Four Scarpetta Novels (72 page)

“You know what, folks?” Marino scans the room. “It just might be that Mitch got tangled up in something that doesn't have a damn thing to do with your undercover operation here. Wrong place, wrong time. Caught something he sure as hell wasn't fishing for.”

“You got any idea where Mitch was at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon, when Matos checked into the motel and the fire started?” Stanfield is putting the pieces together. “Was he here or out somewhere?”

“No, he wasn't here,” she barely says, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “Gone. I don't know where.”

Marino blows out in disgust. He doesn't need to say it. Undercover partners are supposed to keep track of each other, and if Agent McIntyre didn't always know where Special Agent Barbosa was, then he was up to something that maybe wasn't germane to their investigation.

“I know you don't even want to think it, Jilison,” Marino goes on in a milder tone, “but Mitch was tortured and murdered, okay? I mean, the guy was fucking
scared to death
. Literally. Whatever someone was doing to him, it was so awful, he had a fucking heart attack. He wet his fucking pants. He was taken somewhere and strung up, gagged and then has a weirdo key put in his pocket, planted, what for? Why? He into anything we ought to know about, Jilison? He fishing for more than bass out there in that creek by the campground?”

Tears are rolling down McIntryre's face. She wipes them away roughly with the tissue and sniffles loudly. “He liked drinking and women,” she barely says. “Okay?”

“He ever go out at night, barhopping and that sort of thing?” Pruett asks her.

She nods. “It was part of his cover. You saw . . .” Her eyes jump to me. “You saw him. His dyed hair, the earring, all the rest. Mitch played the role of a sort of, well, wild party guy and he did like the women. He never pretended to be, uh, faithful to me, to his so-called girlfriend. It was part of his cover. But it was also him. Yeah. I worried about it, okay? But that was Mitch. He was a good agent. I don't think he did anything dishonest, if that's what you're asking. But he didn't tell me everything, either. If he got onto something going on at the campground, for example, he might have started poking around. He might have.”

“Without letting you know,” Marino confirms.

She nods again. “And I was out doing my thing, too. It's not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn't always know what the other was up to every hour of every day.”

“I'll tell you this much,” Marino decides. “Mitch stumbled onto something. And I'm just wondering if he wasn't out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe whatever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spotted in the area. Maybe it's just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment.”

No one argues. Marino's theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

“Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with,” Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversation. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs several times.

“Detective Stanfield,” I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. “For God's sake, don't tell any of this to your brother-in-law.” Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humiliated him and don't care. “Please,” I add.

“You want to know the truth?” he angrily retorts. “I don't want nothing to do with any of this.” He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glazing over. “I don't know what this is all about, but I don't want no part—I mean, no part of it. You feds are
in it already, up to your eyeballs, so you can just have it. I quit.” He nods. “You heard me right, I quit.”

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank God, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn't injured himself. He is all right. He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarrassed, acutely so.

“Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?” I ask. “Do you have a heart condition?”

“If you just got a Coke or something, that would be good,” he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. “Let me see what I can do,” I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out orange juice. I find peanut butter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I notice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa's name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to McIntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering anxiety and depression, which he blamed on the undercover assignment, on stress, she adds.

“That's interesting,” is all Marino has to say about it.

“You said you're going back to the motel when you leave here?” Jay asks Marino.

“Yeah, Vander's going to see if we might have any luck with prints.”

“Prints?” Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.

“Jesus, Stanfield,” Marino blurts out in exasperation. “They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your goddamn brother-in-law?”

“He
is
a goddamn brother-in-law, you want to know the truth.” He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. “And you're
right.” He meets my eyes. “I shouldn't have told him one peep about this case. And I won't tell him nothing else, not a word, because it's all politicking to that one. It wasn't me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know.”

Pruett frowns. “What Jamestown thing?”

“Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state's planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Dinwiddie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse crap about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!” Stanfield's eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.

“Mitch has Indian blood,” McIntyre says somberly. “He's half Native American.”

“Well, for Christ's sake, let's hope the newspapers don't find that out,” Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. “We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy.” Marino shakes his head. “We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it.” He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. “Because guess what? We can't talk about what we think is really going on, now can we? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around whatever the shit's going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime shit, how do we turn that around when we can't tell the truth?”

“I don't agree,” Jay says to him. “I'm not ready to say what these murders are about. I'm not prepared to accept, for example, that Matos and now Barbosa aren't related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected.”

No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.

“I'm also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they're hate crimes,” Jay goes on. “A gay male. A Native American.” He shrugs. “Torture's pretty damn hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?” He turns to me.

“No.” I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.

