Chaos - Patricia Cornwell

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just big. But explosively bad. The blitz attack he’s describing will create a public panic if it’s not handled properly. I feel slightly sick inside. I remember the young woman on her bicycle looking at me quizzically as Benton handed her the bottle of water she dropped. She put her helmet back on before she rode off, and she didn’t bother fastening the chin strap. I remember seeing it dangling as she rode off across the street, through the Yard, heading in the direction of the Square and the river.

      This would have been close to seven P.M., barely an hour ago as the sun was setting. I tell myself if it turns out the victim is the woman I saw, it would be a bizarre twist of fate, an almost unbelievable one. I almost hope the detail about rigor turns out to be accurate. If it is, the victim couldn’t be the young cyclist in Converse sneakers.

      But even as I reassure myself, I also know that what Marino said about the rigor can’t be true. Or the reporting officer is confused. Because I don’t think it’s possible—even in this weather—for a dead body on the fitness path inside John F. Kennedy Park not to be discovered for hours. I suspect the death happened recently, and then I envision the young woman’s flushed face and smile again.

      What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I hear her voice in my head.

      “I’ve already talked to your office,” Marino says in my earpiece. “Rusty and Harold are bringing a truck.”

      “I need a big one.”

      “The MCC,” he says, and the tri-axle thirty-five-foot mobile command center is a fine idea if there’s a place to park it.

      “We’re going to need a barricade,” I remind Marino, and I can’t get the woman’s face, her sporty sunglasses and self-assured smile, out of my thoughts.

      “That’s what I ordered. Remember who you’re talking to.”

      When he headed investigations at the CFC, he was in charge of our fleet. In some ways he knows more about the nuts and bolts of our operations than I do.

      “I want a place to duck out of the heat and away from the curious,” I reply. “And we’ll need plenty of water.”

      “Yeah, there’s not exactly a 7-Eleven handy, and the park is dark as shit. We’re setting up lights.”

      “Please don’t turn them on yet. The scene will blaze like Fenway.”

      “Don’t worry. We’re keeping everything dark until we’re ready. Doing what we can to keep the gawkers away, especially any assholes trying to film with their phones. There’s student housing everywhere. Eliot House is right there on the other side of Memorial Drive and it’s as big as the Pentagon, plus you got the Kennedy School, and traffic on Memorial Drive. Not to mention the bridge is right there, and across the water is Boston. So we got no plans of lighting up the scene right this minute.”

      “Do we have a name?” I ask.

      “An ID was found on the path near her bike. Elisa Vandersteel, twenty-three years old from the UK. Of course that’s if it’s the dead lady’s. I’m guessing it probably is,” Marino says, and my mood sinks lower. “I’m told the picture looks sort of like her, for what it’s worth. And I just pulled up in front of the Faculty Club. You coming out?”

      “Where in the UK?” I almost don’t want to ask.

      “London, I think.”

      “Do you know what kind of shoes she had on?” I envision the cyclist’s off-white Converse sneakers, and I’m pretty sure I caught a peek of bike socks, the kind that are below the ankle.

      “Her shoes?” Marino asks as if he didn’t hear me right.

      “Yes.”

      “Got no idea,” he says. “Why?”

      “I’ll see you in a minute,” I reply.

       10

      I step away from the front door, pausing by the antique entryway table with its big flower arrangement.

      Inside the drawing room Benton is discreetly tucked to one side of a window near the baby grand piano. He’s on the phone, his face hard and somber. There’s nobody else inside with him, and I wish I could tell him about the woman on the bicycle. He saw her too, and now the worst may have happened.

      But I don’t get any closer. I know when not to disturb him, and I notice that Mrs. P is back at her station, her round old-fashioned glasses staring at me. As I glance at her she quickly looks down and begins to open menus, checking the printed pages inside. I can tell she senses something is wrong.

      I can’t hear what Benton is saying to whoever he’s on the phone with, but I get the impression based on his tone that he’s not talking to the same person he was a moment earlier. I catch his eye and indicate I have to go, and he nods. Then he turns away. He doesn’t place his hand over his phone to ask what’s happening or offer what might be going on with him. And that makes me wonder if we really are being contacted about the same case.

      But I don’t see how that would be feasible. At this stage there’s no reason I can think of for the FBI to be interested in a local death, possibly of a young woman from London named Elisa Vandersteel. But it’s disturbing that Marino mentioned the International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol. I don’t know why he did or if I might have misheard. But I can’t stop thinking of the cyclist with the blue helmet and Converse sneakers who called me the peanut-butter-pie lady.

      I realize the ID found near her body might not be hers, but when I met her she sounded British, possibly from London, and my stomach clenches harder. I feel a sense of urgency that’s personal. As if I knew the woman who’s been killed. As if I might be one of the last people she ever spoke to or saw. And I will myself to control my thoughts.

      I can’t say for a fact whose dead body is in the park or how the death occurred or why, I remind myself. I open the door and step out into the dark oven of the patio, where no one is sitting in the stifling night air. I follow the walkway, looking all around me with every step I take. I listen for the quiet nocturnal sounds of insects, of birds lifting off branches in a startled burst, their wings whistling.

      I listen for the creaking of old trees, the rustle of leafy canopies or chirp of a katydid. But it’s dead quiet except for traffic that gusts like the wind, rushing, then lagging before it picks up again. I’m aware of the solid roughness of the bricks beneath my softly tapping shoes, mindful of the thick static air and the bright bug eyes of vehicles on Quincy Street.

      I pass the same foliage and rockery I did earlier when I was with Benton, but it seems I’m on another planet now, surrounded by unfamiliar voids of lawn, and hulking dark shapes and shadows. Nothing moves except traffic beyond the split-rail paling silhouetted ahead. I can see the libraries sleepily lit up across the street in the Yard, where I was walking not even an hour and a half ago. I reach the sidewalk, and Marino’s SUV is parked at the curb behind Benton’s Audi.

      It seems like déjà vu as I climb in and stare at the rear of my husband’s blacked-out Batmobile illuminated in the glare of headlights. Only he’s not in it now, and I feel a pang of loneliness as I see the empty dark space where he was sitting behind the wheel, watching us in the rearview mirror but a very short time ago.

      Benton is still inside the Faculty Club, and I continue watching for him to emerge from the red front door, to see him illuminated in the entrance light as he steps outside and follows the walkway. But there’s no sign of him. He must still be on the phone, and it enters my mind that in the midst of all this chaos he has to take care of banal matters such as paying for a dinner we didn’t get to eat. I didn’t think of asking for the check. I simply walked out.

      As I pull my door shut and set my briefcase by my feet, I ask Marino what else he instructed my two autopsy technicians Rusty and Harold to bring to the scene.

      “And

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