“Mrs. Pieste, I think you understand nothing was tested as it was supposed to be,” I reply.
“Why didn’t you?”
“The medical examiner in Cape Town—”
“But you signed the death certificate, Dr. Scarpetta. And the autopsy report. I have copies that lawyer from the Pentagon sent me.”
“I didn’t sign them.” I refused to sign documents that I knew were a lie, but knowing they were a lie made me guilty of it anyway. “I don’t have
copies, as hard as that probably is for you to believe,” I then say. “They weren’t supplied to me. What I have are my own notes, my own records,
which I mailed back to the US before I left South Africa because I worried my luggage would be gone through, and it was.”
“But you signed what I have.”
“I promise I didn’t,” I reply calmly but firmly. “My guess is certain people made certain my signature was forged on those falsified documents in
the event I decided to do what I’m doing now.”
“If you decided to tell the truth.”
It’s so hard to hear it stated so bluntly. The truth. Implying what I’ve told or not told over the years makes me a liar.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. “You had a right to know the truth back then, at the time of your daughter’s death. And the death of her friend.”
“I can see why you didn’t say anything back then, though,” Mrs. Pieste says, and she sounds only slightly upset. Mostly she sounds interested
and relieved to be talking about something that has dominated her life for most of it. “When people do things like this, no telling where they’ll stop.
Well, there’s no limit. Other people would have gotten hurt. Including you.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted anybody else to get hurt,” I reply, and I feel worse if what she’s saying is that I was silent out of fear for my own safety. I
was afraid of a lot of things and a host of people I couldn’t see. I was afraid of other people dying, of people being wrongly accused.
“I hope you understand that when I read the death certificate and autopsy report, not that I understand most of the medical terms, well, one
would think the findings are yours,” Mrs. Pieste says.
“They absolutely weren’t, and they are false. There was no tissue response to the injuries. All of it was postmortem. In fact, hours after the
deaths, Mrs. Pieste. What was done to Noonie and Joanne occurred many hours after they had died.”
“If there wasn’t a test for drugs, then how can you be sure they were given something?” her voice goes on, and I hear the sound of another
phone being picked up.
“This is Edward Pieste,” a man’s voice says. “I’m on, too. I’m Noonie’s father.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounds weak, perfectly insipid. “I wish I had exactly the right words to say to both of you. I’m sorry you were lied to
and that I permitted it, and although I won’t make excuses…”
“We understand why you couldn’t say what happened,” the father replies. “The feelings back then, and our government secretly in collusion with
those who wanted to keep Apartheid alive. That’s why Noonie was making that documentary. They wouldn’t let the film crew into South Africa. Each
of them had to go in as if they were tourists. A big dirty secret what our government was doing to support the atrocities over there.”
“It wasn’t that big of a secret, Eddie.” Mrs. Pieste’s voice.
“Well, the White House put on the good face.”
“I’m sure they told you about the documentary Noonie was making? She had such a future,” Mrs. Pieste says to me as I look at a picture of her
daughter that I wouldn’t want the Piestes to ever see.
“About the children of Apartheid,” I reply. “I did see it when it aired here.”
“The evils of white supremacy,” she says. “Of any supremacy, period.”
“I missed the first part of what the two of you have been talking about,” Mr. Pieste says. “Was out shoveling the driveway.”
“He doesn’t listen,” his wife says. “A man his age shoveling snow, but he’s the hard head.” She says it with sad affection. “Dr. Scarpetta was
telling me Noonie and Joanne were drugged.”
“Really. Well, that’s something.” He says it with no energy in his tone.
“I got to the apartment several days after their deaths and did a retrospective. It was staged, of course; their crime scene was staged,” I
explain. “But there were beer cans, plastic cups, and a wine bottle in the kitchen trash, a bottle of white wine from Stellenbosch, and I managed to
get the cans, the bottle, and cups along with other items, and have them sent back to the States, where I had them tested. We found high levels of
GHB in the wine bottle and two of the cups. Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as a date-rape drug.”
“They did say there was rape,” Mr. Pieste says with the same empty affect.
