Flesh and Blood: A Scarpetta Novel (Scarpetta Novels Book 22)

  “A leaky body bag,” Harold explains, and he and Rusty tend to talk in counterpoint like a Gregorian chant. “The seventy-three-year-old lady who rigged up her car with a hose, killed herself with CO? She lived alone and did it in the garage.”

  “The case from Brookline,” I recall.

  “She wasn’t found for a while. Nothing makes you want a cigar more than a decomp. It’s not true you get used to it.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. I don’t even notice.” Marino opens the pastry box and picks out a cannoli to prove his point. “Peanut butter? Where the hell’s the chocolate chip?”

  “The same funeral home we’ve had trouble with.” Rusty sips a coffee in a cheap paper cup, surplus military Bryce buys in bulk. “They use the crappiest bags I’ve ever seen. They all leak like a faulty bladder sling. A steady drip all the way into the cooler.”

  “Stunk up the entire bay and the receiving area. Not to mention the cooler.”

  “Let me guess. Meadows Mortuary.” Marino taps an ash and bites into the cannoli, flakes of pastry drifting to the floor.

  “I don’t know what to do about it,” Harold says. “We’ve even tried supplying them with our pouches but they don’t bother using them.”

  “Probably turn around and sell them on eBay. Same old, same old.” Rusty directs this at Marino. “Nothing’s changed since you left except I don’t mind coming to work now.”

  “What you do about it”—Marino talks as he chews, licking his fingers, wiping them on his sweatpants—“is transport the damn bodies your lazy ass selves and then you don’t have the problem. Instead of sitting here drinking coffee and smoking cigars and eating pastries.”

  “The cannolis are for the Chief. Nobody made a trip to Mike’s with you in mind.”

  “Very kind of you,” I reply.

  “To give credit where it’s due, it was Bryce’s idea and he picked them up.”

  “And I’m most appreciative. Maybe later?”

  “This makes how many cars she’s got?” Marino points the cannoli at the Ferrari.

  “I’ve lost count,” I reply.

  “Can I make you a coffee?” Harold asks me, and by now I know who was waiting here until I got back. “I’m talking to the Chief and not to you,” he says to Marino.

  “No thanks. Not right now,” I reply as I notice there are only four cannolis in the box, five before Marino helped himself.

  Harold, Rusty and Bryce were throwing a small party. I’m touched.

  “I don’t drink your swill.” Marino is done with the pastry and back with the cigarette.

  “We’re not offering.”

  “Be careful or he’ll give you a parking ticket.” The joke is always the same. “He’ll arrest you for littering or disturbing the peace.”

  “Can I see your badge, pretty please?”

  “Watch out. He has a gun.” The Rusty and Harold show continues.

  “A damn big one.” Marino crushes out the cigarette on the floor as he blows smoke out of the side of his mouth.

  He digs cigarette butts from a pocket, drops all of them into the trash.

  “We got two cases that just came in from Memorial. MV fatalities not far from here on the Longfellow Bridge,” Rusty lets me know.

  “I believe we just drove past the accident.”

  “Anyway, I told Lucy not to park in here.” A spurt of flame and Harold relights Rusty’s cigar, then his own and I recognize the woody black cherry fragrance of the Bahamian tobacco they like. “Someone scrapes it with a stretcher and imagine what that would cost?”

  “BMS is on its way to pick up the drowning from Lincoln,” Rusty says, and the acronym is unfortunate.

  Bean Mortuary Services. The irreverent comments about the name and its acronym are predictable.

  “Kids horsing around a pool at a big house no one’s living in,” he says. “That and drinking. They’re jumping on the pool cover like a trampoline and of course it pulls away from its anchors. Her feet go out from under her and she slams the back of her head on the concrete edge. The little assholes she was with didn’t do a damn thing to help. They left her there in the pool, didn’t even bother to pull her out, which I can’t understand at all. How do you leave someone in the pool? She was on the bottom of it when we got there early this morning after a Realtor found her.”

  “The kids she was with didn’t alert anyone?” I ask.

  “Apparently not. Luke says she had a closed skull fracture that was survivable. What killed her is she drowned.”

  Rusty falls silent for a moment, his mouth set hard as he stares off. He tightens the bandana around his head and won’t look at anyone. They went to the scene and transported the body here and it bothers him.

  “Fourteen years old and no one noticed she wasn’t home all night?” He picks up the cigar and puffs on it. “These days I blame everything on the parents.”

