Five Scarpetta Novels (140 page)

“I'll be fine.”

“Well, you call me if for some reason Lucy ain't there. No way you're staying alone.”

I felt like Rose as I drove toward home. I knew exactly what she meant about being held hostage by fear, by old age, by grief, by anything or anyone. I had almost reached my neighborhood when I decided to turn around and cut over to West Broad Street, where I occasionally went to Pleasants Hardware on the twenty-two-hundred block. It was an old neighborhood store that had expanded over the years and tended to carry more than just the standard tools and garden supplies.

When I shopped here, I never arrived earlier than seven o'clock in the evening, when most men came in after work and cruised the aisles like boys coveting toys. There were many cars, trucks and vans in the parking lot, and I was in a hurry as I walked past close-out lawn furniture and discontinued power tools. Just inside the door, spring flower bulbs were on special, and clearance-sale gallon cans of blue and white paint were stacked in a pyramid.

I wasn't sure what class of tool I was looking for,
although I suspected the weapon that had killed Bray was something like a pickaxe or a hammer. So I kept an open mind and went up and down aisles, scanning shelves of nails, nuts, fasteners, screw hooks, hinges, hasps and latches. I wandered through thousands of feet of neatly coiled rope and cord, and weatherizers and caulk and just about everything one needed for plumbing. I saw nothing that mattered, not in the large section of bars and claws and hammers, either.

Pipes didn't quite work, because the threads weren't thick or widely spaced enough to have left the strange striped pattern we found on Bray's mattress. Tire tools didn't even come close. I was getting very discouraged by the time I reached the masonry section of the store, and I saw the tool hanging on a distant peg board and I felt flushed, my heart jumping.

It looked like a black iron pickaxe with a coiled handle that brought to mind a thick large spring. I went over and picked one up. It was heavy. One end was pointed, the other like a chisel. The tag on it said it was a chipping hammer and cost six dollars and ninety-five cents.

The young man who rang it up had no idea what a chipping hammer was, and didn't know the store carried such a thing.

“Is there anyone here who would know?” I asked.

He got on an intercom and asked for an assistant manager named Julie to come to his register. She got there right away and seemed far too proper and well dressed to know about tools.

“It can be used in welding to knock off slag,” she let me know. “But much more commonly it's used in masonry. Brick, stone, whatever. It's a multipurpose tool, as you can probably tell by looking at it. And the orange dot on the tag means it's ten percent off.”

“So you might find these at any site where masonry is involved? It must be a rather obscure tool,” I said.

“Unless you're into masonry, or maybe welding, you'd have no reason to know about it.”

I bought a chipping hammer for ten percent off and drove home. Lucy was not there when I pulled into the driveway, and I hoped she had gone to MCV to pick up Jo and bring her back to my house. A flat bank of clouds was moving in seemingly out of nowhere, and it was beginning to feel like it might snow. I backed my car into the garage and went inside my house, heading straight for the kitchen. I thawed a package of chicken breasts in the microwave oven.

I poured barbecue sauce over the chipping hammer, especially on the coiled handle, and dropped it and rolled it on a white pillow case. The striping was unmistakable. I pounded chicken breasts with both ends of that ominous black iron tool and recognized the punched-out shapes right away. I called Marino. He wasn't home. I paged him. He didn't get back to me for fifteen minutes. By then my nerves were shorting out.

“Sorry,” he said. “The battery went dead in my phone, had to find a pay phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Driving around. We got the state police fixed-wing plane circling the river, probing everything with a searchlight. Maybe the bastard's eyes glow in the dark like a dog. You seen the sky? Goddamn, they're suddenly saying we might get six inches of snow. It's already started.”

“Marino, Bray was killed with a chipping hammer,” I said.

“What the hell is that?”

“Used in masonry. You aware of any construction along the river that might involve stone, brick or something like that? On the off chance he got the tool from there because he's staying there?”

“Where did you find a chipping hammer? I thought you was going home? I hate it when you do shit like this.”

“I
am
home,” I impatiently said. “And maybe he is, too, right this minute. Maybe it's some place putting in pavers or a wall.”

Marino paused.

“I wonder if you use something like that on a slate roof,” he said. “There's this big old house behind gates, way back from Windsor Farms, right on the river. They're putting on a new slate roof.”

“Is anybody living there?”

“I didn't think anything about it, since construction guys are crawling around it all day long. Nobody's in it. It's for sale,” he said.

“He could be inside during the day and come out after dark when the crew is gone,” I replied. “Maybe the alarm isn't on for fear the construction noise would set it off.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Marino, please don't go there alone.”

“ATF's got people all over the place,” he said.

I built a fire and when I went out for more wood, it was snowing hard, the moon a faint face behind low clouds. I cradled split logs in one arm and tightly gripped my Glock in my hand as I kept my eye on every shadow and tuned my ear to every sound. The night seemed to bristle with fear. I hurried inside my house and reset the alarm.

I sat in the great room, flames lashing the sooty throat of the chimney, and I worked on sketches. I tried to reconstruct how the killer might have gotten Bray back to the bedroom without inflicting a single blow. Despite her years in administration, she was a trained police officer. How did he incapacitate her seemingly so easily without apparent injury or a struggle? My television was on, and every half hour or so the local networks had news breaks.

The so-called Loup-Garou couldn't have been pleased about what was being said, assuming he had access to a radio or television.

“. . . been described as stocky, maybe six feet tall, maybe
bald. According to the chief medical examiner, Dr. Scarpetta, he may have a rare disease that causes excess hairiness and a deformed face and teeth . . .”

