Trace

  “You can look later. What happened next?”

  “I got out and walked to the door. I rang the bell, she came to the door and let me in.” The heaving darkness is right in front of his face now, like a storm about to break open on top of him. He takes a deep breath and his head throbs.

  “Marino, it’s all right,” she says quietly. “You can tell me. Let’s find out what. Exactly what. That’s all we’re trying to do.”

  “She…uh, she was wearing boots, like paratrooper boots, like steel-toed black leather boots. Military boots. And she had on a big camouflage T-shirt.” The darkness swallows him, seems to swallow him whole, swallows more of him than he knew he had. “Nothing else, just that, and I was just sort of shocked, and didn’t know why she was dressed like that. I didn’t think nothing of it, not the way you might think. Then she shut the door behind me and put her hands on me.”

  “Where did she put her hands on you?”

  “She said she’d wanted me the minute we walked in that morning,” he says, embellishing a little, but not a lot, because whatever her exact words were, the message he got was just that. She wanted him. She had wanted him the first instant she saw him, when he and Scarpetta showed up at her house to ask about Gilly.

  “You said she put her hands on you. Where? What part of your body?”

  “My pockets. In my pockets.”

  “Front or back pockets?”

  “Front.” His eyes drop to his lap and he blinks as he looks at the deep front pockets of his black cargo pants.

  “The same pants you have on now?” Scarpetta asks, her eyes never leaving him.

  “Yeah. These pants. I didn’t exactly get around to changing my clothes. I didn’t exactly get back to my room this morning. I got a cab and went straight to the morgue.”

  “We’ll get to that,” she replies. “After she put her hands in your pockets, then what?”

  “Why do you want to know all this?”

  “You know why. You know exactly why,” she says in that same calm, steady tone, her eyes on him.

  He remembers Suz’s hands digging deep into his pockets and her pulling him into her house, laughing, saying how good he looked as she pushed the door shut with her foot. A fog swirls in his thoughts like fog swirling in the headlights as the taxi drove him to her house, and he knew he was heading into the unknown, but he went, and then she had her hands in his pockets and was pulling him into the living room, laughing, dressed in nothing but a camouflage T-shirt and combat boots. She pressed against him and he knew she could feel him and she knew he could feel her soft and tight against him.

  “She got a bottle of bourbon out of the kitchen,” he says, and he listens to his voice but he isn’t seeing anything inside the hotel room as he tells Scarpetta. He’s in a trance as he tells her. “She poured us drinks and I said I shouldn’t have any more. Maybe I didn’t say that. I don’t know. She had me going. What can I tell you? She had me going. I asked her what’s the thing with the camouflage, and she said he was into that, Frank was. Uniforms. He used to get her to dress up for him and they would play.”

  “Was Gilly around when he would ask Suz to wear uniforms and play?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we’ll get to Gilly later. What did Frank and Suz play?”

  “Games.”

  “Did she want you to play games last night?” Scarpetta asks.

  The room is dark and he feels the darkness, and he can’t see what he did because it is unbearable, and all he can think about as he tries to be truthful is how the fantasy will die forever. She will imagine him and it will never happen, never, and there will be no point in his ever hoping again, remotely hoping, because she will know what it might be like with him.

  “This is important, Marino,” she says quietly. “Tell me about the game.”

  He swallows and imagines he feels the pills in his throat, deep inside it and burning. He wants more tea but can’t move and he can’t bear to ask her to get him tea or anything else. She is sitting straight in the chair but not tensely, her strong, capable hands on the armrests. She is erect but relaxed in her mud-spattered suit. Her eyes are keen as she listens.

  “She told me to chase her,” he begins. “I was drinking. And I said what do you mean by chase. And she told me to go into the bedroom, her bedroom, and hide behind the door and to time it. She said for me to wait five minutes, exactly five minutes, and then start looking for her like…Like I was going to kill her. And I told her it wasn’t right. Well, I didn’t really tell her.” He takes another deep breath. “I probably didn’t tell her, because she had me going.”

