There’s not a thing wrong with checking on things. And I would pray with her. Talk to her about the Lord.
“The fact that he said it that way,” Benton comments as he drives and Lucy’s helicopter seems to float down like a feather, about to land, far off over the abandoned orchard that Adger still owns, “indicates he knows he did something wrong.”
“The monster,” Scarpetta says.
“We’ll probably never know exactly what he and perhaps others did to her,”Bentonsays, subdued as he drives, his jaw set in a hard way.
He’s angry. He’s upset by what he suspects.
“But this much is obvious,” he goes on. “Her various entities, her alters, were her adaptive response to unbearable trauma when there was no one to turn to, the same sort of thing you find in some survivors of concentration camps.”
“The monster.”
“A very sick man. Now a very sick young woman.”
“He shouldn’t get away with it.”
“I’m afraid he already has.”
“I hope he goes to hell,” Scarpetta says.
“He’s probably already in it.”
“Why must you defend him?” She looks over at him and absently rubs her neck.
It is bruised. It is still tender, and every time she touches it, she remembers Basil grabbing her with a homemade white-cloth ligature, briefly occluding the vessels that supply blood, and therefore oxygen, to the brain. She passed out. She is fine. She wouldn’t be if the guards hadn’t gotten Basil off her as quickly as they did.
He and Helen are safely tucked away atButler. Basil is no longerBenton’s PREDATOR dream subject. Basil won’t be visitingMcLeananymore.
“I’m not defending him. I’m trying to explain it,”Bentonsays.
He slows down on South 27 near an exit that leads to a CITGO truck stop. He turns right onto a narrow dirt road and stops the car. A rusting chain stretches across the dirt road, and there are a lot of tire tracks.Bentongets out and unhooks the thick, rusting chain. It clanks when he tosses it to one side. He drives through, stops, gets out again, and puts the chain back the way it was. The press, the curious, don’t know what’s going on out here yet. Not that a rusting chain will stop the unwelcome and uninvited. But it can’t hurt.
“Some people say once you’ve seen a case or two of DID, you’ve seen them all,” he says. “I happen to disagree, but for something so incredibly complicated and bizarre, the symptoms are remarkably consistent. A dramatic transformation when one alter becomes another, each dominant, each determining behavior. Facial changes, changes in posture, gait, mannerisms, even dramatic alterations of pitch, voice, speech. A disorder often associated with demon possession.”
“Do you think Helen’s alters-Jan, Stevie, whoever paraded as a citrus inspector and shot people to death and God knows who else she is-are aware of each other?”
“When she was atMcLean, she denied she was a multiple, even when staff repeatedly witnessed her transforming into alters right in front of them. She suffered auditory and visual hallucinations. On occasion, one alter talked to another right in front of the clinician. Then she was Helen Quincy again, sitting politely, sweetly, in her chair, acting like the psychiatrist was the crazy one for believing she had multiple personalities.”
“I wonder if Helen ever emerges anymore,” Scarpetta says.
“When she and Basil killed her mother, she changed her identity to Jan Hamilton. That was utilitarian, not an alter, Kay. Don’t even think about Jan as a personality, if you understand what I’m saying. It was just a phony ID that Helen, Stevie, Hog and who-knows-what hid behind.”
Dust billows up as they bump over the overgrown dirt road, a dilapidated house in the distance, weeds and brush everywhere.
“I suspect that, figuratively speaking, Helen Quincy stopped existing when she was twelve,” Scarpetta says.
Lucy’s helicopter has settled in a small clearing, the blades still turning as she shuts down the engine. Parked near the house are a removal-service van, three marked police cruisers, two Academy SUVs and Reba’s Ford LTD.
The Sea Breeze Resortis too far inland to catch a breeze from the sea, and it isn’t a resort. There isn’t even a swimming pool. According to the man at the desk inside the dingy front office with its rattling air conditioner and plastic plants, long-term rentals get special discounts.
He says Jan Hamilton kept odd hours, disappearing for days, especially of late, and at times she dressed strangely. Sexy one minute, sort of in drag the next.
My motto? Live and let live, the man at the desk said when Marino tracked Jan here.
It wasn’t hard. After she crawled out of the magnet and the guards had Basil on the floor and it was all over, she cowered in a corner and started to cry. She wasn’t Kenny Jumper anymore, had never heard of him, denied having any idea what anybody was talking about, including knowing Basil, including why she was on the floor inside the MRI suite atMcLeanHospitalinBelmont,Massachusetts. She was very polite and cooperative withBenton, gave him her address, said she worked as a part-time bartender inSouthBeach, a restaurant called Rumors owned by a very nice man named Laurel Swift.
Marino crouches before the open closet. It doesn’t have a door, just a rod for hanging clothes. On the soiled carpet are stacks of clothing, neatly folded. He goes through them with gloved hands, sweat dripping in his eyes, the window-unit air conditioner not doing a very good job.
“One long black coat with a hood,” he says to Gus, one of Lucy’s Special Ops agents. “Sounds familiar.”
He hands the folded coat to Gus, who places it inside a brown paper bag, writes the date and item and where it was found. There are dozens of brown paper bags by now, all sealed with evidence tape. Basically, they are packing up Jan’s entire room. Marino wrote the search warrant from helclass="underline" Put everything in it and the kitchen sink, in his words.
His big, gloved hands sort through more clothing, shabby, baggy men’s clothing, a pair of shoes with the heels cut out, a Miami Dolphins cap, a white shirt with Department of Agriculture on the back, that’s all, not the full name of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, just Department of Agriculture, the block printing hand-done with what Marino guesses was a Sharpie.
“How could you not know he was really a she?” Gus asks him, sealing another bag.
“You weren’t there.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Gus says, holding out his hand, waiting for the next thing, a pair of black panty hose.
Gus is armed and dressed in fatigues, because that is how Lucy’s Special Ops agents always dress, even if it is unnecessary, and on an eighty-five-degree day when the suspect, a twenty-year-old girl, is safely locked up in a state hospital in Massachusetts, it probably wasn’t necessary to deploy four Special Ops agents to the Sea Breeze Resort. But that was what Lucy wanted. That was what her agents wanted. No matter how detailed Marino has been in his explanation of what Benton relayed to him about Helen’s different personalities or alters, as Benton calls them, the agents don’t quite believe there aren’t other dangerous people running around, that maybe Helen has accomplices-like Basil Jenrette, they point out-who are real.
Two of her agents are going through a computer on a desk by a window that looks out over the parking lot. There is also a scanner, a color printer, packages of magazine-grade paper and half a dozen fishing magazines.
Planks on the front porch are warped, some of them rotted, others missing, exposing the sandy soil beneath the one-story paint-peeled frame house not far from theEverglades.
It is quiet, save for the distant traffic that sounds like gusting wind, and the scraping and stabbing of shovels. Death pollutes the air and in the heat of the late afternoon seems to shimmer darkly in waves that get worse the closer one gets to the pits. The agents, the police and scientists have found four of them. Based on soil disturbances and discoloration, there are more.