Now and then when she’s headed to shore, she thinks of the Mississippi River. On a good day, she could make it there in less than six hours, and she senses Jay is onto her occasional impulse to escape to the Gulf Coast. He’s told her more than once that the Mississippi is the biggest river in the United States, more than a million miles of rough, muddy water and tributaries that fan out into thousands of creeks, marshes and swamps, where a person could get so lost “she would end up a skeleton in her boat,” as Jay puts it. Those are his words exactly, saying she and her instead of he and his, his choice of words no accident. Jay doesn’t have accidents of the tongue or anything else.
All the same, when Bev is out in the boat, she fantasizes about the Mississippi, about riverboat cruises and casinos, about fruity cocktails and beer in frozen glasses and maybe watching Mardi Gras from the window of a nice air-conditioned hotel. She wonders if good food would make her sick now that she’s gone so long without it. A comfortable bed would probably stiffen her up and make her sore because she’s so accustomed to a stinking, broken-down mattress that not even Jay will sleep on anymore.
She motors around a semi-submerged log, worried at first that it might move and prove to have teeth, and she begins to itch, especially beneath the tight waistband of her jeans.
“Shit!” She steers with one hand and digs the other under her clothes, clawing at her flesh as her welts get bigger. “Goddamnit! Oh, shit, what the fuck’s bit me now?”
Breathing hard and beginning to panic, she shoves the throttle lever into neutral, opens the hatch and rummages in her beach bag for the insect repellent, spraying herself all over, including under her clothes.
It’s all in her head, Jay always says. The welts aren’t bites, they’re hives, because she has a nervous condition, because she’s half-crazy. Well, I wasn’t half-crazy until I met you, she answers him in her head. I never got hives in my life, nothing like that, not even poison ivy. Bev drifts in the creek for a minute or two, contemplating what she’s about to do and imagining Jay’s face when she brings him what he wants, then imagining his face if she doesn’t.
She advances the throttle and trims out, speeding up to forty miles an hour, which is much too fast for this part of the Tickfaw and reckless in light of her fears of the dark water and what’s beneath it. Sweeping left, she abruptly cuts back her speed and trims down, heeling into a turn that takes her into a narrow creek, where she runs slowly and quietly into marshland that smells like death. Reaching under the tarp, she slides out the shotgun and lays it across her lap.
SUNLIGHT ILLUMINATES A SLIVER of Benton’s face as he stares out the window.
Silence reigns for a long, tense moment. The air seems to shimmer ominously, and Marino rubs his eyes.
“I don’t get it.” His mouth quivers. “You could be free, go home, be alive again.” His voice cracks. “I thought you’d at least thank my ass for going to all the trouble to come here and tell you that maybe Lucy and me ain’t ever given up on getting you back . . . .”
“By offering her?” Benton turns around and looks at him. “By offering Kay as bait?”
At last he says her name, but he is so calm, it is as if he has no feelings, and Marino is shocked. He wipes his eyes.
“Bait? What . . . ?”
“Isn’t it enough what the bastard has already done to her?” Benton goes on. “He tried to kill her once.” He’s not talking about Jean-Baptiste. He’s talking about Jay Talley.
“He ain’t gonna kill her when he’s sitting behind bulletproof glass, chatting away on a phone inside a maximum-security prison,” Marino says as they continue to talk about two different people.
“You’re not listening to me,” Benton tells him.
“That’s because you’re not listening to me,” Marino childishly retorts.
Benton turns off the air conditioner and slides up the window. He closes his eyes as a breeze touches his hot cheeks like cool fingers. He smells the burgeoning Earth. For an instant, he remembers being alive with her, and he begins to bleed inside like a hemophiliac.
“Does she know?” he asks.
Marino rubs his face. “Jesus. I’m so sick and tired of my blood pressure shooting up like I’m a damn thermometer.”
