Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(90)
"Schweeeew," the driver mutters. "I have to admit this makes me a little bit nervous."
"You'll be fine," Scarpetta assures her. "They'll show you where to park, and you'll stay in the car. I don't recommend you walk around at all."
"What if I have to use the ladies' room?" she worries, slowing at a guard booth that signals the beginning of maximum security and perhaps the most dreaded task Scarpetta has ever undertaken.
"Then I guess you'll have to ask someone," she absently replies, rolling her window down and handing a uniformed guard her driver's license and medical examiner's credentials, a bright brass shield and identification card inside a black wallet.
When she left her position in Richmond, she was as bad as Marino. She never turned in her badge. No one thought to ask for it. Or maybe no one dared. She may not literally be Chief anymore, but what Lucy said last night is right. No one can strip Scarpetta of who she is and how she performs in the work she still loves. Scarpetta knows how good she is, even if she would never say it.
"Who are you here to see?" the guard asks her, returning her license and credentials.
"Jean-Baptiste Chandonne." His name almost chokes her.
The guard is rather casual, considering his environment and responsibility. Based on his demeanor and age, he's probably been working in the prison system for a long time and scarcely notices the foreboding world he enters at the beginning of every shift. He steps back inside his booth and scans a list.
"Ma'am," he says, reemerging from his booth and pointing toward the glass front of the prison, "just drive up there and someone will tell you where to park. The PIO will meet you outside."
A Texas flag seems to wave Scarpetta on. The sky is blue glass, the temperature reminding her of autumn. Birds are having a conversation, nature going on, impervious to evil.
91
LIFE IN POD A does not change. Condemned inmates come and go, and old names belong to silence. After days, or maybe weeks-Jean-Baptiste often loses track of time-the new ones who come in to await their deaths are the names associated with the cells formerly occupied by the old names of the others who awaited their deaths. Pod A, Cell 25 is Beast, who will be moved to a different holding cell in several hours. Pod A, Cell 30 is Jean-Baptiste. Pod A, cell 31, directly to Jean-Baptiste's right, is Moth-called thus because the necrophiliac murderer who stirs after lights-out has trembling hands that flutter, and his skin is almost gray. He likes to sleep on the floor, and his prison-issue clothing is always covered with gray dust-like dust on the wings of a moth.
Jean-Baptiste shaves the tops of his hands, long swirls of hair drifting into the stainless-steel sink.
"All right, Hair Ball." Eyes peer through the tiny window in his door. "Your fifteen minutes are almost up. Two more minutes and I take the razor back."
"Certainement. " He lathers his other hand with cheap-smelling soap and resumes shaving, careful of his knuckles.
The tufts in his ears are tricky, but he manages, "Times up."
Jean-Baptiste carefully rinses the razor.
"You shaved." Moth speaks very quietly, so quietly that the other inmates rarely hear a word he says.
"Oui, mon ami. I look quite beautiful."
The crank key that looks like a crowbar bangs into a slot at the bottom of the door, and the drawer slides out. The officer backs up, out of reach of pale, hairless fingers depositing the blue plastic razor.
92
MOTH SITS AND ROLLS a basketball against the wall precisely, so that it always rolls in a straight line back to him.
He is worthless, so feeble that his only pleasure in killing was having sex with dead flesh. Dead flesh has no energy, the blood no longer magnetic. Jean-Baptiste had a very effective method when he released his chosen ones to the ecstasy. A person with severe head injuries can live for a while, long enough for Jean-Baptiste to bite and suck living flesh and blood, thus recharging his magnetism.
"It is a lovely day, isn't it?" Moth's quiet comment drifts into Jean-Baptiste's cell, because he has the ears to hear the barely audible voice. "No clouds, but later there will be a few very high ones that will move south by late afternoon."
Moth has a radio and obsessively listens to the weather band.
"I see Miss Gittleman has a new car, a cute little silver BMW Roadster."
Through a slitted window in each cell, a death-row inmate has a view of the parking lot behind the prison, and for lack of anything else to look at from their second-floor solitary confinements, men stare out for the better part of the day. In a sense, this is an act of intimidation. Moth's mentioning Miss Gittleman s BMW is the best threat he can muster. Officers most likely will pass this on to other officers, who will pass on to Miss Gittleman, the young and very pretty assistant public information officer, that inmates appreciate her new car. No prison employee is eager for any details of their personal life to be known by offenders so vile that they deserve to die.
Jean-Baptiste is perhaps the only inmate who rarely looks out the slit that is supposed to be a window. After memorizing every vehicle, their colors, makes, models and even certain plate numbers and precisely what their drivers look like, he found no purpose in looking out at a blank blue or stormy sky. Getting up from the toilet without bothering to pull up his pants, he looks out his high window, Moth's comment having made him curious. He spots the BMW, then sits back down on the toilet, thinking.