Four Scarpetta Novels (88 page)

“You killed Benton, didn't you, Jay.” I state it as a fact.

He lays a hand on my back, the pistol pointed and touching me as he pauses behind me and says for me to open the door. We enter room 15, the same room Kiffin showed me when I wanted to see what kind of mattresses and linens she used in this dump. “You and Bray,” I say to Jay. “That's why she sent letters from New York, trying to make it seem they were from Carrie, to make Benton assume they were written from up there where she was locked up in Kirby.”

Jay shuts the door and waves the gun almost wearily, as if I am tiresome and he is not enjoying this. “Sit down.”

My eyes wander up to the ceiling, looking for eyebolts. I wonder where the heat gun is and if it is part of my fate. I keep standing where I am, near the dresser with its Gideon Bible, this one not opened to any special chapter about vanity or anything else. “I just want to know if I slept with the person who killed Benton.” I am looking right at Jay. “You're going to kill me? Go ahead. But you already did that when you killed him. So I guess you can kill me twice, Jay.” It is odd, I feel no fear, only resignation. My pain, my anguish is over my niece, and I wait for the sound of a shotgun to rock these walls. “Can't you just leave her out of it?” I ask anyway, and Jay knows I mean Lucy.

“I didn't kill Benton,” he says, and he has the livid face of people who walk up and shoot a president. Pale, no expression, a zombie. “Carrie and her asshole friend did that. I made the call.”

“The call?”

“Called him to meet. That wasn't too hard. I'm an agent,” he enjoys reminding me. “Carrie handled it from there. Carrie and that whacko scarface she got hooked up with.”

“So you set him up,” I say, simply. “Probably helped Carrie escape, too.”

“She didn't need much help. Just some,” he replies with no inflection. “She was like a lot of people in this business. They get into the goods and fuck up an already fucked-up brain. She started doing her own thing. Years ago. If you guys hadn't solved the problem, we would have. She was at the end of her usefulness.”

“Involved in the family business, Jay?” My eyes pin his. The gun is by his side and he leans against the door. He has no fear of me. I am like a bowstring wound too tightly, about to snap, waiting, listening for any sound next door. “All these women murdered—how many of them did you sleep with first? Like Susan Pless.” I shake my head. “I just want to know if you helped out Chandonne or did he follow you and help himself to what you left behind?”

Jay's eyes focus more sharply on me. I have probed the truth.

“You know, you're much too young to be Jay Talley, whoever he was,” I say next. “Jay Talley with no middle name. And you didn't go to Harvard, and I doubt you ever lived in Los Angeles, not as a child. He's your brother, isn't he, Jay? That horrible deformity who calls himself a werewolf? He's your brother, and your DNA is so close that on a routine screening you could be identical twins. Did you know your DNA is the same as his on a routine screening? At a four-probe level, the two of you are exactly the same.”

Anger flashes. Vain, beautiful Jay would never want to think that his DNA was even similar to someone's as ugly and hideous as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

“And the body in the cargo container. The one you helped us believe is the brother—Thomas. His DNA had many points in common, too, but not as many as yours does—yours from the seminal fluid you left in Susan Pless's body before she was brutalized. Thomas a relative? Not a brother? What? A cousin? You kill him, too? You drown him in Antwerp or did Jean-Baptiste do that? And then you lure me over to Interpol, not because you need my help with the case, but because you want to see what I know. You want to make sure I don't know what Benton was probably starting to figure out: That you are a Chandonne,” I say, and Jay does not react. “You probably mastermind the business for your father and that's why you got into law enforcement, to be an undercover asshole, a spy. God knows how much business you've diverted—knowing everything the good guys are doing and then turning it against them behind their backs.” I shake my head. “Let Lucy go,” I tell him. “I'll do what you want. Just let her go.”

“Can't.” He doesn't even begin to argue with what I have said.

Jay glances at the wall, as if he can see through it. I can tell he is wondering what is going on next door, why it is so quiet. My nerves wind tighter.
Please God, please God. Please. Or make it quick, at least. Don't let her suffer.

Jay pushes the lock in and fastens the burglar chain. “Take your
clothes off,” he says, no longer using my name. It is easier to kill people you have depersonalized. “Don't worry,” he bizarrely adds. “I'm not going to do anything. I just have to make it look like something else.”

