Blow Fly

by Patricia Cornwell

  “When was this?” Scarpetta asks.

  Nic thinks. “Not long before my mother was killed.”

  “How long is not long?” Rudy asks.

  “I don’t know.” Nic swallows hard again. “Days. Days, I think. She wore this dress, had to go out to buy it.” She shuts her eyes again. A sob catches in her throat. “It was pink with white piping. It was still hanging on her closet door when she got killed, you know, hanging there to remind her it needed to go to the dry cleaner’s.”

  “And your mother died less than two weeks before Charlotte Dard did,” Scarpetta remarks.

  “Kind of interesting,” Marino points out, “that Mrs. Dard was so fucked up and having violent fits, and nobody worried about her throwing a fancy garden party?”

  “I’m thinking that,” Rudy says.

  “You know what?” Marino adds. “I drove almost twenty hours to get here. Then Lucy made me airsick. I gotta go to bed. Otherwise, I’ll be making deductions that will cause you to arrest Santa Claus for something.”

  “I didn’t make you airsick,” Lucy says. “Go to bed. You need your beauty sleep. I thought you were Santa Claus.”

  He gets up from the couch and leaves, heading to the main house.

  “I’m not going to make it much longer, either.” Scarpetta gets up from her chair.

  “Time to go,” Nic says.

  “You don’t have to.” Scarpetta tries hard to help.

  “Can I ask you just one last thing?” Nic says.

  “Of course.” She is so tired, her brain feels frozen.

  “Why would he beat her to death?”

  “Why did someone beat Rebecca Milton to death?”

  “Things didn’t go the way he planned.”

  “Would your mother have resisted him?” Lucy asks.

  “She would have clawed his eyes out,” Nic replies.

  “Maybe that’s your answer. Please forgive me. I can’t be much use to you now. I’m too tired.”

  Scarpetta leaves the small living room and closes her bedroom door.

  “How are you?” Lucy moves to the couch and looks at Nic. “This is tough, really tough. Too tough to describe. You’re brave, Nic Robillard.”

  “Worse for my father. He gave up on life. Quit everything.”

  “Like what?” Rudy asks gently.

  “Well, he loved to teach. And he loves the water, or used to. He and Mom. They had this little fishing camp where nobody would bother them. Out in the middle of nowhere, I mean nowhere. He’s never been there since.”

  “Where?”

  “Dutch Bayou.”

  Rudy and Lucy look at each other.

  “Who knew about it?” Lucy asks.

  “I guess whoever my mother chatted about it to. She was a talker, all right. Unlike my dad.”

  “Where’s Dutch Bayou?” Lucy then asks.

  “Near Lake Maurepas. Off Blind River.”

  “Could you find it now?”

  Nic stares at her. “Why?”

  “Just answer my question.” She lightly touches Nic’s arm.

  She nods. Their eyes lock.

  “Okay, then.” Lucy doesn’t stop looking at her. “Tomorrow. You ever been in a helicopter?”

  Rudy gets up. “I gotta go. I’m beat.”

  He knows. In his own way, he accepts it. But he’s not going to watch.

  Lucy gives him her eyes, aware that he understands but in a way never will. “See you in the morning, Rudy.”

  He walks off, his feet light on the stairs.

  “Don’t be reckless,” Lucy tells Nic. “You strike me as the type who would and probably has been.”

  “I’ve been engaging in my own sting operations,” she confesses. “Dressing like potential victims. I look like a potential victim.”

  Lucy examines her closely, looking her over, making an assessment, as if she hasn’t been making assessments all night.

  “Yes, with your blond hair, body build, air of intelligence. But your demeanor isn’t that of a victim. Your energy is strong. However, that could simply present more of a challenge to the killer. More exciting. A bigger coup.”

  “I’ve been wrongly motivated,” Nic chastises herself. “Not that I don’t want him caught. More than anything, I want him caught. But I admit I’m more aggressive, more bullheaded, maybe putting myself in danger, yes, because of a task force that doesn’t want small-town girls like me in their club. Even though I’m probably the only one who’s been trained at the best forensic academy in the U.S., trained by the best. Including your aunt.”

