Trace ks-13

by Patricia Cornwell

  "I'm sorry she didn't. There's the second marker." He holds up a ski pole, pointing at an avalanche marker painted with a large 2.

  "She got over it," Lucy says as she steps in tracks made earlier, because it is easier. "She got over the rubber bullets too. But she didn't like that sim com much either."

  "You'd have to be crazy to like it."

  "I've had a few crazies come through who did. Maybe I'm one of them. They hurt like hell, but it's a rush. Why are you sorry she didn't quit? Do you think she should? I mean, well, I know I should fire her."

  "Fire her for being attacked in your house?"

  "I know. I can't fire her. She'll sue me."

  "Yes," he says. "I think she should quit. Hell yes." He looks at her as he poles ahead. "When you hired her away from LAPD your vision was as covered up as the mountains over there." He indicates the storm. "Maybe she was a good enough cop, but she's not cut out for your level of operation and I hope to hell she quits before something really bad happens."

  "Right," she says ruefully in a puff of frozen breath. "Really bad."

  "No one got killed."

  "So far," Lucy replies. "God, this is getting to me. You do this every day?"

  "Just about. Time permitting."

  "Running half-marathons is easier."

  "If you run where there's oxygen in the air," Benton says. "There's the number-one marker. One and two are close together, you'll be happy to know."

  "Pogue doesn't have a criminal record. He's just some loser. I can't believe it," Lucv says. "Some loser who worked for my aunt. Why? 'Why me? Maybe it's her he's really after. Maybe he blames Aunt Kay for his health problems and God knows what."

  "No," Benton replies. "He blames you."

  "Why? That's crazy."

  "Yes, more or less, it's crazy. You fit into his delusional thinking, that's all I can tell you, Lucy. He's punishing you. He was probably punishing you when he went after Henri. We can't know what goes through a mind like his. His logic is all his own, nothing like ours. I can tell you he's psychotic, not psychopathic, impulse-driven, not calculating. Delusional with magical thinking. That's about all I can tell you. Here it comes," he says, and tiny flakes of snow suddenly are swirling around them.

  Lucy lowers her goggles as gusts of wind rock aspen trees finely stenciled in dark shades of gray against the white mountains. The snow hits fast and is a small dry snow, and the wind is a crosswind that shoves them sideways as they move one snowshoe in front of another, picking their way along the frozen road.

  50

  Outside, the snow is piled high in the branches of the black spruce and in the crooks of the aspen trees. From her third-story window Lucy hears the crunch of ski boots on the crusty sidewalk below. The St. Regis is a sprawling red brick hotel that reminds her of a dragon crouched at the base of Ajax Mountain. The gondolas have not come to life yet at this early hour but people have. The mountains block the sun, and dawn is a blue-gray shadow with no sound except the cold, crunching steps of skiers on their way to the slopes and the buses.

  After their crazy trek up Maroon Creek Road yesterday afternoon, Benton and Lucy got into their separate vehicles and went their separate ways. He did not want her to come to Aspen to begin with, and he certainly never intended for Henri, whom he scarcely knew, to end up here, but that is life. Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upsets. Henri is here. Now Lucy is here. Benton said Lucy could not stay with him, understandably. He does not want her to cripple the progress he might be making with Henri, what little he might be making, if he has made any progress with her. But today Lucy will see Henri when it suits Henri. Two weeks have passed and Lucy can't stand it anymore, can't stand the guilt and the unanswered questions. Whatever Henri is, Lucy needs to see it for herself.

  As the morning becomes lighter, everything Benton did and said is clear. First he wore Lucy out in thin air, where it was hard for her to say too much too soon or give vent to her fear-driven fury. Then, for all practical purposes, he sent her to bed. She isn't a child, even if he seemed to treat her like one yesterday, and she knows he cares. She's always known. He has always been good to her, even when she hated him.

