Four Scarpetta Novels (78 page)

“I believe that's the theory,” I reply.

“Your house is made of stone and has a slate roof,” she says. “Did you closely supervise when it was being built? Because you seem the sort who would. A perfectionist.”

“You're foolish not to supervise if you're building.”

“I'm just wondering if you might have ever seen a chipping hammer while your house was being built. Maybe at the construction site or in a workman's tool belt?”

“Not that I recall. But I can't be sure.”

“And you never owned one prior to your shopping expedition at Pleasants Hardware on the night of December seventeenth—two weeks ago exactly and almost twenty-four hours after Bray was murdered?”

“Not before that night. No, I never owned one before then, not that I am aware of,” I tell her.

“What time was it when you bought the chipping hammer?” Berger asks as I hear the deep thunder of Marino's truck parking in front of my house.

“Sometime around seven. I don't know exactly. Maybe between six-thirty and seven, that Friday night, the night of December seventeenth,” I reply. I am not thinking clearly now. Berger is wearing me down and I can't imagine how any lie could stand up to her long. The problem is knowing what is a lie, and what isn't, and I am not convinced she believes me.

“And you went home right after the hardware store?” she goes on. “Tell me what you did the rest of the night.”

The doorbell rings. I glance at the Aiphone on the wall in the great
room and see Marino's face looming on the video screen. Berger has just asked
the
question. She has just tested the alchemy that I am sure Righter will use to turn my life to shit. She wants to know my alibi. She wants to know where I was at the exact time Bray was murdered on Thursday night, December sixteenth. “I'd just come in from Paris that morning,” I reply. “Ran errands, got home around six
P
.
M
. Later that night, around ten, I drove to MCV to check on Jo—Lucy's former girlfriend, the one who got in the shooting with her in Miami. I wanted to see if I could help out in that situation because the parents were interfering.” My doorbell rings again. “And I wanted to know where Lucy was, and Jo told me Lucy was at a bar in Greenwich Village.” I start walking toward the door. Berger is staring at me. “In New York. Lucy was in New York. I came home and called her. She was drunk.” Marino rings the bell again and pounds on the door. “So to answer your question, Ms. Berger, I have no alibi for where I was between six and maybe ten-thirty Thursday night because I was either in my home or in my car—alone, absolutely alone. No one saw me. No one talked to me. I have no witnesses to the fact that where I
wasn't
between seven-thirty and ten-thirty was at Diane Bray's house beating her to death with a goddamn chipping hammer.”

I open the door. I can feel Berger's eyes burning into my back. Marino looks as if he is about to fly apart. I can't tell if he is furious or scared to death. Maybe both. “What the hell?” he asks, his eyes going from me to her. “What the shit's going on?”

“I'm sorry for making you stand out in the cold,” I tell Marino. “Please come in.”

M
ARINO TOOK SO
long getting here because he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barboso's running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where Spacesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Saturday.

I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call associates who are either locked up or dead. There are also locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishable—such as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.

“Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?” Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.

“To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray's body,” I reply.

“Well, the chicken's still inside the evidence refrigerator,” Marino says. “Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it.”

“Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken,” Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.

I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were
identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray's body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shape—or tool mark—of whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain. I rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.

I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray's mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don't test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is
not human
. Marino is pacing the floor.

I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn't find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn't listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.

“I told you from my car phone that I had bought it,” I remind him.

“Yeah,” he says. He remembers my calling him from my car after I left Pleasants Hardware store, sometime between six-thirty and seven. I told him I believed a chipping hammer was what had been used on Bray. I said I had bought one. But, he points out, that doesn't mean I didn't buy such a tool after Bray's murder to fabricate an alibi. “You know, to make it look like you didn't own one or even know what she was killed with until after the fact.”

“Whose goddamn side are you on?” I say to him. “You believe this Righter bullshit? Jesus. I can't take any more of this.”

“This isn't about sides, Doc,” Marino grimly replies as Berger looks on.

