Four Scarpetta Novels
Page 91
Swatting at sea gnats, he finishes a Budweiser, crushes the can and hurls it out the open screen door, pleased that it sails twenty feet past his boat and plops into the water. Boredom gives pleasure to the most mundane activities, including checking on the crab pots suspended below floats in the murky freshwater. It doesn’t matter that crabs aren’t found in freshwater. Crawfish are, and they’re in season, and if they don’t pick the pots clean, something bigger usually comes along.
Last month, a large log turned into an alligator gar weighing at least a hundred pounds. It moved like a torpedo, speeding off with a trotline and its makeshift float of an empty Clorox bottle. Jay sat calmly in his boat and tipped his baseball cap to the carnivorous creature. Jay doesn’t eat what he catches in the pots, but out here in the middle of this hellish nowhere he now calls home, his only acceptable fresh choices are catfish, bass, turtles and as many frogs as he can gig at night. Otherwise, his food comes in bags and cans from various grocery stores on the mainland.
He brings down a meat cleaver, cutting through muscle and bone. More pieces of foul flesh land in the bucket. It doesn’t take long for meat to rot in this heat.
“Guess who I’m thinking about right now,” he says to Bev Kiffin, his woman.
“Shut up. You just say that to get to me.”
“No, ma chérie, I say it because I’m remembering fucking her in Paris.”
Jealousy flares. Bev can’t control herself when she is forced to think of Kay Scarpetta, who is fine-looking and smart—plenty fine-looking, and smart enough for Jay. Rarely does it occur to Bev that she has no good reason to compete with a woman Jay fantasizes about chopping up and feeding to the alligators and crawfish in the bayou outside their door. If Bev could cut Scarpetta’s throat, she sure as hell would, and her own dream is to one day get her chance. Then Jay wouldn’t talk about the bitch anymore. He wouldn’t stare out at the bayou half the night, thinking about her.
“How come you have to always talk about her?”
Bev moves closer to him and watches sweat trickle down his perfectly sculpted, smooth chest, soaking the waistband of his tight cutoff jeans. She stares at his muscular thighs, the hair on them fine and shiny as gold. Her fury heats to flashover and erupts.
“You got a damn hard-on. You chop away and get a stiff dick! Put down that meat ax!”
“It’s a cleaver, honey. If only you weren’t so stupid.” His handsome face and blond hair are wet with sweat, his cold blue eyes bright against his tan.
She bends over and cups her thick, stubby hand around the bulge between his thighs as he calmly spreads his legs wide and leans back in the chair long enough for her to get started on his zipper. She wears no bra, her cheap flower-printed blouse halfway unbuttoned, offering him a view of heavy, flaccid breasts that arouse nothing beyond his need to manipulate and control. He rips open her blouse, buttons lightly clattering against wood, and begins fondling her the way she craves.
“Oh,” she moans. “Don’t stop,” she begs, moving his head closer.
“Want more, baby?”
“Oh.”
He sucks her, disgusted by her salty, sour taste, and shoves her hard with his bare feet.
The thud of her body hitting the floor, her shocked gasp, are familiar sounds in the fishing shack.
BLOOD SEEPS FROM A SCRAPE on Bev’s dimpled left knee, and she stares at the wound.
“How come you don’t want me no more, baby?” she says. “You used to want me so bad I couldn’t keep you off me.”
Her nose runs. She shoves back her short, frizzy, graying brown hair and pulls her torn blouse together, suddenly humiliated by her ugly nakedness.
“Want is when I want.”
He resumes the blows with the meat cleaver. Tiny bits of flesh and bone fly out from the thick, shiny blade and stick to the stained wooden table and to Jay’s sweaty bare chest. The sweet, sour stench of rotting flesh is heavy in the stifling air, and flies drone in lazy zigzags, lumbering airborne like fat cargo planes. They hover over the gory mother lode inside the bucket, their black and green swarming bodies shimmering like spilled gasoline.
