Blow Fly ks-12

by Patricia Cornwell

  Cops have an obvious presence in New York, sitting in their cruisers, talking to one another on sidewalks and street corners. Benton passes them, stoically looking straight ahead, his pistol strapped around his ankle, a violation so serious he would probably be tackled or slammed against a building, were a cop to spot the gun. He would be handcuffed, stuffed inside a police car, interrogated, run through the FBI computer system, fingerprinted and arraigned in court, all to no avail, really. When he worked crime scenes, his prints were stored in AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system. After his alleged death, his prints-including his ten-print card in cold storage-were altered, swapped with a man who had died of natural causes and was surreptitiously fingerprinted in the embalming room of a Philadelphia funeral home. Benton's DNA profile is in no automated system anywhere on Earth.

  He steps into a doorway and dials directory assistance on a cell phone that has the billing address of a phone number at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Programming the billing address was not so difficult. Benton has had years to become adept on the computer, using and violating cyberspace to his advantage. An occasional collect call added to the Texas penitentiary's telephone bills is likely to escape notice and could not be traced to anyone, certainly never to him.

  Benton knows that when he makes his call to Lucy's office, the Texas penitentiary's name and number will show up on whatever sophisticated security system she has. Of course, all calls are taped. Of course, Lucy will have her own forensic voice analysis computer system. Of course, Benton has Jean-Baptiste's voice on tape and has had it for years, reaching back to the very dangerous days of an undercover operation that did not bring down the Chandonne cartel, but instead annihilated Bentons identity and life. For this, Benton has not yet forgiven himself. He doesn't believe he will ever be able to give up his guilt and humiliation. He underestimated those whose trust was synonymous with his life.

  As a child, Benton and his magic ring made mistakes in his fantasy investigations. As an adult, he and his gold FBI ring have also made mistakes, errors in judgment, and flat-out wrong psychological assessments of murderers. But the one time in his career when he needed his acumen and wits the most, he slipped, and the thought of it still enrages him, sickens him, fills him with self-recrimination.

  He tells himself during his most despondent moments, No one else is to blame. Not even the Chandonnes and their minions are to blame. You dug your pit, and now you must get out of it.

  56

  JUST PLAIN-JANE COPYING PAPER," Polunsky's public information officer, Wayne Reeve, explains to Scarpetta over the phone.

  "We buy it by the ream and sell it to the inmates for a penny a sheet. Envelopes are cheap white dime-store variety, three for a quarter," he adds. "If you don't mind my asking, why are you interested?"

  "Research."

  "Oh." His curiosity lingers.

  "Forensic paper analysis. I'm a scientist. What if the inmate doesn't have commissary privileges?" Scarpetta inquires from her office in Delray Beach.

  She was rushing out of the house with her suitcase when the phone rang. Rose answered it. Scarpetta eagerly took the call. She will miss her flight to New York.

  "He-or she-can get writing paper, envelopes, stamps and so on. No one is denied that privilege, no matter what. You can understand it. Lawyers," Reeve says.

  Scarpetta doesn't ask him if Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row. She doesn't hint that she's gotten a letter from him and is no longer certain Chandonne is safely locked up.

  Enough, you son of a bitch.

  I've had enough, you son of a bitch.

  You want to see me, you'll see me, you son of a bitch.

  You want to talk, we'll talk all right, you son of a bitch.

  If you've escaped, I'm going to find out, you son of a bitch.

  If you did or didn't write this letter, I'm going to find out, you son of a bitch.

  You're not going to hurt anybody else, you son of a bitch.

  I want you dead, you son of a bitch.

  "Can you send me samples of commissary paper?" she asks Reeve.

  "You'll get them tomorrow," he promises.

  57

  TURKEY BUZZARDS SWOOP LOW in the blue sky, the smell of death and decay drawing them to the marsh beyond the gray, weathered pier.

  "What'd you do, throw meat in the saw grass?" Bev complains to Jay as she loops a rope over a piling. "You know how much I hate those damn buzzards."

  Jay smiles, his attention on the lamb cowering in the stern of the boat. She rubs her wrists and ankles, her clothing partially unbuttoned and in disarray. For an instant, relief passes through her terrified eyes, as if the handsome blond man on the dock couldn't possibly be evil. Jay wears nothing but threadbare cutoff jeans, the muscles in his sculpted, tan body popping out with every move he makes. He lightly steps down into the boat.

  "Get inside," he orders Bev. "Hi," he says to the woman. "I'm Jay. You can relax now."

  Her wide, glassy eyes are riveted to him. She keeps rubbing her wrists and wetting her lips.

  "Where am I?" she asks. "I don't understand…"

  Jay reaches out to help her up, and her legs won't work, so he grabs her around the waist.

