Four Scarpetta Novels (100 page)

B
ENTON GETS UP
from the chair and slips his hands into his pockets.

“People from the past,” he says. “We live many lives, Pete, and the past is a death. Something over. Something that can't come back. We move on and reinvent ourselves.”

“What a load of crap. You've been spending too much time alone,” Marino says in disgust as fear chills his heart. “You're making me sick. I'm glad as hell Scarpetta ain't here to see this. Or maybe she ought to, so she'd finally get over you like you've obviously gotten over her. Goddamn it, can't you turn up the air conditioner in this joint?”

Marino strides over to the window unit and turns it on high.

“You know what she's doing these days, or don't you give a flying fuck? Nothing. She's a goddamn consultant. Got fired as the Chief. Can you believe it? The fucking governor of Virginia got rid of her because of political shit.

“And getting fired in the middle of a scandal don't help you get much business,” he rants on. “When it comes to her, no one's hiring, unless it's some pissant case in some place that can't afford anyone, so she does it
for nothing. Like some stupid drug overdose in Baton Rouge. A stupid-ass drug OD . . .”

“Louisiana?” Benton wanders toward a window and looks out.

“Yeah, the coroner from there called me this morning before I left Richmond. Some guy named Lanier. An old drug OD. I knew nothing about it, so then he wanted to know if the Doc's doing private work and basically wanted me to vouch for her character. I was pretty fucking pissed. But that's what it's come down to. She needs fucking references.”

“Louisiana?” Benton says again, as if there must be some mistake.

“You know any other state with a city named Baton Rouge?” Marino snidely asks above the noise of the air conditioner.

“Not a good place for her,” Benton says oddly.

“Yeah, well, New York, D.C., L.A. ain't calling. It's just a damn good thing the Doc's got her own money, otherwise she'd be . . .”

“There are serial murders going on down there . . .” Benton starts to say.

“Well, the task force working them ain't the one calling her. This hasn't got nothing to do with those ladies disappearing. This is chicken shit. A cold case. And I'm just guessing the coroner will call her. And knowing her, she'll help him out.”

“An area where ten women have vanished, and the coroner calls about a cold case? Why now?”

“I don't know. A tip.”

“What tip?”

“I don't know!”

“I want to know why that drug OD's so important all of a sudden,” Benton persists.

“Are your antennas in a knot?” Marino exclaims. “You're missing the fucking point. The Doc's life has turned to shit. She's gone from being Babe Ruth to playing Little League.”

“Louisiana's not a good place for her.” Benton says it again. “Why did the coroner call you? Just for a reference?”

Marino shakes his head, as if trying to wake up. He rubs his face. Benton's losing his grip.

“The coroner called wanting
my
help with the case,” he says.

“
Your
help?”

“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? You don't think I could help somebody with a case? I could help any goddamn . . .”

“Of course you could. So why aren't you helping the Baton Rouge coroner?”

“Because I don't know anything about that case! Jesus, you're making me crazy!”

“The Last Precinct could help down there.”

“Would you fucking give it a rest? The coroner didn't seem all that hot and bothered by it, just indicated he might want the Doc's medical opinion . . .”

“Their legal system is based on the Napoleonic Code.”

Marino has no idea what he's talking about. “What's Napoleon got to do with anything!”

“The French legal system,” Benton says. “The only state in America that has a legal system based on the French legal system instead of the English. Baton Rouge has more unsolved homicides of women per capita than any other city in America.”

“All right, already. So it ain't a nice place.”

“She should not go down there. Especially alone. Not under any circumstances. Make sure of it, Pete.” Benton is still looking out the window. “Trust me on this one.”

“Trust you. What a joke.”

“The least you can do is take care of her.”

Marino is incensed, staring at Benton's back.

“She can't go anywhere near him.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” Marino asks, his frustration intensifying.

Benton is a stranger. Marino doesn't know this man.

“Wolfieboy? Jesus. I thought we were talking about a drug overdose case in Cajun country,” Marino complains.

“Keep her out of there.”

“You got no right asking me anything, especially about her.”

“He's fixated on her.”

“What the hell does he have to do with Louisiana?” Marino steps closer to him and scrutinizes his face, as if straining to read something he can't quite see.

“This is a continuation of a power struggle he lost with her in the past. And he intends to win it now if it's the last thing he does.”

“Don't sound to me like he's gonna win a goddamn thing when he gets pumped full of enough juice to kill a herd of horses.”

“I'm not talking about Jean-Baptiste. Have you forgotten the other Chandonne, his brother? The Last Precinct should help the coroner. She shouldn't.”

Marino doesn't listen. He feels as if he's sitting in the backseat of a moving car that has no one at the wheel.

“The Doc knows what Wolfman wants of her.” Marino sticks with one subject—the one that interests him and makes sense. “She won't mind giving him the needle, and I'll be right there behind the smoky glass, smiling.”

“Have you asked her if she minds?” Benton looks out at another spring day dying gently. Tender, vivid greens are dipped in golden sunlight, and shadows deepen closer to the ground.

