Depraved Heart

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Carrie Grethen was in New Jersey two months ago, right before she went to Florida,” he repeats that point.

  “And that was my next question. Did Hyde ask the housekeeper how she and Chanel met? Or was the information volunteered?”

  We know Carrie was in New Jersey as recently as two months ago. We know that earlier than that she murdered a woman there, shot her to death while she was getting out of her car at the Edgewater Ferry. I can’t help but wonder if it’s another taunt that the alleged housekeeper happened to mention New Jersey. It’s an emotional subject for me. I was in Morristown when I learned that Carrie Grethen is alive and killing people for her twisted reasons. When Lucy told me we were sitting in the very bar where Carrie had been.

  “I don’t know because I didn’t witness them talking.” Marino continues to explain that he didn’t question the woman who claimed to be Elsa Mulligan. “I was with you in that damn truck of yours.”

  “And what might happen if you tried to call Elsa Mulligan right now?” I have a feeling I know the answer.

  Nothing will happen. You won’t get hold of her.

  “I’m not going to until we finish up here,” he says. “But I know what you’re getting at. There’s something off about the whole thing with her.”

  “That’s right. There is.” My eyes slowly move around the room, looking for any hint of covert surveillance devices.

  I’m not going to find them unless Carrie wants me to, and I feel the change that has come over me. It’s rare and always happens the same way. I don’t recognize the transformation until it’s already taken place, irreversibly, finally. Like an engine flaming out. Followed by an instant eerie silence. A floating sensation. A perfect calm. Then the warnings flash bright red and horns blare and sirens scream that I’m about to crash. But it’s Marino’s radio I’m hearing. He has it in his hand, adjusting knobs.

  “Something at the River Basin,” he announces in an annoyed, jaded way. “The same red SUV with the same damn drunk juveniles it sounds like. Only now one of them maybe has a gun.”

  “What kind of red SUV?” I hear myself ask before I think the thought.

  “Late model, maybe high end. That’s all I know based on radio traffic.”

  “The same juveniles and red SUV have been called in several times and there’s no more detail than that? What kind of SUV?” I ask that again.

  “No other info,” Marino says. “Usually there would be a plate number, a make and model or something.”

  I’m thinking about the missing red Range Rover and I mention it. I’m the first to say it’s unlikely kids stole it out of this driveway in a downpour after the police were at the house most of the morning. I’m quick to admit that it sounds like the calls to 911 about a late-model high-end red SUV and rowdy kids might be completely unrelated.

  “But what if they aren’t and what if they’re false?” I ask. “What if it’s a game?”

  We know who might play a game like that and why, and the River Basin is near here. It’s only minutes from the Gilbert house.

  “I guess we have to think of every worst-case scenario,” Marino says, and he gets on his radio. “Anything further on the red SUV and subjects in it?” he asks the dispatcher and he’s not flirty this time. “We got a plate number, a make and model?”

  “Negative. Nothing further.” The dispatcher—Helen I presume—sounds somber too as if there’s been an announcement somewhere that all is wrong in the world.

  “Do we have a phone number for the complainant?” Marino’s jaw muscles are clenching.

  She recites a number that has an exchange I don’t recognize. But it’s not local. Marino tries it and it rings and rings and rings.

  “No voice mail set up,” he tells me. “Probably some bogus disposable phone. Probably kids having a great time messing with the police.”

  “You hope so at any rate.”

  “Well it’s better than the alternative that someone’s out joyriding in a murdered lady’s red Range Rover.”

  “Or that Chanel’s killer is the one calling nine-one-one. Or that her so-called housekeeper is.”

  “You’re thinking they’re the same person?” His eyes are on me, and we know we’re both considering the possibility.

  It’s shocking to contemplate. It would mean that Carrie murdered Chanel Gilbert and at some point when it suited her called 911. Then she answered the door when Officer Hyde showed up. She stayed just long enough to answer a few questions but was long gone by the time Marino and I got here. One look into Elsa Mulligan’s eyes and I would have known it was Carrie. Marino might not have, but it was only two months ago when I watched her shoot me.

