Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  Glands.

  “Hold on,” Scarpetta is saying to whoever Mrs. Simister is. “Let me put you on speakerphone. I have an investigator sitting right here.”

  She gives Marino a look, indicating she is concerned about what she is hearing, and he tries to chase Doris out of his thoughts. He still thinks about her often, and it seems the older he gets, the more he remembers what went on between them and the way he felt when the dentist touched her and the way he felt when she left him for that car salesman, that fucking loser car salesman. Everybody leaves him. Everybody betrays him. Everybody wants what he has. Everybody thinks he’s too stupid to figure out their plots and manipulations. The last few weeks, it has been almost more than he can stand.

  Now this. Scarpetta lies about the study up there. Excludes him. Degrades him. Helps herself to whatever she wants when it suits her, treats him like he’s nothing.

  “I wish I had more information.” Mrs. Simister’s voice enters the room, and she sounds as old as Methuselah. “I certainly hope something bad hasn’t happened, but I fear it. It’s just awful when the police don’t care.”

  Marino has no idea what Mrs. Simister is talking about or who she is or why she is calling the National Forensic Academy, and he can’t exorcise Doris from his head. He wishes he had done more than threaten the damn dentist or root canal specialist or whatever the hell he was. He should have destroyed the asshole’s face and maybe broken a few of his fingers.

  “Explain to Investigator Marino what you mean by the police not caring,” Scarpetta says over speakerphone.

  “The last I saw any sign of life over there was this past Thursday night, and when I realized everybody was gone without a trace, I called nine-one-one right away and they sent a police officer to the house and then he called a detective. She obviously doesn’t care.”

  “You’re talking about the Hollywood police,” Scarpetta says, looking at Marino.

  “Yes. A Detective Wagner.”

  Marino rolls his eyes. This is unbelievable. With all his bad luck of late, he doesn’t need this.

  He asks from the doorway, “You talking about Reba Wagner?”

  “What?” the querulous voice asks.

  He steps closer to the phone on the desk and repeats his question.

  “All I know is the initials on her card are R.T. So I suppose it could be Reba.”

  Marino rolls his eyes again and taps his head, indicating that Detective R. T. Wagner is as dumb as a rock.

  “She looked around the yard and the house and said there was no sign of foul play. She felt they ran off on their own and said there’s nothing the police can do about it.”

  “Do you know these people?” Marino asks.

  “I live right across the water from them. And I go to their church. I just know something bad has happened.”

  “All right,” Scarpetta says. “What is it you’re asking us to do, Mrs. Simister?”

  “To at least look at the house. You see, the church rents it, and they’ve kept it locked up since they disappeared. But the lease is up in three months, and the landlord says he’ll let the church out of it without a penalty because he’s got someone else to rent it. Some of the ladies at the church plan to go over there first thing in the morning and start packing up. Then what happens to any clues?”

  “All right,” Scarpetta says again. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’re going to call Detective Wagner. We can’t go in the house without permission from the police. We don’t have jurisdiction unless they ask for our help.”

  “I understand. Thank you very much. Please do something.”

  “All right, Mrs. Simister. We’ll get back to you. We need your phone number.”

  “Huh,” Marino says when Scarpetta hangs up. “Probably some mental case.”

  “How about you call Detective Wagner, since it seems you’re familiar with her,” Scarpetta says.

  “She used to be a motorcycle cop. Dumb as dirt but handled her Road King pretty good. I can’t believe they made her a detective.”

  He gets out his Treo and dreads hearing Reba’s voice and wishes Doris would get out of his mind. He tells Hollywood police dispatch to have Detective Wagner contact him immediately. He ends the call and looks around Scarpetta’s office, looks everywhere but at her as he thinks about Doris and the dentist, or whatever the hell he was, and the car salesman. He thinks about how satisfying it would have been to beat the dentist, or whatever the hell he was, senseless instead of getting drunk and barging into his office and demanding he step out of an examination room and in front of a lobby full of patients asking why he thought it was necessary to examine his wife’s tits and to please explain how tits might be relevant in a root canal case.

