Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(24)
"Sure. If you want to hear it, I'll read it. But I don't think it's necessary, and maybe you ought..."
"Please read it." Now Benton sounds weary. His eyes are not as intense, and he leans back in the chair.
Marino clears his throat as he unfolds another plain white sheet of paper. He begins:
Mon ch?ri amour, Kay...
He glances up at Benton's expressionless face. The color has drained from it, his complexion sallow beneath his tan.
My heart is in great pain because you have not made an appointment to come to see me yet. I do not understand. Of course, you feel as I do. I am your thief in the night, the great lover who came to steal you away, yet you refused. You shunned me and wounded me. Now you must be empty, so bored, languishing for me, Madame Scarpetta.
As for me? I am not bored. You are here with me in my cell, without a will, completely under my spell. You must know it. You must feel it. Let me see, can I count? Is it four, five or fifteen times a day I rip open those very nice suits you wear-the haute couture of Madame Scarpetta, the doctor, the lawyer, the Chief. I tear off everything with my bare hands and bite into those big tits while you shiver and die with delight...
"Is there a point to this?" Benton's voice snaps like a pistol slide racking back. "I'm not interested in his pornographic drivel. What does he want?"
Marino looks hard at him, pauses, then turns over the letter. Sweat beads on his balding head and rolls down his temples. He reads what is on the back of the plain white sheet of paper:
I must see you! You cannot escape unless you do not care if more innocent people die. Not that anyone is innocent. I will tell you all that is necessary. But I must look at you in the flesh as I speak the truth. And then you will kill me.
Marino stops reading. "More shit you don't need to hear..."
"And she knows nothing about this?"
"Well," Marino equivocates, "not really. Like I said, I didn't show it to her. All I told her is I got a letter and Wolfman wants to see her and will exchange information for her visit. And he wants her to be the one who gives him the needle."
"Typically, penitentiaries use free-world doctors, regular physicians from the outside to administer the lethal cocktail," Benton oddly commerits, as if what Marino just said has no impact on him. "Did you use ninhydrin on the letters?" Now he changes the subject. "Obviously I can't tell, since these are photocopies."
The chemical ninhydrin would have reacted to the amino acid in fingerprints, turning portions of the original letters a deep violet.
"Didn't want to damage them," Marino replies.
"What about an alternate light source? Something nondestructive, such as a crime scope?"
When Marino doesn't respond, Benton pierces him with the obvious point.
"You did nothing to prove these letters are from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? You just assume? Jesus." Benton rubs his face with his hands. "Jesus Christ. You come here-here-take a risk like that and don't even know for a fact that these letters came from him? And let me guess. You didn't have the backs of the stamps and envelope flaps swabbed for DNA, either. What about postmarks? What about return addresses?"
"There's no return address-not for him, I mean-and no postmark that might tell us where he sent it from," Marino admits, and he is sweating profusely now.
Benton leans forward. "What? He hand-delivered the letters? The return address isn't his? What the hell are you talking about? How could he mail something to you and there's no postmark?"
Marino unfolds another piece of paper and hands it to him. The photocopy is of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch white envelope, preprinted, U.S. postage paid for the nonprofit organization the National Academy of Justice.
"Well, I guess we've both seen this before," Benton says, looking at the photocopy, "since we've been members of the NAJ for most of our lives. Or at least I used to be. Sorry to say, but I'm not on their mailing list anymore." He pauses, noting that First-class mail has been x-ed through just below the preprinted postage-paid stamp.
"For once, I'm blanking out on any possible explanation," he says.
"This is what came in the mail to me," Marino explains. "The NAJ envelope, and when I opened it, the two letters were inside. One to me, one to the Doc. Sealed, marked Legal Mail, I guess in case someone at the prison was curious about the NAJ envelope and decided to tear into it. Only other thing written on the envelopes was our names."
Both men are silent for a moment. Marino smokes and drinks beer.
"Well, I do have a possibility, the only thing I can think of," Marino then says. "I checked with the NAJ, and from the warden on down, there are fifty-six officers who are members. It wouldn't be unusual to see one of these envelopes lying around somewhere."
Benton is shaking his head. "But your address is printed, machine-printed. How could Chandonne manage to do that?"
"How the hell do you stand this joint? Don't you even got air-conditioning? And we did swab the envelopes the letters came in, but it's that self-stick adhesive. So he didn't have to lick nothing."
This is evasion and Marino knows it. Sloughed-off skin cells can adhere to self-sticking adhesives. He doesn't want to answer Benton's question.
"How did Chandonne pull off sending you letters inside an envelope like this?" Benton shakes the photocopy at Marino. "And don't you find it just a little odd that first-class mail is x-ed out? Why might that be?"