Four Scarpetta Novels (130 page)

“A mistake. Damn stupid as hell of me. I should have done it myself, away from the office. My secretary is trustworthy. That certain clerk you just met may have overheard, snooped, I don't know.”

They drive through a rather unremarkable area of Baton Rouge, at the edge of the university that dominates the town. Swamp Mama's on 3rd Street is a popular hangout for students. Dr. Lanier parks in a tow-away zone and tosses an
Officer of the Coroner
's red metal plate on the dash, as if lunch has suddenly turned into a crime scene.

M
ARINO TURNS INTO THE LOUISIANA AIR
parking lot and stops cop-style, driver's window to driver's window, with Lucy's SUV.

“Good man. You got rid of the truck,” Lucy commends him without saying hello. “Don't need a monster-garage truck with Virginia plates around here.”

“Hey. I'm not stupid. Even if this is a piece of shit.”

His rental truck is a six-cylinder Toyota. It doesn't even have mud flaps.

“Where'd you ditch it?” Lucy asks.

“The regular airport, long-term parking. Hope nobody breaks in to it. Everything I own's in there. Even if it ain't much.”

“Let's go.”

They park, but not near each other.

“Where's your boyfriend?” Marino asks as they walk toward the FBO.

“Prowling. Seeing if he can find Rocco's place in Spanish Town, the historic district where Rocco kept a place.”

She stops briefly at the desk. “The Bell four-oh-seven,” she says, not giving the tail number.

It isn't necessary. Her helicopter is the only one on the tarmac at the moment. The woman at the desk pushes a button that unlocks the door. A Gulf Stream is starting its engines, the roar painfully loud, and Lucy and Marino cover their ears, making sure they don't walk around the back of the plane and get blasted with exhaust, a good way to smell like jet fuel, which is sure to give one a headache when confined to a small cockpit. They hurry to the helipad, which is at the outer edge of the tarmac, far away from planes, because people ignorant of helicopters assume their rotor wash will kick up rocks and sand and scour the paint right off fixed-wing aircraft.

Marino is ignorant of helicopters and doesn't like them. He can barely force his massive body into the left seat, which doesn't adjust. He can't slide it back.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” is all he says, loosening his harness as far as it will go.

Lucy has already done her usual thorough preflight, checks breakers and switches and throttle one last time and turns on the battery. She waits for automatic checks to go through their routines and she goes through hers, flipping on the generator. Headset on, she eases the throttle up to 100 RPMs. This is a time when the GPS will be of no value, nor will any other navigational instruments. A flight chart isn't going to be of much use, either, so she spreads open a Baton Rouge map on her lap and runs her finger southeast, along Route 408, also known as Hooper Road.

“Where we're going is off the map,” she says into her mike. “Lake Maurepas. We keep going in this direction, towards New Orleans, and hopefully don't end up at Lake Pontchartrain. We're not going that far, but if we do, we've overflown Lake Maurepas, and Blind River and Dutch Bayou. I don't think that will happen.”

“Fly fast,” Marino says. “I hate helicopters, including yours.”

“On the go,” she announces and stabilizes into a hover, taking off into the wind.

S
WAMP MAMA'S IS A BAR
that smells like beer, with old vinyl booths and a stained, unvarnished wooden floor.

While an LSU student waiter takes drink orders, Eric and Dr. Lanier disappear into the men's room.

“I tell you,” Eric says as they push through the restroom's door. “I'd take her home with me any time. What about tonight?”

“She's not interested in you,” Dr. Lanier says in a cadence that rises in pitch at the end of each sentence, causing his comments to sound like questions when they aren't. “Come on now.”

“She's not married.”

“Don't be messing with my consultants, especially this one. She'll eat you alive.”

“Oh, please, God. Let her.”

“Every time you get dumped by your latest girlfriend, you turn into a mental case.”

They are conducting this conversation at the urinals, one of the few places on the planet where they don't mind having their backs to the door.

“I'm trying to figure out how to describe her,” Eric says. “Not pretty
like your wife. Stronger-featured than that, and to me there's nothing sexier than a really great body in a suit or maybe a uniform.”

“You're goofy as a shit-eating fly. Don't go buzzing around her geography, Eric.”

