Depraved Heart

“I think there’s something in her hair. It might be glass.” Light winks on his black-framed glasses, his brown eyes magnified and owlish through the prescription lenses.

“Well duh,” Rusty says, and when he first got here he looked like he always does, a has-been Beach Boy, today in baggy flannel drawstring pants and a hoodie, his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. “There’s broken glass all over the place.”

“I’m just being careful. It didn’t look like lightbulb glass. But it was just a glance and now I don’t see it.”

“Wrap her up really well. Make sure we don’t lose anything,” I reply as Carrie walks into a small bland bathroom and flips on a light.

“Well I’m just not seeing it.” Harold is looking at the bloody matted hair, walking his gloved fingers through it. “I saw something and now I don’t.”

“I’ll look carefully again later. I didn’t notice anything like glass in her hair,” I reply.

“But wouldn’t you think there might be?” Harold stares up at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the empty sockets where two lightbulbs had been screwed in.

He looks around at the broken glass all over the floor, and then he acts out an imagined scenario at the same instant Carrie is acting out her drama on the video. Harold demonstrates someone changing lightbulbs and suddenly falling backward off the ladder.

“If she had lightbulbs, the chandelier’s glass dome in her hands and they hit the floor at the same time she did it would be like a glass bomb going off. Wouldn’t you expect glass all over her?” he asks as Carrie stares in the mirror over the bathroom sink and gives a big smile to her own reflection, then musses up her very short white-gold hair.

“Just cover her really well and she goes straight into the cooler, and I’ll deal with her,” I repeat my instructions.

I can’t pause the video. It’s as if Carrie has hijacked my phone at the worst possible time, in the middle of a suspicious death scene that should require my full attention.

6

The only way I could stop the recording is to power down my phone and turn it off. I’m not about to do that and it vaguely occurs to me that what’s happening could come back to haunt me. If the police complain that I was on my phone, that I was watching a movie, texting or who knows what? It would be very bad.

“Off to one side of the only door that led in and out of Lucy’s room is a private bath.” Carrie sweeps her hand around it as if she’s Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and Rusty shakes open plastic bags and begins covering Chanel Gilbert’s bare feet.

“And the new agents in training didn’t enjoy similar luxury.” Carrie glances down at the script, then back into a hidden camera, and she does this repeatedly. “All of them had roommates. They shared toilets, vanities and showers at the far end of the hall. But young precocious Lucy didn’t mingle with any of those lesser females, all of them older, some with law degrees and Ph.D.s. One was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Another was a former beauty queen.

“An unusual well-educated group with no common sense, no street smarts, and by the time you see this …” She ends the sentence abruptly, awkwardly, and there’s no question the recording has been edited. “I wonder how many of them will be dead. Lucy and I used to make predictions. You see she’d gathered intelligence on every resident on her floor. But she didn’t call anyone by name. She didn’t speak to anyone in passing, and her reserve was correctly interpreted as entitlement and arrogance. Lucy was spoiled. Her Auntie Kay had managed to spoil her rotten.”

Carrie refers to you as if she’s talking to someone else.

She turns a page in her script. “A teenaged civilian with special gifts and special connections, Lucy enjoyed a special status at the FBI Academy that was on a par with a protected witness, a visiting chief of police, an agency director, a secretary-general or in other words a very important person, which Lucy is by merit of her associations and not her accomplishments.

“Her Auntie Kay mandated up front that during her precious niece’s internship and until she turned twenty-one she would have her own room with a bath and a view and a curfew. She would have constant supervision, and she did ostensibly and officially. It was spelled out in her file, a thin unimportant file as I film this. But with time it likely would get much bigger as the federal government wises up to Lucy Farinelli and realizes she must be stopped.”

Where is this file? The question floats up in my mind like a bubble in a cartoon strip. Benton should know.

“But on this bright July afternoon in 1997”—Carrie walks and talks somberly, pensively like the host of a true crime show—“the Academy faculty and staff had no idea that young Lucy’s chaperone, yours truly, was a frequent sleepover and not the harmless eccentric geek who passed her extensive background check, interviews, and a polygraph with flying colors before she was hired to overhaul the FBI’s computer and case management system.

