Scarpetta looks at the keypads by the kitchen door. Outside, shadows fall in a black curtain from trees lush with new leaves. The woods are damp and earthy beneath a waning moon.
“I will let you out this way, then. The driveway is just to the side. But you must promise to come back and see the cave,” she says.
“I’ll go out the front.” Scarpetta starts walking that way.
BENTON DROVE AROUND for a while, then checked into the Radisson under the assumed name of Tony Wilson.
Inside his suite, he sits on the bed, his door secured with the dead-bolt lock and burglar chain. He requested a block on his telephone, not that he is expecting calls. The clerks at reception seemed to understand. He is a wealthy man from Los Angeles and wants privacy. The hotel is the finest one in Baton Rouge, its staff accustomed to accommodating a lot of people from all over who don’t use the valets, preferring to come and go discreetly. They don’t want to be bothered and rarely stay long.
Benton connects his laptop to the modem line in his room. He enters his code to release the lock of the new black briefcase he deliberately scuffed by scraping it against furniture and sliding it across the floor. He takes off his ankle holster and places his .357 magnum Smith & Wesson 340PD on the bed. It is double-action, loaded with five rounds of Speer Gold Dot 125-grain.
From the briefcase he removes two pistols: a pocket-friendly .40-cal- iber Glock 27, capacity ten rounds, including one in the chamber. The ammunition is Hydra-Shok: 135-grain, center-post hollow-point with a notched jacket, velocity 1,190 feet per second, high-energy and with efficient stopping power, punches into the enemy and splays like a razor-sharp flower.
His second and most important pistol is the P 226 SL Sig Sauer nine-millimeter, capacity sixteen rounds, including one in the chamber. The ammunition is also Hydra-Shok: 124-grain, center-post hollow-point with notched jacket, velocity 1,120 feet per second, deep penetration and stopping power.
It is conceivable he can carry the three guns at once. He’s done it before, the .357 Smith & Wesson in his ankle holster, the .40-caliber Glock in a shoulder holster, and the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer in the waistband at the small of his back.
Extra magazines for the pistols and extra cartridges for the .357 magnum go in a designer leather butt pack. Benton dresses in a loose-fitting London Fog jacket and baggy jeans that are slightly too long, a cap, tinted glasses and the rubber-soled Prada shoes. He could be a tourist. He could work in Baton Rouge and barely merit notice in this city of transients, where hundreds of professors, some of them eccentric, and thousands of oblivious students and preoccupied visiting scholars of all ages and nationalities abound. He could be straight. He could be gay. He could be both.
THE NEXT MORNING, muddy, sluggish water carries Scarpetta’s eye to a riverboat casino, to the USS Kidd battleship and on to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, then back to Dr. Sam Lanier.
In the few minutes she spent with him last night when she finally arrived at his door and he quickly escorted her to his guest house in back without walking her through the main house because he didn’t want to awaken his wife, she decided she liked him. She worries that she shouldn’t.
“In Charlotte Dard’s case,” she says, “how involved did you and your office get with the family in terms of trying to counsel or question them?”
“Not as much as I would have liked. I tried.” The light in his eyes dims, and his mouth tightens. “I did talk to the sister, Mrs. Guidon. Briefly. She’s an odd one. Anyway, orientation time. Let me show you where you are.”
His abrupt change of subject strikes her as paranoid, as if he worries that someone might be listening. Swiveling around in his chair, he points west out the window.
“People are always jumping from the Old Mississippi Bridge. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve fished bodies out of the river because some poor soul takes a leap—takes his time, too, while the police try to talk him down and people in their cars start yelling ‘Go ahead and jump!’ because he’s slowing up traffic. Can you believe that?
“Now, down there straight ahead, I had a guy dressed in a shower curtain with an AK-47, tried to get on the USS Kidd to kill all the Russians. He got intercepted,” he drolly adds. “Death and mental health are part of the same department, and we do all the pickups—commit about three thousand cases a year.”
“And that works how, exactly?” Scarpetta inquires. “A family member requests an order of protective custody?”
