“Which direction?” Lucy slowly banks the helicopter around, not thrilled about returning to land at this altitude, grateful that yesterday she was fastidious about noting the locations of any obstacles.
Nic pauses, then her voice returns. “Well, if you follow the river toward the lake, Dutch Bayou would be at about three o’clock. To your right,” she tells Lucy.
Swooping back around and getting on track, Lucy flies over water again.
“That’s it,” Nic says. “That’s the river. See how it bends to the left. Well, we could see it better if we were higher.”
“Forget it,” Rudy says.
“I think . . . yes!” Nic is getting excited. “There it is, that very narrow creek. See it on your right. Dutch Bayou. My father’s fishing shack isn’t even a mile up it, on the left.”
Nerves are suddenly on edge. Rudy pulls his pistol out of his shoulder holster. Lucy takes a deep breath, tenser and more apprehensive than she lets on, as she descends to a hundred feet, directly over a narrow bayou thick with cypress trees that appear ominous in the fog.
“At this altitude especially, they can already hear us,” Lucy says calmly, focusing, thinking, trying not to react to what is quickly becoming a very dangerous situation.
Suddenly, a dilapidated gray shack materializes. Tied to a warped pier is a white boat that is completely incongruous with its surroundings.
Lucy swoops around the shack. “You sure, you sure?” She can’t help it, her adrenaline is raising her voice.
“Yes! I recognize the roof! Papa used blue metal. I can still see some of the blue! And the same porch and screen door!”
Lucy drops to fifty feet, in a hover, and turns to the left, Rudy’s window lined up with the boat.
“Shoot it!” Lucy yells at him.
Rudy slides open his window. He rapidly fires seventeen rounds into the bottom of the boat as the front door of the shack flies open and Bev Kiffin runs out with a shotgun. Lucy pushes the cyclic forward to push up her airspeed.
“Duck! But stay in your seats!”
Rudy has already slapped a new magazine into his gun. Although the seats in back are directly over the fuel cell, this isn’t Lucy’s concern. Jet-A is by no means as flammable as gasoline, and the most damage shotgun pellets might do is cause leaks. On the floor, there is less of the aircraft’s skin to penetrate.
Rudy arms the floats.
The shotgun is pump-action with a magazine extender. Bev fires seven rounds, one right after another. Pellets shatter windows, smacking the composite skin, and hit the main rotor blade and engine cowling. If the burn can is penetrated, there’s going to be a fire, and Lucy immediately cuts off the throttle and lowers the collective. Alarms go off in desperate warnings as she lowers the collective, presses the right pedal and turns into the wind, where there is no place to set down but an area of tall saw grass. Nitrogen explodes like another gunshot, and floats on the skids instantly inflate like rubber rafts. The helicopter lurches out of trim, and Lucy fights to stabilize it, realizing that at least one of the six floats has been penetrated by shotgun pellets.
The landing is hard enough to set off the ELT, or emergency locator transmitter, and the helicopter rocks in dense grass and dark, muddy water, and lists hard to the right. Opening her door, Lucy looks down. Two of the three floats were penetrated and didn’t inflate. Rudy shuts off the battery and the generator and everyone sits for a moment, stunned and listening to the abrupt silence outside as the helicopter lists to the right, sinking into the muck. Not more than three hundred feet away, they can see the boat taking on water, its bow rising as it sinks.
“At least she’s not going anywhere,” Rudy remarks as he and Lucy take off their headsets.
Lucy unscrews a large cap on her watch and pulls out the antenna, activating her ELT.
“Come on,” she says. “We can’t sit here.”
“I can,” Marino replies.
“Nic?” Lucy turns around. “You got any idea how deep the water is right here?”
“Not too deep, or there wouldn’t be all this saw grass. It’s the mud that’s the problem. We could sink up to our knees.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Marino says. “What for? The boat’s sunk, so she ain’t going anywhere, either. And I’m not getting snake-bit or eaten by a fucking alligator.”
