Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Supposedly?”

  “And it was a woman who called.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything unusual about the way she sounded?”

  “Not at all,” he says, pausing. “She sounded credible.”

  “What about an accent?”

  “What’s going on, Kay?”

  “Nothing good,” she says.

  “Let me scroll through. Okay, two eleven. Came in as unavailable.”

  “Of course it did,” Scarpetta says. “See you in about an hour.”

  She leans closer to the bed and looks carefully at the hands, turning them gently. She is always gentle, doesn’t matter that her patients can’t feel anything anymore. She notices no abrasions, cuts or bruises that might suggest binding or defense injuries. She checks again with a lens and finds fibers and dirt adhering to the palms of both hands.

  “She might have been on the floor at some point,” she says as Reba walks into the room, pale and wet from the rain and obviously shaken.

  “The streets are like a maze back here,” Reba says.

  “Hey,” Marino says to her, “what time did you call the ME?”

  “About what?”

  “About the price of eggs in China.”

  “What?” she says, staring at the gore on the bed.

  “About this case,” Marino says gruffly. “What the hell do you think I meant? And why don’t you get a damn GPS.”

  “I didn’t call the ME. Why would I when she was standing right next to me?” she replies, looking at Scarpetta.

  “Let’s bag her hands and her feet,” Scarpetta says. “And I want her wrapped in the quilt and a clean plastic sheet. The bed linens need to come in, too.”

  She goes to a window that overlooks the backyard and the waterway. She looks at citrus trees pommeled by rain and thinks about the inspector she saw earlier. He was in this yard, she’s pretty sure, and she tries to pinpoint the exact time she saw him. She knows it wasn’t long before she heard what she now suspects was a gunshot. She looks around the bedroom again and notices two dark stains on the rug near the window that overlooks the citrus trees, the water.

  The stains are very hard to see against the dark blue background, and she gets a presumptive blood kit out of her bag, gets chemicals and medicine droppers out of it. There are two stains several inches apart. Each is about the size of a quarter and oval-shaped, and she swabs one of them, then drips isopropyl alcohol, then phenolphthalein, then hydrogen peroxide on the swab and it turns bright pink. That doesn’t mean the stains are human blood, but there’s a very good chance they are.

  “If it’s her blood, what’s it doing way over here?” Scarpetta talks to herself.

  “Maybe back spatter,” Reba volunteers.

  “Not possible.”

  “Drips and not exactly round,” Marino says. “Looks like whoever was bleeding was upright, almost.”

  He looks around for any other stains.

  “Kind of unusual they’re here and nowhere else. If someone was bleeding a lot, you’d expect more drips,” he then says, as if Reba isn’t in the room.

  “It’s hard to see them on a dark textured surface like this,” Scarpetta replies. “But I don’t see any others.”

  “Maybe we should come back with luminol.” Marino talks around Reba and anger begins to flicker on her face.

  “We need a sample of these carpet fibers when the techs get here,” Scarpetta says to everyone.

  “Vacuum the rug, check for trace,” Marino adds, avoiding Reba’s stare.

  “I’ll need to get a statement from you before you leave, seeing as how you’re the one who found her,” Reba says to him. “I’m not sure what you were doing just walking in her house.”

  He doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t exist.

  “So how about you and me step outside for a few minutes so I can hear what you’ve got to say,” she says to him. “Mark?” she says to one of the officers. “How about checking Investigator Marino for gunshot residue?”

  “Fuck off,” Marino says.

  Scarpetta recognizes the low rumble in his voice. It is usually the prelude to a major eruption.

  “It’s just pro forma,” Reba replies. “I know you wouldn’t want anybody accusing you of something.”

  “Uh, Reba,” the officer named Mark says. “We don’t carry GSR stubs. The crime-scene techs got to do that.”

  “Where the hell are they, anyway?” Reba asks irritably, embarrassed, still so new on the job.

