“Must have picked up a nail somewhere,” Link supposes, getting down for a closer inspection. “That looks bad.”
“You see anybody around here looking at my bike? Where the hell’s my tire-plug kit?”
“I’ve been right here all day and haven’t seen anyone anywhere near your bike. It’s quite a bike. What? About fourteen hundred CCs? I used to have a Springer until some no-nuts pulled in front of me and I ended up flying over his hood. I started working on the flower beds around ten this morning. The tire was already flat by then.”
Marino thinks back. He got here between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty.
“A puncture like this and the tire would have gone flat so fast I’d never gotten it into the damn lot and it sure as hell wasn’t flat when I stopped to get donuts,” he says. “It had to have happened after I parked in here.”
“Well, I don’t like the sound of it.”
Marino looks around, thinking about Joe Amos. He’ll kill him. If he touched his bike, he’s dead.
“I hate to think it,” Link is saying. “Awfully bold to come right into this lot in the middle of the morning and do something like that. If that’s what happened.”
“Goddamn it, where is it?” Marino says, going through the other saddlebag. “You got anything to plug this thing? Shit! What the hell.” He quits rummaging. “Probably not going to work anyway, not with a hole this big, damn it!”
He’s going to have to change the tire. There are extra ones in the hangar.
“What about Joe Amos? You seen him? You seen his ugly ass anywhere within a mile of here?”
“No.”
“None of the students?”
The students hate him. Every one of them does.
“No,” Link says. “I would have noticed if someone went into this lot and started fooling with your bike or any of the cars.”
“Nobody?” Marino keeps pushing, then entertains the suspicion that maybe Link had something to do with it.
Probably nobody at the Academy likes Marino. Probably half the world is jealous of his tricked-out Harley. He certainly gets enough people staring at it, following him into gas stations and rest stops to get a better look.
“You’re going to have to roll it to the garage down there by the hangar,” Link says, “unless we want to get it on one of those trailers Lucy uses for all those new V-Rods of hers.”
Marino thinks about the gates at both the back and front entrances of the Academy grounds. No one can get in without a code. It had to be an inside job. He thinks about Joe Amos again and realizes an important fact. Joe was in staff meeting. He was already sitting in there, shooting off his big mouth, when Marino showed up.
Chapter 25
The orange-colored house with its white roof was built in the same decade that Scarpetta was born, the fifties. She imagines the people who live here and feels their absence as she walks around the backyard.
She can’t stop thinking about the person who said his name is Hog, about his cryptic reference to Johnny Swift and what Marino thought was Christian Christian. Scarpetta feels certain what Hog actually said was Kristin Christian. Johnny is dead. Kristin is missing. It has often occurred to Scarpetta that there are plenty of places to dispose of dead bodies in South Florida, plenty of wetlands, canals, lakes and vast pine forests. Flesh decomposes quickly in the subtropics, and insects gorge themselves, and animals gnaw on bones and scatter them like sticks and stones. Flesh doesn’t last long in the water, and salt in the sea leaches the minerals from skeletons, dissolving them completely.
The waterway behind the house is the color of putrid blood. Dead leaves float in the brown, stagnant water like debris from an explosion. Green and brown coconuts bob like decapitated heads. The sun slips in and out of mounting storm clouds, the warm air heavy and humid, the wind gusting.
Detective Wagner prefers to be called Reba. She is attractive and rather sexy in an overblown, sun-weathered way, her shaggy hair dyed platinum, her eyes bright blue. She doesn’t have the brains of a maggot. She isn’t as dumb as a cow and has yet to come across as a bitch on ten-spoke custom wheels, to quote Marino, who also called her a cock stalker, although Scarpetta isn’t clear on what that means. Most assuredly, Reba is inexperienced, but she seems to be trying. Scarpetta debates whether to tell her about the anonymous phone call that referenced Kristin Christian.
“They’ve lived here for a while but aren’t citizens,” Reba is saying of the two sisters who live in this house with two boys, a foster situation. “They’re originally from South Africa. The two boys are too, which is probably why they took them in to begin with. You ask me, the four of them are back over there somewhere.”
“And they would have decided to disappear, perhaps flee to South Africa, for what reason?” Scarpetta asks, staring across the narrow, dark waterway as humidity presses down on her like a warm, sticky hand.
“I understand they wanted to adopt the boys. And it’s unlikely they were going to get to.”
“Why not?”
“Seems like relatives of the boys back there in South Africa want them but just couldn’t take them at first, not until they move into a bigger house. And the sisters are religious kooks, which might have weighed against them.”
