Four Scarpetta Novels (25 page)

Dr. Self's vitals remain the same.

An eerie sonar sound that brings to mind a submarine as Benton looks at Dr. Self's blanketed feet on the other side of the glass.

“
The weather here's been perfectly wonderful, Marilyn.
” The recorded voice of Gladys Self.
“I haven't even bothered with the air conditioner—not that it works. Rattles like a huge insect. I just keep the windows and doors open because the temperature isn't so bad right now.”

Although this is the neutral set, the most innocuous one of all, Dr. Self's vital signs have changed.

“Pulse seventy-three, seventy-four,” Benton says, writing it down.

“I'd say this isn't neutral for her,” Dr. Lane says.

“
I was thinking of all those gorgeous fruit trees you used to have when you lived down here, Marilyn, the ones the Department of Agriculture had to cut down because of the citrus canker. I love a pretty yard. And you'd be pleased to know that silly eradication program has pretty much ground to a halt because it doesn't work. Such a shame. Life is all about timing, isn't it?”

“Pulse seventy-five, seventy-six. Pulse ox ninety-eight,” Benton says.

“
…The darnedest thing, Marilyn. This submarine going back and forth all day about a mile offshore. Has a little American flag waving from the whatever you call it. The tower where the periscope is? Must be the war. Back and forth, back and forth, some kind of practice, the little flag waving. I say to my friends, practice for what? Did anybody tell them they don't need submarines in Iraq…?”

The first neutral set ends, and during a thirty-second recovery period, Dr. Self's blood pressure is taken again. It's gone up to one sixteen over eighty-two. Then her mother's voice again. Gladys Self talks about where she likes to shop these days in South Florida, and the never-ending construction, high-rises sprouting up everywhere, she says. A lot of them empty because the real estate market has gone to hell. Mainly because of the war in Iraq. What it's done to everyone.

Dr. Self reacts the same way.

“Wow,” Dr. Lane says. “Something's certainly got her paying attention. Just look at her pulse ox.”

It's dropped to ninety-seven.

Her mother's voice again. Positive comments. Then the criticism.

“…You were a pathological liar, Marilyn. From the time you could talk, I never could get the truth out of you. Then later? What happened? Where did you get those morals of yours? Not from anyone in this family. You and your dirty little secrets. It's disgusting and reprehensible. What happened to your heart, Marilyn? If only your fans knew! Shame on you, Marilyn…”

Dr. Self's oxygenated blood has dropped ninety-six percent, her breathing more rapid, shallower, and audible through the intercom.

“…The people you threw away. And you know what and who I mean. You lie as if it's the truth. That's what's worried me all your life, and it will catch up with you one of these days…”

“Pulse one hundred and twenty-three,” Dr. Lane says.

“She just moved her head,” Josh says.

“Can the motion software correct for it?” Dr. Lane asks.

“I don't know.”

“…And you think money solves everything. Send your widow's mites and it absolves you of responsibility. Pay people off. Oh, we'll see. One of these days you'll reap what you sow. I don't want your money. I have drinks in the tiki bar with my friends and they don't even know who you are to me…”

Pulse one hundred and thirty-four. Oxygenated blood down to ninety-five. Her feet are restless. Nine seconds left. Mother talks, activating neurons in her daughter's brain. Blood flows to those neurons, and with the increase of blood is an increase in deoxygenated blood that is detected by the scanner. Functional images are captured. Dr. Self is in physical and emotional distress. It isn't an act.

“I don't like what's going on with her vitals. That's it. No more,” Benton says to Dr. Lane.

“I agree.”

He gets on the intercom. “Dr. Self. We're going to stop.”

 

From a locked cabinet inside the computer lab, Lucy retrieves a tool kit, a thumb drive, and a small black box as she talks to Benton on the phone.

“Don't ask questions,” he says. “We just finished a scan. Better put, had to abort one. I can't tell you about it, but I need something.”

“Okay.” She sits in front of a computer.

“I need you to talk to Josh. I need you to get in.”

“To do what?”

“A patient is having her e-mails forwarded to the Pavilion's server.”

“And?”

“And also on the same server are electronic files. One for an individual who saw the Pavilion's clinical director. You know who I mean.”

“And?”

“And he saw a person of interest in Rome last November,” Benton says over the phone. “All I can tell you is this patient of interest served in Iraq, seems he's a referral from Dr. Self.”

“And?” Lucy logs on to the Internet.

“Josh just finished the scan. The one aborted. On a person who's leaving tonight, meaning no more forwarded e-mails. Time is of the essence.”

“Still there? The person who's leaving?”

“Right now, yes. Josh has already left, has a sick baby at home. Is in a hurry.”

