Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  I see the bare wires and the water on the stone floor, and I tell Benton that we can’t reach Troy without running the risk of being electrocuted. But Benton is in the same mode Marino was in moments ago. You do your job. You risk your life. You sacrifice if that’s what it takes because that’s what people like us are sworn to do.

  Troy reaches a shackled hand up toward the silver key. He swats at it feebly, spastically as if he’s half awake during a terrible dream. Then he tries to grab the knife, and each time the mobile stirs it completes an electrical circuit. There’s a boom and a blinding flash and Troy screams. As he jerks his head I notice the gaping linear wound running down the back of it, a dark gory crust where part of his scalp has been cut from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

  His narrow white chest rapidly moves in and out as he almost hyperventilates from panic. His gaunt face is patchy with stubble and a fuzzy mustache, and he cowers at the sound of approaching footsteps. But we don’t see anyone. No one seems to be in here except the three of us, and I realize what we must be hearing is another recording that is being infernally piped in wherever Carrie decides. The footsteps sound again and seem to be closer, and Troy’s reaction is Pavlovian. His reflex is to react with terror.

  “No! Please no!” He begins to make whimpering sounds like an infant, tiny cries interspersed with gasps as metal clanks and scrapes against stone. “No,” he begs as his legs go out from under him.

  He slips on the wet stone floor and struggles to regain his balance. He seems too exhausted to stand as the weight of his body threatens to pull his arms out of their sockets. He’s collapsed like a rag doll, and then he’s standing again, swaying and looking around blindly. He flaps at the key again and hits the bottle of water, and it knocks into Mister Pickle and the thudding slams and booms and the light flashes each time Troy is shocked.

  “Not again! Please!” he spits through the space where his front teeth used to be. “Please don’t hurt me anymore. Please …” He cries convulsively and can barely speak. “Please …!”

  He cowers, turning his naked back to us, and the long linear burns covering it and his shoulders are puffy and different shades of red. He grabs at the key hanging almost in reach of his shackled hands, and then another boom. He shrieks and collapses, balling up on the wet floor like a threatened centipede.

  “NO! NO!” he screams. “Please. I’ll be good. Please let me go. I’ll do anything. NOOOO!” His screams rip the air as the thudding sounds again and again, and I remember what Lucy said to Janet a little while ago about the gates of hell.

  Don’t let them slam me in the ass on my way in, Lucy repeated what she claims Carrie used to say to her, and that’s the sound that comes to mind each time. The gates of hell slamming. A prison door banging shut. Troy sobs convulsively and I understand what Carrie has set up. I’m aware of the choice I’m supposed to make and that it’s a damnation, a punishment tailored just for me, and I notice the dust balls on the floor.

  I notice the water everywhere, shining and glinting when my light skims over dirty stone. There’s a bucket filled with a liquid near Troy’s bare feet. I suspect he keeps kicking it over, possibly while trying to move it close, and I can see how dried and cracked his lips are. He’s dehydrated and hungry, and Benton wants to save him.

  “Benton, do not get any closer,” I say as Troy is shocked again, and I realize that every time we’ve heard the slamming sound it’s him being tortured.

  By now he’s so brainwashed and conditioned he no longer seems able to discern between real and remembered pain. When the recording booms he shrieks and cowers no matter what, and I smell ammonia. I smell the fresh stench of his bowels opening up as he soils himself and the floor beneath his filthy bare feet with their long curled nails, as if this once beautiful boy is being turned into a beast like a goat.

  “We have to get him out of here somehow before he’s electrocuted,” Benton says to me as he looks around, and I know what he has in mind.

  He wants to find a junction box. He’s looking for a circuit breaker. He’s inches from the wet area of the floor, and I have no question what he intends to do. Benton is going to try to rescue this kid who assisted in murdering his own father, a kid who sets fires, bullies and sexually assaults whomever he pleases. Troy Rosado is garbage and I’m not allowed to have an opinion like that. He’s done nothing in this life but hurt people and I’m not supposed to feel that either.

  “Keep still.” Benton is going to save him.

  “DO NOT get any closer,” I warn.

