Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 5

I get up from my chair. "Well, it does matter. It sure as h.e.l.l does," I tell him. "You're a coward, Buford." I turn my back on him and walk out of the room.

Minutes later, from behind the shut door in my wing of the house, I hear Anna showing Righter out. Obviously, he lingered long enough to talk to her, and I wonder what he might have said about me. I sit on the edge of my bed, utterly lost. I can't remember ever feeling this lonely, this frightened, and am relieved when I hear Anna coming down the hall. She knocks lightly on my door.

"Come in," I say in an unsteady voice.

She stands in the doorway looking at me. I feel like a child, powerless, hopeless, foolish. "I insulted Righter," I tell her. "Doesn't matter if what I said was true. I called him a coward."

"He thinks you are unstable right now," she replies. "He is concerned. He is also ein Mann ohne Ruckgrat. A man without backbone, as we say where I come from." She smiles a little.

"Anna, I'm not unstable."

"Why are we in here when we can be enjoying the fire?" she says.

She intends to talk to me. "Okay," I concede, "you win."["_Toc37098907"]

CHAPTER 5.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ANNA'S PATIENT. FOR THAT MATter, I have never had psychotherapy of any sort, which is not to say I have never needed it. Certainly I have. I don't know anybody who can't benefit from good counsel. It is simply that I am so private and don't trust people easily and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolute discretion. I am a doctor. I know other doctors. Doctors talk to each other and to their family and friends. They tell secrets that they swear upon Hippocrates they will never utter to another soul. Anna switches off lamps. The late morning is overcast and as dark as dusk, and rose-painted walls catch firelight and make the living room irresistibly cozy. I am suddenly self-conscious. Anna has set the stage for my unveiling. I pick the rocker and she pulls an ottoman close and perches on the edge of it, facing me like a great bird hunched over its nest.

"You will not get through this if you remain silent." She is brutally direct.

Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.

"You are traumatized," Anna goes on. "Kay, you are not made of steel. Not even you can endure so much and just keep going as if nothing has happened. So many times I called you after Benton was killed, and you would not find time for me. Why? Because you did not want to talk.

I can't hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.

"I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning." Anna sits forward, intensely leaning into the words she fires straight at my heart. "This is your day of reckoning." She points at me, staring. "Now you will talk to me, Kay Scarpetta."

I Wearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. "I can never get away from it," I say in despair under my breath.

"Get away from what?" This has snagged Anna's interest.

"What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don't talk about it."

"I want you to talk about it now," she tells me.

"It's foolish."

She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarra.s.sing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or b.l.o.o.d.y Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanee. "I remember being moved in ways I can't say." I share memories I did not know I still had. "The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don't touch their character, don't take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them." My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. "Like my being asked only about my cases," I go on. "Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some G.o.dd.a.m.n cheap thrill with a screw cap."

"You feel lonely," Anna softly observes. "And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients."

I do not answer her but continue my a.n.a.logies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. "I'm constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones," I say. "And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and creva.s.sed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren't. The brain, for example, doesn't look like what it does. On gross examination, it's about as exciting as a mushroom."

Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say no. She wants to know why I didn't feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.

"No." She prods me. "Do not think. Feel it."

I ponder.

"No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it." She touches her hand over her heart.

"I have to think. I've gotten where I am in life by thinking," I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon s.p.a.ce I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.

"You have gotten where you are in life by knowing," she says. "And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?"

"Because I don't really acknowledge that side. It's a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example," I reply.

"Ah." Anna nods again. "You make a.n.a.logies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the a.s.sociations you are just now telling me?"

I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the gra.s.s like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. "I don't want to go through that looking gla.s.s," I tell her. "It isn't just that I didn't want to tell Benton. I don't want to tell anyone. I don't want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and a.s.sociations, I don't, well, I don't..."

Anna nods again, deeply this time. "By not acknowledging them, you don't invite your imagination into your work," she finishes my thought.

"I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand."

She studies me before replying. "Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?" She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. "What if, for example"she pauses dramatically"you could take the facts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray's life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watchwatch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?

"That would be unspeakably awful," I barely reply.

"How powerful if a jury could see a film like that," she says.

Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of minnows.

"But if you went through that looking gla.s.s, as you refer to it," she goes on, "then where might it end?" She throws her hands up. "Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton's murder."

