Trace

  “The back of the building looks all right,” she replies. “When I was chief medical examiner, this was my office. I came out here the other day after Mr. Whitby got killed.”

  “You can’t go in there,” the same man replies, and he gives his comrades a look as they stand around listening to the conversation. He gives them a look that says she is crazy.

  “Where’s your foreman?” she asks. “Let me talk to him.”

  The man removes a cell phone from his belt and calls the foreman. “Hey Joe,” he says. “It’s Bobby. Remember the lady who was down here the other day? The lady and the big cop from L.A.? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. She’s back and wants to talk to you. Okay.” He ends the call and looks at her. “He went to get cigarettes and will be here in a minute,” he says to her. “Why do you want to go in there anyway? I wouldn’t think there’s anything in there.”

  “Except ghosts,” another man says, and his comrades laugh.

  “When exactly did you start tearing this down?” she asks them.

  “About a month ago. Right before Thanksgiving. Then we got weathered out for about a week because of the ice storm.”

  The men talk among themselves, arguing in a good-natured way about when exactly the wrecking ball struck the building the first time, and Scarpetta watches a man come around the side of the building. He is dressed in khaki work pants, a dark green jacket, and boots, his hard hat tucked under an arm as he heads toward them through the mud, smoking.

  “That’s Joe,” the construction worker named Bobby says to her. “He’s not gonna let you go in there, though. You don’t want to go in there, ma’am. It ain’t safe for a lot of reasons.”

  “When you started tearing this place down, did you have the power shut off or was it already off?” she asks.

  “No way we’d start if the power was on.”

  “It hadn’t been shut off long,” another man says. “Remember before we started? People had to go through it. There were lights on then, weren’t there?”

  “Got no idea.”

  “Good afternoon,” Joe, the foreman, says to Scarpetta. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need to get inside the building. In the back door near the bay door,” she replies.

  “No way,” he says adamantly, shaking his head and looking at the building.

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?” Scarpetta says to him, and she moves away from the other workers.

  “Hell no, I’m not letting you go in there. Why the hell would you want to?” Joe says, now that they are a good ten feet from the others and have a little privacy. “It isn’t safe. Why do you want to?”

  “Listen,” she says, shifting her weight in the mud and no longer holding up the hem of her coat, “I helped examine Mr. Whitby. We found some strange evidence on his body, suffice it to say.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  She knew that would get his attention, and she adds, “There’s something I need to check inside the building. Is it really unsafe or are we worried about lawsuits, Joe?”

  He stares at the building and scratches his head, then rakes his fingers through his hair. “Well, it isn’t going to fall down on us, not in the back there. I wouldn’t go in the front.”

  “I don’t want to go in the front,” she replies. “The back is fine. We can go through that back door next to the bay door, and off to the right at the end of the hallway are stairs. We can take the stairs down one more level, to the lowest level. That’s where I need to go.”

  “I know about the stairs. I’ve been in there before. You want to go down there to the first level? Good God. Now that’s something.”

  “How long has the power been cut off?”

  “I made sure of that before we started.”

  “Then it was on the first time you went through?” she says.

  “There was lights. That would have been back in the summer, the first time I had to walk through the place. Be dark as pitch in there now. What evidence? I don’t get it. You thinking something happened to him besides the tractor running him over? I mean, his wife’s making a fuss, accusing all kinds of people of this and that. A lot of nonsense. I was here. Ain’t nothing happened to him except he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to fool with the starter.”

  “I need to look,” she says. “You can come with me. I’d appreciate it if you would. All I need to do is take a look. I imagine the back door is locked. I don’t have a key.”

  “Well, that’s not what’s going to keep us out.” He stares at the building, then looks back at his men. “Hey, Bobby!” he calls out. “Can you drill out the lock in the back door? Do it now. All right then,” he says to her. “All right. I’ll take you in there as long as we don’t go near the front and we don’t stay but a minute.”

  54.

