Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  We approach the guard booth for Lockgreen, my neighborhood. Rita steps out of the booth and I know instantly by her bland expression that she has seen this Mercedes SUV and its driver before. “Hi,” Berger says to her. “I have Dr. Scarpetta.”

  Rita bends over and her face shines in the open window. She is happy to see me. “Welcome back,” she says with a hint of relief. “You’re home for good, I hope? It doesn’t seem right, you not being here. Seems real quiet these days.”

  “Coming home in the morning.” I experience ambivalence, even fear, as I hear myself say the words. “Merry Christmas, Rita. It looks like all of us are working tonight.”

  “Gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Guilt pinches my heart as we drive off. This will be the first Christmas when I haven’t remembered the guards in some way. Usually, I bake bread for them or send food to whoever’s sad lot it is to be sitting in that small booth when he should be home with family. I have gotten quiet. Berger senses I am troubled. “It’s very important that you tell me your feelings,” she quietly says. “I know it’s completely against your nature and violates every rule you have laid down in your life.” We follow the street toward the river. “I understand all too well.”

  “Murder makes everybody selfish,” I tell her.

  “No kidding.”

  “It causes unbearable anger and pain,” I continue. “You think only of yourself. I’ve done much statistical analysis with our computer database, and one day I’m trying to pull up the case of a woman who was raped and murdered. I hit on three cases with the same last name and discover the rest of her family: a brother who died of a drug overdose some years after the murder, then the father who committed suicide several years after that, the mother who got killed in a car accident. We’ve begun an ambitious study at the Institute, doing an analysis of what happens to the people left behind. They get divorced. They become substance abusers. Are treated for mental illness. Lose their jobs. Move.”

  “Violence certainly poisons the lake,” Berger rather banally replies.

  “I’m tired of being selfish. That’s what I’m feeling,” I say. “Christmas Eve, and what have I done for anybody? Not even for Rita. Here she’s working past midnight, has several jobs because she has children. Well, I hate this. He’s hurt so many people. He continues to hurt people. We’ve had two off-the-wall murders that I believe are related. Torture. International connections. Guns, drugs. Bed covers missing.” I look over at Berger. “When the hell is it going to stop?”

  She turns into my driveway, making no pretense that she doesn’t know exactly which one it is. “The reality is, not soon enough,” she answers me.

  Like Bray’s house, mine is completely dark. Someone has turned off all the lights, including the floodlights that are politely hidden in trees or in eaves and pointed down at the ground so they don’t light up my property like a baseball park and completely offend my neighbors. I don’t feel welcome. I dread walking inside and facing what Chandonne, what the police, have done to my private world. I sit for a moment and stare out my window as my heart sinks lower. Anger. Pain. I am deeply offended.

  “What are you feeling?” Berger asks as she stares out at my house.

  “What am I feeling?” I bitterly repeat. “So much for Più si prende e peggio si mangia.” I get out and angrily shut the car door.

  Loosely translated, the Italian proverb means the more you pay, the worse you eat. Italian country life is supposed to be simple and sweet. It is supposed to be uncomplicated. The best food is made of fresh ingredients and people don’t rush away from the table or care about matters that really aren’t important. To my neighbors, my sturdy house is a fortress with every security system known to the human race. To me, what I built is a casa colonica, a quaint farmhouse of varying shades of creamy gray stone with brown shutters that warm me with reassuring, gentle thoughts of the people I come from. I only wish I had roofed my house with coppi, or curved terra-cotta tiles, instead of slate, but I didn’t want a red dragon’s back on top of rustic stone. If I couldn’t reasonably find materials that were old, at least I chose ones that blend with the earth.

  The essence of who I am is ruined. The simple beauty and safety of my life is sullied. I tremble inside. My vision blurs with tears as I climb the front steps and stand beneath the overhead lamp that Chandonne unscrewed. The night air bites and clouds have absorbed the moon. It feels like it might snow again. I blink and take in several breaths of cold air in an effort to calm myself and shove down overwhelming emotion. Berger, at least, has the good grace to give me a moment of peace. She has dropped back as I insert my key into the deadbolt lock. I step inside the dark, cool foyer and enter the alarm code as an awareness raises the hair on the back of my neck. I flip on lights and blink at the steel Medeco key in my hand and my pulse picks up. This is crazy. It can’t be. No way. Berger is quietly coming through the door behind me. She looks around at the stucco walls and vaulted ceilings. Paintings are crooked. Rich Persian rugs are rumpled and disturbed and filthy. Nothing has been restored to its original order. It seems contemptuous that no one bothered to clean up dusting powder and tracked-in mud, but this isn’t why I have a look on my face that pins Berger’s complete attention.

  “What is it?” she says, her hands poised to open her fur coat.

  “I need to make a quick phone call,” I tell her.

  I DON’T TELL Berger what I am thinking. I dont’t let on what I fear. I don’t divulge that when I stepped back outside the house to use my cell phone in private, I called Marino and asked him to come here right now.

  “Everything all right?” Berger asks when I return and shut the front door.

  I don’t answer her. Of course, everything isn’t all right. “Where do you want me to start?” I remind her we have work to do.

