Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  Rain is relentless cold fingers drumming the top of Lucy’s head. She walks, staying out of view, should Marino or Shandy move close to a window. It may be dark, but Lucy takes no chances. Marino is off the phone now.

  “You think I’m so stupid I don’t know who the hell you were talking to and that you were making damn sure I had no idea what you’re saying? Speaking in riddles, in other words.” Shandy is shrieking. “As if I’m so stupid I fall for it. The Big Chief, that’s who!”

  “It’s none of your damn business. How many times I got to tell you that? I can talk to who the hell I want.”

  “Everything’s my business! You spent the night with her, you lying asshole! I saw your damn motorcycle there early the next morning! You think I’m stupid? Was it good? I know you been wanting it half your life! Was it good, you big, fat fuck!”

  “I don’t know who beat it into your spoiled rich girl’s head that everything in life is your business. But hear this. It ain’t.”

  After more fuck-yous and other profanities and threats, Shandy storms out and slams the door. From where she hides, Lucy watches her stride angrily underneath the fishing shack to her motorcycle, angrily ride it through Marino’s sliver of a sandy front yard, then loudly speed away toward the Ben Sawyer Bridge. Lucy waits a few minutes, listening to make sure Shandy isn’t coming back. Nothing. Just the distant sound of traffic and the loud spattering of the rain. On Marino’s front porch, she knocks on the door. He flings it open, his angry face suddenly blank, then uneasy, his expressions running through emotions like a slot machine.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, looking past her, as if worried Shandy might come back.

  Lucy walks into a squalid sanctuary she knows better than he thinks. She notices his computer, the thumb drive still in it. Her fake iPod and its earpiece are tucked in a pocket of her slicker. He shuts the door, stands in front of it, looking more uncomfortable by the second as she sits on a plaid couch that smells like mildew.

  “I hear you was spying on me and Shandy when we was in the morgue like you’re a damn two-legged Patriot Act.” He goes first, maybe assuming that is why she’s here. “You don’t know by now not to try shit like that on me?”

  Foolishly, he tries to intimidate her when he knows damn well he’s never intimidated her, not even when she was a child. Not even when she was a teenager and he ridiculed—at times mocked and shunned—her for who and what she is.

  “I already talked about it with the Doc,” Marino goes on. “There’s nothing left to say, so don’t start in on me.”

  “And that’s all you did with her? Talk to her?” Lucy bends forward, slides her Glock out of her ankle holster and points it at him. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” she says with no emotion.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “One good reason,” Lucy says it again. “You and Shandy were just fighting like hell. Could hear her screaming all the way out on the street.”

  She gets up from the couch, walks over to a table, and opens the drawer. She pulls out the Smith & Wesson .357 revolver she saw last night, sits back down, slides her Glock back into her ankle holster. She points Marino’s own gun at him.

  “Shandy’s fingerprints are all over this place. I imagine there’s plenty of her DNA in here, too. The two of you fight, she shoots you and speeds off on her bike. Such a pathologically jealous bitch.”

  She pulls back the revolver’s hammer. Marino doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t seem to care.

  “One good reason,” she says.

  “I don’t got a good reason,” he says. “Go ahead. I wanted her to and she wouldn’t.” He means Scarpetta. “She should have. She didn’t, so go ahead. I don’t give a shit if Shandy gets blamed. I’ll even help you out. There’s underwear in my room. Help yourself to her DNA. They find her DNA on the gun, that’s all they need. Everyone in the bar knows what she’s like. Just ask Jess. No one would be surprised.”

  Then he shuts up. For a moment, the two of them are motionless. Him standing in front of the door, hands down by his sides. Lucy on the couch, the revolver pointed at his head. She doesn’t need the larger target of his chest. He is well aware of that fact.

  She lowers the gun. “Sit down,” she says.

  He sits in the chair near his computer. “I guess I should have known she’d tell you,” he says.

