Four Scarpetta Novels (83 page)

“Dr. Scarpetta? Can you comment about . . . ?”

“Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”

“When did you find out a special grand jury is investigating you?”

“Isn't it true you and Diane Bray were at odds . . . ?”

“Where's your car?”

“Can you confirm that you've basically been run out of your home and don't even have your own car right now?”

“Will you resign?”

I face them on the sidewalk. I am silent but steady as I wait for them to get quiet. When they realize I intend to address their questions I catch surprised looks and their aggression quickly settles down. I recognize many faces but can't remember names. I am not sure I have ever known the names of the media's real troops who gather the news behind the scenes. I remind myself they are simply doing their jobs and there is no reason for me to take any of this personally. That's right, nothing personal. Rude, inhumane, inappropriate, insensitive and largely inaccurate, but
not personal
. “I've no prepared statement,” I start to say.

“Where were you the night Diane Bray was murdered . . . ?”

“Please,” I interrupt them. “Like you, I've recently learned there is a special grand jury investigation into her murder, and I ask you to honor the very necessary confidentiality of such a proceeding. Please understand why I'm not at liberty to discuss it with you.”

“But did you . . . ?”

“Isn't it true you aren't driving your own car because the police have it?”

Questions and accusations rip the morning air like shrapnel as I walk toward my building. I have nothing more to say. I am the chief. I am poised and calm and unafraid. I did nothing wrong. There is one reporter whom I do remember, because how could I forget a tall, white-haired, chisel-featured African American whose name is Washington George? He wears a long leather trench coat and presses behind me as I struggle to open the glass door leading inside the building.

“Can I just ask you one thing?” he says. “You remember me? That's not my question.” A smile. “I'm Washington George. I work for the AP.”

“I remember you.”

“Here, let me help you with that.” He holds the door and we go inside the lobby, where the security guard looks at me, and I know that look now. My notoriety is reflected in people's eyes. My heart sinks. “Good morning, Jeff,” I say as I walk past the console.

A nod.

I pass my plastic ID over the electronic eye and the door leading into my side of the building unlocks. Washington George is still with me, and he is saying something about information he has that he thinks I need to know, but I am not listening. A woman sits in my reception area. She huddles in a chair and seems sad and small amid polished granite and glass blocks. This is not a good place to be. I always ache for anyone who finds himself in my reception area. “Is someone helping you?” I ask her.

She is dressed in a black skirt and nurses' shoes, a dark raincoat pulled tightly around her. She hugs her pocketbook as if someone might steal it. “I'm just waiting,” she says in a hushed voice.

“Who are you here to see?”

“Well, I don't rightly know,” she stammers, her eyes swimming in tears. Sobs well up inside her and her nose begins to run. “It's about my boy. Do you think I might see him? I don't understand what y'all are doing to him in there.” Her chin trembles and she wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “I just need to see him.”

Fielding left me a message about today's cases, and I know that one of them is a teenage boy who supposedly hanged himself. What was the name? White? I ask her and she nods. Benny, she gives me his first name. I presume she is Mrs. White and she nods again and explains that she and her son changed their last name to
White
after she got remarried a few years back. I tell her to come on with me—and now she is crying hard—and we will find out what is going on with Benny. Whatever Washington George has to tell me will have to wait.

“I don't think you're going to want it to wait,” he replies.

“All right, all right. Come on in with me and I'll get to you as soon as I can.” I am saying this as I let us into my office with another pass of my ID key. Cleta is entering cases into our computer, and she instantly blushes when she sees me.

“Good morning,” she tries to be her usual cheerful self. But she has that look in her eye, the look I've grown to hate and fear. I can only imagine what my staff has been saying among themselves this morning, and it doesn't escape my attention that the newspaper is folded on top of
Cleta's desk and she has tried to cover it with her sweater. Cleta has put on weight over the holidays and has dark circles under her eyes. I am making everybody miserable.

“Who's taking care of Benny White?” I ask her.

“I think Dr. Fielding is.” She looks at Mrs. White and gets up from her workstation. “Can I take your coat? What about some coffee?”