  She digs inside a duffel bag for a pair of stretch ski pants, a sweater, long silk underwear, and socks, and lays them on the bed next to her nine-millimeter Clock pistol with tritium sights and magazines that hold seventeen rounds, a gun she chooses when routine indoor self-protection is on her mind, when she wants a close contact gun with firepower, not knockdown power, because she wouldn't want to shoot a.40 or.45 caliber bullet or a high-power rifle round inside a hotel room. She hasn't figured out what she'll say to Henri or how she'll feel at the sight of her.

  Don't expect anything good, she thinks. Don't expect her to be happy to see you or to be nice or polite. Lucy sits on the bed and pulls off her sweatpants and grabs her t-shirt, snatching it off over her head. She pauses in front of the full-length mirror, looking at herself and making sure she isn't allowing age and gravity to get the best of her. They haven't and they shouldn't, because she isn't quite thirty.

  Her body is muscular and lean but not boyish, and she really has no complaint about her physical self but experiences an odd sensation whenever she studies her reflection. Then her body becomes a stranger, different on the outside from what she is inside. Not less or more attractive, just different from how she feels. And it drifts through her thoughts that no matter how many times she makes love, she will never know how her body feels, how her touch feels to her lover. She wishes she knew and is glad she doesn't.

  You look all right, she thinks, walking away from the mirror. You look good enough to get by, she thinks as she steps into the shower. The way you look isn't going to matter today, not one bit. You aren't going to be touching anyone today, she tells herself as she turns on the water. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. God, what am I going to do? she says out loud as hot water blasts against marble and splashes the glass door and drives down hard on her flesh. What have I done, Rudy? What have 1 done? Please don't quit on me. I promise I'll change. She has secretly cried in showers for almost half her life. When she started out in the FBI she was a teenager who got summer jobs and internships because of her influential aunt, and she had no business living in a dormitory at Quantico and shooting guns and running obstacle courses with agents who did not panic or cry, or at least she never saw them panic or cry. She assumed they never did. She believed many myths back then because she was young and gullible and in awe, and now she may know better but her early programming twisted her in a way that can't be straightened. If she cries, and she rarely does, she cries alone. When she hurts, she hides it.

  She is almost dressed when she becomes aware of the silence. Quietly swearing and suddenly frantic, she digs in a pocket of her ski jacket and finds her cell phone. The battery is dead. Last night she was too tired and unhappy to think about her phone and she forgot it and left it in her pocket, and that isn't like her, that is so unlike her. Rudy doesn't know where she is staying. Neither does her aunt. Neither of them knows the alias she is using, so even if they tried the St. Regis, they wouldn't find her. Only Benton knows where and who she is, and for her to cut Rudy off like this is unthinkable and unprofessional and he will be furious. Of all times, now was not the time to push him farther away. If he quits, what then? She trusts no one else she works with the way she trusts him. Finding the charger, she plugs in the phone and turns it on, and she has eleven messages, most of them left since six a.m. Eastern Standard Time, most of them from him.

  "I thought you'd dropped off the map," Rudy says the instant he answers. "I've been trying to get you for three hours. What are you doing?

  Since when don't you answer the phone? Don't tell me it's not working. I don't believe it. That phone works anywhere, and I've been trying you on the radio too. You've had the damn thing turned off, haven't you?"

  "Calm down, Rudy," she says. "My battery went dead. The phone, the radio don't work when the battery's dead. I'm
sorry."

  "You didn't bring a charger?"

  "I said I'm sorry, Rudy."

  "Well, we have a little bit of intelligence. It would be good if you could get back here ASAP."

  "What's going on?" Lucy sits down on the floor near the socket where her phone is plugged in.

  "Unfortunately, you're not the only one who got a little present from him. Some poor old woman got one of Pogue's chemical bombs, only she wasn't so lucky."

  "Jesus," Lucy says, shutting her eyes.

  "A waitress at a sleazy bar in Hollywood that's right across the street from a Shell station where guess what? They sell Big Gulps in Cat in the Hat cups. The victim's burned pretty bad but is going to make it. Apparently he's been coming into the place she works, the Other Way Lounge. Ever heard of it?"

