Four Scarpetta Novels

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” Scarpetta tells her. “If you could contact Meddicks’, let them know she’s ready for pickup.”

  “I was just coming down to find you,” Rose says. “Worried you might have accidentally locked yourself in the fridge.” An old joke. “Benton’s trying to reach you. Says for you to check your e-mail when, and I quote, you are alone and composed.”

  “You sound worse than you did yesterday. More congested.”

  “I might have a bit of a cold.”

  “I heard Marino’s motorcycle a little while ago. And someone’s been smoking down here. In the fridge. Even my surgical gown reeks of it.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Where is he? Be nice if he could have found time to help me out down here.”

  “In the kitchen,” Rose says.

  Fresh gloves, and Scarpetta pulls the elderly woman’s body from the autopsy table into a sheet-lined sturdy vinyl bag on top of a gurney, which she rolls into the cooler. She hoses off her work station, places tubes of vitreous fluid, urine, bile, and blood, and a carton of sectioned organs into a refrigerator for later toxicological testing and histology. Bloodstained cards go under a hood to dry—samples for DNA testing that are included in each case file. After mopping the floor and cleaning surgical instruments and sinks and gathering paperwork for later dictation, she’s ready to attend to her own hygiene.

  At the back of the autopsy suite are drying cabinets with HEPA and carbon filters for bloody, soiled clothing before it is packaged as evidence and sent to the labs. Next is a storage area, then a laundry room, and finally the locker room, divided by a glass-block wall. One side for men, the other for women. At this early stage of her practice in Charleston, it’s just Marino assisting her in the morgue. He has his side of the locker room and she has the other, and it always feels awkward to her when both of them are showering at the same time and she can hear him and see changes in light through the thick green translucent glass as he moves about.

  She enters her side of the locker room, shuts and locks the door. She removes her disposable shoe covers, apron, cap, and face mask, and drops them in a biohazard trash can, then tosses her surgical gown in a hamper. She showers, scrubbing herself with antibacterial soap, then blow-dries her hair and changes back into her suit and pumps. Returning to the corridor, she walks the length of it to a door. On the other side is the steep flight of worn oak stairs that lead directly up to the kitchen where Marino is popping open a can of Diet Pepsi.

  He looks her up and down. “Aren’t we dressed fancy,” he says. “You forget it’s Sunday and think you got court? So much for my ride to Myrtle Beach.” A long night of carousing shows on his flushed, stubbly face.

  “Count it as a gift. Another day of being alive.” She hates motorcycles. “Besides, the weather is bad and supposed to get worse.”

  “Eventually I’m gonna get you on the back of my Indian Chief Roadmaster and you’ll be hooked, be begging for more.”

  The idea of straddling his big motorcycle, her arms around him, her body pressed against him, is a complete turnoff, and he knows it. She’s his boss, and in many ways always has been for the better part of twenty years, and that no longer seems all right with him. Certainly both of them have changed. Certainly they’ve had their good times and bad. But over recent years and especially of late, his regard for her and his job has become increasingly unrecognizable, and now this. She thinks of Dr. Self’s e-mails, wonders if he assumes she’s seen them. She thinks of whatever game Dr. Self is engaging him in—a game he won’t understand and is destined to lose.

  “I could hear you come in. Obviously, you parked your motorcycle in the bay again,” she says. “If it gets hit by a hearse or a van,” she reminds him, “the liability’s yours and I won’t feel sorry for you.”

  “It gets hit, there’ll be an extra dead body wheeled in, whatever dumb-shit funeral home creepy-crawler didn’t look where he was going.”

  Marino’s motorcycle, with its sound barrier–breaking pipes, has become yet one more point of contention. He rides it to crime scenes, to court, to emergency rooms, to law offices, to witnesses’ homes. At the office, he refuses to leave it in the parking lot and tucks it in the bay, which is for body deliveries, not personal vehicles.

  “Has Mr. Grant gotten here yet?” Scarpetta says.

