Trace

  “He ever show up?” Browning is chewing gum. She can hear him working the gum vigorously between his teeth as she stands looking out the window.

  “I honestly don’t remember. Edgar Allan could come and go without anyone noticing. It may sound unkind, but he was the most nonexistent person who ever worked for me. I hardly remember what he looked like.”

  “‘Looked’ is operative here. We got no clue what he looks like now,” Browning supposes, flipping a page in his notepad. “You said he was a little guy with red hair back then. What? Five-eight, five-nine? One-fifty?”

  “More like five-foot-six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds,” she recalls. “I can’t remember the color of his eyes.”

  “According to DMV, brown. But maybe not, ’cause he lied about his height and weight. On his license he’s got himself five-foot-ten, one-eighty.”

  “Then why did you ask me?” She turns around and looks at him.

  “To give you a chance to remember before I jinxed you with what is probably false information.” He winks at her, chewing gum. “He’s also got himself as having brown hair.” He taps the notepad with his pen. “So back then, what was a guy like him making embalming bodies and doing whatever he did down there in the Anatomical Division?”

  “Eight, ten years ago?” She looks out the window again, at the night, at the lights burning in Gilly Paulsson’s house on the other side of the fence. The police are in her yard too. They’re in her bedroom. She can see shadows moving behind the curtained window in her bedroom, the same window Edgar Allan Pogue probably peeped into whenever he could, looking and fantasizing and maybe watching the games that went on in that house while he left stains on his sheets. “I would say he wasn’t making more than twenty-two thousand a year back then.”

  “And then all of a sudden he quit. Saying he was disabled for one reason or another. Ain’t that a common story.”

  “Exposure to formaldehyde. He wasn’t faking. I had to review his medical reports and probably did talk to him then. I must have. He had respiratory disease from formaldehyde, had fibrosis in his lungs that showed up on X ray and biopsy. As I recall, tests showed the oxygen concentrations in his blood were off, significantly off, and spirometry clearly demonstrated diminished respiratory function.”

  “Spir-what?”

  “A machine, a device. You breathe in and out, and it measures respiratory function.”

  “Gotcha. When I used to smoke, I probably would’ve flunked that one.”

  “If you kept smoking, eventually you would have.”

  “Alrighty. So Edgar Allan really had a problem. Am I to assume he still would?”

  “Well, once he was no longer exposed to formaldehyde or any other irritant, his disease shouldn’t have progressed. But that doesn’t mean it reversed itself, because he’s going to have scarring. Scarring is permanent. So yes, he still has a problem. How serious a problem, I don’t know.”

  “He should have a doctor. You think we could find out the name of his doctor from old personnel files?”

  “They’d be in state archives, assuming they still exist. Actually, Dr. Marcus is the one to ask. I don’t have the authority.”

  “Uh huh. In your medical opinion, Dr. Scarpetta, I guess what I’m really wanting to know is how sick this guy is. Is he so sick he might still be going to the doctor or a clinic or be on prescription drugs?”

  “Certainly he could be on prescription drugs. But he might not be. As long as he’s taken reasonable care of his health, his biggest concern is probably going to be avoiding sick people, staying away from people who have colds or the flu and are contagious. He doesn’t want to get an upper respiratory infection because he doesn’t have much healthy lung in reserve, not like you and I do. So he can get seriously ill. He can get pneumonia. If he is susceptible to asthma, then he’s going to avoid whatever sets that off. He might have prescription drugs, steroids for example. He might take allergy shots. He might use over-the-counter remedies. He might do all kinds of things. He might do nothing.”

  “Right, right, right,” he says, tapping his pen and chewing hard. “He’d probably get really out of breath if he struggled with someone, then.”

  “Probably.” This has been going on for more than an hour and Scarpetta is very tired. She has eaten little all day and her energy is used up. “I mean, he could be strong but his physical activity is going to be limited. He’s not running sprints or playing tennis. If he’s been on steroids on and off for years, he might be fat. His endurance isn’t good.” The long bright probes of the flashlights slash over the front of the wooden shed behind the house, and the lights focus on the doorway, and a uniformed cop is illuminated as he lifts bolt cutters to a lock on the door.

