Trace

  This catches Marino. He drops his not-so-funny act, his silent reaction nudging Scarpetta while she remembers the man in olive-green pants and a dark jacket standing in front of the tractor’s back tire on the pavement near the bay door. He was alive then. Now he’s dead. He should not have been standing in front of the tire, doing whatever he was doing to the engine. She thought that at the time, and now he’s dead.

  “He’s a post,” Dr. Ramie says, her composure and authority somewhat restored.

  Scarpetta remembers turning the corner as she drove around her old building, and the man and his tractor vanished from sight. He must have gotten his tractor started within minutes of her seeing him, and then he died.

  “Dr. Fielding, I suggest you do the tractor death,” Dr. Marcus says. “Make sure he didn’t have a heart attack or some other underlying problem before he was run over. The inventory of his injuries is going to be extensive and time consuming. I don’t need to remind you of how thorough we need to be in cases like this. Somewhat ironical, in light of our guest.” He looks at Scarpetta. “A bit before my time, but I believe Nine North Fourteenth Street was your old building.”

  “It was,” says she, the ghost from the past as she recalls Mr. Whitby from a distance in black and olive green, now a ghost too. “I started out in that building. A bit before your time,” she repeats. “Then I moved to this one.” She reminds him that she worked in this building too, and then feels slightly foolish for reminding him of a fact that is indisputable.

  Dr. Ramie continues going through the cases: a prison death that isn’t suspicious, but by law, all prison deaths are medical examiner cases; a man found dead in a parking lot, possibly hypothermia; a woman who was a known diabetic died suddenly while climbing out of her car; an unexpected infant death; and a nineteen-year-old found dead in the middle of a street, possibly a drive-by shooting.

  “I’m on call for court in Chesterfield,” Dr. Ramie concludes. “I’m going to need a ride, my car’s in the shop again.”

  “I’ll drop you off,” Marino volunteers, winking at her.

  Dr. Ramie looks terrified.

  Everyone makes moves to get out of their chairs, but Dr. Marcus stops them. “Before you go,” he says, “I could use your help and you could probably use a little mental stretching. As you know, the Institute is running another death investigation school, and as usual I’ve been prevailed upon to lecture about the medical examiner system. I thought I’d try out a few test cases on the group, especially since we are fortunate enough to have an expert in our midst.”

  The bastard, Scarpetta thinks. So this is what it’s going to be like. The hell with their talk in the library. The hell with his making the office open to her.

  He pauses, looking around the table. “A twenty-year-old white female,” he begins, “seven weeks pregnant. Her boyfriend kicks her in the belly. She calls the police and goes to the hospital. Hours later she passes the fetus and placenta. The police notify me. What do I do?”

  No one answers him. It’s obvious that they aren’t accustomed to his mental stretches and just stare at him.

  “Come on, come on,” he says with a smile. “Let’s say I just got such a phone call, Dr. Ramie.”

  “Sir?” She turns red again.

  “Come, come. Tell me how to handle it, Dr. Ramie.”

  “Process it like a surgical?” she guesses as if some alien force has just sucked away her long years of medical training, her very intelligence.

  “Anybody else?” Dr. Marcus asks. “Dr. Scarpetta?” He says her name slowly, making sure she notices that he didn’t call her Kay. “Ever had a case like this?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she replies.

  “Tell us. What’s the legal impact?” he asks quite pleasantly.

  “Obviously, if you beat up a pregnant woman, it’s a crime,” she answers. “On the CME-1, I’m going to call the fetal death a homicide.”

  “Interesting.” Dr. Marcus looks around the table as he takes aim at her again. “So your initial report of investigation would say homicide. Perhaps a bit bold of you? Intent is for the police to determine, not us, correct?”

  The sniping son of a bitch, she thinks. “Our job as mandated by code is to determine cause and manner of death,” she says. “As you may recall, in the late nineties the statute changed after a man shot a woman through the belly and she lived but her unborn child died. In the scenario you’ve put before us, Dr. Marcus, I suggest you have the fetus brought in. Autopsy it and give it a case number. There’s no place on a yellow-bordered death certificate for manner of death, so you include that with cause, an intrauterine fetal demise due to an assault on the mother. Use a yellow-bordered death certificate since the fetus wasn’t born alive. Keep a copy with the case file because a year from now that certificate won’t exist anymore, after the Bureau of Vital Records compiles its statistics.”

