Dust

4

An engine rumbles in front of the house, and I open my eyes expecting boxes labeled with a Sharpie and Marino sweating in the folding chair. What I see is simple cherry furniture that’s been in Benton’s New England family for more than a hundred years.

I recognize champagne silk drapes drawn across windows, the striped sofa and coffee table in front of them and then the brown hardwood floor becomes brown carpet. I smell the sweet putrid odor of blood. Dark red streaks and drops on tables and chairs. Pictures colored with crayons and Magic Markers, and a Peg-Board hung with children’s knapsacks inside a brightly cluttered first-grade classroom where everyone is dead.

The air is permeated with the volatile molecules of blood breaking down, red cells separating from serum. Coagulation and decomposition. I smell it. Then I don’t. An olfactory hallucination, the receptors of my first cranial nerve stimulated by something remembered and no longer there. I massage the back of my stiff neck and breathe deeply, the imagined stench replaced by the scent of antique wood and the citrus-ginger reed diffuser on the fireplace mantel. I detect a hint of smoke and burnt split logs from the last fire I built before Benton left town, before Connecticut. Before I got sick. I look at the clock.

“Dammit,” I mutter.

It’s almost five a.m. After Marino called I must have drifted back to sleep and now he’s in my driveway. I text him to give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be right down as I remember the Marino I was just talking to and drinking beer with in the humid heat. Every image, every word, of the dream is vivid like a movie, some of it factual shards of what really happened the summer I left Virginia for good a decade ago, some of it confabulated by my deepest disappointments and fears.

All of it is true in what it represents. What I knew and felt back then during the darkest of dark times. That Benton had been murdered. That I was being forced out of office, done in by politics, by white males in suits who didn’t give a damn about the truth, didn’t give a damn about what I’d lost, which felt like everything.

Lowering my feet to the floor, I find my slippers. I have a crime scene to work and Marino is picking me up like the old days, like our Richmond days. He’s predicting the case is a bad one and I have no doubt that’s what he wants. He wishes for some sensational homicide to reignite his lost self as he rises from the ashes of what he believes he wasted because of me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Sock as I move him again and get up, weak, light-headed but much improved.

I’m fine. In fact, oddly euphoric. Benton’s presence surrounds me. He isn’t dead, thank God, oh thank God. His murder was faked, a brilliant contrivance by the brilliant FBI to protect him from organized criminals, from some French cartel he’d undermined. He wasn’t allowed to tell me he was alive and safe in a protected witness program. There could be no contact at all, not the slightest clue as he watched me from a distance, checking on me without my knowing. I felt him. I know I did. What I dreamed about it is true and there was a better way to do what was done and I won’t forgive the FBI for the years they ruined. Those years were broken and cruel as I languished miserably in the Bureau’s lies, my heart, my soul, my destiny commanded by an artless ugly precast building named after J. Edgar Hoover. Now Benton and I won’t allow such a thing, not ever. We’re each other’s first loyalty and he tells me things. He finds a way to let me know whatever he needs me to know so we never again go through such an outrageous ordeal. He’s alive and well and out of town. That’s all, and I try his cell phone to say I miss him and Happy Almost-Birthday. I get voice mail.

Next I try his hotel in northern Virginia, the Marriott where he always stays when he has business with his FBI colleagues at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, the BAU.

“Mr. Wesley has checked out,” the desk clerk tells me when I ask for Benton’s room.

“When?” I don’t understand.

“It was right as I was coming on duty around midnight.” I recognize the clerk’s voice, soft-spoken with a Virginia lilt. He’s worked at this same Marriott for years and I’ve spoken to him on many occasions, especially these past few weeks after a second and third murder occurred.

“This is Kay Scarpetta —”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. How are you? This is Carl. You sound a little stopped-up. I hope you don’t have the bug that’s going around. I hear it’s a bad one.”

“I’m just fine but thanks for asking. Did he happen to mention why he was checking out earlier than planned? He was supposed to be there until this weekend, last I heard.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m looking. Checkout was scheduled for Saturday.”

“Yes, three more days. Well, I’m puzzled. You don’t know why he suddenly left at midnight?” I’m rambling a bit, trying to work through what doesn’t make sense.

“Mr. Wesley didn’t say. I’ve been reading about the cases around here his unit’s working, what little there is, the FBI being so hush-hush, which only makes it worse, you ask me, because I’d rather know what we’re dealing with. You know there are those of us who don’t wear guns and badges and travel in packs and we have to worry about even going to the mall or a movie. It would be nice to know what’s going on around here, and I got to tell you, Dr. Scarpetta, there are a lot of nervous people, a lot of people really scared including me. If I had my way, my wife wouldn’t leave the house anymore.”

I thank him and extricate myself as politely as I can, contemplating the possibility that there’s been another awful case somewhere. Perhaps Benton has been deployed to a new location. But it’s not like him not to let me know. I check to see if he’s e-mailed me. He hasn’t.

