Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I think that might be when he got his first taste of it.”

  “Taste of what?” Lucy asks.

  “Taste of killing civilians,” Scarpetta says.

  “That doesn’t explain the Dr. Self connection.”

  “Sending photographs to her indicates he’s created a psychological landscape and a ritual for his crimes. And it also becomes a game, serves a purpose. Removes him from the horror of what he’s doing, because to face the fact that he’s sadistically inflicting pain and death might be more than he can bear. So he has to give it a meaning. He has to make it cunning.” She retrieves a very unscientific but practical packet of Post-its from her crime scene case. “Rather much like religion. If you do something in the name of God, that makes it okay. Stoning people to death. Burning them at the stake. The Inquisition. The Crusades. Oppressing people who aren’t just like you. He’s given a meaning to what he does. My opinion, anyway.”

  She probes the bed with a bright white light, and uses the sticky side of Post-its to collect any fibers, hairs, dirt, or sand she sees.

  “Then you don’t think Dr. Self is personally significant to this guy? That she’s just a prop in his drama? That he just latched on to her because she’s there. On the air. A household name.”

  Scarpetta places the Post-its in a plastic evidence bag and seals it with yellow crime scene tape that she labels and dates with a Sharpie. She and Lucy begin to fold the bedspread.

  “I think it’s extremely personal,” Scarpetta replies. “You don’t place someone in the matrix of your game or psychological drama if it isn’t personal. I can’t answer the why part of it.”

  A loud ripping noise as Lucy tears a large sheet of brown paper from its roll.

  “For example, he may have never met her. Same thing stalkers do. Or he might have,” Scarpetta says. “For all we know, he’s been on her show or has spent time with her.”

  They center the folded spread on the paper.

  “You’re right. One way or other, it’s personal,” Lucy decides. “Maybe he kills the woman in Bari and does all but confess it to Dr. Maroni, perhaps thinking Dr. Self will find out. Well, she doesn’t. So now what?”

  “He feels even more ignored.”

  “Then what?”

  “Escalation.”

  “What happens when Mother doesn’t pay attention to her profoundly disturbed and damaged child?” Scarpetta asks as she wraps.

  “Let me think,” Lucy says. “The child grows up to be me?”

  Scarpetta cuts off a strip of yellow tape and says, “What a terrible thing. Torture and kill women who were guests on your show. Or do it to get your attention.”

  The sixty-inch flat-screen television talks to Marino. It tells him something about Madelisa that he can use against her.

  “That a plasma screen?” he asks. “Must be the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

  She’s overweight, with heavy-lidded eyes, and could use a good dentist. Her dentures remind him of a white picket fence, and her hairstylist ought to be shot. She sits on a floral-print couch, her hands fidgety.

  She says, “My husband and his toys. I don’t know what it is, except big and expensive.”

  “Must be something watching a game on that thing. Me? I’d probably sit in front of it, never get a damn thing done.”

  Which is probably what she does. Sit in front of the TV like a zombie.

  “What do you like to watch?” he asks.

  “I like crime shows and mysteries, because I can usually figure them out. But after what just happened to me, I’m not sure I can watch anything violent ever again.”

  “Then you probably know a lot about forensics,” Marino says. “Seeing as how you watch all these crime shows.”

  “I was on jury duty about a year ago and knew more about forensics than the judge did. That doesn’t say much about the judge. But I know a few things.”

  “How about image recovery?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “As in photographs, videotapes, digital recordings that have been erased.”

  “Would you like some iced tea? I can make it.”

  “Not right now.”

  “I think Ashley’s going to pick up some Jimmy Dengate’s. You ever had fried chicken from there? He’ll be home any minute, and maybe you’d like some.”

  “What I’d like is for you to quit changing the subject. See, with image recovery, it’s next to impossible to totally get rid of a digital image that’s on a disk or memory stick or whatever. You can delete stuff all day and we can get it back.” This isn’t entirely true, but Marino has no compunction about lying.

  Madelisa looks like a cornered mouse.

  “You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?” Marino says, and he’s got her where he wants her but he doesn’t feel good about it, and he himself isn’t quite sure what he’s getting at.

