Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “She explained that what she really meant when she brought up the metaphor of a layaway plan was that life on earth is like being in the back room of a department store. Some of us will be in that back room a shorter time than others, depending on ‘what we came equipped with before we were put in storage on this earth, waiting for Jesus.’

  “In other words, what her mother really was referring to when she used that corny layaway analogy was the family flaw, a potentially fatal one that Carrie had inherited. This wasn’t made up. It was an unfortunate fact, and by Carrie’s fourteenth year she’d lost both her maternal grandmother and her mother to a thromboembolism caused by the bone marrow abnormality polycythemia vera. Carrie made a pact with God that she wouldn’t suffer a similar fate, and like clockwork every two months she underwent phlebotomy, removing as much as a pint of blood that she would retain for her own personal use. It wasn’t the only interesting ritual that would follow her well into adulthood.”

  Carrie walks around the dorm room, gesturing, looking into the camera. She’s enjoying herself. She’s loving this.

  “Eventually odd rumors about her would circulate at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility,” she continues, “where it would have been a civil rights violation to question their most senior civilian computer savant about her health, about her personal beliefs and how they were manifested. It was nobody’s business if she saved or drank her own blood or was poly-sexual or communed with the Other World. Her appetites and fantasies were of no concern as long as she kept them to herself.

  “How long she lived wasn’t relevant either, only that she finished the important job the federal government had recruited her to do, a technical feat that didn’t call for an FBI special agent, and Carrie wasn’t one. Professionally she was classified as a non–law enforcement, non-military independent contractor with special security clearances. Personally she was considered a nerd, a weirdo, a nobody who was called derisive and crude nicknames behind her back.”

  Her eyes are dark and cold as they bore into the camera. “Sexist, vulgar names and snipes that the FBI didn’t think Carrie overheard. But she did, and her upbringing had prepared her well for not reacting to taunts or retaliating or doing anything that gave the enemy any power.

  “Punishment isn’t punishment if you don’t feel punished, if you don’t experience the suffering that’s intended. It’s all about perception. It’s all about the way you react to something and that reaction is the real weapon. The weapon is what injures, and in your case I’m banking on you being injured by your own self, by your own reactions because you’ve yet to learn a lesson no one had to teach me: If you feel no pain and show no injury then there was no weapon, only a weak attempt …”

  Her mellow, pleasant voice with its subtle Virginia lilt suddenly stops and the frame goes black. It’s the same as before. The link is disabled. Instantly it’s gone like the first one.

  JILL DONOGHUE is unavailable, and I insist that her secretary interrupt her. I don’t give orders unless I mean it, and right now I feel like an engine about to overtorque. I know I don’t sound particularly nice but I can’t help it.

  “I’m sorry Doctor Scarpetta. But it’s a deposition,” the secretary tries to plead with me. “They’re supposed to break at noon.”

  “Noon won’t work. I need her now and I’m very sorry. I’m sure whatever she’s doing is important. But it’s not as important as this. Please get her for me,” I reply, and I think about patience, about whether I’m a patient person because I certainly don’t sound like it.

  I don’t for a very good reason, I decide. Not this morning, and Carrie knew what she was doing. She’s giving me clues, and as much as I can’t stand to think about how manipulated I feel it would be reckless and foolish to wear blinders. She’s made it clear that everything is about timing. Therefore it stands to reason that the timing of the texts landing in my phone isn’t random.

  I wonder if she’s spying even as I stand in Lucy’s rock garden, the sun moving in and out of white clouds that are ruffled like a washboard underneath, the tops of them building vertically. The storm is coming, a whopper summer thunder cell and I smell its ozone approach as I begin to wander well beyond Lucy’s outdoor sanctuary, thick green grass springy beneath my boots. I move into the partial shade of a dogwood tree, waiting for my pulse to slow down. The Muzak on Donoghue’s office line is awful and I feel a flare of irritation. My face feels angry hot.

