Four Scarpetta Novels

“Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”

  “On him?”

  “Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.

  63

  Benton finds it a little curious that a taxicab is parked outside the neuroimaging lab. It is a blue SUV taxi, and no one is inside it. Maybe it is the taxi that was supposed to pick up Kenny Jumper at the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home, but why is the taxi parked here, and where is the driver? Near the taxi is the white prison van that transported Basil here for his five o’clock interview. He’s not doing well. He says he’s feeling very suicidal and wants to quit the study.

  “We have so much invested in him,” Benton says to Scarpetta as they walk inside the lab. “You have no idea how bad it is when these people drop out. Especially him. Dammit. Maybe you can be a good influence on him.”

  “I’m not even going to comment,” she says.

  Two prison guards stand outside the small room where Benton will talk to Basil, try to talk him out of quitting PREDATOR, talk him out of killing himself. The room is part of the MRI suite, the same room Ben ton has used before when he talks to Basil. Scarpetta is reminded that the guards aren’t armed.

  She and Benton walk into the interview room. Basil is sitting at the small table. He isn’t restrained, not even with plastic flex-cuffs. She likes PREDATOR even less and she didn’t think that was possible.

  “This is Dr. Scarpetta,” Benton says to Basil. “She’s part of the research study team. Do you mind if she sits in?”

  “That would be nice,” Basil says.

  His eyes seem to spin. They are eerie. They seem to spin as they look at her.

  “So tell me what’s going on with you,” Benton says as he and Scarpetta sit down at the table.

  “You two are close,” Basil says, looking at her. “I don’t blame you,” he says to Benton. “I tried to drown myself in the toilet and you know what’s funny about that? They didn’t even notice. Isn’t that something. They have this camera spying on me all the time and when I try to kill myself no one sees it.”

  He is wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a white shirt. He doesn’t have a belt. He has no jewelry. He isn’t at all what Scarpetta imagined. She thought he would be bigger. He is small and insignificant-looking, slightly built, thinning blond hair, not ugly, just insignificant. She supposes that when he approached his victims, they probably felt the way she does, at least at first. He was nothing, just some nobody with a bland smile. The only thing about him that stands out are his eyes. Right now, they are strange and unsettling.

  “Might I ask you a question?” Basil says to her.

  “Go ahead.” She isn’t particularly nice to him.

  “If I met you on the street and told you to get into my car or I would shoot you, what would you do?”

  “Let you shoot me,” she says. “I wouldn’t get into your car.”

  Basil looks at Benton and shoots his finger at him as if it’s a gun. “Bingo,” he says. “She’s a keeper. What time is it?”

  There is no clock in the room.

  “Eleven minutes after five,” Benton says. “We need to talk about why you feel like killing yourself, Basil.”

  Two minutes later, Dr. Lane has the Surface Shading Display of Helen Quincy on the computer screen. Next to it is the Surface Shading Display of the so-called normal who is in the magnet.

  Kenny Jumper.

  Not a minute ago, he asked over the intercom what time it was. Then, not a minute later, he started getting restless, complaining.

  BWONK-BWONK-BWONK…in the MRI suite as Josh rotates Kenny Jumper’s pale, hairless, eyeless head. It ends raggedly just below the jaw, as if he has been decapitated, because of the signal ending, because of the coil. Josh rotates the image some more on one screen, tries to duplicate the exact position of Helen Quincy’s hairless, eyeless, decapitated-looking image on another screen.

  “Oh boy,” he says.

  “I think I need to get out,” Kenny’s voice sounds over the intercom. “What time is it now?”

  “Oh boy,” Josh says to Dr. Lane as he rotates the image some more, looking from one screen to the other.

  “I have to get out.”

  “A little more that way,” Dr. Lane is saying, looking from one screen to the other, back and forth between the pale, eyeless, hairless heads.

  “I need to get out!”

  “That’s it,” Dr. Lane says. “Oh, my.”

  “Whoa!” Josh says.