  When Scarpetta called him a while ago and said Turkington is suspicious about what Mr. Dooley erased because he kept mentioning it during the interview, Marino said he’d get an answer. More than anything right now, he wants to please Scarpetta, make her think something’s still worthwhile about him. He was shocked she called him.

  “Why are you asking me?” Madelisa says, and she begins to cry. “I said, I don’t know anything other than what I already told that investigator.”

  She continues glancing past Marino toward the back of her small, yellow house. Yellow wallpaper, yellow carpet. Marino’s never seen so much yellow. It looks like an interior decorator peed on everything the Dooleys own.

  “The reason I bring up image recovery is I understand your husband erased part of what he videotaped out there on the beach,” Marino says, unmoved by her tears.

  “It was just me standing in front of the house before I had permission. That’s the only thing he erased. Of course, I never did get permission, because how could I? It’s not that I didn’t try. I have manners.”

  “I really don’t give a shit about you and your manners. What I care about is what you’re hiding from me and everybody else.” He leans forward in the recliner chair. “I know damn well you’re not being totally honest with me. Why do I know that? Because of science.”

  He doesn’t know anything of the sort. To recover deleted images from a digital recorder isn’t a given. If it can be done at all, the process is painstaking and would take a while.

  “Please don’t,” she begs him. “I’m so sorry, but please don’t take him. I love him so much.”

  Marino has no idea what she’s talking about. It occurs to him she means her husband, but he isn’t sure.

  He says, “If I don’t take him, what then? How do I explain it when I leave here and I’m asked?”

  “Pretend you don’t know about it.” She cries harder. “What difference does it make? He didn’t do anything. Oh, the poor baby. Who knows what he’s been through. He was shaking and had blood on him. He didn’t do anything except get scared and escape, and if you take him you know what will happen. They’ll put him to sleep. Oh, please, let me keep him. Please! Please! Please!”

  “Why did he have blood on him?” Marino asks.

  In the master bathroom, Scarpetta shines a flashlight obliquely over an onyx floor the color of tigereye.

  “Bare footprints,” she says from the doorway. “Smallish. Maybe hers again. And more hair.”

  “If what Madelisa Dooley says is to be believed, he had to have walked around in here. This is so weird,” Becky says as Lucy shows up with a small blue-and-yellow box and a bottle of sterile water.

  Scarpetta steps inside the bathroom. She pulls open the tiger-striped shower curtain and shines the light inside the deep copper tub. Nothing, then something catches her attention, and she picks up what looks like a piece of broken white pottery that for some reason was between a bar of white soap and a dish hooked to the side of the tub. She examines it carefully. She gets out her jeweler’s lens.

  “Part of a dental crown,” she says. “Not porcelain.
A temporary that somehow got broken.”

  “I wonder where the rest of it is,” Becky says, crouching in the doorway and peering at the floor, turning on her flashlight and shining it in all directions. “Unless it’s not recent.”

  “Could have gone down the drain. We should check the trap. Could be anywhere.” Scarpetta thinks she sees a trace of dried blood on what she estimates is almost half of a crown from what she believes is a front tooth. “We have any way of knowing if Lydia Webster has been to the dentist lately?”

  “I can check it out. There’s not that many dentists on the island. So unless she went elsewhere, it shouldn’t be hard to track down.”

  “It would have to be recent, very recent,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t care how much you neglect your hygiene, you don’t ignore a broken crown, especially on a front tooth.”

  “Could be his,” Lucy says.

  “That would be even better,” Scarpetta says. “We need a small paper envelope.”

  “I’ll get it,” Lucy says.

  “I don’t see anything. If it broke in here, I don’t see the rest of it. I guess it could still be attached to the tooth. I broke a crown once and part of it was still stuck to the little nub that’s left of my tooth.” Becky looks past Scarpetta, at the copper tub. “Talk about the biggest false-positive on the planet,” she adds. “This will be a new one for the books. One of the few times I need to use luminal, and the damn tub and sink are copper. Well, we can forget it.”

  “I don’t use luminol anymore,” Scarpetta says, as if the oxidizing agent is a disloyal friend.