  “Drove up in a piece-of-shit pickup truck with his piece-of-shit fishing boat, shrimp nets, buckets, other crap in back. One big son of a bitch, pitch-black. I’ve never seen black people as black as they are around here. Not a drop of cream in the coffee. Not like our ole stomping grounds in Virginia where Thomas Jefferson slept with the help.”

  She’s in no mood to engage in his provocations. “Is he in my office, because I don’t want to make him wait.”

  “I don’t get why you dressed up for him like you’re meeting with a lawyer or a judge or going to church,” Marino says, and she wonders if what he really hopes is that she dressed up for him, perhaps because she read Dr. Self’s e-mails and is jealous.

  “Meeting with him is as important as meeting with anyone else,” she says. “We always show respect, remember?”

  Marino smells like cigarettes and booze, and when “his chemistry’s off,” as Scarpetta understates it all too often these days, his deep-seated insecurities shift his bad behavior into high gear, a problem made quite threatening by his physical formidability. In his mid-fifties, he shaves off what is left of his hair, typically wears black motorcycle clothing and big boots, and, as of the past few days, a gaudy necklace with a silver dollar dangling from it. He is fanatical about lifting weights, his chest so broad he’s known to brag that it takes two x-rays to capture his lungs on film. In a much earlier phase of his life, based on old photographs she’s seen, he was handsome in a virile, tough way, and might still be attractive were it not for his crassness, slovenliness, and hard living that at this point in his life can’t be blamed on his difficult upbringing in a rough part of New Jersey.

  “I don’t know why you still entertain the fantasy that you’ll fool me,” Scarpetta says, shifting the conversation away from the ridiculous subject of how she is dressed and why. “Last night. And clearly in the morgue.”

  “Fool you about what?” Another gulp from the can.

  “When you splash on that much cologne to disguise cigarette smoke, all you do is give me a headache.”

  “Huh?” He quietly belches.

  “Let me guess, you spent the night at the Kick ’N Horse.”

  “The joint’s full of cigarette smoke.” He shrugs his massive shoulders.

  “And I’m sure you didn’t add to it. You were smoking in the morgue. In the fridge. Even the surgical gown I put on smelled like cigarette smoke. Were you smoking in my locker room?”

  “Probably drifted in from my side. The smoke, I mean. I might have carried my cigarette in there, in my side. I can’t remember.”

  “I know you don’t want lung cancer.”

  He averts his eyes the way he does when a certain topic of conversation is uncomfortable, and he chooses to abort it. “Find anything new? And I don’t mean the old lady, who shouldn’t have been sent here just because the coroner didn’t want to deal with a stinky decomp. But the kid.”

  “I’ve put him in the freezer. There’s nothing more we can do right now.”

  “I can’t stand it when it’s kids. I figure out who did that little kid down there, I’ll kill him, tear him to pieces with my bare hands.”

  “Let’s don’t threaten to kill people, please.” Rose is in the doorway, an odd expression on her face. Scarpetta isn’t sure how long she’s been standing there.

  “It ain’t no threat,” Marino says.

  “That’s exactly why I mentioned it.” Rose steps into the kitchen, dressed as neat as a pin—her old-fashioned expression—in a blue suit, her white hair tucked back in a French twist. She looks exhausted, and her pupils are contracted.

  “You lecturing me again?” Marino says
to her with a wink.

  “You need a good lecture or two. Or three or four,” she says, pouring herself a cup of strong black coffee, a “bad” habit she quit about a year ago and now, apparently, has resumed. “And in case you’ve forgotten”—she eyes him above the rim of her coffee mug—“you have killed people before. So you shouldn’t make threats.” She leans against the countertop and takes a deep breath.

  “I told you. It ain’t no threat.”

  “You sure you’re all right?” Scarpetta asks Rose. “Maybe you’re getting more than a little cold. You shouldn’t have come in.”

  “I had a little chat with Lucy,” Rose says. To Marino, “I don’t want Dr. Scarpetta alone with Mr. Grant. Not even for a second.”

  “Did she mention he passed his background check?” Scarpetta says.

