Predator (56 page)

    
Did you do anything else to them? Anything besides blinding them and having sex?

    
I experimented. Some.

    
Did you ever engage in torture?

    
I’d say stabbing somebody’s eyes out… well, Basil replied, and now he wishes he hadn’t said it.

    
It opened a whole new line of questioning. Dr. Wesley started in on knowing right from wrong and comprehending the suffering Basil was causing another human being, that if he knew something was torture, then he was cognizant of what he was doing at the time he was doing it and also upon reflection. That’s not exactly the way he said it, but that’s what he was getting at. Just the same old song and dance he heard in Gainesville when the shrinks were trying to figure out if he was competent to stand trial. He never should have let them know he was. That was stupid, too. A forensic psychiatric hospital is a five-star hotel compared to prison, especially if you’re on death row, sitting around in your tiny, claustrophobic cell feeling like Bozo the clown in your blue-and-white-striped pants and orange T-shirt.

    
Basil gets up from his steel bed and stretches. He pretends he’s not interested in the camera high up on the wall. He never should have admitted that sometimes he fantasized about killing himself, that his preferred way would be to cut his wrists and watch himself bleed, drip, drip, drip, watch the puddle form on the floor, because it would remind him of his former pleasant preoccupations with how many women? He’s lost count. It might have been eight. He told Dr. Wesley eight. Or was it ten?

    
He stretches some more. He uses the steel toilet and returns to the bed. He opens the most recent Field & Stream, looks at page 52, at what’s supposed to be a column about a hunter’s first .22 rifle and happy memories of rabbit and possum hunting, of fishing in Missouri.

    
This page 52 isn’t the real one. The real page 52 was torn out and scanned into a computer. Then, in an identical font and identical format, a letter was embedded into the magazine’s text. The scanned page 52 was carefully reinserted into the magazine, a little glue used, and what looks like a chatty column on hunting and fishing is a clandestine communication intended for Basil.

    
The guards don’t care about inmates getting fishing magazines. They aren’t likely to even flip through them, not boring magazines that are completely devoid of sex and violence.

    
Basil gets under the covers, turning on his left side diagonally on the bed, his back to the camera, just like he always does when he needs to relieve his sexual tension. He reaches under the thin mattress and pulls out strips of white cotton from two pairs of white boxer shorts that he has been ripping up all week.

    
Under the sheets, he begins a tear with his teeth, then rips. Each strip gets tightly tied to what has become a six-foot-long knotted rope. He has enough fabric left for two more strips. He tears with his teeth and rips. He breathes heavily and rocks himself a little as if relieving his sexual tension, and he rips and he ties a strip to the rope, and then he ties on the last one.

    
Chapter 62

    
Inside the Academy’s computer center, Lucy sits before three large video screens, reading e-mails as she restores them to the server.

    
What she and Marino have discovered so far is that before he began his fellowship, Joe Amos was communicating with a television producer who claimed to be interested in developing yet another forensic show for one of the cable networks. For his input, Joe was promised five thousand dollars per episode, assuming the shows ever make it on the air. Apparently, Joe started getting brilliant ideas in late January, about the time Lucy got sick while testing new avionics in one of her helicopters, fled to the ladies’ room and forgot her Treo. At first he was subtle about it, plagiarizing hell scenes. Then he became blatant, outright stealing them as he went into databases to his heart’s content.

    
Lucy restores another e-mail, this one dated February 10, a year ago. It is from last summer’s intern, Jan Hamilton, who got the needle stick and threatened to sue the Academy.

    
Dear Dr. Amos,

    
I heard you on Dr. Self’s radio show the other night and was fascinated by what you had to say about the National Forensic Academy. Sounds like an amazing place, and by the way, congratulations on being awarded a fellowship. That’s incredibly impressive. I wonder if you could help me get an internship there for the summer. I am studying nuclear biology and genetics at Harvard and want to be a forensic scientist, specializing in DNA. I’m attaching a file that has my photograph and other personal information.

    
Jan Hamilton.

    
P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.

    
“Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.

    
Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles and whatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.

    
Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.

    
“What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.

    
“Body Farm,” Marino says.

    
She finds the video file and opens it.

