Four Scarpetta Novels (163 page)

D
r. Bronson is
in his office, moving a slide around on the stage of his compound microscope. Marino knocks on the open door.

Dr. Bronson is smart and competent, always neat in a starchy white lab coat. He's been a decent chief. But he can't dislodge himself from the past. The way things were done is how he still does them, and that would include how he evaluates other people. Marino doubts Dr. Bronson bothers with background checks or any other sort of intense scrutiny that should be standard practice in today's world.

He knocks again, this time louder, and Dr. Bronson looks up from the microscope.

“Do come in,” he says, smiling. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He is a man of the old world, polite and charming, with a perfectly bald head and vague, gray eyes. A briar-wood pipe is cold in the ashtray on his neatly arranged desk, and the faint aroma of aromatic tobacco always lingers.

“Least down here in the sunny south they still let you smoke indoors,” Marino says, pulling a chair close.

“Well, I shouldn't,” Dr. Bronson says. “My wife keeps telling me I'm going to get cancer of the throat or tongue. I tell her if I do, at least I won't complain much on my way out.”

Marino remembers he didn't shut the door. He gets up, shuts it and sits back down.

“If they cut my tongue or vocal cords out, then I guess I won't be griping much,” Dr. Bronson says as if Marino didn't get the joke.

“I need a couple of things,” Marino says. “First, we'd like to run a sample of Johnny Swift's DNA. Dr. Scarpetta says there should be several DNA cards in his case file.”

“She ought to take my place, you know. I wouldn't mind if she was the one who took my place,” he says, and the way he says it makes Marino realize that Dr. Bronson probably knows all too well what people think.

Everyone wants him to retire. They wanted him to retire years ago.

“I built this place, you know,” he goes on. “Can't just let any Tom, Dick or Harry come in and muck up everything. Not fair to the public. Certainly not fair to my staff.” He picks up the phone and presses a button. “Polly? How about pulling the Johnny Swift case for me and bringing it in. We'll need all the appropriate paperwork.” He listens, then, “Because we need to receipt a DNA card to Pete. They're going to do something with it over at the labs.”

He hangs up, takes off his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief.

“So, am I to assume there's some new development?” he asks.

“It's beginning to look that way,” Marino replies. “When it's a certainty, you'll be the first to know. But put it like this, some things have come up that make it pretty damn likely Johnny Swift was murdered.”

“Happy to change the manner if you can show that. Never was all that comfortable about the case. But I have to go with the evidence and there just hasn't been anything significant in the investigation to make me sure about anything. Mostly, I've suspected suicide.”

“Except for the shotgun missing from the scene,” Marino can't help but remind him.

“You know, a lot of strange things happen, Pete. Can't tell you how many times I show up and find the family's completely mucked up the scene to protect the dignity of their loved one. Especially in autoerotic asphyxiations. I get there and there's not a pornographic magazine or bondage accouterment in sight. Same with suicides. Families don't want anyone to know or want to collect the insurance money, so they hide the gun or knife. They do all kinds of things.”

“We need to talk about Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“A disappointment,” he says, his normally pleasant expression fading. “Truth is, I'm sorry I recommended him for your fine institution. I'm especially sorry because Kay deserves a heck of a lot better than the likes of that arrogant little bastard.”

“That's what I'm getting at. Based on what? You recommended him because of what?”

“His impressive education and references. He has quite a pedigree.”

“Where's his file? You still have it? The original?”

“I sure do. I kept the original. A copy went to Kay.”

“When you went over this fancy education and references, did you check them out to make sure they were authentic?” Marino hates to ask him. “People can fake a lot of things these days. Especially because of computer graphics, the Internet, you name it. That's one reason identity theft's becoming such a problem.”

Dr. Bronson rolls his chair to a filing cabinet and opens a drawer. He walks his fingers through neatly labeled files and pulls out one with Joe Amos's name on it. He hands it to Marino.

“Help yourself,” he says.

“Mind if I sit here for a minute?”

“I don't know what's taking Polly so long,” Dr. Bronson says, rolling his chair back to the microscope. “You take all the time you want, Pete. I'll just get back to my slides. A sad one. Poor woman found in the swimming pool.” He adjusts the focus, his head bent over the eyepiece. “Her ten-year-old little girl found her. Question's whether she drowned or had some other fatal event like a myocardial infarct. She was bulimic.”

Marino looks through letters that medical-school department heads and other pathologists wrote on Joe Amos's behalf. He skims through a résumé that is five pages long.

“Dr. Bronson? Did you ever call any of these people?” Marino asks.

“About what.” He doesn't look up. “No old scarring of her heart. Course, if she had an infarct and survived for hours, I'm not going to see anything. I asked if she might have purged earlier. That can really muck up your electrolytes.”

