I realize Lucy is talking to me. She has gotten up from her spot before the fire and is pulling a chair close to me. She sits and leans over, touching my good arm, as if trying to wake me up. “Aunt Kay?” she says. “You with us, Aunt Kay? Are you listening?”
I focus on her. Marino is telling Stanfield over the phone that they will meet in the morning. It sounds like a threat. “He and I rendezvoused at Phil’s for a beer.” She glances toward the kitchen and I remember Marino telling me late this morning that he and Lucy were getting together this afternoon because she had news for him. “We know about the guy from the motel.” Now she refers to McGovern, who sits very still by the fire, looking at me, waiting to see how I will react when Lucy tells me the rest. “Teun’s been here since Saturday,” Lucy then says. “When I called you from the Jefferson, remember? Teun was with me. I asked her to get here right away.”
“Oh,” is all I can think to say. “Well, that’s good. It bothered me to think of you alone in a hotel.” Tears flood my eyes. I am embarrassed and look away from Lucy and McGovern. I am supposed to be strong. I am the one who has always rescued my niece from trouble, most of it of her own making. I have always been the torchbearer who guided her along the right path. I put her through college. I bought her books, her first computer, sent her to any special course she wanted to attend anywhere in the country. I took her to London with me one summer. I have stood up to anyone who tried to interfere with Lucy, including her mother, who has rewarded my efforts with nothing but abuse. “You’re supposed to respect me,” I say to my niece as I wipe tears with my palm. “How can you anymore?”
She stands up again and looks down at me. “That’s total bullshit,” she says with feeling, and now Marino is returning to the living room, another bourbon in hand. “This isn’t about my not respecting you,” Lucy says. “Jesus Christ. Nobody in the room has any less respect for you, Aunt Kay. But you need help. For once, you’ve got to let other people help you. You sure as hell can’t deal with this all by yourself, and maybe you need to sit on your pride a little and let us help, you know? It’s not like I’m still ten years old. I’m twenty-eight, okay? I’m not a virgin. I’ve been an FBI agent, an ATF agent and am fucking rich. I could be any kind of fucking agent I want.” Her wounds inflame before my eyes. She does care about being put on administrative leave; of course she cares. “And now I’m being my own agent, doing things my own way,” she goes on.
“I resigned tonight,” I tell her. A stunned silence follows.
“What did you say?” Marino asks me, standing in front of the fire, drinking. “You did what?”
“I told the governor,” I reply, and an inexplicable calm begins to settle over me. It feels good to consider that I did something instead of everything being done to me. Maybe quitting my job makes me less a victim, if I am willing to finally admit that I am a victim. I suppose I am one, and the only comeback is to finish what Chandonne started: end my life as I have known it and start all over. What a weird and stunning thought. I tell Marino, McGovern and Lucy all about my conversation with Mike Mitchell.
“Hold on.” Marino is sitting on the hearth. It is getting close to midnight and Anna is so quiet I forgot for a moment that she was in the house. Maybe she has gone to bed. “This mean you can’t work cases no more?” Marino says to me.
“Not at all,” I reply. “I’ll be acting chief until the governor decides otherwise.” No one asks me what I plan to do with the rest of my life. It really doesn’t make sense to worry about some distant future when the present is shot. I am grateful not to be asked and probably am sending out my usual signals that I don’t want to be asked. People sense when to remain silent, or if nothing else, I deflect their interest and they don’t even realize I have just manipulated them into not probing for information that I prefer to keep to myself. I became an expert at this maneuver at a very young age when I didn’t want my classmates asking me about my father and if he was still sick or would ever get better or what it is like to have your father die. I was conditioned not to tell, and I was conditioned not to ask, either. The last three years of my father’s life were spent in absolute avoidance by my entire family, including him, especially him. He was a lot like Marino, both of them macho Italian men who seem to assume their bodies will never part company with them, no matter how ill or out of shape. I envision my father as Lucy, Marino and McGovern talk about all they plan to do and are already doing to help me, including background checks already in the works and all sorts of things The Last Precinct has to offer me.
I really am not listening. Their voices may as well be the chatter of crows as I remember the thick Miami grass of my childhood, and dried-out chinch bug husks and the key lime tree in my small backyard. My father taught me how to crack coconuts on the driveway with a hammer and a screwdriver, and I would spend an inordinate amount of time prying the fleshy, sweet white meat from the hard, hairy shell, and he got a lot of amusement from observing my obsessive labors. The coconut meat would go in the squat white refrigerator, and no one, including me, ever ate it. During blistering summer Saturdays, my father would surprise Dorothy and me now and then by bringing home two big blocks of ice from his neighborhood grocery store. We had a small, inflatable pool we filled with the hose, and my sister and I would sit on the ice, getting scorched by the sun while we froze our asses off. We would jump in and out of the pool to thaw, then perch on our frigid, slick thrones again like princesses while my father laughed at us through the living room window, laughed hilariously and tapped on the glass, playing Fats Waller full blast on the hi-fi.
