Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’ve barely started, Benton.”

  “I meant in here. Are you done working in here because I’m not leaving unless you’re with me. You’re not staying here without me.”

  When he’s extremely serious and intense, I’m reminded of how tall he is. He seems to tower over me when he leans into a conversation, his strong chin lifted, his keen features predatory like an eagle, a hawk.

  “We don’t have much time,” he says next.

  “Who else is with you?”

  “I told them to drop me off. I was coming in alone. We should go.”

  “You told your FBI colleagues that. The ones you were flying with right before the weather turned awful. The ones who are trying to trump up a reason to ruin Lucy’s life or possibly even end it.” I won’t let him forget that unforgivable fact. “Your colleagues who are doing the bidding of the Pentagon, and that’s exactly what must be happening. Otherwise DoD wouldn’t show up on Lucy’s property pretending to be the IRS.” I say it boldly because I’m convinced he already knows.

  “We can’t get into this now.” His face is somber, his eyes intense. “We have maybe fifteen minutes before they’re back with others.”

  THE FBI will be all over this house. They’ve taken charge of the investigation as Marino and I suspected. I know what happens next.

  It doesn’t matter that I have federal jurisdiction. You can’t legislate collaboration and the FBI isn’t exactly known for working and playing well with others. They’ll take over this scene and then they’ll take over the evidence. They can do whatever they want.

  “The house hasn’t been swept yet,” I say to him. “We’re possibly being monitored. But then why am I the one telling you?”

  “I’m glad you did.” He says it with dry ice irony.

  “We should probably assume it at every scene these days.” I begin stripping the bed, and he doesn’t reply. “But then you would know that too.” I glance up at him. “It’s hard not to know something if you’re the one who did it.”

  “Did what, Kay?”

  But I’m the one who’s silent this time as I carefully fold the pillowcase that turned black in UV light. Paper rattles loudly as I package evidence and Benton watches. I feel his eyes on me. I sense he’s busy with his phone. Another scheme, another manipulation, I can’t help but think as I uncap a Sharpie and smell the bright odor of ink. I take off my gloves. I close the scene case and pick it up.

  Non fare i patti con il diavolo, my father used to say.

  “One thing I was taught when I was growing up”—I meet Benton’s eyes—“is don’t make a contract with the devil. The very act of acquiescing will land you in a pit you can’t climb out of. Or is it too late?”

  Benton continues to stand in front of the closed door. Judging by the blank look on his face he has no idea what I’m talking about. But it isn’t true. I feel strongly that it isn’t. He may not know everything going on but he knows most of it. He’s responsible for some of it at the very least, and I find it remarkable to contemplate the position I find myself in. I can’t tell what is Carrie’s bad behavior and what is the federal government’s or my husband’s.

  “Is what too late, Kay?” Benton asks.

  “Whatever you’ve done,” I reply. “And that includes the videos I’ve been watching today, watching against my will I might add. Since I didn’t exactly ask for them. Nor has anyone confessed to sending them. And if you know what I’m talking about and I suspect you do?” I add and the more I allude to the Depraved Heart videos the quieter he gets.

  He knows.

  “Well I just hope you’re sure, Benton. Because you’re playing with fire. You shouldn’t dance Carrie Grethen’s dance or get into her dialogue.” I hold his stare for a beat and hear distant footsteps in the hallway.

  What’s done is done, and Benton isn’t going to listen. I can look at him and tell it’s too late to stop whatever he’s put into motion.

  “I have evidence rounds to make and cases to check on.” I move past him as footsteps in the hallway get closer, and I hear Marino’s voice. “You can ride with me to the office. Unless you’d rather wait for your colleagues,” I say to Benton as I open the door.

  “You need to hold on.” Marino is firm but low-key for him. “Ma’am? Let me …? It’s real important they know what you just told me.”

  “You’re damn right it’s important!” Amanda Gilbert rolls toward us like a gale and I almost don’t recognize the famous producer.

  She looks considerably older than her sixty-some years. Her dyed red hair is disarrayed around her shoulders, her face haggard, her eyes dark pools of grief and something else I try to pin a label on before it’s too late.

