Predator (10 page)

    
Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence—sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence—all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.

    
Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In the real case, the trigger-happy daughter is facedown in a pool of blood on the living-room floor. She was shot three times, once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and he thinks about the way she was dressed when she killed her daddy while he was on the toilet and then put on an act in front of the police before pulling out her pistol again. She died barefoot, in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing panties or a bra. He clicks to her autopsy photographs, not as interested in what she looked like with a Y incision as in how she looked naked on the cold, steel table. She was only fifteen when the police shot her dead, and he thinks of Jenny.

    
He looks up, smiles at her from the other side of his desk. She has been sitting patiently, waiting for instructions. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a Glock nine-millimeter, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, drops out the magazine and pushes the pistol across the desk to her.

    
“You ever shot a gun before?” he asks his newest teacher’s pet.

    
She has the cutest turned-up nose and huge eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he imagines her naked and dead like the girl in the scene photograph on his screen.

    
“I grew up with guns,” she says. “What’s that you’re looking at, if you don’t mind my asking.”

    
“E-mail,” he says, and not telling the truth has never bothered him.

    
He rather likes not telling the truth, likes it far more than dislikes it. Truth isn’t always truth. What is true? What is true is what he decides is true. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Jenny cranes her head to get a better look at what’s on his screen.

    
“Cool. People e-mail entire case files to you.”

    
“Sometimes,” he says, clicking to a different photograph, and the color printer behind his desk starts up. “What we’re doing is classified,” he then says. “Can I trust you?”

    
“Of course, Dr. Amos. I completely understand classified. If I didn’t, I’m training for the wrong profession.”

    
A color photograph of the dead girl in a pool of blood on the living-room floor slides into the printer tray. Joe turns around to get it, looks it over, hands it to her.

    
“That’s going to be you this afternoon,” he says.

    
“I hope not literally,” she teases.

    
“And this is your gun.” He looks at the Glock in front of her on the desk. “Where do you propose you hide it?”

    
She looks at the photograph, not fazed by it, and asks, “Where did she hide it?”

    
“You can’t see it in the photograph,” he replies. “A pocketbook, which, by the way, should have cued somebody. She finds her father dead, supposedly, calls nine-one-one, opens the door when the cops get there and has her pocketbook. She’s hysterical, never left the house, so why’s she walking around with her pocketbook?”

    
“That’s what you want me to do.”

    
“The pistol goes in your pocketbook. At some point, you reach in for tissues because you’re boo-hooing, and you pull the gun and start shooting.”

    
“Anything else?”

    
“Then you’re going to get killed. Try to look pretty.”

    
She smiles. “Anything else?”

    
“The way she’s dressed.” He looks at her, tries to show it in his eyes, what he wants.

    
She knows.

    
“I don’t have the exact same thing,” she replies, playing him a little, acting naïve.

    
She’s anything but, probably been fucking since kindergarten.

    
“Well, Jenny, see if you can approximate. Shorts, T-shirt, no shoes or socks.”

    
“She doesn’t have on underwear, looks to me.”

    
“Then there’s that.”

    
“She looks like a slut.”

    
“Okay. Then look like a slut,” he says.

    
Jenny thinks this is very funny.

    
“I mean, you are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”

    
“You don’t need someone else.”

    
“Oh, really.”

    
“Really,” she says.

    
She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.

    
“We could get in trouble,” she says.

    
“We won’t.”

    
“I don’t want to get kicked out,” she says.

    
“You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”

    
She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.

    
“I’m a grown-up,” she says.

    
“You’re from Texas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big in Texas, don’t they.”

    
“Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.

    
He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their corkboards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.

    
“You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”

    
“You’re also engaged.”

    
“She’s at a conference in Chicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”

    
Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.

    
“Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.

    
“You’re special,” he says.

Chapter 13

    
An hour out from Signature Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.

    
She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries of Broward County tax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper from West Palm Beach.

    
Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in The Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up in Chicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.

    
“Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country of Alberta, Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”

    
Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy…

    
Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.

    
She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.

    
“I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.

    
“When you going to learn to fly that thing?”

    
“Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”

    
She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.

    
“I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

    
“I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

    
“From who?” he says suspiciously.

    
“Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

    
She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR. Benton doesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.