  Basil is getting increasingly restless, glancing at the closed door. Again, he asks what time it is.

  “Five seventeen,” Benton says. “You supposed to be somewhere?” he adds ironically.

  Where would Basil be? In his cell, no place good. He’s lucky to be here. He doesn’t deserve it.

  Basil pulls something out of his sleeve. At first Scarpetta can’t tell what it is and doesn’t understand what is happening, but then he is out of his chair and around to her side of the table and the thing is around her neck. Long and white and thin and around her neck.

  “You try one fucking thing and I tighten it like this!” Basil says.

  She is aware of Benton standing up and yelling at him. She feels her pulse pounding. Then the door opens. Then Basil is pulling her outside the room and her pulse is pounding and she has her hands around her neck and he has the long, white thing tight around her neck and is pulling her and Benton is shouting and the guards are shouting.

  64

  Three years ago at McLean, Helen Quincy was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.

  She may not have fifteen or twenty separate and autonomous alter personalities, maybe just three or four or eight. Benton continues explaining a disorder that is caused by a person splitting with his or her primary personality.

  “An adaptive response to overwhelming trauma,” Benton says as he and Scarpetta drive west toward the Everglades. “Ninety-seven percent of people diagnosed with it were sexually or physically abused or both, and women are nine times more likely to suffer DID than men,” he says as the sun turns the windshield white and Scarpetta squints in the glare, despite her sunglasses.

  Far ahead, Lucy’s helicopter hovers over an abandoned citrus orchard, a parcel of real estate still owned by the Quincy family—Helen’s uncle, specifically. Adger Quincy. Canker struck the orchard some twenty years ago, and all the grapefruit trees were cut down and burned. Since then, the orchard has sat, overgrown, with its falling-down house, an investment, an eventual housing development. Adger Quincy is still alive, a slight man, rather unimpressive in appearance, extremely religious—a Bible-banger, as Marino puts it.

  Adger denies that anything unusual happened when Helen was twelve and went to live with him and his wife while Florrie was hospitalized at McLean. Adger says, as a matter of fact, he was quite attentive to the misguided, uncontrollable young girl who needed to be saved when she lived with them.

  I did what I could, did the best I could, he said when Marino taped yesterday’s interview with him.

  How did she know about your old orchard, your old house? was one of the questions Marino asked him.

  Adger wasn’t inclined to talk about it much, but he did say that now and then he drove twelve-year-old Helen to the old, abandoned orchard so he could check on things.

  What things?

  To make sure it wasn’t being vandalized or anything.

  What was there to vandalize? Ten acres of burned-down trees and weeds and a falling-down house?

  There’s not a thing wrong with checking on things. And I would pray with her. Talk to her about the Lord.

  “The fact that he said it that way,” Benton comments as he drives and Lucy’s helicopter seems to float down like a feather, about to land, far off over the abandoned orchard that Adger still owns, “indicates he knows he did something wrong.”

  “The monster,” Scarpetta says.

  “We’ll probably never kno
w exactly what he and perhaps others did to her,” Benton says, subdued as he drives, his jaw set in a hard way.

  He’s angry. He’s upset by what he suspects.

  “But this much is obvious,” he goes on. “Her various entities, her alters, were her adaptive response to unbearable trauma when there was no one to turn to, the same sort of thing you find in some survivors of concentration camps.”

  “The monster.”

  “A very sick man. Now a very sick young woman.”

  “He shouldn’t get away with it.”

  “I’m afraid he already has.”

  “I hope he goes to hell,” Scarpetta says.

  “He’s probably already in it.”

  “Why must you defend him?” She looks over at him and absently rubs her neck.

  It is bruised. It is still tender, and every time she touches it, she remembers Basil grabbing her with a homemade white-cloth ligature, briefly occluding the vessels that supply blood, and therefore oxygen, to the brain. She passed out. She is fine. She wouldn’t be if the guards hadn’t gotten Basil off her as quickly as they did.

