Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  She will not come back to administer the lethal injection. Lying to him doesn’t bother her in the least.

  He says nothing about Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin.

  Instead, he tells her, “Rocco has a small château in Baton Rouge. It is quaint, in a restored neighborhood where many homosexuals live. Near downtown. I have stayed there many times.”

  “Have you ever heard of a Baton Rouge woman named Charlotte Dard?”

  “Of course. Not beautiful enough for my brother.”

  “Did Rocco Caggiano murder her?”

  “No.” Chandonne sighs as if he is getting bored. “As I said, and you must listen to me more closely. She was not beautiful enough for my brother. The Red Stick.” He subjects her to his hideous open-mouthed grin as his eyes continue to drift. “Did you know that everything you are is visible in your hands?”

  Her hands are in her lap, holding the notepad and the pen. He talks about her hands as if he can see them, yet his eyes float as if he is blind.

  Malingerer.

  “In the hands of all the sons of men God places marks, that all the sons of men may know their own works. Every working of the mind leaves marks on the hand, forms the hand, which is the measure of intelligence and creativity.”

  She listens, wondering if he is on his way to an important point.

  “In France, you find mostly artistic hands. Like mine.” He holds up a shaved hand, his long, tapered fingers splayed. “And like yours, Madame Scarpetta. You have the elegant hands of an artist. And now you know why I do not touch the hands. The Psychonomy of the Hand, or The Hand an Index of Mental Development. Monsieur Richard Beamish. A very good book with many tracings of living hands, if you can find it, but alas, it was written in 1865 and not in your local library. There are two tracings that are you. The square hand, elegant but strong. And the artist’s hand, elastic and flexible, again elegant. But more associated with an impulsive personality.”

  She does not comment.

  “Impulsive. Here you are without notice. Suddenly here. A rather nervous sort. But sanguine.”

  He savors the word sanguine, which in medieval medicine meant the blood was the most dominant of the bodily humors. Sanguine people are supposed to be optimistic and cheerful. She is neither at the moment.

  “You say you don’t touch the hands. An explanation for why you didn’t bite the hands of the women you slaughtered,” she says blandly.

  “The hands are the mind and the soul. I would not harm a manifestation of what I am releasing with my chosen ones. I only lick the hands.”

  Now he is moving in to disgust and degrade her, but she isn’t finished with him yet.

  “You didn’t bite the bottoms of their feet, either,” she reminds him.

  He shrugs, fiddling with the can of Pepsi, which sounded empty the last time he set it down. “Feet are of no interest to me.”

  “Where are Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin?” she asks again.

  “I am getting tired.”

  “Why would you protect your brother after the way he has treated you all of your life?”

  “I am my brother,” he weirdly says. “So your finding me makes it unnecessary for you to find him. Now, I am very tired.”

  Jean-Baptiste Chandonne begins rubbing his stomach and wincing as his eyes wander. “I think I am getting sick.”

  “You have nothing more to tell me? If not, I’m leaving.”

  “I am blind.”

  “You are a malingerer,” Scarpetta replies.

  “You took my physical eyesight, but not before I saw you.” He touches his tongue to his pointed teeth. “Remember your lovely home with the shower in the garage? When you returned from a crime scene at the Richmond port, you went into that garage to change and disinfect, and you showered in there.”

  Anger and humiliation tighten her body. She had been examining a putrid, decomposing body inside a cargo container, and, yes, she went through her routine: taking off her protective coveralls and boots and tying them inside a heavy plastic bag that went in the trunk; then she drove home. Once inside her garage, which certainly was not a typical garage, she threw her scene clothes into an industrial-size stainless-steel sink. She stripped and stepped into the shower, because she will not track death into her house.

  “The small windows in your garage door. Very much like the small window in my cell,” he goes on. “I saw you.”

  Those unfocused eyes and that fishlike smile again.

  His tongue is bleeding.

  Scarpetta’s hands are cold, her feet getting numb. The hair rises on her arms and the back of her neck.

