Four Scarpetta Novels (135 page)

Harvard Medical School–affiliated McLean Hospital is the nation's top psychiatric hospital and is world renowned for its research programs, especially in the field of neuro-science. The most challenging and significant frontier isn't outer space. It is the human brain and its biological role in mental illness. McLean not only sets the standard for psychiatric research, but offers a compassionate alternative to debilitating suffering.

I am extremely grateful to the extraordinary doctors and scientists who so kindly shared their remarkable world with me:

Especially
D
R
. B
RUCE
M.C
OHEN
,
President and Psychiatrist in Chief

and also
D
R
. D
AVID
P.O
LSON
,
Clinical Director, Brain Imaging Center

and most of all
D
R
. S
TACI
A. G
RUBER
,
Associate Director, Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory

I
t is Sunday
afternoon and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is in her office at the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, where clouds are building, promising another thunderstorm. It's not supposed to be this rainy and hot in February.

Gunfire pops, and voices yell things she can't make out. Simulated combat is popular on the weekends. Special Ops agents can run around in black fatigues, shooting up the place, and nobody hears them, only Scarpetta, and she barely notices. She continues reviewing an emergency certificate issued by a coroner in Louisiana, an examination of a patient, a woman who later went on to murder five people and claims to have no memory of it.

The case probably isn't a candidate for the Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsivity research study known as PREDATOR, Scarpetta decides, vaguely aware of a motorcycle getting louder on the Academy grounds.

She writes forensic psychologist Benton Wesley an e-mail:

The motorcycle blasts up to the building and stops right below her window. Pete Marino harassing her again, she thinks irritably as Benton sends her an Instant Message:

She looks out the window as Marino kills the engine, gets off his bike, looks around in his macho way, always wondering who's watching. She is locking PREDATOR case files in her desk drawer when he walks into her office without knocking and helps himself to a chair.

“You know anything about the Johnny Swift case?” he asks, his huge, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless denim vest with the Harley logo on the back.

Marino is the Academy's head of investigations and a part-time death investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office. Of late, he looks like a parody of a biker thug. He sets his helmet on her desk, a scuffed black brain bucket with bullet-hole decals all over it.

“Refresh my memory. And that thing's a hood ornament.” She indicates the helmet. “For show, and worthless if you have an accident on that donorcycle of yours.”

He tosses a file onto her desk. “A San Francisco doctor with an office here in Miami. Had a place in Hollywood on the beach, he and his brother. Not far from the Renaissance, you know, those twin high-rise condo buildings near John Lloyd State Park? About three months ago at Thanksgiving while he was at his place down here, his brother found him on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest. By the way, he'd just had wrist surgery and it didn't go well. At a glance, a straightforward suicide.”

“I wasn't at the ME's office yet,” she reminds him.

She was already the Academy's director of forensic science and medicine then. But she didn't accept the position of consulting forensic pathologist at the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office until this past December when Dr. Bronson, the chief, started cutting back his hours, talking about retiring.

“I remember hearing something about it,” she says, uncomfortable in Marino's presence, rarely happy to see him anymore.

“Dr. Bronson did the autopsy,” he says, looking at what's on her desk, looking everywhere but at her.

“Were you involved?”

“Nope. Wasn't in town. The case is still pending, because the Hollywood PD was worried at the time there might be more to it, suspicious of Laurel.”

“Laurel?”

“Johnny Swift's brother, identical twins. There was nothing to prove anything, and it all went away. Then I got a phone call Friday morning about three a.m., a weird-ass phone call at my house that we've traced to a pay phone in Boston.”

“Massachusetts?”

“As in the Tea Party.”

“I thought your number's unlisted.”

“It is.”

Marino slides a folded piece of torn brown paper from the back pocket of his jeans and opens it.

“I'm going to read you what the guy said, since I wrote it down word for word. He called himself Hog.”

“As in pig? That kind of hog?” She studies him, halfway wondering if he's leading her on, setting her up for ridicule.

He's been doing that a lot these days.

“He just said,
I am Hog. Thou didst send a judgment to mock them.
Whatever the hell that means. Then he said,
There's a reason certain items were missing from the Johnny Swift scene, and if you have half a brain, you'll take a good look at what happened to Christian Christian. Nothing is coincidence. You'd better ask Scarpetta, because the hand of God will crush all perverts, including her dyke bitch niece.
”

Scarpetta doesn't let what she feels register in her voice when she replies. “Are you sure that's exactly what he said?”

