Four Scarpetta Novels

  “It seems what I do causes everything to bother me.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what happens when you know too much. Those hydrangeas over where you are. Put some rusty nails around them and they’ll turn a pretty blue.”

  “Epsom salts will work, too.”

  “Hadn’t heard that.”

  Scarpetta looks through a jeweler’s lens at the back of a camellia leaf, notes whitish scales. “We’ll prune these, and because there are wound pathogens, we’re going to have to disinfect before using the tools on anything else. I need to get the plant pathologist here.”

  “Uh-huh. Plants has diseases just like people.”

  Crows begin to fuss in the canopy of the live oak he’s trimming. Several of them suddenly flap off.

  Madelisa stands paralyzed like that lady in the Bible who didn’t do what God said and He turned her into a pillar of salt. She’s trespassing, breaking the law.

  “Hello?” she calls out again.

  She musters up the courage to walk out of the laundry room and into the grand kitchen of the grandest house she’s ever seen, still calling out “Hello!” and not sure what to do. She’s scared in a way she’s never felt before and should get out of here as fast as she can. She begins to wander, gawking at everything, feeling like a burglar, worrying she’s going to get caught—now or later—and go to jail.

  She should leave, get out. Do it now. The hair pricks up on the back of her neck as she continues calling out “Hello!” and “Anybody home?” and wondering why in the world the house is unlocked with meat on the grill if no one’s here. She begins to imagine she’s being watched as she wanders, something warning her that she ought to run as fast as she can out of this house and get back to Ashley. She has no right to wander around being nosy but can’t help it now that she’s here. She’s never seen a house like this and can’t figure out why nobody is answering her, and she’s too curious to turn back, or feels like she can’t.

  She passes through an arch into a tremendous living room. The floor is blue stone, looks like gemstone, and is arranged with gorgeous Oriental rugs, and there are huge exposed beams and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig. A movie screen is pulled down over an expanse of glass that faces the ocean. Dust drifts in the beam of light from the overhead projector, the screen lit up but blank, and there’s no sound. She looks at the wraparound black leather sofa, puzzled by the neatly folded clothing on top of it: a dark T-shirt, dark pants, a pair of men’s Jockey briefs. The big glass coffee table is cluttered with packs of cigarettes, prescription bottles, an almost empty fifth of Grey Goose vodka.

  Madelisa imagines someone—probably a man—drunk and depressed or sick, maybe explaining why the dog got out. Someone was in here not long ago, drinking, she thinks, and whoever it was started cooking on the grill and seems to have vanished. Her heart pounds. She can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched, and she thinks, My Lord, it’s cold in here.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” she calls out hoarsely.

  Her feet seem to move on their own as she explores in awe, and fear hums inside her like electricity. She should leave. She’s trespassing like a burglar. Breaking and entering. She’s going to get in trouble. She feels something looking at her. The police will be looking at her, all right, if and when they find out, and she’s getting panicky, but her feet won’t listen. They keep moving her from one place to the next.

  “Hello?” she calls out, her voice cracking.

  Beyond the living room, off to the left of the foyer, is another room, and she hears running water.

  “Hello!”

  She hesitantly follows the sound of running water, can’t seem to stop her feet. They keep right on, and she finds herself in a large bedroom with fancy, formal furniture and drawn silk curtains and pictures all over the walls. A beautiful little girl with a very pretty, happy woman who must be her mother. The little girl joyous in a wading pool with a puppy—the basset hound. The same pretty woman crying, sitting on a couch talking to the famous talk-show psychiatrist Dr. Self, big cameras rolled in close. The same pretty lady posing with Drew Martin and a handsome man with olive skin and very dark hair. Drew and the man are in tennis clothes, holding racquets on a tennis court somewhere.

  Drew Martin’s dead. Murdered.

