Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  Scarpetta lowers the shotgun and imagines attempting the same thing after wrist surgery. Her shotgun weighs about seven and a half pounds and starts to shake in her hands when she holds it up by its eighteen-inch barrel. She lowers her feet to the floor and takes off her right running shoe and sock. Her left foot is dominant, but she will have to try her right, and she wonders what Johnny Swift was, right-foot-dominant or left. It would make a difference, but not necessarily a significant one, especially if he was depressed and determined, but she’s not sure he was either, not sure of much.

  She thinks about Marino, and the more her thoughts shift back to him, the more upset she gets. He has no right to treat her this way, no right to disrespect her the same way he did when they first met, and that was many years ago, so many years ago she is surprised he can even remember how to treat her the way he once did. The aroma of her homemade pizza sauce is in the living room. It fills the house, and resentment speeds up her heart and makes her chest tight. She lies back down on her left side, props the stock of the shotgun on the back of the couch, positions the barrel at the center of her chest and pulls the trigger with her right big toe.

  4

  Basil Jenrette is not going to hurt him.

  Unrestrained, he sits across the table from Benton inside the small examination room, the door shut. Basil is quiet and polite in his chair. His outburst inside the magnet lasted maybe two minutes, and when he calmed down, Dr. Lane was already gone. He didn’t see her when he was escorted out, and Benton will make sure he never does.

  “You’re sure you’re not lightheaded or dizzy,” Benton says in his calm, understanding way.

  “I feel great. The tests were cool. I’ve always loved tests. I knew I’d get everything right. Where are the pictures? You promised.”

  “We never discussed anything like that, Basil.”

  “I got everything right, straight A’s.”

  “So you enjoyed the experience.”

  “Next time show me the pictures like you promised.”

  “I never promised you that, Basil. Did you find the experience exciting?”

  “I guess I can’t smoke in here.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What did my brain look like? Did it look good? Did you see anything? Can you tell how smart someone is by looking at their brain? If you showed me the pictures you’d see they match the ones I have in my brain.”

  He is talking quietly and rapidly now, his eyes bright, almost glassy, as he goes on and on about what the scientists might expect to find in his brain, assuming they are able to decipher what is there, and there is definitely a there there, he keeps saying.

  “A there there?” Benton inquires. “Can you explain what you mean, Basil?”

  “My memory. If you can see into it, see what’s in there, see my memories.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Really. I’ll bet all kinds of pictures came up when you were doing the beep-beep, bang-bang, knock-knock. Bet you saw the pictures and don’t want to tell me. There were ten of them, and you saw them. Saw their pictures, ten of them, not four. I always say ten-four as a joke, a real big ha-ha. You think it’s four and I know it’s ten, and you would know if you showed me the pictures, because you’d see they matched the pictures in my brain. You’d see my pictures when you’re inside my brain. Ten-four.”

  “Tell me which pictures you mean, Basil.”

  “I’m just messing with you,” he says with a wink. “I want my mail.”

  “What pictures might we see inside your brain?”

  “Those foolish women. They won’t give me my mail.”

  “You’re saying you killed ten women?” Benton asks this without shock or judgment. Basil smiles as if something has occurred to him.

  “Oh. I can move my head now, can’t I. No more tape on my chin. Will they tape my chin down when they give me the needle?”

  “You won’t be getting the needle, Basil. That’s part of the deal. Your sentence has been commuted to life. You remember us talking about that?”

  “Because I’m crazy,” he says with a smile. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “No. We’ll go over this again, because it is important you understand. You’re here because you’ve agreed to participate in our study, Basil. The governor of Florida allowed you to be transferred to our state hospital, Butler, but Massachusetts wouldn’t agree to it unless he commuted your sentence to life. We don’t have the death penalty in Massachusetts.”

  “I know you want to see the ten ladies. See them as I remember them. They’re in my brain.”

