Four Scarpetta Novels (9 page)

“But isn't it true almost all hangings are suicidal, therefore suggesting it's possible she actually took her own life?” One of Dr. Self's attorneys paced the Florida courtroom.

She'd finished testifying, had been released as a witness, and was unable to resist watching the proceedings. Watching her. Scarpetta. Waiting for her to misspeak or make a mistake.

“Statistically, in modern times, it's true that most hangings—as far as we know—are suicides,” Scarpetta replies to the jurors, refusing to look at Dr. Self's attorney, answering him as if he's talking over an intercom from some other room.

“‘As far as we know'? Are you saying, Mrs. Scarpetta, that…”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” Smiling at the jurors.

They smile back, riveted, so obviously enamored. Smitten with her while she hammers away at Dr. Self's credibility and decency without anybody realizing it's all manipulation and untruths. Oh, yes, lies. A murder, not a suicide. Dr. Self indirectly is to blame for murder! It isn't her fault. She couldn't have known those people would be murdered. Just because they disappeared from their home didn't mean anything bad had happened to them.

And when Scarpetta called her with questions after finding a prescription bottle with Dr. Self's name on it as the prescribing physician, she was completely right to refuse to discuss any patient or former patient. How could she have known that anyone would end up dead? Dead in an unspeakable way. It wasn't her fault. Had it been, there would have been a criminal case, not just a lawsuit filed by greedy relatives. It wasn't her fault, and Scarpetta deliberately made the jury believe otherwise.

(The courtroom scene fills her head.)

“You mean, you can't determine whether a hanging was a suicide or a homicide?” Dr. Self's attorney gets louder.

Scarpetta says, “Not without witnesses or circumstances that make it clear what happened….”

“Which was?”

“That a person couldn't possibly have done this to himself.”

“Such as?”

“Such as being found hanging from a tall light post in a parking lot, no ladder. Hands tightly bound behind the back,” she says.

“A real case, or are you just making this up as you go along?” Snidely.

“Nineteen sixty-two. A lynching in Birmingham, Alabama,” she says to the jurors, seven of whom are black.

Dr. Self returns from the other side of horror and closes the image on her screen. She reaches for the phone and calls Benton Wesley's office, and her instincts immediately tell her that the unfamiliar woman who answers is young, overestimates her importance, has an entitlement attitude, and therefore is probably from a wealthy family and was hired by the hospital as a favor and is a thorn in Benton's side.

“And your first name, Dr. Self?” the woman asks, as if she doesn't know who Dr. Self is, when everyone at the hospital knows.

“I'm hoping Dr. Wesley has finally gotten in,” Dr. Self says. “He's expecting my call.”

“He won't be in until about eleven.” As if Dr. Self is no one special. “May I ask what you're calling about?”

“That's quite all right. And you are? I don't believe we've met. Last time I called, it was someone else.”

“No longer here.”

“Your name?”

“Jackie Minor. His new research assistant.” Her tone turns grand. She probably hasn't finished her Ph.D. yet, assuming she ever will.

Dr. Self charmingly says, “Well, thank you very much, Jackie. And I assume you took the job so you could assist in his research study, what is it they call it? Dorsolateral Activation in Maternal Nagging?”

“DAMN?” Jackie says in surprise. “Who calls it that?”

“Why, I believe you just did,” Dr. Self says. “The acronym hadn't occurred to me. You're the one who just said it. You're quite witty. Who was the great poet…Let me see if I can quote it: ‘Wit is the genius to perceive and the metaphor to express.' Or something like that. Alexander Pope, I believe. We'll meet soon enough. Very soon, Jackie. As you probably know, I'm part of the study. The one you call DAMN.”

“I knew it was someone important. Which is why Dr. Wesley ended up staying here this weekend and asked me to come in. All they put is
VIP
on the schedule.”

“It must be quite demanding working for him.”

“Absolutely.”

“With his worldwide reputation.”

“That's why I wanted to be his RA. I'm interning to be a forensic psychologist.”

“Brava! Very good. Perhaps I'll have you on my show someday.”

