Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  Chest zippers are relatively new. Some people find them preferable because the neoprene isn’t as restrictive when a zipper doesn’t run the length of the wet suit in back. I tend to associate chest zippers with tactical divers, with the police and military, and no wet suit Benton or I own zips in front. It wasn’t him in the video. It wasn’t my FBI husband. I don’t know who it was or why the person was there or if the diver I’m looking at right now in these photographs inside Chanel Gilbert’s library saved my life and now is dead.

  I walk around and study every photograph, estimating that the woman in them is medium height and weighs approximately 130 pounds. She’s looking directly into the camera, and I continue superimposing that image on what I saw earlier today. I’m almost certain they’re the same person but when I examined the dead body this morning, the hair was so bloody it was difficult to tell the color.

  The nose was broken, the eyes almost swollen shut. The photo on Chanel’s driver’s license wasn’t recent and her face was fuller, her hair lighter and longer. But I believe she and the diver are one and the same. This can’t be a coincidence. In fact it’s part of the plan. Not my plan. Not Marino’s plan. Carrie’s plan.

  The Bermuda Triangle. Where I was shot.

  I say this to Marino and he instantly dismisses it. “You were shot off the coast of South Florida. It didn’t happen in the Bermuda Triangle.” He glances around, looking for surveillance devices we’re not going to see.

  “You draw a line from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Bermuda and that’s the Bermuda Triangle,” I reply and geography isn’t my bigger point.

  Did Lucy know her?

  She was in Bermuda last week. When she landed at Logan her private jet was searched by Customs agents. That’s what I want to ask Marino about but I’m not going to say it. He stares at me, then at the photographs on the wall, and I overhear traffic on the handheld radio he has jammed into the back pocket of his borrowed black tactical pants. The reported altercation on North Point Boulevard was unfounded. The police have cleared the parking lot.

  “Obviously Chanel was familiar with wreck diving in Bermuda.” I point to a photograph of the female diver swimming close to a nurse shark. “The more I look? The more I’m sure that’s her unless she’s got an identical twin.”

  “I don’t know anything about her being a scuba diver,” Marino says. “Only that she must have liked underwater photography or her mother or the decorator did.”

  “It’s easy enough to find out.”

  There should be certification cards for the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) or for the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI). She would have taken courses. She would have certifications and her name should be on membership lists. She should have dive gear in the house unless she kept it someplace else, and I bring that up again.

  “Does she have other homes?” I ask and my stubborn calm is shaken.

  “Good question.”

  What I really want to know is if she and Lucy were recently together in Bermuda. Lucy said she went there to dive but she wouldn’t do that alone. Lucy would never dive without a dive buddy, and maybe her buddy was Chanel Gilbert—the person Lucy described as a friend of Janet’s. We have to find that out. The electronic devices collected from here have been receipted to Lucy’s lab or will be before the day is out.

  I can’t have her going through Chanel’s computers, her phone, her thumb drives and any surveillance equipment if the two of them had a personal relationship. Even as I entertain such thoughts a part of me knows better. Lucy may not return to my office. Not ever. I don’t know what’s going on with her right now. I have no idea what might happen next and how far the FBI might go to ruin the rest of her life.

  But I say none of this to Marino because if I do I’ll be saying it to anybody else who might be listening. I’d be saying it to Carrie. I might be saying it to the FBI, and it occurs to me next that Lucy may not know Chanel is dead. That’s assuming she knew her at all. We’ve not released her identity yet and I decide I’d better make sure there’s nothing on the Internet. I call Bryce again. The connection is bad. I ask him where he is.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE RECEPTION’S NEVER GOOD IN HERE,” HE SAYS. “You know because of the magnetic field? Imagine a flock of starlings lifting out of the trees all at once? This big black cloud of demonic birds and that’s what it’s like when all these little electrons fly around and mess up your phone? I could call you on a landline if you prefer.”

  “That won’t work,” I reply.