  I’ve always considered myself a disciplined deliberate person, a long-suffering, patient, logical, unemotional scientist but obviously I’m not patient enough, nowhere near patient enough, and my thoughts race as images flash. I keep seeing Carrie Grethen’s face, the stoniness of her skin as pale as paper, and the way her eyes changed color and shading during her lecture, her soliloquy. Deep blue then aqua then icy pale like a Siberian husky and next her irises were so dark they looked almost black. I was seeing what was going on in her psyche, the shadings of her monster, of her spiritual malignancy, and I take another deep breath and blow out slowly.

  The video and its abrupt ending had the effect of a triple shot of espresso or maybe a large dose of digitalis. My heart is about to beat its way out of my chest. I feel poisoned. I feel so many things I can’t begin to describe them, and I take deep slow breaths. I open up my lungs and breathe in and out deeply, very slowly and quietly as I wait for Donoghue. Finally I hear a click on the line and the Muzak stops.

  “What’s happening, Kay?” Jill Donoghue gets right to it.

  “Nothing good or I wouldn’t be calling like this. I apologize for interrupting.” I move a few steps, and my right thigh reminds me it’s there.

  “What can I do for you? And what’s the noise? Is that a helicopter? Where are you?”

  “It’s an FBI helicopter most likely,” I reply.

  “I take it you’re at a crime scene …”

  “I’m on Lucy’s property which is being treated like a crime scene. I would like to retain you as my attorney, Jill. I’d like to do so immediately.” I watch Lucy sitting some distance away on a bench pretending she isn’t interested in my conversation.

  “Certainly we can talk about that later but what’s happening …?” Donoghue starts to say.

  “For the record we’re talking about it now,” I interrupt her. “Please make a note of it. On August fifteenth at ten minutes past eleven A.M., I hired you as my attorney and asked you to represent Lucy, too. Assuming you’re amenable.”

  “So the three of us are protected by attorney-client privilege,” she considers. “Except you aren’t protected if you talk to Lucy without me present.”

  “I understand. I’m about to believe nothing is privileged or private anyway.”

  “That’s probably a smart attitude to adopt this day and age. For now the answer is yes about representation. But if there’s a conflict I’ll have to withdraw from representing one of you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Can you talk now?”

  “Lucy says where I am right this minute is safe. My guess is most of her property isn’t, and the same may be true of my phone if they’ve wiretapped into it. It may be true of my office e-mail. I have no idea what’s safe to be honest.”

  “Has Lucy talked to the FBI? Has she so much as said good morning?”

  “She’s been cooperating with them to a degree. I’m afraid she’s too comfortable.” I look up at the helicopter and imagine the agents inside looking back. “I’m not happy that she didn’t call you right away.”

  “That wasn’t a good idea. But I know her. It’s her nature to underestimate them. She absolutely shouldn’t.”

  Lucy is now pacing, looking at her phone, texting, and she must not have serious worries about the FBI accessing her e-mail or anything else. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, and I don’t envy anybody who decides to intrude upon her privacy. She’ll treat it as a challenge, as a competition. She’s happy to return the favor. I can only imagine the cyber mischief and dest
ruction she’s capable of if she puts her mind to it, and I remember the look in Carrie’s eyes as she said how spoiled Lucy was. The video clip I just watched continues playing in my mind. I can’t make it stop.

  I can’t shake Carrie’s mockery, her grandiose self-absorption and bottomless pit of hate, and it’s outrageous and wrong that I’m subjected to any of it. I feel saddened, angered and undone in a way that’s hard to define. I wonder if that’s the real point in subjecting me to this, and then I have another thought. If I tell anyone—including Jill Donoghue—there will be the problem of credibility.

  No one will believe me, and for good reason. The links texted to me are dead. It’s impossible to prove they were ever connected to recordings made by Carrie Grethen or anyone else.

  “Who besides you is on the property?” Donoghue continues to ask me questions, to prep herself before she heads out the door.

