Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Now you’re thinking irrationally like me,” I reply wryly. “That’s what I believe happened, or close to it.”

  “The game,” Benton muses in that tone he has when he hates what someone has done. “Games and more games, elaborate, intricate dramas. I can’t wait to meet the fucking bitch. I really can’t wait.”

  “Maybe you’ve had enough Scotch.”

  “Not half enough. Who better to manipulate Johnny Donahue than someone like that, some attractive brain trust of a woman who’s older? To plant the idea in that poor kid’s head that he murdered a six-year-old while he was delusional and having memory lapses because of drugs she was spiking his meds with? Spiking Fielding’s meds with. Who knows who else? A poisonous person who destroys the people she’s supposed to love, pays them back for every crime committed against her, and you pile on her genetic predisposition and maybe the same cocktail Fielding was on?”

  “That would be the perfect storm, as they say.”

  “Let’s see what kind of killing machine I can be and get away with it,” he says in that tone of his, and if I could look into his eyes, I know what would be in them. Complete contempt. “And after it’s ended, no one is left standing but her. Fucking bulletproof.”

  “You could be right.” And I remember the box I left in the car. “Why don’t you make your phone calls.”

  “Borderline, sadistic, manipulative, narcissistic.”

  “I guess some people are everything.” I set down my glass on the coffee table and ease Sock off my lap and onto the rug.

  “Some people just about are.”

  “I forgot the box Briggs left for me,” I say as I get up from the sofa. “And I’ll take Sock out back. You ready to go potty?” I ask the dog. “Then I’ll warm up pizza. I don’t suppose we have anything for salad. What the hell have you eaten the entire time I’ve been gone? Let me guess. You run over to Chang An for Chinese food and live on that for the next three days.”

  “That would be really good right now.”

  “You’ve probably been doing it every week.”

  “I’d rather have your pizza anytime.”

  “Don’t try to be nice,” I reply.

  I walk into the kitchen for Sock’s lead and slip it around his neck and find a flashlight in a drawer, an old Maglite that Marino gave me aeons ago, long and black aluminum, powered by fat D batteries, reminding me of the old days, when police used to carry flashlights the size of nightsticks instead of everything being so small, like the SureFire lights Lucy likes and what Benton keeps in his glove box. I disarm the alarm system and worry about Sock, about how cold it is, realizing as we go down the back steps in the dark that I didn’t bother with a coat for me, and I notice that the motion-sensor light attached to the garage is out. I try to remember if it was out an hour or so ago when we got home, but I’m not sure. There is so much to fix, so much to change, so much to do. Where will I start when tomorrow comes?

  Benton didn’t lock the door to the detached garage, because what would be the point with an open window the size of a big-screen TV? Inside the remodeled carriage house it is dark and bitterly cold, and air blows in through the open black square that I can barely make out, and I turn on the Maglite and it doesn’t work. The batteries must be dead, and how stupid of me not to check before I left the house. I point the key at the SUV, and the lock chirps but the interior light doesn’t go on because it’s a damn Bureau car, and Special Agent Douglas isn’t about to have an interior light that comes on. I feel around on the backseat for the box, which is quite large, and I realize it won’t be easy to carry it and deal with Sock. In fact, I can’t.

  “I’m sorry, Sock,” I say to the dog as I feel him shivering against my legs. “I know it’s cold in here. Just give me a minute. I’m so sorry. But as you’re discovering, I’m a very stupid person.”

  I use the car key to slit the tape on top of the box and pull out a vest that is familiar even if I’ve not examined this particular brand, but I recognize the feel of tough nylon and the stiffness of ceramic-Kevlar plates that Briggs or someone has already inserted into the internal pockets. I tear open the Velcro straps on the sides to open up the vest so I can sling it over my shoulder. I feel the weight of the vest draped over me as I shove the car door shut, and Sock jumps away from me like a rabbit. He yanks the lead out of my hand.

  “It’s just the car door, Sock. It’s all right, come here, Sock….” I start to call out at the same time something else moves inside the garage near the open window, and I turn around to see what it is, but it is too dark to see anything.

