Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “My biggest concern is that someone else might be dead.” Gloves and face shield off, and I place my packages inside a steel evidence locker, shut the door and scan my thumb to set the biometric lock. “If the stains and fletching are what I think they are then we have another problem. Where did this biological material come from? Who or what did it come from?”

  “Could it be from her?” He means Chanel Gilbert.

  “She’s not missing any of her scalp and her hair isn’t short and dyed light blond. If what I’m seeing is human blood and tissue they won’t be hers.”

  I’m sure of that, and I go on to tell him I feel set up. I push two black plastic scene cases closer to him, and they scrape over the diamond-plate steel floor. I explain it would be tough to prove I didn’t place the arrow in here myself.

  “I witnessed you finding it. I know you didn’t put it there.” Marino lifts the cases and sets them on the flooded driveway.

  “You really can’t know that for a fact. It was inside my truck,” I repeat, and I’m going to have to tell him about the videos because now the stakes have changed.

  Carrie has just made her presence known. That transforms everything instantly and completely.

  “But I certainly didn’t put a copper arrow in here. I’ve never seen it before. I promise you that,” I’m saying to Marino.

  “I witnessed you take photographs and they’ll have a date and time stamp. You’ve got proof that it was already inside the truck. That you found it because it started making noise.”

  “Say what you want. Whether I have proof or not, I’m being set up. This is deliberate,” I repeat as he takes the truck keys from me. “Lucy feels set up and now I do,” I add and I’m going to have to tell him the truth, the whole truth. “All of us are being set up and we’d better think long and hard and in different ways about everything we do. Starting right this minute.”

  He begins a slow walk around the truck while I wait inside the back of it and think about how he’ll react to what I confess. He’ll say I should have told him hours ago. He’ll say I shouldn’t have watched the videos unless he was watching them with me, and I hear him checking every access door, unlocking each and banging it shut in the relentless rain.

  I argue with myself that it doesn’t matter how he’ll feel or react because in light of what’s happening it would be irresponsible not to tell him, and I wait for him to return to the open tailgate. When he does he announces that every panel, every storage compartment is locked with no sign of tampering. Then I start in with him.

  “Marino, I need you to listen carefully. You won’t like what you’re about to hear me say.”

  “What?” He’s getting more out of sorts, and if this is a mistake there’s no going back.

  I really don’t know what else to do, and that’s the vortex we’re caught in and it’s precisely where Carrie has put us and wants us to stay. Our usual habits, protocols and procedures for handling the smallest tasks get turned inside out, upside down and are shattered and sucked away into another dimension. She’s done it before. She’s doing it again, and I remember what my boss General John Briggs, the chief of Armed Forces Medical Examiners, often preaches:

  When terrorists find something that works they keep on doing it. It’s predictable.

  Carrie Grethen is a terrorist. She’s doing what she knows works. Creating havoc and confusion. Until we lose direction and judgment. Until we hurt ourselves and each other.

  Think!

  “We’re going to have to make things up as we go along,” I tell Marino.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Think about what she’d predict you’d do right now.

  “The usual way we do things isn’t necessarily relevant and workable, and we’re going to have to be flexible and extremely attentive, as if we’re starting out all over, as if we’re having to re-create the wheel. Because we are in a sense. She knows our playbook, Marino. She knows our cookbook. She knows every handbook we’ve ever read for everything we do. We have to be open to change and mindful of any assumptions she might make based on her knowing us so well.”

  She assumes you won’t tell anyone.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you but now I’ve changed my mind because to keep it a secret is what I anticipate she expects me to do. I’ve been sent three video clips so far today.” I speak loudly, slowly and in a calm manner that belies what churns inside of me. “Surveillance recordings taken by Carrie it would seem. Apparently they were filmed covertly in Lucy’s dorm room when she was at Quantico in 1997.”

  “Carrie sent you videos that are seventeen years old?” Marino is incredulous and enraged. “Are you sure they aren’t faked?”

  “They weren’t.”

