Trace

  “No,” the man replies, shaking his gray head. “I don’t have anything to do with that. Ask them in the Slip. They probably know.”

  “Okay. So here’s the million-dollar question.” Marino tucks the plastic bag back inside his jacket pocket. “You tell Pogue about this place in the Slip so maybe he could find his Cubans?”

  “I told him some people buy cigars in the bar there,” the man says.

  “What’s the name of this place in the Slip?”

  “Stripes. The name of the bar is Stripes, just down Cary Street. I didn’t want him coming back. He was very strange. I always thought he was strange. He’d been coming in here for years, every few months. Never said much of anything,” the man says. “But the last time he was in here, in October maybe, he was stranger than usual. He was carrying a baseball bat. I asked him why and he never answered me. He didn’t used to be so insistent about wanting Cubans, but he was just bizarre about it. Cohibas, he kept saying. He wanted them.”

  “Was the bat red, white, and blue?” Marino asks, thinking about Scarpetta and grinders and bone dust and everything else she said when she was leaving Dr. Philpott’s office.

  “It might have been,” the man says with a strange look. “What the hell is this about?” he asks.

  56.

  IN THE WOODS around the town homes the shadows are deep and cold around patchy white and gray aspen trees. The trees are bare but thick in the woods. To get through them Lucy and Henri have to duck and push branches and winter-dormant saplings out of the way. Their snowshoes don’t stop the snow from coming up to their knees with each step and wherever they look the smooth white surface is unmarked by the tracks of humans.

  “This is a crazy thing to do,” Henri says, breathing hard smoky breaths. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because we need to get out and do something,” Lucy replies as she steps into snow that comes almost up to her thigh. “Wow! Look at this. Unbelievable. It’s beautiful.”

  “I don’t think you should have come here,” Henri says, pausing and looking at her in deepening shadows that tint the snow blue. “I’ve gotten through it and had enough and I’m going back to Los Angeles.”

  “It’s your life.”

  “I know you don’t mean that. Whenever you say flip things like that your nose grows.”

  “Let’s just go a little farther,” Lucy says, forging ahead, making sure she doesn’t let any branches or tender young trees snap back into Henri’s face, although maybe she deserves it. “There’s an old fallen tree, I’m pretty sure. I saw it from the path when I was coming up to see you, and we can brush the snow off and sit.”

  “We’ll freeze,” Henri says, lunging into a deep step and blowing out a cloud of frozen breath.

  “You’re not cold now, are you?”

  “I’m hot.”

  “So if we get cold, we’ll get up and move again and go home.”

  Henri doesn’t reply. Her stamina is noticeably diminished from what it was before she got the flu and then was attacked. In Los Angeles, where Lucy first set eyes on her, she was in superb physical shape, not big but very strong. She could bench-press her own body weight and do ten hand-over pull-ups unassisted, when most women can’t bench-press a third of their weight or do one pull-up. She could run a seven-minute mile. Now she’d be lucky to walk a mile. In less than one month’s time, Henri has lost it and she loses more every day because she has lost something else that is more important than her physical conditioning. She has lost her mission. She has no mission. Lucy worries that Henri never had one, only vanity, and the fires of vanity are quick and hot and soon enough gone.

  “Just up there,” Lucy says. “I see it. See that huge log? There’s a little frozen creek beyond it, then the health club is over that-a-way.” She motions with a ski pole. “Perfect scenario would be end in the gym and then the steam room.”

  “I can’t breathe,” Henri says. “Ever since I got the flu, my lungs feel half the size they were.”

  “You got pneumonia,” Lucy reminds her. “Or maybe you don’t remember. You were on antibiotics for a week. You were still on them when it happened.”

  “Yes. When it happened. Everything is about it. It.” She keeps emphasizing the word “it.” “I guess we talk in euphemisms now.” She steps where Lucy has stepped because she is slowing down and sweating. “My lungs hurt.”

  “What would you like us to say?” Lucy reaches the fallen tree, and it was once a large tree but is now just a hulk, like what is left of a great ship, and she begins to brush deep snow off it. “What would you call what happened?”

