Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

Berger listens without interruption. She has taken in what 1 am saying and seems to understand. As usual, she takes no notes. She asks, “Did he leave hair at your house?”

“I’m not sure what the police found.”

“As much as he seems to shed, I would think he left hair at your house or certainly out in the snow in your yard when he was thrashing about.”

“You would think so,” I agree with her.

“I’ve been reading about werewolves.” Berger leaps to the next topic. “Apparently, there have been people who really thought they were werewolves or tried all sorts of bizarre things to turn themselves into werewolves. Witchcraft, black magic. Satan worship. Biting. Drinking blood. Do you think it’s possible Chandonne really believes he is a loup-garou? A werewolf? And maybe even wants to be one?”

“Thus not guilty by reason of insanity,” I reply, and I have assumed all along this would be his defense.

“There was a Hungarian countess in the early sixteen hun­dreds, Elizabeth Bathory-Nadasdy, also known as the Blood Countess,” Berger goes on. “She supposedly tortured and murdered some six hundred young women. Would bathe in their blood, believing it would keep her young and preserve her beauty. Familiar with the case?”

“Vaguely.”

“As the story goes, this countess kept young women in her dungeon, fattened them up, would bleed them and bathe in their blood and then force other imprisoned women to lick all the blood off her body. Supposedly because towels were harsh on her skin. Rubbing blood in her skin, all over her body,” she ponders. “Accounts of this have left out the obvious. I’d say there was a sexual component,” she adds dryly. “Lust mur­ders. Even if the perpetrator truly believed in the magical powers of blood, it’s about power and sex. That’s what it’s about whether you’re a beautiful countess or some genetic anomaly who grew up on the He Saint-Louis.”

We turn on Canterbury Road, entering the wooded, wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms, where Diane Bray lived on the outer edge, her property separated by a wall from the noisy downtown expressway.

“I would give my right arm to know what’s in the Chan­donne library,” Berger is saying. “Or better put, what sorts of things Chandonne’s been reading over the yearsaside from the histories and other erudite materials he says his father gave him, yada, yada, yada. For example, does he know about the Blood Countess? Was he rubbing blood all over his body in hopes it might magically heal him of his affliction?”

“We believe he was bathing in the Seine and then here in the James River” I reply. “Possibly for that reason. To be magically healed.”

“Sort of a biblical thing.”

“Maybe.”

“He might read the Bible, too,” she offers. “Was he influ­enced by the French serial killer Gilles Gamier, who killed lit­tle boys and ate them and bayed at the moon? There were a lot of so-called werewolves in France during the Middle Ages. Some thirty thousand people charged with it, can you imag­ine?” Berger has been doing a lot of research. This is evident. “And there’s the other weird idea,” she goes on. “In werewolf folklore it was believed if you were bitten by a werewolf, you would turn into one. Possible Chandonne was trying to turn his victims into werewolves? Maybe so he could find a bride of Frankenstein, a mate just like him?”

These unusual considerations begin to form a composite that is far more matter-of-fact and pedestrian than it might seem. Berger is simply anticipating what the defense is go­ing to do in her case, and an obvious ploy is to distract the jury from the heinous nature of the crimes by preoccupying them with Chandonne’s physical deformity and alleged mental illness and downright bizarreness. If the argument can be successfully made that he believes he is a paranor­mal creature, a werewolf, a monster, then it is highly un­likely the jury will find him guilty and sentence him to life in prison. It occurs to me that some people might even feel sorry for him.

“The silver-bullet defense.” Berger alludes to the supersti­tion that only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf. “We have a mountain of evidence, but then so did the prosecution in the O.J. case. The silver bullet for the defense will be that Chan­donne is deranged and pitiful.”

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