Jan Hamilton.
P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.
“Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.
Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles andwhatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.
Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.
“What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.
“Body Farm,” Marino says.
She finds the video file and opens it.
They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.
The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling-yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.
Stevie.
Lucy tries to reachBenton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, andDr. Susan Laneanswers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.
“I’m e-mailing a video clip to you,” Lucy says. “About three years ago, you scanned a young female patient named Helen Quincy. I’m wondering if it might be the same person in the video clip.”
“Lucy, I’m not supposed to.”
“I know, I know. Please. It’s really important.”
WONK… WONK… WONK… WONK…
Dr. Lane has Kenny Jumper in the magnet. She is in the middle of his structural MRI, and the lab is full of the usual racket.
“Can you go into the database?” Dr. Lane asks her research assistant. “See if we might have scanned a patient named Helen Quincy. Possibly three years ago? Josh, keep going,” she says to the MRI tech. “Can you stand it without me for a minute?”
“I’ll try.” He smiles.
Beth, the research assistant, is typing on the keyboard of a computer on the back counter. It doesn’t take her long to find Helen Quincy. Dr. Lane has Lucy on the phone.
“Do you have a photograph of her?” Lucy asks.
WOP WOP WOP WOP. The sound of the gradients acquiring images reminds Dr. Lane of the sonar in a submarine.
“Only of her brain. We don’t photograph patients.”
“Have you looked at the video clip I just e-mailed to you? Maybe it will mean something.”
Lucy sounds frustrated, disappointed.
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP…
“Hold on. But I don’t know what you think I can do with it,” Dr. Lane says.
“Maybe you remember her when she was there? You were working there three years ago. You or someone scanned her. Johnny Swift was doing a fellowship there at the same time. May have seen her, too. Reviewed her scans.”
Dr. Lane isn’t sure she understands.
“Maybe you scanned her,” Lucy persists. “Maybe you saw her three years ago, might remember her if you saw a picture…”
Dr. Lane wouldn’t remember. She’s seen so many patients, and three years is a long time.
“Hold on,” she says again.
BAWN… BAWN… BAWN… BAWN…
She moves to a computer terminal and goes into her e-mail without sitting down. She opens the file of the video clip and plays it several times, watches a pretty young woman with dark blond hair and dark eyes looking up from the dead body of an enormously fat man whose face is covered with maggots.
“Good Lord,” Dr. Lane says.
The pretty young woman in the video clip looks around, right into the camera, her eyes looking right at Dr. Lane, and the pretty young woman digs her gloved hand in the pocket of the fat, dead man’s gray jacket. There the clip stops, and Dr. Lane plays it again, realizing something.
She looks through the Plexiglas at Kenny Jumper and can barely see his head at the other end of the magnet. He is small and slender in baggy, dark clothes, ill-fitting boots, sort of homeless-looking but delicately handsome with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes are dark, and Dr. Lane’s realization gets stronger. He looks so much like the girl in the photograph, they could be brother and sister, maybe twins.
“Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”
“On him?”
“Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.
63
Bentonfinds it a little curious that a taxicab is parked outside the neuroimaging lab. It is a blue SUV taxi, and no one is inside it. Maybe it is the taxi that was supposed to pick up Kenny Jumper at the Alpha amp; Omega Funeral Home, but why is the taxi parked here, and where is the driver? Near the taxi is the white prison van that transported Basil here for hisfive o’clockinterview. He’s not doing well. He says he’s feeling very suicidal and wants to quit the study.
“We have so much invested in him,”Bentonsays to Scarpetta as they walk inside the lab. “You have no idea how bad it is when these people drop out. Especially him. Dammit. Maybe you can be a good influence on him.”
“I’m not even going to comment,” she says.
Two prison guards stand outside the small room whereBentonwill talk to Basil, try to talk him out of quitting PREDATOR, talk him out of killing himself. The room is part of the MRI suite, the same roomBentonhas used before when he talks to Basil. Scarpetta is reminded that the guards aren’t armed.
She and Benton walk into the interview room. Basil is sitting at the small table. He isn’t restrained, not even with plastic flex-cuffs. She likes PREDATOR even less and she didn’t think that was possible.
“This is Dr. Scarpetta,”Bentonsays to Basil. “She’s part of the research study team. Do you mind if she sits in?”
“That would be nice,” Basil says.
His eyes seem to spin. They are eerie. They seem to spin as they look at her.
“So tell me what’s going on with you,”Bentonsays as he and Scarpetta sit down at the table.
“You two are close,” Basil says, looking at her. “I don’t blame you,” he says toBenton. “I tried to drown myself in the toilet and you know what’s funny about that? They didn’t even notice. Isn’t that something. They have this camera spying on me all the time and when I try to kill myself no one sees it.”
He is wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a white shirt. He doesn’t have a belt. He has no jewelry. He isn’t at all what Scarpetta imagined. She thought he would be bigger. He is small and insignificant-looking, slightly built, thinning blond hair, not ugly, just insignificant. She supposes that when he approached his victims, they probably felt the way she does, at least at first. He was nothing, just some nobody with a bland smile. The only thing about him that stands out are his eyes. Right now, they are strange and unsettling.
“Might I ask you a question?” Basil says to her.
“Go ahead.” She isn’t particularly nice to him.
“If I met you on the street and told you to get into my car or I would shoot you, what would you do?”
“Let you shoot me,” she says. “I wouldn’t get into your car.”
Basil looks atBentonand shoots his finger at him as if it’s a gun. “Bingo,” he says. “She’s a keeper. What time is it?”
There is no clock in the room.
“Eleven minutes after five,”Bentonsays. “We need to talk about why you feel like killing yourself, Basil.”
Two minutes later, Dr. Lane has the Surface Shading Display of Helen Quincy on the computer screen. Next to it is the Surface Shading Display of the so-called normal who is in the magnet.