“I’m not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.
“Be nice if they’d restore the beacon so people like us don’t crash into it,” Lucy says.
“Now I feel better.” Benton’s voice.
“I’m going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what’s down there,” Lucy says.
They don’t have to work the grid very long.
“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”
Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.
“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”
“I see it,” Lucy says.
The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.
Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright — as bright as a star — at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.
Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.
A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.
Scarpetta looks out her window, and some distance away, in the sand, a face flashes in the strobes, white teeth grimacing in a bloated mass that isn’t recognizable as a woman or a man. Were it not for the suit and tie, she wouldn’t have a clue.
“What the hell?” Benton’s voice in her headset.
“It’s not her,” Lucy says, flipping off switches. “Don’t know about you, but I got my gun. This isn’t right.”
She turns off the battery, and doors open and they get out, the sand soft beneath their feet. The stench is overwhelming until they get upwind of it. Flashlights probe, pistols are ready. The helicopter is a hulking dragonfly on the dark beach, and the only sound is the surf. Scarpetta moves her light along and stops at wide drag marks that lead to a dune and stop short of it.
“Someone had a boat,” Lucy says, and she is moving toward the dunes. “A flat-bottom boat.”
The dunes are fringed with sea oats and other vegetation, and roll on for as far as they can see, untouched by the tides. Scarpetta thinks of the battles fought here and imagines lives lost for a cause that couldn’t have been more different from the South’s. The evils of slavery. Black Yankee soldiers wiped out. She imagines she hears their moans and whispers in the tall grass, and she tells Lucy and Benton not to stray too far. She watches their lights cut through the dark terrain like long, bright blades.
“Over here,” Lucy says from the darkness between two dunes. “Mother of God,” she says. “Aunt Kay, can you grab face masks!”
Scarpetta opens the baggage compartment and lifts out a large crime scene case. She sets it on the sand and rummages for face masks, and it must be bad for Lucy to ask.
“We can’t get both of them out of here.” Benton’s voice in the wind.
“What the fuck are we dealing with?” Lucy’s voice. “Did you hear that?”
Something flapping. Far off in the dunes.
Scarpetta moves toward their lights, and the stench gets worse. It seems to make the air thick, and her eyes burn and she hands out masks and puts one on because it’s hard to breathe. She joins Lucy and Benton in a hollow between dunes, at an elevation that makes it impossible to see it from the beach. The woman is nude and badly swollen from days of exposure. She’s infested by maggots, her face eaten away, her lips and eyes gone, her teeth exposed. In the beam of Scarpetta’s light is an implanted titanium post from where a crown used to be. Her scalp is slipping from her skull, her long hair splayed in the sand.
Lucy wades through sea oats and grass, moving toward the flapping sound that Scarpetta hears, too, and she’s not sure what to do, and she thinks of gunshot residue and the sand and this place and wonders what it means to him. He has created his own battlefield. How much more littered with the dead would it have become, had she not found this spot, because of barium, antimony, and lead that he probably knew nothing of, and she feels him. His sick spirit seems to hang in the air.
“A tent,” Lucy calls out, and they go to her.
She’s behind another dune, and the dunes are dark waves rolling away from them and tangled with undergrowth and grass, and he has made a tented home, or someone has. Aluminum poles and a tarp, and through a slit in a flap that snaps in the wind is a hovel. A mattress is neatly made with a blanket, and there’s a lantern. Lucy opens an ice chest with her foot. Inside is several inches of water, and she dips her finger in and announces the water is tepid.
“I’ve got one spine board in the back of the helicopter,” she says. “How do you want to do this, Aunt Kay?”
“We need to photograph everything. Take measurements. Get the police out here right away.” There is so much to do. “Any way we can sling two at a time?”
“Not with one spine board.”
“I want to look through everything in here,” Benton says.
“Then we’ll get them in body bags, and you’ll have to take one at a time,” Scarpetta says. “Where do you want to set them down, Lucy? Someplace discreet, can’t be the FBO where your industrious lineman is probably out there marshaling in mosquitoes. I’ll call Hollings and see who can meet you.”
Then they are silent, listening to the flapping of the makeshift tent, listening to the swishing of grass, to the soft, wet crashing of waves. The lighthouse looks like a huge, dark pawn in a game of chess, surrounded by the spreading plain of the riffled black sea. He’s out there somewhere, and it seems surreal. A soldier of misfortune, but Scarpetta feels no pity.
“Let’s do this,” she says, and she tries her phone.
Of course, she gets no signal.
“You’ll have to try him from the air,” she says to Lucy. “Maybe try Rose.”
“Rose?”
“Just try her.”
“What for?”
“I suspect she’ll know where to find him.”
They get the spine board and body bags, and plasticized sheets, and what biohazard gear they have. They start with her. She is limp because rigor mortis came and went, as if it gave up stubbornly protesting her death, and insects and tiny creatures like crabs took over. They have eaten away what was soft and wounded. Her face is swollen, her body bloated from bacterial gas, her skin marbled greenish-black in the branched pattern of her blood vessels. Her left buttock and the back of her thigh have been raggedly cut away, but there are no other obvious injuries or signs of mutilation, and no indication of what killed her. They lift her and place her in the middle of the sheet, and then into a pouch that Scarpetta zips closed.
They turn their attention to the man on the beach who has a translucent plastic retainer on his gritted teeth, and around his right wrist, a rubber band. His suit and tie are black, and his white shirt is stained dark from purge fluid and blood. Multiple narrow slits in his jacket front and back suggest he was repeatedly stabbed. Maggots infest his wounds and are a moving mass under his clothes, and in a pants pocket is a wallet that belonged to Lucious Meddick. It doesn’t appear the killer was interested in credit cards or cash.
More photographs and notes, and Scarpetta and Benton strap the woman’s pouched body — Lydia Webster’s pouched body — onto a spine board while Lucy retrieves a fifty-foot line and a net from the back of the helicopter. She hands Scarpetta her gun.
“You need this more than I do,” she says.
She climbs in and starts the engines, and blades thud, beating back air. Lights flash, and the helicopter gently lifts and noses around. Very slowly, it rises until the line gets taut and the net with its morbid burden is suspended
