Four Scarpetta Novels

  In 62, the torso is face-up on the autopsy table. In 74, it is facedown, and he clicks back and forth between the two images, studying her naked torso, trying to make sense of the bright red handprints and the angry, abraded skin between her shoulderblades, a six-by eight-inch area of flesh rubbed raw and embedded with what appears to be “wood-like splinters and dirt,” according to the autopsy report.

  He has been contemplating the possibility that the red handprints were painted before the woman died, that it has nothing to do with her murder. Maybe for some reason she already had gotten the bodypainting before she encountered her assailant. He has to consider it, but he doesn’t believe it. More likely, it was the killer who turned her torso into a work of art, one that is degrading and suggestive of sexual violence, suggestive of hands grabbing her breasts and forcing open her legs, symbols he painted on her while he held her hostage, possibly when she was incapacitated or dead. Benton doesn’t know. He can’t tell. He wishes the case were Scarpetta’s, that she had gone to the scene and done the autopsy. He wishes she were here. As usual, something came up.

  He reviews more photographs and reports. The victim is presumed to be in her mid-thirties or early forties, and her postmortem findings reiterate what Dr. Lonsdale said in the morgue: She hadn’t been dead long when her body was discovered on an easement that leads through Walden Woods, not far from Walden Pond, in the wealthy town of Lincoln. Swabs from the physical evidence recovery kit are negative for seminal fluid, and it is Benton’s preliminary assessment that whoever killed her and posed her body in the woods is driven by sadistic fantasies, the sort of sexual fantasies that objectify the victim.

  Whoever she is, she was nothing to him. She wasn’t a person, just a symbol, just a thing for him to do with as he pleased, and what pleased him was to degrade and terrorize, to punish, to make her suffer, to force her to face her own impending violent and humiliating death, to taste the shotgun barrel in her mouth and watch him pull the trigger. He might have known her, or she might have been a stranger to him. He might have stalked her and abducted her. No one fitting her description has been reported missing from New England, say the Massachusetts State Police. No one fitting her description has been reported missing from anywhere.

  Beyond the pool is the seawall. It is big enough to moor a sixty-foot boat, although Scarpetta doesn’t have one and has never wanted one of any size or description.

  She watches the boats, especially at night when bow and stern lights move like aircraft along the dark waterway, silent but for the rumbling of their engines. If the lights are on in the cabins, she watches people moving around or sitting and lifting glasses, laughing or serious or just there, and she doesn’t want to be them or be like them or be with them.

  She was never like them. She never wanted anything to do with them. When she was growing up poor and isolated, she wasn’t like them and couldn’t be with them, and that was their choice. Now the choice is hers. She knows what she knows, is on the outside looking into lives that are irrelevant, depressing, empty and scary. She has always feared something tragic would happen to her niece. It is natural for her to entertain morbid thoughts about anyone she loves, but the inclination has always been more extreme with Lucy. Scarpetta has always worried that Lucy would die a violent death. Never did it occur to her that she might get sick, that biology might turn on her, not because it’s personal but because it isn’t.

  “I started having symptoms that didn’t make sense,” Lucy says in the dark, between two wooden pilings, where they sit in teak chairs.

  There is a table, and on it are drinks and cheese and crackers. They haven’t touched the cheese and crackers. This is their second round of drinks.

  “Sometimes I wish I smoke,” Lucy adds, reaching for her tequila.

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “You didn’t think it strange when you did it all those years. You still want it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

  “That is something you would say, as if you’re exempt from the same feelings other people have,” Lucy replies in the dark to the water. “Sure it matters. Whatever you want matters. Especially when you can’t have it.”

  “Do you want her?” Scarpetta asks.

  “Which her?”

  “Whatever her you were with last,” she reminds her. “Your most recent conquest. In Ptown.”

  “I don’t look at them as conquests. I look at them as brief escapes. Like smoking pot. I guess that’s the most disappointing part. It means nothing. Only this time it may mean something. Something I don’t understand. I may have walked into something. Been really blind and stupid.”

  She tells Scarpetta about Stevie, about her tattoos, the red handprints. She has a difficult time talking about it but tries to sound detached, as if she is talking about what somebody else did, as if she is discussing a case.

  Scarpetta is silent. She picks up her drink and tries to think about what Lucy has just said.

  “Maybe it means nothing,” Lucy goes on. “A coincidence. A lot of people are into weird body art, all kinds of weird stuff in acrylics and latex that they airbrush all over themselves.”

  “I’m getting tired of coincidences. There seem to have been a lot of them lately,” Scarpetta says.

  “This is pretty good tequila. I wouldn’t mind a joint right now.”

  “Are you trying to shock me?”

  “Pot’s not as bad for you as you think.”

  “So you’re the doctor now.”

  “Really. It’s true.”

  “Why do you seem to hate yourself so much, Lucy?”

  “You know what, Aunt Kay?” Lucy turns toward her, her face strong and sharp in the soft glow of lights along the seawall. “You really don’t have a clue about what I do or what I’ve done. So don’t pretend to.”

  “That sounds like an indictment of some sort. Most of what you’ve said tonight sounds like an indictment. If I’ve somehow failed you, I’m sorry. Sorrier than you’ll ever imagine.”

