Four Scarpetta Novels (122 page)

D
R. LANIER SOUNDS AS IF
he is on the mend, but he is as taut as a cocked catapult.

“You got a safe place for me to stay down there?” Scarpetta asks him over the phone inside her single room at the Melrose Hotel at 63rd and Lexington.

She opted not to spend the night with Lucy, resisting her niece's persistent urging. Staying with her would make it impossible for Scarpetta to leave for the airport in the morning without Lucy's knowing.

“The safest place in Louisiana. My guest house. It's small. Why? Now you know I can't afford consultants . . . .”

“Listen,” she cuts him off. “I've got to go to Houston first.” She avoids being specific. “I can't get down your way for at least another day.”

“I'll pick you up. Just tell me when.”

“If you could arrange a rental car for me, that's what would work best. I have no idea about anything right now. I'm too tired. But I'd rather take care of myself and not inconvenience you. I just need directions to your house.”

She writes them down. They seem simple enough.

“Any particular kind of car?”

“A safe one.”

“I know all about that,” the coroner replies. “I've peeled enough people out of unsafe cars. I'll get my secretary on it first thing.”

T
RIXIE LEANS AGAINST THE COUNTER
, smoking a menthol cigarette and glumly watching Marino pack a large ice chest with beer, luncheon meats, bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, and whatever his huge hands grab out of the refrigerator.

“It's way past midnight,” Trixie complains, fumbling for a bottle of Corona in a longneck bottle that she clogged by stuffing in too large a slice of lime. “Come on to bed and then you can leave, can't you? Don't that make more sense than zooming out of here, half-lit and all upset, in the middle of the night?”

Marino has been drunk since he returned from Boston, sitting in front of the TV, refusing to answer the phone, refusing to talk to anyone, not even to Lucy or Scarpetta. About an hour ago, he was kicked hard by a message on his cell phone from Lucy's office. That sobered him enough to pry him out of his reclining chair.

Trixie holds the bottle straight up and tries to push the lime away with her tongue. She succeeds, and beer gushes into her mouth and over her chin. Not so long ago, Marino would have found this hilarious. Now nothing will make him smile. He jerks open the freezer door, pulling out the container of ice cubes and dumping them into the chest. Trixie, whose
real name is Teresa, is thirty years old and not even a year ago moved into Marino's small house in its blue-collar neighborhood, right off Midlothian Turnpike on the wrong side of the James River in Richmond.

He lights a cigarette and looks at her, at her face, puffy from booze, the mascara so chronically smeared under her eyes that it looks tattooed on. Her platinum hair has been scalded by so many treatments that Marino hates to touch it, told her once while he was drunk that it felt like insulation. Some of her hurt feelings are permanently crippled, and when Marino catches a glimpse of them hobbling out of her eyes or mouth, he leaves the room, either with his thoughts or his feet.

“Please don't go.” Trixie sucks hard on a cigarette and shoots the smoke out of the side of her mouth, barely inhaling. “I know what you're doing. You ain't coming back, that's what. I saw what you've been packing in your truck. Guns, your bowling ball, even your trophies and fishing poles. Not to mention your usual clothes, nothing nice like those suits that have been hanging in the closet since Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments.”

She steps in front of him and grabs his arm as he rearranges ice in the chest, smoke making him squint.

“I'll call ya. I've got to get to Louisiana, and you know it. The Doc's down there, or is about to be down there. I know her. I know damn well what she's gonna do. She don't have to tell me. You don't want her dead, Trixie.”

“I'm so fucking tired of the
Doc this
and the
Doc that
!
”
Her face darkens, and she shoves Marino's hand away, as if touching had been his idea, not hers. “Ever since I've known you, it's been the
Doc this
and the
Doc that.
She's the only woman in your life, if you're honest about it. I'm just the second-draft choice in your basketball game of life.”

Marino winces. He can't stand Trixie's colorful near-miss expressions, which remind him of a piano out of tune.

“I'm just the girl who sits out the dance in the prom that is your life,” she continues the drama, and by now that's all it is.

A drama. Like a bad soap opera.

Their fights are by rote, for the most part, and although Marino has a special aversion to psychology, not even he can avoid an insight as big as a mountain. He and Trixie fight about everything because they fight about nothing.

Her fat bare feet with their chipped red-painted nails pat across the kitchen as she paces, wildly waving her plump arms, cigarette ashes snowing down on the stained linoleum floor. “Well, you just go on to Louisiana and get with the
Doc this and that,
and by the time you come back—if you ever do—maybe someone else will be living in this dump of yours and I'll be gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.”

Half an hour ago, Marino asked her to put his house on the market. She can live in it until it sells.

Her flower-printed acetate robe flutters around her feet as she paces, her breasts sagging over the sash she keeps tightening around her thick waist. Marino feels pangs of anger and guilt. When Trixie nags him about Scarpetta, he flies out of control like a pissed-off bird out of a knothole, with no place to go, no way to defend himself, no way to counterattack, not really.

His wounded ego can't be assuaged by implying indiscretions with Scarpetta that unfortunately have never occurred. So the arrows of the jealous Trixies in his life find their spot and draw their blood. Marino isn't bothered that he's lost every woman he's ever had. He's bothered by the one he never got, and Trixie's tantrum is mounting dangerously close to the necessary crescendo that will bring about the necessary coda.

“You're so crazy for her it's disgusting,” Trixie yells. “You're nothing but a big redneck to her. That's all you'll ever be. A big, fat, stupid redneck!” she shrieks. “And I don't care if she ends up dead!
Dead
is all she knows anyhow!”

