Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 28

I am silent. I don't want to give Chandonne any more of myself than he has already taken. I feel tears of frustration and fury and blink them back. "How can you help me?" I ask Berger. "You have no jurisdiction here. Diane Bray is not your case. You can drag her into your Molineux motion in Susan Pless's murder, but I'm left hanging out to dry when it comes to a Richmond special grand jury. Especially if certain people are trying to make it appear that I killed her, killed Bray. That I'm deranged." I take a deep breath. My heart races.

"The key to your clearing your name is my same key," she replies. "Susan Pless. How could you possibly have had anything to do with that death? How could you have tampered with that evidence?"

She waits for my answer, as if I have one. The thought numbs me. Of course, I had nothing to do with Susan Pless's murder.

"My question is this," Berger goes on. "If the DNA from Susan's case matches your cases here and possibly the DNA in the Paris cases, doesn't that mean it has to be the same person who killed all these people?"

"I guess jurors don't have to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. All they need is probable cause," I reply, playing devil's advocate in my own dilemma. "The chipping hammer with Bray's blood on itfound in my house. And a receipt showing that I bought a chipping hammer. And the chipping hammer I actually bought has vanished. All sort of sticks out like a smoking gun, Ms. Berger, don't you think?"

She touches my shoulder. "Answer me this," she says. "Did you do it?

"No," I reply. "No, I didn't do it."

"Good. Because I can't afford for you to have done it," she says. "I need you. They need you." She stares out at the cold, empty house beyond our windshield, indicating Chandonne's other victims, the ones who didn't survive. They need me. "Okay." She returns us to why we are waiting in this driveway. She returns us to Diane Bray. "So he comes through her front door. There's no sign of a struggle and he doesn't attack her until they are all the way to the other end of the house, in her bedroom. It doesn't appear she attempted to escape or defend herself in any way. She never went for her gun? She's a policewoman. Where's her gun?"

"I know when he forced his way into my house," I reply, "he tried to throw his coat over my head." I am trying to do what she wants. I act as if I am talking about someone else.

"Then maybe he nets Bray with a coat or something else he threw over her head, and forced her back to the bedroom?"

"Maybe. The police never found Bray's gun. Not that I know of," I reply.

"Huh. Wonder what he did with that?" Berger muses.

Headlights shine in the rearview mirror and I turn around. A station wagon slows at the driveway.

"There was also money missing from her house," I add. 'Twenty-five hundred dollars, drug money Anderson had just brought over earlier that evening. According to her, to Anderson." The station wagon pulls up behind us. "From the sale of prescription pills, if Anderson's telling the truth."

"Do you think she was telling the truth?" Berger asks.

"The whole truth? I don't know," I reply. "So maybe Chandonne took the money and he may have taken her gun, too. Unless Anderson took the money when she came back to the house the next morning and found the body. But after seeing what was in the master bedroom, it's frankly hard for me to imagine she did anything but run like the wind."

"Based on the photographs you've shown me, I would tend to agree," Berger replies.

We get out. I can't see Eric Bray well enough to recognize him, but my vague impression is of a well-dressed, attractive man who is close in age to his slain sister, maybe forty or so. He hands Berger a key attached to a manila tag. "The alarm code's written on it," he says. "I'm just going to wait out here."

"I'm really sorry to put you to all this trouble." Berger gathers a camera and an accordion file from the backseat. "Especially on Christmas Eve."

"I know you people have to do your job," he says in a dull, flat tone.

"Have you been inside?"

He hesitates and stares off at the house. "Can't do it." His voice rises with emotion and tears cut him off. He shakes his head and climbs back inside his car. "I don't know how any of us ... Well," he clears his throat, talking to us through the open car door, the interior light on, the bell dinging. "How we're ever going to go in and deal with her things." He focuses on me, and Berger introduces us. I have no doubt he already knows very well who I am.

"There are professional cleaning services in the area," I delicately tell him. "I suggest you contact one and have them go in before you or any other family member does. Service Master, for example." I have been through this many times with families whose loved ones have died violently inside the residence. No one should have to go in and deal with their loved one's blood and brains everywhere.

"They can just go in without us?" he asks me. "The cleaning people can?"

"Leave a key in a lock box at the door. And yes, they'll go in and take care of things without you present," I reply. "They're bonded and insured."

