Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  I look at Janet carefully, at her rumpled faded scrubs, at her dirty nails and sleep-deprived face. Her eyes burn hard and bright, and I’m reminded of how private and stoical she can be. And strong. Janet is very strong. She’s quietly dangerous like an undertow if you plunge into an area where you don’t belong or dare to threaten anyone she loves.

  She’s not telling us something.

  “Yes, yes, the FBI knows what they’ve been told,” Donoghue argues. “But that doesn’t mean they accept or believe it, as we’ve been pointing out. Frankly it’s most likely that they don’t accept Carrie is responsible for anything. In other words she’s been dead for years and that’s the explanation for why she isn’t back on the Most Wanted list or possibly any lists.”

  “I agree,” I reply. “That’s the explanation for why she isn’t wanted. The Bureau hasn’t listed her as a fugitive. They haven’t asked Interpol to amend her from a black to a red notice, from a dead fugitive to an active extremely dangerous one. I know. I’ve periodically been checking Interpol’s website and her status hasn’t changed. It won’t unless the FBI changes it.”

  “In other words the FBI is still treating her as if she’s deceased,” Donoghue says.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Adding to the theory that they’re refusing to acknowledge her existence because the consequences will be significant, perhaps ones we have no idea about.”

  “And the last time you saw her was thirteen years ago when you thought you witnessed her die in a helicopter crash.” Donoghue directs this at both Lucy and me.

  “It was the last time I thought I saw her.” I sip my coffee. “As it turned out I didn’t see her at all on that occasion.”

  “What we literally saw was a helicopter crash into the ocean,” Lucy says more precisely.

  “We? Both of you witnessed it independently?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “I was in the left seat. Lucy was in the right seat flying. We were in her helicopter when we saw the other one, a white Schweizer, crash into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina.”

  “When I caused it to go down,” Lucy qualifies. “The pilot was shooting at me. I shot back and his helicopter blew up. Aunt Kay and I thought Carrie was on it.”

  “I’ll trust you that she wasn’t.” Donoghue doesn’t take her eyes off Lucy now, and I can’t tell if she believes her or any of us.

  “As I’ve mentioned,” I reply, “no remains we recovered were identified as hers or possibly hers. The only body parts and other personal effects found were the pilot’s, a fugitive named Newton Joyce.”

  “The video recording of when you were shot with the spear gun? Is there any possibility the FBI has seen it?” Donoghue directs this at me but it’s Lucy who answers.

  “I don’t know how. They’ve never been in possession of the recorder. They couldn’t have seen the video unless someone turned it over to them.”

  “The same way this recording was turned over to you?” Donoghue asks. “I need to know exactly how you got it but I don’t want to hear about it with Janet in the room. She’s not protected.”

  “I could leave,” Janet offers.

  “Stay,” Lucy says to her. “The recording wasn’t turned over to me,” she says to Donoghue.

  “Please explain.”

  “Suffice it to say I have access to it and the FBI couldn’t unless they have the mask. And they don’t.”

  “I don’t see how they could,” I agree with Lucy. “By the time the FBI showed up on the scene the mask was long gone. Other responding police divers had looked and had no luck based on what Benton’s told me. It’s probably safe to assume that Carrie might have gotten her hands on the mask. She would have recognized the embedded mini-recorder. If nothing else she might have expected I would have one.”

  “If Carrie has the mask,” Donoghue says, “then she’s seen the recording.”

  “Yes,” Lucy says, nodding. “You should assume she has.”

  “And she couldn’t have tampered with the recording you have?”

  “No. When the camera was running it live streamed to a device. I won’t say what or where,” she says and I again think of her sudden trip to Bermuda. “But the instant Aunt Kay turned the camera on it began to live stream the video to a designated device. That link has been deactivated and the device is untraceable with more firewalls around it than the Pentagon. May I see your phone please?” she asks Donoghue.

  “Might I ask why?”

  “Please,” Lucy says, and Donoghue hands the phone to her. “What’s your password? I can figure it out but it would be quicker if you give it to me.”