“I hadn't thought about it.”

“Well, you should, Jackie. I've been thinking quite a lot about expanding my horizons into
The Other Side of Horror
. The other side of crime that people don't see—the criminal mind.”

“That's all anybody's interested in anymore,” Jackie agrees. “Just turn on the TV. Every single show is about crime.”

“So, I'm just at the brink of thinking about production consultants.”

“I'd be happy to accommodate a conversation with you about that anytime.”

“Have you interviewed a violent offender yet? Or perhaps sat in on one of Dr. Wesley's interviews?”

“Not yet. But I absolutely will.”

“We'll meet again, Dr. Minor. It is
Dr.
Minor?”

“As soon as I take my quals and find time to really focus on my dissertation. We're already planning my hooding ceremony.”

“Of course you are. One of the finest moments in our lives.”

 

In centuries past, the stucco computer lab behind the old brick morgue was a quarters for horses and grooms.

Fortunately, before there was an architectural review board that could put a stop to it, the building was converted into a garage/storage facility that is now, as Lucy calls it, her make-do computer lab. It's brick. It's small. It's minimal. Construction is well in the works on a massive facility on the other side of the Cooper River, where land is plentiful and zoning laws are toothless, as Lucy puts it. Her new forensic labs, when completed, will have every instrument and scientific capability imaginable. So far they manage fairly well with fingerprint analysis, toxicology, firearms, some trace evidence, and DNA. The Feds haven't seen anything yet. She will put them to shame.

Inside her lab of old brick walls and fir-wood flooring is her computer domain, which is secured from the outside world by bullet-and hurricane-proof windows, the shades always drawn. Lucy sits before a work station that is connected to a sixty-four-gigabyte server with a chassis built of six U mountable racks. The kernel—or operating system interfacing the software with the hardware—is of her own design, built with the lowest assembly language so she could talk to the motherboard herself when she was creating her cyberworld—or what she calls the Infinity of Inner Space (IIS), pronounced IS, the prototype of which she sold for a staggering sum that's indecent to mention. Lucy doesn't talk about money.

Along the top of the walls are flat video screens constantly displaying every angle and sound captured by a wireless system of cameras and embedded microphones, and what she's witnessing is unbelievable.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” she says loudly to the flat screen in front of her.

Marino is giving Shandy Snook a tour of the morgue, different angles of them on the screens, their voices as clear as if Lucy is with them.

 

Boston, the fifth floor of a mid-nineteenth-century brownstone on Beacon Street. Benton Wesley sits at his desk gazing out his window at a hot-air balloon drifting above the common, above Scotch elms as old as America. The white balloon slowly rises like a huge moon against the downtown skyline.

His cell phone rings. He puts on his wireless earpiece, says, “Wesley,” and hopes like hell it's not some emergency that has to do with Dr. Self, the current hospital scourge, perhaps the most dangerous one ever.

“It's me,” Lucy says in his ear. “Log on now. I'm conferencing you.”

Benton doesn't ask why. He logs on to Lucy's wireless network, which transfers video, audio, and data in real time. Her face fills the video screen of the laptop on his desk. She looks fresh and dynamically pretty, as usual, but her eyes are sparking with fury.

“Trying something different,” she says. “Connecting you to security access so you can see what I'm seeing right now. Okay? Your screen should split into four quadrants to pick up four angles or locations. Depending on what I choose. That should be enough for you to see what our so-called friend Marino is doing.”

“Got it,” Benton says as his screen splits, allowing him to view, simultaneously, four areas of Scarpetta's building scanned by cameras.

The buzzer in the morgue bay.

In the upper-left corner of the screen, Marino and some young, sexy but cheap-looking woman in motorcycle leather are in the upstairs hallway of Scarpetta's office, and he's saying to her, “You stay right here until she gets signed in.”

“Why can't I go with you? I'm not afraid.” Her voice—husky, a heavy southern accent—is transmitted clearly through the speakers on Benton's desk.

“What the hell?” Benton says to Lucy over the phone.

“Just watch,” she comes back. “His latest girl wonder.”

