Four Scarpetta Novels (89 page)

“I don't know firsthand what Sonny told Pete Marino,” I reply—not that Berger really wants me to answer. She just wants the jury to hear the question. My eyes mist over as I think of that old, pitiful dog and what I know for a fact happened to her.

“The dog hadn't been for a swim—not voluntarily—right, Dr. Scarpetta? Didn't you and Lucy find Mr. Peanut as you waited at the campground for the police to come?” Berger goes on.

“Yes.” Tears well up.

 

MR
.
PEANUT WAS
behind the motel, in the bottom of the swimming pool. She had bricks tied to her back legs. The juror in the flower-printed dress begins to cry. Another woman juror gasps and puts a hand over her eyes. Looks of outrage and even hate pass from face to face, and Berger lets the moment, this painful, awful moment stay in the room. The cruel image of Mr. Peanut is an imagined courtroom display that is vivid and unbearable, and Berger won't take it away. Silence.

“How could anybody do something like that!” the juror in the flower-printed dress exclaims as she snaps shut her pocketbook and wipes her eyes. “What evil people!”

“Sons of bitches is what they are.”

“Thank God. The good Lord was looking after you, He sure was.” A juror shakes his head, the comment directed at me.

Berger paces three steps. Her gaze sweeps the jury. She looks a long moment at me. “Thank you, Dr. Scarpetta,” she quietly says. “There certainly are some evil, awful people out there,” she gently says for the jury's benefit. “Thank you for spending this time with us when we all know you're in pain and have been through hell. That's right.” She looks back at the jury. “Hell.”

Nods all around.

“Hell is right,” the juror in the flower-printed dress tells me, as if I don't know. “You've sure been through it. Can I ask a question. We can ask, can't we?”

“Please,” Berger replies.

“I know what I think,” the juror in the flower-printed dress comments to me. “But you know what? I'll tell you something. The way I grew up, if you didn't tell the truth you got your bottom spanked, and I mean hard.” She juts out her chin in righteous indignation. “Never heard of people doing the things you all have talked about in here. I don't think I'll sleep a wink ever again. Now, I'm no nonsense.”

“Somehow I can tell,” I reply.

“So I'm just going to come right out with it.” She stares at me, her arms hugging her big green pocketbook. “Did you do it? Did you kill that police lady?”

“No, ma'am,” I say as strongly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I did not.”

We wait for a reaction. Everyone sits very quietly, no more talking, no more questions. The jurors are done. Jaime Berger goes to her table and picks up paperwork. She straightens it and gets the edges flush by knocking them on the table. She lets things settle before she looks up. She picks out each juror with her eyes, then looks at me. “I have no further questions,” she says. “Ladies and gentlemen.” She goes right up to the railing, leaning into the jury as if she is peering into a great ship, and she is, really. The lady in the flower-printed dress and her colleagues are my passage out of troubled, dangerous waters.

“I am a professional truth-seeker,” Berger describes herself in words I have never heard a prosecutor use. “It my mission—always—to find the truth and honor it. That is why I was asked to come here to Richmond—to reveal the absolute, certain truth. Now all of you have heard that justice is blind.” She waits, acknowledging nods. “Well, justice is blind in that it is supposed to be supremely nonpartisan, impartial, perfectly fair to all people. But”—she scans faces—“we aren't blind to the truth, now are we? We've seen what has gone on inside this room. I can
tell you understand what has gone on inside this room and are anything but blind. You would have to be blind not to see what is so apparent. This woman—” she glances back at me and points—“Dr. Kay Scarpetta deserves no more of our inquiries, our doubts, our painful probing. In good conscience, I can't allow it.”

Berger pauses. The jurors are transfixed, barely blinking as they stare at her. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your decency, your time, your desire to do what is right. You can go back to your jobs now, back to your homes and families. You are dismissed. There is no case. Case dismissed. Good day.”

The lady in the flower-printed dress smiles and sighs. The jurors start clapping. Buford Righter stares down at his hands clasped on top of the table. I get to my feet and the room spins as I open the saloon-type swinging door and leave the witness stand.

I
FEEL AS
if I am emerging from a brownout and avoid eye contact with reporters and others who wait beyond the paper-shrouded glass door that hid me from the outside world and now returns me to it.

