Four Scarpetta Novels (6 page)

“I could never go back to a life like that,” Scarpetta says, and they are walking into the hotel's lobby that she calls Belle Époque because it is from a beautiful era. But they are oblivious to the marble, the antique Murano glass and silk and sculptures, to everything and everyone, including Romeo—that really is his name—who during the day is a gold-painted mime, most nights a doorman, and of late, a somewhat attractive and sullen young Italian who doesn't want any further interrogations about Drew Martin's murder.

Romeo is polite but avoids their eyes and, like a mime, is completely silent.

“I want what's best for you,” Benton says. “Which is why, obviously, I didn't get in your way when you decided to start your own practice in Charleston, but I was upset about it.”

“You never told me.”

“I shouldn't tell you now. What you've done is right and I know it. For years you've felt you really don't belong anywhere. In a sense, homeless, and in some ways unhappy ever since you left Richmond—worse, sorry to remind you, were fired. That goddamn piss-ant governor. At this stage in your life, you're doing exactly what you should.” As they board the elevator. “But I'm not sure I can stand it anymore.”

She tries not to feel a fear that is indescribably awful. “What do I hear you saying, Benton? That we should give up? Is that what you're really saying?”

“Maybe I'm saying the opposite.”

“Maybe I don't know what that means, and I wasn't flirting.” As they get out on their floor. “I never flirt. Except with you.”

“I don't know what you do when I'm not around.”

“You know what I don't do.”

He unlocks the door to their penthouse suite. It is splendid with antiques and white marble and a stone patio big enough to entertain a small village. Beyond, the ancient city is silhouetted against the night.

“Benton,” she says. “Please, let's don't fight. You're flying back to Boston in the morning. I'm flying back to Charleston. Let's don't push each other away so it somehow makes it easier to be away from each other.”

He takes off his coat.

“What? You're angry that I've finally found a place to settle down, started again in a place that works for me?” she says.

He tosses his coat over a chair.

“In all fairness,” she says, “I'm the one who has to start all over again, create something out of nothing, answer my own phone, and clean up the damn morgue myself. I don't have Harvard. I don't have a multimillion-dollar apartment in Beacon Hill. I have Rose, Marino, and sometimes Lucy. That's it, so I end up answering the phone myself half the time. The local media. Solicitors. Some group that wants me as a luncheon speaker. The exterminator. The other day, it was the damn Chamber of Commerce—how many of their damn phone directories do I want to order. As if I want to be listed in the Chamber of Commerce directory as if I'm a dry cleaner or something.”

“Why?” Benton says. “Rose has always screened your calls.”

“She's getting old. She can do but so much.”

“Why can't Marino answer the phone?”

“Why anything? Nothing's the same. Your making everyone think you were dead fractured and scattered everyone. There, I'll say it. Everybody's changed because of it, including you.”

“I had no choice.”

“That's the funny thing about choices. When you don't have one, nobody else does, either.”

“That's why you've put down roots in Charleston. You don't want to choose me. I might die again.”

“I feel as if I'm standing all alone in the middle of a fucking explosion, everything flying all around me. And I'm just standing here. You ruined me. You fucking ruined me, Benton.”

“Now who's saying ‘fuck'?”

She wipes her eyes. “Now you've made me cry.”

He moves closer to her, touches her. They sit on the couch and gaze out at the twin bell towers of Trinità dei Monti, at the Villa Medici on the edge of the Pincian Hill, and far beyond, Vatican City. She turns to him and is struck again by the clean lines of his face, his silver hair, and his long, lean elegance that is so incongruous with what he does.

“How is it now?” she asks him. “The way you feel, compared to back then? In the beginning.”

“Different.”

“Different sounds ominous.”

“Different because we've been through so much for so long. By now it's hard for me to remember not knowing you. It's hard for me to remember I was married before I met you. That was someone else, some FBI guy who played by the rules, had no passion, no life, until that morning I walked into your conference room, the important so-called profiler, called in to help out with homicides terrorizing your modest city. And there you were in your lab coat, setting down a huge stack of case files, shaking my hand. I thought you were the most remarkable woman I'd ever met, couldn't take my eyes off of you. Still can't.”

