She switches from standby to on, and the display turns dark gray, splotched with bright white hot spots. The C-17 does a thunderous touch-and-go, long plumes of white fire blasting from its engines. Lighted window of the FBO. The lights on the runways. All of it surreal in infrared.
“Low and slow, and we’ll scan everything along the way. Work in a grid?” Lucy says.
Scarpetta lifts the System Control Unit out of its holder, slaves the FLIR with the searchlight, which she keeps turned off. Gray images and ones hot-white displayed on the video monitor near her left knee. They fly past the port, its different-colored containers stacked like building blocks. Cranes are perched like monster praying mantises against the night, and the helicopter moves slowly over the lights of the city, as if it’s floating over them. Ahead, the harbor is black. No stars are out, the moon a charcoal smudge behind thick clouds that are flat on top like anvils.
“Where exactly are we headed?” Benton says.
Scarpetta works the FLIR’s trim button, moving images in and out of the screen. Lucy slows to eighty knots and holds the altitude down at five hundred feet.
Scarpetta says, “Imagine what you’d find if you did a microscopic analysis of sand from Iwo Jima. As long as the sand’s been protected all these years.”
“Away from the surf,” Lucy says. “In dunes, for example.”
“Iwo Jima?” Benton’s voice says, ironically. “We flying to Japan?”
Off Scarpetta’s door are the mansions of the Battery, their lights bright white smudges in infrared. She thinks about Henry Hollings. She thinks about Rose. The lights of habitation become spaced farther apart as they near the shore of James Island and slowly fly past it.
Scarpetta says, “A beach environment that’s remained untouched since the Civil War. In a place like that, if the sand’s protected, you’re likely to find gunshot residue. I believe this is it.” To Lucy, “Almost below us.”
She slows to a near hover and descends to three hundred feet at the northernmost tip of Morris Island. It is uninhabited and accessible only by helicopter or boat unless the tide is so low one can wade from Folly Beach. She looks down at eight hundred acres of desolate conservation land that during the Civil War was the scene of heavy fighting.
“Probably not much different than it was a hundred and forty years ago,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy descends another hundred feet.
“Where the African-American regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was slaughtered,” Benton’s voice says. “That movie they made about it, what was it called?”
“You look out your side,” Lucy says to him. “Tell us if you see anything, and we’ll swoop around with the searchlight.”
“It was called Glory,” Scarpetta says. “Not the searchlight quite yet,” she adds. “It will interfere with infrared.”
The video screen displays mottled gray terrain and a rippled area that is the water, and the water glints like molten lead, flowing to the shore, breaking on the sand in scalloped white ruffles.
“I’m not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.
“Be nice if they’d restore the beacon so people like us don’t crash into it,” Lucy says.
“Now I feel better.” Benton’s voice.
“I’m going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what’s down there,” Lucy says.
They don’t have to work the grid very long.
“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”
Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.
“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”
“I see it,” Lucy says.
The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.
Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright—as bright as a star—at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.
Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.
A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.
Scarpetta looks out her window, and some distance away, in the sand, a face flashes in the strobes, white teeth grimacing in a bloated mass that isn’t recognizable as a woman or a man. Were it not for the suit and tie, she wouldn’t have a clue.
“What the hell?” Benton’s voice in her headset.
“It’s not her,” Lucy says, flipping off switches. “Don’t know about you, but I got my gun. This isn’t right.”
She turns off the battery, and doors open and they get out, the sand soft beneath their feet. The stench is overwhelming until they get upwind of it. Flashlights probe, pistols are ready. The helicopter is a hulking dragonfly on the dark beach, and the only sound is the surf. Scarpetta moves her light along and stops at wide drag marks that lead to a dune and stop short of it.
“Someone had a boat,” Lucy says, and she is moving toward the dunes. “A flat-bottom boat.”
The dunes are fringed with sea oats and other vegetation, and roll on for as far as they can see, untouched by the tides. Scarpetta thinks of the battles fought here and imagines lives lost for a cause that couldn’t have been more different from the South’s. The evils of slavery. Black Yankee soldiers wiped out. She imagines she hears their moans and whispers in the tall grass, and she tells Lucy and Benton not to stray too far. She watches their lights cut through the dark terrain like long, bright blades.
“Over here,” Lucy says from the darkness between two dunes. “Mother of God,” she says. “Aunt Kay, can you grab face masks!”
Scarpetta opens the baggage compartment and lifts out a large crime scene case. She sets it on the sand and rummages for face masks, and it must be bad for Lucy to ask.
“We can’t get both of them out of here.” Benton’s voice in the wind.
“What the fuck are we dealing with?” Lucy’s voice. “Did you hear that?”
Something flapping. Far off in the dunes.
Scarpetta moves toward their lights, and the stench gets worse. It seems to make the air thick, and her eyes burn and she hands out masks and puts one on because it’s hard to breathe. She joins Lucy and Benton in a hollow between dunes, at an elevation that makes it impossible to see it from the beach. The woman is nude and badly swollen from days of exposure. She’s infested by maggots, her face eaten away, her lips and eyes gone, her teeth exposed. In the beam of Scarpetta’s light is an implanted titanium post from where a crown used to be. Her scalp is slipping from her skull, her long hair splayed in the sand.
