Four Scarpetta Novels (164 page)

T
hey sit in
the kitchen at a table before a window that overlooks the narrow, murky canal.

“When the police got involved,” Fred Quincy is saying, “they did ask for a few things that might have their DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush, I forget what else. I never heard anything about what they did with the stuff.”

“They probably never analyzed it,” Lucy says, thinking about what she and Marino just talked about. “Possibly it's still in their evidence room. We can ask them about it, but I'd rather not wait.”

The suggestion that someone may have gained access to her system's administrative password is incredible. It's sickening. Marino must be mistaken. She can't stop thinking about it.

“Obviously, the case isn't a priority for them. They've always believed they just ran off. There was no sign of violence,” Fred says. “They said there should have been a sign of a struggle, or someone should have seen something. It was the middle of the morning, and there were people around. And Mom's SUV was missing.”

“I was told her car was there. An Audi.”

“It definitely wasn't. And she didn't have an Audi. I did. Someone must have seen my car when I got there later, looking for them. Mom had a Chevy Blazer. She used it to haul things around. You know, people get things so twisted. I went to the shop after trying to call all day. My mom's purse and Blazer were gone, and there was no sign of her or my sister.”

“Any sign they had ever been inside the shop?”

“Nothing was on. The closed sign was out.”

“Anything missing?”

“Not that I could tell. Certainly nothing obvious. Nothing in the cash drawer, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. If she left money in it overnight, it wasn't much. Something must have come up if you suddenly need their DNA.”

“I'll let you know,” Lucy says. “We may have a lead.”

“You can't tell me?”

“I promise I'll let you know. What was your first thought when you went looking for them, drove to the shop?”

“Truth? I thought maybe they'd never gone there at all, had just driven off somewhere over the rainbow.”

“Why do you put it like that?”

“There had been a lot of problems. Financial ups and downs. Personal problems. Dad had this extremely successful landscaping business.”

“In Palm Beach.”

“That's where it was headquartered. But he had greenhouses and tree farms in other locations, including around here. Then, in the mid-eighties, he got wiped out by citrus canker. Every damn one of his citrus trees had to be destroyed, and he had to let go of almost all of his employees and came very close to declaring bankruptcy. That was hard on Mom. He got back on his feet and was more successful then, and that was hard on Mom, too. You know, I'm not sure I should be telling you all this.”

“Fred, I'm trying to help. I can't do it if you don't talk to me.”

“Let me start with when Helen was twelve,” he says. “I was beginning my freshman year in college. I'm older, obviously. Helen went to live with my dad's brother and his wife for about six months.”

“Why?”

“It was sad, such a pretty, talented girl. Got into Harvard when she was only sixteen, lasted not even a semester, had a meltdown and came home.”

“When?”

“That would have been the fall before she and Mom disappeared. She only lasted until November—at Harvard.”

“Eight months before she and your mother disappeared?”

“Yes. Helen was dealt a really lousy genetic hand.”

He pauses as if trying to decide whether he should go on, then, “All right. My mom wasn't the most stable person. You might have already figured that out, her Christmas obsession. Craziness, more craziness, on and off for as long as I can remember. But it got really bad when Helen was twelve. Mom was doing some pretty irrational things.”

“Was she seeing a local psychiatrist?”

“Whatever money could buy. That celebrity one. She lived in Palm Beach back then. Dr. Self. She recommended hospitalization. That's the real reason she sent Helen off to live with my aunt and uncle. Mom was in the hospital, and Dad was really busy and not inclined to take care of a twelve-year-old kid all by himself. Mom came home. Then Helen did and neither of them were, well, normal.”

“Did Helen go to a psychiatrist?”

“Not at that time,” Fred says. “She was just strange. Not unstable like Mom but strange. She did well in school, really well, then went off to Harvard and crashed and burned, was found in the lobby of some funeral home up there, didn't know who she was. As if things weren't bad enough, Dad died. Mom went into a real downhill spiral, would go places on the weekends, not tell me where she was, freaking me out. It was awful.”

“So the police figured she was unstable and into disappearing acts, and maybe ran off with Helen?”

“I wondered it myself. I still wonder if my mom and sister are out there somewhere.”

“How did your dad die?”

“Fell off a ladder in the rare-book library. The house in Palm Beach was three stories, everything marble and stone tiles.”

“He home alone when it happened?”

