The door of the holding cell is made of bars, allowing the officers to note Beast's every move inside, ensuring he will not harm the sad, kind people who have come to see him. Beast looks at Jean-Baptiste through the bars, just as the woman in the booth unlocks Jean-Baptiste s door and Officers Abrams and Wilson remove Jean-Baptiste s handcuffs.
Beast screams and grabs at the bars of his holding cell, yelling and cursing and jumping up and down. All attention sharply turns in his direction, and Jean-Baptiste grabs Officers Wilson and Abrams by their thick leather belts and jerks so hard that he lifts them off their feet. Their shocked yells blend with the jarring, deafening noise in the pod as Jean-Baptiste slams them into a concrete wall to the left of the massive door, which he shuts just enough so it doesn't lock. He blinds them with his long, filthy thumbnail, and his magnetized hands crush their windpipes. As their faces turn a dusky blue, their flailing quickly stills. Jean-Baptiste killed them with virtually no bloodshed, just little trickles from their eyes and a cut on Officer Wilson's head.
Jean-Baptiste removes Officer Abrams's uniform and puts it on. He does this in seconds, it seems, pulling the black cap low over his face and slipping on the dead man's glasses. He walks out of the cell and then shuts the door, just one more loud metal clang as Beast struggles with officers far away and gets a faceful of pepper spray, which only makes him scream and resist more, this time sincerely.
One door after another, Jean-Baptiste passes through, holding up Officer Abrams's identification tag. So sure is he of success, he is completely at ease, even seems a little preoccupied, as officers click him through. Jean-Baptiste's feet are not on the ground, but in the air as he easily walks out of the prison, a free man, and digs Officer Abrams's car keys out of a pocket.
101
INSIDE THE GEORGE BUSH Intercontinental Airport, Scarpetta stands near a wall, out of traffic.
She sips black coffee, knowing it's the last thing she needs. Her appetite has abandoned her, and when she bought a hamburger less than an hour ago, she couldn't swallow the first bite. Caffeine makes her hands shake. A hit of Scotch would calm her down, but she won't dare, and the reprieve would only be temporary. Of all times, she needs to think clearly now, to somehow handle her stress without self-destructive assistance.
Please answer your phone, she silently begs.
Three rings and, "Yeah."
Marino is driving his loud truck.
"Thank God!" she exclaims, turning her back to passengers walking with purpose or running to their gates. "Where in God's name have you been? I've been trying to reach you for days. I'm so sorry about Rocco…"
For Marino's sake, she is.
"I don't want to talk about it," he replies, subdued and more unhappy than usual. "Where I've been is hell, if you want to know. Maybe broke my all-time record for drinking bourbon and beer and not answering the goddamn phone."
"Oh, no. Another fight with Trixie. I told you what I think of…"
"I don't want to talk about it," he says again. "No offense, Doc."
"I'm in Houston," she tells him.
"Oh, shit."
"I did it. I took notes. Maybe none of it is true. But he did say that Rocco has a place in some gay district near downtown. In Baton Rouge. Chances are good the house isn't in his name. But neighbors must know about him. Could be a lot of evidence in that house."
"On another subject, in case you ain't been listening to the news, a female arm turned up in one of the creeks down there," he informs her. "They're doing DNA. Might be the last lady, Katherine Bruce. If it is, he's getting frenzied. The location the arm was found in was right off Blind River, which runs into Lake Maurepas. This guy's got to be familiar with the bayous and so on around there.
"Word is, the creek where the arm was isn't easily accessible. You'd have to know where it is, and almost nobody goes there. He was using the arm as gator bait, on a hook suspended from a rope."
"Or he was displaying it for the shock effect."
"I don't think that's it," he says.
"Whatever the case, you're right, he's escalating."
"Probably looking for another one even as we speak," he says.
"I'm headed to Baton Rouge," Scarpetta says.
"Yeah, I figured you would." Marino's voice is barely audible over the thrumming of his V-8 engine. "All to help out with some stupid drug overdose that happened eight years ago."
"This isn't just about a drug overdose, Marino. And you know it."
"Whatever it's about, you ain't safe down there, which is why I'm heading that way. Been driving since midnight and have to stop every other minute for coffee, then I have to stop again every other minute for a john."
She reluctantly tells him about Rocco's connection to the Charlotte Dard case, that he represented a pharmacist, an alleged suspect.
It is as if Marino doesn't hear her.
"I still got another ten hours on the road. And I gotta sleep at some point. So I probably won't catch up with you until tomorrow," he says.
102
JAY HEARS ABOUT his mutant brother on the radio. He isn't sure how he feels about it as he sweats inside the fishing shack, his head bleary, his beauty not quite what it was even a week ago. He faults Bev for this, for everything. The more often she goes to the mainland, the more often the beer supply is replenished. Jay used to go weeks, a month, without a beer. Of late, the refrigerator is never empty.
Resisting alcohol has always been a challenge for him, ever since he began tasting fine wines as a boy in France, wines that are for the gods, his father would say. As a free man with complete mastery of his life, Jay sipped, savored and enjoyed in moderation. Now he is held hostage by cheap beer. Since Bev's last shopping expedition, he has been drinking a case a day.
"I guess I'm gonna have to make another run," Bev says, her eyes fixed on his Adam's apple bobbing as he tilts a can straight up and drains it.
"Yeah, you do that." Beer trickles down his bare chest.
"Whatever you want."
"Fuck you. It's all about what you want." He steps closer to her, his face menacing. "I'm falling apart!" he yells at her as he crumples a beer can and hurls it across the room. "It's your fucking fault! How could anybody be holed up in here with a stupid cow like you and not have to drink his fucking brains out!"
He grabs another beer out of the refrigerator and pushes the door shut with his bare foot. Bev doesn't react. She resists the smile she feels inside. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see Jay out of control, confused and headed for hurting himself. At last she has found a way to get him back, and now that his monster brother is on the loose, Jay's going to get worse and do something, so she needs to keep up her guard. Her self-defense is to keep him drunk. She doesn't know why she didn't think of it a long time ago, but beer was scarce when she went to the mainland no more than once every four or six weeks.
Suddenly, his demands became once a month, twice a month, and each time she returned with cases of beer and was amazed by how much more he was drinking. Until lately, she had never seen him drunk. When he is drunk, he doesn't resist her advances, and she wipes him down with a wet towel as he sinks into unconsciousness. The next morning, he has no memory of what she did, of how she satisfied her own pleasure in creative ways, since he couldn't perform and wouldn't have, were he sober.
She watches him fumble with the radio, searching through static for the latest news updates, well on his way to being drunk again. As long as she's known him, he's had no body fat, his perfectly defined body a constant source of envy and humiliation for her. This will change quickly. It is inevitable. He'll get fat around his waist, and his pride will suffocate beneath puffiness and flab no matter how many push-ups and sit-ups and crunches he does. Maybe his perfect face won't look so good, either. Wouldn't that be something if he got so ugly-as ugly as he thinks she is-that she didn't want him anymore.