Trace ks-13

by Patricia Cornwell

  "The curtains was open when Gilly was looking out the window?" Marino asks.

  Mrs. Paulsson stares at the floor, unblinking, fists clenched so hard her nails are digging into her palms.

  Marino glances at Scarpetta and she says from the fireplace, "It's all right, Mrs. Paulsson. Try to calm down. Try to relax a little bit. When he was petting Sweetie through the fence, how long was this before Gilly died?"

  Mrs. Paulsson wipes her eyes and shuts them.

  "Days? Weeks? Months?"

  She raises her eyes and looks at her. "I don't know why you came back here. I told you not to."

  "This is about Gilly," Scarpetta says, trying to get Mrs. Paulsson to focus on what she doesn't want to think about. "We need to know about the man you saw through the fence, the man you said was petting Sweetie."

  "You can't just come back here when I told you not to."

  "I'm sorry you don't want me here," Scarpetta replies, standing quietly in front of the fireplace. "You may not think so, but I'm trying to help. All of us want to find out what happened to your daughter. And what happened to Sweetie."

  "No," she says with dry eyes that stare weirdly at Scarpetta. "I want you to leave." She doesn't indicate that Marino should leave. She doesn't even seem aware of him sitting in the chair to the left of the couch, not even two feet from where she sits. "If you don't get out, I'm calling someone. The police. I'll call them."

  You want to be alone with him, Scarpetta thinks. You want more of the game because games are easier than what is real. "Remember when the police took things out of Gilly's bedroom?" she asks. "Remember they took the linens off her bed. There were a lot of things taken to the labs."

  "I don't want you here," she says, motionless on the couch, her harshly pretty face staring coldly at her.

  "Scientists look for evidence. Everything on Gilly's bed linens, everything on her pajamas, everything the police took from your house was looked at. And she was looked at. I looked at her," Scarpetta goes on, staring back at Mrs. Paulsson's cheap, pretty-face. "The scientists didn't find any dog hairs. Not one."

  Mrs. Paulsson stares at her and a thought moves in her eyes like a minnow moving in shallow brown water.

  "Not one dog hair. Not one hair from a basset hound," Scarpetta says in the same quiet, firm voice from the higher ground of the fireplace where she stands, looking down at Mrs. Paulsson on the couch. "Sweetie's gone, all right. Because she never existed. There is no puppy. There never was.

  "Tell her to leave," Mrs. Paulsson says to Marino without looking at him. "Make her get out of my house," she says as if he is her ally or her man. "You doctors do what you want to people," she says to Scarpetta. "You doctors do exactly what you want to people."

  "Why'd you lie about the puppy?" Marino asks.

  "Sweetie's gone," she replies. "Gone."

  "We would know if there'd been a dog in your house," he says.

  "Gilly started looking out her window a lot. Because of Sweetie, looking out at Sweetie. Opening her window and calling out to Sweetie," Mrs. Paulsson says, staring down at her clenched hands.

  "There never has been a puppy, now has there, Suz?" Marino asks.

  "She put her window up and down because of Sweetie. When Sweetie was in the yard, Gilly would open her window and laugh and call out. The lock broke." Mrs. Paulsson slowly opens her palms and stares down at them, looking at the crescent wounds from her nails, looking at the crescents of blood. "I should have gotten it fixed," she says.

  44

  Ten o'clock the next morning, Lucy walks around the room, picking up magazines and acting impatient and bored. She hopes that the helicopter pilot sitting near the television will hurry up and go in for his appointment or get an urgent call and leave. She walks around the living room of the house near the hospital complex, and pauses in front of a window with old wavy glass and looks out at Barre Street and the historic homes on it. The tourists won't flock to Charleston until spring, and she doesn't see many people out.

  Lucy rang the bell some fifteen minutes ago, and a chubby older woman let her in and showed her to the waiting room, which is just off the front door and was probably a small formal parlor back in the glory days of the house. The woman gave her a blank Federal Aviation Administration form to fill out, the same form Lucy has filled out every two years for the past decade, and then the woman went up a long flight of polished wooden stairs. Lucy's form is on the coffee table. She started filling it out and then stopped. She plucks another magazine off a table, glances at it and places it back on the stack as the helicopter pilot works on his form and now and then looks up at her.