Thanks a lot, Harris,
I thought. He had to pin all that on me.

“. . . are urged to exercise extreme care. Don't answer the door until you're sure who it is.”

Harris was right about one thing, though. People were going to panic. My phone rang at almost ten.

“Hey,” Lucy said, and she sounded more cheerful than I'd heard her in a while.

“Are you still at MCV?” I asked.

“Closing up things here. You see the snow out there? It's coming down like a bitch. We should be home in about an hour.”

“Drive carefully. Call me when you pull up so I can help get Jo inside.”

I put two more logs on the fire, and no matter how secure my fortress was, I started to feel scared. I tried to distract myself by watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie on HBO while I paid bills. I thought of Talley and got depressed again, and I was angry with him. No matter my ambivalence, he hadn't really given me a chance. I had tried to get in touch with him, and he hadn't bothered to call back.

When the phone rang again, I jumped and a stack of bills fell off my lap.

“Yes?” I said.

“The son of a bitch's been staying there, all right,” Marino exclaimed. “But he ain't there now. Trash, food wrappers, crap all over the place. And hairs in the damn bed. The sheets stink like a dirty, wet dog.”

Electricity crackled up my veins.

“HIDTA's got a squad out somewhere, and I've got cops all over the place. He takes one dip in the river and we got his ass.”

“Lucy's bringing Jo home, Marino,” I said. “She's out there, too.”

“You're by yourself?” he blurted out.

“Inside, locked up, alarm on, pistol on the table.”

“Well, you stay right where you are, you hear me!”

“Don't worry.”

“One good thing is, it's snowing really hard. About three inches already, and you know how snow lights up everything. Ain't a good time for him to be out wandering around.”

I hung up and skipped from channel to channel, but nothing interested me. I got up and wandered into my office to check my e-mail but didn't feel like answering any of it. I picked up the jar of formalin and held it up to the light, looking at those small yellow eyes that were really gold dots reduced in size, and I thought about how off-base I'd been about so much. I anguished over every slow step and every wrong turn I'd taken. Now two more women were dead.

I set the jar of formalin on the coffee table in the great room. At eleven I turned to NBC to watch the news. Of course, it was all about this evil man, this Loup-Garou. As I changed to another channel, I was shocked by my burglar alarm. The remote control fell to the floor as I jumped up and fled to the back of the house. My heart was coming out of my chest. I locked my bedroom door and grabbed my Glock, waiting for the phone to ring. Minutes later it did.

“Zone six, the garage door,” I was told. “Do you want the police?”

“Yes! I want them now!” I said.

I sat on my bed and let the alarm beat my eardrums as it hammered and hammered. I kept an eye on the Aiphone monitor, and then remembered it would not work if the police didn't ring the bell. And, as I knew so well, they never did. I had no choice but to turn the alarm off and reset it and sit and wait in silence, straining so hard to hear every sound that I imagined I could hear the snow falling.

Barely ten minutes later, there was a sharp rapping on my front door and I hurried down the hallway as a voice on the porch loudly called out “Police.”

With great relief I placed my pistol on the dining-room table and said, “Who is it?”

I wanted to be sure.

“Police, ma'am. We're responding to your alarm.”

I opened the door and the same two officers from several nights before knocked snow off their boots and came in.

“You've not been having a good time of it lately, have you?” Officer Butler said as she pulled off her gloves, her eyes moving around. “You might say we've taken a personal interest in you.”

“Garage door this time,” McElwayne, her partner, said. “Okay, let's take a look.”

I followed them through the mud room and into the garage, and instantly knew this was no false alarm. The garage door had been pried up about six inches, and when we got down to look through the opening, we saw footprints in the snow leading to the door and then away from it. There were no apparent tool marks except for scrapes on the rubber strip at the bottom of the door. The footprints were lightly dusted with snow. They had been left recently, and that was consistent with when the alarm had gone off.

McElwayne got on the radio and requested a B&E detective, who showed up twenty minutes later and took photographs of the door and footprints and dusted for fingerprints. But once again, there really was nothing more the police could do other than follow the trail of footprints. It led along the edge of my yard and out to the street, where the snow was chopped up by tires.

“All we can do is step up patrol around here,” Butler told me as they left. “We'll keep an eye on your house as best we can, and if anything else happens, call nine-one-one right away. Even if it's just a noise that bothers you, okay?”

I paged Marino. By now it was midnight.

“What's going on?” he asked.

I told him.

“I'm coming over right now.”

“Listen, I'm all right,” I said. “Rattled, but all right. I'd rather you stay out there looking for him instead of coming here to baby-sit me.”

He seemed unsure. I knew what he was thinking.

“It doesn't seem his style is to break in anyway,” I added.

Marino hesitated, then he said, “There's something you ought to know. I didn't know if I should tell you. Talley's here.”

I was stunned.

“He's the head of the squad HIDTA sent in.”

“How long has he been here?” I tried to sound curious and nothing more.

“Couple days.”

“Tell him hello,” I said as if Talley meant very little to me anymore.

Marino wasn't fooled.

“Sorry he turned out to be such an asshole,” he said.

The minute I hung up, I contacted the orthopedic unit at MCV and the nurse on duty didn't know who I was and wouldn't release any information about anything. I wanted to talk to Senator Lord. I wanted to talk to Dr. Zenner, to Lucy, to a friend, to someone who cared, and at that moment I missed Benton so acutely I thought I couldn't go on. I thought of being buried in the wreckage of my life. I thought of dying.