"I want to do that. We want to go on and sell this place," he tells Berger. "If you're not needing it anymore."

"I'll let you know," she replies. "But you, of course, have the right to do whatever you want with the property, Mr. Bray.

"Well, I don't know who will buy it after what happened," he mutters.

Neither Berger nor I comment. He is probably right. Most people do not want a house where someone has been murdered. "I already talked to one realtor," he goes on in a dull voice that belies his anger. "They said they couldn't take it on. They're sorry and all that, but they didn't want to represent the property. I don't know what to do." He stares out at the dark, lifeless house. "You know, we weren't real close to Diane, no one in the family was. She wasn't what I would call really into her family or friends. Mostly just into herself, and I know I probably shouldn't say that. But it's the d.a.m.n honest truth."

"Did you see her very often?" Berger asks him.

He shakes his head, no. "I guess I knew her best because we're only two years apart. We all knew she had more money than we could understand. She stopped by my house on Thanksgiving, pulled up in this brand new red Jaguar." He smiles bitterly and shakes his head again. "That's when I knew for sure she was into something I probably didn't want to know a d.a.m.n thing about. I'm not surprised, really." He takes a deep, quiet breath. "Not surprised really that it's ended up like this."

"Were you aware of her involvement in drugs?" Berger shifts her file to her other arm.

I am getting cold standing out here, and the dark house pulls at us like a black hole.

"The police have said some things. Diane never talked about what she did and we didn't ask, frankly. As far as we know, she didn't even have a will. So now we've got that mess, too," Eric Bray tells us. "And what to do with her things." He looks up at us from the driver's seat and the dark can't hide his misery. "I really don't know what to do."

So much eddies around a violent death. These are hardships that no one sees in the movies or reads about in the newspapers: the people left behind and the wrenching concerns they bear. I give Eric Bray my business card and tell him to call my office if he has any further questions. I go through my usual routine of letting him know the Inst.i.tute has a book-let, an excellent resource called What to Do When the Police Leave written by Bill Jenkins, whose young son was murdered during the mindless robbery of a fast-food restaurant a couple years back. "The book will answer a lot of your questions," I add. "I'm sorry. A violent death leaves many victims in its wake. That's the unfortunate reality."

"Yes, ma'am, that's for d.a.m.n sure," he says. "And yes, I'd like to read anything you got. I don't know what to expect, what to do about any of this," he repeats himself. "I'm out here if you have any questions. I'll be right here inside the car."

He shuts his door. My chest is tight. I am touched by his pain, yet I can't feel sorrow for his slain sister. If anything, the portrait he paints of her makes me like her even less. She wasn't even decent to her own flesh and blood. Berger says nothing as we climb the front steps and I sense her never-ending scrutiny. She is interested in my every reaction. She can tell that I still resent Diane Bray and what she tried to do to my life. I make no effort to hide it. Why bother at this point?

Berger is looking up at the porch light, which is faintly illuminated by the headlights of Eric Bray's car. It is a simple gla.s.s fixture, small and globe-shaped, supposed to be held into the fixture by screws. Police found the gla.s.s globe in the gra.s.s near a boxwood where Chandonne apparently tossed it. Then it was simply a matter of uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the bulb, which "would have been hot," I tell Berger. "So my guess is he covered it with something to protect his fingers. Maybe he used his coat."

"No fingerprints on it," she says. "Not Chandonne's prints, according to Marino." This is news to me. "But that doesn't surprise me, a.s.suming he covered the bulb so he didn't burn his fingers," she adds.

"What about the globe?"

"No prints. Not his." Berger inserts the key in the lock. "But he might have his hands covered when he unscrewed that, too. Just wonder how he reached the light. It's pretty high up." She opens the door and the alarm system begins beeping.

"Think he climbed up on something?" She goes to the key pad inside and enters the code.

"Maybe he climbed up on the railing," I suggest, suddenly the expert on Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's behavior and not liking the role.

"What about at your house?"

"He could have done that," I reply. "Climbed up on the railing and steadied himself against the wall or the porch roof."

"No prints on your light fixture or the bulb, in case you don't know," she tells me. "Not his, at any rate."

Clocks tick-lock in the living room, and I remember how surprised I was when I walked into Diane Bray's house for the first time, after she was dead, and discovered her collection of perfectly synchronized clocks and her grand but cold English antiques.

