Predator ks-14

by Patricia Cornwell

  Now that she is inside the house, she is about to decide that one of the sisters suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The windows, tile floors and furniture are spotless and immaculately arranged. A rug is perfectly centered, and the fringe border is so neat it looks combed. She checks a thermostat on the wall and jots in her notebook that the air-conditioning is on, the temperature in the living room seventy-two degrees.

  “Has the thermostat been adjusted?” she asks. “Was it like this?”

  “Everything’s been left the way it was,” Reba says, in the kitchen with Academy crime-scene investigator Lex. “Except the stove. It was turned off. The lady who came over here when Ev and Kristin didn’t show up at the church. She turned it off.”

  Scarpetta makes a note that there is no alarm system.

  Reba opens the refrigerator. “I’d go ahead and dust the cabinet doors,” she tells Lex. “May as well dust the heck out of everything while you’re at it. There’s not much food in here for two growing boys.” She directs this to Scarpetta. “Not much to eat at all. I think they’re vegetarians.”

  She shuts the refrigerator door.

  “The powder will ruin the wood,” Lex says.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Do we know what time they got home from church last Thursday night? Allegedly got home?” Scarpetta asks.

  “It ended at seven, and Ev and Kristin stayed over for a while, talking to people. Then they went back to Ev’s office and had a meeting. It’s just a small office. It’s a very small church. The room where they have the services can’t hold more than fifty people, looked like to me.”

  Reba leaves the kitchen and walks into the living room.

  “A meeting with whom, and where were the boys?” Scarpetta asks as she lifts up a cushion from the floral-printed couch.

  “Some of the women met. I don’t know what you call them. They’re the women who run things in the church, and as I understand it, the boys weren’t in the meeting, were doing whatever, horsing around. Then they left with Ev and Kristin at aroundeight p.m.”

  “Are there always meetings after church on Thursday nights?”

  “I believe so. Their regular services are Friday night, so they meet the night before. Something about Good Friday being when God died for our sins. They don’t talk about Jesus, just God, and are sure into sin and going to hell. It’s an oddball church. Like a cult, you ask me. Probably into snake-handling and the likes.”

  Lex taps a small amount of Silk Black oxide powder onto a sheet of paper. The white countertop is chipped but clean and completely bare, and she dabs a fiberglass brush into the powder on the paper and begins to gently swirl the brush over the Corian, turning it an uneven, sooty black wherever the powder adheres to oils or other latent residues.

  “I didn’t find a wallet, a pocketbook, anything like that,” Reba tells Scarpetta. “Which just adds to my suspicion they ran off.”

  “You can be abducted and bring your pocketbook,” Scarpetta says. “People are abducted with their wallets, their keys, their cars, their children. A few years ago, I worked an abduction-homicide in which the victim was allowed to pack a suitcase.”

  “I know about cases, too, ones where the whole thing is faked to look like a crime, when all that really happened is the people ran off. Maybe that weird phone call you told me about was some crank caller from the church.”

  Scarpetta walks into the kitchen to look at the stove. On a back burner is a copper pan covered with a lid, and the metal is dark gray and streaked.

  “This is the burner that was on?” she asks, removing the lid.

  The stainless-steel lining inside the pan is discolored dark gray.

  Lex tears off a segment of lifting tape with a loud snap.

  “When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”

  Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.

  “There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.

  “What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”

  “A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”

  Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey breast suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.

  The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.

  He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.

  He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.

  No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.

  “Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”

  He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.

  “What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.

  “Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”

  “Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”

  He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.

  “Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”

  A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.

  “Mrs. Simister? Anybody here?”

  The television is inside a back room, probably a bedroom, and the door is shut. He hesitates, calls out again. He knocks, then bangs on the door, then goes inside and sees blood, a small body on the bed and what is left of the head.

  29

  Inside a desk drawer are pencils, ballpoint pens and Magic Markers. Two of the pencils and one pen are chewed, and Scarpetta looks at the indentations made by teeth in wood and plastic, wondering which of the boys nervously chews things.

  She places the pencils, pens and markers in separate evidence bags. Shutting the drawer, she looks around, thinking about the lives of these orphaned South African boys. There are no toys in the room, no posters on the walls, no hint that the brothers like girls, cars, movies, music or sports, or have heroes or simply have fun.

  Their bathroom is one door down, and it is an old bathroom with unattractive green tile and a white toilet and tub. Her face appears in the mirrored medicine cabinet as she opens the door. She scans narrow metal shelves lined with dental floss, aspirin and small bars of wrapped soap, the type found in motel bathrooms. She picks up an orange plastic prescription bottle by its white cap, looks at the label and is surprised by the name Marilyn Self, M.D.

