Predator ks-14

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Sitting down has never helped,” she says. “Tell me.”

  “In our own fucking reference collection.”

  “At the Academy? Our reference firearms collection at the Academy?”

  “Hollywood PD donated it to us about a year ago when they gave us a bunch of other guns they no longer needed. Remember?”

  “Have you actually walked into the firearms lab to make sure it isn’t there?”

  “It’s not going to be. We know it was just used to kill some lady up there where you are.”

  “Go check right now,” she says. “Call me back.”

  51

  Hog waits in line.

  He stands behind a fat lady wearing a loud, pink suit. He holds his boots in one hand, and a tote bag, driver’s license and boarding pass in the other. He moves ahead and places his boots and coat in a plastic tub.

  He places the tub and his bag on the black belt, and they move away from him. He stands in the two white footprints, both stocking feet exactly on the white footprints on the carpet, and an airport security officer nods for him to pass through the x-ray scanner, and he does and nothing beeps, and he shows the officer his boarding pass, grabs his boots and jacket out of the tray, grabs his bag. He begins walking to gate twenty-one. Nobody pays any attention to him.

  He still smells the rotting bodies. He can’t seem to get the stench out of his nose. Maybe it’s an olfactory hallucination. He’s had them before. Sometimes he smells the cologne, the Old Spice cologne that he smelled when he did the bad thing on the mattress and was sent away where there were old brick houses, where it was snowing and cold, where he’s going now. It is snowing, not much, but some. He checked the weather before he took a taxi to the airport. He didn’t want to leave his Blazer in long-term parking. That costs real money, and it wouldn’t be good if someone looked inside the back of it. He hasn’t cleaned it up very well.

  In his bag are a few things, not much. All he needs is a change of clothing, a few toiletries, different boots that fit better. He won’t need his old boots much longer. They are a biological hazard, and the thought amuses him. Now that he thinks about it as the boots walk toward the gate, maybe he should save the boots in perpetuity. They have quite a history, have walked in places as if he owned them, taken people away as if he owned them, have returned to places and climbed up on things to spy, walked right in, brazenly, the boots carrying him from room to room from place to place, doing what God says. Punishing. Confusing people. The shotgun. The glove. To show them.

  God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

  His boots carried him right into the house, and he had the hood on before they even knew what was happening. Stupid religious freaks. Stupid little orphans. Stupid little orphan walking into the pharmacy, Mom Number One holding his hand so he could get his prescription filled. Lunatic. Hog hates lunatics, fucking religious freaks, hates little boys, little girls, hates Old Spice. Marino wears Old Spice, the big, dumb cop. Hog hates Dr. Self, should have put her on the mattress, had fun with the ropes, gotten her good after what she did.

  Hog ran out of time. God isn’t happy.

  There wasn’t time to punish the worst offender of all.

  You’ll have to go back, God said. This time with Basil.

  Hog’s boots walk toward the gate, carry him to Basil. They’ll have their good times again, just like those times in the old days after Hog did the bad thing, was sent away, then sent back, then met Basil in a bar.

  He was never afraid of Basil, not the least bit put off by him from the first moment they found themselves sitting next to each other, drinking tequila. They had several together, and there was something about him. Hog could tell.

  He said, You’re different.

  I’m a cop, Basil said.

  This was inSouthBeach, where Hog often cruised and hung out, looking for sex, looking for drugs.

  You’re not just a cop, Hog said to him. I can tell.

  Oh, really?

  I can tell. I know about people.

  How about I take you somewhere, and Hog had a sense that Basil had figured him out, too. I’ve got something you can do for me, Basil said to Hog.

  Why should I do anything for you?

  Because you’ll like it.

  Later that night, Hog was in Basil’s car, not his police car but a white Ford LTD that looked just like an unmarked police car but wasn’t. It was his personal car. They weren’t inMiami, and he couldn’t possibly drive a marked car withDadeCountyon it. Someone might remember seeing it. Hog was a little disappointed. He loves police cars, loves sirens and lights. All those lights lit up and flashing remind him of The Christmas Shop.

  No way they’ll ever think twice if you talk to them, Basil said that first night they met, after they’d been riding around awhile, smoking crack.

  Why me? Hog asked, and he wasn’t the least bit afraid.

  Common sense would dictate that he should have been. Basil kills whomever he pleases, always has. He could have killed Hog. Easily.

