Five Scarpetta Novels (163 page)

I
T IS VERY HOT
inside the hotel room and Scarpetta has given up adjusting the thermostat. She sits in a chair by the window and watches Marino on the bed. He is stretched out in his black pants and black shirt, the baseball cap lonely on the dresser, his black boots lonely on the floor.

“You need to get some food in you,” she says from her chair near the window.

Nearby on the carpet is her mud-spotted black nylon crime scene kit, and draped over another chair is her mud-spattered coat. Wherever she has walked in the room she has tracked red mud, and when her eyes fall on the trail she has made, she is reminded of a crime scene, and then she thinks about Suzanna Paulsson's bedroom and what crime may or may not have occurred there within the past twelve hours.

“I can't eat nothing right now,” Marino says from his supine position. “What if she goes to the police?”

Scarpetta has no intention of giving him false hope. She can't give him anything because she doesn't know anything. “Can you sit up, Marino? It would be better if you sit up. I'm going to order something.”

She gets up from the chair and leaves behind her more bits and flakes of drying mud as she walks to the phone by the bed. She finds a pair of reading glasses in a pocket of her suit jacket and puts them on the tip of her nose, and she studies the phone. Unable to figure out the number for room service, she dials zero for the operator and is transferred to room service.

“Three large bottles of water,” she orders. “Two pots of hot Earl Grey tea, a toasted bagel, and a bowl of oatmeal. No thank you. That will do it.”

Marino works himself up to a sitting position and shoves pillows behind his back. She can feel him watching her as she returns to her chair and sits down, tired because she is overwhelmed, her brain a herd of wild horses galloping in fifty different directions. She is thinking about paint chips and other trace evidence, about the soil samples in her nylon bag, about Gilly and the tractor driver, about what Lucy is doing, about what Benton might be doing, and trying to imagine Marino as a rapist. He has been foolish, no, stupid, with women before. He has mixed business with the personal, specifically he has gotten sexually involved with witnesses and victims in the past, more than once, and it has cost him but never more than he can afford. Never before has he been accused of rape or worried that he might have committed rape.

“We have to do the best we can to sort through this,” she begins. “For the record, I don't believe you raped Suzanna Paulsson. The obvious problem is whether she believes you did or wants to believe you did. If it's the latter, then we will have to get to motive. But let's start with what you remember, the last thing you remember. And Marino?” She looks at him. “If you did rape her, then we'll deal with that.”

Marino just stares at her from his upright position on the bed. His face is flushed, his eyes glassy with fear and pain, and a vein has popped out on his right temple. Now and then, he touches the vein.

“I know you probably have no burning desire to give me every detail of what you did last night, but I can't help you if you don't. I'm not squeamish,” she adds, and after all they've been through, such a comment should be funny. But nothing is going to be funny for a while.

“I don't know if I can.” He looks away from her.

“What I'm capable of imagining is worse than anything you may have done,” she tells him in a quiet but objective tone.

“That's right. You probably wasn't born yesterday.”

“Not hardly,” she says. “If it makes you feel any better, I've done a thing or two myself.” She smiles a little. “As hard as that might be for you to imagine.”

I
T ISN'T HARD
for him to imagine. All these years, he has preferred not to imagine what she has done with other men, especially with Benton.

Marino stares past her head out the window. His plain single room is on the third floor, and he can't see the street, just the gray sky beyond her head. He feels very small inside and has a childish urge to hide under the covers, to sleep and hope when he wakes up he'll discover that nothing has happened. He wants to wake up and discover he is here in Richmond with the Doc, working a case, and nothing has happened. Funny how many times he has opened his eyes in a hotel room and wished he would find her there looking at him. Now here she is in his hotel room looking at him. He tries to think where to begin, then the childish urge clutches him again and he loses his voice. His voice dies somewhere between his heart and his mouth, like a firefly going out in the dark.

His thoughts about her have been long and drawn out, for years they have been, ever since they first met, if he is honest about it. His erotic imaginings are the most skillful, creative, incredible sex he's ever had, and he would never want her to know, he could never let her know, and he has not stopped hoping something might happen with her, but if he starts talking about what he remembers, then she might get an idea of what it would be like to be with him. That would ruin any chance. No matter how remote the chance, it would be killed. To confess in detail what little he does remember would be to show her what it would be like to be with him. That would ruin it. His fantasies wouldn't survive, either, and then he wouldn't even have them, never again. He considers lying.

“Let's go back to when you arrived at the FOP lounge,” Scarpetta says, her eyes steady on him. “What time did you go there?”

Good. He can talk about the FOP lounge. “Around seven,” Marino says. “I met Eise there and then Browning got there and we had something to eat.”

“Details,” she tells him without moving in the chair, her eyes directly on his. “What did you eat and what had you eaten during the day?”

“I thought we were starting with the FOP, not what I ate earlier.”

“Did you eat breakfast yesterday?” she persists with the same steadiness and patience she has when she talks to those left behind after someone is annihilated by randomness or by an Act of God or by a murderer.

“Had coffee in my room,” he replies.

