Predator

62

Inside the Academy’s computer center, Lucy sits before three large video screens, reading e-mails as she restores them to the server.

What she and Marino have discovered so far is that before he began his fellowship, Joe Amos was communicating with a television producer who claimed to be interested in developing yet another forensic show for one of the cable networks. For his input, Joe was promised five thousand dollars per episode, assuming the shows ever make it on the air. Apparently, Joe started getting brilliant ideas in late January, about the time Lucy got sick while testing new avionics in one of her helicopters, fled to the ladies’ room and forgot her Treo. At first he was subtle about it, plagiarizing hell scenes. Then he became blatant, outright stealing them as he went into databases to his heart’s content.

Lucy restores another e-mail, this one dated February 10, a year ago. It is from last summer’s intern, Jan Hamilton, who got the needle stick and threatened to sue the Academy.

Dear Dr. Amos,

I heard you on Dr. Self’s radio show the other night and was fascinated by what you had to say about theNationalForensicAcademy. Sounds like an amazing place, and by the way, congratulations on being awarded a fellowship. That’s incredibly impressive. I wonder if you could help me get an internship there for the summer. I am studying nuclear biology and genetics at Harvard and want to be a forensic scientist, specializing in DNA. I’m attaching a file that has my photograph and other personal information.

Jan Hamilton.

P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.

“Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.

Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles andwhatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.

Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.

“What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.

“Body Farm,” Marino says.

She finds the video file and opens it.

They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.

The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling-yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.

Stevie.

Lucy tries to reachBenton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, andDr. Susan Laneanswers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.

“I’m e-mailing a video clip to you,” Lucy says. “About three years ago, you scanned a young female patient named Helen Quincy. I’m wondering if it might be the same person in the video clip.”

“Lucy, I’m not supposed to.”

“I know, I know. Please. It’s really important.”

WONK… WONK… WONK… WONK…

Dr. Lane has Kenny Jumper in the magnet. She is in the middle of his structural MRI, and the lab is full of the usual racket.

“Can you go into the database?” Dr. Lane asks her research assistant. “See if we might have scanned a patient named Helen Quincy. Possibly three years ago? Josh, keep going,” she says to the MRI tech. “Can you stand it without me for a minute?”

“I’ll try.” He smiles.

Beth, the research assistant, is typing on the keyboard of a computer on the back counter. It doesn’t take her long to find Helen Quincy. Dr. Lane has Lucy on the phone.

“Do you have a photograph of her?” Lucy asks.

WOP WOP WOP WOP. The sound of the gradients acquiring images reminds Dr. Lane of the sonar in a submarine.

“Only of her brain. We don’t photograph patients.”

“Have you looked at the video clip I just e-mailed to you? Maybe it will mean something.”

Lucy sounds frustrated, disappointed.

TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP…

“Hold on. But I don’t know what you think I can do with it,” Dr. Lane says.

“Maybe you remember her when she was there? You were working there three years ago. You or someone scanned her. Johnny Swift was doing a fellowship there at the same time. May have seen her, too. Reviewed her scans.”

Dr. Lane isn’t sure she understands.

“Maybe you scanned her,” Lucy persists. “Maybe you saw her three years ago, might remember her if you saw a picture…”

Dr. Lane wouldn’t remember. She’s seen so many patients, and three years is a long time.

“Hold on,” she says again.

BAWN… BAWN… BAWN… BAWN…

She moves to a computer terminal and goes into her e-mail without sitting down. She opens the file of the video clip and plays it several times, watches a pretty young woman with dark blond hair and dark eyes looking up from the dead body of an enormously fat man whose face is covered with maggots.

“Good Lord,” Dr. Lane says.

The pretty young woman in the video clip looks around, right into the camera, her eyes looking right at Dr. Lane, and the pretty young woman digs her gloved hand in the pocket of the fat, dead man’s gray jacket. There the clip stops, and Dr. Lane plays it again, realizing something.

She looks through the Plexiglas at Kenny Jumper and can barely see his head at the other end of the magnet. He is small and slender in baggy, dark clothes, ill-fitting boots, sort of homeless-looking but delicately handsome with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes are dark, and Dr. Lane’s realization gets stronger. He looks so much like the girl in the photograph, they could be brother and sister, maybe twins.

“Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”

“On him?”

“Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.