“I like those little glasses she wears, too. I wonder if she's dating anybody. That suit doesn't hide what's important, you notice?”

“No, I didn't notice.” Dr. Lanier vigorously scrubs his hands in the sink, as if he's about to perform a heart transplant. “I'm blind. Don't forget to wash up.”

Eric laughs as he moves to the sink, blasts on the hot water and pumps globs of pink soap into his palms. “No kidding, what if I ask her out, Boss? What harm could there be in that?”

“Maybe you should try her niece. She's closer to your age. Very attractive and smart as hell. She might be too much of a handful for you. She's also with a guy. But they didn't sleep in the same room.”

“When do I meet her? Maybe tonight? You cook? Maybe we can go to Boutin's?”

“What's the matter with you?”

“I ate oysters last night.”

Dr. Lanier snatches paper towels out of a metal dispenser on the wall. He places a short stack of them on the edge of Eric's sink. Walking out of the men's room, he watches Scarpetta, noticing that every detail of her is unusual, even the way she reaches for her coffee, slowly, with deliberation, exuding confidence and power that has absolutely nothing to do with drinking coffee. She is scanning notes in a diary that has a black leather slipcover so she can refill it as often as needed. He suspects she is constantly refilling that diary. She's the sort who would record any detail or conversation that in her mind might prove important. Her meticulousness goes beyond her training. He slides in next to her.

“I recommend the gumbo,” he says as his cell phone plays a thin, mechanical version of Beethoven's Fifth.

“Wish you'd set your ringer on something else,” Eric comments.

“Lanier,” he answers. He listens for a minute, frowning, his eyes fixing on Eric. “I'm leaving right now.”

He gets up from the booth and tosses his napkin on the table.

“Come on,” he says. “We got a bad one.”

T
HE TERRAIN BETWEEN
the Baton Rouge airport and Lake Maurepas is a series of swamps, waterways and creeks that make Lucy nervous.

Even with pop-out floats, she would worry about a forced landing. How anyone would get to them is a valid question, and she doesn't want to imagine the reptiles that lurk in those dark waters, on mucky shores and in the shadows of moss-draped trees. In the baggage compartment, she always carries an emergency kit that includes handheld radios, water, protein bars and insect repellent.

Camouflaged in thick trees are duck blinds and an occasional fishing shack. She flies lower and slower but sees no signs of human occupation. In some areas, only a very small boat, perhaps an airboat, could work its way through narrow waterways that from the air look like veins reticulating through saw grass.

“See any gators down there?” she asks Marino.

“I ain't looking for gators. And there ain't nothing down there.”

As creeks move into rivers and Lucy spots a faint blue line on the horizon, they begin to reach civilization. The day is balmy and partly cloudy, good weather for being on the water. A lot of boats are out, and
fishermen and people on pleasure crafts stare up at the helicopter. Lucy is careful not to fly too low, avoiding any appearance of surveillance. She's just a pilot heading somewhere. Banking east, she starts looking for Blind River. She tells Marino to do the same.

“Why do you think they call it Blind River?” he says. “ 'Cause you can't see it, that's why.”

The farther east they go, the more fishing camps they see, most of them well cared for, with boats docked in front. Lucy spots a canal, turns around and follows its convolutions south as it gets wider and turns into a river that empties into the lake. Numerous foreboding canals branch out from the river, and she circles, getting lower, finding not a single fishing shack.

“If Talley baited that hook with the arm,” Lucy says, “then I have a feeling he's hiding out not too far from here.”

“Well, if you're right and keep circling, he damn well is going to see us,” Marino replies.

They head back, keeping up their scan, mostly concentrating on antennas and careful not to overfly petrochemical plants and find themselves intercepted. Lucy has spotted several bright orange Dauphine helicopters, the sort usually flown by the Coast Guard, which is now part of homeland security and constantly on alert for terrorists. Flying over a petrochemical plant is not a wise move these days. Flying into a thousand-foot antenna is worse. Lucy has pushed back the airspeed to ninety knots, in no hurry to return to the airport as she debates if now is the time to tell Marino the truth.

She won't be able to look at him while airborne and keeping alert to avoid coming anywhere near obstacles. Her stomach tightens and her pulse speeds up.

“I don't know how to say this,” she begins.