“If you give me your password, I can access the network,” Lucy says. “That will make it easier. But you're going to be down for about an hour.”

She reaches Josh on his cell phone. He's in his car, driving away from the hospital. That's even better. She tells him Benton can't get into his e-mail, there's something going on with the server, she has to fix it immediately, sounds like it will take some time. She can do it remotely, but she needs the system administrator password unless he wants to turn around and handle it himself. He sure doesn't want to do that, starts talking about his wife, their baby. Okay, it would be great if Lucy could take care of it. They work on technical problems all the time, and it would never occur to him that her intention is to access a patient's e-mail account and Dr. Maroni's private files. Even if Josh suspected the worst, he would assume she would just hack in, wouldn't ask. He knows her abilities, how she makes her money, for God's sake.

She doesn't want to hack into Benton's hospital. And it would take too long. An hour later, she calls Benton back. “Don't have time to look,” she says. “Leave that up to you. I forwarded everything. And your e-mail's up.”

She leaves the lab and rides off on her Agusta Brutale motorcycle and is overwhelmed by anxiety and anger. Dr. Self is at McLean. She has been for almost two weeks.
Goddamn it.
Benton has known it.

She rides fast, the warm wind slapping her helmet, as if trying to bring her to her senses.

She understands why Benton couldn't say a word, but it's not right. Dr. Self and Marino e-mailing each other, and all the while she's under Benton's nose at McLean. He doesn't warn Marino or Scarpetta. He doesn't warn Lucy as the two of them watch Marino on camera in the morgue, giving Shandy a tour. Lucy making comments about Marino, about his e-mails to Dr. Self, and Benton just listens, and now Lucy feels stupid. She feels betrayed. He doesn't mind asking her to break into confidential electronic files, but he can't tell her that Dr. Self is a patient and is sitting in her private room at the very private Pavilion, paying three thousand fucking dollars a day to fuck everyone.

Sixth gear, tucked in, and passing cars on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge with its soaring peaks and vertical cables that remind her of the Stanford Cancer Center, of the lady playing incongruous songs on her harp. Marino may have been messed up already, but he didn't bargain for the chaos Dr. Self could cause. He's too simple to comprehend a neutron bomb. Compared to Dr. Self, he's a big, dumb kid with a slingshot in his back pocket. Maybe he started it by sending her an e-mail, but she knows how to finish something. She knows how to finish him.

Racing past shrimp boats docked in Shem Creek, crossing the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan's Island, where Marino lives in what he said at one time was his dream home—a tiny, run-down fishing shack on stilts, with a red metal roof. The windows are dark, not even a porch light on. Behind the shack, a very long pier cuts through the marsh and ends at a narrow creek that snakes to the Intracoastal Waterway. When he moved here, he bought a drift boat and enjoyed exploring the creeks and fishing or just cruising and drinking beer. She's not sure what happened.
Where did he go? Who's living in his body?

The patch of a front yard is sandy and dappled with spindly weeds. Under the shack, she picks her way through an assortment of junk. Old ice chests, a rusting grill, crab pots, rotting fishnets, garbage cans that smell like a swamp. She climbs warped wooden steps and tries the paint-peeled door. The lock is flimsy, but she doesn't want to pry it open. Better to take the door off the hinges and get in that way. A screwdriver, and she's inside Marino's dream house. He has no alarm system, always says his guns are alarming enough.

She pulls the string of an overhead bulb, and in the harsh glare and uneven shadows, she looks around to see what's changed since she was here last. When was that? Six months ago? He's done nothing new, as if he stopped living here after a while. The living room is a bare wooden floor with a cheap plaid couch, two straight-back chairs, a big-screen TV, a home computer and printer. Against a wall is a kitchenette, a few empty beer cans and a bottle of Jack Daniel's on the counter, lots of cold cuts and cheese and more beer inside the refrigerator.

She sits at Marino's desk and from the USB port of his computer removes a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabyte thumb drive attached to a lanyard. She opens her tool kit and selects needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver pen, a battery-powered drill—as tiny as one a jeweler might use. Inside the small black box are four unidirectional microphones, each no more than eight millimeters in size, or about the size of a baby aspirin. Pulling the plastic casing off the thumb drive, she removes the shaft and the lanyard, and embeds a microphone, its metal mesh top unnoticeable in the small hole where the lanyard originally was attached. The drill makes a quiet hum as it bores a second hole in the base of the casing, where she inserts the ring of the lanyard, reattaching it.