Scarpetta is aware of the houses on the other side of the water, aware of patches of bright green grass and small, pale-blue swimming pools. She’s not certain which house is Mrs. Simister’s, and wonders if Marino is talking with her yet.
“The boys are how old?” she asks.
“Seven and twelve.”
Scarpetta glances at her notebook and flips back several pages. “Eva and Kristin Christian. I’m not clear on why they are taking care of them.”
She is careful to speak of the missing people in the present tense.
“No, not Eva. There’s no ‘a,’ ” Reba says.
“Ev or Eve?”
“It’s Ev as in Evelyn only her name is just Ev. No ‘e’ or ‘a.’ Just Ev.”
Scarpetta writes down “Ev” in her black notebook and thinks, What a name. She stares at the waterway, and sunlight on the water has turned it the color of strong tea. Ev and Kristin Christian. What names for religious women who have vanished like ghosts. Then the sun slips behind clouds again and the water is dark.
“Ev and Kristin Christian are their real names?” Scarpetta asks. “We’re sure they’re not aliases? We’re sure they didn’t change their names at some point, perhaps to give them religious connotations?” she asks, staring across the waterway at houses that look sketched in pastel chalk.
She watches a figure in dark pants and a white shirt walking into someone’s backyard, possibly Mrs. Simister’s backyard.
“As far as we know, it’s their real names,” Reba replies, looking where Scarpetta is looking. “Damn canker inspectors are all over the map. Politics. It’s all about preventing people from growing their own citrus fruit so they have to buy it.”
“Actually, it’s not. Citrus canker is a terrible blight. If it’s not controlled, nobody will be growing citrus fruit in their yards.”
“It’s a conspiracy. I’ve been listening to what all these commentators are saying on the radio. You ever listen to Dr. Self on the radio? You should hear what she has to say about it.”
Scarpetta never listens to Dr. Self if she can avoid it. She watches the figure across the waterway squat in the grass and dig inside what appears to be some sort of dark bag. He pulls out something.
“Ev Christian’s a reverend or priest or whatever you want to call it in some offbeat little church… Okay, I’m gonna have to read this to you. It’s too much to remember,” Reba says, flipping through her notepad. “The True Daughters of the Seal of God.”
“Never heard of that denomination,” Scarpetta comments rather ironically as she writes it down. “And Kristin? What does she do?”
The inspector stands up, screwing together what looks like a fruit picker. He raises it high up in a tree, pulling down a grapefruit that lands on the grass.
“Kristin also works at the church. An assistant who does readings and meditations during the services. The kids’ parents got killed in a scooter accident about a year ago. You know, one of those Vespas.”
“Where?”
“South Africa.”
“And this information came from?” Scarpetta asks.
“Someone at the church.”
“You have a report on the accident?”
“Like I said, it happened in South Africa,” Detective Wagner replies. “We’re trying to track it down.”
Scarpetta continues to deliberate over when she should tell her about the disturbing phone call from Hog.
“What are the boys’ names?” Scarpetta asks.
“David and Tony Luck. Kind of funny, when you think about it. Luck.”
“You’re not getting cooperation from the South African authorities? Where in South Africa?”
“Capetown.”
“Where the sisters are also from?”
“That’s what I’m told. After the parents got killed, the sisters took the kids in. Their church is maybe twenty minutes from here on Davie Boulevard, right next to one of these alternative pet stores, kind of figures.”
“Have you checked with the medical examiner’s office in Capetown?”
“Not yet.”
“I can help you with that.”
“That would be great. Kind of figures, doesn’t it? Spiders, scorpions, poisonous frogs, all these little white rat pups you can buy to feed to your snakes,” Reba says. “Sounds like some sort of cultville over there.”
I’ve never let anybody come in and photograph a business of mine unless it’s a genuine police matter. I was robbed once. That was a while back,“ Larry explains from the stool behind the counter.
Through the window is the constant traffic along A1A, then the ocean beyond. A light rain has begun to fall, a storm moving in, heading south. Lucy thinks about what Marino told her a few minutes ago, about the house and the missing people, and of course his flat tire, which was his bigger complaint. She thinks of what her aunt must be doing right now, of the storm heading her way.
“Of course I’ve heard quite a lot about it.” Larry gets back to the subject of Florrie and Helen Quincy after a long digression about how much South Florida has changed, how much he has been seriously considering moving back to Alaska. “It’s like everything else. The details get more exaggerated with time. But I don’t think I want you videotaping,” he says again.