  "Don't mind me telling you what to do," he says in a friendly tone, "but Dr. Paulsson doesn't like it if your form's not filled out when he gets to you."

  "So you know the ropes," Lucy says, sitting down. "These damn forms. I'm not good with forms. I flunked forms in high school."

  "I hate them,' the helicopter pilot agrees with her. He is young and fit with closely shorn dark hair and closely spaced dark eyes, and when he introduced himself a few minutes ago, he said he flies Black Hawks for the National Guard and Jet Rangers for a charter company. "Last time I did it, 1 forgot to check off the box for allergies because I've been taking allergy shots. My wife has a cat and I had to start taking shots. They worked so well I forgot I have allergies and the computer kicked out my application."

  "It stinks," Lucy says. "One inconsistency and a computer screws up your life for months."

  "This time I brought a copy of an old form," he says, holding up a folded piece of yellow paper. "Now my answers are all the same. That's the trick. But I'd fill out your form, if I were you. He won't like it when you go in, if you haven't done it."

  "I made a mistake," Lucy replies, reaching for her form. "Put the city in the wrong blank. I have to do it again."

  "Uh oh."

  "If that lady comes back, I need another form."

  "She's been here forever," the helicopter pilot says.

  "How do you know?" Lucy inquires. "You're too young to know if anybody's been around forever."

  He grins and is beginning to flirt with her a little. "You'd be surprised how much I've been around. Where do you fly out of? I've never seen you around here. You didn't tell me. Your flight suit doesn't look military, not any military I've ever seen."

  Her flight suit is black with the patch of an American flag on one shoulder and an unusual patch on her other shoulder, a blue and gold patch of her own design with an eagle surrounded by stars. Her leather name tag today reads "P. W. Winston." It attaches with Velcro and she can change her name whenever she wants, depending on what she is doing and where she's doing it. Because her biological father was Cuban, Lucy can pass for Hispanic, Italian, or Portuguese without resorting to makeup. Today she is in Charleston, South Carolina, and is simply a pretty white woman with a passable southern inflection, a very sweet lilt to her otherwise General American accent.

  "Part Ninety-one," she says. "The guy I fly for owns a Four-thirty."

  "Lucky him," the pilot says, impressed. "Must be some rich guy, is all I gotta say. That's one hell of a bird, the Four-thirty. How do you like the sight picture? Did it take a while to get used to it?"

  "Love it," she replies, wishing he would shut up. She can talk helicopters all day but is more interested in figuring out where she should plant covert transmitters in Frank Paulsson's house and how she is going to do it.

  The plump woman who showed Lucy into the waiting room reappears and tells the other pilot he can come with her, that Dr. Paulsson is ready for him and has he finished filling out his form and is he satisfied that his answers are correct.

  "If you're ever around Mercury Air, we've got an office in the hangar, you'll see it off the parking lot. I've got a soft-tail Harley parked back there," he says to Lucy.

  "A man with my taste," she replies from her chair. "I need a new form," she tells the woman. "I messed this one up."

  The woman gives her a suspici
ous look. "Well, let me see what I can do. Don't throw that one away. You'll mess up the sequence numbers."

  "Yes, ma'am. I have it right here on the table." To the pilot, Lucy says, "I just traded my Sportster in for a V-Rod. It's not even broken in yet."

  "Damn! A Four-thirty and a V-Rod. You're living my life," he says admiringly.

  "Maybe we'll ride sometime. Good luck with the cat."

  He laughs. She hears him go up the stairs while he explains to the unsmiling, chunky woman that when he met his wife she wouldn't give up her cat and it slept in her bed and he used to break out in hives at the most inopportune times. Lucy has the downstairs to herself for at least a minute, at least long enough for the woman to get another blank form and come back down to the waiting area. Lucy slips on a pair of cotton gloves and moves quickly around the room, wiping off every magazine she touched.

