“Hello?” she answers.
“Mrs. Simister?”
“Who is this?”
“Investigator Pete Marino. We talked earlier.”
“We did? You’re who?”
“You called theNationalForensicAcademya few hours ago.”
“I most certainly did not. Are you selling something?”
“No, ma’am. I’d like to stop by and talk to you, if that’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” she says, hanging up.
She grips the cool metal armrests so tightly that her big knuckles blanch beneath the loose, sun-spotted skin of her useless old hands. People call all the time and they don’t even know her. Machines call and she can’t imagine why people sit there and listen to tape recordings made by solicitors after money. The phone rings again, and she ignores it as she picks up the binoculars to peer at the pale orange house where the two ladies live with the two little hoodlums.
She sweeps the binoculars over the waterway, then over the property on the other side of it. The yard and pool are suddenly big and bright green and blue. They are sharply defined, but the blonde woman in the dark suit and the tan lady with the gun are nowhere to be seen. What are they looking for over there? Where are the two ladies who live there? Where are the hoodlums? All children are hoodlums these days.
The doorbell rings and she stops rocking as her heart begins to pound. The older she gets, the more easily she is startled by sudden movements and sounds, the more she fears death and what it means, if it means anything. Several minutes pass, and the bell rings again and she sits still and waits. It rings again and someone knocks loudly. Finally, she gets up.
“Hold on, I’m coming,” she mutters, annoyed and anxious. “You’d better not be someone selling something.”
She walks into the living room, her slow feet brushing over the carpet. She can’t pick up her feet the way she once could, can hardly walk.
“Hold on, I’m coming as fast as I can,” she says impatiently when the bell rings again.
Maybe it’s UPS. Sometimes her son orders things for her on the Internet. She looks through the peephole in the front door. The person on her porch certainly isn’t wearing a brown or blue uniform or carrying mail or a package. It’s him again.
“What is it this time?” she says angrily, her eye against the peephole.
“Mrs. Simister? I’ve got some forms for you to fill out.”
27
The gate leads to the front yard, where Scarpetta pays attention to thick hibiscus barricading the property from the sidewalk that dead-ends at the waterway.
There are no broken twigs or branches, nothing to indicate that anyone has entered the property by pushing his way through the hedge. Reaching inside the black nylon shoulder bag she routinely carries to scenes, she pulls out a pair of white cotton examination gloves as she looks at the car on the cracked concrete driveway, an old, gray station wagon parked haphazardly, one tire partially on the lawn, where it has gouged the grass. She works her hands into the gloves and wonders why Ev or Kristin parked the car like that, assuming one or the other was driving.
She looks through the car windows at gray vinyl bench seats and the SunPass transponder neatly affixed to the inside of the windshield. She makes more notes. Already a pattern is becoming apparent. The backyard and pool are meticulous. The screened-in patio and lawn furniture are meticulous. She sees no trash or clutter inside the car, nothing but a black umbrella on the mat in back. Yet the car is parked sloppily, carelessly, as if someone couldn’t see well or was in a hurry. She bends down to take a closer look at dirt and bits of dead vegetation caked in the tire tread. She looks at thick dust that has turned the undercarriage the grayish tan of old bones.
“It appears this was driven off-road somewhere,” Scarpetta says, getting up as she continues to study the dirty tires, walking from one to the other.
Reba follows her around the car, looking, a curious expression on her lined, tan face.
“The dirt in the tread makes me think the ground was damp or wet when the car was driven over it,” Scarpetta says. “Is the church parking lot paved?”
“Well, it dug up the grass here,” Reba says, looking at the gouged yard beneath a back tire.
“That wouldn’t explain it. All four tires are caked with dirt.”
“The strip mall where the church is has a big parking lot. Nothing unpaved in the area that I noticed.”
“Was the car here when the lady from the church showed up looking for Kristin and Ev?”
Reba walks around, interested in the dirty tires. “They said so, and I can tell you for sure it was here when I arrived that afternoon.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check the SunPass, see what tollbooths it’s gone through and when. Have you opened the doors?”
“Yes. They were unlocked. I didn’t see anything significant.”
“So it’s never been processed.”
“I can’t ask the crime-scene techs to process something when there’s no evidence a crime’s been committed.”
“I understand the problem.”
Reba’s dark, tanned face watches her peer through the windows again. They are covered with a fine film of dust. Scarpetta steps back and walks around the station wagon, taking in every inch.
“Who owns it?” Scarpetta says.
“The church.”
“Who owns the house?”
“Same thing.”
“I was told the church leases the house.”
“No, the church definitely owns the house.”
“Do you know someone named Simister?” Scarpetta says as she begins to get a strange feeling, the sort that starts in her stomach and works its way up her throat, the same feeling she got when Reba mentioned the name Christian Christian to Marino.
“Who?” Reba frowns as a muffled explosion sounds from the other side of the waterway.
She and Scarpetta stop talking. They step closer to the gate, looking at the houses on the other side of the water. There is no one in sight.
“Car backfire,” Reba decides. “People drive a lot of junkers around here. Most of them shouldn’t be driving at all. Old as the Grim Reaper and blind as bats.”
Scarpetta repeats the name Simister.
“Never heard of her,” Reba says.
“She said she’s talked to you several times. I believe she said three times, to be exact.”
“I never heard of her, and she’s never talked to me. I guess she’s the one who bad-mouthed me, said I didn’t care about the case.”
“Excuse me,” Scarpetta then says, and she tries Marino on his cell phone and gets his voicemail.
She tells him to call her immediately.
“When you find out who this Mrs. Simister is,” Reba says, “I’d like to know about it. There’s something weird about all this. Maybe we should at least dust the inside of the car for prints. If nothing else, for exclusionary purposes.”
“Unfortunately, you probably won’t get the boys’ prints from inside the car,” Scarpetta says. “Not after four days. You probably won’t get them from inside the house, either. Certainly not the young boy’s prints, the seven-year-old boy’s prints.”
“I don’t get why you would say that.”
“The prints of prepubescent children don’t survive long. Hours, maybe a few days at most. We’re not entirely sure why, but it probably has to do with the oils people secrete when they reach puberty.Davidis twelve? You might get his prints. I emphasizemight.”
“Well, that sure is news to me.”
“I suggest you get this station wagon into the lab, process it for trace evidence and fume the inside of it ASAP with superglue for possible fingerprints. We can do it at the Academy, if you want. We have a bay for processing vehicles and can take care of it.”