“Helen found him on the first-floor landing.”

“She was the only one in the house at the time?”

“A boyfriend, maybe. Don't know who.”

“When was this?”

“A couple months before she and Mom disappeared. Helen was seventeen then, precocious. Well, truthfully, after she came home from Harvard, she was completely out of control. I've always wondered if it was a reaction to my dad, my uncle, the people on my dad's side of the family. Extremely religious and serious, Jesus this, Jesus that, big in their churches. Deacons, Sunday-school teachers, always trying to
witness
to people.”

“You ever meet any of Helen's boyfriends?”

“No. She ran around, would disappear for days. Just trouble. I didn't come home if I didn't have to. Mom's Christmas obsession is such a joke. It was never Christmas in our house. It was always pretty damn awful.”

He gets up from the table. “Mind if I have a beer?”

“Help yourself.”

He picks out a Michelob, twists off the cap. He shuts the refrigerator door and sits back down.

“Was your sister ever hospitalized?” Lucy asks.

“Same place Mom was. For a month right after she dropped out of Harvard. Club McLean, I called it. The good ole family genes.”

“McLean in Massachusetts?”

“Yup. You ever take notes? I don't know how you can remember all this.”

Lucy fingers the pen she's holding, the small recorder turned on and invisible in her pocket.

“We need your mom's and sister's DNA,” she says.

“I don't have any idea how we're going to get it now. Unless the police still have that stuff.”

“Yours will work. Think of it as family-tree DNA,” Lucy says.

S
carpetta looks out
the window at the cold, white street. It is almost three, and she has been on the phone most of the day.

“What kind of screening do you have? You must have some system in place for controlling who makes it on the air,” she says.

“Of course. One of the producers talks to the person, makes sure he isn't crazy.”

It seems an odd choice of words for a psychiatrist.

“In this case, I'd already had a conversation with the man, the lawn-service man. It's a long story.” Dr. Self is talking fast.

“He said his name was Hog when you talked to him the first time?”

“I didn't think anything about it. A lot of people have wacky nicknames. I just need to know. Did some elderly lady suddenly turn up dead, a suicide? You would know, wouldn't you? He threatened to kill me.”

“I'm afraid a lot of elderly ladies turn up dead on a regular basis,” Scarpetta replies evasively. “Can you give me a few more details? What exactly did he say?”

Dr. Self recounts the story of the blighted citrus trees in the old woman's yard, of her grief over the loss of her husband, of her threat to kill herself with her dead husband's shotgun if the lawn-service man—Hog—had her trees destroyed. Benton walks into the living room with two coffees, and Scarpetta puts Dr. Self on speakerphone.

“Then he threatened to kill me,” Dr. Self says again. “Or said he was going to but changed his mind.”

“I've got someone with me who needs to hear this,” Scarpetta says, and she introduces Benton. “Tell him what you just told me.”

Benton sits on the couch as Dr. Self replies that she doesn't understand why a forensic psychologist in Massachusetts would have any interest in a suicide that may or may not have happened in Florida. But he might have a valid opinion about a threat on her life, and she would love to have him on her show sometime. What sort of person would threaten her like that? Is she in danger?

“Does your studio keep track of the call-ins through caller ID?” Benton asks. “Are the numbers stored, even temporarily?”

“I would think so.”

“I'd like you to find that out right away,” he says. “Let's see if we can determine where he was calling from.”

“I do know we don't accept unidentified calls. You have to disable the caller ID block, because once I had this insane woman threaten to kill me on the air. It's not the first time it's happened. Her call came in as unidentified. No more.”

“Then you're obviously capturing the numbers of whoever is calling in,” Benton says. “What I'd like is a printout of the numbers of everybody who called in during the show earlier this afternoon. What about when you talked to this lawn man the first time? You mentioned you had a phone conversation with him. When was that, and was the call local? Did you capture the number in a log?”

“Late Tuesday afternoon. I don't have caller ID. I have an unlisted, unpublished number and don't need it.”

“Did he identify himself?”

“As Hog.”

“He called your house?”

“My private office. I see patients in the office behind my house. It's really a guesthouse-slash-pool house.”

“How might he have gotten the number?”

“I have no idea, now that you mention it. Of course, my colleagues, anybody I do business with, my patients have it.”

“Any possibility this man might be one of your patients?”

