car. I don’t recommend you walk around at all.”

  “What if I have to use the ladies’ room?” she worries, slowing at a guard booth that signals the beginning of maximum security and perhaps the most dreaded task Scarpetta has ever undertaken.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to ask someone,” she absently replies, rolling her window down and handing a uniformed guard her driver’s license and medical examiner’s credentials, a bright brass shield and identification card inside a black wallet.

  When she left her position in Richmond, she was as bad as Marino. She never turned in her badge. No one thought to ask for it. Or maybe no one dared. She may not literally be Chief anymore, but what Lucy said last night is right. No one can strip Scarpetta of who she is and how she performs in the work she still loves. Scarpetta knows how good she is, even if she would never say it.

  “Who are you here to see?” the guard asks her, returning her license and credentials.

  “Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.” His name almost chokes her.

  The guard is rather casual, considering his environment and responsibility. Based on his demeanor and age, he’s probably been working in the prison system for a long time and scarcely notices the foreboding world he enters at the beginning of every shift. He steps back inside his booth and scans a list.

  “Ma’am,” he says, reemerging from his booth and pointing toward the glass front of the prison, “just drive up there and someone will tell you where to park. The PIO will meet you outside.”

  A Texas flag seems to wave Scarpetta on. The sky is blue glass, the temperature reminding her of autumn. Birds are having a conversation, nature going on, impervious to evil.

  LIFE IN POD A does not change.

  Condemned inmates come and go, and old names belong to silence. After days, or maybe weeks—Jean-Baptiste often loses track of time—the new ones who come in to await their deaths are the names associated with the cells formerly occupied by the old names of the others who awaited their deaths. Pod A, Cell 25 is Beast, who will be moved to a different holding cell in several hours. Pod A, Cell 30 is Jean-Baptiste. Pod A, cell 31, directly to Jean-Baptiste’s right, is Moth—called thus because the necrophiliac murderer who stirs after lights-out has trembling hands that flutter, and his skin is almost gray. He likes to sleep on the floor, and his prison-issue clothing is always covered with gray dust—like dust on the wings of a moth.

  Jean-Baptiste shaves the tops of his hands, long swirls of hair drifting into the stainless-steel sink.

  “All right, Hair Ball.” Eyes peer through the tiny window in his door. “Your fifteen minutes are almost up. Two more minutes and I take the razor back.”

  “Certainement.” He lathers his other hand with cheap-smelling soap and resumes shaving, careful of his knuckles.

  The tufts in his ears are tricky, but he manages.

  “Time’s up.”

  Jean-Baptiste carefully rinses the razor.

  “You shaved.” Moth speaks very quietly, so quietly that the other inmates rarely hear a word he says.

  “Oui, mon ami. I look quite beautiful.”

  The crank key that looks like a crowbar bangs into a slot at the bottom of the door, and the drawer slides out. The officer backs up, out of reach of pale, hairless fingers depositing the blue plastic razor.

  MOTH SITS AND ROLLS a basketball against the wall precisely, so that it always rolls in a straight line back to him.

  He is worthless, so feeble that his only pleasure in killing was having sex with dead flesh. Dead flesh has no energy, the blood no longer magnetic. Jean-Baptiste had a very effective method when he released his chosen ones to the ecstasy. A person with severe head injuries can live for a while, long enough for Jean-Baptiste to bite and suck living flesh and blood, thus recharging his magnetism.

  “It is a lovely day, isn’t it?” Moth’s quiet comment drifts into Jean-Baptiste’s cell, because he has the ears to hear the barely audible voice. “No clouds, but later there will be a few very high ones that will move south by late afternoon.”

  Moth has a radio and obsessively listens to the weather band.

  “I see Miss Gittleman has a new car, a cute little silver BMW Roadster.”

  Through a slitted window in each cell, a death-row inmate has a view of the parking lot behind the prison, and for lack of anything else to look at from their second-floor solitary confinements, men stare out for the better part of the day. In a sense, this is an act of intimidation. Moth’s mentioning Miss Gittleman’s BMW is the best threat he can muster. Officers most likely will pass this on to other officers, who will pass on to Miss Gittleman, the young and very pretty assistant public information officer, that inmates appreciate her new car. No prison employee is eager for any
details of their personal life to be known by offenders so vile that they deserve to die.