  “What do you mean weren’t?”

  “As in the past tense.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “I can’t. That’s what I mean by past tense. The instant I finished watching them they were gone and the links were dead. Then the messages themselves disappeared as if I never got them.”

  “E-mailed?” Marino’s wet face is pale and stony, his bloodshot eyes glaring.

  “Texted. Supposedly from Lucy’s In Case of Emergency cell phone line.”

  “That figures. That sucks. The FBI has her phone. They’ll see what she sent. They’ll think she sent the videos to you. It will be more of the same—her getting blamed for what Carrie does.”

  “Let’s hope nothing shows up. It shouldn’t because I’m fairly certain Carrie is spoofing the ICE line. The texts aren’t really from Lucy or any device she owns.”

  “You should give me your phone.” Marino holds out his hand. “I need to take out the SIM card and the battery if you want any proof you ever got what you’re saying. We need to be able to show Lucy had nothing to do with it.”

  “No.”

  “Your SIM card may be the only record you’ve got …”

  “No.”

  “The longer you wait—”

  “I’m not disabling my phone,” I interrupt him. “If I do that I can’t see anything else she decides to send.”

  “Do you hear yourself?”

  “The video links are the real reason I rushed out of here this morning. I was afraid Carrie had Lucy’s phone and what it would mean if that were true. I have to keep my phone.”

  Marino bends over to look at something below me at the back of the truck. He’s interested in a taillight.

  “When I tell you more about the videos you’ll understand my concern,” I continue to explain, “and Lucy wasn’t answering when I tried to reach her. Janet wasn’t either. Now we know it was because the FBI was herding them around and seizing their possessions. What is it? What have you found?”

  Marino has gotten interested in one of the truck’s white high-intensity LEDs.

  “Shit,” he says in an ominous tone. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Now what?”

  “Right under our nose. What they mean by in plain view.” He hovers over the left taillight, his hands clasped behind his back the way he does when he wants to make sure he doesn’t touch something. “Can you hand me some clean gloves?”

  I snatch a pair out of the box for him. I stick my head out of the back of the truck to see what he’s found as I’m battered by heavy rain. It runs down my face and the back of my neck as I count the screws missing from the left taillight’s chrome mount. Five are gone. The one that remains is scratched and gouged.

  CHAPTER 31

  THUNDER CLAPS. WATER HISSES AND SPLASHES AROUND his big black leather sneakers.

  Marino talks on his phone to Al Jacks or Ajax as he’s called. I piece together the gist of what the former Navy SEAL is asking about the house itself. He wants to know what makes Marino think someone could be inside. Is there any chance Hyde is in there? Maybe he’s injured or a hostage? I watch all this from the back of the truck as Marino formally requests the assistance of SWAT, his earpiece flashing blue in the wet din. I�
��m well aware of the risk he’s taking.

  If a special ops team rolls out on this high-profile property it will be extremely embarrassing and difficult to justify if it’s discovered there was no need. Furthermore such a dramatic display will be one more thing to explain to Chanel Gilbert’s wealthy Hollywood mother. She’s already going to be a force to reckon with. I’m sure of that.

  “The rear lens assembly is fastened with stainless number one size Phillips screws but it looks like someone used a regular or number two size screwdriver,” Marino describes over the phone as he looks at the damaged left taillight. “Or maybe a knife or who knows what? Because of the one screw left. The head’s all buggered up like someone used the wrong tool.”

  I imagine Carrie Grethen. Would she use the wrong tool? It doesn’t sound like her but who else would leave me such a grisly gift, and what’s the rest of the story?

  “I realize it’s not likely but yeah I think we have to entertain the possibility he could be inside.” Marino is talking on the phone about Hyde again as he stares at the dark silent house. “But how would he have gotten in on his own? I didn’t leave him a key. And if he’s incapacitated inside, for example, what happened to his car? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That’s all I’m asking. Let’s clear the house but we do it on the lowdown. I want to be real careful what goes out over the air. I don’t want a freakin’ carnival at a multimillion-dollar house by the Harvard campus.”

