Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  Marino’s eyes dart around as the clocks tick tock tick tock, and the rain drums the roof louder, softer, then in a hard roll. The wind rushes and moans as I listen for the tactical team. I turn on alabaster sconces and a chandelier, and they glow wanly. The centuries-old oil paintings of landscapes, the stern portraits on the oak-paneled walls are just as dark, the room just as gloomy.

  An elaborately embroidered screen blocks off the deep brick fireplace, and I don’t see any indication it’s ever used. I don’t smell the stale acrid odor of old burned wood and soot. I don’t see sawdust, firewood or firelogs, and I think how dreary. Even on a sunny day it would be. There’s no television and I can’t find a sound system or speakers anywhere, and there are no magazines or newspapers. Not that I can imagine reading in here or relaxing with a friend.

  The room is vast and unlived in, and as I stand silently and look around I detect a vague spectrum of other odors. Musty upholstery. Mothballs. Dust is on every surface and suspended in the overhead light, and I entertain stronger doubts about Chanel Gilbert’s housekeeper.

  THE LIVING ROOM hasn’t been used or cleaned in quite a while, I tell Marino as I wander toward a menagerie of antique silver animals arranged on a pedestal table.

  A horse, a grouse, a bison, a fish with glassy eyes, intricately handcrafted but tarnished and cold, and I see nothing whimsical. The decor is splendid but static and impersonal except for what I think of as talismans, symbols and tools of divination, and the clocks. Several are as old as the house including a lantern clock and a Swiss Gothic one.

  “I can’t imagine the housekeeper has been keeping this place up properly,” I add, and I’m keenly mindful of the tactical team and what it’s doing.

  “The master bedroom’s way in the back if you keep following the hallway.” Marino walks to a window and pushes aside a panel of the deep red French jacquard curtains. “It’s a long haul to the front door if you’re in bed and someone rings the bell.” He looks out at the dark rainy afternoon, and I hear the downpour and the wind but nothing else.

  “I don’t know what they pay Elsa Mulligan or how many hours she works but they aren’t getting their money’s worth.” I continue making the point because Marino isn’t interested in my domestic acumen, and he should be.

  I try to envision Elsa Mulligan based on how she’s been described, imagining her large framed glasses, her spiky black hair. Hyde commented that his first reaction was he assumed she was a family friend from Los Angeles, and she seems an odd choice for a housekeeping job. Clearly she isn’t thorough or industrious, at least not about cleaning. If she shows up at eight o’clock every morning then what does she do while she’s here? What she told Hyde strikes me as yet one more story we’re supposed to believe that isn’t adding up.

  “Assuming Chanel was in the back of the house and wearing nothing but a robe you have to wonder how her body ended up near the front door,” Marino is saying while my mind runs along multiple tracks, and I listen for creaking floors, for closing doors, for voices. “There’s no way maybe the housekeeper moved the body in there?”

  “Chanel wasn’t killed in one place and then dragged or carried into the foyer if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “But the wiped-up blood we could see when you sprayed the marble,” Marino considers. “Maybe there’s other bloody areas that have been washed up.”

  “I suspect the goal of cleaning up blood in the foyer was to give us an initial impression of an accident. If you fall off a ladder you aren’t going to leave impact blood spatter all over the place.” I look around and listen for the tactical team. “If you want to lure people down the wrong path at the onset then you’d better clean up any blood or other evidence that doesn’t fit with whatever it is you’re staging,” I add as we wait for any sign that there are four big men inside the house with us.

  I listen to the rain and the clocks. Gusting wind rattles the windows. I hear nothing else.

  “And this person knew you’d find wiped-up blood and figure it out eventually.” Marino gets closer to saying what by now I’m sure is the inevitable and unfortunate truth. “There’s no question Chanel was murdered where she was found. It’s obvious, right?”

  “Based on the blood pattern, yes,” I reply. “She received her fatal injuries while she was down on the marble floor. That doesn’t mean that’s where the encounter started.”

  “Like someone got her on the floor without much of a struggle and started slamming her head.”