“Almost always. But the police can request it. And if the coroner—in this case, me—believes the person is gravely disabled and acutely dangerous to himself or others and is unwilling or unable to seek medical attention, deputies are sent in.”
“The coroner is elected. It helps if he’s on good terms with the mayor, the police, the sheriff, LSU, Southern University, the district attorney, judges, the U.S. Attorney, not to mention influential members of the community.” She pauses. “People in power can certainly influence the public on how to cast its votes. So the police recommend someone should be removed to a psychiatric hospital, and the local coroner agrees. In my world, that’s called a conflict of interest.”
“It’s worse than that. The coroner also determines competency to stand trial.”
“So you oversee the autopsy of a murder victim, determine cause and manner of death, then, if the alleged killer is caught, you decide if he’s competent to stand trial.”
“Do the DNA swab in the exam room. Then sits right here in my office, a cop on either side, attorney present. And I interview him. Or her.”
“Dr. Lanier, you have the most bizarre coroner system I’ve ever heard of, and it doesn’t sound to me as if you have any protection, should the powers that be decide they can’t control you.”
“Welcome to Louisiana. And if the powers that be try to tell me how to do my job, I tell them to kiss my ass.”
“And your crime rate? I know it’s bad.”
“Worse than bad. Terrible,” he replies. “By far, Baton Rouge has the highest rate of unsolved homicides in the entire country.”
“Why?”
“Clearly, Baton Rouge is a very violent city. I’m not sure why.”
“And the police?”
“Listen, I have a lot of respect for street cops. Most of them try very hard. But then you’ve got the people in charge who squash the good guys and encourage the assholes. Politics.” His chair creaks as he leans back in it. “We’ve got a serial murderer running around down here. Have probably had more than one running around down here over the decades.” He shrugs in a manner that is anything but easygoing or accepting. “Politics. How many times do I need to say the word?”
“Organized crime?”
“Fifth largest port in the country, the second largest petrochemical industry, and Louisiana produces some sixteen percent of the nation’s oil. Come on.” He gets up from his desk. “Lunch. Everybody’s got to eat, and I have a feeling you haven’t done much of that lately. You look pretty damn beat-up, and your suit’s hanging a little loose around the waist.”
Scarpetta can’t begin to tell him how much she has grown to hate her black suit.
Three clerks glance up as Scarpetta and Dr. Lanier walk out of his office.
“You coming back?” an overweight woman with gray hair asks her boss, a cool steel edge to her voice.
Scarpetta is fairly sure this is the clerk Dr. Lanier has complained about.
“Who knows?” he responds in what Scarpetta would call the flat affect of an expert witness testifying in court.
She can tell he doesn’t like her. Old, ugly specters hover between them. He seems relieved when the outer office door opens and a tall, good-looking man in navy range pants and a dark blue coroner’s jacket walks in. His presence is a high energy that is several steps ahead of him, and the overweight clerk’s eyes fasten on his face like dark, angry wasps.
Eric Murphy, the chief death investigator, welcomes Scarpetta to Luysiana. “Where are we going to lunch?�
�� he asks.
“No matter what, you have to eat,” Dr. Lanier says at the elevator. “I insist, and this is the place to do it. Like I said, I can’t get rid of her.”
He absently stabs the button for the parking garage.
“Hell, she’s been working in this office longer than I have. Sort of an inherited sinkhole that gets passed on from one coroner to the next.”
The elevator doors open inside a large parking garage. Car doors shut in muffled counterpoint as people head out to lunch, and Dr. Lanier points his key at what he calls his unit, a black Chevrolet Caprice with a blue light in the dash, a two-way radio, a police scanner and a special turbo-charged V-8 engine that is “required for all high-speed chases,” he boasts, as Scarpetta helps herself to a backseat door and slides into the seat.
“You can’t be sitting in back. It doesn’t look right,” Eric complains, holding open the front passenger door. “You’re our guest, ma’am.”
“Oh, please don’t call me ma’am. I’m Kay. And my legs are shorter, which means I sit in the back.”
“Call me anything you like,” Eric cheerfully replies. “Everybody else does.”
“From now on, I’m Sam. No more of this doctor shit.”
“Don’t be calling me doctor, either,” Eric says. “For the good reason that I’m not one.”
