“There’s ice in the fish box. And groceries,” Bev says in a flat tone.
“You didn’t bring me any pups,” Jay comments.
“I was busy, and nothing was open.”
“Plenty of strays out there, if you aren’t too lazy to look for them.”
She opens the refrigerator and pours cold water on a dish towel.
“That’s all right,” the lamb meekly replies, relaxing a little.
Jay is handsome and sweet. He is a friend. Not horrid, like that ugly beast of a woman.
“I’ll be fine. I don’t need any ice.”
“It’s not all right.” Jay gently arranges the pillow under her head, and she cries out in pain. “No, it’s not all right.”
He slips a hand under her neck, moving her head so he can feel the back of it. The pressure of his fingers is too much, and the woman cries out again.
“What’d you do to her?” he asks Bev.
“She fell in the boat.”
The woman says nothing and refuses to look at Bev.
“Fell with a little help, maybe?” Jay asks in a tone of perfect self-control.
He gathers the lamb’s blouse together and buttons it without touching her.
BENTON TAKES OFF his jacket and drops it in a trash can.
A block south, he tosses his baseball cap into another trash can and ducks into the shadows of scaffolding to unfasten his canvas knapsack. Inside is a black do-rag, and he ties it tightly around his head. He slips on a denim vest that has an American flag embroidered on the back. During a brief lull in pedestrian traffic, he substitutes his sunglasses for amber-tinted ones in different frames. Rolling up the knapsack, he tucks it under his arm and cuts left on 73rd Street, then left again on Third and back on 75th, where he stands at the corner of Lucy’s building. Jim the doorman ignores him and wanders inside the lobby for a welcome rush of air-conditioning.
New technology is Benton’s ally and enemy. Cell phone calls can be traced by more than caller ID. Signals bounce off satellites and boomerang to where the caller is located geographically when the call is made, and to date, it is impossible to foil this technology. Benton has no choice but somehow to work around it. While caller ID will erroneously indicate that the call is being made from a Texas prison, the satellite transmission will reveal that the call was made in Manhattan, pinpointed to an area that is smaller than a city block.
He uses this to his advantage, however. All obstacles can be steps to a higher benefit.
Benton makes the call from Lucy’s address at Lexington and 75th Street. Jean-Baptiste is on death row, and that is easy enough to check. Logic would dictate that Jean-Baptiste could not have called collect from Manhattan. Then who did? Lucy will puzzle over the call made in the immediate area of her office building, and knowing her as well as Benton does, he is certain she will make a call from her own address and see that the same coordinates are pinpointed by the satellite.
This will lead her to the conclusion that there must have been a technical glitch, that somehow the transmission traced back to where the call was received instead of where it was initiated. She will not understand how this could have happened when it has never happened before. Lucy will be paranoid. Without a doubt, she will be angry, because she does not forgive sloppy work or technical screwups. She will blame the snafu on the telephone company or her staff. Probably the latter.
As for Jim the doorman, when asked, he will say that at the precise moment the call was made, he saw no one on a cell phone in front of the building or close to it. This will be a lie. Almost everybody in New York walks around with a cell phone to his or her ear. The truth is, even if Jim remembers the precise time he left his post for the air-conditioned lobby, he won’t want to admit it.
The last obstacle is voice analysis, which Lucy will conduct immediately to verify that the caller was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. That is no threat. Benton has spent several years meticulously studying, transcribing and editing recordings of Jean-Baptiste’s voice, then rerecording them into digital files with a single directional microphone that, when used in a high-sensitivity mode, picks up multidirectional sound, or background noise—in this case, the inside of a prison. He edited and spliced it on a computer, and the results are seamless, each file a blitz of sound bites intended for voicemail or a live recipient who has no chance for a response that would force a mental engagement that is impossible. Switching from Menu to a folder he named Redstick for Baton Rouge, he verifies the time stamp on the LCD and double-checks that all details of the setup are in order.
He plugs the microphone into a speaker port and tucks in the earpiece.
The phone at Infosearch Solutions—The Last Precinct—is picked up.
“Manhattan. Collect call to Infosearch Solutions on Seventy-fifth,” he says into the microphone.
“Your name?”
“Polunksy Unit.”
“Please hold.”
The operator connects the call.
“Collect call from Polunksy Unit. Will you accept charges?”
“Yes,” without pause or change of inflection.
“Good afternoon. May I ask who’s calling?” a male voice continues, the caller ID showing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Benton sets noise cancel on high to eradicate the live feedback of New York traffic and other sounds that would be ruinous for a call supposedly made from the interior of a penitentiary. He presses Play. The indicator light glows green, and File One begins.
“When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge.” Jean-Baptiste’s recorded voice is as natural as if he himself is speaking in real time.
“She’s out of the office. Who’s calling? Who is this?” The man in Lucy’s office tries to talk to what is nothing more than a memory chip on the line. “May I give her a message?”
