Predator

31

Bentonsits in his office on the ground floor of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, one of few contemporary buildings on a two-hundred-and-thirty-seven-acre campus graced with century-old brick and slate, and fruit trees and ponds. Unlike most offices atMcLean, his has no view, just a handicapped-parking space directly beyond his window, then a road, then a field that is popular withCanadageese.

His office is small and cluttered with papers and books, and is located in the middle of the H-shaped lab. At each corner is an MR sca

He buzzes his study coordinator.

“Has our newest normal called back yet?”Bentonstares out the window at two geese wandering along the road. “Ke

“Hold on, that might be him now.” Then, “Dr. Wesley? He’s on the line.”

“Hello,”Bentonsays. “Good afternoon, Ke

“Not too bad.”

“You sound as if you have a bit of a cold.”

“Maybe allergies. I petted a cat.”

“I’m going to ask you some more questions, Ke

“You already asked me all those questions.”

“These are different ones. Routine questions, the same ones we ask everybody who participates in our study.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, where are you calling from?”Bentonasks.

“A pay phone. You can’t call me back on it. I have to call you.”

“You don’t have a phone where you’re staying?”

“Like I told you, I’m at a friend’s house here inWaltham, and he don’t have a phone.”

“All right. Let me just confirm a few things you told me yesterday, Ke

“Yeah.”

“Twenty-four years old.”

“Yeah.”

“White.”

“Yeah.”

“Ke

“Right-handed. I don’t have a driver’s license, if you want an ID.”

“That’s all right,”Bentonsays. “It’s not required.”

Not only that, but to ask for proof of identification, to photograph patients or make any effort whatsoever to verify who they really are is a violation of HIPPA’s Protected Health Information Restriction.Bentongoes through the questions on the form, asking Ke

“What is your drinking pattern over the last month?”Bentoncontinues down the list, hating every minute of it.

Telephone screening is tedious and pedestrian. But if he doesn’t do it himself, he’ll end up on the phone anyway, because he doesn’t trust information gathered by research assistants and other untrained perso

“Well, maybe a beer or two now and then,” Ke

“Why don’t you come in this Friday? Attwo o’clockin the afternoon. Would that work for you?”

“For the magnet thing?”

“That’s right. Your scan.”

“No. Thursday at five. I can do Thursday at five.”

“All right, then. Okay. Thursday at five.”Bentonwrites it down.

“And you can send a taxi.”

Bentonsays he will send a taxi and asks for an address and is puzzled by Ke

“Why a funeral home?”Bentoninquires, tapping the pencil on the form.

“It’s close to where I’m staying. It has a pay phone.”

“Ke

“Okay. I’ll call you on this same pay phone.”

Wesley hangs up and checks directory assistance to see if there is such a place as the Alpha amp; Omega Funeral Home inEverett. There is. He calls it and is put on hold and subjected to Hoobastank’s The Reason.

The reason for what? He thinks impatiently. Dying?

“Benton?”

He looks up and seesDr. Susan Lanein his doorway, holding a report.

“Hi,” he says, hanging up.

“Have some news about your friend Basil Jenrette,” she says, looking closely at him. “You look stressed.”

“When don’t I? The analysis already done?”

“Maybe you should go home,Benton. You look exhausted.”

“Preoccupied. Staying up too late. Tell me how our boy Basil’s brain works. I’m on pins and needles,”Bentonsays.

She hands him his copy of the structural and functional imaging analysis and begins to explain, “Increased amygdalar activity in response to affective stimuli. Especially faces, overt or masked that were fearful or had any negative content.”

“Continues to be an interesting point,”Bentonsays. “May eventually tell us something about how they select their victims. An expression on someone’s face that we might interpret as surprise or curiosity, they might interpret as anger or fear. And it sets them off.”

“Rather u

“I need to pursue that more vigorously when I talk to them. Starting with him.”

He opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of aspirin.

“Let’s see. During the Stroop interference task,” she says, looking at the report, “he has decreased activity of the anterior cingulate in both dorsal and subgenual regions, accompanied by increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity.”

“Give me the upshot, Susan. I’ve got a headache.”

He shakes three aspirin into his palm and swallows them without water.

“How in the world do you do that?”

“Practice.”

“So.” She resumes the analysis of Basil’s brain. “Overall, the findings certainly reflect anomalous co

“Implicating his ability to monitor and inhibit behavior,”Bentonsays. “We’re seeing a lot of that with our lovely guests fromButler. Consistent with bipolar disorder?”

“Certainly can be. That and other psychiatric disorders.”

“Excuse me a minute,”Bentonsays as he picks up his phone and dials his study coordinator’s extension.

“Can you check your in-log and tell me the number Ke

“No ID.”

“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not aware that pay phones show up as No ID.”

“Actually I just got off the line withButler,” she says. “Apparently, Basil isn’t doing well. He wonders if you could come see him.”

It ishalf past five p.m.and the parking lot of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Laboratory amp; Office is almost empty. Employees, particularly nonmedical ones, rarely linger at the morgue after hours.

This one is onSouthwest 31st Avenue, in the midst of relatively undeveloped land thick with palms, live oak trees and pines, and scattered with mobile homes. Typical ofSouth Floridaarchitecture, the one-story building is stucco and coral stone. It backs up to a narrow brackish canal where mosquitoes are a menace and alligators sometimes wander where they don’t belong. Next door to the morgue is thecountyFireand Rescue service where emergency medical technicians are constantly reminded of where their less-fortunate patients end up.

The rain has almost stopped, and there are puddles everywhere as Scarpetta and Joe walk out to a silver H2 Hummer, not her choice but quite adept at handling off-road death scenes and hauling bulky equipment. Lucy is fond of Hummers. Scarpetta always worries where to park them.

“I just can’t understand how someone managed to walk in with a shotgun in the middle of the day,” Joe says, and he has been saying it for the past hour. “Must be a way to tell if it was sawed off.”

“If the barrel wasn’t smoothed after it was sawn, there could be tool marks on the wad,” Scarpetta replies.

“But the absence of tool marks doesn’t mean it wasn’t sawn.”

“Correct.”

“Because he might have smoothed off the sawed-off barrel. If he did that, there’s no way for us to tell without recovering the weapon. A twelve-gauge. We know that much.”

They know that much from the Remington plastic four-petaled Power Piston wad that Scarpetta recovered from the inside of Daggie Simister’s devastated head. Beyond that fact, there are only a few more Scarpetta can state with certainty, such as the nature of the attack on Mrs. Simister, which the autopsy revealed to be different from what everyone presumed. Had she not been shot, there is a good chance she would have died anyway. Scarpetta is fairly certain Mrs. Simister was unconscious when her killer stuck the shotgun barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t an easy conclusion to determine.

Examinations of massive gaping injuries to the head can mask wounds that may have occurred before the final mutilating trauma. Sometimes forensic pathology requires plastic surgery, and in the morgue, Scarpetta did what she could to repair Mrs. Simister’s head, fitting pieces of bone and scalp back together, then shaving off the hair. What she found was a laceration on the back of the head and a skull fracture. The point of impact correlated with a subdural hematoma in an underlying part of her brain that had been left relatively intact after the shotgun blast.

If the stains on the carpet by the window in Mrs. Simister’s bedroom turn out to be her blood, then it’s likely this was where she was first attacked and would also explain the dirt and bluish fibers on the palms of her hands. She was struck hard from behind with a blunt object and went down. Then her assailant picked her up, all eighty-six pounds of her, and placed her on the bed.