The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

  "And that makes sense because we know a prowler was there about an hour earlier, when someone tried to force open your garage door."

  "Exactly." I nod. "I turn off the alarm and open the door, and he is there," I add as if I am talking about nothing more threatening than trick-or-treaters.

  "Show me," Berger says.

  1 WALK THROUGH THE GREAT ROOM, PAST THE DINING

  room and to the entrance hall. I open the door, and just the act of re-creating a scenario that almost cost me my life causes a visceral reaction. I feel sick. My hands begin to tremble. My front porch light is still out because the police removed the bulb and fixture and submitted them to the labs to be processed for fingerprints. No one has replaced them. Exposed wires dangle from the porch ceiling. Berger is waiting patiently for me to continue. "He rushes inside," I say. "And back-kicks the door shut behind him." I shut the door. "He has this black coat and he tries to put it over my head."

  "Coat on or off when he came in?"

  "On. He was grabbing it off as he came through the door." I am standing still. "And he tried to touch me."

  "Tried to touch you?" Berger frowns. "With the chipping hammer?"

  "With his hand. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek, or tried to touch it."

  "You stood there while he did that? Just stood there?"

  "It all happened so fast," I say. "So fast," I repeat. "I'm not sure. I just know he tried to do that and was snatching off his coat and trying to throw it over my head. And I ran."

  "What about the chipping hammer?"

  "He had it out. I'm not sure. Or he got it out. But I know he had it out when he was chasing me into the great room."

  "Not out at first? He didn't have the chipping hammer out at first? You're sure?" She presses me on this point.

  I try to remember, to envision it. "No, not at first," I decide. "He tried to touch me first with his hand. Then net me. Then he pulled out the chipping hammer."

  "Can you show me what you did next?" she asks.

  "Run?"

  "Yes, run."

  "Not like that," I say. "I'd have to have the same adrenaline rush, the same panic, to run like that."

  "Kay, walk me through it, please."

  I move out of the entrance hall, past the dining room and back into the great room. Straight ahead is the yellow Jarrah coffee table I discovered at that wonderful shop in Katonah, New York. What was the name? Antipodes? The rich blond wood glows like honey and I try not to notice the dusting powder all over it, or that somebody left a 7-Eleven coffee cup on it. "The jar of formalin was here, on this corner of the table," I tell Berger.

  "And it was there because…?"

  "Because of the tattoo in it. The tattoo I'd removed from the back of the body that we believe is Thomas Chandonne."

  "The defense is going to want to know why you brought human skin to your house, Kay."

  "Of course. Everyone's been asking me that." I feel a rush of annoyance. "The tattoo is important and created many, many questions because we just couldn't figure out what it was. Not only was the body badly decomposed, thus making it very difficult to even see the tattoo, but then it turned out that it was a cover-up tattoo. One tattoo covering up another, and it was crucial, especially, that we determine what the original tattoo was."

  "Two gold dots that were covered up with an owl," Berger says. "Every member of the Chandonne cartel has two gold dots tattooed on him."

  "That's what Interpol told me, yes," I say, and by now I have accepted that she and Jay Talley have spent a lot of quality time together.

  "Brother Thomas was screwing his family, had his own side business, was diverting ships, falsifying bills of lading, running his own guns and drugs. And the theory is the family caught on. He changed his tattoo into an owl and began using aliases because he knew the family would kill him if they found him," I recite what I have been told, what Jay told me in Lyon.

  "Interesting." She touches a finger to her lips, looking around. "And it appears the family did kill him. The other son did. The jar of formalin. Why did you bring it home? Tell me again."

  "It wasn't really deliberate. I went to a tattoo parlor in Petersburg to have the tattoo from the body looked at by someone who's an expert, a tattoo artist. I came straight home from there and left the tattoo in my office here. It was just a chance situation that the night he came here…"

  "Jean-Baptiste Chandonne."

  "Yes. The night he came here I had carried the jar in here, in the great room, and was looking at it while I was doing other things. I set it down. He pushes his way into my house and I run. By now he has the chipping hammer out and has it raised to strike me. It was just a panicked reflex that I see the jar and grab it. I jump over the back of the sofa and unscrew the lid and throw the formalin in his face."

  "A reflex because you know very well how caustic formalin is."

  "You can't smell it every day and not know. It's accepted in my profession that exposure to formalin is a chronic danger, and all of us fear being splashed," I explain, realizing how my story may sound to a special grand jury. Contrived. Unbelievable. Grotesquely bizarre.

  "Have you ever gotten it in your eyes?" Berger asks me. "Ever splashed yourself with formalin?"

