“When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”
Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.
“There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.
“What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”
“A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”
Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey breast suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.
The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.
He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.
He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.
No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.
“Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”
He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.
“What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.
“Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”
“Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”
He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.
“Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”
A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.
“Mrs. Simister? Anybody here?”
The television is inside a back room, probably a bedroom, and the door is shut. He hesitates, calls out again. He knocks, then bangs on the door, then goes inside and sees blood, a small body on the bed and what is left of the head.
29
Inside a desk drawer are pencils, ballpoint pens and Magic Markers. Two of the pencils and one pen are chewed, and Scarpetta looks at the indentations made by teeth in wood and plastic, wondering which of the boys nervously chews things.
She places the pencils, pens and markers in separate evidence bags. Shutting the drawer, she looks around, thinking about the lives of these orphaned South African boys. There are no toys in the room, no posters on the walls, no hint that the brothers like girls, cars, movies, music or sports, or have heroes or simply have fun.
Their bathroom is one door down, and it is an old bathroom with unattractive green tile and a white toilet and tub. Her face appears in the mirrored medicine cabinet as she opens the door. She scans narrow metal shelves lined with dental floss, aspirin and small bars of wrapped soap, the type found in motel bathrooms. She picks up an orange plastic prescription bottle by its white cap, looks at the label and is surprised by the name Marilyn Self, M.D.
The celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Self prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride toDavidLuck. He is supposed to take ten milligrams three times daily, and one hundred tablets were refilled last month, exactly three weeks ago to the day. Scarpetta removes the cap and pours the scored green tablets into her hand. She counts forty-nine of them. Three weeks at the prescribed dosage and there should be thirty-seven left, she calculates. He supposedly disappeared Thursday night. That’s five days ago, fifteen tablets ago. Fifteen plus thirty-seven is fifty-two. Close enough. If David’s disappearance was voluntary, why was his Ritalin left behind? Why was the stove left on?
She returns the tablets to their bottle and seals it inside an evidence bag. She walks down the hallway and at the end is the only other bedroom, one the sisters obviously shared. There are two beds, both covered with emerald-green spreads. The wallpaper and carpet are green. The furniture is lacquered green. The lamps and ceiling fan are green, and green draperies are drawn, blocking the daylight completely. The bedside lamp is on, and its low light and the light from the hall are the only light in the room.
There is no mirror, no artwork and only two photographs, framed and on the dresser, one of the sun setting over the ocean and two boys on the beach, in swim trunks and smiling, both of them towheads. They look like brothers, one older than the other. The other photograph is of two women with walking sticks, squinting in the sun, surrounded by a huge, blue sky. Behind them is an odd-shaped mountain that hulks over the horizon, the top of it obscured by an unusual layer of clouds that rise from the rocks like thick, white steam. One woman is short and full-figured with long, graying hair pulled back, while the other is taller and thinner with very long, wavy black hair she is pushing out of her face because of the wind.
Scarpetta gets a lens out of her shoulder bag and studies the photographs more closely, looking carefully at the boys’ exposed skin, their faces. She studies the women’s faces and their exposed skin, looking for scars, tattoos, physical anomalies, jewelry. She moves the lens over the thinner woman with the long black hair, noting that her complexion is unhealthy. Maybe it is the lighting or an artificial tanning product that has given her skin a slight yellowish tint, but she looks almost jaundiced.
She opens the closet. Inside it are inexpensive casual clothes and shoes, and dressier suits in sizes eight and twelve. Scarpetta pulls out everything white or off-white and checks the fabric for yellowish sweat stains, finding them under the arms of several blouses that are size eight. She returns her attention to the photograph of the woman with long dark hair and jaundiced-looking skin and thinks of the raw vegetables inside the refrigerator, the carrots, and she thinks of Dr. Marilyn Self.
There are no books inside the bedroom except a brown leather Bible on a bedside table. It is old and open to the Apocrypha, and light from the lamp falls on fragile pages that are dry and browned by the passing of many years. She puts on her reading glasses and leans closer, writing in her notebook that the Bible is open to the Wisdom of Solomon, and verse twenty-five of chapter twelve is marked with three small X’s in pencil.
Therefore unto them, as to children without the use of reason, thou dids’t send a judgment to mock them.
She tries Marino’s cell phone and it goes directly to voicemail. She opens the draperies to see if the sliders behind them are locked as she tries Marino again and leaves another urgent message. It has begun to rain, and raindrops pockmark the pool and the waterway, and thunderclouds are piled up like anvils. Palms flutter in fits, and low hedges of hibiscus on either side of the sliders are thick with pink and red blossoms that shake in the wind. She notices two smudges on the glass. They have a distinctive shape that she recognizes, and she finds Reba and Lex in the laundry room, checking to see what’s inside the washer and dryer.