  “Sock? Is that you over there?”

  The dark, frigid air moves around me, and the blow to my back feels like a hammer hitting me between my shoulder blades, as if a loud hissing dragon is attacking me, and I lose my balance.

  A piercing scream and hissing, and a warm, wet mist spatters my face as I fall hard against the SUV and swing with all my might at whatever it is. The Maglite cracks like a bat against something hard that gives beneath the weight of the blow and then moves, and I swing again and hit something again, something that feels different. I smell the iron smell of blood and taste it on my lips and in my mouth as I swing again and again at air, and then the lights are on and the glare is blinding and I’m covered with a fine film of blood as if I’ve been spray-painted with it. Benton is inside the garage, pointing a pistol at the woman in a huge black coat facedown on the rubberized floor. I notice blood pooling under her right bloody hand, and near it, a severed fingertip with a glittery white French nail, and near that, a knife with a thin steel blade and a thick black handle with a release button on the shiny metal guard.

  “Kay? Kay? Are you all right? Kay! Are you all right?”

  I realize Benton is shouting at me as I crouch by the woman and touch the side of her neck and find her pulse. I make sure she is breathing and turn her over to check her pupils. Neither of them is fixed. Her face is bloody from the Maglite smashing into it, and I am startled by the resemblance, the dark blond hair cut very short, the strong features, and the full lower lip that look like Jack Fielding’s. Even the small ears close to the sides of her head look like his, and I feel the strength in her upper body, her shoulders, although she isn’t a large person, maybe five-foot-six or -seven and slender but with large bones like her dead father. All this is flooding my senses as I tell Benton to rush into the house and call 911, and to bring a container of ice.

  23

  A warm front moved in during the night and brought more snow, this time a gentle snow that falls silently, muting all sound, covering everything that is ugly, softly rounding whatever is sharp and hard.

  I sit up in bed inside the master bedroom on the second floor of the house in Cambridge, and snow is coming down, piling in the bare branches of an oak tree on the other side of the big window nearest me. A moment ago a fat gray squirrel was there, perfectly balanced on the smallest twig, and we were eye to eye, his cheeks moving as he stared through the window at me while I sifted through the paperwork and photographs in my lap. I smell old paper and dust and the medicine smell of the wipes I used on Sock, who I suspect hadn’t had his ears cleaned in recent memory, maybe not ever, not the way I cleaned them. He didn’t like it at first, but I talked him into it with a soft voice and a sweet-potato treat that Lucy brought by when she gave me a container of the same wipes she uses on her bulldog. The miconazole-chlorhexidine is good for pachydermatis, I made the mistake of mentioning to my niece very early this morning when she stopped by to check on me.

  Jet Ranger wouldn’t appreciate being called a pachyderm, Lucy retorted. He’s not an elephant or a hippopotamus, and there’s only so much one can do about his weight. She has him on a new diet for seniors, but he can’t exercise because of his bad hips, and the snow gives him a rash on his paws for some reason, and his legs are too short for snow this deep, so he can’t go on even the briefest walk this time of year, she went on and on, and I’d truly offended her. But that’s the way Lucy can
get when she’s worried and scared, and most of all she’s upset she wasn’t here last night. She’s angry she wasn’t here to deal with Dawn Kincaid, but I’m not sorry in the least. I can’t say I’m proud of myself for giving someone a linear skull fracture and a concussion, but if Lucy had been in the garage instead of me, there would be one more person dead. My niece would have killed Dawn Kincaid for sure, probably shot her, and there are enough people dead.