Next she digs into a pocket of her cargo pants and pulls out another thumb drive—the one she retrieved from the lab—and inserts it into the USB port. She downloads her own version of a spyware application that will relay Marino's every keystroke to one of her e-mail accounts. She scrolls through his hard drive, looking for documents. Almost nothing except the e-mails from Dr. Self that he copied onto his computer at the office. No big surprise. She doesn't imagine him sitting around writing professional journal articles or a novel. He's bad enough about doing paperwork. She plugs his thumb drive back into the port and begins a quick walk around, opening drawers. Cigarettes, a couple
Playboy
magazines, a .357-magnum Smith & Wesson, a few dollars and loose change, receipts, junk mail.

She's never figured out how he fits inside the bedroom, where the closet is a rod attached between the walls at the foot of the bed, clothes jammed and sloppily hung, other items on the floor, including his huge boxer shorts, socks. She spots a lacy red bra and panties, a studded black leather belt and a crocodile one, way too small to be his, a plastic butter tub filled with condoms and cock rings. The bed is unmade. God knows when the linens were washed last.

Next door is a bathroom the size of a phone booth. A toilet, a shower, a sink. Lucy checks the medicine cabinet, finds the expected toiletries and hangover remedies. She removes a bottle of Fiorinal with Codeine prescribed to Shandy Snook. It's almost empty. On another shelf is a tube of Testroderm, prescribed to someone she's never heard of, and she enters the information on her iPhone. She reattaches the door to its hinges and makes her way down the dark, rickety stairs. The wind has kicked up, and she hears a faint noise coming from the pier. She slips out her Glock, listening, shining the light in the direction of the noise, but the beam falls short, the length of the pier dissolving into solid darkness.

She climbs stairs that lead to the pier, old with curling boards, some of them missing. The smell of pluff mud is strong, and she begins to swat at no-see-ums and remembers what an anthropologist told her. It's all about your blood type. Pests like mosquitos like type O. That would be her, but she's never been sure how a no-see-um can smell her blood type if she isn't bleeding. They swarm around her, attacking her, even biting her scalp.

Her footsteps are quiet as she walks and listens, hearing a bumping sound. The flashlight moves over weathered wood and bent rusty nails, and a breeze touches the marsh grass, whispers through it. The lights of Charleston seem distant in the sulfur-smelling, humid air, the moon elusive behind thick clouds, and at the end of the pier, she looks down at the source of the disconcerting sound. Marino's bass boat is gone, and bright orange bumpers rock against pilings in dull thuds.

K
aren and Dr. Self on the front steps of the Pavilion in the almost-dark.

A porch light that isn't too bright, and Dr. Self slides a folded piece of paper out of her raincoat pocket. She opens it, gets out a pen. In the woods beyond them, the high-pitched static of insects. The faraway cry of coyotes.

“What's that?” Karen asks Dr. Self.

“Whenever I have guests on my shows, they sign one of these. It simply gives me permission to have them on the air. To talk about them. No one can help you, Karen. That's clear, isn't it?”

“I feel a little better.”

“You always do. Because they program you. Just as they tried to program me. It's a conspiracy. That's why they made me listen to my mother.”

Karen takes the waiver from her, tries to read it. There's not enough light.

“I'd like to share our wonderful conversations and the insights from them that might help my millions of viewers around the world. I need your permission. Unless you'd rather I use an alias.”

“Oh, no! I'd be very happy for you to talk about me and use my real name. And even be on your show, Marilyn! What conspiracy? Do you think it includes me?”

“You need to sign this.” She gives Karen the pen.

Karen signs it. “If you'll let me know if you're going to talk about me so I can watch. I mean, if you do. Do you think you really will?”

“If you're still here.”

“What?”

“It can't be my first show, Karen. My first one is about Frankenstein and shocking experiments. Being drugged against my will. Subjected to torment and humiliation in the magnet. Let me repeat, a huge magnet, while I listened to my mother, while they forced me to hear her voice lying about me, blaming me. It could be weeks before you're on my show, you see. I hope you're still here.”

“You mean the hospital? I'm leaving first thing in the morning.”

“I mean here.”

“Where?”

“Do you still want to be in this world, Karen? Or did you ever want to be in it? That's really the question.”

Karen lights a cigarette with trembling hands.

“You saw my series on Drew Martin,” Dr. Self says.

“It's so sad.”

“I should tell everyone the truth about her coach. I certainly tried to tell her.”

“What did he do?”

“Have you ever taken a look at my website?”

“No. I should have.” Karen sits hunched over on the cold stone step, smoking.

“How would you like to be on it? Until we can get you on my show?”

“Be on it? You mean, you tell my story on it?”

“Briefly. We have a section called
Self Talk
. People blog, tell their stories, and write to each other. Of course, some of them can't write very well, and I have a team of people who edit, rewrite, take dictation, interview. Remember when we first met? I gave you my card?”

