Lieutenant Hershel Mote could not keep the note of near hysteria out of his voice when Wesley returned his telephone call at twenty-nine minutes past six p. m.
"You're where?" Wesley asked him again on the speaker phone.
"In the kitchen."
"Lieutenant Mote, take it easy. Tell me exactly where you are."
"I'm in SBI Agent Max Ferguson's kitchen. I can't believe this. I've never seen nothing like this."
"Is there anybody else there?"
"It's just me here alone. Except for what's upstairs, like I told you.
I've called the coroner and the dispatcher seeing who he can raise. "
"Take it easy. Lieutenant," Wesley said again with his usual unflappability.
I could hear Mote's heavy breathing.
I said to him, "Lieutenant Mote? This is Dr. Scarpetta.
I want you to leave everything exactly the way you found it. "
"Oh, Lordy," he blurted.
"I done cut him down…"
"It's okay…"
"When I walked in I… Lord have mercy, I couldn't just leave him like that."
"It's all right," I reassured him.
"But it's very important that nobody touches him now."
"What about the coroner?"
"Not even him." Wesley's eyes were on me.
"We're heading out. You'll see us no later than twenty-two hundred hours. In the meantime, you sit tight."
"Yes, sir. I'm just going to sit right in this chair till my chest stops hurting."
"When did this start?" I wanted to know.
"When I got here and found him. I started having these pains in my chest."
"Have you ever had them before?"
"Not that I recollect. Not like this."
"Describe where they are," I said with growing alarm.
"Right in the middle."
"Has the pain gone to your arms or neck?"
"No, ma'am."
"Any dizziness or sweating?"
"I'm sweating a bit."
"Does it hurt when you cough?"
"I've not been coughing. So I don't reckon I can say."
"Have you ever had any heart disease or high blood pressure?"
"Not that I know of."
"And you smoke?"
"I'm doing it now."
"Lieutenant Mote, I want you to listen to me carefully. I want you to put out your cigarette and try to calm down. I'm very concerned because you've had a terrible shock, you're a smoker, and that's a setup for a coronary. You're down there and I'm up here. I want you to call an ambulance right now."
"The pain's settling down a little. And the coroner should be here any minute. He's a doctor."
"That would be Dr. Jenrette?" Wesley inquired.
"He's all we got'round here."
"I don't want you fooling around with chest pains, Lieutenant Mote," I said firmly.
"No, ma'am, I won't." Wesley wrote down addresses and phone numbers. He hung up and made another call.
"Is Pete Marino still running around out there?" he asked whoever had answered the phone.
"Tell him we've got an urgent situation. He's to grab an overnight bag and meet us over at HRT as fast as he can get there. I'll explain when I see him."
"Look, I'd like Katz in on this one," I said as Wesley got up from his desk.
"We're going to want to fume everything we can for prints, in the event things aren't the way they appear."
"Good idea."
"I doubt he'd be at The Body Farm this late. You might want to try his pager."
"Fine. I'll see if I can track him down," he said of my forensic scientist colleague from Knoxville. When I got to the lobby fifteen minutes later, Wesley was already there, a tote bag slung over his shoulder. I had had just enough time in my room to exchange pumps for more sensible shoes, and to grab other necessities, including my medical bag.
"Dr. Katz is leaving Knoxville now," Wesley told me.
"He'll meet us at the scene." Night was settling beneath a distant slivered moon, and trees stirring in the wind sounded like rain. Wesley and I followed the drive in front of Jefferson and crossed a road dividing the Academy complex from acres of field offices and firing ranges. Closest to us, in the demilitarized zone of barbecues and picnic tables shaded by trees, I spotted a familiar figure so out of context that for an instant I thought I was mistaken. Then I recalled Lucy once mentioning to me that she sometimes wandered out here alone after dinner to think, and my heart lifted at the chance of making amends with her.
"Benton," I said, "I'll be right back." The faint sound of conversation drifted toward me as I neared the edge of the woods, and I wondered, bizarrely, if my niece were talking to herself. Lucy was perched on top of a picnic table, and as I drew closer I was about to call her name when I saw she was speaking to someone seated below her on the bench. They were so close to each other their silhouettes were one, and I froze in the darkness of a tall, dense pine.
"That's because you always do that," Lucy was saying in a wounded tone I knew well.
"No, it's because you always assume I'm doing that." The woman's voice was soothing.
