Book of the Dead (46 page)

    
She begins to spray, and spots and streaks and shapes and spatters luminesce bright cobalt blue all over the room. Becky takes photographs. A little later, when Scarpetta has finished cleaning up after herself and is repacking her crime scene case, her cell phone rings. It’s the fingerprint examiner from Lucy’s labs.

    
“You’re not going to believe this,” he says.

    
“Don’t ever start a conversation like that with me unless you mean it.” Scarpetta isn’t joking.

    
“The print on the gold coin.” He’s excited, talking fast. “We got a hit – the unidentified little boy who was found last week. The kid from Hilton Head.”

    
“Are you sure? You can’t be sure. It makes no sense.”

    
“May not make sense, but there’s no doubt about it.”

    
“Don’t say that, either, unless you mean it. My first reaction is there’s an error,” Scarpetta says.

    
“There’s not. I pulled his ten-print card from the prints Marino took in the morgue. I visually verified it. Unquestionably, the ridge detail from the partial on the coin matches the unidentified kid’s right thumbprint. There’s no mistake.”

    
“A fingerprint on a coin that’s been fumed with glue? I don’t see how.”

    
“Believe me, I’m with you. We all know the fingerprints of prepubescent kids don’t last long enough to fume. They’re mostly water. Just sweat instead of the oils, amino acids, and all the rest that comes with puberty. I’ve never superglued a kid’s prints and don’t think you could. But this print is from a kid, and that kid is the one in your morgue.”

    
“Maybe that’s not how it happened,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe the coin was never fumed.”

    
“Had to be. There’s ridge detail in what sure looks like superglue, the same as if it had been fumed.”

    
“Maybe he had glue on his finger and touched the coin,” she says. “And left his print that way.”

Chapter 18

    
Nine p.m. A hard rain slaps the street in front of Marino’s fishing shack.

    
Lucy is soaking wet as she turns on a wireless receiver mini-disc recorder disguised as an iPod. In exactly six minutes, Scarpetta will call Marino. Right now, he is arguing with Shandy, their every word picked up by the multidirectional mike embedded in his computer’s thumb drive.

    
His heavy footsteps, the refrigerator door opening, the swish of a can popped open, probably a beer.

    
Shandy’s angry voice sounds in Lucy’s earpiece. “…Don’t lie to me. I’m warning you. All of a sudden? All of a sudden you decide you don’t want a committed relationship? And by the way, who said I’m committed to you? The only fucking thing that ought to be committed is you – to a fucking mental hospital. Maybe the Big Chief’s fiancé can give you a discount on a room up there.”

    
He’s told her about Scarpetta’s engagement to Benton. Shandy’s hitting Marino where it hurts, meaning she knows where it hurts. Lucy wonders how much she’s used that against him, taunted him about it.

    
“You don’t own me. You don’t get to have me until it don’t suit you anymore, so maybe I’m getting rid of you first,” he yells. “You’re bad for me. Making me get on that hormone shit – it’s a damn wonder I hadn’t had a stroke or something. After barely more than a week. What happens in a month, huh? You picked out a fucking cemetery? Or maybe I’ll end up in the fucking penitentiary because I lose my mind and do something.”

    
“Maybe you already did something.”

    
“Go to hell.”

    
“Why would I be committed to an old, fat fuck like you, who can’t even get it up without that hormone shit?”

    
“Cut it out, Shandy. I’ve had it with you putting me down, you hear me? If I’m such a nothing, why are you here? I need some space, time to think. Everything’s so fucked up right now. Work’s turned to shit. I’m smoking, not going to the gym, drinking too much, doped up. Everything’s gone to hell, and all you do is get me in worse and worse trouble.”

    
His cell phone rings. He doesn’t answer. It rings and rings.

    
“Answer it!” Lucy says out loud in the heavy, steady rain.

    
“Yeah.” his voice sounds in her earpiece.

    
Thank God. He’s quiet for a moment, listening, then says to Scarpetta on the other line, “That can’t be right.”

    
Lucy can’t hear Scarpetta’s side of the conversation but knows what’s being said. She’s telling Marino there were no hits in NIBIN or IAFIS for the serial number of the Colt .38 and any prints or partial prints recovered from the gun and the cartridges that Bull found in her alleyway.

    
“What about him?” Marino asks.

    
He means Bull. Scarpetta can’t answer that. Bull’s prints wouldn’t be in IAFIS, because he’s never been convicted of a crime, and his being arrested several weeks ago doesn’t count. If the Colt is his but isn’t stolen or wasn’t used in a crime and then ended up back on the street, it wouldn’t be in NIBIN. She’s already told Bull it would be helpful if he were printed for exclusionary purposes, but he’s not gotten around to it. She can’t remind him again because she can’t get hold of him, and both she and Lucy have tried several times since they left Lydia Webster’s house. Bull’s mother says he went out in his boat to pick oysters. Why he would do that in this weather is baffling.

    
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Marino’s voice fills Lucy’s ear, and he is walking around again, obviously careful what he says in front of Shandy.

    
Scarpetta will also tell Marino about the partial print on the gold coin. Maybe that’s what she’s relaying to him right now, because he makes a sound of surprise.

    
Then he says, “Good to know.”

    
Then he falls silent again. Lucy hears him pacing. He moves closer to the computer, to the thumb drive, and a chair scrapes across the wooden floor as if he’s sitting down. Shandy is quiet, probably trying to figure out what he’s talking about and to whom.

