Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Truth is,” Marino says as I wait and listen, “I don’t remember hearing any clocks but I saw them when I walked through. I’m pretty sure they all told a different time,” he explains and my expectation intensifies as I wait for what’s about to happen.

  Something will. Or it already has.

  “I did notice that when I was in the living room,” Marino continues. “I couldn’t believe all the weird shit in there, the spinning wheels, the little crosses made out of iron nails and red thread, the hourglasses. The more I think about it, Doc? I can’t swear the clocks were working.”

  “They are now and antique clocks have to be wound manually. They have to be constantly adjusted if they’re to be in sync.” I listen to everything going on around us and hear blowing air and the clocks.

  “Someone’s been in here,” Marino says.

  “That’s my point.”

  “Someone who has a key and the alarm code.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Not possibly. Absolutely unless you’re talking about a ghost who can pass through walls.” He’s agitated and edgy as he looks at his phone, finding a number.

  CHAPTER 33

  WE SHOULD LEAVE. I HOVER NEAR THE FRONT DOOR and listen for the response team. I don’t detect voices or doors opening and shutting, not so much as a floorboard creaking. Just the wind and the rain and the clocks. I glance at my watch. SWAT has been clearing the house for exactly six minutes. It’s as if the men have vanished.

  TICK TOCK TICK TOCK …

  All Marino and I have to do is walk back outside into the storm. It’s safer than being in here or at least that’s the way I feel as I look at him, at his wide back turned to me. He has one of his contacts on the line, another female I can tell, and I realize he’s talking to Chanel Gilbert’s alarm company.

  “I’m going to repeat this,” Marino says, “and we’re going to write it down.”

  He means I’m going to, and I get a notepad and pen out of my shoulder bag, reminded of my gun again. I slip it out and place it on top of a scene case.

  “It was reset at ten-twenty-eight this morning,” he’s saying to a contact he calls sweetheart, “and there was no activity until twenty-five minutes past one P.M., which is when I disarmed the system.”

  I listen for another moment, and then he ends the call and says to me, “How are we supposed to explain something like that? I set the alarm when we left the first time at ten-twenty-eight, then unset it now. In other words no one’s touched the alarm system in the past three hours except me. So how the hell did someone come in here and wind the clocks? It’s a damn good thing you were with me the entire time or they’d say I did it.”

  “You couldn’t have and that’s ridiculous,” I reply.

  “You positive there’s no other explanation for why we’re hearing the clocks now but we didn’t earlier?”

  “What other explanation could there be?”

  “But the alarm system had to be armed and disarmed. And it wasn’t. So how were the clocks wound?”

  “I can only tell you that they have been since we were here last.”

  “Maybe there’s another way to get in that bypasses the alarm system.” Marino is restless, looking and listening as I think of the locked bulkhead doors outside in the flower bed.

  I’m reminded of the rusting hulk of the Mercedes on the bottom of the sea. It seems the broken-up shipwreck and the bulkhead are somehow the same. Portals to an evil place. Portals to destruction and death. Portals to our ultimate destiny, and I wonder if the bulkhead doors have alarm contacts and are wired to the system. If not, one could access the house that way. No code would be needed and there would be no record of someone coming in and out.

  “As long as you have a key.” I’m describing this to Marino. “You could get in through the bulkhead doors and at the very least be in the basement I’m assuming.”

  “Well if you have a damn key wouldn’t you also have the alarm code and not need to enter the house that way?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  He unclips his holstered Glock from the waistband of his soaked shorts and says, “I wonder if there was some way the housekeeper could have come back in here to poke around. Maybe she knows a way to do that without touching the alarm system. So she snuck in and while she was at it she wound the clocks.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Habit. People do weird things when they’re upset. Or maybe she’s crazy.” His eyes are wide, his holstered pistol pointed down by his side. “You look at all this stuff everywhere and I’m thinking somebody’s a mental case or into bad juju.”

