Predator

31

Bentonsits in his office on the ground floor of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, one of few contemporary buildings on a two-hundred-and-thirty-seven-acre campus graced with century-old brick and slate, and fruit trees and ponds. Unlike most offices atMcLean, his has no view, just a handicapped-parking space directly beyond his window, then a road, then a field that is popular withCanadageese.

His office is small and cluttered with papers and books, and is located in the middle of the H-shaped lab. At each corner is an MR scanner, and collectively, their electromagnetic fields are powerful enough to pull a train off its tracks. He is the only forensic psychologist whose office is located in the lab. He has to be easily accessible to the neuroscientists because of PREDATOR.

He buzzes his study coordinator.

“Has our newest normal called back yet?”Bentonstares out the window at two geese wandering along the road. “Kenny Jumper?”

“Hold on, that might be him now.” Then, “Dr. Wesley? He’s on the line.”

“Hello,”Bentonsays. “Good afternoon, Kenny. It’s Dr. Wesley. How are you today?”

“Not too bad.”

“You sound as if you have a bit of a cold.”

“Maybe allergies. I petted a cat.”

“I’m going to ask you some more questions, Kenny,”Bentonsays, looking at a secondary phone screening form.

“You already asked me all those questions.”

“These are different ones. Routine questions, the same ones we ask everybody who participates in our study.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, where are you calling from?”Bentonasks.

“A pay phone. You can’t call me back on it. I have to call you.”

“You don’t have a phone where you’re staying?”

“Like I told you, I’m at a friend’s house here inWaltham, and he don’t have a phone.”

“All right. Let me just confirm a few things you told me yesterday, Kenny. You’re single.”

“Yeah.”

“Twenty-four years old.”

“Yeah.”

“White.”

“Yeah.”

“Kenny, are you right- or left-handed?”

“Right-handed. I don’t have a driver’s license, if you want an ID.”

“That’s all right,”Bentonsays. “It’s not required.”

Not only that, but to ask for proof of identification, to photograph patients or make any effort whatsoever to verify who they really are is a violation of HIPPA’s Protected Health Information Restriction.Bentongoes through the questions on the form, asking Kenny about dentures or braces, medical implants, metal plates or pins, and how he supports himself. He inquires about any allergies in addition to cats, any breathing problems, any illnesses or medications, and whether he has ever suffered a head injury or had thoughts of harming himself or others or is currently in therapy or on probation. Typically, the answers are no. More than a third of the people who volunteer as normal control subjects have to be removed from the study because they’re anything but normal. However, so far, Kenny seems promising.

“What is your drinking pattern over the last month?”Bentoncontinues down the list, hating every minute of it.

Telephone screening is tedious and pedestrian. But if he doesn’t do it himself, he’ll end up on the phone anyway, because he doesn’t trust information gathered by research assistants and other untrained personnel. It’s not helpful to bring in a potential study subject off the street and find out after countless hours of valuable staff time spent in screening, diagnostic interviews, rating scales, neurocognitive testing, brain imaging and lab work that he is unsuitable or unstable or potentially dangerous.

“Well, maybe a beer or two now and then,” Kenny is saying. “You know, I don’t drink much. I don’t smoke. When can I start? The ad says I get paid eight hundred dollars and you pay for the taxi. I don’t got a car. So I don’t got transportation, and I could use the money.”

“Why don’t you come in this Friday? Attwo o’clockin the afternoon. Would that work for you?”

“For the magnet thing?”

“That’s right. Your scan.”

“No. Thursday at five. I can do Thursday at five.”

“All right, then. Okay. Thursday at five.”Bentonwrites it down.

“And you can send a taxi.”

Bentonsays he will send a taxi and asks for an address and is puzzled by Kenny’s answer. He tellsBentonto send a cab to the Alpha amp; Omega Funeral Home inEverett, a funeral home he has never heard of in a not-so-nice area just outside ofBoston.

“Why a funeral home?”Bentoninquires, tapping the pencil on the form.

“It’s close to where I’m staying. It has a pay phone.”

