Book of the Dead (19 page)

    
“Did they catch who did it?” Scarpetta asks.

    
“Don’t think they tried real hard. The police accused me of fighting, said I’d probably got into it with the man who sold me the weed. I never said who that was, and I know it wasn’t him who cut me. He don’t even work at the port. After I got out of the emergency room, I spent a few nights in jail until I went before the judge, and the case got dismissed because there was no suspect and no weed was found, either.”

    
“Really. So why did they accuse you of possessing marijuana if none was found?” Marino says.

    
“Because I told the police I was getting ready to smoke weed when it happened. I had rolled me one and was about to light it when the man came after me. Maybe the police just never found it. I don’t think they was all that interested, truth is. Or maybe the man who cut me took it, I don’t know. I don’t go near weed no more. Don’t touch a drop of liquor, either. Promised my wife I wouldn’t.”

    
“The port fired you,” Scarpetta assumes.

    
“Yes, ma’am.”

    
“What is it you think you could help us with around here, exactly?” she asks.

    
“Whatever you need. Nothing I’m above doing. The morgue don’t scare me. I got no trouble with dead people.”

    
“Maybe you can leave me your cell phone number or whatever is the best way to get hold of you,” she says.

    
He pulls a folded piece of paper out of a back pocket, gets up and politely places it on her desk. “Got it all right here, ma’am. Call me anytime.”

    
“Investigator Marino will show you out. Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Grant.” Scarpetta gets up from her desk and carefully shakes his hand, mindful of his injuries.

    
Seventy miles southwest on the resort island of Hilton Head, it is overcast, and a warm wind gusts in from the sea.

    
Will Rambo walks the dark, empty beach, headed to a destination. He carries a green tackle box and shines a Surefire tactical light wherever he likes, not really needing it to find his way. The light is powerful enough to blind someone, at least for seconds, and that’s enough, assuming a situation requires it. Blasts of sand sting his face and click against his tinted glasses. Sand swirls like gauzy dancing girls.

    
And the sandstorm roared into Al Asad like a tsunami and swallowed the Humvee and him, swallowed the sky, the sun, swallowed everything. Blood spilled through Roger’s fingers, and his fingers looked as if they had been painted bright red, and the sand blasted and stuck to his bloody fingers as he tried to tuck his intestines back in. His face was panicky and shocked like nothing Will had ever seen, and he could do nothing about it except to promise his friend he would be all right and help him tuck his intestines back in.

    
Will hears Roger’s shrieks in the gulls wheeling over the beach. Screams of panic and pain.

    
“Will! Will! Will!”

    
The screams, piercing screams, and the roar of sand.

    
“Will! Will! Please help me, Will!”

    
It was some time after that, after Germany. Will returned stateside to the Air Force base in Charleston, and then to Italy, different parts of Italy where he grew up. He wandered in and out of blackouts. He went to Rome to face his father because it was time to face his father, and it seemed like a dream to sit amid the stenciled palmette design and trompe l’oeil moldings of the dining room of Will’s boyhood summer home at the Piazza Navona. He drank red wine with his father, wine as red as blood, and was irritated by the noise of tourists below the open windows, silly tourists no smarter than pigeons, throwing coins into Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and taking photographs, water constantly splashing.

    
“Making wishes that never come true. Or if they do, too bad for you,” he commented to his father, who didn’t understand but kept looking at him as if he were a mutant.

    
At the table beneath the chandelier, Will could see his face in the Venetian mirror on the far wall. It wasn’t true. He looked like Will, not like a mutant, and he watched his mouth move in the mirror as he recounted to his father that Roger wished to be a hero when he returned from Iraq. His wish came true, Will’s mouth said. Roger returned home a hero in a cheap coffin in the belly of a C5 cargo plane.

    
“We didn’t have goggles or protective gear or body armor or anything,” Will told his father in Rome, hoping he would understand but knowing he wouldn’t.

    
“Why did you go if all you do is complain?”

    
“I had to write you to send batteries for our flashlights. I had to write you for tools because every screwdriver broke. The cheap shit they gave us,” Will’s mouth said in the mirror. “We had nothing unless it was cheap shit because of goddamn lies, the goddamn lies politicians tell.”

    
“Then why did you go?”

    
“I was fucking told to, you foolish man.”

    
“Don’t you dare talk like that! Not in this house, where you will treat me with respect. I didn’t choose that fascist war, you did. All you do is complain like a baby. Did you pray over there?”

    
When the wall of sand slammed into them and Will couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he prayed. When the explosion from the roadside bomb flipped the Humvee on its side and he couldn’t see and the wind screamed as if he were inside the engine of a C17, he prayed. When he held Roger, he prayed, and when he could no longer endure Roger’s pain, he prayed, and that was the last time he prayed.

    
“When we pray we are really asking ourselves – not God – for help. We’re asking for our own divine intervention,” Will’s mouth in the mirror told his father in Rome. “So I don’t need to pray to some god on a throne. I’m God’s Will because I’m my own Will. I don’t need you or God because I’m God’s Will.”

