Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  Parked on the brick driveway in front of my truck is the red Land Rover registered to Chanel Gilbert. I look through the driver’s window without touching anything. On the backseat is a bag of empty glass bottles, all of them the same and unlabeled, and the dash is dusty, the SUV filthy with pollen and trash from trees. Leaves and pine needles clog the space between the hood and the windshield. Cars don’t stay whistle clean around here. If people have garages they use them for storage.

  “It looks like it’s been sitting outside for a while. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driven recently,” I start to say as I detect a distant thudding that is rapidly coming closer.

  “Yeah.” Marino is distracted, staring at my right leg. “Just so you know you’re walking a lot worse than you were earlier. Maybe the shittiest I’ve seen you walk in weeks.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Thanks for pointing it out with your typical diplomacy.”

  “Don’t get pissed at me, Doc.”

  “Why would I?”

  The helicopter is a beefy black twin engine at about fifteen hundred feet and several miles west, flying along the Charles River. It’s not Lucy’s Agusta with its Ferrari blue and silver paint job. I dig my keys out of my shoulder bag and try to walk without a hitch, without stiffness or a limp as Marino’s comments sting and make me self-conscious.

  “Maybe I should drive.” He watches me skeptically.

  “Nope.”

  “You’ve been on your feet way too much today. You need to rest.”

  “That’s not happening,” I say to him.

  CHAPTER 9

  FIFTEEN MILES NORTHWEST OF CAMBRIDGE THE ROAD is barely wide enough for my big boxy truck.

  White with dark tinted windows and built on a Chevy G 4500 chassis it’s basically an ambulance with the caduceus and scales of justice in blue on the doors. But there are no flashing lights. There’s no siren or PA system. I’m not in the business of offering emergency medical care. It’s a little late by the time I’m called, and I’m not expected to engage in high-risk aggressive driving. Certainly not here in the nation’s proud and proper birthplace where the shot was heard ’round the world during the Revolutionary War.

  Concord, Massachusetts, is known for its famous former residents like Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, and for hiking and horse trails and of course Walden Pond. The people here keep to themselves, often snobbishly so, and whelping horns, beacons, flashing red and blue strobes, and breaking the speed limit and outrunning traffic lights aren’t normal or welcome. They’re also not part of a medical examiner’s SOP.

  But if I had a siren right now it would be screaming. I’d be encouraging everyone on the road to stay out of my way. It’s just a damn shame about the truck. I wish I were driving something inconspicuous. Even one of the CFC vans or SUVs. Anything but this. Everybody we pass is staring at the Grim Reapermobile, the double-wide, in Marino’s words. It’s about as common as a UFO in this low-crime part of the world where Lucy lives on her spectacular estate. Not that people don’t die around here. They have accidents, sudden cardiac catastrophes and take their own lives like anybody else. But those types of cases rarely require a mobile crime scene unit, and I wouldn’t be driving one if I weren’t coming directly from Chanel Gilbert’s house.

  It would have made sense to swap out vehicles but there isn’t time. I don’t have the luxury of taking a shower and changing my clothes. I feel concern that’s fast becoming raw fear, and it ratchets me into a higher gear. Already I’m mobilizing, getting a determined iron-hard attitude edged in stoicism that will break bones. I’ve tried Lucy repeatedly and she doesn’t answer. I’ve tried her partner Janet. She’s not answering either, and their main home number continues to seem out of order.

  “I hate to tell you but I smell it.” Marino cracks open his window and hot humid air seeps in.

  “Smell what?” I pay attention to my driving.

  “The stink you carried out of the house with you and trapped inside this damn truck.” He waves his hand in front of his face.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “You know what they say. A fox can’t smell its own.” Marino routinely butchers clichés and thinks an idiom is a stupid person.

  “The saying is a fox smells its own hole first,” I reply.

  He rolls down his window the rest of the way, and the sound of blowing air is soft because we’re moving slowly. I hear the helicopter. I’ve been hearing it ever since we left Cambridge and I’ve about decided we’re being followed, possibly by a TV news crew. Possibly the media has found out who the dead woman’s mother is, assuming the dead woman is really Chanel Gilbert.

