Predator (6 page)

    
“We need to make this quick,” he says as he parks near the sink and locks two of the swivel casters. “I’m already in deep shit with my wife. It’s her birthday.”

    
He unzips the pouch and spreads it open. The victim has raggedly cut short, black hair that is damp and still gory with bits of brain and other tissue. There is almost nothing left of her face. It looks as if a small bomb blew up inside her head, which is rather much what happened.

    
“Shot in the mouth,” Dr. Lonsdale says, and he is young with an intensity that borders on impatience. “Massive skull fractures, brain pulpifaction, which of course we usually associate with suicides, but nothing else about this case is consistent with suicide. It appears to me that her head was tilted pretty far back when the trigger was pulled, explaining why her face is basically shot off, some of her teeth blown out. Again, not uncommon in suicides.”

    
He switches on a magnifying lamp and positions it close to the head.

    
“No need to pry open her mouth,” he comments. “Since she has no face left. Thank God for small favors.”

    
Benton leans close and smells the sweet, putrid stench of decomposing blood.

    
“Soot on the palate, the tongue,” Dr. Lonsdale continues. “Superficial lacerations of the tongue, the perioral skin and nasolabial fold due to the bulging-out effect when gases from the shotgun blast expand. Not a pretty way to die.”

    
He unzips the pouch the rest of the way.

    
“Saved the best for last,” Thrush says. “What do you make of it? Reminds me of Crazy Horse.”

    
“You mean the Indian?” Dr. Lonsdale gives him a quizzical look as he unscrews the lid from a small glass jar filled with a clear liquid.

    
“Yeah. I think he put red hand prints on his horse’s ass.”

    
There are red hand prints on the woman, on her breasts, abdomen and upper inner thighs, and Benton positions the magnifying lamp closer.

    
Dr. Lonsdale swabs the edge of a hand print and says, “Isopropyl alcohol, a solvent like that will get it off. Obviously, it’s not water-soluble and brings to mind the sort of stuff people use for temporary tattooing. Some type of paint or dye. Could also have been done in permanent Magic Marker, I suppose.”

    
“I’m assuming you haven’t seen this in any other cases around here,” Benton says.

    
“Not at all.”

    
The magnified hand prints are well defined with clean margins, as if made with a stencil, and Benton looks for feathering strokes of a brush, for anything that might indicate how the paint, ink or dye was applied. He can’t tell, but based on the density of color, he suspects the body art is recent.

    
“I suppose she could have gotten this at some point earlier. In other words, it’s unrelated to her death,” Dr. Lonsdale adds.

    
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Thrush agrees. “There’s a lot of witchcraft around here with Salem and all.”

    
“What I’m wondering is how quickly something like this begins to fade,” Benton says. “Have you measured them to see if they’re the same size as her hand?” He indicates the body.

    
“They look bigger to me,” Thrush says, holding out his own hand.

    
“What about her back?” Benton asks.

    
“One on each buttock, one between her shoulder blades,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “Look like a man’s size, the hands do.”

    
“Yeah,” Thrush says.

    
Dr. Lonsdale pulls the body partially on its side, and Benton studies the hand prints on the back.

    
“Looks like she has some sort of abrasion here,” he says, noting a scraped area on the hand print between the shoulder blades. “Some inflammation.”

    
“I’m not clear on all the details,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “It’s not my case.”

    
“Looks as if it was painted after she got the scrape,” Benton says. “Am I seeing welts, too?”

    
“Maybe some localized swelling. Histology should answer that. It’s not my case,” he reminds them. “I didn’t participate in her autopsy,” he is sure to remind them. “I glanced at her. That was it before I just now rolled her out. I did look over the autopsy report.”

    
Should the chief’s work be negligent or incompetent, he’s not about to take the blame.

    
“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” Benton asks.

    
“Well, the cold temperatures would have slowed rigor.”

    
“Frozen when she was found?”

    
“Not yet. Apparently, her body temperature when she got here was thirty-eight degrees. Fahrenheit. I didn’t go to the scene. I can’t give you those details.”

    
“The temperature at ten o’clock this morning was twenty-one degrees,” Thrush tells Benton. “The weather conditions are on the disk I gave you.”

    
“So the autopsy report has already been dictated,” Benton says.

    
“It’s on the disk,” Thrush answers.

    
“Trace evidence?”

    
“Some soil, fibers, other debris adhering to blood,” Thrush replies. “I’ll get them run in the labs as quick as I can.”

    
“Tell me about the shotgun shell you recovered,” Benton says to him.

    
“Inside her rectum. You couldn’t see it from the outside, but it showed up on x-ray. Damnedest thing. When they first showed me the film, I thought maybe the shell was under her body on the x-ray tray. Had no idea the damn thing was inside her.”

    
“What kind?”

    
“Remington Express Magnum, twelve-gauge.”

    
“Well, if she shot herself, she’s certainly not the one who shoved the shell up her rectum after the fact,” Benton says. “You running it through NIBIN?”

    
“Already in the works,” Thrush says. “The firing pin left a nice drag mark. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Chapter 8

    
Early the next morning, snow blows sideways over Cape Cod Bay and melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy’s windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.

    
Lucy shouldn’t have gone to Lorraine’s last night. She wishes she hadn’t and can’t stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here to Provincetown a week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. She watches Stevie’s regular breathing.

    
“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”

    
She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren’t frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can’t believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.

    
“Stevie, wake up. I’ve got to get going,” she says loudly.

    
Stevie doesn’t stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself no more, and then nights like last night happen and it isn’t smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?

    
How could Johnny be dead?

    
She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.

    
I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.

    
“You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.

    
Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang .380 pistol on the table by the bed.

    
“Come on, wake up.”

    
Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God, no.

    
When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.

    
Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.

    
He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.

    
He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.

    
That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.

    
“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”