I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don't make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you 're so smart, what are we gonna do next. Mister Profiler? Can you read our minds, figure us out, predict? Huh? He wouldn't answer them. He would ask them nothing as they forced him into a small neighborhood grocery store on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania that had closed at five in the afternoon. Benton was going to die. They would torment and torture him, and that was the part he would center onhow to short-circuit the pain and degradation he knew they would inflict if they had time. Darkness and the spurt of a match. His face wavering in the light of a small flame that trembles with each stir of air as those two psychopathic a.s.sholes move about in the plenum of a s.h.i.tty little Pakistani grocery store they torched after he was dead.

My eyelids fly open. Anna is talking to me. Cold sweat crawls down my sides like insects. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

"Very, very painful." Her face melts with compa.s.sion. "I cannot imagine."

Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his running shoes, Saucony running shoes. Sauconys were the only brand he would wear and I used to call him a fussbudget because he was so particular if he really liked something. And he has on the old UVA sweatshirt Lucy gave him, dark blue with bright orange letters, and over the years it has gotten very faded and soft. He cut off the sleeves because they were too short, and I have always liked how he looks in that old, worn-out sweatshirt, with his silver hair, his clean profile, the mysteries behind his intense, dark eyes. His hands lightly curl around the armrests of his chair. He has the fingers of a pianist, long and slender and expressive when he talks, and always gentle when they touch me, which is less and less with time. I am saying all this out loud to Anna, speaking in the present tense about a man who has been dead for more than a year.

"What secrets do you think he kept from you?" Anna asks. "What mysteries did you see in his eyes?"

"Oh G.o.d. Mostly about work." My breath trembles, my heart flying away in fear. "He kept many details to himself. Details about what he saw in certain cases, things he felt were so awful no one else should be subjected to them."

"Even you? Is there anything you have not seen?"

"Their pain," I speak quietly. "I don't have to see their terror. I don't have to hear their screams."

"But you reconstruct it."

"Not the same thing. No, not the same. Many of the killers Benton dealt with liked to photograph, audiotape and in some instances videotape what they did to their victims. Benton had to watch. He had to listen. I always knew. He'd come home looking gray. He wouldn't talk much during dinner, wouldn't eat much, and on those nights he drank more than usual."

"But he wouldn't tell you ..."

"Never," I interrupt with feeling. "Never. That was his Indian Burial Ground and no one was allowed to step there. I taught at a death investigation school in Saint Louis. This was early in my career, before I moved here, when I was still a deputy chief in Miami. I was doing a cla.s.s on drowning and decided since I was already there, I'd go ahead and attend the entire weeklong school. One afternoon, a forensic psychiatrist taught a cla.s.s on s.e.xual homicide. He showed slides of living victims. A woman was bound to a chair and her a.s.sailant had tightly tied rope around one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and inserted needles in the nipple. I can still see her eyes. They were dark pools filled with h.e.l.l, and her mouth was wide open as she screamed. And I saw videotapes," I go on in a monotone. "A woman, abducted, bound, tortured and about to be shot in the head. She keeps whimpering for her mother. Begging, crying. I think she was in a bas.e.m.e.nt, the footage dark, grainy. The sound of the gun going off. And silence."

Anna says nothing. The fire snaps and pops.

"I was the only woman in a room of about sixty cops," I add.

"Even worse, then, because the victims were women and you were the only woman," Anna says.

Anger touches me as I remember the way some of the men stared at the slides, at the videotapes. "The s.e.xual mutilation was arousing to some of them," I say. "I could see it in their faces, sense it. Same thing with some of the profilers, Ben-ton's colleagues in the unit. They'd describe the way Bundy would rape a woman from the rear as he strangled her. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding. He would climax as she died. And these men Benton worked with enjoyed the telling a bit too much. Do you have any idea what that's like?" I fix a stare on her that is as sharp as nails. "To see a dead body, to see photographs, videos, of someone brutalized, of someone suffering and terrified and realize that the people around you are secretly enjoying it? That they find it s.e.xy?"

"Do you think Benton found it s.e.xy?" Anna asks.

"No. He witnessed such things weekly, maybe even daily. s.e.xy, never. He had to hear their screams." I have begun to ramble. "Had to hear them crying and begging. Those poor people didn't know. Even if they had, they couldn't have helped it."

"Didn't know? What didn't these poor people know?"

"That s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts are only more aroused by crying. By begging. By fear," I reply.

"Do you think Benton cried or begged when his killers abducted him and took him to that dark building?" Anna is about to score.

"I've seen his autopsy report." I slip into my clinical hiding place. "There's really nothing in it to tell me definitively what happened before death. He was badly burned in the fire. So much tissue burned away, it wasn't possible to see, for example, if he still had a blood pressure when they cut him."