“I still have it.”

“I want you to send your story to the e-mail address on that card, and we'll post it. What an inspiration you can be. Unlike poor Dr. Wesley's niece.”

“Who?”

“She's not really his niece. She has a brain tumor. Not even my tools can cure somebody of that.”

“Oh, my. That's awful. I suppose a brain tumor could make somebody crazy, and there's no help for them.”

“You can read all about her when you log on. You'll see her story and all the blogs. You'd be astonished,” Dr. Self says from one step above her, the breeze in her favor, the smoke drifting the other way. “Your story? Quite a message it will send. How many times have you been hospitalized? At least ten. Why the failure?”

Dr. Self imagines herself asking her audience this as cameras move in tight on her face—one of the most recognizable faces on earth. She loves her name. Her name is part of her incredible destiny. Self. She's always refused to give it up. She wouldn't change her name for anyone, and she would never share it, and anybody who doesn't want it is condemned because the unforgivable sin isn't sex. It's failure.

“I'll be on your show anytime. Please call me. I can be there at a moment's notice,” Karen keeps saying. “As long as I don't have to talk about…I can't say it.”

But even back then, when Dr. Self's fantasies were the most vivid, when her thinking became magical and the premonitions began, she never dreamed of what would happen.

I'm Dr. Marilyn Self. Welcome to Self on Self. SOS. Do you need help?
At the beginning of each show, to the wild applause from a live audience as millions watch from all over the world.

“You won't make me tell it, will you? My family will never forgive me. It's why I can't stop drinking. I'll tell you if you don't make me say it on TV or on your website.” Karen is lost in her drivel.

Thank you, thank you
. Sometimes Dr. Self can't get the audience to stop clapping.
I adore all of you, too
.

“My Boston terrier, Bandit. I let her out late one night and forgot to let her back in because I was so drunk. It was wintertime.”

Applause that sounds like a hard rain, like a thousand hands clapping.

“And the next morning I found her dead by the back door, and the wood was all clawed up from her scratching on it. My poor little Bandit with her short little fur. Shivering, crying, and barking, I'm sure. Scratching to get back in because it was freezing cold.” Karen weeps. “And so I just kill off my brain so I don't have to think. They said I have all these white areas and widening of…well, and the atrophy. Way to go, Karen, I say. You're killing off your brain. You can see it. Plain as day, you can see I'm not normal.” She touches her temple. “It was right up there on the light box in the neurologist's office, big as all outdoors, my abnormal brain. I'm never going to be normal. I'm almost sixty, and what's done is done.”

“People are unforgiving about dogs,” Dr. Self says, lost in herself.

“I know I am. What can I do to get over it? Please tell me.”

“People with mental disease have peculiarities in the shape of their skulls. Lunatics have very contracted or deformed heads,” Dr. Self says. “Maniacs have soft brains. Such scientific insights gleaned from a study done in Paris in 1824, which concluded that out of one hundred idiots and imbeciles examined, only fourteen had normal heads.”

“Are you saying I'm an imbecile?”

“Sound all that different from what the doctors here have been telling you? That your head is somehow different, meaning you are somehow different?”

“I'm an imbecile? I killed my dog.”

“These superstitions and manipulations have been around for centuries. Measuring the skulls of people locked up in lunatic asylums and dissecting the brains of idiots and imbeciles.”

“I'm an imbecile?”

“Today, they put you in some magic tube—a magnet—and tell you your brain is deformed, and they make you listen to your mother.” Dr. Self stops talking as a tall figure walks toward them with purpose in the dark.

“Karen, if you don't mind, I need to talk to Dr. Self,” Benton Wesley says.

“Am I an imbecile?” Karen says, getting up from the step.

“You're not an imbecile,” Benton says kindly.

Karen says good-bye to him. “You were always nice to me,” she says to him. “I'm flying home and won't be back,” she says to him.

Dr. Self invites Benton to sit next to her on the steps, but he won't. She senses his anger, and it's a triumph, yet one more.

“I'm feeling much better,” she says to him.

He's transformed by shadows pushed back by lamps.

She's never seen him in the dark, and the realization is fascinating.

“I wonder what Dr. Maroni would say right now. I wonder what Kay would say,” she says. “Reminds me of spring break at the beach. A young girl notices a glorious young man, and then? He notices her. They sit in the sand and wade in the water and splash each other and do everything they desire until the sun comes up. They don't care that they're wet and sticky with salt and each other. Where did the magic go, Benton? Getting old is when nothing's enough and you know you'll never feel magic again. I know what death is, and so do you. Sit next to me, Benton. I'm glad you want to chat before I go.”

