Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  “No, ma’am. I’d like to stop by and talk to you, if that’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right,” she says, hanging up.

  She grips the cool metal armrests so tightly that her big knuckles blanch beneath the loose, sun-spotted skin of her useless old hands. People call all the time and they don’t even know her. Machines call and she can’t imagine why people sit there and listen to tape recordings made by solicitors after money. The phone rings again, and she ignores it as she picks up the binoculars to peer at the pale orange house where the two ladies live with the two little hoodlums.

  She sweeps the binoculars over the waterway, then over the property on the other side of it. The yard and pool are suddenly big and bright green and blue. They are sharply defined, but the blonde woman in the dark suit and the tan lady with the gun are nowhere to be seen. What are they looking for over there? Where are the two ladies who live there? Where are the hoodlums? All children are hoodlums these days.

  The doorbell rings and she stops rocking as her heart begins to pound. The older she gets, the more easily she is startled by sudden movements and sounds, the more she fears death and what it means, if it means anything. Several minutes pass, and the bell rings again and she sits still and waits. It rings again and someone knocks loudly. Finally, she gets up.

  “Hold on, I’m coming,” she mutters, annoyed and anxious. “You’d better not be someone selling something.”

  She walks into the living room, her slow feet brushing over the carpet. She can’t pick up her feet the way she once could, can hardly walk.

  “Hold on, I’m coming as fast as I can,” she says impatiently when the bell rings again.

  Maybe it’s UPS. Sometimes her son orders things for her on the Internet. She looks through the peephole in the front door. The person on her porch certainly isn’t wearing a brown or blue uniform or carrying mail or a package. It’s him again.

  “What is it this time?” she says angrily, her eye against the peephole.

  “Mrs. Simister? I’ve got some forms for you to fill out.”

  27

  The gate leads to the front yard, where Scarpetta pays attention to thick hibiscus barricading the property from the sidewalk that dead-ends at the waterway.

  There are no broken twigs or branches, nothing to indicate that anyone has entered the property by pushing his way through the hedge. Reaching inside the black nylon shoulder bag she routinely carries to scenes, she pulls out a pair of white cotton examination gloves as she looks at the car on the cracked concrete driveway, an old, gray station wagon parked haphazardly, one tire partially on the lawn, where it has gouged the grass. She works her hands into the gloves and wonders why Ev or Kristin parked the car like that, assuming one or the other was driving.

  She looks through the car windows at gray vinyl bench seats and the SunPass transponder neatly affixed to the inside of the windshield. She makes more notes. Already a pattern is becoming apparent. The backyard and pool are meticulous. The screened-in patio and lawn furniture are meticulous. She sees no trash or clutter inside the car, nothing but a black umbrella on the mat in back. Yet the car is parked sloppily, carelessly, as if someone couldn’t see well or was in a hurry. She bends down to take a closer look at dirt and bits of dead vegetation caked in the tire tread. She looks at thick dust that has turned the undercarriage the grayish tan of old bones.

  “It appears this was driven off-road somewhere,” Scarpetta says, getting up as she continues to study the dirty tires, walking from one to the other.

  Reba follows her around the car, looking, a curious expression on her lined, tan face.

  “The dirt in the tread makes me think the ground was damp or wet when the car was driven over it,” Scarpetta says. “Is the church parking lot paved?”

  “Well, it dug up the grass here,” Reba says, looking at the gouged yard beneath a back tire.

  “That wouldn’t explain it. All four tires are caked with dirt.”

  “The strip mall where the church is has a big parking lot. Nothing unpaved in the area that I noticed.”

  “Was the car here when the lady from the church showed up looking for Kristin and Ev?”

  Reba walks around, interested in the dirty tires. “They said so, and I can tell you for sure it was here when I arrived that afternoon.”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check the SunPass, see what tollbooths it’s gone through and when. Have you opened the doors?”

  “Yes. They were unlocked. I didn’t see anything significant.”

  “So it’s never been processed.”

  “I can’t ask the crime-scene techs to process something when there’s no evidence a crime’s been committed.”

  “I understand the problem.”

  Reba’s dark, tanned face watches her peer through the windows again. They are covered with a fine film of dust. Scarpetta steps back and walks around the station wagon, taking in every inch.

  “Who owns it?” Scarpetta says.

  “The church.”

  “Who owns the house?”

  “Same thing.”

  “I was told the church leases the house.”

  “No, the church definitely owns the house.”

