Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I feel really bad,” she continues to repeat herself over the phone as Marino maintains his position on my bed and I pace.

  “You shouldn’t,” I tell her. “The police don’t want anybody here, and believe me, you don’t want to be here. I guess you’re staying with Jo and that’s good.” I say this to her as if it makes no difference to me, as if it doesn’t bother me that she is not here and I haven’t seen her all day. It does make a difference. It does bother me. But it is my old habit to give people an out. I don’t like to be rejected, especially by Lucy Farinelli, whom I have raised like a daughter.

  She hesitates before answering. “Actually, I’m downtown at the Jefferson.”

  I try to make sense of this. The Jefferson is the grandest hotel in the city, and I don’t know why she would go to a hotel at all, much less an elegant, expensive one. Tears sting my eyes and I force them back, clearing my throat, shoving down hurt. “Oh,” is all I say. “Well, that’s good. I guess Jo’s with you at the hotel, then.”

  “No, with her family. Look, I just checked in. I’ve got a room for you. Why don’t I come get you?”

  “A hotel’s probably not a good idea right now.” She thought of me and wants me with her. I feel a little better. “Anna’s asked me to stay with her. In light of everything, I think it’s best for me to go on to her house. She’s invited you, too. But I guess you’re settled.”

  “How did Anna know?” Lucy inquires. “She hear about it on the news?”

  Since the attempt on my life happened at a very late hour, it won’t be in the newspapers until tomorrow morning. But I expect there has been a storm of news breaks over the radio and on television. I don’t know how Anna knew, now that I think about it. Lucy says she needs to stay put but will try to drop by later tonight. We hang up.

  “The media finds out you’re in a hotel, that’s all you need. They’ll be behind every bush,” Marino says with a hard frown, looking like hell. “Where’s Lucy staying?”

  I repeat what she told me and almost wish I hadn’t talked to her. All it did was make me feel worse. Trapped, I feel trapped, as if I am inside a diving bell a thousand feet under the sea, detached, light-headed, the world beyond me suddenly unrecognizable and surreal. I am numb yet every nerve is on fire.

  “The Jefferson?” Marino is saying. “You gotta be kidding! She win the lottery or something? She not worried about the media finding her, too? What the shit’s gotten into her?”

  I resume packing. I can’t answer his questions. I am so tired of questions.

  “And she ain’t at Jo’s house. Huh,” he goes on, “that’s interesting. Huh. Never thought that would last.” He yawns loudly and rubs his thick-featured, stubbly face as he watches me drape suits over a chair, continuing to pick out clothes for the office. To give Marino credit, he has tried to be even-tempered, even considerate, since I got home from the hospital. Decent behavior is difficult for him given the best of circumstances, which certainly are not the ones he finds himself in at present. He is strung out, sleep-deprived and fueled by caffeine and junk food, and I won’t allow him to smoke inside my house. It was simply a matter of time before his self-control began to erode and he stepped back into his rude, big-mouthed character. I witness the metamorphosis and am strangely relieved by it. I am desperate for things familiar, no matter how unpleasant. Marino starts talking about what Lucy did last night when she pulled up in front of the house and discovered Jean-Baptiste Chandonne and me in my snowy front yard.

  “Hey, it’s not that I blame her for wanting to blow the squirrel’s brains out,” Marino gives me his commentary. “But that’s where your training’s got to come in. Don’t matter if it’s your aunt or your kid involved, you got to do what you’re trained to do, and she didn’t. She sure as hell didn’t. What she did was go ape-shit.”

  “I’ve seen you go ape-shit a few times in your life,” I remind him.

  “Well, it’s my personal opinion they never should have thrown her into that undercover work down there in Miami.” Lucy is assigned to the Miami field office and is here for the holidays, among other reasons. “Sometimes people get too close to the bad guys and start identifying with them. Lucy’s in a kill mode. She’s gotten trigger-happy, Doc.”

  “That’s not fair.” I realize I have packed too many pairs of shoes. “Tell me what you would have done if you’d gotten to my house first instead of her.” I stop what I am doing and look at him.

