Trace

  “Tell me about the damage,” Benton says.

  “Someone scratched it, like with a car key, something like that. Scratched a picture on it.” She stares down at her toes, picking at her big yellowish toe.

  “What was the picture?”

  “She wouldn’t drive it after that. You don’t take out a scratched Ferrari.”

  “Lucy must have been angry,” Benton says.

  “It can be fixed. Anything can be fixed. If she’d killed him, I wouldn’t have to be here. Now I’ll have to worry the rest of my life that he’s going to find me again.”

  “I’m doing my best to make sure you’ll never have to worry about that, Henri. But I need your help.”

  “I may never remember.” She looks at him. “I can’t help it.”

  “Lucy ran up three flights of stairs to the master bedroom. That’s where you were,” Benton says, watching her carefully, making sure she can handle what he is saying, even though she has heard this part before. All along, he has feared that she might not be acting, that none of what she says and does is an act. What if it isn’t? She could break with reality, become psychotic, completely decompensate and shatter. She listens, but her affect isn’t normal. “When Lucy found you, you were unconscious, but your breathing and heart rate were normal.”

  “I didn’t have anything on.” She doesn’t mind that detail. She likes reminding him of her naked body.

  “Do you sleep in the nude?”

  “I like to.”

  “Do you remember if you’d taken off your pajamas before you got back into bed that morning?”

  “Probably I did.”

  “So he didn’t do it? The attacker didn’t. Assuming it’s a he.”

  “He didn’t need to. I’m sure he would have, though.”

  “Lucy says that when she saw you last, at about eight A.M., you were wearing red satin pajamas and a tan terry-cloth robe.”

  “I agree. Because I wanted to go outside. I sat in a lounge chair by the pool, in the sun.”

  More new information, and he asks, “What time was this?”

  “Right after Lucy left, I think. She drove off in the blue Ferrari. Well, not right after,” she corrects herself in a flat tone, and stares out at the snow-covered, sun-dazzled morning. “I was mad at her.”

  Benton slowly gets up and places several logs on the fire. Sparks fly up the chimney and flames greedily lick the bone-dry pine. “She hurt your feelings,” he says, drawing the mesh curtain shut.

  “Lucy isn’t nice when people get sick,” Henri replies, more focused, more poised. “She didn’t want to take care of me.”

  “What about the body lotion?” he asks, and he has figured out the body lotion, he’s pretty sure he has, but it is smart to make absolutely sure.

  “So what? Big deal. That’s a favor, now isn’t it? You know how many people would love to do that? I let her as a favor. She’ll only do so much, only what suits her, then she gets tired of taking care of me. My head hurt and we were arguing.”

  “How long did you sit out by the pool?” Benton says, trying not to get distracted by Lucy, trying not to wonder what the hell she was thinking when she met Henri Walden, and at the same time he is all too aware of how impressive and bewitching sociopaths can be, even to people who should know better.

  “Not long. I didn’t feel good.”

  “Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?”

  “I guess half an hour.”

  “Did you see any other people? Any boats?”

  “I didn’t notice. So maybe there weren’t any. What did Lucy do when she was in the room with me?”

  “She called nine-one-one, continued checking your vital signs while she waited for the rescue squad,” Benton says. He decides to add another detail, a risky one. “She took photographs.”

  “Did she have a gun out?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish she’d killed him.”

  “You keep saying ‘he.’”

  “And she took pictures? Of me?” Henri says.

  “You were unconscious but stable. She took pictures of you before you were moved.”

  “Because I looked like I had been attacked?”

  “Because your body was in an unusual position, Henri. Like this.” He straightens out his arms and holds them over his head. “You were facedown with your arms stretched out in front of you, palms down. Your nose was bleeding, and you had bruises, as you know. And your right big toe was broken, although that wasn’t discovered until later. You don’t seem to remember how it got broken.”

  “I might have stubbed it going down the stairs,” she says.

