Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “But you got the truck.” He has an accusing tone in his voice as if I’m keeping something from him, which I am.

  “I want my transport team to handle this,” I reply and it’s not a request. “I’m not doing it or going to the office straight from here and neither are you. I need you to help me with Lucy.”

  Marino crouches close to the body, keeping clear of the dark sticky blood, swatting at flies, the droning of them constant and maddening. “As long as you’re sure Lucy’s more important than this case? As long as you’re asking Luke to do the post?”

  “Is this multiple choice?”

  “I just don’t understand what you’re doing, Doc.”

  I inform him that either my deputy chief Luke Zenner will do the autopsy or I will when I finally get to the office. But that may not be until this afternoon, possibly midafternoon or the end of the day.

  “What the hell?” Marino is getting louder. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you transporting the body to the office yourself so we can know what the hell happened to her before her Hollywood mother shows up?”

  “I have to leave and come back.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t take the body first.”

  “As I’ve already said my first stop won’t be the CFC. We need to head to Concord and obviously I can’t be driving around with a body in the back of the truck. It needs to go into the cooler right away.” I make that point again. “And Harold and Rusty need to get here now.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says yet again, this time with a scowl. “You’re rolling out of here in a freakin’ double-wide and not going straight to the CFC? You got a hair appointment? Getting your nails done? You and Lucy are hitting the spa?”

  “You didn’t really just say that.”

  “I’m kidding. Anybody can look at you and know I was just kidding. You haven’t bothered with shit for months.” Marino’s voice is flinty with anger, with judgment, and I feel it starting up again.

  Blame the victim. Punish me for almost dying. Make it my fault.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

  “It means you’ve sort of let yourself go. Not that I don’t understand it. I’m sure it’s not easy moving around, at least not as easy as it was. I’m sure it’s hard to dress, to fix yourself up.”

  “Yes it’s been a little difficult to fix myself up,” I reply dryly, and it’s true that my hair could use styling and a trim.

  My nails are short and unpolished. I didn’t bother putting on makeup when I left the house earlier this morning. I’m a bit thinner than I was before I got shot. But this isn’t the time or place to pick on me, and that has never stopped Marino, not in all the years I’ve known him. But he’s sunk to an all-time low criticizing my appearance at a death scene while I’m worried sick about my niece. He should simply take my word for it when I say it’s important we get to her right away. He doesn’t trust me the way he once did. And that’s the problem.

  “Jesus. Where’s your sense of humor?” he says after one of my long silences.

  “I didn’t bring it with me.” I’m so on edge it’s all I can do to control the level of my voice, and the marble floor seems to radiate through my boot, stiffening my right leg.

  It aches and throbs like an abscessed tooth. I almost can’t bend my knee, and the longer I stand here the worse everything gets.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to piss you off but you’re not making sense, Doc,” Marino says. “I’m assuming you’re doing her autopsy like right away? Before her mother gets here with a million questions and demands? Isn’t that a little more important than dropping by Concord to check on Lucy? Unless she’s sick or hurt or something? I mean do you know what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t. That’s why we need to check.”

  “We sure as hell don’t want a problem with Amanda Gilbert and she’s exactly the sort to give us one. And of all times? You don’t need to be causing problems. I’ll just say it because you don’t need …”

  “I’m well aware of what I don’t need.” I watch my phone and avoid looking at him.

  Marino interrogates and lectures me like this because he can. At one time he was my chief investigator until he decided he didn’t want to work for me anymore. He knows my office routines and protocols. He knows exactly how I think. He knows the way I do things and why. Yet suddenly I’m an enigma. I’m from another planet and this has been going on since June.

  “I want her transported now and it can’t be me doing it,” I say to him. “I’ve got to get to Concord. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Okay.” He gets up and looks down at the body for a long moment as I stare at the display on my phone.