  He and Helen are safely tucked away at Butler. Basil is no longer Benton’s PREDATOR dream subject. Basil won’t be visiting McLean anymore.

  “I’m not defending him. I’m trying to explain it,” Benton says.

  He slows down on South 27 near an exit that leads to a CITGO truck stop. He turns right onto a narrow dirt road and stops the car. A rusting chain stretches across the dirt road, and there are a lot of tire tracks. Benton gets out and unhooks the thick, rusting chain. It clanks when he tosses it to one side. He drives through, stops, gets out again, and puts the chain back the way it was. The press, the curious, don’t know what’s going on out here yet. Not that a rusting chain will stop the unwelcome and uninvited. But it can’t hurt.

  “Some people say once you’ve seen a case or two of DID, you’ve seen them all,” he says. “I happen to disagree, but for something so incredibly complicated and bizarre, the symptoms are remarkably consistent. A dramatic transformation when one alter becomes another, each dominant, each determining behavior. Facial changes, changes in posture, gait, mannerisms, even dramatic alterations of pitch, voice, speech. A disorder often associated with demon possession.”

  “Do you think Helen’s alters—Jan, Stevie, whoever paraded as a citrus inspector and shot people to death and God knows who else she is—are aware of each other?”

  “When she was at McLean, she denied she was a multiple, even when staff repeatedly witnessed her transforming into alters right in front of them. She suffered auditory and visual hallucinations. On occasion, one alter talked to another right in front of the clinician. Then she was Helen Quincy again, sitting politely, sweetly, in her chair, acting like the psychiatrist was the crazy one for believing she had multiple personalities.”

  “I wonder if Helen ever emerges anymore,” Scarpetta says.

  “When she and Basil killed her mother, she changed her identity to Jan Hamilton. That was utilitarian, not an alter, Kay. Don’t even think about Jan as a personality, if you understand what I’m saying. It was just a phony ID that Helen, Stevie, Hog and who-knows-what hid behind.”

  Dust billows up as they bump over the overgrown dirt road, a dilapidated house in the distance, weeds and brush everywhere.

  “I suspect that, figuratively speaking, Helen Quincy stopped existing when she was twelve,” Scarpetta says.

  Lucy’s helicopter has settled in a small clearing, the blades still turning as she shuts down the engine. Parked near the house are a removal-service van, three marked police cruisers, two Academy SUVs and Reba’s Ford LTD.

  The Sea Breeze Resort is too far inland to catch a breeze from the sea, and it isn’t a resort. There isn’t even a swimming pool. According to the man at the desk inside the dingy front office with its rattling air conditioner and plastic plants, long-term rentals get special discounts.

  He says Jan Hamilton kept odd hours, disappearing for days, especially of late, and at times she dressed strangely. Sexy one minute, sort of in drag the next.

  My motto? Live and let live, the man at the desk said when Marino tracked Jan here.

  It wasn’t hard. After she crawled out of the magnet and the guards had Basil on the floor and it was all over, she cowered in a corner and started to cry. She wasn’t Kenny Jumper anymore, had never heard of him, denied having any idea what anybody was talking about, including knowing Basil, including why she was on the floor inside the MRI suite at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She was very polite and cooperative with Benton, gave him her address, said she worked as a part-time bartender in South Beach, a restaurant called Rumors owned by a very nice man named Laurel Swift.

  Marino crouches before the open closet. It doesn’t have a door, just a rod for hanging clothes. On the soiled carpet are stacks of clothing, neatly folded. He goes through them with gloved hands, sweat dripping in his eyes, the window-unit air conditioner not doing a very good job.

  “One long black coat with a hood,” he says to Gus, one of Lucy’s Special Ops agents. “Sounds familiar.”

  He hands the folded coat to Gus, who places it inside a brown paper bag, writes the date and item and where it was found. There are dozens of brown paper bags by now, all sealed with evidence tape. Basically, they are packing up Jan’s entire room. Marino wrote the search warrant from hell: Put everything in it and the kitchen sink, in his words.

