Black notice (31 page)

She wept as if outraged over every loss and act of cruelty the world had ever suffered. I held her clenched fists in both of my hands.

"Rose, now you listen to me;" I said. "You saved Sassy from hell just as you've saved others. There's nothing you could have done for Sassy any more than there was anything you could have done when you stopped to get your shortbreads. Kim was dead. She had been dead for hours."

"What about him?" she cried. "What if he had still been inside that store and had come out just as I had pulled in? I'd be dead, too, wouldn't I? Shot and dumped somewhere like garbage. Or maybe he would have done awful things to me, too."

She closed her eyes, exhausted, tears sneaking down her face. She went limp all over as the violent storm passed. Marino leaned forward on the couch and touched her knee.

"You got to help us out," he said. "We need to know why you think your being followed and the murder might be connected."

"Why don't you come home with me?" I said.

Her eyes cleared as she began to regain her composure.

"That car pulling out after me right there where she was murdered? Why didn't he start following me long before that?" she said. "And an hour, an hour and a half, before the alarm went off. Don't you find that an amazing coincidence?"

"Sure I do," Marino said. "But there've been a lot of amazing coincidences in my career."

"I feel foolish," Rose said, looking down at her hands.

"All of us are tired," I said. "I've got plenty of room . . ." "We're gonna nail Chuckle-boy for drugs," Marino said to her. "Not-a damn thing foolish about that."

"I'm going to stay here and go on to bed," Rose said.

I continued to sort through what she'd told us as we went down the stairs and into the parking lot.

"Look," Marino said, unlocking his car. "You've been around Chuck a whole lot more than I have. You know him a lot better, which is too bad for you."

"And you're going to ask me if he's the one in the rental car following us," I said as he backed out and turned on Randy Travis. "The answer's no. He's a sneak. He's a liar and a thief, but he's a coward, Marino. It takes a lot of arrogance to boldly tailgate someone with your high beams on. Whoever's doing it is very sure of himself. He has no fear of being caught because he thinks he's too smart for that."

"Sort of the definition of a psychopath," he said. "And now I feel worse. Shit. I don't want to think that guy who just did Luong is the one following you and Rose."

Roads had frozen over again and Richmond drivers, lacking sense, were sliding and spinning all over the place. Marino had his portable police radio on and was monitoring accidents.

"When are you going to turn that thing in?" I asked.

"When they come and try to take it from me," he replied. "I ain't turning in shit."

"That's the spirit."

"The hard thing about every case we've ever worked," he said, "is there's never just one thing going on. Cops try to connect so much crap that by the time we solve the case, we could have written the victim's biography. Half the time we find a connection, it's not one that matters. Like the husband who gets mad at his wife. She goes out the door, pissed, and ends up abducted from a mall parking lot, raped and murdered. Her husband pissing her off didn't make it happen. Maybe she was going shopping anyway."

He turned into my driveway and put the truck in park. I gave him a long look.

"Marino, what are you going to do about money?"

"I'll be all right."

I knew it wasn't true.

"You could help me out as a field investigator for a while," I said "Until this suspension nonsense ends."

He was silent. As long as Bray was there, it would never end Suspending him without pay was her way of forcing Marino to resign. If he did that, he was out of the way like AI Carson.

"I can hire you two ways;" I went on. "A case-by-case basis and you'll get fifty dollars per . . :'

He snorted. "Fifty dollars my ass!"

"Or I can hire you part-time and eventually I'll have to advertise the position and you'll have to apply for it like everybody else:'

"Don't make me sick."

"How much are you earning now?"

"About sixty-two plus benefits," he replied.

"The best I could do is make you a P-fourteen at senior level. Thirty hours a week. No benefits. Thirty-five a year."

"Now that's a good one. One of the funniest things I've heard in a while."

"I can also take you on as an instructor and coordinator in death investigation at the Institute. That's another thirtyfive. So that's seventy. No benefits. Actually, you'll probably make out better."

He thought about it for a moment, sucking smoke.

"I don't need your help right now," he said rudely. "And hanging around medical examiners and dead bodies ain't part of my life's plan."

I climbed out of his truck.

"Good night;" I said.

He angrily roared away and I knew it wasn't me he was really so angry with. He was frustrated and furious. His self-respect and vulnerability were naked in front of me and he didn't want me to see it. All the same, what he'd said hurt.

I threw my coat over a chair in the foyer and pulled off leather gloves. I put Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony on the CD player and my discordant nerves began to restore their rhythm like the strings that played. I ate an omelet and settled in bed with a book I was too tired to read.

I fell asleep with the light on and was shocked awake by the hammering of my burglar alarm. I got my Glock out of a drawer and fought the impulse to disarm the system. I couldn't stand the awful clangor. But I .didn't know what had set it off. The phone rang several minutes later.

`.`This is ADT . . :'

"Yes, yes," I said loudly. "I don't know why it's gone off.

"We're showing zone five," the man said. "The kitchen back door."

"I have no idea."

"Then you'd like us to dispatch the police."

"I guess you'd better," I said as the air raid in my house went on.

I supposed a strong gust of wind might have set off the alarm, and minutes later I silenced it so I could hear the police arrive. I sat on my bed, waiting. I didn't go through the dreaded routine of securing every inch of my house, of walking into rooms and showers and dark spaces of fear.

I listened to silence and became acutely aware of the sounds of it. I heard the wind, the faint clicking of numbers rolling on the digital clock, heat blowing, my own breathing. A car turned into my driveway and I hurried to the front door as one of the offers sharply rapped with a baton or blackjack instead of ringing the bell.

