“I started having symptoms that didn’t make sense,” Lucy says in the dark, between two wooden pilings, where they sit in teak chairs.
There is a table, and on it are drinks and cheese and crackers. They haven’t touched the cheese and crackers. This is their second round of drinks.
“Sometimes I wish I smoke,” Lucy adds, reaching for her tequila.
“That’s a strange thing to say.”
“You didn’t think it strange when you did it all those years. You still want it.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“That is something you would say, as if you’re exempt from the same feelings other people have,” Lucy replies in the dark to the water. “Sure it matters. Whatever you want matters. Especially when you can’t have it.”
“Do you want her?” Scarpetta asks.
“Which her?”
“Whatever her you were with last,” she reminds her. “Your most recent conquest. In Ptown.”
“I don’t look at them as conquests. I look at them as brief escapes. Like smoking pot. I guess that’s the most disappointing part. It means nothing. Only this time it may mean something. Something I don’t understand. I may have walked into something. Been really blind and stupid.”
She tells Scarpetta about Stevie, about her tattoos, the red handprints. She has a difficult time talking about it but tries to sound detached, as if she is talking about what somebody else did, as if she is discussing a case.
Scarpetta is silent. She picks up her drink and tries to think about what Lucy has just said.
“Maybe it means nothing,” Lucy goes on. “A coincidence. A lot of people are into weird body art, all kinds of weird stuff in acrylics and latex that they airbrush all over themselves.”
“I’m getting tired of coincidences. There seem to have been a lot of them lately,” Scarpetta says.
“This is pretty good tequila. I wouldn’t mind a joint right now.”
“Are you trying to shock me?”
“Pot’s not as bad for you as you think.”
“So you’re the doctor now.”
“Really. It’s true.”
“Why do you seem to hate yourself so much, Lucy?”
“You know what, Aunt Kay?” Lucy turns toward her, her face strong and sharp in the soft glow of lights along the seawall. “You really don’t have a clue about what I do or what I’ve done. So don’t pretend to.”
“That sounds like an indictment of some sort. Most of what you’ve said tonight sounds like an indictment. If I’ve somehow failed you, I’m sorry. Sorrier than you’ll ever imagine.”
“I’m not you.”
“Of course you’re not. And you keep saying that.”
“I’m not looking for something permanent, someone who really matters, someone I can’t live without. I don’t want aBenton. I want people I can forget. One-night stands. Do you want to know how many I’ve had? Because I don’t.”
“You’ve had virtually nothing to do with me this past year. Is that why?”
“It’s easier.”
“Are you afraid I’d judge you?”
“Maybe you should.”
“It’s not who you’re sleeping with that bothers me. It’s the rest of it. You keep to yourself at the Academy, have nothing to do with the students, are virtually never there, or when you are you’re killing yourself in the gym or up in a helicopter or out on the range or testing something, preferably a machine, a dangerous one.”
“Maybe machines are the only thing I get along with.”
“Whatever you fail begins to fail, Lucy. Just so you know.”
“Including my body.”
“What about your heart and soul? How about we start with that.”
“That’s pretty cold. So much for my health.”
“I feel anything but cold. Your health means more to me than my own.”
“I think she set me up, knew I was in the bar, had something in mind.”
She is back to that woman again, the one with the handprints that are similar to the ones inBenton’s case.
“You need to tellBentonabout Stevie. What’s her last name? What do you know about her?” Scarpetta asks.
“I know very little. I’m sure it has nothing to do with anything, but it’s strange, isn’t it. She was up there the same time the woman was murdered and dumped. In the general area.”
Scarpetta is quiet.
“Maybe there’s some cult thing up there in that area,” Lucy then says. “Maybe there are a lot of people painting red handprints all over themselves. Don’t judge me. I don’t need to hear how stupid and reckless I am.”
Scarpetta looks at her and is quiet.
Lucy wipes her eyes.
“I’m not judging you. I’m trying to understand why you’ve turned your back on everything you care about. The Academy is yours. It’s your dream. You hated organized law enforcement, the Feds in particular. So you started your own force, your own posse. Now your riderless horse wanders the parade ground. Where are you? And all of us-all of the people you have brought together in your cause-feel pretty much abandoned. Most of last year’s students never met you, and some of the faculty don’t know you and wouldn’t recognize you on sight.”
Lucy watches a sailboat with furled sails putter past in the night. She wipes her eyes.
“I have a tumor,” she says. “In my brain.”
39
Bentonenlarges another photograph, this one taken at the scene.
The victim looks like a hideous work of violent pornography, on her back, legs and arms splayed, bloody white slacks wrapped around her hips like a diaper, a pair of fecal-stained slightly bloody white panties covering her destroyed head like a mask, with two holes cut out for her eyes. He leans back in his chair, thinking. It would be too simple to assume that whoever posed her in the Walden Woods did so only to shock. There is something else.
The case reminds him of something.
He ponders the diaper-folded slacks. They are inside out, suggesting several possibilities: At some point, she might have taken them off under duress, then put them back on. The killer might have removed them after she was dead. They are linen. Most people don’t wear white linen inNew Englandthis time of year. In a photograph that shows the slacks laid out on a paper-covered autopsy table, the pattern of the bloodstains is telling. The slacks are stiff with dark brown blood in front, from the knee up. From the knee down, there are a few smears and that’s all.Bentonimagines her on her knees when she was shot. He envisions her kneeling. He tries Scarpetta’s phone. She doesn’t answer.
Humiliation. Control. Complete degradation, rendering the victim absolutely powerless, as powerless as an infant. Hooded like somebody about to be executed, possibly. Hooded like a prisoner of war, to torture, to terrorize, possibly. The killer is reenacting something from his own life, probably. His childhood, probably. Sexual abuse, probably. Sadism, possibly. So often that is the case. Do unto others as was done unto you. He tries Scarpetta again and doesn’t get her.
Basil slips into his mind. He posed some of his victims, leaned them up against things, in one case a wall in a rest-stop ladies’ room.Bentonconjures up the scene and autopsy photographs of Basil’s victims, the ones anybody knows about, and sees the gory, eyeless faces of the dead. Maybe that’s the similarity. The eyeholes in the panties are suggestive of Basil’s eyeless victims.
Then again, it might be about the hood. Somehow, it seems more about the hood. Hooding someone is to overpower that person completely, to obviate any possibility of fight or flight, to torment, to terrify, to punish. None of Basil’s victims were hooded, not that anybody knows of, but there is always so much nobody knows about what really happened during a sadistic homicide. The victim isn’t around to tell.