Red Mist ks-19

by Patricia Cornwell

  I begin pouring bottled water into a pot, and Benton stops me. He takes the bottle from me. He sets it down and carries the pot to the sink.

  “Enough,” he says. “I seriously doubt the tap water has been poisoned, and if it has, then nothing we might do is going to save us or anyone anyway, okay?” He fills the pot and sets it on the stovetop and turns on the burner. “Do you understand your vigilance and that, while much of it is appropriate, some of it isn’t? Do you have any insight into what’s going on with you right now? Because I think it’s pretty obvious.”

  “I could have done better. I could have done more.”

  “Your default is to feel that way about everything, and you know why. I don’t want to get into the past, your childhood and what certain events did to you. It would sound simplistic right now, and I know you get tired of hearing me say it.”

  I sprinkle salt into the water on the stovetop and open cans of crushed plum tomatoes.

  “You took care of a parent who was dying and couldn’t save him after years of trying, and that was most of your childhood,” Benton says what he has said before. “Kids take things to heart in a way adults don’t. They get imprinted. When something bad happens and you didn’t stop it, you blame yourself.”

  I stir fresh basil and oregano into the sauce, and my hands aren’t steady. Grief moves through me in waves, and most of all I’m disappointed in myself because I absolutely could have done better. Despite what Benton is saying, I was negligent. The hell with my childhood. I can’t blame my negligence on that. There’s no excuse.

  “I should have called Lucy,” I say to Benton. “There’s no good reason for my not doing it except avoidance. I avoided it. I’ve avoided it since I saw both of you last at the apartment building.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “That doesn’t make it right. I’ll go in and deal with her unless she won’t talk to me. I wouldn’t blame her.”

  “And she doesn’t blame you,” he says. “She’s not happy with me, but she doesn’t blame you. I’ve had a few talks with her, and now it’s your turn.”

  “I blame myself.”

  “You’re going to have to stop.”

  “I was incensed last night, Benton. I stormed out.”

  “You’ve really got to stop this, Kay.”

  “I almost hated her for what she did to Lucy.”

  “You’d be more justified in hating Jaime for what she did to you,” he says. “It’s bad enough what she did to Lucy, but you don’t know the rest of it.”

  “The rest of it is what we found in her apartment today. She’s dead.”

  “The rest of it begins in Chinatown. Not two months ago, as Jaime’s led you to believe, as she led Marino to believe when he took the train to see her in New York. It began in March. In other words, it began not long after Dawn Kincaid tried to kill you.”

  “Chinatown?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “She manipulated to get you down here to Savannah, to get your help, and she manipulated the FBI, and she sure as hell manipulated Marino,” Benton says. “Forlini’s. I know you remember that place, since you’ve been there with Jaime on a number of occasions.”

  A popular watering hole for lawyers, judges, NYPD cops, and the FBI, Forlini’s is an Italian restaurant that names its booths after police and fire commissioners, the very sort of political officials that Jaime claimed ran her off the job.

  “Obviously I don’t know all the details she might have told you last night,” Benton continues, “but what you relayed to me later over the phone was enough for me to ask some questions, to look into a few things, not the least of which was the names of the two agents who supposedly came to her apartment and interrogated her about you. Both of them are from the New York field office, and neither of them ever went to her apartment. She talked to them at Forlini’s one night in early March and chummed the water, as Jaime certainly knew how to do.”

  “Chummed the water with information about me? Is that what this is leading to?” I decide on a pasta. “So she could put me in a weakened position and show me how much I needed her help?”

  “I think you’re getting the picture.” Benton’s face is hard, but he’s also sad. I see his disappointment in the slant of his shoulders and the shadows of his face. He liked Jaime very much, in the old days he did, and I know what he would think of her now, alive or dead.