  The title sequence is long gone. The music has stopped. I continue to be confronted with Lucy’s empty dorm room from what seems half a life ago, and my tension and frustration build. I’m being teased, goaded, tortured, and it occurs to me that Carrie would be hugely amused if she could see me now, if she could spy on me the same way she did on Lucy.

  “I admit she looks pretty damn bad for falling what? Not even six feet?” Marino says next. “Drugs and then she’s got a lot of occult shit all over the place. So no telling the company she keeps. I agree with you this case has some aspects that don’t add up in a good way.”

  “Please make the call now.” I’m riveted to my phone.

  I’m vaguely aware of the sound of him walking away, of him getting hold of my chief of staff Bryce Clark as I watch the seconds tick by. Ten minutes into Carrie Grethen’s cinematic gift and already I know I’m being harassed and manipulated, that she’s having sadistic fun at my expense. But I can’t resist.

  I don’t know what else to do but watch, to give myself up to it as I linger inside the foyer feeling Chanel Gilbert’s morbid presence and the pain in my leg. I look down at my phone, watching a segment of my niece’s past go by in the palm of my ungloved hand. I smell decomposing flesh and blood breaking down. I’m sweating and chilled as I watch the video and think this can’t be real.

  But it is. There can be no question as I recognize the dorm room’s blank walls, the two windows on either side of the bed, and of course Mister Pickle perched on the pillow. I can see the closed door that leads into the dormitory’s fourth-floor hallway, the light shining in from the right where there’s a bathroom. Only VIP guest quarters had private baths. Lucy was a VIP to me and that’s how I mandated she would be treated by the Feds.

  She occupied this room from 1995 through 1998, not constantly. But on and off while she finished the University of Virginia, working for the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility (ERF) almost the entire time. Quantico was her home away from home. Carrie Grethen was her mentor. The FBI placed the niece I raised like a daughter into a psychopathic monster’s care, and that decision changed the course of our lives. It has changed absolutely everything.

  CHAPTER 5

  CARRIE WALKS INTO THE ROOM, A SUBMACHINE GUN slung over her shoulder. The Heckler & Koch flat against her waist is an MP5K. K is for kurz, German for short.

  The machine gun is designed to fit into a firing briefcase, and familiarity touches the back of my brain. I know this gun. I’ve seen it somewhere. I feel my chest tighten as Carrie leans close to a camera, stares directly into it with wide eyes as cold and bright as a winter sky. Her hair is a bleached silver buzz cut, her narrow fine-featured face compelling the way a machete is, and her tank top, gym shorts, shoes and socks are solid white.

  In 1997 she was in her midtwenties although I wasn’t sure of her age at the time. She could pass for much older or younger or ageless or ancient with her lean hard body and blue eyes that rapidly change shadings like a volatile ocean as her dangerous moods shift. She is very pale, as if the sun has never touched her. Her white skin seems to glow like a lampshade, contrasting sharply with the black sling loop around her neck, with the stubby black weapon that is close to the camera now.

  An early model with a wooden foregrip, proba
bly manufactured in the 1980s, possibly earlier but I’m uncertain why I know that. I can see the three modes of fire stamped in white over the thumb area. E for semiautomatic mode. F for full auto. The selector is set on S for safe. I know this gun somehow dammit. Where did I see it?

  “Greetings from the past.” Carrie’s eyes are deep blue as she smiles, resting a forearm on the machine gun’s receiver. “But you know what they say. The past is never over. It isn’t even past. If you’re viewing my cinematic masterpiece then congratulations are in order. You’re still on this earth, Chief.” The way she says chief sounds odd, possibly edited. “What you should conclude from that is I don’t want you gone yet. Or you would be.

  “By the time you watch this can you imagine how many chances I will have had to put a bullet in your head?” Carrie points the machine gun’s short barrel at a camera. “Or better yet? Right here?” She touches the back of her neck at the base of her skull at the level of C2, and a transection of the spinal cord at that junction is instantly fatal.