“Even the psychological profilers in the Behavioral Science Unit including their legendary chief somehow missed that I am a psychopath.” She says legendary chief weirdly. “Just as my father was and his father before him.” Her eyes are cobalt in the camera. “I’m actually quite rare. Less than one percent of the female population is psychopathic. And you know the evolutionary purpose of psychopathy now don’t you? We’re the chosen ones who will survive.

“Remember that when you think I’m gone. And oops! I have to stop reading my wonderful little story for now. We have company.”

The whisper of a long plastic zipper, and I glance at Marino as he stands up from a crouched position. The body is a black cocoon on the floor, and Marino, Rusty and Harold yank off their dirty gloves and drop them into the red biohazard bag.

They pull on fresh gloves. When they lift the body it is limp. Rigor mortis was fully developed and has passed, leaving her flaccid. That usually takes a minimum of eight hours, depending on other factors that include the environmental temperature, which is extremely hot, and the state of dress and body size, which are naked and slender with good musculature.

Chanel Gilbert is about five foot seven, maybe 130 pounds, and I suspect she was athletic and fit. She has tan lines from wearing a bathing suit but is pale from the waist down, her belly, hips and legs spared from exposure to the sun. Wearing a wet suit could leave a similar tan pattern, and I’m reminded of what Benton and I always do between scuba dives. We take off our dive socks and pull down our wet suits, tying the neoprene arms around our waists. Our faces, shoulders, chests, arms and the tops of our feet get sun exposure but not much else.

“Do we know if Chanel Gilbert was into sports?” I ask Marino, startled as it dawns on me that she and Carrie Grethen resemble each other physically. “She has well-developed shoulders and arms, and her legs look strong. Are we sure who this is?” I glance at him. “Has anybody talked to her neighbors?”

“What the hell?” He frowns at me as if I just said the world is flat. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking she’s not visually identifiable and we need to be careful.”

“You mean because she’s bloated and rotting with her face smashed in?”

“We should be sure we know who she is. We shouldn’t assume it’s the woman who lived in this house.” I’m not going to mention that the dead woman on the floor could pass for Carrie Grethen’s twin.

I think of my recent sighting of Carrie when she shot me in Florida, comparing that face with the photograph on Chanel’s driver’s license. The two women look eerily similar, and if I dared to suggest this I’ll sound obsessed and irrational. Marino would want to know why the thought has occurred to me now, and I can’t tell him I’m watching Carrie on my phone. Marino can’t know that. No one can. I’m not sure what the legal implications might be but I’m worried the video is a trap.

“What makes you suspect she isn’t the lady who lived here?” It’s Harold who asks as he squats by his scene case, packing it up.

My answer is a question. “Do we have any reason to think she might have been a scuba diver?”

“I’ve not seen any dive gear anywhere,” Marino says as Lucy appears in the video, unaware and casual. “But I noticed some underwater photographs in one of the rooms down the hall. I’ll look around some more after we get her into the van.”

I watch Lucy walking around her private space that Carrie has invaded and violated.

“I need a sample of Chanel Gilbert’s DNA, maybe from a toothbrush, a hairbrush,” I remind Marino but it’s hard to focus as I watch the image of my niece. “And let’s find out who her dentist is and get her charts. We’re not releasing her identity to anyone including her mother until we’re sure.”

“Seems like there’s a little problem with that,” Marino says but I’m no longer looking at him. “Someone alerted her mother, remember? And she’s on a plane headed here from L.A., remember? So if you’ve got any reason to think this isn’t her daughter … Well that will be a real shit show when Mama shows up.”

“Have you found out who might have notified her?” I ask.

“No.”

“Because it wasn’t us,” I repeat what I’ve said before. “I explicitly instructed Bryce not to release anything until I say so.”

“Someone sure as hell did,” Marino says.

“The housekeeper might have after she found the body,” Rusty suggests and it makes sense. “Maybe she notified the mother. That would be expected don’t you think?”

“Yeah maybe,” Marino answers. “Because let me guess. Mama probably paid for everything including the housekeeper. But we need to find out who got hold of her and told her the bad news.”

“What we need to know first and for a fact is who this dead woman is.” I glance up at Marino’s bloodshot eyes, then I look back down at my phone, at Lucy, in workout clothes, her rose gold hair as short as a boy’s.