  “I’m not you.”

  “Of course you’re not. And you keep saying that.”

  “I’m not looking for something permanent, someone who really matters, someone I can’t live without. I don’t want a Benton. I want people I can forget. One-night stands. Do you want to know how many I’ve had? Because I don’t.”

  “You’ve had virtually nothing to do with me this past year. Is that why?”

  “It’s easier.”

  “Are you afraid I’d judge you?”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “It’s not who you’re sleeping with that bothers me. It’s the rest of it. You keep to yourself at the Academy, have nothing to do with the students, are virtually never there, or when you are you’re killing yourself in the gym or up in a helicopter or out on the range or testing something, preferably a machine, a dangerous one.”

  “Maybe machines are the only thing I get along with.”

  “Whatever you fail begins to fail, Lucy. Just so you know.”

  “Including my body.”

  “What about your heart and soul? How about we start with that.”

  “That’s pretty cold. So much for my health.”

  “I feel anything but cold. Your health means more to me than my own.”

  “I think she set me up, knew I was in the bar, had something in mind.”

  She is back to that woman again, the one with the handprints that are similar to the ones in Benton’s case.

  “You need to tell Benton about Stevie. What’s her last name? What do you know about her?” Scarpetta asks.

  “I know very little. I’m sure it has nothing to do with anything, but it’s strange, isn’t it. She was up there the same time the woman was murdered and dumped. In the general area.”

  Scarpetta is quiet.

  “Maybe there’s some cult thing up there in that area,” Lucy then says. “Maybe there are a lot of people painting red handprints all over themselves. Don’t judge m
e. I don’t need to hear how stupid and reckless I am.”

  Scarpetta looks at her and is quiet.

  Lucy wipes her eyes.

  “I’m not judging you. I’m trying to understand why you’ve turned your back on everything you care about. The Academy is yours. It’s your dream. You hated organized law enforcement, the Feds in particular. So you started your own force, your own posse. Now your riderless horse wanders the parade ground. Where are you? And all of us—all of the people you have brought together in your cause—feel pretty much abandoned. Most of last year’s students never met you, and some of the faculty don’t know you and wouldn’t recognize you on sight.”

  Lucy watches a sailboat with furled sails putter past in the night. She wipes her eyes.

  “I have a tumor,” she says. “In my brain.”

  39

  Benton enlarges another photograph, this one taken at the scene.

  The victim looks like a hideous work of violent pornography, on her back, legs and arms splayed, bloody white slacks wrapped around her hips like a diaper, a pair of fecal-stained slightly bloody white panties covering her destroyed head like a mask, with two holes cut out for her eyes. He leans back in his chair, thinking. It would be too simple to assume that whoever posed her in the Walden Woods did so only to shock. There is something else.

  The case reminds him of something.

  He ponders the diaper-folded slacks. They are inside out, suggesting several possibilities: At some point, she might have taken them off under duress, then put them back on. The killer might have removed them after she was dead. They are linen. Most people don’t wear white linen in New England this time of year. In a photograph that shows the slacks laid out on a paper-covered autopsy table, the pattern of the bloodstains is telling. The slacks are stiff with dark brown blood in front, from the knee up. From the knee down, there are a few smears and that’s all. Benton imagines her on her knees when she was shot. He envisions her kneeling. He tries Scarpetta’s phone. She doesn’t answer.

  Humiliation. Control. Complete degradation, rendering the victim absolutely powerless, as powerless as an infant. Hooded like somebody about to be executed, possibly. Hooded like a prisoner of war, to torture, to terrorize, possibly. The killer is reenacting something from his own life, probably. His childhood, probably. Sexual abuse, probably. Sadism, possibly. So often that is the case. Do unto others as was done unto you. He tries Scarpetta again and doesn’t get her.

  Basil slips into his mind. He posed some of his victims, leaned them up against things, in one case a wall in a rest-stop ladies’ room. Benton conjures up the scene and autopsy photographs of Basil’s victims, the ones anybody knows about, and sees the gory, eyeless faces of the dead. Maybe that’s the similarity. The eyeholes in the panties are suggestive of Basil’s eyeless victims.

  Then again, it might be about the hood. Somehow, it seems more about the hood. Hooding someone is to overpower that person completely, to obviate any possibility of fight or flight, to torment, to terrify, to punish. None of Basil’s victims were hooded, not that anybody knows of, but there is always so much nobody knows about what really happened during a sadistic homicide. The victim isn’t around to tell.

  Benton worries that maybe he has been spending too much time in Basil’s head.

  He tries Scarpetta again.

  “It’s me,” he says when she answers.

  “I was getting ready to call you,” she says tersely, coldly, in an unsteady voice.

  “You sound upset.”

  “You go first, Benton,” she says in the same voice, one that barely sounds like her.

  “Have you been crying?” He doesn’t understand why she is acting like this. “I wanted to talk to you about this case up here,” he says.

  She is the only person who can make him feel this way. Scared.

  “I was hoping to talk to you about it. I’m looking at the case right now,” he says.