  The first bug she plants is the size of a cigarette butt, a wireless microphone-audio transmitter she custom-mounts in a waterproof plant-green plastic tube that looks like nothing. Most bugs should be disguised to look like something, but now and then a bug should simply look like nothing. She places the green tube inside the bright ceramic pot of the lush green silk plant on the coffee table. She quickly walks to the back of the house and plants another nothing-looking green bug in another green silk plant that is on a table inside the eat-in kitchen, and she hears the woman's feet on the stairs.

  45

  Inside Benton's town home, in the third-floor bedroom that he uses as an office, he sits at the desk in front of his laptop computer and waits for Lucy to activate her hidden video camera that is disguised as a pen and connected to a cellular interface that looks like a pager. He waits for her to activate the high-sensitivity audio transmitter disguised as a mechanical pencil. On the desk to the right of his laptop is a modular audio intelligence monitoring system built into a briefcase. The briefcase is open, the tape recorder and receivers inside on standby.

  It is twenty-eight minutes past ten a.m. in Charleston and two hours earlier than that here in Aspen. He stares at the black screen of his laptop, sitting patiently at his desk and wearing headphones, as he waits. He has been waiting for almost an hour. Lucy called him when she landed in Charleston late yesterday her time and told him she had the appointment. Dr. Paulsson is overbooked, she added. She told the lady who answered the phone that it was urgent. Lucy had to get a flight physical right away because her medical certificate expired in two days. Why had she waited until the last minute? the woman at Dr. Paulssoris office wanted to know.

  Lucy described her theatrics to Benton, proud of them. She said she faltered and sounded scared. She stammered a bit and replied that she just hadn't been able to get around to it, that the helicopter owner she worked for had been flying her all over the place and she just hadn't been able to get around to the flight physical. And, well, she'd been having personal problems, she told the woman, and if she didn't get her physical, she wouldn't be legal to fly and she might lose her job, and the last thing she needed on top of everything else was to lose her job. The woman put Lucy on hold. When she got back to her, she said Dr. Paulsson would fit her in at ten A.M. the next morning, which is now this morning, and he was doing her quite a favor because he was cancelling his weekly doubles match because of her predicament. Lucy had better not change the appointment and she had better show up, because of the huge favor the important, busy Dr. Paulsson was doing for her.

  So far, all is well and according to plan. Lucy has an appointment. She is at the flight surgeon's house now. Benton waits at his desk and looks out the window at a snow sky that is lower and denser than it was not even half an hour ago. It is supposed to start snowing again by dark and snow all night. He is getting tired of snow. He is getting tired of his town home. He is getting tired of Aspen. Ever since Henri invaded his life, he has been getting tired of just about everything.

  Henri Walden is a sociopath, a narcissist, a stalker. She is a waste of his time. His post-incident stress counseling is a joke to her, and he might feel sorry for Lucy were he not angry with her for allowing Henri to do so much damage. Henri lured her and used her. Henri got what she wanted. Maybe she didn't plan on being attacked inside Lucy's Florida home, maybe there are a lot of things she didn't plan on, but in the end Henri looked for Lucy and found her and took what she wanted from her, and now she is making a mockery of him. He has sacrificed his Aspen vacation with Scarpetta so some sociopathic failed-actress-failedinvestigative-agent named Henri can mock and infuriate him. He gave up his time with Scarpetta, and he could not afford to give up that time. He couldn't. Already things were bad. Maybe now they will be over. He wouldn't blame her. The thought is unbearable, but he wouldn't blame her.

  Benton picks up a transmitter that looks like a small police radio. "Are you up?" he says to Lucy.

  If she's not, she won't pick up the transmission through the tiny wireless receiver inside her ear canal. The earpiece is invisible but she'll have to be clever about wearing it. Certainly, she can't have it on when Dr. Paulsson checks inside her ears, so Lucy will have to be very quick and shrewd. Benton warned her that the one-way receiver would be helpful but risky. I'd like to be able to talk to you, he told her. It would be extremely helpful if I could cue you. But you know the risks. At some point during the examination, he's going to discover it. She said she would rather not be cued. He said he would rather she was.