“He probably didn’t want to wake me up,” I say to my lazy old dog. “That’s one of the perks if you’re sick. You already feel bad enough and then people make you feel worse because they don’t want to bother you.”

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I pass, pale in rumpled black silk pajamas, blond hair plastered to my head, blue eyes glassy. I’ve lost a few pounds and look haunted from dreams that seem a replay of a past I miss and don’t. I need a shower but it will have to wait.

Opening dresser drawers, I find underwear, socks, black cargo pants, and a black long-sleeved shirt with the CFC crest embroidered in gold. I retrieve my Sig nine-millimeter from the bedside table and zip the pistol inside a quick-release fanny pack as I wonder, Why bother? Nobody cares what I wear to a muddy death scene. I don’t need a concealed weapon if Marino is picking me up.

Even the smallest decision seems overwhelming, possibly because I haven’t had to make any important ones over recent days. Heat up chicken broth and refill Sock’s water bowl, feed him, don’t forget his glucosamine chondroitin. Drink fluids, as much as you can stand. Don’t touch the cases on the floor by the bed, the autopsy and lab reports awaiting your review and initialing, not when you have a fever. And of course I’ve done a lot of online shopping with so much time to drift in and out of thoughts and dreams and spend money on all the people I want to make happy and am grateful for, even if they disappoint me like my mother and my sister Dorothy and maybe Marino, too.

Confined to the bedroom, with Benton some 450 miles south of here, and it’s a good thing I’ve reminded myself until I almost believe it. Most physicians really are bad patients and I might be the worst. When I got home from Connecticut he wanted to leave Washington, D.C., right then and I knew that wasn’t what he should do. He was trying to be a good husband. He said he’d catch the next flight but I wouldn’t hear of it. When he’s in pursuit of a predator there’s no room for anything else, not even me. It doesn’t matter what I’m going through and I told him no.

“I’m not dying but other people are.” I was adamant on the phone with him. “I’ve seen enough death. I just saw more of it than anyone ever should. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people.”

“I’m coming home. A few days early and it’s not going to matter. You can trust me on that. Things are bad here, Kay.”

“A mother has a son with severe developmental problems so she teaches him how to use a damn Bushmaster assault rifle, for God’s sake?”

“You need me with you and I need to come home.”

“Then maybe he can massacre an entire elementary school so he feels powerful for a moment before he takes his own life.”

“I can understand how angry you must feel.”

“Anger doesn’t do any damn good at all.”

“I’ll catch a plane or Lucy can pick me up.”

I told him that the top priority was for him and his colleagues at the BAU to catch a killer the media has dubbed the Capital Murderer. “Stop the infamia bastardo before he kills someone else,” I said. “I’m okay. I can manage. I have the flu, Benton.” I brushed it off. “I won’t be pleasant to be around and I don’t want you or anyone else catching what I’ve got. Don’t come home.”

“It’s not going well here, from bad to worse,” he said. “I’m worried he’s gone somewhere else and is killing again or will be soon, and everyone at the BAU disagrees with me about everything.”

“You’re still convinced he’s not local to the D.C. area.”

“I believe he’s in and out, which would explain why there were no murders between April and Thanksgiving. Seven months of silence and then two in a row. This is someone intimately familiar with certain geographic areas because he has a job that requires travel.”

What he’s told me makes sense but what doesn’t is why he’s being ignored. Benton has always gotten the respect he deserves but not now in the Washington cases, and I know he’s fed up and aggravated as hell but what he can’t do is worry about me. I know he’s had his fill of sitting around with a group of criminal investigative analysts, what people still call profilers, and listening to theories and psychological interpretations that are being run from Boston and not the BAU. Ed Granby has his fingerprints all over this case and that’s the biggest problem, and Benton needs to deal with all that and not his wife.

Sock follows me into the bathroom and I squint in the overhead light, old subway tile shiny and bright. White bath sheets folded on top of a hamper near the tub remind me of the dead body wrapped in white at MIT.

Then I think again about the victims in Washington, D.C., and my review of their cases last month after two more women were murdered one week apart. I deliberate whether I should e-mail the MIT photograph to Benton but it’s not for me to do. It’s for Marino to do and it’s premature, and it’s also not up to me to divulge details to him about Benton’s cases. In fact, I can’t possibly.

I wash my face, freshening up, as I remind myself what he said about repetitive behavior that goes beyond the killing, the bags, the duct tape, each victim wearing the previous victim’s underwear except in the first case, Klara Hembree. She was originally from Cambridge and that’s bothering me, too.

In the midst of an acrimonious divorce from her wealthy real estate developer husband, she moved to D.C. last spring to be near her family and barely a month later was abducted and dead. DNA on the panties she was wearing came back to an unknown female of European descent, and Benton feels strongly this indicates there are other victims.

But there’s no opportunity for cases to be compared or connected because the FBI has been miserly about releasing information. Nothing about the bags or the duct tape has made it into the news. There’s not even been a mention of the white cloths or sheets, certainly not about the bags, clear plastic with the hologram of an octopus, an iridescent oblong head and tentacles that shimmer in rainbow hues depending on the angle of light.