  “Do you know someone named Simister?” Scarpetta says as she begins to get a strange feeling, the sort that starts in her stomach and works its way up her throat, the same feeling she got when Reba mentioned the name Christian Christian to Marino.

  “Who?” Reba frowns as a muffled explosion sounds from the other side of the waterway.

  She and Scarpetta stop talking. They step closer to the gate, looking at the houses on the other side of the water. There is no one in sight.

  “Car backfire,” Reba decides. “People drive a lot of junkers around here. Most of them shouldn’t be driving at all. Old as the Grim Reaper and blind as bats.”

  Scarpetta repeats the name Simister.

  “Never heard of her,” Reba says.

  “She said she’s talked to you several times. I believe she said three times, to be exact.”

  “I never heard of her, and she’s never talked to me. I guess she’s the one who bad-mouthed me, said I didn’t care about the case.”

  “Excuse me,” Scarpetta then says, and she tries Marino on his cell phone and gets his voicemail.

  She tells him to call her immediately.

  “When you find out who this Mrs. Simister is,” Reba says, “I’d like to know about it. There’s something weird about all this. Maybe we should at least dust the inside of the car for prints. If nothing else, for exclusionary purposes.”

  “Unfortunately, you probably won’t get the boys’ prints from inside the car,” Scarpetta says. “Not after four days. You probably won’t get them from inside the house, either. Certainly not the young boy’s prints, the seven-year-old boy’s prints.”

  “I don’t get why you would say that.”

  “The prints of prepubescent children don’t survive long. Hours, maybe a few days at most. We’re not entirely sure why, but it probably has to do with the oils people secrete when they reach puberty. David is twelve? You might get his prints. I emphasize might.”

  “Well, that sure is news to me.”

  “I suggest you get this station wagon into the lab, process it for trace evidence and fume the inside of it ASAP with superglue for possible fingerprints. We can do it at the Academy, if you want. We have a bay for processing vehicles and can take care of it.”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Reba says.

  “We should find Ev’s and Kristin’s prints inside the house. And DNA, including the boys’ DNA. Their toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shoes, clothing,” and then she tells Reba about the anonymous caller who mentioned Kristin Christian’s name.

  Mrs. Simister lives alone in a small white rancher built of stucco that by South Florida standards is a tear-down.

  She has an aluminum carport that is empty, which doesn’t mean she isn’t home, since she no longer owns a
car or has a valid driver’s license. Marino also notices that the curtains are drawn in the windows to the right of the front door and there are no newspapers on the sidewalk. She has daily delivery of The Miami Herald, implying she can see well enough to read as long as she is wearing her glasses.

  Her phone has been busy for the past half-hour. Marino cuts the engine of his motorcycle and climbs off as a white Chevy Blazer with tinted windows drives past on the street. It is a quiet street. Probably a lot of the people who live in this neighborhood are elderly and have been here a long time and can no longer afford the property taxes. It angers him to think of living in the same place for twenty or thirty years, to have your house finally paid for, only to discover you can’t pay the taxes because of rich people who want places on the water. Mrs. Simister’s tear-down house is assessed at almost three quarters of a million dollars, and she will have to sell it, probably soon, if she doesn’t end up in an assisted-living facility first. She has only three thousand dollars in savings.

  Marino learned quite a lot about Dagmara Schudrich Simister. After talking to who he now suspects was someone claiming to be her, on speakerphone in Scarpetta’s office, he ran a search in HIT. Mrs. Simister goes by the name Daggie and is eighty-seven years old. She is Jewish and a member of a local synagogue that she hasn’t attended in years. She has never been a member of the same church as the missing people across the waterway, so what she said on the phone isn’t true, assuming it was Daggie Simister on the phone, and Marino doesn’t believe it was.

  She was born in Lublin, Poland, and survived the Holocaust, remaining in Poland until she was almost thirty, explaining the strong accent Marino heard when he tried to call her a few minutes ago. The woman he talked to on speakerphone had no accent he could discern. She simply sounded old. Mrs. Simister’s only child, a son, lives in Fort Lauderdale and has been charged with two DUIs and three moving violations over the past ten years. Ironically, he is a contractor and developer, one of the very sorts of people responsible for causing his mother’s mounting property taxes.

