Five Scarpetta Novels (132 page)

We stepped inside her office, where there were no windows, and stacks of files and journals and memos spilled from every surface. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension, and asked someone to bring us coffee.

“Please, make yourself comfortable, if that's possible. I'd move things out of the way but I've no place to put them.”

I pulled a chair close to her desk.

“I felt very out of place when we were in Geneva,” she said, her mind apparently jumping back to that memory as she shut the door. “And part of the reason is the system here in France. Forensic pathologists are completely isolated here and that's not changed and perhaps never will in my lifetime. We're allowed to talk to no one, which isn't always so bad because I like to work alone.”

She lit a cigarette.

“I inventory the injuries and police tell the whole story,
if they choose. If a case is sensitive, I talk to the magistrate myself and maybe I get what I need, maybe I don't. Sometimes when I raise the question, no lab is appointed for the tests, do you understand?”

“Then, in a sense,” I said, “your only job is to find the cause of death.”

She nodded. “For each case I receive a mission from the magistrate to determine the cause of death, and that's all.”

“You don't really investigate.”

“Not the way you do. Not the way I want to,” she replied, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. “You see, the problem with French justice is the magistrate is independent. I can report to no one but the magistrate who appointed me, and only the minister of justice can take a case away and give it to another magistrate. So if there's a problem, I don't have the power to do anything about it. The magistrate does what he wants to my report. If I say it's a homicide and he doesn't agree, so be it. It's not my problem. This is law.”

“He can change your report?” The idea was outrageous to me.

“Of course. I'm alone against everyone. And I suspect you are, too.”

I didn't want to think about how alone I was.

“I'm keenly aware if anyone knew we were talking, it could be very bad, especially for you—” I started to say.

She held up her hand for me to be quiet. The door opened and the same young woman who had escorted me came in with a tray of coffee, cream and sugar. Dr. Stvan thanked her and said something else in French I didn't get. The woman nodded and quietly left, shutting the door behind her.

“I told her to hold all calls,” Dr. Stvan informed me. “I need to let you know right away that the magistrate who appointed me is someone I very much respect. But there are pressures above him, if you understand what I mean.
Pressures even above the minister of justice. I don't know where all of it comes from, but there was no lab work done in these cases, which is why you were sent.”

“Sent? I thought it was you who asked for me.”

“How do you take your coffee?” Dr. Stvan asked.

“Who told you I was sent?”

“Certainly, you've been sent in to relieve me of my secrets, and I'll give them up to you gladly. Do you take sugar and cream?”

“Black.”

“When the woman was murdered in Richmond, I was told you'd be sent here if I'd talk to you.”

“So you didn't request that I come?”

“I would never have asked such a thing, because I would never imagine such a request would be granted.”

I thought of the private jet, the Concorde and all the rest of it.

“Could you spare a cigarette?” I said.

“I'm so sorry I didn't ask. I didn't know you smoke.”

“I don't. This is just a detour. One that's lasted about a year. Do you know who sent me, Dr. Stvan?”

“Someone with enough influence to get you here almost instantly. Beyond that, I don't know.”

I thought of Senator Lord.

“I'm worn down by what Loup-Garou brings to me. Eight women now,” she said, staring off, a glazed, pained look in her eyes.

“What can I do, Dr. Stvan?”

“There's no evidence they were raped vaginally,” she said. “Or sodomized. I took swabs of the bite marks, very strange bite marks with missing molars, occlusion and tiny teeth widely spaced. I collected hairs and all the rest of it. But let's go back to the first case, when everything got strange.

“As you might expect, the magistrate instructed me to submit all evidence to the lab. Weeks went by, months
went by, no results ever came back. From then on, I learned. With subsequent cases believed to be Loup-Garou, I didn't ask to submit anything.”

She was silent for a moment, her thoughts elsewhere.

Then she said, “He's a strange one, this Loup-Garou. Biting the palms, the soles of the feet. It must mean something to him. I've never seen anything like it. And now you must contend with him as I have.”

She paused, as if what she had to say next was very hard.

“Please be very careful, Dr. Scarpetta. He will come after you as he did me. You see, I'm the one who survived.”

I was too stunned to speak.

“My husband is a chef at Le Dome. He is almost never home at night, but as God would have it, he was sick in bed when this creature came to my door several weeks ago. It was raining. He said his car had just been in an accident and needed to call the police. Of course, my first thought was to help. I wanted to make certain he wasn't injured. I was very concerned.

“That was my vulnerability,” she went on. “I think physicians have a savior complex, you know? We can take care of problems, no matter what they are, and that's the impulse he counted on, in retrospect, where I was concerned. There was nothing suspicious about him in the least, and he knew I would let him in, and I would have. But Paul heard voices and wanted to know who was there. The man ran off. I never got a good look at him. My house light was out, you see, because he'd unscrewed it, I found out later.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Only a detective I trust.”

“Why?”

“One has to be careful.”

“How did you know it was the killer?”

She sipped her coffee. By now, it was cold, and she added a little to both of ours to warm them up.

“I could
feel
it. I remember smelling a wet animal smell, but I think now I must have imagined it. I could feel the evil, the lust in his eyes. And he wouldn't show himself. I never saw his face, just the glint of his eyes as light spilled out the open door.”

“Wet animal smell?” I asked.