“Since when?”

“Oh, let's see. I think they started sleeping together this past Monday night. The same night they met and got drunk together.”

Marino and Shandy board the elevator, and another camera picks them up as he says to her, “Okay. But if he tells the Doc, I'm cooked.”

“Hickory-dick-or-y-Doc, she's got you by the cock,” she says in a mocking singsong.

“We'll get a gown to hide all your leather, but keep your mouth shut and don't do nothing. Don't freak out or do nothing, and I mean it.”

“It's not like I've never seen a dead body before,” she says.

The elevator doors open and they step out.

“My father choked on a piece of steak right in front of me and my family,” Shandy says.

“The locker room's back there. The one on the left.” Marino points.

“Left? Like when I'm facing which way?”

“The first one when you go around the corner. Grab a gown and do it quick!”

Shandy runs. In one section of the screen, Benton can see her inside the locker room—Scarpetta's locker room—grabbing a blue gown out of a locker—Scarpetta's gown and locker—and hastily putting the gown on—backward. Marino waits down the hall. She runs back to him, the gown untied and flapping.

Another door. This leading into the bay where Marino's and Shandy's motorcycles are parked in a corner, barricaded by traffic cones. A hearse is inside, the engine's rumbling echoing off old brick walls. A funeral home attendant climbs out, lanky and gawky in a suit and tie as black and shiny as his hearse. He unfolds his skinny self like a stretcher, as if he's turning into what he does for a living. Benton notices something weird about his hands, the way they're clenched like claws.

“I'm Lucious Meddick.” He opens the tailgate. “We met the other day when they fished that dead little boy out of the marsh.” He pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and Lucy zooms in on him. Benton notices a plastic orthodontic retainer on his teeth, and a rubber band around his right wrist.

“Closer on his hands,” Benton tells Lucy.

She zooms in more as Marino says, as if he can't stand the man, “Yeah, I remember.”

Benton notices Lucious Meddick's raw fingertips, says to Lucy, “Severe nail biting. A form of self-mutilation.”

“Anything new on that one?” Lucious is asking about the murdered little boy who Benton knows is still unidentified in the morgue.

“None of your business,” Marino says. “If it was for public semination, it would be in the news.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says in Benton's ear. “He sounds like Tony Soprano.”

“Looks like you lost a hubcap.” Marino points to the back left tire of the hearse.

“It's a spare.” Lucious is snippy about it.

“Kinda ruins the effect, don't it,” Marino says. “Tricked out with all that shine, then a wheel with ugly lug nuts.”

Lucious huffily opens the tailgate and slides the stretcher over rollers in back of the hearse. Collapsible aluminum legs clack open and lock in place. Marino doesn't offer assistance as Lucious rolls the stretcher and its black-pouched body up the ramp, bangs it against the door frame, cusses.

Marino winks at Shandy, who looks bizarre in her open surgical gown and black leather motorcycle boots. Lucious impatiently abandons the pouched body in the middle of the hall, snaps the rubber band on his wrist, and says in an irritable raised voice, “Got to take care of her paperwork.”

“Keep it down,” Marino says. “You might wake somebody up.”

“I don't got time for your comedy club.” Lucious starts to walk off.

“You ain't going nowhere until you help me transfer her from your stretcher to one of our state-of-the-art gurneys.”

“Showing off.” Lucy's voice sounds in Benton's earpiece. “Trying to impress his potato-chip tramp.”

Marino rolls a gurney out of the cooler, scratched up and rather bandy-legged, one of the wheels slightly cockeyed like a bedraggled grocery store buggy. He and an angry Lucious lift the pouched body from the stretcher, place it on the gurney.

“That lady boss of yours is a piece of work,” Lucious says. “The b-word comes to mind.”

“Nobody asked your opinion. You hear anybody ask his opinion?” To Shandy.

She stares at the pouch, as if she didn't hear him.

“It's not my fault she's got her addresses mixed up on the Internet. She acted like it was my problem showing up, trying to do my job. Not that I can't get along with anybody. You got a particular funeral home you recommend to your clients?”