"Money." Berger stands in the living room and looks around at the scroll-end sofa, the revolving bookcase, the ebonized sideboard. "Oh yes, indeed. Money, money, money. Cops don't live like this."

"Drugs," I comment.

"No f.u.c.king kidding." Berger's eyes move everywhere. "User and dealer. Only she got others to be her mules. Including Anderson. Including your former morgue supervisor who was stealing prescription drugs that you a.s.sumed were being disposed of down the morgue sink. Chuck what's-his-name." She touches gold damask draperies and looks up at the valances. "Cobwebs," she observes. "Dust that didn't just appear during these last few days. There are other stories about her."

"There must be," I reply. "Selling prescription drugs on the street can't account for all this and a new Jaguar."

"Brings me back to a question I keep asking everyone who will stand still long enough for me to talk to them." Berger moves on toward the kitchen. "Why did Diane Bray move to Richmond?"

I have no answer.

"Not for the job, no matter what she said. Not for that. No way." Berger opens the refrigerator door. There is very little inside: Grape-Nuts cereal, tangerines, mustard, Miracle Whip. The two percent milk pa.s.sed its expiration date yesterday. "Rather interesting," Berger says. "I don't think this lady was ever home." She opens a cupboard and scans cans of Campbell's soup and a box of saltine crackers. There are three jars of gourmet olives. "Martinis? I wonder. She drink a lot?"

"Not the night she died," I remind her.

"That's right. Point-oh-three alcohol level." Berger opens another cupboard and another until she finds where Bray kept her liquor. "One bottle of vodka. One of Scotch. Two Argentine cabernets. Not the bar of someone who drank a lot. Probably was too vain about her figure to ruin it with booze. Pills at least aren't fattening. When you came to the scene, was that the first time you'd ever been to her houseto this house?" Berger asks.

"Yes."

"But your house is only a few blocks away."

"I'd seen this house in pa.s.sing. From the street. But no, I'd never been inside. We weren't friends."

"But she wanted to be friends."

"I'm told she wanted to have lunch or whatever. To get to know me," I reply.

"Marino."

"That's what Marino told me," I confirm, getting used to her questions by now.

"Do you think she was s.e.xually interested in you?" Berger asks this very casually as she opens a cabinet door. Inside are gla.s.ses and dishes. "There are plenty of intimations that she played both sides of the net."

"I've been asked that before. I don't know."

"Would it have bothered you if she was?"

"It would have made me uncomfortable. Probably," I admit.

"She eat out a lot?"

"It's my understanding she did."

I am noting that Berger asks questions I suspect she already has answered. She wants to hear what I have to say and weigh my perceptions against those of others. Some of what she explores carries the echo of what Anna asked me during our fireside confessionals. I wonder if it is remotely possible that Berger has talked to Anna, too.

"Reminds me of a store that's a front for some illegal business," Berger says as she checks out what's beneath the sink: a few cleansers and several dried sponges. "Don't worry," she seems to read my mind. "I'm not going to let anyone ask you these sorts of things in court, about your s.e.x life or whatever. Nothing about her personal life, either. I realize that's not supposed to be your area of expertise."

"Not supposed to be?" It seems an odd comment.

"Problem is, some of what you know isn't hearsay, but knowledge you got directly from her. She did tell you" Berger opens a drawer"that she often ate out alone, sat at the bar at Buckhead's."

"That's what she told me."

"The night you met her there in the parking lot and confronted her."

"The night I tried to prove that she was in collusion with my morgue a.s.sistant, Chuck."

"And she was."

"Unfortunately, she certainly was," I reply.

"And you confronted her."

"I did."

"Well, good oF Chuck's in lockup where he belongs." Berger walks out of the kitchen. "And if it's not hearsay," she returns to that topic, "then Rocky Caggiano is going to ask you and I can't object. Or I can, but it will get me nowhere. You need to realize that. And how it makes you look."

"Right now, I'm more worried about how everything makes me look to a special grand jury," I pointedly answer her.

She stops in the hallway. At the end of it, the master bedroom is behind a door that is carelessly ajar, adding to the ambiance of neglect and indifference that chills this place. Berger meets my eyes. "I don't know you personally," she says. "No one seated on that special grand jury is going to know you personally. It's your word against a murdered policewoman's that it was she who hara.s.sed you and not the other way around, and that you had nothing to do with her murdereven though you seem to think the world is better off without her."

