Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’m assuming Berger heard the news about Chandonne’s being caught, heard about his murders and called us,” I say.

  “Recognized the MO, that’s right. Says the case of Susan Pless has always haunted her. Berger’s in a hellfire hurry to compare DNA. Apparently got seminal fluid and they’ve got a profile on it, have had it for two years now.”

  “So the seminal fluid in Susan’s case was analyzed.” I ponder this, somewhat surprised because typically overworked, financially stressed labs do not analyze DNA evidence until there is a suspect for comparison—especially if there isn’t an extensive databank to run the profile through in hopes of a cold hit. In 1997, New York’s databank wasn’t even in existence yet. “Does this mean they had a suspect originally?” I ask.

  “I think they had one guy in mind who didn’t pan out,” Righter replies. “All I know is they did get a profile and we’re getting Chandonne’s DNA up there to the M.E.’s office immediately—in fact, the sample’s on its way, even as we speak. To state the obvious, we’ve got to know if it’s a match before Chandonne’s arraigned here in Richmond. Got to cut that off at the pass, and the good news is we’re given the gift of at least a few extra days because of his medical condition, because of the chemical burns to his eyes.” He says this as if I had nothing to do with it. “Kind of like the golden hour you always talk about, that brief period of time you’ve got to save someone who’s been in an awful accident or whatever. This is our golden hour. We’ll get the DNA compared and see if Chandonne is in fact the person who killed the woman in New York two years ago.”

  Righter has an annoying habit of repeating things I have said, as if being anecdotal somehow lets him off the hook for remaining ignorant about matters that count. “What about bite marks?” I ask. “Was there any information on those? Chandonne has very unusual dentition.”

  “You know, Kay,” he says, “I really didn’t get into those sorts of details.”

  Of course, he would not have. I push for the truth, for the real reason he has come to see me this morning. “And what if the DNA points to Chandonne? You want to know before the arraignment here? Why?” It is a rhetorical question. I think I know why. “You don’t want him arraigned here. You intend to turn him over to New York and let him be tried up there first.”

  He avoids my eyes.

  “Why in the world would you do that, Buford?” I go on as I become convinced that this is exactly what he has decided. “So you can wash your hands of him? Ship him up to Riker’s Island and be rid of him? And bring no justice to the cases here? Let’s just be honest, Buford, if they get a first-degree murder conviction in Manhattan, you won’t bother to try him here, now will you?”

  He gives me one of his sincere looks. “Everyone in the community has always respected you so much,” he startles me by saying.

  “Has always?” Alarm shoots through me like cold water. “As in not anymore?”

  “I’m just telling you I understand how you feel—that you and these other poor women deserve him punished to the full extent of the . . .”

  “So I guess the bastard just gets away with what he tried to do to me,” I hotly cut him off. Beneath all this is pain. The pain of rejection. The pain of abandonment. “I guess he just gets away with what he did to these other poor women, as you put it. Am I right?”

  “They have the death penalty in New York,” he replies.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I exclaim in disgust. I fix on him intensely, hotly, like the focus of the magnifying glass I used in childhood experiments to burn holes in paper and dead leaves. “And when have they ever imposed it?” He knows the answer is never. No one ever gets the needle in Manhattan.

  “And there’s no guarantee it would be imposed in Virginia, either,” Righter reasonably answers. “The defendant isn’t an American citizen. He has a bizarre disease or deformity or whatever it is. We’re not even certain he speaks English.”

  “He certainly spoke English when he came to my house.”

  “He might get off on insanity, for all we know.”

  “I guess that depends on the skill of the prosecutor, Buford.”

  Righter blinks. His jaw muscles bunch. He looks like a Hollywood parody of an accountant—all buttoned up tight and in tiny glasses—who has just been subjected to an offensive smell.

  “Have you talked to Berger?” I ask him. “You must have. You couldn’t have come up with this on your own. You two have made a deal.”

  “We’ve conferred. There’s pressure, Kay. Certainly you’ve got to appreciate that. For one thing, he’s French. You got any idea how the French would react if we tried to execute one of their native sons here in Virginia?”

