Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  Not SWAT, I think. It looks like a limo.

  “I think if we consider the context, Kay, this hair goes back a long time,” Ernie says. “Possibly from a buffalo skin, a rug, a robe that’s inside someplace or possibly was in an earlier era. The Cambridge house where your truck was parked when you found the dust bunny, the arrow? It’s really old.”

  “Yes. More than three hundred years.” My attention is riveted to the SUV, a Cadillac Escalade with dark tinted windows and a livery license tag.

  It’s slowly backing toward me, starting and stopping, taillights flaring red as Ernie tells me he’s been doing some poking around. He’s been excavating as he puts it, and he reminds me for the hundredth time at least that he should have been an archaeologist.

  “What have you dug up?” My eyes are on the black SUV getting closer.

  “That the Gilbert house was built by some rich Englishman who owned a shipping company,” he says. “According to what I’ve come across the place started out as a sizable estate in Cambridge’s rural days when there was nothing much there but a small college called Harvard. The original property included a smokehouse, a guesthouse and servants’ quarters, a kitchen, and one article said cows were kept in the basement out of the harsh winter weather. They’d take them outside to graze then return them to built-in stalls.”

  “I can only imagine the trace evidence in such a place.” I see where he’s going with this.

  “Trace evidence like the broken piece of Venetian glass that could be from a trade bead,” he says, “which could be related to the shipping company. As could furs.”

  But where might such fragile ephemerae have been preserved this long and out of view? I’ve yet to see anything on the property that could be a time capsule. The house has been renovated and enlarged over the centuries, and the outbuildings are gone with not much left but the broken bricks and stones scattered beneath a backyard hedge I noticed through a window. Then the FBI helicopter thunders through my mind and I remember what Lucy said about ground-penetrating radar. The FBI was searching Lucy’s property for anything buried. Maybe the place to be searching is here.

  I resist the impulse to get out of my SUV, to begin looking around. Benton and Marino will show up any minute. It wouldn’t be wise to wander the grounds alone, and I stay put with my doors locked as Ernie tells me what he’s found out about the early American fur trade. He says unusual fibers beneath a buffalo’s undercoat can be spun into a fabric similar to cashmere, and this is one reason the skins were a popular export until the end of the nineteenth century.

  “Bottom line?” he adds as I watch the Escalade inch closer, faltering, lurching, as if something is wrong with the driver. “Everything we’re finding seems to be from the same context.”

  Water sloshes around the oversize tires, beading on the glossy black paint. The wipers have been turned off, the back windshield fogged up and I don’t know how the driver can see. I’m about to bolt out of my SUV when the Escalade halts inches from my front bumper. It has me blocked in when it couldn’t be more obvious that I’m not merely parked here. I’m on official business with the engine running, the lights on. Not to mention I’m sitting inside.

  I keep my eyes on the Escalade. I wait for someone to get out of it.

  NO ONE DOES. The driver’s door doesn’t open and I decide the limo is Amanda Gilbert’s. Perhaps it dropped her off then drove away for some reason. Now it’s back.

  “Where exactly did you find this buffalo fiber?” I ask Ernie.

  “The arrow fletching,” he replies. “The dyed blond hair.”

  “Human?”

  “As you suspected, I’m sorry to say, because the implication is a pretty bad one. The hair is saturated with glue, so you can imagine what’s stuck to it,” he replies. “I can’t say whose hair. Hopefully DNA will tell us soon. Of course we might be talking the DNA of one of our early ancestors. The tissue and hair could be really old I suppose.”

  “They aren’t. The excised scalp is dried but not mummified and has a slight odor of decomposition. My guess is it’s been in someplace moderately cool and dry but is relatively fresh.”

  “How fresh?”

  “Days old. Possibly weeks,” I reply. “Again it depends on where it’s been since it was removed from someone’s head.”

  “Postmortem? Because I sure as hell hope so. But knowing her? That wouldn’t be as much fun.”

