Flesh and Blood: A Scarpetta Novel (Scarpetta Novels Book 22)

by Patricia Cornwell

  “The safest thing for who?”

  “The safest thing for Leo and that might be exactly what he wants.” Near the polished granite wall of elevators Benton nods at four uniformed police officers, young and bulky with muscle and ballistic gear, familiar-looking but I don’t know them.

  They seem strangely congregated by the door and don’t nod back at him, riveting their attention on me and I already sense what’s coming. I feel uneasiness in my stomach and a cool wariness creeps up my neck. It occurs to me they were expecting us.

  “How you doing, Doc?”

  “What are you gentlemen up to tonight? It looks like you’re keeping the streets more than safe.”

  “You know who’s in town.”

  “I certainly do,” I reply while Benton is ignored.

  “Mind if I ask you something?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “I got over a cold last month and am still congested.”

  “Same thing and I can’t shake the cough,” another one says.

  “Me too,” says yet another.

  The four of them are talking at once, their attention on me as if Benton isn’t here. He’s calm and unflappable. He doesn’t register surprise at the ruse of a welcome or questions about medical advice from men who sound perfectly healthy. Tension and resentment toward the FBI have been palpable since the marathon bombings and the murder of MIT Officer Collier, a close colleague of Cambridge police, his department within the Cambridge city limits. The FBI is accused of not sharing intelligence and that’s nothing new but this time it’s as personal as it gets.

  They continue bantering with me so they can stick it to my husband. This is for his benefit, passive-aggressive behavior on the way to bullying, and I’m convinced they saw us coming. Benton’s car draws attention. All it took was one cop spotting us and tipping off the others so they could lash out, and I can’t say that I blame them. Benton presses the elevator button again and I know he’s bothered even if he doesn’t show it. The doors slide open and we step inside.

  “Good to see you, Doc.”

  “Be safe out there,” I reply, and just as I’m certain we’ve escaped the worst I find out I’m wrong.

  “Hey! We’re being rude leaving out the FBI.” A uniformed arm suddenly juts out and the shutting elevator doors bounce back into their frame.

  “Excuse me?” The officer confronts Benton. “Maybe you got something to say?”

  “About what?” But he knows.

  “Why the FBI thinks it’s okay not to share information that might prevent cops from getting shot while they’re sitting in their cars.”

  Benton leans against the open door, his hands in his pockets, his eyes steady on the four of them. And the officer removes his arm.

  The officer steps back and says, “Wait until we know something you should be told. And we don’t pass it on. See how you feel if something happens to one of your damn agents.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Benton says.

  “Really? Why not?”

  “Because you’re better than that.”

  “The FBI should apologize.”

  “About a lot of things.” Fear and intimidation aren’t colors on Benton’s palette, and the doors slide shut and he meets my eyes. “The Bureau won’t. It never does.”

  “Their hostility might be related to Machado. There’s no telling what he’s spreading around.”

  “It’s not about him. They said what it’s about. They couldn’t have been clearer.”

  “They shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  “They should. I’m safe because I won’t go over their heads and complain,” he says. “The commissioner is here right now and they know I could head straight to his office. They also know I would never do it.”

  CHAPTER 30

  WE RIDE THE ELEVATOR up and the confrontation downstairs reverberates. I try to quiet my inner voice but I can’t. I’m not a pessimist but I’m not a Pollyanna either.

  Resentment of the Feds is at an endless boil, rattling nonstop like scalding water in a pot. It doesn’t come and go anymore like it did when I was getting started. Now it’s chronic. Absolute power has corrupted and the absence of checks and balances seems complete. There’s no place to go but the media, and cops like the ones we just encountered can’t do that without permission from the brass, which they’ll never get.

  “Terrorists score points when they inspire people to act indecently, to misuse what they are sworn to protect.” I watch the floors slowly go by. “It started with 9/11 and is building momentum. Our government spies and lies. Those trusted to uphold and enforce the law use it to their advantage instead.”

  “Not everyone. We don’t.”

  “We probably do. Just not abusively and all of the time.”

  “Without monitoring what’s going on in cyberspace we couldn’t begin to anticipate the next catastrophic move,” Benton says and I again recall what Briggs intimated about intelligence gathered by the CIA, probably by spies in Russia.

  Money, drugs and thugs flowing into this country.

  “We work around what gets in the way,” Benton adds.

  “Like Lucy does.”

  “We have to dance. We can learn something from Leo Gantz.”

  “About what? Lying?”

  “His is a very calculated dance motivated by a desire to stay safe, to escape a danger that is real but unknown at the moment.”

  “You say that as if you know it for a fact.”

  The doors slide open and we step off the elevator.

  “It seems to me Leo caused his own danger by tweeting for attention,” I then say.

  “For attention but not for the usual reason. To inspire hatred and it has,” Benton answers. “Especially among certain factions who applaud his allegedly committing murder.”