I glance up at the ceiling. He knows what I am thinking. He is pale and sweating as he opens a dresser drawer and pulls out several eyebolts and a heat gun, a red heat gun.

“Why?” I ask him. “Why them?” I refer to the two men I now believe Jay murdered.

“You're going to screw these into the ceiling for me,” Jay tells me. “Up there in the crossbeam. Now get on the bed and do it and don't try anything.”

He places the eyebolts on the bed and nods for me to pick them up and do what he orders. “It's all about what becomes necessary when people get into something they shouldn't.” He gets a rag and rope out of the drawer.

I stand where I am, just looking at him. The eyebolts gleam like pewter on the bed.

“Matos came here to find Jean-Baptiste and it took a little coaxing to know exactly what he had in mind and who gave him the order, which wasn't what you think.” Jay takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over a chair. “Not the family, but a first lieutenant who doesn't want Jean-Baptiste to start talking and ruin a good thing for a lot of people. One thing about the family . . .”

“Your family, Jay,” I remind him of his family and that I know him by name.

“Yeah.” He stares at me. “Fuck yeah, my family. We take care of each other. Doesn't matter what you do, family is family. Jean-Baptiste's a fuck-up, I mean, anybody can look at him and see that, and understand why he's got his problem.”

I say nothing.

“Of course we don't approve,” Jay goes on as if he is talking about a kid who is shooting out streetlights or drinking too much beer. “But he's blood, our blood, and you don't touch our blood.”

“Someone touched Thomas,” I reply, and I have not picked up the
eyebolts or climbed up on the bed. I have no intention of helping him torment me.

“You want to know the truth? That was an accident. Thomas couldn't swim. He tripped over a rope and fell off the dock, or something like that,” Jay tells me. “I wasn't there. He drowned. Jean-Baptiste wanted to get his body a long way from the shipyard, away from other stuff going on there and didn't want him identified.”

“Bullshit,” I reply. “Sorry, but Jean-Baptiste left a note with the body.
Bon Voyage Le Loup-Garou.
You do that when you don't want to draw attention to something? I don't think so. Maybe you better recheck your brother's story. Maybe your family takes care of family. Maybe Jean-Baptiste's an exception. Sounds like he doesn't take care of family at all.”

“Thomas was a cousin.” As if that lessens the crime. “Get up and do what I say.” Jay indicates the eyebolts, and he is beginning to get angry, very angry.

“No,” I refuse. “Do what you're going to do, Jay,” and I keep saying his name. I know him. I am not going to let him do this to me without my saying his name and looking him in the eye. “I'm not going to help you kill me, Jay.”

A thud sounds next door, as if something has turned over or fallen to the floor, and then an explosion and my heart lurches. Tears choke me and fill my eyes. Jay flinches and then his face is impassive. “Sit down,” he tells me. When I don't comply, he comes closer and shoves me down on the bed as I cry. I cry for Lucy.

“You fucking son of a bitch,” I exclaim. “You kill that boy, too? You take Benny out and hang him, a goddamn twelve-year-old kid?”

“He shouldn't have come out here. Mitch shouldn't have. I knew Mitch. He saw me. There was nothing I could do.” Jay stands over me as if not sure what to do next.

“Then you killed the boy.” I wipe my eyes with the backs of both hands.

Confusion flickers in Jay's eyes. He has a problem with the boy. The rest of us don't bother him, but the boy does.

“How could you stand there and watch him hang? A kid? A kid in his Sunday suit.”

Jay swings back his hand and slaps me across the face. It happens so fast I don't even feel it at first. My mouth and nose go numb and begin to sting, and something wet drips. Blood drips into my lap. I let it drip as I tremble all over and stare up at Jay. Now it is easier for him. He has begun the process. He pushes me down on the bed and straddles me, pinning my arms with his knees, and my healing fractured elbow screams in pain as he forces my hands above my head and struggles to tie them with the rope. All the while he is snarling about Diane Bray. He is mocking me, telling me that she knew Benton, and didn't Benton ever tell me that Bray had a thing for Benton? And if Benton had been a little nicer to her maybe she would have left him alone. Maybe she would have left me alone. My head pounds. I barely comprehend.

