Authors: Patricia Cornwell
The building isn’t full-service, not even a doorman, and I push the intercom button for apartment 8SE and the electronic lock
buzzes loudly and clicks free, as if the person letting me in knows who I am without asking.
For the second time this day
I scan for surveillance cameras, spotting one in a white metal casing that blends with the white bricks in a corner over the
door.
It occurs to me that if Jaime sees me in a monitor, then it’s likely the closed-circuit camera was installed by her
and includes infrared capabilities, so it will work in the dark.
I see no indication that the building itself has security, nothing but electronic locks and an intercom system, and my curiosity
builds.
Savannah isn’t merely a getaway—not if Jaime has gone to the trouble to install an advanced security system.
As I’m
opening the door I sense something behind me, and I turn around, startled, as a person wearing a flashing helmet climbs off
a bicycle and leans it against a lamppost at the end of the walkway, near the street.
“Jaime Berger?”
asks this person, a woman, I realize, and she takes off her backpack and opens it, pulling out a large white
bag.
“That’s not me,” I reply, as she walks toward me carrying a take-out bag with the name of a restaurant on it.
She presses the buzzer and announces into the intercom, “Delivery for Jaime Berger.”
As I hold the door open, I mention to her, “That’s all right.
I’m going up.
I can take it.
How much?”
“Two tekka maki, two unagi maki, two California maki, two seaweed salads.
Already on her credit card.”
She hands me the bag,
and I give her a ten-dollar tip.
“Her usual Thursday delivery.
Have a nice night.”
I shut the door behind me and take the elevator to the top floor, where I follow an empty carpeted hallway to a unit in the
southeast corner.
Ringing the bell, I look up into the lens of another camera as the heavy oak door opens, and anything I
might have said is eclipsed by my astonishment.
“Doc,” Pete Marino says.
“Don’t be pissed.”
H
e invites me in as if it’s his apartment, and the seriousness of his eyes behind his unstylish wire-rim glasses and the hard
set of his mouth completely unnerve me at first.
“Jaime should be back any minute.”
He shuts the door.
My shocked response just as suddenly turns to anger as I take him in from the top of his shiny shaved head and big weathered
face to the rubber-soled canvas shoes he wears with no socks.
I note his Hawaiian shirt and the drape of it over shoulders
that seem more massive and a belly that seems flatter than I remember.
Baggy green fishing shorts with cargo pockets hang
low on his hips, and he’s darkly tanned except for under his chin, where the sun has spared him.
He’s been out in a boat or
on a beach, out somewhere in the summer weather, his skin bronzed with a ruddy hue.
Even his bare
pate and the tops of his ears are the color of cognac, but he is pale around his eyes.
He’s been wearing sunglasses and no
cap, and I envision the white cargo van and the charter-boat brochures in the glove box.
I think of the fast-food napkins.
Marino craves Bojangles’ and Popeyes fried chicken and biscuits, and often complains that fried food isn’t a “food group”
in New England like it is in the South.
There were the comments he made not long ago about preowned gas-guzzling trucks and
boats selling for a song, and how much he misses warm weather, and I recall being somewhat bothered by his last-minute notice
when he stopped by my office earlier this month.
He said he’d been offered an opportunity for some great vacation package.
He wanted to go fishing, and his calendar was clear.
His last day on duty for the CFC was June 15.
Marino vanished in the middle of this month, and other things happened almost simultaneously.
Kathleen Lawler’s e-mails to
me stopped.
She was transferred to Bravo Pod.
Suddenly she wanted me to visit the GPFW, to talk to me about Jack Fielding.
Leonard Brazzo thought it was a good idea for me to agree, and then I discovered Jaime Berger is here.
Now that I have the
luxury of looking back, it’s plain what occurred.
Marino lied to me.
“She’s picking up dinner,” he says, taking the bag of take-out sushi from me.
“Real food.
I don’t eat fish bait.”
I notice a desk, a small table, and two chairs arranged near the far wall, with two laptops and a printer, and books and legal
pads, and on the floor stacks of expansion file folders.
“The three of us talking in a restaurant isn’t exactly a good idea,” he adds, setting the take-out bag on the kitchen counter.