  "There we go. A little stiff, are we?" He touches the dried bloody clumps of hair matted to the back of her head and his eyes burn. "She wasn't supposed to hurt you. You're hurt, aren't you? Okay. Hold on. I'm going to pick you up, just like this." He lifts her as if she weighs nothing. "Put your arms around my neck. Good. He places her on the dock and climbs out after her. Helping her to her feet again, he picks her up and carries her inside the shack.

  Bev sits on the narrow, sour-smelling bed. It has no covers, just a dingy, rumpled white form-fitted sheet and a stained pillow that has lost its shape and is almost flat. Bev's eyes follow Jay as he lowers the woman to the floor, holding her around the waist while she struggles for balance.

  "I can't seem to stand up," she says, avoiding Bev, pretending Bev isn't there. "My feet are numb."

  "She tied you too tight, didn't she?" Jay says as his eyes burn brighter. "What'd you do to her?" he asks Bev.

  Bev stares at him.

  "Get off the bed," he says to her. "We need to let her lie down. She's hurt. Get a wet towel." To the lamb he says as he helps her on the bed, "I don't have any ice. I'm sorry. Ice would be good for your head."

  "There's ice in the fish box. And groceries," Bev says in a flat tone.

  "You didn't bring me any pups," Jay comments.

  "I was busy, and nothing was open."

  "Plenty of strays out there, if you aren't too lazy to look for them."

  She opens the refrigerator and pours cold water on a dish towel.

  "That's all right," the lamb meekly replies, relaxing a little.

  Jay is handsome and sweet. He is a friend. Not horrid, like that ugly beast of a woman.

  "I'll be fine. I don't need any ice."

  "It's not all right." Jay gently arranges the pillow under her head, and she cries out in pain. "No, it's not all right."

  He slips a hand under her neck, moving her head so he can feel the back of it. The pressure of his fingers is too much, and the woman cries out again.

  "What'd you do to her?" he asks Bev.

  "She fell in the boat."

  The woman says nothing and refuses to look at Bev.

  "Fell with a little help, maybe?" Jay asks in a tone of perfect self-control.

  He gathers the lamb's blouse together and buttons it without touching her.

  58

  BENTON TAKES OFF his jacket and drops it in a trash can. A block south, he tosses his baseball cap into another trash can and ducks into the shadows of scaffolding to unfasten his canvas knapsack. Inside is a black do-rag, and he ties it tightly around his head. He slips on a denim vest that has an American flag embroidered on the back. During a brief lull in pedestrian traffic, he substitutes his sunglasses for amber-tinted ones in different frames. Rolling up
the knapsack, he tucks it under his arm and cuts left on 73rd Street, then left again on Third and back on 75th, where he stands at the corner of Lucy's building. Jim the doorman ignores him and wanders inside the lobby for a welcome rush of air-conditioning.

  New technology is Bentons ally and enemy. Cell phone calls can be traced by more than caller ID. Signals bounce off satellites and boomerang to where the caller is located geographically when the call is made, and to date, it is impossible to foil this technology. Benton has no choice but somehow to work around it. While caller ID will erroneously indicate that the call is being made from a Texas prison, the satellite transmission will reveal that the call was made in Manhattan, pinpointed to an area that is smaller than a city block.

  He uses this to his advantage, however. All obstacles can be steps to a higher benefit.

  Benton makes the call from Lucy's address at Lexington and 75th Street. Jean-Baptiste is on death row, and that is easy enough to check. Logic would dictate that Jean-Baptiste could not have called collect from Manhattan. Then who did? Lucy will puzzle over the call made in the immediate area of her office building, and knowing her as well as Benton does, he is certain she will make a call from her own address and see that the same coordinates are pinpointed by the satellite.

  This will lead her to the conclusion that there must have been a technical glitch, that somehow the transmission traced back to where the call was received instead of where it was initiated. She will not understand how this could have happened when it has never happened before. Lucy will be paranoid. Without a doubt, she will be angry, because she does not forgive sloppy work or technical screwups. She will blame the snafu on the telephone company or her staff Probably the latter.

  As for Jim the doorman, when asked, he will say that at the precise moment the call was made, he saw no one on a cell phone in front of the building or close to it. This will be a lie. Almost everybody in New York walks around with a cell phone to his or her ear. The truth is, even if Jim remembers the precise time he left his post for the air-conditioned lobby, he won't want to admit it.

  The last obstacle is voice analysis, which Lucy will conduct immediately to verify that the caller was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. That is no threat. Benton has spent several years meticulously studying, transcribing and editing recordings of Jean-Baptiste's voice, then rerecording them into digital files with a single directional microphone that, when used in a high-sensitivity mode, picks up multidirectional sound, or background noise-in this case, the inside of a prison. He edited and spliced it on a computer, and the results are seamless, each file a blitz of sound bites intended for voicemail or a live recipient who has no chance for a response that would force a mental engagement that is impossible. Switching from Menu to a folder he named Redstick for Baton Rouge, he verifies the time stamp on the LCD and double-checks that all details of the setup are in order.