  Until recently, it was a forensic staple and she never questioned using it to find blood no longer visible. If blood had been washed away or even painted over, the way to know was to mix up a spray bottle of luminol and see what fluoresced. The problems have always been many. Like a dog that wags its tail at all the neighbors, luminol is excited by more than the hemoglobin in blood and is, unfortunately, quite responsive to a number of things: paint, varnish, Drano, bleach, dandelions, thistle, creeping myrtle, corn. And, of course, copper.

  Lucy retrieves a small container of Hemastix for a presumptive test, looking for any residue of what may be scrubbed-away blood. The presumptive test says blood might be there, and Scarpetta opens the box of Bluestar Magnum and removes a brown glass bottle and a foil pack, and a spray bottle.

  “Stronger, longer-lasting, don’t have to use it in total darkness,” she explains to Becky. “No sodium perborate tetrahydrate, so it’s nontoxic. Can use it on copper because the reaction will be a different intensity, a different color spectrum, and will have a different duration than blood.”

  She has yet to see blood inside the master bathroom. Despite what Madelisa claimed, the most intense white light revealed not the slightest stain. But this is no longer surprising. By all indications so far, after she fled from the house, the killer meticulously cleaned up after himself. Scarpetta selects the finest setting on the spray bottle’s nozzle and pours in four ounces of sterile water. To this she adds two tablets. She gently stirs with a pipette for several minutes, then opens the brown glass bottle and pours in a sodium hydroxide solution.

  She begins to spray, and spots and streaks and shapes and spatters luminesce bright cobalt blue all over the room. Becky takes photographs. A little later, when Scarpetta has finished cleaning up after herself and is repacking her crime scene case, her cell phone rings. It’s the fingerprint examiner from Lucy’s labs.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he says.

  “Don’t ever start a conversation like that with me unless you mean it.” Scarpetta isn’t joking.

  “The print on the gold coin.” He’s excited, talking fast. “We got a hit—the unidentified little boy who was found last week. The kid from Hilton Head.”

  “Are you sure? You can’t be sure. It makes no sense.”

  “May not make sense, but there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Don’t say that, either, unless you mean it. My first reaction is there’s an error,” Scarpetta says.

  “There’s not. I pulled his ten-print card from the prints Marino took in the morgue. I visually verified it. Unquestionably, the ridge detail from the partial on the coin matches the unidentified kid’s right thumbprint. There’s no mistake.”

  “A fingerprint on a coin that’s been fumed with glue? I don’t see how.”

  “Believe me, I’m with you. We all know the fingerprints of prepubescent kids don’t last long enough to fume. They’re mostly water. Just sweat instead of the oils, amino acids, and all the rest that comes with puberty. I’ve never superglued a kid’s prints and don’t think you could. But this print is from a kid, and that kid is the one in your morgue.”

  “Maybe that’s not how it happened,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe the coin was never fumed.”

  “Had to be. There’s ridge detail in what sure looks like superglue, the same as if it had been fumed.”

  “Maybe he had glue on his finger and touched the coin,” she says. “And left his print that way.”

  Chapter 18

  Nine p.m. A hard rain slaps the street in front of Marino’s fishing shack.

  Lucy is soaking wet as she turns on a wireless receiver mini-disc recorder disguised as an iPod. In exactly six minutes, Scarpetta will call Marino. Right now, he is arguing with Shandy, their every word picked up by the multidirectional mike embedded in his computer’s thumb drive.

  His heavy footsteps, the refrigerator door opening, the swish of a can popped open, probably a beer.

  Shandy’s angry voice sounds in Lucy’s earpiece. “…Don’t lie to me. I’m warning you. All of a sudden? All of a sudden you decide you don’t want a committed relationship? And by the way, who said I’m committed to you? The only fucking thing that ought to be committed is you—to a fucking mental hospital. Maybe the Big Chief’s fiancé can give you a discount on a room up there.”

  He’s told her about Scarpetta’s engagement to Benton. Shandy’s hitting Marino where it hurts, meaning she knows where it hurts. Lucy wonders how much she’s used that against him, taunted him about it.

