Free Predator by Patricia Cornwell Page B

been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy…
         Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.
         She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.
         “I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.
         “When you going to learn to fly that thing?”
         “Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”
         She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.
         “I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.
         “I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”
         “From who?” he says suspiciously.
         “Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”
         She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR. Benton doesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.
         “Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.
         Marino knows that McLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.
         “The what?” Marino asks.
         She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”
         “Trees or kids?”
         “Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”
         Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail to Benton.
         “Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”
         “You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.
         “Hello? Is this better? Marino?”
         “I can hear you.”
         “That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”
         “So maybe they turned