Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Never heard of that denomination,” Scarpetta comments rather ironically as she writes it down. “And Kristin? What does she do?”

  The inspector stands up, screwing together what looks like a fruit picker. He raises it high up in a tree, pulling down a grapefruit that lands on the grass.

  “Kristin also works at the church. An assistant who does readings and meditations during the services. The kids’ parents got killed in a scooter accident about a year ago. You know, one of those Vespas.”

  “Where?”

  “South Africa.”

  “And this information came from?” Scarpetta asks.

  “Someone at the church.”

  “You have a report on the accident?”

  “Like I said, it happened in South Africa,” Detective Wagner replies. “We’re trying to track it down.”

  Scarpetta continues to deliberate over when she should tell her about the disturbing phone call from Hog.

  “What are the boys’ names?” Scarpetta asks.

  “David and Tony Luck. Kind of funny, when you think about it. Luck.”

  “You’re not getting cooperation from the South African authorities? Where in South Africa?”

  “Capetown.”

  “Where the sisters are also from?”

  “That’s what I’m told. After the parents got killed, the sisters took the kids in. Their church is maybe twenty minutes from here on Davie Boulevard, right next to one of these alternative pet stores, kind of figures.”

  “Have you checked with the medical examiner’s office in Capetown?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  “That would be great. Kind of figures, doesn’t it? Spiders, scorpions, poisonous frogs, all these little white rat pups you can buy to feed to your snakes,” Reba says. “Sounds like some sort of cultville over there.”

  I’ve never let anybody come in and photograph a business of mine unless it’s a genuine police matter. I was robbed once. That was a while back,” Larry explains from the stool behind the counter.

  Through the window is the constant traffic along A1A, then the ocean beyond. A light rain has begun to fall, a storm moving in, heading south. Lucy thinks about what Marino told her a few minutes ago, about the house and the missing people, and of course his flat tire, which was his bigger complaint. She thinks of what her aunt must be doing right now, of the storm heading her way.

  “Of course I’ve heard quite a lot about it.” Larry gets back to the subject of Florrie and Helen Quincy after a long digression about how much South Florida has changed, how much he has been seriously considering moving back to Alaska. “It’s like everything else. The details get more exaggerated with time. But I don’t think I want you videotaping,” he says again.

  “This is a police matter,” Lucy reiterates. “I’ve been asked to privately investigate the case.”

  “How do I know you aren’t a reporter or something?”

  “I’m former FBI, former ATF. You ever heard of the National Forensic Academy?”

  “That big training camp out there in the Everglades?”

  “It’s not exactly in the Everglades. We have private labs and experts and an agreement with most of the police departments in Florida. We help them out as needed.”

  “Sounds expensive. Let me guess, taxpayers like me.”

  “Indirectly. Grants, quid pro quo—services for services. They help us, we train them. All sorts of things.”

  She reaches into a back pocket and works out a black wallet and hands it to him. He studies her credentials, a fake ID, an investigator shield that isn’t worth the brass it’s made from because it’s also fake.

  “There’s no picture on it,” he says.

  “It’s not a driver’s license.”

  He reads her fictitious name out loud, reads that she’s Special Operations.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, if you say so.” He hands the wallet back to her.

  “Tell me what you’ve heard,” Lucy says, setting the video camera on top of the counter.

  She looks at the locked front door, at a young couple in skimpy swimsuits trying to open it.

  They peer through the glass and Larry shakes his head. No, he’s not open.

  “You’re losing me business,” he says to Lucy, but he doesn’t seem to care very much. “When I had a chance to take over this space, I got quite an earful about the Quincys disappearing. The story I heard is she always got here at seven thirty in the morning so she could get the little electric trains running on their tracks and light up the trees, turn on the Christmas music and do all this other stuff. It appears she never opened up that day. The closed sign was still on the door when her son finally got worried and came looking for her and the daughter.”

  Lucy reaches inside a pocket of her cargo pants and removes a black ballpoint pen from the holder of a concealed tape recorder. She slips out a small notebook.

  “Mind if I take a few notes?” she asks.

  “Don’t take everything I say as gospel. I wasn’t here when it happened, just passing along what I’ve been told.”

  “I understand Mrs. Quincy called in a take-out order,” Lucy says. “There was something in the paper about it.”

  “At the Floridian, that old diner on the other side of the drawbridge. A pretty nifty place, if you’ve never eaten there. It’s my understanding she didn’t call it in, didn’t need to. They always had the same thing ready for her. A tuna plate.”

  “Something for the daughter, too? Helen?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Mrs. Quincy usually pick it up herself?”

  “Unless her son was in the area. He’s one of the reasons I know a few things about what happened.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a year. For a while early on, I did. He would drop by, look around, chat. I guess you could say he was obsessed for maybe the first year after they disappeared. Then, it’s my opinion, he couldn’t bear to think about it. He lives in a real nice house in Hollywood.”

  Lucy looks around the store.

  “There’s no Christmas stuff here,” Larry says, in case that’s what she is wondering.

