Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  Then I hear it again. A muffled thud. As if someone just slammed a door a floor below us in the cellar.

  “What the hell was that?” Marino’s hand drops to his gun. “Stay here,” he orders me, as if I’d ever consider such a thing.

  “I’m not staying anywhere alone in this house.” I follow him past the staircase, and he opens the door I saw him use this morning, flipping on lights.

  “I’m checking,” he says.

  “I’m right behind you.”

  The wooden stairs leading down are very old and scuffed, and the walls are stone. I feel as if I’m descending into the bowels of an old English castle as I take one steep step at a time, slowly, pausing every other second and careful with my leg. The air is cool. I smell dust. I detect fluctuations in light and shadow as if clouds are passing over the sun. But there are no clouds down here. There’s no sun. The cellar is subbasement and there are no windows.

  “What’s moving?” I ask Marino. “There’s a light barely moving on the wall.”

  “I don’t know.” He’s in front of me with his gun drawn.

  Ten steps and then a landing, and four more steps and we’re inside an empty windowless space of stone and plaster walls, and I scan stone-pillared archways and a rough stone floor covered with rush mats. Suspended by braided fabric cords from the high cave-like ceiling are ceramic funnel lamps, and the one closest to the bulkhead doors is swinging slightly.

  We silently stare up at it, then at the double doors, the wood gray on this side, repainted many times, and I notice dried water spots. The doors were opened at some point when it was raining. They’re built into the wall about four feet off the ground and accessed by a stone ramp that is bone dry and very clean. I notice that the latch lock is modern and the key is in it. There’s no sign that the doors are alarmed, and Marino pushes them with a Tyvek-covered shoe. They don’t budge. He looks up at the lamp swaying imperceptibly now as if touched by a spirit or a draft.

  “What we just heard wasn’t these doors shutting,” he decides. “If someone had just gone out this way they wouldn’t be locked. Not with the key still inside. And rain would have gotten in. There’d be water and dirt that washed in from the flower bed.”

  Not if the person cleaned up afterward.

  Marino holds his Glock in his right hand, the barrel pointed down as he walks to another door, this one in the far wall, a normal pedestrian door painted white. He climbs the four stone steps leading up to it.

  “Locked and dead bolted.” His Tyvek-covered feet make a slippery sound on stone as he returns to me. “I don’t know why the hell this light was moving unless something ran into it, maybe flew into it. This joint probably has bats.”

  “We definitely heard what sounded like a door shutting, and we’ve heard it more than once today. Are you suggesting bats are responsible for that too?” I say as my phone rings, and I’m surprised I have a signal down here.

  I look at the display. It’s Jen Garate. She’s parking on the driveway and I tell her to meet me at the top of the steps near the supercans at the east side of the house.

  “Why is there a roll of crime scene tape in the flower bed by those big wooden doors?” she asks. “I assume you noticed it?”

  “Stay away from the front of the house,” I tell her. “Meet me exactly where I just told you and don’t touch anything.”

  I USE TYVEK as an umbrella, holding a disposable lab coat over my head as I step outside on the landing. The rain is steady but not as hard, the sky lighter to the south.

  I block the open door. I hope if we stay out here we won’t be overheard by any interior surveillance devices that might be hidden somewhere. Beyond that there’s nothing I can do, and it’s not the first time I’ve worried about drop cams, nanny cams and other home security devices that are increasingly common and easy to use. When I work a crime scene these days it always enters my mind that what we do and say may not be private.

  Jen Garate climbs out of the CFC SUV she’s parked in front of my truck. Dressed in rain gear she trots toward me, her rubber boots splashing through water as if she’s having great fun. She’s loud on the wooden steps. She’s excited as we exchange keys, her wet fingers fumbling and pushy.

  “Don’t go into the back of the truck except to remove the packaged evidence,” I instruct her, and I’m not friendly or about to let her into the house.

  That’s what she wants. It’s obvious she’s desperate to come inside.

  “They’re in the first locker.” I’m all business as I explain. “Receipt the packages to Ernie after you’ve left the truck in the evidence bay. He’ll take it from there.”

