Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“Which bathroom?”

“The one in her bedroom.”

“Any other sign the killer might have cleaned up afterwards?”

“No. Just the gloves in the sink. No bloody towels, no bloody water.”

“I’ll need to look. We sure who she is?”

“We know whose residence it is. Daggie Simister’s. I can’t say for a fact who’s back there on the bed.”

Scarpetta digs inside her bag for a pair of gloves and steps into the foyer. She stops to look around as she thinks of the unlocked sliders in the master bedroom in the house across the waterway. She scans the terrazzo floor, the pale blue walls, then the small living room. It is crowded with furniture, photographs and porcelain birds and other figurines from an earlier era. Nothing seems disturbed. Marino leads her through the living room, past the kitchen and to the other side of the house, where the body is inside a bedroom that faces the water.

She is clothed in a pink warm-up suit and pink slippers and is lying on her back on top of the bed. Her mouth gapes open, her dull eyes staring below a massive wound that has opened the top of her head like an egg cup. Her brain is eviscerated, chunks of it and fragments of bone on a pillow soaked with blood that is a deep red, just beginning to coagulate. Bits of brain and skin adhere to the blood-spattered and streaked headboard and wall.

Scarpetta slides her hand inside the bloody warm-up jacket and feels the chest and belly, then touches the hands. The body is warm, and rigor mortis isn’t apparent yet. She unzips the jacket and tucks a chemical thermometer under the right arm. While she waits for a reading on the body temperature, she looks for any injury besides the obvious one to the head.

“How long you think she’s been dead?” Marino asks.

“She’s still very warm. Rigor’s not even present yet.”

She thinks about what she and Reba assumed was a backfire, decides it was about an hour ago. She walks over to a thermostat on the wall. The air-conditioning is on, the bedroom a chilly sixty-eight degrees. She writes it down and looks around, taking her time, scanning. The small bedroom has a terrazzo floor, and a dark-blue throw rug covers almost half of it from the foot of the blue duvet-covered bed to the window that overlooks the waterway. The blinds are shut. On a bedside table is a glass of what looks like water, a large-print edition of a Dan Brown novel and a pair of glasses. At first glance, there is no sign of a struggle.

“So maybe she got killed right before I got here,” Marino is saying, and he is agitated, trying not to show it. “So it could have happened minutes before I got here on my bike. I was running late. Someone punctured my front tire.”

“Deliberately?” she says, wondering about the coincidence of that happening when it did.

If he had gotten here earlier, this lady might not be dead, and she tells him about what she now assumes was a gunshot while a uniformed officer emerges from the bathroom, his hands full of prescription bottles that he sets on a dresser.

“Yeah, it was deliberate all right,” Marino says.

“Obviously, she hasn’t been dead long. What time did you find her?”

“I’d been here maybe fifteen minutes when I called you. I wanted to make sure the house was clear before I did anything. Make sure whoever killed her wasn’t hiding in a closet or something.”

“The neighbors didn’t hear anything?”

He says there is nobody home in the houses on either side of this one. One of the uniformed officers already checked. He is sweating profusely, his face deep red, his eyes wide, half crazy.

“I just don’t know what’s going on,” he says again as the rain drums the roof. “I feel like we’ve been set up somehow. You and Wagner were right across the water. I was late because of a flat tire.”

“There was an inspector,” she says. “Someone inspecting citrus trees over here.” She tells him about the fruit picker he disassembled and tucked inside a big black bag. “I’d check into that right away.”

She withdraws the thermometer from under the dead woman’s arm and writes down ninety-seven-point-two degrees. She walks into the tiled bathroom and looks inside the shower. She looks in the toilet and the waste paper basket. The sink is dry, with no blood, not the slightest residue, which makes no sense. She looks at Marino.

“The gloves were in this sink?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“If he-or she, I suppose-took them off after killing her and dropped them into the sink, they should have left a bloody residue. The bloody one should have.”

“Unless the blood was already dry on the glove.”

“It shouldn’t have been,” Scarpetta says, opening the medicine cabinet and finding the usual alchemies for aches and pains and troublesome bowels. “Not unless the killer had them on long enough for the blood to dry.”

“Wouldn’t take all that long.”

“It might not. You got them handy?”

They walk out of the bathroom, and Marino retrieves a large brown-paper evidence envelope from a crime-scene case. He opens the envelope so she can look inside without touching the gloves. One is clean, the other partially inside out and stained with dark-brown dried blood. The gloves aren’t talc-lined, and the clean glove looks as if it has never been worn.

“We’ll want to do DNA on the inside, too. And prints,” she says.

“He must not know you can leave prints on the inside of latex gloves,” Marino says.

“Then he must not watch TV,” an officer says.

“Don’t talk to me about the crap on TV. It’s ruining my life,” another officer comments from halfway under the bed. Then, “Well, well.”

He gets up holding a flashlight and a small, stainless-steel revolver with rosewood grips. He opens the cylinder, touching as little of the metal as possible.

“Unloaded. So that did her a lot of good. Doesn’t look like it’s been fired since it was cleaned last, if it was ever fired at all,” he says.

“We’ll check it for prints anyway,” Marino tells him. “A weird place to hide a gun. How far under the bed?”

“Too far to reach without getting down on the floor and crawling under it like I just did. Twenty-two caliber. What the hell’s a Black Widow?”

“You’re kidding,” Marino says, taking a look. “North American Arms, single-action. Sort of a stupid gun for a little old lady with gnarly, arthritic hands.”

“Someone must have given it to her for home protection and she never bothered.”

“See a box of ammo anywhere?”

“Not so far.”

The officer drops the gun into an evidence bag, which he places on a dresser where another officer begins taking an inventory of prescription bottles.

“Accuretic, Diurese and Enduron,” he reads labels. “Got no idea.”

“An ace inhibitor and diuretics. For hypertension,” Scarpetta says.

“Verapamil, an old one. Dates back to July.”

“Hypertension, angina, arrhythmia.”

“Apresoline and Loniten. Try to pronounce this stuff. Over a year old.”

“Vasodilators. Again, for hypertension.”

“So maybe she died of a stroke. Vicodin. I know what that is. And Ultram. These are more recent prescriptions.”

“Pain medications. Possibly for arthritis.”

“And Zithromax. That’s an antibiotic, right? Date on it’s December.”

“Nothing else?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“Who told the Medical Examiner’s Office she has a history of depression?” she asks, looking at Marino.

No one answers at first.

Then Marino says, “I sure as hell didn’t.”

“Who called the Medical Examiner’s Office?” she asks.

The two officers and Marino look at each other.