“Do I look like a fiction writer?”

“Christian Christian?”

“Who the hell knows. The guy wasn't exactly interested in me asking questions like how to spell something. He talked in a soft voice, like someone who feels nothing, kind of flat, then hung up.”

“Did he actually mention Lucy by name or just—?”

“I told you exactly what he said,” he cuts her off. “She's your only niece, right? So obviously he meant Lucy. And HOG could stand for Hand of God, in case you haven't connected those dots. Long story short, I contacted the Hollywood police and they've asked us to take a look at the Johnny Swift case ASAP. Apparently, there's some other shit about the evidence showing he was shot from a distance and from close range. Well, it's one or the other, right?”

“If there was only one shot, yes. Something must be skewed with the interpretation. Do we have any idea who Christian Christian is? Are we even talking about a person?”

“So far nothing in our computer searches that's helpful.”

“Why are you just telling me now? I've been around all weekend.”

“Been busy.”

“You get information about a case like this, you shouldn't wait days to tell me,” she says as calmly as she can.

“Maybe you're not one to talk about withholding information.”

“What information?” she asks, baffled.

“You should be more careful. That's all I got to say.”

“It's not helpful when you're cryptic, Marino.”

“I almost forgot. Hollywood's curious about what Benton's professional opinion might be,” he adds as if it is an afterthought, as if he doesn't care.

He typically does a poor job hiding how he feels about Benton Wesley.

“Certainly they can ask him to evaluate the case,” she replies. “I can't speak for him.”

“They want him to figure out if the call I got from this wacko Hog was a crank, and I said that would be kind of hard when it's not recorded, when all he'd get is my own version of shorthand scribbled on a paper bag.”

He gets up from his chair, and his big presence seems even bigger, and he makes her feel even smaller than he used to make her feel. He picks up his useless helmet and puts on his sunglasses. He hasn't looked at her throughout their entire conversation, and now she can't see his eyes at all. She can't see what's in them.

“I'll give it my complete attention. Immediately,” she says as he walks to the door. “If you'd like to go over it later, we can.”

“Huh.”

“Why don't you come to the house?”

“Huh,” he says again. “What time?”

“Seven,” she says.

I
nside the MRI
suite, Benton Wesley watches his patient through a partition of Plexiglas. The lights are low, multiple video screens illuminated along the wraparound counter, his wristwatch on top of his briefcase. He is cold. After several hours inside the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory, even his bones are cold, or at least that's how it feels.

Tonight's patient goes by an identification number, but he has a name. Basil Jenrette. He is a mildly anxious and intelligent thirty-three-year-old compulsive murderer. Benton avoids the term
serial killer.
It has been so overused, it means nothing helpful and never did except to loosely imply that a perpetrator has murdered three or more people over a certain period of time. The word
serial
suggests something that occurs in succession. It suggests nothing about a violent offender's motives or state of mind, and when Basil Jenrette was busy killing, he was compulsive. He couldn't stop.

The reason he is getting his brain scanned in a 3-Tesla MRI machine that has a magnetic field sixty thousand times more powerful than the earth's is to see if there is anything about his gray and white matter and how it functions that might hint at why. Benton has asked him why numerous times during their clinical interviews.

I would see her and that was it. I had to do it.

Had to do it right that minute?

Not right there on the street. I might follow her until I figured it out, came up with a plan. To be honest, the more I calculated, the better it felt.

And how long would this take? The following, the calculating. Can you approximate? Days, hours, minutes?

Minutes. Maybe hours. Sometimes days. Depends. Stupid bitches. I mean, if it was you and you realized you were being abducted, would you just sit there in the car and not even try to get away?

Is that what they did, Basil? They sat in the car and didn't try to get away?

Except for the last two. You know about them because that's why I'm here. They wouldn't have resisted, but my car broke down. Stupid. If it was you, would you rather be killed right there in the car or wait to see what I'm going to do to you when I get you to my special spot?

Where was your special spot? Always the same place?

All because my damn car broke down.