My father was a good man. When he felt halfway decent he was generous, thoughtful and full of humor and fun. He was handsome, of medium height, blond and broad-shouldered when he wasn’t wasted by cancer. His full name was Kay Marcellus Scarpetta III, and he insisted that his firstborn take this name, which has been in the family since Verona. It didn’t matter that I happened to arrive first, a girl. Kay is one of those names that can be assigned to either gender, but my mother has always called me Katie. In part, according to her, it was confusing to have two Kays in the house. Later, when that was no longer an issue because I was the only Kay left, she still called me Katie, refusing to accept my father’s death, to get over it, and she still isn’t over it. She won’t let him go. My father died more than thirty years ago, when I was twelve, and my mother has never gone out with another man. She still wears her wedding band. She still calls me Katie.
LUCY AND MCGOVERN go over plans until past midnight. They have given up trying to include me in their conversations and no longer even seem to notice that I have slipped away to the Old Country in my mind, staring into the fire, absently massaging my stiff left hand and worming a finger under plaster to scratch my miserable, air-starved flesh. Finally, Marino yawns like a bear and pulls himself to his feet. He is made slightly unsteady by bourbon and smells like stale cigarettes, and regards me with a softness in his eyes that I might call sad love if I were willing to accept his true feelings for me. “Come on,” he says to me. “Walk me out to my truck, Doc.” This is his way of calling for a treaty between us. Marino is not a brute. He is feeling bad about the way he has been treating me since I was almost murdered, and he has never seen me so distant and strangely quiet.
The night is cold and still, and stars are shy behind vague clouds. From Anna’s driveway, I take in the glow of her many candles in the windows and am reminded that tomorrow is Christmas Eve, the last Christmas Eve of the twentieth century. Keys disturb the peace as Marino unlocks his truck and hesitates awkwardly before opening the driver’s door. “We got a lot to do. I’ll meet you at the morgue early.” This is not what he really wants to say. He stares up at the dark sky and sighs. “Shit, Doc. Look, I’ve known for a while, okay? By now you’ve figured that out. I’ve known what that son of a bitch Righter was up to and I had to let it run its course.”
“When were you going to tell me?” I don’t ask this accusingly, simply curiously.
&n
bsp; He shrugs. “I’m glad Anna brought it up first. I know you didn’t kill Diane Bray, for God’s sake. But I wouldn’t blame you if you had, truth be told. She was the biggest fucking bitch ever born. In my book, if you’d done her in, it would have been damn self-defense.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been.” I address the possibility seriously. “It wouldn’t have been, Marino. And I didn’t kill her.” I look closely at his hulking shape in the castoffs of carriage lamps and holiday lights in trees. “You’ve never really thought . . . ?” I don’t finish the question. Maybe I really don’t want to know his answer.
“Hell, I’m not sure what I’ve been thinking lately,” he says. “That’s the truth. But what am I going to do, Doc?”
“Do? About what?” I don’t know what he means.
He shrugs and gets choked up. I can’t believe it. Marino is about to cry. “If you quit.” His voice rises and he clears his throat and fumbles for his Lucky Strikes. He cups his huge hands around my hand and lights a cigarette for me, his skin rough against mine, the hairs on the back of his wrists whispering against my chin. He smokes, staring off, heartbroken. “Then what? I’m supposed to go down to the fucking morgue and you ain’t there anymore? Hell, I wouldn’t go down to that stink-hole half as much as I do if it wasn’t for you being there, Doc. You’re the only damn thing that gives any life to that joint, no kidding.”
I hug him. I barely come up to his chest, and his belly separates the beat of our hearts. He has raised his own barriers in this life and I am overwhelmed by an immeasurable compassion and need for him. I pat his broad chest and let him know, “We’ve been together for a long time, Marino. You’re not rid of me yet.”
CHAPTER 21
TEETH HAVE THEIR own stories. Your dental habits often reveal more about you than jewelry or designer clothes and can identify you to the exclusion of all others, providing you have premortem records for comparison. Teeth tell me about your hygiene. They whisper secrets about drug abuse, early childhood antibiotics, disease, injury and how important your appearance was to you. They confess if your dentist was a crook and billed your insurance company for work that was never done. They tell me, for that matter, if your dentist was competent.
Marino meets me at the morgue before daylight the next morning. He has in hand the dental records of a twenty-two-year-old James City County man who went out jogging yesterday near the campus of William & Mary and never returned home. His name is Mitch Barbosa. William & Mary is but a few miles from The Fort James Motel, and when Marino talked to Stanfield last night and was given this latest information, my first thought was, “How odd.” Marino’s shifty attorney son, Rocky Caggiano, went to William & Mary. Life offers up yet one more eerie coincidence.
It is six-forty-five when I roll the body out of the X-ray room and over to my station inside the autopsy suite. Again, it is quiet. It is Christmas Eve and all state offices are closed. Marino is suited up to assist me, and I don’t expect another living person—except the forensic dentist—to show up here right now. Marino’s part will be to help me undress the stiff, unwilling body and lift it to and from the autopsy table. I would never allow him to assist in any medical procedure—not that he has ever volunteered. I have never asked him to scribe and won’t because his slaughter of Latin medical words and terms is remarkable.