  LIGHTS DANCE OVER cinder-block walls and beige-painted concrete steps, and their feet make scuffing sounds as they go down to where Edgar Allan Pogue worked when Scarpetta was chief. There are no windows in the first two levels of the building because the level they entered the building from was where the morgue used to be, and there shouldn’t be windows in morgues and usually aren’t, and there aren’t windows belowground. The darkness in the stairwell is complete, and the air is sharp and damp and thick with dust.

  “When they gave me a tour of this place,” Joe is saying as he goes down the steps ahead of her, his flashlight bobbing with each step, “they didn’t take me down here. All I did was do a walk-through upstairs. I thought this was a basement. They didn’t take me down here,” he says, and he sounds uneasy.

  “They should have,” she replies, and dust tickles her throat and prickles her skin. “There are two floor vats down here, about twenty feet by twenty feet and ten feet deep. You wouldn’t want to roll a tractor into one or fall in, for that matter.”

  “Now that really makes me mad,” he says, and he sounds mad. “They should have at least showed me pictures. Twenty by twenty feet. Damn! Now that really pisses me off. This is the last step. Be careful.” He sweeps his light around.

  “We should be in a hallway. Turn left.”

  “Looks like that’s the only way we can turn.” He starts moving again, slowly. “Why the hell didn’t they tell us about those vats?” He just can’t believe it.

  “I don’t know. Depends on who showed you around.”

  “Some guy, oh hell, what was his name. All I remember is he was with General Services and didn’t like being in here worth a damn. I’m not sure he even knew much about the building.”

  “Probably didn’t,” Scarpetta says, looking at the filthy white tile floor shining dully in her light. “They just wanted it torn down. The guy from GSA probably didn’t even know about the floor vats. He may not ever have been down here in the Anatomical Division. Not many people have been down here. They’re right over there.” She points her light ahead of them, and the beam of light pushes back the dense darkness of a huge empty room and dimly illuminates the dark iron rectangular covers of the vats in the floor. “Well, the covers are on. I don’t know if that’s good or not,” she says. “But this is a terrible biological hazard down here. Be sure you’re aware of what you’re dealing with when you start knocking down this part of the building.”

  “Oh don’t you worry. I just can’t believe it,” he says angry and nervous as he shines his light around.

  She moves away from the vats, back to an area of the Anatomical Division that’s on the other side of the big space, passing the small room where the embalming used to be done, and she shines her light in it. A steel table attached to thick pipes in the floor gleams in her light, and a steel sink and cabinets flow by in her light. Parked against the wall in that room is a rusting gurney with a wadded plastic shroud on top. To the left of that room is an alcove, and she imagines the crematorium built into cinder block before she sees it. Then her light shines on the long dark iron door in the wall and she remembers seeing fire in the crack of the door, remembers the dusty steel
trays that got shoved in with a body on them and pulled out when there was nothing much on them but ashes and chunks of chalky bone, and she thinks of the baseball bats used to pulverize the chunks. She feels shame when she thinks of the bats.

  Her light moves over the floor. It is still white with dust and small bits of bone that look like chalk, and she can feel grit under her shoes as she moves. Joe hasn’t come in here with her. He waits just beyond the alcove and helps from his distance by shining his light around the floor and in the corners, and the shape of her in the coat and hard hat are huge and black on the cinder-block wall. Then the light flashes over the eye. It is spray-painted in black on beige cinder block, a big black staring eye with eyelashes.

  “What the hell is that?” Joe asks. He is looking at the eye on the wall, even though she can’t see him looking. “Jesus Christ. What is it?”

  Scarpetta doesn’t answer him as her light moves around. The baseball bats are gone from the corner where they were propped when she was chief, but there is a lot of dust and bits of bone, quite a lot, she thinks. Her light finds a spray can of black paint, and two touch-up paint bottles, one red enamel paint and the other blue enamel paint, both empty, and she places them inside a plastic bag and the can of spray paint in a separate bag. She finds a few old cigar boxes that have a residue of ashes inside and she notices cigar butts on the floor and a crumpled brown paper bag. Her gloved hands enter her beam of light and pick up the bag. Paper crackles as she opens it, and she can tell the bag hasn’t been down here eight years, not even one year.

