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

by Patricia Cornwell

  Now we’ve switched to metal, and Kuster, Marino and Lucy are seeing exactly what I am. They let me know I’m off target by about a quarter of a mile. I look up, wiping my face and hands on the towel, then I gaze at the spread of parched grazing land, empty except for berms and their backstops, and far off, clumps of trees. I peer through the scope again. I move the barrel to the left, making very minor adjustments, finding the tiny red targets on the 750-yard berm, and then finally the pale tan berm a thousand yards away, a vague and wavy mirage. It’s as if the targets are dancing.

  I push away sinister thoughts and a growing sense of hopelessness. What we can’t account for is the some seventy-degree downward flight path of the bullet that struck Nari in the back of his neck and lodged under the skin of his chest. Shadows are deepening, creeping in from all angles like nocturnal animals, the sun burning on the horizon and sinking below it in a smoldering rosy orange. I can barely see the red metal targets lined up like lollypops, and I set the white dot on the one farthest to the left and tag it. Then I change my mind.

  “Windcall.” I realized we’ve been at this for more than an hour and it won’t be long before it’s too dark to see. “Maybe the wind has shifted again.”

  It’s picked up and the temperature hasn’t dipped below the high eighties.

  “I think you should do this,” I decide with no one in particular in mind as I reach for my bottle of water, taking a big warm swallow, no one else on the firing line except three men, military I’m sure.

  They showed up about fifteen minutes ago, picking a distant steel-roofed concrete pad reserved for close range. The crisp tap-taps of their M4s are a constant bright peppering, and now and then I catch them staring at us, two men, two women with a weapon that may very well change everything we’ve ever thought about guns.

  “If you don’t experience it you can’t appreciate what’s happening.” Kuster has said this repeatedly. “You can’t appreciate the reality of a weapon system like this.”

  I press my cheek against the stock, squeezing the rear bag, but the rifle seems heavier the more I try. I’m fatigued and I’m struggling. The more I force things the worse they’ll get.

  “If he’s using one of these, it’s not exactly doing all of the work for him,” Marino speaks up. “That’s the point.”

  “A point I get all too well,” I reply.

  “Five miles per hour, right to left,” Kuster says.

  I press a switch, toggling in the wind speed and direction. The gyroscopes and accelerometer will compensate for barrel movement, and the computerized scope will handle distance, temperature, atmospheric pressure and elevation. I fight with the white dot again, doing a poor job of tagging the target.

  “If you don’t like it clear it and take another one,” Lucy says.

  Even my heartbeat bounces the white dot around, and then I get it right and press the button on the side of the trigger guard.

  “Nice tag.” Kuster stares at the iPad. “Back a little out.”

  I try again.

  “A little more. Move forward on the bench, triangulate with your left arm and try to get comfortable, get really tucked in. Nope, clear that. Try again.”

  I tag the target yet again, and I’m shaky and my vision is getting blurry. I hold the white dot on the center of the target and push the button.

  “Beautiful,” Kuster says.

  I line up the cross hairs. They go from blue to red as I press the trigger, but the rifle doesn’t fire. It’s calculating the conditions and any movement a target might make. Then a loud crack and a recoil kicks into my shoulder.

  “Center mass about five o’clock. Good enough to get the job done.” Kuster shows me on the iPad. “Congratulations, Doc. You just killed someone at a thousand yards.”

  CHAPTER 42

  IT ISN’T TRUE THAT a novice could get hold of a PGF and hit the bull’s-eye every time. Jack Kuster demonstrated with excruciating clarity that the killer didn’t simply acquire the latest technology and start on a murderous spree that includes hitting nearly impossible targets.

  The person we’re after is experienced, highly skilled and could be using a smart rifle, a weapon that’s a lot smarter than I am I’ve decided. I learned the hard way that tagging the target isn’t easy as pie. Typically when I managed to get the white dot just right I moved the rifle and lost the tag, and then there’s the problem, the seemingly insurmountable problem of the flight path. After several hours of firing rounds at gong stands and hearing the faint clinks of copper hitting steel Kuster verified what I didn’t want to be true.