Did I really think that Benton had an affair only with me? Was I so stupid to think that Benton would cheat on his wife but never on me? How fucking stupid am I? Jay gets up for the heat gun. What people do is what they do, he says. Benton had something with Bray up in D.C., and then when he dumped her, and he did it pretty quickly, to give him credit, she wasn't going to let that pass. Not Diane Bray. Jay is trying to gag me and I keep jerking my head from side to side. My nose is bleeding. I won't be able to breathe. Bray got Benton good, all right, and this is partly why she wanted to move to Richmond, to make sure she ruined my life, too. “Quite a price to pay for fucking somebody a few times.” Jay gets up from the bed again. He is sweating, his face pale.

I struggle to breathe through my nose and my heart is hammering like a machine gun as my entire body begins to panic. I try to will myself to calm down. Hyperventilating will only make it harder for me to get air. Panic. I try to inhale and blood is dripping down the back of my throat and I cough and gag as my heart explodes against my ribs like fists trying to pound down a door. Pounding, pounding, pounding and the room turns grainy and I can't move.

Two Weeks Later

 

T
HOSE WHO HAVE
assembled in my honor are ordinary people. They sit quietly, even reverently, almost in shock. It is not possible that they have not heard everything that has been in the news. You would have to live in the hinterlands of Africa not to know what has gone on in recent weeks, especially what happened in James City County at a cesspool of a tourist trap that has turned out to be the eye of a monstrous storm of corruption and evil.

All seemed so quiet in that rundown, overgrown campground. I can't imagine how many people have stayed in tents or in the motel and had no idea what was raging around them. Like a hurricane blown out to sea, the raging forces have fled. As far as we know, Bev Kiffin isn't dead. Neither is Jay Talley. Ironically, he is now considered a red notice by Interpol: The very people he once worked with are after him in a furious full-court press. Kiffin is a red notice, too. The supposition is that Jay and Kiffin have fled the United States and are hiding abroad somewhere.

Jaime Berger stands before me. I am in the witness stand facing a jury of three women and five men. Two are white, five are African-American, one is Asian. The races of all of Chandonne's victims are represented, even though that was not deliberate on anybody's part, I am sure. But it seems just, and I am glad. Brown paper has been taped over the courtroom's glass door to ensure that the curious, the media, can't look in. Jurors and witnesses and I entered the courthouse by an underground ramp the same way prisoners are escorted to their trials. Secrecy chills the air and the jurors stare at me as if I am a ghost. My face is greenish yellow from old bruises, my left arm is in a cast again and I still
have rope burns around my wrists. I am alive only because Lucy happened to wear body armor. I had no idea. When she picked me up in the helicopter, she had on a bulletproof vest underneath her down-filled jacket.

Berger is asking me about the night Diane Bray was murdered. It is as if I am a house where different music is playing in every room. I am answering her questions, and yet I am thinking other thoughts and other images are coming to me and I hear other sounds in different areas of my psyche. Somehow I am able to concentrate on my testimony. The cash register tape for the chipping hammer I purchased is mentioned. Then Berger reads from the actual lab report that was turned over to the court as a matter of record, just as the autopsy protocol, the toxicology and all other reports have been. Berger describes the chipping hammer to the jurors and asks me to explain how the hammer's surfaces correlate with Bray's horrendous injuries.

This goes on for a while, and I look at the faces of those here to judge me. Expressions range from passive to intrigued to horrified. One woman gets visibly queasy when I describe punched-out areas of skull and an eyeball that was virtually avulsed, or hanging out of the socket. Berger points out that according to the lab report, the chipping hammer recovered from my house had rust on it. She asks me if the hammer I bought from the hardware store
after Bray's murder
was rusty. I say it wasn't. “Could a tool like this rust in a matter of a few weeks?” she asks me. “In your opinion, Dr. Scarpetta, could blood on the chipping hammer have caused it to be in this condition—in the condition of the one recovered from your house, the one you say Chandonne brought with him when he attacked you?”

“Not in my opinion,” I reply, knowing that it is in my best interest to answer such. But it doesn't matter. I would tell the truth even if it were not in my best interest. “For one thing, the police should as a matter of routine make sure the hammer is dry when it is placed in an evidence bag,” I add.

“And the scientists who received the chipping hammer for examination say it was rusty, is this not right? I mean, I am reading this lab
report correctly, aren't I?” She smiles slightly. She is dressed in a black suit with pale blue pinstripes, and paces in little steps as she works through the case.

“I don't know what the labs have said,” I answer. “I haven't seen those reports.”

