Five Scarpetta Novels (116 page)

“I'll get . . .” I started to say when Agent Francisco suddenly was back on the line.

“I know you're going to hear about this on the news, Dr. Scarpetta, and I wanted to make sure you knew. Especially that Lucy's not hurt.”

“Maybe not physically,” I said.

“I want to tell you exactly what will happen next.”

“What will happen next,” I interrupted him, “is I'm flying down there immediately. I'll get a private plane if I have to.”

“I'd like to ask you not to do that,” he said. “Let me explain. This is a very, very vicious group, and Lucy and Jo
know far too much about them, about who some of them are and how they do business. Within hours of the shooting, we sent a Miami-Dade bomb squad to Lucy and Jo's respective undercover residences and our bomb dog detected pipe bombs wired under each of their cars.”

I pulled a chair out from Marino's kitchen table and sat down. I felt weak all over. My vision was blurred.

“Are you there?” he said.

“Yes, yes.”

“What's happening right now, Dr. Scarpetta, is Miami-Dade is working the cases, just as you might expect, and normally, we'd have a shooting review team on its way in addition to peer support guys—agents who have been involved in critical incidents and are trained to work with other agents going through things like this. But because of the threat level, we're sending Lucy north, to D.C., to wherever she's safe.”

“Thank you for taking such good care of her. God bless you,” I said in a voice that didn't sound like me.

“Look, I know how you feel,” Agent Francisco said. “I promise you I do. I was at Waco.”

“Thank you,” I said again. “What will DEA do with Jo?”

“Transfer her to another hospital a million miles away from here as soon as we can.”

“What about MCV?” I asked.

“I'm not familiar . . .”

“Her family lives in Richmond, as you may know, but more to the point, MCV is excellent and I'm on the faculty,” I said. “If you get her here, I'll personally make sure she's well taken care of.”

He hesitated, then said, “Thank you. I will take that under advisement and discuss it with her supervisor.”

When he hung up, I stood staring at the phone.

“What?” Marino asked.

“The takedown went haywire. Lucy shot two people to death . . .”

“Was it a good shooting?” he cut me off.

“No shooting is good!”

“Goddamn it, Doc, you know what I mean. Was it justified? Don't tell me she fucking shot two agents by accident!”

“No, of course not. Jo was shot. I'm not sure of her condition.”

“Fuck!” he exclaimed, pounding his fist so hard on the kitchen counter dishes rattled in the drain board. “Lucy just had to go slug it out with somebody, didn't she? They shouldn't have even had her in a takedown like this! I coulda told them that! She's just been waiting to shoot the shit out of someone, to go in like a damn cowboy with pistols blazing to pay back everyone she hates in life . . . !”

“Marino, stop it.”

“You saw what she was like at your house the other night,” he railed on. “She's been a damn psycho ever since Benton got killed. There's no payback that's enough, not even shooting that damn helicopter out of the air and chumming the water with Carrie Grethen's and Newton Joyce's pieces and parts.”

“That's enough,” I said, exhausted. “Please, Marino. This isn't helping anything. Lucy's a professional, and you know that. ATF would never have given her an assignment like this if she weren't. They know her story very well and evaluated and counseled her extensively after what happened to Benton and all the rest of it. In fact, how she handled that entire nightmare only gave them more respect for her as both an agent and a human being.”

He was silent as he opened a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

Then he said, “Well, you and I know she ain't handling it so well.”

“Lucy has always been able to compartmentalize.”

“Yeah, and how healthy is that?”

“I guess we should ask each other that.”

“But I'm telling you right now, this time she ain't gonna
handle it well, Doc,” he said, splashing bourbon into a glass and dropping in several ice cubes. “She killed two people in the line of duty barely a year ago, and now she's just done it again. Most guys go their entire careers and don't even take a shot at somebody. That's why I'm trying to make you understand it's gonna be viewed differently this time. The big guys in Washington are gonna consider that maybe they got a gunslinger on their hands, someone who's a problem.”

