Four Scarpetta Novels (159 page)

I bet you would,
she replied.

How many times you dropped that thing?

None.

Huh. Well there's only two types of riders. Those who've dropped their bikes and those who will.

There's a third kind,
she said, feeling rather good about herself in her uniform and tall, black leather boots.
The one who's dropped it and lies about it.

Well, that ain't me.

That's not what I hear,
she said, and she was teasing him, flirting a little.
The story I hear is you forgot to put down the kickstand at the gas pumps.

Bullshit.

I also hear you were doing a poker run and forgot to unlock your front fork before you headed off to the next bar.

That's the biggest crock I ever heard.

How about the time you hit the kill switch instead of your right turn signal?

He started laughing and asked her to ride to Miami and have lunch at Monty Trainer's on the water. They rode quite a few times after that, once to Key West, flying like birds along U.S.1 and crossing the water as if they could walk on it, the old Flagler railway bridges to the west, a storm-battered monument to a romantic past when South Florida was a tropical paradise of Art Deco hotels, Jackie Gleason and Hemingway—not all at the same time, of course.

All was fine until not even a month ago, right after she got promoted to the detective division. He started avoiding sex. He got weird about it. She worried it had to do with her promotion, worried maybe he didn't find her attractive anymore. Men had gotten tired of her in the past, why wouldn't it happen again? Their relationship fractured for good when they were having dinner at Hooters—not her favorite restaurant, by the way—and somehow got on the topic of Kay Scarpetta.

Half the guys in the police department got the hots for her,
Reba said.

Huh,
he said, his face changing.

Just like that, he became somebody else.

I wouldn't know anything about it,
he said, and he didn't sound like the Marino she had come to like so much.

You know Bobby?
she asked, and she now wishes she had kept her mouth shut.

Marino stirred sugar in his coffee. It was the first time she'd seen him do that. He told her he didn't touch sugar anymore.

The first homicide we worked together,
she kept talking,
Dr. Scarpetta was there, and when she was getting ready to transport the body to the morgue, Bobby whispered to me, I might just die if I could have her hands all over me. And I said, Good, you die I'll make sure she saws open your skull to see if you really got a brain in there.

Marino drank his sweetened coffee, looking at some waitress with big tits bending over to take away his salad bowl.

Bobby was talking about Scarpetta,
Reba added, not sure he got it, wishing he would laugh or something, anything other than the hard, distant look on his face, watching tits and asses go by.
It was the first time I met her,
Reba talked on nervously,
and I remember thinking maybe you and her were an item. I sure was glad later on to find out it wasn't true.

You should work all your cases with Bobby.
Marino then made a comment that had nothing to do with what she just said.
Until you know what the hell you're doing, you shouldn't handle any case solo. In fact, you probably should transfer out of the detective division. I don't think you realize what you've gotten yourself into. It's not like what you see on TV.

Reba looks around the bay and feels self-conscious and useless. It is late afternoon. Forensic scientists have been at work for hours, the gray station wagon up on a hydraulic lift, the windows cloudy from superglue fumes, the carpets already processed and vacuumed. Something lit up on the mat beneath the driver's seat. Maybe blood.

The forensic scientists are collecting trace evidence from the tires, using paintbrushes to sweep dust and dirt from the tread, brushing it off onto sections of white paper they fold and seal with bright-yellow evidence tape. A minute ago, one of the scientists, a pretty young woman, told Reba they don't use metal evidence cans because when they run the trace through the SEM…

The what?
Reba asked.

A scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system.

Oh,
Reba said, and the pretty scientist went on to explain that if you put trace evidence in metal cans and the scan is positive for iron or aluminum, how do you know it's not microscopic particles from the can?

That was a good point, one that would never have occurred to Reba. Most of what they are doing wouldn't occur to her. She feels inexperienced and stupid. She stands off to one side, thinking about Marino telling her she shouldn't work anything solo, about the way his face looked and the way he sounded when he said it. She looks around at the tow truck, at other hydraulic lifts and tables of photography equipment, Mini-Crime scopes, luminescent powders and brushes, trace-evidence vacuums, Tyvek protective clothing, superglue and crime-scene kits that look like big, black tackle boxes. On the far side of the hangar, there is even a sled and crash dummies, and she hears Marino's voice. She hears it as plain as day in her head.

It's not like what you see on TV.

He had no right to say that.

You should probably transfer out of the detective division.

Then she hears his voice and it's real, and she is startled and turns around.

Marino is walking over to the station wagon, walks right past her, a coffee in hand.

“Anything new?” Marino says to the pretty scientist taping up a folded sheet of paper.

