“Why don’t we just swing around to her house and ask her?” Marino says, looking out his window, his huge hands in his lap, as if he is protecting his injury.
“It’s almost midnight.”
Marino laughs sarcastically. “Right. Let’s be polite.”
“Okay.” She turns left on Grace Street. “Just be prepared. No telling what she’ll say when she sees you.”
“She ought to be worried about what I say, not the other way around.”
Scarpetta does a U-turn and parks on the same side of the street as the small brick house, behind the dark blue minivan. Only the living room light is on, glowing through the filmy curtains. She tries to think of a foolproof way to get Mrs. Paulsson to come to the door and decides it would be wise to call her first. She scrolls through a list of recently made calls on her cell phone, hoping the Paulsson number is still there, but it isn’t. She digs inside her bag until she finds the scrap of paper she’s had since her first encounter with Suzanna Paulsson, and she enters it in her phone and sends it along the airways or wherever calls go, and imagines the phone ringing beside Mrs. Paulsson’s bed.
“Hello?” Mrs. Paulsson’s voice sounds uneasy and groggy.
“This is Kay Scarpetta. I’m outside your house and something has happened. I need to talk to you. Please come to the door.”
“What time is it?” she asks, confused and frightened.
“Please come to the door,” Scarpetta says, getting out of the SUV. “I’m outside your door.”
“All right. All right.” She hangs up.
“Sit in the car,” Scarpetta says into the SUV. “Wait until she opens the door, then come out. If she sees you through the window, she’s not going to let us in.”
She shuts her door and Marino sits quietly in the dark as she walks to the porch. Lights go on as Mrs. Paulsson passes through the house, heading to the door. Scarpetta waits, and a shadow floats across the living room curtain. It moves as Mrs. Paulsson peeks out, then the curtain flutters shut and sways as the door opens. She is dressed in a zip-up red flannel robe, her hair flat where it was pressed against the pillow, her eyes puffy.
“Lord, what is it?” she asks, letting Scarpetta in the house. “Why are you here? What’s happened?”
“The man living in the house behind your fence,” Scarpetta says. “Did you know him?”
“What man?” She looks baffled and scared. “What fence?”
“The house back there.” Scarpetta points, waiting for Marino to show up at the door any second. “A man has been living there. Come on. You must know someone’s been living back there, Mrs. Paulsson.”
Marino knocks on the door and Mrs. Paulsson jumps and grabs at her heart. “Lord! What now?”
Scarpetta opens the door and Marino walks in. His face is red and he won’t look at Mrs. Paulsson, but he shuts the door behind him and steps inside the living room.
“Oh shit,” Mrs. Paulsson says, suddenly angry. “I don’t want him here,” she says to Scarpetta. “Make him leave!”
“Tell us about the man behind your fence,” Scarpetta says. “You must have seen lights on back there.”
“He call himself Edgar Allan or Al or go by some other name?” Marino says to her, his face red and hard. “Don’t be giving us a bunch of crap, Suz. We ain’t in the mood. What did he call himself? I bet the two of you were chummy.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know about any man back there,” she says. “Why? Did he…? You think…? Oh God.” Her eyes shine with fear and tears, and she seems to be telling the truth as much as any good liar seems to, but Scarpetta doesn’t believe her.
“He ever come to this house?” Marino demands to know.
“No!” She shakes her head side to side, clasping her hands at her waist.
“Oh really?” Marino says. “How do you know if you don’t even know who we’re talking about, huh? Maybe he’s the milkman. Maybe he dropped in to play one of your games. You don’t know who we’re talking about, then how can you say he’s never once been to your house?”
“I’m not going to be talked to like this,” she says to Scarpetta.
“Answer the question,” Scarpetta replies, looking at her.
“I’m telling you…”
“And I’m telling you that his damn fingerprints were in Gilly’s bedroom,” Marino replies aggressively, stepping closer to her. “You let that little redheaded bastard in here for one of your games? Is that it, Suz?”