He handed the drink to me.

“I've known cops, agents like that,” he said. “They always have justifiable reasons for judicial homicide, but if you look hard at it, you begin to get the drift that they subconsciously set things up to go bad. They thrive on it.”

“Lucy's not like that.”

“Yeah, she's only been pissed off since the day she was born. And by the way, you ain't going anywhere tonight. You're staying here with me and Father Christmas.”

He poured himself a bourbon, too, and we went into his shabby, crowded living room with its crooked lampshades, its dusty, bent venetian blinds and the sharp-cornered glass coffee table he blamed on me. He dropped into his recliner chair, which was so old he had repaired splits in the brown Naugahyde with duct tape. I remembered the first time I walked into his house. After recovering from the dismay, I realized he was proud of how thoroughly he wore everything out, except for his truck, aboveground pool, and now his Christmas decorations.

He caught me staring dismally at his chair as I curled up in a corner of the green corduroy couch I tended to choose. It might have been missing its wale wherever bodies came in touch with it, but it was cozy.

“One day I'll get a new one of these,” he said, pushing down the lever on the side of the chair and sliding the footrest out.

He wiggled his stocking feet as if his toes were
cramped, and flicked on the TV. I was surprised when he changed the channel to twenty-one, the Arts & Entertainment network.

“I didn't know you watched
Biography,”
I said.

“Oh yeah. And the real-life cops shows they usually got on. This may sound like I been sniffing glue, but does it strike you how everything in the world's gone to hell ever since Bray came to town?”

“I'm sure it would strike you that way, after what she's been doing to you.”

“Huh. And she's not been doing the same thing to you?” he challenged, sipping his drink. “I'm not the only person in this room she's trying to ruin.”

“I don't think she has the power to cause everything else going on in life,” I replied.

“Let me just run through the list for you, Doc, and make sure to remember we're talking about a three-month period, okay? She arrives in Richmond. I get thrown back in uniform. You suddenly have a thief in your office. You have a snitch who breaks into your e-mail and turns you into Dear Abby.

“Then this dead guy shows up in a container and Interpol's suddenly in the picture, and now Lucy kills two people, which is convenient for Bray, by the way. Don't forget, she's been all hot and bothered about getting Lucy to sign on with Richmond, and if ATF throws Lucy back like a fish, she's gonna need a job. And oh yeah, now someone's following you.”

I watched a young, gorgeous Liberace playing the piano and singing while a voice-over of a friend talked about what a kind, generous man the musician had been.

“You're not listening to me.” Marino raised his voice again.

“I'm listening.”

He heaved himself up again with an exasperated huff and padded into the kitchen.

“Have we heard anything from Interpol?” I called out as he made a lot of noise tearing open paper and rummaging through the silverware drawer.

“Nothing worth passing on.”

The microwave hummed.

“It would be nice if you'd pass it on anyway,” I said, annoyed.

Stage lights caught Liberace blowing kisses to his audience and his sequins flashed like an intense red and gold fireworks display. Marino walked back into the living room with a bowl of ruffled potato chips and a container of some sort of dip.

“The guy at State Police got a computer message back from them within an hour. They just requested more info, that's all.”

“That tells us a lot,” I said, disappointed. “That probably means they didn't get a hit on anything significant. The old fracture of the jaw, the unusual accessory cusp of the Carabelli, not to mention fingerprints. None of it matched up with anybody wanted or missing.”

“Yeah. It's a pisser,” he said, his mouth full as he held out the bowl to me.

“No, thanks.”

“It's really good. What you do is soften the cream cheese in the microwave first and put in jalapeños. It's a lot better for you than onion dip.”

“I'm sure.”

“You know, I always liked him.” He pointed a greasy finger at the TV. “I don't care if he was queer. You gotta admit he had style. If people are gonna pay all that money for records and concert tickets, by God they ought to get people who don't look and act like some schmoe on the street.