  "No," she says almost inaudibly, thinking of the burned woman. "Jesus," she mutters.

  "So we're canvassing the area. I've got some of our people out. Not the recruits. They ain't the sharpest knives in the drawer, these ones aren't."

  "Jesus," is all she can think to say about it. "Can anything go right?"

  "They're going more right than they were. Two other things. Your aunt says Pogue might be wearing a wig. A long black curly wig. A dyed black human-hair wig. I guess the mitochondrial DNA was going to be pretty funny, right? Probably come back to some hooker who sold her hair to a wig company so she could buy crack."

  "You just telling me this now? A wig?"

  "Edgar Allan Pogue has red hair. Your aunt saw the red hairs in the bed

  in his house, in the house where he was staying. A wig could explain the long wavy dyed black hairs recovered from Gilly Paulsson's bed linens and from your bedroom and also the duct tape on the chemical bomb left in your mailbox. A wig would explain a lot of things, according to your aunt. We're also looking for his car. Turns out the old woman who died in the house where he's been staying, Mrs. Arnette, had a white 1991 Buick, and no one knows what happened to it after she died. The family never gave it a thought. Sounds like they never gave her a thought either. We think Pogue might be driving the Buick. It's still registered to Mrs. Arnette. It would be good if you come on back here ASAP. Probably not a good idea for you to stay in your house, though."

  "Don't worry," she says. "I won't ever stay in that house again."

  51

  Edgar Allan Pogue closes his eyes. He sits in his white Buick in a parking lot off AlA, listening to what people call adult rock these days. He keeps his eyes shut and tries not to cough. Whenever he coughs, his lungs burn and he feels dizzy and cold. He doesn't know where the weekend went, but it went all right. The adult rock station says it's rush hour, Monday morning. Pogue coughs, and tears fill his eyes as he tries to breathe deeply.

  He has caught a cold. He is certain he caught it from the redhaired waitress at the Other Way Lounge. She came close to his table when he was leaving Friday night. She came close, wiping her nose on a tissue, and she got much too close to him because she wanted to make sure he paid. As usual, he had to push back his chair and stand up before she bothered to check on him. The truth was, he would have liked another Bleeding Sunset and would have ordered one, but the redhaired waitress couldn't be bothered. None of them can be bothered. So she got a Big Orange and that's what she deserved.

  The sun comes through the front windshield and is warm on Pogue's face as he sits behind the steering wheel, the seat pushed back, his eyes shut. He hopes the sun will cure his cold. His mother always said that sunlight has vitamins in it and cures just about everything, which was why when people get old they move to Florida. That's what she told him. Someday, Edgar Allan, you'll move to Florida. You're young now, Edgar Allan, but someday you'll be ol'd and worn-out like I am, like most people are, and you'll want to move to Florida. If only you had a respectable job, Edgar Allan. I doubt you'll be able to afford Florida the rate you're going.

  His mother nagged him about money. She worried him to death about it. Then she died and left him enough to move to Florida someday if he wanted, and then he retired and started getting a check in the mail every two weeks, and the last check must be sitting in his post office box because he isn't in Richmond to pick it up. He has a little money even without his checks. For now, he has enough. He can still afford his expensive cigars, so he has enough, and if his mother were here she would nag him about smoking with a cold, but he's going to smoke. He thinks about the flu shot he missed, all because he heard that his old building was being torn down and that the Big Fish had opened an office in Hollywood. In Florida.

  Virginia hired a new chief medical examiner, and next thing Pogue knew, they were going to tear the old building down so the city could build a parking deck, and Lucy was in Florida, and if Scarpetta hadn't abandoned Pogue and Richmond, there would have been no need for a new chief and therefore the old building would be fine because everything would have stayed the same, and he would not have been late for his flu shot and would have gotten one. Tearing down his old building wasn't right or fair and no one bothered to ask him how he felt about it. It was his building. He still gets a paycheck every two weeks and he still has his key to the back door and he still works in the Anatomical Division, usually at night.