"Police," a woman's no-nonsense voice announced.

I let them in. There were two officers, a young woman and an older man. The woman's nameplate identified her as J. F. Butler, and there was something about her that had an effect on me.

"The zone's the one for the kitchen door that leads outside," I told them. "I very much appreciate your coming so quickly."

"What's your name?" her partner, R. I. McElwayne, asked me.

He was acting as if he didn't know who I was, as if I were just a middle-aged lady in a bathrobe who happened to live in a nice house in a neighborhood that rarely needed the police.

"I Kay Scarpetta."

His tight demeanor loosened a bit, and he said, "I didn't know if you really existed. Heard about you a lot, but I never been to the morgue, not once in eighteen years, for which I'm grateful."

"'That's because back then you didn't have to go to demo posts and learn all these scientific things," Butler picked on him.

McElwayne tried not to smile as his eyes roamed curiously around my house.

"You're welcome to come watch a demo post anytime you want," I said to him.

Butler's attention was everywhere; her body on alert. She hadn't been dulled yet by the weight of her career, unlike her partner, whose main interest at this moment was my house and who I was. He had probably pulled a thousand cars and answered just as many false alarms by now, all for little pay and even less appreciation.

"We'd like to look around," Butler said to me, locking the front door. "Starting with down here."

"Please. Look anywhere you want."

"If you'll just stay right here," she said, heading toward the kitchen, and then it hit me hard, emotions catching me completely off guard.

She reminded me of Lucy. It was the eyes, the straight bridge of the nose, and the way she gestured. Lucy couldn't move her lips without moving her hands, as if she were conducting a conversation instead of having one. I stood in the foyer and could hear their feet on hardwood, their muffled voices, the shutting of doors. They took their time, and I imagined it was Butler who was making sure they didn't ignore a single space big enough to hide a human being.

They came down the stairs and went out into the icy night, the beams of their strong flashlights sweeping over windows, streaking across blinds. This went on another fifteen minutes, and when they knocked on the door to come back inside, they led me into. the kitchen, McElwayne blowing on his cold, red hands. Butler had something important on her mind.

"Are you aware there's a bent place in the jamb of the kitchen door?" she asked.

"No," I said, startled.

She unlocked the door near the table by the window, where I usually ate when I was with friends or alone. Raw, freezing air rushed in as I moved close to her to see what she was talking about. She shone her light on a smalf indented impression in the strike plate and edge of the wooden frame where it appeared someone had tried to pry open the door.

"It could have been there for a while and you haven't noticed," she said. "We didn't check when your alarm went off on Tuesday because it was the zone for the garage door."

"My alarm went off on Tuesday?" I said in amazement. "I don't know anything about that."

"I'm going out to the car," McElwayne said to his partner as he walked out of the kitchen, still rubbing his hands.

"Be right back." -

"I was working day shift," she explained to me. "It appears your housekeeper accidentally set it off."

I couldn't understand why Marie would have set off the alarm in the, garage, unless she'd gone out that way for some reason and had ignored the warning beep for too long.

"She was pretty shook up," Butler went on. "Apparently couldn't remember the code until we were already here."

"What time was this?" I asked.

"Around eleven hundred hours. "

Marino wouldn't have heard the call come over the radio because at eleven o'clock he was in the morgue with me. I thought of the alarm not being set when I got home that night, of the soiled towels and dirt on the rug. I wondered why Marie hadn't left a note for me saying what had happened.

"We had no reason to check this door," Butler said. "So I can't say whether the pry mark was here on Tuesday or not."

"Even if it wasn't," I said, "obviously someone tried to get in at some point."

"Unit three-twenty," Butler said. "Ten-five to a precinct B and E detective."

"Unit seven-ninety-two," came the response.

"Can you respond, reference B' and E attempt?" she said, giving out my address.

"Ten-four. Take me about fifteen minutes."

Butler set her radio Upright on the kitchen table and studied the lock a little more. Cold gusting air blew a stack of napkins on the floor and sent pages of a newspaper fluttering. `

"He's coming out of Meadow and Cary," she told me, as if it were something I ought to know. "That's where the precinct is."

She shut the door.

"They're not part of the detective division anymore," she went on, watching for my reaction. "So they got moved, are part of uniform operations now. I guess this was about a month ago," she added as I began to suspect where the conversation was headed.

"I guess B and E detectives are under Deputy Chief Bray now," I said.

She hesitated, then replied with an ironic smile, "Isn't everybody?"

"Would you like a cup of coffee?" I asked.

"That would be nice. I don't want to put you out:'

I got a bag of coffee from the freezer. Butler, sat down and started filling out an offense report while I got out mugs and cream and sugar, and dispatchers and cops jumped in and out in ten-codes on the air. The doorbell rang and I let the B&E detective in. I didn't know him. It seemed I didn't know anyone anymore since Bray had taken people away from jobs they had learned so well.

'This the door right here?" the detective was asking Butler.

"Yeah. Hey, Johnny, you got a pen that works better than this?"

A headache began boxing with my brain.

"You got one that works at all?"

I couldn't believe what was going on.

"What's your D. O. B.?" McElwayne was asking me.

"Not too many people have alarm systems in their garage," Butler said. "In my opinion, the contacts are weaker than they're going to be in a regular door. Lightweight metal, a really big surface area. You get a strong gusting wind . . ."