“I wouldn’t know if it’s a good idea or not, since I have no idea why you’re here.
Or, more to the point, why I am,” I reply.
“You want something to drink?”
“Not now.”
I move past the closed-circuit monitor mounted on the wall, past a coat rack, and for an instant I smell cigarettes.
“I don’t blame you for wondering what the hell,” Marino says, and paper rattles as he opens the bag.
“I probably should stick
this in the fridge.
Don’t be pissed, Doc….”
“Don’t tell me what to be.
Are you smoking again?”
“Hell, no.”
“I smell cigarettes.
Someone was smoking in the rental van I didn’t reserve, which also stinks like dead fish and stale fast
food and has suspicious brochures in the glove box.
I hope you’re not smoking again, for God’s sake.”
“No way I’d get hooked on cigarettes after all I went through to quit.”
“Who is Captain Link Michaels?”
I refer to one of the brochures in the glove box.
“Year-round fishing with Captain Link Michaels,”
I quote.
“A charter boat out of Beaufort.
A nice guy.
Been out with him a few times.”
“You weren’t wearing a cap, probably not sunblock, either.
What about skin cancer?”
“I don’t have it anymore.”
He self-consciously touches the top of his ruddy bald head where he had several basal cell carcinomas
removed some months ago.
“Just because spots have been removed doesn’t mean you don’t wear sunblock.
You should always wear a hat.”
“Blew off when we had the boat full throttle.
I got a little burned.”
He touches the top of his head again.
“I guess we don’t need to run the plate of that van I’ve been driving today.
I guess we know it won’t come back to Lowcountry
Concierge Connection,” I then say.
“Who was smoking in it, if not you?”
“You weren’t followed here, that’s what matters,” he says.
“No one was going to follow you in the van.
I forgot to clean out
the glove box.
Should have known you’d look.”
“The kid who dropped it off to me, who was that?
Because I don’t believe he really works for some VIP rental-car company called
Low-country Concierge Connection.
Is that your rental van, and you got some charter-boat captain’s kid to drop it off to me?”
“It’s not a rental,” Marino says.
“Well, I guess I know why Bryce hasn’t returned my phone calls today.
I have a feeling he got influenced, not that it hasn’t
happened before when you sneak around behind my back and get him to cooperate by telling him you have my best interests in
mind.
Did you instruct him to cancel my hotel room, too?”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s turned out okay.”
“Good God, Marino,” I mutter.
“Why would you have Bryce cancel my room?
What the hell is the matter with you?
What if they
hadn’t had another room available?”
“I knew they would.”
“I could have been killed in that damn van.
It’s not drivable.”
“It was fine the other day.”
He frowns.
“What was it doing?
I
wouldn’t put you in something that’s not safe.
And I would have known if you broke down.”
“
Not safe
is an understatement,” I reply.
“Speeds up, slows down, lurching all over the road as if it’s having a grand mal seizure.”
“We had a lot of rain last night, a huge storm in South Carolina, even worse than here.
It rained like hell, and it was sitting
out.
It needs a new hood seal.”
“South Carolina?”
“Maybe the spark plugs got wet.
Then maybe they got even more wet when you had it parked out there at the prison, and maybe
Joey hit potholes or something and the tires are out of alignment.
A nice kid but dumb as a box of hair.
He should have called
me if it was driving like shit.
Well, I’m sorry about that.
Yeah, I got a little place I just started renting.
In Charleston,
a condo near the aquarium, with a pier and boat slips, an easy drive or motorcycle ride from here.
I was going to tell you
about it, but things have happened.”
I look around and try to make sense of what things Marino might mean.
What has happened?
What on earth?
“I had to make sure you weren’t followed, Doc,” he then says.
“Let’s be honest, Benton knows your plans and has your itinerary
because Bryce copies him on the e-mails.
They’re on the CFC computer.”
What he’s saying is the rental car Bryce reserved for me is on my itinerary but a malfunctioning cargo van with a bad hood
seal wouldn’t be, and my room at the Hyatt is moot because it was canceled.
But I’m not sure what Marino is implying about
Benton.
