Predator

  They drove off.

  Shit, Basil said. You’re good, he said, and he was high, laughing. Guess we’d better figure out where we’re going.

  Please don’t hurt me, the girl was crying, and Hog felt something as he sat back there, holding the gun on her while she cried and begged. He felt like having sex.

  Shut up, Basil told her. It won’t do any good. Guess we’d better find somewhere. Maybe the park. No, they patrol it.

  I know somewhere, Hog said. Nobody will ever find us. It’s perfect. We can take our time, all the time in the world, and he was aroused. He wanted sex, wanted it something awful.

  He directed Basil to the house, the house that is falling apart with no electricity or running water, and a mattress and dirty magazines in the back room. It was Hog who figured out how to tie them up so they couldn’t sit without their arms straight up.

  Stick ’em up!

  Like in cartoons.

  Stick ’em up!

  Like in campy Westerns.

  Basil said Hog was brilliant, the most brilliant person he’d ever met, and after a few times of taking women there and keeping them until they smelled too bad, got too infected or just got too used up, Hog told Basil about The Christmas Shop.

  Have you ever seen it?

  No.

  Can’t miss it. Right on the beach on A1A. The lady’s rich.

  Hog explained that on Saturdays, it’s always just her and her daughter in there. Hardly anybody goes in there. Who buys Christmas stuff at the beach in July?

  No shit.

  He wasn’t supposed to do it in there.

  Then before Hog knew what was happening, Basil had her in the back, raping, cutting, blood everywhere, while Hog watched and calculated how they were going to get away with it.

  The lumberjack by the door was five feet tall, hand-carved. He carried a real ax, an antique one, a curved wooden handle and shiny steel blade, half of it painted blood red. It was Hog who thought of it.

  About an hour later, Hog carried out the trash bags, made sure no one was around. He put them in the trunk of Basil’s car. No one saw them.

  We were lucky, Hog told Basil when they were back at their secret place, the old house, digging a pit. Don’t do that again.

  A month later, he did something again, tried to get two women at once. Hog wasn’t with him. Basil forced them into the car, then the damn thing broke down. Basil never told anybody about Hog. He protected Hog. Now it’s Hog’s turn.

  They’re doing a study up there, Hog wrote to him. The prison knows about it and has been asked for volunteers. It would be good for you. You could do something constructive.

  It was a pleasant, innocuous letter. No prison official thought twice about it. Basil got word to the warden that he wanted to volunteer for a study they were doing in Massachusetts, that he wanted to do something to pay for his sins, that if the doctors could learn something about what’s wrong with people like him, maybe it would make a difference. Whether or not the warden fell for Basil’s manipulations is a matter of speculation. But this past December, Basil was transferred to Butler State Hospital.

  All because of Hog. God’s Hand.

  Since then, their communications have had to be more ingenious. God showed Hog how to tell Basil anything he wants. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

  Hog finds a seat at gate twenty-one. He sits as far away from everybody as he can, waiting for the nine a.m. flight. It’s on time. He’ll land at noon. He unzips his bag and pulls out a letter Basil wrote to him more than a month ago.

  I got the fishing magazines. Many thanks. I always learn a lot from the articles. Basil Jenrette.

  P.S. They are going to put me in that damn tube again—Thursday, February 17. But they promise it will be quick. “In at 5 and out at 5:15 p.m.” Promises, promises.

  52

  The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.

  “Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up to Benton.

  “Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.

  She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It’s Benton.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can’t you please come down? I’m cooking. Things are going to hell in Florida. I need to talk to you.”

  She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.

  “And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.

  How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says again.

  “Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”

  “Wood splinters?”

  “A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”

  “If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.

  “If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn’t she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I wish you’d come upstairs.”

  “Any defense injuries?”

  “Why don’t you come up?”

  “As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”

  “No evidence of it, but it’s certainly sexually motivated. I’m not hungry at the moment.”

  She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.

  “Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”

  “Why don’t we talk about this up here.”

  Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.

  “I’m hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

  He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.

  “Glad you didn’t walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”

  “Good thing you weren’t in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”

  She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.

  “Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.

  Benton enlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.

  “To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it’s possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don’t guess we have histology.”

  “If there are slides, I wouldn’t know,” Benton replies.

  “Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”

  “The state police labs have everything.”

  “What I’d like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper
.”

