Four Scarpetta Novels (90 page)

N
IGHT ON THE BAYOU
reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.

He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain's chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.

Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he
bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn't cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn't abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn't struggle.

“No point in struggling, anyway,” he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. “And I'm not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?”

She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering
yes
when, of course, she meant
no.
But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are
terrified,
a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she
anticipates
horror and death. The
anticipation
creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.

A
frisson
of horror.

No.

He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.

Jay's determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine—adrenaline—is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb's past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.

But the word. The
perfect word.
It eludes him tonight.

He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb's rapid,
shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the
perfect word
) shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.

“One-eighty, more or less,” he tells her. “Don't have a heart attack. I had one who did.”

She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.

“I mean it. Don't have a heart attack.” He is serious.

It is an order.

“Take a deep breath.”

She does, her lungs shaky.

“Better?”

“Yes. Please . . .”

“Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?”

Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.

“I'm sorry,” she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.

“Now, there you go again.” He sits back in his throne of the captain's chair. “Do you really,
really
believe that being polite is going to change my plans?” The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. “Do you know what politeness means to me?”

He expects an answer.

She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in there.

“No.” She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.

“Weakness,” he says.

Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner's nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray, chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta's, and finally becomes furious because it can't, furious because Scarpetta wouldn't be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn't weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can't find the perfect word, the
word.

He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn't come with the others.

“I'm getting bored,” he tells his lamb. “I'll ask you again. One last chance. What is the
word
?”

She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.

“I don't understand. I'm sorry . . .”

“Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?”

The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.

“What is the word?
Tell me what you feel.
And don't say
scared.
You're a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it.”

“I feel . . . I feel acceptance,” she says, sobbing.

“You feel
what
?”

“You're not going to let me go,” she says. “I know it now.”

S
CARPETTA'S SUBTLE WIT
reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn't rip and crack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.

He takes pictures of everything you're doing, Nic, so you'd better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.

Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.

“Investigator Robillard?” Scarpetta is saying.

Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.

“Tell us what you'd do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you'd had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene,” Scarpetta presents to her. “Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there's a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don't like to admit that, but it's true.”

“I don't drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.

“Lordy, where'd you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”

“What I mean is, I really can't because I have a five-year-old son . . .” Nic's voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she's ever been away from him.

The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.

“Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name's Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony . . .”

Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.

“How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.

About a dozen hands go up.

“One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work—or shall I call it a mission—is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”

No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch,
Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.

She's gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she's kind and gentle.

“In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.

“So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.

Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”

“Oh yeah! Now I 'member. Lucy. She's been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”

Stupid, drunk idiot,
Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.

“Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.

“FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won't stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”

ATF, you stupid drunk.
Thunder cracks in the back of Nic's mind.

“I dunno. Wasn't there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what's she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.

“That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn't answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.

“Isn't that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she's something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn't she?”

Fucking dyke. Shut up.

Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That's how her father always explained it.
You see, Nic,
he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade.
There's tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There's tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.

“Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You've had enough whiskey for one night.”

“Well, 'scuse me, Miss Teacher's Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.

Nic feels Scarpetta's eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba's outrageous display.

Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpetta's subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn't know she had. She feels inferior to her hero's super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic's. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic's healing broken arm every time the splint came off.

Hurting's good, baby. If you didn't feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn't want that, would you?

No, Mama. I'm sorry for what I did.

Why, Nicci, that's the silliest thing. You didn't hurt yourself on purpose!

But I didn't do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that's when I tripped . . . .

We all make mistakes when we're scared, baby. Maybe it's a good thing you fell down—you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.