Predator

30

It is raining hard when she pulls up to Mrs. Simister’s house, and there are three police cruisers and an ambulance parked in front.

Scarpetta gets out of her car and doesn’t bother with an umbrella as she concludes a conversation with the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has jurisdiction over all sudden, unexpected and violent deaths that occur betweenPalm BeachandMiami. She will examine the body on site because she is already here, she is saying, and as soon as possible she needs a removal service to transport the body to the morgue. She recommends the autopsy be done right away.

You don’t think it can wait until morning? I understand it might be a suicide, that she has a history of depression,” the administrator points out cautiously because he doesn’t want to sound as if he is questioning Scarpetta’s judgment.

He doesn’t want to come right out and say that he isn’t sure the case is urgent. He is careful how he words it, but she knows what he is thinking.

“Marino says there’s no weapon at the scene,” she explains, hurrying up the steps to the front porch, getting soaked.

“Okay. Didn’t know that.”

“I’m not aware anyone is assuming it’s a suicide.”

She thinks of the so-called backfire she and Reba heard earlier. She tries to remember when.

“You coming in, then?”

“Of course,” she says. “Tell Dr. Amos to come in and get everything ready.”

Marino is waiting for her as she reaches the door and goes inside, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes.

“Where’s Wagner?” he asks. “I assume she’s coming. Unfortunately. Shit, we don’t need a moron like her handling this.”

“She left a few minutes after I did. I don’t know where she is.”

“Probably lost. Got the worse sense of direction I’ve ever seen.”

Scarpetta tells him about the Bible inside Ev and Kristin’s bedroom, about the verse that was marked with X’s.

“The same thing the caller said to me,” Marino exclaims. “Jesus Christ. What the hell’s going on? Damn moron,” he exclaims, and he’s talking about Reba again. “I’m going to have to do an end run around her and get a real detective so this doesn’t get screwed up.”

Scarpetta has heard enough of his disparaging comments. “Do me a favor, help her as best you can and tuck your grudges out of sight. Tell me what you know.”

She looks past him through the partially opened front door. Two emergency medical technicians are carrying cases of their equipment, finished with an effort that was a waste of time.

“Shotgun wound to the mouth, blew the top of her head off,” Marino says, moving out of the way as the EMTs walk out the door, heading to the ambulance. “She’s on the bed in back, fully clothed, TV on. Nothing to imply forced entry, robbery or sexual assault. We found a pair of latex gloves in the bathroom sink. One of them is bloody.”

“Which bathroom?”

“The one in her bedroom.”

“Any other sign the killer might have cleaned up afterwards?”

“No. Just the gloves in the sink. No bloody towels, no bloody water.”

“I’ll need to look. We sure who she is?”

“We know whose residence it is. Daggie Simister’s. I can’t say for a fact who’s back there on the bed.”

Scarpetta digs inside her bag for a pair of gloves and steps into the foyer. She stops to look around as she thinks of the unlocked sliders in the master bedroom in the house across the waterway. She scans the terrazzo floor, the pale blue walls, then the small living room. It is crowded with furniture, photographs and porcelain birds and other figurines from an earlier era. Nothing seems disturbed. Marino leads her through the living room, past the kitchen and to the other side of the house, where the body is inside a bedroom that faces the water.

She is clothed in a pink warm-up suit and pink slippers and is lying on her back on top of the bed. Her mouth gapes open, her dull eyes staring below a massive wound that has opened the top of her head like an egg cup. Her brain is eviscerated, chunks of it and fragments of bone on a pillow soaked with blood that is a deep red, just beginning to coagulate. Bits of brain and skin adhere to the blood-spattered and streaked headboard and wall.

Scarpetta slides her hand inside the bloody warm-up jacket and feels the chest and belly, then touches the hands. The body is warm, and rigor mortis isn’t apparent yet. She unzips the jacket and tucks a chemical thermometer under the right arm. While she waits for a reading on the body temperature, she looks for any injury besides the obvious one to the head.

“How long you think she’s been dead?” Marino asks.

“She’s still very warm. Rigor’s not even present yet.”

She thinks about what she and Reba assumed was a backfire, decides it was about an hour ago. She walks over to a thermostat on the wall. The air-conditioning is on, the bedroom a chilly sixty-eight degrees. She writes it down and looks around, taking her time, scanning. The small bedroom has a terrazzo floor, and a dark-blue throw rug covers almost half of it from the foot of the blue duvet-covered bed to the window that overlooks the waterway. The blinds are shut. On a bedside table is a glass of what looks like water, a large-print edition of a Dan Brown novel and a pair of glasses. At first glance, there is no sign of a struggle.

“So maybe she got killed right before I got here,” Marino is saying, and he is agitated, trying not to show it. “So it could have happened minutes before I got here on my bike. I was running late. Someone punctured my front tire.”

“Deliberately?” she says, wondering about the coincidence of that happening when it did.