  Marino tells him to bring several sets of dry clothes, and he describes my size as men’s medium before I can tell him that will be a tent on me. He ends that call and makes another one. I realize he’s talking to his contact at the phone company, probably the same technical operations manager he always gets hold of when he needs a warrant or wishes to bypass waiting for one. Marino recites two cell phone numbers that I assume belong to Hyde and Lapin. He wants to ping locations. Then we wait.

  “It’s going to take fifteen or twenty before we know anything, Doc.” Marino struggles to pull gloves over his wet hands. “And I already feel like crap. I hope like hell I didn’t just make a bad mistake. It’s kind of like nothing we do this minute is right. If we leave it’s wrong. If we stay out here on the driveway it’s wrong. If we go inside the house it’s wrong. If we ask for help it’s wrong and if we don’t it’s wrong. There’s not a damn thing we can do that even makes sense except to wait for Ajax and his guys to roll up.”

  He removes the taillight mount and sets it on the bumper, and I’m aware of how isolated and vulnerable we are. If someone wanted to take us out it would already have happened. If Carrie wanted to kill us this very second she would. I’ve never really believed we could stop her. When we thought she’d died years ago we didn’t feel responsible or give ourselves the credit. We simply felt lucky. We felt blessed.

  “Holy shit,” Marino says. “The bulb’s missing. And behind where it was screwed in is a decent-size wire routing hole that I’m guessing the arrow was shoved through. That would put it exactly where you found it on the floor inside the desk cabinet.”

  “I’ve been driving around with a taillight out? Well that verifies that the truck couldn’t have been like this for very long.”

  “Exactly. The question is when was the damage done? Because someone couldn’t have removed the screws, the bulb while the truck was parked on Lucy’s driveway. Unless the FBI did it.”

  “Planting evidence, tampering with state and federal property? Let’s hope the FBI wouldn’t be that unethical or stupid.” I crouch on the shiny steel floor near the open cabinet where I found the arrow as I remember what Lucy said about Carrie’s obsession with invisibility technology.

  I look around as if she’s ubiquitous and transparent like air, and the wind buffets the truck and rain thrums it in varying intensities. Beating then thrashing then pouring, and Marino is hunched against the weather while I’m spared for the moment. I shine the flashlight inside the cabinet, painting the intense beam over the routing hole, over stacks of cheap blue towels tied with string, the steel floor mirror bright in the light. I notice something else.

  THE CLUMP OF dust is what people often refer to as a dust bunny or dust ball. It’s about the size of a martini olive, fluffy like lint from the dryer.

  Another pair of clean gloves and I use the adhesive back of a Post-it to collect a sample that I’m sure will prove a treasure trove, a microscopic landfill of debris. Fibers, hairs, insect pieces and parts, and particulates that could be anything I imagine. But I’m certain the origin can’t be one of my CFC trucks. It can’t be the labs or the parking lot surrounded by its high black fence that’s supposed to be impossible to climb. Next I seal the dust bunny inside a plastic bag and it goes into the same locker where I placed the arrow and the metamaterial. I call my chief of staff.

  For an entire minute Bryce and I have a useless conversation about chain of evidence, and I don’t have the patience for his incessant chatter. I continue interrupting him. The CFC isn’t even ten minutes from here and I want the truck swapped out immediately for an SUV. Get Harold or Rusty to take care of it right away. I apologize about the inconvenience but I need this truck out of here now. The chain of evidence must be preserved. Not just the evidence packaged inside but also the truck itself.

  “I don’t understand.” Bryce has said this several times. “Because like you just pointed out you’re ten minutes from here. You sure you and Marino can’t drop it off yourselves when you’re done, Doctor Scarpetta? I mean you’re coming here anyway? I’m not trying to be a pain but we’re kind of up to our eyeballs? We’ve had quite the full house this morning with you not here, and Luke’s only just now starting his third case while Harold and Rusty clean workstations and suture up bodies for the other docs. And two of them decided to pull out that box from the skeleton closet so to speak? Remember the one from the other week …?”

  “Bryce …”

  “The remains that washed up on Revere Beach? The anthropologists just got the DNA results and it’s for sure the girl who vanished from her houseboat near the aquarium last year? They have the bones all spread out like a jigsaw puzzle, and …”

  “Bryce, please be quiet and listen. It appears the truck has been vandalized. I want it to go straight into the evidence bay for processing, and I have additional evidence in a locker that needs to go to the labs ASAP.”

  I give him a list of what I want the scientists to look for first.

  “There appears to be biological materials such as blood and tissue, and I want DNA as fast as we can get it,” I add as I stand inside the truck and Marino is hunched against the relentless rain like Eeyore in Winnie-the-Pooh. “And trace evidence because I’m seeing dirt, fibers and an unknown material that looks like quartz. Plus tool marks on a screw.”

  “Quartz and a screw? Oh my God that sounds exciting.”

  “Let’s get Ernie on it right away.”

  Ernie Koppel is my senior trace evidence examiner. He’s a superb microscopist, one of the best.

  “Texting him as we speak,” Bryce says in my earpiece. “And B-T-W? What’s all that racket in the background? It sounds like someone is beating an oil drum with a stick.”

  “Have you looked out your window?”

  A pause and I imagine him looking, then his surprised voice, “Well hello! The acoustics are so amazing in this building? I couldn’t hear an earthquake, and then I had my blinds closed because it’s so depressing out. And whoops! I forgot we’re having a flood. And I’m sending a note to Jen now about swapping out the truck if that’s all right with you.”

  It isn’t really. Jen Garate is the forensic investigator I hired last year after Marino walked off the job at the CFC and signed on with the Cambridge Police Department. She can’t begin to take his place and never will. She wasn’t a good choice with her tight clothes and bling and insatiable craving for attention. I can’t stomach her flirting and flippancy. I’ve been meaning to begin the process of letting her go but the summer has raced away from me.

  “All rig
ht,” I concede to Bryce. “Tell her a response team is headed here as we speak and she’s not to interfere or get in the way of their vehicle.”

  “A response team as in SWAT?”

  “Please just listen, Bryce. I’ll pull my truck over as far as I can so she can go around it and park the SUV in front of it. Then she can get out and so can I. She’s not to come inside the house. She’s to call me the instant she arrives and I’ll meet her at the kitchen door and we’ll exchange keys.”

  “Got it. I’ve just told her to head toward you in one of those amphibious boats they use for the Duck Tours and I’m kidding.” He doesn’t seem to breathe while he talks incessantly. “But it’s so unfair. I just had everything washed the other day. Our entire fleet was all shiny and white and perfect, and now this?”

  “Yes you do a great job keeping our vehicles clean which is exactly why I’m fairly sure the dust sample I collected came from somewhere else and was transferred to the inside of the truck. It’s important to tell Ernie that.”

  “I love dust bunnies.” Bryce says it as if he’s talking about his favorite pet. “Well I mean as long as they’re not inside my house. But they wouldn’t be. Anyway who knows what story your little dust bunny will have to tell. Hair, fur, skin cells, fibers and all sorts of ticky tacky frick and frack that people track in and out of everywhere.”

  I ask him to explain to Ernie that an unusual projectile, an arrow was also left inside the truck, and under a lens I can see dirt, debris and glue.

  “It’s on the arrow and possibly in the dust bunny, and if so that suggests they may have come from the same source,” I add. “They may have been in the same location at some point. We should be able to tell microscopically and by using X-ray spectroscopy to give us chemical and elemental information as well.”

  “Got it. I’ll explain it to Ernie word for word. I know Anne’s already sent him something. Well she didn’t send it per se. Since we’re on the subject of chain of evidence? She did it the right way, walked it up there and receipted it etcetera etcetera so if anyone tries to nail her in court? All to say we’re holding down the ship here.”