Read Online Predator by Patricia Cornwell - Free Book Online Page B

Jenny yourself after class,” Scarpetta says as she tries to figure out why the scenario seems familiar.
         Joe is obsessed with hell scenes, an innovation of Marino’s, extreme mock crime scenes that are supposed to mirror the real risks and unpleasantries of real death. She sometimes thinks Joe should give up forensic pathology and sell his soul to Hollywood. If he has a soul. The scenario he has just proposed reminds her of something.
         “Pretty good, huh?” he says. “It could happen in real life.”
         Then she remembers. It did happen in real life.
         “We had a case in Virginia like that,” she recalls. “When I was chief.”
         “Really?” he says, amazed. “Guess there’s nothing new under the sun.”
         “And by the way, Joe,” she says. “In most cases of seppuku, of hari-kari, the cause of death is cardiac arrest due to sudden cardiac collapse due to a sudden drop in intra-abdominal pressure due to sudden evisceration. Not exsanguination.”
         “Your case? The one in there?” He indicates the classroom.
         “Marino’s and mine. From years back. And one other thing,” she adds. “It’s a suicide, not a homicide.”

    Chapter 12

         The Citation X flies south at just under mach one as Lucy uploads files on a virtual private network that is so firewall-protected not even Homeland Security can break in.
         At least, she believes her information infrastructure is secure. She believes that no hacker, including the government, can monitor the transmissions of classified data generated by the Heterogenous Image Transaction database management system that goes by the acronym HIT. She developed and programmed HIT herself. The government doesn’t know about it, she is sure of it. Few people do, she is sure of it. HIT is proprietary, and she could sell the software easily, but she doesn’t need the money, having made her fortune years ago from other software development, mostly from some of the same search engines she is conducting through cyberspace this minute, looking for any violent deaths that might have occurred in a South Florida business of any description.
         Other than homicides in the expected convenience and liquor stores, massage parlors and topless clubs, she has found no violent crime, unsolved or otherwise, that might verify what Basil Jenrette told Benton. However, there once was a business called The Christmas Shop. It was located at the intersection of A1A and East Las Olas Boulevard, along a strip of tacky touristy boutiques and cafés and ice-cream joints on the beach. Two years ago, The Christmas Shop was sold to a chain called Beach Bums that specializes in T-shirts, swimwear and souvenirs.
         It is hard for Joe to believe how many cases Scarpetta has worked in what is a relatively brief career. Forensic pathologists rarely land their first job until they are thirty, assuming their arduous educational track is continuous. Added to her six years of postgraduate medical training were three more for law school. By the time she was thirty-five, she was the chief of the most prominent medical examiner system in the United States. Unlike most chiefs, she wasn’t just an administrator. She did autopsies, thousands of them.
         Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence—sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence—all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.
         Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In