Predator

26

It has been unseasonably hot and raining a lot lately, and the grass is spongy and coarse beneath Scarpetta’s shoes, and when the sun emerges from the dark clouds again, the sunlight feels flat and hot against her head and shoulders as she walks around the backyard.

She notices the pink-and-red hibiscus bushes, the palm trees, notices several citrus trees with red-painted stripes around their trunks, and she stares across the waterway at the inspector zipping up his bag after the old woman just yelled at him. She wonders if the old woman is Mrs. Simister and assumes Marino hasn’t gotten to her house yet. He is always late, never in a hurry to do what Scarpetta asks if he bothers to do it at all. She walks closer to a concrete wall that drops precipitously to the waterway. This one probably doesn’t have alligators, but it has no fence, and any child or dog could easily fall over the edge and drown.

Ev and Kristin took custody of two children and didn’t bother putting up a fence along the backyard. Scarpetta imagines the property after dark and how easy it would be to forget where the dark yard ends and the dark waterway begins. It runs east-west and is narrow behind the house but gets wider farther off. In the distance, handsome sailboats and motorboats are docked behind much finer homes than the one where Ev, Kristin,Davidand Tony lived.

According to Reba, the sisters and the boys were last seen on Thursday night, February 10. Early the next morning, Marino got the phone call from the man who said his name was Hog. By then, the people had disappeared.

“Was there anything in the news about their disappearance?” Scarpetta asks Reba, wondering if the anonymous caller might have gotten Kristin’s name that way.

“Not that I know of.”

“And you filled out a police report.”

“Not something that would have gone into the press basket. I’m afraid people disappear down here all the time, Dr. Scarpetta. Welcome toSouth Florida.”

“Tell me what else you know about the last time they were allegedly seen, last Thursday night.”

Reba replies that Ev preached at her church and Kristin gave several readings from the Bible. When the two women didn’t show up at the church the following day for a prayer meeting, an associate tried to call them and got no answer, so this associate, a woman, drove to the house. She had a key and let herself in. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except Ev, Kristin and the boys were gone and the stove had been left on low, an empty skillet on top of it. The detail about the stove is important, and Scarpetta will turn her attention to it when she goes inside the house, but she isn’t ready yet, her approach to a scene similar to a predator’s. She moves from the outer edge to the inside, saving the worst for last.

Lucy asks Larry if the storeroom is different from how it was when he moved in approximately two years ago.

“Didn’t do a thing to it,” he says.

She scans big cardboard boxes and shelves of T-shirts, lotions, beach towels, sunglasses, cleaning equipment and other inventory in the glare of a single naked light bulb overhead.

“No point in caring what it looks like back here,” Larry says. “What exactly are you interested in?”

She makes her way into the bathroom, a cramped, windowless space with a sink and a toilet. The walls are cinderblock with a light coat of pale green paint, the floor brown asphalt tile. Overhead is another bare light bulb.

“You didn’t repaint, retile?” she asks.

“It was exactly like this when I took over the place. You’re not thinking something happened in here?”

“I’d like to come back and bring somebody with me,” she says.

On the other side of the waterway, Mrs. Simister watches.

She rocks on her glass-enclosed sun porch, pushing the glider with her feet, rocking back and forth, her slippers barely touching the tile floor as she makes a quiet sliding sound. She looks for the blonde woman in the dark suit who was walking around the yard of the pale orange house. She looks for the inspector who was trespassing, daring to bother Mrs. Simister’s trees again, daring to spray red paint on them. He’s gone. The blonde woman’s gone.

At first, Mrs. Simister thought the blonde woman was a religious nut. There have been plenty of those visiting that house. Then she looked through binoculars and wasn’t so sure. The blonde woman was taking notes and had a black bag slung over her shoulder. She’s a banker or a lawyer, Mrs. Simister was about to decide when the other woman appeared, this one quite tan, with white hair and wearing khaki pants and a gun in a shoulder holster. Maybe she’s the same one who was over there the other day. Friday. She was tan with white hair. Mrs. Simister isn’t sure.

The two women talked and then walked out of sight along the side of the house, toward the front. Maybe they’ll be back. Mrs. Simister watches for the inspector, that same one who was so nice the first time, asking her all about her trees and when they were planted and what they mean to her. Then he comes back and paints them. It made her think about her gun for the first time in years. When her son gave it to her, she said all that would happen is the bad person would get hold of it and use it against her. She keeps the gun under the bed, out of sight.

She wouldn’t have shot the inspector. She wouldn’t have minded scaring him, though. All these citrus inspectors getting paid to rip out trees that people have had for half their lives. She hears talk about it on the radio. Her trees will probably be next. She loves her trees. The yard man takes care of them, picks fruit and leaves it on the stoop. Jake planted a yard full of trees for her when he bought the house right after they got married. She is lost in her past when the phone on the table by her glider rings.

“Hello?” she answers.

“Mrs. Simister?”

“Who is this?”

“Investigator Pete Marino. We talked earlier.”

“We did? You’re who?”

“You called theNationalForensicAcademya few hours ago.”

“I most certainly did not. Are you selling something?”

“No, ma’am. I’d like to stop by and talk to you, if that’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” she says, hanging up.

She grips the cool metal armrests so tightly that her big knuckles blanch beneath the loose, sun-spotted skin of her useless old hands. People call all the time and they don’t even know her. Machines call and she can’t imagine why people sit there and listen to tape recordings made by solicitors after money. The phone rings again, and she ignores it as she picks up the binoculars to peer at the pale orange house where the two ladies live with the two little hoodlums.

She sweeps the binoculars over the waterway, then over the property on the other side of it. The yard and pool are suddenly big and bright green and blue. They are sharply defined, but the blonde woman in the dark suit and the tan lady with the gun are nowhere to be seen. What are they looking for over there? Where are the two ladies who live there? Where are the hoodlums? All children are hoodlums these days.

The doorbell rings and she stops rocking as her heart begins to pound. The older she gets, the more easily she is startled by sudden movements and sounds, the more she fears death and what it means, if it means anything. Several minutes pass, and the bell rings again and she sits still and waits. It rings again and someone knocks loudly. Finally, she gets up.

“Hold on, I’m coming,” she mutters, annoyed and anxious. “You’d better not be someone selling something.”

She walks into the living room, her slow feet brushing over the carpet. She can’t pick up her feet the way she once could, can hardly walk.

“Hold on, I’m coming as fast as I can,” she says impatiently when the bell rings again.

Maybe it’s UPS. Sometimes her son orders things for her on the Internet. She looks through the peephole in the front door. The person on her porch certainly isn’t wearing a brown or blue uniform or carrying mail or a package. It’s him again.

“What is it this time?” she says angrily, her eye against the peephole.

“Mrs. Simister? I’ve got some forms for you to fill out.”