Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  She never sleeps longer than an hour or two at a stretch and has no idea how much time has passed. There is no such thing as time. Gray light fills the broken window on the other side of the room, and she can’t see the sun. She smells rain.

  She doesn’t know what he has done with Kristin and the boys. She doesn’t know what he has done to them. She dimly remembers the first hours, those awful, unreal hours when he brought her food and water and stared at her from the darkness, and he was as dark as the darkness, dark like a dark spirit, hovering in the doorway.

  How does it feel? he said to her in a soft, cold voice. How does it feel to know you’re going to die?

  It is always dark inside the room. It is so much darker when he is in it.

  I’m not afraid. You can’t touch my soul.

  Say you’re sorry.

  It’s not too late to repent. God will forgive even the most vile sin if you humble yourself and repent.

  God is a woman. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.

  Blasphemy. Shame on you. I’ve done nothing to be sorry about.

  I’ll teach you shame. You’ll say you’re sorry just like she did.

  Kristin?

  Then he was gone, and Ev heard voices from another part of the house. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was talking to Kristin, must have been. He was talking to a woman. Ev really couldn’t hear it, but she heard them talking. She could not make out what they said, and she remembers feet scuffing and voices on the other side of the wall, and then she heard Kristin, knew it was her. When Ev thinks about it now, she wonders if she dreamed it.

  Kristin! Kristin! I’m right here! I’m right here! Don’t you dare hurt her!

  She hears her own voice in her head, but it might have been a dream.

  Kristin? Kristin? Answer me! Don’t you dare hurt her!

  Then she heard talking again, so maybe it was all right. But Ev’s not sure. She might have dreamed it. She might have dreamed she heard his boots moving down the hallway and the front door shutting. All this might have taken place in minutes, maybe hours. Maybe she heard a car engine. Maybe it was a dream, a delusion. Ev sat in the dark, her heart flying as she listened for Kristin and the boys and heard nothing. She called out until her throat was on fire and she could barely see or breathe.

  Daylight came and went, and his dark shape would appear with paper cups of water and something to eat, and his shape would stand and watch her, and she could not see his face. She has never seen his face, not even the first time, when he came into the house. He wears a black hood with holes cut in it for his eyes, a hood like a black pillowcase, long and loose around his shoulders. His hooded shape likes to poke her with the barrel of the shotgun as if she is an animal in the zoo, as if he is curious about what she will do if he pokes her. He pokes her in her private places and watches what she will do.

  Shame on you, Ev says when he pokes her. You can harm my flesh but you can’t touch my soul. My soul belongs to God.

  She isn’t here. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.

  My God is a jealous God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

  She isn’t here, and he pokes her with the gun barrel, sometimes pokes her so hard it leaves perfect blackish-blue circles on her flesh.

  Say you’re sorry, he says.

  Ev sits on the stinking, rotting mattress. It has been used before, used horribly, stiff and stained black, and she sits on it inside the stinking, airless, trash-strewn room, listening and trying to think, listening and praying and screaming for help. No one answers. No one hears her, and she wonders where she could be. Where is she that no one can hear her scream?

  She can’t escape because of the clever way he bent and twisted coat hangers around her wrists and ankles with ropes through them and looped over a rafter in the falling-down ceiling, as if she is some sort of grotesque marionette, bruised and covered with insect bites and rashes, her naked body itching and racked with pain. With effort, she can get to her feet. She can move off the mattress to relieve her bladder and bowels. When she does, the pain is so searing, she almost faints.

  He does everything in the dark. He can see in the dark. She hears his breathing in the dark. He is a black shape. He is Satan.

  “Help me God,” she says to the broken window, to the gray sky beyond, to the God beyond the sky, somewhere in His heaven. “Please God help me.”

  19

  Scarpetta hears the distant roar of a motorcycle with very loud pipes.

  She tries to concentrate as the motorcycle gets closer, cruising past the building toward the faculty parking lot. She thinks about Marino and wonders if she is going to have to fire him. She’s not sure she could.

  She is explaining that there were two phones inside Laurel Swift’s house and both of them were unplugged, the cords missing. Laurel had left his cell phone in his car and says he was unable to find his brother’s cell phone, so he had no way to call for help. Panicking, Laurel fled and flagged somebody down. He didn’t return to the house until the police arrived, and by then the shotgun was gone.

  “This is information I got from Dr. Bronson,” Scarpetta says. “I’ve talked to him several times and I’m sorry I don’t have a better grasp of the details.”

  “The phone cords. Have they ever shown up?”

  “I don’t know,” Scarpetta says, because Marino hasn’t briefed her.

  “Johnny Swift could have removed them to make sure no one could call for help in case he didn’t die right away, assuming he’s a suicide,” Joe offers, another one of his creative scenarios.

  Scarpetta doesn’t answer because she knows nothing about the phone cords beyond what Dr. Bronson relayed to her in his vague, somewhat disjointed way.

  “Anything else missing from the house? Anything besides the phone cords, the decedent’s cell phone and the shotgun? As if that’s not enough.”

  “You’ll have to ask Marino,” she says.

  “I believe he’s here. Unless someone else has a motorcycle as loud as the space shuttle.”

