Predator

25

The orange-colored house with its white roof was built in the same decade that Scarpetta was born, the fifties. She imagines the people who live here and feels their absence as she walks around the backyard.

She can’t stop thinking about the person who said his name is Hog, about his cryptic reference to Johnny Swift and what Marino thought was Christian Christian. Scarpetta feels certain what Hog actually said was Kristin Christian. Johnny is dead. Kristin is missing. It has often occurred to Scarpetta that there are plenty of places to dispose of dead bodies inSouth Florida, plenty of wetlands, canals, lakes and vast pine forests. Flesh decomposes quickly in the subtropics, and insects gorge themselves, and animals gnaw on bones and scatter them like sticks and stones. Flesh doesn’t last long in the water, and salt in the sea leaches the minerals from skeletons, dissolving them completely.

The waterway behind the house is the color of putrid blood. Dead leaves float in the brown, stagnant water like debris from an explosion. Green and brown coconuts bob like decapitated heads. The sun slips in and out of mounting storm clouds, the warm air heavy and humid, the wind gusting.

Detective Wagner prefers to be called Reba. She is attractive and rather sexy in an overblown, sun-weathered way, her shaggy hair dyed platinum, her eyes bright blue. She doesn’t have the brains of a maggot. She isn’t as dumb as a cow and has yet to come across as a bitch on ten-spoke custom wheels, to quote Marino, who also called her a cock stalker, although Scarpetta isn’t clear on what that means. Most assuredly, Reba is inexperienced, but she seems to be trying. Scarpetta debates whether to tell her about the anonymous phone call that referenced Kristin Christian.

“They’ve lived here for a while but aren’t citizens,” Reba is saying of the two sisters who live in this house with two boys, a foster situation. “They’re originally fromSouth Africa. The two boys are too, which is probably why they took them in to begin with. You ask me, the four of them are back over there somewhere.”

“And they would have decided to disappear, perhaps flee toSouth Africa, for what reason?” Scarpetta asks, staring across the narrow, dark waterway as humidity presses down on her like a warm, sticky hand.

“I understand they wanted to adopt the boys. And it’s unlikely they were going to get to.”

“Why not?”

“Seems like relatives of the boys back there inSouth Africawant them but just couldn’t take them at first, not until they move into a bigger house. And the sisters are religious kooks, which might have weighed against them.”

Scarpetta is aware of the houses on the other side of the water, aware of patches of bright green grass and small, pale-blue swimming pools. She’s not certain which house is Mrs. Simister’s, and wonders if Marino is talking with her yet.

“The boys are how old?” she asks.

“Seven and twelve.”

Scarpetta glances at her notebook and flips back several pages. “Eva and Kristin Christian. I’m not clear on why they are taking care of them.”

She is careful to speak of the missing people in the present tense.

“No, not Eva. There’s no ‘a,’ ” Reba says.

“Ev or Eve?”

“It’s Ev as in Evelyn only her name is just Ev. No ‘e’ or ‘a.’ Just Ev.”

Scarpetta writes down “Ev” in her black notebook and thinks, What a name. She stares at the waterway, and sunlight on the water has turned it the color of strong tea. Ev and Kristin Christian. What names for religious women who have vanished like ghosts. Then the sun slips behind clouds again and the water is dark.

“Ev and Kristin Christian are their real names?” Scarpetta asks. “We’re sure they’re not aliases? We’re sure they didn’t change their names at some point, perhaps to give them religious connotations?” she asks, staring across the waterway at houses that look sketched in pastel chalk.

She watches a figure in dark pants and a white shirt walking into someone’s backyard, possibly Mrs. Simister’s backyard.

“As far as we know, it’s their real names,” Reba replies, looking where Scarpetta is looking. “Damn canker inspectors are all over the map. Politics. It’s all about preventing people from growing their own citrus fruit so they have to buy it.”

“Actually, it’s not. Citrus canker is a terrible blight. If it’s not controlled, nobody will be growing citrus fruit in their yards.”

“It’s a conspiracy. I’ve been listening to what all these commentators are saying on the radio. You ever listen to Dr. Self on the radio? You should hear what she has to say about it.”

Scarpetta never listens to Dr. Self if she can avoid it. She watches the figure across the waterway squat in the grass and dig inside what appears to be some sort of dark bag. He pulls out something.

“Ev Christian’s a reverend or priest or whatever you want to call it in some offbeat little church… Okay, I’m gonna have to read this to you. It’s too much to remember,” Reba says, flipping through her notepad. “The True Daughters of the Seal of God.”

“Never heard of that denomination,” Scarpetta comments rather ironically as she writes it down. “And Kristin? What does she do?”

The inspector stands up, screwing together what looks like a fruit picker. He raises it high up in a tree, pulling down a grapefruit that lands on the grass.