She could pass for sixteen but was three years older than that when this was filmed, and watching her gives me an indescribable feeling. I feel enraged and sick. I keep reminding myself to feel nothing at all, and I barely glance at Rusty and Harold as they wheel the stretcher out the front door. I’m packing my scene case, tidying up as I watch the video playing on my phone and listen to it through my wireless earpiece.

Multitasking. I shouldn’t be.

Marino has begun walking around the house checking windows and doors, making sure everything is secure before we close up and head out. I’m not done. But I’m not staying. I’ll be back after I’m sure Lucy is safe—after I make damn sure she’s not the one who sent this recording to me.

7

I know my niece. I can tell when she trusts that whatever she’s saying and doing is private and unmonitored.

She believes her conversation with Carrie is between the two of them. It isn’t. I can’t imagine how Lucy would feel if she knew that in a sense I was inside that room with them. I may as well have been there then because I am now, and I feel disloyal. I feel I’m betraying my own flesh and blood.

“How was the gym?” Carrie’s eyes move around the room, finding cameras Lucy can’t see. “Crowded?”

“You should have done weights while you could.”

“Like I told you, I had things to take care of including a surprise.”

Carrie is in the same running clothes but there’s no sign of the machine gun. There’s no time stamp on the recording, only a run time of almost twenty minutes now, and I watch her open the small refrigerator.

“I brought you a present.” She grabs two St. Pauli Girls, pops off the caps and hands one of the green bottles to Lucy.

She stares at it but doesn’t take a sip. “I don’t want it.”

“We can have a drink together can’t we?” Carrie brushes her fingers through her peroxided buzz-cut hair.

“You shouldn’t have brought it here. And I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t need to ask. I’m very thoughtful.” Carrie picks up the Swiss Army knife from the top of the refrigerator, resting the thick red handle in the palm of her hand, flipping open a blade with her thumbnail, and stainless steel flashes.

“You shouldn’t have done it without asking.” Lucy strips down to her sports bra and bikini briefs, and she’s sweating and flushed from exertion. “I get caught with alcohol in my room and I’m fucked.” She drops her clothing into a bamboo hamper I bought for her, grabs a towel and begins drying off.

“You’d better hope they don’t find out you have a gun in here,” Carrie says somberly and for the effect as she studies the knife blade shining thinly, sharply. “A very illegal one.”

“It’s not illegal.”

“Maybe it’s about to be.”

“What have you done? You’ve done something.”

“Well it would be a crime if it’s missing. But what the hell is legal anyway? Arbitrary rules invented by flawed mortals. Benton’s more or less your uncle. Maybe it’s not stealing if you took it from your uncle.”

Lucy walks over to the closet, opens the door, looks inside. “Where is it? What the hell did you do with it?”

“Have you learned nothing in the time we’ve been together? You can’t stop anything I want to do and I don’t need your permission.” Carrie looks directly into a camera and smiles.

I watch Lucy sit on a corner of the desk inside her dorm room, her tan muscular legs dangling. She’s getting visibly upset.

Light seeping around the edges of the closed blinds is different, and just seconds ago Lucy had her running shoes and socks on. Now they’re off. She’s barefoot. The video has been edited heavily, skillfully, and I wonder what has been deleted and stitched together for purposes of Carrie’s propaganda and manipulations.

“You always manage to take whatever you want,” Lucy is saying to her. “You’re always trying to make me do things that are wrong, that are bad for me.”

“I don’t make you do anything.” Carrie walks close, strokes her hair, and Lucy jerks her head away. “Don’t rebuff me.” Carrie is inches from Lucy’s face, almost nose to nose, staring into her eyes. “Do not rebuff me.”

She kisses her and Lucy doesn’t react. She sits stoically, stiffly like a statue.

“You know what happens when you act like this,” Carrie says with an edge that hints of what she’s capable of. “Nothing good and you really must stop blaming everybody for your behavior.”

“Where’s the fucking gun!” Lucy gets up from the desk. “You’d like to get me in trouble, wouldn’t you? You’d like to deliberately set me up for it. Why? Because if you discredit me then no one will believe what I do or say. I won’t get anything I’ve earned and deserve. Not ever. That would be a horrible way to live.”