“I don't need to ask.”

“I see. So you haven't discussed it with her. I'm not surprised. It wouldn't be like her to discuss it with you.”

The insult is subtle but stings Marino like a sea nettle. He has never
been intimate with Kay Scarpetta. No one has ever been as intimate with her, not the way Benton was. She hasn't told Marino how she feels about being an executioner. She doesn't discuss her feelings with him.

“I've depended on you to take care of her,” Benton says.

The air seems to heat up, both of them sweating and silent.

“I know how you feel, Pete,” Benton softly says. “I've always known.”

“You don't know nothing.”

“Take care of her.”

“I came here so you could start doing that,” Marino says.

C
ARTHAGE BLUFF LANDING
is a good popular stop for groceries and gas, but Bev Kiffin never docks there.

She doesn't slow down as she motors past and approaches Tin Lizzy's Landing, a restaurant that cost a million dollars to build from torn-down shacks and what Bev calls
salvage shit.
Rich people from the mainland can access Lizzy's from the Springfield Bridge and eat all the Cajun steaks and seafood and drink all they want without having to go home after dark in a boat. Six months ago, Bev asked Jay to take her there for her birthday, and he just laughed, and then his face twisted in a snarl as he called her stupid and ugly and out of her mind to think he'd take her to a restaurant at all, much less an upper-class one accessible by a highway.

Jealousy smolders as Bev picks up speed, heading due west to Jack's Boat Landing. She imagines Jay touching other women.

She remembers her father lifting other little girls on his lap, demanding that Bev bring home playmates just so he could cuddle with them and make her watch. He was a handsome, successful businessman and, during her teenage years, the object of her friends' crushes. He touched them in ways that weren't obvious or reportable, just what he considered innocent contact between his hard penis and their buttocks as they sat on
his lap. He never exposed himself or talked in a vulgar manner, never even swore. Worst of all, when he accidentally brushed against their breasts, her friends liked it, and sometimes they brushed against him first.

Bev walked out on him one day and never went back, the same way her mother had when Bev was three, leaving her with him and his needs. Bev grew up addicted to men, going from one to the next. Leaving Jay is another matter entirely, and she isn't sure why she hasn't done it yet. She isn't sure why she'll do whatever he demands, despite her fears for her own safety. The thought of him going off in the boat one day and never returning sears her with terror. It would serve her right, since that's what she did to her father, who was dropped by a heart attack in 1997. Bev didn't go to his funeral.

Now and then when she's headed to shore, she thinks of the Mississippi River. On a good day, she could make it there in less than six hours, and she senses Jay is onto her occasional impulse to escape to the Gulf Coast. He's told her more than once that the Mississippi is the biggest river in the United States, more than a million miles of rough, muddy water and tributaries that fan out into thousands of creeks, marshes and swamps, where a person could get so lost “she would end up a skeleton in her boat,” as Jay puts it. Those are his words exactly, saying
she
and
her
instead of
he
and
his,
his choice of words no accident. Jay doesn't have accidents of the tongue or anything else.

All the same, when Bev is out in the boat, she fantasizes about the Mississippi, about riverboat cruises and casinos, about fruity cocktails and beer in frozen glasses and maybe watching Mardi Gras from the window of a nice air-conditioned hotel. She wonders if good food would make her sick now that she's gone so long without it. A comfortable bed would probably stiffen her up and make her sore because she's so accustomed to a stinking, broken-down mattress that not even Jay will sleep on anymore.

She motors around a semi-submerged log, worried at first that it might move and prove to have teeth, and she begins to itch, especially beneath the tight waistband of her jeans.

“Shit!” She steers with one hand and digs the other under her clothes, clawing at her flesh as her welts get bigger. “Goddamnit! Oh, shit, what the fuck's bit me now?”

Breathing hard and beginning to panic, she shoves the throttle lever into neutral, opens the hatch and rummages in her beach bag for the insect repellent, spraying herself all over, including under her clothes.

It's all in her head, Jay always says. The welts aren't bites, they're hives, because she has a nervous condition, because she's half-crazy.
Well, I wasn't half-crazy until I met you,
she answers him in her head.
I never got hives in my life, nothing like that, not even poison ivy.
Bev drifts in the creek for a minute or two, contemplating what she's about to do and imagining Jay's face when she brings him what he wants, then imagining his face if she doesn't.

She advances the throttle and trims out, speeding up to forty miles an hour, which is much too fast for this part of the Tickfaw and reckless in light of her fears of the dark water and what's beneath it. Sweeping left, she abruptly cuts back her speed and trims down, heeling into a turn that takes her into a narrow creek, where she runs slowly and quietly into marshland that smells like death. Reaching under the tarp, she slides out the shotgun and lays it across her lap.

S
UNLIGHT ILLUMINATES A SLIVER
of Benton's face as he stares out the window.

Silence reigns for a long, tense moment. The air seems to shimmer ominously, and Marino rubs his eyes.