“Let me tell you,” Marino said with his mouth full, “shootings are a bitch. You get investigated as if you made an attempt on the damn president, and then there's all the
counseling and everybody worrying about your mental health so much it makes you crazy.”

He threw back bourbon and crunched more chips.

“She's gonna get some time on the bricks,” he went on, using cop jargon for involuntary time off. “And Miami detectives are gonna work it like they always work homicides. Got to. And everything will have the hell reviewed out of it.”

He looked over at me, wiping his hands on his jeans.

“I know this won't make you feel good, but maybe you're the last person she wants to see right now,” he said.

T
here was a rule in our building that any evidence, even something as innocuous as a ten-print card, had to be transported on the service elevator. This was located at the end of a hallway where two cleaning ladies were this minute pushing their carts as I headed to Neils Vander's lab.

“Good morning, Merle. And Beatrice, how are you?” I smiled at them.

Their eyes landed on the towel-covered surgical pan and the paper sheets covering the gurney I was pushing. They had been around long enough to know that whenever I carried something bagged or pushed something covered, it was nothing they wanted to know about.

“Uh-oh,” Merle said.

“Uh-oh is right,” Beatrice chimed in.

I pushed the elevator button.

“You going anyplace special for Christmas, Dr. Scarpetta?”

They could tell by the look on my face that Christmas was a topic I didn't particularly care to talk about.

“You're probably too busy for Christmas,” Merle quickly said.

Both women got uncomfortable for the same reason
everybody else did when they were reminded of what had happened to Benton.

“I know this time of year gets real busy,” Merle awkwardly changed the subject. “All those people drinking on the road. More suicides and people getting mad at each other.”

Christmas would be here in about two weeks. Fielding was on call that day. I couldn't count how many Christ-mases I had worn a pager.

“People burning up in fires, too.”

“When bad things happen this time of year,” I said to them as the elevator doors opened, “we feel them more. That's a lot of it.”

“Maybe that's it.”

“I don't know 'bout that, remember that electrical fire . . . ?”

The doors shut and I headed up to the second floor, which had been designed to accommodate tours for citizens and politicians and anyone else interested in our work. All labs were behind big expanses of plate glass, and at first this had seemed odd and uncomfortable to scientists used to working in secret behind cinder block walls. By now, nobody cared. Examiners tested trigger pulls and worked with bloodstains, fingerprints and fibers without paying much attention to who was on the other side of the glass, which at this moment included me pushing my gurney past.

Neils Vander's world was a large space of countertops, with all sorts of unusual technical instruments and jury-rigged contraptions scattered all over the place. Against one wall were wooden cabinets with glass doors, and these Vander had turned into glue chambers, using clothesline and clothespins to hold up objects exposed to the Super Glue fumes generated by a hot plate.

In the past, scientists and police had had very little success in lifting prints from nonporous objects such as plastic bags, electrical tape and leather. Then, quite by accident, it
was discovered that the fumes from Super Glue adhere to ridge detail, much as traditional dusting powder does, and out pops a white latent print. In a corner was another glue chamber called a Cyvac II that could accommodate larger objects such as a shotgun or rifle or car bumper, or theoretically even an entire body.

Humidity chambers raised prints off porous items, such as paper or wood, that had been treated with ninhydrin, although Vander sometimes resorted to the quick method of using a household steam iron, and once or twice had scorched the evidence, or so I'd heard. Scattered about were Nederman lights equipped with vacuums to suck up fumes and residues from drug Baggies.

Other rooms in Vander's domain housed the Automatic Fingerprints Identification System known as AFIS, and darkrooms for digital audio and video enhancement. He oversaw the photo lab, where more than a hundred and fifty rolls of processed film came off the speedmaster every day. It took me a while to locate Vander, but I finally caught him in the impression lab, where pizza boxes ingenious cops used to transport plaster casts of tire tracks and footwear prints were neatly stacked in corners, and a door someone had tried to kick in was leaning against a wall.

