Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“You know why she’s here?” He indicates Reba. “To arrest your sorry ass.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Falsifying records, grand larceny, maybe homicide since you obviously stole a gun that was used out of state to blow a lady’s head off. Oh, and add fraud,” Marino adds to the list, not caring if any of it’s valid.

“I didn’t! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Quit yelling. I’m not deaf. See, Detective Wagner here’s a witness, right?”

She nods, her face hard. Marino’s never seen her look so scary.

“You see me lay a finger on him?” he asks her.

“Absolutely not,” she says.

Joe is so scared, he might wet himself.

“You want to tell us why you stole that shotgun and who you gave it to or sold it to?” Marino pulls up the desk chair, turns it around, sits on it backward, his huge arms resting on the back. “Or maybe you blew the lady’s head off. Maybe you’re living out hell scenes, only I didn’t write that one. You must have stole it from someone else.”

“What lady? I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t steal a shotgun. What shotgun?”

“The one you checked out last June twenty-eighth at three-fifteen in the afternoon. That one that belongs to the computer record you just updated, falsifying that record, too.”

Joe’s mouth is open, his eyes wide.

Marino reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a piece of paper, unfolds it and hands it to him. It’s a photocopy of the ledger page showing when Joe signed out the Mossberg shotgun and supposedly returned it.

Joe stares at the photocopy, his hands shaking.

He says, “I swear to God I didn’t take it. I remember what happened. I was doing more research with ordnance gelatin and maybe test-fired it once. Then I left to do something in the lab kitchen, I think it was to check on some more blocks I’d just made, the ones we were using to simulate passengers in an airplane crash. Remember when Lucy used that big helicopter to drop an airplane fuselage out of the sky so the students could…?”

“Get to the point!”

“When I came back, the shotgun was gone. I assumed Vince locked it back up in the vault. It was late in the day. He probably locked it up because he was about to go home. I remember feeling pissed about it because I wanted to fire it a couple more times.”

“No wonder you have to steal my hell scenes,” Marino says. “You’ve got no imagination. Try again.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“You want her to haul you off in handcuffs?” Marino says, jerking his thumb toward Reba.

“You can’t prove I did anything.”

“I can prove you’ve committed fraud,” Marino says. “You want to talk about all those letters of reference you faked so the Doc would hire you as a fellow?”

For an instant, he’s speechless. Then he begins to regain his composure. He gets that smart-ass look on his face again.

“Prove it,” he says.

“Every one of those letters is on the same watermarked paper.”

“Doesn’t prove a thing.”

Joe gets to his feet and rubs his lower back.

“I’m going to sue you,” he says.

“Good. Then I may as well hurt you worse,” Marino replies, rubbing his fist. “Maybe I’ll break your neck. You haven’t seen me touch him, have you, Detective Wagner.”

“Absolutely not,” she says. Then, “If you didn’t take the shotgun, who did? Was anybody else with you in the firearms lab that afternoon?”

He thinks for a minute and something shows in his eyes.

“No,” he says.

Twenty-four hours a day, guards inside the control room monitor inmates who are considered suicide risks.

They watch Basil Jenrette. They watch him sleep, shower, eat. They watch him use the steel toilet. They watch him turn his back to the closed-circuit camera and relieve his sexual tension beneath the sheets of his narrow steel bed.

He imagines them laughing at him. He imagines what they say inside the control room as they watch him on the monitors. They make fun of him to the other guards. He can tell by the smirks on their faces when they bring him his meals or let him out so he can exercise or make a phone call. Sometimes they make comments. Sometimes they show up outside his cell just as he is relieving his sexual tension, and they imitate the noise and laugh and bang on the door.

Basil sits on his bed, looking up at the camera mounted high on the opposite wall. He flips through this month’s copy of Field amp; Stream as he thinks back to the first time he met with Benton Wesley and made the mistake of answering one of his questions honestly.

Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?

I’ve already hurt others so I guess that means I think about it, Basil said.

What thoughts do you have, Basil? Can you describe what you envision when you think about hurting other people and yourself?

I think of doing what I used to. Seeing a woman and getting the urge. Getting her into my police car and pulling out my gun and maybe my badge and telling her I’m arresting her, and if she resists arrest, so much as touches the door, I’ll have no choice but to shoot her. They all cooperated.

None of them resisted you.

Just the last two. Because of car trouble. It’s so stupid.

The others, before the last two, did they believe you were the police and you were arresting them?

They believed I was a cop. But they knew what was happening. I wanted them to know. I’d get hard. I’d show them I was hard, make them put their hand on it. They were going to die. It’s so stupid.

What’s stupid, Basil?

So stupid. I’ve said it a thousand times. You’ve heard me say it, right? Wouldn’t you rather I shoot you right then in my car or get you off somewhere so I can take my time with you? Why would you let me get you to some secret place and tie you up?

Tell me how you would tie them up, Basil. Always the same way?

Yeah. I have a really cool method. It’s absolutely unique. I invented it when I started making my arrests.

By arrests you mean abducting and assaulting women.

When I first started, yeah.

Basil smiles as he sits on his bed, remembering the thrill of twisting wire coat hangers around their ankles and wrists and threading rope through them so he could string them up.

They were my puppets, he explained to Dr. Wesley during that first interview, wondering what it would take to get a reaction out of him.

No matter what Basil said, Dr. Wesley kept his steady gaze, listening, not letting anything he felt register on his face. Maybe he didn’t feel anything. Maybe he’s like Basil.

See, in this place I had, there were exposed rafters where the ceiling had come down, especially in this one room in the back. I would throw the ropes over the rafters, and I could tighten or loosen them however I wanted, give them a long leash or a short one.

And they never resisted, even when they realized what was in store for them when you got them into this building? What was it? A house?

I don’t remember.

Did they resist, Basil? Seems as if it might have been difficult to restrain them in such an elaborate fashion while you’re still holding them at gunpoint.

I’ve always had this fantasy of having someone watch. Basil didn’t answer the question. Then having sex after it was over. Having sex for hours with the body right there on the same mattress.

Sex with the dead body or sex with another person?

I was never into that. That’s not for me. I like to hear them. I mean, it had to hurt like hell. Sometimes their shoulders got dislocated. Then I’d give them enough slack to use the bathroom. That was the part I didn’t like. Emptying the bucket.