  “Based on my initial examination, the CT scan and what Luke told me that’s the way it looks.”

  “We’ve seen this before, Doc.” Marino doesn’t mean in general.

  He’s alluding to blunt force trauma deaths that occurred in the past year when a Realtor named Patty Marsico was beaten to death in Nantucket, and young Gracie Smithers died similarly on a rocky shore in Marblehead.

  “Carrie Grethen has a habit of bashing people’s brains out like that.” He’s on her trail, locked in with no turning back.

  “In several homicides we’re aware of at any rate.”

  “The one in Nantucket last Thanksgiving.” He heads there as a crow flies. “Then the one in Marblehead in June. She mixes up her MOs. Beatings, a stabbing, shootings with a PGF, a spear gun. Indoors, outdoors, on land, on a boat, underwater. Whatever the hell she feels like.”

  He leans close to the handcrafted silver fish on the pedestal table, nudging the articulated tail with his purple nitrile-sheathed knuckle.

  “This is kind of strange. It’s actually a box.” Anger hardens his tone as he carefully picks it up and the tail moves, the eyes staring at me. “A heavy one, must be solid silver. Except I can’t open it because it’s glued shut. I can smell the glue so it wasn’t applied all that long ago. Maybe while we were gone. Maybe while the clocks were being wound. I don’t hear anything loose inside.” As he shakes it a little. “So here’s what I have to say, Doc. What happened to Chanel Gilbert is personal. It’s sexual. This isn’t about a burglary or some other crime that got out of control and ended in murder. It’s obvious what we’ve got is sick and demented, and we’re being jerked around and we know by who. Of course that’s just me talking. I’m not that kind of expert. I’m not Benton.”

  I’ve paused by the fireplace to look at the clocks, at the bookcases filled with leather-bound books on either side of the wide stone hearth. “It’s all about power,” I tell him as he squats by the scene case and begins pulling out trays. “Everything with her is about power. That’s what she loves. It’s what sexually excites and drives her. You don’t have to be a profiler to figure that out.”

  Marino finds a small plastic bottle labeled ACETONE and returns to the small table next to the cherry sofa with black leather cushions. He picks up the silver fish box in his gloved hands.

  “Let’s hope it’s not a bomb.” He’s almost joking. “If it is then I’ll just kiss my ass good-bye.” He finds camera equipment.

  “And mine by the way.”

  “Someone glued the lid on and I don’t think it was all that long ago. I want to know why.” He starts taking photographs of the box. “The other alternative is to bring in the bomb squad. Maybe Amanda Gilbert would like to watch. Let’s see what else we can do to put her on the friggin’ warpath.”

  He digs in the scene cases for fingerprint powder and brushes. I peruse old books as he checks the silver box for latent prints, finding not so much as a smudge. He swabs for DNA and he’s getting angrier and more aggressive. He’s feeling manipulated and mocked. I know when the pressure is building inside Marino, and he’s about to blow.

  “I mean you think it’s her.” He angrily rips open a packet of swabs. “By now you don’t have any second thoughts.” It’s not a question. He’s telling me as if there can be no doubt. And there isn’t. We know.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “And you’ve been thinking it all day.”

  “It’s been on my mind since I started getting the videos.” I slide b
ooks off shelves, opening them, looking for any indication they meant something to someone. “I think it’s a foregone conclusion who we’re dealing with.”

  “But usually you’d be on the phone to Benton.” Marino dips a swab in acetone. “And except when we were leaving Lucy’s house you haven’t been in touch with him at all. Not even before you knew he was up in the helicopter. You’ve been shutting him out of everything.”

  I offer no answer or explanation. I’m not going to discuss Benton with him, and I continue to scan musty-smelling books that without exception are arcane. Fly-fishing. Hunting dogs. Gardening. Stone masonry in nineteenth-century England. I’ve come across similar miscellaneous collections in homes accessorized by interior decorators who buy antique books by the yard.