  “You hear me, Marino? Not for one second do you leave Dr. Scarpetta alone with that man. I don’t give a hoot about his background check. He’s bigger than you are,” says the ever-protective Rose, probably upon the ever-protective Lucy’s instructions.

  Rose has been Scarpetta’s secretary for almost twenty years, following her from pillar to post, in Rose’s words, and through thick and thin. At seventy-three, she’s an attractive, imposing figure, erect and keen, daily drifting in and out of the morgue armed with phone messages, reports that must be signed right this minute, any matter of business she decides can’t wait, or simply a reminder—no, an order—that Scarpetta hasn’t eaten all day and take-out food—healthy, of course—awaits her upstairs and she will go eat it now and she won’t have another cup of coffee because she drinks too much coffee.

  “He’s been in what appears to be a knife fight.” Rose continues to worry.

  “It’s in his background check. He was the victim,” Scarpetta says.

  “He looks very violent and dangerous, and is the size of a freighter. It concerns me greatly that he wanted to come here on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps hoping he’d find you alone,” she says to Scarpetta. “How do you know he isn’t the one who killed that child?”

  “Let’s just hear what he has to say.”

  “In the old days, we wouldn’t do it like this. There would be a police presence,” Rose insists.

  “This isn’t the old days,” Scarpetta replies, trying not to lecture. “This is a private practice, and we have more flexibility in some ways and less in others. But in fact, part of our job has always been to meet with anyone who might have useful information, police presence or not.”

  “Just be careful,” Rose says to Marino. “Whoever did this to that poor little boy knows darn well his body’s here and Dr. Scarpetta’s working on it, and usually when she works on something, she figures it out. He could be stalking her, for all we know.”

  Usually Rose doesn’t get this overwrought.

  “You’ve been smoking,” Rose then says to Marino.

  He takes another big gulp of Diet Pepsi. “Should’ve seen me last night. Had ten cigarettes in my mouth and two in my ass while I was playing the harmonica and getting it on with my new woman.”

  “Another edifying evening at that biker bar with some woman whose IQ is the same as my refrigerator. Sub-Zero. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die.” Rose looks troubled as she walks over to the coffeemaker and starts filling the pot with water to make a fresh pot. “Mr. Grant would like coffee,” she says. “And no, Dr. Scarpetta, you can’t have any.”

  Chapter 6

  Bulrush Ulysses S. Grant has always been called Bull. Without any prompting, he begins the conversation by explaining the origin of his name.

  “I ’spect you’re wondering about the S part of my name. That’s it. Just an S and a period,” he says from a chair near Scarpetta’s shut office door. “My mama knows the S in General Grant’s name is for Simpson. But she was afraid if she stuck Simpson in there, it would be a lot for me to write out. So she left it at S. Explaining it takes longer than writing it out, you ask me.”

  He’s neat and clean in freshly pressed gray work clothes, and his sneakers look as if they just came out of the washing machine. A frayed yellow baseball cap with a fish on it is in his lap, his big hands politely folded on top of it. The rest of his appearance is frightening, his face, neck, and scalp savagely slashed with a crisscross of long, pink gashes. If he ever saw a plastic surgeon, it wasn’t a good one. He will be badly disfigured for life, a patchwork of keloid scars that make Scarpetta think of Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

  “I know you just moved here not all that long ago,” Bull says, to her surprise. “In that old carriage house that backs up to the alley between Meeting and King.”

  “How the hell do you know where she supposedly lives, and what business is it of yours?” Marino aggressively interrupts him.

  “I used to work for one of your neighbors.” Bull directs this to Scarpetta. “She passed on a long time back. I guess it would be more accurate to say I worked for her maybe fifteen years, then ’bout four years ago her husband passed. After that, she got rid of most of her help, I think had money anxiousness, and I had to find me something else. Then she passed, too. What I’m telling you is I know the area where you live like the back of my hand.”

  She looks at the pink scars on the backs of his hands.

  “I know your house….” he adds.

  “Like I said…” Marino starts in again.

  “Let him finish,” Scarpetta says.