  “You’re breaking up a little so I’ll make this quick.”

  “I’m the one calling you, Bryce.”

  “Hello? Doctor Scarpetta, hello? Can you hear me okay? It’s Fort Knox in here.”

  “I have only a minute.”

  “Sorry. There I’ve moved. Can you hear me better? Whoa I almost feel a little woozy. Well probably from oxygen deprivation. I do think it’s worse after he’s vacuumed down the chamber, sucking all the air out and maybe that changes the level in the lab. How could it not? I’m sitting down and just realized I’ve not eaten a single thing today. Well kale chips that had been in my drawer too long.”

  My chatty chief of staff is with Ernie inside the trace evidence lab with its thick steel-reinforced concrete walls, ceiling and floor. That’s why the cell phone reception is never good in there. It’s not because of the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) or Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) or any other high-tech instrument we use in the identification of unknown materials. They can’t possibly make Bryce woozy. But he doesn’t need the assistance of any special circumstances, locations or equipment to spin himself into a dizzying state.

  “You go first with updates.” I’m mindful that any covert recording devices inside the Gilbert house can monitor only my side of the conversation.

  What Bryce is saying won’t be overheard. Unless my cell phone has been tapped. Unless Carrie has hacked into it or the FBI has. I will myself to be cool and calm, to concentrate on what I’m doing and why I’m here. But it’s getting more difficult, close to impossible. Chanel Gilbert dove the Bermuda Triangle. Lucy was just in Bermuda. Now Chanel has been murdered and Lucy’s property has been raided by the FBI. A police officer is missing, and Marino and I are alone again inside this house where clocks are mysteriously wound, the table set, and doors open and shut on their own it seems. It’s as if we can’t escape gravity here. It’s pulling us in like a black hole.

  “Well, the headline is the way-cool thing Anne found,” Bryce launches in about why he’s in the trace evidence lab.

  “I hope you don’t mean it literally as in something that’s in the news.”

  “No! But it’s so exciting it should be in the news and I’m sure it will be huge when it eventually hits.”

  “Not now. Not until I say.”

  “You’re talking like someone has a gun pointed at your head or you’ve been turned into bad animation in a bad Lego movie. I take that to mean Big Brother’s watching you not that there’s such a thing as privacy at all anymore. So I’ll do the talking. Anne found a weird piece of glass sticking to blood and I’m thinking good God what could have happened? How did this thing get on Chanel Gilbert’s body? I mean it’s true she lived in a house that goes back to when they were still hanging witches on the Common. But unless you saw other stuff like this inside her …?”

  “Other stuff?”

  “The mineral fingerprint that showed up on SEM.”

  “Can you be more specific? I assume Ernie’s with you …?”

  “Okay hold on.”

  In the background I hear Ernie’s voice, then Bryce is back with the answer. “Specifically sand quartz, soda ash and limestone. In other words glass. With trace amounts of silver and gold.” He parrots what Ernie is saying to him. “Almost undetectable traces. But that could be from dirt obviously.”

  “What dirt?”

  “Well the bit of broken bead’s bee
n somewhere the sun don’t shine all these hundreds of years. Gold and silver could be in the dirt and therefore not really part of the glass but then again they certainly could be. You can’t see it with the naked eye, what he calls a whisper of precious metals. Which is such a poetic way to put it. There’s also lead.”

  “Has he identified something that might tell us where this particular item had been before it somehow ended up where it did?” I’m mindful of my every word and tempted not to be.

  She wants to control you.

  “A teeny tiny piece of a cockroach wing which is why I mentioned dirt as in nasty spaces and hidey-holes where critters congregate,” Bryce says. “Oh my God maybe the source is the actual house? Holy shit. Are you noticing insects? Is it slovenly? I hope it doesn’t get out about Amanda Gilbert that her daughter lived like one of these hoarders on TV with their filth and dead pets and bugs everywhere …?”