  “I’m thinking we should finish up. Let’s try ALS on the bed. Maybe she wasn’t in it alone before she died,” I suggest.

  He opens what is actually a heavy-duty toolbox made of tough black plastic. He finds a kit that contains an Alternate Light Source, a set of what looks like small black flashlights of different bandwidths.

  “What do you want to start with?” He sets a box of gloves on the floor and grabs a new pair.

  “UV.”

  Body fluids can fluoresce in the long wavelengths of black light illumination, and Marino selects that light for me. He hands me amber-tinted goggles and I put them on. The lenses glow violet and I begin painting invisible light over the bed, starting at the head of it. The pillow on the left side that had the sachet under it turns dark like a void.

  “Whoa,” Marino says. “I’ve never seen that before. Why does it look black? The other pillow and sheets don’t. What could turn black in UV like that?”

  “Usually blood would be the first thing that comes to mind,” I reply. “But obviously the pillowcase isn’t covered with blood.”

  “Hell no. When the light’s off it looks perfectly clean. Just a little rumpled like someone’s slept on it.”

  “Let’s start taking photographs, and then all of these linens will need to go to the labs.” As I’m saying this I hear the same thud, as if a heavy door just slammed in a remote area of the house, possibly the cellar.

  “Jeez that’s starting to freak me out,” Marino exclaims.

  Then we hear it again. The same sound. In fact it’s exactly the same.

  “Makes me wonder if it’s the wind blowing something like a loose shutter.” Marino’s eyes are darting around the bedroom, the top of his head sweaty.

  “It doesn’t sound like a shutter.”

  “I’m not going to look right now. I’m not leaving you alone.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” I direct the UV light over other areas of the bed as he collects his camera.

  He finds the thick plastic filters tinted amber, yellow and red that must be held over the lens if we’re going to capture the fluorescence in photographs.

  “The good news,” he says, “is Ajax and his guys wouldn’t have left if there was even a chance someone’s in here. If they saw the slightest thing they’d be taking apart this house.”

  I try a higher wavelength. “What about Hyde? Any news at all about him?”

  “Nope.”

  “And his car?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “And his wife has no idea? Nobody close to him has heard from him?”

  “Not a peep,” Marino says as small stains light up milky white.

  “Dried sweat, saliva, semen, vaginal fluid maybe …,” I start to say when I’m jolted by the alert tone on my phone.

  The C-sharp cord that I’ve heard three times so far today.

  “Wait a minute.” Marino lowers a yellow filter from the camera lens. “How’s that possible?”

  “It’s not.” I take off a glove and dig out my phone.

  We’re supposed to think it’s Lucy’s In Case of Emergency line but it can’t be. She doesn’t have her phone. The FBI does. Even if she’s already gotten another phone it won’t have the same number.

  “And it’s being spoofed anyway just as it has been,” I tell Marino emphat
ically. “This is the same thing that’s happened three other times today, the first time when I was inside this house early this morning. This is exactly what it looked like.” I show him what’s on the display of my phone.

  The message has no text, only an Internet link, and I step away to give myself some privacy. I turn my back to him as I click on the link, and I’m instantly struck by the absence of a Depraved Heart title sequence this time. Then I realize why. The video hasn’t been produced. It hasn’t been scripted or edited. It isn’t a recording. It’s live and Carrie’s not in it.

  Janet is. I watch her in the small display. She’s in the middle of something, clipping her phone to the waistband of the faded scrubs she had on earlier, walking over to Lucy. They’re inside the basement, what we refer to as the bomb shelter only we don’t mean it in an ominous way but rather as an affectionate nostalgic reference to a past that I shouldn’t think about right now. As I’m watching. In real time. As if I’m there.

  Control your thoughts.