Bev collects herself off the floor. She watches Jay hacking and tossing flesh into the bucket, flies darting up and greedily dive-bombing back to their feast. They buzz loudly, bumping against the side of the bucket.
“And now we’re supposed to eat off that table.” Hers is an old line. They never eat off it. The table is Jay’s private space and she knows not to touch it.
He swats furiously at the sea gnats. “Goddamn, I hate these fucking things! When the fuck are you going shopping? And next time, don’t come back here with only two bottles of insect repellent and no pups.”
Bev disappears into the lavatory. It is no bigger than the head on a small boat, and there is no tank to chemically store and treat human waste, which slops through a hole into a washtub between pilings that support the shack. Once a day, she empties the tub into the bayou. Her persistent nightmare is that a water moccasin or alligator is going to get her while she sits on the wooden box toilet, and at especially uneasy times, she squats above it, peering down at the black hole, her fat thighs shaking from fear and the strain of supporting her weight.
She was fleshy when Jay first met her at a campsite near Williamsburg, Virginia, where his family business brought them together by accident, really. He needed a place, and hers was out of the way, an overgrown, garbage-strewn, densely wooded property with abandoned, rusting campers and a motel mostly patronized by prostitutes and drug dealers. When Jay appeared at Bev’s door, she was thrilled by his power and was instantly attracted to him. She came on to him the same way she did with all men, rough raw sex her only means of gratifying her lonely, angry needs.
The rain was driving down that night, reminding her of shiny nails, and she fixed Jay a bowl of Campbell’s vegetable beef soup and a grilled cheese sandwich while her young children hid and watched their mother involving herself with yet another stranger. Bev paid her little ones no mind at the time. She tries not to think about them now or wonder how big they’re getting. They are wards of the state and far better off without her. Ironically, Jay was nicer to them than she was. He was so different then, when he took her to bed that first night.
Three years ago she was more attractive and had not gained weight from eating snack foods and processed cheeses and meats that don’t spoil. She can’t do push-ups and squats all day long the way Jay does, and she gets no exercise. Behind the shack, grass flats thick with mussels and rich black muck stretch for miles. There is no dry ground to walk on except the pier. Maneuvering Jay’s boat through narrow waterways burns few calories.
A small outboard motor would do, but Jay will have nothing less than a 200-horsepower Evinrude with a stainless-steel prop to speed through channels, heading to his secret spots, and drift silently beneath cypress trees, waiting perfectly still like a possum if a helicopter or small plane flies low overhead. He helps Bev with nothing, his distinctive looks impossible to disguise because he is too vain to ruin his beauty. When he goes to shore, it is to get money at a family hideaway and not to run errands. Bev can venture out for provisions because she scarcely resembles her photograph on the FBI’s most-wanted list, her skin withered by the sun, her body overblown, her face puffy and hair cut short.
“Why can’t we close the door?” Bev asks as she walks out of the tiny, dirty bathroom.
He goes to the refrigerator, rounded and white with spots of rust, left over from the sixties. Swinging open the door, he grabs another beer.
“I like being hot,” he says, his footsteps heavy on the old planking.
“The air-conditioning’s going right out the door.” Hers is the usual complaint. “We only got so much gasoline for the generator.”
“Then you’ll just have to go out and get more. How many times do I have to tell you to get your fat ass out to get more?”
He stares at her, his eyes weird, the way they get when he is engrossed in his ritual. H
is arousal strains against his zipper, and soon he will relieve it—again, at a time of his choosing. Body odor and a rotten stench waft past her as he carries the bucket outside, flies storming after it in a loud buzzing blitzkrieg. He busies himself, pulling up crab pots by their yellow nylon ropes. He has dozens of pots. He simply tosses pieces too big to fit inside them into the water, where gators will drag them to the bottom and feed off them at their pleasure. Skulls pose the biggest problem, because they make identity certain. Another ritual of his is to pound skulls into dust, which he mixes with powdered white chalk that he stores in empty paint cans. Chalky, bony dust reminds him of the catacombs that wind twenty-five meters below the streets of Paris.
