Predator

  “Come on, wake up.”

  Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God no.

  When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.

  Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.

  He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.

  He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.

  That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.

  “I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”

  “What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.

  Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.

  “I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”

  The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.

  “Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.

  The wide plank floor is cold beneath Lucy’s bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol’s magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.

  “Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”

  Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.

  “What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.

  “I’ve got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.

  Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”

  “Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

  “I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you’ve ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”

  Lucy told her she is a Boston attorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren’t true.

  “How did you know I like my coffee black?”

  “I didn’t,” Lucy says. “There’s no milk or cream in the house. I’ve really got to go.”

  “I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That’s a first.”

  “Seems like a lot of things were your first.”

  “You didn’t take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That’s a first, all right.”

  “You weren’t exactly with it.”

  “I was with it enough to try. It’s not too late to try again.”

  She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn’t believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.

  “God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn’t do that.”

  “You mixed it with vodka.”

  Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red handprints again.

  “Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.

  “You asked me a lot of things last night.”

  “I asked you where you got them done.”

  “Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.

  “It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”

  “I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”

  “What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the handprints.

  “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Then whose?”

  “Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”

  Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.

  “Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.

  “We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.

  She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.

  “Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”

  Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.

  “It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”

  “It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”

  “You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just…Shit, I’m sorry
. I didn’t mean to…”

  “I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.

  “God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”

  “At least call me the right thing!”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”

  “Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.

  Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.

  9

  Half an hour later, Lucy zips up her ski jacket and tucks the pistol and two extra magazines in a pocket.

  She locks the cottage and climbs down the snow-covered wooden steps to the street as she thinks about Stevie and her inexplicable behavior, feeling guilty. She thinks about Johnny and feels guilty, remembering San Francisco, when he took her to dinner and reassured her that everything would be all right.

  You’re going to be fine, he promised.

  I can’t live like this, she said.

  It was women’s night at Mecca on Market Street, and the restaurant was crowded with women, attractive women who looked happy and confident and pleased with themselves. Lucy felt stared at, and it bothered her in a way it never had before.

  I want to do something about it now, she said. Look at me.

  Lucy, you look great.

  I haven’t been this fat since I was ten.

  You stop taking your medicine and…

  It makes me sick and exhausted.

  I’m not going to let you do anything rash. You have to trust me.

  He held her gaze in the candlelight, and his face will always be in her mind, looking at her the way he did that night. He was handsome, with fine features and unusual eyes the color of tiger eyes, and she could keep nothing from him. He knew all there was to know in every way imaginable.

  Loneliness and guilt follow her as she follows the snowy sidewalk west along the Cape Cod Bay. She ran away. She remembers when she heard about his death. She heard about it the way no one should, on the radio.

  A prominent doctor was found shot to death in a Hollywood apartment in what sources close to the investigation say is a possible suicide….

  She had no one to ask. She wasn’t supposed to know Johnny and had never met his brother, Laurel, or any of their friends, so who could she ask?

  Her cell phone vibrates, and she tucks the earpiece in her ear and answers.

  “Where are you?” Benton says.

  “Walking through a blizzard in Ptown. Well, not literally a blizzard. It’s starting to taper off.” She is dazed, a little hung-over.

  “Anything interesting come up?”

  She thinks of last night and feels bewildered and ashamed.

  What she says is, “Only that he wasn’t alone when he was here last, the week before he died. Apparently, he came here right after his surgery, then went down to Florida.”

  “Laurel with him?”

  “No.”

  “How did he manage alone?”

  “As I said, it appears he wasn’t alone.”

  “Who told you?”

  “A bartender. Apparently, he met someone.”

  “We know who?”

  “A woman. Someone a lot younger.”

  “A name?”

  “Jan, don’t know the rest of it. Johnny was upset about the surgery, which wasn’t all that successful, as you know. People do a lot of things when they’re scared and don’t feel good about themselves.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay,” she lies.

  She was a coward. She was selfish.

  “You don’t sound okay,” Benton says to her. “What happened to Johnny isn’t your fault.”

  “I ran away from it. I didn’t do a damn thing.”

  “Why don’t you spend some time with us. Kay’s going to be up here for a week. We’d love to see you. You and I will find some private time to talk,” Benton the psychologist says.

  “I don’t want to see her. Somehow make her understand.”

  “Lucy, you can’t keep doing this to her.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” she says, thinking of Stevie again.

  “Then tell her the truth. It’s that simple.”

  “You called me.” She abruptly changes the subject.

  “I need you to do something for me as soon as possible,” he replies. “I’m on a secured phone.”

