Blow Fly (35 page)

L
IFE IN POD A
does not change.

Condemned inmates come and go, and old names belong to silence. After days, or maybe weeks—Jean-Baptiste often loses track of time—the new ones who come in to await their deaths are the names associated with the cells formerly occupied by the old names of the others who awaited their deaths. Pod A, Cell 25 is Beast, who will be moved to a different holding cell in several hours. Pod A, Cell 30 is Jean-Baptiste. Pod A, cell 31, directly to Jean-Baptiste's right, is Moth—called thus because the necrophiliac murderer who stirs after lights-out has trembling hands that flutter, and his skin is almost gray. He likes to sleep on the floor, and his prison-issue clothing is always covered with gray dust—like dust on the wings of a moth.

Jean-Baptiste shaves the tops of his hands, long swirls of hair drifting into the stainless-steel sink.

“All right, Hair Ball.” Eyes peer through the tiny window in his door. “Your fifteen minutes are almost up. Two more minutes and I take the razor back.”

“Certainement.”
He lathers his other hand with cheap-smelling soap and resumes shaving, careful of his knuckles.

The tufts in his ears are tricky, but he manages.

“Time's up.”

Jean-Baptiste carefully rinses the razor.

“You shaved.” Moth speaks very quietly, so quietly that the other inmates rarely hear a word he says.

“Oui, mon ami.
I look quite beautiful.”

The crank key that looks like a crowbar bangs into a slot at the bottom of the door, and the drawer slides out. The officer backs up, out of reach of pale, hairless fingers depositing the blue plastic razor.

M
OTH SITS AND ROLLS
a basketball against the wall precisely, so that it always rolls in a straight line back to him.

He is worthless, so feeble that his only pleasure in killing was having sex with dead flesh. Dead flesh has no energy, the blood no longer magnetic. Jean-Baptiste had a very effective method when he released his chosen ones to the ecstasy. A person with severe head injuries can live for a while, long enough for Jean-Baptiste to bite and suck living flesh and blood, thus recharging his magnetism.

“It is a lovely day, isn't it?” Moth's quiet comment drifts into Jean-Baptiste's cell, because he has the ears to hear the barely audible voice. “No clouds, but later there will be a few very high ones that will move south by late afternoon.”

Moth has a radio and obsessively listens to the weather band.

“I see Miss Gittleman has a new car, a cute little silver BMW Roadster.”

Through a slitted window in each cell, a death-row inmate has a view of the parking lot behind the prison, and for lack of anything else to look at from their second-floor solitary confinements, men stare out for the better part of the day. In a sense, this is an act of intimidation. Moth's
mentioning Miss Gittleman's BMW is the best threat he can muster. Officers most likely will pass this on to other officers, who will pass on to Miss Gittleman, the young and very pretty assistant public information officer, that inmates appreciate her new car. No prison employee is eager for any details of their personal life to be known by offenders so vile that they deserve to die.

Jean-Baptiste is perhaps the only inmate who rarely looks out the slit that is supposed to be a window. After memorizing every vehicle, their colors, makes, models and even certain plate numbers and precisely what their drivers look like, he found no purpose in looking out at a blank blue or stormy sky. Getting up from the toilet without bothering to pull up his pants, he looks out his high window, Moth's comment having made him curious. He spots the BMW, then sits back down on the toilet, thinking.

He ponders the letter he sent the beautiful Scarpetta. He believes it has changed everything and fantasizes about her reading it and succumbing to his will.

Today, Beast will be allowed four hours to visit with clergy and family. He will leave for the short ride to Huntsville, to the Death House. At 6 p.m., he will die.

This also changes things.

A folded piece of paper quietly slips beneath the right corner of Jean-Baptiste's door. He rips off toilet paper and, again without bothering to pull up his pants, picks up the note and returns to the toilet.

Beast's cell is five down from Jean-Baptiste's, on the left, and he can always tell when a note slid from cell to cell to him is from Beast. The folded paper takes on a certain texture of scraped gray, and the inside is smudged, the paper fiber of the creases weakened by repeated opening and folding, as each inmate along the way reads the note, a few of the men adding their own comments.

Jean-Baptiste crouches on his stainless-steel toilet, the long hair on his back matted with sweat that has turned his white shirt translucent. He is
always hot when he is magnetized, and he is in a chronic state of magnetism as his electricity circulates through the metal of his confinement and races to the iron in his blood, and flows out again to complete another circuit, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

“Today,” the semiliterate Beast wrote in pencil, “wont you be glad when they drive me away. You will miss me? May be not.”