    
“When you lost your toes, did you also lose your mind?” his father said to him in Rome, and it was an ironic thing to say in the dining room where on a gilded console below the mirror was a stone foot of antiquity with all of its toes. But then, Will had seen dismembered feet over there after suicide bombers drove into crowded places, so he supposed to be missing a few toes was better than to be a whole foot missing everything else.

    
“That’s healed now. But what do you know?” he said to his father in Rome. “You never came to see me all those months in Germany or Charleston or the years before. You’ve never been to Charleston. I’ve been here in Rome countless times, but never for you, even if you thought otherwise. Except this time, because of what I have to do, a mission, you see. I was allowed to live so I can relieve others of their suffering. Something you would never understand because you’re selfish and useless and don’t care about anyone except yourself. Look at you. Rich and uncaring and cold.”

    
Will’s body got up from the table, and he watched himself walk to the mirror, to the gilded console beneath it. He picked up the stone foot of antiquity as the fountain below the window splashed and the tourists were noisy.

    
He carries the tackle box, a camera slung over his shoulder as he walks the beach in Hilton Head to carry out his mission. He sits and opens the tackle box, and takes out a freezer bag full of special sand, then small vials of pale violet glue. With the flashlight, he illuminates what he’s doing as he squeezes the glue over the palmar surfaces of his hands. He plunges them one at a time into his bag of sand. He holds up his hands in the wind and the glue dries quickly and he has sandpaper hands. More vials, and he does the same thing with the bottoms of his bare feet, careful to completely cover the pads of his seven toes. He drops the empty vials and what’s left of the sand back into his tackle box.

    
His tinted glasses look around and he turns off the flashlight.

    
His destination is the No Trespassing sign planted in the beach at the end of the long wooden boardwalk that leads to the fenced-in backyard of the villa.

Chapter 7

    
The parking lot behind Scarpetta’s office.

    
It was the cause of much contention when she started her practice, and neighbors filed formal objections to almost every request she made. She got her way with the security fence by obscuring it with evergreens and Cherokee roses, but she lost out on the lighting. At night the parking lot is much too dark.

    
“So far I see no reason not to give him a try. We really could use somebody,” Scarpetta says.

    
Palmettos flutter and the plants bordering her fence stir as she and Rose walk to their cars.

    
“I have no one to help me in my garden, for that matter. I can’t distrust everybody on the planet,” she adds.

    
“Don’t let Marino push you into something you might regret,” Rose says.

    
“I do distrust him.”

    
“You need to sit down with him. I don’t mean at the office. Have him over. Cook for him. He doesn’t mean to hurt you.”

    
They have reached Rose’s Volvo.

    
“Your cough is worse,” Scarpetta says. “Why don’t you stay home tomorrow.”

    
“I wish you’d never told him. I’m surprised you told any of us.”

    
“I believe it was my ring that said something.”

    
“You shouldn’t have explained it,” Rose says.

    
“It’s time Marino faces what he’s avoided for as long as I’ve known him.”

    
Rose leans against her car as if she is too tired to stand on her own, or maybe her knees are hurting. “Then you should have told him a long time ago. But you didn’t, and he held out hope. The fantasy festered. You don’t confront people about their feelings, and all it does is make things…” She coughs so hard she can’t finish her sentence.

    
“I think you’re getting the flu.” Scarpetta presses the back of her hand against Rose’s cheek. “You feel warm.”

    
Rose pulls a tissue out of her bag, dabs her eyes, and sighs. “That man. I can’t believe you’d even consider him.” She’s back to Bull.

    
“The practice is growing. I must get a morgue assistant, and I’ve given up hoping for somebody already trained.”

    
“I don’t think you’ve tried very hard or have an open mind.” The Volvo is so old, Rose has to unlock the door with the key. The interior light goes on, and her face looks drawn and tired as she slides into the seat and primly arranges her skirt to cover her thighs.

    
“The most qualified morgue assistants come from funeral homes or hospital morgues,” Scarpetta replies, her hand on top of the window frame. “Since the biggest funeral home business in the area happens to be owned by Henry Hollings, who also happens to use the Medical University of South Carolina for autopsies that are his jurisdiction or sub-contracted to him, what luck do you think I might have if I called him for a recommendation? The last damn thing our local coroner wants is to help me succeed.”

    
“You’ve been saying that for two years. And it’s based on nothing.”

    
“He shuns me.”

    
“Exactly what I was saying about communicating your feelings. Maybe you should talk to him,” Rose says.

    
“How do I know he’s not the one responsible for my office and home addresses suddenly getting mixed up on the Internet?”

    
“Why would he wait until now to do that? Assuming he did.”

    
“Timing. My office has been in the news because of this child abuse case. And Beaufort County asked me to take care of it instead of calling Hollings. I’m involved in the Drew Martin investigation and just came back from Rome. Interesting timing for someone to deliberately call the Chamber of Commerce and register my practice, listing my home address as the office address. Even pay the membership fee.”

    
“Obviously, you had them remove the listing. And there should be a record of who paid the fee.”