“You there now?”
“Walking that way.”
“Let me guess,” Marino says. “Working on another hell scene you stole from me?”
“If that’s what you want to talk to me about…”
“It’s not,” Marino says. “It’s a whole lot worse than that.”
“You’re really something,” Reba says to Marino, placing the file of hell scenes back on his desk. “They’re really good. They’re brilliant, Pete.”
“We’re going to do this in five, give him time to get into his office,” and now he has Lucy on the phone. “Lay it on me, what do I do?”
“You’re going to hang up, so am I, then hit the conference button on your desk phone and dial my cell phone. When I answer, hit conference again and dial your cell phone. Then you can either put your desk phone on hold to keep the line open or just leave it off the hook. If someone’s monitoring our call, he’s going to assume you’re in your office.”
Marino waits a few minutes, then does what she said. He and Reba walk out of the building while he and Lucy talk to each other on their cell phones. They have a real conversation while he hopes like hell that Joe is listening in. He and Lucy are lucky so far. The reception is good. She sounds as if she’s in the next room.
They chat about the new motorcycles. They chat about all sorts of things as Marino and Reba walk.
The Last Stand motel is a modified double-wide trailer that has been divided into three rooms that are used for mock crime scenes. Each section has a separate door with a number on it. Room 112 is in the middle. Marino notes that the curtain is drawn over the front window, and he can hear the air conditioner running. He tries the door and it’s locked, and he kicks it hard with his big, Harley-booted foot and the cheap door flies open and slams against the wall. Joe is sitting at the desk, the receiver to his ear, a tape recorder hooked up to the phone, his face shocked, then terrified. Marino and Reba look at him.
“Know why they call this the Last Stand motel?” Marino asks, walking over to Joe, grabbing him out of the chair as if he weighs nothing. “Because you’re as dead as Colonel Custer.”
“Let me go!” Joe yells.
His feet are off the floor. Marino is holding him up by his armpits, their faces inches apart. Marino shoves him against a wall.
“Let me go! You’re hurting me!”
Marino drops him. He sits down hard on the floor.
“You know why she’s here?” He indicates Reba. “To arrest your sorry ass.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Falsifying records, grand larceny, maybe homicide since you obviously stole a gun that was used out of state to blow a lady’s head off. Oh, and add fraud,” Marino adds to the list, not caring if any of it’s valid.
“I didn’t! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Quit yelling. I’m not deaf. See, Detective Wagner here’s a witness, right?”
She nods, her face hard. Marino’s never seen her look so scary.
“You see me lay a finger on him?” he asks her.
“Absolutely not,” she says.
Joe is so scared, he might wet himself.
“You want to tell us why you stole that shotgun and who you gave it to or sold it to?” Marino pulls up the desk chair, turns it around, sits on it backward, his huge arms resting on the back. “Or maybe you blew the lady’s head off. Maybe you’re living out hell scenes, only I didn’t write that one. You must have stole it from someone else.”
“What lady? I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t steal a shotgun. What shotgun?”
“The one you checked out last June twenty-eighth at three-fifteen in the afternoon. That one that belongs to the computer record you just updated, falsifying that record, too.”
Joe’s mouth is open, his eyes wide.
Marino reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a piece of paper, unfolds it and hands it to him. It’s a photocopy of the ledger page showing when Joe signed out the Mossberg shotgun and supposedly returned it.
Joe stares at the photocopy, his hands shaking.
He says, “I swear to God I didn’t take it. I remember what happened. I was doing more research with ordnance gelatin and maybe test-fired it once. Then I left to do something in the lab kitchen, I think it was to check on some more blocks I’d just made, the ones we were using to simulate passengers in an airplane crash. Remember when Lucy used that big helicopter to drop an airplane fuselage out of the sky so the students could…?”
“Get to the point!”
“When I came back, the shotgun was gone. I assumed Vince locked it back up in the vault. It was late in the day. He probably locked it up because he was about to go home. I remember feeling pissed about it because I wanted to fire it a couple more times.”
“No wonder you have to steal my hell scenes,” Marino says. “You’ve got no imagination. Try again.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“You want her to haul you off in handcuffs?” Marino says, jerking his thumb toward Reba.
“You can’t prove I did anything.”
“I can prove you’ve committed fraud,” Marino says. “You want to talk about all those letters of reference you faked so the Doc would hire you as a fellow?”
For an instant, he’s speechless. Then he begins to regain his composure. He gets that smart-ass look on his face again.
“Prove it,” he says.
“Every one of those letters is on the same watermarked paper.”
“Doesn’t prove a thing.”
Joe gets to his feet and rubs his lower back.
“I’m going to sue you,” he says.
