Five Scarpetta Novels (148 page)

“He thinks I did this to myself,” Henri replies angrily. “He thinks I didn't hear what he said to the nurse.”

Benton is careful how he reacts. Henri is offering new information. He can only hope that it is true. “Tell me,” he says. “I would very much like to know what he said to the nurse.”

“I should sue the asshole,” she adds.

Benton waits, sipping his coffee.

“Maybe I will sue him,” she adds, spitefully. “He thought I didn't hear him because I had my eyes shut when he walked into the room. I was lying there half asleep and the nurse was in the doorway and then he showed up. So I pretended I was out of it.”

“Pretended you were asleep,” Benton says.

She nods.

“You're a trained actor. You used to be a professional actor.”

“I still am. You don't just stop being an actor. I'm just not in any productions right now because I have other things to do.”

“You've always been good at acting, I would imagine,” he says.

“Yes.”

“At pretending. You've always been good at pretending.” He pauses. “Do you pretend things often, Henri?”

Her eyes get hard as she looks at him. “I was pretending in the hospital room so I could hear the doctor. I heard every word. He said, ‘Nothing like being raped if you're mad at someone. Payback's hell.' And he laughed.”

“I don't blame you for wanting to sue him,” Benton says. “This was in the ER?”

“No, no. In my room. Later that day when they moved me to one of the floors, after all the tests. I don't remember which floor.”

“That's even worse,” Benton says. “He shouldn't have come to your room at all. He's an ER doctor and isn't assigned to one of the floors. He stopped by because he was curious, and that's not right.”

“I'm going to sue him. I hate his guts.” She rubs her toe again, and her bruised toe and the bruises on her hands have faded to a nicotine-yellow. “He made some comment about Dextro Heads. I don't know what that is, but he was insulting me, making fun of me.”

Again, this is new information, and Benton feels renewed hope that with time and patience, she will remember more or be more truthful. “A Dextro Head is someone who abuses allergy and flu remedies or cough syrups that have opiates. It's popular among teenagers, unfortunately.”

“The asshole,” she mutters, picking at her robe. “Can't you do something to get him into trouble?”

“Henri, do you have any idea why he indicated you were raped?” Benton asks.

“I don't know. I don't think I was.”

“Do you remember the forensic nurse?”

She slowly shakes her head, no.

“You were wheeled into an examination room near the ER, and a physical evidence recovery kit was used. You know what that is, don't you? When you got tired of acting, you were a police officer before Lucy met you in L.A. this fall, just a few months ago, and hired you. So you know about swabs and collecting hair and fibers and all the rest.”

“I didn't get tired of it. I just wanted time off from it, to do something else.”

“Okay. But you remember the PERK?”

She nods.

“And the nurse? She was very nice, I'm told. Her name is Brenda. She examined you for sexual assault injury and evidence. The room is also used for children and was filled with stuffed animals. The wallpaper was Winnie the Pooh, bears, honeypots, trees. Brenda wasn't wearing a nurse's uniform. She had on a light blue suit.”

“You weren't there.”

“She told me over the phone.”

Henri stares at her bare feet, which are up on the chair cushion. “You asked her what she had on?”

“She's got hazel eyes, short black hair.” Benton tries to dislodge what Henri is repressing or pretends to be repressing, and it is time to discuss the physical evidence recovery kit. “There was no seminal fluid, Henri. No evidence of sexual assault. But Brenda found fibers adhering to your skin. It appears you had on some sort of lotion or body oil. Do you remember if you put on lotion or body oil that morning?”

“No,” she quietly replies. “But I can't say I didn't.”

“Your skin was oily,” Benton says. “According to Brenda. She detected a fragrance. A nice fragrance like a perfumed body lotion.”

“He didn't put it on me.”

“He?”

“It must have been a he. Don't you think it was a he?” she says in a hopeful tone that rings off-key, the way voices sound when people are trying to fool themselves or others. “It couldn't have been a she. A woman. Women don't do things like that.”

