Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  I’m Dr. Marilyn Self. Welcome to Self on Self. SOS. Do you need help? At the beginning of each show, to the wild applause from a live audience as millions watch from all over the world.

  “You won’t make me tell it, will you? My family will never forgive me. It’s why I can’t stop drinking. I’ll tell you if you don’t make me say it on TV or on your website.” Karen is lost in her drivel.

  Thank you, thank you. Sometimes Dr. Self can’t get the audience to stop clapping. I adore all of you, too.

  “My Boston terrier, Bandit. I let her out late one night and forgot to let her back in because I was so drunk. It was wintertime.”

  Applause that sounds like a hard rain, like a thousand hands clapping.

  “And the next morning I found her dead by the back door, and the wood was all clawed up from her scratching on it. My poor little Bandit with her short little fur. Shivering, crying, and barking, I’m sure. Scratching to get back in because it was freezing cold.” Karen weeps. “And so I just kill off my brain so I don’t have to think. They said I have all these white areas and widening of…well, and the atrophy. Way to go, Karen, I say. You’re killing off your brain. You can see it. Plain as day, you can see I’m not normal.” She touches her temple. “It was right up there on the light box in the neurologist’s office, big as all outdoors, my abnormal brain. I’m never going to be normal. I’m almost sixty, and what’s done is done.”

  “People are unforgiving about dogs,” Dr. Self says, lost in herself.

  “I know I am. What can I do to get over it? Please tell me.”

  “People with mental disease have peculiarities in the shape of their skulls. Lunatics have very contracted or deformed heads,” Dr. Self says. “Maniacs have soft brains. Such scientific insights gleaned from a study done in Paris in 1824, which concluded that out of one hundred idiots and imbeciles examined, only fourteen had normal heads.”

  “Are you saying I’m an imbecile?”

  “Sound all that different from what the doctors here have been telling you? That your head is somehow different, meaning you are somehow different?”

  “I’m an imbecile? I killed my dog.”

  “These superstitions and manipulations have been around for centuries. Measuring the skulls of people locked up in lunatic asylums and dissecting the brains of idiots and imbeciles.”

  “I’m an imbecile?”

  “Today, they put you in some magic tube—a magnet—and tell you your brain is deformed, and they make you listen to your mother.” Dr. Self stops talking as a tall figure walks toward them with purpose in the dark.

  “Karen, if you don’t mind, I need to talk to Dr. Self,” Benton Wesley says.

  “Am I an imbecile?” Karen says, getting up from the step.

  “You’re not an imbecile,” Benton says kindly.

  Karen says good-bye to him. “You were always nice to me,” she says to him. “I’m flying home and won’t be back,” she says to him.

  Dr. Self invites Benton to sit next to her on the steps, but he won’t. She senses his anger, and it’s a triumph, yet one more.

  “I’m feeling much better,” she says to him.

  He’s transformed by shadows pushed back by lamps.

  She’s never seen him in the dark, and the realization is fascinating.

  “I wonder what Dr. Maroni would say right now. I wonder what Kay would say,” she says. “Reminds me of spring break at the beach. A young girl notices a glorious young man, and then? He notices her. They sit in the sand and wade in the water and splash each other and do everything they desire until the sun comes up. They don’t care that they’re wet and sticky with salt and each other. Where did the magic go, Benton? Getting old is when nothing’s enough and you know you’ll never feel magic again. I know what death is, and so do you. Sit next to me, Benton. I’m glad you want to chat before I go.”

  “I talked to your mother,” Benton says. “Again.”

  “You must like her.”

  “She told me something very interesting that’s caused me to retract something I said to you, Dr. Self.”

  “Apologies are always welcome. From you, they’re quite an unexpected treat.”

  “You were right about Dr. Maroni,” Benton says. “About your having sex with him.”

  “I never said I had sex with him.” Dr. Self goes cold inside. “When would that have happened? In my goddamn room with a goddamn view? I was drugged. I couldn’t have had sex with anyone unless it was against my will. He drugged me.”