  Donoghue does as she asks. “Is this a test to see if I really trust you?”

  “I don’t have time for tests.” Lucy enters the password and starts typing in the glass display. “I’m assuming you’d like to see what was recorded.” She looks at us. “I’ve kept it out of e-mail, basically off the Internet with the exception of my transmitting the data over a secure wireless network they’ll never trace to me as I just explained. In summary the Feds do not have this. I’ve made sure they will never ever have this.”

  “This?” I ask.

  “What the camera on your mask recorded when Carrie shot you,” Janet says and she’s obviously watched it, and that dismays me.

  NOT EVEN FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO she said she hadn’t seen a photo or a video that could convince her Carrie is alive. Then who or what did Janet see in the recording Lucy is talking about? My misgivings about the video intensify.

  “Do you know where Carrie is?” I come right out and ask Lucy.

  “Don’t answer that,” Donoghue tells her in no uncertain terms. “Not unless you and Janet are married.”

  “We’re not,” Janet says.

  “Then it’s as I’ve been warning you. And you’re not listening. There’s no spousal privilege. Whatever you and Lucy discuss or witness isn’t protected.” Donoghue continues to make this point but it’s as if Lucy and Janet don’t hear her or care.

  “You’re about to see how Carrie always manages to land on her feet. You’re about to see why the Feds can’t have this.” Lucy touches Donoghue’s phone on the table. “It will prove a fatal error if we’re not careful. It will only help them and hurt us.”

  “Let me ask you this point-blank,” Donoghue says. “Is the actual recording of your aunt being shot in your physical possession?”

  “No,” Lucy says. “It never has been. Not completely. Only nine-tenths.”

  “It’s nine-tenths in your possession,” Donoghue says. “That’s your definition of ownership.”

  “You know what they say. If you have it, you’ve got it. If you’ve got it, you have it.”

  “I don’t know who says that but I understand what you’re implying.” Donoghue is getting unhappier. “I think we get the drift loud and clear.” She looks at me.

  But she doesn’t understand and I’m not going to help her. Lucy is saying that she has the recording because she managed to get it. She’s not saying how and she won’t, and that can mean only one thing at least to me. Lucy doesn’t have the mask or the recorder in her possession. She never has and doesn’t need them. I’m betting the live-streaming went to a device that isn’t in this country, and I keep thinking about Bermuda. Why did she go there recently? Who was she meeting?

  “You installed the camera on my mask about a year ago,” I say to her. “I’d only done two dives with it. The dive in Fort Lauderdale was my third one.”

  “Can you describe what would happen when Kay turned the camera on?” Donoghue asks Lucy.

  “It would send me an e-mail that the recorder had been activated. Sort of the same principle as a nanny cam. Only in those cases the cameras are motion sensitive. With a dive mask that wouldn’t make sense. If you have the mask on and have activated the camera, well obviously you want to start recording and will continue to do so until you’re out of the water with your mask off. In other words,” Lucy says to me, “your mask wasn’t motion sensi
tive. It was on-off sensitive, so to speak. It was either recording or it wasn’t.”

  “When she turned the camera on at the beginning of the dive exactly two months ago,” Donoghue says, “did you get an e-mail prompting you to watch what was being recorded in real time?”

  “I didn’t,” Lucy says.

  “You didn’t?”

  Lucy shakes her head no.

  “Why not?” Donoghue asks.

  “Because the message got diverted.” Lucy is cryptic again, and then she falls silent for a long uncomfortable pause.

  “If you don’t have the recording legally,” I finally say to her quietly, somberly, “then let me suggest that we be exceedingly cautious about what we discuss.” I look at Janet.

  “I think I should step out now.” She abruptly gets up from the couch.

  “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” Lucy slides the phone closer to me as Janet leaves the boathouse. “Unedited, uncut. I did try to sharpen the images as best I could.”

  “How could you do that if you don’t have the actual recording?” Donoghue asks.