“Hmmm,” he says. “I find that interesting and maybe important. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims' genitals.”

Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.

“Because you get some redneck homophobic sort, and the last thing he's going to go near is the guy's genitals,” Jay adds.

“Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush,” Marino acidly says to him, “then let's just connect it to Chandonne. He never went near his victims' genitals either. Shit, he didn't even take their fucking pants off, just beat and bit the shit out of their faces and breasts. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy's afraid of female genitalia because his own's as deformed as the rest of him.” Marino surveys the faces around him. “One good thing about the bastard being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain't got a dick. Or let's just say that what he's got I wouldn't call a dick.”

Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.

“I'll go with you to the motel,” Jay says to Marino.

Marino gets up and looks out the window. “Wonder where the hell Vander is,” he says.

He gets Vander on the cell phone and we head out minutes later to meet in the parking lot. Jay walks with me. I feel the energy of his desire to talk to me, to somehow come to a consensus. In this way, he is like the stereotype of a woman. He wants to talk, to settle matters, to have closure or to rekindle our connection so he can then play hard to get again. I, on the other hand, want none of it.

“Kay, can I have a minute?” he says in the parking lot.

I stop and look at him as I button my coat. I notice Marino glancing
our way as he gets the trash bags and baby carriage out of the back of his truck and loads them into Vander's car.

“I know this is awkward, but is there some way we can make it easier? For one thing, we have to work together,” Jay says.

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you told Jaime Berger every detail, Jay,” I reply.

“That wasn't against you.” His eyes are intense.

“Right.”

“She asked me questions, understandably. She's just doing her job.”

I don't believe him. That is my fundamental problem with Jay Talley. I don't trust him and wish I never had. “Well, that's curious,” I comment. “Because it appears people started asking questions about me before Diane Bray was even murdered. Right about the time I was with you in France inquiries began, as a matter of fact.”

His expression darkens. Anger peers out before he can hide it. “You're paranoid, Kay,” he says.

“You're right,” I reply. “You're absolutely right, Jay.”

I
HAVE NEVER
driven Marino's Dodge Ram Quad Cab pickup truck, and were circumstances not so strained I would probably find the scenario comical. I am not a big person, barely five foot five, slender, and there is nothing funky or extreme about me. I do wear jeans, but not today. I suppose I dress like a proper chief or lawyer, usually in a tailored skirt suit or flannel trousers and a blazer, unless I am working a crime scene. I wear my blond hair short and neatly styled, am light on makeup and, other than my signet ring and watch, jewelry is an afterthought. I don't have a single tattoo. I don't look like the sort who would be roaring along in a monster macho truck that is dark blue with pinstriping, chrome, mud flaps, scanner and big, swooping antennas that go with the CB and two-way radios.

I take 64 West back to Richmond because it is quicker, and I pay close attention to my driving because it is a lot to handle a vehicle this size with only one arm. I have never spent a Christmas Eve like this and I am increasingly depressed over the notion. Usually, by now I have stocked the refrigerator and freezer, and have cooked sauces and soups and decorated the house. I feel utterly homeless and alien as I drive Marino's truck along the interstate, and it occurs to me that I don't know where I will sleep tonight. I guess at Anna's, but I dread the necessary chill between us. I didn't even see her this morning, and a helpless feeling of loneliness settles over me and seems to push me down in my seat. I page Lucy. “I've got to move back into my house tomorrow,” I tell her on the phone.

“Maybe you should stay in the hotel with Teun and me,” she suggests.

“How about you and Teun stay with me?” It is so hard for me to express a need, and I need them. I do. For a lot of reasons.

“When do you want us there?”

“We'll have Christmas together in the morning.”

“Early.” Lucy has never stayed in bed past six on Christmas morning.

“I'll be up, and then we'll go to the house,” I tell her.

December 24. Days have gotten as short as they can, and it will be a while before light savors the hours and burns off my heavy, anxious moods. It is dark by the time I reach downtown Richmond, and when I pull up to Anna's house at five minutes past six, I find Berger waiting for me in her Mercedes SUV, headlights penetrating the night. Anna's car is gone. She is not home. I don't know why this unsettles me so completely unless it is that I am suspicious she somehow knows Berger is meeting me and chose not to be here. Considering such a possibility reminds me that Anna has talked to people and may one day be forced to reveal what I have told her during my most vulnerable hours in her home. Berger climbs out as I open the truck door, and if she is taken aback by my transportation, she makes no indication of it.

“Do you need anything from inside the house before we go?” she asks.

“Give me just a minute,” I tell her. “Was Dr. Zenner here when you arrived?”

I feel her stiffen a little. “I got here just a few minutes before you did.”

