Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

“I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

“From who?” he says suspiciously.

“Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR.Bentondoesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.

“Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.

Marino knows thatMcLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.

“The what?” Marino asks.

She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”

“Trees or kids?”

“Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”

Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail toBenton.

“Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”

“You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.

“Hello? Is this better? Marino?”

“I can hear you.”

“That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”

“So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.

“Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”

“TheFort Lauderdalecops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”

“Let’s find out what it is,” she says.

At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.

“It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”

“Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”

“Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.

There must be a mistake.

“Yes, today.”

“That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”

“Well, someone did.”

“Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.

“The flight’s full. I can waitlist you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”

Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.

“Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”

“Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”

“I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking aboutBenton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.

The yellow moonis misshapen like an overripe mango, hanging heavy over scrubby trees and weeds and dense shadows. In the uneven light of the moon, Hog can see well enough to make out the thing.

He sees it coming because he knows where to look. For several minutes, he has detected its infrared energy in the Heat Stalker he moves horizontally in the dark in a slow scan, like a wand, like a magic wand. A line of bright-red hatch marks marches across the rear LED window of the lightweight olive-green PVC tube as it detects differences in the surface temperatures of the warm-blooded thing and the earth.

He is Hog, and his body is a thing, and he can leave it on demand and no one can see him. No one can see him now in the middle of the empty night holding the Heat Stalker like a leveler while it detects warmth radiating from living flesh and alerts him with small bright-red marks that flow in single file across the dark glass.

Probably the thing is a raccoon.

Stupid thing. Hog silently talks to it as he sits cross-legged on sandy soil and scans. He glances down at the bright red marks moving across the lens at the rear end of the tube, the front end pointed at the thing. He searches the shadowy berm and feels the ruined old house behind him, feels its pull. His head is thick because of the earplugs, his breathing loud, the way it sounds when you breathe through a snorkel, submerged and silent, nothing but the sound of your own rapid, shallow breaths. He doesn’t like earplugs, but it is important to wear them.

You know what happens now, he silently says to the thing. I guess you don’t know.

He watches the dark, fat shape creep along, low to the ground. It moves like a thick, furry cat, and maybe it is a cat. Slowly, it moves through raggedBermudaand torpedo grass and sedge, moving in and out of thick shadows beneath the spiny silhouettes of spindly pines and the brittle litter of dead trees. He scans, watching the thing, watching the red marks flow across the lens. The thing is stupid, the breeze blowing the wrong way for it to pick up his scent and be anything but stupid.

He turns off the Heat Stalker and rests it in his lap. He picks up the camouflage finished Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump, the stock hard and cool against his jaw as he lines up the tritium ghost ring with the thing.

Where’d you think you’re going? he mocks it.

The thing doesn’t run. Stupid thing.

Go on. Run. See what happens.

It continues its oblivious lumbering pace, low to the ground.

He feels his own heart thud hard and slow, and hears his own rapid breathing as he follows the thing with the glowing green post and squeezes the trigger and the shotgun blast cracks open the quiet night. The thing jerks and goes still in the dirt. He removes the earplugs and listens for a cry or grunt but hears nothing, just distant traffic on South 27 and the gritty sound of his own feet as he gets up and shakes out the cramps in his legs. He slowly ejects the shell, catches it, stuffs it in a pocket and walks through the berm. He pushes the pressure pad on the shotgun’s slide and the SureFire Weapon Light shines down on the thing.

It is a cat, furry and striped with a swollen belly. He nudges it over. It is pregnant, and he considers shooting it again as he listens. There is nothing, not a movement, not a sound, not a sign of any life left. The thing was probably slinking toward the ruined house, looking for food. He thinks about it smelling food. If it thought there was food in the house, then recent occupation is detectable. He ponders this possibility as he presses in the safety and shoulders the shotgun, draping his forearm over the stock like a lumberjack shouldering an ax. He stares at the dead thing and thinks of the carved wooden lumberjack in The Christmas Shop, the big one by the door.