The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 48

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"Do you still have the mask, hat, gloves and glasses?"

He stops to think before answering. She has thrown him a curveball and he is uncertain. "I can possibly find them," he hedges.

"What did you do when you got to Richmond?" Berger asks him.

"I got off the train."

She questions him about this for several minutes. Where is the train station? Did he take a taxi next? How did he get around? Just what did he think he would do about his brother? His answers are lucid. Everything he describes makes it seem plausible that he might have been where he claims to have been, such as the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road and in a blue taxicab that let him off at a dump of a motel on Cham-berlayne Avenue, where he paid twenty dollars for a room, again using an assumed name and paying cash. From here, he states that he called my office to get information about the unidentified body he says is his brother. "I asked to speak to the doctor but no one would help me," he is telling Berger.

"Who did you talk to?" she asks him.

"It was a woman. Maybe a clerk."

"Did this clerk tell you who the doctor is?"

"Yes. A Dr. Scarpetta. So then I asked to speak to him, and the clerk tells me Dr. Scarpetta is a woman. So I say, okay. May I speak to her! And she is busy. I don't leave my name and number, of course, because I must continue to be careful. Maybe I'm followed again. How do I know? And then I get a newspaper and read about a murder here, a lady in a store killed a week earlier, and I'm shocked_frightened. They are here."

"These same people? The ones you say are after you?"

"They are here, don't you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him."

"They certainly are amazing, aren't they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it's Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you'd go."

"They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa."

"What about your mother? She wouldn't be upset to find out Thomas is dead?"

"She is drunk so much."

"Your mother's an alcoholic?"

"She's always drinking."

"Every day?"

"Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot."

"You don't live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?"

"Thomas would tell me. It's been her life ever since I can remember. I've always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me."

Berger looks at me. "Possible?"

"Fetal alcohol syndrome?" I consider. "Not likely. Gener- ally severe mental and physical retardation would result if the mother were a chronic alcoholic, and cutaneous changes such as hypertrichosis would be the least of the child's problems."

"Doesn't mean he doesn't believe she caused his condition."

"He certainly might believe it," I agree with her.

"Helping to explain his extreme hatred of women."

"As much as anything can explain his kind of hate," I reply.

On tape, Berger has returned Chandonne to the subject of his allegedly calling the morgue here in Richmond. "So you tried to get through to Dr. Scarpetta on the phone but couldn't. Then what?"

"Then the next day, Friday, I hear on the TV in my motel room that another woman has been murdered. This time a policewoman. They do a newsbreak, you know, and I'm watching it as it is happening and next thing the cameras focus on a big black car pulling up to the scene and they say it is the medical examiner. It is her, Scarpetta. So I get the idea to go there immediately. I will wait until she is leaving the scene and then I will approach her. I will tell her I must talk to her. So I get a taxi."

His remarkable memory fails him here. He recalls nothing about the taxi company, not even the color of the car, only that the driver was a "black man." Probably eighty percent of the taxi drivers in Richmond are black. Chandonne claims that while he is being driven to the scene_and he knows the address because it was on the news_he hears another news-break. This time, the public is being warned about the killer, that he may have a strange medical condition which causes him to have a very unusual appearance. The hypertrichotic description fits Chandonne. "I know now, for sure," he goes on. "They have set the trap and the world thinks I have killed these women in Richmond. So I panic in the back of the taxi, trying to figure out what to do. I say to the taxi driver, 'Do you know this lady they speak of? Scarpetta?' He says that everyone in the city knows her. I ask where she lives and say I'm a tourist. He takes me to her neighborhood but we don't go in because there are guards and a gate. But I know enough to find her. I get out of the taxi several blocks from there. I'm determined 1 will find her before it's too late."

"Too late for what?" Berger asks.

"Before anybody else is killed. I must come back later that night and somehow get her to open the door so I can talk to her. You know, of course, I'm worried they will kill her next. It's their pattern, you see. They did that in Paris, you know. They tried to murder the medical examiner there, a woman. She was very lucky."

"Sir, let's keep on the subject of what happened here in Richmond. Tell me what happened next. It's what, midmorn-ing on Friday, December seventeenth, last Friday? What did you do after the taxi dropped you off? What did you do the rest of the day?"

"Wandered. Found an abandoned house on the river and went in it just to get out of the weather."

"Do you know where that house is?"

"I can't tell you, but not far from her neighborhood."

"From Dr. Scarpetta's neighborhood?"

"Yes."

"You could find that house again, the one you stayed in, couldn't you, sir?"

"It's under construction. Very big. A mansion no one lives in right now. I know where it is."

Berger says to me, "The one where they think he was staying the entire time he was here?"

I nod. I am familiar with the house. I think of the poor people it belongs to and can't imagine them ever wanting to live there again. Chandonne says he hid in the abandoned mansion until dark. Several times that night he ventured out, avoiding the guard gate in my neighborhood by simply following the river and railroad tracks that run behind it. He claims to have knocked on my door early evening and got no answer. At this point, Berger asks me when I got home that night. I tell her it was after eight. I had stopped off at Pleasants Hardware store after leaving the office. I wanted to look at tools because I was perplexed by the strange wounds I had found on Diane Bray's body and by bloody transfers made to the mattress when the killer had set down the bloody tool he had beaten her with. It was during this foraging at Pleasants Hardware that I came across a chipping hammer, and I purchased one and went on home, I tell Berger.

Chandonne goes on to claim he began to get fearful about coming to see me. He claims there were a lot of police cars cruising the neighborhood, and that at one point when he came to my house late, there were two police cruisers parked in front. This was because my alarm had gone off_when Chandonne forced open my garage door so the police would come. Of course, he tells Berger that it wasn't him who set off the alarm. It was them_it must have been them, he says. By now, it is getting close to midnight. It is snowing hard. He hides behind trees near my house and waits until the police leave. He says it is his last chance, he has to see me. He believes they are in the area and will kill me. So he goes to my front door and knocks.

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