Blow Fly (23 page)

G
ATOR EYES REMIND BEV OF
periscopes fixing her in their sights before vanishing under water the color of weak coffee.

Jay told her gators won't bother her unless she bothers them. He says the same about cottonmouths.

“Did you ask them their opinion? And if it's the truth, then how come cottonmouths come crashing out of the trees, trying to get in the boat? And remember that movie we watched? Oh, what was it called . . . ?”

“Faces of Death,”
he replied, on this occasion amused instead of annoyed by her questions.

“Remember that game warden who fell in the lake and right there on camera, this huge gator got him?”

“Cottonmouths don't fall into the boat unless you startle them,” Jay explained. “And the gator got the game warden because the game warden was trying to get him.”

That sounded reasonable enough, and Bev felt slightly reassured until Jay smiled that cruel smile of his and did a complete about-face and explained how she can tell if an animal or reptile is a predator, and therefore an aggressor, and therefore the fearless hunter.

“It's all in the eyes, baby,” he said. “The eyes of predators are in front
of the head, like mine.” He pointed to his beautiful blue eyes. “Like a gator's, like a cottonmouth's, like a tiger's. Us predators are going to look straight-on for something to attack. The eyes of non-predators are more on the sides of the head, because how the hell is a rabbit going to defend itself against a gator, right? So the little bunny needs peripheral vision to see what's coming and run like hell.”

“I've got predator eyes,” Bev said, pleased to know it but not at all happy to hear that gators and cottonmouths are predators.

Eyes like that, she realized, meant something's on the prowl, looking to hurt or kill. Predators, especially reptiles, aren't afraid of people. Shit! As far as Bev's concerned, she's no match for a gator or a snake. If she falls in the water or steps on a cottonmouth, who's going to win? Not her.

“Humans are the ultimate predator,” Jay said. “But we're complicated. A gator is always a gator. A snake's always a snake. A human can be a wolf or a lamb.”

Bev is a wolf.

She feels her wolfish hot blood stirring as she glides past cypress knees jutting from the bayou like the ridges of a sea monster's back. The pretty blonde woman hog-tied on the floor of the boat squints in intermittent early morning sunlight. Wherever cypress roots break the surface, the water isn't deep, and Bev is vigilant as she motors slowly toward the fishing shack. Now and then her prisoner tries to shift her position to ease the terrible pain in her joints, and her labored breathing flares her nostrils, the gag around her mouth wetly sucking in and out.

Bev doesn't know her name and warned her not to say it. This was hours ago, inside the Cherokee, after the lamb realized she couldn't get out the passenger door, and if she tried to climb over the seat, Bev was going to shoot her. Then the lamb got chatty, trying to be friendly, trying to make Bev like her, going so far as to politely ask Bev's name. They all do that, and Bev always says the same thing: “My name is none of your fucking business, and I don't want to know yours or a damn thing about you.”

The woman was instantly powerless, realizing that she wasn't going to talk her way out of whatever horror was in store for her.

Names have only two purposes: use them to manipulate people into feeling that their lives have value, and refuse to use them, to cause people to feel that their lives have no value. Besides, Bev will learn a lot about this pretty little lamb soon enough, when Jay monitors the news on his battery-powered radio.

“Please don't hurt me,” the lamb begs. “I have family.”

“I'm not listening,” Bev tells her. “You know why? Because you're nothing but the catch of the day.”

Bev laughs, enjoying the strength of her own voice, because very soon, she won't have a voice. Jay will. Once he takes possession of the lamb, there will be nothing left for Bev to do, except what he orders her to do or not to do. Mostly, Bev will watch, and thoughts of that overwhelm her with a compulsion to control and abuse while she can. She binds the lambs tighter than Jay does, tying ankles to wrists behind the back so the body is bowed, making it all the more difficult for the lamb's diaphragm to relax and contract as she struggles to breathe.

“Tell you what, honey,” Bev says as she steers. “We're going to anchor right over there under those shade trees, and I'm gonna cover you good with skeeter spray, every inch of you, because my man ain't gonna want you swelled up and itching.”

She laughs as her prisoner's eyes widen and tears flood her puffy red lids. This is the first the lamb's heard mention of a man.

“Now you quit your bawling, honey. You need to look pretty, and right now you're looking like shit.”

The lamb blinks hard, the gag making wet noises with each agonizing, rapid, shallow breath. Bev steers the boat closer to shore, cuts the engine and drops anchor. She picks up the shotgun and scans the trees, checking for snakes. Satisfied that the only one in harm's way is her prisoner, she lays the pump-action shotgun on top of the tarp and places a boat cushion on the floor just inches from her “cute little catch of the
day,” as she continues to call her. Bev digs in her beach bag and pulls out a plastic squirt bottle of insect repellent.

“What I'm going to do now is take off your gag and untie you,” Bev says. “You know why I can be that nice, honey? Because you ain't got nowhere to go but overboard, and if you think about what's in these waters, you ain't likely to want to go for a little swim. Or how about the fish box?”

Bev opens the lid of the coffin-sized fish box. It is filled with ice.

