Five Scarpetta Novels (105 page)

“You know, Doc, I really got to quit these things. And Wild Turkey. I've been going through that stuff like buttered popcorn. Depends on what you're cooking,” he said.

M
arino headed off to find a shower somewhere and I felt lighter of spirit, as if a terrible spasm had gone into remission for a while. When I pulled into my driveway, I collected the bag of scene clothes out of the trunk and began the same disinfectant ritual I had gone through most of my working life.

Inside the garage, I tore open the garbage bags and dropped them and the shoes into a sink of scalding water, detergent and bleach. I tossed the jumpsuit into the washing machine, stirred the shoes and bags around with a long wooden spoon and rinsed them. I enclosed the disinfected bags in two clean bags that went into a Supercan, and I parked my soaked shoes on a shelf to dry.

Everything I had on from jeans to lingerie went into the washing machine, too. More detergent and bleach, and I hurried naked through my house and into the shower, where I scrubbed hard with Phisoderm, not an inch spared, not the inside of my ears and nose, or under my nails, fingers and toes, and I brushed my teeth in there.

I sat on a ledge and let water pound the back of my neck and head and remembered Benton's fingers kneading my tendons and muscles.
Untangling
them was what he
always said. Missing him was a phantom pain. I could feel what I remembered as if I were feeling it now, and I wondered what it would take for me to live where I was instead of back then. Grief held on. It would not let go of loss, because to do that was to accept it. I told that to grieving families and friends all the time.

I dressed in khakis, loafers and a blue-striped shirt, and played Mozart on the CD player. I watered plants and pinched off dead leaves. I polished or rearranged whatever needed it, and tucked reminders of work out of sight. I called my mother in Miami because I knew Monday was bingo night and she wouldn't be home and I could just leave a message. I did not turn on the news because I didn't want to be reminded of what I had just worked so hard to wash away.

I poured a double Scotch, walked into my study and turned on a light. I scanned shelves crowded with medical and science books, and astronomy texts, and Britannica encyclopedias, and all sorts of aids to gardening, flora and fauna, insects, rocks and minerals, and even tools. I found a French dictionary and carried it over to my desk. A
loup
was a wolf, but I had no luck with
garou.
I tried to think my way out of this problem and seized upon a simple plan.

La Petite France was one of the city's finest restaurants, and although it was closed Monday nights, I knew the chef and his wife very well. I called them at home. He answered the phone and was as warm as always.

“You don't come see us anymore,” he said. “We say this too often.”

“I haven't been out much,” I replied.

“You work too much, Miss Kay.”

“I need a translation,” I said. “And I also need you to keep this between us. Not a word to anyone.”

“But of course.”

“What is a
loup-garou?”

“Miss Kay, you must be dreaming bad things!” he
exclaimed, amused. “I'm so glad it's not a full moon!
Le loup-garou
is a werewolf!”

The doorbell rang.

“In France, hundreds of years ago, if you were believed to be a
loup-garou
you were hanged. There were many reports of them, you see.”

I looked at the clock. It was six-fifteen. Marino was early and I was unprepared.

“Thank you,” I told my friend the chef. “I'll come see you soon, I promise.”

The doorbell sounded again.

“Coming,” I said to Marino through the intercom.

I turned off the alarm and let him in. His uniform was clean, his hair was neatly combed and he had splashed on too much aftershave.

“You look a little better than when I saw you last,” I commented as we headed toward the kitchen.

“Looks like you cleaned up this joint,” he said as we passed through the great room.

“It's about time,” I said.

We walked into the kitchen and he sat in his usual spot at the table by the window. He watched me with curious eyes as I got garlic and fast-acting yeast out of the refrigerator.

“So what are we having? Can I smoke in here?”

“No.”

“You do.”

“It's my house.”

“How 'bout if I open the window and blow it out.”

“Depends on which way the wind is blowing.”

“We could get the ceiling fan going and see if that helps. I smell garlic.”

“I thought we'd have pizza on the grill.”

I pushed aside cans and jars in the pantry, looking for crushed tomatoes and high-gluten flour.

“The coins we found are English and German,” he told me. “Two pounds and one deutsche mark. But this is where
it starts getting real interesting. I hung around the port a little longer than you did, showering and whatever. And by the way, they sure as hell didn't waste any time hauling cartons out of that container and cleaning up. You watch, they'll sell that camera shit like nothing happened to it.”

I mixed half a package of yeast, warm water and honey in a bowl and stirred, then I reached for the flour.

“I'm hungry as hell.”

His portable radio was upright on the table, blurting ten codes and unit numbers. He yanked off his tie and unbuckled his duty belt with all its gear. I began kneading dough.

“My lower back's killing me, Doc,” he complained. “You got any idea what it's like wearing twenty pounds of shit around your waist?”

His mood seemed considerably improved as he watched me work, sprinkling flour and shaping dough on the butcher's-block.

“A
loup-garou
is a werewolf,” I told him.

“Huh?”

“As in a wolf man.”

“Shit, I fucking hate those things.”

“I wasn't aware you'd ever met one.”