  She wants me to reconstruct exactly what happened the night Chandonne tried to murder me, and we wander into the great room. I begin with the white cotton sectional sofa in front of the fireplace. I was sitting there last Friday night, going through bills, the television turned down low. Periodically, a newsbreak would come on, warning the public about the serial killer who calls himself Le Loup-Garou. Information had been released about his supposed genetic disorder, his extreme deformity, and as I remember that evening it almost seems absurd to imagine a very serious anchor on a local channel talking about a man who is maybe six feet tall, has weird teeth and a body covered with long baby-fine hair. People were advised not to open the door if they weren’t sure who was there.

  “At about eleven,” I tell Berger, “I switched over to NBC, I think, to watch the late news and moments later my burglar alarm went off. The zone for the garage had been violated, according to the display on the keypad, and when the service called, I told them they’d better dispatch the police because I had no idea why the thing had gone off.”

  “So your garage has an alarm system,” Berger repeats. “Why the garage? Why do you think he tried to break into it?”

  “To deliberately set off the alarm so the police would come,” I repeat my belief. “They show up. They leave. Then he shows up. He impersonates the police and I open my door. No matter what anybody says or what I heard on the videotape when you interviewed him, he spoke English, perfect English. He had no accent at all.”

  “Didn’t sound like the man in the videotape,” she agrees.

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “So you didn’t recognize his voice in that tape.”

  “I didn’t,” I reply.

  “You don’t think he was really trying to get inside your garage, then. That this was just for the purpose of setting off the alarm,” Berger probes, as usual writing nothing down.

  “I doubt it. I think he was trying to do exactly what I said.”

  “And how do you suppose he knew your garage had an alarm system?” Berger inquires. “Rather unusual. Most homes don’t have an alarm system in the garage.”

  “I don’t know if he knew or how he knew.�
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  “He could have tried a back door instead, for example, and been assured that the alarm would go off, assuming you had it on. And I fully believe he knew you would have it on. We can assume he knows you are a very security-minded woman, especially in light of the murders going on around here.”

  “I have no clue what would go through his mind,” I say rather tersely.

  Berger paces. She stops in front of the stone fireplace. It gapes empty and dark and makes my house seem unlived-in and neglected like Bray’s. Berger points a finger at me, “You do know what he thinks,” she confronts me. “Just as he was gathering intelligence on you and getting a feel for how you think and what your patterns are, you were doing the same thing to him. You read about him in the wounds of the bodies. You were communicating with him through his victims, through the crime scenes, through everything you learned in France.”

  CHAPTER 28

  MY TRADITIONAL ITALIAN white sofa is stained pink from formalin. There are footprints on a cushion, probably left by me when I jumped over the sofa to escape Chandonne. I will never sit on that sofa again and can’t wait to have it hauled away. I perch on the edge of a nearby matching chair.

  “I must know him to dismantle him in court,” Berger goes on, her eyes reflecting her inner fire. “I can only know him through you. You must make that introduction, Kay. Take me to him. Show him to me.” She sits on the hearth and dramatically lifts her hands. “Who is Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? Why your garage? Why? What is special about your garage? What?”

  I think for a moment. “I can’t begin to say what might be special about it to him.”

  “All right. Then what’s special about it to you?”

  “It’s where I keep my scene clothes.” I begin trying to figure out what might be special about my garage. “And an industrial-size washer and dryer. I never wear scene clothes inside my house, so that’s rather much my changing room, out there in the garage.”

  Something shines in Berger’s eyes, a recognition, a connection. She gets up. “Show me,” she says.

  I turn on lights in the kitchen as we pass on through to the mud room, where a door leads into the garage.

  “Your home locker room,” Berger comments.

  I flip on lights and my heart constricts as I realize the garage is empty. My Mercedes is gone.

  “Where the hell’s my car?” I ask. I scan walls of cabinets, and the specially ventilated cedar locker, and neatly stored yard and gardening supplies, the expected tools, and an alcove for the washer, dryer and a big steel sink. “No one has said anything about taking my car anywhere.” I look accusingly at Berger and am rocked by instant distrust. But either she is quite an actor, or she has no clue. I walk out into the middle of the garage and look around, as if I might find something that will tell me what has happened to my car. I tell Berger my black Mercedes sedan was here last Saturday, the day I moved to Anna’s. I haven’t seen the car since. I haven’t been here since. “But you have,” I add. “Was my car here when you were here last? How many times have you been here?” I go ahead and ask her that.

  She is walking around, too. She squats before the garage door and examines scrapes on the rubber strip where we believe Chandonne used some type of tool to pry the door up. “Could you open the door, please?” Berger is grim.

  I press a button on the wall and the door loudly rolls up. The temperature inside the garage instantly drops.

  “No, your car wasn’t here when I was.” Berger straightens up. “I’ve never seen it. In light of circumstances, I suspect you do know where it is,” she adds.

  The night fills the large empty space and I walk over to where Berger is standing. “Probably impounded,” I say. “Jesus Christ.”

  She nods. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.” She turns to me and there is something in her eyes I’ve never before seen. Doubt. Berger is uneasy. Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part, but I sense she feels bad for me.

