Shyly, as before, he looked at her sideways, nodded, and then turned his attention to the paintings. “Every time I look at them, I’m deeply moved, inspired, justified.”
The last word in the series was peculiar and therefore the most significant. Jane couldn’t imagine any other meaning than that, to his way of thinking, his devotion justified or excused his criminal activity. His uncle Ricky wasn’t the only relative who operated on the wrong side of the law. The kid was born into a crime family of sorts; so maybe he felt compelled to uphold the tradition.
As she watched Ferrante smiling and nodding and gazing at the gruesome hearts, another possibility occurred to her. Ricky claimed his nephew attended Mass every day and “says his rosary like some old abuela who wears a mantilla even in the shower.” If Ferrante thought that being devout was adequate penance that allowed him to profit from the illegal sale of weapons, he might believe it also justified worse crimes.
Like rape and murder.
That thought wasn’t evidence of rampant paranoia. It was merely a consequence of her experience.
In her time at the Bureau, Jane had captured a serial killer, J. J. Crutchfield, who insisted that he was doing the Lord’s work, killing oversexed teenage girls who would corrupt teenage boys if he didn’t stop them. Thus he was saving both the boys and the girls from damnation. He preserved his victims’ eyes in jars, convinced—or so he claimed—that in each girl’s moment of death, she’d seen God. To J.J., the eyes were sacred relics. He found it difficult, however, to explain why God wanted him to rape the women before killing them to save their souls.
While Jane pretended to admire the paintings, she was aware of her host watching her more directly than he seemed able to do when she was facing him.
As a last word on the art, she said, “Unforgettable.”
When she turned to him, his smile was of a peculiar character that disturbed her, although she couldn’t define the quality of it that she found unsettling.
She remembered what Enrique de Soto had told her on the phone the previous day: But I have to say he’s a weird duck … got this blood obsession.
He seemed about to speak but then broke eye contact again. He went around the desk, opened a drawer, and withdrew a Heckler & Koch Compact .45 still in its original sealed box.
New weapon, no history, no waiting period, no background check, no formal or de facto registration. The guns Ferrante sold probably came from his uncle Ricky, which meant they were stolen and provided a terrific profit margin.
“How much?” Jane asked.
He met her eyes directly and for the first time did not quickly look away. “I won’t accept money from you. There’s something else I want, something better than money.”
She put down the tote to have both hands free.
5
CARTER JERGEN FINDS THE PLACE abhorrent on first sight. In the passenger seat of the VelociRaptor, he shivers with cold disgust.
Rooney Corrigan, pooh-bah of sandsucker society, maintains a small carbon footprint by generating his own electricity. The most prominent structures on his property are two sixty-or seventy-foot-tall windmills. They aren’t the picturesque stone windmills with huge cloth sails seen in Holland, but ugly steel constructs, tripods reminiscent of the Martian death machines in The War of the Worlds.
The single-story green-stucco house—where the “crocodile incident” has occurred, whatever that might be—boasts a roof entirely of solar panels and stands on several acres of pale and sandy dirt, lacking even stones-and-cactus landscaping. The only evidence that the planet produces flora is three struggling king palms with more brown than green fronds and a misshapen olive tree lifeless for so long that its bleached, leafless limbs and weather-shredded bark might be an avant-garde sculpture wired together from the bones and brittle hair of dead men.
The long, unpaved driveway is defined only by parallel lines of stones arranged to mark its borders.
Parked near the house are two black Jeep Cherokees.
As Dubose brakes to a stop fifty yards from those vehicles and stares at the house with a dour expression, he says, “I call it a crocodile incident. He called it ‘the possible assertion and triumph of the reptile consciousness.’ There’s like a one-in-ten-thousand chance an adjusted person might have a catastrophic psychological collapse after the control mechanism activates.”
Jergen frowns. “I never heard such a thing. Says who?”
“The genius who invented the nanoimplants.”
“Bertold Shenneck is dead.”
“I’m not claiming he spoke to me at a séance. He worried about this from day one. He foresaw two kinds of psychotic breakdowns.”
“How do you know this, and I don’t?”
“I knew someone who knew the great man. Inga Shenneck.”
“His wife?”
“Before Shenneck and then for a while after she married him, she and I had this thing going.”
Jergen wants to deny the obvious intended meaning of the words this thing. “But she … she was a stunner.”
“Hot,” Dubose says. “A lot younger than Shenneck and so hot she was thermonuclear. And insatiable. She wore me out.”
Carter Jergen is not na?ve. He doesn’t believe life has some grand meaning. He doesn’t believe in good and evil. He doesn’t see any issue in black-and-white, only in innumerable shades of gray. He doesn’t believe that life, society, and justice are fair or ever can be. He doesn’t believe they should be fair. Fairness is unnatural; it’s seen nowhere in nature. He believes in power. Those with the desire and the will to seize power are those best qualified to shape the future.
But it is so unfair that a backwoods cretin who surely got into Princeton on a fraudulently obtained scholarship, who at breakfast folds two strips of bacon into a thick bonbon of pig fat and pops them into his mouth with his fingers, who wouldn’t know which fork to use for the fish appetizer if the butler snatched it off the table in frustration and stabbed him in the face with it, so unfair that this kind of man could have had a woman like Inga Shenneck.
Jergen says, “I admired her grace, her style, her taste.…”
Dubose nods. “Exactly why she was drawn to me.”
“You never told me about this.”
“I don’t talk about my ladies. A gentleman is always discreet.”
“Discreet? You just said she was insatiable.”
Dubose looked puzzled. “She’s dead. So what’s to be discreet about after she’s packed off in a coffin?”
For a moment, Jergen stares in silence at the windmills looming behind the house, their enormous blades carving the air and probably a significant number of birds in any twenty-four-hour period. The sun flares off the solar panels. The stucco is a bilious shade of green. A ragged dog of numerous heritages wanders into the driveway in front of them, squats, and takes a dump.
“I’m in Hell,” Jergen says. “I don’t believe in Hell, but what is this”—he sweeps one hand across the vista before them, where the dog craps in front of a house that by all appearances is built from the animal’s previous defecations—“what is this if it isn’t Hell?”
Dubose cocks his head and raises one eyebrow. “Are you going all dramatic on me? We can’t afford existential angst in our line of work. My advice is don’t watch those historical dramas on PBS, they just get your panties in a wad. Don’t watch, and you’ll be happier. I want you to be happy, my friend.”
“Comme vous êtes gentil!” Jergen butters the flattery and thank-yous with sarcasm. “Vous êtes trop aimable! Merci infiniment!”
Dubose sighs and shakes his head. “De rien, mademoiselle.”
Astonished by this revelation, Jergen says, “You speak French?”
“Do bears shit in the woods?” He places a hand on Jergen’s shoulder. “Buddy, calm yourself. If just the outside of this place freaks you, then you won’t be able to handle what’s inside.”
Enduring the hand on his shoulder because it will be there only a moment, Carter Jergen says, “Yeah? What’s inside?”
“Dead people.”
“I’ve seen plenty of dead people. Made a few of them myself.”
“Yeah, but these didn’t die pretty.”
6