  “I’m surprised Laurel hasn’t been charged with murder, you want my opinion,” Joe says.

  “You can’t charge someone with murder when the manner of death hasn’t been determined,” Scarpetta replies. “The manner is still pending, and there isn’t sufficient evidence to change it to suicide or homicide or accident, although I certainly fail to see how this is an accident. If the death isn’t resolved to Dr. Bronson’s satisfaction, he’ll eventually change the manner to undetermined.”

  Heavy footsteps sound on carpet in the hallway.

  “What happened to common sense?” Joe says.

  “You don’t determine manner of death based on common sense,” Scarpetta says, and she wishes he could keep his unwelcome comments to himself.

  The conference-room door opens, and Pete Marino walks in dressed in black jeans, black leather boots, a black leather vest with the Harley logo on the back, his usual garb, carrying a briefcase and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. He ignores Scarpetta as he sits in his usual chair next to hers and scoots the box of donuts across the table.

  “I sure wish we could test the brother’s clothing for GSR, get our hands on whatever he was wearing when he was shot,” Joe says, leaning back in his chair the way he does when he’s about to pontificate, and he tends to pontificate more than usual when Marino is around. “Take a look at them on soft x-ray, the Faxitron, SEM/spectrometry.”

  Marino stares at Joe as if he might hit him.

  “Of course, it’s possible to get trace amounts on your person from sources other than a gunshot. Plumbing materials, batteries, automobile greases, paints. Just like in my lab practicum last month,” Joe says as he plucks out a chocolate-iced donut that is smashed, most of its icing stuck to the box. “You know what happened to them?”

  He licks his fingers as he looks across the table at Marino.

  “That was quite a practicum,” Marino says. “Wonder where you got the idea.”

 
“What I asked is, do you know what happened to the brother’s clothes,” Joe says.

  “I think you been watching too many fantasy forensic shows,” Marino says, his big face staring at him. “Too much Harry Potter policing on your big flat-screen TV. Think you’re a forensic pathologist, or almost one, a lawyer, a scientist, a crime-scene investigator, a cop, Captain Kirk and the Easter Bunny all rolled up in one.”

  “By the way, yesterday’s hell scene was a screaming success,” Joe says. “Too bad all of you missed it.”

  “Well, what is the story about the clothes, Pete?” Vince asks Marino. “We know what he had on when he found his brother’s body?”

  “What he had on, according to him, was nothing,” Marino says. “Supposedly, he came in through the kitchen door, put the groceries on the counter, then went straight back to the bedroom to pee. Supposedly. Then he took a shower because he had to work at his restaurant that night and happened to look out the doorway and saw the shotgun on the carpet behind the couch. At this point, he was naked, so he says.”

  “Sounds like a lot of crap to me.” Joe talks with his mouth full.

  “My personal opinion is it’s probably a robbery that got interrupted,” Marino says. “Or something got interrupted. A rich doctor maybe gets tangled up with the wrong person. Anybody seen my Harley jacket? Black with a skull and bones on one shoulder, an American flag on the other.”

  “Where did you have it last?”

  “I took it off in the hangar the other day when Lucy and me were doing an aerial. Came back, it was gone.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Shit. That thing cost me. And the patches are custom. Goddamn it. If someone stole it…”

  “Nobody steals around here,” Joe says.

  “Oh yeah? What about stealing ideas?” Marino glares at him. “And that reminds me,” he says to Scarpetta, “while we’re on the subject of hell scenes…”

  “We’re not on the subject,” she says.

  “I came here this morning with a few things to say about them.”

  “Another time.”

  “I got some good ones, left a file on your desk,” Marino says to her. “Give you something interesting to think about during your vacation. Especially since you’ll probably get snowed in up there, we’ll probably see you again in the spring.”

  She controls her irritation, tries to keep it tucked into a secret place where she hopes no one can see it. He is deliberately disrupting staff meeting and treating her the same way he did some fifteen years ago when she was the new chief medical examiner of Virginia, a woman in a world where women didn’t belong, a woman with an attitude, Marino decided, because she has an M.D. and a law degree.

  “I think the Swift case would be a damn good hell scene,” Joe says. “GSR and x-ray spectrometry and other findings tell two different stories. See if the students figure it out. Bet they’ve never heard of the billiard-ball effect.”

  “I didn’t ask the peanut gallery.” Marino raises his voice. “Anybody hear me ask the peanut gallery?”

  “Well, you know my opinion about your creativity,” Joe says to him. “Frankly, it’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your opinion.”

  “We’re lucky the Academy isn’t bankrupt. That would have been one hell of an expensive settlement,” Joe says, as if it never has occurred to him that one of these days Marino might knock him across the room. “Real lucky after what you did.”

  Last summer, one of Marino’s mock crime scenes traumatized a student who then quit the Academy, threatened to sue and fortunately was never heard from again. Scarpetta and her staff are paranoid about allowing Marino to participate in training, whether it is mock scenes, hellish or otherwise, or even classroom lectures.

  “Don’t think what happened doesn’t enter my mind when I’m creating hell scenes,” Joe goes on.

