Chaos
No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the twenty-fourth engrossing thriller in her high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.Someone is following you…One summer evening in New England, two young girls stumble upon a body. Forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta arrives at the scene to find a young woman has been attacked with almost superhuman force.Someone is taunting you…Meanwhile, people close to Scarpetta start receiving suspicious calls. Could they be linked to Scarpetta’s anonymous cyber stalker, Tailend Charlie?Someone wants to destroy you…A second death shocks Scarpetta to her core. Because analysis of the body shows a material that doesn’t exist on earth. And it’s clear that someone, or something, is coming for her, and is hell-bent on creating chaos…
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
First published in the United States by William Morrow,
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016
Copyright © Cornwell Entertainment, Inc. 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photograph © Elly De Vries / Arcangel
Patricia Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008150655
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008150648
Version: 2018-09-24
THERE IS LOVE IN ME THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU’VE NEVER SEEN. THERE IS RAGE IN ME THE LIKES OF WHICH SHOULD NEVER ESCAPE.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Table of Contents
CHAOS
From the Ancient Greek (
A vast chasm or void
Anarchy
The science of unpredictability
TWILIGHT
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
Beyond the brick wall bordering Harvard Yard, four tall chimneys and a gray slate roof with white-painted dormers peek through the branches of hardwood trees.
The Georgian building is a welcome sight no more than fifteen minutes ahead as the crow flies. But walking wasn’t smart. I was foolish to refuse a ride. Even in the shade it feels like an oven. The atmosphere is stagnant, nothing stirring in the hot humid air.
Were it not for the distant sounds of traffic, the infrequent pedestrian, the vapor trails overhead, I might believe I’m the only human left on a post-apocalyptic earth. I’ve never seen the Harvard campus this deserted except maybe during a bomb scare. But then I’ve also not been witness to such extreme weather in this part of the world, and blizzards and arctic blasts don’t count.
New Englanders are used to that but not temperatures edging past a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The sun is molten in a bone-scrubbed sky that the heat has bleached the blue out of as I’ve heard it described. The greenhouse effect. Global warming. God’s punishment. The Devil’s in his workshop. Mercury in retrograde. El Niño. The end times.
These are some of the explanations for one of the worst heat waves in Massachusetts’s history. Business at my headquarters, the Cambridge Forensic Center, has gone through the roof, and that’s the paradox of what I do. When things are bad they’re normal. When they’re worse they’re good. It’s a gift and a curse that I have job security in this imperfect world, and as I take a shortcut through the center of the campus in the stifling heat, I tweak the talk I’m going to give at the Kennedy School of Government tomorrow night.
Cleverness, a play on words, provocative stories that are real, and maybe my sister Dorothy isn’t the hopeless tool I’ve always believed. She says that I have to be entertaining if I’m to get an auditorium full of jaded Ivy League intellectuals and policy makers to listen. Maybe they’ll even walk around in my shoes for once if I share the dark side, the underbelly, the scary basement no one wants to enter or acknowledge.
As long as I’m not expected to repeat insensitive jokes, certainly not the ones I constantly hear from the cops, rather dreadful slogans that end up on T-shirts and coffee cups. I’m not going to say our day begins when yours ends even if it’s true. Although I suppose it’s all right to quip that the more dire the straits the more necessary I am. Catastrophes are my calling. Dreadful news gets me out of bed. Tragedy is my bread and butter, and the cycle of life and death remains unbroken no matter our IQ.
This is how my sister thinks I should explain myself to hundreds of influential students, faculty, politicos and global leaders tomorrow night. In my opinion I shouldn’t need to explain myself at all. But apparently I do, Dorothy said over the phone last night while our elderly mother was ranting loudly in the background to her thieving South American housekeeper, whose name—no kidding—is Honesty. Apparently Honesty is stealing vast amounts of jewelry and cash again, hiding Mom’s pills, eating her food and rearranging her furniture in the hope she’ll trip and break a hip.