  “I need more details about what happened to it.” Her long dark hair is tied back, her eyes intensely blue beneath her baseball cap as she stares past me into the kitchen.

  “I’ve given you the information you need for now.”

  “I’m happy to come in and help,” she says. “It must be complicated or you wouldn’t have been here earlier and come back. Marino’s with you?”

  “He is?” It’s my way of reminding her that she’s not to interrogate me.

  “Hey don’t mess with me cuz I know he’s with you.” She’s teasing seductively, talking fast as if she’s on speed. “I’ve heard his radio chatter. That officer he’s looking for? What’s his name? Hyde as in Doctor Jekyll? Just so you know, it’s on Twitter that Cambridge P.D. is looking for him, that there’s an APB because it appears he’s vanished off the radar and they can’t find his police cruiser. Do you know what happened?”

  “I’m not the one listening to radio chatter. You tell me.” I don’t answer her questions, and I don’t like the way she continues looking past me and inching closer to the open door.

  “I can finish up in here with Marino so you can get back.” She doesn’t offer but says it like a directive, and I feel my dislike of her intensify.

  Jen Garate is pretty in a bad girl way, midthirties with olive skin and a full-bodied figure that she loves to flaunt. When she applied for the job I didn’t give much thought to her tattoos and Gothic jewelry or her snug skimpy clothing, and none of that is my real problem with her. What I have come to object to and resent are her invasiveness and histrionics. Everything she does is motivated by her own brand of exhibitionism. She can be digging up skeletal remains or recovering a dead body from a river and she somehow makes it a sexy spectator sport.

  “Please get the truck back as discussed,” I tell her, “and I’ll see you and everyone shortly I hope.”

  She lingers on the top step as rain smacks her rain suit, dark blue with forensics in yellow on the back. A sly smile, a smirk creep over her face.

  “Sorry to hear about Lucy,” she says and I don’t react.

  I play dumb as Marino’s heavy footsteps enter the kitchen.

  “What do you mean you’re sorry about her?” I ask Jen calmly, as if there is nothing on earth that might bother me right now.

  “Well from the way I hear it the helicopter buzzing her house this morning wasn’t hers.”

  “And where might you have heard such a thing?” I ask and Marino is behind me in the kitchen.

  I step inside next to him, both of us out of the rain and leaving her in it.

  “Is Lucy in trouble?” Jen stares at him. “I sort of have a right to know. I mean even you have a right to know, Pete. Doesn’t matter that you aren’t at the CFC anymore. You and Lucy are really close. So if she’s in trouble with the Feds don’t you think you should be aware? That everyone around her should be?”

  “What makes you think she’s in trouble?” he asks.

  “BAPERN.”

  The Boston Area Police Emergency Radio Network includes more than a hundred different local agencies, and the state police and the FBI. I can’t imagine why anything about Lucy or her property would have been broadcast over BAPERN.

  “I know the FBI had a chopper up and it was pretty obvious where it was,” Jen explains. “Lucy’s big spread in Concord.”

/>   “Oh yeah? And why would the Feds be talking about one of their tactical helicopters over BAPERN?” Marino glowers at her. “The answer is they wouldn’t. They’d be on the Air Traffic Control freq.”

  “It wasn’t the Feds talking. It was the Concord cops. Plus your big truck was complained about.” She directs this to me. “You blocked in an FBI car or something? Apparently a Concord cruiser checked out why the chopper was flying over Lucy’s house and there was talk about our truck blocking an FBI car.”

  “No shit,” Marino says snidely. “And guess what? It’s not our job to answer your questions. You need to leave.”

  “I’m not asking questions. I’m telling you stuff you clearly don’t know.”

  “We don’t need your help.”

  “Maybe you’re not smart enough to ask for it.” She stares defiantly at him and I can’t believe it.

  He slams the door shut in her face. The last thing I see is Jen Garate’s mouth dropping open as she protests. I move to the window over the sink. I stand there looking out as she goes down the steps. She follows the walkway and drives off in the big white truck, and I feel satisfaction when the tires slide off the bricks and bump through mud. She overcorrects, fishtailing slightly. I drive the damn thing better than she does.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE OLD SAYING THAT YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT has morbid implications if you’re me. I can tell a lot about people from what’s in their cupboards and trash.

