She picks up a slim stack of mail from her desk and offers it to her boss.
“I’ve dealt with the bills. There are a couple personal letters. And the usual journals and so forth. And this, from Lucy.”
She directs Scarpetta’s attention to a large manila envelope, her name and address neatly written in black Magic Marker, the return address Lucy’s New York office, also written in Magic Marker. The envelope is marked Personal in large letters and underlined twice. It is a die-hard habit for Scarpetta to look at postmarks, and this one is puzzling.
“The postal code isn’t for her part of the city,” Scarpetta says. “Lucy always mails things from her office, and as a matter of fact, she always overnights mail to me. I can’t remember a single time she’s ever sent me anything by regular mail, not since she was in college.”
Rose doesn’t seem concerned. “ ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ ” she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, it is her favorite quote.
Rose shakes the envelope. “Doesn’t sound like anything dangerous in there,” she teases. “If you’re feeling one of your bouts of paranoia coming on, I’ll open it for you, but it’s marked Personal . . .”
“Never mind.” Scarpetta takes it and her other mail from Rose.
“And Dr. Lanier from Baton Rouge left a message.” Rose pecks at the keyboard and corrects another typo. “It’s regarding the Charlotte Dard case. He says you’ll get it Monday, his reports and all that. He sounded stressed. He wants to know what you find, immediately.”
She gives her boss a look that always reminds Scarpetta of a schoolteacher about to single out some unsuspecting student and put him or her on the spot. “I think something’s going on in this case, something worse than a drug overdose.”
Scarpetta massages Billy’s soft, speckled ears. “Her cause of death isn’t straightforward. That’s plenty bad. What’s worse, the case is eight years old.”
“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal right now, as if they don’t have enough unsolved murders and suspicious deaths down there. Those abducted women. Lord.”
“I don’t know why it’s suddenly become a priority, either,” Scarpetta replies. “But the fact is, it has, and I feel obliged to do what I can.”
“Because nobody else can be bothered.”
“I can be bothered, can’t I, Billy-Billy?”
“Well, let me tell you a thing or two, Dr. Echo. I think there’s something the coroner down there has no intention of telling you.”
“There had better not be,” Scarpetta remarks as she walks off.
LUCY DESPERATELY NEEDS a ladies’ room.
Forget looking for a gas station or a rest stop. She pushes the Mercedes up to 160 kilometers per hour, despite Rudy’s warning about speeding. Focusing on the dark road, she tries hard to concentrate and ignore her bladder. The drive seems to take twice as long as it should, but she makes excellent time and is ahead of schedule by thirty-five minutes. She redials Rudy’s cell phone.
“On final,” she says. “Just got to land this thing somewhere.”
“Shut up,” Rudy orders someone in the room, as the TV plays loudly. “Don’t make me tell you again.”
ROCCO CAGGIANO’S FAVORITE form of relaxation is to sit for hours in beer gardens, drinking one Gross Bier after another.
The pale gold elixirs are served in tall, plain glasses, and he prefers clean-tasting lagers and will not touch wheat beers. Rocco has never understood how he can drink a gallon of beer in one sitting but not a gallon of water. He could not drink a gallon of water during an entire day, probably not even in three days, and he has always puzzled over how much beer, wine, champagne or mixed drinks he can put away when he can scarcely finish a single glass of water.
In fact, he hates water. Perhaps what a psychic once told him is true: He drowned in a former life. What a terrible way to die, and he often thinks of the killer in England who drowned one wife after another in the tub by grabbing her feet and yanking until her head was under water and she could do nothing but helplessly flop her arms like a fish on a dock. The scenario was a constant emotional itch when Caggiano began to hate his first wife, then his second. Alimony was cheaper than the price he would pay if some medical examiner discovered bruises or God knows what. But even if he did drown in a former life and thought drowning someone was a good way to commit murder, this, in his mind, would not explain the enigma—the purely biological phenomenon—of how much alcohol he can consume and why he cannot and will not finish even one glass of water.