  “That’s a pretty despicable thing to do,” I reply. “Gossip to the FBI that maybe there’s some basis for Dawn Kincaid’s defense. That I’m unstable and potentially violent or was motivated by jealousy. God only knows what she said. Why would she do that? How could she do that?”

  “Increasingly desperate and unhappy. Certain that everybody was out to get her, was jealous and competitive and less deserving, when in fact she was the one,” Benton says. “We could analyze her for the rest of our days and never really know. But what she did was wrong. It was unforgivable, setting you up, placing you in harm’s way so you’d do what she wanted, and you weren’t the only person she’d been undermining of late. When I talked to a couple of agents who were around her a fair amount, I heard the stories.”

  “Do you have any ideas about what’s happening? About who might have killed her? About who might be doing this? Does the FBI?”

  “I’ll be very forthright, Kay. We don’t have a fucking clue.”

  I crush fresh garlic and dribble olive oil into the sauce and look for the container of grated fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s in the refrigerator in a drawer, where Marino put it, and everywhere I look for food or spices or whatever I need, it’s in the wrong place and I feel I’m walking in circles and can’t think straight.

  “Maybe you can help me set the table,” I suggest to Benton, as the door opens to the right of the dining area, and I stop what I’m doing. I stand perfectly still.

  Lucy’s hair is wet and combed straight back. Barefoot, she’s in pajama bottoms and a gray FBI T-shirt she’s had since she went through its academy.

  I want to say something to her, but I can’t.

  “There’s something you need to see. Something you need to hear, too,” she says to me, as if nothing has happened, but I recognize the puffiness around her eyes and the set of her mouth.

  I know when she’s been crying.

  “I logged in to the security camera,” she says, and I look at Benton, and his face is unreadable but I know what he would think of what she’s done.

  He wants nothing to do with it and begins to stir the tomato sauce, his back to us. “I’ll finish up here,” he says. “I think I remember how to boil pasta. I’ll let you know when it’s ready. The two of you talk.”

  “Did Marino give you the password?” I ask Lucy, as I follow her into her room.

  “He doesn’t need to know about this,” she says.

  30

  Two red tugboats with black tire bumpers push a cargo ship west along the river, multicolored containers stacked high like bricks, reminding me of what I must guide and carry. It feels like more than I can manage. I’m not sure I can, and I pray for strength.

  Dear God,I used to address the Almighty when I was a child, but I haven’t of late, not in many years, if I’m honest, not knowing who or what God is, in fact, since He or She is differently defined by everyone I might ask. A Higher Power or a majestic being on a golden throne. A simple man carrying a staff traveling a dusty path or walking on the water and showing kindness to the woman at the well while inviting those without sin to cast the first stone. Or a female spirit found in nature or the collective consciousness of the universe. I don’t know.

  I don’t have a clear definition of what I believe, except there is something and it’s beyond me, and I think to myself, Help me, please.I don’t feel strong. I don’t feel justified or sure of myself. It might just destroy me if Lucy holds me up to the light like a crystal or a gemstone and points out the flaw that she never knew I had. I will see it in her eyes, like shades pulled down in a window
or the hesitation in someone who wants to fire you or replace you or doesn’t respect or love you anymore. I stare Jaime Berger’s death in the face, and it is a mirror I would give anything to escape. I’m not who Lucy thought I was.

  Lights flicker along the shore, the stars out and the moon bright, as I move the only extra chair in Lucy’s room, an armchair upholstered in blue. I drag it from the window overlooking the river, across the carpet, to the desk where she has set up a workstation or cockpit, as I call it, that includes her own secure wireless network. She might hack into whatever she wants, but others aren’t going to do unto her what she does unto them.

  “Don’t be upset,” she says, as I sit down.

  “Funny you would be the one saying that to me,” I remark. “We need to talk about last night. I need to talk about it.”

  “I didn’t ask Marino for the password because I wouldn’t put him in that position, not that I needed anything from him,” she says, as if she didn’t catch my reference to Jaime and the fact that I abandoned her because I was angry and now she’s dead. “And Benton’s going to have to be blind and deaf and have amnesia. He needs to get over himself.”

