Predator

by Patricia Cornwell

  “You must be Fred.” Lucy shakes his hand. “Mind if I come in?”

  She follows him across the marble tile foyer into a living room that overlooks a narrow, murky canal.

  “What about my mother and Helen? Have you found out something?”

  He says it as if he means it the way he should. He isn’t just curious or paranoid. Pain fills his eyes, and there is an eagerness, a faint ring of hope.

  “Fred,” she says. “I’m not with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. I have private investigators and laboratories and we’ve been asked to help.”

  “So you misrepresented yourself at my gate,” he says, his eyes turning unfriendly. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to do. Bet you’re the one who called, too, saying you’re the Herald. To see if I was home.”

  “Right on both counts.”

  “And I’m supposed to talk to you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy says. “It was a lot to explain over an intercom.”

  “What’s happened to make this of interest again? Why now?”

  “I’m afraid I need to be the one asking the questions,” she says.

  Uncle Sam is pointing his finger at YOU and saying I WANT YOUR CITRUS.”

  Dr. Self pauses dramatically. She looks comfortable and confident in a leather chair on the set of Talk It Out. In this segment she has no guests. She doesn’t need them. She has a telephone centered on the table next to her chair, and cameras catch her from different angles as she punches buttons and says, “This is Dr. Self. You’re on the air.”

  “So how about that?” she goes on. “Is the USDA stomping on our Fourth Amendment rights?”

  It is an easy set-up, and she can’t wait to jump right down the throat of the fool who just called in. She glances at the monitor, satisfied the lighting and angles are catching her favorably.

  “They sure are,” the fool says over speakerphone.

  “What’s your name again? Sandy?”

  “Yeah, I…”

  “Stop before you chop, Sandy?”

  “Ah, what…?”

  “Uncle Sam with an ax? Isn’t that the image the public has?”

  “We’re being screwed. It’s a conspiracy.”

  “So that’s how you think of it? Good Old Uncle Sam cutting down all your trees. Chop, chop.”

  She catches the cameramen, her producer smiling.

  “The bastards came into my yard without permission, and next thing I know, all my trees are going to be cut down….”

  “And you live where, Sandy?”

  “Cooper City. I don’t blame people for wanting to shoot them or siccing their dogs on…”

  “Here’s the thing about it, Sandy.” She leans into the point she’s about to make, the cameras zooming in. “You people don’t pay attention to the facts. Have you attended meetings? Have you written your legislators? Have you bothered to ask questions point-blank and consider that maybe, just maybe, the explanations offered by the Department of Agriculture might make sense?”

  It is her style to take whatever side the other person isn’t on. She’s known for it.

  “Well, the stuff about hurricanes is [bleep],” the fool snaps, and Dr. Self suspected it wouldn’t be long before the profanity started.

  “It’s not bleep,” she mimics him. “There’s nothing bleep about it. The fact is”—she faces the camera—“we had four major hurricanes last fall, and it is a fact that citrus canker is a bacterial disease carried by the wind. When we come back, we’re going to explore the reality of this dreaded blight and talk it out with a very special guest. Stay with me.”

  “We’re off,” a cameraman says.

  Dr. Self reaches for her bottle of water. She takes a sip through a straw so she doesn’t smear her lipstick and waits for the makeup person to touch up her forehead and nose, impatient when the makeup person is slow getting to her, impatient when the makeup person is slow to hurry up and finish.

  “All right. Okay. That’s enough.” Dr. Self holds up a hand, shooing off the makeup person. “This is going well,” she says to her producer.

  “I think in the next segment, we need to really focus on the psychology. That’s why people tune in to you, Marilyn. It’s not the politics, it’s their problems with their girlfriends, bosses, mothers, fathers.”

  “I don’t need coaching.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “Listen, what makes my shows unique is the blend of current affairs and our emotional responses.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Three, two, one.”

  “And we’re back.” Dr. Self smiles into the camera.

  57

  Marino stands beneath a palm tree outside the Academy, watching Reba walk off to her unmarked Crown Victoria. He notes the defiance in her step, tries to determine if it’s genuine or if she’s putting on an act. He wonders if she sees him standing under the palm tree, smoking.

  She called him a jerk. He’s been called that a lot, but he never thought she would say it.

  She unlocks her car, then seems to change her mind about getting in. She doesn’t look in his direction, but he has a feeling she knows he’s standing there in the shadow of the palm tree, his Treo in hand, the earpiece in his ear, a cigarette going. She shouldn’t have said what she did. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta. The Effexor ruined things. If he wasn’t depressed before, he was after that, then that comment about Scarpetta, about all these cops having the hots for her.

  The Effexor was a blight. Dr. Self has no right to put him on a drug that ruined his sex life. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta all the time, as if Scarpetta is the most important person in Marino’s life. Reba had to remind him. She said what she did to remind him he couldn’t have sex, remind him of men who can and want it with Scarpetta. Marino hasn’t taken the Effexor for several weeks, and his problem is getting better except he is depressed.

  Reba pops the trunk, walks around to the back of the car and opens it.