“I don't get it.” His mouth quivers. “You could be free, go home, be alive again.” His voice cracks. “I thought you'd at least thank my ass for going to all the trouble to come here and tell you that maybe Lucy and me ain't ever given up on getting you back . . . .”

“By offering her?” Benton turns around and looks at him. “By offering Kay as bait?”

At last he says her name, but he is so calm, it is as if he has no feelings, and Marino is shocked. He wipes his eyes.

“Bait? What . . . ?”

“Isn't it enough what the bastard has already done to her?” Benton goes on. “He tried to kill her once.” He's not talking about Jean-Baptiste. He's talking about Jay Talley.

“He ain't gonna kill her when he's sitting behind bulletproof glass, chatting away on a phone inside a maximum-security prison,” Marino says as they continue to talk about two different people.

“You're not listening to me,” Benton tells him.

“That's because you're not listening to me,” Marino childishly retorts.

Benton turns off the air conditioner and slides up the window. He closes his eyes as a breeze touches his hot cheeks like cool fingers. He smells the burgeoning Earth. For an instant, he remembers being alive with her, and he begins to bleed inside like a hemophiliac.

“Does she know?” he asks.

Marino rubs his face. “Jesus. I'm so sick and tired of my blood pressure shooting up like I'm a damn thermometer.”

“Tell me.” Benton presses his palms against the window frame, leaning into the fresh air. He turns around and meets Marino's eyes. “Does she know?”

Marino gets his meaning and sighs. “No, hell no. She don't know. She'll never know unless you're the one who tells her. I wouldn't do that to her. Lucy wouldn't do that to her. See”—he angrily pulls himself to his feet—“some of us care too much about her to hurt her like that. Imagine how she'd feel if she knew you're alive and don't care a shit about her anymore.”

He walks to the door, shaking with rage and grief. “I thought you might thank me.”

“I do thank you. I know you mean well.” Benton walks over to him, his calm demeanor uncanny. “I know you don't understand, but maybe someday you will. Good-bye, Pete. I don't ever want to see or hear from you again. Please don't take it personally.”

Marino grabs the doorknob and almost yanks it out of the wood. “Good riddance and go fuck yourself. Don't take it personally.”

They face each other like two men squaring off in a gun fight, neither wanting to be the first to move, neither really wanting the other to be gone from his life. Benton's hazel eyes are vacant, as if whoever lives behind them has vanished. Marino's pulse measures panic as he realizes that the Benton he knew is gone and nothing will ever bring him back.

And somehow Marino is going to have to tell Lucy. And somehow
Marino will have to accept the fact that his dream of rescuing Benton and returning him to Scarpetta will always be a dream, only a dream.

“It don't make sense!” Marino shouts.

Benton touches an index finger to his lips. “Please go, Pete,” he quietly says. “It doesn't have to make sense.”

Marino hesitates in the dimly lit, stinking landing just beyond apartment 56. “Okay.” He fumbles for his cigarettes and spills several on the filthy concrete. “Okay . . .” He starts to say
Benton
but catches himself as he squats to pick up the cigarettes, his thick fingers clumsily breaking two of them.

He wipes his eyes with the back of a big hand as Benton looks down at him from the apartment doorway, watching, not offering to help pick up the cigarettes, unable to move.

“Take care, Pete,” Benton, the master of masks and self-control, says in a steady, reasonable voice.

Marino looks up with bloodshot eyes from his squatting position on the landing. The seam in the crotch of his wrinkled khakis is slightly ripped, his white briefs peeking through.

He blurts out, “Don't you get it, you can come back!”

“What
you
don't get is there is no
back
to go
back
to,” Benton says in a voice so low it is almost inaudible. “I don't want to come
back.
Now please get the hell out of my life and leave me alone.”

He pulls his apartment door shut and flips the dead bolt. Inside, he collapses on the couch and covers his face with his hands while Marino's insistent knocking turns to violent thuds and kicks.

“Yeah, well, enjoy your great life, asshole!” his muffled voice sounds through the door. “I always knew you was cold and don't give a fuck about anybody, including
her,
you fucking psycho!” The banging and kicking suddenly stop.

Benton holds his breath, straining to hear. The sudden silence is worse than any tantrum. Pete Marino's silence is damning. It is final. His friend's heavy feet scuff down the stairs.

“I am dead,” Benton mutters into his hands as he doubles over on the couch.

“No matter what, I am dead. I am Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland . . .” His chest heaves and his heart seems to beat out of rhythm. “Born in Greenwich, Connecticut . . .”

He gets up, crushed by a depression that turns the room dark and the air as thick as oil. He smells Marino's lingering cigarette smoke, and it runs through him like a blade. Moving to the window, he stands to one side of it so he isn't visible from below, and he watches Pete Marino walking slowly away through intermittent shadows and dappled sunlight along uneven cobblestones.

Marino stops to light a Lucky Strike and turns around to stare up at Benton's depressing building until he finds apartment 56. Cheap sheer curtains are caught by a breeze and flutter out the open window like spirits leaving.