  “You remember that?” he asks, and she has remembered nothing or admitted nothing about her toe before now. “When might this have happened?”

  “When I went out by the pool. Her stone stairs. I think I missed a step or something, because of all the medicine and my fever and everything. I remember crying. I remember that. Because it hurt, really hurt, and I thought about calling her but why bother. She doesn’t like it when I’m sick or hurt.”

  “You broke your toe going down to the pool and thought of calling Lucy but didn’t.” He wants to make this clear.

  “I agree,” she says, mockingly. “Where were my pajamas and robe?”

  “Neatly folded on a chair near the bed. Did you fold them and put them there?”

  “Probably. Was I under the covers?”

  He knows where she is going with this, but it is important that he tell her the truth. “No,” he replies. “The covers were pulled down to the bottom of the bed, were hanging off the mattress.”

  “I didn’t have anything on and she took pictures,” Henri says, and her face is expressionless as she looks at him with hard, flat eyes.

  “Yes,” Benton says.

  “That figures. She would do something like that. Always the cop.”

  “You’re a cop, Henri. What would you have done?”

  “She would do something like that,” she says.

  8.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” Marino asks when he sees Lucy’s number in the display of his vibrating cell phone. “What’s your location?” He always asks her where she is, even if the answer isn’t relevant.

  Marino has spent his adult life in policing, and one detail a good cop never overlooks is location. It doesn’t do a damn bit of good to get on your radio and scream Mayday if you don’t know where you are. Marino considers himself Lucy’s mentor, and he doesn’t let her forget it even if she forgot it long years back.

  “Atlantic,” Lucy’s voice returns in his right ear. “I’m in the car.”

  “No joke, Sherlock. You sound like you’re in a damn garbage disposal.” Marino never misses an opportunity to give her a hard time about her cars.

  “Jealousy is so unattractive,” she says.

  He walks several steps away from the OCME coffee area, looking around, seeing no one, and is satisfied that his conversation isn’t overheard. “Look, it ain’t going so good up here,” he says, peeking through the small glass window in the shut library door, seeing if anyone is inside. No one is. “This joint’s gone to hell.” He keeps talking into his tiny cell phone, moving it back and forth between his ear and mouth, depending on whether he’s listening or speaking. “I’m just giving you a heads-up.”

  After a pause, Lucy replies, “You’re not just giving me a heads-up. What do you want me to do?”

  “Damn. That car is loud.” He paces, his eyes constantly moving beneath the brim of the LAPD baseball cap Lucy gave him as a joke.

  “Okay, so now you’re starting to worry me,” she says above the roar of her Ferrari. “I should have known when you said this was no big deal, it was going to turn out to be a big deal. Dammit. I warned you, I warned both of you not to go back there.”

  “There’s more to it than this dead girl,” he replies quietly. “That’s what I’m getting at. It ain’t about that, not entirely. I’m not saying she ain’t the main problem. I’m sure she is. But there
’s something else going on here. Our mutual friend,” he refers to Benton, “is making that loud and clear. And you know her.” Now he means Scarpetta. “She’s gonna end up right in the middle of shit.”

  “Something else going on? Like what? Give me an example.” Lucy’s tone changes. When she turns very serious, her voice gets slow and rigid, reminding Marino of drying glue.

  If there is trouble here in Richmond, Marino thinks, he’s stuck, all right. Lucy will be all over him like glue, all right. “Let me tell you something, Boss,” he goes on, “one of the reasons I’m still walking around is ’cause I got instincts.”

  Marino calls her Boss as if he is comfortable with her being his boss, when of course he is anything but, especially if his remarkable instincts warn him that he is about to earn her disapproval. “And my instincts is screaming bloody murder right about now, Boss,” he is saying, and a part of him knows damn well that Lucy and her aunt Kay Scarpetta see his insecurity when he starts trotting out bravado or bragging about his instincts or calling powerful women Boss or Sherlock or other less polite appellations. But he just can’t help himself. So he makes matters worse. “And I’ll add this to the mix,” he continues, “I hate this stinking city. Goddamn, I hate this stinking place. You know what’s wrong with this stinking place? They ain’t got respect, that’s what.”