  “Good God,” I blurt out. “This isn’t about capital punishment. This is about punishment, period. You know how I feel about capital punishment, Buford. I’m against it. I’m more against it the older I get. But he should be held responsible for what he did here in Virginia, damn it.”

  Righter says nothing, looking out the window again.

  “So you and Berger agreed if the DNA matches, Manhattan can have Chandonne,” I offer my summation.

  “Think about it. This is the best we could hope for in terms of change of venue, so to speak.” Righter gives me his eyes again. “And you know damn well the case could never be tried here in Richmond with all the publicity and whatnot. We’d probably all get sent out to some rural courthouse a million miles from here, and how would you like to be put through that for weeks, possibly months, on end?”

  “That’s right.” I get up and jab logs with the poker, heat pressing against my face, sparks exploding up the chimney like a flock of spooked starlings. “God forbid that we should be inconvenienced.” I jab hard with my good arm, as if I am trying to kill the fire. I sit back down, flushed and suddenly on the verge of tears. I know all about post-traumatic stress syndrome and accept that I am suffering from it. I am anxious and startle easily. A little while ago I turned on a local classical music station and Pachelbel overwhelmed me with grief and I began to sob. I know the symptoms. I swallow hard and steady myself. Righter watches me in silence, with a tired look of sad nobility, as if he is Robert E. Lee remembering a painful battle.

  “What will happen to me?” I ask. “Or do I just go on with my life now as if I never worked these God-awful murders—as if I never autopsied his victims or escaped with my life when he forced his way into my house? What will my role in this be, Buford, supposing he’s tried in New York?”

  “That will be up to Ms. Berger,” he replies.

  “Free lunches.” It is a term I use when referring to victims who never see justice. In the scenario Righter is suggesting, I, for example, would be a free lunch because Chandonne will never go to trial in New York for what he intended to do to me in Richmond. More unconscionably, he will not be given so much as a slap on the hand for the murders he committed here, either. “You’ve just thrown this entire city to the wolves,” I tell him.

  He realizes the double entendre the same moment I do. I see it in his eyes. Richmond has already been thrown to one wolf, Chandonne, whose modus operandi when he began killing in France was to leave notes signed Le Loup-Garou, the werewolf. Now justice for this city’s victims will be in the hands of strangers, or more to the point, there will be no justice. Anything can happen. Anything will.

  “What if France wants to extradite him?” I challenge Righter. “What if New York allows it?”

  “We could cite what ifs until the moon turns blue,” he says.

  I stare at him with open disdain.

  “Don’t take this personally, Kay.” Righter gives me that pious, sad look again. “Don’t turn this into your personal war. We just want the bastard out of commission. Doesn’t matter who accomplishes that.”

  I get up from my chair. “Well, it does matter. It sure as hell does,” I tell him. “You’re a coward, Buford.” I turn my back on him and walk out of the room.

  Minutes later, from behind the shut door in my w
ing of the house, I hear Anna showing Righter out. Obviously, he lingered long enough to talk to her, and I wonder what he might have said about me. I sit on the edge of my bed, utterly lost. I can’t remember ever feeling this lonely, this frightened, and am relieved when I hear Anna coming down the hall. She knocks lightly on my door.

  “Come in,” I say in an unsteady voice.

  She stands in the doorway looking at me. I feel like a child, powerless, hopeless, foolish. “I insulted Righter,” I tell her. “Doesn’t matter if what I said was true. I called him a coward.”

  “He thinks you are unstable right now,” she replies. “He is concerned. He is also ein Mann ohne Rückgrat. A man without backbone, as we say where I come from.” She smiles a little.

  “Anna, I’m not unstable.”

  “Why are we in here when we can be enjoying the fire?” she says.

  She intends to talk to me. “Okay,” I concede, “you win.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I HAVE NEVER been Anna’s patient. For that matter, I have never had psychotherapy of any sort, which is not to say I have never needed it. Certainly I have. I don’t know anybody who can’t benefit from good counsel. It is simply that I am so private and don’t trust people easily and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolute discretion. I am a doctor. I know other doctors. Doctors talk to each other and to their family and friends. They tell secrets that they swear upon Hippocrates they will never utter to another soul. Anna switches off lamps. The late morning is overcast and as dark as dusk, and rose-painted walls catch firelight and make the living room irresistibly cozy. I am suddenly self-conscious. Anna has set the stage for my unveiling. I pick the rocker and she pulls an ottoman close and perches on the edge of it, facing me like a great bird hunched over its nest.

  “You will not get through this if you remain silent.” She is brutally direct.

  Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.

  “You are traumatized,” Anna goes on. “Kay, you are not made of steel. Not even you can endure so much and just keep going as if nothing has happened. So many times I called you after Benton was killed, and you would not find time for me. Why? Because you did not want to talk.”

  I can’t hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.

  “I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning.” Anna sits forward, intensely leaning into the words she fires straight at my heart. “This is your day of reckoning.” She points at me, staring. “Now you will talk to me, Kay Scarpetta.”

  I blearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. “I can never get away from it,” I say in despair under my breath.

  “Get away from what?” This has snagged Anna’s interest.

  “What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don’t talk about it.”

  “I want you to talk about it now,” she tells me.

  “It’s foolish.”

  She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarrassing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or Bloody Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanée. “I remember being moved in ways I can’t say,” I share memories I did not know I still had. “The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don’t touch their character, don’t take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them.” My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. “Like my being asked only about my cases,” I go on. “Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some goddamn cheap thrill with a screw cap.”

  “You feel lonely,” Anna softly observes. “And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients.”

  I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. “I’m constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones,” I say. “And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren’t. The brain, for example, doesn’t look like what it does. On gross examination, it’s about as exciting as a mushroom.”

  Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say, no. She wants to know why I didn’t feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.

  “No.” She prods me. “Do not think. Feel it.”

  I ponder.

  “No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it.” She touches her hand over her heart.

  “I have to think. I’ve gotten where I am in life by thinking,” I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.

  “You have gotten where you are in life by knowing,” she says. “And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?”

  “Because I don’t really acknowledge that side. It’s a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example,” I reply.

  “Ah.” Anna nods again. “You make analogies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the associations you are just now telling me?”

  I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the grass like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. “I don’t want to go through that looking glass,” I tell her. “It isn’t just that I didn’t want to tell Benton. I don’t want to tell anyone. I don’t want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and associations, I don’t, well, I don’t . . .”

  Anna nods again, deeply this time. “By not acknowledging them, you don’t invite your imagination into your work,” she finishes my thought.

  “I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand.”

  She studies me before replying. “Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?” She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. “What if, for example”—she pauses dramatically—“you could take the f
acts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray’s life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watch—watch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?”

  “That would be unspeakably awful,” I barely reply.

  “How powerful if a jury could see a film like that,” she says.

  Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of minnows.

  “But if you went through that looking glass, as you refer to it,” she goes on, “then where might it end?” She throws her hands up. “Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton’s murder.”

  I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don’t make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you’re so smart, what are we gonna do next, Mister Profiler? Can you read our minds, figure us out, predict? Huh? He wouldn’t answer them. He would ask them nothing as they forced him into a small neighborhood grocery store on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania that had closed at five in the afternoon. Benton was going to die. They would torment and torture him, and that was the part he would center on—how to short-circuit the pain and degradation he knew they would inflict if they had time. Darkness and the spurt of a match. His face wavering in the light of a small flame that trembles with each stir of air as those two psychopathic assholes move about in the plenum of a shitty little Pakistani grocery store they torched after he was dead.

  My eyelids fly open. Anna is talking to me. Cold sweat crawls down my sides like insects. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “Very, very painful.” Her face melts with compassion. “I cannot imagine.”

  Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his running shoes, Saucony running shoes. Sauconys were the only brand he would wear and I used to call him a fussbudget because he was so particular if he really liked something. And he has on the old UVA sweatshirt Lucy gave him, dark blue with bright orange letters, and over the years it has gotten very faded and soft. He cut off the sleeves because they were too short, and I have always liked how he looks in that old, worn-out sweatshirt, with his silver hair, his clean profile, the mysteries behind his intense, dark eyes. His hands lightly curl around the armrests of his chair. He has the fingers of a pianist, long and slender and expressive when he talks, and always gentle when they touch me, which is less and less with time. I am saying all this out loud to Anna, speaking in the present tense about a man who has been dead for more than a year.