“Different from a body odor. A dirty odor, like a dog that needs to be bathed. That's what I remember. But all of it happened so fast, and I can't be sure. Then the next day I received a note from him. Here. Let me show you.”

She got up and unlocked a drawer of a metal filing cabinet, where files were squeezed so tightly together she had difficulty pulling one out. It was not labeled, and inside was a torn piece of blood-speckled brown paper protected by a transparent plastic evidence bag.

“Pas la police. Ça va, ça va. Pas de problème, tout va bien. Le Loup-Garou,”
she read. “It means
No police. It's all right. It's okay. Everything's fine. The werewolf.”

I stared at the familiar block letters. They were mechanical and almost childish.

“The paper looks like a piece of a torn bag from the market,” she said. “I can't prove it's from him, but who else would it be from? I don't know whose blood it is, because again, I can do no tests, and only my husband knows I got this.”

“Why you?” I asked. “Why would he come after you?”

“I can only suppose it's because he saw me at the crime scenes. So I know he watches. When he kills, he's out there in the dark somewhere, watching what people like us do. He's very intelligent, cunning. I have no doubt he knows exactly what happens when his bodies come to me.”

I tilted the note in lamplight, looking for hidden strokes that might have been pressed into the paper by the force of someone writing on whatever had been on top of it. I saw none.

“When I read the note, the corruption became so plain to
me, as if there had been any doubt,” Dr. Stvan was saying. “Loup-Garou knew it would do no good to submit his note to the police, to the labs. He was telling me, even warning me, not to bother, and it's very odd, but I feel he was also telling me he won't try again.”

“I wouldn't be so quick to assume that,” I said.

“As if he needs a friend. The lonely beast needs a friend. I suppose in his fantasies he matters to me because I saw him and didn't die. But who can know a mind like that?”

She got up from her desk and unlocked another drawer in another filing cabinet. She lifted out an ordinary shoe box, peeled off tape and removed the lid. Inside were eight small, ventilated paper boxes and just as many small manila envelopes, each labeled with case numbers and dates.

“It's unfortunate no impressions were made of the bite marks,” she said. “But to do that I would have to call in a dentist, and I knew that wouldn't be permitted. But I did swab them, and maybe that will help. Maybe it won't.”

“He tried to eradicate the bite marks in Kim Luong's murder,” I told her. “We can't cast them. Even photographs would do no good.”

“I'm not surprised. He knows there's no one to protect him now. He's—how do you say—on your turf? And I'll tell you, it wouldn't be hard to identify him by his dentition. He has very strange pointed teeth, widely spaced. Like some sort of animal.”

I began to get a strange sensation.

“I recovered hair from all of the bodies,” she was saying. “Catlike hair. I've wondered if he breeds angora cats, something like that.”

I leaned forward in my chair.

“Catlike?” I said. “Did you save it?”

She peeled tape off a flap and retrieved a pair of forceps from a drawer in her desk. She dipped into an envelope, withdrawing several hairs. They were so fine they floated like down as she lowered them to the ink blotter.

“All the same, you see? Nine or ten centimeters long, pale blond. Very fine, baby-fine.”

“Dr. Stvan, this isn't cat hair. It's human hair. It was on the clothing of the unidentified man we found in the cargo container. It was on the body of Kim Luong.”

Her eyes widened.

“When you submitted evidence in the first case, did you submit some of these hairs?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you heard nothing back?”

“To my knowledge the labs never analyzed what I sent.”

“Oh, I bet they analyzed it, all right,” I said. “I bet they know damn well these hairs are human and are too long for baby hair. They know what the bite marks mean and may even have recovered DNA from them.”

“Then we should get DNA, too, from the swabs I'm giving you,” she said, getting increasingly unsettled.

I didn't care. It no longer mattered.

“Of course, you can't do much with the hairs,” she rambled. “Hirsute, no pigmentation. They would simply be consistent with each other, wouldn't they . . . ?”

I wasn't listening. I was thinking of Kaspar Hauser. He spent the first sixteen years of his life in a dungeon because Prince Charles of Baden wanted to make sure Kaspar didn't have any claims to the crown.

“. . . no DNA without roots, I suppose . . .” Dr. Stvan went on.

At age sixteen he was found by a gate, a note pinned to him. He was pale like a cave fish, nonverbal like an animal. A freak. He couldn't even write his name without someone's guiding his hand.

“The mechanical, block letters of a beginner,” I thought out loud. “Someone shielded, never exposed to others, never schooled except at home. Maybe even self-taught.”

Dr. Stvan stopped talking.

“Only a family could shield someone from the time he
was born. Only a very powerful family could circumvent the legal system, allowing this anomaly to keep on killing without being caught. Without embarrassing them, drawing unwanted attention to them.”

Dr. Stvan was silent as every word I said torqued what she believed and aroused a new, more pervasive fear.

“The Chandonne family knows exactly what these hairs, the abnormal teeth, all of it means,” I said. “And he knows. Of course he does, and he would have to suspect you know, even if the labs tell you nothing, Dr. Stvan. I think he came to your house because you saw his reflection in what he did to the bodies. You saw his shame, or he thought you did.”

“Shame . . . ?”

“I don't think the purpose of that note was to assure you he wouldn't try again,” I continued. “I think it was mocking you, telling you he could do what he wanted with sovereign immunity. That he would be back and wouldn't fail next time.”

“But it would appear he's not here anymore,” Dr. Stvan answered me.