  Ernie has examined tool marks and other evidence we believe were left by Carrie Grethen during the commission of her various violent acts that in the past year include at least six homicides. He knows what she’s capable of. He doesn’t doubt her existence. He doesn’t find it convenient or politically advantageous to blame Lucy for her crimes. He has no compulsion to engage Carrie in a battle that is ours to lose, and I worry that’s exactly what has happened. What she’s set in motion may be too far gone to remedy.

  Non fare i patti con il diavolo. Non stuzzicare il can che dorme.

  “At this moment I can’t promise it occurred postmortem,” I tell Ernie.

  Don’t make a contract with the devil. Don’t tease a sleeping dog, my father used to say.

  “The victim could still be alive,” I explain. “A partial scalping isn’t necessarily a fatal injury.”

  “So she’s gotten rid of someone else or is going to,” Ernie replies.

  “This isn’t about a need to eliminate people as a matter of convenience or expediency.” I feel hatred stir in my deep dark place. “It never is with her even if she shoots the person from a mile away. It’s about power and control. It’s about what feeds her insatiable compulsions that inevitably cause profound pain and annihilation to anyone in her path.”

  “I sure as hell hope she’s not torturing someone she’s holding captive somewhere,” Ernie then says.

  Given the opportunity Carrie is fond of removing flesh. If she’s in the mood she doesn’t wait for her victim to die before she goes to work with a sharp blade or in one case I know of a well-honed chisel. It all depends on who and what strikes her fancy, and she can be impulsive. Benton says she can be whimsical, a word far kinder than I would apply to the likes of her. But he’s right about her ability to turn on a dime, as I’ve heard it defined.

  If Carrie has a fatal flaw it’s her emotionality. She can’t stop until she’s over the cliff. Based on her history, that can take years before she vanishes again or we mistakenly assume she’s dead.

  “When I can look at the tissue microscopically,” I tell Ernie, “I should be able to say whether there was a vital response. I should be able to say with certainty whether the injury is postmortem or not.”

  “Any idea who she might have targeted?”

  “Whoever it is she’s taunting us with it,” I reply and on and off I’ve been thinking about the boy.

  What has happened to Troy Rosado? What did Carrie do with him after she murdered his politician father, shooting him to death from aboard his own yacht while he was waiting on the water’s surface to begin his dive? I tell Ernie to make sure the DNA lab is aware of my grim suspicion. It would be like Carrie to partner with a disturbed teenage boy, to seduce him into doing her bidding. Then to thank him the way she does. Which is hideously.

  “What do you know about the glue on the arrow?” My anger rolls to a boil. “Do you have a chemical analysis of that yet? Anything special?”

  “Cyanoacrylate, good ole Super Glue.”

  “What else?”

  “So far it’s quite the trace evidence bouillabaisse.” Ernie sounds cheerful as he talks about the trash in life that he considers treasure. “Bovine hair, and remember I mentioned people used to keep cows in the basement. Also deer hair, which isn’t unusual. And I’ve found wool, cotton lint and other natural fibers, pollen, and pieces and parts of cockroaches and crickets. Plus potassium nitrate. In other words saltpeter in addition to sulfur, carbon and traces of iron, copper and lead that have sort of permeated everything,” he says and I understand why he’s in the fire
arms lab.

  Saltpeter, sulfur and carbon are the basic components of gunpowder. Specifically black powder.

  “What’s really strange are tiny globules of metal that was molten at some point,” Ernie says. “It’s what I commonly see on skin, especially around burns in electrocutions.”

  “Possibly part of gunshot residue?” I think of the granule I saw that looked like a black sugar crystal.

  “The molten metal is copper and unrelated to GSR in my opinion. Like I said I associate it with electrical burns we see in fatal electrocutions. I’m putting you on speakerphone now,” Ernie says. “We’ll let a real gun nut weigh in.”

  “You’re sure it’s not gunshot residue, both burned and unburned powder that we typically see in shootings?” I rephrase my question. “In other words could the residue be from something contemporary? Is there some crazy reason GSR could have been inside my truck? And maybe that’s why it’s showing up in the lab?”

