“So what about Righter?” Marino asks. “What will he be doing during all this?”
“Someone from the commonwealth’s attorney’s office will have to work with her. My guess is he’ll be second chair and leave the questioning to her.”
“We’ve had a weird break in The Fort James Motel case.” He gives me his news. “Vander’s been working like hell on the prints he got inside the room, and you aren’t gonna fucking believe it,” he says again. “Guess whose popped up? Diane Bray’s. I’m not shitting you. A perfect latent by the light switch when you first come in the room—her latent, Bray’s damn fingerprint. Of course, we got the dead guy’s prints, but no hit on any others except Bev Kiffin, as you’d expect. Her prints are on the Gideon Bible, for example, but not his, not Matos’s. And that’s kind of interesting, too. It’s looking like Kiffin might have been the one who opened the Bible to whatever it was.”
“Ecclesiastes,” I remind him.
“Yeah. A latent on the open pages, Kiffin’s fingerprint. And remember, she said she didn’t open the Bible, so I asked her about it over the phone and she still says she didn’t open it. So I’m getting mighty suspicious about what her involvement is, especially now that we know Bray was in that very room before the guy was killed in there. What was Bray doing at that motel? You want to tell me that?”
“Maybe her drug-dealing brought her there,” I reply. “I can’t think of another reason. Certainly, the motel isn’t the sort of place you would expect her to stay.”
“Bingo.” Marino fires his finger at me like a gun. “And Kiffin’s husband supposedly works for the same trucking company that Barbosa did, right? Although we still ain’t found no record of someone named Kiffin who drives a truck or whatever—can’t even track him down at all, which I have to admit is strange. And we know Overland’s into smuggling drugs and guns, right? Maybe it’s making more sense if it turns out that Chandonne’s the one who left those hairs at the campsite. Maybe we’re talking his family cartel, huh? Maybe that’s what fucking brought him to Richmond to begin with—the family business. And while he was in the area, he just couldn’t control his habit of whacking women.”
“Might also help explain what Matos was doing there,” I add.
“No kidding. Maybe he and John the Baptist were pals. Or maybe someone in the family sent Matos to Virginia to snuff Johnny-boy, take him out of commission so he don’t sing to anyone about the family business.”
There are endless possibilities. “What none of this explains is why Matos was murdered and who did it. Or why Barbosa was killed,” I point out.
“No, but I feel like we’re getting warmer,” Marino replies. “And I got an itch and I think if we scratch it, we might find Talley. Maybe he’s the missing link in all this.”
“Well, he apparently knew Bray in Washington,” I say. “And he’s been living in the same city where the Chandonne family is headquartered.”
“And he always manages to be on the scene when John the Baptist is, too,” Marino adds. “And I think I saw the asshole the other day. Was pulled up at a red light and there’s this big black Honda motorcycle in the lane next to me. Didn’t recognize him at first because he had a helmet on with this tinted shield covering his face, but he was staring at my truck. I’m pretty sure it was Talley and he looked away real quick. Asshole.”
Rose buzzes me to say that the governor is calling for our ten o’clock telephone appointment. I motion for Marino to shut my office door while I wait on the line for Mitchell. Reality again intrudes. I am returned to my predicament and its wide broadcast. I have a feeling I know exactly what the governor has on his mind. “Kay?” Mike Mitchell is somber. “I was very sorry to see the paper this morning.”
“I’m not happy about it, either,” I let him know.
“I’m supportive of you and will continue to be,” he says, maybe to ease me into the rest of what he plans to relay, which can’t be good. I don’t respond. I also suspect he knows about Berger and probably had something to do with her being appointed the special prosecutor. I don’t bring it up. There is no point. “I think in light of your current circumstances,” he goes on, “that it’s best you relinquish your duties until this matter is resolved. And Kay, it’s not because I believe a word of it.” This is also not the same thing as saying that he thinks I am innocent. “But until things calm down, I believe your continuing to run the medical examiner system for the commonwealth would be unwise.”
