Four Scarpetta Novels (39 page)

“Were you asleep?” Benton asks.

“If you cared, you wouldn't be calling. What's going on that you need to call me at this unseemly hour? Some development in the case, I hope?”

“Not a good one, necessarily.”

“Then what?” Dr. Maroni's voice has an undercurrent of reluctance, or maybe it's resignation that Benton hears.

“The patient you had.”

“I've told you about him.”

“You've told me what you wanted to tell me, Paulo.”

“What more could I help you with?” Dr. Maroni says. “In addition to what I've said, you've read my notes. I've been a friend and not asked you how that happened. I haven't blamed Lucy, for example.”

“You might want to blame yourself. Do you think I haven't figured out that you wanted us to access your patient's file? You left it on the hospital network. You left file-sharing on, meaning anybody who could figure out where it was could get into it. For Lucy, yes, it would be no effort. For you, it was no mistake. You're too smart for that.”

“And so you admit Lucy violated my confidential electronic files.”

“You knew we'd want to see your patient notes. So you arranged it before you left for Rome. Which was earlier than you planned, by the way. Conveniently, right after you learned that Dr. Self was about to be a patient at McLean. You allowed it. She couldn't have been admitted at the Pavilion if you hadn't allowed it.”

“She was manic.”

“She was calculating. Does she know?”

“Know what?”

“Don't lie to me.”

“It's interesting you would think I might,” Dr. Maroni says.

“I've talked to Dr. Self's mother.”

“Is she still such an unpleasant woman?”

“I imagine she hasn't changed,” Benton says.

“People like her rarely do. Sometimes they burn out as they get older. In her case, she's likely worse. As Marilyn will be. As she already is.”

“I imagine she hasn't changed much, either. Although her mother blames her daughter's personality disorder on you,” Benton says.

“And we know that's not what happens. She doesn't have a Paulo-induced personality disorder. She came by it honestly.”

“This isn't amusing.”

“Certainly, it isn't.”

“Where is he?” Benton asks. “And you know exactly who I mean.”

“In those long-ago days, a person was still a minor at age sixteen. Do you understand?”

“And you were twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-two. Gladys would insult me by making me that much older. I'm sure you can understand why I had to leave,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Leave or flee? If you ask Dr. Self, it's the latter when she describes your hasty exit of several weeks ago. You were inappropriate with her and fled to Italy. Where is he, Paulo? Don't do this to yourself, and don't do it to anyone else.”

“Would you believe it if I told you she was inappropriate with me?”

“It doesn't matter. That's not what I give a goddamn about. Where is he?” Benton says.

“Statutory rape is what they would have called it, you know. Her mother threatened it and, indeed, wanted to believe Marilyn wouldn't have sex with a man she happened to meet during spring break. She was so beautiful and exciting, and offered her virginity, and I took it. I did love her. I did flee from her, this is true. I recognized she was toxic way back then. But I didn't return to Italy as I led her to believe. I returned to Harvard to finish medical school, and she never knew I was still in America.”

“We've done DNA, Paulo.”

“After the baby was born, she still didn't know. I wrote her letters, you see. And had them mailed from Rome.”

“Where is he, Paulo? Where's your son?”

“I begged her not to get an abortion, because it's against my religious beliefs. She said if she had the baby, I would have to raise it. And I did the best I could with what turned out to be a miscreant, a devil with a high IQ. He spent most of his life in Italy, and some of his time with her until he turned eighteen. He's the one who is twenty-nine. Perhaps Gladys was playing her usual games…. Well. In many ways, he belongs to neither of us and hates both of us. Marilyn more than me, although when I saw him last, I feared for my safety. Perhaps my life. I thought he was going to attack me with a piece of ancient sculpture, but I managed to soothe him.”

“This was when?”

“Right after I got here. He was in Rome.”

“And he was in Rome when Drew Martin was murdered. At some point, he returned to Charleston. We know he was just in Hilton Head.”

“What can I say, Benton? You know the answer. The tub in the photograph is the very tub in my apartment at Piazza Navona, but then you didn't know I live at Piazza Navona. If you had, you might have asked me questions about my apartment so near the construction site where Drew's body was found. You might have wondered about the coincidence of my driving a black Lancia over here. He probably killed her in my apartment and transported her in my car, not too far. Perhaps a block. In fact, I'm sure he must have. So maybe I would have been better off if he had struck me in the head with that ancient sculpted foot. What he's done is unthinkably reprehensible. But then, he's Marilyn's son.”