  “And what do we do with the fetus?” Dr. Marcus asks, not quite so pleasantly.

  “Up to the family.”

  “It’s not even ten centimeters,” he says, his voice getting tight again. “There’s nothing left for the funeral home to bury.”

  “Then fix it in formalin. Give it to the family, whatever they want.”

  “And call it a homicide,” he says coldly.

  “The new statute,” she reminds him. “In Virginia, an assault with the intent of killing family members, born or unborn, is a capital crime. Even if you can’t prove intent and the charge is malicious wounding of the mother, that carries the same penalty as murder. From there it tracks down through the system as manslaughter and so on. The point is, there doesn’t have to be intent. The fetus doesn’t even have to be viable. A violent crime has occurred.”

  “Any debate?” Dr. Marcus asks his staff. “No comments?”

  No one responds, not even Fielding.

  “Then we’ll try another one,” Dr. Marcus says with an angry smile.

  Go ahead, Scarpetta thinks. Go ahead, you insufferable bastard.

  “A young male in a hospice program,” Dr. Marcus begins. “He’s dying of AIDS. He tells the doctor to pull the plug. If the doctor withdraws life support and the patient dies, is it an ME case or not? Is it a homicide? How about our guest expert again? Did the doctor commit homicide?”

  “It’s a natural death unless the doctor put a bullet through the patient’s head,” Scarpetta answers.

  “Ah. Then you’re an advocate of euthanasia.”

  “Informed consent is murky.” She doesn’t answer his ridiculous charge. “The patient is often dealing with depression, and when people are depressed, they can’t make informed decisions. This is really a societal question.”

  “Let me clarify what you’re saying,” Dr. Marcus replies.

  “Please do.”

  “You have this man in hospice who says, ‘I think I’d like to die today.’ Should you expect your local doc to do it?”

  “The truth is, the patient in hospice already has that capacity. He can decide to die,” she replies. “He can have morphine when he wants it for pain, so he asks for more and goes to sleep and dies from an O.D. He can wear a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet and a squad doesn’t have to resuscitate him. So he dies. Chances are there will be no consequences to anyone.”

  “But is it our case?” Dr. Marcus insists, his thin face white with rage as he glares at her.

  “People are in hospices because they want pain control and want to die in peace,” she says. “People who make informed decisions to wear DNR bracelets basically want the same thing. A morphine O.D., a withdrawal of vital support in a hospice, a person wearing a DNR bracelet isn’t resuscitated. These are not our issues. If you get called about a case like that, Dr. Marcus, I hope you turn it down.”

  “Any comment?” Dr. Marcus asks tersely, shuffling paperwork and ready to leave.

  “Yeah,” Marino says to him. “You ever thought of writing Q-and-A’s for Jeopardy?”

  5.

  BENTON WESLEY paces from wind
ow to window inside his three-bedroom town home at the Aspen Club. The signal of his cell phone surges in and out, and Marino’s voice is clear, then broken.

  “What? I’m sorry, say that again.” Benton backs up three steps and stands still.

  “I said that’s not the half of it. A hell of a lot worse than you thought.” Marino’s voice comes through intact. “It’s like he brought her in to kick the shit out of her in front of an audience. Or try. I emphasize try.”

  Benton stares out at snow caught in crooks of aspen trees and piled on the stubby needles of black spruce. The morning is sunny and clear for the first time in days, and magpies frolic from branch to branch, landing in a flutter and then flitting off in small white bursts of snow. A part of Benton’s mind processes the activity and tries to determine a reason, perhaps a biological cause and effect that might explain the long-tailed birds’ gymnastics, as if it matters. His mental probing is as conditioned as the wildlife and as relentless as the gondolas swinging up and down the mountain.

  “Try, yes. Try.” Benton smiles a little as he imagines it. “But you need to understand he didn’t invite her because it was a choice. It was an order. The health commissioner’s behind it.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “It took me one phone call after she told me she was going.”

