“Hey Doc, we already took our last test.”
“Who brought homework to our party?”
“Yeah, we’re off duty.”
“Off duty, I see,” Scarpetta muses. “So if you’re off duty when the dead body of a missing person has just been found, you’re not going to respond. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’d have to wait until my bourbon wears off,” says a cop whose shaved head is so shiny it looks waxed.
“That’s a thought,” she says.
Now the cops are laughing—everyone but Nic.
“It can happen.” Scarpetta sets the vial next to her wineglass. “At any given moment, we can get a call. It may prove to be the worst call of our careers, and here we are, slightly buzzed from a few drinks on our time off, or maybe sick, or in the middle of a fight with a lover, a friend, one of the kids.”
She pushes away her half-eaten yellowfin tuna and folds her hands on top of the checkered tablecloth.
“But cases can’t wait,” she adds.
“Seriously. Isn’t it true that some can?” asks a Chicago detective his classmates call Popeye because of the anchor tattooed on his left forearm. “Like bones in a well or buried in a basement. Or a body under a slab of concrete. I mean, they ain’t going anywhere.”
“The dead are impatient,” Scarpetta says.
NIGHT ON THE BAYOU reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.
He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain’s chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.
Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn’t cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn’t abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn’t struggle.
“No point in struggling, anyway,” he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. “And I’m not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?”
She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering yes when, of course, she meant no. But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are terrified, a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she anticipates horror and death. The anticipation creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.
A frisson of horror.
No.
He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.
Jay’s determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine—adrenaline—is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb’s past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.
But the word. The perfect word. It eludes him tonight.
He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb’s rapid, shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the perfect word) shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.
“One-eighty, more or less,” he tells her. “Don’t have a heart attack. I had one who did.”
She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.
“I mean it. Don’t have a heart attack.” He is serious.
It is an order.
“Take a deep breath.”
She does, her lungs shaky.
“Better?”
“Yes. Please . . .”
“Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?”
Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.
“I’m sorry,” she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.
“Now, there you go again.” He sits back in his throne of the captain’s chair. “Do you really, really believe that being polite is going to change my plans?” The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. “Do you know what politeness means to me?”
He expects an answer.
She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in there.
“No.” She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.
“Weakness,” he says.
Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner’s nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray, chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta’s, and finally becomes furious because it can’t, furious because Scarpetta wouldn’t be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn’t weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can’t find the perfect word, the word.
He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn’t come with the others.
“I’m getting bored,” he tells his lamb. “I’ll ask you again. One last chance. What is the word?”
She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.
“I don’t understand. I’m sorry . . .”
“Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?”
The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.
“What is the word? Tell me what you feel. And don’t say scared. You’re a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it.”
“I feel . . . I feel acceptance,” she says, sobbing.
“You feel what?”
“You’re not going to let me go,” she says. “I know it now.”
SCARPETTA’S SUBTLE WIT reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn’t rip and cr
ack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.
He takes pictures of everything you’re doing, Nic, so you’d better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.
Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.
“Investigator Robillard?” Scarpetta is saying.
Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.
“Tell us what you’d do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you’d had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene,” Scarpetta presents to her. “Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there’s a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don’t like to admit that, but it’s true.”
“I don’t drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.
“Lordy, where’d you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”
“What I mean is, I really can’t because I have a five-year-old son . . .” Nic’s voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she’s ever been away from him.
The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.
“Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name’s Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony . . .”
Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.
“How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.
About a dozen hands go up.
“One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work—or shall I call it a mission—is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”
No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch, Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.
She’s gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she’s kind and gentle.
“In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.
“So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.
Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”
“Oh yeah! Now I ’member. Lucy. She’s been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”
Stupid, drunk idiot, Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.
“Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.
“FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won’t stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”
ATF, you stupid drunk. Thunder cracks in the back of Nic’s mind.
“I dunno. Wasn’t there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what’s she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.
“That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn’t answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.
“Isn’t that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she’s something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn’t she?”
Fucking dyke. Shut up.
Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That’s how her father always explained it. You see, Nic, he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade. There’s tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There’s tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.
“Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You’ve had enough whiskey for one night.”
“Well, ’scuse me, Miss Teacher’s Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.
Nic feels Scarpetta’s eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba’s outrageous display.
Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpetta’s subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn’t know she had. She feels inferior to her hero’s super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic’s. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic’s healing broken arm every time the splint came off.
Hurting’s good, baby. If you didn’t feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
No, Mama. I’m sorry for what I did.
Why, Nicci, that’s the silliest thing. You didn’t hurt yourself on purpose!
But I didn’t do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that’s when I tripped . . . .
We all make mistakes when we’re scared, baby. Maybe it’s a good thing you fell down—you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.
NIC’S MEMORIES OF HER childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.
It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.
Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn’t pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.
Thou shalt not covet.
Nic’s excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy’s visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic’s acute embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies’ room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.
Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn’t of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta’s name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. “And let me guess, you’re Nicole Robillard.”
Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. “How . . .”
Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, “I requested copies of everyone’s application, including photographs.”
“You did?” Not on
ly was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn’t fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. “Guess that means you know my Social Security number,” Nic tried to be funny.
“Now, I don’t remember that,” Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. “But I know enough.”
SECOND INSTAR.” Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.
The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn’t quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.
“That’s very good, Nic,” Scarpetta commends her.
“Who invited smarty pants?” Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn’t nodding off into her plate.
“I think Nic hasn’t been drinking enough and is having the D. T.’s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere,” says the detective with the shiny shaved head.
The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.
“And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field.” Nic wants to be funny but can’t escape the gravity of her mood. “See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”
“Ah! At last she confesses.”
“It’s second instar.” Nic knows she should stop. “Already shed its skin once since it hatched.”