“Kristin also works at the church. An assistant who does readings and meditations during the services. The kids’ parents got killed in a scooter accident about a year ago. You know, one of those Vespas.”

“Where?”

“South Africa.”

“And this information came from?” Scarpetta asks.

“Someone at the church.”

“You have a report on the accident?”

“Like I said, it happened inSouth Africa,” Detective Wagner replies. “We’re trying to track it down.”

Scarpetta continues to deliberate over when she should tell her about the disturbing phone call from Hog.

“What are the boys’ names?” Scarpetta asks.

“Davidand Tony Luck. Kind of funny, when you think about it. Luck.”

“You’re not getting cooperation from the South African authorities? Where inSouth Africa?”

“Capetown.”

“Where the sisters are also from?”

“That’s what I’m told. After the parents got killed, the sisters took the kids in. Their church is maybe twenty minutes from here onDavie Boulevard, right next to one of these alternative pet stores, kind of figures.”

“Have you checked with the medical examiner’s office in Capetown?”

“Not yet.”

“I can help you with that.”

“That would be great. Kind of figures, doesn’t it? Spiders, scorpions, poisonous frogs, all these little white rat pups you can buy to feed to your snakes,” Reba says. “Sounds like some sort of cultville over there.”

I’ve never let anybody come in and photograph a business of mine unless it’s a genuine police matter. I was robbed once. That was a while back,” Larry explains from the stool behind the counter.

Through the window is the constant traffic along A1A, then the ocean beyond. A light rain has begun to fall, a storm moving in, heading south. Lucy thinks about what Marino told her a few minutes ago, about the house and the missing people, and of course his flat tire, which was his bigger complaint. She thinks of what her aunt must be doing right now, of the storm heading her way.

“Of course I’ve heard quite a lot about it.” Larry gets back to the subject of Florrie and Helen Quincy after a long digression about how muchSouth Floridahas changed, how much he has been seriously considering moving back toAlaska. “It’s like everything else. The details get more exaggerated with time. But I don’t think I want you videotaping,” he says again.

“This is a police matter,” Lucy reiterates. “I’ve been asked to privately investigate the case.”

“How do I know you aren’t a reporter or something?”

“I’m former FBI, former ATF. You ever heard of theNationalForensicAcademy?”

“That big training camp out there in theEverglades?”

“It’s not exactly in theEverglades. We have private labs and experts and an agreement with most of the police departments inFlorida. We help them out as needed.”

“Sounds expensive. Let me guess, taxpayers like me.”

“Indirectly. Grants, quid pro quo-services for services. They help us, we train them. All sorts of things.”

She reaches into a back pocket and works out a black wallet and hands it to him. He studies her credentials, a fake ID, an investigator shield that isn’t worth the brass it’s made from because it’s also fake.

“There’s no picture on it,” he says.

“It’s not a driver’s license.”

He reads her fictitious name out loud, reads that she’s Special Operations.

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you say so.” He hands the wallet back to her.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” Lucy says, setting the video camera on top of the counter.

She looks at the locked front door, at a young couple in skimpy swimsuits trying to open it.

They peer through the glass and Larry shakes his head. No, he’s not open.

“You’re losing me business,” he says to Lucy, but he doesn’t seem to care very much. “When I had a chance to take over this space, I got quite an earful about theQuincysdisappearing. The story I heard is she always got here at seven-thirty in the morning so she could get the little electric trains running on their tracks and light up the trees, turn on the Christmas music and do all this other stuff. It appears she never opened up that day. The closed sign was still on the door when her son finally got worried and came looking for her and the daughter.”

Lucy reaches inside a pocket of her cargo pants and removes a black ballpoint pen from the holder of a concealed tape recorder. She slips out a small notebook.

“Mind if I take a few notes?” she asks.

“Don’t take everything I say as gospel. I wasn’t here when it happened, just passing along what I’ve been told.”

“I understand Mrs. Quincy called in a take-out order,” Lucy says. “There was something in the paper about it.”

“At the Floridian, that old diner on the other side of the drawbridge. A pretty nifty place, if you’ve never eaten there. It’s my understanding she didn’t call it in, didn’t need to. They always had the same thing ready for her. A tuna plate.”

“Something for the daughter, too? Helen?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Mrs. Quincy usually pick it up herself?”

“Unless her son was in the area. He’s one of the reasons I know a few things about what happened.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I haven’t seen him in a year. For a while early on, I did. He would drop by, look around, chat. I guess you could say he was obsessed for maybe the first year after they disappeared. Then, it’s my opinion, he couldn’t bear to think about it. He lives in a real nice house inHollywood.”

Lucy looks around the store.

“There’s no Christmas stuff here,” Larry says, in case that’s what she is wondering.