He stares at the wagon on the lift, acting as if Reba is a shadow on the wall, a mirage on the highway, something that's nothing.

“Maybe blood inside,” the pretty scientist is saying. “Something that reacted to luminol.”

“I go to get coffee and look what I miss. What about prints?”

“We haven't opened her up yet. I was getting ready to, don't want to overcook her.”

The pretty scientist has long hair, shiny and a deep brown that reminds Reba of a chestnut horse. She has beautiful skin, perfect skin. What Reba wouldn't give to have skin like that, to undo all her years in the Florida sun. There's no point caring anymore, and wrinkled skin looks even worse when it's pale, so she bakes herself. She still does. She looks at the pretty scientist's smooth skin and youthful body and feels like crying.

 

T
he living
room has fir floors and paneled mahogany doors, and a marble fireplace ready for a fire. Benton crouches before the hearth and lights a match, and wisps of smoke curl up from fatwood kindling.

“Johnny Swift graduated from Harvard Medical School, did a residency at Mass General, a fellowship in the department of neurology at McLean,” he says, getting up and returning to the couch. “A couple years ago, he started a practice at Stanford, but he also opened an office in Miami. We referred Lucy to Johnny because he was well known at McLean, was excellent and was accessible to her. He was her neurologist and I think they became pretty good friends.”

“She should have told me.” Scarpetta still can't grasp it. “We're investigating his case and she keeps something like that to herself?” She keeps repeating herself. “He may have been murdered and she says nothing?”

“He was a candidate for suicide, Kay. I'm not saying he wasn't murdered, but when he was at Harvard, he started having mood disturbances, became an outpatient at McLean, was diagnosed as bipolar, which was controlled with lithium. As I say, he was well known at McLean.”

“You don't have to keep justifying that he was qualified and compassionate and not just a random referral.”

“He was more than qualified and certainly wasn't a random referral.”

“We're investigating his case, a very suspicious case,” she says again. “And Lucy can't be honest enough to tell me the truth. How the hell can she be objective?”

Benton drinks Scotch and stares into the fire, and the shadows from the flames play on his face.

“I'm not sure it's relevant. His death has nothing to do with her, Kay.”

“And I'm not sure we know that,” she says.

R
eba watches Marino
watching the pretty scientist set her paintbrush on a sheet of clean, white paper and open the wagon's driver's door, his eyes wandering all over her.

He stands very close to the pretty scientist as she removes foil packets of superglue from inside the wagon and drops them into an orange biohazard trash can. They are shoulder to shoulder, bent over, looking inside the front, then the back, one side of the wagon, then the other, saying things to each other that Reba can't hear. The pretty scientist laughs at something he says and Reba feels awful.

“I don't see anything on the glass,” he says loudly, straightening up.

“Me either.”

He squats and looks again at the inside of the door, the one behind the driver's seat. He takes his time as if noticing something.

“Come here,” he says to the pretty scientist as if Reba isn't here.

They are standing so close they couldn't fit a piece of that white paper between them.

“Bingo,” Marino says. “The metal part here that inserts into the buckle.”

“A partial.” The pretty scientist looks. “I see some ridge detail.”

They don't find any other prints, partial or otherwise, not even smudges, and Marino wonders out loud if the interior of the car has been wiped down.

He doesn't move out of Reba's way as she tries to get close. It's her case. She has a right to see what they're talking about. It's her case, not his. No matter what he thinks of her or says, she's the detective and it's her damn case.

“Excuse me.” She says it with authority she doesn't feel. “How about giving me some room.” Then, to the pretty scientist, “What did you find on the carpets?”

“Relatively clean, just a little bit of dirt, kind of the way they look when you shake them out or use a vacuum cleaner that doesn't have good suction. Maybe blood, but we'll have to see.”

“Then maybe this station wagon was used and returned to the house.” Reba talks boldly, and Marino gets that hard look on his face again, that same hard, distant look he had in Hooters. “And it didn't go through any tollbooths after the people disappeared.”

“What are you talking about?” Marino finally looks at her.

“We checked out the SunPass but that doesn't necessarily mean much.” She has information, too. “There's a lot of roads without tollbooths. Maybe it was driven where there aren't tolls.”

“That's a big maybe,” he says, not looking at her again.

“Nothing wrong with maybes,” she replies.

“See how that goes over in court,” he says, and he's not going to look at her. “Using maybes. You say maybe and the defense attorney eats you for lunch.”

“Nothing wrong with what-ifs, either,” she says. “You know, like what if someone or even more than one person abducted these people in this wagon and then later returned it to the driveway, unlocked and partially on the grass? That would be pretty smart, now wouldn't it? If anyone saw the wagon drive away from the house, they weren't going to think it was abnormal. Wouldn't think it abnormal if they saw it drive back, either. And I bet no one saw anything because it was dark.”