No one has ever been able to settle his mind with an answer he accepts. Small conundrums have always worried him like a sandspur stuck to his sock.
“It must be ’cause you pee all the time when you drink beer,” Caggiano introduces the question at virtually every social gathering. “When you pee, you make room for more, right?”
“You drink a gallon of water, you will be pissing all the time, too,” a Dutch customs agent challenged him some months back when he, Rocco and several other friends of the Chandonne cartel were taking time out in a beer garden in Munich.
“I hate water,” Rocco said.
“Then how do you know this about whether you would pee water as fast as beer?” a German container ship’s captain asked.
“He doesn’t know.”
“Yes. You ought to test it out, Rocco.”
“We’ll drink beer, you drink water, and see who pees the most and the fastest.”
The men laughed and clanked glasses in a drunken toast, slopping beer all over the wooden table. It had been a good day. Before they caroused at the beer garden, they had wandered into the nudist park where a naked man on a bicycle pedaled past and the Dutchman yelled at him in Dutch that he’d better be careful which gear he shifted, while the ship’s captain yelled in German that his kickstand was very small. Rocco yelled in English that the man didn’t have to worry about his dick getting caught in the spokes because it didn’t even hang over the seat. The bicyclist pedaled on, ignoring them.
Women sunbathe in the nude in the park and do not seem to care if men stare at them. Rocco and his henchmen would get very brazen and hover right over a woman stretched out on her towel and make comments about her anatomical points of interest. Usually, the woman would turn over on her belly and go back to sleep or continue reading her magazine or book while the men went on to survey her buttocks, as if they were hills they might climb. Rocco’s intense arousal would make him mean, and he would fire vile, lewd aspersions at the woman until his companions had to usher him away. Rocco is especially vicious with the homosexuals minding their own business in the park. He believes all homosexuals should be castrated and executed, and he would like to be the one to do it and watch them pee and defecate out of fright.
“It’s a medical fact that when you’re tortured or about to be snuffed, you piss and shit in your pants,” he announced later in the beer garden.
“What medical fact? I thought you were a lawyer, not a doctor.”
“So you know this, Rocco? And how do you know this? You take off their pants to see? Maybe you take their pants off to check for shit and piss?” Loud laughter. “Then you can know it as a fact. If this is true, I must come around to my important question. Do you go around taking the pants off dead bodies? I think all of us have a right to hear this. Because at least for me, if I die, I need to know if you will take my pants off.”
“If you die,” Rocco replied, “you won’t know a fucking thing.”
It is irrational that Rocco should remember this boozy conversation and what his doctor has preached to him for years. Rocco has gastritis and cranky bowel syndrome due to stress, smoking and heavy drinking. All ills in life are blamed on acute stress, smoking and heavy drinking, Rocco always retorts on his way out of the examination room. He files for medical reimbursement and resumes his self-destructive life.
His bowels and bladder let loose as he sits in a chair inside his hotel room, a Colt .380 cocked and point
ed at his head.
JACK’S BOAT LANDING IS a clutter of trailers, bateaux, bass and flat-bottom boats, and runabouts tied to pilings along a crisscross of rickety docks strung with old tires that serve as fenders.
Pulled up on the muddy shore are several pirogues—or Cajun canoes—and a rotting bow rider that won’t be pulling water-skiers anymore. The parking lot is dirt, and on the fuel dock are two pumps—one for regular gas, the other for diesel. Jack works from five a.m. until nine p.m. in his one-room office with its mounted fish hanging at random angles on the wall with peeling paint. The calendar above his old metal desk features glossy photos of glitter-painted bass boats—the very expensive kind that can go up to sixty miles an hour.
Were it not for the window air-conditioning unit and the Port-a-John behind the building, Jack would lack all modern conveniences. Not that he would care, particularly. He was born into a hard life and raised to make any sacrifice that might keep him right where he is, in a world of water and the creatures in it, and trees draped in Spanish moss.