“About Joe,” Marino says. “To make sure these big-shot doctors really know him.”

“Of course they know him. They wrote me all those letters.”

Marino holds a letter up to the light. He notices a watermark that looks like a crown with a sword through it. He holds up each of the other letters. They all have the same watermark. The letterheads are convincing, but since they aren't engraved or embossed, they could have been scanned or reproduced with some sort of graphic software package. He picks a letter supposedly generated by the chief of pathology at Johns Hopkins and tries the number. A receptionist answers.

“He's out of town,” she tells him.

“I'm calling about Dr. Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“Who?”

He explains. He asks her if she could check her files.

“He wrote a letter on Joe Amos's behalf a little over a year ago, on December seventh,” Marino tells her. “Says here on the bottom of the letter the person who typed it has the initials LFC.”

“There's nobody here with those initials. And I would have been the one who typed anything like that, and those certainly aren't my initials. What is this about?”

“Just a simple case of fraud,” Marino says.

L
ucy rides one
of her souped-up V-Rods north on A1A, hitting every red light on her way to Fred Quincy's house.

He runs his Web design business out of his Hollywood home. He isn't expecting her, but she knows he's in, or at least he was when she called half an hour ago to sell him a subscription to
The Miami Herald.
He was polite, far more polite than Lucy would be if some solicitor dared to get her on the phone. His address is two blocks west of the beach, and he must have money. His home is two stories of pale-green stucco and black wrought iron, and the driveway is gated. Lucy stops her bike at an intercom and presses the button.

“May I help you?” a male voice answers.

“Police,” Lucy says.

“I didn't call the police.”

“I'm here to talk to you about your mother and sister.”

“What police department?” The voice sounds suspicious.

“Broward sheriff's.”

She slips out her wallet and holds up her bogus credentials, holds the wallet and its badge in front of the closed-circuit video camera. A tone sounds, and the wrought-iron gate begins to slide open. She kicks her bike in gear and bumps over granite pavers, parking in front of a big black door that opens the instant she turns off the engine.

“That's quite a bike,” the man she assumes is Fred says.

He is of average height with narrow shoulders and a slender build. His hair is dark blond, his eyes bluish-gray. He is quite handsome in a delicate sort of way.

“Don't think I've ever seen a Harley quite like this,” he says, walking around her bike.

“You ride?” she asks.

“Nope. I leave the dangerous stuff to other people.”

“You must be Fred.” Lucy shakes his hand. “Mind if I come in?”

She follows him across the marble tile foyer into a living room that overlooks a narrow, murky canal.

“What about my mother and Helen? Have you found out something?”

He says it as if he means it the way he should. He isn't just curious or paranoid. Pain fills his eyes, and there is an eagerness, a faint ring of hope.

“Fred,” she says. “I'm not with the Broward County Sheriff's Department. I have private investigators and laboratories and we've been asked to help.”

“So you misrepresented yourself at my gate,” he says, his eyes turning unfriendly. “That wasn't a very nice thing to do. Bet you're the one who called, too, saying you're the
Herald.
To see if I was home.”

“Right on both counts.”

“And I'm supposed to talk to you?”

“I'm sorry,” Lucy says. “It was a lot to explain over an intercom.”

“What's happened to make this of interest again? Why now?”

“I'm afraid I need to be the one asking the questions,” she says.

 

U
ncle Sam
is pointing his finger at YOU and saying I WANT YOUR CITRUS.”

Dr. Self pauses dramatically. She looks comfortable and confident in a leather chair on the set of
Talk It Out.
In this segment she has no guests. She doesn't need them. She has a telephone centered on the table next to her chair, and cameras catch her from different angles as she punches buttons and says, “This is Dr. Self. You're on the air.”

“So how about that?” she goes on. “Is the USDA stomping on our Fourth Amendment rights?”

It is an easy set-up, and she can't wait to jump right down the throat of the fool who just called in. She glances at the monitor, satisfied the lighting and angles are catching her favorably.

“They sure are,” the fool says over speakerphone.

“What's your name again? Sandy?”

“Yeah, I…”

“Stop before you chop, Sandy?”

“Ah, what…?”

“Uncle Sam with an ax? Isn't that the image the public has?”

“We're being screwed. It's a conspiracy.”

“So that's how you think of it? Good Old Uncle Sam cutting down all your trees. Chop, chop.”

She catches the cameramen, her producer smiling.

“The bastards came into my yard without permission, and next thing I know, all my trees are going to be cut down….”

“And you live where, Sandy?”

