Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(114)
"Oh, God, oh, God."
Then the voices are quiet, and conversation recedes into a background murmur. A few flies begin to stray into the house, drawn by the scent of death, the high-pitched droning straining Scarpetta's nerves.
"Tell them to stop opening the goddamn door!" She looks up from her kneeling position, sweat rolling down her face, her knees in terrible pain.
"Jesus. What's going on out there?" Dr. Lanier is angry, too.
"Heeerrrre, Basil! Come on, boy!"
Whistling.
"Yo! Basil! Where are you?"
The front door opens and shuts again.
"That's it!" Dr. Lanier gets to his feet.
He walks out of the bedroom, yanking off his bloody gloves. Scarpetta removes another animal hair, this one black, and places it inside an evidence bag. The hairs adhered to the body when the blood was wet. They are adhering to the belly, breasts and chest but not to the bottoms of the woman's bare feet, which are also smeared with dried blood, not from injuries, but from where she stepped.
Scarpetta's breath is hot and loud behind her surgical mask, sweat stinging her eyes as she waves off flies and goes over the woman's face with a lens, looking for more hairs, every crack in dried blood magnified and more horrible, every split and cut in the skin more ragged and gaping. Flecks of paint adhere to blood, possibly transferred from the living room wall. The variety of animal hairs recovered from the body supplies Scarpetta with an important piece of information.
"We found the dog." Nic is standing in the doorway.
Scarpetta is startled back to a different dimension, one that isn't a hideous, dry red landscape behind a magnifying glass.
"Basil, her dog."
"That's not where most of these hairs are from. I'm finding dozens, different kinds, different colors. Dog hairs, possibly. Much coarser than cat hairs. But I'm not positive."
Dr. Lanier walks back inside the room, brushing past Nic, snapping on fresh gloves.
"What I'm seeing here makes me think the hairs were transferred from the perpetrator-perhaps from his clothing-directly to her upper body. Maybe if he got on top of her."
She pulls the pajama bottoms down an inch, just far enough to expose the indentations left by their elastic waistband. She sits back on her heels and stares, then takes off her mask.
"Why would someone get on top of her and not take her pajama bottoms off?" Dr. Lanier puzzles. "Why would someone transfer all these dog or doglike hairs to her naked upper body and nowhere else? And why the hell would anybody have all these dog hairs all the hell over them to begin with?"
"We found Basil," Nic says again. "Hiding under a house across the street. Just cowering and shaking. He must have run off when the killer left, I guess. Who's going to take care of him, of Basil?"
"I expect the boyfriend will," Dr. Lanier replies. "If not, Eric loves dogs."
He tears open two packets containing sterile, plasticized homicide sheets. While Scarpetta spreads one on the floor, Dr. Lanier and Eric grip the body under the arms and behind the knees, lifting it, centering it on the sheet. They spread the second sheet on top of her, rolling up the edges, wrapping her like a mummy so no trace evidence will be added or lost.
116
JAY LIFTS A HAND OFF the steering wheel to strike Bev, then changes his mind.
"You're stupid. You know that?" he says coldly. "What the hell did you think you were doing?"
"It didn't happen the way it was supposed to."
The radio inside his Cherokee continues with the six o'clock news as he drives toward Jacks Boat Landing.
"... Dr. Sam Lanier, coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, has not completed the autopsy yet, but sources close to the investigation have confirmed that the victim is thirty-six-year-old Rebecca Milton of Zachary. The cause of death isn't official, but sources say she was stabbed to death. Police do not believe the murder is related to the women reported missing from Baton Rouge over the past year..."
"Fools." Jay turns off the radio. "Just lucky for you if they aren't assuming that."
Four small dogs, mixed breeds, sleep in sunlight shining through a back window of the SUV. Five cases of beer are stacked on the backseat. Bev worked hard today after dropping Jay off at the University Lake in the heart of LSU. He didn't say why he was going there or what he'd be doing all day, only to pick him up in the same spot where she dropped him off at half past five. Maybe he was looking for his escaped-convict brother. Maybe he was wandering around, enjoying being away from Bev and the fishing shack. He was probably trolling for pretty coeds. Bev imagines him having sex with one of them. Jealousy wakes up inside her. It smolders.
"You shouldn't have left me all day," she says to him.
"What were you thinking? You were going to abduct her in the middle of the day and take her back to the boat in broad daylight?"
"At first. Then I knew you wouldn't be happy."
He says nothing, his face hard as he drives, careful not to speed or commit any other traffic infraction that could get him pulled over.
"She didn't look like her. She had black hair. I don't know if she went to college."
Bev had been unable to resist the impulse. She had time on her hands, time enough to find that pretty lady she had fixed on at the Wal-Mart. Following her all night, she had learned that the lamb didn't live in the house in the Garden District but had a small place in Zachary. Her neighborhood was dark, and Bev started getting nervous that her lamb might get suspicious. Bev had turned off on a side street before getting a good fix on the address.