The round, brass head shines like a moon on the screen.
Inside the Massachusetts State Police firearms lab, Tom, a firearms examiner, sits amid computers and comparison microscopes in a low-lighted room where the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, NIBIN, has finally answered his query.
He stares at the magnified images of fine striations and gouges transferred from the metal parts of a shotgun to the brass heads of two shells. The two images are superimposed, the two halves joined in the middle, the microscopic signatures, as Tom calls them, lining up perfectly.
“Of course, officially, I’m calling it a possible match until I can validate it on the comparison scope,” he is explaining to Dr. Wesley over the phone, the legendary Benton Wesley.
This is cool, Tom can’t help but think.
“Which means the examiner down in Broward County needs to send me his evidence, and fortunately, that’s not a problem,” Tom goes on. “Preliminarily, let me just say that I don’t think there’s going to be a question about this one being a hit in the computer. It’s my opinion—again, preliminarily—that the two shells were fired by the same shotgun.”
He waits for the reaction and feels charged-up, excited, as high as if he’s had two whisky sours. To say there’s a hit is like telling the investigator he won the lottery.
“What do you know about the Hollywood case?” Dr. Wesley says without so much as a hint of gratitude.
“For one thing, it’s solved,” Tom answers, insulted.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Dr. Wesley says in the same ungracious tone.
He’s unappreciative and high-handed, and that figures. Tom has never met him, never talked to him and had no idea what to expect. But he’s heard of him, heard about his past career with the FBI, and everyone knows the FBI throws its considerable weight around, exploits the local investigators while treating them like inferiors and then takes credit for anything good that comes of a case. He’s an arrogant prick. That figures. No wonder Thrush made him talk directly to the legendary Dr. Benton Wesley. Thrush doesn’t want to deal with him or anyone that is or was or even knows the FBI.
“Two years ago,” Tom is saying, his friendliness withdrawn.
He sounds obtuse, dull. That’s what his wife tells him when his ego is bruised and he justifiably reacts. He has a right to react, but he doesn’t want his affect to become obtuse and dull, as if he’s been hit on the head with a wooden plank, as his wife puts it.
“Hollywood had a robbery in a convenience store,” he is saying, trying not to sound obtuse and dull. “Guy comes in wearing a rubber mask and pointing a shotgun. He shoots this kid who’s sweeping the floor, and then the night manager shoots him in the head with the pistol he kept under the counter.”
“And they ran the shotgun shell through NIBIN?”
“Apparently, to see if this same masked guy might have been connected to some other unsolved cases.”
“I don’t understand,” Dr. Wesley impatiently says again. “What happened to the weapon after the masked guy was killed? It should have been recovered by the police. And now it’s just been used again in a homicide up here in Massachusetts?”
“I asked the Broward County examiner the same thing,” he replies, trying with all his might not to sound obtuse and dull. “He said after he test-fired the gun, he returned it to Hollywood PD.”
“Well, I can promise you it’s not there now,” Dr. Wesley says as if Tom is a simpleton.
Tom chews on a hangnail, making his cuticle bleed, an old habit that annoys the hell out of his wife.
“Thanks,” Dr. Wesley says, getting off the phone, dismissing him.
Tom’s attention wanders to the NIBIN microscope where the shotgun shell in question is mounted, a red, plastic twelve-gauge shell with a brass head that has an unusual drag mark made by the firing pin. He made the case a priority. He has been sitting in his chair the entire day and now into the night, using ring lighting and side lighting and proper orientations of three o’clock and six o’clock positions and saving each picture as a file, doing this repeatedly with breech marks, the firing pin impression and the ejector mark before searching the NIBIN database.
Then he had to wait four hours for the results while his family went to the movies without him. Then Thrush was out to dinner and asked him to call Dr. Wesley but forgot to give him a direct phone number, and Tom had to call the McLean Hospital answering service and be handled, at first, as if he were a patient. A little appreciation is in order, he thinks. Dr. Wesley couldn’t bother to say “job well done” or “I can’t believe you got results so fast or got them at all.” Does he have any idea how hard it is to run a shotgun shell through NIBIN? Most examiners won’t even try.
