Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  But it won’t do any good. I can already tell, and I know my niece. I know what enrages her. I know when there will be hell to pay.

  “I’m going to insist that all further communications must go through me. Are you all right with that?” Donoghue asks.

  “I don’t care,” Lucy says.

  “I need you to care.”

  “It’s better not to.”

  “I don’t need you to be afraid but I do need you to care.”

  “I’m not afraid and I don’t care. Not the way they want me to.”

  “I need you to care the way I want you to,” Donoghue says, and she gives more instructions. “Don’t return to the main house until they’re gone. If they want to interview you, well I shouldn’t indicate that they might not …”

  “Sure you should indicate it,” Lucy rudely cuts her off. “That’s exactly right because the bigger worry is they don’t want to question me, interview me, hear my side of anything, that it was never their intention. They don’t care what I have to say. All they care about is making some case that fits with their petty politics.”

  “I’m assuming they want to ask you questions. I’ll insist that we set up a formal time and they can do it at my firm.” Donoghue’s not an alarmist and she doesn’t accept what Lucy just said.

  In Jill Donoghue’s playbook everybody wants to ask questions. The FBI wouldn’t turn down the chance to interrogate Lucy, especially if they thought they could trip her up or corner her into a lie. If they can’t send her to prison for crimes she didn’t commit, maybe they can manipulate her into making false statements. It’s what I call playing the legal lottery. My answer is don’t let them put a nickel in your slot machine. Don’t ever give them a chance to get lucky.

  “What are you going to do about a phone?” Donoghue is asking my niece.

  “It’s been returned to the factory settings.” What Lucy is saying is that she’s made sure her phone self-destructed after Erin Loria took it from her. “It’s in the exact condition it would be if they bought it brand-new in a store,” she adds. “By the end of the day I’ll have a different number for you to reach me on securely, privately.”

  “And they won’t know what you’ve done? That you’ve acquired another device? Another phone?”

  “Acquiring another phone isn’t against the law. I can do it all day long and whatever they find out?” Lucy stares defiantly at her. “I’ll just continue to defeat them. This is war. They’ve invaded my property and my life, and I’m not going to let it go. They want to spy on me? They want to take me on? They think they’re going to leave me defenseless on my own property with Carrie Grethen on the loose? Really? Let’s see what happens.”

  “Be careful. They can arrest you.” Donoghue is blunt with her. “They have the power of the justice system on their side and you have nothing but your vigilantism and anger.”

  “Vigilantism and anger. An eloquent way to describe it. And you should be careful too, especially about trivializing what you don’t completely understand.”

  “I intend to understand everything. But you need to do as I say.”

  “Gee that’s the one thing I’m not good at.” Lucy touches my arm. “Come on,” she says to me. “Let’s go unblock the driveway.”

  CHAPTER 26

  OUTSIDE ON THE DOCK THE AIR IS STEAMY AND thick. I feel electricity. I smell the rain as veins of lightning shimmer in a black sky that soon will have its way with us.

  I know an advancing big storm when I see one, and we’re going to get a whopper. I hope there’s no hail. This summer there have been violent late-afternoon thunderstorms, and hail as big as marbles has beaten the hell out of my yard. It’s knocked several slate tiles loose from the roof and dented the new drainpipes I recently installed.

  “We’re going to be slammed but good.” I look up and realize how quiet it’s gotten, and I remember the helicopter is gone. “At least there’s something positive to come from nasty weather. Listen. You can hear the peaceful sounds of the countryside again.”

  You can’t really and I’m being just a little sarcastic. What I hear is the wind gusting through trees and our footsteps on the wooden dock and the plashing of the river against its pilings. But I say whatever I want because at this stage Lucy and I are no longer having an honest conversation. We’re manipulating. But not in the same way. Not hardly.

  Lucy is angrily and aggressively acting out while my every word is calculated with a very decided impression in mind. I imagine Erin Loria watching and listening. She won’t get anything helpful from me. Mostly I intend to load her up with what I call dead wood that’s too flimsy to build anything from and too green to burn.