  “Naked.” He savors the word, sucking his tongue. “I watched you undress. I saw you naked. Such a joy, like a fine wine. You were Burgundy then, round and firm, complicated and to be drunk, not sipped. Now you are a Bordeaux, because when you speak, you are heavier, you see. Not physically, I don’t think. I would have to see you naked to make that determination.” He presses a hand against the glass, a hand that has battered human beings to splinters and mush. “A red wine, of course. You are always . . .”

  “That’s enough!” Scarpetta yells as her rage crashes out of its camouflage like a wild boar. “Shut up, you worthless piece of shit.” She leans closer to the glass. “I’m not going to listen to your masturbatory talk. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t care if you saw me naked. Do you think it intimidates me to hear you babble on about your voyeurism and what you think of my body? Do you think I care if I blinded you when you were swinging that fucking hammer at me?

  “You know what the best part is, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? You’re in here because of me. So who won? And, no, I won’t be back here to put you to death. A stranger will do that. Just as you were a stranger to those you killed.”

  Jean-Baptiste suddenly turns back to the wire-mesh screen behind him.

  “Who’s there?” he whispers.

  Scarpetta hangs up the black phone. She walks away.

  “Who’s there!” he screams.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE IS quite fond of handcuffs.

  The thick steel bracelets around his wrists are rings of magnetic strength. Power surges through him. He is calm now, even conversational, as Officers Abrams and Wilson escort him along corridors, stopping at every steel door and holding up their ID name tags and showing their faces through the glass windows. The officer on the other side releases the electronic lock, and the journey continues.

  “She was very upsetting to me,” he says in his soft voice. “I regret my outburst. She blinded me, you know, and will not say she is sorry.”

  “I don’t know why she even came to see a dirtbag like you,” Officer Abrams comments. “If anybody should be upset, it’s her, after what you tried to do. I’ve read about it, know all about your worthless life.”

  Officer Abrams is making the big mistake of giving in to his emotions. He hates Jean-Baptiste. He would like to hurt Jean-Baptiste.

  “I am quiet inside now,” Jean-Baptiste says meekly. “But I feel sick.”

  The officers stop at another door, and Abrams shows his ID in the glass window. They pass through. Jean-Baptiste averts his face, staring down at the floor and looking away from each officer who grants them entrance deeper inside the prison.

  “I eat paper,” Jean-Baptiste confesses. “It is a nervousness of mine, and I have been eating a lot of paper today.”

  “You writing yourself letters?” Abrams snidely goes on. “No wonder you spend so much time on the toilet.”

  “This is very true,” Jean-Baptiste agrees. “But this time it is worse. I feel weak, and my stomach hurts.”

  “It will pass, so to speak.”

  “Don’t worry. If it doesn’t, we’ll get you to the infirmary.” This time it is Officer Wilson who speaks. “They’ll give you an enema. You’ll probably like that.”

  Inside Pod A, the voices of inmates bounce off concrete and steel. The noise is maddening, and the only way Jean-Baptiste has been able to endure it all these months is to decide whe
n he will hear and when he won’t. If this isn’t enough, he leaves, usually for France. But today he will begin his travel to Baton Rouge and be reunited with his brother. He is his brother. This point confuses him.

  When he is with his brother, Jean-Baptiste experiences his brother’s existence, which is apart from the existence of Jean-Baptiste.

  When the two of them are separated, Jean-Baptiste is his brother, and their roles in their conquests unite in one delicious act. Jean-Baptiste picks up the beautiful woman, and she desires him, possibly desperately. They have sex. Then he releases her to the ecstasy, and when it is finished and she is free, Jean-Baptiste is slippery with her blood, his tongue thrilled by the taste of her salty sweetness and the metallic hint of the iron he needs. Later, his teeth sometimes ache, and he is prone to massaging his gums and washing himself obsessively.

