Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  Peter Rocco Marino isn’t a decent person. As is true of almost every criminal he’s caught, he has believed little in life is his fault, that he’s inherently good, brave, and well-intentioned, when the truth is quite the reverse. He’s selfish, sick, and bad. Bad, bad, bad. That’s why his wife left him. That’s why his career has gone to hell. That’s why Lucy hates him. That’s why he’s ruined the best thing he ever had. His relationship with Scarpetta is dead. He killed it. Brutalized it. Betrayed her again and again because of something she can’t help. She never wanted him, and why would she? She’s never been attracted to him. How could she be? So he punished her.

  He shifts into a higher gear as he gives his bike more gas. He rides much too fast, rain painful pinpricks against his bare skin, speeding to the strip, as he calls the hangouts of Sullivan’s Island. Cars are parked wherever there is space. No bikes, only his, because of the weather. He’s chilled, his hands stiff, and he feels unbearable pain and shame, and laced with it is a venomous anger. He unstraps his useless brain bucket of a helmet and hangs it from the handlebars and locks the bike’s front fork. His rain gear swishes as he walks inside a restaurant of unpainted worn wood and ceiling fans, and framed posters of ravens and probably every Edgar Allan Poe movie ever made. The bar is crowded, and his heart bumps hard and flutters like a startled bird when he notices Shandy between two men, one of them wearing a do-rag—the man Marino almost shot the other night. She is talking to him, pressing her body against his arm.

  Marino stands near the door, dripping rainwater on the scuffed floor, watching, wondering what to do as the wounds inside him swell, and his heart races, feels like horses galloping in his neck. Shandy and the man in the do-rag are drinking beer and shots of tequila and snacking on tortilla chips with chili con queso, the same thing she and Marino always order when they come here. Used to. In days past. Over and out. He didn’t use his hormone gel this morning. Threw it away with reluctance as the vile creature inside his darkness whispered mocking things. He can’t believe Shandy is so brazen as to come in here with that man, and the meaning is clear. She put him up to threatening the Doc. As bad as Shandy is, as bad as he is, as bad as they are together, Marino’s worse.

  What they tried to do to the Doc is nothing like what he did.

  He approaches the bar without looking in their direction, pretends he doesn’t see them, wondering why he didn’t spot Shandy’s BMW. She’s probably parked on a side street, always worried about someone dinging one of the doors. He wonders where the man with the do-rag’s chopper is and remembers what Lucy said about it. About it looking dangerous. She did something. She’ll probably do something to Marino’s bike next.

  “Whatcha have, hon? Where you been, anyway?” The bartender looks maybe fifteen, the way all young people look to Marino these days.

  He’s so depressed and distracted, he can’t remember her name, thinks it’s Shelly but is afraid to say. Maybe it’s Kelly. “Bud Lite.” He leans close to her. “Don’t look. But that guy over there with Shandy?”

  “Yeah, they’ve been in here before.”

  “Since when?” Marino asks as she slides a draft beer his way and he slides back a five.

  “Two for the price of one. So you got another one coming, hon. Oh, gosh. On and off for as long as I’ve worked here, hon. The past year, I guess. I don’t like either one of ’em, and that’s ’tween you and me. Don’t ask his name. I don’t know. He’s not the only one she comes in here with. I think she’s married.”

  “No shit.”

  “I hope you and her are taking a time out. For good, hon.”

  “I’m done with her,” Marino says, drinking his beer. “It was nothing.”

  “Nothing but trouble, my guess,” Shelly or Kelly says.

  He feels Shandy’s stare. She’s stopped talking to the man in the dorag, and now Marino has to wonder if she’s been having sex with him all along. Marino wonders about the stolen coins and where she gets her money. Maybe her daddy didn’t leave her anything and she felt she had to steal. Marino wonders about a lot of things and wishes he’d wondered all of them before. She sees him as he lifts his frosty mug, takes a swallow. Her glaring eyes look half crazy. He thinks about walking over to where she’s sitting, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

  He knows they won’t tell him anything. He’s sure they’ll laugh at him. Shandy nudges the man in the do-rag. He looks at Marino and smirks, must think it’s real funny, sitting there feeling up Shandy and knowing that all along she’s never been Marino’s woman. Who the hell else does she sleep with?