Vander was seated before a computer, comparing footwear impressions on a split screen. I left the gurney outside the door.

“You're nice to do this,” I said.

His pale blue eyes always seemed to be elsewhere, and as usual, his lab coat was stained purple from ninhydrin and a felt-tip pen had bled through one of his pockets.

“This is a real good one,” he said, tapping the video screen as he got out of his chair. “Guy buys new shoes and you know how slippery they are if the bottoms are leather? So he gets a knife and slashes them, you know, roughs them up because he's getting married and doesn't want to slip coming down the aisle.”

I followed him out of the lab, not really in the mood for anecdotes.

“Well, he gets burglarized. Shoes, bunch of other clothes and stuff, gone. Two days later a woman in his neighborhood is raped. Police find these weird shoeprints at the scene. In fact, there'd been quite a lot of burglaries in that area.”

We entered the alternate light source lab.

“Turns out it was this kid. Thirteen.” Vander was shaking his head as he flipped on the lights. “I just don't know about kids anymore. When I was thirteen, the worst thing I ever did was shoot a bird with a BB gun.”

He mounted the Luma-Lite on a tripod.

“That's pretty bad in my book,” I told him.

While I laid out the clothes on white paper under the chemical hood, he plugged in the Luma-Lite and its fans began to whir. A minute later he started the source lamp, rotating the intensity knob to full power. He set a pair of protective glasses near me and placed a blue 450 nanometer optical filter over the output lens. We put on our glasses and turned out the lights. The Luma-Lite cast a blue glow across the floor. Vander's shadow moved as he did, and nearby jars of dye lit up Brilliant Yellow and Blitz Green and Redwop. Their dust was a constellation of neon stars scattered throughout the room.

“You know, we've got these idiots at police departments these days who are getting their own Luma-Lites and processing their own scenes,” Vander's voice sounded in the dark. “So they dust with Redwop and put the print on a black background, so I have to photograph it with the Luma-Lite on and reverse the damn print to white.”

He started with the plastic wastepaper basket found inside the container and was instantly rewarded with the faint ridges of fingerprint smudges, which he dusted with Redwop, its electric red dust drifting through the dark.

“Good way to start,” I said. “Keep it up, Neils.”

Vander moved the tripod closer to the dead man's black jeans and the inside-out right pocket began to glow a dull rouge. I poked the material with my gloved finger and found smears of iridescent orange.

“Don't believe I've ever gotten a red like that before,” Vander mused.

We spent an hour going over all of the clothing, including shoes and belt, and nothing else fluoresced.

“Definitely two different things there,” Vander said as I turned on the lights. “Two different things fluorescing naturally. No dye stains involved except the one I used on the bucket.”

I picked up the phone and called the morgue. Fielding answered.

“I need everything that was in the pockets of our unidentified man. It should be air-drying on a tray.”

“That would be some foreign money, a cigar clipper and a lighter.”

“Yes.”

Lights off again and we finished scanning the exterior of all the clothing, finding more of the odd pale hair.

“Is that coming off his head?” Vander asked as my forceps entered the cool, blue light, gently grabbing hairs and placing them inside an envelope.

“His head hair is dark and coarse,” I replied. “So no, this hair can't be his.”

“Looks like cat hair. One of these long-haired types that I don't allow in the house anymore. Angora? Himalayan?”

“Rare. Not too many people have either one,” I said.

“My wife loves cats,” Vander went on. “She had this one named Creamsicle. Damn thing would look for my clothes and lie on them, and when I'd find them to get dressed, damn if they didn't look just like this.”

“I guess it could be cat hair,” I supposed.

“Too fine for dog hair, don't you think?”

“Not if it's something like a Skye terrier. Long, straight silky hair.”