  “I’d call it almost being killed.”

  “Here. Sit.” Lucy sits and pats a cleared-off area of log next to her. “It feels good to sit.” Her frozen breath rises like steam and her face is so cold she can barely feel it. “Almost being killed as opposed to almost being murdered?”

  “Same thing.” Henri is tentative as she stands beside the log, looking around the snowy woods and the deepening of the shadows. Through dark cold branches the lights of town homes and the health club are a buttery yellow, and smoke rises from chimneys.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it the same thing,” Lucy replies, looking up at her, noticing how thin she has gotten and aware of something in her eyes she wasn’t aware of in the beginning. “Almost being killed is a detached way of saying it. I guess I’m looking for feelings, real emotions.”

  “It’s better not to look for things.” Henri reluctantly sits on the log, keeping her distance from Lucy.

  “You didn’t look for him and he found you,” Lucy says, staring straight ahead into the woods, her arms resting on her knees.

  “So I was stalked. Half of Hollywood is stalked. I guess that makes me a member of the club,” she replies, and seems rather pleased to be a member of the star-stalked club.

  “I thought that too until a little while ago.” Lucy’s gloved hands reach into the snow between her feet and she picks up a handful of powder and looks at it. “Apparently you gave an interview about my hiring you. You never told me.”

  “What interview?”

  “The Hollywood Reporter. It quotes you.”

  “I’ve been quoted saying a lot of things I didn’t say,” she replies, bristling.

  “This isn’t about what you didn’t say. This is about your giving an interview. I believe you did. The name of my company’s in the story, not that the existence of TLP is a deep, dark secret, but the fact that I relocated my headquarters to Florida is secret. That I’ve kept very secret, mainly because of the training camp. But it ended up in the paper, and once something runs, it is picked up again and again.”

  “You don’t understand rumors and bullshit stories, apparently,” Henri replies, and Lucy won’t look at her as she talks. “If you ever worked in the movie business, you’d see. You’d understand.”

  “I understand plenty, I’m afraid. Edgar Allan Pogue found out somehow that my aunt supposedly works for me in my new Hollywood, Florida, office. Guess what he does?” She bends over and scoops up more snow. “He comes to Hollywood. To find me.”

  “He wasn’t after you,” Henri says, and her tone is as cold as the snow. Lucy can’t feel the snow because of her glove, but she feels Henri’s coldness.

  “I’m afraid he was. It’s hard to tell who’s driving those Ferraris, you know. You have to get up close to look, and they’re easy enough to follow. Rudy’s right about that. Very easy. Pogue somehow tracked me down. Maybe he asked enough questions and found the camp and followed a Ferrari to my house. Maybe the black Ferrari. I don’t know.” She lets the snow fall through her black-gloved fingers and scoops up more, refusing to look at Henri. “He found my black Ferrari, though. Scratched the hell out of it, so we know he found that car when you took it without permission after I told you never to drive it, as a matter of fact. Maybe that’s the night he found my house. I don’t know. But he wasn’t after you.”

  “You’re so egotistical,” Henri says.
>
  “You know, Henri”—Lucy drops the snow from her open black glove—“we did an extensive background check on you before I recruited you. There probably isn’t an article written about you that we didn’t find. Sadly, we’re talking very few. I wish you’d stop the star shit. I wish you’d stop the I-got-stalked-so-I-must-be-something shit. It’s really boring.”

  “I’m going in.” She gets up from the log and almost loses her balance. “I’m really tired.”

  “He wanted to kill you to pay me back for something that happened when I was a kid,” Lucy says. “As much as one can assign logic to a nutcase like him. Thing is, I don’t even remember him. He probably doesn’t really remember you, Henri. All of us are just a means to an end sometimes, I guess.”

  “I wish I’d never met you. You’ve ruined my life.”

  Tears sting Lucy’s eyes, and she stays seated on the log as if frozen there. She scoops up more snow and tosses it and the powder floats down through the shadows.

