Patricia Cornwell - Depraved Heart

“I think there’s something in her hair. It might be glass.” Light winks on his black-framed glasses, his brown eyes magnified and owlish through the prescription lenses.

“Well duh,” Rusty says, and when he first got here he looked like he always does, a has-been Beach Boy, today in baggy flannel drawstring pants and a hoodie, his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. “There’s broken glass all over the place.”

“I’m just being careful. It didn’t look like lightbulb glass. But it was just a glance and now I don’t see it.”

“Wrap her up really well. Make sure we don’t lose anything,” I reply as Carrie walks into a small bland bathroom and flips on a light.

“Well I’m just not seeing it.” Harold is looking at the bloody matted hair, walking his gloved fingers through it. “I saw something and now I don’t.”

“I’ll look carefully again later. I didn’t notice anything like glass in her hair,” I reply.

“But wouldn’t you think there might be?” Harold stares up at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the empty sockets where two lightbulbs had been screwed in.

He looks around at the broken glass all over the floor, and then he acts out an imagined scenario at the same instant Carrie is acting out her drama on the video. Harold demonstrates someone changing lightbulbs and suddenly falling backward off the ladder.

“If she had lightbulbs, the chandelier’s glass dome in her hands and they hit the floor at the same time she did it would be like a glass bomb going off. Wouldn’t you expect glass all over her?” he asks as Carrie stares in the mirror over the bathroom sink and gives a big smile to her own reflection, then musses up her very short white-gold hair.

“Just cover her really well and she goes straight into the cooler, and I’ll deal with her,” I repeat my instructions.

I can’t pause the video. It’s as if Carrie has hijacked my phone at the worst possible time, in the middle of a suspicious death scene that should require my full attention.

The only way I could stop the recording is to power down my phone and turn it off. I’m not about to do that and it vaguely occurs to me that what’s happening could come back to haunt me. If the police complain that I was on my phone, that I was watching a movie, texting or who knows what? It would be very bad.

“Off to one side of the only door that led in and out of Lucy’s room is a private bath.” Carrie sweeps her hand around it as if she’s Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and Rusty shakes open plastic bags and begins covering Chanel Gilbert’s bare feet.

“And the new agents in training didn’t enjoy similar luxury.” Carrie glances down at the script, then back into a hidden camera, and she does this repeatedly. “All of them had roommates. They shared toilets, vanities and showers at the far end of the hall. But young precocious Lucy didn’t mingle with any of those lesser females, all of them older, some with law degrees and Ph.D.s. One was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Another was a former beauty queen.

“An unusual well-educated group with no common sense, no street smarts, and by the time you see this …” She ends the sentence abruptly, awkwardly, and there’s no question the recording has been edited. “I wonder how many of them will be dead. Lucy and I used to make predictions. You see she’d gathered intelligence on every resident on her floor. But she didn’t call anyone by name. She didn’t speak to anyone in passing, and her reserve was correctly interpreted as entitlement and arrogance. Lucy was spoiled. Her Auntie Kay had managed to spoil her rotten.”

Carrie refers to you as if she’s talking to someone else .

She turns a page in her script. “A teenaged civilian with special gifts and special connections, Lucy enjoyed a special status at the FBI Academy that was on a par with a protected witness, a visiting chief of police, an agency director, a secretary-general or in other words a very important person, which Lucy is by merit of her associations and not her accomplishments.

“Her Auntie Kay mandated up front that during her precious niece’s internship and until she turned twenty-one she would have her own room with a bath and a view and a curfew. She would have constant supervision, and she did ostensibly and officially. It was spelled out in her file, a thin unimportant file as I film this. But with time it likely would get much bigger as the federal government wises up to Lucy Farinelli and realizes she must be stopped.”

Where is this file? The question floats up in my mind like a bubble in a cartoon strip. Benton should know .

“But on this bright July afternoon in 1997”—Carrie walks and talks somberly, pensively like the host of a true crime show—“the Academy faculty and staff had no idea that young Lucy’s chaperone , yours truly, was a frequent sleepover and not the harmless eccentric geek who passed her extensive background check, interviews, and a polygraph with flying colors before she was hired to overhaul the FBI’s computer and case management system.

“Even the psychological profilers in the Behavioral Science Unit including their legendary chief somehow missed that I am a psychopath .” She says legendary chief weirdly. “Just as my father was and his father before him.” Her eyes are cobalt in the camera. “I’m actually quite rare. Less than one percent of the female population is psychopathic. And you know the evolutionary purpose of psychopathy now don’t you? We’re the chosen ones who will survive.

“Remember that when you think I’m gone. And oops! I have to stop reading my wonderful little story for now. We have company.”

The whisper of a long plastic zipper, and I glance at Marino as he stands up from a crouched position. The body is a black cocoon on the floor, and Marino, Rusty and Harold yank off their dirty gloves and drop them into the red biohazard bag.

They pull on fresh gloves. When they lift the body it is limp. Rigor mortis was fully developed and has passed, leaving her flaccid. That usually takes a minimum of eight hours, depending on other factors that include the environmental temperature, which is extremely hot, and the state of dress and body size, which are naked and slender with good musculature.

Chanel Gilbert is about five foot seven, maybe 130 pounds, and I suspect she was athletic and fit. She has tan lines from wearing a bathing suit but is pale from the waist down, her belly, hips and legs spared from exposure to the sun. Wearing a wet suit could leave a similar tan pattern, and I’m reminded of what Benton and I always do between scuba dives. We take off our dive socks and pull down our wet suits, tying the neoprene arms around our waists. Our faces, shoulders, chests, arms and the tops of our feet get sun exposure but not much else.

“Do we know if Chanel Gilbert was into sports?” I ask Marino, startled as it dawns on me that she and Carrie Grethen resemble each other physically. “She has well-developed shoulders and arms, and her legs look strong. Are we sure who this is?” I glance at him. “Has anybody talked to her neighbors?”

“What the hell?” He frowns at me as if I just said the world is flat. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking she’s not visually identifiable and we need to be careful.”

“You mean because she’s bloated and rotting with her face smashed in?”

“We should be sure we know who she is. We shouldn’t assume it’s the woman who lived in this house.” I’m not going to mention that the dead woman on the floor could pass for Carrie Grethen’s twin.

I think of my recent sighting of Carrie when she shot me in Florida, comparing that face with the photograph on Chanel’s driver’s license. The two women look eerily similar, and if I dared to suggest this I’ll sound obsessed and irrational. Marino would want to know why the thought has occurred to me now, and I can’t tell him I’m watching Carrie on my phone. Marino can’t know that. No one can. I’m not sure what the legal implications might be but I’m worried the video is a trap.