  “I guess it should tell you a lot that she didn’t. Not a word to anyone. She continues to protect you. Isn’t that something?” Lucy says. “You see what you did to her wrists?”

  His answer is a sudden brightening of his bloodshot eyes. Lucy’s never seen him cry.

  She continues, “Rose noticed. She told me. This morning when we were in the lab, I saw for myself—the bruises on Aunt Kay’s wrists. Like I said. What are you going to do about it?”

  She tries to push away images of what she imagines he did to her aunt. The idea of him seeing her, touching her, makes Lucy feel far more violated than she would if she had been the victim. She looks a this huge hands and arms, his mouth, and tries to push away what she imagines he did.

  “What’s done is done,” he says. “Plain and simple. I promise she’ll never have to be around me again. None of you will. Or you can shoot me just the way you said and get away with it like you always do. Like you have before. You can get away with anything you want. Go ahead. If someone else did to her what I did, I’d kill him. He’d already be dead.”

  “Pathetic coward. At least tell her you’re sorry instead of running away or committing suicide by cop.”

  “What good would it do to tell her? It’s over. That’s why I find out about everything after the fact. Nobody called me to go to Hilton Head.”

  “Don’t be a baby. Aunt Kay asked you to go see Madelisa Dooley. I couldn’t believe it. It makes me sick.”

  “She won’t ask me nothing again. Not after you being here. I don’t want either of you asking me nothing,” Marino says. “It’s over.”

  “Do you remember what you did?”

  He doesn’t answer. He remembers.

  “Say you’re sorry,” she says. “Tell her you weren’t so drunk that you don’t remember what you did. Tell her you remember and you’re sorry and you can’t undo it but you’re sorry. See what she does. She won’t shoot you. She won’t even send you away. She’s a better person than I am.” Lucy tightens her grip on the gun. “Why? Just tell me why. You’ve been drunk around her before. You’ve been alone with her a million times, even in hotel rooms. Why? How could you?”

  He lights a cigarette, his hands shaking badly. “It’s everything. I know there’s no excuse. I’ve been half crazy. It’s everything, and I know it doesn’t matter. She came back with the ring and I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I should never have e-mailed Dr. Self. She fucked with my head. Then Shandy. Medications. Booze. It’s like this monster moved inside of me,” Marino says. “I don’t know where it came from.”

  Disgusted, Lucy gets up, tosses the revolver on the couch. She walks past him toward the door.

  “Listen to me,” he says. “Shandy got me this stuff. I’m not the first guy she’s handed it out to. Last one had a hard-on for three days. She thought it was funny.”

  “What stuff?” Even though she knows.

  “Hormone gel. It’s been making me crazy, like I want to fuck everyone, kill everyone. Nothing’s ever enough for her. I never been with a woman who can’t get enough.”

  Lucy leans against the door, crosses her arms. “Testosterone prescribed by a dirtbag proctologist in Charlotte.”

  Marino looks baffled. “How did you…” His face darkens. “Oh, I get it. You’ve been in here. That fucking figures.”

  “Who’s the asshole on the chopper, Marino? Who’s the jerk you almost killed in the Kick ’N Horse parking lot? The one who supposedly wants Aunt Kay dead or out of town?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “I believe you do.”

  “I’m tell
ing the truth, I swear. Shandy must know him. She must be the one trying to run the Doc out of town. The jealous fucking bitch.”

  “Or maybe it’s Dr. Self.”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Maybe you should have checked out your jealous fucking bitch,” Lucy says. “Maybe e-mailing Dr. Self to make Aunt Kay jealous was poking a snake with a stick. But I guess you were too busy having testosterone sex and raping my aunt.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “The worst thing I ever did,” Marino says.

  Lucy won’t take her eyes off his. “How about that silver-dollar necklace you got on? Where’d you get it?”

  “You know where.”

  “Shandy ever tell you about her potato-chip daddy’s house getting burglarized not long before she moved here? Burglarized right after he died, matter of fact. Had a coin collection, some cash. All gone. Police suspect an inside job but couldn’t prove it.”

