Four Scarpetta Novels (147 page)

He takes his time walking through the yard, toward the tiny white stucco house next door. He sees her rocking on her sunporch, looking through binoculars at the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway. She's been watching the house for days. How entertaining is that. Hog has been in and out of the pale orange house three times now, and no one has noticed. In and out to remember what happened, to relive it, to take all the time he wants in there. No one can see him. He can make himself disappear.

He enters Mrs. Simister's yard and begins to examine one of her lime trees. She trains the binoculars on him. In a moment, she opens the slider but doesn't walk out into the yard. He's never once seen her in her yard. The yard man comes and goes, but she never leaves the house or speaks to him. Her groceries are delivered, the same man each time. It might be a relative, maybe a son. All he does is carry in the bags. He never stays long. Nobody bothers with her. She should be grateful to Hog. Pretty soon she'll get plenty of attention. A lot of people will hear about her when she ends up on Dr. Self's show.

“Leave my trees alone,” Mrs. Simister says loudly with a thick accent. “You people have been out here two times this week and it's harassment.”

“Sorry, ma'am. I'm almost finished up here,” Hog says politely as he pulls a leaf off the lime tree, looks at it.

“Get off my property or I'm calling the police.” Her voice gets more shrill.

She is frightened. She's angry because she is terrified that she will lose her precious trees, and she will, but by then, it won't matter. Her trees are infected. They are old trees, at least twenty years old, and they're ruined. It was easy. Wherever the big orange trucks roll in to cut down canker-infected trees and grind them up, there are leaves on the road. He picks them up, tears them, puts them in water and watches the bacteria stream up like tiny bubbles. He fills a syringe, the one God gave him.

Hog unzips his black bag and pulls out a can of red spray paint. He sprays a red stripe around the trunk of the lime tree. Blood painted over the door, like the angel of death, but no one will be spared. Hog hears preaching in a dark place somewhere in his head, like a box hidden way out of reach somewhere in his head.

A false witness shall not be unpunished.

I won't say anything.

Liars are punished.

I didn't say anything. I didn't.

Punishment from my hand is endless.

I didn't. I didn't!

“What are you doing? Leave my trees alone, you hear me!”

“I'm happy to explain it to you, ma'am,” Hog says politely, sympathetically.

Mrs. Simister shakes her head. She angrily closes the sliding glass door and locks it.

I
t has been
unseasonably hot and raining a lot lately, and the grass is spongy and coarse beneath Scarpetta's shoes, and when the sun emerges from the dark clouds again, the sunlight feels flat and hot against her head and shoulders as she walks around the backyard.

She notices the pink-and-red hibiscus bushes, the palm trees, notices several citrus trees with red-painted stripes around their trunks, and she stares across the waterway at the inspector zipping up his bag after the old woman just yelled at him. She wonders if the old woman is Mrs. Simister and assumes Marino hasn't gotten to her house yet. He is always late, never in a hurry to do what Scarpetta asks if he bothers to do it at all. She walks closer to a concrete wall that drops precipitously to the waterway. This one probably doesn't have alligators, but it has no fence, and any child or dog could easily fall over the edge and drown.

Ev and Kristin took custody of two children and didn't bother putting up a fence along the backyard. Scarpetta imagines the property after dark and how easy it would be to forget where the dark yard ends and the dark waterway begins. It runs east–west and is narrow behind the house but gets wider farther off. In the distance, handsome sailboats and motorboats are docked behind much finer homes than the one where Ev, Kristin, David and Tony lived.

According to Reba, the sisters and the boys were last seen on Thursday night, February 10. Early the next morning, Marino got the phone call from the man who said his name was Hog. By then, the people had disappeared.

“Was there anything in the news about their disappearance?” Scarpetta asks Reba, wondering if the anonymous caller might have gotten Kristin's name that way.

“Not that I know of.”

“And you filled out a police report.”

“Not something that would have gone into the press basket. I'm afraid people disappear down here all the time, Dr. Scarpetta. Welcome to South Florida.”

“Tell me what else you know about the last time they were allegedly seen, last Thursday night.”