“Here’s what we can do.” Nic continues as if Marino isn’t in the back with her. “The saw grass stretches all the way behind the shack, and I know the water’s not that deep, because we used to put on high boots and collect mussels.”
“I’m going,” Lucy says, opening her door.
Inside the shack, dogs are barking loudly.
The problem for Lucy is that the fat float on her skid is going to make it impossible for her to lower herself gently, one foot at a time. She tightens the shoelaces on her ankle-high boots and hands Rudy her Glock and extra magazines.
Perched in the door frame like a skydiver, she says, “Here I go!”
She lands in the water feetfirst and is pleasantly surprised to find she sinks in just above her boots. If she steps quickly, she doesn’t sink as much. Stepping closer, her face splattered with dirty water, she reaches out to take her weapon and wedges it into the back of her pants. She temporarily jams the extra magazines into a pocket.
Everybody takes turns holding on to guns and ammo as Rudy, then Nic, jumps out, exiting from the same side of the helicopter as Lucy did. Marino sits like an angry lump in the backseat.
“You gonna sit there until the chopper turns over on its side?” Rudy raises his voice. “Idiot! Get out!”
Marino slides across the seats and tosses Rudy his gun. He jumps, loses his balance and falls, his head hitting a float. When he manages to get to his feet, he is covered with mud and swearing.
“Shhhh,” Lucy says. “Voices carry on the water. You all right?”
Marino wipes his hands on Rudy’s shirt and angrily takes back his gun as both ELTs flash brightly on radar screens in airport towers and are picked up by any pilots who happen to be monitoring the emergency frequency.
They slog along, tensely keeping an eye out for snakes, hearing them rustle through the tall grass. When the four of them are within a hundred feet of the shack, pistols held high, barrels pointed up, the screen door whines open again and Bev dashes out on the pier with the shotgun, shrieking, screaming at them, insane and suicidal with desperation and rage.
Before she can even take aim, Rudy fires.
Crack-crack! Crack-crack! Crack-crack!
She hits the old wood planking and rolls into the water next to the half-sunken boat.
ALBERT DARD OPENS the imposing door, the front of his long-sleeve shirt spotted with blood.
“What happened?” Scarpetta exclaims as she steps inside.
She gets down and gently raises his shirt. In a tic-tac-toe pattern on his stomach are shallow cuts. Scarpetta lets out a long breath as she lowers his shirt and stands up.
“When did you do this?” She takes his hand.
“After she left and didn’t come back. Then he left. The man on the plane. I don’t like him!”
“Your aunt didn’t come back?”
Scarpetta noted when she approached the house that a white Mercedes and Mrs. Guidon’s old Volvo were parked in front.
“You have a place where I can do something about those cuts?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to do anything.”
“Well, I do. I’m a doctor. Come on.”
“You are?” He seems dazzled, as if he’s never imagined that women could be doctors.
He leads her up the stairs to a bathroom that, like the kitchen, hasn’t been renovated in many years. Inside is a old-fashioned white tub, a white sink and a medicine cabinet, where she finds iodine but no Band-Aids.
“Let’s get your shirt off.” She helps him pull it over his head. “Can you be brave? I know you can. Cutting yourself hurts, doesn’t it?”
She is dismayed by the
multitude of scars covering his back and shoulders.
“I don’t really feel it when I do it,” he says, watching anxiously as she unscrews the cap from the iodine.
“I’m afraid you’re going to feel this, Albert. A little sting.” She lies the way all doctors do when some procedure is going to hurt like hell.
She works quickly while he bites his lip. He waves his hands to cool the burning while he tries not to cry.
“You are brave,” she says, lowering the lid of the toilet and sitting on it. “You want to tell me why you started cutting yourself? Someone said it began several years ago.”
He hangs his head.
“You can tell me.” She takes both his hands. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
He slowly nods.
