Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“I’m not a firearms examiner. I let you do that. Damn son of a bitch.”

“In the request, you write in what type of firearm you want and when you’d like to reserve the range or the water tank. I can show you.”

He retrieves the ledger and opens it to the last page filled in.

“Here’s Dr. Amos again,” he says. “Ordnance gelatin test-fires with a Taurus PT-145 two weeks ago. At least this time he bothered to log it. He was in here the other day and didn’t.”

“How did he get into the vault?”

“He brought his own pistol. He collects guns, is a real yahoo.”

“Can you tell when the entry for the Mossberg was entered into the computer?” Marino asks. “You know, like when you look at a file and can see the time and date when it was saved last? What I’m wondering is if there’s some way Joe might have altered the computer after the fact, entered the shotgun to make it look like you gave it to him and then returned it to the vault.”

“It’s just a word-processing file called Log. So I’m going to close it now without saving it, take a look at the last time stamp.” He looks hard at it, shocked. “Says here it was last saved twenty-three minutes ago. I can’t believe it!”

“This thing not password-protected?”

“Of course it is. I’m the only person who can get into it. Except, of course, Lucy. So I wonder why Dr. Amos called and said he wanted to come down and check the computer. If he somehow altered the computer log, why bother to call me?”

“That’s an easy one. If you opened the file for him and you saved it when you closed it, then that would explain the new date and time.”

“Then he’s pretty damn smart.”

“We’ll see how smart he is.”

“This is very upsetting. If he did that, he’s got my password.”

“Is it written down anywhere?”

“No. I’m very careful.”

“Who besides you has access to the vault combination? I’m going to get him this time. One way or other.”

“Lucy. She can get into anything. Come on. Let’s look.”

The vault is a fireproof room with a steel door that requires a code to unlock it. Inside are file drawers housing thousands of known bullet and cartridge case specimens, and in racks and hanging on pegboards are hundreds of rifles, shotguns and handguns, all tagged with accession numbers.

“Quite a candy store,” Marino says, looking around.

“You’ve never been in here?”

“I’m not a gun freak. I’ve had some bad experiences with them.”

“Like what?”

“Like having to use them.”

Vince scans racks of shoulder firearms, picks up each shotgun and checks the tag. He does it twice. He and Marino move from rack to rack, checking for the Mossberg. It isn’t inside the vault.

Scarpetta pointsout the livor mortis pattern, a reddish-purple discoloration caused by noncirculating blood settling due to gravity. Pale areas or blanching of the dead woman’s right cheek, breasts, belly, thighs and the inside of her forearms were caused by those areas of her body pressing against some firm surface, perhaps a floor.

“She was facedown for some time,” Scarpetta is saying. “Hours at least, her head turned to the left, which is why there’s blanching of the right cheek-it would have been against the floor or whatever flat surface she was on.”

She pulls up another photograph on the computer screen, this one showing the dead woman facedown on the autopsy table after she was washed, her body and hair wet, the red handprints bright and intact, obviously waterproof. She goes back to a photograph she just looked at, back and forth through a number of them, trying to piece together the artifacts of this woman’s death.

“So, after he killed her,”Bentonsays, “maybe he turned her facedown to paint the handprints on her back, worked on her for hours. Her blood settled and lividity began to form, and that’s why we have this pattern.”

“I have another scenario in mind,” Scarpetta says. “He painted her face-up first, then turned her over and worked on her back, and this was the position he left her in. Certainly he didn’t do all this outside in the cold dark. Someplace where there was no risk anyone would hear the shotgun blast or see him trying to get the body into a vehicle. In fact, maybe he did all this in the vehicle he transported her in, a van, an SUV, a truck. Shot her, painted her, transported her.”

“One-stop shopping.”

“Well, that would have reduced the risk, wouldn’t it. Abduct her, drive her to a remote area, and kill her inside the vehicle-as long as it’s a vehicle with sufficient room in back-then dump the body,” she says, clicking through more photographs, stopping on one she’s already looked at.

She sees it differently this time, the photograph of the woman’s brain, what’s left of it, on a cutting board. The tough, fibrous membrane that lines the inside of the cranium, the dura mater, is supposed to be creamy white. In this photograph, it is stained a yellowish-orange, and she envisions the two sisters, Ev and Kristin, with their hiking sticks, squinting in the sun, the photograph on the dresser in their bedroom. She recalls the somewhat jaundiced complexion of one of them and clicks back to the autopsy report, checks on what it says about the dead woman’s sclera, the whites of her eyes. They’re normal.

She recalls the raw vegetables, the nineteen bags of carrots in the refrigerator at Ev and Kristin’s house, and thinks of the white linen pants the dead woman was wearing like a diaper, clothing consistent with a warm climate.

Bentonis looking curiously at her.

“Xanthochromia of the skin,” Scarpetta says. “A yellow discoloration that doesn’t affect the sclera. Possibly caused by carotenemia. We may know who she is.”

Dr. Bronsonis in his office, moving a slide around on the stage of his compound microscope. Marino knocks on the open door.

Dr. Bronson is smart and competent, always neat in a starchy white lab coat. He’s been a decent chief. But he can’t dislodge himself from the past. The way things were done is how he still does them, and that would include how he evaluates other people. Marino doubts Dr. Bronson bothers with background checks or any other sort of intense scrutiny that should be standard practice in today’s world.

He knocks again, this time louder, and Dr. Bronson looks up from the microscope.

“Do come in,” he says, smiling. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He is a man of the old world, polite and charming, with a perfectly bald head and vague, gray eyes. A briarwood pipe is cold in the ashtray on his neatly arranged desk, and the faint aroma of aromatic tobacco always lingers.

“Least down here in the sunny south they still let you smoke indoors,” Marino says, pulling a chair close.

“Well, I shouldn’t,” Dr. Bronson says. “My wife keeps telling me I’m going to get cancer of the throat or tongue. I tell her if I do, at least I won’t complain much on my way out.”

Marino remembers he didn’t shut the door. He gets up, shuts it and sits back down.

“If they cut my tongue or vocal cords out, then I guess I won’t be griping much,” Dr. Bronson says as if Marino didn’t get the joke.

“I need a couple of things,” Marino says. “First, we’d like to run a sample of Johnny Swift’s DNA. Dr. Scarpetta says there should be several DNA cards in his case file.”

“She ought to take my place, you know. I wouldn’t mind if she was the one who took my place,” he says, and the way he says it makes Marino realize that Dr. Bronson probably knows all too well what people think.

Everyone wants him to retire. They wanted him to retire years ago.