  She vaguely smells cigars as she opens the bag, and it isn’t smoked cigars she thinks she smells but unburnt cigar tobacco, and she shines her light inside the bag and sees bits of tobacco and a receipt. Joe is watching her and has steadied his light on the bag in her hands. She looks at the receipt and feels a sense of disconnection and unreality as she reads the date of this past September fourteenth, when Edgar Allan Pogue, and she feels sure it was Pogue, spent more than a hundred dollars at a tobacco store just down the street at the James Center for ten Romeo y Julieta cigars.

  55.

  THE JAMES CENTER is not the sort of place Marino used to visit when he was a cop in Richmond, and he never bought his Marlboros in the fancy tobacco shop or in any tobacco shop.

  He never bought cigars, not any brand of cigars, because even a cheap cigar is a lot of money for a single smoke, and besides, he wouldn’t have puffed, he would have inhaled. Now that he hardly smokes anymore, he can admit the truth. He would have inhaled cigar smoke. The atrium is all glass and light and plants, and the sound of splashing water from waterfalls and fountains follows Marino as he walks swiftly toward the shop where Edgar Allan Pogue bought cigars not even three months before he murdered little Gilly.

  It is not quite noon yet and the shops aren’t very busy. A few people in stylish business suits are buying coffee and moving about as if they have places to go and important lives, and Marino can’t stomach people like the ones in the James Center. He knows the type. He grew up knowing the type, not personally, but knowing about the type. They were the type who didn’t know Marino’s type and never tried to know his type. He walks fast and is angry, and when a man in a fine black pinstriped suit passes him and doesn’t even see him, Marino thinks, You don’t know shit. People like you don’t know shit.

  Inside the tobacco shop the air is pungent and sweet with a symphony of tobacco scents that fill him with a longing he doesn’t understand and immediately blames on smoking. He misses it like hell. He is sad and upset because he misses cigarettes, and his heart hurts and he feels shaken somewhere deep inside his very soul because he knows he’ll never be able to smoke again, not like he used to, he just can’t do it. He was kidding himself to think he might sneak one or two now and then. What a myth to think there was any hope. There is no hope. There was never hope. If anything is hopeless, his insatiable lust for tobacco, his desperate love for tobacco, is hopeless, and he is suddenly crushed by grief because he will never light up a cigarette and deeply inhale and feel that rush, that sheer joy, that release he aches for every minute of his life. He wakes up aching, he goes to sleep aching, he aches in his dreams and he aches when he is wide awake. Glancing at his watch, he thinks about Scarpetta, wondering if her flight has been delayed. So many flights are delayed these days.

  Marino’s doctor told him that if he keeps on smoking he’ll be carrying an oxygen tank around like a papoose by the time he’s sixty. Eventually he will die gasping for air just like poor little Gilly was fighting for air while that freak sat on her and pinned her hands, and she was under him and panicking, every cell in her lungs screaming for air as her mouth tried to scream for her mommy and daddy, just screaming, Marino thinks. Gilly was unable to make a sound, and what did she ever do to deserve a death like that? Nothing, that’s what, Marino thinks, as he looks around at boxes of cigars on dark wooden shelves inside the cool fragrant rich man’s tobacco shop. Scarpetta should be boarding the plane right about now, he thinks, noticing the boxes of Romeo y Julieta cigars. If she isn’t delayed, she may already be on the plane, heading west to Denver, and Marino feels a hollowness around his heart, and somewhere in an off-limit part of his very soul he feels shame, and then he feels very angry.