“Women do all sorts of things. Right now we don't know if it was a man or a woman. Several head hairs were found on the mattress in the bedroom, black curly ones. Maybe five, six inches long.”

“Well, we'll know soon enough, right? They can get DNA from the hair and find out it's not a woman,” she says.

“I'm afraid they can't. The kind of DNA testing they're doing can't determine gender. Possibly race, but not gender. And even race will take at least a month. Then you think you might have put on the body lotion yourself.”

“No. But he didn't. I wouldn't have let him do it. I would have fought him if I'd had a chance. He probably wanted to do it.”

“And you didn't put the lotion on yourself?”

“I said he didn't and I didn't and that's enough. It's none of your business.”

Benton understands. The lotion has nothing to do with the attack, assuming Henri is telling the truth. Lucy enters his thoughts, and he feels sorry for her and is angry with her at the same time.

“Tell me everything,” Henri says. “Tell me what you think happened to me. You tell me what happened and I'll agree or disagree.” She smiles.

“Lucy came home,” Benton says, and this is old information now. He resists revealing too much too soon. “It was a few minutes past noon, and when she unlocked the front door, she noticed immediately that the alarm wasn't armed. She called out to you, you didn't answer, and she heard the back door that leads out to the pool bang against the doorstop, and she ran in that direction. When she got into the kitchen, she discovered the door leading out to the pool and the seawall was wide open.”

Henri stares wide-eyed past Benton, out the window again. “I wish she'd killed him.”

“She never saw whoever it was. It's possible the person heard her pull up in the driveway in her black Ferrari and ran…”

“He was in my room with me and then had to go down all those stairs,” Henri interrupts, staring off with wide eyes, and at this moment, it feels to Benton that she is telling the truth.

“Lucy didn't park in the garage this time because she was only stopping by to check on you,” Benton says. “So she was in the front door quickly, came in the front door as he was running out the back door. She didn't chase him. She never saw him. At that moment, Lucy's focus was you, not whoever had gotten into the house.”

“I disagree,” Henri says, almost happily.

“Tell me.”

“She didn't drive up in her black Ferrari. It was in the garage. She had the California blue Ferrari. That's the one she parked out front.”

More new information, and Benton remains calm, very easygoing. “You were sick in bed, Henri. Are you sure you know what she drove that day?”

“I always know. She wasn't driving the black Ferrari because it got damaged.”

“Tell me about the damage.”

“It got damaged in a parking lot,” Henri says, studying her bruised toe again. “You know, the gym up there on Atlantic, way up there in Coral Springs. Where we go to the gym sometimes.”

“Can you tell me when this happened?” Benton asks, calmly, not showing the excitement he feels. The information is new and important and he senses where it leads. “The black Ferrari got damaged while you were in the gym?” Benton prods her to tell the truth.

“I didn't say I was in the gym,” she snaps, and her hostility confirms his suspicions.

She took Lucy's black Ferrari to the gym, obviously without Lucy's permission. No one is allowed to drive the black Ferrari, not even Rudy.

“Tell me about the damage,” Benton says.

“Someone scratched it, like with a car key, something like that. Scratched a picture on it.” She stares down at her toes, picking at her big yellowish toe.

“What was the picture?”

“She wouldn't drive it after that. You don't take out a scratched Ferrari.”

“Lucy must have been angry,” Benton says.

“It can be fixed. Anything can be fixed. If she'd killed him, I wouldn't have to be here. Now I'll have to worry the rest of my life that he's going to find me again.”

“I'm doing my best to make sure you'll never have to worry about that, Henri. But I need your help.”

“I may never remember.” She looks at him. “I can't help it.”

“Lucy ran up three flights of stairs to the master bedroom. That's where you were,” Benton says, watching her carefully, making sure she can handle what he is saying, even though she has heard this part before. All along, he has feared that she might not be acting, that none of what she says and does is an act. What if it isn't? She could break with reality, become psychotic, completely decompensate and shatter. She listens, but her affect isn't normal. “When Lucy found you, you were unconscious, but your breathing and heart rate were normal.”