  “Marino?”

  Why that incident should still bother him all over again after all these years is a mystery. He doesn’t understand why a lot of things have started bothering him again. The last few weeks have been hell.

  “Marino?”

  He comes to and looks at Scarpetta at the same time he realizes his cell phone is buzzing.

  “Yeah,” he answers.

  “Detective Wagner here.”

  “Investigator Pete Marino,” he says, as if he doesn’t know her.

  “What do you need, Investigator Pete Marino.” She sounds as if she doesn’t know him, either.

  “I understand you got a family that’s disappeared from the West Lake area. Apparently last Thursday night.”

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “Apparently there’s some concern foul play might be involved. And the word is you aren’t being very helpful.”

  “We’d be investigating the hell out of it if we thought there was anything to it. What’s the source of your information?”

  “A lady from their church. You got the names of these people who supposedly have vanished?”

  “Let me think. They’re kind of odd names, Eva Christian and Crystal or Christine Christian. Something like that. I can’t think of the boys’ names.”

  “Could you mean Christian Christian?”

  Scarpetta and Marino look at each other.

  “Something a whole lot like that. I don’t have my notes in front of me. You want to look into it, be my guest. My department’s not going to devote a lot of resources to something when there’s absolutely no evidence…”

  “I got that part,” Marino says rudely. “Supposedly the church is going to start packing up that house tomorrow and if we’re gonna take a look, now’s the time.”

  “They’ve not even been gone for a week and the church is already packing up the house? Sounds to me they know they’ve skipped town and aren’t coming back. What’s it sound like to you?”

  “Sounds like we ought to make sure,” Marino says.

  The man behind the counter is older and more distinguished than Lucy imagined. She expected someone who looks like a has-been surfer, someone leathery and covered in tattoos. That’s the sort of person who ought to be working in a shop called Beach Bums.

  She sets down a camera case, and her fingers flutter through big, loud shirts printed with sharks, flowers, palm trees and other tropical designs. She peruses stacks of straw hats and bins of flip-flops and displays of sunglasses and lotions, not interested in buying any of it but wishing she were. For a moment she browses, waiting for two other customers to leave. She wonders how it would feel to be like everybody else, to care about souvenirs and gaudy things to wear and days in the sun, to feel good about the way she looks half-naked in a swimsuit.

  “You got any of that stuff with zinc oxide in it?” one of the customers is asking Larry, who is seated behind the counter.

  He has thick, white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, is sixty-two, was born in Alaska, drives a Jeep, has never owned a home, didn’t go to college and in 1957 was arrested for drunk and disorderly. Larry has managed Beach Bums for about two years.

  “Nobody likes that anymore,” he is telling the customer.

  “I do. It d
oesn’t break out my skin like all these other lotions. I think I’m allergic to aloe.”

  “These sunblocks don’t have aloe.”

  “You carry Maui Jim’s?”

  “Too expensive, my dear. The only sunglasses we got are the ones you’re looking at.”

  This goes on for a while, both customers making minor purchases, finally leaving. Lucy wanders up to the counter.

  “Can I help you with something?” Larry asks, looking at the way she is dressed. “Where’d you just come from, a Mission Impossible movie?”

  “I rode my motorcycle here.”

  “Well, you’re one of the few with any sense. Look out the window. Every one of them in shorts and T-shirts, no helmet. Some of them in flip-flops.”

  “You must be Larry.”

  He looks surprised and says, “You been in here before? I don’t remember you, and I’m pretty good with faces.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Florrie and Helen Quincy,” she says. “But I need you to lock the door.”

  The Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Deuce with its flames over blue paint and chrome is parked in a far corner of the faculty lot, and as Marino gets closer to it, he picks up his pace.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch.” He starts to run.