“How horrible? Do tell.” Carrie’s eyes are bright silvery blue.

“You’re sick,” Lucy says. “Go to hell.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll hide the evidence, carry out the empty beer bottles and get rid of them.” Carrie takes a swallow of the German lager. “So you don’t get sent to the principal’s office.”

“I don’t give a shit about the beer! Where’s the gun? It doesn’t belong to you.”

“You know what they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law. It’s fixable you know. That MP5K is going to shoot so sweet.”

“Do you understand what could happen? Of course you do. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Everything you do in life is about creating leverage, finding dirt that can give you an advantage, and that’s been your MO from the start. Give me the gun. Where is it?”

“In due time,” Carrie says in a syrupy, patronizing tone. “I promise it will turn up when you least expect it. How about a massage? Let me dig my fingers into you. I know exactly how to cure what ails you.”

“I’m not drinking this.” Lucy retrieves the bottle of St. Pauli Girl from the desk.

She pads barefoot into the bathroom and there’s a hidden camera in there too. I watch her on video pour out her beer. I hear it splashing into the sink, and when she glances into the mirror her keenly pretty face is a mixture of sad, hurt and angry but mostly sad and hurt. Lucy loved her. Carrie was her first love. In some ways she was Lucy’s last.

“I don’t trust anything you give me, anything you do.” Lucy raises her voice as she turns on the water full blast, washing the beer away.

She looks in the mirror again and her face is so young, so childlike, and her eyes are teary. She’s trying to be brave, to control her volatile emotions, and she splashes water on her face and dries off with a towel. She walks back into the bedroom as I realize that Carrie must have set up a network of motion-sensitive recording devices that she programmed to override each other when someone moved from room to room. I could see what Lucy was doing in the bathroom but I couldn’t see Carrie. Now I can. I’m watching both of them again.

“That was wasteful. It was ungrateful.” Carrie touches the tip of her tongue to the opening of her St. Pauli Girl bottle, lightly tracing the beveled rim.

She stares into a camera and slowly licks her bottom lip. Her eyes are glassy. They’re almost Prussian blue, changing like her moods.

“Please leave,” Lucy says. “I don’t want to fight. We need to end this without a fucking war.”

Carrie bends over to take off her running shoes and socks. “Can you hand me the lotion, please?” Her ankles are unnaturally pale with prominent blue veins, the skin almost translucent like beeswax.

“You’re not showering here. You need to go. I have to get ready for dinner.”

“A dinner I’m not invited to.”

“You know exactly why that is.” Lucy retrieves a camouflage toiletry bag from the top of the dresser.

Rummaging for an unlabeled plastic bottle, she tosses it to her. Carrie snatches it out of the air like a touchdown pass.

“Just keep it. I don’t use it, no way I would.” Lucy returns to her perch on top of the desk. “The long-term side effects of rubbing copper peptides and other metals and minerals into your skin is unknown. In other words fucking untested. Look it up. But what is known is that too much copper is toxic. Look that up too while you’re fucking at it.”

“You sound just like your annoying aunt.” Carrie’s eyes darken, and it continues to jar me when she refers to me as if I’m not the one watching this.

“I don’t,” Lucy says. “Aunt Kay doesn’t say fuck nearly as often as I do. And while I appreciate you mixing up a batch of your bullshit collagen-producing vanishing cream for me …”

“Vanishing cream? Not hardly.” Carrie’s arrogance puffs her up like a Komodo dragon. “It’s a skin regeneration preparation.” She says it condescendingly. “Copper is essential to good health.”

“It also encourages the production of red blood cells, and that’s the last thing you need help with.”

“How touching. You care about me.”

“Right now I don’t give a shit about you. But why the fuck would you rub copper into yourself? Did you ask a physician if someone with your disorder should apply a topical lotion with copper in it? You keep using shit like that and you’ll have blood pudding sluggishly moving through your veins. You’ll drop dead of a stroke.”

“God you’re becoming just like her. Little Kay Junior. Hello Kay Junior.”

“Leave Aunt Kay out of it.”

“It’s really not possible to leave her out of anything, Lucy. Do you think if you weren’t blood kin you might be lovers? Because I could understand it. I could go for her. Definitely. I would try it.” Carrie touches her tongue to the beer bottle, inserts it into the opening. “She’d never go back. I can promise you that.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just speaking the truth. I could make her feel so good. So alive.”

