He hesitates. “You can’t take your car.”
“Damn it!” I blurt out. “Don’t tell me they’ve got to go through my car, too. This is insane.”
“Look. The first time your alarm went off last night, it was because someone tried to break into your garage.”
“What do you mean, someone?” I retort as migraine pain sears my temples and blurs my vision. “We know exactly who. He forced my garage door open because he wanted the alarm to go off. He wanted the police to show up. So it wouldn’t seem odd if the police came back a little later because a neighbor reported a prowler on my property, supposedly.”
It was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne who came back. He impersonated the police. I still can’t believe I fell for it.
“We ain’t got all the answers yet,” Marino replies.
“Why is it I keep getting this feeling you don’t believe me?”
“You need to get to Anna’s and sleep.”
“He didn’t touch my car,” I assert. “He never got inside my garage. I don’t want anyone touching my car. I want to take it tonight. Just leave the scene case inside the trunk.”
“Not tonight.”
Marino walks out and shuts the door behind him. I am desperate for a drink to override the electrical spikes in my central nervous system, but what do I do? Walk out to the bar and tell the cops to get the hell out of my way while I find the Scotch? Knowing that liquor probably won’t help my headache doesn’t have an impact. I am so miserable in my own skin, I don’t care what is good or not good for me right now. In the bathroom I dig through more drawers and spill several lipsticks on the floor. They roll between the toilet and the tub. I am unsteady as I bend over to retrieve them, groping awkwardly with my right arm, all of this made more difficult because I am left-handed. I stop to ponder the perfumes neatly arranged on the vanity and gently pick up the small gold metal bottle of Hermès 24 Faubourg. It is cool in my hand. I lift the spray nozzle to my nose and the spicy, erotic scent that Benton Wesley loved fills my eyes with tears and my heart feels as if it will fatally fly out of rhythm. I have not used the perfume in more than a year, not once since Benton was murdered. Now I have been murdered, I tell him in my throbbing mind. And I am still here, Benton, I am still here. You were a psychological profiler for the FBI, an expert in dissecting the psyches of monsters and interpreting and predicting their behavior. You would have seen this coming, wouldn’t you? You would have predicted it, prevented it. Why weren’t you here, Benton? I would be all right if you had been here.
I realize someone is knocking on my bedroom door. “Just a minute,” I call out, clearing my throat and wiping my eyes. I splash cold water on my face and tuck the Hermès perfume into the tote bag. I go to the door, expecting Marino. Instead, Jay Talley walks in wearing ATF battle dress and a day’s growth of beard that turns his dark beauty sinister. He is one of the handsomest men I have ever known, his body exquisitely sculpted, sensuality exuding from his pores like musk.
“Just checking on you before you head out.” His eyes burn into mine. They seem to feel and explore me the way his hands and mouth did four days ago in France.
“What can I tell you?” I let him into my bedroom and am suddenly self-conscious about the way I look. I don’t want him to see me like this. “I have to leave my own house. It’s almost Christmas. My arm hurts. My head hurts. Other than that, I’m fine.”
“I’ll drive you to Dr. Zenner’s. I would like to, Kay.”
It vaguely penetrates that he knows where I am staying tonight. Marino promised my whereabouts would be secret. Jay shuts the door and takes my hand, and all I can think about is that he didn’t wait at the hospital for me and now he wants to drive me someplace else.
“Let me help you through this. I care about you,” he says to me.
“No one seemed to care very much last night,” I reply as I recall that when he drove me home from the hospital and I thanked him for waiting, for being there for me, he never once even intimated that he hadn’t been there. “You and all your IRTs out there and the bastard just walks right up to my front door,” I go on. “You fly all the way here from Paris to lead a goddamn International Response Team in your big-game hunt for this guy, and what a joke. What a bad movie—all these big cops with all their gear and assault rifles and the monster just strolls right up to my house.”
