Four Scarpetta Novels (43 page)

“You kept it at your house for a week?” she asks with a dubious expression.

“A lot was happening. Kim Luong was murdered. My niece was
almost killed in a shoot-out in Miami. I was called out of the country, to Lyon, France. Interpol wanted to see me, wanted to talk about seven women he”—I mean Chandonne—“probably murdered in Paris and the suspicion that the dead man in the cargo container might be Thomas Chandonne, the brother, the killer's brother, both of them sons of this Chandonne criminal cartel that half of law enforcement in the universe has been trying to bring down forever. Then Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray was murdered. Should I have returned the tattoo to the morgue?” My head pounds. “Yes, I certainly should have. But I was distracted. I just forgot.” I almost snap at her.

“You just forgot,” Officer Calloway repeats while Marino listens with gathering fury, trying to let her do her job and despising her at the same time. “Dr. Scarpetta, do you have other body parts in your house?” Calloway then asks.

A stabbing pain penetrates my right eye. I am getting a migraine.

“What kind of fucking question is that?” Marino raises his voice another decibel.

“I just didn't want us walking in on anything else like body fluids or other chemicals or . . .”

“No, no.” I shake my head and turn my attention to a stack of neatly folded slacks and polo shirts. “Just slides.”

“Slides?”

“For histology,” I vaguely explain.

“For what?”

“Calloway, you're done.” Marino's words crack like a gavel as he rises from the bed.

“I just want to make sure we don't need to worry about any other hazards,” she says to him, and her hot cheeks and the flash in her eyes belie her subordination. She hates Marino. A lot of people do.

“The only hazard you gotta worry about is the one you're looking at,” Marino snaps at her. “How 'bout giving the Doc a little privacy, a little reprieve from dumb-ass questions?”

Calloway is an unattractive chinless woman with thick hips and
narrow shoulders, her body tense with anger and embarrassment. She spins around and walks out of my bedroom, her footsteps absorbed by the Persian runner in the hallway.

“What's she think? You collect trophies or something?” Marino says to me. “You bring home souvenirs like fucking Jeffrey Dahmer? Jesus Christ.”

“I can't take any more of this.” I tuck perfectly folded polo shirts into the tote bag.

“You're gonna have to take it, Doc. But you don't have to take any more of it today.” He wearily sits back down on the foot of my bed.

“Keep your detectives off me,” I warn him. “I don't want to see another cop in my face. I'm not the one who did something wrong.”

“If they got anything else, they'll run it through me. This is my investigation, even if people like Calloway ain't figured that out yet. But I also ain't the one you got to worry about. It's like
take a number
in the deli line, there's so many people who insist they got to talk to you.”

I stack slacks on top of the polo shirts, and then reverse the order, placing the shirts on top so they don't wrinkle.

“Course, nowhere near as many people as the ones who want to talk to him.” He means Chandonne. “All these profilers and forensic psychiatrists and the media and shit,” Marino goes through the Who's Who list.

I stop packing. I have no intention of picking through lingerie while Marino watches. I refuse to sort through toiletries with him witness to it all. “I need a few minutes alone,” I tell him.

He stares at me, his eyes red, his face flushed the deep color of wine. Even his balding head is red, and he is disheveled in his jeans and a sweatshirt, his belly nine months pregnant, his Red Wing boots huge and dirty. I can see his mind working. He doesn't want to leave me alone and seems to be weighing concerns that he will not share with me. A paranoid thought rises like dark smoke in my mind. He doesn't trust me. Maybe he thinks I am suicidal.

“Marino, please. Can you just stand outside and keep people away
while I finish up in here? Go to my car and get my crime scene case out of the trunk. If I get called out on something . . . well, I need to have it. The key's in the kitchen desk drawer, the top right—where I keep all my keys. Please. And I need my car, by the way. I guess I'll just take my car and you can leave the scene case in it.” Confusion eddies.

He hesitates. “You can't take your car.”

“Damn it!” I blurt out. “Don't tell me they've got to go through my car, too. This is insane.”