  “Tell Ernie I’m going to call him directly.”

  “Wait a minute. He’s saying something. What …?”

  I hear Ernie’s voice in the background again. I make out the word millefiore, Italian for a thousand flowers. He’s referring to a type of bead made centuries ago in Venice and used as currency.

  I HANG UP on Bryce and enter the number for Ernie’s lab. Suddenly my favorite microscopist is in my earpiece, and the sound of his familiar voice is a comfort and a relief.

  “It goes without saying this isn’t something I usually come across, Kay, but it’s familiar,” he explains. “I’m not an archaeologist and don’t pretend to be but over the years I’ve become sort of an armchair one, a Sherlock at rooting through society’s detritus. When you’ve worked enough cases there isn’t much you don’t see, including remnants from the past. Like minié and musket balls that mistakenly end up in the labs or buttons and bones that turn out to be from the American Revolution.”

  “Which is what you think this is from. The past.”

  “I’ve seen similar artifacts. You know how much I’ve always loved digging things up microscopic and otherwise, and you may remember a couple years ago I took my family to Jamestown, to the excavation there. We got a personal tour of the site, got to go through the lab and see all the artifacts. That’s one reason the piece of glass from your scene at Brattle Street is familiar. It’s reminiscent of trade beads our early colonists used to snooker the Indians. Especially beads that were blue like the sky. I guess they were passed off as good luck or magical.”

  “You’re talking about a time period of the late fifteen hundreds, early sixteen hundreds,” I reply.

  “Your broken bead might be that old.”

  “Any details you can give me, Ernie.”

  “What we’ve got is a decent-size fragment that’s multifaceted, made from three layers of glass, probably by molding it over the heat of an oil lamp as opposed to drawn or blown glass that requires a proper work space and equipment like a kiln. Once upon a time making beads was a cottage industry sort of like minting your own money, and typically the finishing touch was adding dots of colored glass or thin threads of gold, copper, silver, a pièce de résistance for the perfect gaudy bauble.”

  “How big?” I continue to talk in a vague way but pressure is building inside me and heating me up.

  “Five by three millimeters from a bead that I’m guessing was about the size of a small pearl. Probably about nine or ten millimeters, which is consistent with what they called trade or slave beads. Supposedly Christopher Columbus swapped them for supplies and permission to sail through unfriendly waters. Don’t be impressed. I just found it on the Internet. Beads like yours were also the major currency for the slave trade in West Africa. You know hand over some fancy trinkets and sail off with a ship full of gold, ivory and stolen human beings.”

  “You referenced colors.” There can be no question that what he’s describing isn’t remotely similar to the quartz-like metamaterial I found on Lucy’s property.

  “Shades of blue with a little bit of green,” Ernie says and I think of the cockroach wing.

  I’ve seen no insects dead or alive inside this house except for the flies, and I’m reminded of the dust bunny inside my clean truck. I think of the debris adhering to the pelt-like fletching of the arrow left as a gory surprise. Evidence that’s transferred from another location, and maybe that’s true of the glass fragment too. Nothing I’ve seen so far would give me reason to think the broken bead came from inside this house, at least not from the rooms we’ve searched.

  “Call me as soon as you have anything else,” I tell Ernie. “Jen should get to you soon …”

  “She already did the minute she left the truck in the bay, and I need to get to that after a while too. Do you have any special instructions beyond what Bryce has passed along?”

  “Work as fast as you possibly can.”

  “I’m slitting open one of your packages as we speak.”

  “I’m curious about a possible shared origin.” I’m so cryptic I’m almost unintelligible, and I’m getting angry. “Does that make sense?” I’m like an engine about to overspeed.

  “Loud and clear. You want to know if some or all of it could have come from the same location.”

  “And what type of one. As detailed and as quickly as possible.”

  “If I can tell you where and give you an exact address I will.” He’s teasing and he’s not.