  “What time was it by now?”

  “I’d been there maybe an hour.”

  “She puts her hands in your pants the minute you walked through the front door at approximately ten-thirty and then an hour passes? Nothing happened during that hour?”

  “We were drinking. In the living room, on the couch.” He won’t look at her now. He will never look at her again.

  “Lights on? Curtains open or closed?”

  “She’d built a fire. The lights were off. I don’t remember if the curtains were open.” He thinks about it. “They were closed.”

  “What did you do on the couch?”

  “Talked. And made out, I guess.”

  “Don’t guess. And I don’t know what that means. What does it mean when you say you made out?” Scarpetta replies. “Kissing, fondling? Did you take your clothes off? Did you have intercourse? Oral sex?”

  He feels his face turn hot. “No. I mean, the first part we did. Kissing, mostly. You know, making out. Like people do. Making out. We were on the couch and talked about the game.” His face burns. He knows she can see how hot his face is and he refuses to look at her.

  The lights were out and the light from the fire moved over her flesh, her pale flesh, and when she grabbed him, it hurt and excited him, and then it simply hurt. He told her to be careful because it hurt, and she laughed and said she liked it rough, liked it very rough, and would he bite her, and he said no, he didn’t want to bite her, not hard. You’ll like it, she promised, you’ll like biting hard. You don’t know what you’re missing if you’ve never done it rough, and all the while she talked her flesh caught the light of the fire as she moved, and he tried to keep his tongue in her mouth and please her while he crossed his legs and maneuvered himself so she wouldn’t hurt him. Don’t be such a sissy, she kept saying as she tried to shove him down hard on the couch and force his zipper, but he managed to keep her from getting to him. He was thinking about her teeth showing white in the firelight and what it would be like if she got those white teeth on him.

  “The game began on the couch?” Scarpetta asks from her distant chair.

  “That’s where we talked about it. Then I got up and she took me into the bedroom and told me to step behind the door and wait five minutes, like I said.”

  “Were you still drinking?”

  “She’d poured me another drink, I guess.”

  “Don’t guess. Big drinks? Little drinks? How many by now?”

  “Nothing that woman does is in a small way. Big drinks. Three at least by the time she told me to go behind the door. It starts getting really fuzzy now,” he says. “After the game started, it all starts to fade. Maybe it’s a damn good thing.”

  “It’s not a good thing. Try to remember. We need to know the what. The what. Not the why. I don’t care about the why, Marino. Trust me. There’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t heard before. Or seen. I don’t shock easily.”

  “No, Doc. I’m sure you don’t. But maybe I do. Maybe I didn’t think so, but maybe I do. I remember looking at my watch and having a real hard time seeing the time. My eyesight ain’t what it used to be anyway, but it was blurring bad and I was keyed up, real keyed up, not in a real good way. I don’t know why I went along with it, to tell you the truth.”

  He was sweating profusely behind the door, trying to read his watch, then he starting counting sile
ntly, counting up to sixty and losing his place and starting again until he was sure five minutes had passed. His excitement was not the sort that he had ever felt with a woman, no woman or encounter with a woman he could recall, not ever. He stepped out from behind the door and realized the entire house was dark. He couldn’t see his own hands unless he held them very close to his face, and he felt along the walls and realized she could hear him, and this was when he realized in his drunken obtuseness, somehow as drunk as he was he realized his heart was pounding and he was breathing hard because he was excited and scared, and he doesn’t want Scarpetta to know he was scared. He reached down to his ankle and lost his balance and found himself on the hallway floor, feeling for his gun, but his gun wasn’t in its holster. He doesn’t know how long he sat there. It’s possible he fell asleep, briefly.