  “It’s too bad about Asp—” Marino’s voice fractures.

  Benton moves to the next window, flames snapping and wood popping in the fireplace at his back. He continues to stare out the floor-to-ceiling glass, his attention fixing on the stone house across the street as the front door opens. A man and a boy emerge dressed for the weather, their breath streaming out in a frozen vapor.

  “By now she’s aware of it,” Benton says. “Aware she’s being used.” He knows Scarpetta well enough to make predictions that undoubtedly are true. “I promise she knows the politics or simply that there are politics. Unfortunately, there’s more, a lot more. Can you hear me?”

  He looks out at the man and the boy shouldering their skis and poles, walking sluggishly in half-buckled ski boots. Benton will not ski or snowshoe today. He doesn’t have time.

  “Huh.” Marino has started saying that a lot of late, and Benton finds it annoying.

  “Can you hear me?” Benton asks.

  “Yeah, I’m copying now,” Marino comes back, and Benton can tell he’s moving around, roaming for a better signal. “He’s trying to blame everything on her, like he brought her here to do that. I don’t know what else to tell you until I get into it more. The kid, I mean.”

  Benton is aware of Gilly Paulsson. Her mysterious death may not be national news, not yet, but details from Virginia media sources are on the Internet, and Benton has his own ways of accessing information, very confidential information. Gilly Paulsson is being used, because it is not a requirement to be alive if certain people want to use you.

  “Did I lose you again? Dammit,” Benton says, and communication would be immensely improved if he could use the land line in his own home, but he can’t.

  “I’m copying you, boss.” Marino’s voice is suddenly strong. “Why don’t you use your land line? That would solve half our problem,” he says, as if reading Benton’s thoughts.

  “Can’t.”

  “You think it’s bugged?” Marino isn’t joking. “There are ways to detect that. Get Lucy to do it.”

  “Thanks for the suggestion.” Benton doesn’t need Lucy’s help with countersurveillance, and his concern isn’t that his line is bugged.

  He follows the progress of the man and the boy as he contemplates Gilly Paulsson. The boy looks about Gilly’s age, the age Gilly was when she died. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, only Gilly never got to ski. She never visited Colorado or anywhere else. She was born in Richmond and that’s where she died, and during her short life, mostly she suffered. Benton notices that the wind is picking up. Snow blowing off trees fills the woods like smoke.

  “This is what I want you to tell her,” Benton says, and his emphasis on the word “her” indicates he means Scarpetta. “Her successor, if I must call him that,” he says, and he doesn’t want to say Dr. Marcus’s name either or engage in any specifics, and he can’t stomach the thought of anyone, least of all this worm Dr. Joel Marcus, succeeding Scarpetta. “This person is of interest,” Benton continues, talking cryptically. “When she gets here,” he adds, referring to Scarpetta again, “I’ll go over all of it in person with her. But for now, use caution, extreme caution.”

  “What do you mean, ‘when she gets here’? I’m assuming she might be stuck here for a while.”

  “She needs to call me.”

  “Extreme caution?” Marino complains. “Shit, you would have to say something like that.”

  “While she’s there, you stay with her.”

  “Huh.”

  “Stay with her, am I clear?”

  “She won’t like it,” Marino says.

  Benton looks out at the harsh slopes of the snow-laced Rockies, at a beauty shaped by cruel, scouring winds and the brute force of glaciers. Aspens and evergreens are a stubble on the faces of mountains that surround this old mining town like a bowl, and to the east, beyond a ridge, a distant gray shroud of clouds is slowly spreading across the intense blue sky. Later today, it will snow again.

  “No, she never does,” Benton says.

  “She said you got a case.”

  “Yes.” Benton can’t discuss it.

  “Well, it’s too bad, being in Aspen and all, and you got a case and now she does. So you’ll just stay there and work your case, I guess.”

  “For now I will,” Benton says.

  “Must be something serious if you’re on it during your vacation in Aspen,” Marino fishes.

  “I can’t get into it.”

  “Huh. These damn phones,” Marino says. “Lucy ought to invent something that can’t be tapped into or picked up on a scanner. She could make a fortune.”