  He plugs the microphone into a speaker port and tucks in the earpiece.

  The phone at Infosearch Solutions-The Last Precinct-is picked up.

  "Manhattan. Collect call to Infosearch Solutions on Seventy-fifth," he says into the microphone.

  "Your name?"

  "Polunksy Unit."

  "Please hold."

  The operator connects the call.

  "Collect call from Polunksy Unit. Will you accept charges?"

  "Yes," without pause or change of inflection.

  "Good afternoon. May I ask who's calling?" a male voice continues, the caller ID showing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

  Benton sets noise cancel on high to eradicate the live feedback of New York traffic and other sounds that would be ruinous for a call supposedly made from the interior of a penitentiary. He presses Play. The indicator light glows green, and File One begins.

  "When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge. " Jean-Baptiste s recorded voice is as natural as if he himself is speaking in real time.

  "She's out of the office. Who's calling? Who is this?" The man in Lucy's office tries to talk to what is nothing more than a memory chip on the line. "May I give her a message?"

  The call ended seven seconds ago. Benton erases File One from Red-stick, to ensure that Jean-Baptiste s faked message cannot be played again, ever, by anyone.

  He walks swiftly along the congested sidewalk again, head bent, missing nothing.

  59

  "PLEASE DON'T HURT ME," the lamb says. Jay helps the woman sit up. She cries and moans as he gently cleans her bloody hair, worrying about the split in her scaJp, caused by the blunt-force trauma of her head cracking against the outboard motor. He reassures her that the injury isn't serious and didn't fracture her skuJJ. She's not seeing double, is she?

  "No," she says, her breath catching as he touches her hair again with the wet, bloody towel. "I can see fine."

  Jays sweetness, his protectiveness, has the usual effect, and the woman's attention is fixed only on him. She identifies with him to the extent that she feels she can tell him that Bev-whose name the woman doesn't know-pushed her into the outboard motor.

  "That's how I hit my head," she confides to Jay.

  He tosses the bloody towel to Bev. She hasn't moved, just stands in the middle of the small room, staring at him like a cottonmouth coiled to strike. The towel lands at her feet, and she doesn't pick it up.

  He tells her to pick it up.

  Bev doesn't.

  "Pick it up and wash it in the sink," he says. "I don't want to look at that thing on the floor. You shouldn't have hurt her. Clean the towel and get all this insect repellent off her."

  "I don't need her to get it off me," the woman pleads. "Maybe it's good to keep it on because of all the bugs."

  "No. You need it washed off," Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. "You have too much on. It's toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That's not good."

  "I don't want her touching me again!"

  "She hurt you?"

  The lamb doesn't answer.

  "I'm here. She won't hurt you."

  Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.

  "We don't need to waste water," she says. "The tank's low."

  "It's supposed to rain, eventually," Jay replies, studying the woman as if she's a car he might buy. "The tank's got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here."

  "Please don't hurt me."

  The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.

  "Just take me home and I won't tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God."

  Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he's glorious to look at, and so far he's been nice.

  "Won't tell anybody what?" Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. "What's there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn't you, and we're Good Samaritans, taking care of you."

  She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.

  "Make it quick. Please," she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. "If you aren't going to let me go. Make it quick."

  Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman's blouse.

  "Ah. No bra," he says. "She wasn't wearing one?" He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.

  Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.

  The woman's eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.

  "Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up," he orders Bev. "You touch her again, you know what I'll do to you."

  Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed,
long-running drama.

  60

  THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida. Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard's case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.

  Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscopes stage. If she could add up the hours she's spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she respects the histologist, whose devotion is to the minuscule structures of tissues and the tales their cells can tell, she has never been able to comprehend sitting inside a tiny lab day in and day out, surrounded by sections of heart, lung, liver, brain and other organs, and injuries and stigmata of diseases that are cut into sections and turn rubbery inside bottles of a fixative such as formalin. Each tissue section is embedded in paraffin wax or a plastic resin and shaved into slices thin enough for light to pass through them. After they are mounted on glass slides, they are stained with a variety of dyes that were developed by the nineteenth-century textile industry.

  Mostly, Scarpetta sees a lot of pinks and blues, but there are a perfusion of colors used, depending on the tissue and the cellular structure and possible defects that need to give up their secrets to her at the other end of the lens. Dyes, like diseases, are often named for whoever discovered or invented them, and this is where histology becomes unnecessarily complicated, if not annoying. It isn't enough for dyes or dyeing techniques to be called blue or violet; they must be Cresyl blue, Cresyl violet, or Perl's Prussian blue, or Heidenhain's haematoxylin (purplish red), or Masson's trichrome (blue and green), or Bielschowsky (neutral red), or her favorite mundanity: Jones's methenamine silver. A typical egocentric pathological legacy is a van Gieson staining of a Schwann cell nuclei from a Schwannoma, and Scarpetta fails to understand why German naturalist Theodor Schwann would have wanted a tumor named after him.