Predator

54

On the ground floor of the Academy’s spacious stucco headquarters, the red light is on outside the firearms lab, and from the hallway, Marino hears the dull thud of gunfire. He walks in, not one to care if a range is hot, as long as it’s Vince who’s doing the shooting.

Vince withdraws a small pistol from the port of the horizontal stainless-steel bullet-recovery tank, which weighs five tons when filled with water, explaining why his lab is located where it is.

“You been out flying already?” Marino asks, climbing up the aluminum checker steps to the shooting platform.

Vince is dressed in a black flight suit and ankle-high black leather boots. When he isn’t lost in his world of tool marks and guns, he’s one of Lucy’s helicopter pilots. As is true of a number of her staff, his appearance is inconsistent with what he does. Vince is sixty-five, flew a Black Hawk inVietnam, then went to work for ATF. He has short legs and a barrel chest, and a gray ponytail that he says he hasn’t cut in ten years.

“You say something?” Vince asks, removing his hearing-protector headset and shooting glasses.

“It’s a wonder you can hear a damn thing anymore.”

“Not as good as I used to. When I get home, I’m stone-deaf, according to my wife.”

Marino recognizes the pistol Vince is test-firing, the Black Widow with rosewood grips that was found beneath Daggie Simister’s bed.

“A sweet little.22,” Vince says. “Thought it couldn’t hurt to add it to the database.”

“Doesn’t look to me like it’s ever been fired.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Can’t tell you how many people have guns for home protection and don’t remember they’ve got them or can’t remember where they put it or even know if it’s missing.”

“We’ve got a problem with something missing,” Marino says.

Vince opens a box of ammunition and begins pushing.22 cartridges into the cylinder.

“Want to try it?” he says. “Kind of a strange thing for an old woman’s self-protection. Bet somebody gave it to her. I usually recommend something more user-friendly, like a Lady Smith.38 or a pit bull. I understand it was under the bed, out of reach.”

“Who told you that?” Marino says, getting the same feeling he’s been getting a lot lately.

“Dr. Amos.”

“He wasn’t at the scene. What the hell does he know?”

“Not half as much as he thinks. He’s in here all the time, drives me insane. I hope Dr. Scarpetta doesn’t intend to hire him after he finishes his fellowship. She does, I might just go to work at Wal-Mart. Here.”

He offers Marino the pistol.

“No thanks. The only thing I feel like shooting right now is him.”

“What do you mean, something’s missing.”

“We’ve got a shotgun missing from the reference collection, Vince.”

“Not possible,” he says, shaking his head.

They climb down from the platform, and Vince sets the pistol on top of an evidence table that is covered with other tagged firearms, boxes of ammunition, an array of targets with test powder patterns to determine distance and a shattered window of tempered automobile glass.

“Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump,” Marino says. “Used in a robbery-homicide down here two years ago. The case was exceptionally cleared when the guy behind the counter blew the suspect away.”

“Weird you would mention that,” he says, perplexed. “Dr. Amos called me not five minutes ago and asked if he could come down and check something on the computer.”

Vince moves to a counter arranged with comparison microscopes, a digital trigger-pull gauge and a computer. He taps the keyboard with his index finger, brings up a menu and selects reference collection. He enters the shotgun in question.

“I said no, as a matter of fact he couldn’t. I was doing some test-fires and he couldn’t come in. I asked what he wanted to check and he said never mind.”

“I don’t know how he could be onto this,” Marino says. “How could he know about this? A buddy of mine at the Hollywood PD knows, he’d never say a word. Only other people I’ve told are the Doc and now you.”

“Camo stock, twenty-four-inch barrel, tritium ghost ring sights,” Vince reads. “You’re right. Used in a homicide. Suspect dead. A donation fromHollywoodpolice, March of last year.” He glances up at Marino. “As I recall, it was one of ten or twelve firearms they were clearing out of their inventory, their usual generous selves. Providing we give them free training and consultation, beer and door prizes. Let’s see.” He scrolls down the screen. “According to this, it’s only been checked out twice since we got it. Once by me last April eighth-on the remote-firing platform to make sure there was nothing wrong with it.”

“Son of a bitch,” Marino says, reading over his shoulder.

“And Dr. Amos checked it out the second time this last June twenty-eighth atthree fifteenin the afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Maybe test-firing it in ordnance gelatin. Last summer was when Dr. Scarpetta started giving him cooking lessons. He’s in and out of here so much, unfortunately, it’s hard for me to remember. Says here he used it June twenty-eighth and returned it to the collection that same day, atfive fifteen. And if I look up that date on the computer, there’s the entry. What that means is I did get it out of the vault and put it back.”

“Then how come it’s out on the street and killing people?”

“Unless this record is somehow wrong,” Vince considers, frowning.

“Maybe that’s why he wanted to check the computer. Son of a bitch. Who maintains the log? You or the user? Anybody touch this computer besides you?”

“Electronically, I do. You make your request in writing in the book over there”-Vince indicates a spiral ledger book by the phone-“then you sign it out and sign it back in, all in your own handwriting and initialed. After the fact, I enter the information in the computer to verify that you used the gun and it was returned to the vault. Guess you’ve never played with guns up here.”