  Mrs. Simister is under the care of four physicians for arthritis, cardiac and foot problems, and her eyesight. She doesn’t travel, at least not on commercial airlines. It appears she stays home most of the time and possibly is aware of what goes on around her. Often in neighborhoods like this one, many homebound people are snoops and he hopes she is one them. He hopes she has noticed whatever has gone on across the waterway in the pale orange house. He hopes she might have some idea who called Scarpetta’s office claiming to be her, assuming that is what happened.

  He rings the bell, his wallet ready to display his badge, which isn’t exactly honest because he is retired from policing, was never a cop in Florida and was supposed to turn in his credentials and pistol when he left the last police department he worked for, a modest-sized one in Richmond, Virginia, where he always felt the outsider, unappreciated and underestimated. He rings the bell again and tries again to reach Mrs. Simister by phone.

  It’s still busy.

  “Police! Anybody home?” he calls out loudly as he knocks on the door.

  28

  Scarpetta is hot in her dark suit but doesn’t consider doing anything about it. If she takes off her jacket, she will have to drape or hang it somewhere, and she doesn’t make herself at home at crime scenes, not even ones the police don’t believe are crime scenes.

  Now that she is inside the house, she is about to decide that one of the sisters suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The windows, tile floors and furniture are spotless and immaculately arranged. A rug is perfectly centered, and the fringe border is so neat it looks combed. She checks a thermostat on the wall and jots in her notebook that the air-conditioning is on, the temperature in the living room seventy-two degrees.

  “Has the thermostat been adjusted?” she asks. “Was it like this?”

  “Everything’s been left the way it was,” Reba says, in the kitchen with Academy crime-scene investigator Lex. “Except the stove. It was turned off. The lady who came over here when Ev and Kristin didn’t show up at the church. She turned it off.”

  Scarpetta makes a note that there is no alarm system.

  Reba opens the refrigerator. “I’d go ahead and dust the cabinet doors,” she tells Lex. “May as well dust the heck out of everything while you’re at it. There’s not much food in here for two growing boys.” She directs this to Scarpetta. “Not much to eat at all. I think they’re vegetarians.”

  She shuts the refrigerator door.

  “The powder will ruin the wood,” Lex says.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Do we know what time they got home from church last Thursday night? Allegedly got home?” Scarpetta asks.

  “It ended at seven, and Ev and Kristin stayed over for a while, talking to people. Then they went back to Ev’s office and had a meeting. It’s just a small office. It’s a very small church. The room where they have the services can’t hold more than fifty people, looked like to me.”

  Reba leaves the kitchen and walks into the living room.

  “A meeting with whom, and where were the boys?” Scarpetta asks as she lifts up a cushion from the floral-printed couch.

  “Some of the women met. I don’t know what you call them. They’re the women who run things in the church, and as I understand it, the boys weren’t in the meeting, were doing whatever, horsing around. Then they left with Ev and Kristin at around eight p.m.”

  “Are there always meetings after church on Thursday nights?”

  “I believe so. Their regular services are Friday night, so they meet the night before. Something about Good Friday being when God died for our sins. They don’t talk about Jesus, just God, and are sure into sin and going to hell. It’s an oddball church. Like a cult, you ask me. Probably into snake-handling and the likes.”

  Lex taps a small amount of Silk Black oxide powder onto a sheet of paper. The white countertop is chipped but clean and completely bare, and she dabs a fiberglass brush into the powder on the paper and begins to gently swirl the brush over the Corian, turning it an uneven, sooty black wherever the powder adheres to oils or other latent residues.

  “I didn’t find a wallet, a pocketbook, anything like that,” Reba tells Scarpetta. “Which just adds to my suspicion they ran off.”

  “You can be abducted and bring your pocketbook,” Scarpetta says. “People are abducted with their wallets, their keys, their cars, their children. A few years ago, I worked an abduction-homicide in which the victim was allowed to pack a suitcase.”

  “I know about cases, too, ones where the whole thing is faked to look like a crime, when all that really happened is the people ran off. Maybe that weird phone call you told me about was some crank caller from the church.”

  Scarpetta walks into the kitchen to look at the stove. On a back burner is a copper pan covered with a lid, and the metal is dark gray and streaked.

  “This is the burner that was on?” she asks, removing the lid.

  The stainless-steel lining inside the pan is discolored dark gray.

  Lex tears off a segment of lifting tape with a loud snap.

  “When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”

  Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.

  “There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.

  “What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”

  “A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”

  Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey br
east suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.

  The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.

  He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.

  He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.

  No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.

  “Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”

  He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.

  “What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.

  “Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”

  “Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”

  He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.

  “Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”

  A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.