  “You don’t own me. You don’t get to have me until it don’t suit you anymore, so maybe I’m getting rid of you first,” he yells. “You’re bad for me. Making me get on that hormone shit—it’s a damn wonder I hadn’t had a stroke or something. After barely more than a week. What happens in a month, huh? You picked out a fucking cemetery? Or maybe I’ll end up in the fucking penitentiary because I lose my mind and do something.”

  “Maybe you already did something.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Why would I be committed to an old, fat fuck like you, who can’t even get it up without that hormone shit?”

  “Cut it out, Shandy. I’ve had it with you putting me down, you hear me? If I’m such a nothing, why are you here? I need some space, time to think. Everything’s so fucked up right now. Work’s turned to shit. I’m smoking, not going to the gym, drinking too much, doped up. Everything’s gone to hell, and all you do is get me in worse and worse trouble.”

  His cell phone rings. He doesn’t answer. It rings and rings.

  “Answer it!” Lucy says out loud in the heavy, steady rain.

  “Yeah.” his voice sounds in her earpiece.

  Thank God. He’s quiet for a moment, listening, then says to Scarpetta on the other line, “That can’t be right.”

  Lucy can’t hear Scarpetta’s side of the conversation but knows what’s being said. She’s telling Marino there were no hits in NIBIN or IAFIS for the serial number of the Colt .38 and any prints or partial prints recovered from the gun and the cartridges that Bull found in her alleyway.

  “What about him?” Marino asks.

  He means Bull. Scarpetta can’t answer that. Bull’s prints wouldn’t be in IAFIS, because he’s never been convicted of a crime, and his being arrested several weeks ago doesn’t count. If the Colt is his but isn’t stolen or wasn’t used in a crime and then ended up ba
ck on the street, it wouldn’t be in NIBIN. She’s already told Bull it would be helpful if he were printed for exclusionary purposes, but he’s not gotten around to it. She can’t remind him again because she can’t get hold of him, and both she and Lucy have tried several times since they left Lydia Webster’s house. Bull’s mother says he went out in his boat to pick oysters. Why he would do that in this weather is baffling.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Marino’s voice fills Lucy’s ear, and he is walking around again, obviously careful what he says in front of Shandy.

  Scarpetta will also tell Marino about the partial print on the gold coin. Maybe that’s what she’s relaying to him right now, because he makes a sound of surprise.

  Then he says, “Good to know.”

  Then he falls silent again. Lucy hears him pacing. He moves closer to the computer, to the thumb drive, and a chair scrapes across the wooden floor as if he’s sitting down. Shandy is quiet, probably trying to figure out what he’s talking about and to whom.

  “Okay,” he finally says. “Can we deal with this later? I’m in the middle of something.”

  No. Lucy’s certain her aunt will force him to talk about whatever she wants, or at least listen. She’s not going to get off the phone without reminding him that within the past week, he started wearing an old Morgan silver dollar on a necklace. It may have no connection to the gold coin necklace that was at least held, at some point, by the dead little boy in Scarpetta’s freezer. But where did Marino get his gaudy new necklace? If she’s asking him that, he isn’t answering. He can’t. Shandy’s right there listening. And as Lucy stands in the dark, in the rain, and the rain soaks her cap and seeps in around the collar of her slicker, she thinks about what Marino did to her aunt, and that same feeling comes back. A fearless, flat feeling.

  “Yeah, yeah, no problem,” Marino says. “Like a ripe apple falling from a tree.”

  Lucy infers that her aunt is thanking him. What an irony, she’s thanking him. How the fuck can she thank him for anything? Lucy knows why, but it’s still revolting. Scarpetta’s thanking him for talking with Madelisa, which resulted in her confessing that she’d taken the basset hound, and then showing him a pair of shorts that had blood on them. The blood had been on the dog. Madelisa wiped it on her shorts, indicating she must have arrived on the scene very soon after someone was injured or killed, because the blood on the dog was still wet. Marino took the shorts. He let her keep the dog. His story, he told her, is that the killer stole the basset hound, probably killed it and buried it somewhere. Amazing how kind and decent he is to women he doesn’t know.