  God told Hog what to do. That’s what kept Hog safe.

  Basil spotted the girl. It turned out later she was only eighteen. She was getting cash at an ATM, her car nearby, the engine running. Stupid. Never get cash after dark, especially if you are a young girl, a pretty one, all alone in shorts and a tight T-shirt. If you’re a young girl, a pretty one, bad things happen.

  Give me your knife and your gun, Hog told Basil.

  Hog tucked the gun in his waistband and cut his thumb with the knife. He smeared blood on his face and climbed over the seat, lying down in back. Basil rolled up to the ATM and got out of the car. He opened the back door, checking on Hog, looking appropriately distressed.

  It will be all right, he said to Hog. To the girl he said, Please help us. My friend’s been hurt. Where’s the nearest hospital?

  Oh my God. We should call nine-one-one, and she frantically dug her cell phone out of her bag and Basil shoved her hard into the backseat, and then Hog had the gun in her face.

  They drove off.

  Shit, Basil said. You’re good, he said, and he was high, laughing. Guess we’d better figure out where we’re going.

  Please don’t hurt me, the girl was crying, and Hog felt something as he sat back there, holding the gun on her while she cried and begged. He felt like having sex.

  Shut up, Basil told her. It won’t do any good. Guess we’d better find somewhere. Maybe the park. No, they patrol it.

  I know somewhere, Hog said. Nobody will ever find us. It’s perfect. We can take our time, all the time in the world, and he was aroused. He wanted sex, wanted it something awful.

  He directed Basil to the house, the house that is falling apart with no electricity or running water, and a mattress and dirty magazines in the back room. It was Hog who figured out how to tie them up so they couldn’t sit without their arms straight up.

  Stick ’em up!

  Like in cartoons.

  Stick ’em up!

  Like in campy Westerns.

  Basil said Hog was brilliant, the most brilliant person he’d ever met, and after a few times of taking women there and keeping them until they smelled too bad, got too infected or just got too used up, Hog told Basil about The Christmas Shop.

  Have you ever seen it?

  No.

  Can’t miss it. Right on the beach on A1A. The lady’s rich.

  Hog explained that on Saturdays, it’s always just her and her daughter in there. Hardly anybody goes in there. Who buys Christmas stuff at the beach in July?

  No shit.

  He wasn’t supposed to do it in there.

  Then before Hog knew what was happening, Basil had her in the back, raping, cutting, blood everywhere, while Hog watched and calculated how they were going to get away with it.

  The lumberjack by the door was five feet tall, hand-carved. He carried a real ax, an antique one, a curved wooden handle and shiny steel blade, half of it painted blood red. It was Hog who thought of it.

  A
bout an hour later, Hog carried out the trash bags, made sure no one was around. He put them in the trunk of Basil’s car. No one saw them.

  We were lucky, Hog told Basil when they were back at their secret place, the old house, digging a pit. Don’t do that again.

  A month later, he did something again, tried to get two women at once. Hog wasn’t with him. Basil forced them into the car, then the damn thing broke down. Basil never told anybody about Hog. He protected Hog. Now it’s Hog’s turn.

  They’re doing a study up there, Hog wrote to him. The prison knows about it and has been asked for volunteers. It would be good for you. You could do something constructive.

  It was a pleasant, innocuous letter. No prison official thought twice about it. Basil got word to the warden that he wanted to volunteer for a study they were doing inMassachusetts, that he wanted to do something to pay for his sins, that if the doctors could learn something about what’s wrong with people like him, maybe it would make a difference. Whether or not the warden fell for Basil’s manipulations is a matter of speculation. But this past December, Basil was transferred toButlerStateHospital.

  All because of Hog. God’s Hand.

  Since then, their communications have had to be more ingenious. God showed Hog how to tell Basil anything he wants. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

  Hog finds a seat at gate twenty-one. He sits as far away from everybody as he can, waiting for thenine a.m.flight. It’s on time. He’ll land atnoon. He unzips his bag and pulls out a letter Basil wrote to him more than a month ago.

  I got the fishing magazines. Many thanks. I always learn a lot from the articles. Basil Jenrette.

  P.S. They are going to put me in that damn tube again-Thursday, February 17. But they promise it will be quick. “In at 5 and out at5:15 p.m.” Promises, promises.

  52

  The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.

  “Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up toBenton.

  “Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.