  He knows it isn’t possible to scan someone and see his thoughts and memories. He is being his usual clever self. He wants the autopsy photographs so he can fuel his violent fantasies, and as is true of narcissistic sociopaths, he thinks he is quite entertaining.

  “Is that the surprise, Basil?” he asks. “That you committed ten murders instead of the four you were charged with?”

  He shakes his head and says, “There’s one you want to know about. That’s the surprise. Something special just for you because you’ve been so nice to me. But I want my mail. That’s the deal.”

  “I’m very interested in hearing about your surprise.”

  “The lady in The Christmas Shop,” he says. “Remember that one?”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it,” Benton replies, and he doesn’t know what Basil means. He isn’t familiar with a murder that occurred in a Christmas shop.

  “What about my mail?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “I can’t remember the exact date. Let me see.” He stares at the ceiling, his unrestrained hands restless in his lap. “About three years ago in Las Olas, I think it was around July. So maybe two and a half years ago. Why would anyone want to buy Christmas shit in July in South Florida? She sold little Santas and his elves and nutcrackers and baby Jesuses. I went in on this particular morning after staying up all night.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “I never knew her name. Well, I might have. But I forgot it. If you showed me the pictures, it might jog my memory, you might see her in my brain. Let me see if I can describe her. Let me see. Oh, yes. She was a white woman with long, dyed hair the color of I Love Lucy. Sort of fat. Maybe thirty-five or forty. I went in and locked the door and pulled a knife on her. I raped her in the back, in the storage area, cut her throat from here to here in one cut.”

  He makes a slicing motion across his neck.

  “It was funny because there was one of those oscillating fans in there and I turned it on because it was hot and stuffy and it blew blood all the fuck over the place. Quite a mess to clean up. Then, let’s see”—he looks up at the ceiling again, the way he often does when he’s lying—“I wasn’t in my cop car that day, had taken my bike and parked it in a pay lot behind the Riverside Hotel.”

  “Your motorcycle or a bicycle?”

  “My Honda Shadow. Like I would ride a bicycle when I was going to kill someone.”

  “So you planned on killing someone that morning?”

  “It seemed like a good idea.”

  “You planned on killing her or just planned on killing someone?”

  “I remember there were all these ducks in the parking lot hanging out around the puddles because it had been raining for days. Mommy ducks and little baby ducks everywhere. That’s always bothered me. Poor little ducks. They get run over a lot. You see little babies squashed in the road and Mommy walking round and around her dead little baby, looking so sad.”

  “Did you ever run over the ducks, Basil?”

  “I would never hurt an animal, Dr. Wesley.”

  “You said you killed birds and rabbits when you were a child.”

  “That was a long time ago. You know, boys and their BB guns. Anyway, to go on with my story, all I got was twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents. You have
to do something about my mail.”

  “So you’ve said repeatedly, Basil. I told you I’ll do my best.”

  “Sort of disappointing after all that. Twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents.”

  “From the cash drawer.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “You must have had a lot of blood on you, Basil.”

  “She had a bathroom in the back of the shop.” He looks up at the ceiling again. “I poured Clorox on her, just now remembered it. To kill my DNA. Now you owe me. I want my fucking mail. Get me out of the suicide cell. I want a normal cell where they don’t spy on me.”

  “We’re making sure you’re safe.”

  “Get me a new cell and the pictures and my mail, and I’ll tell you more about The Christmas Shop,” he says and his eyes are very glassy now and he is very restless in the chair, clenching his fists, tapping his foot. “I deserve to be rewarded.”

  5

  Lucy sits where she can see the front door, where she can see who is coming in or leaving. She watches people without them knowing. She watches and calculates even when she is supposed to be relaxing.

  The last few nights, she has wandered into Lorraine’s and talked to the bartenders, Buddy and Tonia. Neither knows Lucy’s real name, but both remember Johnny Swift, remember him as that hot-looking doctor who was straight. A brain doctor who liked Provincetown and unfortunately was straight, Buddy says. What a shame, Buddy says. Always alone, too, except for the last time he was here, Tonia says. She was working that night and remembers that Johnny had splints on his wrists. When she asked him about it, he said he’d just had surgery and it hadn’t gone very well.

