“We’ve got to deal with the Simister scene, and I just can’t do it now. I’ve had it for the night. Reba’s probably had it.”
“She agreed to let us in, I assume.”
“As long as she’s with us. We’ll do it in the morning. I’m thinking about not going to Boston at all, but it’s not fair to Benton. Not fair to either of us,” she says, unable to keep the frustration and disappointment out of her voice. “Of course, it’s the same thing. I suddenly have urgent cases. He suddenly has an urgent case. All we’ll do is work.”
“What’s his case?”
“A woman dumped near Walden Pond, nude, bizarre fake tattoos on her body that I suspect were done after her murder. Red hand prints.”
Lucy grips the steering wheel harder.
“What do you mean, fake tattoos?”
“Painted ones. Body art, Benton says. A hood over her head, a shotgun shell inserted in her rectum, posed, degrading, all the rest. I don’t know much, but I’m sure I will.”
“Do they know who she is?”
“They know very little.”
“Anything similar happen in the area? Similar homicides? With the red hand prints?”
“You can divert the conversation all you want, Lucy, but it won’t work. You’re not yourself. You’ve gained weight, and for that to happen means something is off, very off. Not that you look bad, not at all, but I know what you’re like. You’re tired a lot and don’t look well. I hear about it. I haven’t said anything, but I know something’s wrong. I’ve known it for a while. Are you going to tell me?”
“I need to know more about the hand prints.”
“I’ve told you what I know. Why?” Scarpetta keeps her eyes on Lucy’s tense face. “What’s going on with you?”
She stares straight ahead and seems to struggle with how to put the right answer together. She’s good at that, so bright, so quick, she can rearrange information until her concoctions are more believable than the truth, and rarely does anybody doubt or question. What saves her is that she doesn’t believe her misinformation and manipulations, doesn’t for a moment forget the facts and fall headlong into her own traps. Lucy always has a rational reason for what she does, and sometimes it’s a good one.
“You must be hungry,” Scarpetta then says. She says it quietly, gently, the way she used to talk when Lucy was an impossible child, always acting out because she hurt so much.
“You always feed me when you can’t do anything else with me,” Lucy says in a subdued way.
“It used to work. When you were a little girl, I could get you to do anything in exchange for my pizza.”
Lucy is silent, her face grim and unfamiliar in the red glow of a traffic light.
“Lucy? Are you going to smile or look at me even once this night?”
“I’ve been doing stupid things. One-night stands. I hurt people. Just the other night in P town, I did it again. I don’t want to be close to anybody. I want to be left alone. I can’t seem to help it. This time, it may have been really stupid. Because I haven’t been paying attention. Because maybe I don’t give a shit.”
“I didn’t even know you were in P town,” Scarpetta remarks, and she isn’t judgmental.
Lucy’s sexual orientation isn’t what bothers her.
“You used to be careful,” Scarpetta says. “More careful than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Aunt Kay, I’m sick.”
Chapter 37
The black shape of the spider covers the back of his hand, floating toward her, passing through the beam of light, inches from her face. He has never moved the spider this close to her. He has placed a pair of scissors on the mattress and illuminates them briefly with the light.
“Say you’re sorry,” he says. “This is all your fault.”
“Give up your evil ways before it’s too late,” Ev says, and the scissors are within reach.
Maybe he is tempting her to grab them. She can barely see them, even in the light. She listens for Kristin and the boys, the spider a blur in front of her face.
“None of this would have happened. You’ve brought it upon yourself. Now comes punishment.”
“This can be undone,” she says.
“Time for the punishment. Say you’re sorry.”
Her heart pounds, her fear so intense she might vomit. She won’t apologize. She has committed no sin. If she says she’s sorry, he will kill her. Somehow, she knows it.
“Say you’re sorry!” he says.
She refuses to say it.
He orders her to say she’s sorry and she won’t. She preaches. She preaches her stupid, mindless garbage about her feeble god. If her god were so powerful, she wouldn’t be on the mattress.
“We can pretend it never happened,” she says in her hoarse, demanding voice.
He can feel her fear. He demands she say she’s sorry. No matter how much she preaches at him, she’s scared. The spider makes her tremble, her legs jumping on the mattress.
“You will be forgiven. You will be forgiven if you repent and let us go. I’ll never tell the police.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll never tell. People who tell get punished, punished in ways you can’t imagine. His fangs can go all the way through a finger, right through the nail,” he says of the spider. “Some tarantulas are repeat biters.”
