Predator

39

Bentonenlarges another photograph, this one taken at the scene.

The victim looks like a hideous work of violent pornography, on her back, legs and arms splayed, bloody white slacks wrapped around her hips like a diaper, a pair of fecal-stained slightly bloody white panties covering her destroyed head like a mask, with two holes cut out for her eyes. He leans back in his chair, thinking. It would be too simple to assume that whoever posed her in the Walden Woods did so only to shock. There is something else.

The case reminds him of something.

He ponders the diaper-folded slacks. They are inside out, suggesting several possibilities: At some point, she might have taken them off under duress, then put them back on. The killer might have removed them after she was dead. They are linen. Most people don’t wear white linen inNew Englandthis time of year. In a photograph that shows the slacks laid out on a paper-covered autopsy table, the pattern of the bloodstains is telling. The slacks are stiff with dark brown blood in front, from the knee up. From the knee down, there are a few smears and that’s all.Bentonimagines her on her knees when she was shot. He envisions her kneeling. He tries Scarpetta’s phone. She doesn’t answer.

Humiliation. Control. Complete degradation, rendering the victim absolutely powerless, as powerless as an infant. Hooded like somebody about to be executed, possibly. Hooded like a prisoner of war, to torture, to terrorize, possibly. The killer is reenacting something from his own life, probably. His childhood, probably. Sexual abuse, probably. Sadism, possibly. So often that is the case. Do unto others as was done unto you. He tries Scarpetta again and doesn’t get her.

Basil slips into his mind. He posed some of his victims, leaned them up against things, in one case a wall in a rest-stop ladies’ room.Bentonconjures up the scene and autopsy photographs of Basil’s victims, the ones anybody knows about, and sees the gory, eyeless faces of the dead. Maybe that’s the similarity. The eyeholes in the panties are suggestive of Basil’s eyeless victims.

Then again, it might be about the hood. Somehow, it seems more about the hood. Hooding someone is to overpower that person completely, to obviate any possibility of fight or flight, to torment, to terrify, to punish. None of Basil’s victims were hooded, not that anybody knows of, but there is always so much nobody knows about what really happened during a sadistic homicide. The victim isn’t around to tell.

Bentonworries that maybe he has been spending too much time in Basil’s head.

He tries Scarpetta again.

“It’s me,” he says when she answers.

“I was getting ready to call you,” she says tersely, coldly, in an unsteady voice.

“You sound upset.”

“You go first,Benton,” she says in the same voice, one that barely sounds like her.

“Have you been crying?” He doesn’t understand why she is acting like this. “I wanted to talk to you about this case up here,” he says.

She is the only person who can make him feel this way. Scared.

“I was hoping to talk to you about it. I’m looking at the case right now,” he says.

“I’m glad you want to talk to me about something.” She emphasizes something.

“What’s wrong, Kay?”

“Lucy,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong. You’ve known about it for a year. How could you do this to me.”

“She told you,” he says, rubbing his jaw.

“She was scanned at your damn hospital, and you never said a thing to me. Well, guess what? She’s my niece, not yours. You have no right…”

“She made me promise.”

“She had no right.”

“Of course she did, Kay. No one could talk to you without her consent. Not even her doctors.”

“But she told you.”

“For a very good reason…”

“This is serious. We’re going to have to deal with it. I’m not sure I can trust you anymore.”

He sighs, his stomach as tight as a fist. They rarely fight. When they do, it’s awful.

“I’m getting off the phone now,” she says. “We’ve got to deal with this,” she says again.

She hangs up without saying good-bye, andBentonsits in his chair, unable to move for a moment. He stares blankly at a gruesome photograph on his screen and idly starts clicking through the case again, reading reports, scanning the narrative Thrush wrote up for him, trying to divert his thoughts from what just happened.

There were drag marks in the snow leading from a parking area to where the body was found. There are no footprints in the snow that might have been the victim’s, only her killer’s. Approximately size nine, maybe ten, big tread, some type of hiking boot.