The call ended seven seconds ago. Benton erases File One from Redstick, to ensure that Jean-Baptiste’s faked message cannot be played again, ever, by anyone.
He walks swiftly along the congested sidewalk again, head bent, missing nothing.
PLEASE DON’T HURT ME,” the lamb says.
Jay helps the woman sit up. She cries and moans as he gently cleans her bloody hair, worrying about the split in her scalp, caused by the blunt-force trauma of her head cracking against the outboard motor. He reassures her that the injury isn’t serious and didn’t fracture her skull. She’s not seeing double, is she?
“No,” she says, her breath catching as he touches her hair again with the wet, bloody towel. “I can see fine.”
Jay’s sweetness, his protectiveness, has the usual effect, and the woman’s attention is fixed only on him. She identifies with him to the extent that she feels she can tell him that Bev—whose name the woman doesn’t know—pushed her into the outboard motor.
“That’s how I hit my head,” she confides to Jay.
He tosses the bloody towel to Bev. She hasn’t moved, just stands in the middle of the small room, staring at him like a cottonmouth coiled to strike. The towel lands at her feet, and she doesn’t pick it up.
He tells her to pick it up.
Bev doesn’t.
“Pick it up and wash it in the sink,” he says. “I don’t want to look at that thing on the floor. You shouldn’t have hurt her. Clean the towel and get all this insect repellent off her.”
“I don’t need her to get it off me,” the woman pleads. “Maybe it’s good to keep it on because of all the bugs.”
“No. You need it washed off,” Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. “You have too much on. It’s toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That’s not good.”
“I don’t want her touching me again!”
“She hurt you?”
The lamb doesn’t answer.
“I’m here. She won’t hurt you.”
Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.
“We don’t need to waste water,” she says. “The tank�
��s low.”
“It’s supposed to rain, eventually,” Jay replies, studying the woman as if she’s a car he might buy. “The tank’s got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here.”
“Please don’t hurt me.”
The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.
“Just take me home and I won’t tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God.”
Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he’s glorious to look at, and so far he’s been nice.
“Won’t tell anybody what?” Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. “What’s there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn’t you, and we’re Good Samaritans, taking care of you.”
She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.
“Make it quick. Please,” she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. “If you aren’t going to let me go. Make it quick.”
Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman’s blouse.
“Ah. No bra,” he says. “She wasn’t wearing one?” He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.
Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.
The woman’s eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.
“Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up,” he orders Bev. “You touch her again, you know what I’ll do to you.”
Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed, long-running drama.
THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida.
Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard’s case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.
Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscope’s stage. If she could add up the hours she’s spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she respects the histologist, whose devotion is to the minuscule structures of tissues and the tales their cells can tell, she has never been able to comprehend sitting inside a tiny lab day in and day out, surrounded by sections of heart, lung, liver, brain and other organs, and injuries and stigmata of diseases that are cut into sections and turn rubbery inside bottles of a fixative such as formalin. Each tissue section is embedded in paraffin wax or a plastic resin and shaved into slices thin enough for light to pass through them. After they are mounted on glass slides, they are stained with a variety of dyes that were developed by the nineteenth-century textile industry.
Mostly, Scarpetta sees a lot of pinks and blues, but there are a perfusion of colors used, depending on the tissue and the cellular structure and possible defects that need to give up their secrets to her at the other end of the lens. Dyes, like diseases, are often named for whoever discovered or invented them, and this is where histology becomes unnecessarily complicated, if not annoying. It isn’t enough for dyes or dyeing techniques to be called blue or violet; they must be Cresyl blue, Cresyl violet, or Perl’s Prussian blue, or Heidenhain’s haematoxylin (purplish red), or Masson’s trichrome (blue and green), or Bielschowsky (neutral red), or her favorite mundanity: Jones’s methenamine silver. A typical egocentric pathological legacy is a van Gieson staining of a Schwann cell nuclei from a Schwannoma, and Scarpetta fails to understand why German naturalist Theodor Schwann would have wanted a tumor named after him.
She peers into the lens at the contraction bands in the pink-stained tissue shaved from a section of Charlotte Dard’s heart at autopsy. Some fibers are missing their nuclei, indicating necrosis, or the death of tissue, and other slides reveal pink-and-blue-stained inflammation and old scarring, and narrowing of the coronary arteries. The Louisiana woman was only thirty-two when she dropped dead at the door of a motel room in Baton Rouge, dressed to go out, keys in hand.
It was suspected eight years ago, at the time of her death, that her family pharmacist illegally gave her the powerful pain medication OxyContin, found in her pocketbook. She didn’t have a prescription for the drug. In a letter to Scarpetta, Dr. Lanier suggests that this pharmacist might have fled to Palm Desert, California. Dr. Lanier doesn’t indicate what he bases this possibility on or offer further details for his reopening Charlotte Dard’s case.