  She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It’sBenton.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can’t you please come down? I’m cooking. Things are going to hell inFlorida. I need to talk to you.”

  She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.

  “And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.

  How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says again.

  “Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”

  “Wood splinters?”

  “A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”

  “If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.

  “If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn’t she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I wish you’d come upstairs.”

  “Any defense injuries?”

  “Why don’t you come up?”

  “As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”

  “No evidence of it, but it’s certainly sexually motivated. I’m not hungry at the moment.”

  She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.

  “Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”

  “Why don’t we talk about this up here.”

  Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.

  “I’m hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

  He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.

  “Glad you didn’t walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”

  “Good thing you weren’t in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”

  She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.

  “Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.

  Bentonenlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.

  “To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it’s possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don’t guess we have histology.”

  “If there are slides, I wouldn’t know,”Bentonreplies.

  “Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”

  “The state police labs have everything.”

  “What I’d like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper.”

  Bentonlooks at her, shrugs. “Why?”

  “It’s possible we’re finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”

  “TheQuincyfamily was in the landscaping business. I would assume a lot of commercial citrus growers use copper sprays. Maybe the family tracked it into the back of The Christmas Shop.”

  “And possibly bodypaint in there, too-in the storage area where we found blood.”

  Bentonfalls silent, something else coming to him.

  “A common denominator in Basil’s murders,” he says. “All of the victims, at least the ones whose bodies were recovered, had copper. The trace had copper in it, also citrus pollen, which didn’t mean much. There’s citrus pollen all over the place inFlorida. Nobody thought about copper sprays. Maybe he took them someplace where copper sprays were used, someplace with citrus trees.”

  He looks out the window at the gray sky as a snowplow works loudly on his street.

  “What time do you need to head out?” Scarpetta clicks on a photograph of the abraded area on the dead woman’s back.

  “Not until late afternoon. Basil’s coming in at five.”

  “Wonderful. See how inflamed it is just in that one discrete area?” She points it out. “An area where there’s been a removal of the epithelial layer of the skin by rubbing against some sort of rough surface. And if you zoom in”-she does-“you can see that before she was cleaned up, there’s serosanguineous fluid on the surface of the abrasion. See it?”

  “Okay. What looks like a little bit of scabbing. But not the entire area.”

  “If an abrasion is deep enough, you get leakage of fluid from the vessels. And you’re right, the entire area isn’t scabbing, which makes me suspect that the abraded area is actually several scrape abrasions of differing age, injuries caused by repeated contact with a rough surface.”

  “That’s strange. I’m trying to imagine it.”

  “I wish I had the histol
ogy. Polymorphonuclear white cells would indicate the injury is maybe four to six hours old. As for the brownish-reddish scabs, you generally start seeing those in a minimum of eight hours. She lived for at least a little while after she got this injury, these scrapes.”

  She studies more photographs, studies them closely. She makes notes on a legal pad.

  She says, “If you look at photographs thirteen through eighteen, you’ll see, just barely, areas of what looks like localized red swelling on the backs of her legs and buttocks. What they look like to me are insect bites that have begun to heal. And if you go back to the picture of the abrasion, there’s some localized swelling and barely visible petechial hemorrhaging, which can be associated with spider bites.

  “If I’m right, microscopically you should see a congestion of blood vessels and an infiltration of white blood cells, mainly eosinophils, depending on her response. It’s not very accurate, but we could look for tryptase levels, too, in the event she had an anaphylactic response. But I would be surprised. Certainly she didn’t die of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite. I wish I had the damn histology. Could be more in there than splinters. Urticating hairs. Spiders-tarantulas, specifically-flick them, part of their defense system. Ev and Kristin’s church is next door to a pet store that sells tarantulas.”

  “Itching?”Bentonasks.

  “If she got flicked, she would have itched like hell,” Scarpetta says. “She might have rubbed up against something, scratching herself raw.”

  53

  She suffered.

  “Wherever he kept her, she suffered from bites that were painful and itchy and awful,” Scarpetta says.

  “Mosquitoes?”Bentonsuggests.

  “Just one? Just one bad bite between her shoulder blades? There are no other similar abrasions with inflammation anywhere else on her body, except on her elbows and knees,” she goes on. “Mild abrasions, scrapes, such as you might expect if someone were kneeling or propping herself up by her elbows on a rough surface. But those abraded areas don’t look anything like this.”