“Look. The first time your alarm went off last night, it was because someone tried to break into your garage.”

“What do you mean,
someone
?” I retort as migraine pain sears my temples and blurs my vision. “We know exactly who. He forced my garage door open because he
wanted
the alarm to go off. He
wanted
the police to show up. So it wouldn't seem odd if the police came back a little later because a neighbor reported a prowler on my property, supposedly.”

It was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne who came back. He impersonated the police. I still can't believe I fell for it.

“We ain't got all the answers yet,” Marino replies.

“Why is it I keep getting this feeling you don't believe me?”

“You need to get to Anna's and sleep.”

“He didn't touch my car,” I assert. “He never got inside my garage. I don't want anyone touching my car. I want to take it tonight. Just leave the scene case inside the trunk.”

“Not tonight.”

Marino walks out and shuts the door behind him. I am desperate for a drink to override the electrical spikes in my central nervous system, but what do I do? Walk out to the bar and tell the cops to get the hell out of my way while I find the Scotch? Knowing that liquor probably won't help my headache doesn't have an impact. I am so miserable in my own skin, I don't care what is good or not good for me right now. In the bathroom I dig through more drawers and spill several lipsticks on the floor. They roll between the toilet and the tub. I am unsteady as I
bend over to retrieve them, groping awkwardly with my right arm, all of this made more difficult because I am left-handed. I stop to ponder the perfumes neatly arranged on the vanity and gently pick up the small gold metal bottle of Hermès 24 Faubourg. It is cool in my hand. I lift the spray nozzle to my nose and the spicy, erotic scent that Benton Wesley loved fills my eyes with tears and my heart feels as if it will fatally fly out of rhythm. I have not used the perfume in more than a year, not once since Benton was murdered. Now I have been murdered, I tell him in my throbbing mind. And I am still here, Benton, I am still here. You were a psychological profiler for the FBI, an expert in dissecting the psyches of monsters and interpreting and predicting their behavior. You would have seen this coming, wouldn't you? You would have predicted it, prevented it. Why weren't you here, Benton? I would be all right if you had been here.

I realize someone is knocking on my bedroom door. “Just a minute,” I call out, clearing my throat and wiping my eyes. I splash cold water on my face and tuck the Hermès perfume into the tote bag. I go to the door, expecting Marino. Instead, Jay Talley walks in wearing ATF battle dress and a day's growth of beard that turns his dark beauty sinister. He is one of the handsomest men I have ever known, his body exquisitely sculpted, sensuality exuding from his pores like musk.

“Just checking on you before you head out.” His eyes burn into mine. They seem to feel and explore me the way his hands and mouth did four days ago in France.

“What can I tell you?” I let him into my bedroom and am suddenly self-conscious about the way I look. I don't want him to see me like this. “I have to leave my own house. It's almost Christmas. My arm hurts. My head hurts. Other than that, I'm fine.”

“I'll drive you to Dr. Zenner's. I would like to, Kay.”

It vaguely penetrates that he knows where I am staying tonight. Marino promised my whereabouts would be secret. Jay shuts the door and takes my hand, and all I can think about is that he didn't wait at the hospital for me and now he wants to drive me someplace else.

“Let me help you through this. I care about you,” he says to me.

“No one seemed to care very much last night,” I reply as I recall that when he drove me home from the hospital and I thanked him for waiting, for being there for me, he never once even intimated that he hadn't been there. “You and all your IRTs out there and the bastard just walks right up to my front door,” I go on. “You fly all the way here from Paris to lead a goddamn International Response Team in your big-game hunt for this guy, and what a joke. What a bad movie—all these big cops with all their gear and assault rifles and the monster just strolls right up to my house.”

Jay's eyes have begun wandering over areas of my anatomy as if they are rest stops he is entitled to revisit. It shocks and repulses me that he can think about my body at a time like this. In Paris I thought I was falling in love with him. As I stand here with him in my bedroom and he is openly interested in what is under my old lab coat, I realize I don't love him in the least.