  “The gold coin Bull found,” Marino says. “She’s never said nothing about a gold coin. The only coin I’ve seen is this silver dollar. How do you know Bull didn’t lose it? He’s the one who found that kid, and the coin’s got the kid’s print on it, right?”

  “What if the coin was stolen from Shandy’s dead daddy?” Lucy says. “What does that tell you?”

  “She didn’t kill the kid,” Marino says with a hint of doubt. “I mean, she’s never said nothing about having kids. If the coin has anything to do with her, she probably gave it to somebody. When she gave me mine, she laughed, said it was a dog tag to remind me I was one of her soldiers. Belonged to her. I didn’t know she meant it literally.”

  “Getting her DNA’s a fine idea,” Lucy says.

  Marino gets up and walks off. He comes back with the red panties. Puts them in a sandwich bag. Hands it to Lucy.

  “Kind of unusual you don’t know where she lives,” Lucy says.

  “I don’t know nothing about her. That’s the damn truth of it,” Marino says.

  “I’ll tell you exactly where she lives. This same island. A cozy little place on the water. Looks romantic. Oh. I forgot to mention, when I checked it out, I happened to notice a bike was there. An old chopper with a cardboard license tag, under a cover in the carport. Nobody was home.”

  “I never saw it coming. I didn’t use to be like this.”

  “He’s not going to come within a million miles of Aunt Kay again. I’ve taken care of him, because I don’t trust you to do it. His chopper’s old. A piece of junk with ape-hanger handlebars. I don’t think it’s safe.”

  Marino won’t look at her now. He says, “I didn’t use to be like this.”

  She opens the front door.

  “Why don’t you just get the hell out of our lives,” she says from his porch, in the rain. “I don’t give a shit about you anymore.”

  The old brick building watches Benton with empty eyes, many of its windows broken out. The abandoned cigar company has no lights, its parking lot completely dark.

  His laptop computer is balanced on his thighs as he logs in to the port’s wireless network, hijacks it, and waits inside Lucy’s black Subaru SUV, a car not generally associated with law enforcement. Periodically, he looks out the windshield. Rain slowly slides down the glass, as if the night is crying. He watches the chain-link fence around the empty shipyard across the street, watches the shapes of containers abandoned like wrecked train cars.

  “No activity,” he says.

  Lucy’s voice sounds in his earpiece. “Let’s hold tight as long as you can.”

  The radio frequency is a secure one. Lucy’s technological skills are beyond Benton, and he’s not naïve. All he knows is she has ways of securing this and that, and scramblers, and she thinks it’s great she can spy on others and they can’t spy on her. He hopes she’s right. About that and a lot of things, including her aunt. When he asked Lucy to send her plane, he said he didn’t want Scarpetta to know.

  “Why?” Lucy asked.

  “Because I’ll probably have to sit in a parked car all night, watching the damn port,” he said.

  It would make matters worse if she knew he was here, just a few miles from her house. She might insist on sitting here with him. To which Lucy offered that he was insane. There was no way Scarpetta would stake out the port with him. In Lucy’s words, that’s not her aunt’s job. She’s not a secret agent. She doesn’t particularly like guns, even though she certainly knows how to use them, and she prefers to take care of the victims and leave it to Lucy and Benton to take care of everybody else. What Lucy really meant was that sitting out here at the port could be dangerous, and she didn’t want Scarpetta doing it.

  Funny that Lucy didn’t mention Marino. That he could have helped.

  Benton sits inside the dark Subaru. It smells new—smells like leather. He watches the rain, and looks past it across the street, and monitors the laptop to make sure the Sandman hasn’t hijacked the port’s wireless network and logged on. But where would he do it? Not from this parking lot. Not from the street, because he wouldn’t dare stop his car in the middle of the street and just sit there sending yet another infernal e-mail to the infernal Dr. Self, who is probably back in New York by now inside her Central Park West penthouse apartment. It’s galling. It’s as unfair as anything could possibly be. Even if, in the end, the Sandman doesn’t get away with murder, Dr. Self most likely will, and she’s as much to blame for the murders as the Sandman is, because she sat on information, didn’t look into it, doesn’t care. Benton hates her. He wishes he didn’t. But he hates her more than he’s ever hated anybody in his life.