“Good. Then I may as well hurt you worse,” Marino replies, rubbing his fist. “Maybe I’ll break your neck. You haven’t seen me touch him, have you, Detective Wagner.”
“Absolutely not,” she says. Then, “If you didn’t take the shotgun, who did? Was anybody else with you in the firearms lab that afternoon?”
He thinks for a minute and something shows in his eyes.
“No,” he says.
61
Twenty-four hours a day, guards inside the control room monitor inmates who are considered suicide risks.
They watch Basil Jenrette. They watch him sleep, shower, eat. They watch him use the steel toilet. They watch him turn his back to the closed-circuit camera and relieve his sexual tension beneath the sheets of his narrow steel bed.
He imagines them laughing at him. He imagines what they say inside the control room as they watch him on the monitors. They make fun of him to the other guards. He can tell by the smirks on their faces when they bring him his meals or let him out so he can exercise or make a phone call. Sometimes they make comments. Sometimes they show up outside his cell just as he is relieving his sexual tension, and they imitate the noise and laugh and bang on the door.
Basil sits on his bed, looking up at the camera mounted high on the opposite wall. He flips through this month’s copy of Field amp; Stream as he thinks back to the first time he met with Benton Wesley and made the mistake of answering one of his questions honestly.
Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?
I’ve already hurt others so I guess that means I think about it, Basil said.
What thoughts do you have, Basil? Can you describe what you envision when you think about hurting other people and yourself?
I think of doing what I used to. Seeing a woman and getting the urge. Getting her into my police car and pulling out my gun and maybe my badge and telling her I’m arresting her, and if she resists arrest, so much as touches the door, I’ll have no choice but to shoot her. They all cooperated.
None of them resisted you.
Just the last two. Because of car trouble. It’s so stupid.
The others, before the last two, did they believe you were the police and you were arresting them?
They believed I was a cop. But they knew what was happening. I wanted them to know. I’d get hard. I’d show them I was har
d, make them put their hand on it. They were going to die. It’s so stupid.
What’s stupid, Basil?
So stupid. I’ve said it a thousand times. You’ve heard me say it, right? Wouldn’t you rather I shoot you right then in my car or get you off somewhere so I can take my time with you? Why would you let me get you to some secret place and tie you up?
Tell me how you would tie them up, Basil. Always the same way?
Yeah. I have a really cool method. It’s absolutely unique. I invented it when I started making my arrests.
By arrests you mean abducting and assaulting women.
When I first started, yeah.
Basil smiles as he sits on his bed, remembering the thrill of twisting wire coat hangers around their ankles and wrists and threading rope through them so he could string them up.
They were my puppets, he explained to Dr. Wesley during that first interview, wondering what it would take to get a reaction out of him.
No matter what Basil said, Dr. Wesley kept his steady gaze, listening, not letting anything he felt register on his face. Maybe he didn’t feel anything. Maybe he’s like Basil.
See, in this place I had, there were exposed rafters where the ceiling had come down, especially in this one room in the back. I would throw the ropes over the rafters, and I could tighten or loosen them however I wanted, give them a long leash or a short one.
And they never resisted, even when they realized what was in store for them when you got them into this building? What was it? A house?
I don’t remember.
Did they resist, Basil? Seems as if it might have been difficult to restrain them in such an elaborate fashion while you’re still holding them at gunpoint.
I’ve always had this fantasy of having someone watch. Basil didn’t answer the question. Then having sex after it was over. Having sex for hours with the body right there on the same mattress.
Sex with the dead body or sex with another person?
I was never into that. That’s not for me. I like to hear them. I mean, it had to hurt like hell. Sometimes their shoulders got dislocated. Then I’d give them enough slack to use the bathroom. That was the part I didn’t like. Emptying the bucket.
What about their eyes, Basil?
Well, let’s see. No pun intended.
Dr. Wesley didn’t laugh, and that annoyed Basil a little.
I’d let them dance around at the end of their rope, no pun intended. Don’t you ever smile? I mean, come on, some of this is funny.
I’m listening to you, Basil. I’m listening to every word you say.
That was good, at least. And he was. Dr. Wesley was listening and thought every word was important and fascinating, thought Basil was the most interesting, original person he had ever interviewed.
As soon as I was going to have sex with them, he continued, that’s when I’d do their eyes. You know, if I’d been born with a decent-sized dick, none of this would have been necessary.
They were conscious when you blinded them.
If I could have given them some gas and knocked them out while I was performing the surgery, I would have. I didn’t particularly like them screaming and jerking all over the place. But I couldn’t have sex with them until they were blind. I explained it to them. I’d say, I’m really sorry I got to do this to you, okay? I’ll be as quick as I can. It’s going to hurt a little.