  Troy has been made psychotic by fear and pain, and he weakly flaps a hand around. Groping the air for the small silver key dangling from a long copper wire. Groping for the knife, and Mister Pickle dances slowly in the air. He looks exactly as I remember him, the same way he did in the first video I watched this morning. The memory of it is awful, and I’m frantic for a way to stop what’s happening.

  “You need to stay still,” Benton says to Troy. “You need to be still so we can get you out of here, son.”

  But Troy has been deconstructed and the person who may have existed before is gone. He can’t comprehend what we’re saying or doing, and he continues to flap his hands at the key, at the bottle of water, at the candy bar, at a silly toy bear I rescued from a junk shop in Richmond decades ago.

  The demonic mobile is alive around his head as he continues to shock himself and shriek, and my attention fixes on the bucket, and I bend over and pick it up. It’s full of water, and I step in front of Benton, my feet barely an inch from the wet area of stone flooring.

  “What are you doing?” he exclaims.

  I’ll be damned if either of us is going to die. I’m sorry if Troy might, and I dash the water on him, on the wires dangling over him, and they spark and pop as they short out. Silence and darkness, and the recorded slamming sounds have stopped. I smell singed hair and flesh as I grab the silver key dangling over Troy’s head. I unlock his shackles. I lower his limp body to the floor and begin CPR.

  ONE WEEK LATER

  SIGHTS AND SOUNDS ARE TRIGGERS.

  Water splashing into the sink. The clicking of an induction burner turning on. The screen door banging. Glasses and silverware clinking. Bottles clanking. Backfires on the street. Mundane events are evocative of what’s been uncommon and abnormal.

  “What are you having?” I ask Benton as I obsess over tomorrow’s front page of the Boston Globe.

  I don’t want to get into a disagreement. I don’t want to care and I’m trying not to spend my energy on anger. Benton has told me all about that story and other ones, and he should know since it was his Boston division that planted them. Waving the flag. Taking the credit.

  FBI TRAPS MASS MURDERER IN SECRET TUNNEL

  Those are the sorts of headlines and sound bites we’re hearing with more on the way, and it’s all a lie. It’s all utter bullshit. The FBI didn’t trap Carrie Grethen. Troy Rosado isn’t a mass killer. He didn’t murder FBI agents or police. He’s also not responsible for what happened in the cellar, not for any of it. He was nothing more than a victim. But the FBI can’t resist spin doctoring. They might just have invented data fiction and are about to be done in by it.

  “I don’t know.” Benton moves bottles around, checking labels. “I’m torn. Maybe I shouldn’t drink anything. Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day after that damn story breaks.”

  It includes photographs of the tunnel, which dates back to the late 1600s when hundreds of acres were settled by a wealthy Englishman named Alexander Irons. Married with eight children and many servants, he had much to protect. Extant original property records indicate he kept secret cellars full of food, gunpowder and weapons, and a fortune in silver, gold and furs. There were rumors in his day that he might have been involved in privateering, a polite word for piracy.

  We know for a fact he had subbasement cow stalls, which look like an ice cube tray of windowless cells with stone sides and dirt floors. They’re below the house about halfw
ay between Carrie Grethen’s torture chamber and the hedge in back where I noticed loose bricks and stones.

  “What I’d love is a martini but I’m afraid that will do me in for the night.” Steam clouds up as I empty a pot of boiling water and pasta into a strainer in the sink.

  “Booze booze everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Bottles clink as Benton looks through a cabinet of single malt whiskeys and small batch bourbons. “I don’t know. What goes with prosciutto di Parma and mortadella?”

  “Everything. But there’s a sparkling Malvasia if you’d like.” I shake the strainer over the sink, draining all of the water out. “That’s good with the antipasto. Or there should be a Freisa d’Asti.” I pour the steaming tagliatelle into two big bowls. “Something light and fresh would be nice.”

  “Not for me.” More bottles clink. “I think I need something strong.”

  “Nothing heavy, ponderous and peaty.” I tear up basil leaves and their fresh bright scent makes me happy until I remember why I shouldn’t be. “I’m in the mood for something easy.”