  “Get out.” Her voice trembles as she jabs a finger at me. “I want everybody out of my house.”

  I feel her hatred and fury, and they’re not what I expect in a scenario like this. She just walked through a foyer spattered with her daughter’s blood, and there are no tears, only anger and indignation.

  “The housekeeper,” Marino says to Benton and me. “There isn’t one.”

  “What do you mean there isn’t one? Not at all?” I ask. “Then who did Hyde talk to when he first got here this morning?”

  “I got no idea,” Marino says.

  “Whoever the person is she knew Chanel.” Benton states it as a fact.

  “There’s no housekeeper? Did your daughter clean the house herself?” I ask Amanda Gilbert this but it’s Marino who answers.

  “Apparently Chanel hadn’t been here since the spring,” he says. “And she prefers to pick up after herself.”

  “Where was she?” Benton asks her mother but I’m convinced he already knows, and it’s terrible to think about how badly I’ve been fooled and for how long.

  “Who the hell are you?” she demands and he tells her.

  Then he asks, “Did she have a red Range Rover?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “There’s one registered in her name. I guess you’re not aware of that either.”

  “What are you implying? Identity theft?”

  “Who notified you about your daughter’s death?” Benton asks and he’s definitely not implying identity theft.

  What he’s hinting at is spying. The murdered woman might have been Chanel Gilbert. But she was also someone else. Her mother probably has no idea who and what her daughter really was.

  “I found out because she e-mailed me.” Amanda Gilbert jabs her finger at me, and it’s not true. “The coroner e-mailed me. A politician in other words. And I’m supposed to trust a fucking elected official?”

  I certainly didn’t send the e-mail, and Bryce swears our office didn’t either.

  “I’m actually not a coroner. And I wasn’t elected. I wonder if you could let us see the e-mail,” I say to her quietly, carefully.

  She finds it on her phone and shows it to Marino, and when he looks at me I know the truth. The CFC e-mail has been hacked. Possibly Carrie has hijacked my e-mail account and is in my office database, and if so that will be ruinous in ways I can’t begin to calculate. There can be no other explanation unless Lucy signed onto my e-mail account and sent a message to Amanda Gilbert. I seriously doubt that.

  There’s no reason for Lucy to have known about Chanel’s death until news of it appeared on Twitter not so long ago. I try to imagine what Carrie’s endgame might be as Benton asks Amanda Gilbert how long she’s owned this house. As if he doesn’t already know the answer to that, and I feel certain he does.

  “Where has she been? I’m supposed to answer that again?” Amanda Gilbert is openly hostile toward each of us but seems to distrust me the most.

  “Again?” Benton watches her carefully, and I suspect the questions he’s asking are for our benefit and not his.

  “It’s none of your damn business! I have nothing else to say to the fucking FBI!”

  Nothing else? I think. She’s talked to one of Benton’s colleagues. She’s talked to someone, and Bent
on does us the favor of asking her who.

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  “You don’t remember which agent contacted you?” he asks. “A man? A woman?”

  “Some woman as dumb as a box of hair.”

  Erin Loria.

  “She sounded stupid and southern,” Amanda Gilbert says.

  “It would be helpful if you’d tell me what you discussed,” Benton says before Marino has the chance.

  “Well by all means let me be helpful.” Her voice shakes, her eyes swimming with tears. “Chanel is a professional diver and a photojournalist who constantly travels and gets involved in assignments she doesn’t talk about.”

  She’s more than that if she was in Fort Lauderdale when I was shot. If Chanel is the diver in the video my mask recorded then she was present at the shipwreck when Carrie almost killed me. The implication is obvious, and I suspect it’s the truth. Chanel Gilbert was some sort of operative, possibly working for military intelligence or Homeland Security. Lucy and Janet knew her and I suspect Benton did too, and what that means is Chanel witnessed the attack.

  And now she’s been murdered.

  She could have sworn to Carrie’s existence and Lucy’s innocence. But Chanel Gilbert or whoever she was isn’t around to tell.