The spider is almost touching her face. She jerks her head back, gasping.
“They strike and strike. They won’t stop until you rip them off you. If they bite you in a major artery, you die. They can shoot their hairs into your eyes and blind you. It’s very painful. Say you’re sorry.”
Hog told her to say it, say she was sorry, and he sees the door shutting, old wood with peeling paint, the mattress on the dirty, old floor. Then the sound of the shovel digging because he told her not to tell after he did the bad thing and said that people who tell get punished by God, get punished in unthinkable ways until they learn their lesson.
“Ask forgiveness. God will forgive you.”
“Say you’re sorry!” He shines the light in her eyes and she clamps them shut and jerks her face away from the light, but he finds her with it.
She won’t cry.
When he did the bad thing, she cried. He told her she would cry, all right, if she ever told. Then she finally did. She told, and Hog had no choice but to confess because it was true, he did the bad thing, and Hog’s mother didn’t believe a word of it, said Hog didn’t, couldn’t possibly have, that he obviously was sick and delusional.
It was cold and snowing. He didn’t know there was weather like that, had seen it on TV and in the movies but he didn’t know about it from his own experience. He remembers old brick buildings, seeing them through the window of the car when he was driven there, remembers the small lobby where he sat with his mother before the doctor came, a brightly lit place where a man sat in a chair moving his lips, rolling his eyes upward, having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there.
His mother went in and talked to the doctor, leaving him alone in the lobby. She told the doctor the bad thing Hog said he did, that it wasn’t true and he was very sick, that it was a private matter and all she cared about was that Hog got well, that he didn’t go around talking like that, ruining the family’s good name with his lies.
She didn’t believe he did the bad thing.
She told Hog what she intended to say to the doctor. You’re not well, she told Hog. You can’t help it. You imagine things and lie and are easily influenced. I’ll pray for you. You’d best pray for yourself, ask God to forgive you, say you’re sorry for hurting people who have been nothing but kind to you. I know you’re sick, but shame on you.
“I’m going to put him on you,” Hog says, moving the light closer to her. “If you hurt him like she did”—he pokes her forehead with the barrel of the shotgun—“you’ll learn the true meaning of punishment.”
“Shame on you.”
“I told you not to say that.”
He pokes her harder, the barrel of the shotgun striking bone, and she cries out. He presses the pressure light, shines it on her ugly, puffy, blotchy face. She bleeds. Blood runs down her face. When the other one brushed the spider to the floor, his abdomen ruptured and he bled his yellow blood. Hog had to glue him back together.
“Say you’re sorry. She said she was sorry. Do you know how many times she said it?”
He imagines her feeling the furry legs on her bare right shoulder, imagines her feeling the spider move on her skin and stop, lightly gripping her. She sits against the wall and shakes violently, glancing at the scissors on the mattress.
“All the way to Boston. That was a long trip, and it was cold in the back, her naked and tied up. There’s no seat back there, just a cold metal floor. She was cold. I gave them something to think about up there.”
He remembers the old brick buildings with grayish-blue slate roofs. He remembers when his mother drove him up there after he did the bad thing, and then years later, when he went back on his own and lived in the midst of the old brick and slate and didn’t last long. Because of the bad thing, he didn’t last long.
“What have you done with the boys?” She tries to sound strong, tries to sound unafraid. “Let them go.”
He pokes her private places and she jumps and he laughs and calls her ugly and fat and stupid, says no one would ever want her, the same thing he said when he did the bad thing.
“No wonder,” he keeps on, staring at her sagging breasts, her thick, flabby body. “You’re lucky I’m doing this to you. No one else would. You’re too disgusting and stupid.”
“I won’t tell anyone. Just let me go. Where are Kristin and the boys?”
“I went back and got them, poor little orphans. Just like I said. I even returned your car. I’m so pure of heart, not a sinner like you. Don’t worry. I brought them here just like I said.”
“I don’t hear them.”
“Say you’re sorry.”
“Did you drive them up to Boston, too?”
“No.”
“You didn’t really take Kristin…”
“I gave them something to think about up there. I’m sure he’s impressed. I hope he knows. He will soon, one way or other. There isn’t much time left.”
“Who? You can talk to me. I don’t hate you,” and now she sounds sympathetic.