Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“Are you trying to shock me?”

“Pot’s not as bad for you as you think.”

“So you’re the doctor now.”

“Really. It’s true.”

“Why do you seem to hate yourself so much, Lucy?”

“You know what, Aunt Kay?” Lucy turns toward her, her face strong and sharp in the soft glow of lights along the seawall. “You really don’t have a clue about what I do or what I’ve done. So don’t pretend to.”

“That sounds like an indictment of some sort. Most of what you’ve said tonight sounds like an indictment. If I’ve somehow failed you, I’m sorry. Sorrier than you’ll ever imagine.”

“I’m not you.”

“Of course you’re not. And you keep saying that.”

“I’m not looking for something permanent, someone who really matters, someone I can’t live without. I don’t want aBenton. I want people I can forget. One-night stands. Do you want to know how many I’ve had? Because I don’t.”

“You’ve had virtually nothing to do with me this past year. Is that why?”

“It’s easier.”

“Are you afraid I’d judge you?”

“Maybe you should.”

“It’s not who you’re sleeping with that bothers me. It’s the rest of it. You keep to yourself at the Academy, have nothing to do with the students, are virtually never there, or when you are you’re killing yourself in the gym or up in a helicopter or out on the range or testing something, preferably a machine, a dangerous one.”

“Maybe machines are the only thing I get along with.”

“Whatever you fail begins to fail, Lucy. Just so you know.”

“Including my body.”

“What about your heart and soul? How about we start with that.”

“That’s pretty cold. So much for my health.”

“I feel anything but cold. Your health means more to me than my own.”

“I think she set me up, knew I was in the bar, had something in mind.”

She is back to that woman again, the one with the handprints that are similar to the ones inBenton’s case.

“You need to tellBentonabout Stevie. What’s her last name? What do you know about her?” Scarpetta asks.

“I know very little. I’m sure it has nothing to do with anything, but it’s strange, isn’t it. She was up there the same time the woman was murdered and dumped. In the general area.”

Scarpetta is quiet.

“Maybe there’s some cult thing up there in that area,” Lucy then says. “Maybe there are a lot of people painting red handprints all over themselves. Don’t judge me. I don’t need to hear how stupid and reckless I am.”

Scarpetta looks at her and is quiet.

Lucy wipes her eyes.

“I’m not judging you. I’m trying to understand why you’ve turned your back on everything you care about. The Academy is yours. It’s your dream. You hated organized law enforcement, the Feds in particular. So you started your own force, your own posse. Now your riderless horse wanders the parade ground. Where are you? And all of us-all of the people you have brought together in your cause-feel pretty much abandoned. Most of last year’s students never met you, and some of the faculty don’t know you and wouldn’t recognize you on sight.”

Lucy watches a sailboat with furled sails putter past in the night. She wipes her eyes.

“I have a tumor,” she says. “In my brain.”

Bentonenlarges another photograph, this one taken at the scene.

The victim looks like a hideous work of violent pornography, on her back, legs and arms splayed, bloody white slacks wrapped around her hips like a diaper, a pair of fecal-stained slightly bloody white panties covering her destroyed head like a mask, with two holes cut out for her eyes. He leans back in his chair, thinking. It would be too simple to assume that whoever posed her in the Walden Woods did so only to shock. There is something else.

The case reminds him of something.

He ponders the diaper-folded slacks. They are inside out, suggesting several possibilities: At some point, she might have taken them off under duress, then put them back on. The killer might have removed them after she was dead. They are linen. Most people don’t wear white linen inNew Englandthis time of year. In a photograph that shows the slacks laid out on a paper-covered autopsy table, the pattern of the bloodstains is telling. The slacks are stiff with dark brown blood in front, from the knee up. From the knee down, there are a few smears and that’s all.Bentonimagines her on her knees when she was shot. He envisions her kneeling. He tries Scarpetta’s phone. She doesn’t answer.

Humiliation. Control. Complete degradation, rendering the victim absolutely powerless, as powerless as an infant. Hooded like somebody about to be executed, possibly. Hooded like a prisoner of war, to torture, to terrorize, possibly. The killer is reenacting something from his own life, probably. His childhood, probably. Sexual abuse, probably. Sadism, possibly. So often that is the case. Do unto others as was done unto you. He tries Scarpetta again and doesn’t get her.

Basil slips into his mind. He posed some of his victims, leaned them up against things, in one case a wall in a rest-stop ladies’ room.Bentonconjures up the scene and autopsy photographs of Basil’s victims, the ones anybody knows about, and sees the gory, eyeless faces of the dead. Maybe that’s the similarity. The eyeholes in the panties are suggestive of Basil’s eyeless victims.

Then again, it might be about the hood. Somehow, it seems more about the hood. Hooding someone is to overpower that person completely, to obviate any possibility of fight or flight, to torment, to terrify, to punish. None of Basil’s victims were hooded, not that anybody knows of, but there is always so much nobody knows about what really happened during a sadistic homicide. The victim isn’t around to tell.

Bentonworries that maybe he has been spending too much time in Basil’s head.

He tries Scarpetta again.

“It’s me,” he says when she answers.

“I was getting ready to call you,” she says tersely, coldly, in an unsteady voice.

“You sound upset.”

“You go first,Benton,” she says in the same voice, one that barely sounds like her.

“Have you been crying?” He doesn’t understand why she is acting like this. “I wanted to talk to you about this case up here,” he says.

She is the only person who can make him feel this way. Scared.

“I was hoping to talk to you about it. I’m looking at the case right now,” he says.

“I’m glad you want to talk to me about something.” She emphasizes something.

“What’s wrong, Kay?”

“Lucy,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong. You’ve known about it for a year. How could you do this to me.”

“She told you,” he says, rubbing his jaw.

“She was scanned at your damn hospital, and you never said a thing to me. Well, guess what? She’s my niece, not yours. You have no right…”

“She made me promise.”

“She had no right.”

“Of course she did, Kay. No one could talk to you without her consent. Not even her doctors.”

“But she told you.”

“For a very good reason…”

“This is serious. We’re going to have to deal with it. I’m not sure I can trust you anymore.”

He sighs, his stomach as tight as a fist. They rarely fight. When they do, it’s awful.

“I’m getting off the phone now,” she says. “We’ve got to deal with this,” she says again.

She hangs up without saying good-bye, andBentonsits in his chair, unable to move for a moment. He stares blankly at a gruesome photograph on his screen and idly starts clicking through the case again, reading reports, scanning the narrative Thrush wrote up for him, trying to divert his thoughts from what just happened.