  "No, thank God."

  "So you dashed it in his face. Then what?"

  "I ran out of the house. On my way, I grabbed my Clock pistol off the dining room table, where I'd left it earlier. I go outside, slip on the icy steps and fracture my arm." I hold up my cast.

  "And what's he doing?"

  "He came out after me." -

  "Instantly?"

  "It seems like it."

  Berger moves around to the back of the sofa and stands at the area of antique French oak flooring where formalin has eaten off the finish. She follows the lighter areas of hardwood. The formalin apparently splashed almost to the entrance of the kitchen. This is something I didn't realize until this moment. I only remember his shrieks, his howls of pain as he grabbed at his eyes. Berger stands in the doorway, staring in at my kitchen. I go to her, wondering what has caught her interest.

  "I have to stray off subject and say I don't think I've ever seen a kitchen quite like this," she comments.

  The kitchen is the heart of my house. Copper pots and pans shine like gold from racks around the huge Thirode stove that is central to the room and includes two grills, a hot water bath, a griddle, two hot plates, gas tops, a charbroiler and an oversized burner for the huge pots of soup I love to make. Appliances are stainless steel, including the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. Racks of spices line the walls and there is a butcher block the size of a twin bed. The oak floor is bare, and there is an upright wine cooler in a corner and a small table by the window that offers a distant view of a rocky bend in the James River.

  "Industrial," Berger mutters as she walks around a kitchen that, yes, I must admit, fills me with pride. "Someone who comes in here to work but loves the finer things in life. I've heard you're an amazing cook."

  "I love to cook," I tell her. "It gets my mind off everything else."

  "Where do you get your money?" she boldly asks.

  "I'm smart with it," I reply coolly, never one to discuss money. "I've been lucky with investments over the years, very lucky."

  "You're a smart businesswoman," Berger says.

  "Try to be. And then when Benton died, he left his Hilton Head condo to me." I pause. "I sold it, couldn't stay there anymore." I pause again. "Got six-hundred-and-something thousand for it."

  "I see. And what's this?" She points out the Milano Italian sandwich maker.

  I explain.

  "Well, when this is all over, you'll have to cook for me sometime," she says rather presumptuously. "And rumor has it that you cook Italian. Your specialty."

  "Yes. Mostly Italian." There is no rumor involved. Berger knows more about me than I do. "Do you suppose he might have come in here and tried to wash his face in the sink?" she then asks.

  "I don'
t have any idea. All I can tell you is I ran out and fell, and when I looked up he was staggering out the door after me. He came down the steps, still screaming, and dropped to the ground and started rubbing snow in his face."

  "Trying to wash the formalin out of his eyes. It's rather oily, isn't it? Hard to wash out?"

  "It wouldn't be easy," I reply. "You would want copious amounts of warm water."

  "And you didn't offer that to him? Made no effort to help him?"

  I look at Berger. "Come on," I say. "What the hell would you have done?" Anger spikes. "I'm supposed to play doctor after the son of a bitch has just tried to beat my brains out?"

  "It will be asked," Berger matter-of-factly answers me. "But no. I wouldn't have helped him, either, and that's off the record. So he's in your front yard."

  "I left out that I hit the panic alarm when I was running out of the house," I remember.

  "You grabbed the formalin. You grabbed your gun. You hit the panic alarm. You had pretty damn good presence of mind, didn't you?" she comments. "Anyway, you and Chandonne are in your front yard. Lucy pulls up and you have to talk her out of shooting him point-blank in the head. ATF and all the troops show up. End of story."

  "I wish it were the end of the story," I say.

  "The chipping hammer," Berger gets back to that. "Now you figured out what the weapon was because you went to a hardware store and just looked around until you found something that might have made a pattern like the one on Bray's body?"

  "I had more to go on than you might think," J reply. "I knew Bray was struck with something that had two different surfaces. One rather pointed, the other more square. Actual punched-out areas of her skull clearly showed the shape of what struck her, and then the pattern on the mattress that I knew was made when he set down something bloody Which most likely was the weapon. A hammer or pickax-type weapon of some sort, but unusual. You look around. You ask people."

  "And then of course when he came to your house, he had this chipping hammer inside his coat or whatever and tried to use it on you." She says this dispassionately, objectively.

  "Yes."

  "So there were two chipping hammers at your house. The one you bought in the hardware store after Bray had already been murdered. And a second hammer, the one he brought with him."

