You see, I direct you.
You have no will of your own. You may think you do, but I am the current running through your body, every impulse coming from me. I am inside you. Feel it!
Do you remember that night? You eagerly opened your door and then attacked me because you could not face your longing for me. I have forgiven you for taking my eyes, but you could not take my soul. It follows you constantly. If you try, you can touch it.
Maintenant! Maintenant! It is time. The Red Stick awaits you.
You must come to me first or it will be too late to hear my stories.
Only for you will I tell them.
I know what you want, mon petit agneau prisй! I have what you want.
In two weeks I will be dead and have nothing to say. Ha!
Will you release me to the ecstasy?
Or will I release you? Sinking my teeth into your soft, round loveliness.
If you do not find me, I will find you.
Love and rapture,
Jean-Baptiste
In the old-style bathroom with its plain white toilet, its plain plastic shower curtain around the plain white tub, its mildew-stained white walls, Scarpetta vomits. She drinks a glass of water from the tap and returns to the bedroom, to the table, to that blighted piece of paper, which she suspects will offer her no evidence. He is too clever to leave evidence.
She sits in the chair, trying to fight the images of the filthy beast flying through her front door like an evil spirit crackling out of hell. Scarcely can she recall in detail the pursuit, that terrible pursuit around her living room, as he swung an iron hammer, the same iron hammer he had used before to shatter women's heads and bodies to battered flesh and splintered bone, especially their faces.
At the time she was the medical examiner for the Richmond murders, it never occurred to her that she might be the next one. Since that near-death experience, she struggles to will away her imagined destruction of her own body and face. He would not have raped her. He isn't capable of rape. Jean-Baptiste's revenge on the world is to cause death and disfigurement, to re-create others in his own image. He is the ultimate embodiment of self-hate.
If it is true that she saved her life by permanently blinding him, then he should be so lucky as to be spared his own reflection in the polished metal mirror he must look at every day inside his death row cell.
Scarpetta goes to a hallway closet and moves the vacuum cleaner out of the way. She rolls out a suitcase.
35
IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, CALL me on my cell phone," Nic says, standing in the front doorway of her father's white brick house in the Old Garden District, where homes are large and spreading canopies of magnolias and live oaks keep much of the city's old establishment in the shade.
Even on the brightest days, Nic finds her childhood home dark and foreboding.
"Why, you know I'm not calling that newfangled little phone of yours," her father says, winking at her. "Even if you don't make the call, you have to pay for it, isn't that right? Or does unlimited mileage, I mean minutes, apply?"
"What?" Nic frowns, then laughs. "Never mind. My new number's taped to the refrigerator, whether you decide to call it or not. If I don't call back right away, you know it's because I'm busy. Now you be good, Buddy-Boy. You're my big man, right?"
Her five-year-old son peeks out from behind his grandfather and makes a face.
"Got it!" Nic pretends to snatch his nose and tries the old trick of sticking her thumb up between two fingers. "Do you want your nose back or not?"
Buddy looks like the proverbial towheaded choir boy, dressed in overalls that are an inch too short. He touches his nose and sticks out his tongue.
"You keep sticking out that tongue of yours and one day it won't fit in your mouth anymore," his grandfather warns him.
"Shhhh," Nic says. "Don't be saying things like that, Papa. He'll believe you."
She peeks around him and grabs her son. "Gotcha!" She lifts him up and covers his face with kisses. "Looks like it's time to go shopping, my big man. You're outgrowing your clothes again. How come you keep doing that, huh?"
"I dunno." He hugs her tightly around the neck.
"Do you think it's possible you might wear something besides overalls?" she whispers in his ear.
He vigorously shakes his head. She gently puts him down.
"Why can't I come?" Buddy pouts.
"Mama has to work. By the time you wake up, I'll be back, okay? You go on to bed like my big man and I'll bring you a surprise."
"What surprise?"
"If I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise, now would it?" Nic kisses the top of his head again, and he irritably musses his hair as if swatting away bugs. "Uh-oh," she says to her father. "I believe someone's getting grumpy."
Buddy gives her a look, a mixture of anger and hurt that never fails to make Nic feel as though she has betrayed and failed him. Ever since her salesman ex-husband Ricky got the promotion he always wanted, he got more impossible to live with, traveling all the time, complaining and unkind. He's gone, and Nic's glad, relieved, but deeply wounded in ways she can't define. Hardships in life are always for the best if you do God's will, according to the doctrine of her father, who loves her but won't take her side in her failed marriage.
"You ought to know that being a cop doesn't mix with holding on to a man, if you ever get married," he told her when she got accepted to the police academy eight years ago, after a dreary career of working as a bookkeeper at the Ford dealership in Zachary, where she eventually met Ricky. They dated three months and moved in together. Another sin. At last she was free of her haunted house.
"Mama had her own business," Nic reminded her father every time he made his comments.
"Honey, that's not the same. She didn't carry a gun."
"Maybe if she had…"
"Now, you hush your mouth!"
She finished the sentence only once. This was after she filed for divorce and her father berated her for an entire afternoon, pacing in his living room, his face a storm of disbelief, fear and anger. He's a big, lanky man, and every upset stride seemed to carry him from one wall to the other and jostled the antique crystal lamp on the table next to the couch until it finally fell over and broke.
"Now look what you did!" he cried out. "You broke your mother's lamp."
"You broke it."
"Girls don't need to be chasing criminals and shooting guns. That's why you lost Ricky. He married a pretty woman, not an Annie Oakley. And what kind of mother…"
That was when Nic said it. "If Mama had a gun, maybe she wouldn't have been butchered by some fucking asshole right here in our own house!"
"Don't you dare use words like that," he told her, emphasizing each stony word with a violent stab of his finger, stabs that reminded her of what was done to her mother.
They never touched the subject again. It remains a stalled storm front between them. No matter how often they see each other, she can't feel his warmth or get too close. After two premature babies who didn't survive, Nic was born and is the only child her father has. After he retired from teaching high school sociology, he got bored and pretty much quit life. He spends his mornings working crossword puzzles when he's not babysitting, and taking obsessively long, brisk walks.
She knows he blames himself. Her mother was murdered eight years ago in the middle of the day while he and Nic were both at work. Maybe she blames herself, too, not so much for her mothers death, she tells herself, but because if Nic hadn't gone out with friends after work, her father might not have been the one to find his wife's body and blood all over the house, from where she fought her killer, running from room to room. By the time Nic got home, slightly drunk from beer, police were swarming the property, her mother's body already removed. Nic never saw it. It was a closed-casket funeral. She's never been able to bring herself to get a copy of the police report, and because the case remains unsolved, the coroner's office won't give her a copy of the autopsy records. All she knows is that her mother was stabbed and slashed and bled to death. Knowing that was enough. But for some reason, it isn't anymore.