If he had gotten here earlier, this lady might not be dead, and she tells him about what she now assumes was a gunshot while a uniformed officer emerges from the bathroom, his hands full of prescription bottles that he sets on a dresser.

“Yeah, it was deliberate all right,” Marino says.

“Obviously, she hasn’t been dead long. What time did you find her?”

“I’d been here maybe fifteen minutes when I called you. I wanted to make sure the house was clear before I did anything. Make sure whoever killed her wasn’t hiding in a closet or something.”

“The neighbors didn’t hear anything?”

He says there is nobody home in the houses on either side of this one. One of the uniformed officers already checked. He is sweating profusely, his face deep red, his eyes wide, half crazy.

“I just don’t know what’s going on,” he says again as the rain drums the roof. “I feel like we’ve been set up somehow. You and Wagner were right across the water. I was late because of a flat tire.”

“There was an inspector,” she says. “Someone inspecting citrus trees over here.” She tells him about the fruit picker he disassembled and tucked inside a big black bag. “I’d check into that right away.”

She withdraws the thermometer from under the dead woman’s arm and writes down ninety-seven-point-two degrees. She walks into the tiled bathroom and looks inside the shower. She looks in the toilet and the waste paper basket. The sink is dry, with no blood, not the slightest residue, which makes no sense. She looks at Marino.

“The gloves were in this sink?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“If he-or she, I suppose-took them off after killing her and dropped them into the sink, they should have left a bloody residue. The bloody one should have.”

“Unless the blood was already dry on the glove.”

“It shouldn’t have been,” Scarpetta says, opening the medicine cabinet and finding the usual alchemies for aches and pains and troublesome bowels. “Not unless the killer had them on long enough for the blood to dry.”

“Wouldn’t take all that long.”

“It might not. You got them handy?”

They walk out of the bathroom, and Marino retrieves a large brown-paper evidence envelope from a crime-scene case. He opens the envelope so she can look inside without touching the gloves. One is clean, the other partially inside out and stained with dark-brown dried blood. The gloves aren’t talc-lined, and the clean glove looks as if it has never been worn.

“We’ll want to do DNA on the inside, too. And prints,” she says.

“He must not know you can leave prints on the inside of latex gloves,” Marino says.

“Then he must not watch TV,” an officer says.

“Don’t talk to me about the crap on TV. It’s ruining my life,” another officer comments from halfway under the bed. Then, “Well, well.”

He gets up holding a flashlight and a small, stainless-steel revolver with rosewood grips. He opens the cylinder, touching as little of the metal as possible.

“Unloaded. So that did her a lot of good. Doesn’t look like it’s been fired since it was cleaned last, if it was ever fired at all,” he says.

“We’ll check it for prints anyway,” Marino tells him. “A weird place to hide a gun. How far under the bed?”

“Too far to reach without getting down on the floor and crawling under it like I just did. Twenty-two caliber. What the hell’s a Black Widow?”

“You’re kidding,” Marino says, taking a look. “North American Arms, single-action. Sort of a stupid gun for a little old lady with gnarly, arthritic hands.”

“Someone must have given it to her for home protection and she never bothered.”

“See a box of ammo anywhere?”

“Not so far.”

The officer drops the gun into an evidence bag, which he places on a dresser where another officer begins taking an inventory of prescription bottles.

“Accuretic, Diurese and Enduron,” he reads labels. “Got no idea.”

“An ace inhibitor and diuretics. For hypertension,” Scarpetta says.

“Verapamil, an old one. Dates back to July.”

“Hypertension, angina, arrhythmia.”

“Apresoline and Loniten. Try to pronounce this stuff. Over a year old.”

“Vasodilators. Again, for hypertension.”

“So maybe she died of a stroke. Vicodin. I know what that is. And Ultram. These are more recent prescriptions.”

“Pain medications. Possibly for arthritis.”

“And Zithromax. That’s an antibiotic, right? Date on it’s December.”

“Nothing else?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“Who told the Medical Examiner’s Office she has a history of depression?” she asks, looking at Marino.

No one answers at first.

Then Marino says, “I sure as hell didn’t.”

“Who called the Medical Examiner’s Office?” she asks.

The two officers and Marino look at each other.

“Shit,” Marino says.

“Hold on,” Scarpetta says, and she calls the Medical Examiner’s Office and gets the administrator on the phone. “Who notified you about the shotgun death?”

“Hollywoodpolice.”

“But which officer?”

“Detective Wagner.”

“Detective Wagner?” Scarpetta puzzles. “What time’s on the call sheet?”

“Uh, let me see.Two eleven.”

Scarpetta looks at Marino again and asks him, “Do you know exactly what time you called me?”

He checks his cell phone and replies, “Two twenty-one.”

She glances at her watch. It is almostthree thirty. She won’t be on her six-thirty flight.

“Is everything all right?” the administrator asks her over the phone.

“Anything come up on caller ID when you got that call, the one supposedly from Detective Wagner?”