“Different.” She reminds him of what he said.

“What goes on between two people is different every day.”

“That's okay as long as they feel the same way.”

“Do you?” he says. “Do you still feel the same way? Because if…”

“Because if what?”

“Would you?”

“Would I what? Want to do something about it?”

“Yes. For good.” He gets up and finds his jacket, reaches into a pocket, and comes back to the couch.

“For good, as opposed to for bad,” she says, distracted by what's in his hand.

“I'm not being funny. I mean it.”

“So you don't lose me to some foolish flirt?” She pulls him against her and holds him tight. She pushes her fingers through his hair.

“Maybe,” he says. “Take this, please.”

He opens his hand, and in his palm is a folded piece of paper.

“We're passing notes in school,” she says, and she's afraid to open it.

“Go on, go on. Don't be a chicken.”

She opens it, and inside is a note that says,
Will you?
and then a ring. It's an antique, a thin platinum band of diamonds.

“My great-grandmother's,” he says, and he slides it over her finger, and it fits.

They kiss.

“If it's because you're jealous, that's a terrible reason,” she says.

“I just happened to have it with me after it's been in a safe for fifty years? I'm really asking you,” he says. “Please say you will.”

“And how do we manage? After all your talk about our separate lives?”

“For Christ's sake, for once don't be rational.”

“It's very beautiful,” she says of the ring. “You better mean it, because I'm not giving it back.”

N
ine days later, Sunday. A ship's horn is mournful out at sea.

Church steeples pierce the overcast dawn in Charleston, and a solitary bell begins to ring. Then a cluster of them joins in, clanging in a secret language that sounds the same around the world. With the bells comes the first light of dawn, and Scarpetta begins to stir about in her master suite, as she wryly refers to her living area on the second floor of her early-nineteenth-century carriage house. Compared to the somewhat sumptuous homes of her past, what she has is a very odd departure.

Her bedroom and study are combined, the space so crowded she can barely move without bumping into the antique chest of drawers or bookcases, or the long table draped with a black cloth that bears a microscope and slides, latex gloves, dust masks, camera equipment, and various crime scene necessities—all eccentric in their context. There are no closets, just side-by-side wardrobes lined with cedar, and from one of them she selects a charcoal skirt suit, a gray-and-white-striped silk blouse, and low-heeled black pumps.

Dressed for what promises to be a difficult day, she sits at her desk and looks out at the garden, watching it change in the varying shadows and light of morning. She logs into e-mail, checking to see if her investigator, Pete Marino, has sent her anything that might confound her plans for the day. No messages. To double-check, she calls him.

“Yeah.” He sounds groggy. In the background, an unfamiliar woman's voice complains, “Shit. Now what?”

“You're definitely coming in?” Scarpetta makes sure. “I got word late last night we have a body on the way from Beaufort, and I'm assuming you'll be there to take care of it. Plus, we have that meeting this afternoon. I left you a message. You never called me back.”

“Yeah.”

The woman in the background says in the same complaining voice, “What's
she
want this time?”

“I'm talking within the hour,” Scarpetta firmly tells Marino. “You need to be on your way now or there will be no one to let him in. Meddicks' Funeral Home. I'm not familiar with it.”

“Yeah.”

“I'll be in around eleven to finish up what I can with the little boy.”

As if the Drew Martin case isn't bad enough. Scarpetta's first day back to work after she returned from Rome brought in another horrible case, the murder of a little boy whose name she still doesn't know. He has moved into her mind because he has nowhere else to go, and when she least expects it, she sees his delicate face, emaciated body, and curly brown hair. And then the rest of it. What he looked like when she was done. After all these years, after thousands of cases, a part of her hates the necessity of what she must do to the dead because of what someone did to them first.

“Yeah.” That's all Marino has to say.

“Petulant, rude…” she mutters as she makes her way downstairs. “I'm so goddamn tired of this.” Blowing out in exasperation.

