Four Scarpetta Novels (133 page)

B
ENTON LEAVES HIS JAGUAR
tucked in a church's back parking lot less than half a mile from the Dard plantation house.

Each time he hears a car or truck approaching from either direction, he crashes through underbrush and hides in thick woods across the road from the Mississippi River. In addition to not knowing who might come along, he is well aware that it would appear odd to see a man in a black suit, black T-shirt, black cap and black butt pack walking along the side of a narrow road in the rain. Someone might stop and ask if he's had car trouble. People would stare.

When he spots the gates that he drove past late last night, he leaves the pavement and enters the woods, this time penetrating deeper, until the mansion rises above trees, his scan constant. Looking where he steps, he does his best to avoid snapping fallen branches. Fortunately, the dead leaves are wet and silent. When he scouted the area last night, he didn't venture into the woods because it was too dark to see, and he didn't dare use a flashlight. He did, however, climb over the gate, getting rust all over his jacket and jeans, one of many explanations for why he opted to wear his suit again.

He wondered how much the place had changed since he had been here
last. In the dark, it was difficult to tell whether it had been kept in good repair, but his last act was to toss a rock near shrubbery around the front to see if the motion sensors lit up. They didn't. He tried again, and not a single light was triggered. If any of them are still in working order and he activates them this morning, they won't be conspicuous, even though the sun is blanketed in gray. The grounds used to have an elaborate camera system, but there was no way Benton would have been foolish enough to test cameras, to see if they would turn red and follow him as if they were alive.

The cars in the driveway are a new white Mercedes 500 AMC and an older-model white Volvo. The Mercedes was not here last night. He doesn't know who it belongs to and doesn't have time or means to run the Louisiana plate. The Volvo belongs to Eveline Guidon, or at least it did six years ago. Grateful for dark clothing, Benton freezes like a deer behind a thick, dripping tree when the front door of the mansion opens. He crouches low, completely out of view, about fifty feet to the left of the front steps.

U.S. Attorney Weldon Winn walks out, talking in his usual booming voice, more obese than when Benton last laid eyes on him. Expecting him to climb into his expensive car, Benton thinks fast. Weldon Winn's being here isn't according to plan but certainly is a bonus. It strongly hints that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has sought or will seek asylum at his family's Baton Rouge stronghold, a plantation of incredible corruption that has escaped suspicion for decades because the people associated with it are either completely loyal or dead.

Benton, for example, is dead.

He watches Baton Rouge's despicable U.S. Attorney follow an old brick walkway to an old stone building with a dark Gothic door that leads down into the wine cellar, the centuries-old cave, almost half a mile of convoluted tunnels dug by slaves. Winn unlocks the door, steps inside and shuts it behind him. Benton moves swiftly in a crouch, soaking wet by now, ducking behind the cover of boxwoods, glancing repeatedly from
the wine cellar to the house. His riskiest move is his next. He walks casually, upright, his back to the house.

Should anyone look out the window, the man in black may very well appear to be a Chandonne friend. The door is thick oak, and he barely makes out voices behind it.

S
CARPETTA CAN'T RELEASE
Albert Dard from her mind. She imagines the scars on his little body and is well aware that self-mutilation is an addiction, and if he continues hurting himself, it seems likely that he will be committed to psychiatric hospitals again and again until he becomes as mentally ill as those patients whose diagnoses justify their being institutionalized.

Albert Dard doesn't need to be committed. He needs help. He needs for someone to at least attempt to find out why his anxiety increased so severely a year ago that he shut down, repressed his feelings and perhaps memories to such an extreme that now he needs self-inflicted pain to experience control, a brief release and an affirmation of his own existence. Scarpetta recalls the boy's almost dissociated state on the plane while he played with trading cards, violent ones relating to an ax. She envisions his extreme distress at the thought of no one meeting him, of an abandonment that she doubts is anything new.

With each passing moment, she becomes increasingly angry at those who are supposed to take care of him and frightened for his safety.

Digging inside her pocketbook as she drinks coffee in Dr. Lanier's guest house, she finds the telephone number she wrote down when
Albert waited for an aunt who did not intend to pick him up, but orchestrated events so that Scarpetta would take care of him. It no longer matters what manipulations or conspiracies were on Mrs. Guidon's mind. Perhaps it was all a lure to get Scarpetta to that house to see what she knows about Charlotte Dard's death. Perhaps Mrs. Guidon is now satisfied that Scarpetta knows nothing more about the death than has ever been known.

She dials the number and is startled when Albert answers the phone.

“It's the lady who sat next to you on the plane,” she says.

“Hi!” he greets her, surprised and very pleased. “How come you're calling me? My aunt said you wouldn't.”

“Where is she?”

“I don't know. She went outside.”

“Did she leave the house in her car?”

“No.”

“I've been thinking about you, Albert,” Scarpetta says. “I'm still in town, but I'm leaving soon, and wondered if I could come by for a visit.”

“Now?” The thought seems to make him happy. “You'd come see just me?”

“Would that be all right?”

He eagerly says it would.