  “Marino. Janet and their adopted son, Desi,” I reply. “Well he’s not officially adopted yet. His mother, Janet’s sister, died of pancreatic cancer three weeks ago.”

  Donoghue says she’s deeply sorry to hear it, and whenever she attempts to show empathy or kindness she gets a certain tone in her voice. It reminds me of a piano key that’s a little flat or the dull clink of cheap glass. Her walking around in another person’s moccasins is a well-oiled act. Unfortunately she doesn’t mean it, and I go out of my way never to forget that her charisma, her alleged empathy are a rubber chicken. You hungrily sink your teeth into it and discover it’s fake.

  “What about Janet and Lucy?” Donoghue asks. “Are they married?”

  I’m caught by surprise and feel another wave of misgiving and maybe shame as I reply, “Actually I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if the niece you’ve raised like a daughter is married?”

  “They’ve never said anything. Not to me.”

  “But you would know if they are.”

  “Not necessarily. It wouldn’t be unlike Lucy to get married in secret. But I’d be surprised,” I explain. “It wasn’t all that long ago that she told Janet to move out.”

  “Why?”

  “Lucy fears for Janet’s safety, for Desi’s safety.” I glance at Lucy, making sure she can’t hear me.

  She’s standing with her back to me as she looks at something on her phone.

  “Aren’t they safer with her?” Donoghue asks.

  “It doesn’t seem Lucy thought so several months ago.”

  “Married people can kick each other out of the house. You don’t have to be unmarried to have that happen.”

  “Which brings me back to the same thing. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they’re protected by spousal privilege. You’ll have to ask them.”

  “Does Janet know she shouldn’t say a word to the FBI?” Donoghue asks. “Because they’ll try to trick her into chatting, into anything they possibly can. If they ask her what time it is or what she ate for breakfast, she’s not to tell them.”

  “Janet is former FBI. She’s an attorney. She’s knows how to handle them.”

  “Yes, yes I know. Both she and Lucy are former FBI, meaning they’re overly confident about their ability to handle the FBI. Does Benton know what’s happening? I’m assuming he must.”

  “I have no idea.” I don’t want to.

  It’s yet one more unthinkable possibility. A strong possibility. In fact it’s hard to imagine Benton didn’t know his own family was about to be raided. How could he not have known? This isn’t a spontaneous event. The Feds planned it.

  “I saw him in court early this morning at a status hearing,” Donoghue adds. “I started to say he acted as if everything is fine. But he always acts like that.”

  “Yes he does.” I don’t recall Benton telling me he had court this morning.

  “And you haven’t told him where you are right now and what’s happening,” Donoghue makes sure. “And he’s given you no reason to suspect he knows?”

  Benton and I had coffee together. We spent a few quiet minutes on our sunporch before both of us got ready for work, and I envision his handsome face, conjuring it up from hours earlier.

  “He didn’t,” I reply.

  I didn’t detect the faintest shadow of anything that might have been bothering him. But Benton is stoical. He’s one of the most unreadable people I’ve ever met.

  “What’s the likelihood he doesn’t know, Kay?”

  There’s no likelihood, and that’s probably the dismal truth because how could he not have had a clue that his colleagues were about to raid Lucy’s property and seize her belongings? Of course he knew, and how could he not be bothered by that fact? How could he sleep in the same bed and make love to me while knowing such a thing was about to happen? I feel a twinge of anger, of betrayal, and then I feel nothing. This is our life together. We have more nonconversations than any two people I know.

  We routinely keep secrets from each other. At times we lie. It might be by omission but we deliberately mislead each other and misrepresent the truth because that’s what our jobs require. At moments like this as an FBI helicopter beats overhead and agents raid my niece’s property I wonder if it’s worth it. Benton and I answer to a higher power that’s actually a lower one. We faithfully serve a criminal justice system that’s flawed and compromised on its way to being broken.