  He yells his obscenities loudly enough for Link the maintenance man, who is weeding a flower bed, to stop what he is doing and jump to his feet. “You all right over there?”

  “Fucking motherfucker!” Marino yells.

  The front tire of his new bike is flat. Flat all the way down to the shiny chrome rim. Marino gets down to look at the tire, upset and furious, looks for a nail or a screw, anything sharp he might have picked up on his ride in to work this morning. He rolls the bike backward and forward and discovers the puncture. It is about an eighth of an inch cut that appears to have been made with something sharp and strong, possibly a knife.

  Possibly a stainless-steel surgical knife, and his eyes dart around, looking for Joe Amos.

  “Yeah, I was noticing that,” Link says, walking toward him, wiping his dirty hands on his blue coveralls.

  “Nice of you to let me know,” Marino says angrily as he angrily digs through a saddlebag for his tire-plug kit as he angrily thinks of Joe Amos, getting angrier with each thought.

  “Must have picked up a nail somewhere,” Link supposes, getting down for a closer inspection. “That looks bad.”

  “You see anybody around here looking at my bike? Where the hell’s my tire-plug kit?”

  “I’ve been right here all day and haven’t seen anyone anywhere near your bike. It’s quite a bike. What? About fourteen hundred CCs? I used to have a Springer until some no-nuts pulled in front of me and I ended up flying over his hood. I started working on the flower beds around ten this morning. The tire was already flat by then.”

  Marino thinks back. He got here between nine fifteen and nine thirty.

  “A puncture like this and the tire would have gone flat so fast I’d never have gotten it into the damn lot and it sure as hell wasn’t flat when I stopped to get donuts,” he says. “It had to have happened after I parked in here.”

  “Well, I don’t like the sound of it.”

  Marino looks around, thinking about Joe Amos. He’ll kill him. If he touched his bike, he’s dead.

  “I hate to think it,” Link is saying. “Awfully bold to come right into this lot in the middle of the morning and do something like that. If that’s what happened.”

  “Goddamn it, where is it?” Marino says, going through the other saddlebag. “You got anything to plug this thing? Shit! What the hell.” He quits rummaging. “Probably not going to work anyway, not with a hole this big, damn it!”

  He’s going to have to change the tire. There are extra ones in the hangar.

  “What about Joe Amos? You seen him? You seen his ugly ass anywhere within a mile of here?”

  “No.”

  “None of the students?”

  The students hate him. Every one of them does.

  “No,” Link says. “I would have noticed if someone went into this lot and started fooling with your bike or any of the cars.”

  “Nobody?” Marino keeps pushing, then entertains the suspicion that maybe Link had something to do with it.

  Probably nobody at the Academy likes Marino. Probably half the world is jealous of his tricked-out Harley. He certainly gets enough people staring at it, following him into gas stations and rest stops to get a better look.

  “You’re going to have to roll it to the garage down there by the hangar,” Link says, “unless we want to get it on one of those trailers Lucy uses for all those new V-Rods of hers.”

  Marino thinks about the gates at both the back and front entrances of the Academy grounds. No one can get in without a code. It had to be an inside job. He thinks about Joe Amos again and realizes an important fact. Joe was in staff meeting. He was already sitting in there, shooting off his big mouth, when Marino showed up.

  25

  The orange-colored house with its white roof was built in the same decade that Scarpetta was born, the fifties. She imagines the people who live here and feels their absence as she walks around the backyard.

  She can’t stop thinking about the person who said his name is Hog, about his cryptic reference to Johnny Swift and what Marino thought was Christian Christian. Scarpetta feels certain what Hog actually said was Kristin Christian. Johnny is dead. Kristin is missing. It has often occurred to Scarpetta that there are plenty of places to dispose of dead bodies in South Florida, plenty of wet-lands, canals, lakes and vast pine forests. Flesh decomposes quickly in the subtropics, and insects gorge themselves, and animals gnaw on bones and scatter them like sticks and stones. Flesh doesn’t last long in the water, and salt in the sea leaches the minerals from skeletons, dissolving them completely.