In the kitchen, her heels are sharp on the terra-cotta tile floor that she spent days on her hands and knees laying in a herringbone pattern when she moved into the carriage house. She repainted the walls plain white to capture light from the garden, and restored the cypress ceiling beams that are original to the house. The kitchen—the most important room—is precisely arranged with the stainless-steel appliances, copper pots and pans (always polished as bright as new pennies), cutting boards, and handcrafted German cutlery of a serious chef. Her niece, Lucy, should be here any minute, and it pleases Scarpetta very much, but she's curious. Lucy rarely calls and invites herself for breakfast.

Scarpetta picks out what she needs for egg-white omelets stuffed with ricotta cheese and white cap mushrooms sautéed in sherry and unfiltered olive oil. No bread, not even her flat griddle bread grilled on the terra-cotta slab—or
testo
—she hand-carried from Bologna back in the days when airport security didn't consider cookware a weapon. Lucy is on an unforgiving diet—in training, as she puts it. For what, Scarpetta always asks. For life, Lucy always says. Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she's startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window.

“Please, no,” she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and running to the door.

She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yellow finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It's just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won't die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform.

 

She sits on the back brick steps and doesn't get up as she listens to the distinctive roar of Lucy's Ferrari.

It turns off King Street and parks on the shared driveway in front of the house, and then Lucy appears on the patio, an envelope in hand.

“Breakfast isn't ready, not even coffee,” she says. “You're sitting out here and your eyes are red.”

“Allergies,” Scarpetta says.

“The last time you blamed allergies—which you don't have, by the way—was when a bird flew into a window. And you had a dirty trowel on the table just like that.” Lucy points to an old marble table in the garden, a trowel on top of it. Nearby, beneath a pittosporum, is freshly dug earth covered by broken pieces of pottery.

“A finch,” Scarpetta says.

Lucy sits next to her and says, “So it appears Benton's not coming for the weekend. When he is, you always have a long grocery list on the counter.”

“Can't get away from the hospital.” The small, shallow pond in the middle of the garden has Chinese jasmine and camellia petals floating in it like confetti.

Lucy picks up a loquat leaf knocked down from a recent rain, twirls it by the stem. “I hope that's the only reason. You come back from Rome with your big news and what's different? Nothing that I can tell. He's there, you're here. No plans to change that, right?”

“Suddenly you're the relationship expert?”

“An expert on ones that go wrong.”

“You're making me sorry I told anyone,” Scarpetta says.

“I've been there. It's what happened with Janet. We started talking about commitment, about getting married when it finally became legal for perverts to have more rights than a dog. Suddenly, she couldn't deal with being gay. And it was over before it began. And not in a nice way.”

“Not nice? How about unforgivable?”

“I should be the unforgiving one, not you,” Lucy says. “You weren't there. You don't know what it's like to be there. I don't want to talk about it.”

A small statue of an angel that watches over the pond. What it protects, Scarpetta has yet to discover. Certainly not birds. Maybe not anything. She gets up and brushes off the back of her skirt.

“Is this why you wanted to talk to me,” she says, “or did it just happen to pop into your mind while I was sitting here feeling awful because I had to euthanize another bird?”

“It's not why I called you last night and said I need to see you,” Lucy says, still playing with the leaf.

Her hair, cherrywood-red with highlights of rose-gold, is clean and shiny and tucked behind her ears. She wears a black T-shirt that shows off a beautiful body earned by punishing workouts and good genetics. She's going somewhere, Scarpetta has a suspicion, but she's not going to ask. She sits down again.

“Dr. Self.” Lucy stares at the garden, the way people stare when they aren't looking at anything except what's bothering them.

It's not what Scarpetta expected her to say. “What about her?”

“I told you to keep her close, always keep your enemies close,” Lucy says. “You didn't pay attention. Haven't cared that she disparages you every chance she gets because of that court case. Says you're a liar and a professional sham. Just Google yourself on the Internet. I track her, forwarded her bullshit to you, and you barely look at it.”

“How could you possibly know whether I barely look at something?”

“I'm your system administrator. Your faithful IT. I know damn well how long you keep a file open. You could defend yourself,” Lucy says.

“From what?”

“Accusations that you manipulated the jury.”

“What court's about. Manipulating the jury.”

“That you talking? Or am I sitting with a stranger?”

“If you're hog-tied, tortured, and can hear the screams of your loved ones being brutalized and killed in another room, and you take your own life to escape their fate? That's not a goddamn suicide, Lucy. That's murder.”