“I want the trace analyzed right away and the finger-print run through AFIS.” Marino tries to reassert his dominance by sounding like an even bigger bully.

“Sure thing,” the pretty scientist says sarcastically. “I'll be right back with my magic box.”

“I'm curious,” Reba says to her. “Is it true Lucy's got bulletproof Humvees, speedboats and a hot-air balloon in that other hangar over there?”

The pretty scientist laughs, snatches off her gloves, drops them into the trash. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

“Just some jerk,” she says.

 

A
t seven
thirty that night, all the lights are turned off inside Daggie Simister's house and the porch light is off.

Lucy holds the cable release, ready.

“Go,” she says, and Lex begins to mist the front porch with luminol.

They couldn't do it earlier. They had to wait until after dark. Footprints glow and fade again, this time more strongly. Lucy takes pictures, then quits.

“What's wrong?” Lex asks.

“I have a funny feeling,” Lucy says. “Let me have the spray bottle.”

Lex hands it to her.

“What's the most common false positive we get with luminol?” Lucy asks.

“Bleach.”

“Try again.”

“Copper.”

Lucy starts spraying in wide sweeps over the yard, walking and spraying and the grass glows bluish-green, glowing and fading like an eerie luminescent ocean everywhere the luminol touches. She's never seen anything like it.

“Fungicide is the only thing that makes sense,” she says. “Copper sprays. What they use on citrus trees to prevent canker. Course, it doesn't work all that well. Witness her blighted trees with their pretty red stripes painted around them,” Lucy says.

“Someone walks across her yard and tracks it into the house,” Lex replies. “Someone like a citrus inspector.”

“We've got to find out who that was,” Lucy says.

M
arino hates the
trendy restaurants of South Beach and never parks his Harley anywhere near the lesser bikes, mostly Japanese crotch rockets, that always line the boardwalk at this hour. He cruises slowly and loudly along Ocean Drive, glad his pipes annoy all the cool customers drinking their flavored martinis and wine at their little candlelit outdoor tables.

He stops inches away from the back bumper of a red Lamborghini, pulls in the clutch and rolls the throttle, giving the engine enough gas to remind everybody he's here. The Lamborghini inches forward and Marino inches forward, almost touching the back bumper, and rolls the throttle again, and the Lamborghini inches ahead and Marino does the same. His Harley roars like a mechanical lion, and a bare arm flies out the Lamborghini's open window and a middle finger with a long, red nail flips up.

He smiles as he gooses the throttle again and threads between cars, stopping beside the Lamborghini, peers in at the olive-skinned woman behind the steel-alloy wheel. She looks maybe twenty, is dressed in a denim vest and shorts and not much else. The woman next to her is homely but makes up for it by wearing what looks like a stretchy black Ace bandage around her breasts, and shorts that barely cover what matters.

“How do you type or do housework with those nails?” Marino asks the driver over the roaring and throbbing of big, powerful engines, and he splays his huge hands like cat claws to make his point about her long, red nails, acrylic extenders or whatever they're called.

Her pretty, snooty face stares up at the light, probably desperate for it to turn green so she can blast away from the redneck in black, and she says, “Get away from my car, motherfucker.”

She says it in a heavy Hispanic accent.

“Now that ain't no way for a lady to talk,” Marino replies. “You just hurt my feelings.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“How about I buy you two babes a drink? After that, we'll go dancing.”

“Leave us the fuck alone,” the driver says.

“I call police!” the one in the black Ace bandage threatens.

He tips his helmet, the one with the bullet hole decals, and rockets ahead of them as the light turns green. He is around the corner on 14th Street before the Lamborghini is even out of first gear, and parks by a meter in front of Tattoo's By Lou and Scooter City, cuts the engine and dismounts his warrior seat. He locks the bike and crosses the street to the oldest bar in South Beach, the only bar he frequents in these parts, Mac's Club Deuce, or what the local clientele simply call Deuce, not to be confused with his Harley Deuce. A two-Deuce night is what he says when he rides his Deuce to Deuce, a dark hole with a black-and-white checkered floor, a pool table and a neon nude over the bar.

Rosie starts pouring him a Budweiser draft. He doesn't have to ask.

“You expecting company?” She slides the tall, foaming glass across the old oak bar.

“You don't know her. You don't know nobody tonight.” He gives her the script.

“Ohhhhh-kay.” She measures vodka in a water glass for some old guy sitting by himself on a nearby stool. “I don't know anyone in here, least not the two of you. That's fine. Maybe I don't want to know you.”