  The pale blue duvet on the bed is messy. On the black marble floor near the head of the bed are clothes that seem to have been dropped there. A pink jogging suit, a pair of socks, a bra. The sound of running water gets louder as her feet move toward it, and Madelisa tells her feet to run the other way but they won’t. Run, she tells them as they walk her into a bathroom of black onyx and copper. RUN! She slowly takes in the wet, bloody towels in the copper sink, the bloody saw-toothed knife and bloody box cutters on the back of the black toilet, the neat stack of clean, pale rose linens on top of the hamper.

  Behind tiger-striped curtains drawn around the copper tub, water runs, splashing on something that doesn’t sound like metal.

  Chapter 13

  After dark. Scarpetta shines her flashlight on a stainless-steel Colt revolver in the middle of the alley behind her house.

  She hasn’t called the police. If the coroner is involved in this latest turn of sinister events, then calling the police might make matters worse. No telling who he has in his pocket. Bull has quite a story, and she doesn’t know what to think. He says when the crows flapped off from the oak tree in her garden, he knew that had meaning, so he told her an untruth, said he had to go on home, when what he intended to do was some sneaking—that’s how he put it. He tucked himself behind shrubbery between her two sets of gates and waited. He waited the better part of five hours. Scarpetta had no idea.

  She went about her business. Finished what she was doing in the garden. Took a shower. Worked in her upstairs office. Made phone calls. Checked on Rose. Checked on Lucy. Checked on Benton. All the while, she didn’t know Bull was hiding between the two sets of gates behind the house. He says it’s like fishing. You don’t catch anything unless you fool the fish into thinking you’ve left for the day. When the sun was lower and the shadows longer and Bull had been sitting on dark, cool bricks between the gates all afternoon, he saw a man in the alleyway. The man walked right up to Scarpetta’s outer gate and tried to squeeze his hand through it to unlock it. When that didn’t work, he started to climb the ironwork, and that’s when Bull swung the gate open and got into it with him. He thinks it’s the man who was on the chopper, but whoever it was, he was up to something serious, and when they got into the scuffle, the man dropped his gun.

  “Stay right here,” she tells Bull in the dark alley. “If one of the neighbors comes out or anyone shows up for any reason, no one gets near anything. No one touches anything. Fortunately, I don’t think anybody can see what we’re doing.”

  The beam of Bull’s flashlight probes the uneven bricks as she returns to her house. She climbs the stairs to the second story, and in a few minutes is back in the alley with her camera and crime scene case. She takes photographs. She pulls on latex gloves. She picks up the revolver, opens the cylinder, and ejects six thirty-eight-caliber cartridges, placing them in one paper bag, the gun in another. She seals them with bright yellow evidence tape that she labels and initials with a Sharpie.

  Bull continues to search, his flashlight bobbing as he walks, stops, crouches, then walks some more, all of it very slowly. A few more minutes pass, and he says, “There’s something here. I think you better look.”

  She walks over to him, watching where she steps, and about a hundred feet from her gates on the leaf-littered asphalt is a small gold coin attached to a broken gold chain. They blaze in the beam of her flashlight, the gold as bright as the moon.

  “You were this far away from my gates when you struggled with him?” she says with doubt. “Then why’s his gun way over there?” She points toward the dark shapes of her gates and garden wall.

  “Hard to tell where I was,” he says. “Things like that happen fast. I didn’t think I was way ov
er here, but I can’t say it as a fact.”

  She looks back toward her house. “From here to there is pretty far,” she says. “You sure you didn’t chase him after he dropped the gun?”

  “All I can say,” Bull says, “is a gold chain with a gold coin isn’t going to lie around out here long. So I could have chased him and it got broke when we tussled. I didn’t think I chased him, but when you got life and death going on, time and distance don’t always measure right.”

  “They don’t always,” she agrees.

  She pulls on fresh gloves and picks up the broken necklace by a small area of the chain. Without a lens, she can’t tell what type of coin it is, can make out only a crowned head on one side, a wreath and the number 1 on the other.

  “So it probably broke off when I started tussling with him,” Bull decides, as if he’s convinced himself. “Sure hope they don’t make you turn all this over to them. The police, I mean.”