  “Can you tell if it’s a news chopper? It would make sense but sounds bigger than that,” I ask Marino.

  “Can’t tell.” He’s craning his neck, looking up as best he can, and sweat is like dew on top of his shiny shaved head. “I can’t see it.” He stares out his side window at big trees, an overgrown hedge, a dented mailbox going by.

  A red-tailed hawk circles in the distance, and I’ve always considered birds of prey a good sign, a positive messenger. They remind me to keep above the fray, to have a keen eye and follow my instincts. Another stab of pain knifes through my thigh, and no matter how many times I’ve dissected what happened I can’t figure out what I miscalculated, what I didn’t notice or could have done differently. I was a hawk that got hunted down like a dove. In fact I was a sitting duck.

  “The thing is it’s not like her,” Marino is saying, and I realize I didn’t hear what he said right before it. “It’s not like you either, Doc. And I feel a need to point that out.”

  “I’m sorry. Now what are we talking about?”

  “Lucy and her so-called emergency. I keep wondering if you’ve misunderstood something. Because it doesn’t sound like her. I don’t like that we got up and walked out of a scene that may turn out not to be an accident.”

  “It’s not like Lucy to have an emergency?” I glance over at him. “Anyone can have an emergency.”

  “But I’m not understanding this and I swear I’m trying to. She texts you from her emergency line and that’s it? What did she say exactly? Hurry here now or something like that? Because like I said that doesn’t sound like her.”

  I haven’t told him what the text said. Which was nothing. It was a video link. That’s all. Now it’s gone without a trace and he has no idea about any of it.

  “Let me see the text.” He holds out a huge hand. “Let me see exactly what she said.”

  “Not while I’m driving.” I dig myself deeper into what’s becoming a pit of lies, and I don’t like the feeling.

  I resent the position I’ve been put in and I can’t find my way out. But I’m protecting people or at least that’s my intention.

  “And she said what exactly? Tell me her exact words,” Marino badgers me.

  “There was an indication of a problem.” I’m careful how I phrase it. “And now she’s not answering any of her phones. Janet isn’t either,” I repeat myself.

  “Like I said it doesn’t sound like her. Lucy never acts like there’s a problem or that she needs anyone,” he says and it’s true. “Maybe someone stole her phone. Maybe it wasn’t her who sent the message. How do you know we’re not being set up so we get to her property and find out it’s an ambush?”

  “Set up by whom?” I scrutinize my own voice.

  I sound calm and in control. My tone doesn’t begin to belie my feelings.

  “You know damn well who. It’s the kind of thing Carrie Grethen would do. So she can ambush us, lure us right where she wants us. If I see her I’m shooting on sight.” Marino isn’t making an empty threat. He means it 100 percent. “No questions asked.”

  “I didn’t just hear you say that. You didn’t say it and don’t say it again,” I reply, and the diesel engine seems unnaturally loud.

  I’m a white elephant on this road. I shouldn’t be on it, not driv
ing a medical examiner’s truck, and I imagine if I saw it and didn’t know why it was headed to Lucy’s neighborhood …

  Why isn’t she answering her phone? What has happened?

  I won’t think about it. I can’t stand to think about it, and I’m bombarded by images I can’t shake from a video I never should have seen. At the same time I wonder what I really watched. How much footage did Carrie take out of context? How could she have had me in mind as a future audience? Or did she?

  How could Carrie have known then what she would do almost two decades later? I don’t think it’s possible. Or maybe I just don’t want to believe she’s capable of executing her schemes so far in advance. That would be scary and she’s scary enough, and I obsessively sift through what’s happened today. I work my own morning like a crime scene, detail by detail, second by second. I dig, excavate and reconstruct as I drive with both hands on the wheel.