“I’m not a firearms examiner. I let you do that. Damn son of a bitch.”

“In the request, you write in what type of firearm you want and when you’d like to reserve the range or the water tank. I can show you.”

He retrieves the ledger and opens it to the last page filled in.

“Here’s Dr. Amos again,” he says. “Ordnance gelatin test-fires with a Taurus PT-145 two weeks ago. At least this time he bothered to log it. He was in here the other day and didn’t.”

“How did he get into the vault?”

“He brought his own pistol. He collects guns, is a real yahoo.”

“Can you tell when the entry for the Mossberg was entered into the computer?” Marino asks. “You know, like when you look at a file and can see the time and date when it was saved last? What I’m wondering is if there’s some way Joe might have altered the computer after the fact, entered the shotgun to make it look like you gave it to him and then returned it to the vault.”

“It’s just a word-processing file called Log. So I’m going to close it now without saving it, take a look at the last time stamp.” He looks hard at it, shocked. “Says here it was last saved twenty-three minutes ago. I can’t believe it!”

“This thing not password-protected?”

“Of course it is. I’m the only person who can get into it. Except, of course, Lucy. So I wonder why Dr. Amos called and said he wanted to come down and check the computer. If he somehow altered the computer log, why bother to call me?”

“That’s an easy one. If you opened the file for him and you saved it when you closed it, then that would explain the new date and time.”

“Then he’s pretty damn smart.”

“We’ll see how smart he is.”

“This is very upsetting. If he did that, he’s got my password.”

“Is it written down anywhere?”

“No. I’m very careful.”

“Who besides you has access to the vault combination? I’m going to get him this time. One way or other.”

“Lucy. She can get into anything. Come on. Let’s look.”

The vault is a fireproof room with a steel door that requires a code to unlock it. Inside are file drawers housing thousands of known bullet and cartridge case specimens, and in racks and hanging on pegboards are hundreds of rifles, shotguns and handguns, all tagged with accession numbers.

“Quite a candy store,” Marino says, looking around.

“You’ve never been in here?”

“I’m not a gun freak. I’ve had some bad experiences with them.”

“Like what?”

“Like having to use them.”

Vince scans racks of shoulder firearms, picks up each shotgun and checks the tag. He does it twice. He and Marino move from rack to rack, checking for the Mossberg. It isn’t inside the vault.

Scarpetta pointsout the livor mortis pattern, a reddish-purple discoloration caused by noncirculating blood settling due to gravity. Pale areas or blanching of the dead woman’s right cheek, breasts, belly, thighs and the inside of her forearms were caused by those areas of her body pressing against some firm surface, perhaps a floor.

“She was facedown for some time,” Scarpetta is saying. “Hours at least, her head turned to the left, which is why there’s blanching of the right cheek-it would have been against the floor or whatever flat surface she was on.”

She pulls up another photograph on the computer screen, this one showing the dead woman facedown on the autopsy table after she was washed, her body and hair wet, the red handprints bright and intact, obviously waterproof. She goes back to a photograph she just looked at, back and forth through a number of them, trying to piece together the artifacts of this woman’s death.

“So, after he killed her,”Bentonsays, “maybe he turned her facedown to paint the handprints on her back, worked on her for hours. Her blood settled and lividity began to form, and that’s why we have this pattern.”

“I have another scenario in mind,” Scarpetta says. “He painted her face-up first, then turned her over and worked on her back, and this was the position he left her in. Certainly he didn’t do all this outside in the cold dark. Someplace where there was no risk anyone would hear the shotgun blast or see him trying to get the body into a vehicle. In fact, maybe he did all this in the vehicle he transported her in, a van, an SUV, a truck. Shot her, painted her, transported her.”

“One-stop shopping.”

“Well, that would have reduced the risk, wouldn’t it. Abduct her, drive her to a remote area, and kill her inside the vehicle-as long as it’s a vehicle with sufficient room in back-then dump the body,” she says, clicking through more photographs, stopping on one she’s already looked at.

She sees it differently this time, the photograph of the woman’s brain, what’s left of it, on a cutting board. The tough, fibrous membrane that lines the inside of the cranium, the dura mater, is supposed to be creamy white. In this photograph, it is stained a yellowish-orange, and she envisions the two sisters, Ev and Kristin, with their hiking sticks, squinting in the sun, the photograph on the dresser in their bedroom. She recalls the somewhat jaundiced complexion of one of them and clicks back to the autopsy report, checks on what it says about the dead woman’s sclera, the whites of her eyes. They’re normal.

She recalls the raw vegetables, the nineteen bags of carrots in the refrigerator at Ev and Kristin’s house, and thinks of the white linen pants the dead woman was wearing like a diaper, clothing consistent with a warm climate.

Bentonis looking curiously at her.

“Xanthochromia of the skin,” Scarpetta says. “A yellow discoloration that doesn’t affect the sclera. Possibly caused by carotenemia. We may know who she is.”