Berger accompanies me to the small, nearby witness room, and Marino, Lucy and Anna are instantly on their feet, waiting with dread and excitement. They sense what has happened and I simply nod an affirmation and manage to say, “Well, it's okay. Jaime was masterful.” I finally call Berger by her first name as it vaguely registers that although I have been inside this witness room countless times over the past decade, waiting to explain death to jurors, I never imagined I would one day be in this courthouse to explain myself.

Lucy grabs me, hugging me off my feet and I wince because of my injured arm and laugh at the same time. I hug Anna. I hug Marino. Berger waits in the doorway, for once not intruding. I hug her, too. She begins tucking files, legal pads into her briefcase and puts on her coat. “I'm out of here,” she announces, all business again but I detect her elation. Goddamn, she is proud of herself and ought to be.

“I don't know how to thank you,” I tell her with a heart full of gratitude and respect. “I don't even know what to say, Jaime.”

“Amen to that,” Lucy exclaims. My niece is dressed in a sharp dark
suit and looks like a gorgeous lawyer or doctor or whatever the hell she wants to be. I can tell by the way her eyes fix on Berger that Lucy recognizes what an attractive, impressive woman Berger is. Lucy won't stop looking at her and congratulating her. My niece is effusive. Actually, she is flirting. She is flirting with my special prosecutor.

“Got to head back to New York,” Berger tells me. “Remember my big case up there?” she dryly reminds me of Susan Pless. “Well, there's work to be done. How soon can you come up so we can go over Susan's case?” Berger is serious, I think.

“Go,” says Marino in his rumpled navy suit, wearing a solid red tie that is too short. Sadness crosses his face. “Go to New York, Doc. Go now. You sure as hell don't want to be around here for a while. Let the hoopla die down.”

I don't reply, but he is right. I am rather speechless at the moment.

“You like helicopters?” Lucy asks Berger.

“Never would you get me in that thing,” Anna pipes up. “There is no law in physics that accounts for one of those things being able to fly. Not one.”

“Yup, and there's no law in physics for why bumblebees can fly, either,” Lucy good-naturedly replies. “Big fat things with teeny wings.
Blllbbllblllblll.
” She imitates a bumblebee flying, both arms going like mad, just giddy.

“Shit, you on drugs again?” Marino rolls his eyes at my niece.

Lucy puts her arm around me and we walk out of the witness room. Berger by now has made it to the elevator, alone, her briefcase under her arm. The down arrow glows and the doors open. Rather unsavory-looking people step out, coming for their judgment day or about to watch someone else go through hell. Berger holds the doors for Marino, Lucy, Anna and me. Reporters are on the prowl, but they don't bother trying to approach me as I make it clear by shakes of my head that I have no comment and to leave me alone. The press doesn't know what just happened in the special grand jury proceeding. The world doesn't know. Journalists were not allowed inside the courtroom, even if they obviously are aware that I was scheduled to appear today. Leaks. There will be more,
I am sure. It doesn't matter, but I realize Marino is wise to suggest I get out of town, at least for a while. My mood slowly descends as the elevator does. We bump to a stop on the first floor. I face reality and make a decision.

“I'll come,” I quietly tell Jaime Berger as we get out of the elevator. “Let's take the helicopter and go to New York. I'd be honored to help you in any way I can. It's my turn, Ms. Berger.”

Berger pauses in the busy, noisy lobby and shifts her fat ratty briefcase to her other arm. One of the leather straps has come off. She meets my eyes. “Jaime,” she reminds me. “See you in court, Kay,” she says.

G . P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Blow Fly

 

A
Putnam
Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©
2003
by
Patricia Cornwell

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Electronic edition: October, 2003

To Dr. Louis Cataldie
Coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish
A man of excellence, honor, humanity and truth
—The world is a better place because of you.

They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.
JOB 21:26

D
R. KAY SCARPETTA
moves the tiny glass vial close to candlelight, illuminating a maggot drifting in a poisonous bath of ethanol. At a glance, she knows the exact stage of metamorphosis before the creamy carcass, no larger than a grain of rice, was preserved in a specimen vessel fitted with a black screw cap. Had the larva lived, it would have matured into a bluebottle
Calliphora vicina,
a blow fly. It might have laid its eggs in a dead human body's mouth or eyes, or in a living person's malodorous wounds.