I tell Cleta to take Mrs. White to my conference room and Washington George can wait in the medical library. I find my secretary, Rose. I am so relieved to see her that I forget about my troubles, nor does she reflect them to me by giving me a look—that secretive, curious, embarrassed look. Rose is just Rose. If anything, disaster irons more starch in her than usual. She meets my eyes and shakes her head. “I'm so disgusted I could spit nails,” she says when I show up in her doorway. “The most ridiculous hogwash I've ever heard of my entire life.” She picks up her copy of the paper and shakes it at me as if I am a bad dog. “Don't you let this bother you, Dr. Scarpetta.” As if it is that simple. “More chicken crap than Kentucky Fried, that damn Buford Righter. He can't come out and just tell you to your face, can he? So you have to find out this way?” Shaking the paper again.

“Rose, is Jack in the morgue?” I ask.

“Oh God, working on that poor kid.” Rose gets off the subject of me, and her indignation turns to pity. “Lord, Lord. Have you seen him?”

“I just got here . . .”

“Looks like a little choir boy. Just the most beautiful blue-eyed blond. Lord, Lord. If that was my child . . .”

I interrupt Rose by putting a finger to my lips as I hear Cleta coming up the hallway with the boy's poor mother. I mouth
his mother
to Rose and she gets quiet. Her eyes linger on mine. She is fidgety and high-strung this morning, and dressed severely in black, her hair pulled back and pinned up, reminding me of Grant Wood's
American Gothic
. “I'm okay,” I tell her quietly.

“Well, I don't believe that.” Her eyes get dewy and she nervously busies herself with paperwork.

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has decimated my entire staff. Everyone
who knows and depends on me is dismayed, bewildered. They don't completely trust me anymore and secretly anguish over what will happen to their lives and jobs. I am reminded of my worst moment in school when I was twelve—like Lucy, precocious, the youngest in my class. My father died that school year on December 23, and the only thing good I can find in his waiting until two days before Christmas is at least the neighbors were winding down from work, most of them home and cooking and baking. In the good Italian-Catholic tradition, my father's life was celebrated with abundance. For several days, our house was filled with laughter, tears, food, drink and song.

When I returned to school after the New Year, I became even more relentless in my cerebral conquests and explorations. Making perfect scores on tests was no longer enough. I was desperate for attention, desperate to please, and begged the nuns for special projects, any project, I didn't care what. Eventually, I was hanging around the parochial school all afternoon, beating chalkboard erasers on the school steps, helping the teachers grade tests, putting together bulletin boards. I got very good with scissors and staplers. When there was a need to cut out letters of the alphabet or numbers and exactly assemble them into words, sentences, calendars, the nuns came looking for me.

Martha was a girl in my math class who sat in front of me and never spoke. She glanced back at me a lot, cold but curious, always trying to catch a peek at the grades circled in red on top of my folded homework and tests, hopeful she had scored better than I had. One day, after an especially difficult algebra test, I noticed that Sister Teresa's demeanor toward me decidedly chilled. She waited until I was cleaning erasers again, squatting outside on stucco steps, pounding, creating clouds of chalk dust in the winter tropical sun, and I looked up. There she was in her habit, towering over me like a giant, frowning Antarctic bird wearing a crucifix. Someone had accused me of cheating on my algebra test, and although Sister Teresa did not identify the source of this lie, I had no doubt of the culprit: Martha. The only way I could prove my innocence was to take the test again and make another perfect score.

Sister Teresa watched me closely after that. I dared never let my eyes
stray from what I was doing at my desk. Several days passed. I was emptying the trash baskets, just the two of us alone in the classroom, and she told me I must pray constantly that God would keep me free of sin. I must thank our Heavenly Father for the great gifts I have and look to Him to keep me honest, because I was so smart I could get away with a lot of things. God knows everything, Sister Teresa said. I can't fool God. I protested that I was honest and not trying to fool God and she could ask God herself. I began to cry. “I am not a cheater,” I sobbed. “I want my daddy.”