“Cooper City. I don't blame people for wanting to shoot them or siccing their dogs on…”

“Here's the thing about it, Sandy.” She leans into the point she's about to make, the cameras zooming in. “You people don't pay attention to the facts. Have you attended meetings? Have you written your legislators? Have you bothered to ask questions point-blank and consider that maybe, just maybe, the explanations offered by the Department of Agriculture might make sense?”

It is her style to take whatever side the other person isn't on. She's known for it.

“Well, the stuff about hurricanes is [bleep],” the fool snaps, and Dr. Self suspected it wouldn't be long before the profanity started.

“It's not
bleep,
” she mimics him. “There's nothing
bleep
about it. The fact is”—she faces the camera—“we had four major hurricanes last fall, and it is a fact that citrus canker is a bacterial disease carried by the wind. When we come back, we're going to explore the reality of this dreaded blight and talk it out with a very special guest. Stay with me.”

“We're off,” a cameraman says.

Dr. Self reaches for her bottle of water. She takes a sip through a straw so she doesn't smear her lipstick and waits for the makeup person to touch up her forehead and nose, impatient when the makeup person is slow getting to her, impatient when the makeup person is slow to hurry up and finish.

“All right. Okay. That's enough.” Dr. Self holds up a hand, shooing off the makeup person. “This is going well,” she says to her producer.

“I think in the next segment, we need to really focus on the psychology. That's why people tune in to you, Marilyn. It's not the politics, it's their problems with their girlfriends, bosses, mothers, fathers.”

“I don't need coaching.”

“I didn't mean…”

“Listen, what makes my shows unique is the blend of current affairs and our emotional responses.”

“Absolutely.”

“Three, two, one.”

“And we're back.” Dr. Self smiles into the camera.

M
arino stands beneath
a palm tree outside the Academy, watching Reba walk off to her unmarked Crown Victoria. He notes the defiance in her step, tries to determine if it's genuine or if she's putting on an act. He wonders if she sees him standing under the palm tree, smoking.

She called him a jerk. He's been called that a lot, but he never thought she would say it.

She unlocks her car, then seems to change her mind about getting in. She doesn't look in his direction, but he has a feeling she knows he's standing there in the shadow of the palm tree, his Treo in hand, the earpiece in his ear, a cigarette going. She shouldn't have said what she did. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta. The Effexor ruined things. If he wasn't depressed before, he was after that, then that comment about Scarpetta, about all these cops having the hots for her.

The Effexor was a blight. Dr. Self has no right to put him on a drug that ruined his sex life. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta all the time, as if Scarpetta is the most important person in Marino's life. Reba had to remind him. She said what she did to remind him he couldn't have sex, remind him of men who can and want it with Scarpetta. Marino hasn't taken the Effexor for several weeks, and his problem is getting better except he is depressed.

Reba pops the trunk, walks around to the back of the car and opens it.

Marino wonders what she's doing. He decides he may as well find out and be decent enough to let her know he can't arrest anyone and could probably use her help. He can threaten people all he wants, but he can't legally arrest anybody. It's the only thing he misses about policing. Reba grabs what looks like a bag of laundry out of the trunk and throws it into the backseat as if she's pissed off.

“Got a body in there?” Marino asks, casually walking up to her, flicking his cigarette butt into the grass.

“Ever heard of using a trash can?”

She slams shut the door, barely looking at him.

“What's in the bag?”

“I've got to go to the cleaners. Haven't had time in a week, not that it's any of your business,” she says, hiding behind a pair of dark glasses. “Don't treat me like shit anymore, at least not in front of other people. You want to be a jerk, at least be discreet about it.”

He looks back at his palm tree as if it's his favorite spot, looks at the stucco building against the bright blue sky, trying to think how to put it.

“Well, you were disrespectful,” he says.

She looks at him in shock. “Me? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Last I remember, we had a nice ride and you dragged me to Hooters, never asked if that's where I wanted to go, by the way. Why you'd take a woman to an ass-and-tits place like that beats the hell out of me. Talk about disrespectful? Are you kidding? Making me sit there while you ogle all the tartlets jiggling past.”

“I wasn't.”

“Were too.”

“I sure wasn't,” he says, sliding out the pack of cigarettes.

“You're smoking too much.”

“I wasn't staring at nothing. I was minding my own business drinking my coffee, then out of the blue you started in on all this crap about the Doc and I'll be damned if I have to listen to such disrespectful bullshit.”

She's jealous,
he thinks, pleased. She said what she did because she thought he was staring at the waitresses in Hooters, and maybe he was. To make a point.

“I've worked with her a million years and don't let anybody talk about her like that and I'm not going to start now,” he goes on, lighting up, squinting in the sun, noticing a group of students dressed in field clothes walking past on the road, heading to the SUVs in the parking lot, probably heading off to the Hollywood Police Training Facility for a demonstration by the Bomb Disposal Team.