  “I’m not talking about now.”

  “While I was unconscious, he opened my gown and fondled me. He said he loved my body.”

  “Because he remembered it.”

  “Who said I had sex with him? Did that goddamn bitch say that? What would she know about what happened when I checked in? You must have told her I’m a patient. I’ll sue you. I said he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t resist, and then he fled. I said he knew what he’d done was wrong and so he fled to Italy. I never said I had sex with him. I never told you that. He drugged me and took advantage of me, and I should have known he would. Why wouldn’t he?”

  It excites her. It did then and it still does, and she had no idea it would. At the time she chided him but didn’t tell him to stop. She said, “Why is it necessary to examine me so enthusiastically?” And he said, “Because it’s important I know.” And she said, “Yes. You should know what isn’t yours.” And he said as he explored, “It’s like a special place you once visited and haven’t seen in many years. You want to find out what’s changed and what hasn’t and whether you could live it again.” And she said, “Could you?” And he said, “No.” Then he fled, and that was the worst thing he did, because he’d done it before.

  “I’m talking about a very long time ago,” Benton says.

  Water laps quietly.

  Will Rambo is surrounded by water and the night as he rows away from Sullivan’s Island, where he left the Cadillac in a secluded spot an easy walk from where he borrowed the bass boat. He has borrowed it before. He uses the outboard engine when needed. When he wants quiet, he rows. Water laps. In the dark.

  Into the Grotta Bianca, the place he took the first one. The feeling, the familiarity, as fragments come together in a deep cavern in his mind among dripstones of limestone, and moss where sunlight touched. He walked her beyond the Column of Hercules into an underworld of stone corridors with prisms of minerals and the constant sound of water dripping.

  That dreamlike day they were all alone except once, when he let excited schoolchildren pass in their jackets and hats, and he said to her, “Noisy like a swarm of bats.” And she laughed and said she was having fun with him, and she grabbed his arm and pressed against him, and he felt the softness of her against him. Through silence, only the sound of water dripping. He took her through the Tunnel of Snakes beneath chandeliers of stone. Past translucent curtains of stone into the Corridor of the Desert.

  “If you left me here, I would never find my way out,” she said.

  “Why would I leave you? I’m your guide. In the desert, you can’t survive without a guide unless you know your way.”

  And the sandstorm rose up in a mighty wall, and he rubbed his eyes, trying not to see it in his mind that day.

  “How do you know the way? You must come here often,” she said, and then he left the sandstorm and was back in the cave, and she was so beautiful, pale and well defined, as if carved of quartz, but sad because her lover had left her for another woman.

  “What makes you so special you can know a place like this?” she said to Will. “Three kilometers deep into the earth and an endless maze of wet stone. How horrible to be lost in here. I wonder if anyone’s ever gotten lost in here. After hours, when they turn out the lights, it must be pitch-black and cold as a cellar in here.”

  He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. All he saw was bright red as they were sandblasted until he thought he would have no skin left.

  “Will! Oh,
God! Help me, Will!” Roger’s screams became the screams of the schoolchildren a corridor away, and the roar of the storm stopped.

  Water dripped and their footsteps sounded wet. “Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?” she asked.

  “I could find my way even in the dark. I can see very well in the dark and came here often when I was a child. I’m your guide.” He was very kind, very gentle with her because he understood her loss was more than she could bear. “See how the stone’s translucent with light? It’s flat and strong like tendons and sinews, and crystals are the waxy yellow of bone. And through this narrow corridor is the Dome of Milano, gray, damp, and cool like the tissue and vessels of a very old body.”

  “My shoes and the cuffs of my pants are spattered with wet limestone, like whitewash. You’ve ruined my clothes.”

  Her complaints irritated him. He showed her a natural pond scattered with green coins on the bottom, and wondered aloud if anyone’s wishes had come true, and she tossed a coin in and it plashed and sank to the bottom.