  We’ve been chatting about cocktails for the past hour, going back and forth and around and around as I cook a comfort food dinner of Ragù alla Contadina and also a vegan version of it. It’s as if we can’t make decisions about the smallest things but we talk about recent horrors easily. We decisively discuss running away and starting all over and we explore incarceration, disability and death in detail. But we can’t decide between wine and whiskey. We don’t know what we want.

  “It’s weird when you can’t think of anything that might make you feel soothed.” Benton has said this repeatedly over recent days and it’s more an observation than a complaint. “Not that we don’t feel stressed on a regular basis but usually it doesn’t last this long. It’s not relentless. I have more empathy for people who feel like this all of the time. It’s no wonder they medicate with cigarettes and booze.”

  “Medicating sounds good right about now.” I dribble unfiltered cold-pressed olive oil over pasta, tossing it with wooden spoons. “I’m not sure I remember feeling soothed it’s been so long.” I blend in fresh grated Parmesan Reggiano, crushed red pepper and the basil.

  “I know how to soothe you.”

  “Promises promises.” A second bowl of pasta is for Lucy and Janet, and I leave out the cheese. “As I said it’s been so long.”

  “Well we can’t have that. Don’t get too sleepy tonight.” Benton finds glasses in another cupboard. “A red, maybe a Valpolicella would be civilized I suppose.” He goes to the wine cooler, opens the door and shuts it without selecting anything.

  He returns to the liquor cabinet and illustrates exactly what my father meant about actions telling the truth, about people speaking with their feet. Benton sets two crystal tumblers next to a bottle of Scotch, Glenmorangie aged eighteen years. He pulls out the cork with a quiet pop.

  “No worries about my being sleepy.” I stir crushed plum tomatoes into the sauce, and the kitchen is filled with the savory aroma of onions, garlic and fresh herbs from earthenware pots on the sunporch. “If anyone wants wine I recommend the Rincione. You can go ahead and open a bottle. It should breathe before Jill gets here.”

  “She’ll drink the hard stuff I’m pretty sure,” he says and I hate the reminder.

  “Let’s put a Freisa d’Asti on ice. Maybe we can pretend this will be a festive dinner full of pleasant conversations as opposed to an interrogation we’ll pay for by the hour.”

  “Try not to be negative about her.”

  “Oh I’m not negative. Just realistically unhappy about spending an evening with her.”

  “She’s trying to help. She would do anything for us, Kay. I consider her a friend.”

  “I understand that it’s not her fault I dread seeing her. She can’t help it that I don’t want to hear her voice right now. I’m sure it’s not her choice that she represents everything wrong in our lives. It’s through no damn fault of her own that I associate her with everything I care about being taken and destroyed.”

  “Nothing’s been taken and destroyed, Kay.” Benton’s voice is gentle, his eyes soft and I can feel his love for me. “We won’t allow anything that matters to be taken from us.”

  “I don’t want Desi to be frightened by what she says.”

  “We’ll protect him. I promise. But he’s been hearing it, Kay. He’s actually taking things in stride.”

  “Maybe better than I am.” I stir wine into the sauce. “But I don’t want him worrying that his Aunt Lucy could go to jail. Or worse that she’s bad, that she used her Swiss Army knife to break into the back of my truck, and that her childhood teddy bear was involved in torture.”

  Tool marks on the flathead screwdriver matched what was used to remove screws in the taillight. The red Swiss Army knife and Mister Pickle are evidence that could be used against Lucy. I have no doubt this was part of Carrie’s plan, and I don’t expect to have a pleasant evening.

  “Let’s just get through this.” Benton kisses me and pours our drinks.

  Jill Donoghue is on her way here and the visit isn’t social. For the most part it will be miserable as we fill her in on what has occurred and what we should expect, which is nothing less than anarchy. There are possible criminal charges to explore, and of course I’m waiting for Troy Rosado to sue now that he’s no longer in critical condition.

