Were it not for the window air-conditioning unit and the Port-a-John behind the building, Jack would lack all modern conveniences. Not that he would care, particularly. He was born into a hard life and raised to make any sacrifice that might keep him right where he is, in a world of water and the creatures in it, and trees draped in Spanish moss.
For those who frequent his boat landing, tying up for gas and making a trip into town for provisions is normal behavior. People who stay for weeks or longer in their fishing camps on the bayous and rivers are expected to leave vehicles and boat trailers parked at the landing. He never thinks twice about the white Jeep Cherokee tucked between trucks and other SUVs in a far corner of the lot near the water’s edge. He minds his own business, even if he does have instincts about people that are as strong as his sense of smell. Swamp Woman sent strong signals to him from day one—and that’s been some two years now. Her demeanor is no-nonsense about asking personal questions.
Bev Kiffin opens the hatch and pulls out her beach bag. She stands aft and drops in the plow anchor, then tosses two nylon lines up on the fuel dock as Jack waves, walking swiftly her way.
“Why if it isn’t Swamp Woman!” he calls out. “Can I top you off?”
The landing is lit and bugs are thick, roiling clouds in the yellow glow of lamps. Jack tosses her the bowline.
“I’ll be leaving her here for a few hours.” Bev turns the rope and makes a half hitch over the horns of the cleat. She pulls back the tarp and sets empty gas cans on the dock. “Fill ’em up. What’s your price these days?”
“One eighty-five.”
“Shit.” Bev hops up on the dock, moving nimbly for a woman her size. “That’s highway robbery.”
Jack laughs. “It ain’t me who decides the price of oil.”
He’s tall and bald, as dark and strong as a cypress. Bev’s never seen him once when he wasn’t wearing his sweat-stained orange Harley-Davidson cap and chewing on a plug of tobacco.
“You comin’ and goin’?” He spits and wipes his mouth on the back of a sunspotted, gnarled hand and helps her with the stern lines.
“Just to the store.”
Bev dips into her beach bag for a single key attached to a small fishing bobber—in case she ever accidentally drops the key into the water. Her attention wanders around the crowded parking lot, fixing on the Cherokee.
“I guess I’d better crank her up to make sure the battery ain’t dead.”
“Well if it is,” Jack says, lining up the four gas cans near the pump, “you know I’ll jump ’er.”
Bev watches him squat, sticking the gas nozzle into each can, the pump clicking away her cash. The back of his neck reminds her of alligator hide, and his elbows are big calluses. She’s been coming to him at least ten times a year, more often of late, and he doesn’t have a damn clue about her, which is a good thing for him. She heads to the SUV, suddenly worried about whether it needs gas, too. She can’t remember if she filled it up last time.
Unlocking the driver’s door, she slides in and turns the key in the ignition. The engine cranks after three tries, and she’s relieved to see she has more than half a tank of gas. When she runs low, she’ll fill up at a gas station. Turning the headlights on, she backs up and parks near the dock. While she is pulling cash out of her wallet and squinting to make out the bills, Jack wipes his hands on a rag and waits for her to roll down the window.
“That’ll be forty-four dollars and forty cents,” he tells her. “I’ll get those cans back in your boat for ya and keep an eye on it. I noticed you got your friend with ya.” He means the shotgun. “You plan on leaving it in the boat? I wouldn’t. Watch out shooting at gators with that thing. All it does is make ’em rageful.”
Bev can’t believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She’s not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.
“Last thing you do before you leave,” she adds as he steps down into the boat, “is fill the fish box with ice.”
“How much?” He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.
“A hundred pounds will do.”
“Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice.” He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.
“Stuff spoils quick out here.”
“That’ll be another twenty. I’m givin’ you three bucks off.”
She hands him two tens and doesn’t thank him for the discount.
“I’m gone by nine.” He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. “So if you ain’t back by then . . .”
“Won’t be,” Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.
She never is and doesn’t need the reminder.
He stares past her at the front passenger’s door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.
“You know, girl, I could fix that if you’re ever of a mind to leave the keys.”
Bev glances at the door. “Don’t matter,” she says. “Nobody rides in this thing but me.”
UPSTAIRS IN THE NORTH WING of the house is a guest bedroom overlooking the ocean, and in front of the bay window is Scarpetta’s large desk, not an antique or anything special, just an inexpensive computer desk with a matching return.
Bookcases fill the walls so tightly that some light switches and electrical outlets are behind them, out of reach, and she has to get by with power strips. Her furniture is a light maple veneer, in depressing contrast to the beautiful antiques and artistic pieces, including Oriental rugs, fine stemware and china, that she spent most of her career collecting. Scarpetta’s former life is locked up in a Connecticut storage warehouse, one secure enough for museum pieces.
She has not gone to see what she owns since Lucy took care of her aunt’s chattel more than two years ago, choosing the location because of its proximity to New York, where Lucy has her headquarters and apartment. Scarpetta doesn’t miss the furniture from her past. It is useless to care about it. Just the thought of it makes her tired for reasons she doesn’t completely comprehend.