“You don't have to say nothing,” he replies. “I already know.”

“How?” She is baffled and scared.

“I'm a detective, remember? Chandonne sent two sealed letters, one
to you, one to me, both of them inside NAJ envelopes. You never let me read yours. Said it was a lot of deranged crap. I could've pushed, but something told me not to. Then next thing, you've disappeared, you and Rudy, and a couple days later I find out Rocco's dead. All I ask is if Chandonne told you where to find him and gave you enough info to get Rocco pinned with a Red Notice.”

“Yes. I didn't show you the letter. I was afraid you'd go to Poland yourself.”

“And do what?”

“What do you think? If you found him inside that hotel room and finally confronted him, saw him up close for what he was, what would you have done?”

“Probably the same thing you and Rudy did,” Marino says.

“I can tell you all the details.”

“I don't want to know.”

“Maybe you really couldn't have done it yourself, Marino. Thank God you didn't. He was your son,” she tells him. “And in some very hidden part of your heart, you loved him.”

“What hurts worse than him being dead is I never did,” he says.

T
HE FIRST BLOOD IS THREE
feet inside the front door, a single drop the size of a dime, perfectly round with a stellate margin reminiscent of a buzzsaw blade.

Ninety-degree angle, Scarpetta thinks. A drop of blood moving through the air assumes an almost perfect spherical shape that is maintained on impact if the blood falls straight down, at a ninety-degree angle.

“She was upright, or someone was,” Scarpetta says.

She stands very still, her eyes moving from one drop to the next on the terra-cotta tile floor. At the edge of the rug in front of the couch is a bloody area that appears to have been smeared by a foot, as if the person who stepped on the blood-spotted tile slipped. Scarpetta moves in for a closer inspection, staring at the dry, dark red stain, then turning her head and meeting Dr. Lanier's eyes. He comes over, and she points out an almost indiscernible partial footwear impression of a heel with a small undulating tread pattern that reminds Scarpetta of a child's drawing of ocean waves.

Eric begins taking photographs.

From the couch, the signs of the struggle continue around a glass and
wrought-iron coffee table that is askew, the rug rumpled beneath it, and just beyond, a head was slammed against the wall.

“Hair swipes.” Scarpetta points out a bloody pattern feathering over the pale pink paint.

The front door opens and in walks a plainclothes cop, young, with dark, receding hair. He looks back and forth between Dr. Lanier and Eric, and fixes on Scarpetta.

“Who's she?” he asks.

“Let's start with who you are,” Dr. Lanier says to him.

The cop seems threatening because he is frantic, his eyes darting back in the direction of an area of the house they can't see. “Detective Clark, with Zachary.” He swats at a fly, the black hair on top of his fingers showing through translucent latex gloves stretched over his big hands. “I just got transferred into investigations last month,” he adds. “So I don't know her.” He nods again at Scarpetta, who hasn't moved from her spot by the wall.

“A visiting consultant,” Dr. Lanier replies. “If you haven't heard of her, you will. Now tell me what happened here. Where's the body, and who's with it?”

“In a front bedroom—a guest room, it looks like. Robillard's in there, taking pictures and everything.”

Scarpetta glances up at the mention of Nic Robillard's name.

“Good,” she says.

“You know her?” Now Detective Clark seems very confused. He irritably swats at another fly. “Damn, I hate those things.”

Scarpetta follows tiny spatters of blood on the wall and floor, some no bigger than a pinpoint, the tapered ends pointing in the direction of flight. The victim was down on the floor by the baseboard and managed to struggle back to her feet. Small, elongated drops on the wall are not the usual cast-off blood that Scarpetta is accustomed to seeing when a victim has been repeatedly beaten or stabbed and blood has flown off the weapon as it is swung through the air.

The point of origin is what appears to be a violent struggle in the living room, and Scarpetta envisions punching, grabbing, feet sliding and perhaps kicking and clawing, resulting in a bloody mess—but not thousands of drops of blood cast great distances from the swings of a weapon. Possibly, there was no weapon, Scarpetta ponders, at least not at this stage of the assault. Maybe early on, after the assailant came through the front door, the only weapon was a fist. Possibly, the assailant did not assume he would need a weapon, and then he lost control of the situation quickly.