“These people came,” he whispers. “I heard cars. My aunt went outside, so I did too, only I hid. And they pulled this lady out of a car and she was trying to scream but they had her tied up.” He points to his mouth, indicating a gag. “Then they pushed her into the cellar.”
“The wine cellar?”
“Yes.”
Scarpetta recalls Mrs. Guidon’s insistence that she tour the wine cellar. Fear raises the hairs on the back of her neck. She is here. She doesn’t know who else is here, except Albert, and someone could drive up at any moment.
“One of the people with the tied-up lady was a monster.” Albert’s voice rises almost to a squeal as his eyes widen in terror. “Like I’ve seen on TV, in scary movies, with these sharp teeth and long hair. I was so afraid he saw me behind the bush!”
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.
“And then my doggie, Nestlé. She never came home again!” He begins to cry.
Scarpetta hears the front door open and close, then footsteps downstairs.
“Is there a phone up here?” Scarpetta whispers to Albert.
Terrified, he wipes away tears.
She repeats her question urgently.
He stares at her, paralyzed.
“Go lock yourself in your room!”
He touches the wounds on his stomach, then rubs them, causing them to bleed.
“Go! Don’t make any noise.”
He walks quickly, quietly down the hall and turns into a room.
For several minutes she waits, listening to footsteps until they stop. The footsteps sound like those of a man, relatively heavy, but not the sharp sound of hard leather against wood. He starts walking again, and Scarpetta’s heart hammers as he seems to head toward the stairs. She hears him on the first step and walks out of the bathroom, because she does not want him—and she is certain he is Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—to find Albert.
At the top of the stairs she freezes, gripping the railing with all her might, looking down the staircase at him, the sight of him draining the blood from her head. She shuts her eyes and opens them again, thinking he will go away. Slowly, she takes one step at a time, holding on to the railing, staring. Midway, she sits down, staring.
Benton Wesley doesn’t move as he too stares. His eyes glisten with tears that he quickly blinks away.
“Who are you?” Scarpetta’s voice sounds miles away. “You aren’t him.”
“I am.”
She begins to cry.
“Please come down. Or would you like me to come up and get you?” He doesn’t want to touch her until she is ready. Until he is ready, too.
She gets up and slowly walks down the stairs. When she reaches him, she backs away, far away.
“So you’re part of this, you bastard. You goddamn bastard.” Her voice shakes so violently that she can barely speak. “So I guess you’d better shoot me, because now I know. What you’ve been doing all this time I thought you were dead. With them!” She looks at the stairs, as if someone is standing there. “You are one of them!”
“I’m anything but,” he says.
Digging into a pocket of his suit jacket, he takes out a folded piece of white paper. He smooths it open. It is a National Academy of Justice envelope, just like the photocopy Marino showed her—the photocopy of the envelope containing the letters Chandonne wrote to Marino and her.
Benton drops the envelope to the floor where she can see it.
“No,” she says.
“Please, let’s talk.”
“You told Lucy where Rocco was. You knew what she’d do!”
“You’re safe.”
“And you set me up to see him. I never wrote to him. It was you who wrote a letter supposedly from me, claiming I wanted to come see him and make a deal.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why would you subject me to that? To make me stare at that man, that awful excuse for life?”
“You just called him a man. That’s right. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is a man, not a monster, not a myth. I wanted you to confront him before he died. I wanted you to take back your power.”
“You had no right to control my life, to manipulate me that way!”
“Are you sorry you went?”
For an instant, she is speechless. Then she says, “You were wrong. He didn’t die.”
“I didn’t anticipate his seeing you would give him cause to stay alive. I should have known. Psychopaths like him don’t want to die. I suppose because he pled guilty in Texas, where he knew he would be death-eligible, I was fooled into thinking he really did want . . .”
“You were wrong,” she accuses him again. “You’ve had too damn much time to play God. And I don’t know what you’ve turned into, some, some . . .”
“I was wrong, yes. I miscalculated, yes. Became a machine, Kay.”