“Don't break my heart,” Marino says. “How 'bout putting some lime in it.” He pushes the beer back to her.

“Well, aren't we fancy tonight.” She drops in a few slices. “That how you like it?”

“It's really good.”

“Didn't ask if it was good. Asked if that's how you like it.”

As usual, the usual locals ignore them. The usuals are slouched on stools on the other side of the bar, glazed as they stare at a baseball game they're not following on the big TV. He doesn't know their names, but they don't need names. There's the fat guy with the goatee, the really fat woman who's always complaining and her boyfriend, who is a third her size and looks like a ferret with yellow teeth. Marino wonders how the hell they fuck and imagines a jockey-sized cowboy flopping like a fish on a bucking bull. All of them smoke. On a two-Deuce night, Marino usually lights up a few, doesn't think about Dr. Self. Whatever goes on in here stays in here.

He carries his beer with lime to the pool table and picks out a stick from the mismatched collection propped in a corner. He racks the balls and stalks around the table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, chalking his stick. He squints at ferret, watching him get up from his stool and carry his beer to the men's room. He always does that, afraid someone will swipe his drink. Marino's eyes take in everything and everyone.

A scrawny, homeless-looking man with a scraggly beard, a ponytail, dark, ill-fitting Goodwill clothes, a filthy Miami Dolphins cap and weird pink-tinted glasses walks unsteadily into the bar and pulls up a chair near the door, stuffs a washcloth into the back pocket of his dark, baggy pants. A kid outside on the sidewalk is shaking a broken parking meter that just ate his money.

Marino smacks two solids into side pockets, squinting through cigarette smoke.

“That's right. You keep knocking your balls in the hole,” Rosie calls out to him, pouring another beer. “Where you been anyway?”

She is sexy in a hard-ridden way, a little thing nobody in his right mind dares to mess with, no matter how drunk he is. Marino once saw her break a three-hundredpounder's wrist with a beer bottle when he wouldn't stop grabbing at her ass.

“Quit waiting on everybody and get over here,” Marino says, smacking the eight ball.

It warbles to the center of the green felt and stops.

“Screw it,” he mutters, propping his stick against the table, wandering over to the jukebox while Rosie pops open two bottles of Miller Lite and sets them in front of the fat woman and the ferret.

Rosie's always frenetic, like a windshield wiper on high. She dries her hands on the back of her jeans as Marino picks out a few favorites from a mix of the seventies.

“What are you staring at?” he asks the homeless-looking man sitting by the door.

“How about a game?”

“I'm busy,” Marino says, not turning around as he makes selections on the jukebox.

“You're not playing anything unless you buy a drink,” Rosie tells the homeless-looking man slumped by the door. “And I don't want you hanging around here just for the hell of it. How many times I got to tell you?”

“I thought he might like a game with me.” He pulls out his washcloth and nervously starts wringing it.

“I'm going to tell you the same thing I did last time you came in here buying nothing and using the john, get out,” Rosie says in his face, her hands on her hips. “You want to stay, you pay.”

He slowly gets up from his chair, wringing the washcloth, and stares at Marino, his eyes defeated and tired, but there's something in them.

“I thought you might like to play a game,” he says to Marino.

“Out!” Rosie yells at him.

“I'll take care of it,” Marino says, walking over to the man. “Come on, I'm seeing you out, pal, before it's too late. You know how she gets.”

The man doesn't resist. He doesn't stink half as bad as Marino expected, and he follows him out the door onto the sidewalk, where the idiot kid is still shaking the parking meter.

“It ain't a goddamn apple tree,” Marino tells the kid.

“Fuck off.”

Marino strides over to him, towers over him, and the kid's eyes get wide.

“What'd you say?” Marino asks, cupping his ear, leaning into him. “Did I hear what I think I did?”

“I put in three quarters.”

“Well now, ain't that a pity. I suggest you get in your piece-of-shit car and get your ass out of here before I arrest you for damaging city property,” Marino says, even though he really can't arrest anybody anymore.

The homeless-looking man from the bar is walking slowly along the sidewalk, glancing back as if expecting Marino to follow. He says something as the kid starts his Mustang and guns it out of there.

“You talking to me?” Marino asks the homeless-looking man, walking his way.

“He's always doing that,” the homeless-looking man says quietly, softly. “Same kid. He never puts a damn nickel in the meters around here and then shakes the hell out of them until they break.”

“What do you want.”

“Johnny came in here the night before it happened,” he says in his ill-fitting clothes, the heels of his shoes cut out.

“Who you talking about.”

