Predator (58 page)
He says Jan Hamilton kept odd hours, disappearing for days, especially of late, and at times she dressed strangely. Sexy one minute, sort of in drag the next.
My motto? Live and let live, the man at the desk said when Marino tracked Jan here.
It wasn’t hard. After she crawled out of the magnet and the guards had Basil on the floor and it was all over, she cowered in a corner and started to cry. She wasn’t Kenny Jumper anymore, had never heard of him, denied having any idea what anybody was talking about, including knowing Basil, including why she was on the floor inside the MRI suite at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She was very polite and cooperative with Benton, gave him her address, said she worked as a part-time bartender in South Beach, a restaurant called Rumors owned by a very nice man named Laurel Swift.
Marino crouches before the open closet. It doesn’t have a door, just a rod for hanging clothes. On the soiled carpet are stacks of clothing, neatly folded. He goes through them with gloved hands, sweat dripping in his eyes, the window-unit air conditioner not doing a very good job.
“One long black coat with a hood,” he says to Gus, one of Lucy’s Special Ops agents. “Sounds familiar.”
He hands the folded coat to Gus, who places it inside a brown paper bag, writes the date and item and where it was found. There are dozens of brown paper bags by now, all sealed with evidence tape. Basically, they are packing up Jan’s entire room. Marino wrote the search warrant from hell: Put everything in it and the kitchen sink, in his words.
His big, gloved hands sort through more clothing, shabby, baggy men’s clothing, a pair of shoes with the heels cut out, a Miami Dolphins cap, a white shirt with Department of Agriculture on the back, that’s all, not the full name of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, just Department of Agriculture, the block printing hand-done with what Marino guesses was a Sharpie.
“How could you not know he was really a she?” Gus asks him, sealing another bag.
“You weren’t there.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Gus says, holding out his hand, waiting for the next thing, a pair of black panty hose.
Gus is armed and dressed in fatigues, because that is how Lucy’s Special Ops agents always dress, even if it is unnecessary, and on an eighty-five-degree day when the suspect, a twenty-year-old girl, is safely locked up in a state hospital in Massachusetts, it probably wasn’t necessary to deploy four Special Ops agents to the Sea Breeze Resort. But that was what Lucy wanted. That was what her agents wanted. No matter how detailed Marino has been in his explanation of what Benton relayed to him about Helen’s different personalities or alters, as Benton calls them, the agents don’t quite believe there aren’t other dangerous people running around, that maybe Helen has accomplices—like Basil Jenrette, they point out—who are real.
Two of her agents are going through a computer on a desk by a window that looks out over the parking lot. There is also a scanner, a color printer, packages of magazine-grade paper and half a dozen fishing magazines.
Planks Anthe front porch are warped, some of them rotted, others missing, exposing the sandy soil beneath the one-story paint-peeled frame house not far from the Everglades.
It is quiet, save for the distant traffic that sounds like gusting wind, and the scraping and stabbing of shovels. Death pollutes the air and in the heat of the late afternoon seems to shimmer darkly in waves that get worse the closer one gets to the pits. The agents, the police and scientists have found four of them. Based on soil disturbances and discoloration, there are more.
Scarpetta and Benton are in the foyer just inside the door, where there is a fish tank and a large, dead spider curled up on a rock. Leaning against a wall is a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun and five boxes of cartridges. Scarpetta and Benton watch two men, sweating in suits and ties and blue nitrile gloves, push a stretcher bearing the pouched remains of Ev Christian, wheels clattering. They stop at the wide-open door.
“When you get her to the morgue,” Scarpetta says to them, “I’m going to need you to come right back.”
“We figured that. I believe it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” one attendant says to her.
“You got your work cut out for you,” says the other.
They fold up the legs with loud clacks and carry the stretcher bearing Ev Christian toward the dark-blue van.
“How’s this going to end up in court?” one of the attendants thinks to ask from the bottom of the steps. “I mean, if this lady’s a suicide, how do you charge someone with murder if it’s a suicide?”
“We’ll see you shortly,” Scarpetta says.
The men hesitate, then move on, and she watches Lucy appear from the back of the house. She has on protective clothing and dark glasses but has taken off her face mask and gloves. She trots toward the helicopter, the one where she left her Treo not long after Joe Amos began his fellowship.
“There’s really nothing to say she didn’t do it,” Scarpetta says to Benton as she opens packets of disposable protective clothing—a set for her, a set for him—and by she, Scarpetta means Helen Quincy.
“Nothing to say she did, either. They’re right.” Benton stares at the stretcher and its grim cargo as the attendants clack open the aluminum legs again so they can open the back of the van. “A suicide that’s a homicide, the perpetrator DID. The lawyers will have a field day.”
The stretcher lists on the sandy, weed-choked soil, and Scarpetta worries it might fall over. It’s happened before, a pouched body lands on the ground, very inappropriate, very disrespectful. She is getting more anxious by the moment.
“The autopsy will probably show she is a death by hanging,” she says, looking out at the bright, hot afternoon and the activity in it, watching Lucy get something out of the back of the helicopter, an ice chest.