  The waterway behind the house is the color of putrid blood. Dead leaves float in the brown, stagnant water like debris from an explosion. Green and brown coconuts bob like decapitated heads. The sun slips in and out of mounting storm clouds, the warm air heavy and humid, the wind gusting.

  Detective Wagner prefers to be called Reba. She is attractive and rather sexy in an overblown, sun-weathered way, her shaggy hair dyed platinum, her eyes bright blue. She doesn’t have the brains of a maggot. She isn’t as dumb as a cow and has yet to come across as a bitch on ten-spoke custom wheels, to quote Marino, who also called her a cock stalker, although Scarpetta isn’t clear on what that means. Most assuredly, Reba is inexperienced, but she seems to be trying. Scarpetta debates whether to tell her about the anonymous phone call that referenced Kristin Christian.

  “They’ve lived here for a while but aren’t citizens,” Reba is saying of the two sisters who live in this house with two boys, a foster situation. “They’re originally from South Africa. The two boys are, too, which is probably why they took them in to begin with. You ask me, the four of them are back over there somewhere.”

  “And they would have decided to disappear, perhaps flee to South Africa, for what reason?” Scarpetta asks, staring across the narrow, dark waterway as humidity presses down on her like a warm, sticky hand.

  “I understand they wanted to adopt the boys. And it’s unlikely they were going to get to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Seems like relatives of the boys back there in South Africa want them but just couldn’t take them at first, not until they move into a bigger house. And the sisters are religious kooks, which might have weighed against them.”

  Scarpetta is aware of the houses on the other side of the water, aware of patches of bright green grass and small, pale-blue swimming pools. She’s not certain which house is Mrs. Simister’s, and wonders if Marino is talking with her yet.

  “The boys are how old?” she asks.

  “Seven and twelve.”

  Scarpetta glances at her notebook and flips back several pages. “Eva and Kristin Christian. I’m not clear on why they are taking care of them.”r />
  She is careful to speak of the missing people in the present tense.

  “No, not Eva. There’s no ‘a,’” Reba says.

  “Ev or Eve?”

  “It’s Ev, as in Evelyn, only her name is just Ev. No ‘e’ or ‘a.’ Just Ev.”

  Scarpetta writes down “Ev” in her black notebook and thinks, What a name. She stares at the waterway, and sunlight on the water has turned it the color of strong tea. Ev and Kristin Christian. What names for religious women who have vanished like ghosts. Then the sun slips behind clouds again and the water is dark.

  “Ev and Kristin Christian are their real names?” Scarpetta asks. “We’re sure they’re not aliases? We’re sure they didn’t change their names at some point, perhaps to give them religious connotations?” she asks, staring across the waterway at houses that look sketched in pastel chalk.

  She watches a figure in dark pants and a white shirt walking into someone’s backyard, possibly Mrs. Simister’s backyard.

  “As far as we know, it’s their real names,” Reba replies, looking where Scarpetta is looking. “Damn canker inspectors are all over the map. Politics. It’s all about preventing people from growing their own citrus fruit so they have to buy it.”

  “Actually, it’s not. Citrus canker is a terrible blight. If it’s not controlled, nobody will be growing citrus fruit in their yards.”

  “It’s a conspiracy. I’ve been listening to what all these commentators are saying on the radio. You ever listen to Dr. Self on the radio? You should hear what she has to say about it.”

  Scarpetta never listens to Dr. Self if she can avoid it. She watches the figure across the waterway squat in the grass and dig inside what appears to be some sort of dark bag. He pulls out something.

  “Ev Christian’s a reverend or priest or whatever you want to call it in some offbeat little church…. Okay, I’m gonna have to read this to you. It’s too much to remember,” Reba says, flipping through her notepad. “The True Daughters of the Seal of God.”