“Snacks? Lunch?”

“Nope.”

“I'll lecture you about that another time,” she says. “No food all day, just coffee, and then you went to the FOP lounge at seven. Did you drink on an empty stomach?”

“I started with a couple beers. Then I had a steak and a salad.”

“No potato or bread? No carbs? You were on your diet.”

“Huh. About the only good habit I stuck to last night, that's for sure.”

She doesn't answer, and he senses she is thinking that his low-carb habit isn't exactly a good habit, but she isn't going to lecture him about nutrition right now when he's sitting on a bed, miserable with a hangover and in pain and panicky because he might have committed a felony or is about to be accused of committing one, assuming he hasn't already been accused. He looks at the gray sky out the window and imagines a Richmond police unmarked Crown Victoria prowling the streets, looking for him. Hell, it could be Detective Browning himself out there ready to serve a warrant on him.

“Then what?” Scarpetta asks.

Marino imagines himself in the backseat of the Crown Vic and wonders if Browning would handcuff him. Out of professional respect he could let Marino sit in the back unrestrained, or he could forget respect and snap handcuffs on him. He would have to handcuff him, Marino decides.

“You drank a few beers and ate a steak and a salad starting at seven,” Scarpetta prods him in that easygoing but unstoppable way of hers. “How many beers, exactly?”

“Four, I think.”

“Not think. How many, exactly.”

“Six,” he replies.

“Glasses or bottles or cans? Tall ones? Regulars? What size, in other words?”

“Six bottles of Budweiser, regular size. That ain't all that much for me, by the way. I can hold it. Six beers for me is like half a beer for you.”

“Unlikely,” she replies. “We'll talk about your math later.”

“Well, I don't need a lecture,” he mutters, glancing at her, then staring steadily at her in sullen silence.

“Six beers, one steak, a salad at the FOP with Junius Eise and Detective Browning, and about when did you hear the rumor that I'm moving back to Richmond? Might this have been while you were eating with Eise and Browning?”

“Now you're really putting two and two together,” he says crabbily.

Eise and Browning were sitting across from him in the booth, a candle moving in the red glass globe, all three of them drinking beer. Eise asks Marino what he thinks of Scarpetta, what he really thinks. Is she a big-shot doctor-chief, what is she really like. She's a big shot but don't act like one, were Marino's exact words. He does remember that much, and he remembers the way he felt when Eise and Browning started talking about her, about her getting reappointed as chief and moving back to Richmond. She hadn't said a word to Marino about any such thing, not even given him a hint, and he was humiliated and furious. That's when he switched from beer to bourbon.

I always thought she was hot, that idiot Eise had the balls to say, and then he switched to bourbon. Quite a set that one's got, he added a few minutes later, cupping his hands at his chest, grinning. Wouldn't mind getting into the lab coat of that one. Well, you've worked with her forever, haven't you, so maybe when you've been around her enough, you don't notice her looks anymore. Browning said he's never seen her, but he'd heard about her, and he was grinning too.

Marino didn't know what to say, so he drank the first bourbon and ordered another one. The thought of Eise looking at her body put him in a mood to punch him. Of course he didn't. He just sat in the booth and drank and tried not to think about the way she looks when she takes off her lab coat, when she drapes it over her chair or hangs it on the hook behind her door. He did his best to block out images of her taking off her suit jacket at a scene, unbuttoning the sleeves of her blouse, doing and undoing whatever is needed when a dead body is waiting for her. She has always been easy about herself, not showing it, not conscious of what she's got and whether anyone might be looking at it when she's unbuttoning and taking off and reaching and moving, because she has work and because the dead don't care about seeing it. They're dead. It's just Marino who isn't dead. Maybe she thinks he's dead.

“I'll say it again, I have no plans for moving back to Richmond,” Scarpetta says from her chair, her legs crossed, the hem of her dark blue pants speckled with mud, her shoes so smeared with mud it's hard to remember they were shiny black earlier today. “Besides, you don't really think I would make plans like that and not tell you, do you?”

“You never know,” he replies.

“You do know.”

“I ain't moving back here. Especially not now.”

Someone knocks on the door and Marino's heart jumps and he thinks of the police and of jail and court. He shuts his eyes in relief when a voice on the other side of the door says, “Room service.”

“I'll get it,” Scarpetta says.

Marino sits still on the bed, and his eyes follow her as she moves across the small room and opens the door. If she were alone, were he not sitting right here, she would probably ask who is there and look through the peephole. But she isn't worried because Marino is right here and wears a Colt .280 semiautomatic in an ankle holster, not that it would be necessary to shoot anyone. He wouldn't mind beating the hell out of someone, though. Right now he would be happy to slam his big fists into someone's jaw and solar plexus, like he used to do when he boxed.

“How you folks today?” the pimply-faced young man in a uniform asks as he rolls in the cart.

“Fine, just fine,” she says, digging in a pocket of her pants and pulling out a ten-dollar bill that is neatly folded. “You can leave it right there. Thank you.” She hands him the folded bill.