“I didn't recognize his voice. I can't think of anybody I see who might have been him. There's something more going on here.” She gets pushy. “I think I have a right to know if there's something more about this than meets the eye. In the first place, you haven't confirmed whether there's an old woman who committed suicide with a shotgun because of her blighted citrus trees.”

“Nothing quite like that.” It is Scarpetta who speaks. “But there is a very recent case that sounds similar to what you just described, an elderly woman whose trees were marked for eradication. A shotgun death.”

“My God. Did it happen after six p.m. this past Tuesday?”

“Probably before that,” Scarpetta says, fairly certain she knows why Dr. Self is asking.

“That's a relief. Then she was already dead by the time the lawn man, Hog, called me. He called maybe five, ten minutes after six and asked to be on my show, told the story about the old woman threatening to kill herself. So she must have already done it. I wouldn't want to think her death had something to do with him wanting to be on my show.”

Benton gives Scarpetta a look that says,
What a narcissistic, insensitive bitch,
and says to the speakerphone, “Right now we're trying to figure out a lot of other things, Dr. Self. And it would be helpful if you could give us a little more information about David Luck. You prescribed Ritalin to him.”

“Are you now saying something horrible's happened to him, too? I know he's missing. Is there something new?”

“There's reason to be greatly concerned.” Scarpetta repeats what she's said in the past. “We have reason to be very concerned about him, his brother and the two sisters they lived with. How long have you been seeing David as a patient?”

“Since last summer. I think he first came to see me last July. It might have been late June. Both parents had been killed in an accident and he was acting out a lot, doing poorly in school. He and his brother were homeschooled.”

“You saw him how often?” Benton asks.

“Usually once a week.”

“Who brought him to his appointments?”

“Sometimes Kristin. Sometimes Ev. Now and then they both brought him, and on occasion I would meet with the three of them.”

“How was David referred to you?” It is Scarpetta who asks. “How did he end up in your care?”

“Well, it's rather poignant. Kristin was a call-in. Apparently, she listens to my show a lot and decided maybe she could get hold of me that way. She called in to my radio show and said she was taking care of a South African boy who had just lost both his parents and he needed help, et cetera, et cetera. It was quite a heartbreaking story, and I agreed on the air to see him. You would be amazed at the mail I got from my listeners after that. I still get mail, people wanting to know how the little South African orphan is doing.”

“Do you have a tape of the show you're talking about?” Benton asks. “An audio clip?”

“We have tapes of everything.”

“How quickly could you get me that audio clip, and one from your television show earlier today? I'm afraid we're snowed in up here—at the moment, anyway. We're doing what we can remotely but are somewhat limited.”

“Yes, I hear you've had quite the storm up there. Hope you don't lose power,” she says, as if they've just spent the past half-hour having a pleasant conversation. “I can call my producer right now, and he can get it to you by e-mail. I'm sure he'll want to talk with you about being on my show sometime.”

“And the phone numbers of the callers,” Benton reminds her.

“Dr. Self?” Scarpetta says, looking out the window with dismay.

It is starting to snow again.

“What about Tony? David's brother?”

“They fought a lot.”

“Did you see Tony, too?”

“I never met him,” she says.

“You said you know both Ev and Kristin. Did one of them have an eating disorder?”

“I wasn't treating either one of them. They weren't my patients.”

“I should think you could tell by looking at them. One of them was on a steady diet of carrots.”

“Based on her appearance, Kristin,” she replies.

Scarpetta looks at Benton. She had the Academy's DNA lab contact Detective Thrush the instant she discovered the yellowish dura mater. DNA from the dead woman up here has been matched to DNA from yellowish stains on a blouse Scarpetta removed from Kristin's and Ev's house. The body in the Boston morgue most likely is Kristin, and Scarpetta has no intention of relaying this information to Dr. Self, who might very well talk about it on the air.

Benton gets up from the couch to put another log on the fire as Scarpetta gets off the phone. She watches the snow. It falls fast in the light of the lamps at Benton's front gate.

“No more coffee,” Benton says. “My nerves have had it.”

“Does it do anything besides snow up here?”

“The main streets are probably already clear. They're amazingly fast up here. I don't think the boys have anything to do with this.”

“They have something to do with it,” she says, moving in front of the fire, sitting on the hearth. “They're gone. It appears Kristin's dead. Probably all of them are.”