Marino picks up the ice chest as if it weighs nothing and walks through his shabby, cluttered living room and stops at the front door. He looks around at the thirty-six-inch color TV—not a new one, but a Sony and plenty nice. He stares sadly at his favorite reclining chair, where it
seems he has spent most of his life, and he feels an ache so deep it's a cramp in his bowels. He imagines how many hours he has spent half-drunk, watching football and wasting his time and efforts on the likes of Trixie.

She's not a bad woman. She's not evil. None of them have been. They're simply pitiful, and he is even more pitiful than any of them because he has never insisted on more for himself, and he could have.

“I won't be calling you after all,” Marino tells her. “I don't even give a rat's ass what happens to the house. Sell it. Rent it. Live in it.”

“You don't mean that, baby.” Trixie begins to cry. “I love you.”

“You don't know me,” Marino says from the door, and he feels too tired to leave and too depressed to stay.

“ 'Course I do, baby.” She crushes out a cigarette in the sink and rummages in the refrigerator for another beer. “And you're going to miss me.” Her face twists as she smiles, crying at the same time. “And you'll get your ass back here. I was just mad when I said you wouldn't. You will.” She pops off the bottle cap. “One reason I know you'll be back is, what?” She points coyly at him. “Can you guess what Detective Trixie noticed, huh? You're leaving without your Christmas decorations.

“All those millions of plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, jalapeno pepper lights and the rest of what you been collecting for a century? And you're gonna drive off and just leave 'em in the basement? Naw-uh. No way, naw-uh.”

She talks herself into believing she's right. Marino wouldn't leave for good and not pack up his beloved Christmas decorations.

“Rocco's dead,” he says.

“Who?” Trixie's face goes blank.

“See, that's what I mean. You don't know me,” he says. “It's all right. It ain't your fault.”

He shuts the door on her, shuts the door on Richmond for good.

T
HE MISSING WOMAN'S
name is Katherine Bruce.

She is now considered abducted, the latest victim of the serial killer, presumed dead. Her husband, a former Air Force pilot now employed by Continental, was out of town, and after trying to reach his wife for two days with no success, he became concerned. He sent a friend to the house. Katherine wasn't there, nor was her car, which was discovered parked at the Wal-Mart near LSU where it did not draw attention to itself, since the lot has cars in it twenty-four hours a day. Her keys were in the ignition, her doors unlocked, her purse and wallet gone.

The morning is barely materializing, as if its molecules are slowly gathering into a sky that promises to be clear and bright blue. Nic knew nothing about the abduction until yesterday's six o'clock news. She still can't believe it. Katherine Bruce's friend, according to what has been released to the media, called the Baton Rouge police immediately
yesterday morning.
The information should have been released immediately and nationally. What did the idiot task force do? Give the friend, whose identity has not been disclosed, a damn polygraph to make sure Katherine really is missing? Were they digging up the backyard to make sure the pilot husband didn't kill and bury his wife before flying out of town?

The killer got an extra eight hours. The public lost eight hours. Katherine lost eight hours. She might still have been alive, assuming she's not alive now. Someone might have spotted her and the killer. You never know. Nic obsessively walks the Wal-Mart parking lot, looking for any detail that might speak to her. The huge crime scene is mute, Katherine Bruce's car long gone, impounded somewhere. Nothing but bits of trash, chewing gum and millions of cigarette butts out here.

It's 7:16 when she makes her only find thus far, one that would have thrilled her as a child: two quarters.
Both of them heads.
That's always luckier than tails, and right now she'll nurture any fantasy of luck she can. After she heard the news last night, Nic rushed here right away. If the coins were on the tarmac at that time, her flashlight didn't pick them up. And she didn't see the coins first thing this morning, when she returned and it was still dark. She takes photographs with thirty-five-millimeter and Polaroid cameras and memorizes the coins' location, making notes, just as she was taught at the forensic academy. She pulls on surgical gloves and secures the coins in a paper evidence envelope, then trots into the store.

“I need to see the manager,” she tells a checkout clerk who is busy ringing up a cartful of children's clothing while a tired-looking young woman—maybe a mother—pulls out a MasterCard.

Nic thinks of Buddy's overalls and feels terrible.

“That way.” The clerk points to an office behind a swinging wooden door.

Thank God he's in.

Nic shows him her badge as she says, “I need to see the exact location where Katherine Bruce's car was found.”

The manager is young and friendly. He is clearly upset.

“Glad to show you. I sure know where it is. The police were out here for hours, poking around, and then they towed it. This is really awful.”

“It's awful, all right,” Nic agrees as they leave the store and the sun begins to show its bright face in the east.

The location of Katherine Bruce's 1999 black Maxima was approximately twenty feet from where Nic found the quarters.

“You're sure this is where it was?”

“Oh, I'm sure, yes ma'am. Parked right here five rows away. A lot of women who shop after dark park relatively close to the front door.”

In her case, that didn't help. But she must have been at least somewhat security-conscious. Well, maybe not. Most people want to park as close to a store entrance as possible, unless they drive an expensive car and don't want anyone dinging the doors. Usually, it's men who worry about that. Nic has never understood why so many women don't seem to have much interest in cars or their upkeep. If she had a daughter, she'd make sure her little girl knew the name of every exotic car, and Nic would tell her if she works hard, maybe she'll drive a Lamborghini someday—the same thing she tells Buddy, who has numerous models of sports cars that he loves to roll into walls.

“Did anyone notice any unusual activity the night she drove her car into this lot? Did anyone spot Katherine Bruce? Did anyone see anything at all?” Nic asks the manager, both of them standing in the same spot and looking around.

“No. I don't think she ever made it inside the store,” he says.