  “I’ve not talked to him since we left the house this morning,” I summarize to Donoghue. “I’ve told him nothing.”

  “Let’s leave it like that for now,” she says, and after a weighty beat she adds, “I have a question for you, Kay, while we’re on the subject. Have you ever heard the term data fiction?”

  “Data fiction?” I repeat, and Lucy turns around and stares in my direction as if she heard what I just said. “No I haven’t. Why?”

  “It’s a term that’s central to a case I was just in court about this morning. Not a case that has any direct relevance to you per se. Well we’ll talk when I see you. I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I END THE CALL AND LEAN AGAINST THE DOGWOOD tree, thinking. The helicopter is a huge menacing black hornet. It’s been nosing low and loud over the river, going up and down, then cutting hard left or right, flying a grid pattern as if searching for someone.

  I feel sunlight on the back of my neck as I look around at the freshly mown grass and lush trees. The meadow beyond the rock garden is a paint-spattered canvas in bold primary colors and electric mixtures of them. It’s breathtakingly beautiful in this spot. It’s supposed to be peaceful but the FBI has turned it into a war zone and I realize how alone I am. I can’t confide in anyone, not really, and especially not Benton.

  Jill Donoghue was in a status hearing early this morning and ran into him. What business took him to the federal courthouse in Boston and why didn’t he mention it before we both left for work? What really gnaws at me is that Donoghue brought up something called data fiction in the context of why I just called her. What does it have to do with Lucy or me or any of us? Or was she simply referencing something that was on her mind? I twist around and look up at the helicopter banking east, swooping around, thundering over Lucy’s house directly toward us.

  “Are we ready?” Lucy’s face is stone.

  I can’t be sure that she didn’t overhear my conversation. I have no idea what she really knows.

  “Yes we should go,” I reply, and we set out for the house together. “Before we say another word to each other let me remind you that whatever is communicated between the two of us isn’t privileged.”

  “That’s nothing new, Aunt Kay.”

  “So I want to be very careful what I ask or tell you, Lucy. I just want to make sure you understand that.” Thick grass makes a brushing sound against my boots, and the humidity is fast approaching the dew point.

  In another hour or so we’re going to have a Noah’s Ark downpour.

  “I know all about privilege.” She glances over at me. “What do you want to know? Ask me while you can. In a few min
utes it won’t be safe to have this conversation.”

  “Jill Donoghue mentioned something about a case involving data fiction. I’m curious if you have any idea what she might have been referring to because I’m not familiar with the term.”

  “Data fiction is a trending concept on the Undernet, the underground of the Internet.”

  “The Undernet where most of what goes on is illegal?”

  “Depends on who you’re talking to. For me it’s just an extreme frontier of cyberspace like the wild wild west, just another place to data mine and send my search engines loose.”

  “Tell me about data fiction.”

  “It’s what can happen if we’re so reliant on technology that we become completely dependent on things we can’t see. Therefore we can no longer judge for ourselves what’s true, what’s false, what’s accurate, what isn’t. In other words if reality is defined by software that does all the work for us then what if this software lies? What if everything we believe isn’t true but is a facade, a mirage? What if we go to war, pull the plug, make life-and-death decisions based on data fiction?”

  “I’d say that happens more than we’d like to imagine,” I reply. “It’s certainly something I worry about every time we generate our annual crime statistics and the government makes decisions based on our data.”

  “Imagine armed drones controlled by unreliable software. A click of the mouse and you blow up the wrong person’s house.”

  “I don’t have to imagine it,” I reply. “I’m afraid it’s happened.”

  “Or how about financial misinformation and manipulation, something far worse than a Ponzi scheme? Think about all those online transactions and digital reads of what you have in your bank accounts. You believe you have a certain amount of cash, assets or debt because it says so right there on your computer screen or in your quarterly report that was generated by software. What if this software creates data that accounts for every penny but in fact it’s false? What if it’s a front for fraud? Then you have data fiction.”