Four Scarpetta Novels (144 page)

T
he CITGO station
is getting busy with truckers who park their semis behind the food mart and off to the side of the Chickee Hut restaurant, line them up at the edge of the woods and sleep in them and probably have sex in them.

The truckers eat at the Chickee Hut, which is misspelled because the people who come here are too ignorant to know how to spell chikee and probably don't even know what it is. Chikee is a Seminole word, and even the Seminoles can't spell it.

The ignorant truckers live from mile to mile and pull over here to spend their money at the food mart, where there is plenty of diesel fuel, beer, hotdogs and cigars, and a selection of folding knives in a glass case. They can play pool in the Golden Tee game room and get their trucks repaired at the CB antenna or tire services. The CITGO is a full-service stop out in the middle of nothing, where people come and go and mind their own business. Nobody bothers Hog. They barely look at him, so many people in and out, hardly anybody to see him twice, except the guy who works in the Chickee Hut restaurant.

It is behind a chain-link fence at the edge of the parking lot. Signs posted on the fence announce that solicitors will be prosecuted and the only dogs allowed are K9s, and wildlife can enter at its own risk. There is plenty of wildlife at night, but Hog wouldn't know about it first-hand because he doesn't waste money in the game room, not on pool or the jukebox. He doesn't drink. He doesn't smoke. He doesn't want sex with any of the women at the CITGO.

They are disgusting in skimpy shorts and tight tops, their faces made harsh by too much cheap makeup and too much sun. They sit in the open-air restaurant or at the bar, which is nothing but a roof thatched with palmetto leaves and a scarred wooden counter lined with eight stools. They eat dinner specials like BBQ ribs and meat-loaf and country-fried steak, and they drink. The food is good and cooked right there on the premises. Hog likes the trucker burger, and it's only three ninety-five. A grilled cheese is three dollars and a quarter. Cheap, disgusting women, bad things happen to women like that. They deserve it.

They want it.

They tell everyone.

“I'll have a grilled cheese to go,” Hog says to the man behind the bar. “And a trucker burger for here.”

The man has a big belly and wears a soiled white apron. He is busy popping caps off dripping bottles of beer that he keeps on ice inside tubs. The man with the big belly has waited on him before but never seems to remember him.

“You want the grilled cheese the same time as your burger?” he asks, sliding two bottles of beer closer to a trucker and his lady who are already drunk.

“Just make sure the grilled cheese is wrapped to go.”

“I asked you if you wanted them at the same time.” He isn't annoyed but rather indifferent about it.

“That would be fine.”

“What do you want to drink?” the man with the big belly asks as he opens another beer.

“Plain water.”

“Now what the hell is plain water?” the drunk trucker asks loudly as his lady giggles and presses her breast against his big, tattooed arm. “Water you get on an
air-plane
?”

“Just plain water,” Hog says to the man behind the bar.

“I don't like nothing plain, do I baby?” the drunk trucker's drunk girlfriend slurs, gripping the stool with her plump legs in their tight shorts, her plump breasts bulging from her low-cut top.

“So where you heading?” the drunk girlfriend asks.

“North,” he says. “Eventually.”

“Well you be careful driving around down here all by your lonesome,” the woman slurs. “There's a lot of crazies.”

D
o we have
any idea where he is?” Scarpetta asks Rose.

“He's not in his office and he's not answering his cell phone. When I spoke to him after staff meeting and said you needed to see him, he told me he had an errand to run and would be right back,” Rose reminds her. “That was an hour and a half ago.”

“What time did you say we should leave for the airport?” Scarpetta looks out the window at palm trees shaking in the gusting wind and thinks again about firing him. “We're going to have a thunderstorm, a bad one. That figures. Well, I'm not going to sit around and wait for him. I should just leave.”

“Your flight's not until six thirty,” Rose says as she hands Scarpetta several phone messages.

“I don't know why I'm bothering. Why am I bothering to talk to him?” Scarpetta glances through the messages.

Rose looks at her in a way that only Rose can. She stands quietly, thoughtfully, in the doorway, her white hair swept up and pinned back in a French twist, her gray linen suit out of style but elegant and crisp. After ten years, her gray lizard-skin pumps still look new.

“One minute you want to talk to him, the next you don't. What is it?” Rose remarks.

“I guess I should go.”

“I didn't say which is it. I asked what is it.”