“No!” Tears spill down her face. “No! Nobody lives back there! Just the old woman, and she’s been gone for years! And maybe somebody’s in there now and then, but nobody lives there, I swear! His fingerprints? Oh God! My little baby. My little baby.” She sobs, hugging herself, crying so hard her bottom teeth are bared, and she presses her hands against her cheeks, and her hands are trembling. “What did he do to my little baby?”
“He killed her, that’s what,” Marino says. “Tell us about him, Suz.”
“Oh no,” she wails. “Oh Gilly.”
“Sit down, Suz.”
She stands there and cries into her hands.
“Sit down!” Marino orders her angrily, and Scarpetta knows his act.
She lets him do what he does so well, even if it is hard to watch.
“Sit down!” He points at the couch. “For once in your goddamn life tell the goddamn truth. Do it for Gilly.”
Mrs. Paulsson collapses on the plaid couch beneath the windows, her face in her hands, tears running down her neck and spotting the front of her robe. Scarpetta moves in front of the cold fireplace, across from Mrs. Paulsson.
“Tell me about Edgar Allan Pogue,” Marino says, loudly and slowly. “You listening, Suz? Hell-o? You listening, Suz? He killed your little girl. Or maybe you don’t care about that. She was such a pain in the ass, Gilly was. I heard about what a slob she was. All you did was pick up after her spoiled little ass…”
“Stop it!” she shrieks, her eyes wide and red and glaring as she stares hate at him. “Stop it! Stop it! You fucking…You…” She sobs and wipes her nose with a trembling hand. “My Gilly.”
Marino sits in the wing chair, and neither of them seems aware that Scarpetta is in the room, but he knows. He knows the act. “You want us to get him, Suz?” he asks, suddenly quieter and calmer. He leans forward and rests his thick forearms on his big knees. “What do you want? Tell me.”
“Yes.” She nods, crying. “Yes.”
“Help us.”
She shakes her head and cries.
“You aren’t gonna help us?” He leans back in the chair and looks over at Scarpetta in front of the fireplace. “She isn’t gonna help us, Doc. She don’t want to catch him.”
“No,” Mrs. Paulsson sobs. “I…I don’t know. I only saw him, I guess it was…One night I went out, you know. I…I went over to the fence. I went over to the fence to get Sweetie, and a man was in the yard back there.”
“The yard behind his house,” Marino says. “On the other side of your back fence.”
“He was behind the fence, and there’s cracks between the boards, and he had his fingers through, petting Sweetie through the fence. I said, Good evening. That’s what I said to him…Oh shit.” She can hardly catch her breath. “Oh shit. He did it. He was petting Sweetie.”
“What did he say to you?” Marino asks, his voice quiet. “He say something?”
“He said…” Her voice goes up and vanishes. “He…he said, I like Sweetie.”
“How’d he know your puppy’s name?”
“I like Sweetie, he said.”
“How’d he know your puppy’s name was Sweetie?” Marino asks.
She breathes hard, not crying as much, staring down at the floor.
Marino says, “Well, I guess he might have taken your puppy too. Since he liked her. You haven’t seen Sweetie, have you?”
“So he took Sweetie.” She clenches her hands in her lap, and her knuckles blanch. “He took everything.”
“That night when
he was petting Sweetie through the fence, what did you think? What did you think about some man being back there?”
“He had a low voice, you know, not a loud voice, kind of a slow voice that wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. I don’t know.”
“You didn’t say nothing else to him?”
She stares at the floor, her hands clenched in fists in her lap. “I think I said to him, ‘I’m Suz. You live in the neighborhood?’ He said he was visiting. That was all. So I picked up Sweetie and headed into the house. And when I was walking in, in through the kitchen door, I saw Gilly. She was in her bedroom, looking out the window. Watching me get Sweetie. As soon as I was at the door, she ran from the window to meet me and to get Sweetie. She loved that dog.” Her lips twitch as she stares at the floor. “She would be so upset.”
“The curtains was open when Gilly was looking out the window?” Marino asks.
Mrs. Paulsson stares at the floor, unblinking, fists clenched so hard her nails are digging into her palms.