For those who frequent his boat landing, tying up for gas and making a trip into town for provisions is normal behavior. People who stay for weeks or longer in their fishing camps on the bayous and rivers are expected to leave vehicles and boat trailers parked at the landing. He never thinks twice about the white Jeep Cherokee tucked between trucks and other SUVs in a far corner of the lot near the water’s edge. He minds his own business, even if he does have instincts about people that are as strong as his sense of smell. Swamp Woman sent strong signals to him from day one—and that’s been some two years now. Her demeanor is no-nonsense about asking personal questions.
Bev Kiffin opens the hatch and pulls out her beach bag. She stands aft and drops in the plow anchor, then tosses two nylon lines up on the fuel dock as Jack waves, walking swiftly her way.
“Why if it isn’t Swamp Woman!” he calls out. “Can I top you off?”
The landing is lit and bugs are thick, roiling clouds in the yellow glow of lamps. Jack tosses her the bowline.
“I’ll be leaving her here for a few hours.” Bev turns the rope and makes a half hitch over the horns of the cleat. She pulls back the tarp and sets empty gas cans on the dock. “Fill ’em up. What’s your price these days?”
“One eighty-five.”
“Shit.” Bev hops up on the dock, moving nimbly for a woman her size. “That’s highway robbery.”
Jack laughs. “It ain’t me who decides the price of oil.”
He’s tall and bald, as dark and strong as a cypress. Bev’s never seen him once when he wasn’t wearing his sweat-stained orange Harley-Davidson cap and chewing on a plug of tobacco.
“You comin’ and goin’?” He spits and wipes his mouth on the back of a sunspotted, gnarled hand and helps her with the stern lines.
“Just to the store.”
Bev dips into her beach bag for a single key attached to a small fishing bobber—in case she ever accidentally drops the key into the water. Her attention wanders around the crowded parking lot, fixing on the Cherokee.
“I guess I’d better crank her up to make sure the battery ain’t dead.”
“Well if it is,” Jack says, lining up the four gas cans near the pump, “you know I’ll jump ’er.”
Bev watches him squat, sticking the gas nozzle into each can, the pump clicking away her cash. The back of his neck reminds her of alligator hide, and his elbows are big calluses. She’s been coming to him at least ten times a year, more often of late, and he doesn’t have a damn clue about her, which is a good thing for him. She heads to the SUV, suddenly worried about whether it needs gas, too. She can’t remember if she filled it up last time.
Unlocking the driver’s door, she slides in and turns the key in the ignition. The engine cranks after three tries, and she’s relieved to see she has more than half a tank of gas. When she runs low, she’ll fill up at a gas station. Turning the headlights on, she backs up and parks near the dock. While she is pulling cash out of her wallet and squinting to make out the bills, Jack wipes his hands on a rag and waits for her to roll down the window.
“That’ll be forty-four dollars and forty cents,” he tells her. “I’ll get those cans back in your boat for ya and keep an eye on it. I noticed you got your friend with ya.” He means the shotgun. “You plan on leaving it in the boat? I wouldn’t. Watch out shooting at gators with that thing. All it does is make ’em rageful.”
Bev can’t believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She’s not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.
“Last thing you do before you leave,” she adds as he steps down into the boat, “is fill the fish box with ice.”
“How much?” He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.
“A hundred pounds will do.”
“Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice.” He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.
“Stuff spoils quick out here.”
“That’ll be another twenty. I’m givin’ you three bucks off.”
She hands him two tens and doesn’t thank him for the discount.
“I’m gone by nine.” He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. “So if you ain’t back by then . . .”
“Won’t be,” Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.
She never is and doesn’t need the reminder.
He stares past her at the front passenger’s door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.
“You know, girl, I could fix that if you’re ever of a mind to leave the keys.”
Bev glances at the door. “Don’t matter,” she says. “Nobody rides in this thing but me.”
UPSTAIRS IN THE NORTH WING of the house is a guest bedroom overlooking the ocean, and in front of the bay window is Scarpetta’s large desk, not an antique or anything special, just an inexpensive computer desk with a matching return.