  “There’s nothing to turn over,” she says. “So far, there’s no crime. Just a scuffle between you and a stranger. Which I don’t intend to mention to anyone. Except Lucy. We’ll see what we can do in the labs tomorrow.”

  He’s already been in trouble. He’s not getting into trouble again, especially on her account.

  “When folks find a gun lying around, they supposed to call the police,” Bull says.

  “Well, I’m not going to.” She packs up what she carried outside.

  “You’re fretting they’d think I was involved in something and haul me off. Don’t you get in a mess because of me, Dr. Kay.”

  “No one’s hauling you anywhere,” she says.

  Gianni Lupano’s black Porsche 911 Carrera is permanently located in Charleston, no matter how seldom he’s here.

  “Where is he?” Lucy asks Ed.

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “But he’s still in town.”

  “I talked to him yesterday. He called and asked me to get maintenance up there because his air-conditioning wasn’t working right. So while he was out, and I don’t know where he went, they changed the filter. He’s a private one. I know about his coming and going because he gets me to start his car once a week so the battery don’t go dead.” Ed opens a foam to-go box, and his small office smells like french fries. “You mind? Don’t want it to get cold. Who told you about his car?”

  “Rose didn’t know he has a place in the building,” Lucy says from the doorway, watching the lobby, seeing who walks in. “When she found out, she figured who he is and told me she’s seen him driving an expensive sports car that she thought was a Porsche.”

  “She’s got a Volvo as old as my cat.”

  “I’ve always loved cars, so Rose knows a lot about them, whether she likes it or not,” Lucy says. “Ask her about Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, she’ll tell you. Around here, people don’t rent Porsches. Maybe a Mercedes but not a Porsche like he’s got. So I figured he might keep it here.”

  “How’s she doing?” Ed sits at his desk, eating a cheeseburger from the Sweetwater Cafe. “That was a bad time of it earlier.”

  “Well,” Lucy says. “She’s not feeling all that great.”

  “I had the flu shot this year. Got the flu twice, plus a cold. It’s like giving you candy so you don’t get a cavity. Last time I’m doing it.”

  “Was Gianni Lupano here when Drew was murdered in Rome?” Lucy asks. “I was told he was in New York, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “She won the tournament here on a Sunday, the middle of the month.” He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, picks up a big soda, and sucks on the straw. “I know that night Gianni left Charleston, because he asked me to look after his car. Said he didn’t know when he’d be back, then all of a sudden, here he is.”

  “But you haven’t seen him.”

  “Almost never do.”

  “You talk to him on the phone.”

  “That’s usually it.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Lucy says. “Other than Drew playing the Family Circle Cup, why would he be in Charleston? The tournament’s what? One week a year?”

  “You’d be surprised the people who got places in the area. Movie stars, even.”

  “His car have a GPS?”

  “It’s got everything. That’s some car.”

  “I need to borrow the key.”

  “Oh.” Ed sets the cheeseburger back in the container. “I can’t do that.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to drive it, just need to check something, and I know you won’t say a word about it.”

  “I can’t give you the key.” He’s stopped eating. “He ever found out…”

  “I need the key for ten minutes, fifteen at the most. He’ll never find out, I promise.”

  “Maybe you could start her up while you’re at it. No harm in it.” He rips open a packet of ketchup.

  “Will do.”

  She goes out a back door and finds the Porsche in a secluded corner of the parking lot. She turns on the engine and opens the glove box to check the registration. The Carrera is a 2006 and registered to Lupano. She turns on the GPS, checks the history of the stored destinations, and writes them down.

  The rapid respiration of the magnet keeping cool.

  Inside the MRI suite, Benton looks through glass at Dr. Self’s sheet-draped feet. She’s on a sliding table inside the bore of the fourteen-ton magnet, her chin taped down to remind her not to move her head, which is against a coil that will receive the radio frequency pulses necessary to image her brain. Over her ears is a set of gradient-damping headphones. Through them, a little later, when the functional imaging starts, she’ll hear the audiotape of her mother’s voice.