  When he came to, he didn’t have his gun and his heart was pounding in his neck as he sat without moving, barely breathing, on the wooden floor, sweat streaming into his eyes, listening, trying to hear where the son of a bitch was. The darkness was so complete it was thick and airless and it wrapped around him like black cloth as he tried to get to his feet without making noise and giving away his position. The bastard was in here somewhere, and Marino didn’t have his gun. With his arms out like oars, he barely brushed the walls as he moved himself forward, listening, ready to pounce, knowing he was going to get shot if he didn’t catch the piece of shit by surprise.

  He moved slowly like a cat, his brain focused on the enemy, and the thought that kept coming to him was how did he get into the house and what house and what son of a bitch and where was his backup? Where the fuck was everybody? Oh Christ, maybe they were down. Maybe he was the only one left and now he was going down because he didn’t have his gun and somehow he had lost his radio, and he didn’t know where he was. And then he felt something hit him. And then he passed in and out of a heaving darkness, a hot darkness that drove the air out of him as it moved and he became aware of pain, of burning pain as the darkness moved and grabbed at him and made terrible wet noises.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he hears himself say, and it surprises him that his voice sounds sane because inside he feels crazy. “I just don’t know. I woke up in her bed.”

  “Clothed?”

  “No.”

  “Where were your clothes, your belongings?”

  “In a chair.”

  “In a chair? Neatly in a chair?”

  “Yeah, pretty neatly. My clothes and my pistol was on top of them. I sat up in bed and nobody else was there,” he says.

  “Was her side of the bed unmade? Did it look slept in?”

  “The covers were pulled down and messed up, real messed up. But nobody was there. I looked around and didn’t know where the hell I was and then I remembered I’d taken a taxi to her house, and I remembered her coming to the door dressed the way she was, you know, the night before. I looked around and saw a glass of bourbon on the table on my side of the bed, and a towel. The towel had blood on it and it scared the shit out of me. I tried to get up and couldn’t. I just sat there. I couldn’t get up.”

  He realizes his teacup is full, and it terrifies him that he has no recollection of Scarpetta getting up from her chair and refilling his tea or if maybe he did, but he doubts he did. He has a sense that he is in the same position on the bed that he has been in, and he notices the clock and more than three hours have passed since he and Scarpetta started talking in his hotel room.

  “Do you think it’s possible she drugged you?” Scarpetta asks him. “Unfortunately, I don’t think a drug test would be helpful at this point. Too much time has passed. It depends on the drug.”

  “Oh, that would be great. If I go get a drug test, then I may as well call the police myself, assuming she ain’t already done it.”

  “Tell me about the bloody towel,” she says.

  “I don’t know whose blood it was. Maybe it was mine. My mouth hurt.” He touches it. “I hurt like shit. I guess that’s what she’s into, hurting, but all I can say is…Well, I don’t know what I did because I didn’t see her. She was in the bathroom and when I started calling out her name to see where the hell she was, she started screaming at me, screaming for me to leave her house and saying I…She was saying all these things.”

  “I don’t guess you thought to take the bloody towel with you.”

  “I don’t even know how I managed to call a taxi to get out of there. In fact, I don’t remember doing it. Obviously I did. No, I didn’t take the towel, goddamn it.”

  “You came straight to the morgue.” She frowns a little, as if this part doesn’t make sense.

  “I stopped for coffee. A Seven-Eleven. Finally, I got the cabdriver to drop me off several blocks from the office so I could walk, hoping I could clear my head. It helped a little. I felt half human again, and then I walked in the office and damn if she’s not there.”

  “Before you got to the OCME, did you listen to your phone messages?”

  “Oh. Maybe I did.”

  “Otherwise you couldn’t have known about the meeting.”

  “No. I knew about the meeting,” Marino says. “Eise told me at the FOP lounge that he’d passed on some information to Marcus. An e-mail, that’s what he said.” He tries to remember. “Oh yeah, now I know. Marcus was on the phone as soon as he opened the e-mail and said he was going to have to call a meeting for the next morning and he told Eise to make sure he was in the building in case he needed him to come down and explain things.”

  “So you knew about the meeting last night,” Scarpetta says.

