Depraved Heart - Patricia Cornwell

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have her own code that only she uses?”

      “No. There’s just one and it’s shared. The housekeeper and Chanel used the same dumbass code. One-two-three-four. Sounds like Chanel wasn’t particularly security conscious.”

      “With her Hollywood background that would surprise me. I wouldn’t expect her to be trusting. And one-two-three-four is usually the default code when a security system is installed. The expectation is you’ll change the code to something difficult to guess.”

      “Obviously she didn’t bother.”

      “We need to find out how long she’s lived there, how often she’s in Cambridge. While I didn’t have a chance to look around I can say the house didn’t feel all that lived in.” As I explain this I’m desperate to tell him the truth about why we’re rushing to Lucy’s house.

      I want to show him the video but I can’t. Even if I were able to I couldn’t let him see it. Legally I wouldn’t dare. I can’t prove who sent it or why. The video could be a setup, a trap, maybe one cooked up by our own government. Lucy admits on film to being in possession of an illegal firearm, a fully automatic machine gun that Carrie accuses her of stealing from my husband Benton—an FBI agent. Any violation involving a Class III weapon is serious trouble, the very trouble Lucy doesn’t need. Especially now.

      Over recent months the police and the Feds have been watching her. I don’t know how closely. Because of her prior relationship with Carrie almost everyone is concerned about what Lucy’s involvement might be with her. Or is Carrie even still alive? That’s the most inflammatory question I’ve been hearing this summer. Maybe Carrie really is dead. Maybe everything happening is being manufactured by my niece, and this thought leads back to Marino. If only I could show the video to him.

      I continue arguing with myself that were it possible and prudent there would be no point. I know how he would react. He would be convinced that someone—probably Carrie—is harassing me. He would say she knows exactly how to push my buttons, to stick it to me, and the stupidest thing I could have done is what I’m doing now. I should have stayed put. I shouldn’t have reacted. I’ve let her get the best of me and there must be other nasty tricks to follow.

      Let the games begin, I imagine Marino commenting, and I wonder what he’d say if he knew the date it was filmed.

      July 11, 1997. His birthday seventeen years ago.

       10

      I don’t remember it. But birthdays are a big deal and I would have cooked him dinner, one of his favorite dishes, whatever he wanted.

      It also was long ago when Lucy was at the FBI Academy, inside her dorm room breaking up with Carrie. Assuming the date is correct on the video file, the two of them had run the FBI obstacle course known as the Yellow Brick Road. Then Lucy worked out in the gym. I have no idea where I was and I don’t know where Marino might have been or what he was doing. So I ask him.

      “That’s sure as hell out of the blue,” he replies. “Why do you want to know about my birthday in 1997?”

      “Just tell me if you remember.”

      “Yeah I do.” He looks over at me as I keep my eyes straight ahead. “I’m surprised you don’t.”

      “Help me out. I have no clue.”

      “You and me drove to Quantico. We picked up Lucy and Benton and went to the Globe and Laurel.”

      The legendary Marine Corps hangout is suddenly vivid in my mind. I see the beer steins around the polished wooden bar, the ceiling covered with law enforcement and military patches from all over the world. Good food, good booze, and a huge seal over the door, the eagle, globe and anchor emblazoned with semper fidelis. We were part of the always faithful, the always loyal, and what went on in there stayed in there. I haven’t been in years, and then I envision something else. Marino drunk. It was ugly. I see him wild eyed in the incomplete darkness of the parking lot yelling, swearing at Lucy, his arms rigidly by his sides, fists clenched as if he might hit her.

      “Something was wrong with Lucy that night.” I’m deliberately vague with him. “You two were having a bad time, got upset with each other. That much is coming back.”

      “Let me refresh your memory,” he says. “She couldn’t eat anything. She had belly pain. Me? I figured it was her period.”

      “Which you didn’t mind saying to her in front of everyone.”

      “I thought she was having cramps and PMS. That’s what I remember about my birthday in 1997. I was really looking forward to the Globe but she freakin’ ruined it.”

      “I believe she said she’d pulled an abdominal muscle on the obstacle course.” I know Lucy was in pain and I do recall that she wouldn’t let me check her.

      “She was weird as a shithouse rat, a real asshole. A worse one than usual,” Marino says.

      I remember the two of them shouting at each other by the car. She wouldn’t get in. She threatened to walk back to her dorm, was angry and in tears and now I might know why. She and Carrie had gone out to run the Yellow Brick Road earlier that day and not so serendipitously encountered the new agent in training, a former beauty queen named Erin. Lucy believed Carrie was cheating on her with Erin and it’s all there on film.

      More pieces of a puzzle from the past, and I keep going back to my question. How could Carrie have known at the time that one day she would give me a ringside seat to what was going on in my niece’s private life? And would Carrie also have anticipated that I would begin to interpret and in some ways embellish the video even as I watched? Each second of it brought back information I’ve buried and blocked. Other details are new and that’s equally troubling. What else don’t we know about Carrie Grethen?

      I think about her obsession with the harmful effects of pollution and the sun. I had no idea about her magical beliefs and pathological vanity. To my knowledge no one has ever mentioned she has a blood disorder, and all of it will hold Lucy in very poor standing with the authorities. She knew these details. Obviously she did because she’s talking about them in the recording I saw. But I’m not aware that she’s ever passed the information along to anyone, and then my mood dips deeper into the dark trough of guilt.

      I was the moving force behind Lucy’s internship at Quantico. Carrie was telling the truth when she said I was instrumental in lining it up and had implemented strict guidelines for how the FBI was to deal with my teenaged niece. So I suppose it’s fair to say that it’s my fault Lucy ever met her mentor, her supervisor Carrie. The nightmare that would unfold is because of me. And now it’s unfolding further. And I wasn’t expecting this. And I honestly don’t know what to do except to get to Lucy as fast as I can and make sure she’s safe.

      Marino pats his pockets for his cigarettes. This is the third time he’s lit up since we left Cambridge. If there’s a fourth time I might have to give in. I could use a cigarette right now. Badly. I try to shut out images from the video. I try to get past what I felt, which was like a spy, a traitor, a terrible aunt as I watched Lucy and Carrie together intimately and barely dressed, as I listened to Carrie’s disrespectful, disparaging comments about me. I wonder the same thing I always do. How much is deserved? How much is an accurate portrait of who and what I really am?

      I’m so tense I might explode to the touch, and my right leg throbs, the ache spreading down my thigh to my calf muscle. Even the slightest adjustment of the accelerator is at a price. When I press the brake as I just did, I pay for it all right, and Marino hunches his shoulder and sniffs his shirt to make sure he doesn’t smell bad.

      “It’s not me,” he decides. “Sorry about that, Doc. You stink like a decomp and might want to stay away from Lucy’s dog.”

      I drive slowly around blind curves where round convex mirrors are mounted on thick old trees. I look and listen for anything coming.

      The

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