“I hope you aren’t working here all by yourself at night,” I said to the clerk, because it was my irrepressible habit to give security tips whether or not anyone wanted them.
“I’ve got Pickle,” she affectionately referred to her fat black cat.
“That’s an interesting name.”
“You leave an open pickle jar around, and she’ll get into it. Dips her paw right in, ever since she was a kitten.”
Pickle was sitting in a doorway leading into a room that I suspected was the clerk’s private quarters. The cat’s eyes were gold coins fixed on me as her fluffy tail twitched. She looked bored when the bell rang and her owner unlocked the door for a man in a tank top who was holding a burned-out lightbulb.
“Looks like it done it again, Helen.” He handed her the evidence.
She went into a cabinet and brought out a box of lightbulbs as I gave Lucy plenty of time to get off the pay phone so I could use it. I glanced at my watch, certain Benton should have made it to Hilton Head by now.
“Here you go, Big Jim.” She exchanged a new lightbulb for bad. “That’s sixty watts?” She squinted at it. “Uh huh. You here a little longer?” She sounded as if she hoped he would be.
“Hell if I know.”
“Oh dear,” said Helen. “So things still aren’t too good.”
“When have they ever been?” He shook his head as he went out into the night.
“Fighting with his wife again,” Helen the clerk commented to me as she shook her head, too. “Course, he’s been here before, which is partly why they fight so much. Never knew there’d be so many people cheating on each other. Half the business here is from folks just three miles down the road.”
“And they can’t fool you,” I said.
“Oh no-sir-ree-bob. But it’s none of my business as long as they don’t wreck the room.”
“You’re not too far from the farm that burned,” I then said.
She got more animated. “I was working that night. You could see the flames shooting up like a volcano going off.” She gestured broadly with her arms. “Everyone staying here was out front watching and listening to the sirens. All those poor horses. I can’t get over it.”
“Are you acquainted with Kenneth Sparkes?” I wondered out loud.
“Can’t say I’ve ever seen him in person.”
“What about a woman who might have been staying in his house?” I asked. “You ever heard anything about that?”
“Only what people say.” Helen was looking at the door as if someone might appear any second.
“For example,” I prodded.
“Well, I guess Mr. Sparkes is quite the gentleman, you know,” Helen said. “Not that his ways are popular around here, but he’s quite a figure. Likes them young and pretty.”
She thought for a moment and gave me her eyes as moths flickered outside the window.
“There are those who got upset when they’d see him around with the newest one,” she said. “You know, no matter what anybody says, this is still the Old South.”
“Anybody in particular who got upset?” I asked.
“Well, the Jackson boys. They’re always in one sort of trouble or another,” she said, and she was still watching the door. “They just don’t like colored people. So for him to be sporting something pretty, young, and white, he tended to do that a lot . . . Well, there’s been talk. I’ll just put it like that.”
I was imagining Ku Klux Klansmen with burning crosses, and white supremacists with cold eyes and guns. I had seen hate before. I had dipped my hands in its carnage for most of my life. My chest was tight as I bid Helen the clerk good night. I was trying not to leap to assumptions about prejudice and arson and an intended victim, which may have been only Sparkes and not a woman whose body was now on its way to Richmond. Of course, it may simply have been Sparkes’s vast property that the perpetrators had been interested in, and they did not know anyone was home.
The man in the tank top was on the pay phone when I went out. He was absently holding his new lightbulb and talking in an intense, low voice. As I walked past, his anger flared.
“Dammit, Louise! That’s what I mean. You never shut up,” he snarled into the phone as I decided to call Benton later.
I unlocked the red door to room fifteen, and Lucy pretended that she hadn’t been waiting for me as she sat in a wing chair, bent over a spiral notebook, making notes and calculations. But she had not touched her fast-food dinner, and I knew she was starved. I took Whoppers and French fries out of the bag and set paper napkins and food on a nearby table.
“Everything’s cold,” I simply said.
“You get used to it.” Her voice was distant and distracted.
“Would you like to shower first?” I politely asked.
“Go ahead,” she replied, buried in math, a scowl furrowing her brow.
Our room was impressively clean for the price and decorated in shades of brown, with a Zenith TV almost as old as my niece. There were Chinese lamps and long-tasseled lanterns, porcelain figurines, static oil paintings and flower-printed spreads. Carpeting was a thick shag Indian design, and wallpaper was woodland scenes. Furniture was Formica or so thickly shellacked that I could not see the grain of the wood.
I inspected the bath and found it a solid pink and white tile that probably went back to the fifties, with Styrofoam cups and tiny wrapped bars of Lisa Luxury soap on the sink. But it was a single plastic red rose in a window that touched me most. Someone had done the best with the least to make strangers feel special, and I doubted that most patrons noticed or cared. Maybe forty years ago such resourcefulness and attention to detail would have mattered when people were more civilized than they seemed to be now.