We are back to there being only one hammer: the one with Bray's blood on it found inside my house. Specifically, in my great room on the
Persian rug, exactly seventeen and a half inches to the right of the Jarrah Wood coffee table. Chandonne's hammer, not my hammer, I keep saying as I imagine cheap brown paper bags with a voucher number and bar code that represent Scarpetta—me, behind wire mesh on Spacesaver shelves.

I lean against the wall inside my entry hallway and feel lightheaded. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on myself after something terrible and final has happened. My undoing. My destruction. I am dead like other people whose brown paper bags end up in that evidence room. I am not dead, but maybe it is worse to be the accused. I hate even to suggest the next stage of my undoing. It is overkill. “Marino,” I say, “try the key in my door.”

He hesitates, frowning. Then he slips the clear plastic evidence bag out of the inner pocket of his old leather jacket with its balding fleece lining. Cold wind punches into the house as he opens the front door and slides the steel key—easily slides it—into the lock, and clicks the lock, and the dead bolt slides open and shut.

“The number written on it,” I quietly tell Marino and Berger. “Two-thirty-three. That's my burglar alarm code.”

“What?” Berger, for once, is almost speechless.

The three of us go into my great room. This time I perch on the cold hearth, like Cinderella. Berger and Marino avoid sitting on the ruined couch, but situate themselves near me, looking at me, waiting for any possible explanation. There is but one, and I think it is rather obvious. “Police and God knows who else have been in and out of my house since Saturday,” I begin. “A drawer in the kitchen. In it are keys to everything. My house, my car, my office, file cabinets, whatever. So it's not like someone didn't have easy access to a spare key to my house, and you guys had my burglar alarm code, right?” I look at Marino. “I mean, you weren't leaving my house unarmed after you left it. And the alarm was on when we came in a little while ago.”

“We need a list of everybody who's been inside this house,” Berger grimly decides.

“I can tell you everybody I know about,” Marino answers. “But I
haven't been here every time somebody else has. So I can't say I know who everybody is.”

I sigh and lean my back against the fireplace. I start naming cops I saw with my own eyes, including Jay Talley. Including Marino. “And Righter's been in here,” I add.

“As have I,” Berger replies. “But I certainly didn't let myself in. I had no idea what your code is.”

“Who let you in?” I ask.

Her answer is to look at Marino. It bothers me that Marino never told me he was Berger's tour guide. It is irrational for me to feel stung. After all, who better than Marino? Who do I trust more than him? Marino is visibly agitated. He gets up and strolls through the doorway leading into my kitchen. I hear him open the drawer where I keep the keys, then he opens the refrigerator.

“Well, I was with you when you found that key in Mitch Barbosa's pocket,” Berger starts to think out loud. “You couldn't have put it there, couldn't have planted it.” She is working this out. “Because you weren't at the scene. And you didn't touch the body unwitnessed. I mean, Marino and I were right there when you unzipped the pouch.” She blows out in frustration. “And Marino?”

“He wouldn't,” I cut her off with a weary wave of my hand. “No way. Sure, he had access, but no way. And based on his account of the crime scene, he never saw Barbosa's body. It was already being loaded into the ambulance when he pulled up on Mosby Court.”

“So either one of the cops at the scene did it . . .”

“Or more likely,” I finish her thought, “the key was placed in Barbosa's pocket when he was killed. At the crime scene. Not where he was dumped.”

Marino walks in drinking a bottle of Spaten beer that Lucy must have bought. I don't remember buying it. Nothing about my house seems to belong to me anymore, and Anna's story comes to mind. I am beginning to understand the way she must have felt when Nazis occupied her family home. I realize, suddenly, that people can be pushed beyond anger, beyond tears, beyond protest, beyond even grief. Finally, you just sink
into a dark mire of acceptance. What is, is. And what was, is past. “I can't live here anymore,” I tell Berger and Marino.

“You got that right,” Marino fires back in the aggressive, angry tone he seems to wear like his own skin these days.