“Supposedly?”

“And it was a woman who called.”

“Yes.”

“Anything unusual about the way she sounded?”

“Not at all,” he says, pausing. “She sounded credible.”

“What about an accent?”

“What’s going on, Kay?”

“Nothing good,” she says.

“Let me scroll through. Okay,two eleven. Came in as unavailable.”

“Of course it did,” Scarpetta says. “See you in about an hour.”

She leans closer to the bed and looks carefully at the hands, turning them gently. She is always gentle, doesn’t matter that her patients can’t feel anything anymore. She notices no abrasions, cuts or bruises that might suggest binding or defense injuries. She checks again with a lens and finds fibers and dirt adhering to the palms of both hands.

“She might have been on the floor at some point,” she says as Reba walks into the room, pale and wet from the rain and obviously shaken.

“The streets are like a maze back here,” Reba says.

“Hey,” Marino says to her, “what time did you call the ME?”

“About what?”

“About the price of eggs inChina.”

“What?” she says, staring at the gore on the bed.

“About this case,” Marino says gruffly. “What the hell do you think I meant? And why don’t you get a damn GPS.”

“I didn’t call the ME. Why would I when she was standing right next to me?” she replies, looking at Scarpetta.

“Let’s bag her hands and her feet,” Scarpetta says. “And I want her wrapped in the quilt and a clean plastic sheet. The bed linens need to come in, too.”

She goes to a window that overlooks the backyard and the waterway. She looks at citrus trees pommeled by rain and thinks about the inspector she saw earlier. He was in this yard, she’s pretty sure, and she tries to pinpoint the exact time she saw him. She knows it wasn’t long before she heard what she now suspects was a gunshot. She looks around the bedroom again and notices two dark stains on the rug near the window that overlooks the citrus trees, the water.

The stains are very hard to see against the dark blue background, and she gets a presumptive blood kit out of her bag, gets chemicals and medicine droppers out of it. There are two stains several inches apart. Each is about the size of a quarter and oval-shaped, and she swabs one of them, then drips isopropyl alcohol, then phenolphthalein, then hydrogen peroxide on the swab and it turns bright pink. That doesn’t mean the stains are human blood, but there’s a very good chance they are.

“If it’s her blood, what’s it doing way over here?” Scarpetta talks to herself.

“Maybe back spatter,” Reba volunteers.

“Not possible.”

“Drips and not exactly round,” Marino says. “Looks like whoever was bleeding was upright, almost.”

He looks around for any other stains.

“Kind of unusual they’re here and nowhere else. If someone was bleeding a lot, you’d expect more drips,” he then says, as if Reba isn’t in the room.

“It’s hard to see them on a dark textured surface like this,” Scarpetta replies. “But I don’t see any others.”

“Maybe we should come back with luminol.” Marino talks around Reba and anger begins to flicker on her face.

“We need a sample of these carpet fibers when the techs get here,” Scarpetta says to everyone.

“Vacuum the rug, check for trace,” Marino adds, avoiding Reba’s stare.

“I’ll need to get a statement from you before you leave, seeing as how you’re the one who found her,” Reba says to him. “I’m not sure what you were doing just walking in her house.”

He doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t exist.

“So how about you and me step outside for a few minutes so I can hear what you’ve got to say,” she says to him. “Mark?” she says to one of the officers. “How about checking Investigator Marino for gunshot residue?”

“Fuck off,” Marino says.

Scarpetta recognizes the low rumble in his voice. It is usually the prelude to a major eruption.

“It’s just pro forma,” Reba replies. “I know you wouldn’t want anybody accusing you of something.”

“Uh, Reba,” the officer named Mark says. “We don’t carry GSR stubs. The crime-scene techs got to do that.”

“Where the hell are they, anyway?” Reba asks irritably, embarrassed, still so new on the job.

“Marino,” Scarpetta says. “How about checking on the removal service. See where they are.”

“I’m just curious,” Marino says, getting so close to Reba she is forced to back up a step. “How many scenes you been the only detective at a scene where there’s a dead body?”

“I’m going to need you to clear out,” she replies. “You and Dr. Scarpetta both. So we can start processing.”

“The answer’s none.” He keeps talking. “Not a single goddamn one.” He gets louder. “Well, if you go back and take a look at your Detective for Dummies notes, you might find out that the body is the medical examiner’s jurisdiction, meaning right now the Doc here’s in charge, not you. And since I just so happen to be a certified death investigator in addition to all my other fancy titles and assist the Doc as needed, you can’t order my ass around, either.”

The uniformed officers are struggling not to laugh.

“All of which adds up to one very important fact,” Marino goes on. “Me and the Doc are in charge at the moment and you don’t know chicken shit and are in the goddamn way.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!” Reba exclaims, near tears.

“Could one of you please get a real detective here?” Marino asks the uniformed cops. “Because I’m not leaving until you do.”