  It’s also possible that Lucy wouldn’t have survived the encounter, I don’t care what she says. It depends on two details that made the difference in my still being here and Dawn Kincaid being locked up on the forensic ward of an area hospital. I don’t think she was expecting me to walk into the garage. I think she was lurking on the other side of the gaping window, waiting for me to take Sock into the dark backyard. But I surprised her by entering the garage first to get what I’d left in the car, and by the time she slipped through the big space where the window was supposed to be, I’d already opened the box and slung the level-4-A tactical vest over my shoulder. When she stabbed at my back with the injection knife, it hit a nylon-covered ceramic-Kevlar plate, and the terrific jolt caused by that absolute stopping action caused her fingers to slide along the blade. She cut three fingers to the bone and severed the tip of her pinkie at the same time she was releasing the CO2, and a mist of her blood sprayed all over me.

  My point to Lucy was that unless she’d caused Dawn to lose the surprise element for the attack and unless Lucy also just happened to have on body armor or at least have it draped over her torso, she might not have been as fortunate as I was. So my niece should stop saying it’s a damn shame she wasn’t here last night, claiming that she sure as hell would have taken care of things, as if I didn’t, because I did, even though it was luck. I think I took care of things just fine and only hope I can take care of a far more important matter that hasn’t killed me yet but at times has certainly felt like it might.

  “She’d told me there had been catcalls and ugly comments,” Mrs. Pieste is telling me over the phone as I go over her daughter’s case with her. “Calling her a Boer. Telling the Boers to go home, and as you know, that’s Afrikaans for farmer but really meant to disparage all white South Africans. And I kept telling the man from the Pentagon that I didn’t care about the reason, whether it was Noonie and Joanne being white or American or assumed to be South African. And, of course, they weren’t South African. I didn’t care why. I just didn’t want to believe the suffering he described.”

  “Do you remember who that man from the Pentagon was?” I ask.

  “A lawyer.”

  “It wasn’t a colonel in the army,” I hope out loud.

  “It was some young lawyer at the Pentagon who worked for the secretary of defense. I don’t remember his name.”

  Then it wasn’t Briggs.

  “A fast-talking one,” Mrs. Pieste adds disdainfully. “I remember I didn’t like him. But I wouldn’t have liked anybody who told me the things he did.”

  “The only comfort I can offer out of all of this,” I repeat, “is Noonie and Joanne didn’t suffer the way you’ve been led to believe. I can’t say with absolute certainty that they weren’t aware of being smothered, but it is extremely likely they weren’t aware because they were drugged.”

  “But that would have been tested for,” Mrs. Pieste’s voice says, and she has a Massachusetts accent, can’t pronounce R’s, and I didn’t realize she’s originally from Andover. After Noonie’s murder, the Piestes moved to New Hampshire, I just found out.

  “Mrs. Pieste, I think you understand nothing was tested as it was supposed to be,” I reply.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The medical examiner in Cape Town—”

  “But you signed the death certificate, Dr. Scarpetta. And the autopsy report. I have copies that lawyer from the Pentagon sent me.”

  “I didn’t sign them.” I refused to sign documents that I knew were a lie, but knowing they were a lie made me guilty of it anyway. “I don’t have copies, as hard as that probably is for you to believe,” I then say. “They weren’t supplied to me. What I have are my own notes, my own records, which I mailed back to the US before I left South Africa because I worried my luggage would be gone through, and it was.”

  “But you signed what I have.”

  “I promise I didn’t,” I reply calmly but firmly. “My guess is certain people made certain my signature was forged on those falsified documents in the event I decided to do what I’m doing now.”

  “If you decided to tell the truth.”

  It’s so hard to hear it stated so bluntly. The truth. Implying what I’ve told or not told over the years makes me a liar.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her again. “You had a right to know the truth back then, at the time of your daughter’s death. And the death of her friend.”

  “I can see why you didn’t say anything back then, though,” Mrs. Pieste says, and she sounds only slightly upset. Mostly she sounds interested and relieved to be talking about something that has dominated her life for most of it. “When people do things like this, no telling where they’ll stop. Well, there’s no limit. Other people would have gotten hurt. Including you.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted anybody else to get hurt,” I reply, and I feel worse if what she’s saying is that I was silent out of fear for my own safety. I was afraid of a lot of things and a host of people I couldn’t see. I was afraid of other people dying, of people being wrongly accused.