“You remember seeing Lon Chaney with all that fur growing on his face when the moon came out? Scared the hell out of me. Rocky used to watch
Shock Theater,
remember that?”

Rocky was Marino's only child, a son I'd never met. I placed the dough in a bowl and covered it with a warm, wet cloth.

“Do you ever hear from him?” I cautiously asked. “What about at Christmas? Will you see him then?”

Marino nervously tapped an ash.

“Do you even know where he lives?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Oh, hell, yeah.”

“You act as if you don't like him at all,” I said.

“Maybe I don't.”

I scanned the wine rack for a nice bottle of red. Marino sucked smoke and exhaled loudly. He had nothing more to say about Rocky than he ever had.

“One of these days you're going to talk to me about him,” I said as I poured crushed tomatoes in a pot.

“You know as much about him as you need to,” he said.

“You love him, Marino.”

“I'm telling you, I don't love him. I wish he'd never been born. I wish I'd never met him.”

He stared out the window at my backyard fading into night. This moment I didn't seem to know Marino at all. He was a stranger in my kitchen, this man in uniform who had a son I'd never met and knew nothing about. Marino wouldn't look me in the eye or thank me when I set a cup of coffee on his place mat.

“How about peanuts or something?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said. “I been thinking about going on a diet.”

“Thinking about it won't help much. It's been proven in studies.”

“You gonna wear garlic around your neck or something when you post our dead werewolf? You know, you get bit by one, you turn into one. Sort of like AIDS.”

“It's nothing like AIDS, and I wish you'd get off this AIDS thing.”

“You think he wrote that on the box himself?”

“We can't assume that box and what was written on it are connected with him, Marino.”

“Have a nice trip, werewolf.
Yeah, you find that written on camera boxes all the time. Especially when they're near dead bodies.”

“Let's get back to Bray and your new fashion statement,” I said. “Start from the beginning. What did you do to make her such a fan?”

“It started about two weeks after she got here. Remember that autoerotic hanging?”

“Yes.”

“She shows up and just walks right into the middle of everything and starts telling people what to do, like she's the detective. She starts looking through the porno magazines the guy was having fun with when he strung himself up in his leather mask. She starts asking his wife questions.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“So I tell her to leave, that she's in the way and screwing up everything, and the next day she calls me into her office. I figure she's going to be tear-ass about what happened, but she doesn't say a word. Instead, she asks what I think of the detective division.”

He took a gulp of coffee and stirred in two more teaspoons of sugar.

“Thing is, I could tell that really wasn't what she was interested in,” he went on. “I knew she wanted something. She wasn't in charge of investigations, so why the hell was she asking me about the detective division?”

I poured myself a glass of wine.

“Then what did she want?” I asked.

“She wanted to talk about you. She started asking me a thousand questions about you, said she knew we had been ‘partners in crime,' as she put it, for a long time.”

I checked the dough, then the sauce.

“She was asking me background stuff. What the cops thought of you.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told her you was a doctor-lawyer-Indian chief with an IQ bigger than my paycheck, that the cops was all in love with you, including the women. And let's see, what else?”

“That was probably quite enough.”

“She asked about Benton and what happened to him and how much it had affected your work.”

Anger heated me up.

“She starting quizzing me about Lucy. About why she left the FBI and if the way she swings is the reason.”

“This woman's fast sealing her fate with me,” I warned.

“I told her Lucy left the Bureau because NASA asked her to become an astronaut,” Marino kept going. “But when she got into the space program, she decided she liked flying helicopters better and signed on as a pilot for ATF. Bray wanted me to tell her next time Lucy was in town, to arrange for the two of them to meet because Bray might want to recruit her. I said that was sort of like asking Billie Jean King to be a ball girl. End of story? I didn't tell Bray shit except I ain't your social secretary. One week later, my ass was back in uniform.”

I reached for my pack and felt like a junkie. We shared an ashtray, smoking in my house, silent and frustrated. I was trying not to feel hateful.

“I think she's jealous as hell of you, plain and simple, Doc,” Marino finally said. “She's the big shot moving here from D.C., and all she hears about is the great Dr. Scarpetta. And I think she got a cheap thrill out of busting up the two of us. Gave the bitch a little power rush.”

He smashed the cigarette butt in the ashtray and ground it out.

“This is the first time you and me haven't worked together since you moved here,” he said as the doorbell rang for a second time this night.

“Who the hell's that?” he said. “You invite someone else and not tell me?”

I got up and looked into the video screen of the Aiphone on the kitchen wall. I stared, incredulous, at the images picked up by the front-door camera.

“I'm dreaming,” I said.

L
ucy and Jo seemed apparitions, physical presences that could not be flesh and blood. Both of them had been riding the streets of Miami barely eight hours ago. Now they were in my arms.

“I don't know what to say,” I said at least five times as they dropped duffel bags on the floor.

“What the hell's going on?” Marino boomed, intercepting us in the great room. “What do you think you're doing here?” he demanded of Lucy, as if she had done something wrong.

He had never been able to show affection in a normal way. The gruffer and more sarcastic he got, the happier he was to see my niece.

“They fire your ass down there already?” he asked.