  The rest of them are dead, and I can’t stop seeing their bodies piled in an old cow stall. I see them vividly when I least expect it. The images are there in my mind like a huge graphic painting, a gruesome mural that wraps around the walls. I see death and destruction and a future that offers little hope as we face the ugly fact that everything we’ve built in our careers has been compromised. Possibly it’s been perverted and completely destroyed. Worst of all is the thought that every case we’ve worked will be overturned and evil people will be free to pick up where they left off.

  “A little more ice please.” I set down my whiskey tumbler. “And make mine a double.”

  “She just pulled up.” Benton is peeking out the window by the breakfast table.

  “She’s early.” I turn off the stove.

  I take off my apron and absently run my fingers through my hair. There’s no mirror in the kitchen and it’s just as well. I know I look like hell. The first part of this past week I didn’t leave the office. I didn’t sleep. It wasn’t just the caseload and associated complications, which are massive. I didn’t dare vacate the premises or close my eyes while Amanda Gilbert was on the prowl and the Feds were everywhere.

  The FBI has been frantic in its investigative and PR efforts to determine how it was possible that four of their agents including Erin Loria were murdered without a struggle. They must have been lured downstairs the same way Benton and I were, and somehow Carrie electrocuted them, possibly by tricking them to step on the same wet flooring Benton was about to walk across when I short-circuited the electrical booby trap that I’m now certain would have killed him.

  I will always wonder what I was hearing. For the rest of my days I know I’m going to wonder and anguish. The boom, the thuds happening in quick succession, and as I remember them I’m haunted by the fear that what I was hearing was those four agents dying. I’ll never know but will always worry that Carrie was killing them even as Benton and I were inside the Gilbert house.

  She dragged the bodies deep into the tunnel, piling them into the same stall where we eventually would find Hyde. At least he died more humanely than the others, stabbed in the back of the neck with the copper arrow that was then planted inside my truck. It’s unlikely he knew what hit him. He didn’t suffer. His spinal cord was transected. He was blessed with instant death.

  “Maybe we could have a little music?” I take the tumbler of Scotch from Benton after he’s dropped a few more ice cubes in it. “It might not soothe us but it will help.” The liquor heats up my nose and the back of my throat. “Maybe The Magic Flute.”

  “So in good operatic fashion we can be re
minded of the ordeals that lead to enlightenment.” Benton heads to the sound system in the hallway closet. “Before we’re cast into the eternal night.”

  Momentarily the Overture begins. I chop celery to the crashing of big brass answered by argumentative piccolos and scurrying strings.

  “THE FBI AND CFC DATABASES have been hacked.” Benton carries a platter of cured meats and bread to the teak table in the backyard where all of us sit. “There’s no telling what else.”

  “You’re thinking we’re going to discover that she’s into other databases.” Jill Donoghue picks up her drink, and I can smell the Scotch’s sherry finish as I walk past her and hand out small plates and napkins.

  “Yes.” Benton sits back down next to Janet who is watching Lucy horse around with Desi, Jet Ranger and our rescued greyhound Sock.

  Lucy grabs a green rubber ball off the lawn and tosses it, and when she darts and dodges playfully I catch a glimpse of the .40 caliber pistol in her ankle holster. Jet Ranger runs several steps and that’s enough exertion for him. He sits as Sock wanders off to his favorite rest stop of rosebushes and Desi races to the ball laughing hilariously. He hurls it back to Lucy as the screen door bangs shut and Marino emerges drinking a bottle of Red Stripe beer. He wears a pistol on the waistband of his jeans. Janet and Benton also are armed, and I’m reminded that no one close to me is very far from a gun at any given time. We don’t know where Carrie is. We have no clue.

  “We can’t trust that cases haven’t been tampered with and turned into data fiction.” Donoghue is presenting the case as she sees it.

  “That’s the point,” Janet says. “Every single record or report she might have accessed will be questioned. Defense attorneys will have a field day.”

  “I know I would.”

  “Not would but will,” Benton says to her.

  “People will get out of prison.”

  “Right and left” is his answer.

  “Dirtbags who will want to send Benton and Kay a thank-you note.” Janet is sipping the sparkling wine, her eyes on Lucy and Desi.