Lucy wades through sea oats and grass, moving toward the flapping sound that Scarpetta hears, too, and she’s not sure what to do, and she thinks of gunshot residue and the sand and this place and wonders what it means to him. He has created his own battlefield. How much more littered with the dead would it have become, had she not found this spot, because of barium, antimony, and lead that he probably knew nothing of, and she feels him. His sick spirit seems to hang in the air.
“A tent,” Lucy calls out, and they go to her.
She’s behind another dune, and the dunes are dark waves rolling away from them and tangled with undergrowth and grass, and he has made a tented home, or someone has. Aluminum poles and a tarp, and through a slit in a flap that snaps in the wind is a hovel. A mattress is neatly made with a blanket, and there’s a lantern. Lucy opens an ice chest with her foot. Inside is several inches of water, and she dips h
er finger in and announces the water is tepid.
“I’ve got one spine board in the back of the helicopter,” she says. “How do you want to do this, Aunt Kay?”
“We need to photograph everything. Take measurements. Get the police out here right away.” There is so much to do. “Any way we can sling two at a time?”
“Not with one spine board.”
“I want to look through everything in here,” Benton says.
“Then we’ll get them in body bags, and you’ll have to take one at a time,” Scarpetta says. “Where do you want to set them down, Lucy? Someplace discreet, can’t be the FBO where your industrious lineman is probably out there marshaling in mosquitoes. I’ll call Hollings and see who can meet you.”
Then they are silent, listening to the flapping of the makeshift tent, listening to the swishing of grass, to the soft, wet crashing of waves. The lighthouse looks like a huge, dark pawn in a game of chess, surrounded by the spreading plain of the riffled black sea. He’s out there somewhere, and it seems surreal. A soldier of misfortune, but Scarpetta feels no pity.
“Let’s do this,” she says, and she tries her phone.
Of course, she gets no signal.
“You’ll have to try him from the air,” she says to Lucy. “Maybe try Rose.”
“Rose?”
“Just try her.”
“What for?”
“I suspect she’ll know where to find him.”
They get the spine board and body bags, and plasticized sheets, and what biohazard gear they have. They start with her. She is limp because rigor mortis came and went, as if it gave up stubbornly protesting her death, and insects and tiny creatures like crabs took over. They have eaten away what was soft and wounded. Her face is swollen, her body bloated from bacterial gas, her skin marbled greenish-black in the branched pattern of her blood vessels. Her left buttock and the back of her thigh have been raggedly cut away, but there are no other obvious injuries or signs of mutilation, and no indication of what killed her. They lift her and place her in the middle of the sheet, and then into a pouch that Scarpetta zips closed.
They turn their attention to the man on the beach who has a translucent plastic retainer on his gritted teeth, and around his right wrist, a rubber band. His suit and tie are black, and his white shirt is stained dark from purge fluid and blood. Multiple narrow slits in his jacket front and back suggest he was repeatedly stabbed. Maggots infest his wounds and are a moving mass under his clothes, and in a pants pocket is a wallet that belonged to Lucious Meddick. It doesn’t appear the killer was interested in credit cards or cash.
More photographs and notes, and Scarpetta and Benton strap the woman’s pouched body—Lydia Webster’s pouched body—onto a spine board while Lucy retrieves a fifty-foot line and a net from the back of the helicopter. She hands Scarpetta her gun.
“You need this more than I do,” she says.
She climbs in and starts the engines, and blades thud, beating back air. Lights flash, and the helicopter gently lifts and noses around. Very slowly, it rises until the line gets taut and the net with its morbid burden is suspended off the sand. She flies away, and the load gently swings like a pendulum. Scarpetta and Benton head back to the tent. Were it daylight, the flies would be a droning storm and the air would be dense and loud with decay.
“He sleeps here,” Benton says. “Not necessarily all the time.”
He nudges the pillow with his foot. Beneath it is the border of the blanket, and beneath that, the mattress. A freezer bag keeps a box of matches dry, but paperback books don’t seem to mean much to him. They are soggy, the pages stuck together—the sort of obscure family sagas and romance novels one might buy in a drugstore when one wants something to read and doesn’t care what it is. Beneath this small makeshift tent is a pit where he built fires, using charcoal and the rusting grate from a grill set on top of rocks. There are root-beer cans. Scarpetta and Benton don’t touch anything, and they return to the beach where the helicopter landed, the marks from its skids deep in the sand. More stars are out, and the stench taints the air but no longer crowds it.
“At first you thought it was him. I saw it on your face,” Benton says.
“I hope he’s all right and didn’t do anything foolish,” she says. “One more thing that will be Dr. Self’s fault. Ruining what all of us had. Driving us apart. You haven’t told me how you found out.” Getting angry. Old anger and new.