“I don't know what I'm going to do about him. I keep thinking about firing him, but I'd rather resign than do that.”

“You could take the position of chief,” Rose reminds her. “They'd force Dr. Bronson to retire if you'd agree, and maybe you should seriously consider it.”

Rose knows what she's doing. She can seem very sincere when suggesting something that she secretly doesn't want Scarpetta to do, and the result is predictable.

“No thank you,” Scarpetta says adamantly. “Been there, done that, and in case you've forgotten, Marino's one of their investigators, so I wouldn't exactly get away from him by resigning from the Academy and ending up at the ME's office full-time. Who's Mrs. Simister and what church?” she asks, puzzling over one of the phone messages.

“I don't know who she is, but she acted as if she knows you.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She called a few minutes ago and said she wanted to talk to you about some missing family in the West Lake Park area. She didn't leave her number, said she'd call back.”

“What missing family? Here in Hollywood?”

“That's what she said. Let's see, you're flying out of Miami, unfortunately. Worst airport on earth. I'd say we don't need to leave…well, you know the traffic down here. Maybe we should leave as early as four. But we're not going anywhere until I check on your flight.”

“You're sure I'm in first class? And it's not been cancelled.”

“I have your printed reservation, but you're going to have to check in because it's last-minute.”

“Can you believe it? They cancel me, and now it's last-minute because I had to rebook?”

“You're all set.”

“No offense, but that's what you said last month, Rose. And I wasn't in the computer and ended up in coach. All the way to Los Angeles. And look what happened yesterday.”

“I confirmed it first thing this morning. I'll do it again.”

“Do you think this is all about Marino's hell scenes? Maybe that's what's wrong with him.”

“I suspect he feels you shunned him after that, no longer trusted or respected him.”

“How can I trust his judgment?”

“I'm still not sure what Marino did,” Rose replies. “I typed up that particular hell scene and edited it just like I do all of his, and as I've told you before, his script didn't include a hypodermic needle in that big, old, fat dead man's pocket.”

“He set up the scene. He supervised it.”

“He swears someone else put that needle in the pocket. Probably she did. For money, which thankfully, she didn't get. I don't blame Marino for the way he feels. Hell scenes were his idea, and now Dr. Amos is doing them and getting all sorts of attention from the students while Marino's treated like…”

“He's not nice to the students. Not from day one.”

“Well, now it's worse. They don't know him and think he's an ill-tempered dinosaur, a cranky old has-been. And I know just how it feels to be treated like a cranky old has-been or, worse, to feel like one.”

“You're anything but cranky or a has-been.”

“At least you agree that I'm old,” Rose says as she steps back through the doorway, adding, “I'll try him again.”

 

I
nside room
112 of the Last Stand motel, Joe sits at the cheap desk across from the cheap bed and checks the computer for Scarpetta's plane reservation, jotting down the flight number and other information. He calls the airline.

After five minutes of dead time on hold, he gets a real person.

“I need to change a reservation,” he says.

He recites the information, then changes the seating to coach, as far back in the plane as is available, preferably a middle seat, because his boss doesn't like windows or the aisle. Just like he did last time so successfully, when she was flying to Los Angeles. He could cancel her flight again. But this is more fun.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about an E-ticket?”

“No sir, a change this close to departure, and you're going to have to check in at the desk.”

He hangs up, exhilarated, as he imagines the Almighty Scarpetta trapped between two strangers, hopefully two enormous, smelly ones for three hours. He smiles as he plugs a digital recorder into his super hybrid system telephone handset. The window air-conditioning unit rattles loudly but is ineffective. He is getting uncomfortably warm and detects the faint, foul stench of rotting meat from a recent hell scene that included racks of raw pork ribs, beef liver and chicken skin rolled up in carpet and hidden beneath closet flooring.

He scheduled the exercise right after a special lunch he charged to the Academy that included barbecue ribs and rice and resulted in several students gagging when the foul bundle was discovered oozing with rotting fluids and teeming with maggots. In their haste to recover the simulated human remains and clear the scene, Team A neglected to notice a torn bit of fingernail that was also beneath the flooring, lost in the stinking, putrid slop, and as it turned out, that piece of evidence was the only one that could have revealed the identity of the killer.