  When I first met Benton he worked in the Behavioral Science Unit, his elite squadron of psychological profilers located inside Hoover’s former bomb shelter. I used to descend into the bowels of the FBI Academy to meet about cases and I wasn’t above trumping up excuses. When I wanted to see Special Agent Benton Wesley there was no extreme I wouldn’t go to, and on numerous occasions Lucy was with me. She knew what was going on. She’d known for years that Benton and I were more than colleagues. She understood what it meant.

  He was married with children. Professionally it was a conflict for the chief medical examiner and the head of the FBI’s profiling unit to be sleeping together. Everything we were doing was wrong. It would have been considered shameful and unethical but nothing was going to stop us, and the unexpected reminder of that is powerful. I’m overwhelmed by a reaction I couldn’t have anticipated and I realize how hurt I am. Everything I’ve been through and the day is far from over, and where is he? Benton is with his tribe. The FBI is his tribe. Not his family. Not me. I was almost murdered two months ago and he’s with them. How could he be loyal to them after what’s happened? How could he be okay with what they’re doing to Lucy?

  Focus!

  In those early days when I carried my official business to Quantico and descended into that dank dismal cave it was the most glorious place on earth. When I ached for him. When I could think of nothing but him, the same way Lucy feels about Janet, the way both of them feel. They love each other. They always have even when they were apart all those years. They think nothing about breaking rules any more than Benton and I did, and we broke them all the time. That’s what happens when people have affairs, and as I watch what’s live-streaming on my phone I know I’m being shown this for a reason.

  I steel myself for what it might be as I remember that the security cameras Lucy installed have backup batteries and built-in hard drives. They can continue to run and record without the server, without external power. The FBI didn’t shut down Lucy’s network even if they assume they did. They aren’t in control of it even if they think they are. They couldn’t possibly outsmart her but someone has.

  Her security system and communications network have been hijacked. They’re being used to broadcast what she’s doing in the privacy of her home. Lucy doesn’t realize it’s happening. She can’t possibly have a clue. She’d never allow such a thing I keep telling myself. She’s being spied on the same way she was in 1997 and has no idea now any more than she did then. And yet it seems incredible that my shrewd, stubborn, brilliant niece could be duped by anyone.

  Especially more than once.

  Doubts are growing by leaps and bounds as I watch Lucy and Janet crouch by an area of gray flooring, examining large stone tiles as if there’s something wrong with them. I recognize the huge space they’re in, what Lucy calls her naughty Santa’s workshop that is professionally outfitted with built-ins and any piece of equipment or tool one might need for gunsmithing, automotive work, hand-loading ammunition.

  I hear Marino breathing and feel his heat. He’s crept close and is looking over my shoulder. I step away and tell him absolutely not. Under no circumstances can he watch. It’s bad enough that I’ve been compromised. He doesn’t need to be compromised too.

  “Jesus Christ. Inside their own house?” He can’t tear his eyes away. “Who else is seeing this?”

  “I don’t know but not you.” I cover the phone with my hand. “There’s nothing for you to see. Stay over there and don’t look.”

  CHAPTER 40

  THERE ARE NO WINDOWS, AND THE OVERHEAD LAMPS inside the machine shop are an intense candlepower on a par with an OR. I can see Lucy and Janet in vivid detail. I can make out the expressions on their faces and their every gesture as they hover by the same area of flooring, the bright lights harsh on them, unkind and glaring, and that’s the way life feels right now.

  Exposed, unsafe and rife with deceptions and brazen lies as I witness my niece and her partner in the privacy of their home. They’re deliberating, talking somewhat tersely, cryptically in the midst of workbenches, with vises and tall red roll-around toolboxes, a CNC mill and lathe and a table saw, a surface grinder, a shaper, drill press and welding machines.

  I don’t know for a fact what they’re pondering but I can make an educated guess. They’ve hidden something down here, probably Lucy has. Drugs, firearms, maybe both, and as I watch my niece and listen to her I realize her FBI sweats from her academy days still seem ironic to me but not in the same way.