  Marino yanks off his silver-dollar necklace and drops it in his beer, and it makes a plopping sound and sinks to the bottom. He slides the mug across the bar, and it stops short of them, and he walks out, hoping he’ll be followed. The rain has let up, and the pavement is steaming under streetlights, and he sits on the wet seat of his motorcycle and waits, hoping he’ll be followed. He watches the front door of Poe’s Tavern, waiting and hoping. Maybe he can start a fight. Maybe they can finish it. He wishes his heart would slow down and his chest would stop hurting. Maybe he’ll have a heart attack. His heart ought to attack him, as bad as he is. He waits, looking at the door, looking at people on the other side of lighted windows, everybody happy except him. He waits and lights a cigarette and sits on his wet motorcycle in his wet rain gear, smoking and waiting.

  He’s such a nothing, he can’t even make people angry anymore. He can’t make anybody fight him. He’s such a nothing, he’s sitting out here in the rainy dark, smoking and looking at the door, wishing Shandy or the man in the do-rag or both of them would come out and make him feel he still has something worthwhile left in him. But the door doesn’t open. They don’t care. They aren’t scared. They think Marino’s a joke. He waits and smokes. He unlocks the front fork of his bike and starts the engine.

  He opens the throttle, rubber squealing, and rides fast. He leaves his bike under his fishing shack, leaves the key in the ignition because he doesn’t need his motorcycle anymore. Where he’s going, he won’t be riding motorcycles. He walks fast but not as fast as his heart is going, and in the dark he climbs the steps to his dock and he thinks about Shandy’s making fun of his old, rickety dock, saying it’s long and skinny and bent like a stick bug. He thought she was funny and clever with words when she said that the first time he brought her here, and they’d made love all night. Ten days ago. That’s all it was. He has to consider that she set him up, that it’s no coincidence she flirted with him the very night of the very day the dead little boy was found. Maybe she wanted to use Marino to get information. He let her. All because of a ring. The Doc got a ring, and Marino lost his mind. His big boots thud loudly on the pier, and its weathered wood shakes beneath the weight of him as no-see-ums swarm around him like something in a cartoon.

  At the end of the pier he stops, breathing hard, eaten alive by what feels like a million invisible teeth as tears flood his eyes and his chest heaves rapidly, the way he’s seen a man’s chest heave right after he’s gotten a lethal injection, right before his face turns dusky blue and he dies. It’s so dark and overcast, the water and the sky are one, and below him bumpers thud, and water softly laps against pilings.

  He cries out something that doesn’t seem to come from him as he hurls his cell phone and earpiece as hard as he can. He hurls them so far, he can’t hear them land.

  Chapter 19

  Y-12 National Security Complex. Scarpetta stops her rental car at a checkpoint in the midst of concrete blast barriers and fences topped with razor wire.

  She rolls down her window for the second time in the past five minutes and hands over her identification badge. The guard steps inside his booth to make a phone call while another guard searches the trunk of the red Dodge Stratus that Scarpetta was unhappy to find waiting for her at Hertz when she landed in Knoxville an hour ago. She’d requested an SUV. She doesn’t drive red. She doesn’t even wear red. The guards seem more vigilant than they’ve been in the past
, as if the car makes them wary, and they are already wary enough. Y-12 has the largest stockpile of enriched uranium in the country. Security is unyielding, and she never bothers the scientists here unless she has a special need that has reached, as she puts it, critical mass.

  In the back of the car is the brown-paper-wrapped window from Lydia Webster’s laundry room, and a small box containing the gold coin that has the unidentified murdered little boy’s fingerprint on it. In the far reaches of the complex is a redbrick lab building that looks like all the others, but housed within it is the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet.

  “You can pull over right there.” A guard points. “And he’ll be right here. You can follow him in.”