  Jean-Baptiste’s cell comes into view, and he glances inside the control booth at the woman who sits there today. She is a difficulty, but not an impossible one. No one can watch all activities at all times, and as Jean-Baptiste walks slowly, very slowly, and holds his stomach, she barely glances at him. The early afternoon belongs to Beast. Now he has his visitors in a special holding cell on the other end of the pod, a much more civilized place to visit relatives and the clergy. Because visitors have been in and out for the past three or four hours, the woman in the console must pay special attention in the event Beast acts out. Why not? He has nothing to lose.

  The door of the holding cell is made of bars, allowing the officers to note Beast’s every move inside, ensuring he will not harm the sad, kind people who have come to see him. Beast looks at Jean-Baptiste through the bars, just as the woman in the booth unlocks Jean-Baptiste’s door and Officers Abrams and Wilson remove Jean-Baptiste’s handcuffs.

  Beast screams and grabs at the bars of his holding cell, yelling and cursing and jumping up and down. All attention sharply turns in his direction, and Jean-Baptiste grabs Officers Wilson and Abrams by their thick leather belts and jerks so hard that he lifts them off their feet. Their shocked yells blend with the jarring, deafening noise in the pod as Jean-Baptiste slams them into a concrete wall to the left of the massive door, which he shuts just enough so it doesn’t lock. He blinds them with his long, filthy thumbnail, and his magnetized hands crush their windpipes. As their faces turn a dusky blue, their flailing quickly stills. Jean-Baptiste killed them with virtually no bloodshed, just little trickles from their eyes and a cut on Officer Wilson’s head.

  Jean-Baptiste removes Officer Abrams’s uniform and puts it on. He does this in seconds, it seems, pulling the black cap low over his face and slipping on the dead man’s glasses. He walks out of the cell and then shuts the door, just one more loud metal clang as Beast struggles with officers far away and gets a faceful of pepper spray, which only makes him scream and resist more, this time sincerely.

  One door after another, Jean-Baptiste passes through, holding up Officer Abrams’s identification tag. So sure is he of success, he is completely at ease, even seems a little preoccupied, as officers click him through. Jean-Baptiste’s feet are not on the ground, but in the air as he easily walks out of the prison, a free man, and digs Officer Abrams’s car keys out of a pocket.

  INSIDE THE GEORGE BUSH Intercontinental Airport, Scarpetta stands near a wall, out of traffic.

  She sips black coffee, knowing it’s the last thing she needs. Her appetite has abandoned her, and when she bought a hamburger less than an hour ago, she couldn’t swallow the first bite. Caffeine makes her hands shake. A hit of Scotch would calm her down, but she won’t dare, and the reprieve would only be temporary. Of all times, she needs to think clearly now, to somehow handle her stress without self-destructive assistance.

  Please answer your phone, she silently begs.

  Three rings and, “Yeah.”

  Marino is driving his loud truck.

  “Thank God!” she exclaims, turning her back to passengers walking with purpose or running to their gates. “Where in God’s name have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days. I’m so sorry about Rocco . . .”

  For Marino’s sake, she is.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he replies, subdued and more unhappy than usual. “Where I’ve been is hell, if you want to know. Maybe broke my all-time record for drinking bourbon and beer and not answering the goddamn phone.”

  “Oh, no. Another fight with Trixie. I told you what I think of . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says again. “No offense, Doc.”

  “I’m in Houston,” she tells him.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I did it. I took notes. Maybe none of it is true. But he did say that Rocco has a place in some gay district near downtown. In Baton Rouge. Chances are good the house isn’t in his name. But neighbors must know about him. Could be a lot of evidence in that house.”

  “On another subject, in case you ain’t been listening to the news, a female arm turned up in one of the creeks down there,” he informs her. “They’re doing DNA. Might be the last lady, Katherine Bruce. If it is, he’s getting frenzied. The location the arm was found in was right off Blind River, which runs into Lake Maurepas. This guy’s got to be familiar with the bayous and so on around there.