  "Lucy? Are you up?" he broadcasts again. "I'm not hearing or seeing you, so I m checking."

  The video is suddenly activated and he watches images fill the screen of his laptop, and he hears Lucy's footsteps. A picture of wooden stairs in front of her bobs up and down as she climbs the stairs, and in the headphones he hears her feet. He hears her breathe.

  "I got you loud and clear," he says into the transmitter, holding it close to his lips. The voice and video and recorder lights have switched from standby to active.

  Lucy's fist intrudes into the picture and is very clear and loud as she knocks on a door. Benton sits at his desk, watching, and the door opens and a lab coat fills the screen, and he sees a male neck, then the face of Dr. Paulsson sternly greeting Lucy, backing away from her, telling her to have a seat, and as she moves, the pen camera sweeps around the small, stark examination room and the white-paper-covered examination table comes into view.

  "Here's the old form. And the second one I filled out," Lucy says, handing forms to him. "I'm sorry. I hope I didn't mess up your system.

  I'm not good with forms. Flunked forms, you know, in high school." She laughs nervously as Dr. Paulsson seriously scans the forms, both of them.

  "Loud and clear," Benton says into the transmitter.

  Her hand passes over his computer screen as she passes her hand in front of the pen, acknowledging that she hears him through the tiny receiver in her ear.

  "Did you go to college?" Dr. Paulsson asks her.

  ''No, sir. 1 wanted to, but…"

  "That's too bad," he replies, unsmiling, and he wears small rimless glasses and is a very attractive man. Some people might call him handsome. He is taller than Lucy but not much, maybe several inches taller, maybe around five-foot-ten or -eleven, and he is slender and looks strong based on what Benton is able to see. He is able to see only what the pen camera picks up from the breast pocket of Lucy's flight suit.

  "Well, I don't need to go to college to fly a helicopter," Lucy says with uncertainty. She is doing an excellent job of acting insecure and intimidated and basically invalidated by life.

  "My secretary mentioned you've been going through personal problems," Dr. Paulsson says, still looking over her forms.

  "A little bit."

  "Tell me what's been going on," he says.

  "Uh, just the usual boyfriend stuff," she says nervously, sheepishly. "I was supposed to get married and it didn't work out. You know, with my schedule. I've been gone the last five months out of six if you added it up, I bet."

  "So your boyfriend couldn't handle you
r absenteeism and bolted," Dr. Paulsson says, placing her paperwork on a countertop where there is a computer. Lucy is doing a fine job of turning her body to capture him on the video camera concealed as a pen.

  "Good," Benton transmits, glancing at his closed, locked door. Henri went out for a walk, but he has locked his door because he isn't sure that she won't just walk in. She hasn't learned about boundaries because to her nothing is out of bounds.

  "We broke up," Lucy replies. "I'm all right. But that and everything else… It's been stressful, but I'm fine."

  "That's why you waited until the last minute to come in for a physical?" Dr. Paulsson asks, moving closer to her.

  "I guess so."

  "That's not very smart. You can't fly without your medical. There are flight surgeons all over the country, you should have taken care of it. What if I couldn't have seen you today? I had one emergency appointment this morning for the son of a friend of mine and the rest of the day off, but I made an exception for you. What if I'd said no? Your medical expires tomorrow, assuming the date you put down is correct."

  "Yes, sir. I know it was stupid to wait. I can't tell you how much I appreciate…"

  "I'm very pressed for time. So let's move along and get you out of here." He retrieves a blood pressure cuff from the counter and tells her to roll up her right sleeve, and he wraps the cuff around her upper arm and begins to pump. "You're very strong. Do you work out a lot?"

  "I try to," she replies in a shaky voice as he brushes a hand against her breast, and Benton feels the violation as he watches it on his laptop more than a thousand miles away in Aspen, Colorado. No one looking at Benton would see a reaction, not even a spark in his eyes or a tightening of his lips. But he feels the violation as much as Lucy does.

  "He's touching you," Benton transmits, for the taped tecord. "He's begun touching you now."