  "Yes." I am stunned by what she has just indicated. "Good God," I mutter. "That's right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before." I am so confused by what has passed, by the days, by all of it. "What am I thinking? The date on the receipt…" My voice fades. I remember paying cash in the hardware store. Five dollars, something like that. I don't have a receipt, I am fairly sure, and I feel the blood drain from my face. Berger has known all along what I have forgotten: that I didn't buy the hammer before Bray was beaten to death, but the day after. But I can't prove it. Unless the clerk who waited on me in the hardware store can produce the cash register tape and swear I am the one who bought the chipping hammer, there is no proof.

  "And now one of them is gone. The chipping hammer you bought is gone," Berger is saying as my mind reels. I tell her I am not privy to what the police found.

  "But you were there when they were searching your house. Were you not in your house while the police were?" she asks me.

  "I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Saturday and left early that evening, but I can't say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don't even know how long they were in my house or how many times." I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. "Christ, I didn't have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I've been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day." I am rambling now.

  "What exactly is a chipping hammer used for?" Berger next asks. "And by the way, hate to tell you, but no matter when you say you bought the chipping hammer, Kay, there remains the minor problem that the one_the only one_found at your house happened to have Bray's blood on it."

  "They're used for masonry. There's a lot of slatework in this area. And stonework."

  "So probably used by roofers? And the theory is that Chandonne found a chipping hammer at the house he had broken into. The place under construction where he was staying?" Berger is relentless.

  "I believe that's the theory," I reply.

  "Your house is made of stone and has a slate roof," she says. "Did you closely supervise when it was being built? Because you seem the sort who would. A perfectionist."

  "You're foolish not to supervise if you're building."

  "I'm just wondering if you might have ever seen a chipping hammer while your house was being buiit. Maybe at the construction site or in a workman's tool belt?"

  "Not that I recall. But I can't be sure.''

  ''And you never owned one prior to your shopping expedition at Pleasants Hardware on the night of December seventeenth_exactly one week ago and almost twenty-four hours after Bray was murdered?"

  "Not before that night. No. I never owned one before then, not that I am aware of," I tell her.

  "What time was it when you bought the chipping hammer?" Berger asks as I hear the deep thunder of Marino's truck parking in front of my house.

  "Sometime around seven. I don't know exactly. Maybe between six-thirty and seven, that Friday night, the night of December seventeenth," I reply. I am not thinking clearly now. Berger is wearing me down and I can't imagine how any lie could stand up to her long. The problem is knowing what is a lie, and what isn't, and I am not convinced she believes me.

  "And you went home right after the hardware store?" she goes on. "Tell me what you did the rest of the night."

  The doorbell rings. I glance at the Aiphone on the wall in the great room and see Marino's face looming on the video screen. Berger has just asked the question. She has just tested the alchemy that I am sure Righter will use to turn my life to shit. She wants to know my alibi. She wants to know where I was at the exact time Bray was murdered on Thursday night. December sixteenth. "I'd just come in from Paris that morning," I reply. "Ran errands, got home around six P.M. Later that night, around ten, I drove to MCV to check on Jo_Lucy's former girlfriend, the one who got in the shooting with her in Miami. I wanted to see if I could help out in that situation because the parents were interfering." My doorbell rings again. "And I wanted to know where Lucy was, and Jo told me Lucy was at a baf in Greenwich Village." 1 start walking toward the door. Berger is staring at me. "In New York. Lucy was in New York. I carne home and called her. She was drunk." Marmo rings the bell again and pounds on the door. "So to answer your question, Ms. Berger, I have no alibi for where I was between six and maybe ten-thirty Thursday night because I was either in my home or in my car_alone, absolutely alone. No one saw me. No one talked to me. I have no witnesses to the fact that where I wasn 't between seven-thitty and ten-thirty was at Diane Bray's house beating her to death with a goddamn chipping hammer."

  I open the door. I can feel Berger's eyes burning into my back. Marino looks as if he is about to fly apart. I can't tell if he is furious or scared to death. Maybe both. ''What the hell?" he asks, his eyes going from me to her. '"What the shit's going on?"

  "I'm sorry for making you stand out in the cold," I tell Marino. "Please come in."

  Chapter 29

  MARINO TOOK SO LONG GETTING HERE BECAUSE he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barbosa's running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where Spacesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Saturday.

  I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call associates who are either locked up or dead. There are al
so locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishable_such as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.

  "Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?" Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.

  "To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray's body," I reply.

  "Well, the chicken's still inside the evidence refrigerator," Marino says. "Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it."

  "Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken," Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.

  I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray's body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shape_or tool mark_of whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain, i rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.

  I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray's mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don't test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is not human. Marino is pacing the floor.

  I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn't find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn't listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.