  There are no areas of the range including its towers that are elevated enough to simulate the Jamal Nari shooting. In conditions like the ones Thursday morning Kuster estimates the sniper had to have been as much as three hundred feet above the target. At that distance the most anybody would have heard is a snap of the bullet hitting. He snapped his fingers to show us.

  SNAP. I keep hearing it.

  He said we’d be “foolish” to rule out a helicopter, and it’s just one more thing that the FBI will use against Lucy. A sharpshooter and gun expert, she was flying the Thursday morning Nari was killed, and I feel an undercurrent of urgency as I slide my magnetic card into the lock of my hotel room and open the door. I walk in and drop my bags on the perfectly made bed. I turn on lights and find the desk and a bottle of water, distractedly aware of formal furniture and striped upholstery as I plug in my laptop and sit.

  I open a satellite map of Cambridge that was updated eleven minutes ago at eight-fifty P.M. and find the Victorian house on Farrar Street, lit up, tall iron lamps glowing. I recognize the big porch, the bicycles and a scooter chained to pillars, parked cars, the yellow ribbon of crime scene tape still encircling the yard. I zoom out and move due north to the construction site where a tower crane operator allegedly fell to his death early Wednesday morning.

  Across the line in Somerville, a tall building, concrete, glass and scaffolding and not much else. I search for information. A twenty-story luxury apartment complex, construction began last summer and the site is exactly point-six miles as the crow flies or approximately a thousand yards from where Nari dropped to the pavement, bags of groceries spilling everywhere.

  As is typical of most high-rise construction there’s a tower crane for aerial lifting, 250 feet tall, I estimate. The operator cab is tucked in the right angle of the tower and the jib, and the only way up is to climb the fixed ladder, caged inside steel framework that wouldn’t prevent someone from falling especially if the person were ambushed. I can’t imagine starting my workday climbing up such a thing, wearing a backpack or carrying a rucksack with basic necessities, and I log in to the CFC database and find the case from three days ago, June 11.

  Art Ruiz, forty-one years old, with the blunt force trauma and deceleration injuries I expect in a fall from a significant height, and I study photographs of him at the scene and on the autopsy table, noting his lacerated right ear, his open skull fractures, his crushed pelvis and lower legs. Then I get interested in the cuts and ripped nails of his hands. They aren’t consistent with someone who suffered a major cardiac event while climbing a ladder, someone unconscious who dropped to his death. I read Jen Garate’s report and notice that Sil Machado was the investigator.

  Discovered by coworkers at approximately eight o’clock on the morning of June 11th, Ruiz was on his back at the base of the tower crane, his jeans and shirt bloody and disarrayed, one boot and his hard hat off, his backpack on but the straps were down around his elbows and his arms were badly abraded. I notice from the CT scan that both of his shoulders were dislocated, and a close-up photograph of the right side of his face and forehead tell a different story. They show discrete areas of contusion, very faint, a pinkish purple, a parallel pattern that I associate with shoe tread. I call Luke Zenner’s cell phone.

  “It’s hard to know exactly what he hit on his way d
own. That’s one of the reasons I pended his case,” he says to me when I ask him about the marks on the crane operator’s face. “As you can see he has a lot of nonlethal injuries from hitting the rungs of the steel ladder and its caging as he fell, and he also has narrowing of his vessels, apparently asymptomatic cardiovascular disease. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get dizzy or faint. Climbing up two-hundred-something feet of ladder would be strenuous.”

  “He also could have been kicked.” I open another map on my computer, this one of Edgewater, New Jersey. “If someone were already inside the cab, all this person had to do was open the door when Ruiz reached the top. Swift hard kicks to the head and he slams back against metalwork and loses his grip, which might explain his dislocated shoulders. His backpack got snagged possibly repeatedly, and the injuries to his hands indicate he may have attempted to grab hold of rungs and the caging as he fell. What does Machado think?”

