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.Gus is armed and dressed in fatigues, because that is how Lucy’s Special Ops agents always dress, even if it is unnecessary, and on an eighty-five-degree day when the suspect, a twenty-year-old girl, is safely locked up in a state hospital in Massachusetts, it probably wasn’t necessary to deploy four Special Ops agents to the Sea Breeze Resort.But that was what Lucy wanted.That was what her agents wanted.No matter how detailed Marino has been in his explanation of what Benton relayed to him about Helen’s different personalities or alters, as Benton calls them, the agents don’t quite believe there aren’t other dangerous people running around, that maybe Helen has accomplices—like Basil Jenrette, they point out—who are real.Two of her agents are going through a computer on a desk by a window that looks out over the parking lot.There is also a scanner, a color printer, packages of magazine-grade paper and half a dozen fishing magazines.Planks Anthe front porch are warped, some of them rotted, others missing, exposing the sandy soil beneath the one-story paint-peeled frame house not far from the Everglades.It is quiet, save for the distant traffic that sounds like gusting wind, and the scraping and stabbing of shovels.Death pollutes the air and in the heat of the late afternoon seems to shimmer darkly in waves that get worse the closer one gets to the pits.The agents, the police and scientists have found four of them.Based on soil disturbances and discoloration, there are more.Scarpetta and Benton are in the foyer just inside the door, where there is a fish tank and a large, dead spider curled up on a rock.Leaning against a wall is a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun and five boxes of cartridges.Scarpetta and Benton watch two men, sweating in suits and ties and blue nitrile gloves, push a stretcher bearing the pouched remains of Ev Christian, wheels clattering.They stop at the wide-open door.“When you get her to the morgue,” Scarpetta says to them, “I’m going to need you to come right back.”“We figured that.I believe it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” one attendant says to her.“You got your work cut out for you,” says the other.They fold up the legs with loud clacks and carry the stretcher bearing Ev Christian toward the dark-blue van.“How’s this going to end up in court?” one of the attendants thinks to ask from the bottom of the steps.“I mean, if this lady’s a suicide, how do you charge someone with murder if it’s a suicide?”“We’ll see you shortly,” Scarpetta says.The men hesitate, then move on, and she watches Lucy appear from the back of the house.She has on protective clothing and dark glasses but has taken off her face mask and gloves.She trots toward the helicopter, the one where she left her Treo not long after Joe Amos began his fellowship.“There’s really nothing to say she didn’t do it,” Scarpetta says to Benton as she opens packets of disposable protective clothing—a set for her, a set for him—and by she, Scarpetta means Helen Quincy.“Nothing to say she did, either.They’re right.” Benton stares at the stretcher and its grim cargo as the attendants clack open the aluminum legs again so they can open the back of the van.“A suicide that’s a homicide, the perpetrator DID.The lawyers will have a field day.”The stretcher lists on the sandy, weed-choked soil, and Scarpetta worries it might fall over.It’s happened before, a pouched body lands on the ground, very inappropriate, very disrespectful.She is getting more anxious by the moment.“The autopsy will probably show she is a death by hanging,” she says, looking out at the bright, hot afternoon and the activity in it, watching Lucy get something out of the back of the helicopter, an ice chest.The same helicopter where she left her Treo, an act of forgetfulness that in many ways started everything and led everybody here to this hellhole, this plague pit.“That’s probably all it will show in terms of what killed her,” Scarpetta is saying.“But the rest of it is a different story.”The rest of it is Ev’s pain and suffering, her naked, bloated body tethered by ropes looped over a rafter, one of them looped around her neck.She is covered by insect bites and rashes, her wrists and ankles with fulminating infections.When Scarpetta palpated her head, she felt bits of fractured bone move beneath her fingers, the woman’s face pulverized, her scalp lacerated, contusions all over her, reddish abraded areas inflicted at or around the time of death.Scarpetta suspects that Jan or Stevie or Hog, or whoever she was when she tortured Ev inside this house, kicked Ev’s body severely and repeatedly after discovering she had hanged herself.On Ev’s lower back, belly and buttocks are faint impressions in the shape of a shoe or boot.Reba comes around from the side of the house and carefully climbs the rotting steps and picks her way across the porch.She is bright white in her disposable clothing and pushes up her face mask.She’s carrying a brown paper bag, neatly folded at the top.“There’s some black plastic trash bags,” she says.“In a separate grave, a shallow one
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