  “Let me know if you need some help,” a man in a V-necked gray sweater and brown corduroys says from behind the counter. The color of his clothes and his gray hair remind Marino of smoke. The man works in a tobacco shop full of smokes and he has become the color of smoke. He probably goes home at the end of the day and can have all the smokes he wants while Marino goes home or back to a hotel alone and can’t even light up a smoke, much less inhale smoke. Now he sees the truth. He knows it. He can’t have it. He was kidding himself to think he could have it, and he is filled with grief and shame.

  He reaches inside a jacket pocket and pulls out the receipt Scarpetta found on the bone-dusty floor in the Anatomical Division of her old building. The receipt is inside a transparent plastic bag, and he places it on the counter.

  “How long you worked here?” Marino asks the smoky-looking man behind the counter.

  “Going on twelve years,” the man says, giving him a smile, but he has a look in his smoky gray eyes. Marino recognizes fear and does nothing to allay it.

  “Then you know Edgar Allan Pogue. He came in here on September fourteenth of this year and bought these cigars.”

  The man frowns and bends over to look at the receipt inside the plastic evidence bag. “That’s our receipt,” he says.

  “No joke, Sherlock. A short little fat guy with red hair,” Marino says, doing nothing at all to ease the man’s fear. “In his thirties. Used to work at the old morgue over there.” He points toward 14th Street. “Probably acted weird when he was in here.”

  The man keeps glancing at Marino’s LAPD baseball cap. He is pale and uneasy. “We don’t sell Cuban cigars.”

  “What?” Marino scowls.

  “If that’s what this is about. He may have asked, but we don’t sell them.”

  “He came in here asking for Cuban cigars?”

  “He was very determined, more so last time he was in here,” the man says nervously. “We don’t sell Cubans or anything else illegal.”

  “I ain’t accusing you and I ain’t ATF or the FDA or the Surgeon General or the goddamn Easter Bunny,” Marino says. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you sell Cuban shit under the counter.”

  “I don’t. I swear I don’t.”

  “I just want Pogue. Talk to me.”

  “I remember him,” the man says, and now his face is the color of smoke. “Yes, he’s asked me for Cubans. For Cohibas, not the Dominicans we sell, but Cubans. I told him we don’t sell Cuban cigars. They’re illegal. You’re not from here, are you? You don’t sound as if you’re from here.”

  “I sure as hell ain’t from here,” Marino replies. “What else did Pogue say? And when was this, when he came in here last?”

  The man looks down at the rec
eipt on the counter. “Probably since then. Seems like it might have been in October when he came in last. He came in here maybe once a month. A very strange man. Very strange.”

  “In October? Okay. What else did he say when he came in?”

  “He wanted Cuban cigars, said he would pay what he had to for them, and I told him we don’t sell them. He knew that. He’d asked me before when he came in here, but not so insistently, not like he was when he came in last. Strange, that man. He’d asked me before and was asking me again, but very insistent. Seems like he said Cuban tobacco is better for the lungs, some nonsense like that. You can smoke all the Cubans you want and they won’t hurt you, in fact they’re good for you. They are pure and better for the lungs and actually have a medicinal quality, something silly like that.”

  “What did you tell him? Don’t lie to me. I don’t give a shit if you sold him Cubans. I need to find him. If he thinks the shit’s good for his screwed-up lungs, he’s buying it somewhere. If he’s got a thing about it, he’s getting it from somewhere.”

  “He’s got a thing about it, at least last time he was here, he was adamant. Don’t ask me why,” the man says, staring down at the receipt. “There are plenty of good cigars. Why they had to be Cuban, I don’t understand, but he wanted them. It reminded me of sick people desperate for some magic herb or marijuana or people with arthritis who want gold injections or whatever. Obviously a superstition of some sort. Very strange. I sent him to a different store, told him not to be asking me about Cubans anymore.”

  “What store?”

  “Well, actually it’s a restaurant where I hear they sell things and know where to get things. In the bar they do. Anything you want, I guess. That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t go in there. I don’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Where.”

  “Down in the Slip,” he says. “Just a few blocks from here.”

  “You know any places in South Florida that sell Cubans? Maybe you recommended a place in South Florida to him.”