  Johnny and a woman sat at the bar and were very friendly with each other, talking as if no one else was there. Her name was Jan and she seemed really smart, was pretty and polite, very shy, not the least bit stuck on herself, young, dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, Tonia recalls. It was obvious Johnny hadn’t known her long, maybe had just met her, found her interesting, obviously liked her, Tonia says.

  Liked her as in sexually? Lucy asked Tonia.

  I didn’t get that impression. He was more, well, it’s like she had some sort of problem and he was helping her out. He was a doctor, you know.

  That doesn’t surprise Lucy. Johnny was unselfish. He was extraordinarily kind.

  She sits at the bar in Lorraine’s and thinks about Johnny walking in the same way she just did and sitting at the same bar, maybe on the same stool. She imagines him with Jan, someone he may have just met. It wasn’t like him to pick up women, to have casual encounters. He wasn’t into one-night stands and may very well have been helping her, counseling her. But about what? Some medical problem? Some psychological problem? The story about the shy young woman named Jan is puzzling and disconcerting. Lucy isn’t quite sure why.

  Maybe he wasn’t feeling good about himself. Maybe he was scared because the carpal tunnel surgery wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. Maybe counseling and befriending a shy, pretty young woman made him forget his fears, feel powerful and important. Lucy drinks tequila and thinks about what he said to her in San Francisco when she was with him last September, the last time she saw him.

  Biology is cruel, he said. Physical liabilities are unforgiving. Nobody wants you if you’re scarred and crippled, useless and maimed.

  My God, Johnny. It’s just carpal tunnel surgery. Not amputation.

  I apologize, he said. We’re not here to talk about me.

  She thinks about him as she sits at the bar in Lorraine’s, watching people, mostly men, enter and leave the restaurant as snow gusts in.

  It has begun to snow in Boston as Benton drives his Porsche Turbo S past the Victorian brick buildings of the university medical campus and remembers the early days when Scarpetta used to summon him to the morgue at night. He always knew the case was bad.

  Most forensic psychologists have never been to a morgue. They have never seen an autopsy and don’t even want to look at the photographs. They are more interested in the details of the offender than in what he did to his victim, because the offender is the patient and the victim is nothing more than the medium he used to express his violence. This is the excuse many forensic psychologists and psychiatrists give. A more likely explanation is they don’t have the courage or the inclination to interview victims or, worse, spend time with their mauled dead bodies.

  Benton is different. After more than a decade of Scarpetta, there is no way he couldn’t be different.

  You have no right to work any case if you won’t listen to what the dead have to say, she told him some fifteen years ago when they were working their first homicide together. If you can’t be bothered with them, then, frankly, I can’t be bothered with you, Special Agent Wesley.

  Fair enough, Dr. Scarpetta. I’ll trust you to make introductions.

  All right then, she said. Come with me.

  That was the first time he had ever been inside a morgue refrigerator, and he can still hear the loud clack of the handle pulling back and the whoosh of cold, foul air. He would know that smell anywhere, that dark, dead stench, foul and flat. It hangs heavy in the air, and he has always imagined that if he could see it, it would look like filthy ground fog slowly spreading out from whatever has died.

  He replays his conversation with Basil, analyzes every word, every twitch, every facial expression. Violent offenders promise all sorts of things. They manipulate the hell out of everybody to get what they want, promise to reveal the locations of bodies, admit to crimes that were never solved, confess the details of what they did, offer insights into their motivation and psychological state. In most cases, it is lies. In this case, Benton is concerned. Something about at least some of what Basil confessed strikes him as true.

  He tries Scarpetta on his cell phone. She doesn’t answer. Several minutes later, he tries again and still can’t get her.