  “Not in my physical possession, I don’t,” Lucy replies as I keep thinking of her recent trip and her story about Customs agents crawling all over her plane. “What you see is as good as it’s going to get.”

  “You don’t say that in a way that instills confidence.” I pick up the phone and press PLAY.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE RECORDING STARTS SEVERAL FEET BENEATH THE surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

  I remember my giant stride off the stern of the boat. I relive the sensation of water splashing, and the cold salty chop against my chin as I floated, easing my way to the mooring line, breathing through my snorkel with the sun glaring in my eyes. It seemed like a routine dive. Underwater missions like this aren’t new to me. I distinctly remember feeling there was nothing to worry about.

  I had a false sense of safety, and I hit pause. I have to think about this long and hard.

  “What is it?” Donoghue’s breath touches my hair as she looks on.

  “I felt safe and I shouldn’t have. I’m trying to figure out why.”

  The previous night I’d seen images of Bob Rosado’s murder at a dive site called the Mercedes. The congressman’s wife was on the stern of their yacht, drinking a martini, filming him, joking with him as he floated on the surface. He was waiting to make his descent when a bullet struck the back of his neck and a second one pierced his tank, sending him pirouetting into the air. Copperhead.

  There was every reason to suspect that Carrie was in the Fort Lauderdale area. She’d flown there under an assumed name with her partner in crime at the time, Rosado’s sadistic son, nineteen-year-old Troy, a sex offender, a pyromaniac, Carrie’s latest monster boy toy. I knew this and yet I wasn’t worried.

  Why?

  Most importantly it didn’t seem to penetrate my conscious mind that she might be thinking about me.

  Why?

  I’m anything but a careless, unobservant person.

  Why did you feel safe?

  Maybe I was simply in shock. The night before I flew to Florida I was sitting in New Jersey, having just found out from Lucy that Carrie isn’t dead, that she’s been living in Russia and Ukraine for at least the past decade. After the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted, Carrie fled and returned to the United States. Using the name Sasha Sarin she began doing dirty work for Congressman Rosado and chaperoned his troubled, increasingly violent son, Troy. So I was astonished and maybe I was in denial when I found out all this. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t worried. I don’t know and I think back, conjuring up every detail I possibly can.

  I remember floating in the bright blue water on the bright sunny afternoon, bobbing, waiting for Benton. I envision him striding off the dive platform, splashing, floating, smiling, giving me the okay sign and I gave it back. I placed the regulator into my mouth, bled the air out of my BCD, and reached up to turn on my mask’s mini-recorder. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t wary. Carrie had just murdered Bob Rosado. Or maybe Troy was to blame. Or maybe Carrie had murdered Troy too, possibly in this very spot barely a mile offshore, and yet I wasn’t worried.

  What were you thinking?

  I hit PLAY again and resume watching the video on the small display, the volume turned up as high as it will go. Bubbles blast up past my mask, and the sound of them is loud as I touch the mooring line, following it down, pinching my nose to clear my ears, down and down. Glimpses of my legs, my fins, my gloved hands, and the water is a darker blue as I descend deeper. Benton is above me and I don’t look up at him. My attention is directed down, looking straight down through bubbles.

  Down and darker, and I remember the cooling of the water the deeper we went. I could feel the chill through my three-millimeter wet suit. I could feel the pressure of the heavy water weighing on us, and I watch myself on the video as I continuously lift my left hand to my nose, clearing my ears, the sound of my breathing artificial and loud. The shape is vague when it first comes into frame, and then it becomes the wrecked barge, a twisted, broken, rusting carcass.

  My attention is fixed on it in the surrounding darkness, getting closer and closer, and the images bring back sensations, the flutter of unsettledness when I didn’t see any sign of the two police divers who had gone down minutes before us. I’m looking for them. I’m scanning the surroundings for them as I puzzle over where they are. Now Benton and I are almost a hundred feet deep where the sunken German freighter called the Mercedes is nestled in the silt. We move away from the mooring line and turn on our small flashlights attached by lanyards to our wrists.

