Book of the Dead (8 page)
Authors: Patricia Cornwell
“I told you to keep her close, always keep your enemies close,” Lucy says. “You didn’t pay attention. Haven’t cared that she disparages you every chance she gets because of that court case. Says you’re a liar and a professional sham. Just Google yourself on the Internet. I track her, forwarded her bullshit to you, and you barely look at it.”
“How could you possibly know whether I barely look at something?”
“I’m your system administrator. Your faithful IT. I know damn well how long you keep a file open. You could defend yourself,” Lucy says.
“From what?”
“Accusations that you manipulated the jury.”
“What court’s about. Manipulating the jury.”
“That you talking? Or am I sitting with a stranger?”
“If you’re hog-tied, tortured, and can hear the screams of your loved ones being brutalized and killed in another room, and you take your own life to escape their fate? That’s not a goddamn suicide, Lucy. That’s murder.”
“What about legally?”
“I really don’t care.”
“You sort of used to.”
“I sort of didn’t. You don’t know what’s been in my mind when I’ve worked cases all these years and often found myself the only advocate for the victims. Dr. Self wrongly hid behind her shield of confidentiality and didn’t divulge information that could have prevented profound suffering and death. She deserves worse than she got. Why are we talking about this? Why are you getting me upset?”
Lucy meets her eyes. “What do they say? Revenge is best served cold? She’s in contact with Marino again.”
“Oh, God. As if this past week hasn’t been hell enough. Has he completely lost his mind?”
“When you came back from Rome and spread the word, did you think he was going to be happy about it? Do you live in outer space?”
“Clearly, I must.”
“How can you not see it? Suddenly he goes out and gets drunk every night, gets a new trashy girlfriend. He’s really picked one this time. Or don’t you know? Shandy Snook, as in Snook’s Flamin’ Chips?”
“Flamin’ what? Who?”
“Greasy, oversalted potato chips flavored with jalapeño and red pepper sauce. Made her father a fortune. She moved here about a year ago. Met Marino at the Kick ’N Horse this past Monday night, and it was love at first sight.”
“He tell you all this?”
“Jess told me.”
Scarpetta shakes her head, has no idea who Jess is.
“Owns the Kick ’N Horse. Marino’s biker hangout, and I know you’ve heard him talk about it. She called me because she’s worried about him and his latest trailer-park paramour, worried about how out of control he’s getting. Jess says she’s never seen him like this.”
“How would Dr. Self know Marino’s e-mail address unless he contacted her first?” Scarpetta asks.
“Her personal e-mail address hasn’t changed since he was her patient in Florida. His has. So I think we can figure out who wrote who first. I can find out for sure. Not that I have the password for the personal e-mail account on his home computer, although minor inconveniences like that have never stopped me. I’d have to…”
“I know what you’d have to do.”
“Have physical access.”
“I know what you’d have to do, and I don’t want you to. Let’s don’t make this any worse than it is.”
“At least some of the e-mails he’s gotten from her are now on his office desktop for all the world to see,” Lucy says.
“That makes no sense.”
“Of course it does. To make you angry and jealous. Payback.”
“And you noticed them on his desktop because?”
“Because of the little emergency last night. When he called me and said he’d been notified that an alarm was going off, indicating the fridge was malfunctioning, and he wasn’t anywhere near the office and could I check. He said if I need to call the alarm company, the number’s on the list taped to his wall.”
“An alarm?” she says, baffled. “No one notified me.”
“Because it didn’t happen. I get there and everything’s status quo. The fridge is fine. I go into his office to get the number of the alarm company so I can check to be sure everything really is okay, and guess what’s on his desktop.”
“This is ridiculous. He’s acting like a child.”
“He’s no child, Aunt Kay. And you’re going to have to fire him one of these days.”
“And manage how? I can barely manage now. I’m already short-staffed, without a single eligible person on the horizon to hire.”
“This is just the beginning. He’s going to get worse,” Lucy says. “He’s not the person you once knew.”
“I don’t believe that, and I could never fire him.”
“You’re right,” Lucy says. “You couldn’t. It would be a divorce. He’s your husband. God knows you’ve spent a hell of a lot more time with him than you have with Benton.”
“He most assuredly isn’t my husband. Don’t goad me, please.”
Lucy picks up the envelope from the steps and hands it to her. “Six of them, all from her. Coincidentally, starting on this past Monday, your first day back at work from Rome. The same day we saw your ring and, great sleuths that we are, figured out it wasn’t from Cracker Jacks.”
“Any e-mails from Marino to Dr. Self?”
“He must not want you to see whatever he wrote. I recommend you bite on a stick.” Indicating the envelope and what’s inside it. “How is he? She misses him. Thinks about him. You’re a tyrant, a has-been, and he must be miserable working for you, and what can she do to help him?”