“Of course not. You've not been in the office for ten days or so. And, ummm, this report was just turned in day before yesterday.” She glances at the date typed on it. “But it does say the chipping hammer that has Bray's blood on it was rusty. It looked old, and I believe the clerk at Pleasants Hardware Store claims the hammer you bought on the night of December seventeen—almost twenty-four hours
after
Bray's murder—certainly didn't look old. It was brand new. Correct?”

Again, I can't say what the hardware store clerk claimed, I remind Berger from the stand as jurors take in every word, every gesture. I have been excluded from all witness testimony. Berger is simply asking me questions I can't answer so she can tell the jurors what she wants them to know. What is treacherous and wonderful about any grand jury proceeding is that defense counsel is not present and there is no judge—no one to object to Berger's questions. She can ask me anything, and she does, because in one of the rare instances on this planet, a prosecutor is trying to show the defendant is innocent.

Berger asks what time I got home from Paris and went grocery shopping. She mentions my going to the hospital to visit Jo that night, and the phone conversation with Lucy afterward. The window narrows. It gets tighter and tighter. When did I have time to rush over to Bray's house, beat her to death, plant evidence and stage the crime? And why would I bother buying a chipping hammer almost twenty-four hours after the fact unless it was for the very purpose I have stated all along: to conduct tests? She lets these questions hover while Buford Righter sits at the prosecution table and studies notes on a legal pad. He avoids looking at me as much as he can.

I answer Berger point by point. It gets harder and harder for me to talk. The inside of my mouth was abraded from the gag, and then the wounds became ulcerated. I haven't had mouth sores since I was a child
and had forgotten how painful they are. When my ulcerated tongue hits my teeth as I speak, it sounds as if I have a speech impediment. I feel weak and strung out. My left arm throbs, in a cast again because it was re-injured when Jay wrenched my arms above my head and bound them to the bed's headboard.

“I notice you're having some trouble talking.” Berger pauses to point this out. “Dr. Scarpetta, I know this is off the subject.” Nothing is off the subject for Jaime Berger. She has a reason for every breath she takes, every step she makes, every expression on her face—everything, absolutely everything. “But can we digress for a moment?” She stops pacing and raises her palms in a shrug. “I think it would be instructive if you would tell the jury what happened to you last week. I know the jury must be wondering why you're bruised and having difficulty speaking.”

She digs her hands in the pockets of her trousers and patiently encourages me to tell my story. I apologize for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer at the moment, I say, and the jurors smile. I tell them about Benny and their faces are pained. One man's eyes fill with tears as I describe the boy's drawings that led me up into the deer stand where I believe Benny spent much of his time watching the world and recording it in images on his sketchpad. I express my fears that young Benny may have met up with foul play. His gastric contents, I explain, could not be explained by what we knew about the last few hours of his life.

“And sometimes pedophiles—child molesters—lure children with candy, food, something that will entice them. You've had cases like this, Dr. Scarpetta?” Berger questions me.

“Yes,” I reply. “Unfortunately.”

“Can you give us an example of a case in which a child was lured by food or candy?”

“Some years ago we got in the body of an eight-year-old boy,” I offer a case from personal experience. “On autopsy I determined he had asphyxiated when the perpetrator forced the boy, this eight-year-old child, to perform oral sex. I recovered gum from the child's stomach, a rather large wad of chewing gum. It turned out an adult male neighbor had
given the boy four sticks of gum, Dentyne gum, and this man did, in fact, confess to the killing.”

“So you had good reason, based upon your years of experience, to be concerned when you found popcorn and hotdogs in Benny White's stomach,” Berger states.

“That is correct. I was very concerned,” I answer.

“Please continue, Dr. Scarpetta,” Berger says. “What happened when you left the deer stand and followed the footpath through the woods?”

 

THERE IS A
woman juror. She is on the front row of the jury box, second from the left, and she reminds me of my mother. She is very overweight and must be close to seventy, at least, and wears a frumpy black dress with big red flowers on it. She doesn't take her eyes off me, and I smile at her. She seems like a kind woman with a lot of sense, and I am so glad my mother isn't here, that she is in Miami. I don't think she has any idea what is happening in my life. I haven't told her. My mother's health is poor and she doesn't need to worry about me. I keep going back to the juror in the flower-printed dress as I describe what happened at The Fort James Motel.