Marino glances at Scarpetta and she says from the fireplace, “It’s all right, Mrs. Paulsson. Try to calm down. Try to relax a little bit. When he was petting Sweetie through the fence, how long was this before Gilly died?”
Mrs. Paulsson wipes her eyes and shuts them.
“Days? Weeks? Months?”
She raises her eyes and looks at her. “I don’t know why you came back here. I told you not to.”
“This is about Gilly,” Scarpetta says, trying to get Mrs. Paulsson to focus on what she doesn’t want to think about. “We need to know about the man you saw through the fence, the man you said was petting Sweetie.”
“You can’t just come back here when I told you not to.”
“I’m sorry you don’t want me here,” Scarpetta replies, standing quietly in front of the fireplace. “You may not think so, but I’m trying to help. All of us want to find out what happened to your daughter. And what happened to Sweetie.”
“No,” she says with dry eyes that stare weirdly at Scarpetta. “I want you to leave.” She doesn’t indicate that Marino should leave. She doesn’t even seem aware of him sitting in the chair to the left of the couch, not even two feet from where she sits. “If you don’t get out, I’m calling someone. The police. I’ll call them.”
You want to be alone with him, Scarpetta thinks. You want more of the game because games are easier than what is real. “Remember when the police took things out of Gilly’s bedroom?” she asks. “Remember they took the linens off her bed. There were a lot of things taken to the labs.”
“I don’t want you here,” she says, motionless on the couch, her harshly pretty face staring coldly at her.
“Scientists look for evidence. Everything on Gilly’s bed linens, everything on her pajamas, everything the police took from your house was looked at. And she was looked at. I looked at her,” Scarpetta goes on, staring back at Mrs. Paulsson’s cheap, pretty face. “The scientists didn’t find any dog hairs. Not one.”
Mrs. Paulsson stares at her and a thought moves in her eyes like a minnow moving in shallow brown water.
“Not one dog hair. Not one hair from a basset hound,” Scarpetta says in the same quiet, firm voice from the higher ground of the fireplace where she stands, looking down at Mrs. Paulsson on the couch. “Sweetie’s gone, all right. Because she never existed. There is no puppy. There never was.”
“Tell her to leave,” Mrs. Paulsson says to Marino without looking at him. “Make her get out of my house,” she says as if he is her ally or her man. “You doctors do what you want to people,” she says to Scarpetta. “You doctors do exactly what you want to people.”
“Why’d you lie about the puppy?” Marino asks.
“Sweetie’s gone,” she replies. “Gone.”
“We would know if there’d been a dog in your house,” he says.
“Gilly started looking out her window a lot. Because of Sweetie, looking out at Sweetie. Opening her window and calling out to Sweetie,” Mrs. Paulsson says, staring down at her clenched hands.
“There never has been a puppy, now has there, Suz?” Marino asks.
“She put her window up and down because of Sweetie. When Sweetie was in the yard, Gilly would open her window and laugh and call out. The lock broke.” Mrs. Paulsson slowly opens her palms and stares down at them, looking at the crescent wounds from her nails, looking at the crescents of blood. “I should have gotten it fixed,” she says.
44.
TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Lucy walks around the room, picking up magazines and acting impatient and bored. She hopes that the helicopter pilot sitting near the television will hurry up and go in for his appointment or get an urgent call and leave. She walks around the living room of the house near the hospital complex, and pauses in front of a window with old wavy glass and looks out at Barre Street and the historic homes on it. The tourists won’t flock to Charleston until spring, and she doesn’t see many people out.
Lucy rang the bell some fifteen minutes ago, and a chubby older woman let her in and showed her to the waiting room, which is just off the front door and was probably a small formal parlor back in the glory days of the house. The woman gave her a blank Federal Aviation Administration form to fill out, the same form Lucy has filled out every two years for the past decade, and then the woman went up a long flight of polished wooden stairs. Lucy’s form is on the coffee table. She started filling it out and then stopped. She plucks another magazine off a table, glances at it and places it back on the stack as the helicopter pilot works on his form and now and then looks up at her.