He stares at the shell. He’s never had one that was recovered from a dead person’s ass.
He glances at his watch and calls Thrush at home.
“Just tell me one thing,” he says when Thrush answers. “How come you made me talk to Dr. Fuck-B-I. And a thank-you would be nice.”
“You talking about Benton?”
“No, I’m talking about Bond. James Bond.”
“He’s a nice guy. I don’t know what you’re talking about except you got such a thing about the Feds, you constitute what I call a bigot. And you want to know what else, Tom?” Thrush goes on, and he sounds slightly drunk. “Let me give you a word to the wise. NIBIN belongs to the Feds, meaning you do, too. Where the hell you think you got all that pretty equipment to work on and all that training so you could sit there and do what you do every day? Well, guess who? The Feds.”
“I don’t need this right now,” Tom says, the phone tucked under his chin as he types on the keyboard, closing out files, getting ready to go home to his empty house while his family enjoys the movies without him.
“Besides, just so you know, Benton quit the Bureau a long time ago, doesn’t have anything to do with them.”
“Well, he should be grateful. That’s all. It’s the first time we got a hit in NIBIN on a shotgun shell.”
“Grateful? Are you fucking kidding me? Grateful for what? That the shell from this dead lady’s ass matches up with a dead man’s gun that’s supposed to be in the custody of the fucking Hollywood police or sold as scrap metal by now?” Thrush says loudly, and he tends to say fuck a lot when he’s been drinking. “Let me tell you, he ain’t fucking grateful. Like me, all he probably wants to do right now is get shit-faced drunk.”
41
It is hot inside the ruined house, and the air is heavy and doesn’t move. It smells like mildew, mold and rancid food, and stinks like a latrine.
Hog moves with self-assuredness through the dark, from room to room, knowing by feel and smell exactly where he is. He can pick his way nimbly from one corner to the next, and when the moon is bright as it is tonight, his eyes hold the moonlight and he can see as clearly as if it is midday. He can see beyond the shadows, so far beyond them they may as well not exist. He can see the red welts on the woman’s neck and face, see the sweat shining on her dirty, white skin, see the fear in her eyes, see her cut hair all over the mattress and the floor, and she can’t see him.
He walks toward her, toward the stinking stained mattress on the rotting wooden floor where she sits up, leaning against the wall, her shiny, green-draped legs straight out in front of her. What is left of her hair stands straight up, as if she’s got her finger in a wall socket, as if she’s seen a ghost. She was wise enough to leave the scissors on the mattress. He picks them up and with the toe of his boot rearranges the bright-green robe, hears her breathing, feels her eyes on him, like damp spots on him.
He took the beautiful green robe that was draped over the sofa. She had just carried it into the house from the car, from the church, where she’d had it on hours earlier. He took the robe because it pleased him. Now it is wilted and wrinkled and reminds him of a slain dragon in a crumpled heap. He captured the dragon. It is his, and his disappointment in what has become of it makes him edgy and violent. The d
ragon has failed him. It has betrayed him. When the brilliant green dragon moved freely and beautifully through the air and people listened to it and could not take their eyes off it, he coveted it. He wanted it. He almost loved it. Now look at it.
He drifts closer to her and kicks her green-draped wire-bound ankles. She barely moves. She was more alert a while ago, but the spider seems to have worn her out. She hasn’t preached the usual lowbrow drivel to him. She has said nothing. She has pissed since he was in here not even an hour ago. The ammonia smell is sharp in his nostrils.
“Why are you so disgusting?” Hog says, looking down at her.
“Are the boys asleep? I don’t hear them.” She sounds delirious.
“Shut up about them.”
“I know you don’t want to hurt them. I know you’re a nice person.”