  She doesn’t ask anything about Mrs. Quincy’s son, Fred. She already knows from HIT that Fred Anderson Quincy is twenty-six years old. She knows his address and that he’s self-employed, into computer graphics, a Web designer. Larry goes on to say that on the day Mrs. Quincy and Helen disappeared, Fred tried numerous times to reach them and finally drove to the shop and found it closed, his mother’s Audi still parked in back.

  “We’re sure they actually had unlocked the shop that morning?” Lucy asks. “Any possibility something happened to them after they got out of the car?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible.”

  “Were Mrs. Quincy’s pocketbook, her car keys, inside the shop? Had she made coffee, used the phone, done anything at all that might indicate she and Helen had been there? For example, were the trees lit up, the toy trains running? Was there Christmas music playing? Were the shop lights on?”

  “I heard they never did find her pocketbook and car keys. I’ve heard different stories about things being turned on inside the shop. Some say they were. Others say they weren’t.”

  Lucy’s attention wanders to the doorway in the back of the store. She thinks about what Basil Jenrette told Benton. She doesn’t see how it’s possible that Basil raped and murdered anybody in the storage area. It’s hard to believe he could clean up and remove the body from the shop, place it in a car and drive off without being seen. It was daylight. It is a populated area, even during the off-season of July, and such a scenario certainly wouldn’t explain what happened to the daughter unless he abducted her, perhaps killed her elsewhere, as he did to his other victims. A gruesome thought. A seventeen-year-old girl.

  “What happened to this place after they disappeared?” Lucy asks. “Did it reope
n?”

  “Nope. Wasn’t much of a market for Christmas stuff anyway. You ask me, it was more an eccentric hobby of hers than anything else. Her shop never reopened, and her son cleared out the merchandise a month or two after they disappeared. Beach Bums moved in that September and hired me.”

  “I’d like to take a look in back,” Lucy says. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

  Hog pulls down two more oranges, then grabs at grapefruits with the clawlike basket on the end of the long-handled picker. He looks across the waterway, watching Scarpetta and Detective Wagner walk around the pool.

  The detective gestures a lot. Scarpetta takes notes, looking at everything. It gives Hog extreme pleasure to watch the show. Fools. None of them are as smart as they think. He can outsmart all of them, and he smiles as he imagines Marino running a little late, delayed by an unexpected flat tire that could have been remedied easily and quickly by driving here in an Academy vehicle. But not him. He couldn’t stand it, would have to fix it right then. Big, stupid redneck. Hog squats in the grass, breaks down the picker by unscrewing its aluminum segments, tucks them back into the big black nylon bag. The bag is heavy, and he props it on his shoulder like a lumberjack shouldering an ax, like the lumberjack in The Christmas Shop.

  He takes his time walking through the yard, toward the tiny white stucco house next door. He sees her rocking on her sunporch, looking through binoculars at the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway. She’s been watching the house for days. How entertaining is that. Hog has been in and out of the pale orange house three times now, and no one has noticed. In and out to remember what happened, to relive it, to take all the time he wants in there. No one can see him. He can make himself disappear.

  He enters Mrs. Simister’s yard and begins to examine one of her lime trees. She trains the binoculars on him. In a moment, she opens the slider but doesn’t walk out into the yard. He’s never once seen her in her yard. The yard man comes and goes, but she never leaves the house or speaks to him. Her groceries are delivered, the same man each time. It might be a relative, maybe a son. All he does is carry in the bags. He never stays long. Nobody bothers with her. She should be grateful to Hog. Pretty soon she’ll get plenty of attention. A lot of people will hear about her when she ends up on Dr. Self’s show.

  “Leave my trees alone,” Mrs. Simister says loudly with a thick accent. “You people have been out here two times this week and it’s harassment.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. I’m almost finished up here,” Hog says politely as he pulls a leaf off the lime tree, looks at it.

  “Get off my property or I’m calling the police.” Her voice gets more shrill.

  She is frightened. She’s angry because she is terrified that she will lose her precious trees, and she will, but by then, it won’t matter. Her trees are infected. They are old trees, at least twenty years old, and they’re ruined. It was easy. Wherever the big orange trucks roll in to cut down canker-infected trees and grind them up, there are leaves on the road. He picks them up, tears them, puts them in water and watches the bacteria stream up like tiny bubbles. He fills a syringe, the one God gave him.

  Hog unzips his black bag and pulls out a can of red spray paint. He sprays a red stripe around the trunk of the lime tree. Blood painted over the door, like the angel of death, but no one will be spared. Hog hears preaching in a dark place somewhere in his head, like a box hidden way out of reach somewhere in his head.

  A false witness shall not be unpunished.

  I won’t say anything.

  Liars are punished.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t.

  Punishment from my hand is endless.

  I didn’t. I didn’t!

  “What are you doing? Leave my trees alone, you hear me!”

  “I’m happy to explain it to you, ma’am,” Hog says politely, sympathetically.

  Mrs. Simister shakes her head. She angrily closes the sliding glass door and locks it.