  His big, gloved hands sort through more clothing, shabby, baggy men’s clothing, a pair of shoes with the heels cut out, a Miami Dolphins cap, a white shirt with Department of Agriculture on the back, that’s all, not the full name of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, just Department of Agriculture, the block printing hand-done with what Marino guesses was a Sharpie.

  “How could you not know he was really a she?” Gus asks him, sealing another bag.

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Gus says, holding out his hand, waiting for the next thing, a pair of black panty hose.

  Gus is armed and dressed in fatigues, because that is how Lucy’s Special Ops agents always dress, even if it is unnecessary, and on an eighty-five-degree day when the suspect, a twenty-year-old girl, is safely locked up in a state hospital in Massachusetts, it probably wasn’t necessary to deploy four Special Ops agents to the Sea Breeze Resort. But that was what Lucy wanted. That was what her agents wanted. No matter how detailed Marino has been in his explanation of what Benton relayed to him about Helen’s different personalities or alters, as Benton calls them, the agents don’t quite believe there aren’t other dangerous people running around, that maybe Helen has accomplices—like Basil Jenrette, they point out—who are real.

  Two of her agents are going through a computer on a desk by a window that looks out over the parking lot. There is also a scanner, a color printer, packages of magazine-grade paper and half a dozen fishing magazines.

  Planks on the front porch are warped, some of them rotted, others missing, exposing the sandy soil beneath the one-story paint-peeled frame house not far from the Everglades.

  It is quiet, save for the distant traffic that sounds like gusting wind, and the scraping and stabbing of shovels. Death pollutes the air and in the heat of the late afternoon seems to shimmer darkly in waves that get worse the closer one gets to the pits. The agents, the police and scientists have found four of them. Based on soil disturbances and discoloration, there are more.

  Scarpetta and Benton are in the foyer just inside the door, where there is a fish tank and a large, dead spider curled up on a rock. Leaning against a wall is a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun and five boxes of cartridges. Scarpetta and Benton watch two men, sweating in suits and ties and blue nitrile gloves, push a stretcher bearing the pouched remains of Ev Christian, wheels clattering. They stop at the wide-open door.

  “When you get her to the morgue,” Scarpetta says to them, “I’m going to need you to come right
back.”

  “We figured that. I believe it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” one attendant says to her.

  “You got your work cut out for you,” says the other.

  They fold up the legs with loud clacks and carry the stretcher bearing Ev Christian toward the dark-blue van.

  “How’s this going to end up in court?” one of the attendants thinks to ask from the bottom of the steps. “I mean, if this lady’s a suicide, how do you charge someone with murder if it’s a suicide?”

  “We’ll see you shortly,” Scarpetta says.

  The men hesitate, then move on, and she watches Lucy appear from the back of the house. She has on protective clothing and dark glasses but has taken off her face mask and gloves. She trots toward the helicopter, the one where she left her Treo not long after Joe Amos began his fellowship.

  “There’s really nothing to say she didn’t do it,” Scarpetta says to Benton as she opens packets of disposable protective clothing—a set for her, a set for him—and by she, Scarpetta means Helen Quincy.

  “Nothing to say she did, either. They’re right.” Benton stares at the stretcher and its grim cargo as the attendants clack open the aluminum legs again so they can open the back of the van. “A suicide that’s a homicide, the perpetrator DID. The lawyers will have a field day.”

  The stretcher lists on the sandy, weed-choked soil, and Scarpetta worries it might fall over. It’s happened before, a pouched body lands on the ground, very inappropriate, very disrespectful. She is getting more anxious by the moment.

  “The autopsy will probably show she is a death by hanging,” she says, looking out at the bright, hot afternoon and the activity in it, watching Lucy get something out of the back of the helicopter, an ice chest.

  The same helicopter where she left her Treo, an act of forgetfulness that in many ways started everything and led everybody here to this hellhole, this plague pit.

  “That’s probably all it will show in terms of what killed her,” Scarpetta is saying. “But the rest of it is a different story.”