  “I know your garden real good ’cause I dug the pond and poured the cement, and took care of the angel statue looking over it, kept her nice and clean. I built the white fence with finials on one side. But not the brick columns and wrought iron on the other. That was before my time and probably so overgrowed with wax myrtle and bamboo when you bought the place, you didn’t know it was there. I planted roses, Europa, California poppies, and Chinese jasmine, and I fixed things around the house.”

  Scarpetta is stunned.

  “Anyhow,” Bull says, “I been doing things for half the people up and down your alleyway and on King Street, Meeting Street, Church Street, all over. Since I was a boy. You wouldn’t know it because I keep to my own business. That’s a good thing if you don’t want folks around here to take offense to you.”

  She says, “Like they do to me?”

  Marino shoots her a disdainful look. She’s being too friendly.

  “Yes, ma’am. They sure can be like that around here,” Bull says. “Then you put all them spiderweb decals on all the windows, and that don’t help, ’specially because of what you do for a living. One of your neighbors, if I’m honest, calls you Dr. Halloween.”

  “Let me guess. That would be Mrs. Grimball.”

  “I wouldn’t take no seriousness to it,” Bull says. “She calls me Olé. ’Cause of me being called Bull.”

  “The decals are so birds don’t fly into the glass.”

  “Uh-huh. Never have figured out how we know exactly what birds see. Like do they see what’s s’posed to be a spiderweb and head the other way even though I never have seen a bird caught up in a spiderweb like it’s a bug or something. It’s like saying dogs is color-blind or got no sense of time. How do we know?”

  “What business is it of yours to be anywhere near her house?” Marino says.

  “Looking for work. When I was a boy, I helped out Mrs. Whaley, too,” Bull says to Scarpetta. “Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Mrs. Whaley’s garden, the most famous one here in Charleston, down there on Church Street.” He smiles proudly, pointing in the general direction, wounds on his hand flashing pink.

  He has them on his palms, too. Defensive injuries, Scarpetta thinks.

  “That was a real privilege working for Mrs. Whaley. She was real good to me. She wrote a book, you know. They keep copies of it right there in the window of that bookstore at the Charleston Hotel. She signed a copy for me once. I still got it.”

  “What the shit’s going on here?” Marino says. “You come to the morgue to talk to us about that dead little boy, or is this a damn job inter
view and stroll through memory lane?”

  “Sometimes things fit together in mysterious ways,” Bull says. “My mama always says that. Maybe something good come out of the bad. Maybe something good could come out of what happened. And what happened is bad, all right. Like a movie in my head playing all the time, seeing that little boy dead in the mud. Crabs and flies crawling on him.” Bull touches a scarred index finger to his scarred, furrowed brow. “Up there, I see it when I shut my eyes. The police in Beaufort County says you’re still getting established down here.” He scans Scarpetta’s office, slowly taking in all her books and framed degrees. “You look pretty established to me, but I probably could’ve done you better.” His attention drifts to recently installed cabinets, where she locks up sensitive cases and ones that haven’t gone to court yet. “Like that black walnut door ain’t flush with the one beside it. Not hung straight. I could fix it easy enough. You see any doors hung crooked in your carriage house? No, ma’am, you don’t. Not ones I hung back then when I helped out over there. Can do ’bout anything, and if I don’t know, I’m sure willing to learn. So I said to myself, maybe I should just ask. No harm in asking.”

  “So maybe I should just ask,” Marino says. “You kill that little boy? Kind of a coincidence you found him, right?”

  “No, sir.” Bull looks at him, looks him straight in the eye, his jaw muscles flexing. “I go all over these parts cutting sweetgrass, fishing, shrimping, digging clams, and picking oysters. Let me ask you”—he holds Marino’s stare—“if I killed that boy, why would I be the one to find him and call for the police?”

  “You tell me. Why would you?”

  “I sure wouldn’t.”

  “That reminds me. How’d you call anyone?” Marino says, leaning farther forward in his chair, hands the size of bear paws on his knees. “You got yourself a cell phone?” As if a poor black man wouldn’t have a cell phone.

  “I called nine-one-one. And like I said, why would I if I was the one who killed that boy?”