  “We have to do things….” I start to say that we have to do things the right way, but I can’t get the words out. I didn’t do things the right way last night, so who am I to tell Lucy what to do. Or anybody. “Benton doesn’t want you getting into trouble,” I add, and it sounds ridiculous.

  “There’s no way I wasn’t going to view the security footage. He needs to quit being so fucking FBI.”

  “Then you’ve already seen it.”

  “Sitting around waiting, playing by the rules, while that piece of shit is trying to frame you,” Lucy says, staring at a computer screen. “Out there free as a bird, and here we are, holed up in this hotel, afraid to eat the food or drink the water. She’ll kill someone else, maybe a lot of people, if she hasn’t already. I don’t have to be a profiler, a criminal intelligence analyst, to tell you that. I don’t have to be Benton.”

  She’s angry with him, and I know why. “What piece of shit? Who?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. But I will,” she promises.

  “Benton has an idea about who it is? He told me he didn’t. That the FBI has no idea.”

  “I’m going to find out, and I’m going to get her.” Lucy clicks the mouse pad of a MacBook and types in a password I can’t see.

  “You can’t take matters into your own hands.” But there’s no point in saying it. She already has, and I don’t have a right to say it.

  I took matters into my own hands when I came to Savannah, and then last night and also today. I did what I thought was best or simply what I wanted to do, and Jaime is dead and it could be said that I’ve compromised the case, certainly the crime scene. All because I was determined to rid myself of guilt and hurt, to somehow fix what can’t be fixed. Jack Fielding is still gone, and what he did is still terrible, and now I feel guilty about everyone, and others have died.

  “Benton did what he thought was best for you,” I say to Lucy. “I know you’re upset with him for keeping you out of the apartment.”

  “It’s not accidental you happened to be at the building when she showed up with the take-out bag,” she says, as a printer starts, and she’s not going to discuss Jaime or Benton.

  She’s not going to allow me to confess that I was negligent, that I broke the oath I’ve sworn to. I did harm by doing nothing.

  “She wanted to hand it to you,” she goes on. “She wanted you to carry it inside. So maybe your prints are on it, your DNA. You’re on camera clear as day, walking into the building with that bag of sushi you ordered.”

  “I ordered?” I think of the forged letter sent to Kathleen Lawler, allegedly by me.

  “I called Savannah Sushi Fusion before anybody else did.”

  “That probably wasn’t the best idea.”

  “Marino told me about the delivery, and I called and asked. Dr. Scarpetta placed the order a few minutes after seven last night. Sixty-three dollars and forty-seven cents. You said you’d pick it up.”

  “I never did.”

  “And it was picked up about seven-forty-five.”

  “Not by me.”

  “Of course not by you. Payment wasn’t a credit card. It was cash. Even though her credit card was on file.” She means Jaime’s was.

  “And the person who delivered the bag knew the credit card was on file. She mentioned it to me.”

  “I’m aware,” Lucy says. “It’s recorded on the security DVR. Cash is cleaner. No follow-up phone calls. No questions asked. No discussion about why someone named Scarpetta would have a right to charge something to another person’s credit card. Small family-run restaurant, doesn’t have a lot of seating and most of their business is take-out. The person I talked to doesn’t have a good recollection of what this individual looked like, the one who showed up for the order.”

  “On a bicycle?”

  “Doesn’t remember, and I’ll get to the bicycle in a minute. Youngish woman. White. Medium-size. Spoke English.”

  “That fits the description of the person I encountered outside Jaime’s building, for what it’s worth.”

  “You would think Dawn Kincaid was doing all this, but she has the minor problem of being brain-dead in Boston.”

  “How could this person know I was meeting Jaime and at the precise time I was opening the front door of the apartment building when even I didn’t know I was meeting with her until the last minute?” It doesn’t seem possible.