  Marino and I are searching the kitchen now as I caution him about Jen. It’s not the first time and likely won’t be the last. The empty trash can is exactly as we left it, no bag inside, the plastic liner pulled up far enough to keep the lid open.

  “I just wish you wouldn’t,” I’m saying.

  “You know me. I’m always honest.” He shuts a drawer of pot holders and dish towels.

  “Please don’t give her any reason to sue the CFC, calling it a hostile workplace, for example, because people like you slam doors in her face. I don’t care if it’s honest.”

  “I don’t like her and it’s not because she has my old job.”

  Inside the refrigerator I scan shelves of bottled water and juices, and white wine, sticks of butter and condiments. I think about Chanel’s gastric contents. It would seem she ate a seafood dish, possibly a creole gumbo, stew or soup shortly before she was murdered. But I don’t see fresh vegetables such as peppers and onions or anything that suggests she cooked such a thing, and there’s no take-out box. I begin to wonder about the trash that’s disappeared. I mention it in a guarded way to Marino, knowing our every word may be monitored.

  I let him know I’m not seeing anything that might indicate someone has eaten or prepared food in recent memory. The only exception is the cold-pressed fresh juices. There are five glass bottles of them, deep red concoctions. I open one and smell ginger, cayenne pepper, kale and beets. I seriously doubt the perishable drinks are available in any grocery store I’ve been to in the Cambridge area, and I’m again reminded that this house isn’t even two miles from mine. It’s barely ten minutes from my office. It’s possible Chanel Gilbert and I shopped, gassed up our cars, ran errands in some of the same places.

  “A lot of these fresh juice companies deliver,” I’m saying to Marino. “And this particular brand isn’t one I’ve ever seen in a store.”

  He picks up a bottle of the dark red juice, turns it in his hand, inspecting the label. The name of the company is 1-Octen. It occurs to me the bottles look like the ones I saw in a bag in the back of the red Range Rover.

  “No company address anywhere, no expiration date. Sort of looks like a computer-generated label, sort of homemade?” He returns the bottle to the shelf, takes off his gloves and dips into a pocket for his phone. “And now I’m Googling it and nothing. There’s no such company. A freaky name. Maybe as in octane? Like a high-octane super fuel or food?”

  “Or in one-octen-three-one,” I suggest. “The molecular composition for the odorant that depending on other things causes blood to smell metallic.”

  “Blood?”

  “This particular blend of juice obviously is heavy in beets, explaining the deep red color. Like blood, like the essence, the fluid of life. Beets are high in iron, and iron is what we smell when blood touches our skin. One-Octen is an odd if not distasteful name for a food.”

  “Maybe Chanel Gilbert bottled it herself. Like I said it sort of looks homemade.”

  “Then we need to find a juicer, a food processor, a Ninja. And I don’t see anything like that here in the kitchen.”

  “Well maybe she was into vampires in addition to all the occult shit everywhere,” he says sarcastically.

  “It appears that she or someone was vegan and on a gluten-free diet.” I’m looking in the pantry now. “Nothing with wheat. No cheese, fish or meat in her refrigerator or freezer. Lots of herbal teas and nutritional supplements. Again there’s nothing perishable except the juice.”

  I refrain from telling him about Chanel Gilbert’s gastric contents. Vegans would abstain from shrimp or any seafood and yet that seems to be the last thing she ate before she was murdered. Was she out at a restaurant last night? Was the food delivered or brought to her by someone she knew? Are remnants of her last meal in the trash that’s missing? Was she really vegan? I don’t give voice to such questions. I don’t want anyone spying on us gifted with autopsy details.

  I retrieve an evidence bag from the scene case, deciding to take a bottle of the red juice with me because it’s inconsistent with the context. The juices are fresh. Nothing else is. It’s as if nobody has been living here for a while and yet someone has been. I’m seeing things that contradict each other. I’m picking up mixed signals. Suddenly and in unison the clocks begin to chime. It’s three P.M. Next there’s a burst of radio chatter.