“Shut up!”

Carrie sets down the beer as she unscrews the cap from the lotion, sniffs the fragrance, swooning. “Ohhhh soooo nice. You sure? Not even a little bit in those hard-to-reach places?”

“For the record?” Lucy swipes ChapStick on her lips. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”

“All this because Miss Beauty Queen was running the Yellow Brick Road the same time we were. A coincidence. And you go nuclear.”

“The hell it was a coincidence.”

“It really was. I swear, Lucy.”

“Bullshit!”

“I swear on the Bible I didn’t tell Erin we’d be out there at three o’clock. And voilà.” Carrie snaps her fingers. “She happens to show up.”

“Running out there all by her lonesome and there we are and she joins us. Ignoring me like I wasn’t there. Focused only on you. Right. What a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Just like she’s happened to show up everywhere else the two of you have fucked each other, Carrie.”

“You want to talk a health threat?”

“You mean you?”

“Jealousy. It’s toxic.”

“How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again.”

“You need to start putting this on every time you go out, even on overcast days in the dead of winter.” The viscous translucent lotion Carrie dribbles into her palm looks like semen. “And you say fuck too much. Vulgarity is inversely proportionate to intelligence and facility with languages. Profuse swearing is generally associated with a low IQ, a limited vocabulary and uncontrollable hostility.”

“Are you listening to me? Because I’m not kidding.” Lucy seems to vibrate with emotion, with fury and pain.

“How about a back rub? I promise you’ll feel better.”

“I’m done with your lying! Your cheating and stealing credit!” Lucy is crying. “Every shitty thing you do! You don’t know what it is to love anybody. You aren’t capable of it!”

Carrie is completely calm no matter what is happening or said, her attention flicking from one concealed camera to another like an exotic reptile reading the air with its forked tongue.

“You’re a cheater-whore!”

“Someday I’ll remind you what you said. And you might wish you hadn’t.” Carrie holds up her hand with a dollop of lotion, smiles brightly.

“I’m scared.” Lucy glares at her, the veins standing out in her neck.

Carrie begins rubbing the lotion on herself, slowly, salaciously on her face, her neck. She clicks her tongue at Lucy as if she’s a dog, waving the bottle of lotion at her as if it’s a bone.

“Come. I’ll put it on you. I’ll rub it in the way you like.” She rapidly rubs her palms together. “I’ll warm my hands and drive my magic potion into your skin. Sort of an improvised nanotechnology.”

“Stay away from me!” Lucy furiously wipes tears with the back of her hand, and suddenly the video stops.

I try to rewind it but I can’t. I can’t replay it. I can’t do anything to it at all.

8

The icons are inert. When I click on the link in my text messages nothing happens.

Then just as suddenly the link isn’t there anymore, as if I deleted any trace of it from my messages. But I certainly didn’t. The recording has vanished before my eyes like a disturbing dream. It’s gone as if it was imagined, and I look around the foyer at the dark dried blood, the shattered glass, the gory area on the floor where the body had been. My attention stops on the upright ladder.

Fiberglass, rubber feet, four steps and a platform on top, perfectly centered, and that begins to bother me like many details in this case. The ladder is set up directly under the light fixture, which at some point shattered over the marble floor. If Chanel really lost her balance I would have expected the ladder to slide, possibly to tilt and tumble over as she fell. I scan feathery marks made by her bloody hair at the perimeter of the putrid crazed blackish mess where her upper body had been. It appears that at some point she moved her head.

Or someone moved it.

We’ve found no footprints, handprints, nothing that might suggest the presence of a second person including the housekeeper who discovered the body. I recall the bottoms of Chanel’s bare feet were completely clean. Once she was down, she stayed down. She didn’t step in her own blood. It doesn’t appear anybody did, and then I begin looking harder at a scene that is increasingly suspicious as I listen for Marino, waiting for him to come back so we can check on Lucy. I halfway expect another alert tone on my phone, another video link to land, and I keep hoping Lucy will call me. I text her at the same time I carefully scan the foyer, focusing on areas of clean white marble, looking for any indication that someone may have washed the floor in an attempt to alter the scene, to stage it.