  “So now what?” I mutter, looking around my garage as if I have never seen it before. “What am I supposed to drive?”

  “Your alarm went off around eleven o’clock Friday night,” Berger is all business again. She is firm and no-nonsense again. She returns to our mission of retracing Chandonne’s steps. “The cops arrive. You take them in here and find the door open about eight inches.” Obviously, she has seen the incident report of the attempted breaking and entering. “It was snowing and you found footprints on the other side of the door.” She steps outside and I follow. “The footprints were covered with a dusting of snow, but you could tell they led around the side of the house, up to the street.”

  We stand on my driveway in the raw air, both of us without coats. I stare up at the murky sky and a few flakes of snow coldly touch my face. It has started again. Winter has become a hemophiliac. It can’t seem to stop precipitating. Lights from my neighbor’s house shine through magnolias and bare trees, and I wonder how much peace of mind the people of Lockgreen have left. Chandonne has tainted life for them, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people move.

  “Can you remember where the footprints were?” Berger asks.

  I show her. I follow my driveway around the side of the house and cut through the yard, straight out to the street.

  “Which way did he go?” Berger looks up and down the dark, empty street.

  “Don’t know,” I reply. “The snow was churned up and it was snowing again. We couldn’t tell which way he went. But I didn’t stay out here looking, either. I guess you’ll have to ask the police.” I think about Marino. I wish he would hurry up and get here, and I am reminded of why I called him. Fear and bewilderment crackle up my spine. I look around at my neighbors’ houses. I have learned to read where I live and can tell, by windows lit up, by cars in the driveway and newspaper deliveries, when people are home, which really isn’t often. So much of the population here is retired and wintering in Florida and spending hot summer months on the water somewhere. It occurs to me that I have never really had friends in my neighborhood, only people who wave when we pass each other in our cars.

  Berger walks back toward the garage, hugging herself to keep warm, the moisture in her breath freezing and puffing out white. I remember Lucy as a child coming to visit from Miami. Her only exposure to the cold was Richmond, and she would roll up notebook paper and stand out on the patio, pretending to smoke, tapping imaginary ashes, not knowing I was watching through a window. “Let’s back up,” Berger is saying as she walks. “To Monday, December sixth. The day the body was found in the container at the Richmond Port. The body that we believe was Thomas Chandonne, allegedly murdered by his brother, Jean-Baptiste. Tell me exactly what happened that Monday.”

  “I was notified about the body,” I begin.

  “By whom?”

  “Marino. Then minutes later, my deputy chief, Jack Fielding, called. I said I would respond to the scene,” I begin.

  “But you didn’t have to,” she interrupts. “You’re the chief. We have a stinky, nasty decomposing body on an unseasonably warm morning. You could have let, uh, Fielding or whoever respond.”

  “I could have.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It was clearly going to be a complicated case. The ship was out of Belgium and we had to entertain the possibility that the body originated in Belgium, thus adding international difficulties. I tend to take the hard cases, the ones that will get a lot of publicity.”

  “Because you like the publicity?”

  “Because I don’t like it.”

  We are inside my garage now and both of us are thoroughly chilled. I shut the door.

  “And maybe you wanted to take this case because you’d had an upsetting morning?” Berger walks over to the large cedar locker. “You mind?” I tell her to help herself as I marvel again at the details she seems to know about me.

  Black Monday. That morning, Senator Frank Lord, chairman of the judiciary committee and an old, dear friend, came to see me. In his possession was a letter
Benton had written to me. I knew nothing about this letter. It would never occur to me that while Benton was on vacation at Lake Michigan some years ago, he had written me a letter and instructed Senator Lord to give it to me should he—Benton—die. I remember recognizing the penmanship when Senator Lord delivered the letter to me. I will never forget the shock. I was devastated. Grief finally caught up with me and seized my soul, and this was precisely what Benton had intended. He was the brilliant profiler to the end. He knew exactly how I would react should something happen to him, and he was forcing me out of my workaholic denial.

  “How do you know about the letter?” I numbly ask Berger.

  She is looking inside the locker at jumpsuits, rubber boots, waders, heavy leather gloves, long underwear, socks, tennis shoes. “Please bear with me,” she says almost gently. “Just answer my questions for now. I’ll answer yours later.”

  Later isn’t good enough. “Why does the letter matter?”

  “I’m not sure. But let’s start with state of mind.”

  She lets that sink in. My state of mind is the bull’s-eye of Caggiano’s target, should I end up in New York. More immediately, it is what everyone else seems to be questioning.

  “Let’s assume if I know something, the opposing counsel does, too,” she adds.

  I nod.

  “You get this letter out of the blue. From Benton.” She pauses and emotion flickers across her face. “Let me just say . . .” She looks away from me. “That would have undone me, too, totally. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” She meets my eyes. Another ploy to make me trust her, bond with her? “Benton is reminding you a year after his death that you’ve probably not dealt with his loss. You’ve run like hell from the pain.”

  “You can’t have seen the letter.” I am stunned and outraged. “It’s locked in a safe. How do you know what it says?”