Point of Origin

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I need to know everything about her that you can tell me,” I said to him with feeling. “Anything about where she was from, her family. Anything that might help me identify the body or rule Claire Rawley out. Of course, I will contact the university, as well.”

  “I’ve got to tell you the sad truth, Dr. Scarpetta,” he said to me. “I never knew anything about her, really. Our relationship was mainly sexual, with me helping her out with money and her problems as best I could. I did care about her.” He paused. “But it was never serious, at least not on my side. I mean, marriage was never in the offing.”

  He did not need to further explain. Sparkes had power. He exuded it and had always enjoyed almost any woman he wanted. But I felt no judgment now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, getting up. “I can only tell you that she was rather much a failed artist. A want-to-be actor who spent most of her time surfing or wandering the beach. And after I’d been around her for a while, I began to see that something wasn’t right about her. The way she seemed so lacking in motivation, and would act so erratic and glazed sometimes.”

  “Did she abuse alcohol?” I asked.

  “Not chronically. It has too many calories.”

  “Drugs?”

  “That’s what I began to suspect, and it was something I could have no association with. I don’t know.”

  “I need for you to spell her name for me,” I said.

  “Before you go walking off,” Marino jumped in, and I recognized the bad-cop edge to his tone, “you sure this couldn’t be some sort of a murder-suicide? Only she kills everything you own and goes up in flames along with it? You sure there’s no reason she might have done that, Mr. Sparkes?”

  “At this point, I can’t be sure of anything,” Sparkes answered him as he paused near the barn’s open door.

  Marino got up, too.

  “Well, this ain’t adding up, no disrespect intended,” Marino said. “And I do need to see any receipts you have for your London trip. And for Dulles airport. And I know ATF’s hot to know about your basement full of bourbon and automatic weapons.”

  “I collect World War II weapons, and all of them are registered and legal,” he said with restraint. “I bought the bourbon from a Kentucky distillery that went out of business five years ago. They shouldn’t have sold it to me and I shouldn’t have bought it. But so be it.”

  “I think ATF’s got bigger fish to fry than your barrels of bourbon,” Marino said. “So if you got any of those receipts with you now, I’d appreciate your handing them over to me.”

  “Will you strip search me next, Captain?” Sparkes fixed hard eyes on him.

  Marino stared back as guinea hens kicked past again like break-dancers.

  “You can deal with my lawyer,” Sparkes said. “And then I’ll be happy to cooperate.”

  “Marino,” it was my turn to speak, “if you’d give me just a minute alone with Mr. Sparkes.”

  Marino was taken aback and very annoyed. Without a word, he stalked off into the barn, several hens trotting after him. Sparkes and I stood, facing each other. He was a strikingly handsome man, tall and lean, with thick gray hair. His eyes were amber, his features aristocratic, with a straight Jeffersonian nose and skin dark and as smooth as a man half his age. The way he tightly gripped his riding crop seemed to fit his mood. Kenneth Sparkes was capable of violence but had never given in to it, as best I knew.

  “All right. What’s on your mind?” he asked me suspiciously.

  “I just wanted to make sure you understand that our differences of the past . . .”

  He shook his head and would not let me finish.

  “The past is past,” he curtly said.

  “No, Kenneth, it isn’t. And it’s important for you to know that I don’t harbor bad feelings about you,” I replied. “That what’s going on now is not related.”

  When he had been more actively involved with the publishing of his newspapers, he had basically accused me of racism when I had released statistics about black-on-black homicides. I had shown citizens how many deaths were drug-related or involved prostitution or were just plain hate of one black for another.

  His own reporters had taken several of my quotes out of context and had distorted the rest, and by the end of the day, Sparkes had summoned me to his posh downtown office. I would never forget being shown into his mahogany space of fresh flowers and colonial furniture and lighting. He had ordered me, as if he could, to demonstrate more sensitivity to African Americans and publicly retract my bigoted professional assessments. As I looked at him now, with sweat on his face and manure on his boots, it did not seem I was talking to the same arrogant man. His hands were trembling, his strong demeanor about to break.

  “Will you let me know what you find out?” he asked as tears filled his eyes, his head held high.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” I evasively promised.

  “I just want to know if it’s her, and that she didn’t suffer,” he said.

  “Most people in fires don’t. The carbon monoxide renders them unconscious long before the flames get close. Usually, death is quiet and painless.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  He looked up at the sky.

  “Oh, thank you, God,” he muttered.

  5

  I GOT HOME that night in time for a dinner I did not feel like cooking. Benton had left me three messages, and I had not returned any one of them. I felt strange. I felt an odd sensation of doom, and yet I felt a lightness around my heart that spurred me into working in my garden until dark, pulling weeds and clipping roses for the kitchen. The ones I chose were pink and yellow, tightly furled like flags before glory. At dusk, I went out to walk and wished I had a dog. For a while I fantasized about that, wondering just what sort of dog I would have, were it possible and practical.

  I decided on a retired greyhound rescued from the track and from certain extermination. Of course, my life was too unkind for a pet. I pondered this as one of my neighbors came out of his grand stone home to walk his small white dog.

