Patricia Cornwell: Point of Origin

Day 523.6

One Pheasant Place

Kirby Woman's Ward

Wards Island, NY

Hey DOC,

Tick Tock

Sawed bone and fire.

Still home alone with FIB the liar? Watch the clock BIG DOC!

Spurt dark light and fright TRAINSTRAINSTRAINS. GKSFWFY wants photos.

Visit with we. On floor three. YOU trade with we.

TICK TOC DOC! (Will Lucy talk?)

LUCY-BOO on TV. Fly through window. Come with we Under covers. Come til dawn. Laugh and sing. Same ole song. LUCY LUCY LUCY and we!

Wait and see.

Carrie

BENTON WESLEY WAS taking off his running shoes in my kitchen when I ran to him, my heart tripping over fear and hate and remembered horror. Carrie Grethen's letter had been mixed in a stack of mail and other paperwork, all of it put off until a moment ago when I had decided to drink cinnamon tea in the privacy of my Richmond, Virginia, home. It was Sunday afternoon, thirty-two minutes past five, June eighth.

'I'm assuming she sent this to your office,' Benton said.

He did not seem disturbed as he bent over, peeling off white Nike socks.

'Rose doesn't read mail marked personal and confidential.' I added a detail he already knew as my pulse ran hard.

'Maybe she should. You seem to have a lot of fans out there.' His wry words cut like paper.

I watched him set pale bare feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees and head low. Sweat trickled over shoulders and arms well defined for a man his age, and my eyes drifted down knees and calves, to tapered ankles still imprinted with the weave of his socks. He ran his fingers through wet silver hair and leaned back in the chair.

'Christ,' he muttered, wiping his face and neck with a towel. 'I'm too old for this crap.'

He took a deep breath and blew out slowly with mounting anger. The stainless steel Breitling Aerospace watch I had given to him for Christmas was on the table. He picked it up and snapped it on.

'Goddamn it. These people are worse than cancer. Let me see it,' he said.

The letter was penned by hand in bizarre red block printing, and drawn at the top was a crude crest of a bird with long tail feathers. Scrawled under it was the enigmatic Latin word ergo, or therefore, which in this context meant nothing to me. I unfolded the simple sheet of white typing paper by its comers and set it in front of him on the antique French oak breakfast table. He did not touch a document that might be evidence as he carefully scanned Carrie Grethen's weird words and began running them through the violent database in his mind.

'The postmark's New York, and of course there's been publicity in New York about her trial,' I said as I continued to rationalize and deny. 'A sensational article just two weeks ago. So anyone could have gotten Carrie Grethen's name from that. Not to mention, my office address is public information. This letter's probably not from her at all. Probably some other cuckoo.'

'It probably is from her.' He continued reading.

'She could mail something like this from a forensic psychiatric hospital and nobody would check it?' I countered as fear coiled around my heart.

'Saint Elizabeth's, Bellevue, Mid-Hudson, Kirby.' He did not glance up. 'The Carrie Grethens, the John Hinckley Juniors, the Mark David Chapmans are patients, not inmates. They enjoy our same civil rights as they sit around in penitentiaries and forensic psychiatric centers and create pedophile bulletin boards on computers and sell serial killer tips through the mail. And write taunting letters to chief medical examiners.'

His voice had more bite, his words more clipped. Benton's eyes burned with hate as he finally lifted them to me.

'Carrie Grethen is mocking you, big chief. The FBI. Me,' he went on.

'FIB,' I muttered, and on another occasion, I might have found this funny.

Wesley stood and draped the towel over a shoulder.

'Let's say it's her,' I started in again.

'It is.' He had no doubt.

'Okay. Then there's more to this than mockery, Benton.'

'Of course. She's making sure we don't forget that she and Lucy were lovers, something the general public doesn't know yet,' he said. 'The obvious point is, Carrie Grethen hasn't finished ruining people's lives.'

I could not stand to hear her name, and it enraged me that she was now, this moment, inside my West End home. She might as well be sitting at my breakfast table with us, curdling the air with her foul, evil presence. I envisioned her condescending smile and blazing eyes and wondered what she looked like now after five years of steel bars and socializing with the criminally insane. Carrie was not crazy. She had never been that. She was a character disorder, a psychopath, a violent entity with no conscience.

I looked out at wind rocking Japanese maples in my yard and the incomplete stone wall that scarcely kept me from my neighbors. The telephone rang abruptly and I was reluctant to answer it.

'Dr Scarpetta,' I said into the receiver as I watched Benton's eyes sweep back down that red-penned page.

'Yo,' Pete Marino's familiar voice came over the line. 'It's me.'

He was a captain with the Richmond Police Department, and I knew him well enough to recognize his tone. I braced myself for more bad news.

'What's up?' I said to him.

'A horse farm went up in flames last night in Warrenton. You may have heard about it on the news,' he said. 'Stables, close to twenty high-dollar horses, and the house. The whole nine yards. Everything burned to the ground.'

So far, this wasn't making any sense. 'Marino, why are you calling me about a fire? In the first place, Northern Virginia is not your turf.'

'It is now,' he said.

My kitchen seemed to get small and airless as I waited for the rest.

'ATF's just called out NRT,' he went on.

'Meaning us,' I said.

'Bingo. Your ass and mine. First thing in the morning.'

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' National Response Team, or NRT, was deployed when churches or businesses burned, and in bombings or any other disaster in which ATF had jurisdiction. Marino and I were not ATF, but it was not unusual for it and other law enforcement agencies to recruit us when the need arose. In recent years I had worked the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and the crash of TWA Flight 800. I had helped with the identifications of the Branch Davidians at Waco and reviewed the disfigurement and death caused by the Unabomber. I knew from stressful experience that ATF included me in a call-out only when people were dead, and if Marino was recruited, too, then the suspicion was murder.

'How many?' I reached for my clipboard of call sheets.

'It's not how many, Doc. It's who. The owner of the farm is media big shot Kenneth Sparkes, the one and only. And right now it's looking like he didn't make it.'

'Oh God,' I muttered as my world suddenly got too dark to see. 'We're sure?'

'Well, he's missing.'

'You mind explaining to me why I'm just now being told about this?'

I felt anger rising, and it was all I could do not to hurl it at him, for all unnatural deaths in Virginia were my responsibility. I shouldn't have needed Marino to inform me about this one, and I was furious with my Northern Virginia office for not calling me at home.

'Don't go getting pissed at your docs up in Fairfax,' said Marino, who seemed to read my mind. 'Fauquier County asked ATF to take over here, so that's the way it's going.'

I still didn't like it, but it was time to get on with the business at hand.