  Maybe that’s why she’s dead.

  “This is my damn house,” Amanda Gilbert is saying shakily, furiously. “I grew up in this damn house. It was my family home. My father sold it after I left for college and when it went on the market several years ago I decided to buy it for Chanel and her eventual family. I thought maybe she might settle down and have some peace and quiet, that maybe she’d stop running around and disappearing.”

  “What about Bermuda?” Marino asks her. “I’m wondering if you have a place there.”

  “I have a lot of places at my disposal. And Chanel has managed to use all of them as whistle-stops. She was hardly ever here. She’s not been anyplace for long ever since she was discharged from the Navy with PTSD.”

  “A disorder she possibly treated with medical marijuana?” I suggest, and when she doesn’t answer I add, “Although based on what I’ve seen she didn’t get her medication locally.”

  “Ma’am,” Marino says to her, “I know how difficult this is. But you need to help us out by answering our questions. We’re supposed to believe your daughter never had a housekeeper, that she tends to straighten up after her own self. Well let me ask you this. Who was Elsa Mulligan?”

  “Who?”

  “The lady who said she’s your housekeeper,” Marino replies. “The one who found your daughter’s body?”

  “I’ve never heard of any such person.” She nails her attention on me, her eyes wild. “Who really found her? It wasn’t some fictitious housekeeper that’s for damn sure! So who was it? Who was inside this house …?” She’s raised her voice until she’s yelling.

  Carrie has been staying here.

  “There is no damn housekeeper! There is no such damn person!”

  “The candles, the spinning wheels, the iron crosses and crystals.” I draw her attention to that. “Was your daughter superstitious or into the occult.”

  “Hell no!”

  “Your decorator, for example, didn’t place these items in here?”

  “I don’t know what items you’re even talking about!”

  “You’ll see them when you walk into the living room,” I reply and I can’t stop thinking about Carrie.

  The neighbors could have been seeing her for weeks, months and would have been none the wiser. They wouldn’t know the young woman driving the red Range Rover wasn’t the owner of the house. Carrie has been helping herself to whatever she wants. That’s why there are potpourris and special charms in rooms she inhabited, and I have a hunch about why the pillowcase turned black in ultraviolet light.

  I’ve heard of bed linens treated with copper oxide, especially pillowcases. Impregnating a fabric with nanoparticles of copper is supposed to help combat wrinkles and other signs of aging, and there can be no doubt how Carrie feels about her youthful appearance.

  She’s been sleeping in Chanel’s bed.

  “Someone’s been in and out according to the neighbors,” Marino is saying. “We’ve got reports of the red Range Rover being spotted on the driveway. Who the hell was in it?”

  “How dare you! How dare all of you! How could they let you in?” She steps closer to me and I smell alcohol and garlic on her breath. “Your niece seduced my daughter! She murdered my beautiful daughter in cold blood and they let you inside the house? They let you tamper with evidence!”

  She clutches my arm, her grip like iron. Tears flood her bloodshot eyes and spill down her blotchy puffy face.

  “Do you have any idea what my attorneys will do to you, to Lucy Farinelli, to the entire fucking lot of you?” she shrieks as she begins to cry uncontrollably.

  CHAPTER 43

  I’M AWARE OF MY LEG AS I SIT ALONE INSIDE THE SUV Jen Garate left for me. The ache is as deep as bone. Pain throbs in rhythm with the rain slowly thumping the roof and sliding down the windows.

  The Ford Explorer is white with the CFC crest, the scales of justice and caduceus in dark blue symbolizing what I’m supposed to represent and fight for, what I’m sworn to uphold and never violate. Justice and do no harm. Yet nothing is just. I want to harm someone. If I were given a polygraph I would fail if I said I didn’t want Carrie Grethen dead. I do. I want her eliminated for good by any means possible. My eyes don’t stop moving. My nerves, my pulse have been humming all day like high-voltage power lines. I’m constantly checking the mirrors, my Rohrbaugh pistol in my lap. As I wait. As I wonder.