  “At least take a nanosecond to assess the situation before I went in there and put a gun to the asshole’s head. Shit. The guy was so fucked up he couldn’t even see what he was doing. He’s screaming bloody murder because he’s got this chemical shit you threw in his eyes. He wasn’t armed by this point. He wasn’t going to be hurting nobody. That was obvious right away. And it was obvious you was hurt, too. So if it had been me, I’d called for an ambulance, and Lucy didn’t think to even do that. She’s a wild card, Doc. And no, I didn’t want her in the house with all this going on. That’s why we interviewed her down at the station, got her statements in a neutral place to get her calmed down.”

  “I don’t consider an interrogation room a neutral place,” I reply.

  “Well, being inside the house where your Aunt Kay almost got whacked ain’t exactly neutral, either.”

  I don’t disagree with him, but sarcasm is poisoning his tone. I begin to resent it.

  “All the same, I got to tell you I’ve got a really bad feeling about her being alone in a hotel right now,” he adds, rubbing his face again, and no matter what he says to the contrary, he thinks the world of my niece and would do anything for her. He has known her since she was ten, and he introduced her to trucks and big engines and guns and all sorts of so-called manly interests that he now criticizes her for having in her life. “I might just check on the little shit after I drop you off at Anna’s. Not that anybody seems to care about my bad feelings,” he jumps back several thoughts. “Like Jay Talley. Of course, it ain’t my business. The self-centered bastard.”

  “He waited with me the entire time at the hospital,” I defend Jay yet one more time, deflecting Marino’s naked jealousy. Jay is ATF’s Interpol liaison. I don’t know him very well but slept with him in Paris four days ago. “And I was there thirteen or fourteen hours,” I go on as Marino practically rolls his eyes. “I don’t call that self-centered.”

  “Jesus!” Marino exclaims. “Where’d you hear that fairy tale?” His eyes burn with resentment. He despises Jay and did the first time he ever laid eyes on him in France. “I can’t believe it. He lets you think he was at the hospital all that time? He didn’t wait for you! That’s total bullshit. He took you there on his fucking white horse and came right back here. Then he called to see when you was going to be ready to check out and slithered back to the hospital and picked you up.”

  “Which makes good sense.” I don’t show my dismay. “No point in sitting and doing nothing. And he never said he was there the entire time. I just assumed it.”

  “Yeah, why? Because he let you assume it. He lets you think something that isn’t true, and you ain’t bothered by that? In my book, that’s known as a character flaw. It’s called lying. . . . What?” He abruptly changes his tone. Someone is in my doorway.

  A uniformed officer whose nameplate reads M. I. Calloway steps inside my bedroom. “I’m sorry,” she addresses Marino right off. “Captain, I didn’t know you were back here.”

  “Well, now you know.” He gives her a black look.

  “Dr. Scarpetta?” Her wide eyes are like Ping-Pong balls, bouncing back and forth between Marino and me. “I need to ask you about the jar. Where the jar of the chemical, the formulin . . .”

  “Formalin,” I quietly correct her.

  “Right,” she says. “Exactly, I mean, where exactly was the jar when you picked it up?”

  Marino remains on the bed, as if he makes himself at home on the foot of my bed every day of his life. He starts feeling for his cigarettes.

  “Th
e coffee table in the great room,” I answer Calloway. “I’ve already told everybody that.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but where on the coffee table? It’s a pretty big coffee table. I’m really sorry to bother you with all this. It’s just we’re trying to reconstruct how it all happened, because later it’s only going to get harder to remember.”

  Marino slowly shakes a Lucky Strike loose from the pack. “Calloway?” He doesn’t even look at her. “Since when are you a detective? Don’t seem I remember you being in A Squad.” He is the head of the Richmond Police Department’s violent crime unit known as A Squad.

  “We just aren’t sure where the jar was, Captain.” Her cheeks burn.

  The cops probably assumed a woman coming back here to question me would be less intrusive than a male. Perhaps her comrades sent her back here for that reason, or maybe it was simply that she got the assignment because no one else wanted to tangle with me.

  “When you walk into the great room and face the coffee table, it’s the right corner of the table closest to you,” I say to her. I have been through this many times. Nothing is clear. What happened is a blur, an unreal torquing of reality.