“What's this, trick or treat?” Lucy said just as loudly, tugging a sleeve of his uniform shirt. “You trying to make us finally believe you're a real cop?”

“Marino,” I said as we went into the kitchen, “I don't think you've met Jo Sanders.”

“Nope,” he said.

“You've heard me talk about her.”

He gave Jo a blank look. She was an athletically built
strawberry blonde with dark blue eyes, and I could tell he thought she was pretty.

“He knows exactly who you are,” I said to Jo. “He's not being rude. He's just being him.”

“You work?” Marino asked her, fishing his smoldering cigarette out of the ashtray and drawing one last puff.

“Only when I have no choice,” Jo answered.

“Doing what?”

“A little rappelling out of Black Hawks. Drug busts. Nothing special.”

“Don't tell me you and Lucy are in the same field division down there in South America.”

“She's DEA,” Lucy told him.

“No shit?” Marino said to Jo. “You seem kind of puny for DEA.”

“They're into quotas,” Jo said.

He opened the refrigerator and shoved things around until he found a Red Stripe beer. He twisted off the cap and started chugging.

“Drinks are on the house,” he called out.

“Marino,” I said. “What are you doing? You're on duty.”

“Not anymore. Here, let me show you.”

He set the bottle down hard on the table and dialed a number.

“Mann, what'cha know,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, I ain't joking. I'm feeling like shit. You think you could cover for me tonight? I'll owe ya.”

Marino winked at us. He hung up, hit the speaker button on the phone and dialed again. His call was answered on the first ring.

“Bray,” the deputy chief of administration, Diane Bray, announced in my kitchen for all to hear.

“Deputy Chief Bray, it's Marino,” he said in the voice of someone dying of a terrible scourge. “Really sorry to bug you at home.”

He was answered with silence, having instantly and
deliberately irritated his direct supervisor by addressing her as “Deputy Chief.” According to protocol, deputy chiefs were always addressed as “Chief,” while the chief himself was called “Colonel.” Calling her at home didn't win him any points, either.

“What is it?” Bray tersely asked.

“I feel like hell,” Marino rasped. “Throwing up, fever, the whole nine yards. I gotta mark off sick and go to bed.”

“You certainly weren't sick when I saw you a few hours ago.”

“It happened real sudden. I sure hope I didn't catch some bacteria thing . . .”

I quickly dashed out
Strep
and
Clostridia
on a notepad.

“. . . you know, like strep or Clos-ter-ida out there at the scene. One doctor I called warned me about that, because of getting in such close proximity to that dead body and all . . .”

“When does your shift end?” she interrupted him.

“Eleven.”

Lucy, Jo and I were red-faced, strangled by laughter we were fighting to hold in.

“It's not likely I can find someone to be watch commander this late in the shift,” Bray coldly replied.

“I already got hold of Lieutenant Mann in third precinct. He's nice enough to work the rest of tour for me,” Marino let her know as his health failed precipitously.

“You should have notified me earlier!” Bray snapped.

“I kept hoping I could hang in there, Deputy Chief Bray.”

“Go home. I want to see you in my office tomorrow.”

“If I'm well enough, I'll drop by, I sure will, Deputy Chief Bray. You take care, now. Sure hope you don't get whatever I got.”

She hung up.

“What a sweetheart,” Marino said as laughter leapt out.

“God, no wonder,” Jo said when she could finally talk again. “I hear she's pretty much hated.”

“How'd you hear that?” Marino frowned. “They talk about her in Miami?”

“I'm from here. On Old Mill, right off Three Chopt, not too far from the University of Richmond.”

“Your dad teach there?” Marino asked.

“He's a Baptist minister.”

“Oh. That must be fun.”

“Yeah,” Lucy chimed in, “kind of bizarre to think she grew up around here and we never met until Miami. So, what are you going to do about Bray?”

“Nothing,” he said, draining the bottle of beer and going into the refrigerator for another one.

“Well, I sure as hell would do something,” she said with huge confidence.

“You know, you think shit like that when you're young,” he remarked. “Truth, justice and the American way. Wait till you're my age.”

“I'll never be your age.”

“Lucy told me you're a detective,” Jo started talking to Marino. “So why are you dressed like that?”

“Story time,” Marino said. “You want to sit on my knee?”

“Let me guess. You pissed somebody off. Probably her.”

“DEA teach you to make deductions like that, or are you just unusually smart for someone almost grown up?”

I sliced mushrooms, green peppers and onions, and pinched off pieces of whole-milk mozzarella while Lucy watched. Finally, she made me look her in the eye.

“Right after you called this morning, Senator Lord did,” she quietly told me. “It about shocked the entire field office, I might add.”

“I bet it did.”

“He told me to get on a plane immediately and come here . . .”

“If only you minded me so well.” I was getting shaky inside again.

“That you needed me.”

“I can't tell you how glad I am . . .” My voice caught as I tumbled back down into that frigid, dark space.

“Why didn't you tell me you needed me?”

“I didn't want to interfere. You're so involved down there. You didn't seem to want to talk.”

“All you had to say was,
I need you.”

“You were on a cell phone.”

“I want to see the letter,” she said.