He gets inside the car, giving up on telling Scarpetta where to sit.
“Hell, the only time you were a doctor was when you were, what?” Dr. Lanier starts the engine. “Ten, maybe twelve years old, and molesting all the little girls in your neighborhood? Jesus God, I hate parking between concrete damn pillars.”
“They have a way of moving in on you, don’t they, Sam?” Eric turns around and winks at Scarpetta. “They grab at his ve-hicle on a regular basis. Look over there.” He points at a concrete support gouged and streaked with black paint. “If you were working that crime scene, what would you conclude?” He peels cellophane off a pack of Dentyne chewing gum. “Let me give you a clue. That used to be the coroner’s parking place, but not so long ago, the coroner—guess which one, and there’s only one—complained it was way too narrow, and he’d be goddamned if he was parking there.”
“Now, don’t tell all my secrets.” Dr. Lanier slowly creeps out of his spot. “Besides, it was my wife who did that bit of damage. She’s a worse driver than I am, for the record.”
“She’s a death investigator, too.” Eric turns around again. “Works for nothing, which is pretty much what the rest of us do.”
“Shit.” Dr. Lanier accelerates his high-speed-chase unit more than necessary inside a parking deck. “You get paid a hell of a lot more than you deserve.”
“Can we talk now?” Scarpetta asks.
“I’m pretty sure we can. Maybe people get into my office, hell if I know. But nobody touches my car, or my Harley,” Dr. Lanier replies.
In a firm, even voice, Scarpetta confronts him. “I happened to fly here with the Dards’ young son sitting on one side of me and your U.S. Attorney, Weldon Winn, on the other. In fact, I ended up having to drive Albert Dard home. You want to tell me what that’s about?”
“Scares the hell out of me.”
“The boy just happens to be in Miami, is suddenly whisked to the airport yesterday morning and routed through Houston and just happens to be on my flight to Baton Rouge. Just as Winn happens to be on my flight. And by the way, you don’t strike me as the sort who gets scared.”
“Two things. One, you don’t know me. Two, you don’t know here.”
“Where was Albert eight years ago when his mother died in that motel room?” Scarpetta asks. “Where was his father, and why is this mysterious father, quote, gone all the time, as the boy put it?”
“That I don’t know. What I can tell you is I’m familiar with Albert. Last year, I had to examine the kid in the ER, was given a heads-up, in other words, especially in light of his wealthy family and the mysterious death of his mother. He was committed to a private psychiatric hospital in New Orleans.”
“What on Earth for?” Scarpetta asks, adding, “A psychiatric history, and his family lets him travel alone?”
“But then he wasn’t alone, according to what you’ve told me. His uncle put him in the hands of airline attendants, who also, no doubt, saw to it that he got to his proper gate in Houston. Then, best of all, you took care of him the rest of the time. He’s not psychotic.
“The story is, three years ago last October, his aunt called nine-one-one and said her nephew—he was seven at the time, I believe—was bleeding badly and claimed to have been assaulted when he was out riding his bicycle. Story is, he was hysterical, scared out of his mind. Well, nobody assaulted that poor little kid, Kay. You said I could call you that. There was no evidence whatsoever of that. In fact, he’s a cutter. Into self-mutilation. Apparently, that started up again with him not long before I examined him in the ER. Which was a pretty damn awful experience.”
Scarpetta recalls the absence of knives in the Dard kitchen.
“You’re absolutely certain his injuries were self-inflicted?” she asks.
“I try not to be absolutely certain of anything. I don’t know of much that’s an absolute certainty except death,” Dr. Lanier replies. “But I found a lot of hesitation cuts. Just scratches, really. That’s significant for someone getting started in this unfortunate pattern of self-destruction. His cuts were minor, all in places within reach but not readily visible to others. Stomach. Thighs. Buttocks.”
“That would explain why I saw no scars when I was sitting next to him on the plane,” Scarpetta remarks. “I would have noticed.”
“What really disturbs me is the obvious,” he says. “Somebody wants you here in Baton Rouge. Why?”