    
“Okay,” he finally says. “Can we deal with this later? I’m in the middle of something.”

    
No. Lucy’s certain her aunt will force him to talk about whatever she wants, or at least listen. She’s not going to get off the phone without reminding him that within the past week, he started wearing an old Morgan silver dollar on a necklace. It may have no connection to the gold coin necklace that was at least held, at some point, by the dead little boy in Scarpetta’s freezer. But where did Marino get his gaudy new necklace? If she’s asking him that, he isn’t answering. He can’t. Shandy’s right there listening. And as Lucy stands in the dark, in the rain, and the rain soaks her cap and seeps in around the collar of her slicker, she thinks about what Marino did to her aunt, and that same feeling comes back. A fearless, flat feeling.

    
“Yeah, yeah, no problem,” Marino says. “Like a ripe apple falling from a tree.”

    
Lucy infers that her aunt is thanking him. What an irony, she’s thanking him. How the fuck can she thank him for anything? Lucy knows why, but it’s still revolting. Scarpetta’s thanking him for talking with Madelisa, which resulted in her confessing that she’d taken the basset hound, and then showing him a pair of shorts that had blood on them. The blood had been on the dog. Madelisa wiped it on her shorts, indicating she must have arrived on the scene very soon after someone was injured or killed, because the blood on the dog was still wet. Marino took the shorts. He let her keep the dog. His story, he told her, is that the killer stole the basset hound, probably killed it and buried it somewhere. Amazing how kind and decent he is to women he doesn’t know.

    
Rain is relentless cold fingers drumming the top of Lucy’s head. She walks, staying out of view, should Marino or Shandy move close to a window. It may be dark, but Lucy takes no chances. Marino is off the phone now.

    
“You think I’m so stupid I don’t know who the hell you were talking to and that you were making damn sure I had no idea what you’re saying? Speaking in riddles, in other words.” Shandy is shrieking. “As if I’m so stupid I fall for it. The Big Chief, that’s who!”

    
“It’s none of your damn business. How many times I got to tell you that? I can talk to who the hell I want.”

    
“Everything’s my business! You spent the night with her, you lying asshole! I saw your damn motorcycle there early the next morning! You think I’m stupid? Was it good? I know you been wanting it half your life! Was it good, you big, fat fuck!”

    
“I don’t know who beat it into your spoiled rich girl’s head that everything in life is your business. But hear this. It ain’t.”

    
After more fuck-yous and other profanities and threats, Shandy storms out and slams the door. From where she hides, Lucy watches her stride angrily underneath the fishing shack to her motorcycle, angrily ride it through Marino’s sliver of a sandy front yard, then loudly speed away toward the Ben Sawyer Bridge. Lucy waits a few minutes, listening to make sure Shandy isn’t coming back. Nothing. Just the distant sound of traffic and the loud spattering of the rain. On Marino’s front porch, she knocks on the door. He flings it open, his angry face suddenly blank, then uneasy, his expressions running through emotions like a slot machine.

    
“What are you doing here?” he asks, looking past her, as if worried Shandy might come back.

    
Lucy walks into a squalid sanctuary she knows better than he thinks. She notices his computer, the thumb drive still in it. Her fake iPod and its earpiece are tucked in a pocket of her slicker. He shuts the door, stands in front of it, looking more uncomfortable by the second as she sits on a plaid couch that smells like mildew.

    
“I hear you was spying on me and Shandy when we was in the morgue like you’re a damn two-legged Patriot Act.” He goes first, maybe assuming that is why she’s here. “You don’t know by now not to try shit like that on me?”

    
Foolishly, he tries to intimidate her when he knows damn well he’s never intimidated her, not even when she was a child. Not even when she was a teenager and he ridiculed – at times mocked and shunned – her for who and what she is.

    
“I already talked about it with the Doc,” Marino goes on. “There’s nothing left to say, so don’t start in on me.”

    
“And that’s all you did with her? Talk to her?” Lucy bends forward, slides her Glock out of her ankle holster and points it at him. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” she says with no emotion.

    
He doesn’t answer.

    
“One good reason,” Lucy says it again. “You and Shandy were just fighting like hell. Could hear her screaming all the way out on the street.”

    
She gets up from the couch, walks over to a table, and opens the drawer. She pulls out the Smith & Wesson .357 revolver she saw last night, sits back down, slides her Glock back into her ankle holster. She points Marino’s own gun at him.

    
“Shandy’s fingerprints are all over this place. I imagine there’s plenty of her DNA in here, too. The two of you fight, she shoots you and speeds off on her bike. Such a pathologically jealous bitch.”

    
She pulls back the revolver’s hammer. Marino doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t seem to care.

    
“One good reason,” she says.

    
“I don’t got a good reason,” he says. “Go ahead. I wanted her to and she wouldn’t.” He means Scarpetta. “She should have. She didn’t, so go ahead. I don’t give a shit if Shandy gets blamed. I’ll even help you out. There’s underwear in my room. Help yourself to her DNA. They find her DNA on the gun, that’s all they need. Everyone in the bar knows what she’s like. Just ask Jess. No one would be surprised.”

    
Then he shuts up. For a moment, the two of them are motionless. Him standing in front of the door, hands down by his sides. Lucy on the couch, the revolver pointed at his head. She doesn’t need the larger target of his chest. He is well aware of that fact.

    
She lowers the gun. “Sit down,” she says.