“Will he never learn?” Mostly, it’s depressing.
“You should have kept the news from him. How could you not know what it would do to him?”
Scarpetta notices the purple Mexican petunias climbing the north garden wall. She notices the lavender lantana. They look a bit parched.
“Well, aren’t you going to read the damn things?” Lucy indicates the envelope again.
“I’m not going to give them that power right now,” Scarpetta says. “I have more important things to deal with. That’s why I’m dressed in a damn suit and going into the damn office on a damn Sunday when I could be working in my garden or even going for a damn walk.”
“I ran a background check on the guy you’re meeting with this afternoon. Recently, he was the victim of an assault. No suspect. And related to this, he was charged with a misdemeanor for possession of marijuana. The charge was dropped. Beyond that, not even a speeding ticket. But I don’t think you should be alone with him.”
“What about the brutalized little boy all alone in my morgue? Since you haven’t said anything, I assume your computer searches are still coming up empty-handed.”
“It’s like he didn’t exist.”
“Well, he did. And what was done to him is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s time we go out on a limb.”
“And do what?”
“I’ve been thinking about statistical genetics.”
“I still can’t believe no one’s doing it,” Lucy says. “The technology’s there. It’s been there. It’s all so stupid. Alleles are shared among relatives, and, as is true of any other database, it’s all a function of probability.”
“A father, mother, sibling would have a higher score. And we’d see it and focus on it. I think we should try it.”
“If we do, what happens if it turns out this little kid was killed by a relative? We use statistical genetics in a criminal case, and what happens in court?” Lucy says.
“If we figure out who he is, then we’ll worry about court.”
Belmont, Massachusetts. Dr. Marilyn Self sits before a window in her room with a view.
Sloping lawns, forests and fruit trees, and old brick buildings harken back to a genteel era when the wealthy and famous could disappear from their lives, briefly or for as long as needed, or in some hopeless cases, forever, and be treated with the respect and pampering they deserved. At McLean Hospital, it’s perfectly normal to spot famous actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians strolling the cottage-style campus, designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose other famous projects include New York’s Central Park, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the Biltmore Estate, and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.
It isn’t perfectly normal to spot Dr. Marilyn Self. But she doesn’t intend to be here much longer, and when the public eventually finds out the truth, her reasons will be clear. To be safe and sequestered, and then, as has always been the story of her life, a destiny. What she calls a meant-to-be. She’d forgotten Benton Wesley works here.
Shocking Secret Experiments: Frankenstein.
Let’s see. She continues to script her first show when she returns to the air. While in seclusion to guard my life, I unwittingly and unwillingly became an eyewitness – worse, a guinea pig – to clandestine experiments and abuse. In the name of science. It is as Kurtz said in Heart of Darkness – “The horror! The horror!” I was subjected to a modern form of what was done in asylums during the darkest days of the darkest times when people who didn’t have the proper tools were considered subhuman and treated like…Treated like…? The right analogy will come to her later.
Dr. Self smiles as she imagines Marino’s ecstasy when he discovered she had written back to him. He probably believes that she (the most famous psychiatrist in the world) was happy to hear from him. He still believes she cares! She’s never cared. Even when he was her patient in her less prominent Florida days, she didn’t care. He was little more than a therapeutic amusement, and yes (she admits it), a dash of spice, because his adoration of her was almost as pathetic as his besotted sexual obsession with Scarpetta.
Poor, pathetic Scarpetta. Amazing what a few well-placed calls can do.
Her mind races. Her thoughts are nonstop inside her room at the Pavilion, where meals are catered and a concierge is available, should one wish to go to the theater or a Red Sox game or a health spa. The privileged patient at the Pavilion gets rather much whatever he or she wants, which in Dr. Self’s case is her own e-mail account and a room that happened to be occupied by another patient named Karen when Dr. Self was admitted nine days ago.
The unacceptable room assignment was, of course, remedied easily enough without administrative intervention or delay on Dr. Self’s first day when she entered Karen’s room before dawn and awakened her by gently blowing on her eyes.
“Oh!” Karen exclaimed in relief when she realized it was Dr. Self, not a rapist, hovering over her. “I was having a strange dream.”
“Here. I brought you coffee. You were sleeping like the dead. Perhaps you stared too long at the crystal light fixture last night?” Dr. Self looked up at the shadowy shape of the Victorian crystal light fixture above the bed.
“What!” Karen exclaimed in alarm, setting down her coffee on the antique bedside table.
“One must be most careful about staring at anything crystal. It can have a hypnotic effect and put you into a trancelike state. What was your dream?”