  “Unless there’s anyone around here with an intercept system, I am, too. Go ahead.”

  He tells her about a murder that supposedly occurred at some sort of Christmas shop, supposedly in the Las Olas area about two and a half years ago. He tells her everything Basil Jenrette told him. He says Scarpetta is unfamiliar with any case that sounds similar, but she wasn’t working in South Florida back then.

  “The information came from a sociopath,” he reminds her, “so I’m not holding my breath that there’s anything to it.”

  “The alleged victim in the Christmas shop have her eyes gouged out?”

  “He didn’t tell me that. I didn’t want to ask him too many questions until I check out his story. Can you run it in HIT, see what you can find?”

  “I’ll get started on the plane,” she says.

  10

  The clock on the wall above the bookcase reads half past noon, and the attorney representing a kid who probably murdered his baby brother is taking his time going through paperwork on the other side of Kay Scarpetta’s desk.

  Dave is young, dark, nicely built, one of those men whose irregular features somehow fit together in a very appealing way. He is known for his flamboyance in the malpractice arena, and whenever he comes to the Academy, the secretaries and female students suddenly find reasons to walk past Scarpetta’s door, except Rose, of course. She has been Scarpetta’s secretary for fifteen years, is well past retirement age and isn’t particularly vulnerable to male charm unless it is Marino’s. He is probably the only man whose flirtations she welcomes, and Scarpetta picks up the phone to ask her where he is. He is supposed to be here for this meeting.

  “I tried him last night,” Scarpetta says over the phone to Rose. “Several times.”

  “Let me see if I can find him,” Rose says. “He’s been acting rather odd lately.”

  “Not just lately.”

  Dave studies an autopsy report, his head tilted back as he reads through the horn-rimmed glasses low on his nose.

  “The last few weeks have been worse. I have a funny feeling it’s about a woman.”

  “See if you can find him.”

  She hangs up and looks across her desk to see if Dave is ready to get on with his prejudicial questions about another difficult death that he is convinced can be resolved for a substantial fee. Unlike most police departments that invite the assistance of the Academy’s scientific and medical experts, lawyers usually pay, and, as a rule, most clients who can pay are representing people who are as guilty as hell.

  “Marino not coming?” he asks.

  “We’re trying to find him.”

  “I’ve got a deposition in less than an hour.” He turns a page of the report. “Seems to me when all is said and done, the findings are in favor of an impact and nothing more.”

  “I’m not going to say that in court,” she replies, looking at the report, at the details of an autopsy she didn’t perform. “What I can say is that while a subdural hematoma can be caused by an impact—in this case, the alleged fall off the couch onto the tile floor—it is highly unlikely, was more likely caused b
y violent shaking that causes shearing forces in the cranial cavity and subdural bleeding and injury to the spinal cord.”

  “As for the retinal hemorrhages, aren’t we in agreement those can also be caused by trauma, such as his head striking the tile floor, resulting in a subdural?”

  “Not at all in a short fall like this. Again, was more likely caused by the head whipping back and forth. Just as the report makes clear.”

  “I don’t think you’re helping me out much here, Kay.”

  “If you don’t want an unbiased opinion, you should find another expert.”

  “There is no other expert. You’re unrivaled.” He smiles. “What about a vitamin K deficiency?”

  “If you have antemortem blood that revealed protein-induced vitamin K deficiency,” she replies. “If you’re looking for leprechauns.”

  “Problem is, we don’t have antemortem blood. He didn’t survive long enough to get to the hospital.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “Well, shaken baby syndrome can’t be proved. It’s definitely unclear and improbable. You can at least say that.”

  “What’s clear is you don’t have mama’s fourteen-year-old son babysit his newborn brother when the son has already been to juvenile court twice for assault on other children and is legendary for his explosive temper.”

  “And you won’t say that.”

  “No.”

  “Look, all I ask is you point out there’s no definitive evidence that this baby was shaken.”

  “I will also point out there’s no definitive evidence that he wasn’t, that I can find no fault with the autopsy report in question.”

  “The Academy’s great,” Dave says, getting up from his chair. “But you guys are roughing me up. Marino’s a no-show. Now you’re leaving me hanging out to dry.”

  “I’m sorry about Marino,” she says.

  “Maybe you need to control him better.”

  “That’s not exactly possible.”

  Dave tucks in his bold striped shirt, straightens his bold silk tie, puts on his tailored silk jacket. He arranges his paperwork inside his crocodile briefcase.

  “Rumor has it you’re looking into the Johnny Swift case,” he then says, snapping shut the silver clasps.