The same helicopter where she left her Treo, an act of forgetfulness that in many ways started everything and led everybody here to this hellhole, this plague pit.
“That’s probably all it will show in terms of what killed her,” Scarpetta is saying. “But the rest of it is a different story.”
The rest of it is Ev’s pain and suffering, her naked, bloated body tethered by ropes looped over a rafter, one of them looped around her neck. She is covered by insect bites and rashes, her wrists and ankles with fulminating infections. When Scarpetta palpated her head, she felt bits of fractured bone move beneath her fingers, the woman’s face pulverized, her scalp lacerated, contusions all over her, reddish abraded areas inflicted at or around the time of death. Scarpetta suspects that Jan or Stevie or Hog, or whoever she was when she tortured Ev inside this house, kicked Ev’s body severely and repeatedly after discovering she had hanged herself. On Ev’s lower back, belly and buttocks are faint impressions in the shape of a shoe or boot.
Reba comes around from the side of the house and carefully climbs the rotting steps and picks her way across the porch. She is bright white in her disposable clothing and pushes up her face mask. She’s carrying a brown paper bag, neatly folded at the top.
“There’s some black plastic trash bags,” she says. “In a separate grave, a shallow one. And a couple Christmas ornaments inside. Broken but it looks like Snoopy in a Santa cap and maybe Little Red Riding Hood.”
“That’s how many bodies?” Benton says, and he has gone into his mode.
When death, even the most vile death, is in his face, he doesn’t flinch. He appears rational and calm. He almost appears not to care, as if the Snoopy and Little Red Riding Hood ornaments are just more information to file away.
He might be rational but he isn’t calm. Scarpetta saw the way he was in the car just a few hours ago and more recently inside this house when they began to realize far more clearly the nature of the original crime, the one that happened when Helen Quincy was twelve. In the kitchen is a rusting refrigerator, and in it are Yoo-hoo chocolate drinks, Nehi grape and orange sodas and a carton of chocolate milk with expiration dates that go back eight years, when Helen was twelve and forced to stay with her aunt and uncle. There are dozens of pornographic magazines from that same period of time, suggesting that the devoutly religious Sunday school teacher, Adger, quite likely brought his young niece out here not once. But often.
“Well, the two boys,” Reba is saying, her face mask moving on her chin when she talks. “Looks to me like their heads are bashed in. But that’s not my department,” she says to Scarpetta. “Then some commingled remains. Nude it looks to me, but there’s clothes in there, too. Not on them but in the pits, like maybe they dumped some of their victims in there and then just tossed in their clothing.”
“Obviously, he killed more than he said,” Benton says as Reba opens the paper bag. “Posed some, buried some.”
She holds open the bag so Scarpetta and Benton can see the snorkel and dirty pink Keds sneaker, a girl’s size, inside it.
“Matches the shoe up there on the mattress,” Reba says. “Found this one in a hole we assumed was going to have more bodies. Nothing in it but this.” She indicates the snorkel, the pink shoe. “Lucy found it. I got not a clue.”
“I’m afraid I probably do,” Scarpetta says, lifting out the snorkel and the little girl’s shoe with her gloved hands, imagining twelve-year-old Helen in that hole as dirt is being shoveled in, a snorkel her only means of air as her uncle tortured her.
“Shutting children in trunks, chaining them in basements, burying them with nothing but a hose leading to the surface,” Scarpetta says as Reba looks at her.
“No wonder she’s all these people,” Benton says, not so stoic now. “Fucking bastard.”
Reba turns away, stares off, swallowing. She gets hold of herself as she folds the top of the brown paper bag, slowly, neatly.
“Well,” she says, clearing her throat. “We got cold drinks. We haven’t touched anything. Didn’t open the trash bags in the pit with the Snoopy ornament, but by the feel and smell of them, there’s body parts in there. One of them has a tear and you can see what looks to me like matted red hair—that kind of dyed henna red color? An arm and a sleeve. I think this one’s dressed. The rest sure aren’t. Diet Cokes, Gatorade and water. I’m taking orders. Or if you want something else, we can send someone. Well, maybe not.”
She looks toward the back of the house, toward the pits. She keeps swallowing and blinking, her lower lip trembling.
“I don’t think any of us are exactly socially acceptable right now,” she adds, clearing her throat again. “Probably shouldn’t be walking into a 7-Eleven smelling like this. I just don’t see how… if he did that, we got to get him. They should do to him the same damn thing he did to her! Bury him alive only don’t give him a goddamn snorkel to breathe! Cut his fucking balls off!”
“Let’s get suited up,” Scarpetta says quietly, to Benton.
They unfold disposable white coveralls, start putting them on.
“No way we can prove it,” Reba says. “No damn way.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Scarpetta says, handing Benton shoe covers. “He left an awful lot in there, never thinking we’d come looking.”
They cover their hair with caps and go down the warped old steps, pulling on gloves, covering their faces with the face masks.