  The video link landed on my phone at exactly 9:33 A.M., a little more than an hour ago. I recognized the alert from Lucy’s ICE line. It sounds like a C-sharp chord on an electric guitar, and immediately I pulled off my soiled gloves and stepped away from the body. I watched the recording and now it’s gone. Irretrievably gone. That’s what happened. That’s what I want to tell Marino. But I can’t and it’s making matters more difficult with him than they already were.

  He doesn’t completely trust me. I’ve sensed it since my near miss in Florida.

  Blame the victim.

  Only I’m the victim this time, and in his mind it has to be my fault. That suggests I’m not who I used to be. At least not to him. He treats me differently. It’s difficult to pinpoint and define, subtle like a shadow that didn’t used to be there. I see it in front of me whenever he’s around, like the changing shades of blue and gray on a heaving sea. He blocks my sun. He makes reality shift when he shows up.

  Doubt.

  I think that’s mostly it. Marino doubts me. He hasn’t always liked me and in the beginning of my career he might have hated me and then for the longest time he loved me too much. But throughout it all he didn’t doubt my judgment. There’s plenty he criticizes and harps on but being erratic, irrational or unreliable was never on the list. Not trusting me as a professional is new and it doesn’t feel good. It feels damn terrible.

  “The more I think about it the more I agree with you, Doc,” Marino continues to talk as I drive my big truck. “She hadn’t been dead all that long to be in such bad condition. I don’t know how we’re going to explain it to her mother. That and what lit up blue on the floor. A case that started out as no big deal and now there are questions, serious questions. And we can’t answer them. And why? Because for one thing we’re here in Concord and not in Cambridge getting to the bottom of things. How do I explain to Amanda Gilbert that you got a personal call and left her daughter’s body on the floor and just walked out?”

  “I didn’t leave the body on the floor,” I reply.

  “I meant it figuratively.”

  “Literally the body is safely at my office and I didn’t just walk out. There’s nothing figurative about it. Everything has been left as is and we’ll be back soon. And it’s also not for you to explain, Marino, and at the moment I don’t intend to discuss details with Amanda Gilbert. Not to mention we need to confirm the dead woman’s identity first.”

  “For the sake of the argument,” Marino replies, “let’s assume it’s Chanel Gilbert because who else would it be? Her mother is going to ask a shitload of questions.”

  “My answer is simple. I’ll say we need to confirm identification. We need more details and reliable witness accounts. We need undisputed facts that tell us when her daughter was last seen alive, when she last e-mailed or made a phone call. That’s the missing link. We find that out and I have a better chance of knowing when she died. The housekeeper is important. She’s the one who may have the best information.”

  I hear myself using words such as reliable, fact and undisputed. I’m being defensive because of what I sense from him. I feel his doubt. I feel it like a glowering mountain looming over me.

  “I’m suspicious of the housekeeper to tell you the truth,” he says. “What if she’s involved and is the one who turned off the air-conditioning?”

  “Was she asked about it?”

  “Hyde said it was already like that when he got to the house. She didn’t seem to know anything about why it was so hot.”

  “We need to sit down with her. What’s her name?”

  “Elsa Mulligan, thirty years old, originally from New Jersey. Apparently she moved to this area when Chanel Gilbert offered her the job.”

  “Why New Jersey?”

  “That’s where they met.”

  “When?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Right now we have so many questions everything matters,” I reply.

  “I got the impression Elsa Mulligan hadn’t worked for Chanel all that long. A couple years? I’m not sure. That’s about as much as I know since she wasn’t still at the house when I got there. I’m passing on what Hyde said. She told him that when she let herself in through the kitchen door she could smell this horrible odor like something had died, and yep something sure had. The house was hot as shit and she got a whiff and followed it into the foyer.”

  “Did Hyde feel she was being truthful? What’s your gut tell you?”

  “I’m not sure of anything or anyone,” Marino says. “Usually we can at least count on the dead body to tell us the truth. Dead people don’t lie. Just living people do. But Chanel Gilbert’s body isn’t telling us shit because the heat escalated decomp, confusing things and I wonder if a housekeeper would know something like that.”

