Page 44 of Sharp Force (Kay Scarpetta #29)

Inside my medical kit is the small UV light that looks like a flashlight, and I turn it on, the lens glowing purple. Before the senator can protest further, I’ve put on tinted goggles, painting the light over Zain’s hair.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Calvin Willard exclaims, furious. “I told you that’s enough! I need you to leave now.”

“His hair hasn’t been washed, and it might be the one place we find trace evidence,” I explain. “He says the killer kicked him in the head…”

I don’t let on how startled I am to see a scattering of a powdery substance fluorescing fiery red. I’m not going to tell Zain or his uncle what I’m finding and what it might mean.

“It could be that something was transferred from the killer to Zain.” I return to my medical kit for wooden Q-tips and distilled water.

I begin swabbing dried bloody areas of his hair where the residue fluoresced. Calvin Willard’s face is dark with anger.

“Get out!” he demands.

“This is important,” Benton says. “Chances are it was the Slasher who got inside the house and killed Georgine Duvall, almost killed your nephew. I’m sure you’d want to help us stop whoever it is. I’m sure you’d want the public knowing how determined you are to find the killer.”

“What if he comes back to finish me off!” Zain exclaims again, his eyes wild.

“We aren’t going to let that happen,” his uncle promises.

“Did you ever use the spare key hidden outside the house?” Benton asks Zain. “A key to the front door that was hidden in a fake rock?”

“It’s easy to lock yourself out,” he says. “I do it a lot. So does Georgine. She did, I mean.”

“Jesus,” Calvin Willard mutters. “Could she be any more obtuse and careless? In some ways I’m not at all surprised this happened. I shouldn’t have been so trusting. I should have seen it coming considering her patients.”

“Do you have reason to think a patient of hers did this?” Benton asks him.

“It’s certainly my first suspicion. I’m betting that will turn out to be the case.”

“When’s the last time Georgine locked herself out?” Benton directs this at Zain.

“She did it several times in the last two weeks,” he says. “She’d used the tunnel to return from the hospital or gym and realized she didn’t have her keys.”

“Had she always been like this?” Benton queries.

“It was much worse lately,” Zain explains as I think of the bottle of clonazepam in her bathroom.

It appears she was taking it possibly for anxiety, and the medication can interfere with short-term memory.

“She’d come back home through the tunnel and find herself locked out of the basement,” Zain explains. “She’d have to go outside and use the spare key to open the front door.”

“Did she return that key to its hiding place?” Benton asks him.

“I assume so…”

“When’s the last time you used that key, Zain?”

“Out, now!” His uncle opens the door as I seal the swabs inside a paper envelope, tucking it into the medical kit.

Benton has his badge wallet out. He finds a business card, placing it on the plastic swivel tray next to the bed.

“If there’s anything else you remember or want to tell me?” he says to Zain. “Don’t hesitate to call at any hour.”

We leave the room, and Calvin Willard follows. He shuts the door so Zain can’t hear us. He tells the two agents standing guard that he needs a little privacy.

“Give us a minute,” the senator orders, and they look at Benton.

“It’s okay,” he says, and they walk off toward the nurses’ station.

“You go after him for no good reason, and I can promise there will be consequences,” the senator says in a tone that’s deadly.

“I’d like to think we don’t go after anyone when there’s no good reason,” Benton answers. “But I’m sure you understand that as unfortunate as all this is, we have to do our jobs. We have to investigate and get to the bottom of what happened. It seems to me you should want that.”

“What did you find in his hair?” he demands, looking me in the eye. “Why did you swab the blood in his hair?”

“His story is that the killer kicked him in the head, practically tripping over him.” I’m not going to tell him the real reason. “It’s important to determine whether any trace evidence was transferred to Zain.”

“I don’t know what that is.” The senator glares at me. “What the hell is trace evidence?”

“Microscopic material that people might have on them without knowing,” I explain. “It could be anything.”

“I know you must be quite familiar with Zain’s robotic dog, Robbie,” Benton then says. “You and I have both seen the demos. And it goes without saying that you were around Robbie often.”

“What about him?” Calvin gets an uneasy look in his eyes.

It occurs to him why Benton is asking. The senator knows the cameras were always off inside the house at 13 Shore Lane. But Robbie’s are on as long as his battery is charged.

“Dammit,” Calvin Willard says under his breath.