“You're just upset. God, why wouldn't you be? I'm concerned about you. I'm here for you.” He tries to touch me and I move away.

“We had an afternoon.” I have told him this before, but now I mean it. “A few hours. An encounter, Jay.”

“A mistake?” Hurt sharpens his voice. Dark anger flashes in his eyes.

“Don't try to turn an afternoon into a life, into something of permanent meaning. It isn't there. I'm sorry. For God's sake.” My indignation rises. “Don't want anything from me right now.” I walk away from him, gesturing with my one good arm. “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”

He raises a hand and hangs his head, warding off my blows, acknowledging his mistake. I am not sure if he is sincere. “I don't know what I'm doing. Being stupid, that's what,” he says. “I don't mean to want anything. Stupid, I'm stupid because of how I feel about you. Don't hold it against me. Please.” He casts me an intense look and opens the door. “I'm here for you, Kay.
Je t'aime
.” I realize Jay has a way of saying good-bye that makes me feel I might never see him again. An atavistic panic
thrills my deepest psyche and I resist the temptation to call after him, to apologize, to promise we will have dinner or drinks soon. I shut my eyes and rub my temples, briefly leaning against the bedpost. I tell myself I don't know what I am doing right now and should not do anything.

Marino is in the hallway, an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, and I can feel him trying to read me and what might have just happened while Jay was inside my bedroom with the door shut. My gaze lingers on the empty hallway, halfway hoping Jay will reappear and dreading it at the same time. Marino grabs my bags and cops fall silent as I approach. They avoid looking in my direction as they move about my great room, duty belts creaking, equipment they manipulate clicking and clacking. An investigator takes photographs of the coffee table, the flash gun popping bright white. Someone else is videotaping while a crime scene technician sets up an alternative light source called a Luma-Lite that can detect fingerprints, drugs and body fluids not visible to the unaided eye. My downtown office has a Luma-Lite I routinely use on bodies at scenes and in the morgue. To see a Luma-Lite inside my house gives me a feeling that is indescribable.

Dark dusting powder smudges furniture and walls, and the colorful Persian rug is pulled back, exposing antique French oak underneath. An endtable lamp is unplugged and on the floor. The sectional sofa has craters where cushions used to be, the air oily and acrid with the residual odor of formalin. Off the great room and near the front door is the dining room and through the open doorway I am greeted with the sight of a brown paper bag sealed with yellow evidence tape, dated, initialed and labeled
clothing Scarpetta.
Inside it are the slacks, sweater, socks, shoes, bra and panties I was wearing last night, clothes taken from me in the hospital. That bag and other evidence and flashlights and equipment are on top of my favorite red Jarrah Wood dining room table, as if it is a workbench. Cops have draped coats over chairs, and wet, dirty footprints are everywhere. My mouth is dry, my joints weak with shame and rage.

“Yo Marino!” a cop barks. “Righter's looking for you.”

Buford Righter is the city commonwealth's attorney. I look around for Jay. He is nowhere to be seen.

“Tell him to take a number and wait in line.” Marino sticks to his deli-line allusion.

He lights the cigarette as I open the front door, and cold air bites my face and makes my eyes water. “Did you get my crime scene case?” I ask him.

“It's in the truck.” He says this like a condescending husband who has been asked to fetch his wife's pocketbook.

“Why's Righter calling?” I want to know.

“Bunch of fucking voyeurs,” he mutters.

Marino's truck is on the street out front and two massive tires have chewed tracks into my snowy churned-up lawn. Buford Righter and I have worked many cases together over the years and it stings that he did not ask me directly if he could come to my house. He has not, for that matter, contacted me to see how I am and let me know he is glad I am alive.

“You ask me, people just want to see your joint,” Marino says. “So they give these excuses about needing to check this and that.”

Slush seeps into my shoes as I carefully make my way along the driveway.

“You got no idea how many people ask me what your house is like. You'd think you was Lady Di or something. Plus, Righter's got his nose in everything, can't stand to be left out of the loop. Biggest fucking case since Jack the Ripper. Righter's bugging the hell out of us.”