“That'll keep you nice and fresh if you decide to get rowdy. And you're not gonna do that, are you?”

The woman vigorously shakes her head and dryly says “No” as the gag comes off. “Thank you, thank you,” she says in a shaking voice, wetting her lips.

“Bet your joints are hurting like hell,” Bev says, taking her time untying her. “My man Jay tied me up once, my ankles and wrists tied up tight together behind my back until I was bent like a pretzel, just like you. It turned him on, you know.” She tosses the rope on top of the tarp. “Well, you'll find out soon enough.”

The woman rubs her raw ankles and wrists, trying to catch her breath. She reminds Bev of a cheerleader, one of those athletic blondes with pure prettiness, like those in
Seventeen
magazine. She wears small horn-rimmed glasses that make her look smart, and she's the right age, late thirties, maybe forty.

“You go to college?” Bev asks her.

“Yes.”

“Good. That's real good.” She disappears inside her thoughts for a moment, a slack expression on her fleshy, weathered face.

“Please take me back. We've got money. We'll pay you whatever you want.”

Bev's meanness snaps back into her eyes. Jay's smart and has money. The woman is smart and has money. She leans close to the woman, the whine of mosquitoes loud beneath the trees. Not far away, a fish splashes.
The higher the sun gets, the hotter it is, and Bev's Hawaiian shirt is damp with sweat.

“Money's not what this is about,” Bev says as the woman stares at her, hope fading from her light blue eyes. “Don't you know what this is about?”

“I didn't do anything to you. Please just let me go home and I'll never tell anyone. I won't ever do anything to get you into trouble. How could I, anyway? I don't know you.”

“Well, you're getting ready to know me, honey,” Bev says, laying a rough, dry hand on the woman's neck and stroking it with her thumb. “We're getting ready to know each other real good.”

The woman blinks, wetting her chapped lips as Bev's hand works its way down, touching the hollow of her neck, then down lower, exploring wherever she pleases. The woman sits rigidly and shuts her eyes. She jerks when Bev reaches under her clothing, unhooking her bra in back. Bev starts squeezing the insect repellent, rubbing it on the lamb's naked body, feeling her luscious, firm flesh tremble like Jell-O. Bev thinks of Jay and the bleached area of the floor beneath the bed, and she shoves the lamb hard, slamming her head into the outboard motor.

A
T THE CORNER OF 83RD
and Lexington, a delivery truck struck a pedestrian—an elderly woman.

Benton Wesley overhears excited talk in the gawking crowd as emergency lights flash, the block cordoned off in yellow crime-scene tape. The fatal accident occurred less than an hour earlier, and Benton has seen enough gore in his life to walk swiftly past and respectfully avert his eyes from the body trapped under one of the truck's back tires.

He catches the words
brains
and
decapitated,
and something about
dentures
lying on the street. If the public had its way, every death scene would be pay-per-view: Five dollars for a ticket, and you can stare at blood and guts to your heart's content. When he used to arrive at crime scenes and all the cops would move out of the way to allow his expert eye to take in every detail, he had the right to order unauthorized people to leave. He could vent his disgust as he pleased—sometimes calmly, sometimes not.

He surveys the area from behind his dark glasses, his lean body moving along the crowded sidewalk, cutting in and out with the agility of a lynx. A plain black baseball cap covers his shaved head, and he backtracks
toward Lucy's headquarters, having gotten out of a taxi ten blocks north instead of directly in front of her building or even near it. Benton probably could walk right past Lucy and say “excuse me,” and she would not recognize him. Six years it has been since he has seen or talked to her, and he is desperate to know what she looks like, sounds like, acts like. Anxiety presses him onward at his determined pace until he nears the modern polished granite building on 75th Street. A doorman stands in front, hands behind his back. He is hot in his gray uniform and shifts his weight from leg to leg, indicating that his feet hurt.

“I'm looking for The Last Precinct,” Benton says to him.

“The what?” The doorman looks at him as if he's crazy.

Benton repeats himself.

“You talking about some kind of police precinct?” The doorman scrutinizes him, and
homeless
and
wacko
register on his jaded Irish face. “Maybe you mean the precinct on Sixty-ninth.”

“Twenty-first floor, suite twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton replies.

“Yeah, now I know what you're talking about, but it ain't called The Last Precinct. Twenty-one-oh-three's a software company—you know, computer stuff.”

“You sure?”

“Hell, I work here, don't I?” The doorman is getting impatient, and he glares at a woman whose dog is sniffing too close to the planter in front of the building. “Hey,” he says to her. “No dogs doing their business in the hedge.”

“She's just sniffing,” the woman indignantly replies, jerking the leash, tugging her hapless toy poodle back to the middle of the sidewalk.

Having asserted himself, the doorman ignores the woman and her dog. Benton digs in a pocket of his faded jeans and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He smooths it open and glances at an address and phone number that have nothing to do with Lucy or her building or the office that really is called The Last Precinct, despite what the doorman
thinks. If the doorman happens to relay to her, perhaps in jest, that some weirdo stopped by asking for The Last Precinct, she will go on the alert, get very worried. Marino believes that Jean-Baptiste knows Lucy's company by that name. Benton wants Marino and Lucy on the alert and worried.

