Trace

  “We need to stop leaving the gurney in the elevator,” she said to Pogue’s supervisor, Dave, a strange, slouching man with bruised smudges under his dark eyes, his dyed black hair wild and stiff with cowlicks. “Apparently the body tray is one you’re using in the crematorium, which is why the elevator is filled with dust, and that just isn’t good form. Probably not healthy, either.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dave replied, and he was working the overhead chains and pulleys, hoisting the naked pink body out of a floor vat of pink formalin, a big sturdy iron hook in each of her ears because that was the way they lifted people out of the vats when Edgar Allan Pogue worked there. “But it’s not in the elevator.” Dave made a point of looking at the gurney. Scratched and dented, and rusting at the joints, it was parked in the middle of the floor, a translucent plastic shroud balled up on top of it.

  “I’m just reminding you while I think about it. The elevator may not be used by most people in this building, but we still need to keep it clean and inoffensive,” said she.

  Right then Pogue knew she thought his job was offensive. How else was he supposed to interpret a comment like that? Yet the irony is, without those bodies donated to science, medical students wouldn’t have cadavers to dissect, and without a cadaver, where would Kay Scarpetta be? Just where might she be without one of Edgar Allan Pogue’s bodies, although she literally didn’t become acquainted with one of his bodies when she was in medical school. That was before his time and not in Virginia. She went to medical school in Baltimore, not Virginia, and is older than Pogue by about ten years.

  She did not speak to him on that occasion, although he can’t accuse her of being uppity. She did make a point of saying hello Edgar Allan and good morning Edgar Allan and where is Dave, Edgar Allan, whenever she dropped by the Anatomical Division with one purpose or another on her mind. But she didn’t speak to him on this occasion when she walked fast across the brown floor, her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, and maybe she didn’t speak to Pogue because she didn’t see him. She didn’t look for him, either. Had she looked, she would have found him back by his hearth like Cinderella, sweeping up ashes and bits of bone he had just crushed with his favorite tee ball bat.

  But what matters is she did not look. No, she did not. He, on the other hand, had the advantage of the dim concrete alcove where the oven was, and had a direct view into the main room where Dave had the pink old woman on hooks, and the motorized pulleys and chain were bumping along smoothly, and she was moving pinkly through the air, her arms and knees hitched up as if she were still sitting in the vat, and the overhead fluorescent lights flashed on the steel identification tag dangling from her left ear.

  Pogue watched her progress and couldn’t help but feel a touch of pride until Scarpetta said, “In the new building we’re not going to do it like this anymore, Dave. We’re going to stack them on trays in a cooler just like we do the other bodies. This is an indignity, something from the Dark Ages. It isn’t right.”

  “Yes, ma’am. A cooler would be fine. We can fit more in the vats, though,” Dave said, and he hit a switch and the chain came to a dead halt, and the pink old woman swayed as if she were riding a chair lift that suddenly came to a dead halt.

  “Assuming I can finagle the space. You know how that goes, and they’re taking every square foot away from me that they can. Everything depends on space,” Scarpetta said, touching a finger to her chin, looking around, surveying her kingdom.

  Edgar Allan Pogue remembers thinking at the time, All right then, this brown floor with the vats, the oven, and the embalming room are your kingdom at this minute. But when you aren’t here, which is ninety-nine percent of the time, this kingdom is mine. And the people who roll in and are drained and sit in the vats and go up in flames and drift out the chimney are my subjects and friends.

  “I was hoping for someone who hasn’t been embalmed,” Scarpetta said to Dave as the drawn-up pink old woman swayed from the chain overhead. “Maybe I should cancel the demo.”

  “Edgar Allan was too quick. Embalmed her and put her in the vat before I had a chance to tell him you needed one this morning,” Dave said. “Don’t have anyone fresh at the moment.”

  “She unclaimed?” Scarpetta looks at the body pinkly swaying.

  “Edgar Allan?” Dave called out. “This one’s unclaimed, isn’t she?”