So far, the structure of Basil Jenrette's brain is unremarkable except for the incidental finding of a posterior cerebellar abnormality, an approximately six-millimeter cyst that might affect his balance a little, but nothing else. It is the way his brain functions that isn't quite right. It can't be right. If it were, he wouldn't have been a candidate for the PREDATOR research study, and he probably wouldn't have agreed to it. Everything is a game to Basil, and he is smarter than Einstein, thinks he is the most gifted person on earth. He has never suffered one moment of remorse for what he's done and is quite candid in saying that he would kill more women given the opportunity. Unfortunately, Basil is likeable.

The two prison guards inside the MRI suite vacillate from confused to curious as they stare through the glass at the seven-foot-long tube, the bore of the magnet, on the other side. The guards wear uniforms but no guns. Weapons aren't allowed in here. Nothing ferrous, including handcuffs and shackles, is permitted, and only plastic flex-cuffs restrain Basil's ankles and wrists as he lies on the table inside the magnet, listening to the jarring knocks and wonks of radio-frequency pulses that sound like infernal music played on high-voltage power lines—or that's what Benton imagines.

“Remember, this next one is color blocks. All I want you to do is name the color,” Dr. Susan Lane, the neuropsychologist, says into the intercom. “No, Mr. Jenrette, please don't nod your head. Remember, the tape is on your chin to remind you not to move.”

“Ten-four,” Basil's voice sounds through the intercom.

It is half past eight at night and Benton is uneasy. He has been uneasy for months, not so much worried that the Basil Jenrettes of the world are going to suddenly explode into violence inside the gracious old brick walls of McLean Hospital and slaughter everything in sight, but that the research study is doomed to failure, that it is a waste of grant money and a foolish expenditure of precious time. McLean is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and neither the hospital nor the university is forgiving about failure.

“Don't worry about getting all of them right,” Dr. Lane is saying over the intercom. “We don't expect you to get all of them right.”

“Green, red, blue, red, blue, green.” Basil's confident voice fills the room.

A researcher marks down results on a data-entry sheet while the MRI technician checks images on his video screen.

Dr. Lane pushes the talk button again. “Mr. Jenrette? You're doing an excellent job. Can you see everything okay?”

“Ten-four.”

“Very good. Every time you see that black screen, you are nice and still. No talking, just look at the white dot on the screen.”

“Ten-four.”

She releases the talk button and says to Benton, “What's with the cop jargon?”

“He was a cop. That's probably how he was able to get his victims into his car.”

“Dr. Wesley?” the researcher says, turning around in her chair. “It's for you. Detective Thrush.”

Benton takes the phone.

“What's up,” he asks Thrush, a homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police.

“I hope you weren't planning on an early bedtime,” Thrush says. “You hear about the body found this morning out by Walden Pond?”

“No. I've been locked up in this place all day.”

“White female, unidentified, hard to tell her age. Maybe in her late thirties, early forties, shot in the head, the shotgun shell shoved up her ass.”

“News to me.”

“She's been autopsied already, but I thought you might want to take a look. This one ain't the average bear.”

“I'll be finished up in less than an hour,” Benton says.

“Meet me at the morgue.”

 

T
he house
is quiet and Kay Scarpetta walks from room to room, turning on every light, unsettled. She listens for the sound of a car or a motorcycle, listens for Marino. He is late and hasn't returned her phone calls.

Unsettled and anxious, she checks to make sure that the burglar alarm is armed and the floodlights are on. She pauses at the video display on the kitchen phone to make sure the cameras monitoring the front, back and sides of her house are operating properly. Her property is shadowy in the video display, and dark images of citrus trees, palms and hibiscus move in the wind. The dock behind her swimming pool and the waterway beyond are a black plain dabbed with blurred lights from lamps along the seawall. She stirs tomato sauce and mushrooms in copper pots on the stove. She checks dough rising and fresh mozzarella soaking in covered bowls by the sink.

It is almost nine, and Marino was supposed to be here two hours ago. Tomorrow she is tied up with cases and teaching, and she doesn't have time for his rudeness. She feels set up. She has had it with him. She has worked nonstop on the Johnny Swift alleged suicide for the past three hours, and now Marino can't bother to show up. She is hurt, then angry. It is easier to be angry.

She is very angry as she walks into her living room, still listening for a motorcycle or a car, still listening for him. She picks up a twelve-gauge Remington Marine Magnum from her couch and sits down. The nickel-plated shotgun is heavy in her lap, and she inserts a small key in the lock. She turns the key to the right and pulls the lock free from the trigger guard. She racks the pump back to make sure there are no cartridges in the magazine.