  “When you’ve been out there putting yourself in danger, did you observe anything?”

  “The Wal-Mart where Katherine was abducted. I was there within hours of it happening. One thing still stands out, this lady who acted peculiar, fell down in the parking lot, said her knee went out from under her. Something bothered me. I backed off and wouldn’t help her up. Something told me not to touch her. I thought her eyes were weird, scary. And she called me a lamb. I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a lamb. I think she was some homeless schizo.”

  “Describe what she looked like.” Lucy tries to remain calm, tries not to make the evidence fit the case instead of the other way around.

  Nic describes her. “You know, the funny thing about it is, she looked a bit like this woman I saw a few minutes earlier inside the store. She was digging around in cheap lingerie, shoplifting.”

  Now Lucy is getting excited.

  “It’s never occurred to anyone that the killer might be a woman or at least have a woman who is an accomplice. Bev Kiffin,” she says.

  Nic gets up for more coffee, her hand shaking. She blames it on caffeine. “Who is Bev Kiffin?”

  “On the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.”

  “Oh my God.” Nic sits back down, this time closer to Lucy. She wants to be close to her. She doesn’t know why. But the near proximity of her is energizing and exciting.

  “Promise me you won’t go out there prowling again,” Lucy tells her. “Consider yourself on my task force, okay? We do things together, all of us. My aunt, Rudy, Marino.”

  “I promise.”

  “You don’t want to tangle with Bev Kiffin, who is probably bringing the abducted women to her partner, Jay Talley, number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

  “They hiding out here?” Nic can’t believe it. “Two people like that are hiding out here?”

  “I can’t think of a better place. You said your father has a fishing shack that he abandoned after your mother was murdered. Any possibility Charlotte Dard might have known about it, known where it was? Or is.”

  “Is. Papa never sold it. The place must be half-rotted by now. Mrs. Dard might have known, since my mother was so into salvage, the stuff she sold in her shop. She liked old weathered wood, would recommend using it for fireplace mantels, exposed beams, whatever. Especially, she liked the thick pilings the fishing shacks are built on. I don’t know what she might have said to Mrs. Dard. But my mother was completely trusting. She thought everybody had their good qualities. The truth is, she talked too much.”

  “Can you show me where the fishing shack is, the one your father abandoned?”

  “It’s in Dutch Bayou, off the Blind River. I can show you.”

  “From the air?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Nic says.

  BENTON LEAVES HIS JAGUAR tucked in a church’s back parking lot less than half a mile from the Dard plantation house.

  Each time he hears a car or truck approaching from either direction, he crashes through underbrush and hides in thick woods across the road from the Mississippi River. In addition to not knowing who might come along, he is well aware that it would appear odd to see a man in a black suit, black T-shirt, black cap and black butt pack walking along the side of a narrow road in the rain. Someone might stop and ask if he’s had car trouble. People would stare.

  When he spots the gates that he drove past late last night, he leaves the pavement and
enters the woods, this time penetrating deeper, until the mansion rises above trees, his scan constant. Looking where he steps, he does his best to avoid snapping fallen branches. Fortunately, the dead leaves are wet and silent. When he scouted the area last night, he didn’t venture into the woods because it was too dark to see, and he didn’t dare use a flashlight. He did, however, climb over the gate, getting rust all over his jacket and jeans, one of many explanations for why he opted to wear his suit again.

  He wondered how much the place had changed since he had been here last. In the dark, it was difficult to tell whether it had been kept in good repair, but his last act was to toss a rock near shrubbery around the front to see if the motion sensors lit up. They didn’t. He tried again, and not a single light was triggered. If any of them are still in working order and he activates them this morning, they won’t be conspicuous, even though the sun is blanketed in gray. The grounds used to have an elaborate camera system, but there was no way Benton would have been foolish enough to test cameras, to see if they would turn red and follow him as if they were alive.