  “For good reason,” I reply.

  “When I was coming along if I got in trouble I couldn’t leave my room.”

  “I suspect that happened often.”

  “You know what I’m saying, Chief.”

  “I certainly do. Is Luke still here? I didn’t notice his car in the lot.”

  “He and Anne carpooled this morning.”

  “What they’re doing isn’t carpooling,” Marino says. “And what she’s doing is friggin’ stupid.”

  “She knows herself,” I reply.

  She also knows Luke, an extremely attractive Austrian who is allergic to committed relationships and has a craving for affairs.

  “What can we do for you, Chief?” Rusty asks me. “I’m sorry about your plans getting screwed up. If anybody deserves a nice relaxing trip it’s you and Benton.”

  “The Nari case. I want to take a look before we release him. Do we have a funeral home yet?”

  “Not that I know of.” Rusty and Harold push back their chairs.

  “Finish your cigars and coffee first,” I tell them, and Marino and I head toward the door that leads inside.

  “She bought another Ferrari and didn’t say anything to you?” he asks me.

  “So it appears.”

  “She and Janet getting along okay?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Sometimes people spend money when they aren’t happy,” he says as his cell phone rings.

  I don’t reply that my niece buying a supercar is like someone else buying a bicycle. She really is that rich from computer technologies she’s invented and sold since she was a teenager. Lucy is a genius. She’s difficult, quixotic and has been fired from or forced out of every job she’s ever had except for the one with me, which she doesn’t do for pay. I couldn’t love her more, like a daughter, and have since her complicated life began in Miami where she was totally neglected by my sister, who I owe a call. Dorothy left me a message yesterday wishing me a happy birthday. She usually gets the date wrong.

  “What? No way.” Marino is on his phone. “Yeah I’m with her right this minute.” His eyes are locked on me and I can tell by his terse tone that he’s talking to Machado. “You don’t need to call her yourself. I’m standing ten feet from her. Where is he and where the hell are you?” He listens and gets angrier, then says, “You called them and didn’t mention it to me first? You did it on your own?” He’s pacing furiously. “You know what? You’re out of control. Or maybe you’re brain-dead . . . Did you really just say that?”

  THE DOOR THAT LEADS inside my building opens.

  “Well maybe I will,” Marino retorts, his earpiece flashing blue, and as angry as he is it ought to flash red. “Don’t you respond there and do one more damn thing until we get this sorted out.”

  Lucy is here and it’s not to say hello. In her black flight suit, she’s busy with an iPad, her strong pretty face serious and intense. Before I can ask her what has happened, Ben
ton is behind her dressed for work in a charcoal pin-striped suit, white shirt and gray silk tie. The two of them must have been together, probably in her cyber crime lab. She would have seen me on her closed-circuit video camera displays, and then Bryce walks out the door next.

  If anybody deserves a nice relaxing trip it’s you and Benton, Rusty just said to me, and neither he nor Harold mentioned that my husband is here. His reason isn’t social.

  “What is it?” I ask everyone.

  “Leo Gantz.” Marino is off the phone and looks like he might explode. “This is total bullshit!”

  “He just confessed to Jamal Nari’s murder,” Bryce announces excitedly as if he won the lottery. “It’s already trending, expelled student confesses to murder of controversial music teacher.” He holds up his phone to show me the Yahoo headline. “We’ve got company. Oh Harold? Rusty? Hello? Is anybody working?” he sings. “We got a pickup. The drowning! Gracie Smithers!”

  He pushes a green button on the wall. The sound of an electric motor, and the slatted steel door begins to roll up.

  “Leo Gantz called Cambridge PD and us,” Benton says to me. “Unfortunately he also tweeted it.”

  “Just confessed?” I don’t understand.

  “Not even half an hour ago!” Bryce is energized as if he’s about to break into a dance, dressed in his typical uniform of slim fitted jeans, a baggy sweater and red leather high-tops.

  About the time the commissioner texted Leo Gantz’s photograph to Marino and said for him to expect a call, I realize. That call was from Machado, who has taken the bait, and I look at Benton, trying to read his face. The more impervious he gets, the more certain I am that he has information the rest of us don’t. I watch the gears in motion, everything moving right before my eyes, headed to an inevitable conclusion like the game Mouse Trap. Sil Machado is done and not because of whatever he said to Marino on the phone. The call was gratuitous and Marino doesn’t know it.