  They’re not the chest-thumping taunt they were hours ago when I first saw her trotting toward me on her driveway. They look wilted and faded, sweat splotched and tired in their soft cotton grayness, drooping and defeated like a faded old battle flag on a windless day. Lucy looks rather pitiful really, and her demeanor has completely changed. She’s fast talking and aggressive, about to fly apart and I know what that means. It’s the way she gets when she’s desperate. Which is almost never.

  “Didn’t I tell you nobody would ever know? And they were walking in and out of here all day without a clue. I told you there was nothing to worry about.” Lucy is full of bravado and I don’t buy it.

  She’s scared.

  “There’s everything to worry about.” Janet is quiet and controlled but I sense something else. “They’ve predicted you’ll do this.”

  “So you’ve said fifty times.”

  “And I’ll make it fifty-one times, Lucy. They can anticipate with pretty good certainty what your post offense behavior is going to be.”

  “I’ve not committed an offense. They fucking have.”

  “Do you want me to talk like a lawyer right now?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “I’m going to anyway. Erin Loria knows how you’re wired. She’s well aware there’s no way you’d ever allow us to be left in the position they’ve just put us in—of not being able to defend ourselves. She knows you’re not going to sit on your hands and let us be hurt or killed.”

  “Why is it my behavior and not both of us? Since when do you sit on your hands either?”

  “They took my guns too,” Janet says as if that answers the question.

  But it doesn’t. It simply raises another legal problem. What right did the FBI have to confiscate anything belonging to Janet? There wasn’t a warrant for her, not that I know about. Of course if they took her firearms then they’ll simply say they needed to test them. What if Lucy had used them in the commission of a crime? What if Janet had for that matter? Agents walking out the door with Janet’s belongings is no different from them walking out with my computer and anything else they seized from the guest bedroom. They’ll assert that when people live together or stay under the same roof then anything on the property is fair game. The FBI can’t know what’s mine, Janet’s or Lucy’s if all of it is in the same location.

  I’m not all that surprised the FBI might have decided to send Janet’s guns to the lab. But her mention of it to Lucy strikes me as a strategic sidest
ep, a non sequitur, a lawyer-speak that is far more deliberate than it might seem. Janet is choosing her words with precision and care, and maybe that simply comes naturally to her when times are stressful. But it strikes me that she’s creating a record, as if someone is listening, and someone is. I am. But who else?

  Then she uses the word criminal. She says that what’s happened is criminal but she doesn’t make her meaning clear. Is she referring to what Lucy has done or what the Bureau has? And Lucy’s response is that a person’s rights are honored only in the breach.

  “Justice won’t do us any good if we’re dead,” she says, “and they’ll make sure the truth never comes out. If we’re murdered it will have been sanctioned by our own government. Hell yes it’s criminal. They basically have put a hit on us.”

  “Technically, legally I’m sure they haven’t,” Janet replies. “I guarantee you they didn’t hire Carrie, they didn’t contract with her to hurt Kay last June or kill us. What they’ve done is far more clever and diabolical. It’s an open invitation to commit a violent act, and yes it’s willful negligence. It’s a complete disregard for human life, the absolute definition of a depraved heart crime,” she adds to my disbelief. “It should be criminal. But it’s the FBI, Lucy. And there’s no accountability unless there is a perceived political obstruction such as an embarrassment to POTUS.”

  An embarrassment to the president of the United States would have to be a public event. If it’s not public then he can’t be embarrassed. I imagine what sort of political obstruction Janet might be thinking about and come up with one right away. Gun control is an acutely polarizing issue in this country with the majority of Americans literally up in arms over the prospect of losing their Second Amendment right.

  If it ever came out that our government disarmed citizens who then ended up murdered? The fallout would be significant. Such a horrendous story would bring new energy to the battle over gun control. It would galvanize conservative voters. It would become a raging agenda in the upcoming presidential election.