Joe lights a cigar as he fondly remembers the success of that hell scene, a success made all the better because of Marino's outrage, his insistence that Joe once again had stolen an idea from him. The big bumpkin cop has yet to figure out that Lucy's choice of a communications-monitoring system that interfaces with the Academy's PBX means that given the appropriate security clearance, one can monitor whomever he pleases in almost any way imaginable.

Lucy was careless. The intrepid super-agent Lucy left her Treo—an ultra-high-tech palm-size communications device that is a personal digital assistant, cell phone, e-mail, camera and everything else—inside one of her helicopters. It happened almost a year ago. He'd barely started his fellowship when he had the most amazing bit of luck, was in the hangar with one of the students, an especially pretty one, showing her Lucy's helicopters when he happened to notice a Treo inside the Bell 407.

Lucy's Treo.

She was still logged on. He didn't need her password to access everything in it. He kept the Treo long enough to download all its files before returning it to the helicopter, leaving it on the floor, partially under a seat, where Lucy found it later that day, having no idea what had happened. She still has no idea.

Joe has passwords, dozens of them, including Lucy's system-administrator password, which enables her and now him to access and alter the computer and telecommunications systems of the South Florida regional headquarters, the central headquarters in Knoxville, satellite offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Benton Wesley and his
top-secret
PREDATOR research study and everything else he and Scarpetta confide in each other. Joe can redirect files and e-mail, get hold of the unlisted phone numbers of anybody who has ever had anything to do with the Academy, wreak havoc. His fellowship ends in a month, and by the time he moves on, and he will in a big way, he might just have succeeded in causing the Academy to implode and everybody, especially the big stupid thug Marino and the overbearing Scarpetta, to hate each other.

It is easy to monitor the big dope's office line, to secretly activate his speakerphone so it is like having an open mic in the room. Marino dictates everything, including his hell scenes, and Rose types them up because he can't spell, has terrible grammar, rarely reads and is practically illiterate.

Joe feels a rush of euphoria as he taps cigar ash into a Coke can and logs into the PBX system. He accesses Marino's office line, activates the speakerphone to see if he is in and up to something.

W
hen Scarpetta agreed
to serve as the consulting forensic pathologist for PREDATOR, she wasn't enthusiastic about it.

She warned Benton, tried to talk him out of it, repeatedly reminded him that the subjects of the research study don't care if someone is a physician or a psychologist or a Harvard professor.

They'll break your neck or smash your head against a wall just like they will anybody else,
she said.
There's no such thing as sovereign immunity.

I've been around these people most of my life,
he replied.
That's what I do, Kay.

You've never done it in this type of setting. Not at an Ivy League–affiliated psychiatric hospital that has historically never dealt with convicted murderers. You're not only staring into the abyss, you're installing lights and an elevator in it, Benton.

She hears Rose talking on the other side of the wall in her office.

“Where on earth have you been?” Rose is saying.

“So when am I taking you for that ride?” Marino replies loudly.

“I told you, I'm not getting on the back of that thing. I think there's something wrong with your phone.”

“I've always had this fantasy of seeing you in black leather.”

“I went looking for you, and you weren't in your office. Or, at least, you didn't answer the door….”

“I ain't been in there all morning.”

“But your line's lit up.”

“No it ain't.”

“It was a few minutes ago.”

“You checking on me again? I think you're sweet on me, Rose.”

Marino goes on in his boisterous voice as Scarpetta reviews an e-mail she just got from Benton, another recruitment ad that is to run in
The Boston Globe
and on the Internet.

“Go on now. Dr. Scarpetta's waiting and you're late again.” She hears Rose chastise Marino in her firm but affectionate way. “You need to quit the disappearing acts.”

• ARE A 17-TO 45-YEAR-OLD MALE
  
• ARE AVAILABLE TO COME TO
  M
  C
  L
  EAN
  H
  OSPITAL FOR FIVE VISITS
  
• HAVE NO HISTORY OF HEAD TRAUMA OR DRUG ABUSE
  
• HAVE NEVER BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA OR BIPOLAR DISORDER
  

Scarpetta scrolls through the rest of the ad, getting to the good part, a P.S. from Benton.

Marino's big presence fills the doorway.

“What's up?” he asks.

“Please shut the door,” Scarpetta says as she reaches for the phone.