“Look,” I say to him, “don't bark at me anymore, Marino. We're all angry, frustrated, worn out. I don't understand what's happening, but it's clear someone connected to us is also involved in the murder of these two recent victims, these men who were tortured, and I guess whoever planted my key on Barbosa's body wants to either implicate me in those crimes, as well, or more likely, is sending me a warning.”

“I think it's a warning,” Marino says.

And where's Rocky these days? I almost ask him.

“Your dear son Rocky,” Berger says it for me.

Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn't respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. “Well,” she says, “Merry Christmas, I guess.”

A
NNA
'
S HOUSE IS
dark and still when I come in at nearly three
A
.
M
. She has thoughtfully left on a light in the hallway and one in the kitchen near a crystal tumbler and the bottle of Glenmorangie, just in case I need a sedative. At this hour, I decline. A part of me wishes Anna were awake. I am halfway tempted to rattle around in hopes she will wander in and sit down with me. I have become oddly addicted to our sessions even if I am now supposed to wish they had never taken place. I make my way to the guest wing and start thinking about transference and wonder if I am experiencing this with Anna. Or maybe I just feel lonely and gloomy because it is Christmas and I am wide awake and frazzled in someone else's house after investigating violent death all day, including one I am accused of committing.

Anna has left a note on my bed. I pick up the elegant creamy envelope and can tell by its weight and thickness that whatever she has written is lengthy. I leave my clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and imagine the ugliness that must linger in their very fabrics because of where I have been and what I have done the past twenty hours. I do not realize until I am out of the shower that the clothes carry with them the dirty fire smell of the motel room. Now I ball them up in a towel so I can forget about them until they can go to the dry cleaner. I wear one of Anna's thick robes to bed and am edgy as I pick up the letter again. I open it and unfold six stiff pages of watermarked engraved stationery. I begin to read, willing myself not to go too fast. Anna is deliberate and wants me to take in every word, because she does not waste words.

Dearest Kay,

As a child of the war, I learned that truth is not always what is right or good or best. If the SS came to your door and asked if you had Jews inside, you did not tell the truth if you were hiding Jews. When members of the Totenkopf SS occupied my family home in Austria, I could not tell the truth about how much I hated them. When the SS commander of Mauthausen came into my bed so many nights and asked me if I enjoyed what he did to me, I did not tell the truth.

He would tell vile jokes and hiss in my ear, imitating the sound of the Jews being gassed, and I laughed because I was afraid. He would get very drunk sometimes when he came back from the camp, and once he bragged he had killed a 12-year-old village boy in nearby Langenstein during an SS hunting raid. Later I learned this was not so, that the Leitstelle—Chief of Staatspolizei in Linz—was the one who shot the boy, but I believed what I was told at the time and my fear was indescribable. I, too, was a civilian child. No one was safe. (In 1945 that same commander died in Gusen and his body was displayed to the public for days. I saw it and spat. That was the truth about how I felt—a truth I could not tell earlier!)

Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful. A strange thing for a psychiatrist to admit, yes? I give you this lesson for a reason, Kay. After you read my letter, you must destroy it and never admit it existed. I know you well. Such a small covert act will be hard for you. If you are asked, you must say nothing about what I am telling you here.

My life in this country would be ruined if it was known that my family gave food and shelter to the SS, no matter that our hearts were not in it. It was to survive. I also think you would be greatly harmed if people should know that your best friend is a Nazi sympathizer, as I am certain I would be called. And oh, what a terrible thing to be called, especially when one hates them as I do. I am a Jew. My father was a prescient man and very aware of what Hitler intended to do. In
the late thirties, my father used his banking and political connections and wealth to secure entire new identities for us. He changed our name to Zenner and moved us from Poland to Austria when I was too young to be aware of much.

So you might say that I have lived a lie since I can remember. Perhaps this helps you understand why I do not want to be interrogated in a legal proceeding and why I will avoid this if I can. So Kay, the real reason for this long letter is not to tell my story. At last I talk to you about Benton.

