Blow Fly (45 page)

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.

B
ENTON 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.

S
CARPETTA 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.