  “Most of what you’re seeing is impersonal,” I inform Marino but he’s distracted. “Except for the hourglasses, the spinning wheels, the candles, the iron crosses, and the clocks,” I add and he isn’t paying attention. “They’re not part of the decor. They seem collected for some reason, possibly a symbolic one.” I say nothing more.

  Marino has the silver box open and is walking toward me. His face is an angry dark red. He holds both halves of the silver box in one gloved hand, pointing the fish’s head away from us. He touches his finger to his lips at the same instant I hear movement in the central hallway.

  “Looks like she read strange stuff.” Marino makes bland small talk, alerting me that there’s a problem.

  We’ve been talking inside this house and shouldn’t have been. We’ve been discussing this case and Carrie, and someone has been listening. I can very well imagine who.

  “I don’t think anybody’s been reading these books,” I add to our mundane discussion as the small black device inside the fish box continues to record us.

  The eyes are actually pinholes for the mini-recorder lens and microphone, and I’m reminded of the electric pencil sharpener in Lucy’s Quantico dorm room. I remember the dragon in her rock garden and the garnet Mona Lisa eyes that seemed to follow me. I feel the hair prickle on my arms and the back of my neck even as I act as if nothing is wrong.

  “I doubt these were collected because someone wanted to read them,” I’m saying to Marino as he carries the silver box and its concealed recording device to the other side of the room. “I suspect what you’re seeing is an example of the L.A. influence. It’s as if much of her home was designed like a movie set with eclectic antiques, rugs and old paintings of people and places that likely had no connection to anyone that matters.”

  “And that means what to you besides Chanel Gilbert comes from Hollywood money?” He opens a paper evidence bag as we continue to talk as if nothing is abnormal.

  “It tells me she parked herself here. But she lived somewhere else. Possibly metaphorically.” I feel a presence and turn around.

  The four officers in black ballistic gear are in the doorway.

  CHAPTER 35

  MARINO FOLDS THE TOP OF THE BROWN PAPER BAG, sealing it with red tape.

  “Battery operated, wireless, and probably installed not all that long ago.” He says this to Ajax, who suggests they call in the cyber investigation unit to sweep the house for surveillance devices.

  “We should get that going ASAP,” he adds.

  “Not until we’re done and the hell out of here. I don’t need any more cops stomping through.” Marino finds a Sharpie in the scene case.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you. I meant the geek squad, and while they’re at it they also should look for anything capable of jamming radio signals and rerouting cell phone traffic.” Marino uses his teeth to pull the cap off a Sharpie.

  “Someone might be listening. Where there’s one device there are probably others,” Ajax warns him. “These days I assume there’s cameras everywhere.”

  “Let them listen. Screw whoever it is including the Feds. Hello, Feds,” Marino says loudly, rudely. “So nice of you to join us.”

  “Nothing caught my attention when we were looking around but that doesn’t mean you’ve got privacy. Like I said, I never assume I’ve got privacy except hopefully in my own home.” Ajax is talking to both of us. “And even there we got cameras. But I know where they are in that case.”

  “Maybe Chanel Gilbert didn’t have privacy either. Maybe she was being spied on.” Marino just keeps on talking. “Or maybe she was blocking any attempt at someone spying on her. No matter which it is we should be asking the same question. Who the hell was she and what was she involved in?”

  “You’re clear in here,” Ajax lets us know but his eyes are riveted to me now.

  I know what his opinion is. He doesn’t have to say it and out of respect for me he won’t. But he wears his doubt like a sandwich sign and there can be no question what he would advise if asked. He’d point out that if the situation merits a special response team searching the property then I shouldn’t be here.

  To tactical operators, to troops involved in the active warfare of military and sting operations, I’m nonessential personnel. If the order on any given day is kill or be killed? Then justice and the way something might play out in court are low on the list. They may not be on the list at all. The Ajaxes of the world aren’t the excavators, the scientists who have to interpret and decipher what they discover. Special ops shoot the cobras. It’s up to me to figure out if it was merited. That’s my job. I walked off it earlier today. I won’t again.