“He's your son.”

“He's an American citizen who didn't want to go to a university and continued his foolishness by joining the American Air Force to be a photographer in your fascist war, where he was wounded. His foot. I believe he did it to himself after he put his friend out of his misery by shooting him in the head. But regardless, if he were unbalanced before he went, he was cognitively and psychologically unrecognizable when he came back. I admit I wasn't the father I should have been. I sent him supplies. Tools, batteries, medical necessities. But I didn't go to see him after it was over. I didn't care. I admit it.”

“Where is he?”

“After he joined the Air Force, I washed my hands of him. I admit it. He amounted to nothing. After all that—after my sacrificing so much to keep him on this earth when Marilyn would have had it otherwise—he amounted to nothing. Imagine the irony. I spared his life because the church says abortion is murder, and look what he does. He kills people. He killed them over there because it was his job, and now he kills them because it's madness.”

“And his child?”

“Marilyn and her patterns. Once she has a pattern, try to break it—told the mother to keep him just as I told Marilyn to keep our son. It probably was a mistake. Our son isn't fit to be a father, even if he loves his son very much.”

“His little boy is dead,” Benton says. “Starved and beaten to death and left in a marsh to be eaten by maggots, crabs.”

“I'm sorry to hear it. I never met the child.”

“Such compassion you have, Paulo. Where's your son?”

“I don't know.”

“You must realize how serious this is. Do you want to go to prison?”

“The last time he was here, I walked him out, and on the street, where it was safe for me to say it, I told him I never wanted to see him again. There were tourists at the construction site where Drew's body was found. There were piles of flowers and stuffed animals. I saw all this as I told him to go away and never come back, and if he didn't honor my wishes, I would go to the police. Then I had my apartment very thoroughly cleaned. And I got rid of my car. And I called Otto to offer my assistance in the case, because it was important for me to know what the police knew.”

“I don't believe you don't know where he is,” Benton says. “I don't believe you don't know where he stays or lives or—more likely right now—hides. I don't want to go to your wife. I'm assuming she hasn't a clue.”

“Please leave my wife out of this. She knows nothing.”

“Maybe you know this,” Benton says. “Your dead grandson's mother. Is she still with your son?”

“It is like what I had with Marilyn. We sometimes pay a lifelong price for enjoying sex with someone. These women? They get pregnant on purpose, you know. To keep you on a tether. It's a strange thing. They do it and then don't want the child because what they really wanted was you.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I've never met her. Marilyn tells me her name is Shandy or Sandy and she's a whore. And stupid.”

“Is your son still with her? That's what I asked.”

“They had the child in common. But that's it. The same story again. The sins of the father. Events repeating themselves. Now I truly say, I wish my son had never been born.”

“Marilyn knows Shandy, obviously,” Benton says. “That brings me to Marino.”

“I wouldn't know him or what he has to do with this.”

Benton tells him. He informs Dr. Maroni of everything except what Marino did to Scarpetta.

“So you'd like me to analyze it for you,” Dr. Maroni says. “Based on my knowing Marilyn, based on what you've just said. I would venture a guess that Marino made a very big mistake by sending an e-mail to Marilyn. It woke her up to possibilities, you see, that had nothing to do with why she was at McLean. Now she can get back at the one person she truly hates. Kay, of course. What better way than to torment the people she loves.”

“She's the reason Marino met Shandy?”

“My guess. But not the entire reason for why Shandy got so interested in him. There is the boy. Marilyn doesn't know. Or she didn't. She would have told me. For someone to do such a thing would not appeal to Marilyn.”

“She has about as much compassion as you do,” Benton says. “She's here, by the way.”

“You mean New York.”

“I mean Charleston. I got an anonymous e-mail with information I won't discuss, and I traced the IP to the Charleston Place Hotel, recognized the Machine Access Code. Guess who's staying there.”

“I warn you to be careful what you say to her. She doesn't know about Will.”

“Will?”

“Will Rambo. When Marilyn started becoming famous, he changed his name from Willard Self to Will Rambo. He picked Rambo, a nice enough Swedish name. He's anything but a Rambo, and that's at least some of his problem. Will is quite small. He's a good-looking boy but small.”

“When she got e-mails from the Sandman, she had no idea it was her son?” Benton says, and it is jarring to hear the Sandman referred to as a boy.