  The cars in the driveway are a new white Mercedes 500 AMC and an older-model white Volvo. The Mercedes was not here last night. He doesn’t know who it belongs to and doesn’t have time or means to run the Louisiana plate. The Volvo belongs to Eveline Guidon, or at least it did six years ago. Grateful for dark clothing, Benton freezes like a deer behind a thick, dripping tree when the front door of the mansion opens. He crouches low, completely out of view, about fifty feet to the left of the front steps.

  U.S. Attorney Weldon Winn walks out, talking in his usual booming voice, more obese than when Benton last laid eyes on him. Expecting him to climb into his expensive car, Benton thinks fast. Weldon Winn’s being here isn’t according to plan but certainly is a bonus. It strongly hints that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has sought or will seek asylum at his family’s Baton Rouge stronghold, a plantation of incredible corruption that has escaped suspicion for decades because the people associated with it are either completely loyal or dead.

  Benton, for example, is dead.

  He watches Baton Rouge’s despicable U.S. Attorney follow an old brick walkway to an old stone building with a dark Gothic door that leads down into the wine cellar, the centuries-old cave, almost half a mile of convoluted tunnels dug by slaves. Winn unlocks the door, steps inside and shuts it behind him. Benton moves swiftly in a crouch, soaking wet by now, ducking behind the cover of boxwoods, glancing repeatedly from the wine cellar to the house. His riskiest move is his next. He walks casually, upright, his back to the house.

  Should anyone look out the window, the man in black may very well appear to be a Chandonne friend. The door is thick oak, and he barely makes out voices behind it.

  SCARPETTA CAN’T RELEASE Albert Dard from her mind. She imagines the scars on his little body and is well aware that self-mutilation is an addiction, and if he continues hurting himself, it seems likely that he will be committed to psychiatric hospitals again and again until he becomes as mentally ill as those patients whose diagnoses justify their being institutionalized.

  Albert Dard doesn’t need to be committed. He needs help. He needs for someone to at least attempt to find out why his anxiety increased so severely a year ago that he shut down, repressed his feelings and perhaps memories to such an extreme that now he needs self-inflicted pain to experience control, a brief release and an affirmation of his own existence. Scarpetta recalls the boy’s almost dissociated state on the plane while he played with trading cards, violent ones relating to an ax. She envisions his extreme distress at the thought of no one meeting him, of an abandonment that she doubts is anything new.

  With each passing moment, she becomes increasingly angry at those who are supposed to take care of him and frightened for his safety.

  Digging inside her pocketbook as she drinks coffee in Dr. Lanier’s guest house, she finds the telephone number she wrote down when Albert waited for an aunt who did not intend to pick him up, but orchestrated events so that Scarpetta would take care of him. It no longer matters what manipulations or conspiracies were on Mrs. Guidon’s mind. Perhaps it was all a lure to get Scarpetta to that house to see what she knows about Charlotte Dard’s death. Perhaps Mrs. Guidon is now satisfied that Scarpetta knows nothing more about the death than has ever been known.

  She dials the number and is startled when Albert answers the phone.

  “It’s the lady who sat next to you on the plane,” she says.

  “Hi!” he greets her, surprised and very pleased. “How come you’re calling me? My aunt said you wouldn’t.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. She went outside.”

  “Did she leave the house in her car?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Albert,” Scarpetta says. “I’m still in town, but I’m leaving soon, and wondered if I could come by for a visit.”

  “Now?” The thought seems to make him happy. “You’d come see just me?”

  “Would that be all right?”

  He eagerly says it would.

  BENTON QUIETLY, CAREFULLY OPENS the wine cellar door, his Sig Sauer drawn and cocked as he stands to one side of the narrow opening.

  The conversation just beyond stops, and a male voice says, “You didn’t shut it all the way.”

  Feet sound on steps, maybe five steps, and a hand, most likely Weldon Winn’s, pushes the door to shut it, and Benton pushes back hard, the door opening wide and knocking Winn down the steps, where he lies, shocked and groaning, on the stone floor. Whoever he was talking to had seconds, no more, to flee down another set of steps. Benton can hear the person running fast, getting away, but there is nowhere for him—perhaps Jean-Baptiste—to go. The cave has an entrance and no exit.