  “I’ve always been into men, anyway,” Henri says, stepping into the trail they made when they snowshoed to the log just a little while ago. “I don’t know why I went along with it. Maybe I was just curious to see what it was like. I guess a lot of people would find you very exciting for a while. Not that experimenting is unusual in the world I come from. Not that it matters. None of it matters.”

  “How did you get the bruises?” Lucy asks Henri’s back as she takes high, exaggerated steps into the woods, stabbing her poles and breathing hard. “I know you remember. You remember exactly how.”

  “Oh. The bruises you took pictures of, Miss Super Cop?” Henri answers, out of breath, stabbing a ski pole into the deep snow.

  “I know you remember.” Lucy looks after her from the log, her eyes swimming with tears, but she manages to keep her voice steady.

  “He sat on me.” Henri stabs the other pole into the snow and lifts a snowshoe. “This freak with long kinky hair. At first I thought he was the pool lady, thought he was a she. I’d seen him around the pool a few days earlier when I was upstairs sick, saw him, only I thought it was a fat lady with kinky hair, skimming the pool.”

  “He was skimming the pool?”

  “Yes. So I thought he was a second pool lady, maybe a substitute or something, a second pool lady skimming away. And here’s the funny part.” She looks back at Lucy, and Henri’s face doesn’t look like her face. It looks different. “That fucking drunk of a neighbor was taking pictures just like she does of everything that happens on your property.”

  “Good of you to pass along the information,” Lucy says. “I’m sure you didn’t mention it to Benton after all this time, all this time he’s spent trying to help you. Nice of you to let us know there might be pictures.”

  “That’s all I remember. He sat on me. I didn’t want to tell.” She can barely breathe as she steps, then stops, and turns around, and her face is white and cruel in the shadows. “Found it embarrassing, you know.” She breathes. “To think of some fat ugly wacko showing up at your bed. Not to have some. You know. But to sit on you.” She turns around and trudges ahead.

  “Thanks for the information, Henri. You’re quite the investigator.”

  “Not anymore. I quit. I’m flying back,” she gasps. “To L.A. I quit.”

  Lucy sits on the log, scooping up snow and looking at it in her black gloves. “You can’t quit,” she says. “Because you’re fired.”

  Henri doesn’t hear her.

  “You’re fired,” Lucy says from her log.

  Henri steps high and stabs her poles through the woods.

  57.

  INSIDE THE Guns & Pawn Shop on U.S. 1, Edgar Allan Pogue walks up and down the aisles, taking his time looking as his fingers stroke the copper-and-lead cartridges deep inside the right pocket of his pants. He takes one holster at a time off the rack and reads the package, then neatly hangs each holster back. He doesn’t need a holster today. What is today? He isn’t sure. Days have passed with nothing to show for them except vague memories of changing light as he sweated on his lawn chair and stared at the big eye staring at him from the wall.

  Every other minute he starts coughing a deep dry cough that leaves him exhausted and wheezy and more upset. His nose is running and his joints are aching and he knows what all of it means. Dr. Philpott was out of flu shots. He didn’t save any vaccine for Pogue. Of all people who should have had a dose saved for him, he should have, but Dr. Philpott never gave it a thought. Dr. Philpott said he was sorry but he didn’t have any vaccine left, nobody in the entire city did as far as he knew, and that was that. Try back in a week or so, but it doesn’t look good, Dr. Philpott said.

  What about down in Florida? Pogue asked him.

  I doubt it, Dr. Philpott replied, busy and hardly listening to Pogue. I doubt you’ll find influenza vaccine anywhere unless you’re lucky, and if you’re that lucky, you ought to play the lottery. There’s a severe nationwide shortage this year. They just didn’t make enough and it takes a good three or four months to make more, so that’s it for the year. Truth is, you can get vaccinated for one strain of flu but catch another. Best thing is to avoid sick people and take good care of yourself. Don’t get on airplanes, and stay out of gyms. You can get exposed to a lot in gyms.

  Yes sir, Pogue replied, although he has never been on an airplane in his life and he hasn’t gone inside a gym since he was in high school.