  “If she watches some of these crime shows she could.”

  “I guess so,” he says. “And I don’t trust her. And I’m getting an increasingly bad feeling about the case and wish to hell we hadn’t walked out on it.”

  “We didn’t walk out on it, and you’ll be the problem if you keep saying that.”

  “Really?” He looks at me. “When’s the last time you did something like this?”

  The answer is never. I don’t take personal calls in the middle of a scene and interrupt what I’m doing. But this was different. I heard an alert tone from Lucy’s emergency line, and she’s not the sort to overreact or cry wolf. I had no choice but to check on whether something terrible has happened.

  “What about the burglar alarm being on when she arrived this morning?” I ask Marino. “You told me the housekeeper turned it off. Are we sure it was armed when she unlocked the door?”

  “It was turned off at seven-forty-four, which is when she told Hyde she got there. Quarter of eight is exactly what she said.” Marino takes off his sunglasses, starts cleaning them on the hem of his shirt. “The alarm company log verifies the alarm was turned off at that time this morning.”

  “What about last night?”

  “It was set, disarmed and reset multiple times. The last time it was armed was close to ten P.M. The code was entered and after that none of the door contacts were broken. In other words it doesn’t appear someone set the alarm and then left the house. It’s like the person was in for the night. So maybe Chanel was still alive then.”

  “Assuming she’s the one who reset the alarm. Does she have her own code that only she uses?”

  “No. There’s just one and it’s shared. The housekeeper and Chanel used the same dumbass code. One-two-three-four. Sounds like Chanel wasn’t particularly security conscious.”

  “With her Hollywood background that would surprise me. I wouldn’t expect her to be trusting. And one-two-three-four is usually the default code when a security system is installed. The expectation is you’ll change the code to something difficult to guess.”

  “Obviously she didn’t bother.”

  “We need to find out how long she’s lived there, how often she’s in Cambridge. While I didn’t have a chance to look around I can say the house didn’t feel all that lived
in.” As I explain this I’m desperate to tell him the truth about why we’re rushing to Lucy’s house.

  I want to show him the video but I can’t. Even if I were able to I couldn’t let him see it. Legally I wouldn’t dare. I can’t prove who sent it or why. The video could be a setup, a trap, maybe one cooked up by our own government. Lucy admits on film to being in possession of an illegal firearm, a fully automatic machine gun that Carrie accuses her of stealing from my husband Benton—an FBI agent. Any violation involving a Class III weapon is serious trouble, the very trouble Lucy doesn’t need. Especially now.

  Over recent months the police and the Feds have been watching her. I don’t know how closely. Because of her prior relationship with Carrie almost everyone is concerned about what Lucy’s involvement might be with her. Or is Carrie even still alive? That’s the most inflammatory question I’ve been hearing this summer. Maybe Carrie really is dead. Maybe everything happening is being manufactured by my niece, and this thought leads back to Marino. If only I could show the video to him.

  I continue arguing with myself that were it possible and prudent there would be no point. I know how he would react. He would be convinced that someone—probably Carrie—is harassing me. He would say she knows exactly how to push my buttons, to stick it to me, and the stupidest thing I could have done is what I’m doing now. I should have stayed put. I shouldn’t have reacted. I’ve let her get the best of me and there must be other nasty tricks to follow.

  Let the games begin, I imagine Marino commenting, and I wonder what he’d say if he knew the date it was filmed.

  July 11, 1997. His birthday seventeen years ago.

  CHAPTER 10

  I DON’T REMEMBER IT. BUT BIRTHDAYS ARE A BIG deal and I would have cooked him dinner, one of his favorite dishes, whatever he wanted.

  It also was long ago when Lucy was at the FBI Academy, inside her dorm room breaking up with Carrie. Assuming the date is correct on the video file, the two of them had run the FBI obstacle course known as the Yellow Brick Road. Then Lucy worked out in the gym. I have no idea where I was and I don’t know where Marino might have been or what he was doing. So I ask him.