  By factions he means people who are anti-Muslim and that continues to be the irony. Jamal Nari was mistaken for a Muslim with terrorist ties when he was neither. A former heroin addict turned drug smuggler, he was a gifted guitarist who didn’t play for the right reason anymore. A troubled teacher with penis piercing and old needle scars, he didn’t merit hating. His life was a struggle. It was sadly mundane and he was held hostage by his own demons. Had he not died this morning he was headed in that direction.

  Lucy has been going through his laptop. He had booked a noon flight today to Canada and it wasn’t the first time. He’d been in and out of Toronto on average twice a month since March, probably smuggling drugs, probably liquid cocaine, easy to dilute and reconvert to powdered form, nothing lost except your freedom or your life eventually and inevitably. His routine was to check a suitcase and one of his graphite guitars that he loved so much it merited a tattooed endorsement on his shoulder. He played at live music hot spots, The Horseshoe Tavern, Dominion on Queen and Polyhaus, but what drove him wasn’t his rhythm and blues funk or his rock-and-roll riffs.

  He wanted money. Judging by the number of condoms inside his stomach when he was murdered he could have been making anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars cash per month from his trips to Canada alone. Lucy has been following his trail through his emails. What she can’t determine is why it appears he turned into a drug mule possibly only three months ago except that was about the time his lawsuit completely stalled. The case continued to cost him with no end in sight. In a way his turning to crime is Rand Bloom’s fault, and I’m wondering if it wasn’t his influence that caused it.

  “I hope this goes away before it’s time to eat.” Benton is still preoccupied with the odor trapped in his nose.

  “I have something that will help as soon as we get where we’re going,” I reply as we follow a corridor to the end.

  HE OPENS THE DOOR to the Investigative Unit, a large open space of grayish blue carpet and cubicles in a grid, the typical police department ice cube
tray.

  We stop at the front desk where no one is sitting. On one side is a wall of plateglass windows, on the other a line of shut wooden doors, some of the rooms with windows, some without. I hear detectives on phones and the quiet tapping of computer keys. There is no one to greet us and no one pays us any mind as we head in the direction of the interview rooms.

  Benton is texting, using one thumb and then he stops, pausing us closer to the soundproof rooms with their shut windowless doors. I can’t hear a thing, not even a murmur. Then a door in the middle of the wall opens and Marino steps out holding his phone. He closes the door behind him and walks toward us. His feet make a brushing sound over carpet. He motions for us to follow him to his cubicle in the very back.

  A corner office he likes to say, it’s nothing more than a workstation with a computer, a coatrack, equipment piled on the floor and photographs crammed on the fabric-covered partition. I notice he’s changed his clothes, in khaki cargo pants, a black polo shirt, a black flak jacket. He has on the same black leather high-tops.

  “How’s it going?” Benton asks.

  “He’s not budging from his story and the wound on his head isn’t pretty.” Marino looks keyed up and sure of himself.

  “Did he have it treated?” I want to know.

  “Nope.”

  “He continues to say Jamal Nari hit him with a trophy?” I look at a large brown paper evidence bag on Marino’s cluttered desk, files, pink message slips and dirty coffee cups, the long cord to the phone ridiculously snarled.

  Cop humor. Since Marino has worked here he’s replaced his phone cord every month. Overnight it ends up like this. It probably won’t happen anymore. I’ve always suspected Machado.

  “The kid’s a damn good liar,” Marino says. “I’ve lifted a few prints and swabbed for DNA. There’s definitely blood on the trophy.”

  He reaches for the bag sealed with red evidence tape and snatches two pairs of examination gloves out of a box, handing a pair to me. We put them on. Opening the blade of a folding knife he slits the tape. Heavy paper rattles as he digs inside and pulls out a large silver cup with a rosewood base, what Leo Gantz was presented when he won the state tennis championship last summer. The trophy is spattered and smeared with rusty dried blood. There are smudges of fingerprint powder all over it.

  I open my portable kit, this one small and silver aluminum, a modified EMT medical box that includes essential forensic necessities. It’s not often I need first-aid supplies but typically when I examine pattern injuries on the living I find their wounds could use a little extra cleaning up and of course I have to replace their dressings. I give Benton an alcohol wipe and he gets the implication.

  “Excuse me.” He tears it open, turns away from us and wipes the inside of his nose.

  “What the hell?” Marino stares and Benton ignores him. “Oh I get it. I guess I know where you’ve been. Me? I root up there with a wet paper towel before I leave the morgue, as far up as I can reach without causing brain damage. Don’t use Vicks. It makes it worse.”

  I find a tape measure inside the kit and estimate the weight as I hold the trophy by its stem, rosewood embedded with a gold medallion, what looks like a Roman coin. The trophy is heavy, approximately eight pounds, I estimate, and twenty inches high. If enough force were used it could inflict profound damage but obviously it didn’t or Leo Gantz wouldn’t be sitting inside an interview room. I notice that one of the silver handles is bent and an area of the cup is dented and scuffed.

  “Before I take a look can you tell me exactly what he claims happened?” I find my camera and set the trophy on top of the paper bag.