Evasion, I think as I climb the front steps. I unlock the door and turn off the burglar alarm. The foyer is dark, the great chandelier and Christmas tree lights off. I write Anna a note and thank her for her friendship and hospitality. I need to return to my own home tomorrow and know she will understand why I must. Mostly, I want her to believe I am not upset with her, that I realize she is as victimized by circumstances as I am. I say
circumstances
because I am no longer sure who is holding a gun to Anna's head and ordering her to divulge confidences about me. Rocky Caggiano may be next in line, unless I am indicted. If that should happen, I will be no factor in Chandonne's trial, not hardly. I leave the
note on Anna's immaculately made Biedermeier bed. Then I get in Berger's car and begin to tell her about my day in James City County, about the abandoned campsite and the long, pale hairs. She listens intently, driving, knowing where she is going as if she has lived in Richmond all of her life.

“Can we prove the hairs are Chandonne's?” she finally asks. “Assuming there are no roots, as usual. And there weren't roots with the ones found at the crime scenes, right? Your crime scenes. Luong and Bray.”

“No roots,” I say, rankled by the reference to
my
crime scenes. They aren't my crime scenes, I silently protest. “He shed those hairs, so there are no roots,” I tell Berger. “But we can get mitochondrial DNA from the shafts. So yes, we can definitely know if the hairs from the campground are his.”

“Please explain,” she says. “I'm not an expert on mitochondrial DNA. Or an expert on hair for that matter, especially the kind of hair he has.”

The subject of DNA is a difficult one. Explaining human life on a molecular level tells most people far more than they can understand or care to know. Cops and prosecutors love what DNA can do. They hate to talk about it scientifically. Few of them understand it. The old joke is, most people can't even spell DNA. I explain that
nuclear
DNA is what we get when cells with nuclei are present, such as with blood, tissue, seminal fluid and hair roots. Nuclear DNA is inherited equally from both parents, so if we have someone's nuclear DNA we have, in a sense, all of him, and can compare his DNA profile to any other biological sample this same person has left at, say, another crime scene.

“Can we just compare the hairs from the campground to the hairs he left at the murder scenes?” Berger asks.

“Not successfully,” I reply. “Examining microscopic characteristics in this instance won't tell us much because the hairs are unpigmented. The most we will be able to say is their morphologies are similar or consistent with each other.”

“Not conclusive to a jury.” She thinks out loud.

“Not in the least.”

“If we don't do a microscopic comparison anyway, the defense will bring that up,” Berger considers. “He'll say,
Why didn't you
?”

“Well, we can microscopically compare the hairs, if you want.”

“The ones from Susan Pless's body and the ones from your cases.”

“If you want,” I repeat.

“Explain hair shafts. How does DNA work with those?”

I tell her that mitochondrial DNA is found in the walls of cells and not in their nuclei, meaning mitochondrial DNA is the anthropological DNA of hair, fingernail, tooth and bone. Mitochondrial DNA is the molecules that make up our mortar and stone, I say. The limited usefulness lies in that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female lineage. I use the analogy of an egg. Think of mitochondrial DNA as the egg white, while nuclear DNA is the yolk. You can't compare one to the other. But if you have DNA from blood, you have the whole egg and can compare mitochondrial to mitochondrial—egg white to egg white. We have blood because we have Chandonne. He had to give up a blood sample while in the hospital. We have his complete DNA profile and can compare the mitochondrial DNA of unknown hairs to the mitochondrial DNA from his blood sample.

Berger listens without interruption. She has taken in what I am saying and seems to understand. As usual, she takes no notes. She asks, “Did he leave hair at your house?”

“I'm not sure what the police found.”

“As much as he seems to shed, I would think he left hair at your house or certainly out in the snow in your yard when he was thrashing about.”

“You would think so,” I agree with her.

“I've been reading about werewolves.” Berger leaps to the next topic. “Apparently, there have been people who really thought they were werewolves or tried all sorts of bizarre things to turn themselves into werewolves. Witchcraft, black magic. Satan worship. Biting. Drinking blood. Do you think it's possible Chandonne really believes he is a loup-garou? A werewolf? And maybe even wants to be one?”

“Thus not guilty by reason of insanity,” I reply, and I have assumed all along this would be his defense.

“There was a Hungarian countess in the early sixteen hundreds, Elizabeth Bathory-Nadasdy, also known as the Blood Countess,” Berger goes on. “She supposedly tortured and murdered some six hundred young women. Would bathe in their blood, believing it would keep her young and preserve her beauty. Familiar with the case?”

“Vaguely.”