“Are you firing me, Mike?” I ask him point-blank.
“No, no,” he is quick to say, and his tone is gentler. “Let’s just get through the special grand jury hearing, and we’ll go from there. I haven’t given up on you or your idea of being a private contractor, either. Let’s just get through this,” he says again.
“Of course, I will do whatever you wish,” I tell him with all due respect. “But I have to say that I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the commonwealth for me to withdraw from ongoing cases that still need my attention.”
“Kay, it’s not possible.” He is the politician. “We’re only talking two weeks, assuming your hearing turns out all right.”
“Good God,” I reply. “It has to.”
“And I’m sure it will.”
I get off the phone and look at Marino. “Well, that’s that.” I start throwing things in my briefcase. “I hope they don’t change the locks the minute I’m out the door.”
“Really, what could he do? When you think about it, Doc, what could he do?” Marino has resigned himself to this inevitability.
“I would just like to know who the hell leaked it to the media.” I shut my briefcase and snap in the locks. “Have you been subpoenaed, Marino?” I go ahead and ask. “Nothing’s confidential. May as well tell me.”
“You knew I would be.” He has a pained expression on his face. “Don’t let the bastards get you, Doc. Don’t give up.”
I pick up my briefcase and open the office door. “I’m doing anything but give up. In fact, I’ve got a lot to do.”
His expression asks, what? I’ve just been ordered by the governor to do nothing. “Mike’s a good guy,” Marino says. “But don’t push him. Don’t give him a reason to fire you. Why don’t you go somewhere for a few days? Maybe go see Lucy in New York. Didn’t she head on up to New York? Her and Teun? Just get the hell out of here until the hearing. I wish you would so I don’t have to worry about you every other minute. I don’t even like you being out there in Anna’s house all by yourself.”
I take a deep breath and try to tuck in my fury and hurt. Marino is right. There is no point in pissing off the governor and making matters worse. But now I feel run out of town on top of everything else, and I have not heard a word from Anna, and that stings, too. I am almost in tears, and I refuse to cry in my office. I avert my eyes from Marino, but he catches my feelings.
“Hey,” he says, “you got every right not to feel good. All of this sucks, Doc.”
I cross the hallway and cut through the ladies’ room, on my way to the morgue. Turk is sewing up Benny White and Jack is sitting at the counter doing paperwork. I pull out a chair next to my assistant chief and pluck several stray hairs off his scrubs. “You got to quit shedding,” I say, trying to hide my upset. “You going to tell me why your hair keeps falling out?” I have been meaning to ask him for weeks. As usual, so much has happened and Jack and I have not talked.
“All you got to do is read the paper,” he says, putting down his pen. “That should tell you why my hair’s falling out.” His eyes are heavy.
I nod as I get his meaning. It is what I expect. Jack has known for a while that I am in serious trouble. Maybe Righter contacted him weeks ago and started fishing, just as he did with Anna. I ask Jack if this is the case, and he admits it. He says he has been a wreck. He hates politics and administration and does not want my job and never will.
“You make me look good,” he says. “You always have, Dr. Scarpetta. They might think I should be appointed
chief. Then what do I do? I don’t know.” He runs his fingers through his hair and loses more. “I just wish everything could go back to normal.”
“Believe me, so do I,” I say as the phone rings and Turk answers it.
“That reminds me,” Jack says. “We’re getting weird phone calls down here. I tell you about that?”
“I was down here when we got one,” I reply. “Someone claiming to be Benton.”
“Sick,” he says in disgust.
“That’s the only one I’m aware of,” I add.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” Turk calls out. “Can you take it? It’s Paul.”
I go to the phone. “How are you, Paul?” I ask Paul Monty, the statewide director of the forensic labs.