  “I believe she’s already made a fortune. Maybe several fortunes.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Take care,” Benton says. “If I don’t talk to you in the next few days, take care of her. Watch your back and hers, I mean it.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already do,” Marino says. “Don’t hurt yourself out there playing in the snow.”

  Benton ends the call and returns to a couch that faces the windows near the fire. On the wormy chestnut coffee table is a legal pad filled with his almost indecipherable scrawl and near that is a Glock .40-caliber pistol. Slipping a pair of reading glasses out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt, he settles against the armrest and begins flipping through the legal pad. Each lined page is numbered and in the upper right-hand corner is a date. Benton rubs his angular jaw, remembering that he hasn’t shaved in two days, and his rough, graying beard reminds him of the bristly trees on the mountains. He circles the words “shared paranoia” and tilts his head up as he peers through the reading glasses on the tip of his straight, sharp nose.

  In the margin he scribbles, “Will seem to work when fills in gaps. Serious gaps. Can’t last. L is real victim, not H. H is narcissist,” and he underlines “narcissist” three times. He jots “histrionic” and underlines it twice, and he turns to a different page, this one with the heading “Post Offense Behavior,” and he listens for the sound of running water, puzzled that he hasn’t heard it yet. “Critical mass. Will reach no later than Xmas. Tension unbearable. Will kill by Xmas if not sooner,” he writes, quietly looking up as he senses her before he hears her.

  “Who was that?” asks Henri, which is short for Henrietta. She stands on the stairway landing, her delicate hand resting on the railing. Henri Walden stares across the living room at him.

  “Good morning,” Benton says. “You usually take a shower. There’s coffee.”

  Henri pulls a plain red flannel robe more tightly around her thin body, her green eyes sleepy and reticent as she takes in Benton, studying him as if a preexisting argument or encou
nter stands between them. She is twenty-eight and attractive in an off-tilt way. Her features aren’t perfect, because her nose is strong and, according to her own warped beliefs, too big. Her teeth aren’t perfect either, but right now nothing would convince her that she has a beautiful smile, that she is disturbingly alluring even when she doesn’t try to be. Benton hasn’t tried to convince her and won’t. It is too dangerous.

  “I heard you talking to someone,” she says. “Was it Lucy?”

  “No,” he replies.

  “Oh,” she says and disappointment tugs her lips and anger flashes in her eyes. “Oh. Well. Who was it then?”

  “It was a private conversation, Henri.” He takes off his reading glasses. “We’ve talked a lot about boundaries. We’ve talked about them every day, haven’t we?”

  “I know,” she says from the landing, her hand on the railing. “If it wasn’t Lucy, who was it? Was it her aunt? She talks too much about her aunt.”

  “Her aunt doesn’t know you’re here, Henri,” Benton says very patiently. “Only Lucy and Rudy know you’re here.”

  “I know about you and her aunt.”

  “Only Lucy and Rudy know you’re here,” he repeats.

  “It was Rudy then. What did he want? I always knew he liked me.” She smiles and the look on her face is peculiar and unsettling. “Rudy is gorgeous. I should have gotten with him. I could have. When we were out in the Ferrari I could have. I could have with anybody when I was in the Ferrari. Not that I need Lucy to have a Ferrari.”

  “Boundaries, Henri,” Benton says, and he refuses to accept the abysmal defeat that is a dark plain in front of him, nothing but darkness that has spread wider and deeper ever since Lucy flew Henri to Aspen and entrusted her to him.

  You won’t hurt her, Lucy said to him at the time. Someone else will hurt her, take advantage of her, and find out things about me and what I do.

  I’m not a psychiatrist, Benton said.

  She needs a post-incident stress counselor, a forensic psychologist. That’s what you do. You can do it. You can find out what happened. We have to know what happened, Lucy said, and she was beside herself. Lucy never panics, but she was panicking. She believes Benton can figure out anyone. Even if he could, that doesn’t mean all people can be fixed. Henri is not a hostage. She could leave anytime. It profoundly unsettles him that she seems to have no interest in leaving, that she just might be enjoying herself.