  “Marino,” Scarpetta says. “How about checking on the removal service. See where they are.”

  “I’m just curious,” Marino says, getting so close to Reba she is forced to back up a step. “How many scenes you been the only detective at a scene where there’s a dead body?”

  “I’m going to need you to clear out,” she replies. “You and Dr. Scarpetta both. So we can start processing.”

  “The answer’s none.” He keeps talking. “Not a single goddamn one.” He gets louder. “Well, if you go back and take a look at your Detective for Dummies notes, you might find out that the body is the medical examiner’s jurisdiction, meaning right now the Doc here’s in charge, not you. And since I just so happen to be a certified death investigator in addition to all my other fancy titles and assist the Doc as needed, you can’t order my ass around, either.”

  The uniformed officers are struggling not to laugh.

  “All of which adds up to one very important fact,” Marino goes on. “Me and the Doc are in charge at the moment and you don’t know chicken shit and are in the goddamn way.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that!” Reba exclaims, near tears.

  “Could one of you please get a real detective here?” Marino asks the uniformed cops. “Because I’m not leaving until you do.”

  31

  Benton sits in his office on the ground floor of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, one of few contemporary buildings on a two-hundred-and-thirty-seven-acre campus graced with century-old brick and slate, and fruit trees and ponds. Unlike most offices at McLean, his has no view, just a handicapped-parking space directly beyond his window, then a road, then a field that is popular with Canada geese.

  His office is small and cluttered with papers and books, and is located in the middle of the H-shaped lab. At each corner is an MR scanner, and collectively, their electromagnetic fields are powerful enough to pull a train off its tracks. He is the only forensic psychologist whose office is located in the lab. He has to be easily accessible to the neuroscientists because of PREDATOR.

  He buzzes his study coordinator.

  “Has our newest normal called back yet?” Benton stares out the window at two geese wandering along the road. “Kenny Jumper?”

  “Hold on, that might be him now.” Then, “Dr. Wesley? He’s on the line.”

  “Hello,” Benton says. “Good afternoon, Kenny. It’s Dr. Wesley. How are you today?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “You sound as if you have a bit of a cold.”

  “Maybe allergies. I petted a cat.”

  “I’m going to ask you some more questions, Kenny,” Benton says, looking at a secondary phone screening form.

  “You already asked me all those questions.”

  “These are different ones. Routine questions, the same ones we ask everybody who participates in our study.”

  “Okay.”

  “First of all, where are you calling from?” Benton asks.

  “A pay phone. You can’t call me back on it. I have to call you.”

  “You don’t have a phone where you’re staying?”

  “Like I told you, I’m at a friend’s house here in Waltham, and he don’t have a phone.”

  “All right. Let me just confirm a few things you told me yesterday, Kenny. You’re single.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Twenty-four years old.”

  “Yeah.”

  “White.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ken
ny, are you right-or left-handed?”

  “Right-handed. I don’t have a driver’s license, if you want an ID.”

  “That’s all right,” Benton says. “It’s not required.”

  Not only that, but to ask for proof of identification, to photograph patients or make any effort whatsoever to verify who they really are is a violation of HIPPA’s Protected Health Information Restriction. Benton goes through the questions on the form, asking Kenny about dentures or braces, medical implants, metal plates or pins, and how he supports himself. He inquires about any allergies in addition to cats, any breathing problems, any illnesses or medications, and whether he has ever suffered a head injury or had thoughts of harming himself or others or is currently in therapy or on probation. Typically, the answers are no. More than a third of the people who volunteer as normal control subjects have to be removed from the study because they’re anything but normal. However, so far, Kenny seems promising.

  “What is your drinking pattern over the last month?” Benton continues down the list, hating every minute of it.

  Telephone screening is tedious and pedestrian. But if he doesn’t do it himself, he’ll end up on the phone anyway, because he doesn’t trust information gathered by research assistants and other untrained personnel. It’s not helpful to bring in a potential study subject off the street and find out after countless hours of valuable staff time spent in screening, diagnostic interviews, rating scales, neurocognitive testing, brain imaging and lab work that he is unsuitable or unstable or potentially dangerous.