“She didn't. Not consciously. As far as I know, she still doesn't. Not consciously, but what can I say about what she knows in the deep caves of her mind? When she was admitted at McLean and told me about the e-mail, the image of Drew Martin…”

“She told you?”

“Of course.”

Benton would like to leap through the phone and grab him around the throat. He should go to prison. He should go to hell.

“As I look back, it's tragically clear. Of course, I had a suspicion all along but never mentioned it to her. I mean, from the beginning when she called me with the referral, and Will knew she would do exactly that. He set her up for it. Of course, he had her e-mail address. Marilyn is very generous about an occasional e-mail to people she doesn't have time to see. He started sending these rather bizarre e-mails that he knew would captivate her, because he's just sick enough to understand her perfectly well. I'm sure he was amused when she referred him to me, and then when he called my office in Rome to make an appointment, that, of course, resulted in our having dinner, not a clinical interview. I was concerned about his mental health, but it never occurred to me he might kill someone. When I heard about the murdered tourist in Bari, I was in denial.”

“He raped a woman in Venice, too. Another tourist.”

“I'm not surprised. Let me guess. After the war began. Each time he was deployed, he got worse.”

“Then the case notes weren't really from appointments you had with him. Obviously, he's your son and was never a patient.”

“I fabricated the notes. I expected you to guess it.”

“Why?”

“So you would do this. Find him yourself, because I could never turn him in. I needed you to ask the questions so I could answer them, and now I have.”

“If we don't find him quickly, Paulo, he'll kill again. There must be something else you know. You must have a picture of him?”

“Not a recent one.”

“E-mail what you've got.”

“The Air Force should have what you need. Perhaps his fingerprints and his DNA. Certainly a photograph. It's better you get such things from them.”

“And by the time I go through all those hoops,” Benton says, “it will be too goddamn late.”

“I won't be back, by the way,” Dr. Maroni says. “I'm certain you won't try to bring me back but will leave me alone because I have shown you respect, so you will show me some. It would be futile, anyway, Benton,” he says. “I have many friends over here.”

L
ucy goes through her pre-start checklist.

Landing lights, Nr switch, OEI limit, fuel valves. She checks the flight instrument indications, sets the altimeter, turns on the battery. She starts the first engine as Scarpetta emerges from the FBO and walks across the tarmac. She slides open the helicopter's back door and sets her crime scene case and camera equipment on the floor, then opens the left front door. She steps up on the skid and climbs in.

Engine one locked into ground idle position, and Lucy fires up engine number two. The whining turbines and
thud-thudding
get louder, and Scarpetta buckles herself into the four-point harness. A linesman trots across the ramp, waving his marshaling wands, and Scarpetta puts her headset on.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Lucy says into her mike. “Hey!” As if the linesman can hear her. “We don't need your help. He's gonna be standing there for a while.” Lucy opens her door, tries to motion for him to go away. “We're not a plane.” She says more things he can't hear. “Don't need your help to take off. Go on now.”

“You're awfully tense.” Scarpetta's voice sounds inside Lucy's headset. “Any word from other people searching?”

“Nothing. No helicopter up in the Hilton Head area yet, still too foggy there. No luck with the search on the ground. FLIR on standby.” Lucy turns on the overhead power switch. “Need about eight minutes for it to cool. Then we're on the go. Hey!” As if the linesman has on a headset, too, and can hear her. “Go away. We're busy. Damn, he must be new.”

The linesman stands there, orange wands down by his side, not marshaling anyone anywhere. The tower tells Lucy, “You got the heavy C-seventeen on downwind….”

The military cargo jet is a cluster of big, bright lights and barely seems to move, hangs hugely in the air, and Lucy radios back that she's got it. The “heavy C-seventeen” and its “heavy wingtip vortices” aren't a factor because she wants to head toward downtown, toward the Cooper River bridge. Referring to the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Toward whatever she wants. Doing figure-eights if she wants. Barely above the water or the ground if she wants. Because she isn't a plane. That's not how she explains it in radio talk, but it's what she means.

“I called Turkington,” she then says to Scarpetta. “Filled him in. Benton called me, so I guess you talked to him and he's filled you in. He should be here any minute, or he'd better be. I'm not sitting here forever. We know who the asshole is.”

“We just don't know where he is,” Scarpetta says. “I'm supposing we still have no idea where Marino is.”

“If you want my opinion, we should be looking for the Sandman, not a dead body.”