  “I guess you haven’t heard. As of late this afternoon he’s no longer with Cambridge. I understand he’s taken a job with the state police.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” But Marino’s better off and that means all of us are.

  Another high-rise under construction, another tower crane just blocks from where Julie Eastman was murdered, and I search for government reports, for anything that might have been made public. I ask Luke if there’s been any discussion about Ruiz being a homicide.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  “And the construction site? I’m assuming it was immediately shut down.”

  “Yes. You know what happens when OSHA gets involved.”

  “Well there was something similar in a New Jersey shooting that’s connected to the Nari shooting . . .”

  “Hold on. And these shootings are related to the construction death?”

  “I’m thinking that,” I reply. “A construction site close to the Edgewater Ferry Landing was shut down two days before Julie Eastman was murdered. Apparently there were complaints to OSHA about safety violations and the job was temporarily halted pending an investigation. And six months ago, the shooting homicide in Morristown? Jack Segal was murdered as he was getting out of his car behind his restaurant, which is a third of a mile from another major construction site with a tower crane.”

  “Was that site also shut down?”

  “It would have been,” I reply. “Segal was murdered December twenty-ninth and I don’t know of any construction site that is active during the holidays. They obviously don’t disassemble tower cranes when work is halted and there’s nothing to stop someone from climbing up and breaking into the cab.”

  “To shoot people.”

  “The ultimate deer stand, hundreds of feet in the air,” I reply.

  “The question is who the hell would think of something like that?”

  “Someone who’s been doing very bad things for a while and has no fear,” I reply. “A trained killer in other words, the worst rogue imaginable.”

  AN HOUR LATER IN the bar downstairs, I squeeze lime into a gin and tonic while Lucy drinks beer.

  “Are you still convinced Copperhead . . . ?” I start to ask.

  “It’s a stupid name,” she interrupts. “A stunt for attention.”

  “The killer is the one who chose it, not the media.”

  “Right. Hijacked the Twitter account of a dead plumber, picking a name that would fuck with us.”

  “How did this person do it?” I follow Lucy’s lead. I avoid using pronouns or any reference to gender.

  “Easy if you know how to data mine, how to access death records. And we’re supposed to start thinking that too. It’s all planned and deliberate.”

  “We are? Us specifically?” I ask and she says nothing. “Why would it enter your mind that this person wanted to ensure we’d find an intact bullet?” I get back to my question as I continue to think about what else Jack Kuster said.

  Lucy is subjective. She’s wound so tight she’s about to pop. She’s that way for a reason. Lucy always has one and I’m going to find out what it is.

  “An engraved three on a bullet and we’re supposed to think about how many other people are going to die and if the next victims are us,” she says.

  I think four to go as I sip my drink and listen to the clatter of the Midtown Express Train. The grand white brick Madison Hotel is close to railroad tracks in a historic area of Morristown that’s only a thirty- or forty-minute drive from where Julie Eastman was murdered. The restaurant where Jack Segal was shot is even closer, and a month ago the killer was inside this hotel’s business center sending me a tweet.

  A poem from Copperhead that referenced a silent hangman and gold-like fragments. A poem that said tick tock. A disturbed unsettled flutter starts in my gut as if I’m about to be sick.

  “An elevation of several hundred feet.” I bring that up to see what Lucy will say. “How is that possible in the area of Cambridge where Nari was shot?”

  “You say that as if you already know the answer.” She looks at me.

  “I might. Maybe I got the idea from you.”

  “Not from me.”

  “From my wanting an explanation other than a helicopter, specifically your helicopter,” I reply.

  “The tallest building anywhere near the house on Farrar Street is maybe four or five stories,” she says and then she brings up construction, the high-rise being built on Somerville Avenue where the tower crane operator died.