  “And that’s approximately where you were standing when you threw the chemical on him?” Calloway asks me.

  “No. I was on the other side of the couch. Near the sliding glass door. He was chasing me and that’s where I ended up,” I explain.

  “And after that you ran directly out of the house . . . ?” Calloway scratches through something she is writing on her small memo pad.

  “Through the dining room,” I interrupt her. “Where my gun was, where I happened to have set it on the dining room table earlier in the evening. Not a good place to leave it, I admit.” My mind meanders. I feel as if I have severe jet lag. “I hit the panic alarm and went out the front door. With the gun, the Glock. But I slipped on ice and fractured my elbow. I couldn’t pull the slide back, not with just one hand.”

  She writes this down, too. My story is tired and the same. If I have to tell it one more time, I might become irrational, and no cop on this planet has ever seen me irrational.

  “You never fired it?” She glances up at me and wets her lips.

  “I couldn’t cock it.”

  “You never tried to fire it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by try. I couldn’t cock it.”

  “But you tried to?”

  “You need a translator or something?” Marino erupts. The ominous way he stares at M. I. Calloway reminds me of the red dot a laser sight marks on a person before a bullet follows. “The gun wasn’t cocked and she didn’t fire it, you got that?” he repeats slowly and rudely. “How many cartridges you have in the magazine?” He directs this to me. “Eighteen? It’s a Glock Seventeen, takes eighteen in the mag, one in the chamber, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Probably not eighteen, definitely not. It’s hard to get that many rounds in it because the spring’s stiff, the spring in the magazine.”

  “Right, right. You remember the last time you shot that gun?” he then asks me.

  “Whenever I was at the range last. Months at least.”

  “You always clean your guns after you go to the range, don’t you, Doc.” This is a statement, not an inquiry. Marino knows my habits and routines.

  “Yes.” I am standing in the middle of my bedroom, blinking. I have a headache and the lights hurt my eyes.

  “You looked at the gun, Calloway? I mean, you’ve examined it, right?” He fixes her in his laser sight again. “So what’s the deal?” He flaps a hand at her as if she is a stupid nuisance. “Tell me what you found.”

  She hesitates. I sense she doesn’t want to give out information in front of me. Marino’s question hangs heavy like moisture about to precipitate. I decide on two skirts, one navy blue, one gray, and drape them over the chair.

  “There are fourteen rounds in the magazine,” Calloway tells him in a robotic military tone. “There wasn’t one in the chamber. It wasn’t cocked. And it looks clean.”

  “Well, well. Then it wasn’t cocked and she didn’t shoot it. And it was a dark and stormy night and three Indians sat around a campfire. We want to go round and round, or can we fucking move along?” He is sweating and his body odor rises with his heat.

  “Look, there’s nothing new to add,” I say, suddenly on the verge of tears, cold and trembling and smelling Chandonne’s awful stench again.

  “And why was it you had the jar in your home? And what exactly was in it? That stuff you use in the morgue, right?” Calloway positions herself to take Marino out of her sight line.

  “Formalin. A ten percent dilution of formaldehyde known as formalin,” I say. “It’s used in the morgue to fix tissue, yes. Sections of organs. Skin, in this case.”

  I dashed a caustic chemical into the eyes of another human being. I maimed him. Maybe I permanently blinded him. I imagine him strapped to a bed on the ninth-floor prison ward of the Medical College of Virginia. I saved my own life and feel no satisfaction in that fact. All I feel is ruined.

  “So you had human tissue in your house. The skin. A tattoo. From that unidentified body at the port? The one in the cargo container?” The sound of Calloway’s voice, of her pen, of pages flipping, reminds me of reporters. “I don’t mean to be dense, but why would you have something like that at your house?”

  I go on to explain that we have had a very difficult time identifying the body from the port. We had nothing beyond a tattoo, really, and last week I drove to Petersburg and had an experienced tattoo artist look at the tattoo from my case. I came directly home afterward, which is why the tattoo in its jar of formalin happened to be in my house last night. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have something like that in my house,” I add.

  “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.

&nb
sp; “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.