  None of it caught my attention when I was here this morning. I left too abruptly, and I can’t stop thinking about the Depraved Heart videos and how they’ve made me feel and act. Stunned. Threatened. Angry. Sad. Most of all I was overwhelmed by a sense of urgency. I was too quick to race out of here.

  If I’d had a chance to look around I would have wondered if Chanel Gilbert had psychiatric problems or was involved in pagan religions. Either could have made her vulnerable to a predator like Carrie, and I listen for the response team clearing the house. I hear nothing. Then Marino’s phone rings, a birdsong ringtone that for an instant confuses both of us.

  “What the hell is going on, Lapin?” he angrily blurts out the instant he realizes who it is. “Yeah well sorry to hear that but I don’t give a shit if you’re really sick or not. I sound like I’m in a tomb? Well guess why. It’s because I am. I’m back in the foyer where a lady was found dead this morning, remember? And the Doc and I just got back here to finish up the scene of what’s turned out to be a homicide and guess what? The perimeter hadn’t been secured and my backup was nowhere in sight. And guess what else? Chanel Gilbert’s Range Rover isn’t at the house anymore. You heard me. Nope, I’m not being funny. It’s not in the driveway where we saw it three hours ago. It appears someone went inside the house while we were gone. Maybe the same person who took her car … Hell no that couldn’t be Hyde. He has no way to get in.”

  Marino looks at me as he listens. The conversation didn’t start well and it only gets worse. I can see his internal struggle. I can see it in his eyes, in the set of his heavy jaw, and I’m convinced that Carrie is playing us for Keystone Cops, for fools, and I imagine her amusement, her smug smile and laughter. We’re in the midst of a nightmare of her making because that’s what she does while decent people try to live their lives and do their jobs. We’re here according to plan. Not our plan. Her plan.

  “And you got no clue,” Marino is saying to Lapin over the phone. “You haven’t talked to him, and when you saw him last he didn’t give you any reason to think he had something to do, someplace to go? Any reason you can think of he’d quit answering his radio and phone? Yeah like you did. And you’re home? Well it’s a damn good thing because any minute we’re going to see the exact GPS coordinates of where your phone is as we speak. Yeah you heard me right. Sorry, buddy. But that’s what happens when you disappear off the radar.”

  It isn’t really. Marino is exaggerating. Using cell towers to determine someone’s exact location isn’t foolproof. It can be off by twenty miles or more depending on the software, topography, the weather and how much signal traffic is handled by regional switching centers at any given moment. But that doesn’t stop Marino from trying. If nothing else cell phone pinging is the stuff of bluffs if he wants to scare a suspect into a confession.

  “Here’s what we know.” Marino is talking to me now as he bends down to remove his sopping wet sneakers. “Lapin claims he and Hyde pulled out of here in their respective vehicles while we were still inside the house. This would have been at about ten-fifteen.” His ankles are white and imprinted with the pattern of his socks as he peels them off.

  “I saw them leave.” I’m so cold I’m beginning to shiver as we stand near the front door dripping. “The two of them and also Trooper Vogel. About fifteen minutes before you and I headed out.”

  I listen to him and I also
listen for the tactical team. How can big men with all that gear be so damn quiet? The warnings are fast and strong. We shouldn’t be inside this house. But we’ve walked in and here we are. We’re safe. I keep telling myself we couldn’t be safer. There are special ops cops in here, and I continue to wonder how it’s possible they don’t make a sound. They’re silent like cats. I can’t hear anything, not their feet or their voices, and my heart is beating harder.

  SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED. Suddenly the two police divers are before me vividly, horribly, suspended facedown inside the hull of the sunken barge.

  Their names were Rick and Sam and I envision their dead young faces, their hoses dangling, their hair floating up in the brownish murky water as their eyes stared unblinking behind their masks. There were no bubbles. The regulators weren’t in their mouths.