“It won’t do any good,” he says. “You can just shut up about it. You don’t know a damn thing and never will. You’re so stupid and ugly. You’re disgusting. No one would believe you. Say you’re sorry. This is all your fault.”
He kicks her ankles again, this time harder, and she cries out in pain.
“What a joke. Look at you. Who’s my little pretty now? You’re filth. Spoiled little brat, ungrateful little smart aleck. I’ll teach you humility. Say you’re sorry.”
He kicks her ankles harder, and she screams and tears fill her eyes and they shine like glass in the moonlight.
“You’re not so high and mighty now, are you. Think you’re so much better, so much smarter than everybody else? Look at you now. Obviously, I’m going to have to find some more effective way to punish you. Put your shoes back on.”
Confusion touches her eyes.
“We’re going back outside. It’s the only thing you listen to. Say you’re sorry!”
Her glassy, wide eyes stare at him.
“You want the snorkel again? Say you’re sorry!”
He pokes her with the shotgun and her legs jerk.
“You’re going to tell me how much you want it, aren’t you. Thank me because you’re so ugly no one would ever touch you. You’re honored, aren’t you.” He lowers his voice, knows how to make it scarier.
He pokes her again, pokes her breasts.
“Stupid and ugly. Let’s get your shoes. You’ve left me no choice.”
She doesn’t say anything. He kicks her ankles, kicks them hard, and tears roll down her blood-caked face. Her nose is probably broken.
She broke Hog’s nose, slapped him so hard his nose bled for hours and he knew it was broken. He can feel the bump in the bridge of his nose. She slapped him when he did the bad thing, when she struggled at first, the bad thing that happened in the room behind the paint-peeled door. Then his mother took him to that place where the buildings are old and it snows. He had never seen snow before, he had never been so cold. She took him there because he lied.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he says. “Hurts like hell when you’ve got coat hangers biting into your anklebones and someone kicks them. That’s what you get for disobeying me. For lying. Let’s see, where’s the snorkel.”
He kicks her again and she moans. Her legs shake beneath the wilted green robe, beneath the dead green dragon draped over her.
“I don’t hear the boys,” she says, and her voice is getting weaker, her fire going out.
“Say you’re sorry.”
“I forgive you,” she says with wide, shiny eyes.
He raises the shotgun and points it at her head. She stares straight at the barrel, stares as if she doesn’t care anymore, and he seethes.
“You can say forgive all you want, but God is on my side,” he says. “You deserve punishment. That’s why you’re here. Do you understand? It’s your fault. You have heaped these burning coals on top of your own head. Do what I say! Tell me you’re sorry!”
His big boots creak very little as he moves through the thick, hot air and stands in the doorway, staring back into the room. The slain green dragon stirs and warm air moves through the broken window. The room faces west, and in the late afternoon the low sun seeps in through the gaping broken window, and light touches the shiny green dragon and it shimmers and glows like emerald-green fire. But it doesn’t move. It is nothing now. It is broken and ugly and it is her fault.
He looks at her pale flesh, her doughy, sour flesh covered with insect bites and rashes. He can smell her stench halfway down the hallway. The dead green dragon stirs when she stirs, and it incenses him when he thinks of capturing the dragon and discovering what was under it. She was under it. He was tricked. It’s her fault. She wanted this to happen, tricked him. It’s her fault.
“Say you’re sorry!”
“I forgive you.” Her wide, shiny eyes stare at him.
“I guess you know what happens now,” he says.
She barely moves her mouth and no sound emerges.
“I guess you don’t know.”
He stares at her, ruined and disgusting in her foulness on the filthy mattress, and feels coldness in his chest, and the coldness feels quiet and indifferent like death, as if anything he has ever felt is as dead as the dragon.
“I guess you really don’t know.”
The shotgun’s pump slides back with a loud crack in the empty house.
“Run,” he says.
“I forgive you,” she mouths, her wide, watery eyes fixed on him.