“Kenny, I’d like you to call me back tomorrow so we can confirm you’re coming in the next day, Thursday at five. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll call you on this same pay phone.”

Wesley hangs up and checks directory assistance to see if there is such a place as the Alpha amp; Omega Funeral Home inEverett. There is. He calls it and is put on hold and subjected to Hoobastank’s The Reason.

The reason for what? He thinks impatiently. Dying?

“Benton?”

He looks up and seesDr. Susan Lanein his doorway, holding a report.

“Hi,” he says, hanging up.

“Have some news about your friend Basil Jenrette,” she says, looking closely at him. “You look stressed.”

“When don’t I? The analysis already done?”

“Maybe you should go home,Benton. You look exhausted.”

“Preoccupied. Staying up too late. Tell me how our boy Basil’s brain works. I’m on pins and needles,”Bentonsays.

She hands him his copy of the structural and functional imaging analysis and begins to explain, “Increased amygdalar activity in response to affective stimuli. Especially faces, overt or masked that were fearful or had any negative content.”

“Continues to be an interesting point,”Bentonsays. “May eventually tell us something about how they select their victims. An expression on someone’s face that we might interpret as surprise or curiosity, they might interpret as anger or fear. And it sets them off.”

“Rather unnerving to think about.”

“I need to pursue that more vigorously when I talk to them. Starting with him.”

He opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of aspirin.

“Let’s see. During the Stroop interference task,” she says, looking at the report, “he has decreased activity of the anterior cingulate in both dorsal and subgenual regions, accompanied by increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity.”

“Give me the upshot, Susan. I’ve got a headache.”

He shakes three aspirin into his palm and swallows them without water.

“How in the world do you do that?”

“Practice.”

“So.” She resumes the analysis of Basil’s brain. “Overall, the findings certainly reflect anomalous connectivity of frontal-limbic structures, suggesting anomalous response inhibition that may be due to deficits in a number of frontally mediated processes.”

“Implicating his ability to monitor and inhibit behavior,”Bentonsays. “We’re seeing a lot of that with our lovely guests fromButler. Consistent with bipolar disorder?”

“Certainly can be. That and other psychiatric disorders.”

“Excuse me a minute,”Bentonsays as he picks up his phone and dials his study coordinator’s extension.

“Can you check your in-log and tell me the number Kenny Jumper called from?” he asks.

“No ID.”

“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not aware that pay phones show up as No ID.”

“Actually I just got off the line withButler,” she says. “Apparently, Basil isn’t doing well. He wonders if you could come see him.”

It ishalf past five p.m.and the parking lot of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Laboratory amp; Office is almost empty. Employees, particularly nonmedical ones, rarely linger at the morgue after hours.

This one is onSouthwest 31st Avenue, in the midst of relatively undeveloped land thick with palms, live oak trees and pines, and scattered with mobile homes. Typical ofSouth Floridaarchitecture, the one-story building is stucco and coral stone. It backs up to a narrow brackish canal where mosquitoes are a menace and alligators sometimes wander where they don’t belong. Next door to the morgue is thecountyFireand Rescue service where emergency medical technicians are constantly reminded of where their less-fortunate patients end up.

The rain has almost stopped, and there are puddles everywhere as Scarpetta and Joe walk out to a silver H2 Hummer, not her choice but quite adept at handling off-road death scenes and hauling bulky equipment. Lucy is fond of Hummers. Scarpetta always worries where to park them.

“I just can’t understand how someone managed to walk in with a shotgun in the middle of the day,” Joe says, and he has been saying it for the past hour. “Must be a way to tell if it was sawed off.”

“If the barrel wasn’t smoothed after it was sawn, there could be tool marks on the wad,” Scarpetta replies.

“But the absence of tool marks doesn’t mean it wasn’t sawn.”

“Correct.”

“Because he might have smoothed off the sawed-off barrel. If he did that, there’s no way for us to tell without recovering the weapon. A twelve-gauge. We know that much.”