He pulls it shut, takes a chair, not directly across from her but at an angle so he doesn't have to look at her straight on as she sits at her big desk in her big leather chair. She knows about his tricks. She knows all about his gauche manipulations. He doesn't like dealing with her from the other side of her big desk, but would prefer they were seated with nothing between them, like equals. She knows about office psychology, knows a lot more about it than he does.

“Just give me a minute,” she says.

 

B
ONG-BONG-BONG-BONG-BONG-
BONG, the rapid sounds of a radio frequency pulse causing a magnetic field to excite protons.

In the MRI lab, the structure of another so-called normal's brain is being scanned.

“Just how bad is the weather up there?” Scarpetta is saying over the phone.

Dr. Lane pushes the intercom button. “Are you all right?” she asks their latest research study subject for PREDATOR.

He claims to be normal. He probably isn't. He has no idea the point is to compare his brain to a killer's.

“I don't know,” the normal's unnerved voice answers.

“It's okay,” Benton is saying to Scarpetta over the phone. “If you don't get delayed again. But tomorrow night it's supposed to get bad….”

BWAWWH…BWAWWH…BWAWH…BWAWH…

“I can't hear a damn thing,” he says in exasperation.

The reception is bad. Sometimes his cell phone doesn't even ring in here, and he is distracted, frustrated, tired. The scan isn't going well. Nothing has gone well today. Dr. Lane is dejected. Josh sits in front of his screen, bored.

“I don't feel hopeful,” Dr. Lane says to Benton, a resigned look on her face. “Even with earplugs.”

Twice today, normal control subjects have refused to be scanned because they're claustrophobic, a detail they failed to mention when they were accepted into the study. Now this control subject is complaining about the noise, says it sounds like electric bass guitars being played in hell. At least he's creative.

“I'll call before I take off,” Scarpetta is saying over the phone. “The ad looks fine, as fine as any of them look.”

“Thanks for the enthusiasm. We're going to need a big response. The casualties are mounting. Must be something phobic in the air. Add to that, about one out of three normal subjects isn't.”

“I'm not sure what's normal anymore.”

Benton covers his other ear, walks around, trying to hear, trying to get a better signal. “I'm afraid a big case has come in, Kay. It's going to be a lot of work.”

“How are we doing in there?” Dr. Lane asks over the intercom.

“Not good,” the subject's voice comes back.

“They always do when we're about to get together,” Scarpetta is saying above what now sounds like a hammer rapidly striking wood. “I'll help in any way I can.”

“I'm really starting to freak out,” the normal subject's voice says.

“This isn't going to work.” Benton looks through the Plexiglas at the normal control subject on the far side of the magnet.

He is moving his taped-down head.

“Susan?” Benton looks at her.

“I know,” Dr. Lane says. “I'm going to need to reposition him.”

“Good luck. I think he's done,” Benton says.

“He's destroyed the landmark,” Josh looks up and says.

“Okay,” Dr. Lane tells the subject. “We're going to stop. I'm coming in to get you out.”

“I'm sorry, man, I can't take this,” his stressed voice sounds.

“Sorry. Another one bites the dust,” Benton says to Scarpetta over the phone as he watches Dr. Lane open the magnet room and head in to free their latest failure. “I just spent two hours evaluating this guy and bye-bye. He's out. Josh?” Benton says. “Call someone to get him a taxi.”

 

B
lack leather
creaks as Marino makes himself comfortable in his Harley gear. He goes out of his way to show how relaxed he is, slumped back in the chair, his legs spread.

“What ad?” he asks when Scarpetta hangs up.

“Just another research study he's involved in up there.”

“Huh. What kind of study?” He says it as if he is suspicious of something.

“A neuropsychological study. How different types of people process different types of information, that sort of thing.”

“Huh. That's a line all right. Probably the same line they use every time a reporter calls, a line that says nothing. What did you want to see me about?”

“Did you get my messages? Since Sunday night, I've left you four.”

“Yeah I got them.”

“It would have been nice if you'd returned them.”

“You didn't say it was a nine-one-one.”

That has been their code over the years when they paged each other, back when cell phones weren't so popular, then later because they were insecure. Now Lucy has scramblers and who-knows-what to protect privacy, and it's fine to leave voicemail.

“I don't leave a nine-one-one when it's a phone message,” she says. “How does that work? After the beep I say ‘nine-one-one'?”

“My point being, you didn't say it was an emergency. What did you want?”