  Marino turns up the volume, adjusts the squelch, and there’s a report of a fight in progress in a parking lot on North Point Boulevard.

  “Two white males, possibly juveniles in a late-model red SUV. One has on a baseball cap, the other a sweatshirt with a hood, apparently intoxicated and arguing outside the vehicle …,” the dispatcher is saying, and a marked unit responds that it’s in the area, then another one does.

  Marino tucks the radio back in a pocket. “Come on, Doc,” he says to me with a sigh. “Let’s get this over with.”

  WE HEAD DOWN a hallway of wide board pine flooring that I suspect is original to the house.

  The walls are stucco and hung with more old dark English art. A doorway leads into an oak-paneled library that’s a gallery of underwater photographs illuminated by vintage mirrored sconces that have been electrified. Built-in bookcases are crowded with more antique leather volumes most likely purchased as decor, and for a moment I stand in the doorway conducting my usual high recon as Lucy calls it.

  I take in the exposed dark timber beams in the white plaster ceiling, the wood-burning stove built into a deep stone fireplace. The wide board floor is covered with rush mats just like the ones in the cellar, and between the two curtained windows is an inlaid mahogany and satinwood writing desk. The computer that was on it has been taken to the labs, Marino informs me.

  I begin to walk around the library table. It’s at least ten feet long with a parquetry top and an elaborately hand-carved base. In the center is an empty crystal decanter, several small glasses, and another clock tick-tocking, this one tortoiseshell, gilt and colorful enamel, possibly late eighteenth century and musical. I check my watch. It’s now exactly four minutes past three P.M. The clock has been synced with the others.

  “Was there any other indication that Chanel Gilbert worked in here? What else was on the desk?” I begin looking at the framed photographs of sea turtles, eagle rays and barracuda.

  There are rainbow parrot fish, Spanish lobster, a queen conch and a goliath grouper near the shadowy carcasses of sunken ships. The water is vivid shades of green and blue, and sunlight filters through it from the surface.

  “In here we collecte
d the computer, one of these Mac Pro desktops.” Marino watches me look around at dive scenes vibrantly reflected in the mirrored sconces. “Plus we got her phone. She also has a router but there was no point in taking that, the TV and other electronics. Not at that time.”

  “What about a laptop, an iPad, any other devices?”

  He shakes his head and I wonder who doesn’t have a laptop or an iPad these days. But we don’t discuss it. I take my time perusing the sea creatures and sunken vessels as another bad feeling billows up from the darkest depths of my psyche. It slowly comes to me that what I’m seeing is familiar.

  I look more closely and begin to recognize the scattered remains of the Greek steamer The Pelinaion that sank during World War II. I know The Hermes, The Constellation and many other shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle. Where I’ve been diving many times. Where I was shot on June 15. Exactly two months ago to the day.

  “You didn’t say anything about these.” I indicate the photographs, and I don’t mean to sound accusatory but I can’t help myself.

  Where I was shot.

  “Paintings of cows, photos of fish.” Marino shrugs as he looks around. “What’s the big deal?”

  Where I was shot!

  “The diver here. Here. Here …” I walk around pointing, my right thigh throbbing. “It’s the same person. Isn’t this her? Isn’t this Chanel Gilbert?”

  The woman looks young and fit in a three-millimeter-thick black wet suit with double white stripes around the right thigh. Her fins and mask are black, and her hair is brown, and then I notice the zipper. It stops me in my tracks, startling me. I search my memory for what I saw in the video my dive mask recorded. I remember the double white stripes on the leg of the wet suit Benton was wearing as he tried to place the regulator into my mouth, and then I catch myself.

  How can I be sure it was Benton? He’s always said he helped me to the surface after I was shot. I’ve never had a reason to doubt him until today, until this very minute, and I envision what Lucy played for me inside the boathouse. In truth I couldn’t identify the diver in the video. I couldn’t swear it was Benton, and I didn’t notice the person’s wet suit zipper either. But in these photographs I’m looking at now the wet suit looks the same as what I saw earlier today—and the zipper is in front. Most are in back with a very long pull tab so you can reach around and zip yourself up.