Jay’s eyes have begun wandering over areas of my anatomy as if they are rest stops he is entitled to revisit. It shocks and repulses me that he can think about my body at a time like this. In Paris I thought I was falling in love with him. As I stand here with him in my bedroom and he is openly interested in what is under my old lab coat, I realize I don’t love him in the least.
“You’re just upset. God, why wouldn’t you be? I’m concerned about you. I’m here for you.” He tries to touch me and I move away.
“We had an afternoon.” I have told him this before, but now I mean it. “A few hours. An encounter, Jay.”
“A mistake?” Hurt sharpens his voice. Dark anger flashes in his eyes.
“Don’t try to turn an afternoon into a life, into something of permanent meaning. It isn’t there. I’m sorry. For God’s sake.” My indignation rises. “Don’t want anything from me right now.” I walk away from him, gesturing with my one good arm. “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”
He raises a hand and hangs his head, warding off my blows, acknowledging his mistake. I am not sure if he is sincere. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Being stupid, that’s what,” he says. “I don’t mean to want anything. Stupid, I’m stupid because of how I feel about you. Don’t hold it against me. Please.” He casts me an intense look and opens the door. “I’m here for you, Kay. Je t’aime.” I realize Jay has a way of saying good-bye that makes me feel I might never see him again. An atavistic panic thrills my deepest psyche and I resist the temptation to call after him, to apologize, to promise we will have dinner or drinks soon. I shut my eyes and rub my temples, briefly leaning against the bedpost. I tell myself I don’t know what I am doing right now and should not do anything.
Marino is in the hallway, an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, and I can feel him trying to read me and what might have just happened while Jay was inside my bedroom with the door shut. My gaze lingers on the empty hallway, halfway hoping Jay will reappear and dreading it at the same time. Marino grabs my bags and cops fall silent as I approach. They avoid looking in my direction as they move about my great room, duty belts creaking, equipment they manipulate clicking and clacking. An investigator takes photographs of the coffee table, the flash gun popping bright white. Someone else is videotaping while a crime scene technician sets up an alternative light source called a Luma-Lite that can detect fingerprints, drugs and body fluids not visible to the unaided eye. My downtown office has a Luma-Lite I routinely use on bodies at scenes and in the morgue. To see a Luma-Lite inside my house gives me a feeling that is indescribable.
Dark dusting powder smudges furniture and walls, and the colorful Persian rug is pulled back, exposing antique French oak underneath. An endtable lamp is unplugged and on the floor. The sectional sofa has craters where cushions used to be, the air oily and acrid with the residual odor of formalin. Off the great room and near the front door is the dining room and through the open doorway I am greeted with the sight of a brown paper bag sealed with yellow evidence tape, dated, initialed and labeled clothing Scarpetta. Inside it are the slacks, sweater, socks, shoes, bra and panties I was wearing last night, clothes taken from me in the hospital. That bag and other evidence and flashlights and equipment are on top of my favorite red Jarrah Wood dining room table, as if it is a workbench. Cops have draped coats over chairs, and wet, dirty footprints are everywhere. My mouth is dry, my joints weak with shame and rage.
“Yo Marino!” a cop barks. “Righter’s looking for you.”
Buford Righter is the city commonwealth’s attorney. I look around for Jay. He is nowhere to be seen.
“Tell him to take a number and wait in line.” Marino sticks to his deli-line allusion.
He lights the cigarette as I open the front door, and cold air bites my face and makes my eyes water. “Did you get my crime scene case?” I ask him.
“It’s in the truck.” He says this like a condescending husband who has been asked to fetch his wife’s pocketbook.
“Why’s Righter calling?” I want to know.
“Bunch of fucking voyeurs,” he mutters.
Marino’s truck is on the street out front and two massive tires have chewed tracks into my snowy churned-up lawn. Buford Righter and I have worked many cases together over the years and it stings that he did not ask me directly if he could come to my house. He has not, for that matter, contacted me to see how I am and let me know he is glad I am alive.
“You ask me, people just want to see your joint,” Marino says. “So they give these excuses about needing to check this and that.”
Slush seeps into my shoes as I carefully make my way along the driveway.