Dr. Lanier glances toward the back of the house. “Eric, go on and make sure everything's secure. We'll be right in.”

“What do you know about the victim?” Scarpetta asks Detective Clark. “What do you know about any of this?”

“Not much.” He flips back several pages in a notepad. “Name's Rebecca Milton, thirty-six-year-old white female. All we really know at this time is she rents this house, and her boyfriend stopped by around twelve-thirty to take her to lunch. She doesn't answer the door, so he lets himself in and finds her.”

“Door unlocked?” Dr. Lanier asks.

“Yes. He finds her body and calls the police.”

“Then he identified her,” Scarpetta says, getting up from her squatting position, her knees aching.

Clark hesitates.

“How good a look did he get?” Scarpetta doesn't trust visual identifications, and one should never assume that a victim found inside a residence is the person who lived there.

“Not sure,” Clark replies. “My guess is he didn't stay in that bedroom long. You'll see when you get there. She's in bad shape, real bad shape. But Robillard seems to think the victim's Rebecca Milton, the lady who lives here.”

Dr. Lanier frowns. “How the hell would Robillard know?”

“She lives two houses down.”

“Who does?” Scarpetta asks, panning the living room like a camera.

“Robillard lives right over there.” Detective Clark points toward the street. “Two houses down.”

“Jesus God,” Dr. Lanier says. “How weird is that? And she didn't hear anything, see anything?”

“It's the middle of the day. She was out on the street like the rest of us.”

The house is that of a neat person with a reasonably good income and expensive tastes, Scarpetta notes. Oriental rugs are machine-made but handsome, and to the left of the front door is a cherry entertainment center with an elaborate sound system and large-screen television. Bright Cajun paintings hanging on the walls are joyous in their loud, primary colors and primitive depictions of fish, people, water and trees. Rebecca Milton, if she is the victim, loved art and life. In whimsical frames are photographs of a tan woman with shiny black hair, a bright smile and a slim body. In several other photographs she is in a boat or standing on a pier with another woman, also with dark hair, who looks enough like her to be her sister.

“We're sure she lived alone?” Scarpetta asks.

“It appears she was alone when she got attacked,” Clark says, scanning pages in his notepad.

“But we don't know that for a fact.”

He shrugs. “No ma'am. We don't know much of anything for a fact at the moment.”

“I'm just wondering, because many of these pictures are of two women—two women who seem to have a close relationship. And a number of the photographs were taken inside this house or in what appears to be on the front porch or perhaps in the backyard.” She points out the hair swipes near the baseboard and interprets them. “Right here, she went down, or someone did, and whoever it was, the person was bleeding sufficiently for her hair to be bloody . . .”

“Yeah, well, she's got a big-time head injury. I mean, her face is smashed up bad,” Clark offers.

Straight ahead is the dining room, with a centered antique walnut table and six matching chairs. The hutch is old, and behind its glass doors are dishes with gold around the rims. Beyond, through an open doorway, is the kitchen, and it does not appear that the killer or the victim moved in this direction, but off to the right of the living room, the pursuit continuing through a blue-carpeted hallway and ending in a bedroom that faces the front yard.

Blood is everywhere. It has dried a dark red, but some areas of the carpet are so soaked that the blood is still damp. Scarpetta pauses at the end of the hallway and examines blood droplets on the paneled wall. One drop is round, very light red inside and very dark around the rim. Surrounding it is a spray of other droplets, some almost too small to see.

“Do we know if she was stabbed?” Scarpetta turns around and asks Clark, who is hanging back at the beginning of the hallway, busy with a video camera.

Dr. Lanier has already walked inside the bedroom. He appears in the doorway and looks grimly at her. “She's been stabbed, all right,” he replies in a hard voice. “About thirty or forty times.”

“Along the wall here are sneeze or cough patterns of blood,” Dr. Scarpetta tells him. “You can tell because the dark-rimmed drops here, here, and here”—she points them out—“indicate bubbles. Sometimes you see that when a person's bled into the airway or lungs. Or she may just have had blood in her mouth.”

Scarpetta walks to the left edge of the bedroom door, where there is only a small amount of blood. Her eyes follow finger smears of whoever grabbed the door frame, and more drips on the carpet that continue through the doorway onto the hardwood floor. Her view of the body is blocked by Dr. Lanier, Eric and Nic Robillard. Scarpetta walks in and shuts the door behind her without touching any bloody surface, including the knob.

