Patricia Cornwell - Depraved Heart

An early model with a wooden foregrip, probably manufactured in the 1980s, possibly earlier but I’m uncertain why I know that. I can see the three modes of fire stamped in white over the thumb area. E for semiautomatic mode. F for full auto. The selector is set on S for safe. I know this gun somehow dammit. Where did I see it?

“Greetings from the past.” Carrie’s eyes are deep blue as she smiles, resting a forearm on the machine gun’s receiver. “But you know what they say. The past is never over. It isn’t even past. If you’re viewing my cinematic masterpiece then congratulations are in order. You’re still on this earth, Chief.” The way she says chief sounds odd, possibly edited. “What you should conclude from that is I don’t want you gone yet. Or you would be.

“By the time you watch this can you imagine how many chances I will have had to put a bullet in your head?” Carrie points the machine gun’s short barrel at a camera. “Or better yet? Right here?” She touches the back of her neck at the base of her skull at the level of C2, and a transection of the spinal cord at that junction is instantly fatal.

As I watch her describe this I’m not surprised. It’s the exact injury I encountered in recent sniper shootings that occurred in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida when a stealth assassin the press calls Copperhead fired solid copper bullets into the necks of four victims. One of them was Bob Rosado, a United States congressman scuba diving off his yacht in Fort Lauderdale when he was murdered this past June. His teenage son Troy, a budding violent psychopath with a criminal history, vanished at the same time and might also be a casualty. We haven’t found him. We don’t know where he is. He was last seen with her, with Copperhead, with Carrie Grethen.

“There are many different ways to cause death if you’re an expert.” She talks slowly, deliberately in the recording. “And I’m not sure what would be best suited for you. Quick so you have no idea what’s happening? Or drawn out and painful so you have full awareness? Do you want to know you’re about to die or not? That is the question. Hmmm.”

She looks up at the white acoustical tile ceiling with its grayish fluorescent tube lights that are turned off. “I’m probably still giving these options careful consideration. I wonder how close I will have come to ending you by the time you see this. But let’s get started while we’re alone. Lucy will be back soon. This is between you and me. Shhhh!” She holds a finger to her lips. “Our secret.

“I’ve written it all out in a narrative that explains what you’re seeing and hearing.” She holds up sheets of paper filled with typing in the format of a script.

She’s showing off. She wants attention. But from whom? This video clip was sent to me. Yet my gut says I’m not the intended audience. Maybe you can’t be objective anymore.

“There are six hidden cameras here inside four-eleven, Lucy’s cozy little dorm room with all her juvenilia.”

She points the machine gun at movie posters on the wall. Silence of the Lambs and Sneakers . She walks to another wall where a rampant Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park is a black silhouette against a blaze orange background. Lucy’s favorite movies. I went to a lot of trouble to find the posters for her after she began her internship with the FBI.

Carrie walks to the bed and pokes the machine gun’s barrel in Mister Pickle’s forlorn fuzzy face. His wide glassy eyes seem panicked, as if he knows he’s about to die, and I catch myself projecting emotions onto an inanimate object, onto a tiny toy bear.

“She’s a child, you know.” Carrie is in constant motion as she talks. “She may have an IQ that’s two hundred and beyond, well into the uncharted airspace of super genius, but she’s always had the emotional maturity of a toddler. Stunted. Lucy is hopelessly stunted. She has no idea what wizardry is in her room, covering every angle and completely out of sight.

“Imagine how I spend my spare time when she’s not around? I’m always watching.” She points two fingers at her eyes. “Like the billboard in The Great Gatsby. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg peering through glasses, watching over the Valley of Ashes, the moral wasteland of American society with its blind, greedy, lying government.”

I glance up from my phone at Harold and Rusty. They look like Ghostbusters in hooded white Tyvek coveralls, their hands gloved in blue nitrile, respirators over their noses and mouths. They’re debating with Marino how best to get the dead woman inside the pouch and whether it would be a good idea to place a bag over her head. Maybe there’s important trace evidence in her hair. Brain tissue is oozing out of an open fracture in her skull. Some of her teeth may be loose. One was knocked out, a front tooth I recovered from blood on the floor.

“We don’t want to displace anything. No telling what’s sticking to the blood, especially in her hair,” Marino is saying as Carrie’s voice sounds in my ear.

“Once upon a time there was a dorm room that was tiny and tidy,” she reads from her script as Marino unfolds a stretcher and the aluminum legs clack. “It was dimly lit by a gooseneck lamp on the desk, which like the matching chair, the wardrobe, the dresser and twin bed was cheaply built of plywood with a fake wood-grain veneer.”

Carrie walks around the room giving a tour, and I don’t look up from my phone as I tell Marino, Rusty and Harold to bag Chanel Gilbert’s head and also her hands and her feet. After that, wrap disposable sheets round her. I’m fairly certain I’ve collected everything that might not survive the trip to my office but let’s be meticulous. Nothing left behind. Nothing lost. Not a hair. Not a tooth.

“Then you can pouch her and carry her out,” I tell them as Carrie says in the recording: “On top of a hotel-size refrigerator were a Mr. Coffee maker, a jar of generic-brand creamer, a bag of Starbuck’s House Blend, three FBI mugs, a chipped ceramic beer stein with the crest for the Richmond police department”—she picks it up, shows the chip—“a Swiss Army knife, and six boxes of Speer Gold Dot 9 mil ammo that went with the MP5K Lucy stole from Benton Wesley and kept hidden inside this room.”

There’s something strange about the way she said Benton’s name. But I can’t stop the recording. I can’t replay it. If Carrie intended this recording for me then why would she say Benton’s last name as if whoever is listening might not know it? I don’t understand what’s happening but I don’t believe Lucy would steal a gun or anything else from him.

Carrie’s lying about the MP5K and in the process she’s creating a record that suggests both Benton and Lucy violated the National Firearms Act, a felony punishable with serious prison time. The statute of limitations should be up by now. But that depends. Everything depends. This is potentially very bad, and I’m aware of paper rattling less than ten feet away from me.

Harold opens what looks like a plain brown paper grocery bag with no handles. Wisely he decides against it. Chanel Gilbert’s head is a gory mess. Plastic bags are better suited as long as the body is quickly refrigerated, and I say this without looking up.

“As long as she goes into the cooler the minute you get her inside the building,” I emphasize because plastic and moisture are a bad combination, especially when decomposition is advancing.

“I agree,” Harold says. “That’s exactly what we’ll do, Chief.”

He used to work in a funeral home and I halfway wonder if he sleeps in a suit and tie, in dark socks and dress shoes. By his way of thinking he covers up in personal protective clothing anyway. So he may as well be dapper and properly attired underneath Tyvek.