"He had a gunshot wound to his head, too, did he not?" Anna asks.

"Yes."

"Which do you think came first?"

I stare mutely at her. I have not reconstructed what led up to his death. I have never been able to bring myself to do that.

"Envision it, Kay," Anna tells me. "You know, do you not? You have worked too many deaths not to know what happened."

My mind is dark, as dark as the inside of that grocery store in Philadelphia.

"He did something, didn't he?" She pushes, leaning into me, on the very edge of the ottoman. "He won, didn't he?"

"Won?" I clear my throat. "Won!" I exclaim. "They cut his face off and burned him up and you say he won?"

She waits for me to make the connection. When I offer her nothing further, she gets up and walks to the fire, lightly touching my shoulder as she pa.s.ses. She tosses on another log and looks at me and says, "Kay, let me ask you. Why would they shoot him after the fact?"

I rub my eyes and sigh.

"Cutting off the face was part of the MO," she goes on. "What Newton Joyce liked to do to his victims." She refers to the evil male partner of the evil Carrie Grethena psychopathic pair that made Bonnie and Clyde seem like a Sat.u.r.day morning cartoon from my youth. "Excise their faces and store them in the freezer as souvenirs, and because Joyce's face was so homely, so scarred by acne," Anna goes on, "he stole what he envied, beauty. Yes?"

"Yes, I suppose. As much we can go with any such theory about why people do what they do."

"And it was important that Joyce do the excisions carefully and not damage the faces. Which is why he did not shoot his victims, certainly not in the head. He did not want to risk causing damage to the face, the scalp. And shooting is too easy." Anna shrugs. "Quick. Maybe merciful. Far better to be shot than to have your throat cut. So why did Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen shoot Benton?"

Anna stands over me. I look up at her. "He said something," I answer slowly, finally. "He must have."

"Yes." Anna sits back down. "Yes, yes." She encourages me with her hands, as if directing traffic to move across the next intersection. "What, what? Tell me, Kay."

I reply that I don't know what Benton said to Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen. But he said something or did something that caused one or the other to lose control of the game. It was an impulse, an involuntary reaction when one of them pushed the gun to Benton's head and pulled the trigger. Boom. And the fun was over. Benton felt nothing, was cognizant of nothing after that. No matter what they did to him after that, it didn't matter. He was dead or dying. Unconscious. He never felt the knife. Maybe he never saw it.

"You knew Benton so well," Anna says. "You knew his killers, or at least you knew Carrie Grethenyou'd had experiences with her in the past. What do you think Benton said and to whom did he say it? Who shot him?"

"I can't..."

"You can."

I look at her.

"Who lost control?" She pushes me farther than I ever thought I could go.

"She did." I pull this up from the deep. "Carrie did. Because it was personal. She'd been around Benton from the old days, from the start, when she was at Quantico, at the Engineering Research Facility."

"Where she also met Lucy long years ago, maybe ten years ago."

"Yes, Benton knew her, knew Carrie, knew her probably as well as you can know any reptilian mind like hers," I add.

"What did he say to her?" Anna's eyes are riveted to me.

"Something about Lucy, probably," I say. "Something about Lucy that would insult Carrie. He insulted Carrie, taunted her about Lucy, that's what I believe." I have a direct shunt from my subconscious to my tongue. I don't even have to think.

"Carrie and Lucy were lovers at Quantico," Anna adds another piece. "Both working on the artificial intelligence computer in the Engineering Research Facility."

"Lucy was an intern, just a teenager, a kid, and Carrie seduced her. They were working on the computer system together. I got Lucy that internship," I bitterly add. "I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt."

"Didn't lead to quite what you intended, did it?" Anna suggests.

"Carrie used her...."

"Made Lucy gay?"

"No, I wouldn't go that far," I say. "You don't make people gay"

"Made Benton dead? Can you go that far?"

"I don't know, Anna."

"A volatile past, a personal history. Yes. Benton said something about Lucy, and Carrie lost control and shot him just like that," Anna summarizes. "He did not die the way they planned." She sounds triumphant. "He did not."

I rock quietly, looking out at a gray morning that has become full of bl.u.s.ter. The wind exerts itself in fierce gusts that fling dead branches and vines across Anna's backyard, reminding me of the angry tree hurling apples at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Then Anna gets up with no announcement, as if an appointment is up. She leaves me to go about other business in her house. We have talked enough for now. I decide to retreat to the kitchen, and that is where Lucy finds me around noon after her workout. I am opening a can of whole tomatoes when she walks in, the early stages of a marinara sauce simmering on the stove.