  “Well, maybe a beer or two now and then,” Kenny is saying. “You know, I don’t drink much. I don’t smoke. When can I start? The ad says I get paid eight hundred dollars and you pay for the taxi. I don’t got a car. So I don’t got transportation, and I could use the money.”

  “Why don’t you come in this Friday? At two o’clock in the afternoon. Would that work for you?”

  “For the magnet thing?”

  “That’s right. Your scan.”

  “No. Thursday at five. I can do Thursday at five.”

  “All right, then. Okay. Thursday at five.” Benton writes it down.

  “And you can send a taxi.”

  Benton says he will send a taxi and asks for an address and is puzzled by Kenny’s answer. He tells Benton to send a cab to the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home in Everett, a funeral home he has never heard of in a not-so-nice area just outside of Boston.

  “Why a funeral home?” Benton inquires, tapping the pencil on the form.

  “It’s close to where I’m staying. It has a pay phone.”

  “Kenny, I’d like you to call me back tomorrow so we can confirm you’re coming in the next day, Thursday at five. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll call you on this same pay phone.”

  Wesley hangs up and checks directory assistance to see if there is such a place as the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home in Everett. There is. He calls it and is put on hold and subjected to Hoobastank’s The Reason.

  The reason for what? he thinks impatiently. Dying?

  “Benton?”

  He looks up and sees Dr. Susan Lane in his doorway, holding a report.

  “Hi,” he says, hanging up.

  “Have some news about your friend Basil Jenrette,” she says, looking closely at him. “You look stressed.”

  “When don’t I? The analysis already done?”

  “Maybe you should go home, Benton. You look exhausted.”

  “Preoccupied. Staying up too late. Tell me how our boy Basil’s brain works. I’m on pins and needles,” Benton says.

  She hands him his copy of the structural and functional imaging analysis and begins to explain, “Increased amygdalar activity in response to affective stimuli. Especially faces, overt or masked that were fearful or had any negative content.”

  “Continues to be an interesting point,” Benton says. “May eventually tell us something about how they select their victims. An expression on someone’s face that we might interpret as surprise or curiosity, they might interpret as anger or fear. And it sets them off.”

  “Rather unnerving to think about.”

  “I need to pursue that more vigorously when I talk to them. Starting with him.”

  He opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of aspirin.

  “Let’s see. During the Stroop interference task,” she says, looking at the report, “he has decreased activity of the anterior cingulate in both dorsal and subgenual regions, accompanied by increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity.”

  “Give me the upshot, Susan. I’ve got a headache.”

  He shakes three aspirin into his palm and swallows them without water.

  “How in the world do you do that?”

  “Practice.”

  “So.” She resumes the analysis of Basil’s brain. “Over-all, the findings certainly reflect anomalous connectivity of frontal-limbic structures, suggesting anomalous response inhibition that may be due to deficits in a number of frontally mediated processes.”

  “Implicating his ability to monitor and inhibit behavior,” Benton says. “We’re seeing a lot of that with our lovely guests from Butler. Consistent with bipolar disorder?”

  “Certainly can be. That and other psychiatric disorders.”

  “Excuse me a minute,” Benton says as he picks up his phone and dials his study coordinator’s extension.

  “Can you check your in-log and tell me the number Kenny Jumper called from?” he asks.

  “No ID.”

  “Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not aware that pay phones show up as No ID.”

  “Actually I just got off the line with Butler,” she says. “Apparently, Basil isn’t doing well. He wonders if you could come see him.”

  It is half past five p.m. and the parking lot of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Laboratory & Office is almost empty. Employees, particularly nonmedical ones, rarely linger at the morgue after hours.