“Within the hour, everybody will be looking for him. Benton's notified the police, local and military. Somebody's got to look for her. That's my job, and I intend to do it. Did you bring the cargo net? And have we heard any word from Marino? Anything at all?”

“I've got the cargo net.”

“The usual gear's in baggage?”

Benton is walking toward the linesman. He hands him a tip and Lucy laughs.

“I suppose every time I ask about Marino, you're going to ignore me,” Scarpetta says, as Benton gets closer.

“Maybe you should be truthful with the person you're supposed to marry.” Lucy watches Benton.

“What makes you think I haven't been?”

“I wouldn't know what you've done.”

“Benton and I have talked,” Scarpetta says, looking at her. “And you're right, I should be truthful, and I have been.”

Benton slides open the back door and gets in.

“Good. Because the more you trust someone, the more criminal it is to lie. Including by omission,” Lucy says.

The clunking and scraping sounds of Benton putting his headset on.

“I have to get over this,” Lucy says.

“I should be the one who needs to get over it,” Scarpetta says. “And we can't talk about this now.”

“What is it we can't talk about?” Benton's voice in Lucy's headset.

“Aunt Kay's clairvoyance,” Lucy says. “She's convinced she knows where the body is. Just in case, I've got the gear and chemicals for decon. And body bags in case we need to slingload. Sorry to be insensitive, but no way a decomp's riding in the back.”

“Not clairvoyance. Just gunshot residue,” Scarpetta says. “And he wants her found.”

“Then he should have made it easier,” Lucy says, rolling up the throttles.

“What about the gunshot residue?” Benton asks.

“I have an idea. If you ask what sand around here might have traces of GSR.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says. “The guy's going to blow away. Look at him. Just standing there with his cones like a zombie referee for the NFL. I'm glad you tipped him, Benton. Poor guy. He's trying.”

“Yes, a tip. Only not a hundred-dollar bill,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy waits to get on the radio.

Air traffic is almost impossible, because flights have been delayed all day, and now the tower can't keep up.

“When I went off to UVA, what did you do?” Lucy says to Scarpetta. “Sent me a hundred bucks now and then.
For no reason.
That's what you always wrote at the bottom of the check.”

“It wasn't much to do.” Scarpetta's voice goes straight into Lucy's head.

“Books. Food. Clothes. Computer stuff.”

Voice-activated mikes, and people talk truncated talk.

“Well,” Scarpetta's voice says. “It was nice of you. That's a lot of money for someone like Ed.”

“Maybe I was bribing him.” Lucy leans closer to Scarpetta to check the FLIR's video display. “Ready and waiting,” she says. “We're out of here as soon as you'll let us,” as if the tower can hear her. “We're a damn helicopter, for Christ's sake. Don't need the damn runway. And we don't need to be vectored. Makes me crazy.”

“Maybe you're too cranky to fly.” Benton's voice.

Lucy contacts the tower again, and at last is cleared to take off to the southeast.

“Going while the going's good,” she says, and the helicopter gets light on its skids. The linesman is marshaling as if he's going to park them. “Maybe he should get a job as a traffic cone,” Lucy says, lifting her three-and-a-quarter-ton bird into a hover. “We'll follow the Ashley River a little ways, then turn east, track along the shoreline toward Folly Beach.” She hovers at the intersection of two taxiways. “Un-stowing the FLIR.”

She switches from
standby
to
on,
and the display turns dark gray, splotched with bright white hot spots. The C-17 does a thunderous touch-and-go, long plumes of white fire blasting from its engines. Lighted window of the FBO. The lights on the runways. All of it surreal in infrared.

“Low and slow, and we'll scan everything along the way. Work in a grid?” Lucy says.

Scarpetta lifts the System Control Unit out of its holder, slaves the FLIR with the searchlight, which she keeps turned off. Gray images and ones hot-white displayed on the video monitor near her left knee. They fly past the port, its different-colored containers stacked like building blocks. Cranes are perched like monster praying mantises against the night, and the helicopter moves slowly over the lights of the city, as if it's floating over them. Ahead, the harbor is black. No stars are out, the moon a charcoal smudge behind thick clouds that are flat on top like anvils.

“Where exactly are we headed?” Benton says.

Scarpetta works the FLIR's trim button, moving images in and out of the screen. Lucy slows to eighty knots and holds the altitude down at five hundred feet.

Scarpetta says, “Imagine what you'd find if you did a microscopic analysis of sand from Iwo Jima. As long as the sand's been protected all these years.”