  “One big fishing expedition.” Lucy walks slowly, considerately so I can keep up with her.

  “I’m sure Desi loved the idea of fishing with Marino one of these days.” I try to deflect what I already know Lucy will do next.

  She’s going to dish on the FBI. She’s going to have her brand of fun. She’s homicidally angry and this is what she does. She flaunts and taunts. She goads and inflames. She does it recklessly and with no regard for consequences. It’s who my niece is. She’s grown up and she’s not and never will be.

  “To catch me at whatever they miscalculate I might do,” she says loudly. “For what they foolishly hope I’ve been up to when no one’s looking such as … Let me see. Oh I know. Digging a hole to China. That must be it. Thus the aerial search. That tactical bird of theirs is equipped from soup to nuts including GPR, ground-penetrating radar. I’m sure they were hoping to detect underground safe bunkers or secret rooms or wormholes.”

  She boldly, loudly and in a hostile voice recites the exact wording in the warrant: “Any hidden doors, egresses including but not limited to structures, dwellings, elevators or passageways which are partly or wholly belowground or separate from the main residence.”

  “Yes,” I answer with more platitudes and vagueness. “It’s what I call the kitchen sink scenario. Ask for everything.”

  “Precedents,” Lucy announces as we reach the driveway. “Never forget the way their robotic rigid minds work. They think in precedents that have nothing to do with relevance or truth. It has to do with whatever else has been done, as opposed to what should be or could be done. What we think of as a cover your ass way of life. If you’re never an original thinker how can you possibly get in trouble? If you’re banal and unoriginal enough you’ll get promoted.”

  We walk past surveillance equipment attached to lampposts and in trees. She doesn’t care in the appropriate prudent way she should. In fact she’s looking directly into the cameras.

  “If a hidden safe room has been found in some other case then they’re going to list it no matter how ridiculous.” Lucy talks much too openly and snidely, and no signal I send her is going to do any good. “A couple years ago there was a drug bust in Florida that became a huge mess on appeal and was all over the news. The Feds were executing a routine search and found an escape tunnel and other hidden surprises they weren’t looking for and hadn’t included on the warrant. More recently there was a case involving an escape hatch. The popular thing to look for these days are secret rooms and tunnels. Especially in the drug business. You may also recall that tunnel dug from San Diego to Mexico. It even had train tracks.”

  “The drug business?” I’m breathing hard from exertion, and the dew point and humidity must be almost the same. The air is saturated. It feels like a steam room. “Since when has that subject come up?” I ask. “Who thinks that?”

  “They’re not thinking. What they do is harass and bully,” Lucy almost shouts, and I imagine Erin Loria watching and getting incensed. “They’re looking for anything that might give me the ability to disappear from here right under their nose. POOF! Because we all know I have a looking glass like Alice. I have a Bat Cave like Bruce Wayne and a phone booth like Clark Kent. The Fucking Bureau of Investigation is looking for anything that might give me the ability to make my getaway or hide something
from them.”

  The walk in this direction is downhill and that’s not easy for me either. I watch what I’m doing. I’m cautious about my body language and what I might say, and I wish Lucy would be the same way. She’s taken off like a bomber jet and I’m not going to stop her. Lucy has a point to make. Or maybe it’s more of a threat.

  “You should try Benton,” she says. “It will be interesting to see if you get him.”

  I wish she wouldn’t act like this, and of course she knows me far too well. She knows I’m thinking about him, wondering what he’s been doing while his employer pillages his family’s privacy and possessions. While the FBI eviscerates the lives of the people he loves. While we are out here miserable and about to get rained on, and I’m hurt in a way I won’t say. Right this moment I’m unhappy with him. I feel abandoned by him, possibly betrayed. I feel I might yell at him if I got him on the phone, and the wind gusts hard, sending pollen, dirt and leaves skittering over the blacktop.

  “Are you crying?” Lucy looks over at me.

  “It’s all this stuff blowing around out here,” I explain as I wipe my eyes with my shirtsleeve.