“You got no idea how many people ask me what your house is like. You’d think you was Lady Di or something. Plus, Righter’s got his nose in everything, can’t stand to be left out of the loop. Biggest fucking case since Jack the Ripper. Righter’s bugging the hell out of us.”
Flash guns suddenly explode in bright white stutters and I almost slip. I swear out loud. Photographers have gotten past the neighborhood guard gate. Three of them hurry toward me in a blaze of flashes as I struggle with one arm to climb into the truck’s high front seat.
“Hey!” Marino yells at the nearest offender, a woman. “Goddamn bitch!” He lunges, trying to block her camera, and her feet go out from under her. She sits down hard on the slick street, camera equipment thudding and scattering.
“Fuckhead!” she screams at him. “Fuckhead!”
“Get in the truck! Get in the truck!” Marino yells at me.
“Motherfucker!”
My heart drills my ribs.
“I’m going to sue you, motherfucker!”
More flashes and I shut my coat in the door and have to open it again and shut it again while Marino shoves my bags in back and jumps into the driver’s seat, the engine turning over and rumbling like a yacht. The photographer is trying to get up, and it occurs to me I ought to make sure she isn’t injured. “We should see if she’s hurt,” I say, staring out the side window.
“Hell no. Fuck no.” The truck lurches onto the street, fishtails and accelerates.
“Who are they?” Adrenaline pumps. Blue dots float before my eyes.
“Assholes. That’s who.” He snatches up the hand mike. “Unit nine,” he announces over the air.
“Unit nine,” the dispatcher comes back.
“I don’t need pictures of me, my house . . .” I raise my voice. Every cell in my body lights up to protest the unfairness of it all.
“Ten-five unit three-twenty, ask him to call me on my portable.” Marino holds the mike against his mouth. Unit three-twenty gets back to him right away, the portable phone vibrating like a huge insect. Marino flips it open and talks. “Somehow the media’s gotten in the neighborhood. Photographers. I’m thinking they parked somewhere in Windsor Farms, came in on foot over the fence, through that open grassy area behind the guard booth. Send units to look for any cars parked where they shouldn’t be and tow ’em. They step foot on the Doc’s property, arrest ’em.” He ends the call, flipping the phone shut as if he is Captain Kirk and has just ordered the Enterprise to attack.
We slow down at the guard booth and Joe steps out. He is an old man who has always been proud to wear his brown Pinkerton’s uniform, and he is very nice, polite and protective, but I would not want to depend on him or his colleagues for more than nuisance control. It shouldn’t surprise me a bit that Chandonne got inside my neighborhood or that now the media has. Joe’s slack, wrinkled face turns uneasy when he notices me sitting inside the truck.
“Hey, man,” Marino gruffly says through the open window, “how’d the photographers get in here?”
“What?” Joe instantly goes into protect mode, eyes narrowing as he stares down the slick, empty street, sodium vapor lights casting yellow auras high up on poles.
“In front of the Doc’s house. At least three of ’em.”
“They didn’t come through here,” Joe declares. He ducks back inside the booth and grabs the phone.
We drive off. “We can do but so much, Doc,” Marino says to me. “You may as well duck your head in the sand because there’s gonna be pictures and shit all over the place.”
I stare out the window at lovely Georgian homes glowing with holiday festivity.
“Bad news is, your security risk just went up another mile.” He is preaching to me, telling me what I already know and have no interest in dwelling on right now. “Because now half the world’s gonna see your big fancy house and know exactly where you live. Problem is, and what worries the hell out of me, is stuff like this brings out other squirrels. Gives ’em ideas. They start imagining you as a victim and get off on it, like those assholes who go to the courthouse, cruising for rape cases to sit in on.”
He eases to a stop at the intersection of Canterbury Road and West Cary Street, and headlights sweep over us as a compact dark-colored sedan turns in and slows. I recognize the narrow, insipid face of Buford Righter looking over at Marino’s truck. Righter and Marino roll down their windows.