  Edgar Allan Pogue coughs so hard his eyes water as he stands before a shelf of gun-cleaning accessories, fascinated by all the little brushes and bottles and kits. He won’t be cleaning guns today, and he strolls along the aisle, noticing everybody in the store. A few minutes later, he is the only customer, and at the counter he looks at a big man in black who is replacing a pistol in the showcase.

  “Can I help you?” the man asks, and he’s probably in his fifties, has a shaved head and looks like he could hurt someone.

  “I hear you sell cigars,” Pogue replies, stifling a cough.

  “Huh.” The man looks at him defiantly, then his eyes drift up to Pogue’s wig, then back to Pogue’s eyes, and there’s something about the man that taps Pogue on the shoulder. “Oh really? And where’d you hear that?”

  “I heard it,” Pogue says, and something taps his shoulder, asking for his attention, and he starts coughing and his eyes tear up.

  “Sounds like you don’t need to be smoking,” the man says from the other side of the glass showcase. He has a black baseball cap stuck in the back waistband of his cargo pants, but Pogue can’t tell what kind of cap.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Pogue replies, trying to catch his breath. “I’d like Cohibas. I’ll pay twenty apiece for six of them.”

  “What the hell kind of gun is a Cohiba?” the man says with a straight face.

  “Twenty-five then.”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Thirty,” Pogue says. “That’s as high as I go. They’d better be Cuban. I can tell. And I’d like to see a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. That revolver right there.” He points at one in the showcase. “I want to see it. Let me see the Cohibas and the thirty-eight.”

  “I hear ya,” the man says, looking past him as if he sees something, and his tone changes, his face changes, and something about him taps Pogue’s shoulder, keeps tapping it.

  Pogue turns around as if something might be behind him, but nothing is, nothing but two aisles crowded with gun equipment and accessories and camouflage clothing and cases of ammunition. He fingers the six .38 caliber cartridges in his pocket, wondering how it will feel to shoot the big man in black, deciding it will probably feel good, and he turns back to the glass showcase and the man behind it is pointing a pistol right between Pogue’s eyes.

  “How ya doin’, Edgar Allan,” the man says. “I’m Marino.”

  58.

  SCARPETTA SEES BENTON coming down the shoveled path that leads from his town home to the newly plowed road, and she stops beneath dark green fragrant tree
s and waits for him. She hasn’t seen him since he came to Aspen. He quit calling her very often after Henri moved in, something Scarpetta knew nothing about at the time, and he didn’t have much to say when they talked by phone. She understands. She has learned to understand and doesn’t find it all that hard to understand, not anymore.

  He kisses her and his lips taste like salt.

  “What have you been eating?” she asks, holding him tight and kissing him again outside in the snow beneath the heavy branches of evergreens.

  “Peanuts. You should have been a bloodhound with that nose of yours,” he says, looking into her eyes and wrapping an arm around her.

  “I said I taste something, not smell something.” She smiles, walking with him up the shoveled path toward the town home.

  “I was thinking about cigars,” he replies, pulling her close, both of them trying to walk together as if their four legs are two legs. “Remember when I smoked cigars?”

  “That didn’t taste good,” she says. “Smelled good but didn’t taste good.”

  “Look who’s talking. You smoked cigarettes back then.”

  “So I didn’t taste good.”

  “I didn’t say that. I sure as hell didn’t.”

  He holds her tight and her arm is tight around his waist as they walk toward the lighted town home that is halfway in the woods.

  “That was really smart. You and cigars, Kay,” he says, digging in a pocket of his ski jacket for keys. “If I haven’t made that clear, I want to make sure you know how smart that was.”

  “I didn’t do it,” she replies, wondering what Benton feels like after all this time and checking on her own feelings to see what they are. “Marino did.”

  “I’d like to have seen him buying Cuban cigars in that fancy tobacco shop in Richmond.”

  “That’s not where they sell the illegal stuff, the Cuban stuff, and by the way, how stupid is that? Treating Cuban cigars like they’re marijuana in this country,” she says. “Someone in the fancy tobacco shop had a lead for him. Then the leads went on and on right down to that gun-and-pawn shop in Hollywood. You know Marino. He’s something.”