  26

  It has been unseasonably hot and raining a lot lately, and the grass is spongy and coarse beneath Scarpetta’s shoes, and when the sun emerges from the dark clouds again, the sunlight feels flat and hot against her head and shoulders as she walks around the backyard.

  She notices the pink-and-red hibiscus bushes, the palm trees, notices several citrus trees with red-painted stripes around their trunks, and she stares across the waterway at the inspector zipping up his bag after the old woman just yelled at him. She wonders if the old woman is Mrs. Simister and assumes Marino hasn’t gotten to her house yet. He is always late, never in a hurry to do what Scarpetta asks if he bothers to do it at all. She walks closer to a concrete wall that drops precipitously to the waterway. This one probably doesn’t have alligators, but it has no fence, and any child or dog could easily fall over the edge and drown.

  Ev and Kristin took custody of two children and didn’t bother putting up a fence along the backyard. Scarpetta imagines the property after dark and how easy it would be to forget where the dark yard ends and the dark waterway begins. It runs east–west and is narrow behind the house but gets wider farther off. In the distance, handsome sailboats and motorboats are docked behind much finer homes than the one where Ev, Kristin, David and Tony lived.

  According to Reba, the sisters and the boys were last seen on Thursday night, February 10. Early the next morning, Marino got the phone call from the man who said his name was Hog. By then, the people had disappeared.

  “Was there anything in the news about their disappearance?” Scarpetta asks Reba, wondering if the anonymous caller might have gotten Kristin’s name that way.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And you filled out a police report.”

  “Not something that would have gone into the press basket. I’m afraid people disappear down here all the time, Dr. Scarpetta. Welcome to South Florida.”

  “Tell me what else you know about the last time they were allegedly seen, last Thursday night.”

  Reba replies that Ev preached at her church and Kristin gave several readings from the Bible. When the two women didn’t show up at the church the following day for a prayer meeting, an associate tried to call them and got no answer, so this associate, a woman, drove to the house. She had a key and let herself in. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except Ev, Kristin and the boys were gone and the stove had been left on low, an empty skillet on top of it. The detail about the stove is important, and Scarpetta will turn her attention to it when she goes inside the house, but she isn’t ready yet, her approach to a scene similar to a predator’s. She moves from the outer edge to the inside, saving the worst for last.

  Lucy asks Larry if the storeroom is different from how it was when he moved in approximately two years ago.

  “Didn’t do a thing to it,” he says.

  She scans big cardboard boxes and shelves of T-shirts, lotions, beach towels, sunglasses, cleaning equipment and other inventory in the glare of a single naked lightbulb overhead.

  “No point in caring what it looks like back here,” Larry says. “What exactly are you interested in?”

  She makes her way into the bathroom, a cramped, windowless space with a sink and a toilet. The walls are cinderblock with a light coat of pale green paint, the floor brown asphalt tile. Overhead is another bare lightbulb.

  “You didn’t repaint, retile?” she asks.

  “It was exactly like this when I took over the place. You’re not thinking something happened in here?”

  “I’d like to come back and bring somebody with me,” she says.

  On the other side of the waterway, Mrs. Simister watches.

  She rocks on her glass-enclosed sunporch, pushing the glider with her feet, rocking back and forth, her slippers barely touching the tile floor as she makes a quiet sliding sound. She looks for the blonde woman in the dark suit who was walking around the yard of the pale orange house. She looks for the inspector who was trespassing, daring to bother Mrs. Simister’s trees ag
ain, daring to spray red paint on them. He’s gone. The blonde woman’s gone.

  At first, Mrs. Simister thought the blonde woman was a religious nut. There have been plenty of those visiting that house. Then she looked through binoculars and wasn’t so sure. The blonde woman was taking notes and had a black bag slung over her shoulder. She’s a banker or a lawyer, Mrs. Simister was about to decide when the other woman appeared, this one quite tan, with white hair and wearing khaki pants and a gun in a shoulder holster. Maybe she’s the same one who was over there the other day. Friday. She was tan with white hair. Mrs. Simister isn’t sure.

  The two women talked and then walked out of sight along the side of the house, toward the front. Maybe they’ll be back. Mrs. Simister watches for the inspector, that same one who was so nice the first time, asking her all about her trees and when they were planted and what they mean to her. Then he comes back and paints them. It made her think about her gun for the first time in years. When her son gave it to her, she said all that would happen is the bad person would get hold of it and use it against her. She keeps the gun under the bed, out of sight.

  She wouldn’t have shot the inspector. She wouldn’t have minded scaring him, though. All these citrus inspectors getting paid to rip out trees that people have had for half their lives. She hears talk about it on the radio. Her trees will probably be next. She loves her trees. The yard man takes care of them, picks fruit and leaves it on the stoop. Jake planted a yard full of trees for her when he bought the house right after they got married. She is lost in her past when the phone on the table by her glider rings.

  “Hello?” she answers.

  “Mrs. Simister?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Investigator Pete Marino. We talked earlier.”

  “We did? You’re who?”

  “You called the National Forensic Academy a few hours ago.”

  “I most certainly did not. Are you selling something?”