For once, Beast isn't insulting, although the kite reads like a taunt to other inmates, of this Jean-Baptiste is certain.

He writes back, “You don't have to miss me,
mon ami.”

Beast will know Jean-Baptiste's meaning, although he will know nothing more about what Jean-Baptiste will do to save Beast from his appointment with death. Footsteps ring on metal as officers walk by. He tears Beast's note into small pieces and stuffs them into his mouth.

S
HE MUST HAVE PARKED AND
been approached by the killer before she even took her keys out of the ignition.

Nic assumes the purse and wallet may have been tossed in the parking lot, and after two days, certainly someone would have picked them up. Unfortunately, finders-keepers appears to have prevailed. As much news coverage as Katherine Bruce's abduction is getting, whoever found her purse and wallet sure as hell knows that what he or she has is evidence. Some sniveling worm out there who lives according to situational ethics is not going to call the police now and basically admit that he or she intended to keep the purse or wallet or both until discovering they belonged to a murdered woman, assuming that Katherine has been murdered.

If she hasn't been yet, she will be soon.

Then it occurs to Nic with a jolt that if the purse and wallet were turned in, whoever had them would have called the mighty Baton Rouge task force, which, of course, would find some lame-brain reason for not releasing the information to the press, and certainly not to other brothers and sisters of the badge. Nic can't stop thinking about Wal-Mart and that she herself was at that very location within hours, perhaps, of when
Katherine Bruce was abducted, driven away, probably to the same secret place the killer has taken all his victims.

Nic is haunted by the possibility, not a strong one, that Katherine Bruce might have been inside the Wal-Mart while Nic was there trolling, as she has done at all hours since returning from Knoxville.

Photographs of the pretty blonde victim constantly flash on the TV news and are in every newspaper Nic has picked up. She has no recollection of noticing anyone who looked even remotely similar to her while she was picking out a needlepoint pattern, when she doesn't know how to do needlepoint, and showing interest in gaudy lingerie she would never wear.

For some reason, the odd woman who fell down in the parking lot because of an injured knee drifts through Nic's mind every now and then. Something about that woman bothers her.

A
T HIGH TIDE, SMALL BOATS
can enter creeks and bayous that are usually not possible to enter and almost never ventured into by rational people.

Darren Citron is known to rev up his old Bay Runner and skim the shallow water and just make it over the mudbar into the mouth of whatever waterway he intends to challenge on any given day. Right now, the tide's a little lower than he'd like, but he speeds full-throttle in Blind River and almost gets caught in the silt, which can be up to six feet deep. The muck can suck one's shoes off, and although Darren can usually manage to push his boat out, he doesn't like wading in water that's full of cottonmouths.

A local boy, he is eighteen years old, perpetually tanned the hue of a burnt peanut, and he lives to fish and find new spots for hunting gators. Because of his latter preoccupation, Darren is not particularly admired. If he goes after big ones that can bring a good price for their hides, meat and heads, it requires a strong rope, a huge steel hook and, of course, bait. The higher the bait dangles over the water, the longer the gator has to be to reach it. The best bait is dogs. Darren gets them from shelters all over the area, his sweet demeanor fooling people. He does what he has to,
rationalizing to himself that the animals will be put to sleep anyway. When he's gator hunting, he thinks about the gator, not the bait or how he got it. Gators bite at night, especially if Darren sits very still in his boat and plays a tape recording of dogs whining. He's skilled at disassociating from the bait, only thinking about the huge gator that's going to come out of the water, snap its jaws together and get caught on the hook. Then he moves in quickly and humanely shoots the reptile in the head with a .22 rifle.

He cruises through a waterway lined with lily pads and saw grass, dappled with shadows from cypress dressed in Spanish moss, their roots ropy. Gators go in and out of the water, especially if the female has laid eggs. Their long tails leave trails, and when Darren sees a particular spot with a lot of trails, he marks it on his mental map and comes back there after dark, if the weather and tides are right.

The water is carpeted in duck seed blooms, and a blue heron lifts off up ahead, unhappy about the intrusion of man and motor. Darren scans for trails. He is followed by iridescent dragonflies. Gator eyes remind him of tiny tunnels side by side, just above the surface of the water, before they catch him looking back. Around a bend, he spots a myriad of trails and a yellow nylon rope hanging from a tree. The bait on the huge steel hook is a human arm.