“I didn't have anything on.” She doesn't mind that detail. She likes reminding him of her naked body.

“Do you sleep in the nude?”

“I like to.”

“Do you remember if you'd taken off your pajamas before you got back into bed that morning?”

“Probably I did.”

“So he didn't do it? The attacker didn't. Assuming it's a he.”

“He didn't need to. I'm sure he would have, though.”

“Lucy says that when she saw you last, at about eight
A.M.
, you were wearing red satin pajamas and a tan terry-cloth robe.”

“I agree. Because I wanted to go outside. I sat in a lounge chair by the pool, in the sun.”

More new information, and he asks, “What time was this?”

“Right after Lucy left, I think. She drove off in the blue Ferrari. Well, not right after,” she corrects herself in a flat tone, and stares out at the snow-covered, sun-dazzled morning. “I was mad at her.”

Benton slowly gets up and places several logs on the fire. Sparks fly up the chimney and flames greedily lick the bone-dry pine. “She hurt your feelings,” he says, drawing the mesh curtain shut.

“Lucy isn't nice when people get sick,” Henri replies, more focused, more poised. “She didn't want to take care of me.”

“What about the body lotion?” he asks, and he has figured out the body lotion, he's pretty sure he has, but it is smart to make absolutely sure.

“So what? Big deal. That's a favor, now isn't it? You know how many people would love to do that? I let her as a favor. She'll only do so much, only what suits her, then she gets tired of taking care of me. My head hurt and we were arguing.”

“How long did you sit out by the pool?” Benton says, trying not to get distracted by Lucy, trying not to wonder what the hell she was thinking when she met Henri Walden, and at the same time he is all too aware of how impressive and bewitching sociopaths can be, even to people who should know better.

“Not long. I didn't feel good.”

“Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?”

“I guess half an hour.”

“Did you see any other people? Any boats?”

“I didn't notice. So maybe there weren't any. What did Lucy do when she was in the room with me?”

“She called nine-one-one, continued checking your vital signs while she waited for the rescue squad,” Benton says. He decides to add another detail, a risky one. “She took photographs.”

“Did she have a gun out?”

“Yes.”

“I wish she'd killed him.”

“You keep saying ‘he.'”

“And she took pictures? Of me?” Henri says.

“You were unconscious but stable. She took pictures of you before you were moved.”

“Because I looked like I had been attacked?”

“Because your body was in an unusual position, Henri. Like this.” He straightens out his arms and holds them over his head. “You were facedown with your arms stretched out in front of you, palms down. Your nose was bleeding, and you had bruises, as you know. And your right big toe was broken, although that wasn't discovered until later. You don't seem to remember how it got broken.”

“I might have stubbed it going down the stairs,” she says.

“You remember that?” he asks, and she has remembered nothing or admitted nothing about her toe before now. “When might this have happened?”

“When I went out by the pool. Her stone stairs. I think I missed a step or something, because of all the medicine and my fever and everything. I remember crying. I remember that. Because it hurt, really hurt, and I thought about calling her but why bother. She doesn't like it when I'm sick or hurt.”

“You broke your toe going down to the pool and thought of calling Lucy but didn't.” He wants to make this clear.

“I agree,” she says, mockingly. “Where were my pajamas and robe?”

“Neatly folded on a chair near the bed. Did you fold them and put them there?”

“Probably. Was I under the covers?”

He knows where she is going with this, but it is important that he tell her the truth. “No,” he replies. “The covers were pulled down to the bottom of the bed, were hanging off the mattress.”

“I didn't have anything on and she took pictures,” Henri says, and her face is expressionless as she looks at him with hard, flat eyes.

“Yes,” Benton says.

“That figures. She would do something like that. Always the cop.”