It is a mess for multiple reasons: The case is old; there is no evidence the drug came from the pharmacist, and even if it did, unless he premeditated killing her with OxyContin, he is not guilty of first-degree murder; at the time of Charlotte Dard’s death, he would not talk to the police but through his attorney claimed that a family friend with a ruptured disk must have given Charlotte Dard OxyContin, and she accidentally overdosed on it.
Several copies of letters sent eight years ago to Dr. Lanier are from the pharmacist’s attorney, Rocco Caggiano.
BEYOND THE WINDOW IN FRONT of Scarpetta’s desk, shadows crawl over sand dunes as the sun moves.
Palm fronds rattle lightly, and a man walking his yellow lab on the beach leans into a headwind. Far off on the hazy blue horizon, a container ship forges south, probably to Miami. If Scarpetta is too caught up in her work, she will forget the time and where she is and soon will miss another flight to New York.
Dr. Lanier answers his phone and is hoarse as he says, “Hello.”
“You sound terrible,” Scarpetta says sympathetically.
“I don’t know what I caught, but I feel like hell. Thanks for getting back to me.”
“What meds are you taking? I hope it’s decongestants and a cough suppressant with an expectorant, and that you’re staying away from antihistamines. Try the daytime or nondrowsy formulas that don’t list antihistamines or doxylamine succinate on the label—unless you want to dry yourself out and get a bacterial infection. And stay away from alcohol. It lowers your immunities.”
He blows his nose. “I’m a real medical doctor, just so you know. And an addictionologist, meaning I do know a thing or two about drugs.” He says this without a trace of defensiveness. “Thought you might be relieved to hear that.”
Scarpetta is embarrassed for making assumptions. Coroners are elected officials and unfortunately, nationwide, many of them are not physicians.
“I didn’t mean to insult you, Dr. Lanier.”
“You didn’t. By the way, your sidekick Pete Marino thinks you walk on water.”
“You checked me out.” She is nonplussed. “Good. Now hopefully we can get down to business. I’ve been through Charlotte Dard’s case.”
“An oldie but goodie, and I don’t mean that literally. There’s nothing good about it. Hold on. Let me get something to write with. Unquestionably, there’s a Bermuda Triangle for pens, and in my home it’s my beloved wife. All right.”
“Mrs. Dard’s case is definitely perplexing,” Scarpetta begins. “As you know from her tox reports, oxymorphone—the metabolite of OxyContin—is only four milligrams per liter of blood, which puts her in the low lethal range. Her gastric is negative, and the level in her liver’s no higher than the level in her blood. In other words, death from an overdose of OxyContin is equivocal. Clearly, her drug level isn’t as critical as her clinical findings.”
“I agree. My thought all along. If you interpret her tox in light of the histological findings, it’s possible she didn’t need as high a level for an accidental overdose. Although her reports and body diagrams don’t indicate any cutaneous stigmata of past intravenous drug abuse,” he adds. “So I’m guessing she was a pill-popper but didn’t shoot up.
”
“Certainly she was a chronic drug abuser,” Scarpetta says. “Her heart tells us that. Patchy necrosis and fibrosis of varying age, and chronic ischemia, plus an absence of coronary artery disease or cardiomegaly. Basically, a coke heart.”
It is a catch-all phrase that does not necessarily mean the person was a cocaine addict. Drugs such as narcotics, synthetic narcotics, OxyContin, hydrocodone, Percocet, Percodan and whatever else the addict can get his or her hands on will destroy the heart just as completely as cocaine will. Elvis Presley is a sad example.
“I need to ask you about blackouts,” Dr. Lanier says, after a pause.
“What about them?” This must be what he so urgently wanted to talk to her about. “I saw nothing in the case file you sent me that mentions blackouts.”
She checks her irritation. As a private consultant, she is limited by the medicolegal information presented to her, and the absence of pertinent findings—or the presence of incorrect findings—is intolerable. Until she gave up working her own cases or supervising those worked by her other forensic pathologists throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, she did not have to rely on the competence or veracity of virtual strangers.
“Charlotte Dard suffered occasional blackouts,” Dr. Lanier explains. “Or at least this is what I was told at the time.”
“Who told you?”
“Her sister. It appears,” he goes on, “or let me qualify this by saying it is alleged, that she suffered from retrograde amnesia . . .”
“I certainly would think her family would know that, unless no one was ever home.”
“Problem is, her husband Jason Dard’s a rather shady character. Nobody around here knows much, maybe nothing about him, except he’s rich as hell and lives on an old plantation. I wouldn’t call Mrs. Guidon a reliable witness. Although she certainly could be telling the truth about her sister’s condition prior to her death.”
“I’ve read the police narrative, which is brief. Tell me what you know,” Scarpetta says.
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