“We know you stopped by to see Zain last night.” Benton is bluffing. “Robbie told us his cameras recorded your visit.”

That’s not true, but the senator’s fallen for it.

I can tell by the wariness in his eyes. He’s been around the robot countless times for years and that’s a recipe for trouble.

Once the uncommon is familiar, it’s human nature to let down one’s guard and become less vigilant, eventually paying no attention at all.

When the senator appeared at 13 Shore Lane last night, he wasn’t thinking about Robbie’s cameras. I can tell by watching him that he realizes he made a significant error.

“You showed up and gave your nephew a check made out to Georgine Duvall for eighteen thousand dollars tax free,” Benton says, and that much is a fact.

“Yes, I did.” His expression goes from guarded to resignation. “As I have so many times. Tax-free gifts and everything else.”

“Why?” Benton asks, and the senator motions us to step farther away from the door.

“She’s fucking broke,” he says with contempt. “Has been for years because of her idiot husband, and I warned her about Liam when all of us were at UVA together.”

He explains that for a while when all of them were in college, he was dating Georgine’s sister, Claire, at the same time Georgine was dating Liam.

Now and then the four of them would go out together, and it’s the first I’ve heard about a sibling.

The times Georgine and I were together in Charlottesville or on the phone, she never referenced Claire.

“Liam was a nice guy but always had one harebrained scheme after another for how to make money,” the senator goes on disdainfully.

“A lot of huge purchases combined with high-risk investments, and he dies leaving her in a hole she can’t get out of.

We all know the story. We’ve heard it a million times. ”

“Does the sister know what’s happened?” I ask. “Where does she live? And what about their parents.”

“The parents are gone,” he replies. “And Georgine and Claire have never gotten along, truth be told. The sister is in Chicago, and I gave her the news right away. She’s already lining up a funeral home and all the rest. And of course, I’ll help in any way needed.”

“It sounds like you must have kept up with Georgine ever since college?” Benton queries.

“We’ve always stayed friends. After her husband died, we got closer.”

“Maybe more than friends?” Benton suggests.

“Be careful starting rumors,” Calvin Willard threatens.

“Why was your nephew staying in her house on Mercy Island?” Benton is unrelenting in his calm, quiet way. “Why were you giving her money?”

“Because she was helping Zain,” the senator answers. “And had been for the past six or seven years.”

“Helping with what?”

“He’s never had a good relationship with his mother. My damn sister. I blame her for why he’s never had a girlfriend of any consequence. If you get my drift.”

“I’m not sure I do.” Benton plays obtuse.

“It’s not that I care if he’s gay, nonbinary or whatever the hell people call themselves these days,” Calvin Willard goes on to say.

“But he’s had trouble with depression, with feeling like he’s never fit in.

And I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough that Georgine’s been seeing him since he graduated from high school.

That’s when his mother bailed, and Zain went into a serious decline. ”

“Georgine began giving him therapy?” Benton assumes.

“Her job was to keep him alive,” Calvin says, and for an instant I see the love he feels for Zain. “His moods got much worse when he started William & Mary. He became increasingly uncomfortable in his own skin. He started exploring alternatives, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Benton says.

“Self-hatred, doing self-destructive stuff, wanting to die.”

“I noticed his scars,” I reply, and he nods gravely.

“A cutter. Someone who self-harms.” He tells me what I’d already decided.

“Has he ever made an attempt at taking his own life?” I ask.

“Nothing that anyone knows about.” Calvin Willard stares off.

“Meaning, he’s made attempts that weren’t reported to the police or anyone else,” Benton infers, and what the senator is saying won’t be helpful to his nephew.

I can anticipate a prosecutor making the case that it’s not surprising a cutter would slice his own throat.

It will be suggested that Zain deliberately caught the knife blade on his necklace, minimizing the injury.

Or maybe he tried to kill himself after murdering his psychiatrist. I can feel a net closing around him as we talk outside his hospital room.

“What’s important is his preoccupation with killing himself,” Calvin Willard says.

“I’ve made sure Georgine looked after him since my sister can’t be fucking bothered with her own son.

It was Georgine’s idea for him to have the robot.

As weird as it sounds, Robbie is a therapy dog for Zain.

His best friend. Zain fucking loves the thing. ”

“Then you were paying Georgine to be his live-in psychiatrist,” I summarize.