They know that much from the Remington plastic four-petaled Power Piston wad that Scarpetta recovered from the inside of Daggie Simister’s devastated head. Beyond that fact, there are only a few more Scarpetta can state with certainty, such as the nature of the attack on Mrs. Simister, which the autopsy revealed to be different from what everyone presumed. Had she not been shot, there is a good chance she would have died anyway. Scarpetta is fairly certain Mrs. Simister was unconscious when her killer stuck the shotgun barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t an easy conclusion to determine.

Examinations of massive gaping injuries to the head can mask wounds that may have occurred before the final mutilating trauma. Sometimes forensic pathology requires plastic surgery, and in the morgue, Scarpetta did what she could to repair Mrs. Simister’s head, fitting pieces of bone and scalp back together, then shaving off the hair. What she found was a laceration on the back of the head and a skull fracture. The point of impact correlated with a subdural hematoma in an underlying part of her brain that had been left relatively intact after the shotgun blast.

If the stains on the carpet by the window in Mrs. Simister’s bedroom turn out to be her blood, then it’s likely this was where she was first attacked and would also explain the dirt and bluish fibers on the palms of her hands. She was struck hard from behind with a blunt object and went down. Then her assailant picked her up, all eighty-six pounds of her, and placed her on the bed.

“I mean, you could easily carry a sawed-off shotgun in a knapsack,” Joe is saying.

Scarpetta points the remote at the Hummer and unlocks the doors and replies wearily, “Not necessarily.”

Joe makes her tired. He annoys her more each day.

“Even if you sawed twelve or even eighteen inches off the barrel and six inches off the stock,” she remarks, “you’re still left with an eighteen-inch-long gun, at least. Assuming we’re talking about an autoloader.”

She thinks of the big black bag the citrus inspector was carrying.

“If we’re talking about a pump, you’re likely to have a longer gun than that,” she adds. “Neither scenario works with a knapsack, unless it’s a big one.”

“A tote bag, then.”

She thinks of the citrus inspector, of the long picker that he disassembled and packed inside his black bag. She’s seen citrus inspectors before and never noticed them using pickers. Usually, they look at what they can reach.

“I bet he had a tote bag,” Joe says.

“I’ve got no idea.” She’s about to snap at him.

Throughout the entire autopsy, he prattled and divined and pontificated until she could scarcely think. He found it necessary to announce everything he was doing, everything he was writing on the protocol attached to his clipboard. He felt it necessary to tell her the weight of every organ and deduce when Mrs. Simister ate last based on the partially digested meat and vegetables in her stomach. He made sure Scarpetta heard the crunching sound of calcium deposits when he opened partially occluded coronaries with the scalpel and announced that maybe atherosclerosis killed her.

Ha, ha.

And, well, Mrs. Simister didn’t have much to look forward to, anyway. She had a bad heart. Her lungs had adhesions, probably from old pneumonia, and her brain was somewhat atrophied, so she probably had Alzheimer’s.

If you have to be murdered, Joe said, you may as well be in bad health.

“I’m thinking he hit her in the back of the head with the butt of the gun,” now he is saying. “You know, like this.”

He rams an imaginary head with the imaginary stock of a shotgun.

“She wasn’t even five feet tall,” he continues his scenario. “So for him to slam her head with the butt of a gun that weighs maybe six or seven pounds, assuming it wasn’t sawed off, he would need to be reasonably strong and taller than her.”

“We can’t say that at all,” Scarpetta replies, driving out of the parking lot. “So much depends on his position in relation to her. So much depends on a lot of things. And we don’t know that she was struck with the gun. We don’t know that the killer was a he. Be careful, Joe.”

“Of what?”

“In your great enthusiasm to reconstruct exactly how and why she died, you run the risk of confusing the theoretical with the truth and turning fact into fiction. This isn’t a hell scene. This is a real human being who is really dead.”

“Nothing wrong with creativity,” he says, staring straight ahead, his thin mouth and long, pointed chin set the way they always are when he gets petulant.

“Creativity is good,” she replies. “It should suggest where to look and for what, but not necessarily choreograph the sort of reenactments you see in movies and on TV.”