  Benton looks at her, shrugs. “Why?”

  “It’s possible we’re finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”

  “The Quincy family was in the landscaping business. I would assume a lot of commercial citrus growers use copper sprays. Maybe the family tracked it into the back of The Christmas Shop.”

  “And possibly bodypaint in there, too—in the storage area where we found blood.”

  Benton falls silent, something else coming to him.

  “A common denominator in Basil’s murders,” he says. “All of the victims, at least the ones whose bodies were recovered, had copper. The trace had copper in it, also citrus pollen, which didn’t mean much. There’s citrus pollen all over the place in Florida. Nobody thought about copper sprays. Maybe he took them someplace where copper sprays were used, someplace with citrus trees.”

  He looks out the window at the gray sky as a snow-plow works loudly on his street.

  “What time do you need to head out?” Scarpetta clicks on a photograph of the abraded area on the dead woman’s back.

  “Not until late afternoon. Basil’s coming in at five.”

  “Wonderful. See how inflamed it is just in that one discrete area?” She points it out. “An area where there’s been a removal of the epithelial layer of the skin by rubbing against some sort of rough surface. And if you zoom in”—she does—“you can see that before she was cleaned up, there’s serosanguineous fluid on the surface of the abrasion. See it?”

  “Okay. What looks like a little bit of scabbing. But not the entire area.”

  “If an abrasion is deep enough, you get leakage of fluid from the vessels. And you’re right, the entire area isn’t scabbing, which makes me suspect that the abraded area is actually several scrape abrasions of differing age, injuries caused by repeated contact with a rough surface.”

  “That’s strange. I’m trying to imagine it.”

  “I wish I had the histology. Polymorphonuclear white cells would indicate the injury is maybe four to six hours old. As for the brownish-reddish scabs, you generally start seeing those in a minimum of eight hours. She lived for at least a little while after she got this injury, these scrapes.”

  She studies more photographs, studies them closely. She makes notes on a legal pad.

  She says, “If you look at photographs thirteen through eighteen, you’ll see, just barely, areas of what looks like localized red swelling on the backs of her legs and buttocks. What they look like to me are insect bites that have begun to heal. And if you go back to the picture of the abrasion, there’s some localized swelling and barely visible petechial hemorrhaging, which can be associated with spider bites.

  “If I’m right, microscopically you should see a congestion of blood vessels and an infiltration of white blood cells, mainly eosinophils, depending on her response. It’s not very accurate, but we could look for tryptase levels, too, in the event she had an anaphylactic response. But I would be surprised. Certainly she didn’t die of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite. I wish I had the damn histology. Could be more in there than splinters. Urticating hairs. Spiders—tarantulas, specifically—flick them, part of their defense system. Ev and Kristin’s church is next door to a pet store that sells tarantulas.”

  “Itching?” Benton asks.

  “If she got flicked, she would have itched like hell,” Scarpetta says. “She might have rubbed up against something, scratching herself raw.”

  53

  S he suffered.

  “Wherever he kept her, she suffered from bites that were painful and itchy and awful,” Scarpetta says.

  “Mosquitoes?” Benton suggests.

  “Just one? Just one bad bite between her shoulder blades? There are no other similar abrasions with inflammation anywhere else on her body, except on her elbows and knees,” she goes on. “Mild abrasions, scrapes, such as you might expect if someone were kneeling or propping herself up by her elbows on a rough surface. But those abraded areas don’t look anything like this.”

  She again points out the inflamed area between the shoulder blades.

  “It’s my theory she was kneeling when he shot her,” Benton says. “Based on the blood pattern on her slacks. Could you get abrasions on your knees if you had pants on when you were kneeling?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then he killed her first, then undressed her. That tells a different story, now doesn’t it. If he really wanted to sexually humiliate and terrorize, he would have made her undress, made her kneel nude, then put the shotgun barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “What about the shotgun shell in her rectum.”

  “Could be anger. Could be he wanted us to find it and link it to the case in Florida.”

  “You’re suggesting her murder might have been impulsive, perhaps anger-driven. Yet you’re also suggesting a significant element of premeditation, of game playing, as if he wanted us to link her case to that robbery-homicide.” Scarpetta looks at him.

  “It all means something, at least to him. Welcome to the world of violent sociopaths.”