  “That Nari took the trophy as if he intended to give it to his wife and then suddenly whacked Leo in the head.” Marino watches me take photographs. “He says he didn’t see it coming, had his back to him, heading to the door.”

  “He hit him like this?” I pick up the trophy by the stem and turn it upside down, wielding it like a club. “And struck him with the base of it?”

  “That’s his story.”

  I look at the bent handle, at the smudges and smears made by someone with bloody hands.

  “I’m going to guess the trophy was already damaged.” I point out the handle, which is bent the way it would be if someone smashed it against the floor. “In other words the dent, the bent handle are probably unrelated to the alleged attack.”

  There’s also blood on one edge of the wooden base, crusty and thick and beginning to flake. I turn the trophy this way and that, looking at it carefully.

  “How many times does he say he was hit?” I take more photographs.

  “Once,” Marino says.

  “Not possible,” I reply. “Assuming he was struck with the base there wouldn’t be this much blood on the edge of it unless he was already bleeding. Notice the teardrop-shaped droplets pointing in different directions. The pattern is haphazard and nonsensical. These would appear to be consistent with a medium-velocity impact spatter caused by the base of the trophy striking blood, in other words, striking someone already bleeding. But the problem is it makes no sense that the direction of travel is inconsistent and erratic.”

  “Because he put the blood drops on there himself,” Marino sums it up.

  “He could have flicked it.” I flick my fingers as if they’re bloody, flicking from different angles. “That could account for the droplets and the chaotic pattern. What about castoff?”

  “As you know there was no blood inside Nari’s apartment, not even any that was cleaned up. Just something like bleach on the guitars, the two cases on the bed, the other stuff. They lit up when we sprayed them but not the same way blood does,” Marino says.

  “What about at Leo’s house?” Benton asks.

  “I’ve got photographs,” Marino says. “How about you talk to him alone for a few minutes. Then we’ll bring the Doc in and maybe she can get something out of him. I quit.”

  Benton tucks the used alcohol wipe back into its packet and drops it into the trash.

  “My being the good cop didn’t work,” Marino adds.

  Benton doesn’t say he’s not surprised because he isn’t.

  “He’s the same arrogant prick we saw this morning,” Marino says to me. “When I tried to be his friend he went out of his way to piss me off.”

  “What does he think is happening next?” Benton asks.

  “You’re looking at him,” Marino says to me. “I hope he doesn’t recognize you from this morning.”

  “I never got out of your car.”

  “So maybe you wander in first,” he says to Benton. “Use your touchy-feely magic on him and get him to start telling the truth so he doesn’t spend the night in jail.”

  “He wants to spend the night in jail. He wants to be out of circulation.”

  “He’s probably scared of his father.”

  “That’s not why he wants to stay locked up,” Benton says.

  “Yeah well maybe if he’s lucky they’ll give him a vacation at McLean for a while.”

  The Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital is a few miles from here in Belmont, and Benton used to be a consultant there. It would be a good place for Leo, truth be told.

  “That’s what he wants,” Benton says. “He wants exactly what he’s getting.”

  “Then how come he keeps asking when he can leave?”

  “Asking you,” Benton says pointedly. “He wants to be locked up and he wants nothing to do with you.”

  “And you’re basing this on what?” Marino is getting offended.

  “Did you Mirandize him?”

  “Now you’re thinking I’m stupid.” Anger touches Marino’s face.

  “Obviously he waived his right to an attorney. Obviously he’s fully aware and understands the legal process and the repercussions of his confession.”

  “According to him he’s not
trying to hide anything so he doesn’t need an attorney. Plus I told him three times he could wait for one or his parents.”

  “This kid is very bright, very logical but his prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet,” Benton says.

  “Give me a fucking break,” Marino says.

  “He doesn’t like the police but he’s not afraid of them. He’s afraid of something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “The police won’t hurt or kill him. Something else might.”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about,” Marino says.

  “Leo is impulsive,” Benton says. “He’s driven by fight or flight, by a need to survive and conquer. He’s also driven by the short-term gratification of notoriety, of being a hero and also feelings of guilt. At his young age he’s three times more likely to confess to crimes he didn’t commit than an adult would be.”

  “I’m not interested in statistics right now.” Marino doesn’t try to be diplomatic or anything but annoyed.

  “Give me fifteen minutes.” Benton walks off.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE BEDROOM IS SMALL with French wallpaper in a blue floral pattern that is stained brownish in places near the molding. The pumpkin pine floor is badly scuffed. Against one wall are bunk beds. Supposedly Leo’s was the top one until he relocated to the basement and began sleeping on a couch.

  Marino has given me his desk chair while he leans close clicking the mouse, showing me what he found when he went through the Gantzes’ house. What grabs my attention instantly are tennis awards that fill three walls, trophies of all size and description, crystal, silver, bronze, and large medals on bright ribbons. Everything is damaged. Male figures are serving and hitting strokes with rackets that have been removed or broken off. There are blank gluey areas where engraved plates used to be. Platters and bowls are scratched as if someone took a screwdriver to them.