  “Get up,” Benton says to Winn. “Slowly.”

  “I’m hurt.” He looks up as Benton stands on the top step, shutting the door behind him, while he keeps the pistol pointed at Winn’s chest.

  “I don’t give a goddamn if you’re hurt. Get up.”

  Benton takes off his baseball cap and tosses it on top of Winn. Recognition is slow, then Winn’s face blanches and his lips part as he lies twisted on the floor, tangled in his own raincoat, staring in horror.

  “It can’t be you,” he says in awe. “It can’t be!”

  All the while this is going on, Benton listens for footsteps, for whoever escaped. He hears no one.

  The small, windowless space has a cobweb-covered naked lightbulb overhead and a small, very old cypress table, covered with dark rings left by the countless bottles of wine that were tasted in here. Walls are damp stone, and attached to the one on the left of Benton are four iron rings in eyebolts. They are very old, but most of the rust is worn off. Nearby on the floor are coils of yellow nylon rope and an electrical receptacle.

  “Get up,” Benton says again. “Who else is down here? Who were you just talking to?”

  The injured Weldon Winn moves with surprising agility as he suddenly rolls on the floor and pulls out a gun from under his coat.

  Benton shoots him twice, once in the chest, once in the head, before Winn can even get his finger on the trigger. Gunshots are muffled by stone.

  MARINO’S PERSONAL PAYLOAD is enough to slow the helicopter by five knots.

  Lucy isn’t concerned. In this weather, she wouldn’t push her machine up to maximum speed. There is no point in rushing to run into an antenna, and antennas are all over the place, rising out of swirling fog that makes the hairline obstacles and their strobes almost impossible to see in the distance. Lucy flies at five hundred feet, the conditions worse than they were when they took off in Baton Rouge twenty minutes ago.

  “I don’t like this,” Marino’s nervous voice sounds in Lucy’s headset.

  “You’re not the one flying. Relax. Enjoy the flight. Can I get you anything, sir?”

  “How ’bout a fucking parachute?”

  Lucy smiles as both she and Rudy keep up th
eir scan outside the cockpit.

  “You mind if I let go of the controls for a minute?” she says to Rudy for Marino’s benefit.

  “You’re shitting me!” Marino yells.

  “Ouch.” Lucy turns down the volume in her headset while Rudy takes the controls. “It’s your ship.” She repeats the standard line, ensuring that the other pilot knows for a fact that he’s supposed to be flying at that precise moment.

  Turning a small knob on her emergency watch, she changes the upper display to chronograph mode.

  Nic has never been up in a helicopter, and she tells Marino to stop making matters worse.

  “If we aren’t safe with them,” Nic says, “we aren’t safe with anyone. Besides, you’re more likely to get hit by a car than crash in this weather.”

  “That’s a bunch of shit. There ain’t no cars up here. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the crash word.”

  “Concentrate,” Lucy tells everyone, and she’s not smiling now as she glances at the GPS.

  Yesterday, when she and Marino flew here and found the northwesternmost edge of the lake, she entered the coordinates into the GPS.

  “We’re exactly on track.”

  Descending to three hundred feet and slowing to eighty knots, she catches a glimpse of Lake Maurepas between rolling fog. The water is almost below them. Thank God. No fear of antennas over a lake or its creeks and bayous. She slows down more as Rudy leans forward, staring hard, trying to make out the shoreline.

  “Nic?” Lucy asks. “You hearing me?”

  “Yes,” her voice comes back.

  “Recognize anything down there?”

  Lucy slows to sixty knots. If she reduces her airspeed more than that, she’ll go ahead and hover, but she prefers not to do so out of ground effect with such poor visibility.

  “Can you go back a little ways so we can find Blind River?” she asks. “Dutch Bayou branches off it right at the edge of the lake.”