“Thank you, ma'am. You all have a really nice day now.” And he leaves. And the door shuts softly.

Marino doesn't move on the bed, only his eyes do as he watches her. He watches her loosen plastic wrap from the bagel and the oatmeal. He watches her open a pat of butter and mix the butter into the oatmeal, then sprinkle it with salt. She opens another pat of butter and spreads it on the bagel, then she pours two cups of tea. She does not put sugar in the tea. In fact, there is no sugar, none at all, on the cart.

“Here,” she says, setting the oatmeal and a cup of strong tea on the table by the bed. “Eat.” She walks back to the cart and carries the bagel to him. “The more you eat, the better. Maybe when you start feeling better, your memory will have a miraculous recovery.”

The vision of the oatmeal causes a protest that rocks his gut, but he picks up the bowl and slowly dips in the spoon, and the spoon digging into the congealing oatmeal makes him think of Scarpetta digging the tongue depressor into the mud on the pavement, and then he imagines something else similar to oatmeal that causes another wave of disgust and remorse. If only he had been too drunk to do it. But he's done it. Seeing the oatmeal makes him certain he did it last night, finished what he started.

“I can't eat this,” he says.

“Eat it,” she replies, sitting back in the same chair like a judge, sitting up straight, looking right at him.

He tastes the oatmeal and is surprised that it's pretty good. It feels good going down. Before he knows it, he's eaten the entire bowl and is working on the bagel, and while he's doing this, he can feel her watching him. She isn't talking and he knows damn well why she's not saying anything and is watching him. He hasn't told her the truth yet. He is holding back the details that he is certain will kill the fantasy. Once she knows, he'll have no chance, and the bagel is suddenly dry in his throat and he can't swallow it.

“Feel a little bit better? Drink some of the tea,” she suggests, and now she really is a judge dressed in dark clothes, sitting upright in the chair beneath the gray window. “Eat all of the bagel and drink at least one cup of the tea. You need food and you're dehydrated. I've got Advil.”

“Yeah, Advil might be good,” he says, chewing.

She reaches down into her nylon bag, and pills rattle as she pulls out a small bottle of Advil. He chews and gulps tea, suddenly very hungry, and he watches her walk back to him again, all the way to where he is propped against the pillows, and she removes the childproof cap easily because anything childproof may as well not exist when it gets into her hands. She shakes out two pills and places them in his palm. Her fingers are agile and strong and seem small against his huge palm, and they lightly brush his skin, and her touch feels better to him than most things he has felt in life.

“Thanks,” he says as she returns to her chair.

She'll sit in that chair for a month if she has to, he thinks. Maybe I should just let her sit there for a month. She's not going anywhere until I tell her. I wish she'd quit looking at me like that.

“How's our memory doing?” she asks.

“Some things are lost for good, you know. It happens,” he replies, draining the cup of tea and concentrating on the pills to make sure they haven't gotten stuck somewhere in his throat.

“Some things never do come back,” she agrees. “Or were never completely gone. Other things are just hard to talk about. You were drinking bourbon with Eise and Browning, then what? About what time was it when you started on the bourbon?”

“Maybe eight-thirty, nine. My cell phone rings and it was Suz. She was upset and said she needed to talk to me, asked me if I could come by her house.” He pauses, waiting for Scarpetta's reaction. She doesn't have to say it. She is thinking it.

“Please continue,” she says.

“I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I shouldn't have gone over there after drinking a few.”

“You have no idea what I'm thinking,” she replies from her chair.

“I was feeling all right.”

“Define few,” she adds.

“The beer, a couple bourbons.”

“A couple?”

“No more than three.”

“Six beers equals six ounces of alcohol. Three bourbons is another four or five ounces, depending on how well you know the bartender,” she calculates. “Let's say over a three-hour period. That equals approximately ten ounces, I'm being conservative. Let's say you metabolized one ounce per hour, that's the norm. You still had at least seven ounces on board when you headed out of the FOP lounge.”

“Shit,” he says. “I sure could do without the math. I was feeling all right. I'm telling you I was.”

“You hold it well. But you were legally drunk, more than legally drunk,” the doctor-lawyer says. “By my calculations, more than point one-oh. You got to her house safe and sound, I presume. And by now it is what time?”

“Ten-thirty, maybe. I mean, I wasn't looking at my watch every damn minute.” He stares at her and feels dark and sluggish slumped against pillows on the bed. What happened next heaves darkly inside him and he doesn't want to step into that darkness.

“I'm listening,” Scarpetta says. “How are you feeling? Do you need some more tea? More food?”

He shakes his head no and feels again for the pills, worried they might be stuck somewhere and burning holes inside his throat. He burns in so many places, two more little burns might be hard to detect, but he doesn't need them.

“The headache better?”

“You ever been to a shrink?” he suddenly asks. “'Cause that's what I'm feeling like. Like I'm sitting in a room with a shrink. But since I ain't never been to a shrink, I don't know if it feels like this. I thought you would know.” He isn't sure why he said it, but it came out. He looks at her, helpless and angry and desperate to do anything that keeps him out of the heaving darkness.