“First, I just want you to know everybody in this damn building is pulling for you, Kay,” he says. “Bullshit. I read all that bullshit and practically spit my coffee out. And we’re working our fannies off.” By this he means evidence testing. There is supposed to be an egalitarian order in the workup of evidence—appropriately, no one victim should be more important than another and moved to the front of the line. But there is also an unspoken code, same as in police shootings. People take care of their own. It is a fact. “Got some interesting test results that I wanted to pass on to you personally,” Paul Monty goes on. “The hairs from the campground—the ones that you suspect are Chandonne’s? Well, the DNA matches. What’s of even more interest is that a fiber comparison shows that the cotton linens from that campsite match fibers collected from the mattress in Diane Bray’s bedroom.”
A scenario forms. Chandonne took Diane Bray’s linens after her murder and fled to the campground. Maybe he slept on them. Or maybe he simply disposed of them. But either way, we can definitely place Chandonne at The Fort James Motel. Paul has nothing more to report at the moment.
“What about the dental floss I found in the toilet?” I ask Paul. “In the room where Matos was killed?”
“No hit on that. The DNA’s not Chandonne’s or Bray’s or any of the usual suspects,” he tells me. “Maybe some previous guest at the motel? Could be unrelated.”
I return to the counter, where Jack resumes telling me about the strange phone calls. He says there have been several of them.
“One I happened to answer and the person, a guy, asked for you, says he’s Benton and then hangs up,” Jack reports. “Turk answered the second time. The guy says to tell you he called and will be an hour late to dinner, identifies himself as Benton and hangs up. So add that to the mix. No wonder I’m going bald.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I absently pick up Polaroid photographs of Benny White’s body on the gurney before he was unclothed.
“Thought you had enough shit going on. I should have told you. I was wrong.”
The sight of this young boy dressed in his Sunday best and inside an unzipped body pouch on top of a steel gurney is so incongruous. I feel deeply saddened as I notice his pants are a little short and his socks don’t quite match, one blue, one black. I feel worse. “You find anything unexpected with him?” I have talked enough about my problems. My problems, as a matter of fact, do not seem very important when I look at photographs of Benny and think about his mother in the viewing room.
“Yeah, one thing puzzled me,” Jack says. “The story I got is he came home from church and never went inside the house. He gets out of the car and heads out to the barn, saying he’ll be right in and is trying to find his pocket knife—thinks it might be in his tackle box and he forgot to take it out when he came home from fishing the other day. He never comes back to the house. In other words, he never ate Sunday dinner. But this little guy had a full stomach.”
“Could you tell what he might have eaten?” I ask.
“Yeah. Popcorn, for one thing. And looks like he ate hotdogs. So I call his house and talk to his stepdad. I ask if Benny might have eaten anything at church and am told no. His stepdad’s got no idea where the food came from,” Jack replies.
“That’s very odd,” I comment. “So he comes home from church and goes out to hang himself, but stops off someplace to eat popcorn and hotdogs first?” I get up from the counter. “Something’s wrong with that picture.”
“If it wasn’t for the gastric contents, I’d say it’s a straightforward suicide.” Jack remains seated, looking up at me. “I could kill Stanfield for cutting through the knot. The fuckhead.”
“Maybe we should take a look at where Benny was hanged,” I decide. “Go to the scene.”
“They live on a farm in James City County,” Jacks says. “Right on the river, and apparently the woods where he was hanged are at the edge of the field, not even a mile from the house.”
“Let’s go,” I tell him. “Maybe Lucy can give us a ride.”
IT IS A two-hour flight from the hangar in New York to HeloAir in Richmond, and Lucy was more than happy to show off her new company vehicle. The plan is simple. She will pick up Jack and me and land us at the farm, then the three of us will check out where Benny White allegedly killed himself. I also want to see his bedroom. Afterwards, we will drop Jack off in Richmond and I will return to New York with Lucy, where I will stay until the special grand jury hearing. This is all planned for tomorrow morning, and Detective Stanfield has no interest in meeting us at the scene.
“What for?” are the first words out of his mouth. “What you need to go there for?”