  Fish swim by, magnified by the water, and Benton hovers inches above the ocean floor, horizontal, his buoyancy perfectly controlled. He shines his light over a fishing lure, the antenna of a spiny lobster hiding in the rocks, the old tires that are supposed to help build an artificial reef. A small shark leisurely snuffles past, skimming the silt and stirring it up, and I use gentle movements of my fins to propel myself to the barge. I sweep my light into gaping holes in the corroded metal.

  Disturbed fish dart off, a barracuda big and silvery, and then I’m suspended above the deck, dropping lower into an opening, what used to be a hatch, and as I watch the recording I vividly remember not understanding what I was seeing at first. A man’s neoprene-covered back. The hoses hanging down. The absence of bubbles, and when I moved him I could see the spear embedded in his chest. Then below him my light finds the second body, two dead police divers inside the freighter’s hull. I bolt out of there with powerful kicks.

  I dart to Benton and tap my knife against his tank. Clink, clink! I’m pointing my light up at the barge, and suddenly I’m looking around. I remember hearing a faint vibration, like a distant power tool, and I see my fins kicking up into the camera as I try to back up and twist away. She’s there. Pointing a spear gun at me. Pandemonium. The blast of my bubbles and the clank of something hitting my tank as the camera jerks crazily. A second spear, and the line attached to it leads tautly to the surface where it’s tethered to a float that moves with the strong current, tugging my impaled leg. Thrashing crazily. Thundering bubbles.

  This goes on for several seconds, and I get the impression of another diver, someone’s lower body and arms. A flash of a double white stripe around a leg, a chest zipper with a long pull tag, and black neoprene gloved hands near my face. Benton. It must be Benton but it enters my mind crazily that I don’t remember his wet suit having a double white stripe. Then the only image is water, then nothing. My mask had come off. I back up the recording and replay it again and again as my disappointment grows. This isn’t helpful. In fact it’s worse than not helpful. It’s extremely harmful.

  Carrie would have recognized the mini-recorder built into my mask. She knew she was being recorded. I’m sure she knows by now that she’s not identifiable. The lighting is poor, and I’m seeing her through bubbles streaming up from my regulator. I’m seeing my own movements as I reach around, fr
antically feeling the right side of my BCD, and then I’m slashing at someone I can’t see, madly slashing my dive knife at empty murky water.

  “Please tell me this isn’t all there is.” I nudge the phone back in Donoghue’s direction, and I feel sick.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy says.

  “Then how do we know it’s her? We can’t see who it is.” Donoghue is so close to me now our shoulders are touching. “And you were sure at the time it was her?”

  “Yes. I’m completely sure.” I feel emptied of any hope I might have had. “What is this?” I say to Lucy. “What the hell am I looking at? I cut her with the knife. I cut her face.”

  “I know you believed you did,” she says. “But based on this recording it doesn’t look like it.”

  “A recording you got from who?” I can’t keep an accusatory tone out of my voice.

  “What matters is who doesn’t have it.” Lucy’s demeanor is steady and still. “And I can promise the FBI doesn’t. My initial hope was we’d get to rub their noses in it but that’s not possible. Because all it would do is make things a thousand times worse. I’m sorry, Aunt Kay.”

  “I remember cutting her,” I insist.

  “I know you believe you did.”

  “You sure she couldn’t have somehow Photoshopped it out?”

  “I’m sure,” Lucy says. “I won’t explain why I know that.”

  “I don’t want a technical hypothetical explanation. And just because it’s not on the recording doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Now I sound argumentative.

  I sound ridiculous.

  “It didn’t happen.” Lucy locks eyes with me as the boathouse door opens.

  Lucy doesn’t look at Janet as she walks back in, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  “Is this okay?” she asks Donoghue. “Am I allowed back?”

  “It probably isn’t okay.”

  “It’s always polite to ask. I’m staying anyway.” She sits back on the couch, and I get the same sensation again.

  There’s a calm about Janet that goes beyond her usual disposition. It’s as if she’s made up her mind about something and is simply going through the motions with us.