“Pale yellow?”

“They can be tawny,” I said. “Maybe the undercoat? I don't know.”

“Maybe the guy's a breeder or works with one,” Vander suggested. “Aren't there long-hair rabbits, too?”

“Knock, knock,” Fielding's voice sounded as he opened the door.

He walked in, tray in hand, and we turned on the lights.

“There are angora rabbits,” I said. “The ones the sweaters are made from.”

“You look like you've been working out again,” Vander said to Fielding.

“You mean I haven't looked that way before?” Fielding asked.

Vander looked puzzled as if he'd never noticed that Fielding was a body-sculpting fanatic.

“We've picked up on some sort of residue in one of the pockets,” I told Fielding. “It's the same pocket the money was in.”

Fielding removed the towel that covered the tray.

“I recognize the pounds and deutsche marks,” he said. “But not those two coppery things.”

“I think they're Belgian francs,” I said.

“And I got no clue what this cash is.”

It had been lined up bill by bill to dry.

“It looks like it's got some sort of temple on it and what? What's a dirham? Arabic?”

“I'll get Rose to check.”

“Why would somebody have four different kinds of money on him?” Fielding asked.

“If he was in and out of a lot of countries in a short period of time,” I ventured a guess. “That's all I can think of. Let's get the residues analyzed ASAP.”

We put on our protective glasses and Vander turned out
the lights. The same dull rouge and brilliant orange fluoresced on several of the bills. We scanned all of them on both sides, finding flecks and smudges here and there, and then the ridge detail of a latent fingerprint. It was barely visible on the upper left corner of a hundred-dirham bill.

“We must be living right,” Fielding said.

“Hot dog,” Vander chortled. “Two for two! I'm going to hop on this right away. Get one of my buddies at Secret Service to run 'em through MORPHO, PRINTRAK, NECAFIS, WIN, whatever—every database out there, all forty-fifty million prints.”

Nothing excited Vander more than finding a loop or whorl he could hurl through cyberspace to hog-tie a criminal.

“Is the FBI's national database up and running yet?” Fielding asked.

“Secret Service already has every damn print the FBI does, but as usual, the Bureau has to re-create the wheel. Spending all this money to create their own database, and using different vendors so everything is incompatible with everybody else. I've got a dinner to go to tonight.”

He focused the Luma-Lite on the foul, dark flesh pinned to the cutting board, and instantly two specks fluoresced bright yellow. They were not much bigger than a nailhead, and were parallel and symmetrical and could not be rubbed off.

“I'm pretty sure it's a tattoo,” I said.

“Yeah,” Vander agreed. “Don't know what else it could be. Nothing else is doing anything.”

The flesh from the dead man's back was murky and muddy in the cool, blue light.

“But see how dark this is in here?” Vander's gloved finger outlined an area about the size of my hand.

“I wonder what the hell that is,” Fielding said.

“I just don't know why it's so dark,” Vander mused.

“Maybe the tattoo's black or brown,” I suggested.

“Well, we'll give Phil a whirl at it,” Vander said. “What
time's it getting to be? You know, I wish Edith hadn't said we'd do this dinner tonight. I gotta go. Dr. Scarpetta, you're on your own. Damn, damn. I hate it when Edith wants to
celebrate
something.”

“Ah, come on, big guy,” Fielding said. “You know what a party animal you are.”

“I don't drink much anymore. I feel it.”

“You're supposed to feel it, Neils,” I said.

Phil Lapointe was not in a good mood when I walked into the image enhancement lab, which looked more like a production studio than a place where scientists worked with pixels and contrasts in all shades of light and dark to put a face on evil. Lapointe was one of our first Institute graduates, and he was skilled and determined but had not yet learned to move on when a case absolutely wouldn't.

“Damn,” he said, raking his fingers through thick red hair and squinting as he leaned into a twenty-four-inch screen.

“I hate to do this to you,” I said.