    
They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.

    
The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling—yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.

    
Stevie.

    
Lucy tries to reach Benton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, and Dr. Susan Lane answers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.

    
“I’m e-mailing a video clip to you,” Lucy says. “About three years ago, you scanned a young female patient named Helen Quincy. I’m wondering if it might be the same person in the video clip.”

    
“Lucy, I’m not supposed to.”

    
“I know, I know. Please. It’s really important.”

    
WONK… WONK… WONK… WONK…

    
Dr. Lane has Kenny Jumper in the magnet. She is in the middle of his structural MRI, and the lab is full of the usual racket.

    
“Can you go into the database?” Dr. Lane asks her research assistant. “See if we might have scanned a patient named Helen Quincy. Possibly three years ago? Josh, keep going,” she says to the MRI tech. “Can you stand it without me for a minute?”

    
“I’ll try.” He smiles.

    
Beth, the research assistant, is typing on the keyboard of a computer on the back counter. It doesn’t take her long to find Helen Quincy. Dr. Lane has Lucy on the phone.

    
“Do you have a photograph of her?” Lucy asks.

    
WOP WOP WOP WOP. The sound of the gradients acquiring images reminds Dr. Lane of the sonar in a submarine.

    
“Only of her brain. We don’t photograph patients.”

    
“Have you looked at the video clip I just e-mailed to you? Maybe it will mean something.”

    
Lucy sounds frustrated, disappointed.

    
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP…

    
“Hold on. But I don’t know what you think I can do with it,” Dr. Lane says.

    
“Maybe you remember her when she was there? You were working there three years ago. You or someone scanned her. Johnny Swift was doing a fellowship there at the same time. May have seen her, too. Reviewed her scans.”

    
Dr. Lane isn’t sure she understands.

    
“Maybe you scanned her,” Lucy persists. “Maybe you saw her three years ago, might remember her if you saw a picture…”

    
Dr. Lane wouldn’t remember. She’s seen so many patients, and three years is a long time.

    
“Hold on,” she says again.

    
BAWN… BAWN… BAWN… BAWN…

    
She moves to a computer terminal and goes into her e-mail without sitting down. She opens the file of the video clip and plays it several times, watches a pretty young woman with dark blond hair and dark eyes looking up from the dead body of an enormously fat man whose face is covered with maggots.

    
“Good Lord,” Dr. Lane says.

    
The pretty young woman in the video clip looks around, right into the camera, her eyes looking right at Dr. Lane, and the pretty young woman digs her gloved hand in the pocket of the fat, dead man’s gray jacket. There the clip stops, and Dr. Lane plays it again, realizing something.

    
She looks through the Plexiglas at Kenny Jumper and can barely see his head at the other end of the magnet. He is small and slender in baggy, dark clothes, ill-fitting boots, sort of homeless-looking but delicately handsome with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes are dark, and Dr. Lane’s realization gets stronger. He looks so much like the girl in the photograph, they could be brother and sister, maybe twins.

    
“Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”

    
“On him?”

    
“Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.

    
Chapter 63

    
Benton finds it a little curious that a taxicab is parked outside the neuroimaging lab. It is a blue SUV taxi, and no one is inside it. Maybe it is the taxi that was supposed to pick up Kenny Jumper at the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home, but why is the taxi parked here, and where is the driver? Near the taxi is the white prison van that transported Basil here for his five o’clock interview. He’s not doing well. He says he’s feeling very suicidal and wants to quit the study.

    
“We have so much invested in him,” Benton says to Scarpetta as they walk inside the lab. “You have no idea how bad it is when these people drop out. Especially him. Dammit. Maybe you can be a good influence on him.”

    
“I’m not even going to comment,” she says.

    
Two prison guards stand outside the small room where Benton will talk to Basil, try to talk him out of quitting PREDATOR, talk him out of killing himself. The room is part of the MRI suite, the same room Benton has used before when he talks to Basil. Scarpetta is reminded that the guards aren’t armed.

    
She and Benton walk into the interview room. Basil is sitting at the small table. He isn’t restrained, not even with plastic flex-cuffs. She likes PREDATOR even less and she didn’t think that was possible.