  “Good evening, Dr. Scarpetta,” the neighbor grimly said. “How long are you in town for?”

  “I never know,” I said, still imagining my greyhound.

  “Heard about the fire.”

  He was a retired surgeon, and he shook his head.

  “Poor Kenneth.”

  “I suppose you know him,” I said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “It is too bad. What kind of dog do you have?”

  “He’s a salad bar dog. Little bit of everything,” my neighbor said.

  He walked on, taking out a pipe and lighting up, because his wife, no doubt, would not let him smoke in the house. I walked past the homes of my neighbors, all different but the same because they were brick or stucco and not very old. It seemed fitting that the sluggish stretch of the river in the back of the neighborhood made its way over rocks the same way it had two hundred years before. Richmond was not known for change.

  When I reached the spot where I had found Wesley when he had been somewhat mad at me, I stood near that same tree, and soon it was too dark to spot an eagle or the river’s rocks. For a time, I stood staring at my neighbors’ lights in the night, suddenly not having the energy to move as I contemplated that Kenneth Sparkes was either a victim or a killer. Then heavy footsteps sounded on the street behind me. Startled, I whipped around, gripping the canister of red pepper spray attached to my keys.

  Marino’s voice was quickly followed by his formidable shape.

  “Doc, you shouldn’t be out here this late,” he said.

  I was too drained to resent his having an opinion on how I was spending my evening.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  “One of your neighbors.”

  I did not care.

  “My car’s right over there,” he went on. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Marino, can I never have a moment’s peace?” I said with no rancor, for I knew he meant no harm to m
e.

  “Not tonight,” he said. “I got some really bad news and think you might want to sit down.”

  I immediately thought of Lucy and felt the strength go out of my knees. I swayed and put my hand on his shoulder as my mind seemed to shatter into a million pieces. I had always known the day might come when someone would deliver her death notice to me, and I could not speak or think. I was miles beyond the moment, sucked down deeper and deeper into a dark and terrible vortex. Marino grabbed my arm to steady me.

  “Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Let me get you to the car and we’ll sit down.”

  “No,” I barely said, because I had to know. “How’s Lucy?”

  He paused for a moment and seemed confused.

  “Well, she don’t know yet, unless she’s heard it on the news,” he replied.

  “Know what?” I asked as my blood seemed to move again.

  “Carrie Grethen’s escaped from Kirby,” he told me. “Some time late this afternoon. They didn’t figure it out until it was time to take the female inmates down for dinner.”

  We began walking quickly to his car as fear made him angry.

  “And here you are walking around in the dark with nothing but a keychain,” he went on. “Shit. Goddamn son of a bitch. Don’t you do that anymore, you hear me? We got no idea where that bitch is, but one thing I know for a fact, as long as she’s out, you ain’t safe.”

  “No one in the world is safe,” I muttered as I climbed into his car and thought of Benton alone at the beach.

  Carrie Grethen hated him almost as much as she hated me, or at least this was my belief. Benton had profiled her and was the quarterback in the game that had eventually resulted in her capture and Temple Gault’s death. Benton had used the Bureau’s every resource to lock Carrie away, and until now, it had worked.

  “Is there any way she might know where Benton is?” I said as Marino drove me to my house. “He’s alone on an island resort. He probably takes walks on the beach without his gun, unmindful that there might be someone looking for him . . .”

  “Like someone else I know,” Marino cut me off.

  “Point well taken.”

  “I’m sure Benton already knows, but I’ll call him,” Marino said. “And I got no reason to think that Carrie would know about your place in Hilton Head. You didn’t have it back then when Lucy was telling her all your secrets.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said as he pulled into my driveway and came to an abrupt stop. “Lucy never meant it that way. She never meant to be disloyal, to hurt me.”

  I lifted the handle of my door.

  “At this point, it don’t matter what she meant.”

  He blew smoke out his window.

  “How did Carrie get out?” I asked. “Kirby’s on an island and not easily accessible.”

  “No one knows. About three hours ago, she was supposed to go down to dinner with all the other lovely ladies, and that’s when the guards realized she was gone. Boom, no sign of her, and about a mile away there’s an old footbridge that goes over the East River into Harlem.”

  He tossed the cigarette butt on my driveway.

  “All anyone can figure is maybe she got off the island that way. Cops are everywhere, and they got choppers out to make sure she’s not still hiding somewhere on the island. But I don’t think so. I think she’s planned this for a while and timed it exactly. We’ll hear from her, all right. You can bet on that.”

  I was deeply unsettled when I went inside my house and checked every door and set the alarm. I then did something that was rare and unnerving for me. I got my Glock nine-millimeter pistol from a drawer in my office and secured every closet in every room, on each floor. I stepped into each doorway, the pistol firm in both hands as my heart hammered. By now Carrie Grethen had become a monster with supernatural powers. I had begun to imagine that she could evade any security system, and would glide out of the shadows when I was feeling safe and unaware.

  There seemed to be no presence in my two-story stone house but me, and I carried a glass of red burgundy into my bedroom and got into my robe. I called Wesley again and felt a chill when he did not pick up the phone. I tried once more at almost midnight, and still he did not answer.