  “So far, so good,” he says to Dr. Susan Lane. “Except for her fun and games. I’m awfully sorry she’s kept everybody waiting.” To the tech: “Josh? How about you? Awake?”

  “Can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this,” Josh says from his console. “My little girl’s been throwing up all day. Ask my wife how much she’d like to kill me right now.”

  “Never known one person to bring such happiness into the world.” Benton means Dr. Self, the eye of the storm. He looks through glass at her feet, catches a glimpse of stockings. “She’s wearing hose?”

  “You’re lucky she’s wearing anything. When I brought her in, she insisted on taking everything off,” Dr. Lane says.

  “I’m not surprised.” He’s careful. Although Dr. Self can’t hear them unless they use the intercom, she can see them. “Manic as hell. Has been since she got here. Been a productive stay. Ask her. She’s as sane as a judge.”

  “I did ask her about anything metal, asked if she had on an underwire bra,” Dr. Lane says. “Told her the scanner has a magnetic pull sixty thousand times greater than the earth’s and nothing ferrous can be near it, and bra burning would have a different meaning if there was underwire and she didn’t tell us. She said she did, was quite proud of the fact, and went on and on about the—ah-hmmm—burden of having large breasts. Of course, I told her she had to take off the bra, and she said she preferred to take off everything and asked for a johnny.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “So she has on a johnny, but I did convince her to keep her pants on. And her stockings.”

  “Good job, Susan. Let’s get this over with.”

  Dr. Lane pushes the talk button of the intercom and says, “What we’re going to do now is start with some localizing images—structural imaging, in other words. This first part is going to last about six minutes, and you’re going to hear some rather loud, strange noises that the machine makes. How are you doing?”

  “Can we start, please?” Dr. Self’s voice.

  Intercom off, and Dr. Lane says to Benton, “You ready for the PANAS?” Positive and Negative Affect Scales rating.

  Benton pushes the intercom button again and says, “Dr. Self, I’m going to start with a series of questions about how you’re feeling. And I’ll be asking you these same qu
estions several other times during our session, all right?”

  “I know what a PANAS is.” Her voice.

  Benton and Dr. Lane exchange glances, their facial expressions relaxed, revealing nothing as Dr. Lane says sarcastically, “Wonderful.”

  Benton says, “Ignore it. Let’s just do this.”

  Josh looks at Benton, ready to start. Benton thinks of his conversation with Dr. Maroni and the implied accusation that Josh told Lucy about their VIP patient, and then Lucy told Scarpetta. It still puzzles Benton. What was Dr. Maroni trying to say? As he looks at Dr. Self through the glass, something comes to him. The file that isn’t in Rome. The Sandman’s file. Maybe it’s here at McLean.

  A monitor displays vital signs remotely relayed by Dr. Self’s finger holder and a blood pressure cuff. Benton says, “BP one twelve over seventy-eight.” He writes it down. “Pulse seventy-two.”

  “What’s her pulse ox?” Dr. Lane asks.

  He tells her that Dr. Self’s arterial oxyhemoglobin saturation—or the measurement of oxygen saturation in her blood—is ninety-nine. Normal. He presses the intercom button to start the PANAS.

  “Dr. Self? Are you ready for a few questions?”

  “Finally.” Her voice over the intercom.

  “I’ll ask questions, and I want you to rate what you’re feeling on a scale of one to five. One means you feel nothing. Two means you feel a little. Three is moderately, four is very much, and five is extremely. Make sense?”

  “I’m familiar with a PANAS. I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “It appears she’s a neuroscientist, too,” Dr. Lane comments. “She’s going to cheat this part of it.”

  “I don’t care.” Benton presses the intercom button and goes through the questions, the same ones he’ll ask her several more times during the testing. Is she feeling upset, ashamed, distressed, hostile, irritable, guilty? Or interested, proud, determined, active, strong, inspired, excited, enthusiastic, alert? She assigns a rating of one to all of them, claiming she feels nothing.

  He checks her vitals and writes them down. They are normal, unchanged.