  “Strike you as odd he might have done something to Gilly Paulsson when she was sick with the flu? Wouldn’t he be worried he’d catch it?” Browning asks.

  “No,” she says, looking out at the cop with the bolt cutters, and seeing the door suddenly open wide and the beams of light stab into the darkness inside the shed.

  “How come?” he asks as her cell phone vibrates.

  “Drug addicts don’t think about hepatitis and AIDS when they’re suffering withdrawal. Serial rapists and killers aren’t thinking about sexually transmitted diseases when they’re in a mood to rape and murder,” she says, sliding the phone out of her pocket. “No, I wouldn’t expect Edgar Allan to be thinking about the flu if he were seized by the urge to kill a young girl. Excuse me.” She answers her phone.

  “It’s me,” Rudy says. “Something’s come up, something you need to know about. The case you’re on in Richmond, well, latents from it match latents from a case we’re working in Florida. IAFIS matched up latents. Unknown latents.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “One of our cases. A case Lucy and I are working. You don’t know about it. It’s too much to go into right now. Lucy didn’t want you to know about it.”

  Scarpetta listens and disbelief thaws her numbness, and through the window she watches a big figure in dark clothing walk away from the woodshed behind the house, his flashlight moving as he moves. Marino is heading toward the house. “What kind of case?” she asks Rudy.

  “I’m not supposed to be talking about it.” He pauses and takes a breath. “But I can’t get Lucy. Her damn phone, I don’t know what she’s doing but she’s not answering it again, hasn’t for the past two hours, dammit. An attempted murder of one of our rookies, a female. She was inside Lucy’s house when it happened.”

  “Oh God.” Scarpetta briefly shuts her eyes.

  “Weird as shit. I thought at first she was faking for attention or something. But prints on the bottle bomb are the same as ones we lifted in the bedroom. Same as prints from your case in Richmond, the girl’s case you got called in to work.”

  “The woman in your case. What happened to her, exactly?” Scarpetta asks while Marino’s heavy footsteps sound in the hallway, and Browning gets up and goes to the doorway.

  “Was in bed, sick with the flu. We aren’t sure after that, except he got in an unlocked door and must have gotten scared off when Lucy came home. The victim was unconscious, in shock, had a seizure, hell if I know. Doesn’t remember what happened, but was nude, facedown in the bed, covers off the bed.”

  “Injuries?” She can hear Marino and Browning talking just outside the bedroom. She hears the word “bones.”

  “Nothing except bruises. Benton says bruises on her hands, chest, back.”

  “So Benton knows about this. Everybody does except me,” she says, getting angry. “Lucy kept this from me. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  Rudy hesitates, and it seems hard for him to say, “Personal reasons, I think.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t get me started. But I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t even be telling you, but you need to know since it now looks like your case is connected. Don’t ask me how, Jesus, I’ve never seen anything as creepy-weird as this. What the hell are we d
ealing with? Some freak?”

  Marino walks into the bedroom, his eyes intense on Scarpetta. “A freak, yes,” she says to Rudy and looks at Marino. “Very possibly a white male named Edgar Allan Pogue, in his thirties, mid-thirties. There are databases for pharmacies,” she says. “He might be in a pharmaceutical database, maybe different ones, might be on steroids for respiratory disease. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “That’s all you need to say,” he says, sounding encouraged.

  Scarpetta ends the call and keeps looking at Marino while she thinks, only fleetingly, of how her view of rules has changed as light changes with the weather and the season, and things that looked one way in the past look another way now and will look different in days and years to come. There are few databases on earth that TLP can’t hack into. At this moment, it is all about tracking monsters. The hell with rules. The hell with the doubt and guilt she feels as she stands in the bedroom and tucks the phone back into her pocket.

  “From his bedroom window he could see into hers,” Scarpetta says to Marino and Browning. “If Mrs. Paulsson’s games, so-called games, went on in the house, he might have seen them through the windows. And God forbid, if something went on in Gilly’s room, he could have seen that, too.”