  The celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Self prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride toDavidLuck. He is supposed to take ten milligrams three times daily, and one
hundred tablets were refilled last month, exactly three weeks ago to the day. Scarpetta removes the cap and pours the scored green tablets into her hand. She counts forty-nine of them. Three weeks at the prescribed dosage and there should be thirty-seven left, she calculates. He supposedly disappeared Thursday night. That’s five days ago, fifteen tablets ago. Fifteen plus thirty-seven is fifty-two. Close enough. If David’s disappearance was voluntary, why was his Ritalin left behind? Why was the stove left on?

  She returns the tablets to their bottle and seals it inside an evidence bag. She walks down the hallway and at the end is the only other bedroom, one the sisters obviously shared. There are two beds, both covered with emerald-green spreads. The wallpaper and carpet are green. The furniture is lacquered green. The lamps and ceiling fan are green, and green draperies are drawn, blocking the daylight completely. The bedside lamp is on, and its low light and the light from the hall are the only light in the room.

  There is no mirror, no artwork and only two photographs, framed and on the dresser, one of the sun setting over the ocean and two boys on the beach, in swim trunks and smiling, both of them towheads. They look like brothers, one older than the other. The other photograph is of two women with walking sticks, squinting in the sun, surrounded by a huge, blue sky. Behind them is an odd-shaped mountain that hulks over the horizon, the top of it obscured by an unusual layer of clouds that rise from the rocks like thick, white steam. One woman is short and full-figured with long, graying hair pulled back, while the other is taller and thinner with very long, wavy black hair she is pushing out of her face because of the wind.

  Scarpetta gets a lens out of her shoulder bag and studies the photographs more closely, looking carefully at the boys’ exposed skin, their faces. She studies the women’s faces and their exposed skin, looking for scars, tattoos, physical anomalies, jewelry. She moves the lens over the thinner woman with the long black hair, noting that her complexion is unhealthy. Maybe it is the lighting or an artificial tanning product that has given her skin a slight yellowish tint, but she looks almost jaundiced.

  She opens the closet. Inside it are inexpensive casual clothes and shoes, and dressier suits in sizes eight and twelve. Scarpetta pulls out everything white or off-white and checks the fabric for yellowish sweat stains, finding them under the arms of several blouses that are size eight. She returns her attention to the photograph of the woman with long dark hair and jaundiced-looking skin and thinks of the raw vegetables inside the refrigerator, the carrots, and she thinks of Dr. Marilyn Self.

  There are no books inside the bedroom except a brown leather Bible on a bedside table. It is old and open to the Apocrypha, and light from the lamp falls on fragile pages that are dry and browned by the passing of many years. She puts on her reading glasses and leans closer, writing in her notebook that the Bible is open to the Wisdom of Solomon, and verse twenty-five of chapter twelve is marked with three small X’s in pencil.

  Therefore unto them, as to children without the use of reason, thou dids’t send a judgment to mock them.

  She tries Marino’s cell phone and it goes directly to voicemail. She opens the draperies to see if the sliders behind them are locked as she tries Marino again and leaves another urgent message. It has begun to rain, and raindrops pockmark the pool and the waterway, and thunderclouds are piled up like anvils. Palms flutter in fits, and low hedges of hibiscus on either side of the sliders are thick with pink and red blossoms that shake in the wind. She notices two smudges on the glass. They have a distinctive shape that she recognizes, and she finds Reba and Lex in the laundry room, checking to see what’s inside the washer and dryer.

  “There’s a Bible in the master bedroom,” Scarpetta says. “It’s open to the Apocrypha and a lamp is on, a lamp by the bed.”

  Reba seems confused.

  “My question is, was the bedroom exactly like that when the lady from the church came into the house? Was the bedroom exactly like that the first time you saw it?”

  “When I went into the bedroom, it looked undisturbed. I remember the curtains were shut. I didn’t see a Bible or anything like that, and I don’t remember a lamp on,” Reba says.

  “There’s a photograph of two women. Ev and Kristin?”

  “The lady from the church said so.”

  “The other one Tony and David?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does one of the women have some sort of eating disorder? Is she sick? Do we know if one or both of them is under the care of a physician? And do we know which woman is which in the photograph?”

  Reba is at a loss for answers. Before now, answers didn’t seem very important. No one thought there might be questions like the ones Scarpetta is asking now.