It’s not fair that Scarpetta should blame him. He had no choice. Lucy swore him to secrecy, said she would never forgive him if he told anyone, especially her aunt, especially Marino.

There are no blood drips or smears along the trail the killer left, suggesting he wrapped her body in something, dragged her wrapped up. Police recovered some fibers from the drag marks.

Scarpetta is projecting, she’s attacking him because she can’t attack Lucy. She can’t attack Lucy’s tumor. She can’t get angry at someone who is sick.

Trace evidence on the body includes fibers and microscopic debris under the fingernails and adhering to blood and to abraded skin and hair. A preliminary lab analysis indicates most of the trace is consistent with carpet and cotton fibers, and there are minerals, the fragments of insects and vegetation and pollen found in soil, or what the medical examiner so eloquently called “dirt.”

When the telephone rings onBenton’s desk, the call is identified as unavailable, and he assumes it is Scarpetta. He snaps up the phone.

“Hello,” he says.

“This is theMcLeanHospitaloperator.”

He hesitates, disappointed deeply and hurt. Scarpetta could have called him back. He doesn’t remember the last time she hung up on him.

“I’m trying to reach Dr. Wesley,” the operator says.

It still sounds strange when people call him that. He has had his Ph.D. for many years, as far back as his career with the FBI, but never insisted on or wanted people to call him doctor.

“Speaking,” he says.

Lucy sits up in bed in her aunt’s guest room. The lights are out. She had too many tequilas to drive. She looks at the number on the illuminated display of her Treo, the one with the 617 exchange. She’s a little woozy, a little drunk.

She thinks about Stevie, remembers her acting upset and insecure as she abruptly left the cottage. She thinks of Stevie following her to the Hummer in the parking lot and acting like the same seductive, mysterious and self-assured woman Lucy had met in Lorraine’s, and as she thinks about that first meeting in Lorraine’s, she feels what she felt then. She doesn’t want to feel anything but she does and it unsettles her.

Stevie unsettles her. She might know something. She was inNew Englandaround the same time the lady was murdered and dumped atWalden Pond. Both of them had red handprints on their bodies. Stevie claims she didn’t paint the handprints, someone else did.

Who?

Lucy hits send, a little bleary, a little scared. She should have traced the 617 number Stevie gave her, see who it really comes back to, see if it really is Stevie’s number or if her name is Stevie.

“Hello?”

“Stevie?” So it is her number. “You remember me?”

“How could I forget you? No one could.”

She sounds seductive. Her voice is soothing and rich, and Lucy feels what she felt atLorraine’s. She reminds herself why she is calling.

The handprints. Where did she get them? Who?

“I was sure I’d never hear from you again,” Stevie’s seductive voice is saying.

“Well, you have,” Lucy says.

“Why are you talking so quietly?”

“I’m not in my own house.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask what that means. But I do quite a lot of things I shouldn’t. Who are you with?”

“No one,” Lucy says. “You still up in Ptown?”

“I left right after you did. Drove straight through. I’m back home.”

“Gainesville?”

“Where are you?”

“You never have told me your last name,” Lucy says.

“What house are you in if it’s not yours? I assume you live in a house. I guess I don’t know.”

“You ever come south?”

“I can go anywhere I want. South of where? Are you inBoston?”

“I’m inFlorida,” Lucy says. “I’d like to see you. We need to talk. How about telling me your last name, you know, like maybe we’re not strangers.”

“You want to talk about what.”

She’s not going to tell Lucy her full name. There’s no point in asking again. She’s probably not going to tell Lucy anything, at least not over the phone.

“Let’s talk in person,” Lucy says.

“That’s always better.”

She asks Stevie to meet her inSouthBeachtomorrow night at ten.

“You heard of a place called Deuce?” Lucy asks.

“It’s quite famous,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “I know it well.”