"Well, then, don't give me cause."
"Lucy, can't we get past this? Please."
"Let me have one of those."
"I wish you wouldn't start."
"I'm not starting. I just want a puff."
I heard the spurt of a match striking, and a small flame penetrated the darkness. For an instant, my niece's profile was illuminated as she leaned closer to her friend, whose face I could not see. The tip of the cigarette glowed as they passed it back and forth. I silently turned and walked away. Wesley resumed his long strides when I got back to him.
"Someone you know?" he asked.
"I thought it was," I said.
We walked without speaking past empty ranges with rows of target frames and steel silhouettes eternally standing at attention. Beyond, a control tower rose over a building constructed completely of tires, where HRT, the Bureau's Green Berets, practiced maneuvers with live ammunition. A white-and-blue Bell Jetranger waited on the nearby grass like a sleeping insect, its pilot standing outside with Marino.
"We all here?" the pilot asked as we approached.
"Yes. Thanks, Whit," Wesley said.
Whit, a perfect specimen of male fitness in a black flight suit, opened the helicopter's doors to help us board. We strapped ourselves in, Marino and I in back, Wesley up front, and put on headsets as blades began to turn, the jet engine warming. Minutes later, the dark earth was suddenly far beneath our feet as we rose above the horizon, air vents open and cabin lights off. Our transmitted voices blurted on and off in our ears as the helicopter sped south toward a tiny mountain town where another person was dead.
"He couldn't have been home long," Marino said.
"We know…?"
"He wasn't." Wesley's voice cut in from the copilot's seat.
"He left Quantico right after the consultation. Flew out of National at one."
"We know what time his plane got to Asheville?"
"Around four-thirty. He could have been back to his house by five."
"In Black Mountain?"
"Right."
I spoke. "Mote found him at six."
"Jesus." Marino turned to me.
"Ferguson must've started beating off the minute he hit" - The pilot cut in! "We got music if anybody wants it."
"Sure."
"What flavor?"
"Classical."
"Shit, Benton."
"You're outvoted, Pete."
"Ferguson hadn't been home long. That much is clear no matter who or what's to blame," I resumed our jerky conversation as Berlioz began in the background.
"Looks like an accident. Like auto eroticism gone bad. But we don't know." Marino nudged me.
"Got any aspirins?"
I dug in my pocketbook in the dark, then got a mini Maglite out of my medical bag and rooted around some more. Marino muttered profanities when I motioned I could not help him, and I realized he was still in the sweatpants, hooded sweatshirt, and lace-up boots he had been wearing at Hogan's Alley. He looked like a hard drinking coach for some bush-league team, and I could not resist shining the light over incriminating red paint stains on his upper back and left shoulder. Marino had gotten shot.
"Yeah, well, you ought to see the other guys," his voice abruptly sounded in my ears.
"Yo, Benton. Got any aspirins?"
"Airsick?"
"Having too much fun for that," said Marino, who hated to fly. The weather was in our favor as we chopped a path through the clear night at around a hundred and five knots. Cars below us glided like bright-eyed water bugs as the lights of civilization flickered like small fires in the trees. The vibrating darkness might have soothed me to sleep were my nerves not running hot. My mind would not stay still as images clashed and questions screamed.
I envisioned Lucy's face, the lovely curve of her jaw and cheek as she leaned into the flame cupped by her girlfriend's hands. Their impassioned voices sounded in my memory, and I did not know why I was stunned.
I did not know why it should matter. I wondered how much Wesley was aware. My niece had been interning at Quantico since fall semester had begun. He had seen her quite a lot more than I had. There was not a breath of wind until we got into the mountains, and for a while the earth was a pitch-black plain.
"Going up to forty-five hundred feet," our pilot's voice sounded in our headsets.
"Everybody all right back there?"
"I don't guess you can smoke in here," Marino said. At ten past nine, the inky sky was pricked with stars, the Blue Ridge a black ocean swelling without motion or sound. We followed deep shadows of woods, smoothly turning with the pitch of blades toward a brick building that I suspected was a school. Around a corner, we found a football field with police lights flashing and flares burning copper in an unnecessary illumination of our landing zone. And the Nightsun's thirty million peak candlepower blazed down from our belly as we made our descent. At the fifty-yard line, Whit settled us softly like a bird.
" 'Home of the War Horses,' " Wesley read from bunting draped along the fence.