  “Word is, the creek where the arm was isn’t easily accessible. You’d have to know where it is, and almost nobody goes there. He was using the arm as gator bait, on a hook suspended from a rope.”

  “Or he was displaying it for the shock effect.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” he says.

  “Whatever the case, you’re right, he’s escalating.”

  “Probably looking for another one even as we speak,” he says.

  “I’m headed to Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says.

  “Yeah, I figured you would.” Marino’s voice is barely audible over the thrumming of his V-8 engine. “All to help out with some stupid drug overdose that happened eight years ago.”

  “This isn’t just about a drug overdose, Marino. And you know it.”

  “Whatever it’s about, you ain’t safe down there, which is why I’m heading that way. Been driving since midnight and have to stop every other minute for coffee, then I have to stop again every other minute for a john.”

  She reluctantly tells him about Rocco’s connection to the Charlotte Dard case, that he represented a pharmacist, an alleged suspect.

  It is as if Marino doesn’t hear her.

  “I still got another ten hours on the road. And I gotta sleep at some point. So I probably won’t catch up with you until tomorrow,” he says.

  JAY HEARS ABOUT his mutant brother on the radio.

  He isn’t sure how he feels about it as he sweats inside the fishing shack, his head bleary, his beauty not quite what it was even a week ago. He faults Bev for this, for everything. The more often she goes to the mainland, the more often the beer supply is replenished. Jay used to go weeks, a month, without a beer. Of late, the refrigerator is never empty.

  Resisting alcohol has always been a challenge for him, ever since he began tasting fine wines as a boy in France, wines that are for the gods, his father would say. As a free man with complete mastery of his life, Jay sipped, savored and enjoyed in moderation. Now he is held hostage by cheap beer. Since Bev’s last shopping expedition, he has been drinking a case a day.

  “I guess I’m gonna have to make another run,” Bev says, her eyes fixed on his Adam’s apple bobbing as he tilts a can straight up and drains it.

  “Yeah, you do that.” Beer trickles down his bare chest.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Fuck you. It’s all about what you want.” He steps closer to her, his face menacing. “I’m falling apart!” he yells at her as he crumples a beer can and hurls it across the room. “It’s your fucking fault! How could anybody be holed up in here with a stupid cow like you and not have to drink his fucking brains out!”

  He grabs another beer out of the refrigerator and pushes
the door shut with his bare foot. Bev doesn’t react. She resists the smile she feels inside. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see Jay out of control, confused and headed for hurting himself. At last she has found a way to get him back, and now that his monster brother is on the loose, Jay’s going to get worse and do something, so she needs to keep up her guard. Her self-defense is to keep him drunk. She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of it a long time ago, but beer was scarce when she went to the mainland no more than once every four or six weeks.

  Suddenly, his demands became once a month, twice a month, and each time she returned with cases of beer and was amazed by how much more he was drinking. Until lately, she had never seen him drunk. When he is drunk, he doesn’t resist her advances, and she wipes him down with a wet towel as he sinks into unconsciousness. The next morning, he has no memory of what she did, of how she satisfied her own pleasure in creative ways, since he couldn’t perform and wouldn’t have, were he sober.

  She watches him fumble with the radio, searching through static for the latest news updates, well on his way to being drunk again. As long as she’s known him, he’s had no body fat, his perfectly defined body a constant source of envy and humiliation for her. This will change quickly. It is inevitable. He’ll get fat around his waist, and his pride will suffocate beneath puffiness and flab no matter how many push-ups and sit-ups and crunches he does. Maybe his perfect face won’t look so good, either. Wouldn’t that be something if he got so ugly—as ugly as he thinks she is—that she didn’t want him anymore.

  What was that story in the Bible? Samson—the mighty, beautiful Samson—gave in to what’s-her-name, and she cut off his magical hair, or something. He lost all his strength.

  “You stupid bitch!” Jay calls out. “Why are you just standing here, staring? My brother’s on his way here if he isn’t already here. He’d figure out where I’d be. He always has.”