  Edgar lied and said she was, knowing Scarpetta wouldn’t use a claimed body because that wouldn’t be in the spirit of what the person wanted when he donated his body to science. But Pogue knew this pink old woman wouldn’t have cared. Not a bit. All she wanted was to pay God back for a few injustices, that was it.

  “I guess it will be all right,” Scarpetta decided. “I hate to cancel. So it will work out.”

  “I sure am sorry,” Dave said. “I know it’s not ideal to do a demo autopsy with an embalmed one.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Scarpetta patted Dave’s arm. “Wouldn’t you know there aren’t any cases today. The one day we don’t have any, I happen to have the police academy coming through. Well, send her up.”

  “You betcha. I’m doing you a favor,” Dave said with a wink, and sometimes he flirted with Scarpetta. “Donations are on the lean side.”

  “Just be grateful the general public doesn’t see where they’d end up or you wouldn’t get any donations at all,” she replied, heading back to the elevator. “We got to work on those specs for the new building, Dave. Soon.”

  So Pogue helped Dave unhook their most recent donation, and they placed her on the same dusty gurney Scarpetta had been complaining about minutes earlier. Pogue wheeled the pink old lady across brown tile and onto the rusting service elevator and they rode up together and he pushed her out on the first floor, thinking that this was a ride the old woman never planned to take. No, she certainly didn’t envision this detour, now did she? And he should know. He talked to her enough, didn’t he? Even before she was dead, didn’t he? The plastic shroud he had draped over her rustled as he rolled her through the heavy, deodorized air, and wheels clattered along white tile as he guided her toward the open double doors that led into the autopsy suite.

  “And that, Mother Dear, is what happened to Mrs. Arnette,” Edgar Allan Pogue says, sitting up on the lawn chair, photographs of the blue-haired Mrs. Arnette spread out on the yellow and white webbing between his naked, hairy thighs. “Oh I know, it sounds unfair and dreadful, doesn’t it? But it really wasn’t. I knew she’d rather have an audience of young policemen than to be carved on by some ungrateful medical student. It’s a nice story, isn’t it, Mother? A very nice story.”

  18.

  THE BEDROOM is big enough to hold a single bed and a small table to the left of the headboard, and a dresser next to the closet. The furniture is oak, not antique but not new, and it is nice enough, and taped to the paneled wall around the bed are scenic posters.

  Gilly Paulsson slept at the steps of Siena’s Duomo and woke up beneath the ancient Palace of Domitian on Rome’s Palatine Hill. She may have dressed and brushed her long blond hair in the full-length mirror near Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce with its statue of Dante. She probably did not know who Dante was. She may not have been able to find Italy on a map.

  Marino is standing next to a window that overlooks the backyard. He does not have to explain what he is seeing because it is obvious. The window is no more than four feet from the ground and locks by two thumb latches that when pressed allow the window to be slid up easily.

  “They don’t catch,” Marino says. He is wearing white cotton gloves and pushes in the thumb latches, demonstrating how effortlessly one can raise the window.

  “Detective Browning should know about this,” Scarpetta says, getting out gloves, too, a white cotton pair that are slightly soiled because they permanently reside in a side pocket of her handbag. “But there is nothing in any of the reports I’ve seen that mentions the window lock is broken. Forced?”

  “Naw,” Marino replies, sliding the window back down
. “Just old and worn out. I wonder if she ever opened her window. Hard to believe someone just happened to notice she was home from school and Mom’s on a quick errand, and Hey, I’ll break in, and Hey, aren’t I lucky the window lock is busted.”

  “More likely someone already knew the window doesn’t lock,” Scarpetta says.

  “My guess.”

  “Then someone familiar with this house or able to watch it and gather intelligence.”