  “Watching you. Waiting. The old mansion and the square across the street that take up the entire block. The Owens-Thomas House is a museum now and not open at night, and there isn’t much activity in the square. A lot of huge trees and bushes, a lot of dark shadows to lurk around in if you’re waiting for someone,” she says, as I remember standing outside in front of Jaime’s apartment late last night, waiting for Marino to pick me up. I thought I saw something move in the shadows across the street.

  Lucy collects pages from the printer and straightens their edges, making a neat stack, the top sheet of paper a photograph from the security camera. A zoomed-in image in shades of gray, a person walking a bicycle across the street, the mansion in the background, hulking hugely against the night.

  “Or I was followed from the hotel,” I suggest.

  “I don’t think so. Too risky. Better to pick up the food and hang out across the street and wait.”

  “I don’t see how she could have known that I was going to be there.”

  “The missing link,” Lucy says. “Who’s the common denominator?”

  “I don’t have an answer that makes sense.”

  “I’m about to show you. I’m living up to my reputation,” she adds. “It must seem I’ve not lived up to mine,” I reply, but it’s as if she doesn’t hear it.

  “The rogue agent. The hacker,” Lucy repeats what I told her Jaime said to me last night.

  “And when I had to listen to that, I got upset,” I continue to confess, and she continues to ignore it. “I got very angry, and I shouldn’t have.”

  She is clicking through a menu on the MacBook. Two other computer notebooks on the desk display programs that are running searches, it seems, but nothing I’m seeing is intelligible, and there is a BlackBerry plugged into a charger, which I don’t understand. Lucy doesn’t use a BlackBerry anymore. She hasn’t for a while.

  “What are we looking for?” I watch data speeding by on the two notebooks, words, names, numbers, symbols flowing too fast to read.

  “My usual data mining.”

  “Might I ask for what?”

  “Do you have any idea what’s available out there if you have a way to find it?” Lucy is content to talk about computers and security cameras and data mining, about anything that doesn’t include my evening with Jaime and my need to be absolved for her death in the eyes of a niece I love like a daughter.

  “I’m sure I can’t begin to imagine,” I reply.
“But based on Wiki-Leaks and everything else, there don’t seem to be many secrets anymore, and almost nothing is safe.”

  “Statistics,” she says. “Data that are gathered so we can look for patterns and predict. Crime patterns, for example, so the government remembers it had better give you funding to keep all those bad people off the street. Or stats that will help you market a product or maybe a service, such as a security company. Create a database of a hundred thousand or a hundred million customer records and produce histograms you can show to the next person or business you want as a client. Name, age, income, property value, location, prediction. Burglaries, break-ins, vandalism, stalking, assaults, murder, more predictions. You’re moving into an expensive house in Malibu and starting your own movie studio and I’m going to show you that it is statistically improbable anyone is going to break in to your residence or buildings or mug your staff in the parking lot or rape someone in a stairwell if you have a contract with my company and I install state-of-the-art security systems and you remember to use them.”

  “The Jordans.” She must be looking for their alarm company information.

  “Customer data is gold, and it’s sold constantly and at the speed of light,” Lucy says. “That’s what everybody wants. Advertisers, researchers, Homeland Security, the Special Forces that took out Bin Laden. Every detail about what you surf for on the Web, where you travel, who you call or e-mail, what prescription drugs you buy, what vaccinations you or your children get, your credit card and Social Security numbers, even your fingerprints and your iris scans because you gave your personal information to a privatized security screening service that has checkpoints at some airports and for a monthly fee you bypass the long lines everybody else stands in. If you’re going to sell your business, whoever acquires it wants your customer data, and in many cases that’s all they want. Who are you, and how do you spend your money? Come spend it with us. And from there the data gets sold again and again and again.”

  “But there are firewalls, I assume.” I don’t want to know if she’s hacked her way through.