  “Well, one thing is clear,” she says. “For a while, at least, she was held hostage some place where there was insect activity. Possibly fire ants, maybe spiders, and your normal hotel room or house isn’t likely to have an infestation of fire ants or spiders, not around here. Not this time of year.”

  “Except tarantulas. Usually they’re pets, unrelated to the climate,” Benton says.

  “She was abducted from someplace else. Where exactly was the body found?” she then asks. “Right at Walden Pond?”

  “About fifty feet off a path that isn’t used much this time of year but certainly is used some. A family hiking near the pond found her. Their black Lab ran off into the woods and started barking.”

  “What a horrible thing to happen upon when you’re minding your own business at Walden Pond.”

  She scans the autopsy report on the screen.

  “She wasn’t out there long, her body dumped after dark,” she says. “If what I’m reading here is accurate. The after-dark part makes sense. And maybe he put her where he did, off the path and not in clear view, because he wasn’t taking any chance of being seen. If anybody happened to show up—although not likely after dark—he’s out of sight in the woods with her. And this business”—she points at the hooded face and what looks like a diaper—“you could do this in minutes if you’d premeditated it, already cut the eyeholes into the panties, if the body was already nude and so on. It all makes me suspect he’s familiar with the area.”

  “It makes sense he is.”

  “Are you hungry or do you intend to obsess up here all day?”

  “What did you make? Then I’ll decide.”

  “Risotto alla Sbirraglia. Also known as chicken risotto.”

  “Sbirraglia?” He takes her hand. “That some exotic breed of Venetian chicken?”

  “Supposedly from the word sbirri, which is pejorative for the police. A little humor on a day that hasn’t been funny.”

  “I don’t understand what the police have to do with a chicken dish.”

  “Supposedly when the Austrians occupied Venice, the police were quite fond of this particular dish, if my culinary sources are to be believed. And I was thinking of a bottle of Soave or a fuller-bodied Piave Pinot Bianco. You have both in your cellar, and as the Venetians say, ‘He who drinks well sleeps well, and he who sleeps well thinks no evil, does no evil and goes to heaven,’ or something like that.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not a wine on earth that will stop me from thinking about evil,” Benton says. “And I don’t believe in heaven. Only hell.”

  54

  On the ground floor of the Academy’s spacious stucco headquarters, the red light is on outside the firearms lab, and from the hallway, Marino hears the dull thud of gunfire. He walks in, not one to care if a range is hot, as long as it’s Vince who’s doing the shooting
.

  Vince withdraws a small pistol from the port of the horizontal stainless-steel bullet-recovery tank, which weighs five tons when filled with water, explaining why his lab is located where it is.

  “You been out flying already?” Marino asks, climbing up the aluminum checker steps to the shooting platform.

  Vince is dressed in a black flight suit and ankle-high black leather boots. When he isn’t lost in his world of tool marks and guns, he’s one of Lucy’s helicopter pilots. As is true of a number of her staff, his appearance is inconsistent with what he does. Vince is sixty-five, flew Black Hawks in Vietnam, then went to work for ATF. He has short legs and a barrel chest, and a gray ponytail that he says he hasn’t cut in ten years.

  “You say something?” Vince asks, removing his hearing-protector headset and shooting glasses.

  “It’s a wonder you can hear a damn thing anymore.”

  “Not as good as I used to. When I get home, I’m stone-deaf, according to my wife.”

  Marino recognizes the pistol Vince is test-firing, the Black Widow with rosewood grips that was found beneath Daggie Simister’s bed.

  “A sweet little .22,” Vince says. “Thought it couldn’t hurt to add it to the database.”

  “Doesn’t look to me like it’s ever been fired.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Can’t tell you how many people have guns for home protection and don’t remember they’ve got them or can’t remember where they put it or even know if it’s missing.”

  “We’ve got a problem with something missing,” Marino says.

  Vince opens a box of ammunition and begins pushing. 22 cartridges into the cylinder.

  “Want to try it?” he says. “Kind of a strange thing for an old woman’s self-protection. Bet somebody gave it to her. I usually recommend something more user-friendly, like a Lady Smith .38 or a pit bull. I understand it was under the bed, out of reach.”

  “Who told you that?” Marino says, getting the same feeling he’s been getting a lot lately.

  “Dr. Amos.”