  “No sign of anyone upstairs or down,” Ajax continues to brief us. “In fact if you ask me it doesn’t look like most of the house has been lived in for a while. Other than the master bedroom at the back of this floor. Someone’s definitely using that. Or was.”

  He waits near the doorway, the three other cops behind him in the hallway, their forearms resting on the matte black stocks of the rifles across their chests, barrels pointed down, their night vision goggles flipped up on their helmets. When they shift their weight or move they are subtle and silent. They’re agile and nonreactive. They’re disciplined, stoical, what I consider the perfect hero blend of selflessness and narcissism. You have to love yourself if you’re going to fight gloriously and bravely, if you’re going to survive at any price while protecting a person or a people with your life. It’s a contradiction. It seems illogical. It’s not a stereotype or a cliché when I say that special ops aren’t like the rest of us.

  “So unless there’s anything else?” Ajax asks Marino.

  “Nothing right now except for whatever’s happened to Hyde.” He finishes labeling the bag and puts the cap back on the Sharpie, tosses it into the top tray of the open Pelican case. “I heard from Lapin but still nothing from Hyde. We know he made a phone call from here before he left this morning and it’s just more of the same crazy crap. We ping his phone and it comes back to a cell tower right here that doesn’t exist. It sounds to me like someone is scrambling, jamming radio signals, turning this location into a dead zone for communications.”

  “Unless he uses his phone again we won’t get anything else.” Ajax joins his team in the hallway. “If you don’t hit SEND? There’s no signal and we can’t find you. It’s unusual that he’s not used his phone for the past three hours. Unless you’re sick, disabled or someplace that makes you turn it off, you’re going to use your phone for something.”

  “No shit,” Marino says.

  “Are you sure his phone’s not here somewhere?” one of the other cops asks. “Any possibility he might have dropped it, set it down and doesn’t have it with him? I mean we didn’t see it anywhere. But that doesn’t mean it’s not here. What happens when you call his number?”

  “It goes straight to voice mail like the phone’s turned off or the battery’s dead.” Marino tries Hyde’s number again. “Straight to voice mail just like it’s been doing.”

  “It’s on the air that we’re looking for him and his car,” Ajax says. “Everybody’s looking from here to Timbuktu. I’ll get a couple backups on the perimeter so you t
wo don’t get lonely.”

  “We won’t be here much longer.” Marino slides his phone back into a pocket. “The Doc wants a walk-through of the important areas, and then we’re out. I need the backup units to stay in place until we find Hyde, until we figure out what happened to the victim’s Range Rover. No one unauthorized steps foot on this property or inside the house unless I say.”

  “Roger that,” Ajax says. “You know where to find me.”

  Marino and I watch them leave, disappearing down the hallway, past the staircase, into the foyer. I listen for the front door to shut. I can barely make out the sound of their SUV starting up. I’m keenly aware that we’re alone again, and I feel the emptiness and the silence as Marino returns to the foyer. He leaves the taped-up paper bag and other evidence near the door.

  “You heard what he said,” I say as he walks back to me. “If there’s one covert device there could be others.”

  “I would count on it. Ready?” He snaps shut the scene case and picks it up.

  Back into the hallway and the next right is the dining room, small with a low ceiling, the table built of an old barn door and surrounded by eight rustic brown leather chairs. Overhead is a Tiffany pendant chandelier, and I scan the dark oil pastoral scenes beneath gallery lights. The paintings depict cows and rolling hills, and meadows and mountains, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English and Dutch. The dishes in the Georgian breakfront cabinet are very old Chinese porcelain, and I detect the hand of a decorator again.

  Pale gold damask draperies are drawn over the glass sliders, and I part the heavy satiny fabric. I look out at a narrow side yard hemmed in by a wrought-iron fence. Rain splashes deep puddles that are like small ponds, and rose petals litter the lawn like pastel confetti. The fence terminates at a tall dense boxwood hedge at the back of the property. I notice loose bricks and large stones, a hint of ruins possibly from an outbuilding in an earlier more gracious era, and I’m reminded of the people of New England. They’ll work around and build on the past. But they’ll never get rid of it.