  “Yeah, last night was the first I heard about it, and it seemed like Eise said something to make me think you was going to be there, so I knew I had to be there.”

  “You knew the meeting was to be at nine-thirty?”

  “I must have. I’m sorry I’m so foggy, Doc. But I knew about the meeting.” He looks at her and can’t figure out what’s going through her mind. “Why? What’s the big deal about the meeting?”

  “He didn’t tell me about it until eight-thirty this morning,” she replies.

  “He’s shooting bullets at your feet, making you dance,” Marino says, and he hates Dr. Marcus. “Let’s get us a plane and go back to Florida. Fuck him.”

  “When you saw Mrs. Paulsson at the office this morning, did she speak to you?”

  “She looked at me and walked off. Like she didn’t know me. I don’t understand nothing about this, Doc. I just know something happened and it’s bad, and I’m scared shitless I did something really bad and now I’m going to get it. After all the shit I’ve done, now this is going to do it. This is it.”

  Scarpetta slowly gets up from her chair, and she looks tired, but she is alert, and he can see the worry in her eyes but he can also see that she is thinking, she is making connections he sure as hell isn’t making. Her eyes are full of thoughts as she looks out the window and walks over to the service cart and drains the last little bit of tea into her cup.

  “She injured you, didn’t she?” she says, standing near the bed, looking down at him. “Show me what she did to you.”

  “Hell no! Hell no, I can’t,” he says in a whine that makes him sound ten years old. “I can’t do that. No way.”

  “Do you want me to help you or not? You think you have something I’ve never seen before?”

  He covers his face with his hands. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can call the police and they’ll get you down to the station and photograph your injuries. Then you’ve just started a case. Maybe that’s what you want. Not a bad plan, assuming she’s already called the police. But I suspect she hasn’t.”

  He lowers his hands and looks up at her. “Why?”

  “Why do I suspect that? Very simple. People know we’re staying here. Doesn’t Detective Browning know you’re staying here? Doesn’t he have your phone numbers? So why haven’t the police shown up to arrest you? You think they wouldn’t be all over you if Gilly Paulsson’s mother call
ed nine-one-one and said you raped her? And why didn’t she scream when she saw you at the office? You just raped her and she doesn’t make a scene or call the police right then?”

  “Ain’t no way I’m calling the police,” he says.

  “Then I’m all you’ve got.” She walks back to her chair and picks up her nylon scene kit. She unzips it and pulls out a digital camera.

  “Holy shit,” he says, staring at the camera as if it is a gun pointed at him.

  “Sounds like the victim here is you,” she says. “Sounds like she wants you to think you did something to her. Why?”

  “Shit if I know. I can’t do it.”

  “You’re hungover but not stupid, Marino.”

  He looks at her. He looks at the camera down by her side. He looks at Scarpetta standing in the middle of his room in her dark, mud-spattered suit.

  “We’re here working the death of her daughter, Marino. Mama clearly wants some kind of leverage or money or attention or some kind of something, and I intend to find out what it is she wants. Oh yes. I will find out. Take your shirt off, your pants off, take off whatever you need to take off to show me what that woman did to you during her sick little game last night.”

  “Now what are you gonna think of me?” he says, pulling his black Polo shirt over his head, carefully, the fabric hurting him where it rubs the bite and suck marks all over his chest.

  “God. Sit still. God damn it, why didn’t you show me this earlier? We’ve got to take care of this or you’re going to get infections. And you’re worried about her calling the police? Are you out of your mind?” All this while she takes photographs, moving over him, getting close-ups of each wound.

  “Thing is, I ain’t seen what I did to her,” he says, a little calmer, realizing that getting checked out by the Doc might not be as bad as he thought.

  “You did even half of this to her, your teeth should hurt.”

  He pays very close attention to his teeth and feels nothing at all, just his usual teeth and the usual way they feel. Thank God his teeth don’t hurt.

  “What about your back?” she asks, standing over him.