I almost mention the gastric contents that don’t make sense. I come close to inquiring as to whether there was anything Stanfield observed that made him suspicious. But I catch myself. Something stops me. “If you can just give me directions to their place,” I tell him.
He describes where Benny White’s family lives, just off Route 5, I can’t miss it because there is a small country store at the intersection, and I need to turn left at that store. He gives me landmarks that will not be helpful from the air. I finally get it out of him that the farm is less than a mile from the ferry near Jamestown, and that’s when I realize for the first time that Benny White’s farm is very close to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground.
“Oh yeah,” Stanfield says when I ask him about this. “He was right there in the same area as the other ones. That’s what had him so upset, according to his mom.”
“How far is the farm from the motel?” I ask.
“Right across the creek from it. It’s not much of a farm.”
“Detective Stanfield, is there any possibility Benny knew Bev Kiffin’s children, her two boys? I understand Benny liked to fish.” I envision the fishing pole leaning against the upstairs window in Mitch Barbosa’s townhouse.
“Now, I know the story about him supposedly getting his pocket knife out of his tackle box, but I don’t think that’s what he did. I think he just wanted an excuse to get away from everybody,” Stanfield replies.
“Do we know where he got the rope?” I push aside his annoying assumptions.
“His stepdaddy says there’s all kinds of rope in the barn,” Stanfield replies. “Well, they call it a barn but it’s where they just keep junk. I asked him what was in there, and he said just junk. You know, I got a hunch Benny might have run into Barbosa out there, you know, fishing, and we know Barbosa was nice to kids. That sure would help explain it. And his mama did say the boy had been having nightmares and was mighty upset by the killings. Was scared to death, is the way she put it. Now what you’re gonna want to do is go straight to the creek. You’ll see the barn at the edge of the field, and then the woods right off to the left. There’s an overgrown footpath and where he hung himself is maybe fifty feet down that path where a deer stand is. You can’t miss it. I didn’t climb up it, up the deer stand, to cut down the rope, only cut off the end that was around his neck. So it should still be right where it was. The rope should be right there where it was.”
I refrain from showing my complete disgust with Stanfield’s sloppy policing. I don’t probe any further or suggest to him he ought to do exactly what he threatened: quit. I call Mrs. Whit
e to let her know my plans. Her voice is small and wounded. She is dazed and can’t seem to comprehend that we want to land a helicopter on her farm. “We need a clearing. A level field, an area where there are no telephone lines or a lot of trees,” I explain.
“We don’t have a runway.” She says this several times.
Finally, she puts her husband on the phone. His name is Marcus. He tells me they have a soybean field between their house and Route 5 and there’s a silo painted dark green, too. There isn’t another silo in that area, not one painted dark green, he adds. It is fine with him if we land in his field.
The rest of my day is long. I work at the office and catch my staff before they head home. I explain to them what is happening in my life and assure each person that his job is not in jeopardy. I also make it clear that I have done nothing wrong and am confident my name will be cleared. I don’t tell them I have resigned. They have suffered enough tremors and don’t need an earthquake. I don’t pack items in my office or head out with anything other than my briefcase, as if all is well and I’ll see everybody in the morning, as usual.
Now it is nine P.M. I sit in Anna’s kitchen, picking at a thick slice of cheddar cheese and sipping a glass of red wine, going easy, unwilling to cloud my thinking and simply finding it almost impossible to swallow solid food. I have lost weight. I don’t know how much. I have no appetite and have developed a wretched routine of going outside periodically to smoke. Every half hour or so, I try to contact Marino with no success. And I keep thinking about the Tlip file. It has hardly been out of my mind since I looked at it on Christmas Day. The telephone rings at close to midnight and I assume it is Marino finally returning my page. “Scarpetta,” I answer.
“It’s Jaime,” Berger’s distinctive, confident voice sounds over the line.
I pause in surprise. But then I remember: Berger seems to have no hesitation in talking to people she intends to send to jail, doesn’t matter the hour.