  “Hell scenes you create?” Marino declares. “You mean all those ideas you stole from me?”

  “I believe that’s called sour grapes. I don’t need to steal anyone’s ideas, certainly not yours.”

  “Oh really? You think I don’t recognize my own shit? You don’t know enough to come up with the kind of shit I do, Dr. Almost a Forensic Pathologist.”

  “That’s it,” Scarpetta says. She raises her voice. “That’s enough.”

  “I happen to have a great one of a body found in what appears to be a drive-by shooting,” Joe says, “but when the bullet’s recovered, it has an unusual waffle or mesh pattern in the lead because the victim was actually shot through a window screen, his body dumped…”

  “That’s mine!” Marino slams his fist down on the table.

  20

  The Seminole belongs to a beat-up white pickup truck filled with ears of corn, parked some distance from the gas pumps. Hog has been watching him for a while.

  “Some motherfucker took my fucking wallet, my cell phone, I think maybe when I was in the fucking shower,” the man is saying on the pay phone, standing with his back to the CITGO station and all the eighteen-wheelers rumbling in and out.

  Hog doesn’t show his amusement as he listens to the man rant and rave about overnighting again, complaining and cursing because he’ll have to sleep in the cab of his truck, has no phone, no money for a motel. He doesn’t even have money for a shower, and anyway, a shower has gone up to five bucks, and that’s a lot to pay for a shower when nothing comes with it, not even soap. Some of the men double up and get a discount, disappearing behind an unpainted privacy fence on the west side of the CITGO food mart, piling their clothes and shoes on a bench inside the fence before stepping into a tiny concrete space dimly lit with a single showerhead and a big, rusty drain in the middle of the floor.

  It is always wet inside the shower. The shower head always drips, and the water handles screech. The men carry in their own soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, usually in plastic bags. They bring their own towels. Hog has never showered in there, but he’s looked at the men’s clothes, figuring out what might be in the pockets. Money. Cell phones. Sometimes drugs. Women shower in a similar arrangement on the east side of the food mart. They never go in two at a time, no matter the discount, and are in a nervous hurry when they shower, shamed by their nakedness and terrified that someone will walk in on them, that a man will, a big, powerful man who can do what he wants.

  Hog dials the 800 number on the green card he keeps folded in his back pocket, a rectangular card maybe eight inches long with a large hole and a slit in one end so it can be attached to a door handle. Printed on the card is information and a cartoon of an animated citrus fruit wearing a tropical shirt and sunglasses. He is doing God’s will. He is the Hand of God doing God’s work. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

  “Thank you for calling the Citrus Canker Eradication Program,” the familiar recording says. “Your call may be monitored for quality.”

  The canned female voice goes on to say that if he is calling to report damage in Palm Beach, Dade or Broward Counties or Monroe to please dial the following number. He watches the Seminole climb into his pickup truck, and his red-plaid shirt reminds him of a lumber-jack, the carved one by the front door of The Christmas Shop. He dials the number the recorded voice gave him.

  “Department of Agriculture,” a woman answers.

  “I need to speak to a citrus inspector, please,” he says as he stares at the Seminole and thinks about alligator wrestling.

  “What may I help you with?”

  “Are you an inspector?” he asks as he thinks of the alligator he saw about an hour ago on the bank of the narrow canal that runs along South 27.

  He took it as a good sign. The gator was at least five feet long and very dark and dry, and not interested in the big lumber trucks rumbling by. He would have pulled over if there had been any place to do it. He would have watched the gator, studied the way it fearlessly handles life, quiet and calm but poised to flash into the water or gra
b its unsuspecting prey and drag it down to the bottom of the canal, where it would drown and rot and be eaten. He would have watched the gator for a long time, but he couldn’t safely get off the highway, and he is on a mission.

  “Do you have something to report?” the woman’s voice is asking over the line.

  “I work for a lawn service and happened to notice citrus canker in a yard about a block from where I was cutting the grass yesterday.”

  “Can you give me the address?”

  He gives her an address in the West Lake Park area.

  “May I have your name?”

  “I’d rather report this anonymously. I could get in trouble with my boss.”

  “All right. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Did you actually enter this yard where you think you spotted the canker?”

  “It’s an open yard, so I walked in because there are a lot of really nice trees and hedges and a lot of grass, and I was thinking maybe I could do some work there if they needed anyone. Then I noticed the suspicious-looking leaves. Several of the trees have tiny lesions on their leaves.”

  “Did you notice a watery-looking margin around any of these lesions?”

  “It’s my impression these trees were recently infected, which is probably why your routine inspections have missed them. What worries me is the yards on either side. They have citrus that in my estimation are less than nineteen hundred feet from the infected ones, meaning they’re probably infected, too, and the citrus in other yards beyond that in my estimation are also less than nineteen hundred feet away. And on and on throughout the neighborhood. So you can understand my concern.”

  “What makes you think our routine inspections have missed the properties you’re mentioning?”

  “Nothing to indicate you’ve been there. I’ve been working with citrus trees down here for a long time, working with professional lawn services most of my life. I’ve seen the worst of the worst, entire orchards that had to be burned. People wiped out.”