  “Doc?” Marino starts to say, his eyes intense and angry.

  “My point is, human nature, damaged human nature, is a strange thing,” she adds. “Seeing someone victimized can make someone want to victimize that person again. Watching sexual violence through a window could be very provocative to someone who is marginal…”

  “What games?” Browning interrupts her.

  “Doc?” Marino says, and his eyes are hot and hard with the fury that goes with the hunt. “Looks like there’s quite a crowd out there in the shed, a lot of dead people. Think you might want to take a look.”

  “You were saying something about another case?” Browning asks as they follow the narrow, dim, cold hallway. The smell of dust and mildew suddenly seems choking to Scarpetta, and she tries not to think about Lucy, about what she deems personal and off-limits. Scarpetta tells Browning and Marino what Rudy just told her. Browning gets excited. Marino gets quiet.

  “Then Pogue is probably in Florida,” Browning says. “I’m on that like a flea on a dog.” He looks confused by a host of thoughts that flicker in his eyes, and in the kitchen he stops and adds, “I’ll be out in a minute,” and he unclips his phone from his belt.

  A crime scene technician in a navy blue jumpsuit and a baseball cap is dusting the plate around a light switch in the kitchen, and Scarpetta hears other cops on the other side of the small depressing house, in the living room. By the back door are big black trash bags tied and tagged as evidence, and Junius Eise enters her mind. He is going to be busy sorting through the demented trash of Edgar Allan Pogue’s demented life.

  “This guy ever work for a funeral home?” Marino asks Scarpetta, and beyond the back door the yard is overgrown and dead and thick with soggy leaves. “The shed back here is piled, I mean piled, with boxes of what looks like human ashes. They’ve been around for a while, but I don’t think they’ve been here long. Like maybe he just moved them out there in the shed.”

  She doesn’t say anything until they get to the shed. Then she borrows a flashlight from one of the cops, and she directs the strong beam inside the shed. The light picks out big plastic garbage bags that the cops have opened. Spilling out of them are white ashes, bits of chalky bone, and cheap metal boxes and cigar boxes that are coated with white dust. Some of them are dented. A cop stands to one side of the open door and reaches inside it with a retractable tactical baton that he has opened. He pokes into an open bag of ashes.

  “You think he burned up these people himself?” the cop asks Scarpetta. Her light moves through the blackness inside the shed, stopping on long bones and a skull the color of old parchment.

  “No,” she replies. “Not unless he has his own crematorium somewhere. These are typical for cremains.” She moves the light to a dusty, dented box half buried in ashes inside a trash bag. “When the ashes of your person are returned to you, it’s in a plain cheap box like this. You want something fancier, you buy it.” She moves the light back to the unburned long bones and skull, and the skull stares at them with black empty eyes and a gap-toothed grimace. “To reduce a human body to ash requires temperatures as high as eighteen hundred degrees or two thousand degrees.”

  “What about the bones that aren’t burned?” He points his baton at the long bones and skull, and the baton is steady in his hand but she can tell that he is unnerved.

  “I’d check to see if there have been any grave robberies around here in recent memory,” she replies. “These bones look pretty old to me. Certainly, they aren’t fresh. And I don’t smell any odor, not like we’d smell if bodies have been decomposing out here.” She stares at the skull and it stares back at her.

  “Necrophilia,” Marino comments, flashing his light around the inside of the shed, at the white dust of what must be scores and scores of people that has been accumulating somewhere for years and years and then recently was dumped inside the shed.

  “I don’t know,” Scarpetta replies, turning off her light and stepping back from the shed. “But I’d say it’s very possible he has a scam going, taking cremains for a fee, ostensibly to fulfill some poor person’s wish to have his ashes scattered over a mountain, over the sea, in a garden, in his favorite fishing hole. You take the money and dump the ashes somewhere. I guess eventually in this shed. No one knows. It’s happened before. He may have started doing it while he worked for me. I’d check with local crematoriums too, see if he hung around any of them, looking for business. Of course, they probably won’t admit to it.” She walks off through the wet dead leaves.