“Away from the surf,” Lucy says. “In dunes, for example.”

“Iwo Jima?” Benton's voice says, ironically. “We flying to Japan?”

Off Scarpetta's door are the mansions of the Battery, their lights bright white smudges in infrared. She thinks about Henry Hollings. She thinks about Rose. The lights of habitation become spaced farther apart as they near the shore of James Island and slowly fly past it.

Scarpetta says, “A beach environment that's remained untouched since the Civil War. In a place like that, if the sand's protected, you're likely to find gunshot residue. I believe this is it.” To Lucy, “Almost below us.”

She slows to a near hover and descends to three hundred feet at the northernmost tip of Morris Island. It is uninhabited and accessible only by helicopter or boat unless the tide is so low one can wade from Folly Beach. She looks down at eight hundred acres of desolate conservation land that during the Civil War was the scene of heavy fighting.

“Probably not much different than it was a hundred and forty years ago,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy descends another hundred feet.

“Where the African-American regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was slaughtered,” Benton's voice says. “That movie they made about it, what was it called?”

“You look out your side,” Lucy says to him. “Tell us if you see anything, and we'll swoop around with the searchlight.”

“It was called
Glory
,” Scarpetta says. “Not the searchlight quite yet,” she adds. “It will interfere with infrared.”

The video screen displays mottled gray terrain and a rippled area that is the water, and the water glints like molten lead, flowing to the shore, breaking on the sand in scalloped white ruffles.

“I'm not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.

“Be nice if they'd restore the beacon so people like us don't crash into it,” Lucy says.

“Now I feel better.” Benton's voice.

“I'm going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what's down there,” Lucy says.

They don't have to work the grid very long.

“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”

Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.

“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”

“I see it,” Lucy says.

The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.

Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright—as bright as a star—at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.

Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.

 

A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.

Scarpetta looks out her window, and some distance away, in the sand, a face flashes in the strobes, white teeth grimacing in a bloated mass that isn't recognizable as a woman or a man. Were it not for the suit and tie, she wouldn't have a clue.

“What the hell?” Benton's voice in her headset.

“It's not her,” Lucy says, flipping off switches. “Don't know about you, but I got my gun. This isn't right.”

She turns off the battery, and doors open and they get out, the sand soft beneath their feet. The stench is overwhelming until they get upwind of it. Flashlights probe, pistols are ready. The helicopter is a hulking dragonfly on the dark beach, and the only sound is the surf. Scarpetta moves her light along and stops at wide drag marks that lead to a dune and stop short of it.

“Someone had a boat,” Lucy says, and she is moving toward the dunes. “A flat-bottom boat.”

The dunes are fringed with sea oats and other vegetation, and roll on for as far as they can see, untouched by the tides. Scarpetta thinks of the battles fought here and imagines lives lost for a cause that couldn't have been more different from the South's. The evils of slavery. Black Yankee soldiers wiped out. She imagines she hears their moans and whispers in the tall grass, and she tells Lucy and Benton not to stray too far. She watches their lights cut through the dark terrain like long, bright blades.

“Over here,” Lucy says from the darkness between two dunes. “Mother of God,” she says. “Aunt Kay, can you grab face masks!”

Scarpetta opens the baggage compartment and lifts out a large crime scene case. She sets it on the sand and rummages for face masks, and it must be bad for Lucy to ask.

“We can't get both of them out of here.” Benton's voice in the wind.

“What the fuck are we dealing with?” Lucy's voice. “Did you hear that?”

Something flapping. Far off in the dunes.

Scarpetta moves toward their lights, and the stench gets worse. It seems to make the air thick, and her eyes burn and she hands out masks and puts one on because it's hard to breathe. She joins Lucy and Benton in a hollow between dunes, at an elevation that makes it impossible to see it from the beach. The woman is nude and badly swollen from days of exposure. She's infested by maggots, her face eaten away, her lips and eyes gone, her teeth exposed. In the beam of Scarpetta's light is an implanted titanium post from where a crown used to be. Her scalp is slipping from her skull, her long hair splayed in the sand.

Lucy wades through sea oats and grass, moving toward the flapping sound that Scarpetta hears, too, and she's not sure what to do, and she thinks of gunshot residue and the sand and this place and wonders what it means to him. He has created his own battlefield. How much more littered with the dead would it have become, had she not found this spot, because of barium, antimony, and lead that he probably knew nothing of, and she feels him. His sick spirit seems to hang in the air.