"Hope they're having a better season than we are." Marino gazed out his window as the blades slowed down.
"I haven't seen a high school football game since I was in one."
"I didn't know you played football," I remarked.
"Yo. Number twelve."
"What position?"
"Tight end."
"That figures," I said.
"This is actually Swannanoa," Whit announced.
"Black Mountain's just east." We were met by two uniformed officers from the Black Mountain Police. They looked too young to drive or carry guns, their faces pale and peculiar as they tried not to stare. It was as if we had arrived by spacecraft in a blaze of gyrating lights and unearthly quiet. They did not know what to make of us or what was happening in their town, and it was with very little conversation that they drove us away. Moments later, we parked along a narrow street throbbing with engines and emergency lights. I counted three cruisers in addition to ours, one ambulance, two fire trucks, two unmarked cars, and a Cadillac.
"Great," Marino muttered as he shut the car door.
"Everybody and his cousin Abner's here." Crime-scene tape ran from the front porch posts to shrubbery, fanning out on either side of the beige two-story aluminum-sided house. A Ford Bronco was parked in the gravel drive ahead of an unmarked Skylark with police antennas and lights.
"The cars are Ferguson's?" Wesley asked as we mounted concrete steps.
"The ones in the drive, yes, sir," the officer replied.
"That window up in the comer's where he's at."
I was dismayed when Lieutenant Hershel Mote suddenly appeared in the front doorway. Obviously, he had not followed my advice.
"How are you feeling?" I asked him.
"I'm holding on." He looked so relieved to see us I almost expected a hug. But his face was gray. Sweat ringed the collar of his denim shirt and shone on his brow and neck. He reeked of stale cigarettes. We hesitated in the foyer, our backs to stairs that led to the second floor.
"What's been done?" Wesley asked.
"Doc Jenrette took pictures, lots of'em, but he didn't touch nothing, just like you said. He's outside talking to the squad if you need him."
"There's a lot of cars out there," Marino said.
"Where is everybody?"
"A couple of the boys are in the kitchen. And one or two's poking around the yard and in the woods out back."
"But they haven't been upstairs?" Mote let out a deep breath.
"Well, now, I'm not going to stand here and lie to you. They did go on up and look. But nobody's messed with anything, I can promise you that. The Doc's the only one who got close." He started up the stairs.
"Max is… he's… Well, goddam." He stopped and looked back at us, his eyes bright with tears.
"I'm not clear on how you discovered him," Marino said. We resumed climbing steps as Mote struggled for composure. The floor was covered in the same dark red carpet I had seen downstairs, the heavily varnished pine paneling the color of honey. He cleared his throat.
"About six this evening I stopped by to see if Max wanted to go out for some supper. When he didn't come to the door, I figured he was in the shower or something and came on in.
"Were you aware of anything that might have indicated he had a history of this type of activity?" Wesley delicately asked.
"No, sir," Mote said with feeling.
"I can't imagine it. I sure don't understand… Well, I've heard tell of people rigging up weird things. I can't say I know what it's for."
"The point of using a noose while masturbating is to place pressure on the carotids," I explained.
"This constricts the flow of oxygen and blood to the brain, which supposedly enhances orgasm."
"Also known as going while you're coming," Marino remarked with his typical subtlety. Mote did not accompany us as we moved forward to a lighted doorway at the end of the hall.
SBI Agent Max Ferguson had a manly, modest bedroom with pine chests of drawers and a rack filled with shotguns and rifles over a rolltop desk. His pistol, wallet, credentials, and a box of Rough Rider condoms were on the table by the quilt-covered bed, the suit I'd seen him wearing in Quantico this morning neatly draped over a chair, shoes and socks nearby.
A wooden bar stool stood between the bathroom and closet, inches from where his body was covered with a colorful crocheted afghan. Overhead, a severed nylon cord dangled from an eye hook screwed into the wooden ceiling. I got gloves and a thermometer out of my medical bag. Marino swore under his breath as I pulled the afghan back from what must have been Ferguson's worst nightmare.
I doubted he would have feared a bullet half as much. He was on his back, the size-D cups of a long- line black brassiere stuffed with socks that smelled faintly of musk. The pair of black nylon panties he had put on before he died had been pulled down around his hairy knees, and a condom still clung limply to his penis. Magazines nearby revealed his predilection for women in bondage with spectacularly augmented breasts and nipples the size of saucers.