“What about legally?”

“I really don't care.”

“You sort of used to.”

“I sort of didn't. You don't know what's been in my mind when I've worked cases all these years and often found myself the only advocate for the victims. Dr. Self wrongly hid behind her shield of confidentiality and didn't divulge information that could have prevented profound suffering and death. She deserves worse than she got. Why are we talking about this? Why are you getting me upset?”

Lucy meets her eyes. “What do they say? Revenge is best served cold? She's in contact with Marino again.”

“Oh, God. As if this past week hasn't been hell enough. Has he completely lost his mind?”

“When you came back from Rome and spread the word, did you think he was going to be happy about it? Do you live in outer space?”

“Clearly, I must.”

“How can you not see it? Suddenly he goes out and gets drunk every night, gets a new trashy girlfriend. He's really picked one this time. Or don't you know? Shandy Snook, as in Snook's Flamin' Chips?”

“Flamin' what? Who?”

“Greasy, oversalted potato chips flavored with jalapeño and red pepper sauce. Made her father a fortune. She moved here about a year ago. Met Marino at the Kick 'N Horse this past Monday night, and it was love at first sight.”

“He tell you all this?”

“Jess told me.”

Scarpetta shakes her head, has no idea who Jess is.

“Owns the Kick 'N Horse. Marino's biker hangout, and I know you've heard him talk about it. She called me because she's worried about him and his latest trailer-park paramour, worried about how out of control he's getting. Jess says she's never seen him like this.”

“How would Dr. Self know Marino's e-mail address unless he contacted her first?” Scarpetta asks.

“Her personal e-mail address hasn't changed since he was her patient in Florida. His has. So I think we can figure out who wrote who first. I can find out for sure. Not that I have the password for the personal e-mail account on his home computer, although minor inconveniences like that have never stopped me. I'd have to…”

“I know what you'd have to do.”

“Have physical access.”

“I know what you'd have to do, and I don't want you to. Let's don't make this any worse than it is.”

“At least some of the e-mails he's gotten from her are now on his office desktop for all the world to see,” Lucy says.

“That makes no sense.”

“Of course it does. To make you angry and jealous. Payback.”

“And you noticed them on his desktop because?”

“Because of the little emergency last night. When he called me and said he'd been notified that an alarm was going off, indicating the fridge was malfunctioning, and he wasn't anywhere near the office and could I check. He said if I need to call the alarm company, the number's on the list taped to his wall.”

“An alarm?” she says, baffled. “No one notified me.”

“Because it didn't happen. I get there and everything's status quo. The fridge is fine. I go into his office to get the number of the alarm company so I can check to be sure everything really is okay, and guess what's on his desktop.”

“This is ridiculous. He's acting like a child.”

“He's no child, Aunt Kay. And you're going to have to fire him one of these days.”

“And manage how? I can barely manage now. I'm already short-staffed, without a single eligible person on the horizon to hire.”

“This is just the beginning. He's going to get worse,” Lucy says. “He's not the person you once knew.”

“I don't believe that, and I could never fire him.”

“You're right,” Lucy says. “You couldn't. It would be a divorce. He's your husband. God knows you've spent a hell of a lot more time with him than you have with Benton.”

“He most assuredly isn't my husband. Don't goad me, please.”

Lucy picks up the envelope from the steps and hands it to her. “Six of them, all from her. Coincidentally, starting on this past Monday, your first day back at work from Rome. The same day we saw your ring and, great sleuths that we are, figured out it wasn't from Cracker Jacks.”

“Any e-mails from Marino to Dr. Self?”

“He must not want you to see whatever he wrote. I recommend you bite on a stick.” Indicating the envelope and what's inside it. “How is he? She misses him. Thinks about him. You're a tyrant, a has-been, and he must be miserable working for you, and what can she do to help him?”

“Will he never learn?” Mostly, it's depressing.

“You should have kept the news from him. How could you not know what it would do to him?”

Scarpetta notices the purple Mexican petunias climbing the north garden wall. She notices the lavender lantana. They look a bit parched.

“Well, aren't you going to read the damn things?” Lucy indicates the envelope again.