Seems like they were scheduled for that today, to play with Eddie the RemoteTec robot, watch it move on its tractor belts, sounding like a crab crawling down the trailer's aluminum ramp, connected to a fiber-optic cable, showing off, and Bunky the bomb dog showing off, and firefighters in their big trucks showing off, and guys in their bomb-and-search suits showing off with dynamite and det cord and disrupters, maybe blowing up a car.

Marino misses it. He's tired of being left out.

“I'm sorry,” Reba says, “I didn't mean to say anything disrespectful about her. All I was saying was some of the guys I work with—”

“I need you to arrest somebody,” he cuts her off, looking at his watch, not interested in hearing her repeat what she told him at Hooters, not interested in perhaps having to face that some of it was him.

Most of it was him.

The Effexor. Reba would have found out sooner rather than later. The damn stuff ruined him.

“In maybe half an hour. If you can put off going to the Laundromat,” he is saying.

“The dry cleaner's, jerk,” she says with hostility that's not at all convincing.

She still likes him.

“I've got my own washer and dryer,” she says. “I don't live in a trailer.”

Marino tries Lucy on the cell phone as he says to Reba, “I've got an idea. Not sure it will work, but maybe we'll get lucky.”

Lucy answers and tells him she can't talk.

“It's important,” Marino says, looking at Reba, remembering their weekend in Key West when he wasn't on Effexor. “Just give me two minutes.”

He can hear Lucy talking to someone, saying she's got to take the call and will be right back. A man's voice says no problem. Marino can hear Lucy walking. He looks at Reba and remembers getting drunk on Captain Morgan rum in the Paradise Lounge at the Holiday Inn and watching the sunsets and sitting up late at night in the hot tub when he wasn't on Effexor.

“You there?” Lucy is asking him.

“Is it possible for me to have a three-way conference call with two cell phones, one landline and only two people?” he asks.

“This some kind of Mensa test question?”

“What I want is to make it look like I'm on my phone in my office talking to you, but what I'm really doing is talking to you on my cell phone. Hello? Are you there?”

“Are you suggesting someone may be monitoring your phone calls from a multiline phone that's connected to the PBX system?”

“From the damn phone on my desk,” he says, looking at Reba looking at him, trying to see if she's impressed.

“That's what I meant. Who?” Lucy says.

“I intend to find out but I'm pretty sure I know.”

“No one could do that without the system admin's password. And that would be me.”

“I think someone's got it. It would explain a lot of things. Is it possible to do what I said?” he asks her again. “Can I call you on my office phone, then conference in on my cell phone, then leave my office phone line open so it seems I'm in there talking but I'm not?”

“Yes, we can,” she says. “But not right this minute.”

 

D
r. Self
presses a flashing button on the phone.

“Our next caller—well, he's been on hold for several minutes now, and he has an unusual nickname. Hog? I apologize. You still with us?”

“Yes, ma'am,” a soft-spoken voice enters the studio.

“You're on the air,” she says. “Now, Hog? Why don't you tell us about your nickname first. I'm sure everybody's curious.”

“It's what I'm called.”

Silence, and Dr. Self fills it instantly. There can be no dead time on the air.

“Well, Hog it is. Now, you called in with a startling story. You're in the lawn-care business. And you were in a certain neighborhood and noticed citrus canker in someone's yard…?”

“No. It's not quite like that.”

Dr. Self feels a pinch of irritation. Hog's not following the script. When he called late Tuesday afternoon and she pretended to be someone other than herself, he distinctly said he had discovered canker in an old woman's yard in Hollywood, just one orange tree, and now every citrus tree in her yard and all her neighbors' yards has to be cut down, and when he mentioned the problem to the owner of that particular infected tree, the old woman, she threatened to kill herself if Hog reported the canker to the Department of Agriculture. She threatened to shoot herself with her dead husband's shotgun.

The old woman's husband had planted the trees when they first got married. He's dead and the trees are all she has left, the only living thing left. To cut down her trees is to destroy a precious part of her life that nobody has any business touching.

“Eradicating those trees is to cause her to at last accept her loss.” Dr. Self is explaining all this to her audience. “And in doing so, she doesn't see anything left worth living for. She wants to die. That's quite a dilemma to find yourself in, isn't it, Hog? Playing God,” she says to the speakerphone.

“I don't play God. I do what God says. It's not an act.”

Dr. Self is confused but carries on. “What a choice for you to make. Did you follow the government's rules or follow your heart?”

“I painted red stripes on them,” he says. “Now she's dead. You were next. But there isn't time.”