“Says here, twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton tells the doorman, shoving the piece of paper back in his pocket. “What's the name of the company? Maybe the information I was given is wrong.”

The doorman steps inside and picks up a clipboard. Running his finger down a page, he replies, “Okay, okay, twenty-one-oh-three. Like I said, some computer outfit. Infosearch Solutions. You want to go up, I gotta call 'em and see an ID.”

An ID, yes, but calling isn't necessary, and Benton is amused. The doorman is openly rude and prejudiced toward the scruffy stranger before him, no longer mindful—as many New Yorkers aren't—that the city's greatest virtue in the past was to welcome scruffy strangers, desperately poor immigrants who barely spoke English. Benton speaks English exquisitely when he chooses, and he isn't poor, although his funds are regulated.

He reaches inside his jacket for his wallet and produces a driver's license: Steven Leonard Glover, age forty-four, born in Ithaca, New York, no longer Tom Haviland because Marino knows him by that alias. Whenever Benton has to change his identity, which he does whenever needed, he suffers a period of depression and meaninglessness, finding himself once again angrier than is necessary and all the more determined to prevail without burning with hate.

Hate destroys the vessel that holds it. To hate is to lose clarity of mind and vision. Throughout his life he has resisted hate, and it would be all too easy and appropriate to hate the hate-filled sadistic and unremorseful offenders he has relentlessly tracked and trapped beyond what was appropriate while he was with the FBI. Benton's gift at evasion and
imperviousness would not be possible if he hated or gave in to any extreme of emotion.

He became Scarpetta's lover while he was still married, and perhaps that is his only sin he won't forgive. He can't bear to imagine the anguish Connie and their daughters suffered when they believed he was murdered. At times he considers his exile punishment for what he did to his family, because he was weak and gave in to an extreme of an emotion that he still feels. Scarpetta has that effect on him, and he would commit the same sin again—he knows it—were he to go back in time to when they first realized what they were feeling for each other. His only excuse—a weak one, he knows—is that their lust and falling in love wasn't premeditated by either one of them. It happened. It simply happened.

“I'll call 'em up for you,” the doorman says, returning the fraudulent ID to Benton.

“Thank you . . . what is your name?”

“Jim.”

“Thank you, Jim, but that won't be necessary.”

Benton walks off, ignoring a
Don't Walk
sign, crossing 75th Street and becoming part of the anonymous flow of pedestrians along Lexington Avenue. Swerving under scaffolding, he pulls his cap lower, but behind his dark glasses, his eyes miss nothing. Were any of the same oblivious people to pass him again on another block, he would recognize their faces, always aware and on guard. Three times, and he will tail whoever it is and capture him or her on his pocket-size video camera. He has amassed hundreds of tapes in the past six years, and so far they mean nothing beyond demonstrating that he lives in a very small world, no matter how big the city.

Cops have an obvious presence in New York, sitting in their cruisers, talking to one another on sidewalks and street corners. Benton passes them, stoically looking straight ahead, his pistol strapped around his
ankle, a violation so serious he would probably be tackled or slammed against a building, were a cop to spot the gun. He would be handcuffed, stuffed inside a police car, interrogated, run through the FBI computer system, fingerprinted and arraigned in court, all to no avail, really. When he worked crime scenes, his prints were stored in AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system. After his alleged death, his prints—including his ten-print card in cold storage—were altered, swapped with a man who had died of natural causes and was surreptitiously fingerprinted in the embalming room of a Philadelphia funeral home. Benton's DNA profile is in no automated system anywhere on Earth.

He steps into a doorway and dials directory assistance on a cell phone that has the billing address of a phone number at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Programming the billing address was not so difficult. Benton has had years to become adept on the computer, using and violating cyberspace to his advantage. An occasional collect call added to the Texas penitentiary's telephone bills is likely to escape notice and could not be traced to anyone, certainly never to him.

Benton knows that when he makes his call to Lucy's office, the Texas penitentiary's name and number will show up on whatever sophisticated security system she has. Of course, all calls are taped. Of course, Lucy will have her own forensic voice analysis computer system. Of course, Benton has Jean-Baptiste's voice on tape and has had it for years, reaching back to the very dangerous days of an undercover operation that did not bring down the Chandonne cartel, but instead annihilated Benton's identity and life. For this, Benton has not yet forgiven himself. He doesn't believe he will ever be able to give up his guilt and humiliation. He underestimated those whose trust was synonymous with his life.

As a child, Benton and his magic ring made mistakes in his fantasy investigations. As an adult, he and his gold FBI ring have also made mistakes, errors in judgment, and flat-out wrong psychological assessments of murderers. But the one time in his career when he needed his acumen
and wits the most, he slipped, and the thought of it still enrages him, sickens him, fills him with self-recrimination.

He tells himself during his most despondent moments,
No one else is to blame. Not even the Chandonnes and their minions are to blame. You dug your pit, and now you must get out of it.