“All you got to do is read the paper,” he says, putting down his pen. “That should tell you why my hair’s falling out.” His eyes are heavy.
I nod as I get his meaning. It is what I expect. Jack has known for a while that I am in serious trouble. Maybe Righter contacted him weeks ago and started fishing, just as he did with Anna. I ask Jack if this is the case, and he admits it. He says he has been a wreck. He hates politics and administration and does not want my job and never will.
“You make me look good,” he says. “You always have, Dr. Scarpetta. They might think I should be appointed chief. Then what do I do? I don’t know.” He runs his fingers through his hair and loses more. “I just wish everything could go back to normal.”
“Believe me, so do I,” I say as the phone rings and Turk answers it.
“That reminds me,” Jack says. “We’re getting weird phone calls down here. I tell you about that?”
“I was down here when we got one,” I reply. “Someone claiming to be Benton.”
“Sick,” he says in disgust.
“That’s the only one I’m aware of,” I add.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” Turk calls out. “Can you take it? It’s Paul.”
I go to the phone. “How are you, Paul?” I ask Paul Monty, the statewide director of the forensic labs.
“First, I just want you to know everybody in this damn building is pulling for you, Kay,” he says. “Bullshit. I read all that bullshit and practically spit my coffee out. And we’re working our fannies off.” By this he means evidence testing. There is supposed to be an egalitarian order in the workup of evidenceappropriately, no one victim should be more important than another and moved to the front of the line. But there is also an unspoken code, same as in police shootings. People take care of their own. It is a fact. “Got some interesting test results that I wanted to pass on to you personally,” Paul Monty goes on. “The hairs from the campgroundthe ones that you suspect are Chandonne’s? Well, the DNA matches. What’s of even more interest is that a fiber comparison shows that the cotton linens from that campsite match fibers collected from the mattress in Diane Bray’s bedroom.”
A scenario forms. Chandonne took Diane Bray’s linens after her murder and fled to the campground. Maybe he slept on them. Or maybe he simply disposed of them. But either way, we can definitely place Chandonne at The Fort James Motel. Paul has nothing more to report at the moment.
“What about the dental floss I found in the toilet?” I ask Paul. “In the room where Matos was killed?”
“No hit on that. The DNA’s not Chandonne’s or Bray’s or any of the usual suspects,” he tells me. “Maybe some previous guest at the motel? Could be unrelated.”
I return to the counter, where Jack resumes telling me about the strange phone calls. He says there have been several of them.
“One I happened to answer and the person, a guy, asked for you, says he’s Benton and then hangs up,” Jack reports. “Turk answered the second time. The guy says to tell you he called and will be an hour late to dinner, identifies himself as Benton and hangs up. So add that to the mix. No wonder I’m going bald.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I absently pick up Polaroid photographs of Benny White’s body on the gurney before he was unclothed.
“Thought you had enough shit going on. I should have told you. I was wrong.”
The sight of this young boy dressed in his Sunday best and inside an unzipped body pouch on top of a steel gurney is so incongruous. I feel deeply saddened as I notice his pants are a little short and his socks don’t quite match, one blue, one black. I feel worse. “You find anything unexpected with him?” I have talked enough about my problems. My problems, as a matter of fact, do not seem very important when I look at photographs of Benny and think about his mother in the viewing room.