  Marino wonders what she’s doing. He decides he may as well find out and be decent enough to let her know he can’t arrest anyone and could probably use her help. He can threaten people all he wants, but he can’t legally arrest anybody. It’s the only thing he misses about policing. Reba grabs what looks like a bag of laundry out of the trunk and throws it into the backseat as if she’s pissed off.

  “Got a body in there?” Marino asks, casually walking up to her, flicking his cigarette butt into the grass.

  “Ever heard of using a trash can?”

  She slams shut the door, barely looking at him.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “I’ve got to go to the cleaners. Haven’t had time in a week, not that it’s any of your business,” she says, hiding behind a pair of dark glasses. “Don’t treat me like shit anymore, at least not in front of other people. You want to be a jerk, at least be discreet about it.”

  He looks back at his palm tree as if it’s his favorite spot, looks at the stucco building against the bright blue sky, trying to think how to put it.

  “Well, you were disrespectful,” he says.

  She looks at him in shock. “Me? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Last I remember, we had a nice ride and you dragged me to Hooters, never asked if that’s where I wanted to go, by the way. Why you’d take a woman to an ass-and-tits place like that beats the hell out of me. Talk about disrespectful? Are you kidding? Making me sit there while you ogle all the tartlets jiggling past.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Were too.”

  “I sure wasn’t,” he says, sliding out the pack of cigarettes.

  “You’re smoking too much.”

  “I wasn’t staring at nothing. I was minding my own business drinking my coffee, then out of the blue you started in on all this crap about the Doc and I’ll be damned if I have to listen to such disrespectful bullshit.”

  She’s jealous, he thinks, pleased. She said what she did because she thought he was staring at the wa
itresses in Hooters, and maybe he was. To make a point.

  “I’ve worked with her a million years and don’t let anybody talk about her like that and I’m not going to start now,” he goes on, lighting up, squinting in the sun, noticing a group of students dressed in field clothes walking past on the road, heading to the SUVs in the parking lot, probably heading off to the Hollywood Police Training Facility for a demonstration by the Bomb Disposal Team.

  Seems like they were scheduled for that today, to play with Eddie the RemoteTec robot, watch it move on its tractor belts, sounding like a crab crawling down the trailer’s aluminum ramp, connected to a fiber-optic cable, showing off, and Bunky the bomb dog showing off, and firefighters in their big trucks showing off, and guys in their bomb-and-search suits showing off with dynamite and det cord and disrupters, maybe blowing up a car.

  Marino misses it. He’s tired of being left out.

  “I’m sorry,” Reba says, “I didn’t mean to say anything disrespectful about her. All I was saying was some of the guys I work with—”

  “I need you to arrest somebody,” he cuts her off, looking at his watch, not interested in hearing her repeat what she told him at Hooters, not interested in perhaps having to face that some of it was him.

  Most of it was him.

  The Effexor. Reba would have found out sooner rather than later. The damn stuff ruined him.

  “In maybe half an hour. If you can put off going to the Laundromat,” he is saying.

  “The dry cleaner’s, jerk,” she says with hostility that’s not at all convincing.

  She still likes him.

  “I’ve got my own washer and dryer,” she says. “I don’t live in a trailer.”

  Marino tries Lucy on the cell phone as he says to Reba, “I’ve got an idea. Not sure it will work, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Lucy answers and tells him she can’t talk.

  “It’s important,” Marino says, looking at Reba, remembering their weekend in Key West when he wasn’t on Effexor. “Just give me two minutes.”

  He can hear Lucy talking to someone, saying she’s got to take the call and will be right back. A man’s voice says no problem. Marino can hear Lucy walking. He looks at Reba and remembers getting drunk on Captain Morgan rum in the Paradise Lounge at the Holiday Inn and watching the sunsets and sitting up late at night in the hot tub when he wasn’t on Effexor.

  “You there?” Lucy is asking him.

  “Is it possible for me to have a three-way conference call with two cell phones, one landline and only two people?” he asks.

  “This some kind of Mensa test question?”

  “What I want is to make it look like I’m on my phone in my office talking to you, but what I’m really doing is talking to you on my cell phone. Hello? Are you there?”

  “Are you suggesting someone may be monitoring your phone calls from a multiline phone that’s connected to the PBX system?”

  “From the damn phone on my desk,” he says, looking at Reba looking at him, trying to see if she’s impressed.

  “That’s what I meant. Who?” Lucy says.

  “I intend to find out but I’m pretty sure I know.”

  “No one could do that without the system admin’s password. And that would be me.”

  “I think someone’s got it. It would explain a lot of things. Is it possible to do what I said?” he asks her again. “Can I call you on my office phone, then conference in on my cell phone, then leave my office phone line open so it seems I’m in there talking but I’m not?”

  “Yes, we can,” she says. “But not right this minute.”

  Dr. Self presses a flashing button on the phone.

  “Our next caller—well, he’s been on hold for several minutes now, and he has an unusual nickname. Hog? I apologize. You still with us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” a soft-spoken voice enters the studio.

  “You’re on the air,” she says. “Now, Hog? Why don’t you tell us about your nickname first. I’m sure everybody’s curious.”

  “It’s what I’m called.”