Bookcases fill the walls so tightly that some light switches and electrical outlets are behind them, out of reach, and she has to get by with power strips. Her furniture is a light maple veneer, in depressing contrast to the beautiful antiques and artistic pieces, including Oriental rugs, fine stemware and china, that she spent most of her career collecting. Scarpetta’s former life is locked up in a Connecticut storage warehouse, one secure enough for museum pieces.
She has not gone to see what she owns since Lucy took care of her aunt’s chattel more than two years ago, choosing the location because of its proximity to New York, where Lucy has her headquarters and apartment. Scarpetta doesn’t miss the furniture from her past. It is useless to care about it. Just the thought of it makes her tired for reasons she doesn’t completely comprehend.
The office in her Delray rental house is a comfortable size, although nowhere near as spacious and organized as what she was accustomed to in her Richmond house, where she had cabinets of hanging files, miles of workspace and a massive desk custom-built of Brazilian cherry. Her house there was modern Italian country, put together stone by stone, the walls antiqued plaster, the exposed beams nineteenth-century black jarrah railroad ties from South Africa. If the house she built in Richmond wasn’t beautiful before, it was spectacular by the time she remodeled it in an attempt to eradicate the past—a past haunted by Benton and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. But she felt no better. The ghosts followed her from room to room.
Her denial of unbearable loss and her own near murder were fragmented dreams of horror that chilled her, no matter the temperature inside the house. Every creak of old wood and utterance of wind sends her hand reaching for the pistol she carried as her heart beat hard. One day she walked out of her magnificent home and never went back, not even to retrieve her belongings. Lucy handled that.
For one who had always walled her soul from a wicked world and unreachable pain, she found herself a wanderer, skipping from one hotel to another like a stone across water, making phone calls to
set up private consulting, and quickly became so bound in the snarled chains of evidence, of investigative incompetence and carelessness of police and medical examiners all over the place, that she had no choice but to settle in another house because she had to settle somewhere. She could no longer review cases while sitting on a hotel bed.
“Go south, far south,” Lucy told her quietly, lovingly, one afternoon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Scarpetta was in hiding at the Homestead Inn. “You aren’t ready for New York yet, Aunt Kay, and you sure as hell aren’t ready to work for me.”
“I’ll never work for you.” Scarpetta meant it, shame pulling her eyes away from her niece.
“Well, you don’t have to be insulting about it.” Lucy was stung too, and within a minute, the two of them were arguing and fighting.
“I raised you,” Scarpetta blurted out from the bed, where she sat rigidly and enraged. “My goddamn sister, the admired author of children’s books who doesn’t have a clue about raising her own goddamn child, dumped me on your doorstep . . . I mean, the other way around.”
“Freudian slip! You needed me worse than I needed you.”
“Not hardly. You were a monster. At ten, when you rolled into my life like the Trojan Horse, I was stupid enough to let you park, and then what? Then what?” The great Chief, the logical doctor-lawyer, was sputtering, tears rolling down her face. “You had to be a genius, didn’t you? The worst brat on Earth . . .” Scarpetta’s voice quavered. “And I couldn’t give you up, you awful child.” She could hardly speak. “If Dorothy had wanted you back, I would have taken the bitch to court and proved she wasn’t a fit mother.”
“She wasn’t a fit mother and she isn’t.” Lucy was beginning to cry, too. “A bitch? That’s charging her with a misdemeanor when she’s a felon. A felon! A character disorder. For God’s sake, how did you end up with a psycho for a sister?” Lucy weeps, sitting next to her aunt on the bed, their shoulders touching.
“She’s the dragon you always fight, have spent your life fighting,” Scarpetta said. “You’re really fighting Mom. She’s too small a quarry for me. She’s nothing more than a rabbit with sharp teeth that goes after your ankles. I don’t waste my time on rabbits. I don’t have time.”
Blow Fly Page 12