  “Huh,” Marino says, walking over to the dresser and opening the top drawer. “We need to know something about the neighbors. The one with the best view of her bedroom’s going to be that house.” He nods toward the window with its worn-out lock, indicating the house behind the back fence, the one with the mossy slate roof. “I’ll find out if the cops questioned whoever lives back there.” It sounds odd when he refers to police as cops, as if he never was one. “Maybe whoever lives there has noticed someone hanging around the house. I thought you might find this interesting.”

  Marino reaches inside the drawer and lifts out a man’s black leather wallet. It is curved and smooth the way wallets are when they are habitually kept in a back pocket. He opens it and inside is the expired Virginia driver’s license of Franklin Adam Paulsson, born August 14, 1966, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are no credit cards, no cash, nothing else inside the wallet.

  “Dad,” Scarpetta says, giving thoughtful attention to the photograph on the license, to the smiling blond man with a hard jaw and light gray-blue eyes the color of winter. He is handsome but she isn’t sure what she thinks of him, assuming one can judge a person by the way he looks on a driver’s license. Maybe he is cold, she thinks. He is something, but she doesn’t know what and feels uneasy.

  “See, I think this is weird,” Marino says. “This top drawer’s like a shrine to him. These T-shirts?” He holds up a thin stack of neatly folded white undershirts. “Size large, men’s, maybe Dad’s, and some are stained and have holes in them. And letters.” He hands her a dozen or so envelopes, several of them greeting cards, it appears, and all with a Charleston return address. “And then there’s this.” His thick white cottony fingers pull out a dead long-stem red rose. “You notice the same thing I do?” he asks.

  “It doesn’t look very old.”

  “Exactly.” He carefully sets it back inside the drawer. “Two weeks, three weeks? You grow roses,” he adds as if that makes her an expert in wilted ones.

  “I don’t know. But it doesn’t look months old. It isn’t completely dried out. What do you want to do in here, Marino? Dust for prints? It should already have been done. What the hell did they do in here?”

  “Make assumptions,” he says. “That’s what they did. I’ll get my case out of the car, take pictures. I can dust for prints. The window, window frame, this dresser, especially the top drawer. That’s about it.”

  “May as well. We can’t mess up this crime scene now. Too many people got to it first.” She realizes she has just referred to the bedroom as a crime scene and it is the first time she has called it that.

  “Then I guess I’ll wander out in the yard,” he says. “Two weeks, though. Unlikely any of little Sweetie’s poop would be out there unless it never rained once, and we know it has. So kind of hard to know if there’s really a missing dog. Browning said nothing about it.”

  Scarpetta returns to the kitchen where Mrs. Paulsson sits at the table. It does not appear she has moved, but is in the same position in the same chair, staring off. She doesn’t really believe her daughter died of the flu. How could she possibly believe such a thing?

  “Has anybody explained to you why the FBI is interested in Gilly’s death?” Scarpetta asks, sitting across the small table from her. “What have the police said to you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t watch that sort of thing on TV,” she mutters, her voice trailing off.

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Police shows. FBI shows. Crime shows. Never have watched things like that.”

  “But you know the FBI is involved,” Scarpetta says as her concerns about Mrs. Paulsson’s mental health gather more darkly. “Have you talked to the FBI?”

  “This woman came to see me, I already told you. She said she just had routine questions and was mighty sorry to bother me because I was upset. That’s what she said, I was upset. She sat right here, right where we are, and she asked me things about Gilly and Frank and anybody suspicious I might have noticed. You know, did Gilly talk to strangers, did she talk to her father. What are the neighbors like. She asked about Frank, a lot about him.”

  “Why do you think that is? What kinds of questions about Frank?” Scarpetta probes, envisioning the blond man with the hard jaw and pale blue eyes.

  Mrs. Paulsson stares at the wall to the left of the stove as if something is on the white-painted wall that captures her interest, but nothing is there. “I don’t know why she asked about him except that women often do.” She stiffens and her voice gets brittle. “Oh boy, do they ever.”

  “And he’s where now? Right this minute, I mean.”