He said her name. And it shakes her to her soul.
“There is no one here to hurt you now,” he then says.
“Now?”
“Rocco is dead. Weldon Winn is dead. Jay Talley is dead.”
“Jay?”
Benton flinches. “I’m sorry. If you still care.”
“About Jay?” Confusion spins. She feels dizzy, about to faint. “Care about him? How could I? Do you know everything?”
“More than everything,” he replies.
INSIDE THE KITCHEN, THEY SIT at the same butcher-block table where Scarpetta talked to Mrs. Guidon on a night Scarpetta scarcely remembers.
“I got in too deep,” Benton is saying.
They are sitting across from each other.
“It was here, in this place of theirs, where a lot of the major players come to do their dirty business at the port and the Mississippi. Rocco. Weldon Winn. Talley. Even Jean-Baptiste.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Many times,” Benton says. “Here in this house. He found me amusing and much nicer to him than the others were. In and out, you name it. Guidon was the matron of the manor, you might say. As bad as the rest of them.”
“Was?”
Benton hesitates. “I saw Winn go into the wine cellar. I didn’t know the others were in there, thought maybe Jean-Baptiste was, hiding. It was her and Talley. I had no choice.”
“You killed them.”
“I had no choice,” Benton repeats.
Scarpetta nods.
“Six years ago, another agent was working with me, Minor. Riley Minor. Supposedly from around here. He did something stupid, I’m not sure what. But they did their number on him.” Benton nods in the direction of the wine cellar. “The torture chamber, where they make everybody talk. There are old iron rings in the walls from the slave days, and Talley was fond of heat guns and other means of deriving information. Quickly.
“When I saw them dragging Minor into the cellar, I knew the operation was over and I got the hell away.”
“You didn’t try to help him?”
“Impossible.”
She is silent.
“If I hadn’t died, I would have, Kay. If I hadn’t died, I could never have been around you, Lucy, Marino. Ever. Because they would have killed you, too.”
“You are a coward,” she says, drained of emotion.
“I understand your hating me for all I m
ade you suffer.”
“You could have told me! So I wouldn’t suffer!”
He looks at her for a long moment, remembers her face. It hasn’t changed much. None of her has.
“What would you have done, Kay, had I told you my death had to be faked and I would never see you again?” he asks.
She doesn’t have the answer she thought she might. The truth is, she wouldn’t have allowed him to vanish, and he knows it. “I would have taken my chances.” Grief closes her throat again. “For you, I would have.”
“Then you understand. And if it’s any consolation, I’ve suffered. Not a day has gone by when I didn’t think of you.”
She shuts her eyes and tries to steady her breathing.
“Then I couldn’t take it anymore. Early on I became so miserable, so goddamn angry, and I began to figure away. Like chess . . .”
“A game?”
“Not a game. I was very serious. One by one, to eliminate the major threats, knowing that once I came out, I could never go back, because if I failed, I would be recognized. Or simply killed during the process.”
“I have never believed in vigilantism.”
“I suppose you can talk to your friend Senator Lord about that. The Chandonnes heavily fund terrorism, Kay.”
She gets up. “Too much, too much for one day. Too much.” She glances up, suddenly remembering Albert. “Is that little mistreated boy really Charlotte Dard’s son?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re his father.”
“Jay Talley is. Was. Albert doesn’t know that. He’s always been given this mysterious line about a very prominent but busy father he’s never met. A kid’s fantasy. He still believes he has this omnipotent father somewhere. Talley had a brief affair with Charlotte. One night while I was here, there was a garden party and Charlotte invited an acquaintance, an antiques dealer . . .”
“I know,” Scarpetta says. “At least that question will be answered.”
“Talley saw her, spoke to her, went to her house. She resisted him, which is something he won’t tolerate. He murdered her, and because Charlotte had seen the two of them together, and because Talley was tired of Charlotte, bored with her, he saw to it that she died. Met her, brought her pills.”
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