  “Go ahead and call him,” she encourages, and I don’t respond. “Really. Go ahead. You might not have gotten him a half hour ago but I’ll bet you will now.”

  “As if you have reason to know.”

  “Go on. I’ll bet you twenty bucks you get him.”

  I try Benton’s cell phone and he answers.

  I DON’T SAY HELLO. I tell him I’m on Lucy’s property. I’ve been here for the past hour and a half, and will be heading back to Cambridge shortly.

  “I know where you are, Kay.” Benton’s mild baritone voice is quiet and friendly but I know when he’s not alone. “I’m well aware of what you’ve been doing. Are you all right?”

  “Where are you?”

  “We landed at Hanscom. We were forced to with this weather moving in. Conditions have deteriorated extremely fast and you shouldn’t be out in it either.”

  Benton was up in the helicopter, and Lucy suspected or knew it for some reason. It explains her cryptic comment to me about his ability to answer the phone right now when he might not have been able to a while ago. He’s with his FBI colleagues, the same agents who followed Marino and me from Chanel Gilbert’s house in Cambridge.

  “Yes I’m aware of the chopper,” I say next, and I’m answered with silence. “Can you offer an explanation?” I ask and he says nothing.

  When Benton is like this there’s no point in my probing because he’s not going to respond in a helpful way, not over the phone, not with other agents within earshot. What I generally resort to is making statements. Now and then he’ll address those, and my thought process picks up speed and I concentrate more intensely. I have to worry about what both of us say because people are listening.

  “You’re not going to tell me what’s going on,” I try again.

  “No.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Is there interest in my Cambridge case from this morning? Because unless I was looking at the wrong helicopter, you were in the area while we were there.” I go ahead and say that much and instantly I sense he won’t answer, and he doesn’t.

  “I’m sorry. You’re breaking up,” Benton says instead.

  I’m probably not. But next I pose the same information as a statement, summarizing, “You’re interested in my Cambridge case, the house on Brattle Street.” I avoid mentioning the suspected name of the dead woman or any other details.

  “I agree it’s interesting.”

  “I’m not aware that it’s a federal concern.”

  “It makes sense that you’re not aware of it,” he says in a pleasant voice.

  “I don’t have answers yet. A lot of questions but no answers yet,” I repeat.

  “I see. For example?”

  “Suffice it to say there are a number of things, and I’m concerned about confidentiality, Benton.” What I mean is I don’t have privacy.

  He doesn’t ask me to elaborate.

  I do anyway but I’m appropriately understated. “I haven’t autopsied her and I need to do a second walk-through of the scene as soon as I’m done here. I was interrupted earlier.”

  “I understand.”

  But he can’t really understand, and then it enters my mind again. Does he know about the Depraved Heart videos? I continue to wonder if Carrie Grethen has sent them to anyone else including the FBI.

  “Will I see you tonight?” I ask.

  “I’ll call you later,” he says and then he’s gone, and I study an angry sky that looks punishing.

  Lucy and I have reached her open gate. Parked in front of it are two white SUVs, engines idling as their FBI drivers wait for us. I recognize one of them as the agent I had words with earlier, and I don’t smile or nod. He glares at me, his polo shirt sweat stained, his angry face shiny, and I unlock my truck and climb inside.

  I crank the engine and it rumbles loudly to life as I call my forensic radiologist Anne. I want to know if anything unusual has turned up on Chanel Gilbert’s CT scan because now I’m suspicious. The FBI is interested in her and I want to figure out why, and I can’t be overheard inside my truck with its rolled-up windows and loud engine. I can talk freely.

  “I need to make this quick,” I say to Anne as I check my mirrors. “In a few minutes we’re heading back to the Gilbert house. Is there anything I should know?”

  “It’s not up to me to decide the manner of death,” she says. “But I’m voting for homicide.”

  “Tell me why.” I back up so I can maneuver off to the side, leaving room for cars to pass in and out of the gate.