Berger prompts me to give background information on Jay Talley, how we met and became intimate in Paris. Woven into Berger's prompting and conclusions are the seemingly inexplicable events that transpired after Chandonne attacked me: the disappearance of the chipping hammer I had bought for research purposes; the key to my house found in Mitch Barbosa's pocket—an undercover FBI agent who was tortured and murdered and whom I had never even met. Berger asks if Jay was ever inside my house, and of course, he was. So he would have had access to a key and the burglar alarm code. He would have had access to evidence. Yes, I confirm.

And it would have been in Jay Talley's best interest to frame me and confuse the issue of his brother's guilt, right? Berger stops pacing again, fixing those eyes on me. I am not sure I can answer the question. She
moves on. When he attacked me in the motel room and gagged me, I scratched his arms, didn't I?

“I know I struggled with him,” I reply. “And after it was over, I had blood under my fingernails. And skin.”

“Not your skin? Did you perhaps scratch yourself during the struggle?”

“No.”

She goes back to her table and shuffles through paperwork for another lab analysis report. Buford Righter is turned to slate, sitting rigidly, tensely. DNA done on my fingernail scrapings doesn't match my DNA. It does match the DNA of the person who ejaculated inside Susan Pless's vagina. “And that would have been Jay Talley,” Berger says, nodding, pacing again. “So we have a federal law enforcement officer who had sex with a woman right before she was brutally murdered. This man's DNA also so closely resembles Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's DNA that we can conclude almost with certainty that Jay Talley is a close relative, most likely a sibling of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.” She walks a few steps, a finger on her lips. “We do know Jay Talley's real name isn't Jay Talley. He is a living lie. He beat you, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“Yes. He struck my face.”

“He tied you to the bed and apparently intended to torture you with a heat gun?”

“That was my impression.”

“He ordered you to undress, he bound and gagged you, and clearly was going to kill you?”

“Yes. He made it clear he was going to kill me.”

“Why didn't he, Dr. Scarpetta?” Berger says this as if she doesn't believe me. But it is an act. She believes me. I know she does.

I look at the juror who reminds me of my mother. I explain that I was having a terribly hard time breathing after Jay tied me up and gagged me. I was panicking and began to hyperventilate, which means, I explain, that I was taking such rapid, shallow breaths, I couldn't get sufficient oxygen. My nose was bleeding and swelling and the gag prevented me from breathing out of my mouth. I went unconscious and when I came
to, Lucy was in the room. I was untied, the gag removed, and Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin were gone.

“Now we've already heard Lucy's testimony,” Berger says, pensively moving toward the jury box. “So we know from her testimony what happened after you passed out. What did she tell you when you came to, Dr. Scarpetta?” In a trial, for me to say what Lucy said would constitute hearsay. Again, Berger can get away with almost anything in this uniquely private proceeding.

“She told me she'd worn a bulletproof vest, uh, body armor,” I answer the question. “Lucy said there was some conversation in the room. . . .”

“Between Lucy and Bev Kiffin,” Berger clarifies.

“Yes. Lucy said she was against the wall and Bev Kiffin had the shotgun pointed at her. And she fired it and Lucy's vest absorbed the shot, and although she was badly bruised, she was all right, and she grabbed the shotgun away from Mrs. Kiffin and ran from the room.”

“Because her primary concern at this point was you. She didn't stick around to subdue Bev Kiffin because Lucy's priority was you.”

“Yes. She told me she started kicking doors. She didn't know which room I was in, so then she ran around to the back of the motel because there are windows in back overlooking the pool. She found my room, saw me on the bed and broke out the window with the butt of the shotgun and came inside. He was gone. Apparently, he and Bev Kiffin went out the front and got on his motorcycle and fled. Lucy says she remembers hearing a motorcycle while she was trying to revive me.”

“Have you heard from Jay Talley since?” Berger pauses to meet my eyes.

“No,” I say, and for the first time this long day, anger stirs.

“What about from Bev Kiffin? Got any idea where she is?”

“No. No idea.”

“So they are fugitives. She leaves behind two children. And a dog—the family dog. The dog Benny White was so fond of. Perhaps even the reason he came to the motel after church. Correct me if my memory is failing me. But didn't Sonny Kiffin, the son, say something about teasing Benny? Something about Benny's calling the Kiffins' house right
before church to see if Mr. Peanut had been found? That the dog had, quote, just been for a swim and if Benny came over he could see Mr. Peanut? Didn't Sonny tell Detective Marino all this after the fact, after Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin tried to kill you and your niece and then escaped?”