Predator

28

Scarpetta is hot in her dark suit but doesn’t consider doing anything about it. If she takes off her jacket, she will have to drape or hang it somewhere, and she doesn’t make herself at home at crime scenes, not even ones the police don’t believe are crime scenes.

Now that she is inside the house, she is about to decide that one of the sisters suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The windows, tile floors and furniture are spotless and immaculately arranged. A rug is perfectly centered, and the fringe border is so neat it looks combed. She checks a thermostat on the wall and jots in her notebook that the air-conditioning is on, the temperature in the living room seventy-two degrees.

“Has the thermostat been adjusted?” she asks. “Was it like this?”

“Everything’s been left the way it was,” Reba says, in the kitchen with Academy crime-scene investigator Lex. “Except the stove. It was turned off. The lady who came over here when Ev and Kristin didn’t show up at the church. She turned it off.”

Scarpetta makes a note that there is no alarm system.

Reba opens the refrigerator. “I’d go ahead and dust the cabinet doors,” she tells Lex. “May as well dust the heck out of everything while you’re at it. There’s not much food in here for two growing boys.” She directs this to Scarpetta. “Not much to eat at all. I think they’re vegetarians.”

She shuts the refrigerator door.

“The powder will ruin the wood,” Lex says.

“That’s up to you.”

“Do we know what time they got home from church last Thursday night? Allegedly got home?” Scarpetta asks.

“It ended at seven, and Ev and Kristin stayed over for a while, talking to people. Then they went back to Ev’s office and had a meeting. It’s just a small office. It’s a very small church. The room where they have the services can’t hold more than fifty people, looked like to me.”

Reba leaves the kitchen and walks into the living room.

“A meeting with whom, and where were the boys?” Scarpetta asks as she lifts up a cushion from the floral-printed couch.

“Some of the women met. I don’t know what you call them. They’re the women who run things in the church, and as I understand it, the boys weren’t in the meeting, were doing whatever, horsing around. Then they left with Ev and Kristin at aroundeight p.m.”

“Are there always meetings after church on Thursday nights?”

“I believe so. Their regular services are Friday night, so they meet the night before. Something about Good Friday being when God died for our sins. They don’t talk about Jesus, just God, and are sure into sin and going to hell. It’s an oddball church. Like a cult, you ask me. Probably into snake-handling and the likes.”

Lex taps a small amount of Silk Black oxide powder onto a sheet of paper. The white countertop is chipped but clean and completely bare, and she dabs a fiberglass brush into the powder on the paper and begins to gently swirl the brush over the Corian, turning it an uneven, sooty black wherever the powder adheres to oils or other latent residues.

“I didn’t find a wallet, a pocketbook, anything like that,” Reba tells Scarpetta. “Which just adds to my suspicion they ran off.”

“You can be abducted and bring your pocketbook,” Scarpetta says. “People are abducted with their wallets, their keys, their cars, their children. A few years ago, I worked an abduction-homicide in which the victim was allowed to pack a suitcase.”

“I know about cases, too, ones where the whole thing is faked to look like a crime, when all that really happened is the people ran off. Maybe that weird phone call you told me about was some crank caller from the church.”

Scarpetta walks into the kitchen to look at the stove. On a back burner is a copper pan covered with a lid, and the metal is dark gray and streaked.

“This is the burner that was on?” she asks, removing the lid.

The stainless-steel lining inside the pan is discolored dark gray.

Lex tears off a segment of lifting tape with a loud snap.

“When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”

Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.

“There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.

“What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”

“A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”

Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey breast suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.

The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.

He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.

He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.

No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.

“Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”

He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.

“What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.

“Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”

“Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”

He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.

“Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”

A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.

“Mrs. Simister? Anybody here?”

The television is inside a back room, probably a bedroom, and the door is shut. He hesitates, calls out again. He knocks, then bangs on the door, then goes inside and sees blood, a small body on the bed and what is left of the head.