  “I don’t see how it’s possible she fell from a ladder, Doctor Scarpetta. Not unless she fell from it three or four times. She has multiple depressed skull fractures that extend into the paranasal sinuses, the structures of the middle ear. Plus underlying areas of hematoma.”

  “How are we doing with her identification?”

  “Dental charts are on the way. It’s her. I mean who else would it be?”

  “Let’s get it confirmed.”

  “I’ll let you know the instant we do.”

  “Has Luke started her post?”

  “He’s in the middle of it.”

  I open the screen of the laptop built into the console between the two front seats, and in a moment I’m logged into the CFC’s closed camera system, a network of fish-eye panoramic domes in the ceiling of every room of the intake and examination areas. It allows me to monitor what my doctors and forensic investigators are doing at any given time. I type in my password and the computer screen splits into quadrants that cover each workstation in Autopsy Room A, which is where Luke and I work.

  I hear the whine of the Stryker saw inside a vast space of bright overhead lights, glass observation galleries, and stainless steel. I see Luke at his station suited up in a teal green gown, an apron, a face shield and surgical cap. Our two medical residents are across the table from him, and Harold is sawing open Chanel Gilbert’s skull, the oscillating blade grinding as he cuts through thick bone.

  “It’s Doctor Scarpetta. I’ve got you up on my screen,” I say as if I’m talking to people inside the truck.

  “Hello.” Luke looks up at the camera in the high ceiling, and the glare of the face shield makes it hard to see his handsome face and vivid blue eyes.

  The body has been opened from the clavicles to the pubic bone, the bloc of organs on a cutting board, and Luke is snipping open the stomach with a pair of surgical scissors. He pours the contents into a plasticized paper carton. I tell him I’m checking on how the case is going and explain that I’ll be returning to the scene shortly, and is there anything I should know? Is there anything special I should look for?

  “You definitely should check for multiple impact areas.” His voice with its heavy German accent sounds from the laptop inside the truck. “I’m assuming you’ve seen the images on CT?�
�

  “Anne has given me a quick summary.” The diesel engine rumbles in my bones as I talk to the laptop’s screen. “But I haven’t viewed the actual scans yet. She doesn’t think Chanel Gilbert is an accident.”

  “She has contusions and abrasions of the scalp which you can clearly see in areas where I’ve shaved her hair.” He rests his bloody gloved hands on the edge of the table as he talks to me. “Posteriorally, temporally. Obviously I’ve not looked at her brain yet but on CT there’s subgaleal hematomas of the left parietal-temporal and right occipital areas, and a coup contusion in addition to diffuse subarachnoid hemorrhage. Her fractures are complex, suggesting a lot of force, a high velocity and multiple impact points.”

  “Consistent with hard impacts such as someone beating her head against a marble floor.”

  “Yes. And what I’m just now seeing might be helpful.” He holds up the carton of gastric contents.

  “I’m zooming in.” It’s as if I’m inches away, and I can make out approximately 200 milliliters of what looks like a lumpy vegetable soup.

  “What appears to be seafood, possibly shrimp, and greenish peppers, onions, some rice.” He pokes through it with a scalpel. “Something she must have eaten not long before she died. It’s barely begun to digest.”

  “What about a STAT alcohol?”

  “Nothing much. Point oh-three. Maybe she had a glass of wine with dinner. Or it could be from decomposition.”

  “She certainly wasn’t impaired, at least not by booze. I’ll check to see what’s in her refrigerator. I’m on my way back there.” I log off the computer, cut the engine and climb out of the truck.

  Lucy has parked Donoghue’s big Mercedes sedan out of the way, and she trots over to me.

  “Come on,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

  CHAPTER 27

  WE WALK AROUND THE SOUTH WING OF THE HOUSE where a narrow grassy strip of yard gives way to dense woods.

  A ten-foot-high chain-link fence is coated in dark green PVC and anchored by heavy steel poles driven deep into the earth. Lucy unlocks a gate as another FBI SUV disappears down the driveway. There are only two government vehicles still parked in front of the house. One of them must belong to Erin Loria. I’ve been watching for her. I’m sure she’s still here. She wouldn’t miss it.