“I talked to your mother,” Benton says. “Again.”

“You must like her.”

“She told me something very interesting that's caused me to retract something I said to you, Dr. Self.”

“Apologies are always welcome. From you, they're quite an unexpected treat.”

“You were right about Dr. Maroni,” Benton says. “About your having sex with him.”

“I never said I had sex with him.” Dr. Self goes cold inside. “When would that have happened? In my goddamn room with a goddamn view? I was drugged. I couldn't have had sex with anyone unless it was against my will. He drugged me.”

“I'm not talking about now.”

“While I was unconscious, he opened my gown and fondled me. He said he loved my body.”

“Because he remembered it.”

“Who said I had sex with him? Did that goddamn bitch say that? What would she know about what happened when I checked in? You must have told her I'm a patient. I'll sue you. I said he couldn't help himself, couldn't resist, and then he fled. I said he knew what he'd done was wrong and so he fled to Italy. I never said I had sex with him. I never told you that. He drugged me and took advantage of me, and I should have known he would. Why wouldn't he?”

It excites her. It did then and it still does, and she had no idea it would. At the time she chided him but didn't tell him to stop. She said, “Why is it necessary to examine me so enthusiastically?” And he said, “Because it's important I know.” And she said, “Yes. You should know what isn't yours.” And he said as he explored, “It's like a special place you once visited and haven't seen in many years. You want to find out what's changed and what hasn't and whether you could live it again.” And she said, “Could you?” And he said, “No.” Then he fled, and that was the worst thing he did, because he'd done it before.

“I'm talking about a very long time ago,” Benton says.

 

Water laps quietly.

Will Rambo is surrounded by water and the night as he rows away from Sullivan's Island, where he left the Cadillac in a secluded spot an easy walk from where he borrowed the bass boat. He has borrowed it before. He uses the outboard engine when needed. When he wants quiet, he rows. Water laps. In the dark.

Into the Grotta Bianca, the place he took the first one. The feeling, the familiarity, as fragments come together in a deep cavern in his mind among dripstones of limestone, and moss where sunlight touched. He walked her beyond the Column of Hercules into an underworld of stone corridors with prisms of minerals and the constant sound of water dripping.

That dreamlike day they were all alone except once, when he let excited schoolchildren pass in their jackets and hats, and he said to her
,
“Noisy like a swarm of bats.” And she laughed and said she was having fun with him, and she grabbed his arm and pressed against him, and he felt the softness of her against him. Through silence, only the sound of water dripping. He took her through the Tunnel of Snakes beneath chandeliers of stone. Past translucent curtains of stone into the Corridor of the Desert
.

“If you left me here, I would never find my way out,” she said.

“Why would I leave you? I'm your guide. In the desert, you can't survive without a guide unless you know your way.”

And the sandstorm rose up in a mighty wall, and he rubbed his eyes, trying not to see it in his mind that day.

“How do you know the way? You must come here often,” she said, and then he left the sandstorm and was back in the cave, and she was so beautiful, pale and well defined, as if carved of quartz, but sad because her lover had left her for another woman.

“What makes you so special you can know a place like this?” she said to Will. “Three kilometers deep into the earth and an endless maze of wet stone. How horrible to be lost in here. I wonder if anyone's ever gotten lost in here. After hours, when they turn out the lights, it must be pitch-black and cold as a cellar in here.”

He couldn't see his hand in front of his face. All he saw was bright red as they were sandblasted until he thought he would have no skin left.

“Will! Oh, God! Help me, Will!” Roger's screams became the screams of the schoolchildren a corridor away, and the roar of the storm stopped.

Water dripped and their footsteps sounded wet. “Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?” she asked.

“I could find my way even in the dark. I can see very well in the dark and came here often when I was a child. I'm your guide.” He was very kind, very gentle with her because he understood her loss was more than she could bear. “See how the stone's translucent with light? It's flat and strong like tendons and sinews, and crystals are the waxy yellow of bone. And through this narrow corridor is the Dome of Milano, gray, damp, and cool like the tissue and vessels of a very old body.”

“My shoes and the cuffs of my pants are spattered with wet limestone, like whitewash. You've ruined my clothes.”

Her complaints irritated him. He showed her a natural pond scattered with green coins on the bottom, and wondered aloud if anyone's wishes had come true, and she tossed a coin in and it plashed and sank to the bottom.

“Make all the wishes you want,” he says. “But they never come true, or if they do, too bad for you.”

“That's a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How can you say that it would be bad if a wish came true? You don't know what I wished. What if my wish was to make love to you? Are you a bad lover?”