Blow Fly (2 page)

He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn't come with the others.

“I'm getting bored,” he tells his lamb. “I'll ask you again. One last chance. What is the
word
?”

She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.

“I don't understand. I'm sorry . . .”

“Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?”

The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.

“What is the word?
Tell me what you feel.
And don't say
scared.
You're a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it.”

“I feel . . . I feel acceptance,” she says, sobbing.

“You feel
what
?”

“You're not going to let me go,” she says. “I know it now.”

S
CARPETTA'S SUBTLE WIT
reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn't rip and crack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.

He takes pictures of everything you're doing, Nic, so you'd better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.

Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.

“Investigator Robillard?” Scarpetta is saying.

Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.

“Tell us what you'd do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you'd had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene,” Scarpetta presents to her. “Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there's a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don't like to admit that, but it's true.”

“I don't drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.

“Lordy, where'd you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”

“What I mean is, I really can't because I have a five-year-old son . . .” Nic's voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she's ever been away from him.

The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.

“Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name's Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony . . .”

Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.

“How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.

About a dozen hands go up.

“One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work—or shall I call it a mission—is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”

No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch,
Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.

She's gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she's kind and gentle.

“In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.

“So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.

Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”

“Oh yeah! Now I 'member. Lucy. She's been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”

Stupid, drunk idiot,
Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.

“Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.

“FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won't stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”

ATF, you stupid drunk.
Thunder cracks in the back of Nic's mind.

“I dunno. Wasn't there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what's she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.

“That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn't answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.

“Isn't that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she's something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn't she?”

Fucking dyke. Shut up.

Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That's how her father always explained it.
You see, Nic,
he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade.
There's tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There's tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.

“Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You've had enough whiskey for one night.”

“Well, 'scuse me, Miss Teacher's Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.

Nic feels Scarpetta's eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba's outrageous display.

Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpetta's subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn't know she had. She feels inferior to her hero's super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic's. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic's healing broken arm every time the splint came off.

Hurting's good, baby. If you didn't feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn't want that, would you?

No, Mama. I'm sorry for what I did.

Why, Nicci, that's the silliest thing. You didn't hurt yourself on purpose!

But I didn't do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that's when I tripped . . . .

We all make mistakes when we're scared, baby. Maybe it's a good thing you fell down—you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.

N
IC'S MEMORIES OF HER
childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.

It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.

Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn't pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.

Thou shalt not covet.

Nic's excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy's visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic's acute
embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies' room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.

Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn't of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta's name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.

“Hi, I'm Dr. Scarpetta,” her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. “And let me guess, you're Nicole Robillard.”

Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. “How . . .”

Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, “I requested copies of everyone's application, including photographs.”

“You did?” Not only was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn't fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. “Guess that means you know my Social Security number,” Nic tried to be funny.

“Now, I don't remember that,” Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. “But I know enough.”

S
ECOND INSTAR.”
Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.

The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn't quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.

“That's very good, Nic,” Scarpetta commends her.

“Who invited smarty pants?” Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn't nodding off into her plate.

“I think Nic hasn't been drinking enough and is having the D. T.'s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere,” says the detective with the shiny shaved head.

The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.

“And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field.”
Nic wants to be funny but can't escape the gravity of her mood. “See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”

“Ah! At last she confesses.”

“It's second instar.” Nic knows she should stop. “Already shed its skin once since it hatched.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?” the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.

“Nic's got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends,” someone else says.

“I would if I needed to.”

No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she's dropping by the old folks' home and checking on her relatives.

“Bet Nic's got a name for every maggot, fly, beetle and buzzard out there.”

The quips and gross-out jokes continue until Reba drops her fork with a loud clatter.

“Not while I'm eating rare steak!” she protests much too loudly.

“The spinach adds a nice touch of green, girlfriend.”

“Too bad you didn't get no rice . . .”

“Hey, it ain't too late! Waitress! Bring this lady a nice bowl of rice. With gravy.”

“And what are these tiny black dots that look like Maggie's eyes?” Scarpetta lifts the vial to the candlelight again, hoping her students will settle down before they all get kicked out of the restaurant.

“Eyes,” says the cop with the shaved head. “They're eyes, right?”

Reba begins to sway in her chair.

“No, they're not eyes,” Scarpetta replies. “Come on. I already gave you a hint a few minutes ago.”

“Look like eyes to me. Little beady black eyes like Magilla's.”

In the past ten weeks, Sergeant Magil from Houston has become “Magilla the Gorilla” because of his hairy, muscle-bound body.

“Hey!” he protests. “You ask my girlfriend if I got maggot eyes. She looks deep into these eyes of mine”—he points to them—“and faints.”

“Exactly what we're saying, Magilla. I looked into those eyes of yours, I'd pass out cold, too.”

“They gotta be eyes. How the hell else does a maggot see where it's going?”

“They're spiracles, not eyes,” Nic answers. “That's what the little black dots are. Like little snorkels so the maggot can breathe.”

“Snorkels?”

“Wait a minute. Hey, hand that thing over, Dr. Scarpetta. I wanna see if Maggie's wearing a mask and fins.”

A skinny state police investigator from Michigan has her head on the table, she is laughing so hard.

“Next time we find a ripe one, just look for little snorkels sticking up . . .”

The guffaws turn to fits, Magilla sliding off his chair, prone on the floor. “Oh, shit! I'm gonna throw up,” he shrieks with laughter.

“Snorkels!”

Scarpetta surrenders, sitting back in silence, the situation out of her control.

“Hey, Nic! Didn't know you were a Navy SEAL!”

This goes on until the manager of Ye Old Steak House silently appears in the doorway—his way of indicating that the party in his back room is disturbing the other diners.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Scarpetta says in a tone that is slightly scary. “Enough.”

The hilarity is gone as quickly as a sonic boom, the maggot jokes end, and then there are other gifts for Scarpetta: a space pen that can supposedly write in “rain, blizzards, and if you accidentally drop it in a chest cavity while you're doing an autopsy”; a Mini Maglite “to see in those hard-to-reach places”; and a dark blue baseball cap embellished with enough gold braid for a general.

“General Dr. Scarpetta. Salute!”

Everybody does as they eagerly look for her response, irreverent remarks flying around again like shotgun pellets. Magilla tops off Scarpetta's wine glass from a gallon paper carton with a push-button spout. She figures the cheap Chardonnay is probably made from grapes grown at the lowest level of the slopes, where the drainage is terrible. If she's lucky, the vintage is four months old. She will be sick tomorrow. She is sure of it.