“Don’t mind me telling you what to do,” he says in a friendly tone, “but Dr. Paulsson doesn’t like it if your form’s not filled out when he gets to you.”
“So you know the ropes,” Lucy says, sitting down. “These damn forms. I’m not good with forms. I flunked forms in high school.”
“I hate them,” the helicopter pilot agrees with her. He is young and fit with closely shorn dark hair and closely spaced dark eyes, and when he introduced himself a few minutes ago, he said he flies Black Hawks for the National Guard and Jet Rangers for a charter company. “Last time I did it, I forgot to check off the box for allergies because I’ve been taking allergy shots. My wife has a cat and I had to start taking shots. They worked so well I forgot I have allergies and the computer kicked out my application.”
“It stinks,” Lucy says. “One inconsistency and a computer screws up your life for months.”
“This time I brought a copy of an old form,” he says, holding up a folded piece of yellow paper. “Now my answers are all the same. That’s the trick. But I’d fill out your form, if I were you. He won’t like it when you go in, if you haven’t done it.”
“I made a mistake,” Lucy replies, reaching for her form. “Put the city in the wrong blank. I have to do it again.”
“Uh oh.”
“If that lady comes back, I need another form.”
“She’s been here forever,” the helicopter pilot says.
“How do you know?” Lucy inquires. “You’re too young to know if anybody’s been around forever.”
He grins and is beginning to flirt with her a little. “You’d be surprised how much I’ve been around. Where do you fly out of? I’ve never seen you around here. You didn’t tell me. Your flight suit doesn’t look military, not any military I’ve ever seen.”
Her flight suit is black with the patch of an American flag on one shoulder and an unusual patch on her other shoulder, a blue and gold patch of her own design with an eagle surrounded by stars. Her leather name tag today reads “P. W. Winston.” It attaches with Velcro and she can change her name whenever she wants, depending on what she is doing and where she’s doing it. Because her biological father was Cuban, Lucy can pass for Hispanic, Italian, or Portuguese without resorting to makeup. Today she is in Charleston, South Carolina, and is simply a pretty white woman with a passable southern inflection, a very sweet lilt to her otherwise general American acce
nt.
“Part Ninety-one,” she says. “The guy I fly for owns a Four-thirty.”
“Lucky him,” the pilot says, impressed. “Must be some rich guy, is all I gotta say. That’s one hell of a bird, the Four-thirty. How do you like the sight picture? Did it take a while to get used to it?”
“Love it,” she replies, wishing he would shut up. She can talk helicopters all day but is more interested in figuring out where she should plant covert transmitters in Frank Paulsson’s house and how she is going to do it.
The plump woman who showed Lucy into the waiting room reappears and tells the other pilot he can come with her, that Dr. Paulsson is ready for him and has he finished filling out his form and is he satisfied that his answers are correct.
“If you’re ever around Mercury Air, we’ve got an office in the hangar, you’ll see it off the parking lot. I’ve got a soft-tail Harley parked back there,” he says to Lucy.
“A man with my taste,” she replies from her chair. “I need a new form,” she tells the woman. “I messed this one up.”
The woman gives her a suspicious look. “Well, let me see what I can do. Don’t throw that one away. You’ll mess up the sequence numbers.”
“Yes, ma’am. I have it right here on the table.” To the pilot, Lucy says, “I just traded my Sportster in for a V-Rod. It’s not even broken in yet.”
“Damn! A Four-thirty and a V-Rod. You’re living my life,” he says admiringly.
“Maybe we’ll ride sometime. Good luck with the cat.”
He laughs. She hears him go up the stairs while he explains to the unsmiling, chunky woman that when he met his wife she wouldn’t give up her cat and it slept in her bed and he used to break out in hives at the most inopportune times. Lucy has the downstairs to herself for at least a minute, at least long enough for the woman to get another blank form and come back down to the waiting area. Lucy slips on a pair of cotton gloves and moves quickly around the room, wiping off every magazine she touched.