  As I watch her describe this I’m not surprised. It’s the exact injury I encountered in recent sniper shootings that occurred in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida when a stealth assassin the press calls Copperhead fired solid copper bullets into the necks of four victims. One of them was Bob Rosado, a United States congressman scuba diving off his yacht in Fort Lauderdale when he was murdered this past June. His teenage son Troy, a budding violent psychopath with a criminal history, vanished at the same time and might also be a casualty. We haven’t found him. We don’t know where he is. He was last seen with her, with Copperhead, with Carrie Grethen.

  “There are many different ways to cause death if you’re an expert.” She talks slowly, deliberately in the recording. “And I’m not sure what would be best suited for you. Quick so you have no idea what’s happening? Or drawn out and painful so you have full awareness? Do you want to know you’re about to die or not? That is the question. Hmmm.”

  She looks up at the white acoustical tile ceiling with its grayish fluorescent tube lights that are turned off. “I’m probably still giving these options careful consideration. I wonder how close I will have come to ending you by the time you see this. But let’s get started while we’re alone. Lucy will be back soon. This is between you and me. Shhhh!” She holds a finger to her lips. “Our secret.

  “I’ve written it all out in a narrative that explains what you’re seeing and hearing.” She holds up sheets of paper filled with typing in the format of a script.

  She’s showing off. She wants attention. But from whom? This video clip was sent to me. Yet my gut says I’m not the intended audience. Maybe you can’t be objective anymore.

  “There are six hidden cameras here inside four-eleven, Lucy’s cozy little dorm room with all her juvenilia.”

  She points the machine gun at movie posters on the wall. Silence of the Lambs and Sneakers. She walks to another wall where a rampant Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park is a black silhouette against a blaze orange background. Lucy’s favorite movies. I went to a lot of trouble to find the posters for her after she began her internship with the FBI.

  Carrie walks to the bed and pokes the machine gun’s barrel in Mister Pickle’s forlorn fuzzy face. His wide glassy eyes seem panicked, as if he knows he’s about to die, and I catch myself projecting emotions onto an inanimate object, onto a tiny toy bear.

  “She’s a child, you know.” Carrie is in constant motion as she talks. “She may have an IQ that’s two hundred and beyond, well into the uncharted airspace of super genius, but she’s always had the emotional maturity of a toddler. Stunted. Lucy is hopelessly stunted. She has no idea what wizardry is in her room, covering every angle and completely out of sight.

  “Imagine how I spend my spare time when she’s not around? I’m always watching.” She points two fingers at her eyes. “Like the billboard in The Great Gatsby. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg peering through glasses, watching over the Valley of Ashes, the moral wasteland of American society with its blind, greedy, lying government.”

  I glance up from my phone at Harold and Rusty. They look like Ghostbusters in hooded white Tyvek coveralls, their hands gloved in blue nitrile, respirators over their noses and mouths. They’re debating with Marino how best to get the dead woman inside the pouch and whether it would be a good idea to place a bag over her head. Maybe there’s important trace evidence in her hair. Brain tissue is oozing out of an open fracture in her skull. Some of her teeth may be loose. One was knocked out, a front tooth I recovered from blood on the floor.

  “We don’t want to displace anything. No telling what’s sticking to the blood, especially in her hair,” Marino is saying as Carrie’s voice sounds in my ear.

  “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a dorm room that was tiny and tidy,” she reads from her script as Marino unfolds a stretcher and the aluminum legs clack. “It was dimly lit by a gooseneck lamp on the desk, which like the matching chair, the wardrobe, the dresser and twin bed was cheaply built of plywood with a fake wood-grain veneer.”

  Carrie walks around the room giving a tour, and I don’t look up from my phone as I tell Marino, Rusty and Harold to bag Chanel Gilbert’s head and also her hands and her feet. After that, wrap disposable sheets round her. I’m fairly certain I’ve collected everything that might not survive the trip to my office but let’s be meticulous. Nothing left behind. Nothing lost. Not a hair. Not a tooth.