I am quite certain you do not know that for a while he was my patient. About three years ago, he came to see me in my office. He was depressed and had many work-related difficulties that he could not speak of to anyone, including you. He said that throughout his career with the FBI he had seen the worst of the worst—the most aberrant acts imaginable, and although he had been haunted by them and suffered in many ways because of this exposure to what he called “evil,” he had never felt truly afraid. Most of those bad people were not interested in him, he said. They meant him no personal harm, and in fact enjoyed the attention he paid to them when he interviewed them in prison. As for the many cases he helped police solve, again, he was in no personal danger. Serial rapists and killers were not interested in him.

But then strange things began to happen to him some months before he came to see me. I wish I could remember better, Kay, but there were odd events. Phone calls. Hang-ups that could not be traced because they were made by satellite (I guess he meant cell phones). He got crank mail that made very terrible references to you. There were threats made toward you, again untraceable. It was clear to Benton that whoever was writing the letters knew something about both of you personally.

Of course, he was very suspicious of Carrie Grethen. He kept saying, “We haven't heard the last from that woman.” But at the time, he did not see how she could be making the calls and sending the mail because she was still locked up in New York—in Kirby.

I will sum up six months of conversations with Benton by saying
he had a very strong premonition that his death was imminent. He suffered subsequent depression, anxiety, paranoia and began to struggle with alcohol. He said he hid bouts of heavy drinking from you and that his problems were causing a deterioration in his relationship with you. As I listened to some of what you told me during our talks, Kay, I can see that his behavior at home did change. Now perhaps you understand some of the reasons why.

I wanted to put Benton on a mild antidepressant but he would not let me. He worried constantly about what would happen to you and Lucy if something happened to him. He wept about it openly in my office. It was I who suggested he write the letter that Senator Lord delivered to you several weeks ago. I said to Benton, “Imagine you are dead and have one last chance to say something to Kay.” So he did. He said to you the words you read in his letter.

During our sessions, I suggested to him repeatedly that perhaps he knew more about who was harassing him and perhaps denial was preventing him from facing the truth. He hesitated. I remember so well I had a feeling he possessed information he could not or would not say. Now I am beginning to think I might know. I have reached the conclusion that what began happening to Benton several years ago and what is now happening to you are connected to Marino's Mafia son. Rocky is involved with very powerful criminal people and he hates his father. He would hate everyone who matters to his father. Can it be a coincidence that Benton got threatening letters and was murdered, and then this terrible killer, Chandonne, ends up in Richmond and now Marino's terrible son is Chandonne's lawyer? Is this tortuous road not winding, at last, to some dreadful conclusion that is meant to bring down everyone good in Marino's life?

In my office, Benton often referred to a
Tlip
file. In it he kept all the strange, menacing letters and other records of communications and incidents that he had begun to receive. For months, I thought he was saying
Tip
file, as in police tips. But one day I made mention of his Tip file and he corrected me and said the file was actually his
T-L-P
file which he pronounced
tlip
. I next asked what TLP stood for, and he said
The Last Precinct
. I asked him what he meant by that and
his eyes filled with tears. His exact words to me were this: “The Last Precinct is where I will end up, Anna. It is where I'll end up.”

You cannot imagine my feeling when Lucy mentioned that this is also the name for the investigative consulting company that she has now gone to work for in New York. When I was so upset last night, it was not simply over the subpoena delivered to my house. What happened was the following: I got the subpoena. I called Lucy because I thought she should know what was happening to you. She said her “new boss” (Teun McGovern) was in town and mentioned The Last Precinct. I was shocked. I still am shocked and do not understand what all this means. Does Lucy perhaps know about Benton's file?

Again, can this be coincidence, Kay? Did she just happen to think up the same name that Benton called his secret file? Can all these connections be coincidences? Now there is something called The Last Precinct and it is located in New York and Lucy is moving to New York, the trial of Chandonne has moved to New York because he killed in New York two years ago while Carrie Grethen was still incarcerated in New York, and Carrie's former murderous partner Temple Gault was killed (by you) in New York, and Marino began his police career in New York. And Rocky lives in New York.