  “Charleston. We may as well have been divorced forever.” She begins to pick at a hangnail, her eyes riveted to the wall, as if something on it seizes her attention, but there is nothing on it, nothing at all.

  “Were he and Gilly close?”

  “She worships him.” Mrs. Paulsson takes a deep, quiet breath, her eyes wide, and her head begins to move, suddenly unsteady on her thin neck. “He can do no wrong. The couch in the living room below the window, it’s just a plaid couch, nothing special about that couch except it was his spot. Where he watched TV, read the paper.” She takes a deep, heavy breath. “After he left she used to go in there and lie down on it. I could hardly get her off it.” She sighs. “He’s not a good father. Isn’t that the way it goes? We love what we can’t have.”

  Marino’s boots sound from the direction of Gilly’s bedroom. This time his big, heavy feet are louder.

  “We love what doesn’t love us back,” Mrs. Paulsson says.

  Scarpetta has made no notes since returning to the kitchen. Her wrist rests on top of the notebook, the ballpoint pen ready but still. “What is the FBI agent’s name?” she asks.

  “Oh dear. Karen. Let me see.” She shuts her eyes and touches her trembling fingers to her forehead. “I just don’t remember things anymore. Let me see. Weber. Karen Weber.”

  “From the Richmond field office?”

  Marino walks into the kitchen, a black plastic fishing tackle box gripped in one hand, the other hand holding his baseball cap. He has taken the cap off finally, perhaps out of respect for Mrs. Paulsson, the mother of a young girl who was murdered.

  “Oh dear. I guess she was. I have her card somewhere. Where did I put it?”

  “You know anything about Gilly having a red rose?” Marino asks from the doorway. “There’s a red rose in her bedroom.”

  “What?” Mrs. Paulsson says.

  “Why don’t we show you,” Scarpetta says, getting up from the table. She hesitates, hoping Mrs. Paulsson can handle what is about to happen. “I’d like to explain a few things.”

  “Oh. I guess we can.” She stands and is shaky on her feet. “A red rose?”

  “When did Gilly see her father last?” Scarpetta asks, and they head back to the bedroom, Marino leading the way.

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “Did she go see him? Did he come here?” Scarpetta asks in her most nonaggressive voice, and it strikes her that the hallway seems tighter and darker than it was a few minutes ago.

  “I don’t know anything about a rose,” Mrs. Paulsson says.

  “I had to look in her drawers,” Marino says. “You understand we have to do things like that.”

  “Is this what happens when children die of the flu?”

  “I’m sure the police looked in her drawers already,” Marino says. “Or maybe you weren’t in the room when they were looking around and taking pictures.”

  He steps aside and lets Mrs.
Paulsson enter her dead daughter’s bedroom. She walks in as far as the dresser to the left of the doorway, against the wall. Marino digs in a pocket and pulls out his cotton gloves. He works his huge hands into them and opens the top dresser drawer. He picks up the drooping rose, one of those roses that was furled and never opened, the sort Scarpetta has seen wrapped in transparent plastic and sold in convenience stores, usually at the counter for a dollar and a half.

  “I don’t know what that is.” Mrs. Paulsson stares at the rose, her face turning red, almost the same crimson red as the wilted rose. “I don’t have any idea where she got that.”

  Marino doesn’t react visibly.

  “When you came back from the drugstore,” Scarpetta says, “you didn’t see the rose in her bedroom? Possible someone brought it to Gilly because she was sick? What about a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Paulsson replies.

  “Okay,” Marino says, placing the rose on top of the dresser, in plain view. “You walked in here when you came home from the drugstore. Let’s go back to that. Let’s start with your parking the car. Where did you park when you got home?”

  “In front. Right by the sidewalk.”

  “That’s where you always park?”

  She nods yes, her attention drifting to the bed. It is neatly made and covered with a quilt that is the same dusky blue as her estranged husband’s eyes.

  “Mrs. Paulsson, would you like to sit down?” Scarpetta says, giving Marino a quick look.