  “Then you can pouch her and carry her out,” I tell them as Carrie says in the recording: “On top of a hotel-size refrigerator were a Mr. Coffee maker, a jar of generic-brand creamer, a bag of Starbuck’s House Blend, three FBI mugs, a chipped ceramic beer stein with the crest for the Richmond police department”—she picks it up, shows the chip—“a Swiss Army knife, and six boxes of Speer Gold Dot 9 mil ammo that went with the MP5K Lucy stole from Benton Wesley and kept hidden inside this room.”

  There’s something strange about the way she said Benton’s name. But I can’t stop the recording. I can’t replay it. If Carrie intended this recording for me then why would she say Benton’s last name as if whoever is listening might not know it? I don’t understand what’s happening but I don’t believe Lucy would steal a gun or anything else from him.

  Carrie’s lying about the MP5K and in the process she’s creating a record that suggests both Benton and Lucy violated the National Firearms Act, a felony punishable with serious prison time. The statute of limitations should be up by now. But that depends. Everything depends. This is potentially very bad, and I’m aware of paper rattling less than ten feet away from me.

  Harold opens what looks like a plain brown paper grocery bag with no handles. Wisely he decides against it. Chanel Gilbert’s head is a gory mess. Plastic bags are better suited as long as the body is quickly refrigerated, and I say this without looking up.

  “As long as she goes into the cooler the minute you get her inside the building,” I emphasize because plastic and moisture are a bad combination, especially when decomposition is advancing.

  “I agree,” Harold says. “That’s exactly what we’ll do, Chief.”

  He used to work in a funeral home and I halfway wonder if he sleeps in a suit and tie, in dark socks and dress shoes. By his way of thinking he covers up in personal protective clothing anyway. So he may as well be dapper and properly attired underneath Tyvek.

  “I think there’s something in her hair. It might be glass.” Light winks on his black-framed glasses, his brown eyes magnified and owlish through the prescription lenses.

  “Well duh,” Rusty says, and when he first got here he looked like he always does, a has-been Beach Boy, today in baggy flannel drawstring pants and a hoodie, his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. “There’s broken glass all over the place.”

  “I’m just being careful. It didn’t look like lightbulb glass. But it was just a glance and now I don’t see it.”

  “Wrap her up really well. Make sure we don’t lose anything,” I reply as Carrie walks i
nto a small bland bathroom and flips on a light.

  “Well I’m just not seeing it.” Harold is looking at the bloody matted hair, walking his gloved fingers through it. “I saw something and now I don’t.”

  “I’ll look carefully again later. I didn’t notice anything like glass in her hair,” I reply.

  “But wouldn’t you think there might be?” Harold stares up at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the empty sockets where two lightbulbs had been screwed in.

  He looks around at the broken glass all over the floor, and then he acts out an imagined scenario at the same instant Carrie is acting out her drama on the video. Harold demonstrates someone changing lightbulbs and suddenly falling backward off the ladder.

  “If she had lightbulbs, the chandelier’s glass dome in her hands and they hit the floor at the same time she did it would be like a glass bomb going off. Wouldn’t you expect glass all over her?” he asks as Carrie stares in the mirror over the bathroom sink and gives a big smile to her own reflection, then musses up her very short white-gold hair.

  “Just cover her really well and she goes straight into the cooler, and I’ll deal with her,” I repeat my instructions.

  I can’t pause the video. It’s as if Carrie has hijacked my phone at the worst possible time, in the middle of a suspicious death scene that should require my full attention.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE ONLY WAY I COULD STOP THE RECORDING IS TO power down my phone and turn it off. I’m not about to do that and it vaguely occurs to me that what’s happening could come back to haunt me. If the police complain that I was on my phone, that I was watching a movie, texting or who knows what? It would be very bad.

  “Off to one side of the only door that led in and out of Lucy’s room is a private bath.” Carrie sweeps her hand around it as if she’s Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and Rusty shakes open plastic bags and begins covering Chanel Gilbert’s bare feet.