Let me close by telling you I feel so badly over any hand I might have in making your current situation worse, although you can be sure I intend to say nothing that can be twisted. Never. I am too old for this. Tomorrow, on Christmas Day, I will leave for my house in Hilton Head, where I will stay until it is all right to return to Richmond. I do this for several reasons. I do not intend to make it easy for Buford or anyone else to get to me. Most important, you need some place to stay. Do not go back to your house, Kay.

Your devoted friend,

Anna

I read and reread. I feel sick as I imagine Anna growing up in the poisonous air of Mauthausen and knowing what went on there. I feel the deepest sorrow that all her life she has listened to references to Jews
and bad jokes about Jews and learned more of the atrocities committed against Jews, all the while knowing she is a Jew. No matter how she rationalizes it, what her father did was cowardly and wrong. I suspect he also knew Anna was being raped by the SS commander he wined and dined, and Anna's father did nothing about that, either. Not one thing.

I realize it is now almost five o'clock in the morning. My eyelids are heavy, my nerves buzzing. There is no point in trying to sleep. I get up and go into the kitchen to make coffee. For a while I sit before the dark window looking out toward a river I can't see and contemplate everything Anna has revealed to me. So much about Benton's last years now makes sense. I think of days when he claimed to have a tension headache, and I thought he looked hung over and now I suspect he probably was. He was increasingly depressed and distant and frustrated. In a way, I understand his not telling me about the letters, the phone calls, the Tlip file, as he referred to it. But I don't agree with him. He should have told me.

I have no recollection of having come across such a file when I was going through his belongings after his death. But then, there is so much I don't remember about that time. It was as if I were living under the earth, moving ever so heavily and slowly, and unable to see where I was going or where I had been. After Benton's death, Anna helped me sort through his personal effects. She cleaned out his closets and went through his drawers while I was in and out of rooms like a crazed insect, helping one minute, ranting and weeping the next. I wonder if she came across that file. I know I must find it, if it still exists.

The first morning light is a hint of deep blue as I fix coffee for Anna and carry it back to her bedroom. I listen outside her door to see if I hear any sign of her being awake. All is still. I quietly open her door and carry her coffee in. I set it down on the oval table by her bed. Anna likes night-lights. Her suite is lit up like a runway, lights inserted in almost every receptacle. When I first became aware of this, I thought it odd. Now I begin to understand. Perhaps she associates utter darkness with being alone and terrified in her bedroom, waiting for a drunken, stinking Nazi
to come in and overpower her young body. No wonder she has spent her life dealing with damaged people. She understands damaged people. She is as much a student of her past tragedies as she has said I am of mine.

“Anna?” I whisper. I see her stir. “Anna? It's me. I've brought you coffee.”

She sits up with a start, squinting, her white hair in her face and sticking up in places.

Merry Christmas, I start to say. I tell her “happy holidays” instead.

“All these years I celebrate Christmas while I am secretly Jewish.” She reaches for her coffee. “I am not known for a sweet disposition early in the morning,” she says.

I squeeze her hand, and in the dark she seems suddenly so old and delicate. “I read your letter. I'm not sure what to say but I can't destroy it, and we must talk about it,” I tell her.

For an instant she pauses. I think I catch relief in her silence. Then she gets stubborn again and waves me off, as if by a mere gesture she can dismiss her entire history and what she has told me about my own life. Night-lights cast exaggerated, deep shadows of Biedemeier furniture and antique lamps and oil paintings in her large, gorgeous bedroom. Thick silk draperies are drawn. “I probably should not have written any of that to you,” she says firmly.

“I wish you'd written it to me sooner, Anna.”

She sips her coffee and pulls the covers up to her shoulders.

“What happened to you as a child isn't your fault,” I say to her. “The choices were made by your father, not you. He protected you in one way and didn't protect you at all. Maybe there was no choice.”