Reba replies that Ev preached at her church and Kristin gave several readings from the Bible. When the two women didn't show up at the church the following day for a prayer meeting, an associate tried to call them and got no answer, so this associate, a woman, drove to the house. She had a key and let herself in. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except Ev, Kristin and the boys were gone and the stove had been left on low, an empty skillet on top of it. The detail about the stove is important, and Scarpetta will turn her attention to it when she goes inside the house, but she isn't ready yet, her approach to a scene similar to a predator's. She moves from the outer edge to the inside, saving the worst for last.

 

L
ucy asks
Larry if the storeroom is different from how it was when he moved in approximately two years ago.

“Didn't do a thing to it,” he says.

She scans big cardboard boxes and shelves of T-shirts, lotions, beach towels, sunglasses, cleaning equipment and other inventory in the glare of a single naked lightbulb overhead.

“No point in caring what it looks like back here,” Larry says. “What exactly are you interested in?”

She makes her way into the bathroom, a cramped, windowless space with a sink and a toilet. The walls are cinderblock with a light coat of pale green paint, the floor brown asphalt tile. Overhead is another bare lightbulb.

“You didn't repaint, retile?” she asks.

“It was exactly like this when I took over the place. You're not thinking something happened in here?”

“I'd like to come back and bring somebody with me,” she says.

 

O
n the
other side of the waterway, Mrs. Simister watches.

She rocks on her glass-enclosed sunporch, pushing the glider with her feet, rocking back and forth, her slippers barely touching the tile floor as she makes a quiet sliding sound. She looks for the blonde woman in the dark suit who was walking around the yard of the pale orange house. She looks for the inspector who was trespassing, daring to bother Mrs. Simister's trees again, daring to spray red paint on them. He's gone. The blonde woman's gone.

At first, Mrs. Simister thought the blonde woman was a religious nut. There have been plenty of those visiting that house. Then she looked through binoculars and wasn't so sure. The blonde woman was taking notes and had a black bag slung over her shoulder. She's a banker or a lawyer, Mrs. Simister was about to decide when the other woman appeared, this one quite tan, with white hair and wearing khaki pants and a gun in a shoulder holster. Maybe she's the same one who was over there the other day. Friday. She was tan with white hair. Mrs. Simister isn't sure.

The two women talked and then walked out of sight along the side of the house, toward the front. Maybe they'll be back. Mrs. Simister watches for the inspector, that same one who was so nice the first time, asking her all about her trees and when they were planted and what they mean to her. Then he comes back and paints them. It made her think about her gun for the first time in years. When her son gave it to her, she said all that would happen is the bad person would get hold of it and use it against her. She keeps the gun under the bed, out of sight.

She wouldn't have shot the inspector. She wouldn't have minded scaring him, though. All these citrus inspectors getting paid to rip out trees that people have had for half their lives. She hears talk about it on the radio. Her trees will probably be next. She loves her trees. The yard man takes care of them, picks fruit and leaves it on the stoop. Jake planted a yard full of trees for her when he bought the house right after they got married. She is lost in her past when the phone on the table by her glider rings.

“Hello?” she answers.

“Mrs. Simister?”

“Who is this?”

“Investigator Pete Marino. We talked earlier.”

“We did? You're who?”

“You called the National Forensic Academy a few hours ago.”

“I most certainly did not. Are you selling something?”

“No, ma'am. I'd like to stop by and talk to you, if that's all right.”

“It's not all right,” she says, hanging up.

She grips the cool metal armrests so tightly that her big knuckles blanch beneath the loose, sun-spotted skin of her useless old hands. People call all the time and they don't even know her. Machines call and she can't imagine why people sit there and listen to tape recordings made by solicitors after money. The phone rings again, and she ignores it as she picks up the binoculars to peer at the pale orange house where the two ladies live with the two little hoodlums.

She sweeps the binoculars over the waterway, then over the property on the other side of it. The yard and pool are suddenly big and bright green and blue. They are sharply defined, but the blonde woman in the dark suit and the tan lady with the gun are nowhere to be seen. What are they looking for over there? Where are the two ladies who live there? Where are the hoodlums? All children are hoodlums these days.

The doorbell rings and she stops rocking as her heart begins to pound. The older she gets, the more easily she is startled by sudden movements and sounds, the more she fears death and what it means, if it means anything. Several minutes pass, and the bell rings again and she sits still and waits. It rings again and someone knocks loudly. Finally, she gets up.