When I was at Johns Hopkins in my first year of medical school, I wrote Sister Teresa a letter and recounted that wrenching, unfair incident. I reiterated my innocence, still bothered, still furious that I had been falsely accused and the nuns didn't defend me and never seemed quite as sure of me afterward.

As I stand in Rose's office now, more than twenty years later, I think about what Jaime Berger said the first time we met. She promised that the hurt had only begun. Of course, she was right. “Before everybody leaves today,” I say to my secretary, “I'd like to talk to them. If you'd pass that along, Rose. We'll see how the day goes and find a time. I'm going to check on Benny White. Please make sure his mother is all right, and I'll be in shortly to talk to her.”

I head down the hallway past the break room and find Washington George in the medical library. “I just have a minute,” I tell him in a distracted way.

He is scanning books on a shelf, notepad down by his side like a gun he might use. “I heard a rumor,” he says. “If you know it's true, maybe you can verify it. If you don't know, well, maybe you should. Buford Righter's not going to be the prosecutor in your special grand jury hearing.”

“I know nothing about it,” I reply, masking the indignation I always feel when the press knows details before I do. “But we've worked a lot of cases together,” I add. “I wouldn't expect him to want to deal with this himself.”

“I guess so, and what I understand is a special prosecutor has been appointed. That's the part I'm getting to. You aware of this?” He tries to read my face.

“No.” I am trying to read his face, too, hoping to catch a foreshadowing that might prevent me from being broadsided.

“No one's indicated to you that Jaime Berger's been appointed to get you indicted, Dr. Scarpetta?” He stares me in the eye. “From what I understand, that's one of the reasons she came to town. You've been going through the Luong and Bray cases with her and all that, but I have it from a very good source it's a setup. She's been undercover, I guess you would say. Righter set it up before Chandonne allegedly showed up at your house. I understand Berger's been in the picture for weeks.”

All I can think to say is, “Allegedly?” I am shocked.

“Well,” Washington George says, “I assume by your reaction that you haven't heard any of this.”

“I don't guess you can tell me who your reliable source is,” I respond.

“Naw.” He smiles a little, somewhat sheepishly. “So you can't confirm?”

“Of course I can't,” I say as I gather my wits about me.

“Look, I'm going to keep digging, but I want you to know I like you and you've always been nice enough to me.” He goes on. I am barely hearing a word of it. All I can think of is Berger spending hours with me in the dark, in her car, in my house, in Bray's house, and all along she was making mental notes to use against me in the special grand jury hearing. God, no wonder she seems to know so much about my life. She has probably been through my phone records, bank statements, credit reports and interviewed everyone who knows me. “Washington,” I say, “I've got the mother of some poor person who just died, and I can't stand here and talk to you any longer.” I walk off. I don't care if he thinks I am rude.

I cut through the ladies' room and in the changing area I put on a lab coat and slip paper covers over my shoes. The autopsy suite is full of sounds, every table occupied with the unfortunate. Jack Fielding is splashed with blood. He has already opened up Mrs. White's son and is
inserting a syringe with a fourteen-gauge needle into the aorta to draw blood. Jack gives me a rather frantic, wild-eyed look when I walk over to his table. The morning news is all over his face.

“Later.” I raise my hand before he can ask a question. “His mother's in my office.” I indicate the body.

“Shit,” Fielding says. “Shit is all I gotta say about this entire fucking world.”

“She wants to see him.” I take a rag from a bag on a gurney and wipe the boy's delicately pretty face. His hair is the color of hay and, except for his suffused face, his skin is like rose milk. He has fuzz on his upper lip and the first hint of pubic hair, his hormones just beginning to stir, preparing for an adult life he was not destined to have. A narrow, dark furrow around the neck angles up to the right ear where the rope was knotted. Otherwise, his strong, young body bears no evidence of violence, no hint that he should have had any reason in the world not to live. Suicides can be very challenging. Contrary to popular belief, people rarely leave notes. People don't always talk about their feelings in life and sometimes their dead bodies don't have much to say, either.