  He leaves a message: “Please call me when you get this,” he says.

  The door opens again and a woman comes in with the snow, as if blown in by the blizzard.

  She wears a long, black coat and is brushing it off as she pushes back her hood, and her fair skin is rosy from the cold, her eyes quite bright. She is pretty, remarkably pretty, with dark blond hair and dark eyes and a body that she flaunts. Lucy watches her glide to the back of the restaurant, glide between tables like a sexy pilgrim or a sensuous witch in her long, black coat, and it swirls around her black boots as she heads straight back to the bar where there are plenty of empty stools. She chooses one next to Lucy’s and takes off her coat and folds it and sits on it without a word or a glance.

  Lucy drinks tequila and stares at the TV over the bar as if the latest celebrity romance is interesting. Buddy makes the woman a drink as if he knows what she likes.

  “I’ll have another,” Lucy tells him soon enough.

  “Coming up.”

  The woman with the black hooded coat gets interested in the colorful tequila bottle that Buddy lifts from a shelf. She keenly watches the pale amber liquor pour in a delicate stream, filling the bottom of the brandy snifter. Lucy slowly swirls the tequila, and the smell of it fills her nose all the way up to her brain.

  “That stuff will give you the headache from Hades,” the woman with the black hooded coat says in a husky voice that is seductive and full of secrets.

  “It’s much purer than regular liquor,” Lucy says. “Haven’t heard the word Hades in a while. Most people I know say hell.”

  “The worst headaches I ever got were from margaritas,” the woman offers, sipping a Cosmopolitan that is pink and lethal-looking in a champagne glass. “And I don’t believe in hell.”

  “You’ll believe in it if you keep drinking that shit,” Lucy replies, and in the mirror behind the bar, she watches the front door open again and more snow blow into Lorraine’s.

  Wind gusting in from the bay sounds like silk whipping, reminding her of silk stockings whipping on a clothesline, although she has never seen silk stockings on a c
lothesline or heard what they sound like in the wind. She is aware of the woman’s black stockings because tall stools and short, slitted skirts are not a safe combination unless a woman is in a bar where the men are interested only in one another, and in Provincetown, this is usually the case.

  “Another Cosmo, Stevie?” Buddy asks, and now Lucy knows her name.

  “No,” Lucy answers for her. “Let Stevie try what I’m having.”

  “I’ll try anything,” Stevie says. “I think I’ve seen you at the Pied and the Vixen, dancing with different people.”

  “I don’t dance.”

  “I’ve seen you. You’re hard to miss.”

  “You come here a lot?” Lucy asks, and she has never seen Stevie before, not at the Pied or the Vixen or any other club or restaurant in Ptown.

  Stevie watches Buddy pour more tequila. He leaves the bottle on the bar, steps away and busies himself with another customer.

  “This is my first time,” Stevie says to Lucy. “A Valentine’s Day present to myself, a week in Ptown.”

  “In the dead of winter?”

  “Last I checked, Valentine’s Day was always in the winter. It happens to be my favorite holiday.”

  “It’s not a holiday. I’ve been here every night this week and never seen you.”

  “What are you? The bar police?” Stevie smiles and looks into Lucy’s eyes so intensely it has an effect.

  Lucy feels something. No, she thinks. Not again.

  “Maybe I don’t come in here only at night like you do,” Stevie says, reaching for the tequila bottle, brushing Lucy’s arm.

  The feeling gets stronger. Stevie studies the colorful label, sets the bottle back on the bar, taking her time, her body touching Lucy. The feeling intensifies.

  “Cuervo? What’s so special about Cuervo?” Stevie asks.

  “How would you know what I do?” Lucy says.

  She tries to make the feeling go away.

  “Just guessing. You look like a night person,” Stevie says. “Your hair is naturally red, isn’t it. Maybe mahogany mixed with deep red. Dyed hair can’t look like that. You haven’t always worn it long, as long as it is now.”