Isn’t that funny? It’s going to hurt a little. Every time somebody says that to me, I know it’s going to hurt like a bitch. Then I’d tell them I was going to untie them so we could have sex. I said if they tried to get away or do anything stupid, I was going to do even worse things to them than I already did. That’s it. We had sex.
How long would this go on?
You mean the sex?
How long did you keep them alive and have sex with them?
Depended. If I liked having sex with them, sometimes I’d keep them around for days. I think the longest time was ten days. But that didn’t turn out to be a good thing because she got infected real bad and it was disgusting.
Did you do anything else to them? Anything besides blinding them and having sex?
I experimented. Some.
Did you ever engage in torture?
I’d say stabbing somebody’s eyes out… well, Basil replied, and now he wishes he hadn’t said it.
It opened a whole new line of questioning. Dr. Wesley started in on knowing right from wrong and comprehending the suffering Basil was causing another human being, that if he knew something was torture, then he was cognizant of what he was doing at the time he was doing it and also upon reflection. That’s not exactly the way he said it, but that’s what he was getting at. Just the same old song and dance he heard inGainesvillewhen the shrinks were trying to figure out if he was competent to stand trial. He never should have let them know he was. That was stupid, too. A forensic psychiatric hospital is a five-star hotel compared to prison, especially if you’re on death row, sitting around in your tiny, claustrophobic cell feeling like Bozo the clown in your blue-and-white-striped pants and orange T-shirt.
Basil gets up from his steel bed and stretches. He pretends he’s not interested in the camera high up on the wall. He never should have admitted that sometimes he fantasized about killing himself, that his preferred way would be to cut his wrists and watch himself bleed, drip, drip, drip, watch the puddle form on the floor, because it would remind him of his former pleasant preoccupations with how many women? He’s lost count. It might have been eight. He told Dr. Wesley eight. Or was it ten?
He stretches some more. He uses the steel toilet and returns to the bed. He opens the most recent Field amp; Stream, looks at page 52, at what’s supposed to be a column about a hunter’s first.22 rifle and happy memories of rabbit and possum hunting, of fishing inMissouri.
This page 52 isn’t the real one. The real page 52 was torn out and scanned into a computer. Then, in an identical font and identical format, a letter was embedded into the magazine’s text. The scanned page 52 was carefully reinserted into the magazine, a little glue used, and what looks like a chatty column on hunting and fishing is a clandestine communication intended for Basil.
The guards don’t care about inmates getting fishing magazines. They aren’t likely to even flip through them, not boring magazines that are completely devoid of sex and violence.
Basil gets under the covers, turning on his left side diagonally on the bed, his back to the camera, just like he always does when he needs to relieve his sexual tension. He reaches under the thin mattress and pulls out strips of white cotton from two pairs of white boxer shorts that he has been ripping up all week.
Under the sheets, he begins a tear with his teeth, then rips. Each strip gets tightly tied to what has become a six-foot-long knotted rope. He has enough fabric left for two more strips. He tears with his teeth and rips. He breathes heavily and rocks himself a little as if relieving his sexual tension, and he rips and he ties a strip to the rope, and then he ties on the last one.
62
Inside the Academy’s computer center, Lucy sits before three large video screens, reading e-mails as she restores them to the server.
What she and Marino have discovered so far is that before he began his fellowship, Joe Amos was communicating with a television producer who claimed to be interested in developing yet another forensic show for one of the cable networks. For his input, Joe was promised five thousand dollars per episode, assuming the shows ever make it on the air. Apparently, Joe started getting brilliant ideas in late January, about the time Lucy got sick while testing new avionics in one of her helicopters, fled to the ladies’ room and forgot her Treo. At first he was subtle about it, plagiarizing hell scenes. Then he became blatant, outright stealing them as he went into databases to his heart’s content.
Lucy restores another e-mail, this one dated February 10, a year ago. It is from last summer’s intern, Jan Hamilton, who got the needle stick and threatened to sue the Academy.
&nbs
p; Dear Dr. Amos,
I heard you on Dr. Self’s radio show the other night and was fascinated by what you had to say about theNationalForensicAcademy. Sounds like an amazing place, and by the way, congratulations on being awarded a fellowship. That’s incredibly impressive. I wonder if you could help me get an internship there for the summer. I am studying nuclear biology and genetics at Harvard and want to be a forensic scientist, specializing in DNA. I’m attaching a file that has my photograph and other personal information.
Jan Hamilton.
P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.
“Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.
Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles andwhatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.
Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.
“What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.
“Body Farm,” Marino says.
She finds the video file and opens it.
They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.
The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling-yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.
Stevie.
Lucy tries to reachBenton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, andDr. Susan Laneanswers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.
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