B
ENTON QUIETLY, CAREFULLY OPENS
the wine cellar door, his Sig Sauer drawn and cocked as he stands to one side of the narrow opening.

The conversation just beyond stops, and a male voice says, “You didn't shut it all the way.”

Feet sound on steps, maybe five steps, and a hand, most likely Weldon Winn's, pushes the door to shut it, and Benton pushes back hard, the door opening wide and knocking Winn down the steps, where he lies, shocked and groaning, on the stone floor. Whoever he was talking to had seconds, no more, to flee down another set of steps. Benton can hear the person running fast, getting away, but there is nowhere for him—perhaps Jean-Baptiste—to go. The cave has an entrance and no exit.

“Get up,” Benton says to Winn. “Slowly.”

“I'm hurt.” He looks up as Benton stands on the top step, shutting the door behind him, while he keeps the pistol pointed at Winn's chest.

“I don't give a goddamn if you're hurt. Get up.”

Benton takes off his baseball cap and tosses it on top of Winn. Recognition is slow, then Winn's face blanches and his lips part as he lies twisted on the floor, tangled in his own raincoat, staring in horror.

“It can't be you,” he says in awe. “It can't be!”

All the while this is going on, Benton listens for footsteps, for whoever escaped. He hears no one.

The small, windowless space has a cobweb-covered naked lightbulb overhead and a small, very old cypress table, covered with dark rings left by the countless bottles of wine that were tasted in here. Walls are damp stone, and attached to the one on the left of Benton are four iron rings in eyebolts. They are very old, but most of the rust is worn off. Nearby on the floor are coils of yellow nylon rope and an electrical receptacle.

“Get up,” Benton says again. “Who else is down here? Who were you just talking to?”

The injured Weldon Winn moves with surprising agility as he suddenly rolls on the floor and pulls out a gun from under his coat.

Benton shoots him twice, once in the chest, once in the head, before Winn can even get his finger on the trigger. Gunshots are muffled by stone.

M
ARINO'S PERSONAL PAYLOAD
is enough to slow the helicopter by five knots.

Lucy isn't concerned. In this weather, she wouldn't push her machine up to maximum speed. There is no point in rushing to run into an antenna, and antennas are all over the place, rising out of swirling fog that makes the hairline obstacles and their strobes almost impossible to see in the distance. Lucy flies at five hundred feet, the conditions worse than they were when they took off in Baton Rouge twenty minutes ago.

“I don't like this,” Marino's nervous voice sounds in Lucy's headset.

“You're not the one flying. Relax. Enjoy the flight. Can I get you anything, sir?”

“How 'bout a fucking parachute?”

Lucy smiles as both she and Rudy keep up their scan outside the cockpit.

“You mind if I let go of the controls for a minute?” she says to Rudy for Marino's benefit.

“You're shitting me!” Marino yells.

“Ouch.” Lucy turns down the volume in her headset while Rudy takes the controls. “It's your ship.” She repeats the standard line, ensuring that
the other pilot knows for a fact that he's supposed to be flying at that precise moment.

Turning a small knob on her emergency watch, she changes the upper display to chronograph mode.

Nic has never been up in a helicopter, and she tells Marino to stop making matters worse.

“If we aren't safe with them,” Nic says, “we aren't safe with anyone. Besides, you're more likely to get hit by a car than crash in this weather.”

“That's a bunch of shit. There ain't no cars up here. And I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't use the crash word.”

“Concentrate,” Lucy tells everyone, and she's not smiling now as she glances at the GPS.

Yesterday, when she and Marino flew here and found the northwesternmost edge of the lake, she entered the coordinates into the GPS.

“We're exactly on track.”

Descending to three hundred feet and slowing to eighty knots, she catches a glimpse of Lake Maurepas between rolling fog. The water is almost below them. Thank God. No fear of antennas over a lake or its creeks and bayous. She slows down more as Rudy leans forward, staring hard, trying to make out the shoreline.

“Nic?” Lucy asks. “You hearing me?”

“Yes,” her voice comes back.

“Recognize anything down there?”

Lucy slows to sixty knots. If she reduces her airspeed more than that, she'll go ahead and hover, but she prefers not to do so out of ground effect with such poor visibility.

“Can you go back a little ways so we can find Blind River?” she asks. “Dutch Bayou branches off it right at the edge of the lake.”

“Which direction?” Lucy slowly banks the helicopter around, not thrilled about returning to land at this altitude, grateful that yesterday she was fastidious about noting the locations of any obstacles.

Nic pauses, then her voice returns. “Well, if you follow the river
toward the lake, Dutch Bayou would be at about three o'clock. To your right,” she tells Lucy.

Swooping back around and getting on track, Lucy flies over water again.

“That's it,” Nic says. “That's the river. See how it bends to the left. Well, we could see it better if we were higher.”

“Forget it,” Rudy says.

“I think . . . yes!” Nic is getting excited. “There it is, that very narrow creek. See it on your right. Dutch Bayou. My father's fishing shack isn't even a mile up it, on the left.”