“You tell me. You tell me who leaked my travel plans, because it seems the most likely suspect is you—or whoever else in your office knew I was coming.”
“I can see why you’d think that. No question about it. I knew enough to arrange the whole damn scenario, assuming I’m on friendly terms with Weldon Winn. And I’m not, can’t stand the son of a bitch. He’s dirtier than a landfill and got a lot of money. His explanation is he grew up with money. Well, guess what, he’s from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His father managed a golf course, and his mother worked like a dog as a nurse’s aid. The son of a bitch isn’t from shit.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Ask Eric.”
The death investigator turns around and smiles. “I started out with the FBI. Now and then, I can find my way out of a paper bag and look for things.”
“Point is, Weldon Winn is involved, deeply involved, with illegal activities,” Dr. Lanier continues. “Now, how anyone will ever prove that, or even care, is another matter. What is a fact is that a number of people arrested here over the years have somehow managed to escape Project Exile, didn’t get the automatic five years in federal prison added to their sentences for possession of a firearm while committing a crime. Our U.S. Attorney somehow overlooked those cases, as did the committee that’s supposed to track them.
“One of the reasons I’m given so much grief in my lovely city is because I won’t kowtow to the politicians. I’m up for reelection next year, and I’ve got a whole Noah’s ark full of assholes who would love for me not to be coroner anymore. I’m not appreciated by any of the bad guys, don’t socialize with them. I consider that a compliment.”
Scarpetta says, “You and I talked on the phone. Your office arranged my rental car.”
“A mistake. Damn stupid as hell of me. I should have done it myself, away from the office. My secretary is trustworthy. That certain clerk you just met may have overheard, snooped, I don’t know.”
They drive through a rather unremarkable area of Baton Rouge, at the edge of the university that dominates the town. Swamp Mama’s on 3rd Street is a popular hangout for students. Dr. Lanier parks in a tow-away zone and tosses an Officer of the Coroner’s red metal plate on the dash, as if lunch has suddenly tu
rned into a crime scene.
MARINO TURNS INTO THE LOUISIANA AIR parking lot and stops cop-style, driver’s window to driver’s window, with Lucy’s SUV.
“Good man. You got rid of the truck,” Lucy commends him without saying hello. “Don’t need a monster-garage truck with Virginia plates around here.”
“Hey. I’m not stupid. Even if this is a piece of shit.”
His rental truck is a six-cylinder Toyota. It doesn’t even have mud flaps.
“Where’d you ditch it?” Lucy asks.
“The regular airport, long-term parking. Hope nobody breaks in to it. Everything I own’s in there. Even if it ain’t much.”
“Let’s go.”
They park, but not near each other.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Marino asks as they walk toward the FBO.
“Prowling. Seeing if he can find Rocco’s place in Spanish Town, the historic district where Rocco kept a place.”
She stops briefly at the desk. “The Bell four-oh-seven,” she says, not giving the tail number.
It isn’t necessary. Her helicopter is the only one on the tarmac at the moment. The woman at the desk pushes a button that unlocks the door. A Gulf Stream is starting its engines, the roar painfully loud, and Lucy and Marino cover their ears, making sure they don’t walk around the back of the plane and get blasted with exhaust, a good way to smell like jet fuel, which is sure to give one a headache when confined to a small cockpit. They hurry to the helipad, which is at the outer edge of the tarmac, far away from planes, because people ignorant of helicopters assume their rotor wash will kick up rocks and sand and scour the paint right off fixed-wing aircraft.
Marino is ignorant of helicopters and doesn’t like them. He can barely force his massive body into the left seat, which doesn’t adjust. He can’t slide it back.
“Goddamn son of a bitch,” is all he says, loosening his harness as far as it will go.
Lucy has already done her usual thorough preflight, checks breakers and switches and throttle one last time and turns on the battery. She waits for automatic checks to go through their routines and she goes through hers, flipping on the generator. Headset on, she eases the throttle up to 100 RPMs. This is a time when the GPS will be of no value, nor will any other navigational instruments. A flight chart isn’t going to be of much use, either, so she spreads open a Baton Rouge map on her lap and runs her finger southeast, along Route 408, also known as Hooper Road.
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