"Did you get that from Anna or Righter?" I bitterly ask her.

She starts down the hallway. "Pretty soon, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, you're gonna get a thick skin," she says. "I'm making that my mission."["_Toc37098928"]

CHAPTER 26.

BLOOD IS LIFE. IT BEHAVES LIKE A LIVING CREAture.

When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in a panic, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear or cut. Platelets immediately rally to plug the hole. There are thirteen clotting factors and together they instigate their alchemy to stop blood loss. I have always thought that blood is bright red for a reason, too. It is the color of alarm, of emergency, of danger and distress. If blood were a clear fluid like sweat, we might not notice when we are injured or when someone else is. Bright red boasts of blood's importance, and it is the siren that sounds when the greatest of all violations has occurred: when another person has maimed or taken a life.

Diane Bray's blood cries out in drips and droplets, splashes and smears. It tattles on who did what and how and in some instances, why. The severity of a beating affects the velocity and volume of blood flying through the air. Castoff blood from the backswing of a weapon tells the number of blows, which in this case were at least fifty-six. That is as precisely as we can calculate, because some blood spatters overlay other spatters and sorting out how many might be on top of each other is like trying to figure out how many times a hammer struck a nail to drive it into a tree. The number of blows mapped in this room are consistent with what Bray's body told me. But again, so many fractures overlaid others and so much bone was utterly crushed that I, too, lost count. Hate. Incredible l.u.s.t and rage.

There has been no attempt to clean up what happened in the master bedroom, and what Berger and I find contrasts profoundly with the stillness and sterility of the rest of the house. First, there is what looks like a ma.s.sive bright pink web spun by crime scene technicians who have used a method called stringing to find the trajectories of blood droplets that are simply everywhere. The objective is to determine distance, velocity and angle, to conjure up through a mathematical model the exact position of Bray's body when each blow was struck. The results look like a strange modern art design, a weird fuchsia geometry that leads the eye to walls, ceiling, floor, antique furniture and the four ornate mirrors where Bray once admired her spectacular, sensual beauty. Coagulated puddles of blood on the floor are now hard and thick like dried mola.s.ses, and the king-size bed where Bray's body was so crudely displayed looks as if someone dashed cans of black paint across the bare mattress.

I feel Berger's reaction as she stares. She is silent as she absorbs what is ghastly, truly incomprehensible. She becomes charged with a peculiar energy that only people, especially women, who battle violence for a living can really understand. "Where are the bed linens?" Berger opens the accordion file. "Were they turned in to the labs?"

"We never found them," I reply, and I am reminded of the motel room at the campground. Those bed linens are missing, too. Chandonne claims bed linens disappeared from his apartment in Paris, I recall his saying.

"Removed before or after she was killed?" Berger slips photographs out of an envelope.

"Before. That's apparent from the b.l.o.o.d.y transfers on the bare mattress." I step inside the room, moving around strings that point accusingly at Chandonne's crime like long slender fingers. I show Berger unusual parallel smears on the mattress, the b.l.o.o.d.y stripes transferred by the coil handle of the chipping hammer when Chandonne set it down on the mattress between or after blows. Berger doesn't see the pattern at first. She stares, slightly frowning as I decipher a chaos of dark stains that are handprints and smears where I believe Chandonne's knees may have been as he was straddling the body and acting out his horrific s.e.xual fantasies. "These patterns wouldn't have been transferred to the mattress if there were linens on the bed at the time of the attack," I explain.

Berger studies a photograph of Bray on her back, sprawled across the middle of the mattress, black corduroy pants and belt on, but no shoes and socks, naked from the waist up, a smashed gold watch on her left wrist. A gold ring on her battered right hand is driven into the bone of her finger.

"So either there were no linens on the bed at the time, or he removed them for some reason," I add.

"I'm trying to envision that." Berger scans the mattress. "He's in the house. He's forcing her down the hallway, back to this area, to the bedroom. There's no sign of a struggleno evidence he injured her until they get in here and then boom! All h.e.l.l breaks loose. My question is this: He gets her back here and then says, 'Hey, wait a second while I strip the bed' ? He takes time to do that?"