Nerves are suddenly on edge. Rudy pulls his pistol out of his shoulder holster. Lucy takes a deep breath, tenser and more apprehensive than she lets on, as she descends to a hundred feet, directly over a narrow bayou thick with cypress trees that appear ominous in the fog.

“At this altitude especially, they can already hear us,” Lucy says calmly, focusing, thinking, trying not to react to what is quickly becoming a very dangerous situation.

Suddenly, a dilapidated gray shack materializes. Tied to a warped pier is a white boat that is completely incongruous with its surroundings.

Lucy swoops around the shack. “You sure, you sure?” She can't help it, her adrenaline is raising her voice.

“Yes! I recognize the roof! Papa used blue metal. I can still see some of the blue! And the same porch and screen door!”

Lucy drops to fifty feet, in a hover, and turns to the left, Rudy's window lined up with the boat.

“Shoot it!” Lucy yells at him.

Rudy slides open his window. He rapidly fires seventeen rounds into the bottom of the boat as the front door of the shack flies open and Bev Kiffin runs out with a shotgun. Lucy pushes the cyclic forward to push up her airspeed.

“Duck! But stay in your seats!”

Rudy has already slapped a new magazine into his gun. Although the
seats in back are directly over the fuel cell, this isn't Lucy's concern. Jet-A is by no means as flammable as gasoline, and the most damage shotgun pellets might do is cause leaks. On the floor, there is less of the aircraft's skin to penetrate.

Rudy arms the floats.

The shotgun is pump-action with a magazine extender. Bev fires seven rounds, one right after another. Pellets shatter windows, smacking the composite skin, and hit the main rotor blade and engine cowling. If the burn can is penetrated, there's going to be a fire, and Lucy immediately cuts off the throttle and lowers the collective. Alarms go off in desperate warnings as she lowers the collective, presses the right pedal and turns into the wind, where there is no place to set down but an area of tall saw grass. Nitrogen explodes like another gunshot, and floats on the skids instantly inflate like rubber rafts. The helicopter lurches out of trim, and Lucy fights to stabilize it, realizing that at least one of the six floats has been penetrated by shotgun pellets.

The landing is hard enough to set off the ELT, or emergency locator transmitter, and the helicopter rocks in dense grass and dark, muddy water, and lists hard to the right. Opening her door, Lucy looks down. Two of the three floats were penetrated and didn't inflate. Rudy shuts off the battery and the generator and everyone sits for a moment, stunned and listening to the abrupt silence outside as the helicopter lists to the right, sinking into the muck. Not more than three hundred feet away, they can see the boat taking on water, its bow rising as it sinks.

“At least she's not going anywhere,” Rudy remarks as he and Lucy take off their headsets.

Lucy unscrews a large cap on her watch and pulls out the antenna, activating her ELT.

“Come on,” she says. “We can't sit here.”

“I can,” Marino replies.

“Nic?” Lucy turns around. “You got any idea how deep the water is right here?”

“Not too deep, or there wouldn't be all this saw grass. It's the mud that's the problem. We could sink up to our knees.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Marino says. “What for? The boat's sunk, so she ain't going anywhere, either. And I'm not getting snake-bit or eaten by a fucking alligator.”

“Here's what we can do.” Nic continues as if Marino isn't in the back with her. “The saw grass stretches all the way behind the shack, and I know the water's not that deep, because we used to put on high boots and collect mussels.”

“I'm going,” Lucy says, opening her door.

Inside the shack, dogs are barking loudly.

The problem for Lucy is that the fat float on her skid is going to make it impossible for her to lower herself gently, one foot at a time. She tightens the shoelaces on her ankle-high boots and hands Rudy her Glock and extra magazines.

Perched in the door frame like a skydiver, she says, “Here I go!”

She lands in the water feetfirst and is pleasantly surprised to find she sinks in just above her boots. If she steps quickly, she doesn't sink as much. Stepping closer, her face splattered with dirty water, she reaches out to take her weapon and wedges it into the back of her pants. She temporarily jams the extra magazines into a pocket.

Everybody takes turns holding on to guns and ammo as Rudy, then Nic, jumps out, exiting from the same side of the helicopter as Lucy did. Marino sits like an angry lump in the backseat.

“You gonna sit there until the chopper turns over on its side?” Rudy raises his voice. “Idiot! Get out!”

Marino slides across the seats and tosses Rudy his gun. He jumps, loses his balance and falls, his head hitting a float. When he manages to get to his feet, he is covered with mud and swearing.

“Shhhh,” Lucy says. “Voices carry on the water. You all right?”

Marino wipes his hands on Rudy's shirt and angrily takes back his gun as both ELTs flash brightly on radar screens in airport towers and are
picked up by any pilots who happen to be monitoring the emergency frequency.

They slog along, tensely keeping an eye out for snakes, hearing them rustle through the tall grass. When the four of them are within a hundred feet of the shack, pistols held high, barrels pointed up, the screen door whines open again and Bev dashes out on the pier with the shotgun, shrieking, screaming at them, insane and suicidal with desperation and rage.

Before she can even take aim, Rudy fires.

Crack-crack! Crack-crack! Crack-crack!

She hits the old wood planking and rolls into the water next to the half-sunken boat.