“Hold him on either side,” I direct Marino. “Good. Just like that.”
Marino grips either side of the dead man’s head, trying to hold it still as I work a thin chisel into the side of the mouth, sliding it between molars to pry open the jaws. Steel scrapes against enamel. I am careful not to cut the lips, but it is inevitable that I chip the surfaces of the back teeth.
“It’s just a damn good thing people are dead when you do shit like this to them,” Marino says. “Bet you’ll be glad when you got two hands again.”
“Don’t remind me.” I am so sick of my cast, I have had thoughts of cutting it off myself with a Stryker saw.
The dead man’s jaws give up and open, and I turn on the surgical lamp and fill the inside of his mouth with white light. There are fibers on his tongue, and I collect them. Marino helps me break the rigor mortis in the arms so we can get the jacket and shirt off, and then I take off shoes and socks, and finally the warm-up pants and running shorts. I PERK him and find no evidence of injury to his anus, nothing so far to suggest homosexual activity. Marino’s pager goes off. It is Stanfield again. Marino has not said a word about Rocky this morning, but the specter of him hovers. Rocky is in the air, and the effect this has on his father is subtle but profound. A heavy, helpless anguish radiates from Marino like body heat. I should be worried about what Rocky has in store for me, but all I can think about is what will happen to Marino.
Now that my patient is naked before me, I take in the full picture of who he was physically. He is five-foot-seven and a lean one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. He has muscular legs but little muscle development in his upper body, which is consistent with a runner. He has no tattoos, is circumcised and clearly cared about his grooming, based on his neatly manicured fingernails and toenails and clean-shaven face. So far, I find no evidence of injury externally, and X rays reveal no projectiles, no fractures. He has old scars on his knees and left elbow, but nothing fresh except the abrasions from being bound and gagged. What happened to you? Why did you die? He remains silent. Only Marino is talking in a blunt, loud way to disguise how unsettled he is. He thinks Stanfield is a dolt and treats him as such. Marino is more impatient, more insulting than usual.
“Yeah, well, it sure would be nice if we knew that,” Marino blasts sarcasm into the wallphone. “Death don’t take no holiday,” he adds a moment later. “You tell whoever I’m coming and they will let me in.” Then, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. ’Tis the season. And Stanfield? Keep your mouth shut, okay? You got that? I read about this in the goddamn paper one more time . . . Oh really, well, maybe you didn’t see the Richmond paper yet. I’ll make sure and tear out this morning’s article for you. All this Jamestown shit, hate crime shit. One more peep and I’m gonna get tear-ass. You never seen me tear-ass and you don’t want to.”
Marino pulls on fresh gloves as he returns to the gurney, his gown flapping around his legs. “Well, it just gets more squirrelly, Doc. Assuming this guy here’s our disappeared jogger, it appears we’re dealing with a garden-variety truck driver. No record. No trouble. Lived in a condo with a girlfriend who’s ID’ed him by photo. That’s who Stanfield talked to late last night, apparently, but she ain’t answering the phone so far this morning.” He gets a lost look on his face, not certain how much he has already told me.
“Let’s get him on the table,” I say.
I parallel-park the gurney next to the autopsy table. Marino gets the feet, I grab an arm, and we pull. The body bangs against steel and blood trickles from the nose. I turn on water and it drums into the steel sink, the dead man’s X rays glowing from light boxes on the wall, revealing perfectly pristine bones, and the skull from different angles, and the zipper of the warm-up jacket snaking down each side of gracefully bowed ribs. The buzzer sounds out in the bay as I run a scalpel from shoulder to shoulder, then down to the pelvis, making a small detour around the navel. I observe Dr. Sam Terry’s image on closed-circuit TV and hit a button with my elbow to open the bay door. He is one of our odontologists, or forensic dentists, whose bad luck it is to be on call Christmas Eve.
“I’m thinking we need to drop by and pay her a visit while we’re in the area,” Marino goes on. “I got her address, the girlfriend. The condo where they live.” He glances down at the body. “Lived, I guess.”
“And you think Stanfield can keep his mouth shut?” I reflect back tissue with staccato cuts of the scalpel, awkwardly gripping forceps in the gloved fingertips of my plaster-bound left hand.
“Yeah. Says he’ll meet us at the motel, which ain’t being real friendly, moaning and groaning it’s Christmas Eve and they don’t want any more attention because it’s already hurt thei
r business. Something like ten cancellations because of people hearing about it on the news. Yeah, like bullshit, is what I say. Most the people who stay in that dump probably don’t know shit about what’s happened around here or care.”
Dr. Terry walks in, his scuffed black doctor’s bag in hand, a fresh surgical gown untied in back and billowing as he heads to the counter. He is our youngest and newest odontologist and is almost seven feet tall. Legend has it that he could have had a career with the NBA but wanted to continue his education. The truth, and he’ll tell you if you ask, is he was a mediocre guard at Virginia Commonwealth University, that the only good shooting he has ever done is with guns, the only good rebounding is with women and he only went into dentistry because he couldn’t get into medical school. Terry desperately wanted to be a forensic pathologist. What he’s doing as basically a volunteer is as close as he will ever get.
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