“You know who. He didn't kill himself, neither. I know who did.”

Marino gets a feeling, the same feeling he got when he walked inside Mrs. Simister's house. He spots Lucy a block away, taking her time on the sidewalk, not dressed in her usual baggy black clothes.

“Him and me played pool the night before it happened. He had on splints. They didn't seem to bother him. He played pool just fine.”

Marino watches Lucy without making it obvious. Tonight, she fits in. She could be any gay woman who hangs out around here, boyish but good-looking and sexy in expensive jeans, faded and full of holes, and beneath her soft, black leather jacket is a white undershirt that clings to her breasts, and he's always liked her breasts, even if he isn't supposed to notice them.

“I saw him just the one time when he brought this girl in here,” the homeless man is saying, looking around as if something makes him edgy, turning his back to the bar. “Think she's somebody you ought to find. That's all I have to say.”

“What girl and why should I give a shit?” Marino says, watching Lucy get closer, scanning the area, making sure nobody gets any ideas about her.

“Pretty,” the man says. “The kind both men and women look at around here, dressed all sexy. Nobody wanted her around.”

“Seems to me nobody wants you around, either. You just got your ass kicked out.”

Lucy walks into Deuce without looking, as if Marino and the homeless man are invisible.

“Only reason I didn't get kicked out that night is because Johnny bought me a drink. We played pool while the girl sat by the jukebox, looking around as if she'd never been taken to such a slop hole in her life. Went in the ladies' room a couple times and after that it smelled like weed.”

“You make a habit of going into the ladies' room?”

“I heard a woman at the bar talking. This girl, she looked like trouble.”

“You got any idea what her name is?”

“Sure don't.”

Marino lights a cigarette. “What makes you think she has anything to do with what happened to Johnny?”

“I didn't like her. Nobody did. That's all I know.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't be telling nobody else about this, you got it?”

“No point in it.”

“Point or not, keep your mouth shut. And now you're going to tell me how the hell you knew I was going to be in here tonight, and why the hell you thought you could talk to me.”

“That's quite a bike you got.” The homeless man looks across the street. “Kind of hard to miss. A lot of people around here know you used to be a homicide detective and now do private-investigation stuff at some police camp or something north of here.”

“What? Am I the mayor?”

“You're a regular. I've seen you with some of the Harley guys, been watching for you for weeks, hoping for a chance to talk to you. I hang out in the area, do the best I can. Not exactly the high point of my life, but I keep hoping it will get better.”

Marino pulls out his wallet and slips him a fifty-dollar bill.

“You find out more about this girl you saw in here, I'll make it worth your while,” he says. “Where can I reach you?”

“Different place, different night. Like I said, I do the best I can.”

Marino gives him his cell phone number.

 

W
ant another
one?” Rosie asks as Marino returns to the bar.

“Better give me an unleaded. You remember right before Thanksgiving, some good-looking blond doctor coming in here with a girl? He and that guy you just chased out play pool that night?”

She looks thoughtful, wiping down the bar, shakes her head. “A lot of people come in here. That was a long time ago. How long before Thanksgiving?”

Marino watches the door. It is a few minutes before ten. “Maybe the night before.”

“No, not me. I know this is hard to believe,” she says, “but I got a life, don't work here every damn night. I was out of here at Thanksgiving. In Atlanta with my son.”

“Supposedly there was a girl in here who was trouble, was in here with the doctor I've told you about. Was with him the night before he died.”

“Got no idea.”

“Maybe she came in that night with the doctor when you was out of town?”

Rosie keeps wiping down the bar. “I don't want a problem in here.”

 

L
ucy sits
by the window, near the jukebox, Marino at another table on the other side of the bar, his earpiece in and plugged into a receiver that looks like a cell phone. He drinks a nonalcoholic beer and smokes.

The locals on the other side aren't paying any attention. They never do. Every time Lucy has been in here with Marino, the same losers are sitting on the same stools, smoking menthol cigarettes and drinking lite beer. The only person they talk to outside their deadbeat little club is Rosie, who once told Lucy that the hugely fat woman and her scrawny boyfriend used to live in a nice Miami neighborhood with a guard gate and everything until he got sent to jail for selling crystal meth to an undercover cop. Now the fat lady has to support him on what she makes as a bank teller. The fat man with the goatee is a cook in a diner Lucy will never visit. He comes here every night, gets drunk and somehow manages to drive himself home.

Lucy and Marino ignore each other. No matter how many times they've been through this routine during various operations, it always feels awkward and invasive. She doesn't like being spied on, even if it's her idea, and no matter the logic in him being here tonight, she resents his presence.