  “So you thought of it too,” I reply and I tell her he might have been murdered.

  “That would make sense,” she says.

  “Why would it?” I ask.

  “It was smart of you to figure it out and I agree. It makes sense,” she repeats.

  The bar is pleasantly dark with wainscoted walls and bare wooden floors, and there’s a piano at the far end, nobody playing right now. It’s almost eleven and we’ve showered and changed, both of us in jeans and polo shirts, finishing salads, going easy with our drinks after hours in the heat. I feel the unpleasant flutter again as I confront her about helicopters because someone else will and may have already.

  “You were flying Thursday morning around the time Nari was murdered.” I sip my drink and focus on my stomach to see if the tonic water might settle it.

  “After he was murdered,” she corrects me. “I took off from Norwood at eleven-oh-eight and that’s on an ATC recording. It’s an indisputable fact.”

  “I’m not interrogating you, Lucy. But it has to be cleared up. I think the shootings are being done from tower cranes but we have to talk about helicopters.”

  “Go right ahead, interrogate. You won’t be the only one. In fact you aren’t.”

  “What time did you begin monitoring the Boston-area frequencies Thursday morning?” The tonic water isn’t helping and I don’t know what’s wrong. “You routinely do that prior to a flight. You check weather. You check area traffic and notices.” The waitress is heading our way, a young woman with short spikey hair, in tight black pants and a white cotton dress shirt. “Could there have been another helicopter up that might have . . .”

  “Might have what?” Lucy interrupts. “The killer put it on autopilot and fired a heavy weapon system out the window? Or maybe had an accomplice who was doing the flying with a door off? No way. You were smart to think of the cranes. I guarantee you’re right. It makes sense.”

  “Need another?” The waitress smiles at me and glances warily at Lucy as my feeling gets worse.

  “A shot of gin on the side and extra tonic water please.” It’s a bad idea and I probably should go upstairs to bed but I can’t possibly.

  “Do you have Saint Pauli Girl?” Lucy asks boldly and I’m stunned.

  “Yes.” The waitress sounds nervous.

  “Now we’re talking.” Lucy is intimidating her and she hurries off.

  “What just happened?” I ta
ke a deep slow breath, waiting for the nausea to pass. “How did you know about the beer?”

  “You mean the empty bottles lined up on the rocks where Gracie Smithers had her head smashed? You took photographs at the scene and uploaded them into the database. You also took plenty of photographs at the Patty Marsico scene in Nantucket. Do you remember what was on the windowsill inside the flooded basement? Four empty Saint Pauli girl bottles, wiped clean of prints, the DNA destroyed by bleach, the labels facing out. You know who owns the real estate company, the one that Patty Marsico’s estranged husband tried to sue? Gordian Knot Estates, the corporation formed three years ago by Bob Rosado.”

  “You just scared the hell out of our server.” I finish my drink and don’t feel any worse or better.

  “I don’t want her hanging around.”

  “I don’t think she has any interest in hanging around. Are you ready to start telling me the truth? Do you think I don’t know when you’re not?” I touch my forehead and it’s hot.

  “You know everything,” she says.

  “We’ll sit here until I do.”

  “Why’s your face so flushed?”

  “No more lies,” I reply.

  “It’s not lying. It’s about timing, about my feeling it’s safe to share information. So far it hasn’t been safe and I wasn’t sure of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you won’t approve. Maybe you won’t believe me the same way certain other people don’t.”

  “What other people?”

  “Marino. I know what he thinks.”

  “What did you tell him that you haven’t told me?”

  I hold her stare, trying to read what’s going through her mind, secrets she doesn’t want to trust me with, and she’s not afraid. She’s not angry. She’s something else I can’t quite define and then I catch the scent of it. I feel its motionless presence, its stare like a majestic animal perfectly camouflaged. And I know what it is.