I examined the nylon noose tightly angled around the towel padding his neck. The cord, old and fuzzy, had been severed just above the eighth turn of a perfect hangman's knot. His eyes were almost shut, his tongue protruding.
"Is this consistent with him sitting on the stool?" Marino looked up at the segment of rope attached to the ceiling.
"Yes," I said.
"So he was beating off and slipped?"
"Or he may have lost consciousness and then slipped," I answered. Marino moved to the window and leaned over a tumbler of amber liquid on the sill.
"Bourbon," he announced.
"Straight or close to it." The rectal temperature was 91 degrees, consistent with what I would have expected had Ferguson been dead approximately five hours in this room, his body covered. Rigor mortis had started in the small muscles. The condom was a studded affair with a large reservoir that was dry, and I went over to the bed to take a look at the box. One condom was missing, and when I stepped into the master bathroom I found the purple foil wrapper in the wicker trash basket.
"That's interesting," I said as Marino opened dresser drawers.
"What is?"
"I guess I assumed he would have put on the condom while he was rigged up."
"Makes sense to me."
"Then wouldn't you expect the wrapper to be near his body?" I picked it out of the trash, touching as little of it as possible, and placed it inside a plastic bag.
When Marino didn't respond, I added, "Well, I guess it all depends on when he pulled down his panties. Maybe he did that before he put the noose around his neck."
I walked back into the bedroom. Marino was squatting by a chest of drawers, staring at the body, a mixture of incredulity and disgust on his face.
"And I always thought the worst thing that could happen is you croak on the John," he said.
I looked up at the eye bolt in the ceiling. There was no way to tell how long it had been there. I started to ask Marino if he had found any other pornography when we were startled by a heavy thud in the hallway.
"What the hell…?" Marino exclaimed. He was out the door, and I was right behind him. Lieutenant Mote had collapsed near the stairs. He was facedown and motionless on the carpet. When I knelt beside him and turned him over, he was already blue.
"He's in cardiac arrest! Get the squad!" I pulled Mote's jaw forward to make sure his airway was unobstructed. Marino's feet thundered down the stairs as I placed my fingers on Mote's carotid and felt no pulse. I thumped his chest but his heart would not answer. I began CPR, compressing his chest once, twice, three times, four, then tilted his head back and blew once into his mouth. His chest rose, and one-two three-four I blew again.
I maintained a rhythm of sixty compressions per minute as sweat rolled down my temples and my own pulse roared. My arms ached and were becoming as unwilling as stone when I began the third minute and the noise of paramedics and police swelled up from the stairs. Someone gripped my elbow and guided me out of the way as many pairs of gloved hands slapped on leads, hung a bottle of IV fluid, and started a line. Voices barked orders and announced every activity in the loud dispassion of rescue efforts and emergency rooms. As I leaned against the wall and tried to catch my breath, I noticed a short, fair young man incongruously dressed for golf watching the activity from the landing. After several glances in my direction, he approached me shyly.
"Dr. Scarpetta?" His earnest face was sunburned below his brow, which obviously had been spared by a cap. It occurred to me that he probably belonged to the Cadillac parked out front.
"Yes?"
"James Jenrette," he said, confirming my suspicions.
"Are you all right?" He withdrew a neatly folded handkerchief and offered it to me.
"I'm doing okay, and I'm very glad you're here," I said sincerely, for I could not turn over my latest patient to someone who was not an M. D.
"Can I entrust Lieutenant Mote to your care?" My arms trembled as I wiped my face and neck.
"Absolutely. I'll go with him to the hospital." Jenrette next handed me his card.
"If you have any other questions tonight, just page me."
"You'll be posting Ferguson in the morning?" I asked.
"Yes. You're welcome to assist. Then we'll talk about all this." He looked down the hall.
"I'll be there. Thank you." I managed a smile. Jenrette followed the stretcher out, and I returned to the bedroom at the end of the hall. From the window, I watched lights pulse blood red on the street below as Mote was placed inside the ambulance. I wondered if he would live.
I sensed the presence of Ferguson in his flaccid condom and stiff brassiere, and none of it seemed real. The tailgate slammed. Sirens whelped as if in protest before they began to scream. I was not aware that Marino had walked into the room until he touched my arm.
"Katz is downstairs," he informed me. I slowly turned around.
"We'll need another squad," I said.