“That’s her favorite thing to do. Drive people apart.”
They wait near the water, upwind from Lucious Meddick’s black cocoon, and the stench is carried away from them. Scarpetta smells the sea and hears it breathe and softly break on the shore. The horizon is black, and the lighthouse warns of nothing anymore.
A little later, in the distance, winking lights, and Lucy flies in and they turn away from blasting sand as she lands. With Lucious Meddick’s body securely in the cargo net, they lift off and carry him to Charleston. Police lights throb on the ramp, and Henry Hollings and Captain Poma stand near a windowless van.
Scarpetta walks in front of them. Anger moves her feet. She scarcely listens to a four-way conversation. Lucious Meddick’s hearse being found parked behind Hollings’s Funeral Home, keys in the ignition. How did it get there unless the killer left it—or maybe Shandy did. Bonnie and Clyde—that’s what Captain Poma calls them, then he brings up Bull. Where is he, what else might he know? Bull’s mother says he’s not home, been saying that for days. No sign of Marino, and now the police are looking for him, and Hollings says the bodies will go straight to the morgue. Not Scarpetta’s morgue. The MUSC morgue, where two forensic pathologists are waiting after working most of the night on Gianni Lupano.
“We could use you, if you’re willing,” Hollings says to Scarpetta. “You found them, so you should work it through. Only if you don’t mind.”
“The police need to get to Morris Island now and secure the scene,” she says.
“Zodiac boats are on the way. I’d better give you directions to the morgue.”
“I’ve been there before. You said the head of security is your friend,” she says. “At the Charleston Place Hotel. What’s the name?”
As they walk.
Hollings then says, “Suicide. Blunt-force trauma from a jump or a fall. Nothing to indicate foul play. Unless you can charge someone with driving a person to it. In that event, Dr. Self should be indicted. My friend at the hotel, her name’s Ruth.”
Lights are bright inside the FBO, and Scarpetta steps into the ladies’ room to wash her hands and her face and the inside of her nose. She sprays a lot of air freshener and moves into its mist, and she brushes her teeth. When she walks back out, Benton is standing there, waiting.
“You should go home,” he says.
“As if I can sleep.”
He follows her as the windowless van drives away, and Hollings is talking to Captain Poma and Lucy.
“I’ve got something I need to do,” Scarpetta says.
Benton lets her go. She walks to her SUV alone.
Ruth’s office is near the kitchen, where the hotel has had numerous problems with theft.
Shrimp, in particular. Cunning petty criminals disguised as chefs. She tells one amusing story after another, and Scarpetta listens attentively because she wants something, and the only way to get it is to play audience to the head of security’s performance. Ruth is an elegant older woman who is a captain in the National Guard but looks more like a demure librarian. In fact, she looks a little bit like Rose.
“But then, you didn’t come see me to hear all this,” Ruth says from behind a desk that is likely hotel surplus. “You want to know about Drew Martin, and probably Mr. Hollings told you the last time she stayed here, she was never in her room.”
“He did tell me that,” Scarpetta says, looking for a gun under Ruth’s paisley jacket. “Was her coach ever here?”
“He ate in the Grill now and then. Always ordered the same thing, caviar and Dom Pérignon. Never hear
d of her being in there, but I don’t imagine a professional tennis player would be eating rich food or drinking champagne the night before a big match. Like I said, she obviously had another life somewhere and was never here.”
“You have another famous guest staying here,” Scarpetta says.
“We have famous guests all the time.”
“I could go door to door and knock.”
“You can’t get on the secure floor without a key. There’s forty suites here. That’s a lot of doors.”
“My first question is whether she’s still here, and I assume the reservation isn’t in her name. Otherwise, I’d just call her,” Scarpetta says.
“We have twenty-four-hour-a-day room service. I’m so close to the kitchen, I can hear the carts rattle by,” Ruth says.
“She’s already up, then. Good. I wouldn’t want to wake her.” Rage. It starts behind Scarpetta’s eyes and begins working its way down.
“Coffee every morning at five. She doesn’t tip much. We’re not crazy about her,” Ruth says.
Dr. Self is in a corner suite on the hotel’s eighth floor, and Scarpetta inserts a magnetic card into the elevator and minutes later is at her door. She senses her looking through the peephole.
Dr. Self opens the door as she says, “I see someone was indiscreet. Hello, Kay.”
She wears a flashy red silk robe, loosely tied around her waist, and black silk slippers.
“What a pleasant surprise. I wonder who told you. Please.” She moves to one side to let Scarpetta in. “As fate would have it, they brought two cups and an extra pot of coffee. Let me guess how you found me here at all, and I don’t just mean this wonderful room.” Dr. Self sits on the couch and tucks her legs under her. “Shandy. It would appear my giving her what she wanted resulted in a loss of leverage. That would be her petty point of view, at any rate.”
“I haven’t met Shandy,” Scarpetta says from a wing chair near a window that offers a view of the lighted old city.
Four Scarpetta Novels Page 37