  Ernie will get on this immediately because he knows me. We’ve worked together for years. He’s patient and he listens, and it’s just a shame I can’t say the same about Bryce. I get him back on the phone.

  I tell him in a no-nonsense way, “I have ten seconds. When I was here this morning I didn’t see anything similar to what you and Ernie are describing.”

  “You probably wouldn’t have.”

  “Where was it?” I resist saying the words glass or bead. “Where exactly on the body?” I’m on the verge of venting my temper.

  Don’t give her the satisfaction.

  “Like I said in blood. Matted inside her bloody hair,” Bryce says.

  “Okay. Harold thought he saw something like that and then he couldn’t find it.”

  “Well Anne found it on CT. It lit up like Times Square but itty-bitty like a split pea. It’s so awesome to see it magnified five hundred times on SEM. You can make out the tool marks on it from where it was gripped while the glass was melted,” he says cheerfully, as if we’re having a happy conversation.

  “Bryce, I need to be sure that Chanel Gilbert’s name and any other information about her and the case haven’t been released publicly.”

  “Certainly not by us. You know of course it’s on Twitter.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Lucy must know she’s dead.

  “Oh yes. As of just a little while ago. But I’m not surprised. Nothing’s secret anymore,” Bryce reminds me.

  “What’s being said?”

  “Just that the daughter of the famous producer Amanda Gilbert was found dead in Cambridge this morning. I don’t know who tweeted it. I guess a lot of people have.”

  I get off the phone and find myself staring at a photograph of a hammerhead shark. A big one with dead eyes and bared teeth. The diver is almost on top of it. She’s not afraid. She might be smiling.

  Don’t give her your fear. Don’t give her what she wants.

  In another photo the same diver is removing a tangle of fishing line and a hook from a tiger shark’s mouth. Chanel Gilbert. Brave and adventuresome. Kind to animals it would seem. Fearless. Sure of herself. Maybe overly confident. Maybe nothing phased her until she was beaten to death on her marble floor, and I envision a blitz attack. She didn’t see it coming.

  She was in the foyer barely dressed and didn’t feel physically threatened. I found no defensive injuries that might indicate she attempted to protect herself. Then suddenly she was on the floor being knocked senseless. She was trusting for some reason. She was unguarded and thought she had nothing to fear or she wouldn’t have been in
her foyer almost naked. It’s unlikely she would have been in such a state of undress and vulnerability were the person she was with a stranger.

  She knew her killer.

  The blood pattern shows she was murdered where she was found. But that doesn’t mean her body didn’t lie there for a while. That would explain the time of death not making sense, and another image comes to me. Carrie returning to the foyer and enjoying the afterglow. She may have lived with the dead body in situ for hours or days.

  Their relationship was sexual. At least to her.

  “See these?” I point at the photographs.

  “Yeah I think you’re right.” Marino is looking over my shoulder. “It’s Chanel Gilbert. Obviously she was a big diver.”

  “She doesn’t seem to be afraid of much.”

  “Or else she was stupid. Anybody who tries to get the hook out of a shark’s mouth is stupid if you ask me.”

  “I doubt she was stupid and we need to seriously question who she really was.” I look at my watch and it’s close to four.

  “Her dental records …,” he starts to say.

  “Yes they seem to confirm she’s Chanel Gilbert but I think it’s like everything else we’re seeing, Marino. Nothing is what it appears to be. Including her.”

  I walk out of the library before he can answer. I don’t wait for him to pack up his scene case.

  “Hey! Wait up!” he yells but I’m not waiting for him or anyone.

  He hurries after me, clutching the scene case, his Tyvek-covered feet thudding and sliding along the wooden hallway. It dead-ends at the master wing, an addition with oak floors and paneling that are different from what I’ve seen in other rooms. The stylistic elements are Gothic Revival, possibly mid-nineteenth century, the doorway an elaborate pointed arch. Inside are cluster columns and decorative molding. The drapes are drawn.