  “I hope you understand that when I read the death certificate and autopsy report, not that I understand most of the medical terms, well, one would think the findings are yours,” Mrs. Pieste says.

  “They absolutely weren’t, and they are false. There was no tissue response to the injuries. All of it was postmortem. In fact, hours after the deaths, Mrs. Pieste. What was done to Noonie and Joanne occurred many hours after they had died.”

  “If there wasn’t a test for drugs, then how can you be sure they were given something?” her voice goes on, and I hear the sound of another phone being picked up.

  “This is Edward Pieste,” a man’s voice says. “I’m on, too. I’m Noonie’s father.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounds weak, perfectly insipid. “I wish I had exactly the right words to say to both of you. I’m sorry you were lied to and that I permitted it, and although I won’t make excuses…”

  “We understand why you couldn’t say what happened,” the father replies. “The feelings back then, and our government secretly in collusion with those who wanted to keep Apartheid alive. That’s why Noonie was making that documentary. They wouldn’t let the film crew into South Africa. Each of them had to go in as if they were tourists. A big dirty secret what our government was doing to support the atrocities over there.”

  “It wasn’t that big of a secret, Eddie.” Mrs. Pieste’s voice.

  “Well, the White House put on the good face.”

  “I’m sure they told you about the documentary Noonie was making? She had such a future,” Mrs. Pieste says to me as I look at a picture of her daughter that I wouldn’t want the Piestes to ever see.

  “About the children of Apartheid,” I reply. “I did see it when it aired here.”

  “The evils of white supremacy,” she says. “Of any supremacy, period.”

  “I missed the first part of what the two of you have been talking about,” Mr. Pieste says. “Was out shoveling the driveway.”

  “He doesn’t listen,” his wife says. “A man his age shoveling snow, but he’s the hard head.” She says it with sad affection. “Dr. Scarpetta was telling me Noonie and Joanne were drugged.”

  “Really. Well, that’s something.” He says it with no energy in his tone.

  “I got to the apartment several days after their deaths and did a retrospective. It was staged, of course; their crime scene was staged,” I explain. “But there were beer cans, plastic cups, and a wine bottle in the kitchen trash, a bottle of
white wine from Stellenbosch, and I managed to get the cans, the bottle, and cups along with other items, and have them sent back to the States, where I had them tested. We found high levels of GHB in the wine bottle and two of the cups. Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as a date-rape drug.”

  “They did say there was rape,” Mr. Pieste says with the same empty affect.

  “I don’t know for a fact that they were raped. There was no physical sign of it, no injuries except staged ones inflicted postmortem, and swabs I had tested privately here in the US were negative for sperm,” I reply, looking through photographs of the nude bodies bound to chairs I know the women weren’t sitting in when they were murdered. I look at close-ups showing a livor mortis pattern that told me the women were lying in bed on rumpled sheets for at least twelve hours after death.

  I go through photographs I took with my own camera of hacking and cutting injuries that barely bled, and ligatures that scarcely left a mark on the skin because the brutes behind all this were too ignorant to know what the hell they were doing, someone hired or assigned by government or military operatives to spike a bottle of local wine and have drinks with the women, possibly a friend or they thought the person was friendly or safe, when, of course, he was anything but, and I tell them that serology tests I had done after I got home indicated the presence of a male. Later, when I had DNA testing done, I got the profile of a European or white male who remains unknown. I can’t say for a fact it is the profile of the killer, but it was someone drinking beer inside the apartment, I add.

  As much as one can reconstruct anything, I tell the Piestes what I think happened, that after Noonie and Joanne were drugged and groggy or unconscious, their assailant helped them to bed and smothered them with a pillow, and I based this on pinpoint hemorrhages and other injuries, I explain. Then for some reason this person must have left. Maybe he wanted to come back later with others involved in the conspiracy, or it could be that he waited inside the apartment for his compatriots to arrive, I don’t know. But by the time the women were bound and cut and mutilated so savagely, they had been dead for a while, and it couldn’t have been more obvious to me when I finally saw them.