  Rain pummels the roof of the SUV, and fog shrouds distant streetlights, and he can’t tell the horizon from the sky, the harbor from the heavens. He can’t tell anything from anything in this weather, until something moves. He sits very still, and his heart kicks as a dark figure slowly moves along the fence across the street.

  “I’ve got activity.” He transmits to Lucy. “Anybody on, because I’m not seeing it.”

  “Nobody’s on.” Her voice comes back into his earpiece, and she’s confirming that the Sandman has not logged on to the port’s wireless network. “What kind of activity?” she asks.

  “At the fence. About three o’clock, not moving now. Holding at three o’clock.”

  “I’m ten minutes away. Not even.”

  “I’m getting out,” Benton says, and he slowly opens his car door, and the interior light is out. Complete darkness, and the rain sounds louder.

  He reaches under his jacket and slides out his gun, and he doesn’t shut the car door all the way. He doesn’t make a sound. He knows how to do this, has had to do it more times than he’d ever want to remember. He moves like a ghost, dark and silent, through puddles, through the rain. Every other step he stops, and he’s sure the person across the street doesn’t see him. What is he doing? Just standing there by the fence, not moving. Benton gets closer, and the figure doesn’t move. Benton can barely see the shape through blowing veils of water, and he can’t hear anything but the splashing of the rain.

  “You okay?” Lucy’s voice in his head.

  He doesn’t answer. He stops behind a telephone pole and smells creosote. The figure at the fence moves to the left, to the one o’clock position, and he starts to cross the street.

  Lucy says, “You ten-four?”

  Benton doesn’t answer, and the figure is so close, he can see the dark shadow of a face, and the distinct outline of a hat, then arms and legs moving. Benton steps out and points the pistol at him.

  “Don’t move.” He says it quietly in a tone that commands attention. “I’ve got a nine-mil pointed right at your head, so stand real still.”

  The man, and Benton feels sure it’s a man, has turned into a statue. He doesn’t make a sound.

  “Step off the road but not toward me. Step to your left. Very slowly. Now drop to your knees and put your hands on top of your head.” Then, to Lucy, he says, “I’ve got him
. You can close in.”

  As if she’s a stone’s throw away.

  “Hold on.” Her voice is tense. “Just hold on. I’m coming.”

  He knows she’s far away—too far away to help him if there’s a problem.

  The man has his hands on top of his head, and he’s kneeling on the cracked, wet blacktop, and he says, “Please don’t shoot.”

  “Who are you?” Benton says. “Tell me who you are.”

  “Don’t shoot.”

  “Who are you?” Benton raises his voice above the sound of the rain. “What are you doing here? Tell me who you are.”

  “Don’t shoot.”

  “Goddamn it. Tell me who you are. What are you doing at the port? Don’t make me ask you again.”

  “I know who you are. I recognize who you are. My hands are on my head, so there is no need to shoot,” the voice says as rain splashes, and Benton detects an accent. “I’m here to catch a killer, just like you. Am I right, Benton Wesley? Please put away your gun. It’s Otto Poma. I’m here for the same reason as you. It’s Captain Otto Poma. Please put the gun away.”

  Poe’s Tavern, a few minutes’ ride from Marino’s fishing shack. He could use a beer or two.

  The street is wet and shiny black, and the wind carries the smell of the rain and the scent of the sea and the marshes. He is soothed as he rides his Roadmaster through the dark, rainy night, knowing he shouldn’t drink, but he doesn’t know how to stop himself, and anyway, why does it matter? Ever since it happened, he has a sickness in his soul, a feeling of terror. The beast within has surfaced, the monster has shown himself, and what he’s always feared is right in front of him.