The office in her Delray rental house is a comfortable size, although nowhere near as spacious and organized as what she was accustomed to in her Richmond house, where she had cabinets of hanging files, miles of workspace and a massive desk custom-built of Brazilian cherry. Her house there was modern Italian country, put together stone by stone, the walls antiqued plaster, the exposed beams nineteenth-century black jarrah railroad ties from South Africa. If the house she built in Richmond wasn’t beautiful before, it was spectacular by the time she remodeled it in an attempt to eradicate the past—a past haunted by Benton and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. But she felt no better. The ghosts followed her from room to room.
Her denial of unbearable loss and her own near murder were fragmented dreams of horror that chilled her, no matter the temperature inside the house. Every creak of old wood and utterance of wind sends her hand reaching for the pistol she carried as her heart beat hard. One day she walked out of her magnificent home and never went back, not even to retrieve her belongings. Lucy handled that.
For one who had always walled her soul from a wicked world and unreachable pain, she found herself a wanderer, skipping from one hotel to another like a stone across water, making phone calls to set up private consulting, and quickly became so bound in the snarled chains of evidence, of investigative incompetence and carelessness of police and medical examiners all over the place, that she had no choice but to settle in another house because she had to settle somewhere. She could no longer review cases while sitting on a hotel bed.
“Go south, far south,” Lucy told her quietly, lovingly, one afternoon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Scarpetta was in hiding at the Homestead Inn. “You aren’t ready for New York yet, Aunt Kay, and you sure as hell aren’t ready to work for me.”
“I’ll never work for you.” Scarpetta meant it, shame pulling her eyes away from her niece.
“Well, you don’t have to be insulti
ng about it.” Lucy was stung too, and within a minute, the two of them were arguing and fighting.
“I raised you,” Scarpetta blurted out from the bed, where she sat rigidly and enraged. “My goddamn sister, the admired author of children’s books who doesn’t have a clue about raising her own goddamn child, dumped me on your doorstep . . . I mean, the other way around.”
“Freudian slip! You needed me worse than I needed you.”
“Not hardly. You were a monster. At ten, when you rolled into my life like the Trojan Horse, I was stupid enough to let you park, and then what? Then what?” The great Chief, the logical doctor-lawyer, was sputtering, tears rolling down her face. “You had to be a genius, didn’t you? The worst brat on Earth . . .” Scarpetta’s voice quavered. “And I couldn’t give you up, you awful child.” She could hardly speak. “If Dorothy had wanted you back, I would have taken the bitch to court and proved she wasn’t a fit mother.”
“She wasn’t a fit mother and she isn’t.” Lucy was beginning to cry, too. “A bitch? That’s charging her with a misdemeanor when she’s a felon. A felon! A character disorder. For God’s sake, how did you end up with a psycho for a sister?” Lucy weeps, sitting next to her aunt on the bed, their shoulders touching.
“She’s the dragon you always fight, have spent your life fighting,” Scarpetta said. “You’re really fighting Mom. She’s too small a quarry for me. She’s nothing more than a rabbit with sharp teeth that goes after your ankles. I don’t waste my time on rabbits. I don’t have time.”
“Please go south,” Lucy begged her, getting up from the bed and facing her with wet eyes and a red nose. “For now. Please. Go back to where you came from and start all over.”
“I’m too old to start over.”
“Shit!” Lucy laughed. “You’re only forty-six, and men and women stare at you everywhere you go. And you don’t even notice. You’re one hell of a package.”
The only time Scarpetta was ever called a package was when she was in worse trouble than usual and required off-duty police for security. On their radios, they referred to her as the package. Scarpetta wasn’t entirely sure what they meant.
She moved south to Delray Beach, not exactly returning to her roots, but to an area near where her mother and sister live, yet safely far away.
Inside her weather-beaten 1950s rented house, her office is piled with paperwork and stiff cardboard slide folders, so much of it stacked on the floor that she has to make an effort not to trip over her work, making it impossible for her to be her usual prepossessed self when she walks in. Bookcases are crammed, some medical and legal tomes are double-shelved, while her rare antique books are protected from the sun and humidity in a tiny room next door that was probably intended to be the nursery.
She picks at Rose’s fresh tuna salad as she goes through her mail, her letter opener a scalpel. She slices open the manila envelope first, apparently from her niece or perhaps someone else in her office, and is baffled to discover another envelope inside, this one plain white and addressed by hand in calligraphy to Madame Kay Scarpetta, LLB.
She drops the manila envelope on the table and hurries out of her office, rushing past Rose without speaking and into the kitchen for freezer paper.
TAXICABS REMIND BENTON OF INSECTS.
And during his exile, he has grown fond of certain insects. Stick bugs look remarkably like twigs. Benton often loses himself in parks and along sidewalks, patiently searching shrubbery for a stick bug or, better yet, a praying mantis, which is extremely rare and a good omen, although he has never experienced a positive change in fortune directly after spotting a praying mantis. Maybe someday he will. Ladybugs are good luck. Everybody knows that. If one ends up wherever he is staying, he gently coaxes it onto his finger and takes it outside, no matter how many flights of stairs, and deposits it on a bush.