“You stood me up. We were set to review the Swift case, remember?”

She fixed dinner for him, too, but she leaves out that part.

“I've been busy, on the road.”

“Would you like to tell me what you've been doing and where?”

“Riding my new bike.”

“For two solid days? You didn't stop for gas, maybe go to the men's room? Couldn't find time for one phone call?”

She leans back in the big chair behind her big desk and feels small as she looks at him. “You're being contraire. That's what this is about.”

“Why should I tell you what I'm doing?”

“Because I'm the director of forensic science and medicine, if for no other reason.”

“And I'm the head of investigations, and that really falls under training and Special Ops. So Lucy's really my supervisor, not really you.”

“Lucy isn't your supervisor.”

“Guess you'd really better talk to her about that.”

“Investigations really falls under forensic science and medicine. You really aren't a Special Ops agent, Marino. My department pays your salary. Really.” She is about to rip into him and knows she shouldn't.

He looks at her with his big, tough face, his big, thick fingers drumming the armrest. He crosses his legs and starts jiggling a big Harley-booted foot.

“Your job is to assist me in casework,” she says. “You're the person I depend on most.”

“Guess you better take that up with Lucy.”

He slowly drums the armrest and jiggles his foot, his flinty eyes looking past her.

“I'm supposed to tell you everything and you don't tell me shit,” he says. “You do whatever the hell you want and don't think you ever owe me an explanation. I'm sitting right here, listening to you lie like I'm so stupid I don't see through it. You don't ask or tell me nothing unless it suits you.”

“I don't work for you, Marino.” She can't stop herself from saying it. “I believe it's the other way around.”

“Oh yeah?”

He leans closer to her big desk, his face turning crimson.

“Ask Lucy,” he says. “She owns this damn place. She pays everybody's salary. Ask her.”

“Obviously, you weren't present for most of our discussion about the Swift case,” she says, changing her tone, trying to abort what is about to turn into a battle.

“Why bother? I'm the one with the damn information.”

“We were hoping you might share it. We're all in this together.”

“No kidding. Everybody's into everything. Nothing of mine's private anymore. It's open season on my old cases, my hell scenes. You just give away whatever you want and don't care how I feel.”

“That's not true. I wish you'd calm down. I don't want you having a stroke.”

“You hear about yesterday's hell scene? Where do you think that came from? He's getting into our files.”

“That's not possible. The hard copies are locked up. Electronic copies are completely inaccessible. As for yesterday's hell scene, I agree it's very similar…”

“Similar my ass. It's exactly the same.”

“Marino, it was also in the news. In fact, you can still pull it up on the Internet. I checked.”

His big flushed face stares at her, a face so unfriendly she scarcely recognizes it anymore.

“Can we talk about Johnny Swift for a minute, please?” she says.

“Ask me anything you want,” he says glumly.

“I'm confused about the possibility of robbery as a motive. Was there a robbery or not?”

“Nothing of value missing from the house except we can't figure out the credit-card shit.”

“What credit-card shit?”

“The week after his death, someone withdrew a total of twenty-five hundred dollars cash. Each withdrawal was five hundred bucks from five different ATMs in the Hollywood area.”

“Tracked?”

Marino shrugs and says, “Yeah. To machines in parking lots, different days, different times, everything different except the amount. Always the limit of five hundred bucks. By the time the credit-card company tried to notify Johnny Swift—who was dead by then—about an out-of-pattern behavior that might indicate someone was using his card, the withdrawals had stopped.”

“What about cameras? Any chance the person was caught on video?”

“Each ATM machine that was picked didn't have one. Somebody knew what he was doing, has probably done it before.”

“Did Laurel have the PIN number?”

“Johnny wasn't able to drive yet because of the surgery. So Laurel had to do everything, including cash withdrawals.”

“Anybody else have the PIN number?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“It certainly doesn't look good for him,” Scarpetta says.

“Well, I don't think he whacked his twin brother for his ATM card.”

“People have killed for a lot less.”

“I think we're talking someone else, maybe someone Johnny Swift had some kind of encounter with. Maybe the person had just killed him and heard Laurel drive up. So he ducked, explaining why the shotgun was still on the floor. Then when Laurel ran from the house, the guy grabbed it and bolted.”

“Why was the shotgun on the floor to begin with?”

“Maybe he was staging the scene to look like a suicide and got interrupted.”