“Put it this way,” Marino says, “there’s a Toyota Camry sitting in the lot at Lowcountry Concierge Connection with the name
Dr.
Kay Scarpetta on it.
If anybody was hanging around, waiting for you to get in it because maybe they got access to your
itinerary, your e-mails, or found out your schedule some other way, you would have been a no-show.
And if they called your
hotel, they would have found out you’d canceled your room because you missed your connection in Atlanta.”
“Why would Benton have me followed?”
“Maybe he wouldn’t.
But maybe someone would see the itinerary that went from your e-mail to his.
Maybe he knows the possibility
or likelihood of that happening, and that’s why he didn’t want you coming down here.”
“How do you know he didn’t want me coming down here?”
“Because he wouldn’t.”
I don’t reply or look Marino in the eye.
Instead I look around.
I take in the details of Jaime’s charming loft of exposed
old brick, pine floors, and high white plaster ceilings with rough oak beams, very much to my liking but definitely not to
hers.
The living area, simply furnished with a leather couch, a matching armchair, and a slate coffee table, flows into a
large kitchen with a stone peninsula and the stainless-steel appliances of an industrious cook, which Berger most decidedly
isn’t.
There is no art, and I happen to know that she is a collector.
I see no evidence of anything personal beyond what’s on the
desk and floor against the far wall under a big window filled with the night, the moon distant now, small and bone-white.
I don’t see any furniture or rugs that might be hers, and I know her taste.
Contemporary and minimalist, predominantly high-end
Italian and Scandinavian, a lot of light woods, such as maple and birch.
Jaime’s taste is uncomplicated
because her life is its antithesis, and I’m reminded of how much she disliked Lucy’s loft in Greenwich Village, a fabulous
building that once was a candle factory.
I remember being offended when Jaime used to refer to it as “Lucy’s drafty old barn.”
“She’s renting this,” I say to Marino.
“Why?”
I sit on the brown leather couch that is a reproduction, not at all Jaime’s
style.
“And how do you fit into the equation?
How do I fit into it?
Why are you convinced someone would follow me, given the
chance?
You could have called me if you were so worried.
What is it?
Are you thinking of changing jobs?
Or have you gone back
to work for Jaime and forgot to let me know.”
“I’m not exactly changing jobs, Doc.”
“Not exactly?
Well, she’s pulled you into something.
You should know that about her by now.”
Jaime Berger is calculating, almost frighteningly so, and Marino is no match for her.
He wasn’t when he was an investigator
with NYPD and was assigned to her office, and he’s no match for her now and never will be.
Whatever reason she’s given him
for his being here and maneuvering me into what feels like nothing less than a calculated machination, it isn’t the whole
truth or even close.
“You are working for her de facto because you’re here at her bidding,” I add.
“You’re certainly not working for me when you
swap my car and cancel my hotel and scheme with her behind my back.”
“I’m working for you but helping her, too.
I haven’t walked off the job, Doc,” he says, with surprising gentleness for Marino.
“I wouldn’t do something shitty like that to you.”
I don’t reply that he has done plenty of shitty things to me over the twenty-plus years I’ve known him and worked with him,
and I
can’t help thinking about what Kathleen Lawler said.
Every other minute it enters my mind.
Jack Fielding wrote to her in the
early nineties, wrote to her on lined notebook paper, like a schoolboy—an immature, sophomoric, mean-spirited schoolboy who
resented me.
He and Marino thought I needed to be warmed up, humanized, fucked but good, and for an instant the Marino standing
before me is the Marino from back then.
I envision him inside his dark blue unmarked Crown Vic, with all of its antennas and emergency lights and crumpled fast-food
bags, its overflowing ashtray, the air shellacked with a stale stench of cigarettes that air fresheners hanging from the rearview
mirror couldn’t begin to crack.
I remember the defiance in his eyes, the way he blatantly stared, making sure he reminded
me that I might be the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia, but I was tits and ass to him.
I remember going home
at the end of each day in the Capital of the Confederacy, where I certainly didn’t belong.
“Doc?”
Richmond.
Where I knew no one.
“What is it?”
I remember how alone I was.
“Hey.
Are you okay?”