  Jean-Baptiste is perhaps the only inmate who rarely looks out the slit that is supposed to be a window. After memorizing every vehicle, their colors, makes, models and even certain plate numbers and precisely what their drivers look like, he found no purpose in looking out at a blank blue or stormy sky. Getting up from the toilet without bothering to pull up his pants, he looks out his high window, Moth’s comment having made him curious. He spots the BMW, then sits back down on the toilet, thinking.

  He ponders the letter he sent the beautiful Scarpetta. He believes it has changed everything and fantasizes about her reading it and succumbing to his will.

  Today, Beast will be allowed four hours to visit with clergy and family. He will leave for the short ride to Huntsville, to the Death House. At 6 p.m., he will die.

  This also changes things.

  A folded piece of paper quietly slips beneath the right corner of Jean-Baptiste’s door. He rips off toilet paper and, again without bothering to pull up his pants, picks up the note and returns to the toilet.

  Beast’s cell is five down from Jean-Baptiste’s, on the left, and he can always tell when a note slid from cell to cell to him is from Beast. The folded paper takes on a certain texture of scraped gray, and the inside is smudged, the paper fiber of the creases weakened by repeated opening and folding, as each inmate along the way reads the note, a few of the men adding their own comments.

  Jean-Baptiste crouches on his stainless-steel toilet, the long hair on his back matted with sweat that has turned his white shirt translucent. He is always hot when he is magnetized, and he is in a chronic state of magnetism as his electricity circulates through the metal of his confinement and races to the iron in his blood, and flows out again to complete another circuit, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

  “Today,” the semiliterate Beast wrote in pencil, “wont you be glad when they drive me away. You will miss me? May be not.”

  For once, Beast isn’t insulting, although the kite reads like a taunt to other inmates, of this Jean-Baptiste is certain.

  He writes back, “You don’t have to miss me, mon ami.”

  Beast will know Jean-Baptiste’s meaning, although he will know nothing more about what Jean-Baptiste will do to save Beast from his appointment with death. Footsteps ring on metal as officers walk by. He tears Beast’s note into small pieces and stuffs them into his mouth.

  SHE MUST HAVE PARKED AND been approached by the killer before she even took her keys out of the ignition.

  Nic assumes the purse and wallet may have been tossed in the parking lot, and after two days, certainly someone would have picked them up. Unfortunately, finders-keepers appears to have prevailed. As much news coverage as Katherine Bruce’s abduction is getting, whoever found her purse and wallet sure as hell knows that what he or she has is evidence. Some sniveling worm out there who lives according to situational ethics is not going to call the police now and basically admit that he or she intended to keep the purse or wallet or both until discovering they belonged to a murdered woman, assuming that Katherine has been murdered.

  If she hasn’t been yet, she will be soon.

  Then it occurs to Nic with a jolt that if the purse and wallet were turned in, whoever had them would have called the mighty Baton Rouge task force, which, of course, would find some lame-brain reason for not releasing the information to the press, and certainly not to other brothers and sisters of the badge. Nic can’t stop thinking about Wal-Mart and that she herself was at that very location within hours, perhaps, of when Katherine Bruce was abducted, driven away, probably to the same secret place the killer has taken all his victims.

  Nic is haunted by the possibility, not a strong one, that Katherine Bruce might have been inside the Wal-Mart while Nic was there trolling, as she has done at all hours since returning from Knoxville.

  Photographs of the pretty blonde victim constantly flash on the TV news and are in every newspaper Nic has picked up. She has no recollection of noticing anyone who looked even remotely similar to her while she was picking out a needlepoint pattern, when she doesn’t know how to do needlepoint, and showing interest in gaudy lingerie she would never wear.

  For some reason, the odd woman who fell down in the parking lot because of an injured knee drifts through Nic’s mind every now and then. Something about that woman bothers her.

  AT HIGH TIDE, SMALL BOATS can enter creeks and bayous that are usually not possible to enter and almost never ventured into by rational people.

  Darren Citron is known to rev up his old Bay Runner and skim the shallow water and just make it over the mudbar into the mouth of whatever waterway he intends to challenge on any given day. Right now, the tide’s a little lower than he’d like, but he speeds full-throttle in Blind River and almost gets caught in the silt, which can be up to six feet deep. The muck can suck one’s shoes off, and although Darren can usually manage to push his boat out, he doesn’t like wading in water that’s full of cottonmouths.