  She moves on and parks, waiting for the black Tahoe driven by Dr. Franz, the director of the materials science lab. She always follows him in. No matter how many times she’s been here, she not only can’t find her way, she wouldn’t dare try. Getting lost inside a facility that manufactures nuclear weapons isn’t an option. The Tahoe rolls up and turns around, and Dr. Franz’s arm waves out his window, motioning for her to proceed. She follows him past nondescript buildings with nondescript names, then the terrain dramatically changes into woods and open fields, and finally the one-story labs known as Technology 2020. The setting is deceptively bucolic. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz get out of their vehicles. She removes the brown-paper-wrapped window from the back, where it was held safely in place with the seat belt.

  “What fun things you bring us,” he says. “Last time, it was a complete door.”

  “And we found a bootprint, didn’t we—that nobody thought was there.”

  “There’s always a there there.” Dr. Franz’s motto.

  About her age and dressed in a polo shirt and baggy jeans, he isn’t what comes to mind when one conjures up the image of a nuclear metallurgical engineer who finds it fascinating to spend his time magnifying a milled tool part or a spider spinneret, or pieces and parts of a space shuttle or a submarine. She follows him inside what would look like a normal lab, were it not for the massive metal chamber supported by four dampening pillars the diameter of trees. The VisiTech Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope—LC-SEM—weighs ten tons, and required a forty-ton forklift to install it. Simply put, it’s the biggest microscope on earth, and its original intended use wasn’t forensic science but failure analysis of materials such as the metals used in weapons. But technology is technology, as far as Scarpetta is concerned, and by now Y-12 is used to her shameless begging.

  Dr. Franz unwraps the window. He places it and the coin on top of a three-inch-thick steel turntable, and begins positioning an electron gun the size of a small missile, and the detectors lurking behind it, lowering them as close as he can to suspect areas of sand and glue and broken glass. With a remote axis control, he slides and tilts. Hums and clicks. Stopping at end stops—or switches—that prevent precious parts from crashing into samples or one another or going over the edge. He closes the door so he can vacuum down the chamber to ten-to-the-minus-six, he explains. Then he’ll backfill the rest of it to ten-to-the-minus-two, he adds, and you couldn’t open the door if you tried, he says. Showing her. And what they basically have are the conditions of outer space, he explains. No moisture, no oxygen, just the molecules of a crime.

  The sound of vacuum pumps and an electrical smell, and the clean-room begins to heat up. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz leave, shutting an outer door, back in the lab now, and a column of red, yellow, green, and white lights remind them that no human is inside the chamber, because that would be almost instant death. It would be like a space walk without a suit, Dr. Franz says.

  He sits before a computer console with multiple large flat video screens, and says to Scarpetta, “Let’s see. What magnification? We can go up to two hundred thousand X.” They could, but he’s being droll.

  “And a grain of sand will look like a planet, and maybe we’ll discover little people living on it,” she says.

  “Exactly what I was thinking.” He clicks through layers of menus.

  She sits next to him, and the big roughing vacuum pumps remind Scarpetta of an MRI scanner, and then the turbo pump kicks in and is followed by a silence that is broken at intervals when the air dryer vents in a huge, heartfelt sigh that sounds like a whale. They wait for a while, and when they get a green light, they begin to look at what the instrument sees as the electron beam strikes an area of window glass.

  “Sand,” Dr. Franz says. “And what the heck?”

  Mingled with the different shapes and sizes of grains of sand that look like chips and shards of stone are spheres with craters that look like microscopic meteorites and moons. An elemental analysis confirms barium, antimony, and lead in addition to the silica of sand.

  “Did this case involve a shooting?” Dr. Franz says.

  “Not that I know of,” Scarpetta answers, and she adds, “It’s like Rome.”

  “Could be environmental or occupational particulate,” he supposes. “The highest peak, of course, is silicon. Plus traces of potassium, sodium, calcium, and don’t know why, but a trace of aluminum. I’m going to subtract out the background, which is glass.” Now he’s talking to himself.

  “This is similar—very similar—to what they found in Rome.” She says it again. “The sand in Drew Martin’s eye sockets. Same thing, and I’m repeating myself because I almost can’t believe it. Certainly, I don’t understand it. What appears to be gunshot residue. And these darkly shaded areas here?” She points. “These strata?”