  He worked there all he wanted until he heard the building was coming down. He was the only one using the building. No one else cared about it in the least, and now he suddenly had to get his things out of there. All those people he had down there in little dented boxes had to be moved late at night, when no one could see him do it. What an ordeal, going up and down the stairs, in and out of the parking lot, his lungs burning as ashes leaked everywhere. One box slid off the stack he was carrying and spilled on the parking lot, and it was very hard to pick up ashes that seemed lighter than air and blew everywhere. What an awful ordeal. It wasn't fair, and next thing he knew, a month had passed and he was late for his flu shoe and there was no more vaccine. He coughs and his chest burns and his eyes tear up, and he sits very still in the sun, soaking in the vitamins, and he thinks of the Big Fish.

  He feels depressed and angry when he thinks of her. She knows nothing about him and never even said hello to him, and now he has stiff lungs because of her. He has nothing because of her. She has a mansion and cars that cost more than any house he's ever lived in, and she couldn't bother to say she was sorry the day it happened. In fact, she laughed. She thought it was funny when he jumped and gave out a little yelp like a little dog as he was walking out of the embalming room and she rattled past, riding a gurney. She was standing on a rung of the gurney, rattling past, laughing, and her aunt was standing by an open vat, talking to Dave about something going on with the General Assembly, some problem.

  Scarpetta never came down unless there was a problem. This particular day, and it was this same time of year, Christmastime, she brought the spoiled know-it-all Lucy with her, and he already knew about Scarpetta's niece. Everybody there did. He knew that she was from Florida. She lived in Florida, in Miami, with Scarpetta's sister. Pogue doesn't know all the details, but he knows enough, and he knew enough back then to realize that Lucy could soak in vitamins and not have anyone nag and complain that she would never do well enough to live in Florida.

  She already lived there, was born there and did nothing to earn it, and then she laughed at Pogue. She rode by on the gurney and almost hit him when he was walking past, pushing an empty fifty-gallon drum of formaldehyde on a dolly, and because of Lucy, he jumped and came to an abrupt halt and the dolly tipped and the drum toppled over and rolled, and Lucy clattered by on the gurney like a bratty kid riding a shopping cart in the grocery store, only she wasn't a kid, she was a teenager, a very bratty pretty prideful seventeen-year-old, and Pogue remembers her age exactly. He knows her birthday. For years he has sent her anonymous sympathy cards on her birthday, in care of Scarpetta at the OCME at the old 9 North 14th Street address, even after the building was abandoned. He doubts Lucy ever got them.

  That day, that fateful day, Scarpetta stood by the
open vat, and she was wearing a lab coat over a very smart dark suit because she had a meeting with a legislator, she told Dave, and was going to address whatever the problem was. She was going to talk to the legislator about some proposed cockeyed bill, and Pogue can't remember what it was because at the time the bill wasn't the point of anything. He takes a breath and it rattles in his stiff lungs as he sits in the sun. Scarpetta was a very good-looking woman when she was dressed smartly like she was that morning, and it always pained Pogue to look at her when she wasn't looking at him, and he would feel a deep twinge that he couldn't define when he watched her from a distance. He felt something for Lucy but it was different, what he felt for her. He sensed the intensity of what Scarpetta felt for her, and that made him feel something for Lucy. But it was different.

  The empty drum made the most god-awful racket as it rolled across the tile, and Pogue rushed to grab it as it rolled right toward Lucy on the gurney, and it was never possible to get every drop of formaldehyde out of a fifty-gallon metal drum, and the swill in the bottom was spilling and splashing as the drum rolled. Several drops hit his face as he grabbed the drum, and one drop went into his mouth and he inhaled it. Then he was coughing and vomiting in the bathroom and no one came to check on him. Scarpetta didn't. Lucy certainly didn't. He could hear Lucy through the closed bathroom door. She was riding the gurney again, laughing. No one knew that Pogue's life was broken at that precise moment, broken for good.