Oh my God. We should call nine-one-one, and she frantically dug her cell phone out of her bag and Basil shoved her hard into the backseat, and then Hog had the gun in her face.
They drove off.
Shit, Basil said. You’re good, he said, and he was high, laughing. Guess we’d better figure out where we’re going.
Please don’t hurt me, the girl was crying, and Hog felt something as he sat back there, holding the gun on her while she cried and begged. He felt like having sex.
Shut up, Basil told her. It won’t do any good. Guess we’d better find somewhere. Maybe the park. No, they patrol it.
I know somewhere, Hog said. Nobody will ever find us. It’s perfect. We can take our time, all the time in the world, and he was aroused. He wanted sex, wanted it something awful.
He directed Basil to the house, the house that is falling apart with no electricity or running water, and a mattress and dirty magazines in the back room. It was Hog who figured out how to tie them up so they couldn’t sit without their arms straight up.
Stick ’em up!
Like in cartoons.
Stick ’em up!
Like in campy Westerns.
Basil said Hog was brilliant, the most brilliant person he’d ever met, and after a few times of taking women there and keeping them until they smelled too bad, got too infected or just got too used up, Hog told Basil about The Christmas Shop.
Have you ever seen it?
No.
Can’t miss it. Right on the beach on A1A. The lady’s rich.
Hog explained that on Saturdays, it’s always just her and her daughter in there. Hardly anybody goes in there. Who buys Christmas stuff at the beach in July?
No shit.
He wasn’t supposed to do it in there.
Then before Hog knew what was happening, Basil had her in the back, raping, cutting, blood everywhere, while Hog watched and calculated how they were going to get away with it.
The lumberjack by the door was five feet tall, hand-carved. He carried a real ax, an antique one, a curved wooden handle and shiny steel blade, half of it painted blood red. It was Hog who thought of it.
About an hour later, Hog carried out the trash bags, made sure no one was around. He put them in the trunk of Basil’s car. No one saw them.
We were lucky, Hog told Basil when they were back at their secret place, the old house, digging a pit. Don’t do that again.
A month later, he did something again, tried to get two women at once. Hog wasn’t with him. Basil forced them into the car, then the damn thing broke down. Basil never told anybody about Hog. He protected Hog. Now it’s Hog’s turn.
They’re doing a study up there, Hog wrote to him. The prison knows about it and has been asked for volunteers. It would be good for you. You could do something constructive.
It was a pleasant, innocuous letter. No prison official thought twice about it. Basil got word to the warden that he wanted to volunteer for a study they were doing inMassachusetts, that he wanted to do something to pay for his sins, that if the doctors could learn something about what’s wrong with people like him, maybe it would make a difference. Whether or not the warden fell for Basil’s manipulations is a matter of speculation. But this past December, Basil was transferred toButlerStateHospital.
All because of Hog. God’s Hand.
Since then, their communications have had to be more ingenious. God showed Hog how to tell Basil anything he wants. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.
Hog finds a seat at gate twenty-one. He sits as far away from everybody as he can, waiting for thenine a.m.flight. It’s on time. He’ll land atnoon. He unzips his bag and pulls out a letter Basil wrote to him more than a month ago.
I got the fishing magazines. Many thanks. I always learn a lot from the articles. Basil Jenrette.
P.S. They are going to put me in that damn tube again-Thursday, February 17. But they promise it will be quick. “In at 5 and out at5:15 p.m.” Promises, promises.
52
The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.
“Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up toBenton.
“Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.
She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It’sBenton.
“This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can’t you please come down? I’m cooking. Things are going to hell inFlorida. I need to talk to you.”
She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.
“And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.
How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.
“This is ridiculous,” she says again.
“Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”
“Wood splinters?”
“A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”
“If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.
“If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn’t she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I wish you’d come upstairs.”
“Any defense injuries?”
“Why don’t you come up?”
“As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”
“No evidence of it, but it’s certainly sexually motivated. I’m not hungry at the moment.”
She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.
“Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”
“Seriously.”
“Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”
“Why don’t we talk about this up here.”
Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.
“I’m hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.
He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.
“Glad you didn’t walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”
“Good thing you weren’t in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”
She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.
“Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.
Bentonenlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.
“To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it’s possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don’t guess we have histology.”
“If there are slides, I wouldn’t know,”Bentonreplies.
“Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”
“The state police labs have everything.”
“What I’d like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper.”
Bentonlooks at her, shrugs. “Why?”
“It’s possible we’re finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”