The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

  "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. 1 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. Cal-loway 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 for-mulin…"

  "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.

  "The coffee table in the great room," I answer Galloway. "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. "Galloway?" 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?" Galloway 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…?" Galloway 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. Galloway 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, Galloway? 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," Galloway 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 camp/ire. 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?" Galloway 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 Galloway'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 Chan-donne_"probably murdered in Paris and the suspicion that the dead man in the cargo container might be Thomas Chan-donne, the brother, the killer's brother, both of them sons of this Chandonne criminal cartel that half of law enforcement in the universe h
as 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?"

  "Galloway, 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?"

  Galloway 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.

  "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 Galloway 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.

  He hesitates. "You can't take your car."

  "Damn it!" I blurt out. "Don't tell me they've got to go through my car, too. This is insane."

  "Look. The first time your alarm went off last night, it was because someone tried to break into your garage."

  "What do you mean, someone!" I retort as migraine pain sears my temples and blurs my vision. "We know exactly who. He forced my garage door open because he wanted the alarm to go off. He wanted the police to show up. So it wouldn't seem odd if the police came back a little later be- cause a neighbor reported a prowler on my property, supposedly."

  It was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne who came back. He impersonated the police. I still can't believe I fell for it.

  "We ain't got all the answers yet," Marino replies.

  "Why is it I keep getting this feeling you don't believe me?"

  "You need to get to Anna's and sleep."

  "He didn't touch my car," I assert. "He never got inside my garage. I don't want anyone touching my car. I want to take it tonight. Just leave the scene case inside the trunk."

  "Not tonight."

  Marino walks out and shuts the door behind him. I am desperate for a drink to override the electrical spikes in my central nervous system, but what do I do? Walk out to the bar and tell the cops to get the hell out of my way while I find the Scotch? Knowing that liquor probably won't help my headache doesn't have an impact. I am so miserable in my own skin, I don't care what is good or not good for me right now. In the bathroom I dig through more drawers and spill several lipsticks on the floor. They roll between the toilet and the tub. I am unsteady as I bend over to retrieve them, groping awkwardly with my right arm, all of this made more difficult because I am left-handed. I stop to ponder the perfumes neatly arranged on the vanity and gently pick up the small gold metal bottle of Hermes 24 Faubourg. It is cool in my hand. I lift the spray nozzle to my nose and the spicy, erotic scent that Ben-ton Wesley loved fills my eyes with tears and my heart feels as if it will fatally fly out of rhythm. I have not used the perfume in more than a year, not once since Benton was murdered. Now I have been murdered, I tell him in my throbbing mind. And I am still here, Benton, I am still here. You were a psychological profiler for the FBI, an expert in dissecting the psyches of monsters and interpreting and predicting their behavior. You would have seen this coming, wouldn't you? You would have predicted it, prevented it. Why weren't you here, Benton? I would be all right if you had been here.

  I realize someone is knocking on my bedroom door. "Just a minute," I call out, clearing my throat and wiping my eyes. I splash cold water on my face and tuck the Hermes perfume into the tote bag. I go to the door, expecting Marino. Instead, Jay Talley walks in wearing ATF battle dress and a day's growth of beard that turns his dark beauty sinister. He is one of the handsomest men I have ever known, his body exquisitely sculpted, sensuality exuding from his pores like musk.

  "Just checking on you before you head out." His eyes burn into mine. They seem to feel and explore me the way his hands and mouth did four days ago in France.

  "What can I tell you?" I let him into my bedroom and am suddenly self-conscious about the way I look. I don't want him to see me like this. "I have to leave my own house. It's almost Christmas. My arm hurts. My head hurts. Other than that, I'm fine."

  "I'll drive you to Dr. Zenner's. I would like to, Kay."

  It vaguely penetrates that he knows where I am staying tonight. Marino promised my whereabouts would be secret. Jay shuts the door and takes my hand, and all I can think about is that he didn't wait at the hospital for me and now he wants to drive me someplace else.

  "Let me help you through this. I care about you," he says to me.

  "No one seemed to care very much last night," I reply as I recall that when he drove me home from the hospital and I thanked him for waiting, for being there for me, he never once even intimated that he hadn't been there. "You and all your IRTs out there and the bastard just walks right up to my front door," I go on. "You fly all the way here from Paris to lead a goddamn International Response Team in your big-game hunt for this guy, and what a joke. What a bad movie_all these big cops with all their gear and assault rifles and the monster just strolls right up to my house."

 
Jay's eyes have begun wandering over areas of my anatomy as if they are rest stops he is entitled to revisit. It shocks and repulses me that he can think about my body at a time like this. In Paris I thought I was falling in love with him. As I stand here with him in my bedroom and he is openly in- terested in what is under my old lab coat, I realize I don't love him in the least.

  "You're just upset. God, why wouldn't you be? I'm concerned about you. I'm here for you." He tries to touch me and I move away.

  "We had an afternoon." I have told him this before, but now I mean it. "A few hours. An encounter, Jay."

  "A mistake?" Hurt sharpens his voice. Dark anger flashes in his eyes.

  "Don't try to turn an afternoon into a life, into something of permanent meaning. It isn't there. I'm sorry. For God's sake." My indignation rises. "Don't want anything from me right now." I walk away from him, gesturing with my one good arm. "What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?"

  He raises a hand and hangs his head, warding off my blows, acknowledging his mistake. I am not sure if he is sincere. "I don't know what I'm doing. Being stupid, that's what," he says. "I don't mean to want anything. Stupid, I'm stupid because of how I feel about you. Don't hold it against me. Please." He casts me an intense look and opens the door. "I'm here for you, Kay. Je t'aime." I realize Jay has a way of saying good-bye that makes me feel I might never see him again. An atavistic panic thrills my deepest psyche and I resist the temptation to call after him, to apologize, to promise we will have dinner or drinks soon. I shut my eyes and rub my temples, briefly leaning against the bedpost. I tell myself I don't know what I am doing right now and should not do anything.

  Marino is in the hallway, an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, and I can feel him trying to read me and what might have just happened while Jay was inside my bedroom with the door shut. My gaze lingers on the empty hallway, halfway hoping Jay will reappear and dreading it at the same time. Marino grabs my bags and cops fall silent as I approach. They avoid looking in my direction as they move about my great room, duty belts creaking, equipment they manipulate clicking and clacking. An investigator takes photographs of the coffee table, the flash gun popping bright white. Someone else is videotaping while a crime scene technician sets up an alternative light source called a Luma-Lite that can detect fingerprints, drugs and body fluids not visible to the unaided eye. My downtown office has a Luma-Lite I routinely use on bodies at scenes and in the morgue. To see a Luma-Lite inside my house gives me a feeling that is indescribable.