  “Dear God,” I said, alone in my room.

  Lamplight was soft and cast shadows from antique dressers and tables that had been stripped down to old gray oak, because I liked flaws and the stress marks of time. Pale rose draperies stirred as air flowed out from vents, and every movement unglued me more, no matter the explanation. With each passing moment, my brain was further overruled by fear as I tried to repress images from the past I shared with Carrie Grethen. I hoped Benton would call. I told myself he was okay and that what I needed was sleep. So I tried to read Seamus Heaney’s poetry and dozed off somewhere in the middle of The Spoonbait. The phone rang at twenty minutes past two A.M., and my book slid to the floor.

  “Scarpetta,” I blurted into the receiver as my heart pounded the way it always did when I was startled awake.

  “Kay, it’s me,” Benton said. “Sorry to call you this late, but I was afraid you were trying to reach me. Somehow the answering machine got turned off, and, well, I went out to eat and then walked the beach for more than two hours. To think. I guess you know the news.”

  “Yes.” I was suddenly very alert.

  “Are you all right,” he said, because he knew me well.

  “I searched every inch of my house tonight before going to bed. I had my gun out and checked every closet and behind every shower curtain.”

  “I thought you probably would.”

  “It’s like knowing a bomb is on the way in the mail.”

  “No, it’s not like that, Kay. Because we don’t know one is coming or when or in what form. I wish we did. But that’s part of her game. To make us guess.”

  “Benton, you know how she feels about you. I don’t like you there alone.”

  “Do you want me to come home?”

  I thought about this and had no good answer.

  “I’ll get in my car right this minute,” he added. “If that’s what you want.”

  Then I told him about the body in the ruins of Kenneth Sparkes’s mansion, and I went on and on about that, and about my meeting with the tycoon on Hootowl Farm. I talked and explained while he patiently listened.

  “The point is,” I concluded, “that this is turning out to be terribly complicated, if not bizarre, and there is so much to do. It makes no sense for your vacation to be ruined, too. And Marino’s right. There’s no reason to suspect that Carrie knows about our place in Hilton Head. You’re probably safer there than here, Benton.”

  “I wish she’d come here.” His voice turned hard. “I’d welcome her with my Sig Sauer and we could finally put an end to this.”

  I knew he truly wanted to kill her, and this was, in a way, the worst damage she could have done. It was not like Benton to wish for violence, to allow a shadow of the evil he pursued to fall over his conscience and heart, and as I listened, I felt my own culpability, too.

  “Do you see how destructive this is?” I said, upset. “We sit around talking about shooting her, strapping her into the electric chair or giving her a lethal injection. She has succeeded in taking possession of us, Benton. Because I admit that I want her dead about as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.”

  “I think I should come on home,” he again said.

  We hung up soon after, and insomnia proved the only enemy of the night. It robbed me of the few hours left before dawn and ripped my brain into fragmented dreams of anxiety and horror. I dreamed I was late for an important appointment and got stuck in the snow and was unable to dial the phone. In my twilight state I could not find answers in autopsies anymore and felt my life was over, and suddenly I drove up on a terrible car accident with bleeding bodies inside, and I could not make a move to help. I flipped this way and that, rearranging pillows and covers until the sky turned smoky blue and the stars went out. I got up and made coffee.
>
  I drove to work with the radio on, listening to repeated news breaks about the fire in Warrenton and a body that was found. Speculation was wild and dramatic about the victim being the famed media mogul, and I could not help but wonder if this amused Sparkes just a little. I was curious why he had not issued a statement to the press, letting the world know he was quite alive, and again, doubts about him darkened my mind.

  Dr. Jack Fielding’s red Mustang was parked behind our new building on Jackson Street, between the restored row houses of Jackson Ward, and the Medical College of Virginia campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. My new building, which was also home to the forensic labs, was the anchor of thirty-four acres of rapidly developing data institutes known as Biotech Park.

  We had just moved from our old address to this new one but two months before, and I was still adjusting to modern glass and brick, and lintels on top of windows to reflect the neighborhoods once there. Our new space was bright, with tan epoxy flooring and walls that were easily hosed down. There was much still to be unpacked and sorted and rearranged, and as thrilled as I was to finally have a modern morgue, I felt more overwhelmed than I had ever been. The low sun was in my eyes as I parked in the chief’s slot inside the covered bay on Jackson Street, and I unlocked a back door to let myself in.

  The corridor was spotless and smelled of industrial deodorizer, and there were still boxes of electrical wiring and switch plates and cans of paint parked against walls. Fielding had unlocked the stainless steel cooler, which was bigger than most living rooms, and he had opened the doors to the autopsy room. I tucked my keys into my pocketbook and headed to the lockers, where I slipped out of my suit jacket and hung it up. I buttoned a lab coat up to my neck, and exchanged pumps for the rather gruesome black Reeboks I called my autopsy shoes. They were spattered and stained and certainly a biological hazard. But they supported my less-than-youthful legs and feet, and never left the morgue.