Klara Hembree was murdered last April, and then this past month before Thanksgiving there were two more — Sally Carson, a professor, and Julianne Goulet, a concert pianist. Each of the women, like the first one, is believed to have been suffocated with a plastic bag from the D.C. spa store called Octopus that was burglarized about a year ago, cases of the customized bags and other inventory stolen from the loading dock. Benton is certain the killer is escalating out of control but the FBI’s not listening to him or his repeated suggestion that certain details of the crimes should be released publicly.

Maybe some police department somewhere has had a similar crime but Benton’s argument continues to be overruled by his boss Ed Granby. He’s ordered that there can be absolutely no sharing of investigative information about former Cambridge resident Klara Hembree and that means there can’t be information released about the other two recent cases. Details will get leaked and might inspire a copycat and Granby’s not going to budge from that opinion. While he’s got a valid point, he’s ground the investigation to a halt, according to Benton.

Since Granby took over the Boston division last summer Benton has felt increasingly ostracized and marginalized, and I’ve continued to remind him that some people are jealous, controlling, and competitive. It’s an ugly fact of life. By now the two of them cordially despise each other and this is probably a hidden reason why my husband wanted to come home. It wasn’t just about my being sick or that his birthday is tomorrow or that the holidays are here. He was extremely unhappy when I talked to him last and I’ve been halfway expecting him any minute, or that might be wishful thinking. He left for D.C. almost a month ago and I miss him terribly.

I walk back into the bedroom with Sock on my heels, and Marino’s just going to have to wait a minute or two longer. Retrieving my iPad from the bed, I log on to my office database and find what Benton scanned to me last month, quickly scrolling through the files. The three homicides play out in my mind as if they’re happening before my eyes and the details are just as perplexing as when I first looked at them. I envision what I’ve envisioned before, reconstructing the way I know biology works or doesn’t, and I watch them die as I’ve watched them die before. I see it.

A woman with a clear plastic bag over her head and duct tape around her neck, a designer duct tape with a black lacy pattern, and clear plastic rapidly sucks in and out, her eyes panicked as her face turns a deep blue-red. Pressure builds, causing a light scattering of petechial hemorrhages across the cheeks and eyelids, tiny pinpricks blooming bright red as vessels rupture. Fighting to stay alive but restrained somehow and then all goes silent and still, and the final act, a bow fashioned from the same designer duct tape is attached under her chin, the killer wrapping his gift to inhumanity.

Yet the physical findings don’t add up to what I would expect. They tell a truth that seems a lie. The victims would have struggled violently. They would have frantically fought to breathe when they were being suffocated but there’s no evidence they did. As Benton put it, they seemed to comply as if they wanted to die and I know damn well they didn’t.

These aren’t suicides. They’re sadistic murders and I believe the killer is restraining them, possibly with a ligature that leaves no mark. But I can’t figure out what that might be. Even the softest material will leave a bruise or abrasion if someone is tightly bound with it and panics and fights. I can’t fathom why the duct tape left no injury. How do you suffocate someone and leave virtually no sign of it?

Each body was found in a northern Virginia or southern Maryland public park, and I continue to quickly skim through what Benton sent to me the end of November, knowing I’ve got to hurry up and I can’t tell Marino what’s on my mind. Three different parks, two with a lake, another with a golf course, all of them very close to railroad tracks and within twenty miles of Washington, D.C. In the scene photographs the victims were clad only in panties that were identified as belonging to a previous victim except in the case of the former Cambridge resident Klara Hembree. A DNA profile recovered from the panties she had on is the unknown female of European descent — in other words, white.

I click through photographs of dead faces staring through plastic bags from the bath and body boutique called Octopus near Lafayette Square, mere blocks from the White House. There’s no evidence of sexual assault, nothing significant recovered from the bodies except two types of Lycra fibers, one blue-dyed and the other white. The morphology of the fibers in each of the three cases is slightly different. It’s been speculated they might be from athletic clothing the killer wears or possibly from furniture upholstery in his residence.

I sit down on the sofa to dress, conserving strength, before venturing out to MIT’s playing fields where I will examine a dead human being whose truth must be coaxed and cut out of her, as I have done thousands of times in my career. Sock jumps up and rests his grizzled muzzle on my lap. I stroke his head and velvety long snout, careful with his ears, tattered and scarred from his former cruel life at the racetrack.

“You need to get up,” I tell him. “I have to take you out, then I’ve got work to do. I don’t want you to get into a state about it. Promise?” I reassure him our housekeeper Rosa will be here soon and will keep him company. “Come on. Then you’ll eat breakfast and take a nap. I’ll be home before you know it.”

I hope dogs don’t know when we lie. Rosa won’t be here soon and I won’t be home before Sock knows it. It’s very early and will be a very long day. The message alert dings on my phone.

“You coming or what?” Marino texts me.

“Ready,” I reply.

I clip the fanny pack’s nylon strap around my waist, tightening it as I move a curtain aside.