Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  She knows.

  “I don’t have the exact same thing,” she replies, playing him a little, acting naïve.

  She’s anything but, probably been fucking since kindergarten.

  “Well, Jenny, see if you can approximate. Shorts, T-shirt, no shoes or socks.”

  “She doesn’t have on underwear, looks to me.”

  “Then there’s that.”

  “She looks like a slut.”

  “Okay. Then look like a slut,” he says.

  Jenny thinks this is very funny.

  “I mean, you are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”

  “You don’t need someone else.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Really,” she says.

  She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.

  “We could get in trouble,” she says.

  “We won’t.”

  “I don’t want to get kicked out,” she says.

  “You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”

  She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.

  “I’m a grown-up,” she says.

  “You’re from Texas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big in Texas, don’t they.”

  “Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.

  He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their cork-boards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.

  “You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”

  “You’re also engaged.”

  “She’s at a conference in Chicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”

  Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.

  “Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.

  “You’re special,” he says.

  13

  An hour out from Signature Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.

  She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries of Broward County tax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper from West Palm Beach.

  Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in the Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up in Chicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.

  “Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country of Alberta, Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”

  Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy….

  Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.

  She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.

  “I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.

  “When you going to learn to fly that thing?”

  “Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”

  She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.

  “I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

  “I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

  “From who?” he says suspiciously.

  “Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

  She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR. Benton doesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.

  “Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.

  Marino knows that McLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.

  “The what?” Marino asks.

  She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”

  “Trees or kids?”

  “Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”

  Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail to Benton.

  “Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”

  “You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.

  “Hello? Is this better? Marino?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and th
ere and nothing at all in the past year.”

  “So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.

  “Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”

  “The Fort Lauderdale cops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”

  “Let’s find out what it is,” she says.

  At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.

  “It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”

  “Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”

  “Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.

  There must be a mistake.

  “Yes, today.”

  “That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”

  “Well, someone did.”

  “Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.

  “The flight’s full. I can waitlist you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”

  Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.

  “Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”

  “Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”

  “I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking about Benton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.

  14

  The yellow moon is misshapen like an overripe mango, hanging heavy over scrubby trees and weeds and dense shadows. In the uneven light of the moon, Hog can see well enough to make out the thing.

  He sees it coming because he knows where to look. For several minutes, he has detected its infrared energy in the Heat Stalker he moves horizontally in the dark in a slow scan, like a wand, like a magic wand. A line of bright-red hatch marks marches across the rear LED window of the lightweight olive-green PVC tube as it detects differences in the surface temperatures of the warm-blooded thing and the earth.

  He is Hog, and his body is a thing, and he can leave it on demand and no one can see him. No one can see him now in the middle of the empty night holding the Heat Stalker like a leveler while it detects warmth radiating from living flesh and alerts him with small bright-red marks that flow in single file across the dark glass.

  Probably the thing is a raccoon.

  Stupid thing. Hog silently talks to it as he sits cross-legged on sandy soil and scans. He glances down at the bright red marks moving across the lens at the rear end of the tube, the front end pointed at the thing. He searches the shadowy berm and feels the ruined old house behind him, feels its pull. His head is thick because of the earplugs, his breathing loud, the way it sounds when you breathe through a snorkel, submerged and silent, nothing but the sound of your own rapid, shallow breaths. He doesn’t like earplugs, but it is important to wear them.

  You know what happens now, he silently says to the thing. I guess you don’t know.

  He watches the dark, fat shape creep along, low to the ground. It moves like a thick, furry cat, and maybe it is a cat. Slowly, it moves through ragged Bermuda and torpedo grass and sedge, moving in and out of thick shadows beneath the spiny silhouettes of spindly pines and the brittle litter of dead trees. He scans, watching the thing, watching the red marks flow across the lens. The thing is stupid, the breeze blowing the wrong way for it to pick up his scent and be anything but stupid.

  He turns off the Heat Stalker and rests it in his lap. He picks up the camouflage-finished Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump, the stock hard and cool against his jaw as he lines up the tritium ghost ring with the thing.

  Where you think you’re going? he mocks it.

  The thing doesn’t run. Stupid thing.

  Go on. Run. See what happens.

  It continues its oblivious lumbering pace, low to the ground.

  He feels his own heart thud hard and slow, and hears his own rapid breathing as he follows the thing with the glowing green post and squeezes the trigger and the shotgun blast cracks open the quiet night. The thing jerks and goes still in the dirt. He removes the earplugs and listens for a cry or grunt but hears nothing, just distant traffic on South 27 and the gritty sound of his own feet as he gets up and shakes out the cramps in his legs. He slowly ejects the shell, catches it, stuffs it in a pocket and walks through the berm. He pushes the pressure pad on the shotgun’s slide and the SureFire WeaponLight shines down on the thing.