He steps out in the hallway, surprised by the sound of the front door shutting.
“Are you here?” he calls out.
He lowers the gun and walks toward the front of the house, his pulse picking up. He wasn’t expecting her, not yet.
“I told you not to do that,” God’s voice greets him, but he can’t see her, not yet. “You do only what I say.”
She materializes in the darkness, her black, flowing self in the dark, flowing toward him. She is beautiful and so powerful and he loves her and could never be without her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she says to him.
“She still isn’t sorry. She won’t say it,” he tries to explain.
“It isn’t time. Did you think to bring the paint before you got so carried away in there?”
“It’s not here. It’s in the truck. Where I used it on the last one.”
“Bring it in. Prepare first. Always prepare. You lose control and then what. You know what to do. Don’t disappoint me.”
God flows closer to him. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.
“We’re almost out of time,” Hog says.
“You are nothing without me,” God says. “Don’t disappoint me.”
42
Dr. Self sits at her desk, staring at the pool and getting anxious about the time. Every Wednesday morning she is supposed to be at the studio by ten to get ready for her live radio show. “I absolutely can’t confirm that,” she says on the phone, and were she not in such a hurry, she would enjoy this conversation for all the wrong reasons.
“There’s no question you prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride to David Luck,” Dr. Kay Scarpetta replies.
Dr. Self can’t help but think of Marino and everything he has said about Scarpetta. Dr. Self isn’t intimidated. At the moment, she has the advantage over this woman she has met only once and hears about incessantly every single week.
“Ten milligrams three times daily,” Dr. Scarpetta’s voice comes over the line.
She sounds tired, maybe depressed. Dr. Self could help her. She told her so when they met last June at the Academy, at the dinner in honor of Dr. Self.
Highly motivated, successful professional women like us must be careful not to neglect our emotional landscapes, she said to Scarpetta when they happened to be in the ladies’ room at the same time.
Thank you for your lectures. I know the students are enjoying them, Scarpetta replied, and Dr. Self saw right through her.
The Scarpettas of the world are masters at evading personal scrutiny or anything that might expose their secret vulnerability.
I’m sur
e the students are quite inspired, Scarpetta said, washing her hands in the sink, washing them as if she were scrubbing for surgery. Everyone appreciates your finding time in your busy schedule to come here.
I can tell you really don’t mean that, Dr. Self replied quite candidly. The vast majority of my colleagues in the medical profession look down on anyone who takes their practice beyond closed doors, walks out in the wide open arena of radio and television. The truth, of course, is usually jealousy. I suspect half the people who criticize me would ransom their souls to be on the air.
You’re probably right, Scarpetta replied, drying her hands.
It was a comment that lent itself to several very different interpretations: Dr. Self is right, the vast majority of people in the medical profession do look down on her; or half the people who criticize her are jealous; or it is true that she suspects half the people who criticize her are jealous, meaning they may not be jealous at all. No matter how many times she has replayed their conversation in the ladies’ room and analyzed that particular remark, she can’t decide what it meant and whether she was subtly and cleverly insulted.
“You sound as if something is bothering you,” she says to Scarpetta over the phone.
“It is. I want to know what happened to your patient David.” She dodges the personal comment. “One hundred tablets were refilled a little over three weeks ago,” Scarpetta says.
“I can’t verify that.”
“I don’t need you to verify it. I collected the prescription bottle from his house. I know you prescribed the Ritalin hydrochloride, and I know exactly when it was filled and where. The pharmacy is in the same strip mall as Ev and Kristin’s church.”
Dr. Self doesn’t confirm this, but it’s true.
What she says is, “Certainly, of all people, you understand confidentiality.”
“I would hope you might understand that we’re greatly concerned about the welfare of David and his brother and the two women they live with.”
“Has anyone considered the possibility that the boys might have been homesick for South Africa? I’m not saying they were,” she adds. “I’m simply posing a hypothetical.”
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