“Tell me.” Benton presses his palms against the window frame, leaning into the fresh air. He turns around and meets Marino’s eyes. “Does she know?”
Marino gets his meaning and sighs. “No, hell no. She don’t know. She’ll never know unless you’re the one who tells her. I wouldn’t do that to her. Lucy wouldn’t do that to her. See”—he angrily pulls himself to his feet—“some of us care too much about her to hurt her like that. Imagine how she’d feel if she knew you’re alive and don’t care a shit about her anymore.”
He walks to the door, shaking with rage and grief. “I thought you might thank me.”
“I do thank you. I know you mean well.” Benton walks over to him, his calm demeanor uncanny. “I know you don’t understand, but maybe someday you will. Good-bye, Pete. I don’t ever want to see or hear from you again. Please don’t take it personally.”
Marino grabs the doorknob and almost yanks it out of the wood. “Good riddance and go fuck yourself. Don’t take it personally.”
They face each other like two men squaring off in a gun fight, neither wanting to be the first to move, neither really wanting the other to be gone from his life. Benton’s hazel eyes are vacant, as if whoever lives behind them has vanished. Marino’s pulse measures panic as he realizes that the Benton he knew is gone and nothing will ever bring him back.
And somehow Marino is going to have to tell Lucy. And somehow Marino will have to accept the fact that his dream of rescuing Benton and returning him to Scarpetta will always be a dream, only a dream.
“It don’t make sense!” Marino shouts.
Benton touches an index finger to his lips. “Please go, Pete,” he quietly says. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”
Marino hesitates in the dimly lit, stinking landing just beyond apartment 56. “Okay.” He fumbles for his cigarettes and spills several on the filthy concrete. “Okay . . .” He starts to say Benton but catches himself as he squats to pick up the cigarettes, his thick fingers clumsily breaking two of them.
He wipes his eyes with the back of a big hand as Benton looks down at him from the apartment doorway, watching, not offering to help pick up the cigarettes, unable to move.
“Take care, Pete,” Benton, the master of masks and self-control, says in a steady, reasonable voice.
Marino looks up with bloodshot eyes from his squatting position on the landing. The seam in the crotch of his wrinkled khakis is slightly ripped, his white briefs peeking through.
He blurts out, “Don’t you get it, you can come back!”
“What you don’t get is there is no back to go back to,” Benton says in a voice so low it is almost inaudible. “I don’t want to come back. Now please get the hell out of my life and leave me alone.”
He pulls his apartment door shut and flips the dead bolt. Inside, he collapses on the couch and covers his face with his hands while Marino’s insistent knocking turns to violent thuds and kicks.
“Yeah, well, enjoy your great life, asshole!” his muffled voice sounds through the door. “I always knew you was cold and don’t give a fuck about anybody, including her, you fucking psycho!” The banging and kicking suddenly stop.
Benton holds his breath, straining to hear. The sudden silence is worse than any tantrum. Pete Marino’s silence is damning. It is final. His friend’s heavy feet scuff down the stairs.
“I am dead,” Benton mutters into his hands as he doubles over on the couch.
“No matter what, I am dead. I am Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland . . .” His chest heaves and his heart seems to beat out of rhythm. “Born in Greenwich, Connecticut . . .”
He gets up, crushed by a depression that turns the room dark and the air as thick as oil. He smells Marino’s lingering cigarette smoke, an
d it runs through him like a blade. Moving to the window, he stands to one side of it so he isn’t visible from below, and he watches Pete Marino walking slowly away through intermittent shadows and dappled sunlight along uneven cobblestones.
Marino stops to light a Lucky Strike and turns around to stare up at Benton’s depressing building until he finds apartment 56. Cheap sheer curtains are caught by a breeze and flutter out the open window like spirits leaving.
IN POLAND, it is a few minutes past midnight.