  It is a cat, furry and striped with a swollen belly. He nudges it over. It is pregnant, and he considers shooting it again as he listens. There is nothing, not a movement, not a sound, not a sign of any life left. The thing was probably slinking toward the ruined house, looking for food. He thinks about it smelling food. If it thought there was food in the house, then recent occupation is detectable. He ponders this possibility as he presses in the safety and shoulders the shotgun, draping his forearm over the stock like a lumberjack shouldering an ax. He stares at the dead thing and thinks of the carved wooden lumberjack in The Christmas Shop, the big one by the door.

  “Stupid thing,” he says, and there is no one to hear him, only the dead thing.

  “No, you’re the stupid thing,” God’s voice sounds from behind him.

  He takes out the earplugs and turns around. She is there in black, a black, flowing shape in the moonlit night.

  “I told you not to do that,” she says.

  “No one can hear it out here,” he replies, shifting the shotgun to his other shoulder and seeing the wooden lumberjack as if it is right in front of him.

  “I’m not telling you again.”

  “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “You know where I am if I choose for you to know.”

  “I got you the Field & Streams. Two of them. And the paper, the glossy laser paper.”

  “I told you to get me six in all, including two Fly Fishing, two Angling Journals.”

  “I stole them. It was too hard to get six at once.”

  “Then go back. Why are you so stupid?”

  She is God. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

  “You will do what I say,” she says.

  God is a woman, and she is it, and there is no other. She became God after he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent very far away where it was cold and kept snowing, and then he came back and by then, she had somehow become God and she told him he is her Hand. The Hand of God. Hog.

  He watches God go away, dissolving in the night. He hears the loud engine as she flies away, flying down the highway. And he wonders if she’ll ever have sex with him again. All the time he thinks about it. When she became God, she wouldn’t have sex with him. Theirs is a holy union, she explains it. She has sex with other people but not with him, because he is her Hand. She laughs at him, says she can’t exactly have sex with her own Hand. It would be the same thing as having sex with herself. And she laughs.

  “You were stupid, now weren’t you?” Hog says to the dead pregnant thing in the dirt.

  He wants to have sex. He wants it right now as he stares at the dead thing and nudges it with his boot again and thinks about God and what she looks like naked with hands all over her.

  I know you want it, Hog.

  I do, he says. I want it.

  I know where you want to put your hands. I’m right, aren’t I?

  Yes.

  You want to put them where I let other people put
them, don’t you?

  I wish you wouldn’t let anybody. Yes, I want it.

  She makes him paint the red handprints in places he doesn’t want other people to touch, places where he put his hands when he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent to the cold place where it snows, the place where they put him in the machine and rearranged his molecules.

  15

  The next morning, Tuesday, clouds pile up from the distant sea and the pregnant dead thing is stiff on the ground and flies have found it.

  “Now look what you did. Killed all your children, didn’t you? Stupid thing.”

  Hog nudges it with his boot. Flies scatter like sparks. He watches as they buzz back to the gory, coagulated head. He stares at the stiff, dead thing and the flies crawling on it. He stares at it, not bothered by it. He squats beside it, getting close enough to craze the flies again and now he smells it. He gets a whiff of death, a stench that in several days will be overpowering and noticeable an acre away, depending on the wind. Flies will lay their eggs in orifices and the wounds, and soon the carcass will team with maggots, but it won’t bother him. He likes to watch what death does.

  He walks off toward the ruined house, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He listens to the distant rumble of traffic on South 27, but there is no reason for anybody to come out here. Eventually, there will be. But now there isn’t. He steps up on the rotting porch and a curling plank gives under his boots, and he shoves open the door, entering a dark, airless space thick with dust. Even on a clear day, it is dark and suffocating inside the house, and this morning it is worse because a thunderstorm is on the way. It is eight o’clock and almost as dark as night inside the house, and he begins to sweat.

  “Is that you?” The voice sounds from the darkness, from the rear of the house, where the voice ought to be.

  Against a wall is a makeshift table of plywood and cinder blocks, and on top is a small glass fish tank. He points the shotgun at the tank and pushes the pressure pad on the slide, and the xenon light flashes brilliantly on glass and illuminates the black shape of the tarantula inside. It is motionless on sandy dirt and wood chips, poised like a dark hand next to its water sponge and favorite rock. In a corner of the tank, small crickets stir in the light, disturbed by it.