  “So this is all about money?” the cop with the baton follows her, incredulity in his voice.

  “Maybe he got so attracted to death, he starting causing it,” she replies, walking through the yard. The rain has stopped. The wind is quiet, and the moon has come out of the clouds and is thin and pale like a shard of glass high above the mossy slate roof of the house where Edgar Allan Pogue lived.

  43.

  OUT ON THE foggy street, the light from the nearest lamp reaches Scarpetta just enough to cast her shadow on the asphalt as she stares across the soggy, dark yard at the lighted windows on either side of the front door.

  Whoever lives in this neighborhood or drives through it should have noticed lights on and a man with red hair coming and going. Maybe he has a car, but Browning told her a minute ago that if Pogue has a vehicle of any description, there is no record of it. Of course, that is peculiar. It means that if he has a car, the plates on it are not registered to him. Either the car isn’t his or the plates are stolen. It is possible he has no car, she thinks.

  Her cell phone feels awkward and heavy although it is small and doesn’t weigh much, but she is burdened by thoughts of Lucy and halfway dreads calling her under the circumstances. Whatever Lucy’s personal situation is, Scarpetta dreads knowing the details. Lucy’s personal situations are rarely good, and the part of Scarpetta that seems to have nothing better to do than worry and doubt spends a considerable amount of time blaming herself for Lucy’s failure at relationships. Benton is in Aspen, and Lucy must know it. She must know that Scarpetta and Benton are not in a good place and haven’t been since they got back together again.

  Scarpetta dials Lucy’s number as the front door opens and Marino steps out onto the deeply shadowed porch. Scarpetta is struck by the oddity of seeing him emerge empty-handed from a crime scene. When he was a detective in Richmond, he never left a crime scene without hauling off as many bags of evidence as he could fit in his trunk, but now he carries nothing because Richmond is no longer his jurisdiction. So it is wise to let the cops collect evidence and label and receipt it to the labs. Perhaps these cops will do an adequate job and not leave out anything important or include too much that isn’t, but as Scarpetta watches Marino s
lowly follow the brick walk, she feels powerless, and she ends her call to Lucy before voicemail answers.

  “What do you want to do?” she asks Marino when he gets to her.

  “I wish I had a cigarette,” he says, looking up and down the unevenly lit street. “Jimbo the fearless real-estate agent called me back. He got hold of Bernice Towle. She’s the daughter.”

  “The daughter of whoever Mrs. Arnette was?”

  “Right. So Mrs. Towle knows nothing about anybody living in the house. According to her, the house has been empty for several years. There’s some weirdo shit about a will. I don’t know. The family’s not allowed to sell the house for less than a certain amount of money, and Jim says no way in hell he’ll ever get that price. I don’t know. I sure could use a cigarette. Maybe I did pick up on cigar smoke in there and it’s got me craving a cigarette.”

  “What about guests? Did Mrs. Towle allow guests to stay in the house?”

  “Nobody seems to remember the last time this dump had guests. I guess he could do like the hobos who lived in abandoned buildings. Have free run of the place and if you see someone coming, you scram. Then when the coast is clear, you come back. Who the hell knows. So what do you want to do?”

  “I guess we should go back to the hotel.” She unlocks the SUV and looks again at the lighted house. “I don’t think there’s much else we can do tonight.”

  “I wonder how late the hotel bar stays open,” he says, opening the passenger door and hiking up his pants leg as he steps on the running board and carefully climbs up into the SUV. “Now I’m wide awake. That’s what happens, dammit. I don’t guess it would hurt me if I had a cigarette, just one, and a few beers. Then maybe I’ll sleep.”

  She shuts her door and starts the engine. “Hopefully the bar is closed,” she replies. “If I drink anything, it will only make matters worse because I can’t think. What has happened, Marino?” She pulls away from the curb, the lights from Edgar Allan Pogue’s house moving behind her. “He’s been living in this house. Didn’t anybody know? He’s got a woodshed full of human remains and nobody ever saw him in the backyard going into the shed, nobody ever did? You telling me Mrs. Paulsson never saw him moving around back there? Maybe Gilly did.”