  Silence, and Dr. Self fills it instantly. There can be no dead time on the air.

  “Well, Hog it is. Now, you called in with a startling story. You’re in the lawn-care business. And you were in a certain neighborhood and noticed citrus canker in someone’s yard…?”

  “No. It’s not quite like that.”

  Dr. Self feels a pinch of irritation. Hog’s not following the script. When he called late Tuesday afternoon and she pretended to be someone other than herself, he distinctly said he had discovered canker in an old woman’s yard in Hollywood, just one orange tree, and now every citrus tree in her yard and all her neighbors’ yards has to be cut down, and when he mentioned the problem to the owner of that particular infected tree, the old woman, she threatened to kill herself if Hog reported the canker to the Department of Agriculture. She threatened to shoot herself with her dead husband’s shotgun.

  The old woman’s husband had planted the trees when they first got married. He’s dead and the trees are all she has left, the only living thing left. To cut down her trees is to destroy a precious part of her life that nobody has any business touching.

  “Eradicating those trees is to cause her to at last accept her loss.” Dr. Self is explaining all this to her audience. “And in doing so, she doesn’t see anything left worth living for. She wants to die. That’s quite a dilemma to find yourself in, isn’t it, Hog? Playing God,” she says to the speakerphone.

  “I don’t play God. I do what God says. It’s not an act.”

  Dr. Self is confused but carries on. “What a choice for you to make. Did you follow the government’s rules or follow your heart?”

  “I painted red stripes on them,” he says. “Now she’s dead. You were next. But there isn’t time.”

  58

  They sit in the kitchen at a table before a window that overlooks the narrow, murky canal.

  “When the police got involved,” Fred Quincy is saying, “they did ask for a few things that might have their DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush, I forget what else. I never heard anything about what they did with the stuff.”

  “They probably never analyzed it,” Lucy says, thinking about what she and Marino just talked about. “Possibly it’s still in their evidence room. We can ask them about it, but I’d rather not wait.”

  The suggestion that someone may have gained access to her system’s administrative password is incredible. It’s sickening. Marino must be mistaken. She can’t stop thinking about it.

  “Obviously, the case isn’t a priority for them. They’ve always believed they just ran off. There was no sign of violence,” Fred says. “They said there should have been a sign of a struggle, or someone should have seen something. It was the middle of the morning, and there were people around. And Mom’s SUV was missing.”

  “I was told her car was there. An Audi.”

  “It definitely wasn’t. And she didn’t have an Audi. I did. Someone must have seen my car when I got there later, looking for them. Mom had a Chevy Blazer. She used it to haul things around. You know, people get things so twisted. I went to the shop after trying to call all day. My mom’s purse and Blazer were gone, and there was no sign of her or my sister.”

  “Any sign they had ever been inside the shop?”

  “Nothing was on. The closed sign was out.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “Not that I could tell. Certainly nothing obvious. Nothing in the cash drawer, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. If she left money in it overnight, it wasn’t much. Something must have come up if you suddenly need their DNA.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Lucy says. “We may have a lead.”

  “You can’t tell me?”

  “I promise I’ll let you know. What was your first thought when you went looking for them, drove to the shop?”

  “Truth? I thought maybe they’d never gone there at all, had just driven off somewhere over the rain
bow.”

  “Why do you put it like that?”

  “There had been a lot of problems. Financial ups and downs. Personal problems. Dad had this extremely successful landscaping business.”

  “In Palm Beach.”

  “That’s where it was headquartered. But he had greenhouses and tree farms in other locations, including around here. Then, in the mid-eighties, he got wiped out by citrus canker. Every damn one of his citrus trees had to be destroyed, and he had to let go of almost all of his employees and came very close to declaring bankruptcy. That was hard on Mom. He got back on his feet and was more successful then, and that was hard on Mom, too. You know, I’m not sure I should be telling you all this.”

  “Fred, I’m trying to help. I can’t do it if you don’t talk to me.”

  “Let me start with when Helen was twelve,” he says. “I was beginning my freshman year in college. I’m older, obviously. Helen went to live with my dad’s brother and his wife for about six months.”

  “Why?”

  “It was sad, such a pretty, talented girl. Got into Harvard when she was only sixteen, lasted not even a semester, had a meltdown and came home.”

  “When?”

  “That would have been the fall before she and Mom disappeared. She only lasted until November—at Harvard.”

  “Eight months before she and your mother disappeared?”

  “Yes. Helen was dealt a really lousy genetic hand.”

  He pauses as if trying to decide whether he should go on, then, “All right. My mom wasn’t the most stable person. You might have already figured that out, her Christmas obsession. Craziness, more craziness, on and off for as long as I can remember. But it got really bad when Helen was twelve. Mom was doing some pretty irrational things.”

  “Was she seeing a local psychiatrist?”

  “Whatever money could buy. That celebrity one. She lived in Palm Beach back then. Dr. Self. She recommended hospitalization. That’s the real reason she sent Helen off to live with my aunt and uncle. Mom was in the hospital, and Dad was really busy and not inclined to take care of a twelve-year-old kid all by himself. Mom came home. Then Helen did and neither of them were, well, normal.”