  “I’m not going to say I told you so,” Lucy tells him so. Her voice is setting like glue very quickly now. “Do you want us to come?”

  “No,” he says, and it gripes him that he can’t tell Lucy what he thinks without her assuming she should do something about it. “Right now, I’m just giving you a heads-up, Boss,” he says, wishing he hadn’t called Lucy and told her anything. It was a mistake to call her, he thinks. But if she finds out her aunt is having a hard time and he didn’t say a word, Lucy would be all over him.

  When he first met her she was ten years old. Ten. A pudgy little runt with glasses and an obnoxious attitude. They hated each other, then things changed and she hero-worshipped him, and then they became friends, and then things changed again. Somewhere along the line, he should have put a stop to progress, to all the changing, because about ten years ago things were just right and he felt good teaching her to drive his truck and ride a motorcycle, how to shoot, how to drink beer, how to tell if someone’s lying, the important things in life. Back then he wasn’t afraid of her. Maybe fear isn’t the right word to describe what he feels, but she has power in life and he doesn’t, and half the time when he gets off the phone after talking to her, he feels down in the dumps and bad about himself. Lucy can do whatever she likes and still have money and order people around, and he can’t. Not even when he was a sworn police officer could he flaunt power the way she does. But he’s not afraid of her, he tells himself. Hell no, he’s not.

  “We’ll come if you need us,” Lucy says over the phone. “But it’s not a good time. I’m into something down here and it’s not a good time.”

  “I told you I don’t need you to come,” Marino says grumpily, and being grumpy has always been the magic charm that forces people to worry more about him and his moods than about themselves and their moods. “I’m telling you what’s going on and that’s it. I don’t need you. There’s nothing for you to do.”

  “Good,” Lucy says. Grumpy doesn’t work with her anymore. Marino keeps forgetting that. “I’ve got to go.”

  9.

  LUCY TOUCHES the paddle shift with her left index finger and the engine kicks up a thousand rpm’s with a roar as she slows down. Her sonaradar chirps and the front alert flashes red, indicating police radar somewhere up ahead.

  “I’m not speeding,” she says to Rudy Musil, who sits in the passenger’s seat, near the fire extinguisher, and he is looking at the speedometer. “Only going six miles over.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” he replies, glancing in his side-view mirror.

  “Let me see if I’m right.” She keeps the car in third and just a little over forty miles per hour. “The cop car’s going to be at the next intersection looking for us yahoos who can’t wait to hit the coast and haul ass.”

  “What’s going on with Marino? Let me guess,” Rudy says. “I need to pack a suitcase.”

  Both of them keep up their constant scans, checking mirrors, noting other cars, aware of every palm tree, pedestrian, and building on this flat stretch of strip malls. Traffic is moderate and relatively polite at the moment on Atlantic Boulevard in Pompano Beach, just north of Fort Lauderdale.

  “Yup,” Lucy says. “Tally ho.” Her sunglasses are fixed straight ahead as she passes a dark blue Ford LTD that has just turned right off Powerline Road, an intersection with an Eckerd’s drugstore and the Discount Meat Market. The unmarked Ford slides in behind her in the left lane.

  “You got him curious,” Rudy says.

  “Well, he’s not paid to be curious,” she says aggressively as the unmarked Ford follows her, and she knows damn well the cop is hoping she’ll do something that gives him cause to turn on his lights and check out the car and the young couple in it. “Look at that. People passing me in the right lane, and that guy over there’s got an expired inspection sticker.” She points. “And the cop’s more interested in me.”

  She stops checking on him in the rearview mirror and wishes that Rudy would lighten his mood. Ever since she opened an office in Los Angeles, he has been out of sorts. She’s not sure how, but clearly she’s miscalculated his ambitions and needs in life. She assumed that Rudy would love a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard with a view so immense that on a clear day one can see Catalina Island. She was wrong, terribly wrong, as wrong as she has ever been about anything she has ever assumed about him.