“Hold on, I'm coming,” she mutters, annoyed and anxious. “You'd better not be someone selling something.”

She walks into the living room, her slow feet brushing over the carpet. She can't pick up her feet the way she once could, can hardly walk.

“Hold on, I'm coming as fast as I can,” she says impatiently when the bell rings again.

Maybe it's UPS. Sometimes her son orders things for her on the Internet. She looks through the peephole in the front door. The person on her porch certainly isn't wearing a brown or blue uniform or carrying mail or a package. It's him again.

“What is it this time?” she says angrily, her eye against the peephole.

“Mrs. Simister? I've got some forms for you to fill out.”

T
he gate leads
to the front yard, where Scarpetta pays attention to thick hibiscus barricading the property from the sidewalk that dead-ends at the waterway.

There are no broken twigs or branches, nothing to indicate that anyone has entered the property by pushing his way through the hedge. Reaching inside the black nylon shoulder bag she routinely carries to scenes, she pulls out a pair of white cotton examination gloves as she looks at the car on the cracked concrete driveway, an old, gray station wagon parked haphazardly, one tire partially on the lawn, where it has gouged the grass. She works her hands into the gloves and wonders why Ev or Kristin parked the car like that, assuming one or the other was driving.

She looks through the car windows at gray vinyl bench seats and the SunPass transponder neatly affixed to the inside of the windshield. She makes more notes. Already a pattern is becoming apparent. The backyard and pool are meticulous. The screened-in patio and lawn furniture are meticulous. She sees no trash or clutter inside the car, nothing but a black umbrella on the mat in back. Yet the car is parked sloppily, carelessly, as if someone couldn't see well or was in a hurry. She bends down to take a closer look at dirt and bits of dead vegetation caked in the tire tread. She looks at thick dust that has turned the undercarriage the grayish tan of old bones.

“It appears this was driven off-road somewhere,” Scarpetta says, getting up as she continues to study the dirty tires, walking from one to the other.

Reba follows her around the car, looking, a curious expression on her lined, tan face.

“The dirt in the tread makes me think the ground was damp or wet when the car was driven over it,” Scarpetta says. “Is the church parking lot paved?”

“Well, it dug up the grass here,” Reba says, looking at the gouged yard beneath a back tire.

“That wouldn't explain it. All four tires are caked with dirt.”

“The strip mall where the church is has a big parking lot. Nothing unpaved in the area that I noticed.”

“Was the car here when the lady from the church showed up looking for Kristin and Ev?”

Reba walks around, interested in the dirty tires. “They said so, and I can tell you for sure it was here when I arrived that afternoon.”

“It wouldn't be a bad idea to check the SunPass, see what tollbooths it's gone through and when. Have you opened the doors?”

“Yes. They were unlocked. I didn't see anything significant.”

“So it's never been processed.”

“I can't ask the crime-scene techs to process something when there's no evidence a crime's been committed.”

“I understand the problem.”

Reba's dark, tanned face watches her peer through the windows again. They are covered with a fine film of dust. Scarpetta steps back and walks around the station wagon, taking in every inch.

“Who owns it?” Scarpetta says.

“The church.”

“Who owns the house?”

“Same thing.”

“I was told the church leases the house.”

“No, the church definitely owns the house.”

“Do you know someone named Simister?” Scarpetta says as she begins to get a strange feeling, the sort that starts in her stomach and works its way up her throat, the same feeling she got when Reba mentioned the name Christian Christian to Marino.

“Who?” Reba frowns as a muffled explosion sounds from the other side of the waterway.

She and Scarpetta stop talking. They step closer to the gate, looking at the houses on the other side of the water. There is no one in sight.

“Car backfire,” Reba decides. “People drive a lot of junkers around here. Most of them shouldn't be driving at all. Old as the Grim Reaper and blind as bats.”

Scarpetta repeats the name
Simister.

“Never heard of her,” Reba says.

“She said she's talked to you several times. I believe she said three times, to be exact.”

“I never heard of her, and she's never talked to me. I guess she's the one who bad-mouthed me, said I didn't care about the case.”