I lowered the toilet lid and sat to remove my dirty wet boots. Then I fought with buttons and hooks until my clothes retreated to a wilted heap on the floor. I showered until I was warm and cleansed of the smell of fire and death. Lucy was working on her laptop when I emerged in an old Medical College of Virginia T-shirt and popped open a beer.
“What’s up?” I asked as I sat on the couch.
“Just screwing around. I don’t know enough to do much more than that,” she replied. “But that was a big fucking fire, Aunt Kay. And it doesn’t appear to have been set with gasoline.”
I had nothing to say.
“And someone died in it? In the master bathroom? Maybe? How did that happen? At eight o’clock at night?”
I did not know.
“I mean, she’s in there brushing her teeth and the fire horn goes off?”
Lucy stared hard at me.
“And what?” she asked. “She just stays there and dies?”
She paused to stretch sore shoulders.
“You tell me, Chief. You’re the expert.”
“I can offer no explanation, Lucy,” I said.
“And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. World famous expert Dr. Kay Scarpetta doesn’t know.” She was getting irritable. “Nineteen horses,” she went on. “So who took care of them? Sparkes doesn’t have a stable hand? And why did one of the horses get away? The little black stallion?”
“How do you know it’s a boy?” I said as someone knocked on our door. “Who is it?” I asked through wood.
“Yo. It’s me,” Marino gruffly announced.
I let him in and could tell by the expression on his face that he had news.
“Kenneth Sparks is alive and well,” he announced.
“Where is he?” I was very confused again.
“Apparently, he’s been out of the country and flew back when he heard the news. He’s staying in Beaverdam and don’t seem to have a clue about anything, including who the victim is,” Marino told us.
“Why Beaverdam?” I asked, calculating how long the trip would take to that remote part of Hanover County.
“His trainer lives there.”
“His?”
“Horse trainer. Not his trainer, like in weight lifting or nothing.”
�
�I see.”
“I’m heading out in the morning, around nine A.M.,” he said to me. “You can go on to Richmond or go with me.”
“I have a body to identify, so I need to talk to him whether he claims to know anything or not. I guess I’m going with you,” I said as Lucy met my eyes. “Are you planning on our fearless pilot dropping us off, or have you managed to get a car?”
“I’m skipping the whirlybird,” Marino retorted. “And do I need to remind you that the last time you had a chat with Sparkes, you pissed him off?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, and I really did not, for I had irritated Sparkes on more than one occasion, when we disagreed about case details he thought should be released to the media.
“I can guarantee he does, Doc. You gonna share the beer or what?”
“I can’t believe you don’t have your own stash,” Lucy said as she resumed working on her laptop, keys clicking.
He went to the refrigerator and helped himself to one.
“You want my opinion at the end of the day?” he said. “It’s the same as it was.”
“Which is?” Lucy asked without looking up.
“Sparkes is behind this.”
He set the bottle opener on the coffee table and stopped at the door, resting his hand on the knob.
“For one thing, it’s just too friggin’ convenient that he was suddenly out of the country when it happened,” he talked on as he yawned. “So he gets someone to do his dirty work. Money.” He slid a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and shoved it between his lips. “That’s all the bastard’s ever cared about, anyway. Money and his dick.”
“Marino, for God’s sake,” I complained.
I wanted to shut him up, and I wanted him to leave. But he ignored my cue.
“The worst news of all is now we probably got a homicide on our hands, on top of everything else,” he said as he opened the door. “Meaning yours truly here is stuck on this case like a fly on a pest strip. And that goes for the two of you. Shit.”
He got out his lighter, the cigarette moving with his lips.
“The last thing I feel like doing right now. You know how many people that asshole’s probably got in his pocket?” Marino would not stop. “Judges, sheriffs, fire marshals . . .”
“Marino,” I interrupted him because he was making everything worse. “You’re jumping to conclusions. In fact, you’re jumping to Mars.”
He pointed his unlit cigarette at me. “Just wait,” he said on his way out. “Everywhere you turn on this one, you’re going to run into a briar patch.”
“I’m used to it,” I said.
“You just think you are.”
He shut the door too hard.
“Hey, don’t wreck the joint,” Lucy called out after him.
“Are you going to work on that laptop all night?” I asked her.
“Not all night.”
“It’s getting late, and there’s something you and I need to discuss,” I said, and Carrie Grethen was back in my mind.
“What if I told you I don’t feel like it?” Lucy wasn’t kidding.
“It wouldn’t matter,” I replied. “We have to talk.”
“You know, Aunt Kay, if you’re going to start in on Teun and Philly . . .”
“What?” I said, baffled. “What does Teun have to do with anything?”
“I can tell you don’t like her.”
“That’s utterly ridiculous.”
“I can see through you,” she went on.
“I have nothing against Teun, and she is not relevant to this conversation.”
My niece got silent. She began taking off her boots.
“Lucy, I got a letter from Carrie.”
I waited to see a response and was rewarded with none.
“It’s a bizarre note. Threatening, harassing, from Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York.”
I paused again as Lucy dropped a boot to the shag carpeting.