Lucy drives past caravans of World War II Russian Army trucks and speeds through miles of tiled tunnels and along the tree-lined E28. She can’t stop thinking about the Red Notice, how easy it was for her to send computerized information that has law enforcement agencies around the world on guard. Of course, her information is legitimate. Rocco Caggiano is a criminal. She has known that for years. But until she recently received information that ties him to at least a few of his crimes, neither she nor other interested parties had probable cause to do anything more than hate him.
One simple phone call.
Lucy called Interpol’s Central Bureau in Washington, D.C. She identified herself—her real identity, of course—and had a brief conversation with a U.S. Marshal liaison named McCord. The next step was a search of the Interpol database to see if Caggiano is known, and he wasn’t, not even as a Green Notice, which simply means a person is of interest to Interpol and should be watched and subjected to extra scans and pat-downs when he or she crosses borders and passes through international airports.
Rocco Caggiano is in his mid-thirties. He has never been arrested and has made a fortune, ostensibly as a scumbag, ambulance-chasing lawyer, but his formidable wealth and power come from his real clients, the Chandonnes, although it isn’t accurate to call them clients. They own him. They shield him. He is kept in high style and alive at their pleasure.
“Check out a murder in 1997,” Lucy told McCord. “New Year’s Day in Sicily. A journalist named Carlos Guarino. Shot in the head, his body dumped in a drainage ditch. He was working on an investigative story about the Chandonnes—a very risky thing to do, by the way. He had just interviewed a lawyer who represents Jean-Baptiste Chandonne . . .”
“Right, right. I know about that case. The Wolfman, or whatever they call him.”
“The cover of People magazine, Time magazine, whatever. Who doesn’t know about the Wolfman serial killer, I guess,” Lucy replied. “Guarino was murdered hours after talking to Caggiano.
“Next, a journalist named Emmanuelle La Fleur. Barbizon, France, February eleventh, 1997. Worked for Le Monde. He also was unwisely doing a story on the Chandonne family.”
“Why all this interest in the Chandonnes, beyond their being Jean-Baptiste’s unlucky parents?”
“Organized crime. A huge cartel. Never been proven that the father heads it, but he does. There are rumors. Investigative reporters are sometimes blinded by scoops and prizes. La Fleur had drinks with Caggiano hours before the journalist’s body was found in a garden near the former château of the painter Jean François Millet—don’t bother looking for him. He’s been dead more than a hundred years.”
She wasn’t being sarcastic. She would never assume that Millet was a household name and didn’t want to find the artist was suddenly a person of interest.
“La Fleur was shot in the head, and the ten-millimeter bullet was fired from the same gun used to murder Guarino,” she explained.
There was more. The information came from a letter written by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.
“I’ll e-mail you his letter immediately,” Lucy said, a transmission that would have been unthinkable before Interpol began using the Internet.
But the International Police Agency’s computerized communication network has more than enough firewalls, hieroglyphical encryptions and hacker-tracking systems to render any transmission secure. Lucy knows. When Interpol began to use the Internet, the secretary general personally invited her to hack her way in. She couldn’t. She never made it past the first firewall and secretly was furious at being foiled, even though the last thing she should have wanted was success.
The secretary general called her, quite amused. He read to her a list of her usernames, passwords and the location of her computer.
“Don’t worry, Lucy. I won’t send the police,” he said.
“Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Hartman,” she replied to the secretary general, who is American.
From New York to London to Berlin and now crossing the border into Poland, police have been alert, she sensed that. But they didn’t take her seriously, could have cared less about this young American woman driving her rented Mercedes at a late hour on a cool spring night. To them she clearly doesn’t look like a terrorist, and she isn’t. But she could be—easily—and it is foolish not to take her seriously, for no reason beyond her nationality, youthfulness, appearance and a smile that can be warm and captivating when she chooses.