  “I’d say no. I’d say it categorically.” It’s not Ernie talking now. “No one has cleaner forensic vehicles than we do and if the black powder in question is burned it would be very fragile. Chances are we wouldn’t be finding it.”

  The deep midwestern voice belongs to Jim, the chief of the firearms lab.

  “Burned black powder is extremely corrosive,” he explains. “Especially when it’s exposed to moisture, for example condensation that forms when a gun barrel is cooling. There’s a chemical reaction that forms sulfuric acid, and if you don’t know that and don’t clean your black powder pistol right away? The barrel is fouled like you wouldn’t believe. I’m talking within hours. What we’ve got here isn’t burned powder. It’s definitely not GSR.”

  In contrast unburned black powder can remain viable indefinitely if it’s protected in an abandoned armory or is sealed by rust inside an old weapon, and that’s what Jim and Ernie believe we’re talking about. Unburned powder that could be hundreds of years old, and I think of the stories I’ve heard about antique firearms loaded with ammunition that people assume is inert until the gun accidentally goes off.

  “How many cannonballs have you seen used as doorstops or hanging from gates especially during your Virginia days?” Jim says.

  “If I had a dollar for every one,” I reply.

  “Most people have no idea a cannonball from the American Revolution or the Civil War could still explode, that they’re basically decorating their house with a bomb.”

  “Could the black powder possibly be modern?” I ask the question again because it’s critically important. “Even remotely possible? How can we be sure someone isn’t using it to build an explosive device?”

  “BP”—as Jim refers to black powder—“isn’t child’s play. Using it to build a bomb would be impractical and dangerous.”

  “As is true of everything it all depends on who you’re talking about.”

  “Listen I’m the first to say we should never underestimate any potential disaster. Better safe than sorry. And sure. The person could make BP. When I was a kid I used to make my own, was a regular Betty Crocker in the garage. It’s a damn wonder I lived long enough to vote and buy booze.”

  “The person I’m most concerned about may do her own gunsmithing, may reload her own ammo,” I say to him and Ernie. “If so there would be traces of gunpowder, lead, iron and copper in her work area and possibly elsewhere. That’s why I’m asking if we’re absolutely certain the black powder is of antiquity and not from a location where someone might be building a weapon of mass destruction.”

  “I personally think it’s an old remnant from the same era the other trace evidence is from.” It’s Ernie who says this, and I search my memory.

  CHAPTER 44

  I CAN’T RECALL SEEING BLACK POWDER IN ANY MACHINE shop Lucy has ever owned or worked in. I don’t remember seeing its modern substitute Pyrodex either.

  My niece has always been into extreme technology and has been tinkering and tampering with electronics and machines since she could walk. She isn’t the sort to care about firing a flintlock gun or a muzzle-loader. She’s never been particularly interested in things that are old. She’d rather read a book about physics than history. She doesn’t collect antiques. She’s not particularly sentimental about the past.

  Lucy does her own handloading of ammunition and has for almost as long as she’s been shooting her very fine guns. I’ve always preached safety first and would be very unhappy if Lucy worked with black powder. It’s easily ignited. It’s highly unpredictable and I’ve worked my share of explosive catastrophes when someone decides to make a dirty bomb and arrives at the morgue in heavy-duty plastic bags. I remember my surprise in the early days of my career when I realized that the first question in such cases is who are the bombers versus their victims.

  It wasn’t always obvious at first that the eviscerated, handless, headless body I examined turned out to be what was left of a cruel intention that literally blew up in the perpetrator’s face. Now and then evildoers do it to themselves. I won’t say it’s poetic justice. But I think it.

  “How many granules did you find?” I ask Ernie as I wonder if Carrie knows what we’ve discovered.

  Or is the evidence in question something she left deliberately? Because it could be. It very well may be. If so what is it she’s hoping we’ll conclude and act on? I don’t want to engage with her. I don’t want to dance but I’m doing it even as I tell myself to resist. I shouldn’t have started but I did, and the synchronizing isn’t mine. I didn’t choreograph it. I wasn’t invited. I was recruited and tricked. But it doesn’t matter at this point.