“I don’t know for a fact that they were raped. There was no physical sign of it, no injuries except staged ones inflicted postmortem, and swabs I
had tested privately here in the US were negative for sperm,” I reply, looking through photographs of the nude bodies bound to chairs I know the
women weren’t sitting in when they were murdered. I look at close-ups showing a livor mortis pattern that told me the women were lying in bed on
rumpled sheets for at least twelve hours after death.
I go through photographs I took with my own camera of hacking and cutting injuries that barely bled, and ligatures that scarcely left a mark on
the skin because the brutes behind all this were too ignorant to know what the hell they were doing, someone hired or assigned by government or
military operatives to spike a bottle of local wine and have drinks with the women, possibly a friend or they thought the person was friendly or safe,
when, of course, he was anything but, and I tell them that serology tests I had done after I got home indicated the presence of a male. Later, when I
had DNA testing done, I got the profile of a European or white male who remains unknown. I can’t say for a fact it is the profile of the killer, but it was
someone drinking beer inside the apartment, I add.
As much as one can reconstruct anything, I tell the Piestes what I think happened, that after Noonie and Joanne were drugged and groggy or
unconscious, their assailant helped them to bed and smothered them with a pillow, and I based this on pinpoint hemorrhages and other injuries, I
explain. Then for some reason this person must have left. Maybe he wanted to come back later with others involved in the conspiracy, or it could be
that he waited inside the apartment for his compatriots to arrive, I don’t know. But by the time the women were bound and cut and mutilated so
savagely, they had been dead for a while, and it couldn’t have been more obvious to me when I finally saw them.
“Up here we got about four inches already,” Mr. Pieste says after a while, after he’s heard enough. “That on top of ice. Did you get the ice down
there in Cambridge?”
“I guess we should complain about this to someone,” Mrs. Pieste says. “Does it matter how long it’s been?”
“It never matters how long it’s been when you’re talking about the truth,” I reply. “And there’s no statute of limitation on homicide.”
“I just hope they didn’t lock up someone who shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Pieste then says.
“The cases have remained unsolved. Attributed to black gang members but no arrests,” I tell them.
“But it was probably someone white,” she says.
“Someone white was drinking beer inside the apartment, that much I can say with reasonable certainty.”
“Do you know who did it?” she asks.
“Because we would want them punished,” her husband says.
“I only know the type of people who likely did it. Cowardly people all about power and politics. And you should do what you feel, what’s in your
heart.”
“Eddie, what do you think?”
“I’ll write a letter to Senator Chappel.”
“You know how much good that will do.”
“Then to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I’ll write everyone,” he says.
“What will anybody do about it now?” Mrs. Pieste says to her husband. “I don’t know that I can live through it again, Eddie.”
“Well, I need to go clear the walk again,” he says. “Got to stay on top of the snow, and it’s really coming down. Thank you for your time and
trouble, ma’am,” he says to me. “And for going ahead and telling us. I know that wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sure my daughter would
appreciate it if she was here to tell you herself.”
After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a while, the paperwork and photographs back in the gray accordion file they’ve been in for more than two
decades. I’ll return the file to the safe in the basement, I decide. But not now. I don’t feel like going down into the basement and into that safe right
now, and I think someone has just pulled into our driveway. I hear snow crunching, and I’m not in a good state of mind to see whoever it is. I’ll stay up
here for a little while longer. Maybe make a grocery list or contemplate errands or just pet Sock for a minute or two.
“I can’t take you for a walk,” I tell him.
He is curled up next to me, his head on my thigh, unperturbed by the sad conversation he just overheard and having no idea what it says about
the world he lives in. But then he knows cruelty, maybe knows it better than the rest of us.
“No walks without a coat,” I go on, petting him, and he yawns and licks my hand, and I hear the beeping of the alarm being disarmed, then the
front door shuts. “I think we’re going to try boots,” I tell Sock as Marino’s and Benton’s voices drift up from the entryway. “You probably aren’t going
to like these little shoes they make for dogs and are likely to get quite annoyed with me, but I promise it’s a good thing. Well, we have company.” I
recognize Marino’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “You remember him from yesterday, in the big truck. The big man in yellow who gets on my nerves
most of the time. But for future reference, you have no reason to be afraid of him. He’s not a bad person, and as you may be aware, people who
have known each other for a very long time tend to be ruder to each other than they are to people they don’t like half as much.”