“You leaving . . . ?” Righter starts to say when his eyes shoot past Marino and land on me in surprise. I have the unnerving sense that I am the last person he wants to see. “Sorry for your trouble,” Righter weirdly says to me, as if what is happening in my life is nothing more than trouble, an inconvenience, an unpleasantness.
“Yeah, heading out.” Marino sucks on the cigarette, not the least bit helpful. He has already expressed his opinion about Righter’s showing up at my house. It is unnecessary, and even if he truly thinks it is so important to eyeball the crime scene himself, why didn’t he do it earlier when I was at the hospital?
Righter pulls his overcoat more tightly around his neck, light from street lamps glinting off his glasses. He nods and says to me, “Take care. Glad you’re okay,” deciding to acknowledge my so-called trouble. “This is real hard on all of us.” A thought catches before it is out in words. Whatever he was going to say next is gone, retracted, struck from the record. “I’ll be talking to you,” he promises Marino.
Windows go up. We drive off.
“Give me a cigarette,” I tell Marino. “I’m assuming he didn’t come to my house earlier today,” I then say.
“Yeah, actually he did. About ten o’clock this morning.” He offers me the pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes and flame spits out of a lighter he holds my way.
Anger coils through my entrails, and the back of my neck is hot, the pressure in my head almost unbearable. Fear stirs inside me like a waking beast. I turn mean, punching in the lighter on the dash, ungraciously leaving Marino’s arm extended with the Bic lighter flaming. “Thanks for telling me,” I sharply reply. “You mind my asking who the hell else has been in my house? And how many times? And how long they stayed and what they touched?”
“Hey, don’t take it out on me,” he warns.
I know the tone. He is about to lose his patience with me and my mess. We are like weather systems about to collide, and I don’t want that. The last thing I need right now is a war with Marino. I touch the tip of the cigarette to bright orange coils and inhale deeply, the punch of pure tobacco spinning me. We drive several minutes in flinty silence, and when I finally speak, I sound numb, my feverish brain glazing over like the streets, depression a heavy pain spreading along my ribs. “I know you’re just doing what has to be done. I appreciate it,” I force the words. “Even if I’m not showing it.”
“You don’t got to explain nothing.” He sucks on the cigarette, both of us shooting streams of smoke toward our partially open windows. “I know exactly what you feel,” he a
dds.
“You couldn’t possibly.” Resentment seeps up my throat like bile. “I don’t even know.”
“I understand a lot more than you give me credit for,” he says. “Someday you’ll see that, Doc. No way you can see shit right now, and I’m telling you it ain’t gonna get no better in days and weeks to come. That’s the way it works. The real damage hasn’t even hit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, seen what happens to people when they’re victimized.”
I absolutely do not want to hear a single word of this.
“Damn good thing you’re going where you are,” he says. “Exactly what the doctor ordered, in more ways than one.”
“I’m not staying with Anna because it’s what the doctor ordered,” I reply testily. “I’m staying with her because she’s my friend.”
“Look, you’re a victim and you got to deal with it, and you need help dealing with it. Don’t matter you’re a doctor-lawyer–Indian chief.” Marino will not shut up, in part because he is looking for a fight. He wants a focus for his anger. I can see what is coming, and anger crawls up my neck and heats up the roots of my hair. “Being a victim’s the great equalizer,” Marino, the world’s authority, goes on.
I draw out the words slowly. “I am not a victim.” My voice wavers around its edges like fire. “There’s a difference between being victimized and being a victim. I’m not a sideshow for character disorders.” My tone sears. “I haven’t become what he wanted to turn me into”—of course, I mean Chandonne—“even if he’d had his way, I wouldn’t be what he tried to project onto me. I would just be dead. Not changed. Not something less than I am. Just dead.”
I feel Marino recoil in his dark, loud space on the other side of his huge, manly truck. He doesn’t understand what I mean or feel and probably never will. He reacts as if I slapped him across the face or kneed him in the groin.
“I’m talking reality.” He strikes back. “One of us has to.”