“Thank you very much,” Scarpetta says, looking around the table at the fourteen cops and crime-scene technicians of the National Forensic Academy's class of 2003. Her eyes linger on Nic Robillard's innocent face. “I don't know who collected this from a location best not to contemplate at the dinner table, and preserved it with me in mind . . . but . . .”

Blank looks and shrugs.

“I have to say that this is the first time I've been given a maggot as a gift.”

No one claims responsibility, but if there is a fact Scarpetta has never doubted, it is a cop's ability to bluff and, when necessary, outright lie. Having noticed a tug at the corner of Nic Robillard's mouth before
anyone else realized that a maggot had joined them at the dinner table, Scarpetta has a suspect in mind.

The light of the flame moves over the vial in Scarpetta's fingertips, her nails neatly filed short and square, her hand steady and elegant but strong from years of manipulating the unwilling dead and cutting through their stubborn tissue and bone.

Unfortunately for Nic, her classmates aren't laughing, and humiliation finds her like a frigid draft. After ten weeks with cops she should now count as comrades and friends, she is still Nic the Hick from Zachary, Louisiana, a town of twelve thousand, where, until recently, murder was an almost unheard-of atrocity. It was not unusual for Zachary to go for years without one.

Most of Nic's classmates are so jaded by working homicides that they have come up with their own categories for them: real murders, misdemeanor murders, even urban renewal. Nic doesn't have her own pet categories. Murder is murder. So far in her eight-year career, she has worked only two, both of them domestic shootings. It was awful the first day of class when an instructor went from one cop to another, asking how many homicides each of their departments averaged a year.
None,
Nic said. Then he asked the size of each cop's department.
Thirty-five,
Nic said. Or
smaller than my eighth-grade class,
as one of her new classmates put it. From the beginning of what was supposed to be the greatest opportunity of her life, Nic quit trying to fit in, accepting that in the police way of defining the universe, she was a
them,
not an
us.

Her rather whimsical maggot mischief, she realizes with regret, was a breach of something (she's not sure what), but without a doubt she should never have decided to give a gift, serious or otherwise, to the legendary forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Nic's face heats up, and a cold sweat dampens her armpits as she watches for her hero's reaction, unable to read it, probably because Nic is stunned stupid by insecurity and embarrassment.

“So I'll call her Maggie, although we really can't determine gender yet,” Scarpetta decides, her wire-rim glasses reflecting shifting candlelight. “But a good enough name for a maggot, I think.” A ceiling fan snaps and whips the candle flame inside its glass globe as she holds up the vial. “Who's going to tell me which instar Maggie is? What life stage was she in before someone”—she scans the faces at the table, pausing on Nic's again—“dropped her in this little bottle of ethanol? And by the way, I suspect Maggie aspirated and drowned. Maggots need air the same way we do.”

“What asshole drowned a maggot?” one of the cops snipes.

“Yeah. Imagine inhaling alcohol . . .”

“What'cha talking about, Joey? You been inhaling it all night.”

A dark, ominous humor begins to rumble like a distant storm, and Nic doesn't know how to duck out of it. She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms at her chest, doing her best to look indifferent as her mind unexpectedly plays one of her father's worn-out storm warnings:
Now, Nic, honey, when there's lightning, don't stand alone or think you'll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can.
At the moment, she has no place to hide but in her own silence.

“Hey Doc, we already took our last test.”

“Who brought homework to our party?”

“Yeah, we're off duty.”

“Off duty, I see,” Scarpetta muses. “So if you're off duty when the dead body of a missing person has just been found, you're not going to respond. Is that what you're saying?”

“I'd have to wait until my bourbon wears off,” says a cop whose shaved head is so shiny it looks waxed.

“That's a thought,” she says.

Now the cops are laughing—everyone but Nic.

“It can happen.” Scarpetta sets the vial next to her wineglass. “At any given moment, we can get a call. It may prove to be the worst call of our
careers, and here we are, slightly buzzed from a few drinks on our time off, or maybe sick, or in the middle of a fight with a lover, a friend, one of the kids.”

She pushes away her half-eaten yellowfin tuna and folds her hands on top of the checkered tablecloth.

“But cases can't wait,” she adds.

“Seriously. Isn't it true that some can?” asks a Chicago detective his classmates call Popeye because of the anchor tattooed on his left forearm. “Like bones in a well or buried in a basement. Or a body under a slab of concrete. I mean, they ain't going anywhere.”

“The dead are impatient,” Scarpetta says.