  I remember my disbelief, my electrifying explosion of adrenaline as I realized what I was seeing were spears sticking out of their black neoprene-covered torsos. It had been only minutes earlier that the men were alive and well, cheerfully checking each other’s dive gear, taking their giant strides off the stern of the boat and disappearing below the surface. I was joking with Benton about them flashing their badges underwater, making sure nobody bothered us or interfered with our mission. We had an underwater escort. We had underwater security.

  Then they were dead on the bottom of the sea, ambushed, trapped, and I’ve never figured out what drew them into the hatch and down into the lightless hull. Why did they go in there? Carrie must have lured them somehow. Maybe she was inside waiting with the spear gun, blending with the rusty metal when she struck out of the abyss, and I hope what I always do. I hope they didn’t suffer as they hemorrhaged internally and drowned, and I feel conflicted. My thoughts are louder and more adamant as they argue in rhythm to the clocks.

  GO STAY! GO STAY! GO STAY! GO STAY!

  “Lapin supposedly started feeling bad, got a headache, a tickle in his throat,” Marino is saying as I will myself to listen.

  Pay attention!

  “He swung by his house for cold medicine and didn’t bother notifying the radio. At least that’s what he claims, and a few minutes ago he finally marked out sick.”

  My intuition says we should leave and yet I can’t. I need to finish what I started. I’ll be damned if I’ll allow Carrie Grethen to interfere with how I handle a scene.

  GO STAY! GO STAY! GO STAY! GO STAY!

  “What exactly was Lapin’s understanding when he and Hyde left here this morning?” I ask Marino.

  “That Hyde was going to grab coffee, borrow the john and then return here to secure the perimeter with crime scene tape like I told him to. Supposedly he was in a hurry because he wanted to do it before the rain started.”

  “Unless someone else strung the tape across the front steps it would appear he did just that. He got started and then abruptly left. Look the other way please,” I tell Marino, and of course he looks right at me. “Turn around. Don’t look in this direction.” I begin to unbutton my shirt.

  I take it off and then my soggy boots, my soaked socks and cargo pants, leaving my clothing on the floor a safe distance from blood and broken glass. The tactical pants SWAT picked out are so big I could pull them on without unzipping them, and I fold over the waistband to tighten it a little. I put on the black shirt, and it’s huge in the shoulders and waist, and the buttonholes are stubborn, the cotton fabric new and stiff. At least I have plenty of pockets for pistol magazines, pens, flashlights, knives, whatever one might need, I think ironically. I glance at myself in the mirror, and my tactical attire looks baggy and borrowed.

  I don’t exactly look menacing without ballistic armor, helmet, night vision goggles or the smallest caliber assault rifle or even a pistol that holds more than six rounds. I can only hope that if the wrong person sees me I don’t get shot because it’s assumed I’m dangerous, and I am dangerous. But not the way I’d like to be right this minute.

  “Well Lapin is suddenly sick thanks to you.” Marino is standing with his back to me, scrolling through his phone.

  “Why thanks to me?” I sit down on the cool marble and put my wet boots back on without socks, and over them disposable shoe covers that will prevent me from tracking water in the house.

  “You said something about Vogel not having a tetanus shot and maybe what he’s really got is the whooping cough. Lapin’s right there listening, and it’s what I call power of suggestion. Suddenly he started feeling sick.” Marino puts soaked sneakers back on as his phone rings again.

  I gather from what he says that it’s his contact at the phone company. For a long moment Marino listens. He says very little. I can tell that what he’s being told isn’t helpful. Or maybe he doesn’t understand how it’s helpful or even plausible.

  “This is nuts,” he exclaims to me when he ends the call. “We pinged his phone …”

  “Hyde’s phone.”

  “Yeah we don’t care about Lapin. We know where he is, at home playing hooky. The last call Hyde made was at nine-forty-nine this morning while he was still inside this house,” Marino says. “The phone records show that the call connected to a cell tower that has the exact same GPS coordinates as this house.”

  “I don’t understand,” I start to say.