“She’s basically making sure we know that she intends to cause a lot of trouble during her trial,” I explained. “Not that this should come as any great surprise. But, well, I . . .” I stumbled as she tugged off wet socks and massaged her pale feet. “We just need to be prepared, that’s all.”
Lucy unbuckled her belt and unzipped her pants as if she had not heard a word I’d said. She pulled her filthy shirt over her head and threw it on the floor, stripping down to sports bra and cotton panties. She stalked toward the bathroom, her body beautiful and fluid, and I sat staring after her, stunned, until I heard water run.
It was as if I had never really noticed her full hips and breasts and her arms and legs curved and strong like a hunter’s bow. Or maybe I simply had refused to see her as someone apart from me and sexual, because I chose not to understand her or the way she lived. I felt shamed and confused, when for an electric instant, I envisioned her as Carrie’s supple, hungry lover. It did not seem so foreign that a woman would want to touch my niece.
Lucy took her time in the shower, and I knew this was deliberate because of the discussion we were about to have. She was thinking. I suspected she was furious. I anticipated she would vent her rage on me. But when she emerged a little later, she was wearing a Philadelphia fire marshal T-shirt that did nothing but darken my mood. She was cool and smelled like lemons.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, staring at the logo on her chest.
“Teun gave it to me,” she answered.
“Ah.”
“And you’re right, Aunt Kay, it’s none of your business.”
“I just wonder why you don’t learn . . .” I started in as my own temper flared.
“Learn?”
She feigned a clueless expression that was meant to irritate, eliminate, and make one feel vapid.
“About sleeping with people you work with.”
My emotions hurled down their own treacherous track. I was being unfair, jumping to conclusions with little evidence. But I was scared for Lucy in every way imaginable.
“Someone gives me a T-shirt and suddenly I’m sleeping with this person? Hmmm. Quite a deduction, Dr. Scarpetta,” Lucy said with gathering fury. “And by the way, you’re one to talk about sleeping with people you work with. Look who you practically live with, hello?”
I was certain Lucy would have stormed out into the night if she had been dressed. Instead, she stood with her back to me, staring at a curtained window. She wiped outraged tears from her face as I tried to salvage what was left of a moment that I had never intended to turn out like this.
“We’re both tired,” I softly said. “It’s been an awful day, and now Carrie has gotten just what she wanted. She has turned us on each other.”
My niece did not move or utter a sound as she wiped her face again, her back solidly to me like a wall.
“I am not at all implying that you are sleeping with Teun,” I went on. “I’m only warning you of the heartbreak and chaos . . . Well, I can see how it could happen.”
She turned around and stared at me with a challenge in her eyes.
“What do you mean, you can see how it could happen?” she demanded to know. “She’s gay? I don’t remember her telling me that.”
“Maybe things aren’t so good with Janet right now,” I went on. “And people are people.”
She sat on the foot of my bed, and it was clear she intended to hold me to this conversation.
“Meaning?” she asked.
“Just that. I wasn’t born in a cave. Teun’s gender makes no difference to me. I do not know a thing about her proclivities. But if you are attracted to each other? Why wouldn’t anyone be attracted to either of you? Both of you are striking and compelling and brilliant and heroic. I’m just reminding you that she’s your supervisor, Lucy.”
My blood pounded as my voice got more intense.
“And then what?” I asked. “Will you move from one federal agency to another until you’ve screwed yourself out of a career? That’s my point, like it o
r not. And that’s the last I will ever bring it up.”
My niece just stared at me as her eyes filled again. She did not wipe them this time, and tears rolled down her face and splashed the shirt Teun McGovern had given to her.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” I gently said. “I know your life isn’t easy.”
We were silent as she looked away and wept. She took a deep, long breath that trembled in her chest.
“Have you ever loved a woman?” she asked me.
“I love you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Not in love with one,” I said. “Not to my knowledge.”
“That’s rather evasive.”
“I didn’t mean it to be.”
“Could you?”
“Could I what?”
“Love a woman,” she persisted.
“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think I don’t know anything.” I was as honest as I knew how to be. “Probably that part of my brain is shut.”
“It has nothing to do with your brain.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I’ve slept with two men,” she said. “So I know the difference, for your information.”
“Lucy, you don’t need to plead your case to me.”
“My personal life should not be a case.”
“But it’s about to become one,” I went back to that subject. “What do you think will be Carrie’s next move?”
Lucy opened another beer and glanced to see that I still had plenty.
“Send letters to the media?” I speculated for her. “Lie under oath? Take the stand and go into gory detail about everything the two of you ever said and did and dreamed?”
“How the hell can I know?” Lucy retorted. “She’s had five years to do nothing but think and scheme while the rest of us have been rather busy.”
“What else might she know that could come out?” I had to ask.
Lucy got up and began to pace.
“You trusted her once,” I went on. “You confided in her, and all the while she was an accomplice to Gault. You were their pipeline, Lucy. Right into the heart of all of us.”
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