She doesn’t ask anything about Mrs. Quincy’s son, Fred. She already knows from HIT that Fred Anderson Quincy is twenty-six years old. She knows his address and that he’s self-employed, into computer graphics, a Web designer. Larry goes on to say that on the day Mrs. Quincy and Helen disappeared, Fred tried numerous times to reach them and finally drove to the shop and found it closed, his mother’s Audi still parked in back.

“We’re sure they actually had unlocked the shop that morning?” Lucy asks. “Any possibility something happened to them after they got out of the car?”

“I suppose anything’s possible.”

“Were Mrs. Quincy’s pocketbook, her car keys, inside the shop? Had she made coffee, used the phone, done anything at all that might indicate she and Helen had been there? For example, were the trees lit up, the toy trains running? Was there Christmas music playing? Were the shop lights on?”

“I heard they never did find her pocketbook and car keys. I’ve heard different stories about things being turned on inside the shop. Some say they were. Others say they weren’t.”

Lucy’s attention wanders to the doorway in the back of the store. She thinks about what Basil Jenrette toldBenton. She doesn’t see how it’s possible that Basil raped and murdered anybody in the storage area. It’s hard to believe he could clean up and remove the body from the shop, place it in a car and drive off without being seen. It was daylight. It is a populated area, even during the off-season of July, and such a scenario certainly wouldn’t explain what happened to the daughter unless he abducted her, perhaps killed her elsewhere, as he did to his other victims. A gruesome thought. A seventeen-year-old girl.

“What happened to this place after they disappeared?” Lucy asks. “Did it reopen?”

“Nope. Wasn’t much of a market for Christmas stuff anyway. You ask me, it was more an eccentric hobby of hers than anything else. Her shop never reopened, and her son cleared out the merchandise a month or two after they disappeared. Beach Bums moved in that September and hired me.”

“I’d like to take a look in back,” Lucy says. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Hog pulls down two more oranges, then grabs at grapefruits with the claw like basket on the end of the long-handled picker. He looks across the waterway, watching Scarpetta and Detective Wagner walk around the pool.

The detective gestures a lot. Scarpetta takes notes, looking at everything. It gives Hog extreme pleasure to watch the show. Fools. None of them are as smart as they think. He can outsmart all of them, and he smiles as he imagines Marino running a little late, delayed by an unexpected flat tire that could have been remedied easily and quickly by driving here in an Academy vehicle. But not him. He couldn’t stand it, would have to fix it right then. Big, stupid redneck. Hog squats in the grass, breaks down the picker by unscrewing its aluminum segments, tucks them back into the big black nylon bag. The bag is heavy, and he props it on his shoulder like a lumberjack shouldering an ax, like the lumberjack in The Christmas Shop.

He takes his time walking through the yard, toward the tiny white stucco house next door. He sees her rocking on her sun porch, looking through binoculars at the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway. She’s been watching the house for days. How entertaining is that. Hog has been in and out of the pale orange house three times now, and no one has noticed. In and out to remember what happened, to relive it, to take all the time he wants in there. No one can see him. He can make himself disappear.

He enters Mrs. Simister’s yard and begins to examine one of her lime trees. She trains the binoculars on him. In a moment, she opens the slider but doesn’t walk out into the yard. He’s never once seen her in her yard. The yard man comes and goes, but she never leaves the house or speaks to him. Her groceries are delivered, the same man each time. It might be a relative, maybe a son. All he does is carry in the bags. He never stays long. Nobody bothers with her. She should be grateful to Hog. Pretty soon she’ll get plenty of attention. A lot of people will hear about her when she ends up on Dr. Self’s show.

“Leave my trees alone,” Mrs. Simister says loudly with a thick accent. “You people have been out here two times this week and it’s harassment.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m almost finished up here,” Hog says politely as he pulls a leaf off the lime tree, looks at it.

“Get off my property or I’m calling the police.” Her voice gets more shrill.

She is frightened. She’s angry because she is terrified that she will lose her precious trees, and she will, but by then, it won’t matter. Her trees are infected. They are old trees, at least twenty years old, and they’re ruined. It was easy. Wherever the big orange trucks roll in to cut down canker-infected trees and grind them up, there are leaves on the road. He picks them up, tears them, puts them in water and watches the bacteria stream up like tiny bubbles. He fills a syringe, the one God gave him.

Hog unzips his black bag and pulls out a can of red spray paint. He sprays a red stripe around the trunk of the lime tree. Blood painted over the door, like the angel of death, but no one will be spared. Hog hears preaching in a dark place somewhere in his head, like a box hidden way out of reach somewhere in his head.

A false witness shall not be unpunished.

I won’t say anything.

Liars are punished.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t.

Punishment from my hand is endless.

I didn’t. I didn’t!

“What are you doing? Leave my trees alone, you hear me!”

“I’m happy to explain it to you, ma’am,” Hog says politely, sympathetically.

Mrs. Simister shakes her head. She angrily closes the sliding glass door and locks it.