She is far too smart to carry a firearm. Her tactical baton will do if she runs into a problem, not from the police, but from some asshole along the way who might have singled her out for robbery or some other type of assault. The baton was easy for her to smuggle into Germany. She used her shopworn routine because it has never failed: overnighted it in a cosmetic bag filled with a jumble of accessories (curling iron, curling brush, blow-dryer, et cetera). The package arrived at a cheap hotel near the airport, addressed to one of Lucy’s aliases; she also had a room reserved and paid for in that name. Lucy drove her rental car to the hotel, parked on a side street, picked up the package at check-in, messed up her room a bit and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She was back in her car in half an hour.
If a more serious weapon is imperative on a mission, a handgun and extra magazines of ammunition are tucked inside alleged lost baggage sloppily bound in airline tape and dumped at the hotel desk by one of Lucy’s associates, dressed for the part. She has many associates. Most of them have never met her and don’t know who she is. Only her core team knows her. She has them and they have her. It is enough.
She plucks her international cell phone from between her legs and presses redial.
“I’m on the go,” she says when Rudy Musil answers. “An hour-fifteen out if I don’t speed too much.”
“Don’t.” A television plays loudly in the background.
Lucy eyes the speedometer as it eases past 120 kilometers per hour. She might be brazen, but never intentionally foolish. She has no intention of getting entangled with police as she heads toward the most prominent but beleaguered port city in Poland. Americans aren’t often seen in Szczecin. Why would Americans go there? Certainly not for tourism, unless it is to look at nearby concentration camps. For years now, the Germans have been intercepting foreign vessels en route to the Szczecin port. Daily, the Germans steal business from a city where unemployment and economic depression continue to corrode what once was a jewel of architecture, culture and art.
Very little glory has been restored to Szczecin since World War II, when Hitler set out to bomb Poland off the map and exterminate its people. It is impossible to earn a decent living. Few people know what it is like to live in a nice house, drive a nice car, wear nice clothes, buy books or go on vacation. It is said that no one but members of the Russian Mafia and criminal cartels have money in Poland, and with rare exception, this is true.
Lucy constantly scans the highway and her smile fades, her eyes narrow.
“Taillights ahead. I don’t like it,” she says into the cell phone. “Someone slowing.” She eases up on the accelerator. “Stopping in the middle of the fucking highway. No place to pull over.”
“Don’t stop. Go around it,” Rudy tells her.
“Disabled limousine. Weird to see an American limo in these parts.”
Lucy swerves around a white stretch Lincoln. The driver and a passenger are climbing out, and she resists the urge to stop and help.
“Shit,” she mutters in frustration.
“Don’t
even think about it,” Rudy warns, well aware of Lucy’s high-risk personality and compulsion to save the world.
She pushes down the accelerator, and the limousine and its stranded passengers become part of the thick darkness behind her.
“The front desk is empty at this hour. You know where you’re going,” Rudy makes sure.
There can be no mistakes and no sightings.
Lucy repeatedly glances in the rearview mirror, worrying that the limousine might be gaining on her and turn out to be real trouble. Her stomach tightens. What if those people back there genuinely need help? She left them alone in the dark on E28, where there is no way to pull off the road. They’ll probably get run over by a truck.
For several seconds she considers speeding to the next exit and turning around. She does it for lost dogs, for turtles crossing highways and streets. She always brakes for chipmunks and squirrels, and runs outside to check on birds that fly into her windows. But people are another matter. She can’t afford to take the chance.
“You can’t miss the Radisson,” Rudy is saying. “Don’t park in the courtyard for buses. They don’t appreciate it.”
He is joking. It goes without saying that Lucy will not park at the Radisson.
DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA, is hot at six o’clock p.m., and Kay Scarpetta turns away from her kitchen window, deciding she will work another hour before venturing outside.
She has become an expert in judging shadows and light, monitoring them in her scientific manner before heading out to check on her fruit trees or walk on the beach. Making rather useless decisions based on analysis and calculations of how the sun moves across the sky helps her feel as though she has not lost complete control of her life.