Patricia Cornwell - Blow Fly

"Not ten. Just the two in Zachary. I'm not on the task force," Nic replies with restrained resentment. "I don't run with the big boys. They don't need help from little country cops like me, at least that's the way the U.S. Attorney looks at it."

"What's the U.S. Attorney got to do with it?" Scarpetta asks. "These cases aren't the jurisdiction of the feds."

"Weldon Winn's not only an egotistical asshole, but he's stupid. Nothing worse than someone who's stupid and arrogant and has power. The cases are high-profile, all over the news. He wants to be part of them, maybe end up a federal judge or senator someday.

"And you're right. I know what I'm going home to, but all I can do is work the two disappearances we've had in Zachary, even if I know damn well they're connected to the other eight."

"Interesting the abductions are now happening farther north of Baton Rouge," Scarpetta says. "He may be finding his earlier killing field too risky."

"The only thing good I can say about that is Zachary may be in the East Baton Rouge Parish, but at least it isn't the jurisdiction of the Baton Rouge police. So the high and mighty task force can't boss me around about my cases."

"Tell me about them."

"Let's see. The most recent one. What I know about it. What anybody knows about it. Two days after Easter, just four nights ago," she begins. "A forty-year-old schoolteacher named Glenda Marler. She's a teacher at the high school-same high school I went to. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, very smart. Divorced, no children. This past Tuesday night, she goes to the Road Side Bar Be Q, gets pulled pork, hush puppies and slaw to go. She has a '94 Honda Accord, blue, and is observed driving away from the restaurant, south on Main Street, right through the middle of town. She vanishes, her car found abandoned in the parking lot of the high school where she taught. Of course, the task force is suggesting she was having a rendezvous with one of her students, that the case isn't related to the others, that it's a copycat. Bullshit."

"Her own high school parking lot," Scarpetta thoughtfully observes. "So he talked to her, found out about her after he had her in his car, maybe asked her where she worked, and she told him. Or else he stalked her."

"Which do you think it is?"

"I don't know. Most serial killers stalk their victims. But there's no set rule, despite what most profilers would like to think."

"The other victim," Nic continues, "vanished right before I came here. Ivy Ford. Forty-two years old, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, worked as a bank teller. Kids are off in college, and her husband was up in Jackson, Mississippi, on a business trip, so she was home alone when someone must have showed up at her door. As usual, no sign of a struggle. No nothing. And she's gone without a trace."

"Nothing is ever without a trace," Scarpetta says as she envisions each scenario, contemplating the obvious: The victim has no reason to fear her attacker until it is too late.

"Is Ivy Ford's house still secured?" Scarpetta doubts it after all this time.

"Family's still living in it. I don't know how people return to homes where such awful things have happened."

Nic starts to say that she wouldn't. But that isn't true. Earlier in her life, she did.

"The car in this most recent case, Glenda Marler's case, is impounded and was thoroughly examined?" Scarpetta asks.

"Hours and hours we… well, as you know, I was here." This detail disappoints her. "But I've gotten the full report, and I know we spent a lot of time on it. My guys lifted every print they could find. Entered the useable ones in AFIS, and no matches. Personally, I don't think that matters because I believe that whoever grabbed Glenda Marler was never inside her car. So his prints wouldn't be in there, anyway. And the only prints on the door handles were hers."

"What about her keys and wallet and any other personal effects?"

"Keys in the ignition, her pocketbook and wallet in the high school parking lot about twenty feet from the car."

"Money in the wallet?" Scarpetta asks.

Nic shakes her head. "But her checkbook and charge cards weren't touched. She wasn't one to carry much cash. Whatever she had, it was gone, and I know she had at least six dollars and thirty-two cents because that was the change she got when she gave the guy at the barbeque a ten-dollar bill to pay for her food. I had my guys check, because oddly, the bag of food wasn't inside her car. So there was no receipt. We had to go back to the barbeque and have him pull her receipt."

"Then it would appear that the perpetrator took her food, too."

This is odd, more typical of a burglary or robbery, certainly not the usual in a psychopathic violent crime.

"As far as you know, is robbery involved in the cases of the other eight missing women?" Scarpetta asks.

"Rumor has it that their billfolds were cleaned out of cash and tossed not far from where they were snatched."

"No fingerprints in any of the cases, as far as you know?"

"I don't know for a fact."

"Perhaps DNA from skin cells where the perpetrator touched the billfold?"

"I don't know what the Baton Rouge police have done, because they don't tell anybody shit. But the guys at my department swabbed everything we could, including Ivy Ford's wallet, and did get her DNA profile-and another one that isn't in the FBI's database, CODIS. Louisiana, as you know, is just getting started on a DNA database and is so backed up on entering samples, you may as well forget it."

"But you do have an unknown profile," Scarpetta says with interest. "Although we have to accept right off that it could be anybody's. What about her children, her husband?"

"The DNA's not theirs."

Scarpetta nods. "Then you have to start wondering who else would have had good reason to touch Ivy Ford's wallet. Who else besides the killer."

"I wonder about that twenty-four hours a day."

"And this most recent case, Glenda Marler?"

"The state police labs have the evidence. The tests results will be a while, even though there's a rush on them."

"An alternate light source used on the inside of the car?"

"Yes. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," Nic says in frustration. "No crime scenes, no bodies, like it's all a bad dream. If even just one body would show up. The coroner's great. You've heard of him? Dr. Sam Lanier."

Scarpetta doesn't know him.

THE EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH Coroner's Office overlooks a long straight reach of the Mississippi River and the former art deco state capitol where the wily, fearless and despotic Huey Long was assassinated.

Muddy, sluggish water carries Dr. Sam Lanier's eye to a riverboat casino and past the USS Kidd battleship to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, as he stands before his office window on the fifth floor of the Governmental Building. He is a fit man in his early sixties with a head of gray hair that naturally parts neatly on the right side. Unlike most men of his power, he shuns suits except when he is in court or attending the political functions he cannot avoid.

His may be a political office, but he despises politics and virtually all people involved in it. Contrary by nature, Dr. Lanier wears the same outfit pretty much every day, even if he's meeting with the mayor: comfortable shoes capable of walking him into unpleasant places, dark slacks and a polo shirt embroidered with the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner's crest.

Deliberate man that he is, he ponders how to handle the bizarre communication he received yesterday morning, a letter enclosed in a National Academy of Justice postage-paid mailing. Dr. Lamer has been a member of the organization for years. The large white NAJ envelope was sealed. It did not look tampered with in any way until Dr. Lanier opened it and found another envelope, also sealed. It was addressed to him by hand in block printing, the return address the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. A search on the Internet revealed that the Polunsky Unit is death row. The letter, also written by hand in block printing, reads: