Four Scarpetta Novels (126 page)

J
EAN-BAPTISTE IS
quite fond of handcuffs.

The thick steel bracelets around his wrists are rings of magnetic strength. Power surges through him. He is calm now, even conversational, as Officers Abrams and Wilson escort him along corridors, stopping at every steel door and holding up their ID name tags and showing their faces through the glass windows. The officer on the other side releases the electronic lock, and the journey continues.

“She was very upsetting to me,” he says in his soft voice. “I regret my outburst. She blinded me, you know, and will not say she is sorry.”

“I don't know why she even came to see a dirtbag like you,” Officer Abrams comments. “If anybody should be upset, it's her, after what you tried to do. I've read about it, know all about your worthless life.”

Officer Abrams is making the big mistake of giving in to his emotions. He hates Jean-Baptiste. He would like to hurt Jean-Baptiste.

“I am quiet inside now,” Jean-Baptiste says meekly. “But I feel sick.”

The officers stop at another door, and Abrams shows his ID in the glass window. They pass through. Jean-Baptiste averts his face, staring down at the floor and looking away from each officer who grants them entrance deeper inside the prison.

“I eat paper,” Jean-Baptiste confesses. “It is a nervousness of mine, and I have been eating a lot of paper today.”

“You writing yourself letters?” Abrams snidely goes on. “No wonder you spend so much time on the toilet.”

“This is very true,” Jean-Baptiste agrees. “But this time it is worse. I feel weak, and my stomach hurts.”

“It will pass, so to speak.”

“Don't worry. If it doesn't, we'll get you to the infirmary.” This time it is Officer Wilson who speaks. “They'll give you an enema. You'll probably like that.”

Inside Pod A, the voices of inmates bounce off concrete and steel. The noise is maddening, and the only way Jean-Baptiste has been able to endure it all these months is to decide when he will hear and when he won't. If this isn't enough, he leaves, usually for France. But today he will begin his travel to Baton Rouge and be reunited with his brother. He is his brother. This point confuses him.

When he is with his brother, Jean-Baptiste experiences his brother's existence, which is apart from the existence of Jean-Baptiste.

When the two of them are separated, Jean-Baptiste is his brother, and their roles in their conquests unite in one delicious act. Jean-Baptiste picks up the beautiful woman, and she desires him, possibly desperately. They have sex. Then he releases her to the ecstasy, and when it is finished and she is free, Jean-Baptiste is slippery with her blood, his tongue thrilled by the taste of her salty sweetness and the metallic hint of the iron he needs. Later, his teeth sometimes ache, and he is prone to massaging his gums and washing himself obsessively.

Jean-Baptiste's cell comes into view, and he glances inside the control booth at the woman who sits there today. She is a difficulty, but not an impossible one. No one can watch all activities at all times, and as Jean-Baptiste walks slowly, very slowly, and holds his stomach, she barely glances at him. The early afternoon belongs to Beast. Now he has his visitors in a special holding cell on the other end of the pod, a much more
civilized place to visit relatives and the clergy. Because visitors have been in and out for the past three or four hours, the woman in the console must pay special attention in the event Beast acts out. Why not? He has nothing to lose.

The door of the holding cell is made of bars, allowing the officers to note Beast's every move inside, ensuring he will not harm the sad, kind people who have come to see him. Beast looks at Jean-Baptiste through the bars, just as the woman in the booth unlocks Jean-Baptiste's door and Officers Abrams and Wilson remove Jean-Baptiste's handcuffs.

Beast screams and grabs at the bars of his holding cell, yelling and cursing and jumping up and down. All attention sharply turns in his direction, and Jean-Baptiste grabs Officers Wilson and Abrams by their thick leather belts and jerks so hard that he lifts them off their feet. Their shocked yells blend with the jarring, deafening noise in the pod as Jean-Baptiste slams them into a concrete wall to the left of the massive door, which he shuts just enough so it doesn't lock. He blinds them with his long, filthy thumbnail, and his magnetized hands crush their windpipes. As their faces turn a dusky blue, their flailing quickly stills. Jean-Baptiste killed them with virtually no bloodshed, just little trickles from their eyes and a cut on Officer Wilson's head.

Jean-Baptiste removes Officer Abrams's uniform and puts it on. He does this in seconds, it seems, pulling the black cap low over his face and slipping on the dead man's glasses. He walks out of the cell and then shuts the door, just one more loud metal clang as Beast struggles with officers far away and gets a faceful of pepper spray, which only makes him scream and resist more, this time sincerely.

One door after another, Jean-Baptiste passes through, holding up Officer Abrams's identification tag. So sure is he of success, he is completely at ease, even seems a little preoccupied, as officers click him through. Jean-Baptiste's feet are not on the ground, but in the air as he easily walks out of the prison, a free man, and digs Officer Abrams's car keys out of a pocket.

I
NSIDE THE GEORGE BUSH
Intercontinental Airport, Scarpetta stands near a wall, out of traffic.

She sips black coffee, knowing it's the last thing she needs. Her appetite has abandoned her, and when she bought a hamburger less than an hour ago, she couldn't swallow the first bite. Caffeine makes her hands shake. A hit of Scotch would calm her down, but she won't dare, and the reprieve would only be temporary. Of all times, she needs to think clearly now, to somehow handle her stress without self-destructive assistance.

Please answer your phone,
she silently begs.

Three rings and, “Yeah.”

Marino is driving his loud truck.

“Thank God!” she exclaims, turning her back to passengers walking with purpose or running to their gates. “Where in God's name have you been? I've been trying to reach you for days. I'm so sorry about Rocco . . .”

For Marino's sake, she is.

“I don't want to talk about it,” he replies, subdued and more unhappy than usual. “Where I've been is hell, if you want to know. Maybe broke
my all-time record for drinking bourbon and beer and not answering the goddamn phone.”

“Oh, no. Another fight with Trixie. I told you what I think of . . .”

“I don't want to talk about it,” he says again. “No offense, Doc.”

“I'm in Houston,” she tells him.

“Oh, shit.”

“I did it. I took notes. Maybe none of it is true. But he did say that Rocco has a place in some gay district near downtown. In Baton Rouge. Chances are good the house isn't in his name. But neighbors must know about him. Could be a lot of evidence in that house.”

“On another subject, in case you ain't been listening to the news, a female arm turned up in one of the creeks down there,” he informs her. “They're doing DNA. Might be the last lady, Katherine Bruce. If it is, he's getting frenzied. The location the arm was found in was right off Blind River, which runs into Lake Maurepas. This guy's got to be familiar with the bayous and so on around there.

“Word is, the creek where the arm was isn't easily accessible. You'd have to know where it is, and almost nobody goes there. He was using the arm as gator bait, on a hook suspended from a rope.”

“Or he was displaying it for the shock effect.”

“I don't think that's it,” he says.

“Whatever the case, you're right, he's escalating.”

“Probably looking for another one even as we speak,” he says.

“I'm headed to Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says.

“Yeah, I figured you would.” Marino's voice is barely audible over the thrumming of his V-8 engine. “All to help out with some stupid drug overdose that happened eight years ago.”

“This isn't just about a drug overdose, Marino. And you know it.”

“Whatever it's about, you ain't safe down there, which is why I'm heading that way. Been driving since midnight and have to stop every other minute for coffee, then I have to stop again every other minute for a john.”

She reluctantly tells him about Rocco's connection to the Charlotte Dard case, that he represented a pharmacist, an alleged suspect.

It is as if Marino doesn't hear her.

“I still got another ten hours on the road. And I gotta sleep at some point. So I probably won't catch up with you until tomorrow,” he says.

J
AY HEARS ABOUT
his mutant brother on the radio.

He isn't sure how he feels about it as he sweats inside the fishing shack, his head bleary, his beauty not quite what it was even a week ago. He faults Bev for this, for everything. The more often she goes to the mainland, the more often the beer supply is replenished. Jay used to go weeks, a month, without a beer. Of late, the refrigerator is never empty.

Resisting alcohol has always been a challenge for him, ever since he began tasting fine wines as a boy in France, wines that are for the gods, his father would say. As a free man with complete mastery of his life, Jay sipped, savored and enjoyed in moderation. Now he is held hostage by cheap beer. Since Bev's last shopping expedition, he has been drinking a case a day.

“I guess I'm gonna have to make another run,” Bev says, her eyes fixed on his Adam's apple bobbing as he tilts a can straight up and drains it.

“Yeah, you do that.” Beer trickles down his bare chest.

“Whatever you want.”

“Fuck you. It's all about what you want.” He steps closer to her, his face menacing. “I'm falling apart!” he yells at her as he crumples a beer
can and hurls it across the room. “It's your fucking fault! How could anybody be holed up in here with a stupid cow like you and not have to drink his fucking brains out!”

He grabs another beer out of the refrigerator and pushes the door shut with his bare foot. Bev doesn't react. She resists the smile she feels inside. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see Jay out of control, confused and headed for hurting himself. At last she has found a way to get him back, and now that his monster brother is on the loose, Jay's going to get worse and do something, so she needs to keep up her guard. Her self-defense is to keep him drunk. She doesn't know why she didn't think of it a long time ago, but beer was scarce when she went to the mainland no more than once every four or six weeks.

Suddenly, his demands became once a month, twice a month, and each time she returned with cases of beer and was amazed by how much more he was drinking. Until lately, she had never seen him drunk. When he is drunk, he doesn't resist her advances, and she wipes him down with a wet towel as he sinks into unconsciousness. The next morning, he has no memory of what she did, of how she satisfied her own pleasure in creative ways, since he couldn't perform and wouldn't have, were he sober.

She watches him fumble with the radio, searching through static for the latest news updates, well on his way to being drunk again. As long as she's known him, he's had no body fat, his perfectly defined body a constant source of envy and humiliation for her. This will change quickly. It is inevitable. He'll get fat around his waist, and his pride will suffocate beneath puffiness and flab no matter how many push-ups and sit-ups and crunches he does. Maybe his perfect face won't look so good, either. Wouldn't that be something if he got so ugly—as ugly as he thinks she is—that she didn't want him anymore.

What was that story in the Bible? Samson—the mighty, beautiful Samson—gave in to what's-her-name, and she cut off his magical hair, or something. He lost all his strength.

“You stupid bitch!” Jay calls out. “Why are you just standing here, staring? My brother's on his way here if he isn't already here. He'd figure out where I'd be. He always has.”

“I hear twins think like that, are real tuned-in to each other.” The word
twin
is a deliberate scorpion sting. “He won't hurt you. He won't hurt me. You forget I've met him before. Why, I think he likes me because I can get beyond his looks.”

“He doesn't like anybody.” Jay gives up on the radio and angrily turns it off. “You don't live in the real world. I've got to find him first before he does something stupid, sees some woman and does her, leaving his damn bite marks all over her and smashing her head.”

“You ever watched him do it?” she casually asks.

“Go get the boat ready, Bev.”

She can't remember the last time he said her name. It is rich, like melted butter.

Then he spoils the moment by adding, “It's your goddamn fault about the arm. Wouldn't have happened if you'd brought me some pups.”

Since she returned from her errand-running on the mainland, all he's done is complain that she didn't bring gator bait, not the least bit grateful for what she did bring him.

She stares at the empty mattress by the wall.

“You got plenty of gator bait,” she said the other day. “More than you know what to do with these days.”

She convinced him that baiting a gator hook with human flesh would work just fine, maybe even better. Jay could have his fun with a reptile that was longer than he was tall. He'd watch it thrashing until he got bored, then shoot it in the head. Outlaw hunter that he is, he never keeps what he catches. He'd cut the nylon rope and watch the reptile slide into the water. Then he'd motor back to the shack.

This time it didn't work that way. All he vaguely remembers is baiting the hook and stringing it up over the thick branch of a cypress tree, and then hearing another boat not far away, someone else hunting gators
or maybe gigging frogs. Jay got the hell out of there, the hook still baited and dangling from the yellow nylon line. He should have cut it down. He made a big mistake but won't admit it. She suspects there was no other hunter out there. Jay was hearing things and he didn't think straight. Had he, it would have entered his mind that when another hunter found the caught gator, the bait either would have been found hanging out of its jaws or discovered in its guts when the gator was field-dressed.

“Do what I say, damn it. Get the boat ready,” he orders her. “So I can deal with him.”

“And how do you think you'll do that?” Bev asks calmly, placated and pleased by the craziness in front of her.

“I already told you. He'll find me,” Jay says, his head beginning to throb. “He can't live without me. He can't even die without me.”