Patricia Cornwell - Depraved Heart

“I want my transport team to handle this,” I reply and it’s not a request. “I’m not doing it or going to the office straight from here and neither are you. I need you to help me with Lucy.”

Marino crouches close to the body, keeping clear of the dark sticky blood, swatting at flies, the droning of them constant and maddening. “As long as you’re sure Lucy’s more important than this case? As long as you’re asking Luke to do the post?”

“Is this multiple choice?”

“I just don’t understand what you’re doing, Doc.”

I inform him that either my deputy chief Luke Zenner will do the autopsy or I will when I finally get to the office. But that may not be until this afternoon, possibly midafternoon or the end of the day.

“What the hell?” Marino is getting louder. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you transporting the body to the office yourself so we can know what the hell happened to her before her Hollywood mother shows up?”

“I have to leave and come back.”

“I don’t see why you can’t take the body first.”

“As I’ve already said my first stop won’t be the CFC. We need to head to Concord and obviously I can’t be driving around with a body in the back of the truck. It needs to go into the cooler right away.” I make that point again. “And Harold and Rusty need to get here now.”

“I don’t get it,” he says yet again, this time with a scowl. “You’re rolling out of here in a freakin’ double-wide and not going straight to the CFC? You got a hair appointment? Getting your nails done? You and Lucy are hitting the spa?”

“You didn’t really just say that.”

“I’m kidding. Anybody can look at you and know I was just kidding. You haven’t bothered with shit for months.” Marino’s voice is flinty with anger, with judgment, and I feel it starting up again.

Blame the victim. Punish me for almost dying. Make it my fault .

“And what is that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

“It means you’ve sort of let yourself go. Not that I don’t understand it. I’m sure it’s not easy moving around, at least not as easy as it was. I’m sure it’s hard to dress, to fix yourself up.”

“Yes it’s been a little difficult to fix myself up, ” I reply dryly, and it’s true that my hair could use styling and a trim.

My nails are short and unpolished. I didn’t bother putting on makeup when I left the house earlier this morning. I’m a bit thinner than I was before I got shot. But this isn’t the time or place to pick on me, and that has never stopped Marino, not in all the years I’ve known him. But he’s sunk to an all-time low criticizing my appearance at a death scene while I’m worried sick about my niece. He should simply take my word for it when I say it’s important we get to her right away. He doesn’t trust me the way he once did. And that’s the problem.

“Jesus. Where’s your sense of humor?” he says after one of my long silences.

“I didn’t bring it with me.” I’m so on edge it’s all I can do to control the level of my voice, and the marble floor seems to radiate through my boot, stiffening my right leg.

It aches and throbs like an abscessed tooth. I almost can’t bend my knee, and the longer I stand here the worse everything gets.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to piss you off but you’re not making sense, Doc,” Marino says. “I’m assuming you’re doing her autopsy like right away? Before her mother gets here with a million questions and demands? Isn’t that a little more important than dropping by Concord to check on Lucy? Unless she’s sick or hurt or something? I mean do you know what’s the matter?”

“I don’t. That’s why we need to check.”

“We sure as hell don’t want a problem with Amanda Gilbert and she’s exactly the sort to give us one. And of all times? You don’t need to be causing problems. I’ll just say it because you don’t need …”

“I’m well aware of what I don’t need.” I watch my phone and avoid looking at him.

Marino interrogates and lectures me like this because he can. At one time he was my chief investigator until he decided he didn’t want to work for me anymore. He knows my office routines and protocols. He knows exactly how I think. He knows the way I do things and why. Yet suddenly I’m an enigma. I’m from another planet and this has been going on since June.

“I want her transported now and it can’t be me doing it,” I say to him. “I’ve got to get to Concord. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

“Okay.” He gets up and looks down at the body for a long moment as I stare at the display on my phone.

The title sequence is long gone. The music has stopped. I continue to be confronted with Lucy’s empty dorm room from what seems half a life ago, and my tension and frustration build. I’m being teased, goaded, tortured, and it occurs to me that Carrie would be hugely amused if she could see me now, if she could spy on me the same way she did on Lucy.

“I admit she looks pretty damn bad for falling what? Not even six feet?” Marino says next. “Drugs and then she’s got a lot of occult shit all over the place. So no telling the company she keeps. I agree with you this case has some aspects that don’t add up in a good way.”

“Please make the call now.” I’m riveted to my phone.

I’m vaguely aware of the sound of him walking away, of him getting hold of my chief of staff Bryce Clark as I watch the seconds tick by. Ten minutes into Carrie Grethen’s cinematic gift and already I know I’m being harassed and manipulated, that she’s having sadistic fun at my expense. But I can’t resist.

I don’t know what else to do but watch, to give myself up to it as I linger inside the foyer feeling Chanel Gilbert’s morbid presence and the pain in my leg. I look down at my phone, watching a segment of my niece’s past go by in the palm of my ungloved hand. I smell decomposing flesh and blood breaking down. I’m sweating and chilled as I watch the video and think this can’t be real.

But it is. There can be no question as I recognize the dorm room’s blank walls, the two windows on either side of the bed, and of course Mister Pickle perched on the pillow. I can see the closed door that leads into the dormitory’s fourth-floor hallway, the light shining in from the right where there’s a bathroom. Only VIP guest quarters had private baths. Lucy was a VIP to me and that’s how I mandated she would be treated by the Feds.

She occupied this room from 1995 through 1998, not constantly. But on and off while she finished the University of Virginia, working for the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility (ERF) almost the entire time. Quantico was her home away from home. Carrie Grethen was her mentor. The FBI placed the niece I raised like a daughter into a psychopathic monster’s care, and that decision changed the course of our lives. It has changed absolutely everything.

Carrie walks into the room, a submachine gun slung over her shoulder. The Heckler & Koch flat against her waist is an MP5K. K is for kurz , German for short .

The machine gun is designed to fit into a firing briefcase, and familiarity touches the back of my brain. I know this gun. I’ve seen it somewhere. I feel my chest tighten as Carrie leans close to a camera, stares directly into it with wide eyes as cold and bright as a winter sky. Her hair is a bleached silver buzz cut, her narrow fine-featured face compelling the way a machete is, and her tank top, gym shorts, shoes and socks are solid white.

In 1997 she was in her midtwenties although I wasn’t sure of her age at the time. She could pass for much older or younger or ageless or ancient with her lean hard body and blue eyes that rapidly change shadings like a volatile ocean as her dangerous moods shift. She is very pale, as if the sun has never touched her. Her white skin seems to glow like a lampshade, contrasting sharply with the black sling loop around her neck, with the stubby black weapon that is close to the camera now.