  A front is rolling in from the south, the sky divided into layers that vary between thick smoke to sunlit pearly gray. Cooler air pushes away rain that at times today was pounding, leaving puddles that blast the undercarriage of Lucy’s low-slung car. Just ahead, a flock of migrating seagulls swirl over the road, flying low and in crazy directions, and Lucy drives on, the unmarked car dogging her rear.

  “Marino doesn’t have much to say,” she answers Rudy’s question from a moment ago. “Just that something’s up in Richmond. As usual, my aunt is stepping into a mess.”

  “I heard you volunteer our services. I thought she was just going to consult about something. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know if we need to do anything. We’ll see. What’s up is the chief, I can’t remember his name, asked her help in a case, some kid, a girl, who suddenly died and he can’t figure out why. His office can’t, so no big surprise. He’s not even been there four months, and he washes his hands of the first big problem and calls my aunt. Hey, how about you coming on up and stepping in this shit so I don’t have to. Right? I told her not to touch it and now it seems there are other problems. Huge surprise. I don’t know. I told her not to go back to Richmond, but she doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Listens to you about like you listen to her,” Rudy says.

  “You know something, Rudy. I don’t like this guy.” Lucy looks in her rearview mirror, at the unmarked Ford.

  It is still on her bumper, and its driver is a dark-skinned person, perhaps a man, but Lucy can’t tell and she doesn’t want to seem interested in him or even aware of him, and then something else occurs to her.

  “Damn, I’m stupid,” she says, incredulous. “My radar’s not going off. What am I thinking? It hasn’t made a chirp since that car pulled in behind us. It’s not a police car with radar. It can’t be. And he’s following us.”

  “Easy,” Rudy says. “Just drive and ignore him. Let’s see what he does. Probably just some dude looking at your car. That’s what you get for driving cars like this. I’ve told you and told you. Shit.”

  Rudy didn’t used to lecture her. When they first met years ago at the FBI Academy, they became colleagues, then partners, then friends, and then he thought enough of her personally and professionally to leave law enforcement not long after she did a
nd come work for her company, which might be described as an international private investigation firm for lack of a better definition of what The Last Precinct or its employees do. Even some of the people who work for TLP don’t know what it does and have never met its founder and owner, Lucy. Some employees have never met Rudy, or if they have, they don’t know who he is or what he does.

  “Run the plate,” Lucy says.

  Rudy has his palm-size computer out and he is logging on, but he can’t run the plate number because he can’t see it. The car has no license plate in front, and Lucy feels stupid for ordering him to run a number he can’t see.

  “Let him get in front of you,” Rudy says. “I can’t see his plate unless he gets in front.”

  She touches the left paddle and drops to second gear. Now she is going five miles below the speed limit, and the driver stays behind her. He doesn’t seem interested in passing her.

  “Okay, let the games begin,” she says. “You’re fucking with the wrong chicken, asshole.” She suddenly turns a hard right into a strip mall parking lot.

  “Oh shit. What the hell…? Now he knows you’re messing with him,” Rudy says in annoyance.

  “Get the plate now. You should be able to see it.”

  Rudy twists around in the seat, but he’s not going to get the plate because the Ford LTD has turned off too, and is still on their tail, following them through the parking lot.

  “Stop,” Rudy says to Lucy. He is disgusted with her, completely disgusted with her. “Stop the car right now.”

  She eases on the brake and shifts the car into neutral, and the Ford stops right behind her. Rudy gets out and walks toward it as the driver’s window rolls down. Lucy has her window open, her pistol in her lap, and she watches the activity in her side-view mirror and tries to chase away her feelings. She feels stupid and embarrassed and angry and slightly afraid.

  “You got a problem?” she hears Rudy say to the driver, definitely a Hispanic male, a young one.