Patricia Cornwell - Predator

Scarpetta makes a note that there is no alarm system.

Reba opens the refrigerator. “I’d go ahead and dust the cabinet doors,” she tells Lex. “May as well dust the heck out of everything while you’re at it. There’s not much food in here for two growing boys.” She directs this to Scarpetta. “Not much to eat at all. I think they’re vegetarians.”

She shuts the refrigerator door.

“The powder will ruin the wood,” Lex says.

“That’s up to you.”

“Do we know what time they got home from church last Thursday night? Allegedly got home?” Scarpetta asks.

“It ended at seven, and Ev and Kristin stayed over for a while, talking to people. Then they went back to Ev’s office and had a meeting. It’s just a small office. It’s a very small church. The room where they have the services can’t hold more than fifty people, looked like to me.”

Reba leaves the kitchen and walks into the living room.

“A meeting with whom, and where were the boys?” Scarpetta asks as she lifts up a cushion from the floral-printed couch.

“Some of the women met. I don’t know what you call them. They’re the women who run things in the church, and as I understand it, the boys weren’t in the meeting, were doing whatever, horsing around. Then they left with Ev and Kristin at aroundeight p.m.”

“Are there always meetings after church on Thursday nights?”

“I believe so. Their regular services are Friday night, so they meet the night before. Something about Good Friday being when God died for our sins. They don’t talk about Jesus, just God, and are sure into sin and going to hell. It’s an oddball church. Like a cult, you ask me. Probably into snake-handling and the likes.”

Lex taps a small amount of Silk Black oxide powder onto a sheet of paper. The white countertop is chipped but clean and completely bare, and she dabs a fiberglass brush into the powder on the paper and begins to gently swirl the brush over the Corian, turning it an uneven, sooty black wherever the powder adheres to oils or other latent residues.

“I didn’t find a wallet, a pocketbook, anything like that,” Reba tells Scarpetta. “Which just adds to my suspicion they ran off.”

“You can be abducted and bring your pocketbook,” Scarpetta says. “People are abducted with their wallets, their keys, their cars, their children. A few years ago, I worked an abduction-homicide in which the victim was allowed to pack a suitcase.”

“I know about cases, too, ones where the whole thing is faked to look like a crime, when all that really happened is the people ran off. Maybe that weird phone call you told me about was some crank caller from the church.”

Scarpetta walks into the kitchen to look at the stove. On a back burner is a copper pan covered with a lid, and the metal is dark gray and streaked.

“This is the burner that was on?” she asks, removing the lid.

The stainless-steel lining inside the pan is discolored dark gray.

Lex tears off a segment of lifting tape with a loud snap.

“When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”

Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.

“There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.

“What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”

“A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”

Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey breast suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.

The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.

He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.

He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.

No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.

“Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”

He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.

“What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.

“Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”

“Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”

He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.

“Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”

A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.

“Mrs. Simister? Anybody here?”

The television is inside a back room, probably a bedroom, and the door is shut. He hesitates, calls out again. He knocks, then bangs on the door, then goes inside and sees blood, a small body on the bed and what is left of the head.

Inside a desk drawer are pencils, ballpoint pens and Magic Markers. Two of the pencils and one pen are chewed, and Scarpetta looks at the indentations made by teeth in wood and plastic, wondering which of the boys nervously chews things.

She places the pencils, pens and markers in separate evidence bags. Shutting the drawer, she looks around, thinking about the lives of these orphaned South African boys. There are no toys in the room, no posters on the walls, no hint that the brothers like girls, cars, movies, music or sports, or have heroes or simply have fun.

Their bathroom is one door down, and it is an old bathroom with unattractive green tile and a white toilet and tub. Her face appears in the mirrored medicine cabinet as she opens the door. She scans narrow metal shelves lined with dental floss, aspirin and small bars of wrapped soap, the type found in motel bathrooms. She picks up an orange plastic prescription bottle by its white cap, looks at the label and is surprised by the name Marilyn Self, M.D.

The celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Self prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride toDavidLuck. He is supposed to take ten milligrams three times daily, and one hundred tablets were refilled last month, exactly three weeks ago to the day. Scarpetta removes the cap and pours the scored green tablets into her hand. She counts forty-nine of them. Three weeks at the prescribed dosage and there should be thirty-seven left, she calculates. He supposedly disappeared Thursday night. That’s five days ago, fifteen tablets ago. Fifteen plus thirty-seven is fifty-two. Close enough. If David’s disappearance was voluntary, why was his Ritalin left behind? Why was the stove left on?