  “Yeah you don’t understand because obviously there’s no cell tower at this location. It doesn’t exist.” Marino raises his voice in frustration. “In other words Hyde’s call connected to a fake tower, probably one of these cell site simulators, a phone tracker, something like a stingray. They’re so compact these days you can carry one in your car, in a briefcase, or maybe there’s one hidden inside this house somewhere.”

  “Bad people use equipment like that.” I think about Lucy and how much I wish I could talk to her.

  She would know about such surveillance devices. She probably could tell me exactly what’s been happening on this property and who’s spying or intercepting communications and why.

  “But law enforcement uses it too,” I’m saying to Marino. “There’s been a lot of controversy about cops relying on such devices to capture content, to track people or in some instances to jam radio signals.”

  “That’s right. It works both ways. Spying and counterspying,” Marino says. “You can track someone and intercept content or use the same device to prevent yourself from being tracked. Benton would know if the FBI’s been spying on this property.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But he’s not going to tell you my guess is.”

  “He probably wouldn’t.” I hand Marino a dry set of clothing, size double X. “Get changed.” I toss him a pair of blue Tyvek shoe covers.

  CHAPTER 34

  I POLITELY AVERT MY GAZE AS HE DROPS SOPPING wet garments to the floor in a pile near mine, and I’m again reminded of how uncharitable crime scenes are. We can’t help ourselves to privacy, a drink of water or a toilet. I can’t borrow the clothes dryer, a bath towel or even sit in a chair.

  “May as well get started while we wait.” Marino zips up his borrowed black tactical pants and they fit him just fine.

  “I don’t think that’s wise.” I roll up my cuffs so I don’t trip on them. “Surprising SWAT is a good way to get shot. I suggest we stay put until they say otherwise.”

  “We’re fine as long as we restrict ourselves to rooms they already cleared. We don’t go upstairs yet or in the basement.” Marino hops on one foot then the other, tugging the blue booties over his wet sneakers. “Not until they’ve been there first.”

  He clips his holstered Glock to his waistband and tucks his radio into one back pocket, his phone in the other and picks up a scene case. We walk out of the foyer, past the stairs, into a living room crowded with formidable antiques and silk rugs in bright patterns on the heart of pine floors, and something rolls through me like a seismic tremor.

  My attention locks on the six white votive candles in simple glass holders on the red lacquer coffee table. They’ve never been lit. They aren’t du
sty and look new. I lean close to them, isolating the familiar scents of jasmine, tuberose and sandalwood. I recognize musk and vanilla, the rich erotic fragrance of Amorvero, Italian for true love, the signature perfume of the Hotel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome where Benton proposed to me eight years ago.

  I have Amorvero perfume, bath oil and body lotion at home. He always buys it for my birthday and now I smell it here inside this house. I sniff my wrists to make sure it isn’t me even though I know it can’t be. I didn’t put it on this morning.

  “What do you smell?” I ask Marino.

  He sniffs, shrugs. “An old house, maybe flowers. But my nose is stuffed up because of all the dust in this place. It’s like it’s been closed up for a long time. Have you noticed?”

  “Do you recognize anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “What you described as a flowery fragrance. Is it familiar?”

  “Yeah. It smells sort of like what you wear now that you mention it.” He walks closer to me, sniffs a few more times.

  “That’s because it’s the same fragrance but I don’t have it on right now. It’s also uncommon and I rarely run into it anywhere. Benton has to order it from Italy.”

  “You’re saying it’s your special scent.” Sweat is popping out on top of Marino’s shaved head. “And people close to you would know it.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” I reply and he’s thinking the same thing I am.

  “It’s like the clocks,” Marino says. “I walked through this room this morning and I know the clocks weren’t working. I didn’t hear them. I don’t remember seeing these little white candles or smelling anything in here except dust.”

  “The candles haven’t been used.” I point a gloved finger at one on a side table. “And if I pick one up”—I do it as I say it—“there’s no sparing, no round shape in the dust on the tabletop. It appears the candles were placed in here recently and the room hasn’t been cleaned in a while.”