Now inside and flopping on the narrow bed against a wall, he puts his hands behind his head.
Bev slips out of her torn blouse, teasing him like a stripper. A master at the waiting game, he does not react as she brushes against his lips. She throbs unbearably. This might go on for a very long time, never mind her begging, and when he is ready, and only then, he bites, but not hard enough to leave a mark because he can’t abide the idea of being anything like Jean-Baptiste, his brother.
Jay used to smell and taste so good. Now that he is a fugitive, he rarely bathes, and when he does, he simply dumps buckets of bayou water over his body. Bev dares not complain or react in the slightest way to the strong stench of his breath and groin. The one and only time she gagged, he broke her nose and forced her to finish, her blood and small cries of pain giving him pleasure.
When she cleans the shack, she obsessively scrubs that spot below the bed, but the bloodstains are stubborn, like something out of a horror movie, she thinks. Bleach has left a mottled whitish-brown area the size of a doormat that Jay constantly complains about, as if he had nothing to do with how it got there.
JEAN-BAPTISTE CHANDONNE is Rodin’s The Thinker on the stainless-steel toilet, his white pants drooping around his furry knees.
Corrections officers make fun of him. It never stops. He can sense it as he perches on the toilet, staring at the locked steel door of his cell. The iron bars in its tiny window are drawn to the iron in Jean-Baptiste’s blood. Animal magnetism is a scientific fact scarcely heard of now and, for the most part, not accepted centuries ago, even though there are documented cases of magnetized materials having been applied to diseased and damaged parts of the body, causing all symptoms to cease, the patient’s health restored. Jean-Baptiste is well schooled in the doctrine of the famous Dr. Mesmer, whose system of treatment is eloquently laid out in his Mémoir sur la Découverte du Magnétisme Animal.
The original work, first published in French in 1779, is Jean-Baptiste’s Bible. Before his books and radio were confiscated, he memorized long sections of Mesmer, and he is devout in his belief that a universal magnetic fluid influences the tides and people.
“I possessed the usual knowledge about the magnet: its action on iron, the ability of our body fluids to receive that mineral . . .” Mesmer wrote, and Jean-Baptiste quotes under his breath as he thinks on the toilet. “I prepared the patient by the continuous use of chalybeates.”
A chalybeate is an iron tonic, and who but Jean-Baptiste knows this? If only he could find a chalybeate, just the right one, he would be healed. Before he was in prison, he tried soaking iron nails in drinking water, eating rust, sleeping with pieces of iron under his bed and pillow, and carrying nuts and bolts and magnets in the pockets of his pants. He came to believe that his chalybeate is the iron in human blood, but he could not get enough of it before he went to prison, and he can’t get it at all now. When, on rare occasion, he bites himself and sucks, it makes no difference but is the equivalent of one drinking his own blood to cure himself of anemia.
Franz Anton Mesmer was mocked by the religious and scientific community, just as Jean-Baptiste has always been mocked. True believers publicly feigned skepticism—or if they were believers, used pseudonyms to avoid being labeled as quacks. The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, published in 1837, for example, was written by “A Gentleman in Philadelphia,” who some suspect was Edgar Allan Poe. Such books ended up in universities and were eventually discarded by their libraries, allowing Jean-Baptiste to acquire a small but amazing collection for a pittance.
He obsesses about what has happened to his books. His pulse pounds in his neck as he strains on the toilet. The books he brought here from France were taken from him as punishment when the prison’s classification team demoted him from a level-one status to a level-three, supposedly because he masturbates and commits food infractions. Jean-Baptiste spends much of the time on the toilet, and the officers call this masturbating.
Twice in one day—he forgets how long ago—he fumbled his meal trays as they were shoved through the slot at the bottom of his door. Food splattered everywhere, and the incidents were deemed deliberate. He has been deprived of all commissaries, including, of course, his books. He is allowed only one hour of recreation per week. It doesn’t matter. He can write letters. The guards are baffled.
“He can write fucking letters when he’s blind?” they say.