“Anybody home?” Marino’s big voice precedes him into the bedroom as the doorknob turns, and then he knocks as he opens the door.
“Benton said you was decent. Who were you talking to? You on the phone?”
“He’s clairvoyant, then,” I reply from the bed, where I’m under the covers, nothing but pajamas on. “And I’m not on the phone and wasn’t talking
to anyone.”
“How’s Sock? How ya doing, boy?” he then says before I can answer. “How come he smells funny? What did you put on him, flea medicine?
This time of year? You look okay. How are you feeling?”
“I cleaned his ears.”
“So how are you doing, Doc?”
Marino looms over me, and his presence seems larger than usual because he’s in a heavy parka and a baseball cap and hiking boots while
I’m in nothing but flannel, modestly tucked under a blanket and a duvet. He has a small black case in his hands that I recognize as Lucy’s iPad,
unless he’s managed to get one of his own, which I doubt.
“I didn’t get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been staying in this morning, taking care of a few things,” I say to him. “I’m assuming
Dawn Kincaid is fine. Last I heard, she was stable.”
“Stable? You’re joking, right?”
“I’m talking about her physical condition. The reattachment of her finger and the damage to the rest of them, the other three that were cut so
severely. It’s probably a good thing for her it was so cold in the garage. And, of course, we thought to pack her hand and her severed finger in ice.
I’m hoping that helped. Do you know? I haven’t heard a word. What’s her status? I’ve not heard any reports since she was admitted last night.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Marino’s eyes look at me, and they’re just as bloodshot as they were yesterday in Salem.
“I’m not kidding. Nobody’s told me a word. Benton said earlier he would check, but I don’t think he has.”
“He’s been on the phone with us all morning.”
“Maybe you’d be so kind as to call the hospital and check.”
“Like I give a flying fuck if she loses a finger or all of her damn fingers,” Marino says. “Why would you give a fuck? You afraid she’ll sue you?
That must be it, and wouldn’t that figure? She probably will. Will sue you for maybe losing the use of her hand so she can’t build nanobots or
whatever anymore, a psycho like that. I guess psychopaths are stable in the mental-illness sense of the word. Can you be crazy and a psychopath?
And still be put together well enough to work at a place like Otwahl? Her case is going to be one big damn problem. If she gets out, well, can you
imagine?”
“Why would she get out?”
“I’m just telling you the case is going to be a problem. You won’t be safe if she’s on the loose again. None of us will be.”
He helps himself to the foot of the bed, and the bed sinks and it feels like I’m suddenly sitting uphill as he makes himself comfortable, petting
Sock and informing me that the police and the FBI found the “rat hole” Dawn Kincaid had rented, a one-bedroom apartment in Revere, just outside
of Boston, where she stayed when she wasn’t with Eli Goldman or with her biological father, Jack Fielding, or whoever else she had entangled in
her web at any point in time. Marino slips the iPad out of its case and turns it on as he lets me know that he and Lucy and quite a number of other
investigators have been searching the rat-hole apartment for hours, going through Dawn’s computer and everything she has, including everything
she’s stolen.
“What about her mother?” I ask. “Has anybody talked to her?”
“Dawn’s been in contact with her for a number of years, visiting her in prison down there in Georgia now and then. Reconnected with her and
with Fielding on and off over the years. Latches on when she wants something, a first-class manipulator and user.”
“But does the mother know what’s happened up here?”
“Why do you care what a fucking child molester thinks?”
“Her relationship with Jack wasn’t that simple. It’s not as easily explained as you so eloquently just put it. I’d hate for her to hear about him on
the news.”
“Who gives a shit.”
“I never want anybody to find out that way,” I reply. “I don’t care who it is. Her relationship with him wasn’t simple,” I repeat. “Relationships like
that never are.”
“Plain and simple to me. Black and white.”
“If she hears it on the news,” I reply, and I realize I’m perseverating. “I always hate for that to happen. Such an inhumane way for people to find
out terrible things like this. That’s my concern.”
“A klepto,” Marino then says, because his only interest is the case and what the investigators have been discovering at Dawn Kincaid’s