  “The glue,” he says. “I would venture to say that the sand isn’t from there—from Rome or its surrounds. What about the sand in Drew Martin’s case? Since there was no basalt, nothing to indicate volcanic activity, such as you’d expect in that area. So he brought his own sand with him to Rome?”

  “I do know it’s never been assumed the sand came from there. At least not the nearby beaches of Ostia. I don’t know what he did. Maybe the sand is symbolic, has meaning. But I’ve seen magnified sand. I’ve seen magnified dirt. And I’ve never seen this.”

  Dr. Franz manipulates the contrast and magnification some more. He says, “And now it gets stranger.”

  “Maybe epithelial cells. Skin?” She scrutinizes what’s on the screen. “No mention of that in Drew Martin’s case. I need to call Captain Poma. It all depends on what was deemed important. Or noticed. And no matter how sophisticated the police lab, it’s not going to have R&D-quality instruments. It’s not going to have this.” She means the LC-SEM.

  “Well, I hope they didn’t use mass spec and digest the entire sample in acid. Or there won’t be anything left to retest.”

  “They didn’t,” she says. “Solid-phase x-ray analysis. Raman. Any skin cells should still be in the sand over there, but as I said, I’m not aware of it. There’s nothing on the report. No one mentioned it. I need to call Captain Poma.”

  “It’s already seven p.m. over there.”

  “He’s here. Well, in Charleston.”

  “Now I’m more confused. I thought you told me earlier he’s Carabiniere. Not Charleston PD.”

  “He showed up rather unexpectedly. In Charleston last night. Don’t ask me. I’m more confused than you are.”

  She’s still stung. It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when Benton appeared at her house last night and had Captain Poma with him. For an instant, she was speechless with surprise, and after coffee and soup, they left just as abruptly as they had arrived. She hasn’t seen Benton since, and she’s unhappy and hurt, and not sure what to say to him when she sees him—whenever that might be. Before she flew here this morning, she considered taking off her ring.

  “DNA,” Dr. Franz is saying. “So we don’t want to screw this up with bleach. But the signal would be better if we could get rid of skin debris and oils. If that’s what this is.”

  It’s like looking at constellations of stars. Do they resemble animals or even a dipper? Does the moon have a face? What is she really seeing? And she pushe
s Benton from her thoughts so she can concentrate.

  “No bleach, and to be safe, we definitely should try DNA,” she says. “And although epithelial cells are common in GSR, that’s only when a suspect’s hands are dabbed with double-sided sticky carbon tape. So what we’re seeing, if it’s skin, doesn’t make sense unless the skin cells were transferred by the killer’s hands. Or the cells were already on the windowpane. But what would be peculiar about the latter is the glass was cleaned, wiped off, and we’re seeing fibers from that. Consistent with white cotton, and the dirty T-shirt I found in the laundry basket is white cotton, but what does that mean? Not much, really. The laundry room would be a landfill of microscopic fibers.”

  “At this magnification, everything becomes a landfill.” Dr. Franz clicks the mouse, and manipulates and repositions, and the electron beam strikes an area of broken glass.

  Beneath the polyurethane foam, which dried clear, cracks look like canyons. Blurred white shapes might be more epithelial cells, and lines and pores are a skin imprint from some part of the body hitting the glass. There are fragments of hair.

  “Someone ran into it or punched it?” Dr. Franz says. “That’s how it was broken, maybe?”

  “Not with a hand or the bottom of a foot,” Scarpetta points out. “No friction ridge detail.” She can’t stop thinking about Rome. She says, “Instead of the GSR having been transferred from someone’s hands, maybe it was in the sand.”

  “You mean before he touched it?”

  “Maybe. Drew Martin wasn’t shot. We know that for a fact. Yet traces of barium, antimony, lead are in the sand found in her eye sockets.” She goes through it again, trying to sort it out. “He put the sand in there and then glued her eyelids shut. So what appears to be GSR could have been on his hands and was transferred to the sand, because certainly he touched it. But what if the GSR is there because it was already there?”