  A local boy, he is eighteen years old, perpetually tanned the hue of a burnt peanut, and he lives to fish and find new spots for hunting gators. Because of his latter preoccupation, Darren is not particularly admired. If he goes after big ones that can bring a good price for their hides, meat and heads, it requires a strong rope, a huge steel hook and, of course, bait. The higher the bait dangles over the water, the longer the gator has to be to reach it. The best bait is dogs. Darren gets them from shelters all over the area, his sweet demeanor fooling people. He does what he has to, rationalizing to himself that the animals will be put to sleep anyway. When he’s gator hunting, he thinks about the gator, not the bait or how he got it. Gators bite at night, especially if Darren sits very still in his boat and plays a tape recording of dogs whining. He’s skilled at disassociating from the bait, only thinking about the huge gator that’s going to come out of the water, snap its jaws together and get caught on the hook. Then he moves in quickly and humanely shoots the reptile in the head with a .22 rifle.

  He cruises through a waterway lined with lily pads and saw grass, dappled with shadows from cypress dressed in Spanish moss, their roots ropy. Gators go in and out of the water, especially if the female has laid eggs. Their long tails leave trails, and when Darren sees a particular spot with a lot of trails, he marks it on his mental map and comes back there after dark, if the weather and tides are right.

  The water is carpeted in duck seed blooms, and a blue heron lifts off up ahead, unhappy about the intrusion of man and motor. Darren scans for trails. He is followed by iridescent dragonflies. Gator eyes remind him of tiny tunnels side by side, just above the surface of the water, before they catch him looking back. Around a bend, he spots a myriad of trails and a yellow nylon rope hanging from a tree. The bait on the huge steel hook is a human arm.

  TODAY FOR THE FIRST TIME in more than five years, Benton speaks to Senator Frank Lord, both of them using pay phones.

  It strikes Benton as almost comical, as he envisions the ever-immaculately groomed and impeccably dressed Senator Lord driving from his Northern Virginia home, on his way to the Capitol, and pulling off at a gas station to use a pay phone. Benton orchestrated the conversation after receiving a very unexpected e-mail from the senator late last night.

  Trouble, it read. Tomorrow 7:15. Leave me a number.

  Benton e-mailed back the number of the pay phone he’s using right now, having picked it out in advance last night. Always go for the simplest, most obvious plan, if possible. Certainly, it is beginning to seem that his meticulous and complicated ones are going awry in all directions.

  He leans against a wall, watching his beat-up Cadillac, making sure no one goes near it or shows interest in him. Every alarm inside his head is hammering. Senator Lord is telling him about Scarpetta’s letter from Chandonne, the one with the calligraphy.

  “How did you find out about this?” Benton asks him.

  “Jaime Berger called me la
st night. At home. Very concerned that Chandonne has set up a trap and Scarpetta’s walking right into it. Berger wants my help, my intervention. People forget that I have my limitations. Well, my enemies don’t forget it.”

  The senator wants to send legions of federal agents to Baton Rouge, but not even he can bend the law. The Baton Rouge Task Force has to invite the FBI into the investigation, and for all practical purposes to take it over. In these serial abductions—or murders, because that’s what they are—there is an insurmountable jurisdictional problem with the feds storming in on their own. No federal laws have been broken.

  “Damn incompetence,” Senator Lord says. “Damn ignorant fools down there.”

  “It’s close,” Benton says into the phone. “The letter means the situation is very close to a possible conclusion. Not the way I wanted it. This is bad, very bad. I’m not worried about me.”

  “It can be handled?”

  “I’m the only one who knows how. It will require exposure.”

  A long pause, then Senator Lord acquiesces. “Yes, I believe it will. But once that happens, there’s no going back. We can’t go through this again. Do you really . . . ?”

  “I have to. The letter changes things dramatically, and you know how she is. He is luring her there.”

  “She’s there now.”

  “Baton Rouge?” Benton is frightened.

  “Texas. I mean Texas.”

  “Christ. Not good, either. No, no, no. The letter. This one’s real. Texas is no longer safe for her.”