Nic sits on the back of her heels, a thirty-five-millimeter camera gripped in her gloved hands, her forearms resting on her knees.

If she's happy to see Scarpetta, she makes no sign of it. Sweat rolls down her neck, disappearing into the dark green Zachary Police Department polo shirt tucked in khaki cargo pants. Nic gets up and moves to one side so Scarpetta can approach the dead body.

“She's got really weird stab wounds,” Nic comments. “The temperature of the room when I got here was seventy degrees.”

Dr. Lanier inserts a long chemical thermometer under the body's arm. He leans close to the body, his eyes moving up and down it, taking his time. Scarpetta vaguely recognizes the woman as one she saw in some of the photographs scattered throughout the living room.

It isn't easy to tell. Her hair is matted with dried blood, her face swollen and deformed by contusions, cuts and smashed bones, the degree of tissue reaction to injuries consistent with her having survived for a while. Scarpetta touches an arm. The body is warm as in life. Rigor mortis hasn't begun, nor has livor mortis—or the settling of the blood due to gravity once circulation stops.

Dr. Lanier removes the thermometer, reads it and says, “Body temp's ninety-six.”

“She's not been dead long at all,” Scarpetta says. “Yet the condition of the blood in the living room, hallway and even some in here suggests the attack occurred hours ago.”

“Probably the head injury is what got her, but it took a little while,” Dr. Lanier says, gently palpating the back of the head. “Fractures. You get the back of your head smashed against a masonry plaster wall, and you're talking serious injuries.”

Scarpetta isn't ready to comment on the cause of death, but she does agree that the victim suffered severe blunt-force trauma to her head. If the stab wounds cut or completely severed a major artery, such as the carotid, death would have occurred in minutes. This is unlikely—impossible, really—since it appears the woman survived for a while. Scarpetta sees no arterial spatter pattern. The woman may still have been
barely alive when her boyfriend found her at 12:30 p.m. and was dead by the time the rescue squad arrived.

It is several minutes past 1:30 now.

The victim is dressed in pale blue satin pajamas, the bottoms intact, the top ripped open. Her belly, breasts, chest and neck are clustered with stab wounds that measure sixteen millimeters—or approximately three-quarters of an inch—with both ends blunt, one end slightly narrower than the other. Those injuries that are superficial indicate she wasn't stabbed with an ordinary knife. Almost in the center of those shallow wounds is an area of tissue bridging that indicates the weapon had some type of gap at the tip, or perhaps was a tool that had two stabbing surfaces, each of them a slightly different thickness and length.

“Now that's strange as hell,” Dr. Lanier says, his head bent close to the body as he moves a magnifying lens over wounds. “Not any normal knife I've ever seen. How about you?” He looks at Scarpetta.

“No.”

The wounds were made at various angles, some of them V- or Y-shaped due to twisting of the blade, which is common in stab injuries. Some wounds gape, others are button-hole-like slits, depending on whether the incisions are in line with the elastic fibers of the skin or cut across them.

Scarpetta's gloved fingers gently separate the margins of a wound. Again, she puzzles over the area of uncut skin stretching almost across the middle. She looks closely through a lens, trying to imagine what sort of weapon was used. Gently gathering the pajama top together, she lines up holes in the satin with wounds, trying to get some idea where the clothing was when the woman was stabbed. Three buttons are missing from the torn pajama top. Scarpetta spots them on the floor. Two buttons dangle by threads.

When she arranges the pajama top neatly over the chest, the way it would be were the victim standing, of course the holes don't line up with the stab wounds at all, and there are more holes in the satin than there
are wounds. She counts thirty-eight holes and twenty-two wounds. Overkill, to say the least—overkill that is typical in lust murders, but also typical when the assailant and victim know each other.

“Anything?” Dr. Lanier asks her.

Scarpetta is still lining up holes and is getting somewhere. “It appears that her top was bunched up above her breasts when she was stabbed. See?” She moves up the top, which is so stained with blood, very little of the satin looks blue. “Some of the holes go through three layers of fabric. That's why there are more holes than wounds.”