  This one is on Southwest 31st Avenue, in the midst of relatively undeveloped land thick with palms, live oak trees and pines, and scattered with mobile homes. Typical of South Florida architecture, the one-story building is stucco and coral stone. It backs up to a narrow brackish canal where mosquitoes are a menace and alligators sometimes wander where they don’t belong. Next door to the morgue is the county Fire and Rescue service where emergency medical technicians are constantly reminded of where their less-fortunate patients end up.

  The rain has almost stopped, and there are puddles everywhere as Scarpetta and Joe walk out to a silver H2 Hummer, not her choice but quite adept at handling off-road death scenes and hauling bulky equipment. Lucy is fond of Hummers. Scarpetta always worries where to park them.

  “I just can’t understand how someone managed to walk in with a shotgun in the middle of the day,” Joe says, and he has been saying it for the past hour. “Must be a way to tell if it was sawed off.”

  “If the barrel wasn’t smoothed after it was sawn, there could be tool marks on the wad,” Scarpetta replies.

  “But the absence of tool marks doesn’t mean it wasn’t sawn.”

  “Correct.”

  “Because he might have smoothed off the sawed-off barrel. If he did that, there’s no way for us to tell without recovering the weapon. A twelve-gauge. We know that much.”

  They know that much from the Remington plastic four-petaled Power Piston wad that Scarpetta recovered from the inside of Daggie Simister’s devastated head. Beyond that fact, there are only a few more Scarpetta can state with certainty, such as the nature of the attack on Mrs. Simister, which the autopsy revealed to be different from what everyone presumed. Had she not been shot, there is a good chance she would have died anyway. Scarpetta is fairly certain Mrs. Simister was unconscious when her killer stuck the shotgun barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t an easy conclusion to determine.

  Examinations of massive gaping injuries to the head can mask wounds that may have occurred before the final mutilating trauma. Somet
imes forensic pathology requires plastic surgery, and in the morgue, Scarpetta did what she could to repair Mrs. Simister’s head, fitting pieces of bone and scalp back together, then shaving off the hair. What she found was a laceration on the back of the head and a skull fracture. The point of impact correlated with a subdural hematoma in an underlying part of her brain that had been left relatively intact after the shotgun blast.

  If the stains on the carpet by the window in Mrs. Simister’s bedroom turn out to be her blood, then it’s likely this was where she was first attacked and would also explain the dirt and bluish fibers on the palms of her hands. She was struck hard from behind with a blunt object and went down. Then her assailant picked her up, all eighty-six pounds of her, and placed her on the bed.

  “I mean, you could easily carry a sawed-off shotgun in a knapsack,” Joe is saying.

  Scarpetta points the remote at the Hummer and unlocks the doors and replies wearily, “Not necessarily.”

  Joe makes her tired. He annoys her more each day.

  “Even if you sawed twelve or even eighteen inches off the barrel and six inches off the stock,” she remarks, “you’re still left with an eighteen-inch-long gun, at least. Assuming we’re talking about an autoloader.”

  She thinks of the big black bag the citrus inspector was carrying.

  “If we’re talking about a pump, you’re likely to have a longer gun than that,” she adds. “Neither scenario works with a knapsack, unless it’s a big one.”

  “A tote bag, then.”

  She thinks of the citrus inspector, of the long picker that he disassembled and packed inside his black bag. She’s seen citrus inspectors before and never noticed them using pickers. Usually, they look at what they can reach.

  “I bet he had a tote bag,” Joe says.

  “I’ve got no idea.” She’s about to snap at him.

  Throughout the entire autopsy, he prattled and divined and pontificated until she could scarcely think. He found it necessary to announce everything he was doing, everything he was writing on the protocol attached to his clipboard. He felt it necessary to tell her the weight of every organ and deduce when Mrs. Simister ate last based on the partially digested meat and vegetables in her stomach. He made sure Scarpetta heard the crunching sound of calcium deposits when he opened partially occluded coronaries with the scalpel and announced that maybe atherosclerosis killed her.