One week he did this ten times and enjoyed the thought that it was the same ladybug flirting with him. He believes that all kindnesses will be repaid. He also believes that evil will get its ugly reward, and until he began his nonexistence, he argued about that with Scarpetta often, because he didn’t believe it at all back then. And she did.
We often don’t know the reason for things, Benton. But I believe there is one, always.
He hears Scarpetta’s voice in a remote cavern of his brain as he sits in the dark backseat of a southbound taxi.
How can you say that?
He hears his own voice answering her.
Because I’ve seen enough to say it. What reason can there possibly be for a sister or a daughter or a brother or a son or a parent or a significant other to be raped, tortured and murdered?
Silence. The taxi driver is listening to hip-hop.
“Turn that down, please,” Benton calmly says, this time out loud.
Or what about the old woman struck by lightning because her umbrella frame was metal?
Scarpetta doesn’t answer him.
Okay, then what about the entire family killed by carbon monoxide because no one told them not to cook with charcoal in the fireplace, especially with the windows closed? What reason, Kay?
His sense of her continues to linger like her favorite perfume.
So there’s a reason I was murdered and am gone from your life forever?
The conversation has turned one-sided and won’t stop. What reason has she assigned to what she believes happened to him, he asks, convinced she has come up with a reason, certainly by now.
You’re rationalizing, Kay. You have forgotten our talks about denial.
Benton’s facile mind moves on to another point as he rides in the taxi shortly after dark, en route to Manhattan, the trunk and every other space in the car piled with his belongings. The driver did not disguise his disgust when he realized that his fare came with a substantial pile of baggage. But Benton was clever. He hailed the cab from the street, and the driver didn’t see the pile of luggage in the thick shadows of the sidewalk until he was faced with the choice of speeding off or accepting the lucrative job of driving a fare to New York.
The driver’s name is Robert Leary, a white male with brown hair, brown eyes, approximately five-foot-ten and one hundred and eighty pounds. Those details and others, including the identification number on the photo ID clamped to the visor, are written in a refillable wallet-size leather notebook that Benton carries wherever he goes. As soon as he gets to his hotel room, he will, as is customary for him, transfer the notes to his laptop computer. Since he entered the witness protection program, Benton has recorded his every activity, his every location and every person he has met—especially if it is more than once—and even the weather and where he worked out and what he ate.
Several times now, Robert Leary has attempted to initiate a conversation, but Benton stares out the window and says nothing, the driver, of course, having no idea that the man with the tan, chiseled, bearded face and shaved head is silently making points and examining tactical requirements and possibilities and probabilities from every tilt imaginable. No doubt, the cabbie is thinking it is his sorry luck to have picked up a weirdo, who, based on the shabbiness of his luggage, has fallen on hard times, very hard times.
“You sure you can pay the fare?” he asks, or rather demands, for the third time. “It ain’t gonna be cheap, you know, depending on what route I end up taking, depending on traffic and what streets they got closed off in the city. These days, ya never know what streets the cops will close off. Security. It’s something. Me, I’m not a big fan of machine guns and guys in camouflage.”
“I can pay the fare,” Benton replies.
The headlights of passing cars slash his window, briefly lighting up his somber face. Of this he is certain: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s attempted murder of Scarpetta has no point or meaning beyond the remarkable fact that she used her wits and survived. Thank God, thank God. Other schemes to bring about her ruination have no meaning beyond the miracle that they, too, have failed. Benton is well versed in the details, perhaps not all of them,
but what he has followed in the news is enough.
Every person involved in his plan is tangentially if not directly connected to the Chandonnes’ evil, intricate network. Benton knows what empowers the Chandonnes and what robs them of their strength. He knows the receptacles, without whom the major conduits between drones and the higher order cannot function. The solution to the situation has always been far too complicated for anyone to work out, but for six years, Benton has had nothing to do but work it out.
The answer, he discovered, is simple: Surgically snip and strip the wires and disconnect, then splice, rewire and reconnect so that the criminals short-circuit and the Chandonne empire implodes. Meanwhile, Benton—the dead Benton—invisibly watches what he has designed and implemented as if it is a video game, and no player in his game has an inkling about what is going on, except that something is, and whatever it is must be instigated by traitors from inside. Main players must die. Other players, many of whom Benton does not know, will be blamed and labeled traitors. They will die.
By this method, Benton will manipulate his enemies and delete them, one by one. By his calculations, the coalition comprised of himself and others who do not even know they have been conscripted into his private army will complete his mission in a few months, perhaps weeks. By his calculations, Rocco Caggiano is already dead or soon will be dead, killed in cold blood, his murder staged, and Lucy and Rudy may know what they are doing or have done, but what they don’t know is the video game. They don’t know that they are in it.
What Benton did not calculate and would never have anticipated is that Kay Scarpetta would form a connection to Baton Rouge, the most strategic position on Benton’s mental map. For some reason, this part of his near-perfect plan has failed. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know what happened. He reviews every detail repeatedly, but at the end of the routine, the screen is blank, a useless cursor blinking hypnotically at him. Now Benton must rush. It is against his nature to rush. Scarpetta was never supposed to have any contact whatsoever with anything or anybody in Baton Rouge. Marino was. The Last Precinct was.
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