  Maybe it’s part of the master plan for me to be driving this next. Maybe it was anticipated like the truck I selected this morning, and I consider that the SUV may have been tampered with too. Maybe it will go haywire on the highway or blow to the moon. Maybe that will be next and the way my time on this planet ends. I’m no longer sure of anything, not the natural course or progression of events or who’s to blame. Is this what’s supposed to happen? Is it preordained? Or does it just feel that way? Is it Carrie or someone else?

  Don’t doubt your own mind.

  Then I think about Lucy as stress spikes and arcs like electrical glitches and overloads. What can any of us believe? What’s true? Who’s to say? I don’t know what’s been manipulated and schemed with more ugly surprises on the way, and I watch and wait for Marino and Benton. They’re inside the house with a mother made berserk by grief and rage. She has enough power and money to give me as much trouble as she wants. Based on her demeanor she will try, and her accusations replay in my thoughts like a discordant chorus that won’t stop.

  Who planted the idea that Lucy had seduced and murdered her daughter? Why would Amanda Gilbert bring up my niece for any reason? Why would the Hollywood producer have heard of her? Unless Lucy and Chanel really did know each other but that seems strange too. If Chanel was a spy then why would Lucy know her? What business might they have had in Bermuda, and I remember Lucy saying the person she met there was Janet’s friend. Chanel Gilbert may have known Janet first.

  I’m not sure what that might mean. But I have no doubt someone gave the mother a reason to worry that I might tamper with evidence. I don’t have to look very hard to know who. Erin Loria is after Lucy. I can imagine the aggressive self-important FBI agent with her southern roots and twang calling Amanda Gilbert and feeding her all sorts of propaganda, miscommunications and outright lies. But why exactly? To ensure we’re sued? To frame Lucy and get me fired? To turn all of us on each other and watch us self-destruct? What is Erin Loria’s real agenda?

  I seriously doubt it has anything to do with law enforcement, with her damn job, and all these things float up from my deepest darkest trench of distrust. I can’t be certain who’s telling me the truth, including my own husband, my entire family really, and I adjust the defogger, clearing the glass. I’m grateful that the rain is on its way to stopping and t
he wind is calmer. Thunder beats a distant retreat. I can scarcely hear it anymore and to the south clouds are breaking up, flattening the way they do when their violent drama is spent.

  I keep up my scan as I glance at my e-mails, my messages. When my phone rings I realize how easily I startle right now. I’m hypervigilant and jumpy. I recognize the number calling me but I’m puzzled.

  “Scarpetta,” I answer.

  “I hate to start out by saying you’re not going to believe this,” Ernie launches in without a hello.

  “Why are you calling from the firearms lab?” I reply.

  “I’m about to get to that but first on the list?” he says. “The metamaterial you sent in may be from Lucy’s camera system, which I’m guessing is Star Trek high-tech.”

  “I asked her that and she said it wasn’t,” I’m quick to answer.

  “Not that I’ve ever seen anything quite like this associated with a security system,” he says.

  “Lucy told me she’d never seen the metamaterial before but she suspected it might be quartz or calcite.”

  “It is,” he verifies. “Specifically a laser-quality calcite that is typically used in high-grade optics like camera lenses, microscopes, telescopes. But again, the hexagonal shape of this is very odd.”

  “So we can’t know what the metamaterial might be from unless we locate a possible source for comparison.”

  “Exactly right,” he replies. “Which brings me to your buffalo fiber. I’d sure like to know the source of it because you can bet it’s old and interesting.”

  “Did you say buffalo?”

  “As in ‘Home on the Range’ and nickels from my grandfather’s day.”

  “Buffalo have fibers?”

  “The same way sheep do. For the sake of simplicity I’ll call what I found a hair. But technically it’s a fiber and a first-time match in my animal reference library,” he says proudly, almost lovingly. “Which is why I’ve been building it all these years. You’re always waiting for that one oddball something to show up …”

  “Buffalo aren’t exactly indigenous to this area.” I stare straight ahead at a black SUV backing toward me on the flooded driveway.