  I fatti contano più delle parole. Another thing my father used to say.

  “Five,” Ernie answers my question. “Two in the dust bunny. Three in the fletching, the dyed human hair glued to the arrow. By the way? Jim had to head out to a deposition. He said to call if you need anything else.”

  Actions count more than words. I’m demonstrating it even as I’m sitting here. If I didn’t want to play along I should have returned to my office hours ago. But that’s not who I am and Carrie knows it.

  “And I’ve just e-mailed you a couple photos,” Ernie says.

  “Hold on.” I log on to the laptop built into the console.

  I open the images Ernie has sent and at a magnification of 100X the BP granules look like broken pieces of coal, black and irregular. At 500X they look like meteorites big enough to land a spacecraft on, rugged and jagged, no two shapes alike. They’re mingled with other debris, what looks like thick cables and cords and crystals in vivid colors. Dirt is only dirt when we don’t see it up close. Under magnification it becomes a ruined world of broken edifices and habitats and the disintegrating remains of past lives that include bacteria and beetles and human beings.

  “Well it’s definitely not like smokeless powder, not like any manufactured propellant I’ve seen.” I save the photographs in a folder. “Those granules come in a variety of shapes and sizes that are uniform and don’t occur in nature. They don’t look anything like what you just showed me. But I have to ask you again, Ernie. Old or new? What if someone makes BP? Will it look the same as it did centuries ago?”

  “She could be making the stuff,” he says as I watch the Gilbert’s front door open. “Cooking it herself, sure she could. Jim says most people into BP these days are do-it-yourselfers, and it’s risky as hell but not all that hard. Just saltpeter, sulfur and carbon with a dash or two of water and voilà, you’ve made a cake. And I always add the caveat of not trying this at home.”

  Amanda Gilbert emerges first on the front porch, and I feel a deep sense of doom rumble through me like an earthquake.

  “When it’s dry you break it up and force it through screens or whatever’s handy in the kitchen like a spaghetti strainer.” Ernie continues his deadly cooking lesson while my thoughts keep bumping into Carrie Grethen.

  How cruel and cunning it would be to resort to a low-tech black powder bomb loaded with vicious frag like ball bearings an
d nails. I’d much rather be shot. So would most people. Carrie no doubt would be amused by the thought of such a mutilating way to die. Or maybe her goal is to maim and torment, to terrorize, to rip us apart one inch, one limb, one portion of scalp at a time.

  I watch Amanda Gilbert, Benton and Marino talking on the front porch out of the rain as Ernie tells me about other microscopic fragments that he considers significant. It’s possible the black powder was once stored in oak kegs, he’s decided. It could go back to the American Revolution or the Civil War. Unless it’s homemade? The BP Ernie has found can’t be modern. He’s quite certain it isn’t but I’m withholding judgment. If I’m mindful of nothing else this day it’s to be very careful of assumptions.

  “I’m thinking about an outbuilding, a cellar?” He again wants to know if we’ve searched everywhere. “It’s significant that I’ve yet to find anything consistent with contemporary times. Nothing synthetic for example such as polyester or nylon fibers.”

  “We checked the basement.” I look out my side window at Amanda Gilbert arguing with Marino on the front porch. “And it’s empty and clean. It isn’t closed or sealed off. It’s accessible by bulkhead doors that open into the yard.”

  “It could be a place that in an earlier life was an armory and later was turned into something else,” Ernie suggests. “Just keep that in mind when you’re looking around.”

  Amanda Gilbert, Benton and Marino are making their way down the front steps in the gentle steady rain. I tell Ernie I have to go as a chauffeur climbs out of the Escalade, and he’s a Mister Magoo squinting, his big ears sticking out from his uniform cap.

  I watch him open the back door for Amanda Gilbert and I’m not surprised by his erratic driving, his starting and stopping earlier. Marino and Benton climb inside my SUV and in typical fashion Marino picks the front seat. He doesn’t ask. I pull out after the Escalade, keeping my distance.