  “Make all the wishes you want,” he says. “But they never come true, or if they do, too bad for you.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How can you say that it would be bad if a wish came true? You don’t know what I wished. What if my wish was to make love to you? Are you a bad lover?”

  He didn’t answer her as he got angrier, because if they made love, she would see his bare feet. The last time he made love was in Iraq, a twelve-year-old girl who screamed and cried and pounded him with small fists. Then she stopped and went to sleep, and he has never felt anything about it because she had no life, nothing to look forward to except the endless destruction of her country, and endless deaths. Her face fades from his mind as water drips. He holds the pistol in his hand as Roger screams because the pain is too much.

  In the Cave of the Cupola, stones were round like skulls, and water dripped, dripped, dripped, as if it had rained, and then there were formations of stony frost and icicles and spurs that glowed like candlelight. He told her not to touch them.

  “If you touch them, they turn black like soot,” he warned.

  “The story of my life,” she said. “Whatever I touch turns to shit.”

  “You will thank me,” he said.

  “For what?” she said.

  In the Corridor of the Return, it was warm and humid, and water ran down the walls like blood. He held the pistol and was one finger away from the end of all he knew about himself. If Roger could thank him, he would.

  A simple thanks, and doing it again isn’t needed. People are ungrateful and take away whatever has meaning. Then one doesn’t care anymore. One can’t.

  A red-and-white-striped lighthouse, built soon after the War, is isolated three hundred feet offshore and no longer has a beacon.

  Will’s shoulders burn from rowing, and his buttocks ache on the fiberglass bench. It’s hard work because his payload weighs almost as much as the flat-bottom boat, and now that he’s close to his place, he won’t use the outboard motor. He never does. It makes noise, and he wants no noise, even if there is no one to hear it. No one lives here. No one comes here except during the day, and then only in nice weather. Even then, no one knows this place is his. The love of a lighthouse and a bucket of sand. How many little boys own an island? A glove and a ball, and a picnic and camping. All gone. Dead. The forlorn passage in a boat to the other side.

  Across the water are the lights of Mount Pleasant, and the lights of James Island and Charleston. Southwest is Folly Beach. Tomorrow will be warm and cloudy, and by late afternoon, the tide will be low. The boat scrapes over oyster shells as he drags it onto the beach.

  Chapter 15

  Inside the forensic photography lab, early the next morning. It is Wednesday now.

  Scarpetta sets up what she might need, the science this time simple. From cabinets and drawers she retrieves ceramic bowls, paper, and foam cups, paper towels, sterile swabs, envelopes, modeling clay, distilled water, a bottle of gun blue (a selenium dioxide solution that turns metal surfaces a dark blue/black), a bottle of RTX (ruthenium tetroxide), tubes of superglue, and a small aluminum pan. She attaches a macro lens and a remote shutter release to a digital camera mounted on a copy stand, and covers a countertop with thick brown paper.

  Although she has a choice of which concoctions to use so latent prints will show themselves on nonporous surfaces, such as metal, the standard fare is fuming. No magic, just chemistry. Superglue is composed almost entirely of cyanoacrylate, an acrylic resin that reacts to the amino acids, glucose, sodium, lactic acid, and other chemicals exuded from skin pores. When superglue vapors come in contact with a latent print (not visible to the unaided eye), a chemical reaction forms a new composite—one hopes, a very durable and visible white ridge detail.

  Scarpetta ponders her approach. DNA swabbing, but not in this lab, and it shouldn’t be done first and doesn’t need to be first because neither RTX nor superglue destroys DNA. Superglue, she decides, and she removes the revolver from its paper bag and writes down the serial number. She opens the empty cylinder and plugs both ends of the barrel with wads of paper towel. From another bag, she retrieves the six .38 special live rounds, setting them upright inside a fuming chamber, which is nothing more than a heat source inside a glass tank. From a wire anchored across the length of it, she suspends the revolver by its trigger guard. She places a cup of warm water inside for humidity, squeezes superglue into a small aluminum pan, and covers the fuming chamber with a lid. She turns on an exhaust fan.