“Don’t know for sure he is. Seems like sometimes he is, and sometimes he ain’t.”
“Faking?”
“Fucking crazy, man.”
Jean-Baptiste can do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks whenever he pleases inside his sixty-four-square-foot cell. His number of visits from the outside world has been limited. That doesn’t matter, either. Who asks to see him except reporters and those physicians, profilers and academic types who wish to study him as if he is a new strain of virus? Jean-Baptiste’s incarceration, abuse and imminent death have condensed his soul into a bright light scattered with white specks.
He’s perpetually magnetized and somnambulous, and his clairvoyance gives him clear-sightedness without eyes. He has ears but does not need them to hear. He can know without knowing and go anywhere without the body that has punished him since birth. Jean-Baptiste has never known anything but hate. Before he attempted to murder the lady forensic pathologist in Virginia and was finally captured by police, intense hatred flowed through others, through him, and returned to others, the circuit complete and infinite. His violent rampages were inevitable, and he does not hold his body responsible for them and suffers no remorse.
After two years on death row, Jean-Baptiste exists in a perpetual state of magnetism and no longer suffers from negativity toward any living being. This does not imply that he would no longer kill. Given the opportunity, he would rip women apart as he did in the past, but his electricity is not charged by hate and lust. He would destroy beautiful females to answer his higher calling, to complete a pure circuit that is necessary and godly. His delicious ecstasy would flow through his chosen ones. Their pain and deaths would be beautiful, and his chosen ones would be eternally grateful to him as their minds detached from their bodies.
“Who’s there?” he demands of the stale, foul air.
He pushes the roll of toilet paper toward his small bunk, watching the unfurling of a soft white highway that will take him beyond his cinder-block walls. Today, perhaps, he will go to Beaune and visit his favorite twelfth-century cave at the domain of Monsieur Cambrai and taste Burgundies from casks of his choosing and not bother pulling air into his mouth and spitting the wine into a stone bowl, as is proper when tasting the treasures of le terroire. He cannot waste a drop! Ha! Let’s see, which grand vins de Bourgogne this time? He touches an index finger to his deformed lips.
His father, Monsieur Chandonne, owns vineyards in Beaune. He owns wine makers and exporters. Jean-Baptiste is very knowledgeable about wines, even if they were denied him when he was confined to the basement and then banished from his family home. His intimacy with Beaune is a rich fantasy projected from his charming brother’s detailed stories of wines to remind Jean-Baptiste of his deprivation and nonexistence. Ha! Jean-Baptiste does not need a tongue to taste. He knows the confident Clos de Vougeot, and the soft, complex and elegant red Clos de Mouches.
“Who’s there?” he calls out.
“Shut up and quit fucking with the toilet paper! Pick it up.”
Jean-Baptiste does not have to look to see the angry eyes peering through the bars in the door.
“Roll it up nice and neat, and quit playing with your Mini-Me dick!”
The eyes disappear, leaving cool air. Jean-Baptiste must leave for Beaune, where there are no eyes. He must find his next chosen one and rip away her flawed sight and beat her brains into forgetfulness so she will not remember her revulsion when she saw him. Then her domain is his. Her hillsides and luscious clusters of grapes belong to him. Her cave is his to explore, to feel his way along dark, damp walls that become cooler the longer he takes. Her blood is fine red wine, whichever vintage he craves. Reds, reds, splashing and running down his arms, turning his hair red and sticky, making his teeth ache with joy!
“Who’s there?”
Rarely is he answered.
After two years, the corrections officers assigned to death row are weary of the mutant madman Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. They look forward to the end of him. The French wolfman with his deformed penis and hairy body is repulsive. His face is asymmetrical, as if the two sides were not lined up when they were put together in the womb, one eye lower than the other, his tiny baby teeth widely spaced and pointed. Until recently, he shaved daily. Jean-Baptiste doesn’t shave now. This is his right. The last four months before execution, the condemned inmate doesn’t have to shave. He can go to the death chamber with long hair and a beard.