  “I’m glad you want to talk to me about something.” She emphasizes something.

  “What’s wrong, Kay?”

  “Lucy,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong. You’ve known about it for a year. How could you do this to me.”

  “She told you,” he says, rubbing his jaw.

  “She was scanned at your damn hospital, and you never said a thing to me. Well, guess what? She’s my niece, not yours. You have no right…”

  “She made me promise.”

  “She had no right.”

  “Of course she did, Kay. No one could talk to you without her consent. Not even her doctors.”

  “But she told you.”

  “For a very good reason…”

  “This is serious. We’re going to have to deal with it. I’m not sure I can trust you anymore.”

  He sighs, his stomach as tight as a fist. They rarely fight. When they do, it’s awful.

  “I’m getting off the phone now,” she says. “We’ve got to deal with this,” she says again.

  She hangs up without saying good-bye, and Benton sits in his chair, unable to move for a moment. He stares blankly at a gruesome photograph on his screen and idly starts clicking through the case again, reading reports, scanning the narrative Thrush wrote up for him, trying to divert his thoughts from what just happened.

  There were drag marks in the snow leading from a parking area to where the body was found. There are no footprints in the snow that might have been the victim’s, only her killer’s. Approximately size nine, maybe ten, big tread, some type of hiking boot.

  It’s not fair that Scarpetta should blame him. He had no choice. Lucy swore him to secrecy, said she would never forgive him if he told anyone, especially her aunt, especially Marino.

  There are no blood drips or smears along the trail the killer left, suggesting he wrapped her body in something, dragged her wrapped up. Police recovered some fibers from the drag marks.

  Scarpetta is projecting; she’s attacking him because she can’t attack Lucy. She can’t attack Lucy’s tumor. She can’t get angry at someone who is sick.

  Trace evidence on the body includes fibers and microscopic debris under the fingernails and adhering to blood and to abraded skin and hair. A preliminary lab analysis indicates most of the trace is consistent with carpet and cotton fibers, and there are minerals, the fragments of insects and vegetation and pollen found in soil, or what the medical examiner so eloquently called “dirt.”

  When the telephone rings on Benton’s desk, the call is identified as unavailable, and he assumes it is Scarpetta. He snaps up the phone.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “This is the McLean Hospital operator.”

  He hesitates, disappointed deeply and hurt. Scarpetta could have called him back. He doesn’t remember the last time she hung up on him.

  “I’m trying to reach Dr. Wesley,” the operator says.

  It still sounds strange when people call him that. He has had his Ph.D. for many years, as far back as his career with the FBI, but never insisted on or wanted people to call him doctor.

  “Speaking,” he says.

  Lucy sits up in bed in her aunt’s guest room. The lights are out. She had too many tequilas to drive. She looks at the number on the illuminated display of her Treo, the one with the 617 exchange. She’s a little woozy, a little drunk.

  She thinks about Stevie, remembers her acting upset and insecure as she abruptly left the cottage. She thinks of Stevie following her to the Hummer in the parking lot and acting like the same seductive, mysterious and self-assured woman Lucy had met in Lorraine’s, and as she thinks about that first meeting in Lorraine’s, she feels what she felt then. She doesn’t want to feel anything but she does and it unsettles her.

  Stevie unsettles her. She might know something. She was in New England around the same time the lady was murdered and dumped at Walden Pond. Both of them had red handprints on their bodies. Stevie claims she didn’t paint the handprints, someone else did.

  Who?

  Lucy hits send, a lit
tle bleary, a little scared. She should have traced the 617 number Stevie gave her, see who it really comes back to, see if it really is Stevie’s number or if her name is Stevie.

  “Hello?”

  “Stevie?” So it is her number. “You remember me?”

  “How could I forget you? No one could.”

  She sounds seductive. Her voice is soothing and rich, and Lucy feels what she felt at Lorraine’s. She reminds herself why she is calling.

  The handprints. Where did she get them? Who?

  “I was sure I’d never hear from you again,” Stevie’s seductive voice is saying.

  “Well, you have,” Lucy says.

  “Why are you talking so quietly?”

  “I’m not in my own house.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t ask what that means. But I do quite a lot of things I shouldn’t. Who are you with?”

  “No one,” Lucy says. “You still up in Ptown?”

  “I left right after you did. Drove straight through. I’m back home.”

  “Gainesville?”

  “Where are you?”

  “You never have told me your last name,” Lucy says.

  “What house are you in if it’s not yours? I assume you live in a house. I guess I don’t know.”

  “You ever come south?”

  “I can go anywhere I want. South of where? Are you in Boston?”

  “I’m in Florida,” Lucy says. “I’d like to see you. We need to talk. How about telling me your last name, you know, like maybe we’re not strangers.”

  “You want to talk about what.”

  She’s not going to tell Lucy her full name. There’s no point in asking again. She’s probably not going to tell Lucy anything, at least not over the phone.

  “Let’s talk in person,” Lucy says.

  “That’s always better.”

  She asks Stevie to meet her in South Beach tomorrow night at ten.

  “You heard of a place called Deuce?” Lucy asks.

  “It’s quite famous,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “I know it well.”

  40