“As the story goes, this countess kept young women in her dungeon, fattened them up, would bleed them and bathe in their blood and then force other imprisoned women to lick all the blood off her body. Supposedly because towels were harsh on her skin. Rubbing blood in her skin, all over her body,” she ponders. “Accounts of this have left out the obvious. I'd say there was a sexual component,” she adds dryly. “Lust murders. Even if the perpetrator truly believed in the magical powers of blood, it's about power and sex. That's what it's about whether you're a beautiful countess or some genetic anomaly who grew up on the Île Saint-Louis.”

We turn on Canterbury Road, entering the wooded, wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms, where Diane Bray lived on the outer edge, her property separated by a wall from the noisy downtown expressway.

“I would give my right arm to know what's in the Chandonne library,” Berger is saying. “Or better put, what sorts of things Chandonne's been reading over the years—aside from the histories and other erudite materials he says his father gave him, yada, yada, yada. For example, does he know about the Blood Countess? Was he rubbing blood all over his body in hopes it might magically heal him of his affliction?”

“We believe he was bathing in the Seine and then here in the James River,” I reply. “Possibly for that reason. To be magically healed.”

“Sort of a biblical thing.”

“Maybe.”

“He might read the Bible, too,” she offers. “Was he influenced by the French serial killer Gilles Garnier, who killed little boys and ate them and bayed at the moon? There were a lot of so-called werewolves in France during the Middle Ages. Some thirty thousand people charged with it, can you imagine?” Berger has been doing a lot of research. This
is evident. “And there's the other weird idea,” she goes on. “In werewolf folklore it was believed if you were bitten by a werewolf, you would turn into one. Possible Chandonne was trying to turn his victims into werewolves? Maybe so he could find a bride of Frankenstein, a mate just like him?”

These unusual considerations begin to form a composite that is far more matter-of-fact and pedestrian than it might seem. Berger is simply anticipating what the defense is going to do in her case, and an obvious ploy is to distract the jury from the heinous nature of the crimes by preoccupying them with Chandonne's physical deformity and alleged mental illness and downright bizarreness. If the argument can be successfully made that he believes he is a paranormal creature, a werewolf, a monster, then it is highly unlikely the jury will find him guilty and sentence him to life in prison. It occurs to me that some people might even feel sorry for him.

“The silver-bullet defense.” Berger alludes to the superstition that only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf. “We have a mountain of evidence, but then so did the prosecution in the O.J. case. The silver bullet for the defense will be that Chandonne is deranged and pitiful.”

 

DIANE BRAY
'
S HOUSE
is a white Cape Cod with a gambrel roof, and although the police havesecured and cleared the scene, the property has not returned to life. Not even Berger can enter without permission of the owner, or in this case, the person acting as custodian. We sit in the driveway and wait for Eric Bray, the brother, to appear with a key.

“You may have seen him at the memorial service.” Berger reminds me that Eric Bray was the man carrying the urn containing his sister's cremains. “Tell me how you think Chandonne got an experienced policewoman to open the door.” Berger's attention flows far away from monsters in medieval France to the very real slaughterhouse before our eyes.

“That's a little wide of my boundaries, Ms. Berger. Maybe it's better if you restrict your questions to the bodies and what my findings are.”

“There are no boundaries right now, only questions.”

“Is this because you assume I may never be in court, at least not in New York, because I'm tainted?” I go ahead and open that door. “In fact, they don't get much more tainted than I am right this minute.”

I pause to see if she knows. When she says nothing, I confront her. “Has Righter given you a hint that I may not prove very helpful to you? That I'm being investigated by a grand jury because he has this cockeyed notion that I had something to do with Bray's death?”

“I've been given more than a hint,” she quietly replies as she stares out at Bray's dark house. “Marino and I have talked about it, too.”

“So much for secret proceedings,” I sardonically say.

“Well, the rule is, nothing that goes on inside the grand jury room can be discussed. Nothing's gone on yet. All that's happening is Righter is using a special grand jury as a tool for gaining access to everything he can. About you. Your phone bills. Your bank statements. What people have to say. You know how it works. I'm sure you've testified in your share of grand jury hearings.”

She says all this as if it is routine. My indignation rises and spills over in words. “You know, I do have feelings,” I say. “Maybe murder indictments are everyday matters to you, but they aren't to me. My integrity is the one thing I've got that I can't afford to lose. It's everything to me, and of all people to accuse of such a crime. Of all people! To even consider that I would do the very thing I fight against every waking minute of my life? Never. I don't abuse power. Never. I don't deliberately hurt people. Never. And I don't take this bullshit in stride, Ms. Berger. Nothing worse could happen to me. Nothing.”

“Do you want my recommendation?” She looks at me.