  “Did you or anyone open the sliding glass doors in their bedroom, the green one?”

  “No.”

  “They aren’t locked, and I noticed smudges on the outside of the glass. Earprints. I’m wondering if they were there when you looked around the property last Friday.”

  “Earprints?”

  “Two of them made by someone’s right ear,” Scarpetta says as her phone rings.

  30

  It is raining hard when she pulls up to Mrs. Simister’s house, and there are three police cruisers and an ambulance parked in front.

  Scarpetta gets out of her car and doesn’t bother with an umbrella as she concludes a conversation with the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has jurisdiction over all sudden, unexpected and violent deaths that occur betweenPalm BeachandMiami. She will examine the body on site because she is already here, she is saying, and as soon as possible she needs a removal service to transport the body to the morgue. She recommends the autopsy be done right away.

  You don’t think it can wait until morning? I understand it might be a suicide, that she has a history of depression,” the administrator points out cautiously because he doesn’t want to sound as if he is questioning Scarpetta’s judgment.

  He doesn’t want to come right out and say that he isn’t sure the case is urgent. He is careful how he words it, but she knows what he is thinking.

  “Marino says there’s no weapon at the scene,” she explains, hurrying up the steps to the front porch, getting soaked.

  “Okay. Didn’t know that.”

  “I’m not aware anyone is assuming it’s a suicide.”

  She thinks of the so-called backfire she and Reba heard earlier. She tries to remember when.

  “You coming in, then?”

  “Of course,” she says. “Tell Dr. Amos to come in and get everything ready.”

  Marino is waiting for her as she reaches the door and goes inside, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes.

  “Where’s Wagner?” he asks. “I assume she’s coming. Unfortunately. Shit, we don’t need a moron like her handling this.”

  “She left a few minutes after I did. I don’t know where she is.”

  “Probably lost. Got the worse sense of direction I’ve ever seen.”

  Scarpetta tells him about the Bible inside Ev and Kristin’s bedroom, about the verse that was marked with X’s.

  “The same thing the caller said to me,” Marino exclaims. “Jesus Christ. What the hell’s going on? Damn moron,” he exclaims, and he’s talking about Reba again. “I’m going to have to do an end run around her and get a real detective so this doesn’t get screwed up.”

  Scarpetta has heard enough of his disparaging comments. “Do me a favor, help her as best you can and tuck your grudges out of sight. Tell me what you know.”

  She looks past him through the partially opened front door. Two emergency medical technicians are carrying cases of their equipment, finished with an effort that was a waste of time.

  “Shotgun wound to the mouth, blew the top of her head off,” Marino says, moving out of the way as the EMTs walk out the door, heading to the ambulance. “She’s on the bed in back, fully clothed, TV on. Nothing to imply forced entry, robbery or sexual assault. We found a pair of latex gloves in
the bathroom sink. One of them is bloody.”

  “Which bathroom?”

  “The one in her bedroom.”

  “Any other sign the killer might have cleaned up afterwards?”

  “No. Just the gloves in the sink. No bloody towels, no bloody water.”

  “I’ll need to look. We sure who she is?”

  “We know whose residence it is. Daggie Simister’s. I can’t say for a fact who’s back there on the bed.”

  Scarpetta digs inside her bag for a pair of gloves and steps into the foyer. She stops to look around as she thinks of the unlocked sliders in the master bedroom in the house across the waterway. She scans the terrazzo floor, the pale blue walls, then the small living room. It is crowded with furniture, photographs and porcelain birds and other figurines from an earlier era. Nothing seems disturbed. Marino leads her through the living room, past the kitchen and to the other side of the house, where the body is inside a bedroom that faces the water.

  She is clothed in a pink warm-up suit and pink slippers and is lying on her back on top of the bed. Her mouth gapes open, her dull eyes staring below a massive wound that has opened the top of her head like an egg cup. Her brain is eviscerated, chunks of it and fragments of bone on a pillow soaked with blood that is a deep red, just beginning to coagulate. Bits of brain and skin adhere to the blood-spattered and streaked headboard and wall.

  Scarpetta slides her hand inside the bloody warm-up jacket and feels the chest and belly, then touches the hands. The body is warm, and rigor mortis isn’t apparent yet. She unzips the jacket and tucks a chemical thermometer under the right arm. While she waits for a reading on the body temperature, she looks for any injury besides the obvious one to the head.

  “How long you think she’s been dead?” Marino asks.

  “She’s still very warm. Rigor’s not even present yet.”