  Another pair of fresh gloves, and she picks up the plastic bag with the gold coin necklace inside. The gold chain is a very likely source of DNA, and she bags that separately and labels it. The coin is a possible source of DNA but also of fingerprints, and she holds it lightly by its edges and looks at it through a lens as she hears the biometric lock of the lab’s front door. Then Lucy walks in. Scarpetta can feel her mood.

  “I wish we had a program that does photo recognition,” Scarpetta says, because she knows when not to ask questions about how Lucy is feeling and why.

  “We do,” Lucy says, avoiding her eyes. “But you have to have something to compare it with. Very few police departments have searchable databases of mug shots, and those that do? Doesn’t matter. Nothing’s integrated. Whoever this asshole is, we’ll probably have to ID him some other way. And I don’t necessarily mean the asshole on the chopper who supposedly showed up in your alley.”

  “Then who do you mean?”

  “I mean whoever was wearing the necklace and had the gun. And I mean you don’t know it wasn’t Bull.”

  “That wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “Sure as hell would if he wanted to seem like a hero. Or hide something else he’s up to. You don’t know who had the gun or necklace, because you never saw whoever lost them.”

  “Unless the evidence indicates otherwise,” Scarpetta says, “I’ll take him at his word and feel grateful that he put himself in harm’s way to protect me.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  Scarpetta looks at Lucy’s face. “I believe something’s wrong.”

  “I’m just pointing out that the alleged altercation between him and whoever this guy on a chopper is wasn’t witnessed. That’s all.”

  Scarpetta checks her watch. She walks over to the fuming chamber. “Five minutes. That should do it.” She removes the lid to bring the process to a halt. “We need to run the serial number of the revolver.”

  Lucy moves close, looks inside the glass tank. She puts on gloves, reaches inside, and detaches the wire and retrieves the revolver. “Ridge detail. A little. Here on the barrel.” She turns the gun this way and that, sets it down on the paper-covered countertop. She reaches back inside the tank and plucks out the cartridges. “A few partials. I think there’s enough minutiae.” She sets them down, too.

  “I’ll photograph them, and perhaps you can scan in the photos so we can get the characteristics and have them run on IAFIS
.”

  Scarpetta picks up the phone, calls the fingerprints lab, explains what they’re doing.

  “I’ll work with them first to save time,” Lucy says, and she isn’t friendly. “Lose the color channels so the white’s inverted to black and get them run ASAP.”

  “Something’s the matter. I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  Lucy doesn’t listen. Angrily, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  Her favorite point to make when she’s cynical. A print is scanned into IAFIS, and the computer doesn’t know if it’s looking at a rock or a fish. The automated system doesn’t think. It knows nothing. It overlays the characteristics of one print on top of the matching characteristics of another print, meaning if characteristics are missing or obscured or haven’t been correctly encoded by a competent forensic examiner, there’s a good chance a search will come to nothing. IAFIS isn’t the problem. People are. Same is true of DNA. The results are only as good as what’s collected and how it’s processed and by whom.

  “You know how rare it is when prints are even rolled properly?” Lucy rants on. Her tone bites. “You get some Deputy Bubba in a jail taking all these ten-print cards, still doing centuries-old shitty ink-and-roll, and they’re all dumped into IAFIS and are crap, when they wouldn’t be if we were using biometric optical live scanning. But no jail’s got money. No money for anything in this fucking country.”

  Scarpetta leaves the gold coin inside its transparent plastic envelope and looks at it under a lens. “You want to tell me why you’re in such an awful mood?” She’s afraid of the answer.

  “Where’s the serial number so I can enter the gun into NCIC?”

  “That piece of paper over there on the counter. Have you been talking to Rose?”

  Lucy gets it, sits before a computer terminal. Keys start clicking. “Called to check on her. She said you need checking on.”

  “A U.S. one-dollar piece,” Scarpetta says of the magnified coin so she doesn’t have to say anything else. “Eighteen seventy-three.” And she notices something she’s never seen before in unprocessed evidence.