“Excuse me,” Scarpetta then says, and she tries Marino on his cell phone and gets his voicemail.

She tells him to call her immediately.

“When you find out who this Mrs. Simister is,” Reba says, “I'd like to know about it. There's something weird about all this. Maybe we should at least dust the inside of the car for prints. If nothing else, for exclusionary purposes.”

“Unfortunately, you probably won't get the boys' prints from inside the car,” Scarpetta says. “Not after four days. You probably won't get them from inside the house, either. Certainly not the young boy's prints, the seven-year-old boy's prints.”

“I don't get why you would say that.”

“The prints of prepubescent children don't survive long. Hours, maybe a few days at most. We're not entirely sure why, but it probably has to do with the oils people secrete when they reach puberty. David is twelve? You might get his prints. I emphasize
might
.”

“Well, that sure is news to me.”

“I suggest you get this station wagon into the lab, process it for trace evidence and fume the inside of it ASAP with superglue for possible fingerprints. We can do it at the Academy, if you want. We have a bay for processing vehicles and can take care of it.”

“Maybe that's not a bad idea,” Reba says.

“We should find Ev's and Kristin's prints inside the house. And DNA, including the boys' DNA. Their toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shoes, clothing,” and then she tells Reba about the anonymous caller who mentioned Kristin Christian's name.

 

M
rs. Simister
lives alone in a small white rancher built of stucco that by South Florida standards is a tear-down.

She has an aluminum carport that is empty, which doesn't mean she isn't home, since she no longer owns a car or has a valid driver's license. Marino also notices that the curtains are drawn in the windows to the right of the front door and there are no newspapers on the sidewalk. She has daily delivery of
The Miami Herald,
implying she can see well enough to read as long as she is wearing her glasses.

Her phone has been busy for the past half-hour. Marino cuts the engine of his motorcycle and climbs off as a white Chevy Blazer with tinted windows drives past on the street. It is a quiet street. Probably a lot of the people who live in this neighborhood are elderly and have been here a long time and can no longer afford the property taxes. It angers him to think of living in the same place for twenty or thirty years, to have your house finally paid for, only to discover you can't pay the taxes because of rich people who want places on the water. Mrs. Simister's tear-down house is assessed at almost three quarters of a million dollars, and she will have to sell it, probably soon, if she doesn't end up in an assisted-living facility first. She has only three thousand dollars in savings.

Marino learned quite a lot about Dagmara Schudrich Simister. After talking to who he now suspects was someone claiming to be her, on speakerphone in Scarpetta's office, he ran a search in HIT. Mrs. Simister goes by the name Daggie and is eighty-seven years old. She is Jewish and a member of a local synagogue that she hasn't attended in years. She has never been a member of the same church as the missing people across the waterway, so what she said on the phone isn't true, assuming it was Daggie Simister on the phone, and Marino doesn't believe it was.

She was born in Lublin, Poland, and survived the Holocaust, remaining in Poland until she was almost thirty, explaining the strong accent Marino heard when he tried to call her a few minutes ago. The woman he talked to on speakerphone had no accent he could discern. She simply sounded old. Mrs. Simister's only child, a son, lives in Fort Lauderdale and has been charged with two DUIs and three moving violations over the past ten years. Ironically, he is a contractor and developer, one of the very sorts of people responsible for causing his mother's mounting property taxes.

Mrs. Simister is under the care of four physicians for arthritis, cardiac and foot problems, and her eyesight. She doesn't travel, at least not on commercial airlines. It appears she stays home most of the time and possibly is aware of what goes on around her. Often in neighborhoods like this one, many homebound people are snoops and he hopes she is one them. He hopes she has noticed whatever has gone on across the waterway in the pale orange house. He hopes she might have some idea who called Scarpetta's office claiming to be her, assuming that is what happened.

He rings the bell, his wallet ready to display his badge, which isn't exactly honest because he is retired from policing, was never a cop in Florida and was supposed to turn in his credentials and pistol when he left the last police department he worked for, a modest-sized one in Richmond, Virginia, where he always felt the outsider, unappreciated and underestimated. He rings the bell again and tries again to reach Mrs. Simister by phone.

It's still busy.

“Police! Anybody home?” he calls out loudly as he knocks on the door.