  “Already CNN and Fox have left messages plus a producer from Sixty Minutes,” Bryce gushes. “Look at all the emails piling up?” He holds out his phone again, his boyish face beaming because there’s nothing my chief of staff likes more than drama. “This is so huge!”

  “Please don’t talk to the media right now. Don’t answer their emails or calls,” I say to him. “So you were already here at the CFC when this happened?” I direct this at Benton. “Why?”

  “Cambridge PD requested our assistance,” he says as if Marino isn’t standing here and I didn’t ask what I did. “This was a couple of hours ago, the first time they contacted us about it.”

  “They asked you twice?” Bryce says. “You big bad Bureau boys playing hard to get these days . . . ?”

  “Contacted you about what?” I inquire.

  “We won’t go into it here,” Lucy says and whatever Benton is involved in, it includes her.

  “You in on this too?” Marino snaps at her, his face purplish red, his eyes wide and glaring.

  He’s so angry he’s scary, the kind of rage where the brain shuts down like a dog in a fight. I look past him at the widening space in the opening bay door as it occurs to me that there is other cyber evidence besides the computers recovered from the house on Farrar Street. I think of the tweeted poem from Morristown. Then someone tweeted this morning, an allusion to Nari’s murder before it happened. Hard drives and security videos have been seized. They’re probably inside Lucy’s lab and she and Benton have been going through them.

  I look at Marino until he looks back. I give him a subtle gesture, the slightest shake of my head. No, I’m telling him. You don’t need to react like this. Your war with Machado is over. He doesn’t read my mind. He’s not looking at me now.

  CHAPTER 21

  A VAN DRIVES INSIDE, PATENT leather shiny black.

  Bean Mortuary Services is here for the drowning, a fourteen-year-old girl who shouldn’t have died. For an instant I wonder about the friends she was with and what the rest of their lives will be like.

  I used to get angry over stupid deaths. I was judgmental about drunks, drug addicts, people standing up in the back of a truck or jumping into lakes and pools when they are under the influence and don’t know how to swim. The emotions have settled into a deep place with me, not volatile anymore but heavy like gravity. Mostly I feel sad. Mostly I think what a waste. No one starts out in life imagining it will end on one of my steel tables. It’s not what people script when they dream about what they’ll be and who they’ll love.

  In the huge square of the retracted door I see the parking lot. It’s in shadows, the sky dusky blue, and in the few minutes I’ve been here more cars have left, employees gone for the day. Few people who work at the CFC exit the building through the bay. It’s the autopsy staff who does and I’m always puzzled by forensic scientists who don’t want to see a case they’re working on. They don’t want to be anywhere near dead bodies or even know the details. My entire DNA section wants nothing to do with my building’s lower level, what most of them still call the morgue. Some of them call it Hell.

  “The confession is extremely problematic any way you look at it,” Benton is explaining. “I’ve been asked to help with that as well.”

  One of his areas of expertise is confessions, true and false ones.

  “Machado!” Marino thunders. “He can’t do this! Don’t you get it? Godammit, Benton! He can’t do this and you need to talk to Gerry!”

  “You were asked to help in the investigation earlier or just now?” I pin Benton down because he’s being typically evasive.

  “Both,” he says. “Machado called me directly.”

  “He had no right to do that,” Marino says, and that really is the point.

  It would be the equivalent of one of my doctors sending out evidence to the FBI labs without clearing it with me first.

  “You’ve got to call the commissioner,” Marino repeats and he’s almost yelling.

  “What is it you’ve been told?” I ask Benton.

  “Hell yeah. What do you know about my case that I damn don’t?” Marino says.

  “Leo Gantz claims Nari attacked him this morning, hitting him in the head with a tennis trophy. Leo came back later and shot him. This supposedly occurred inside the apartment on Farrar Street.” Benton isn’t going to react to Marino’s tantrum, and I’ve given up trying to send signals.

  Marino’s rage will run its course. Then he’ll find out it wasn’t merited.

  “Of concern is that certain details haven’t been publicized yet,” Benton says. “I’m not aware it’s been released to the media that he was shot.”

  “It wasn’t on the Internet until Leo Gantz tweeted it,” Lucy confirms, and I instantly think about Joanna Cather.

  She knows we suspect her husband was killed with a gun. She asked me about it, and I wonder if she talked to Leo after Marino and I left her apartment. I have a feeling she did, and I envision the young man with the leaf blower, the quiet anger on his face, the way he didn’t back down when Marino threatened him. Leo Gantz seemed to enjoy the confrontation. He liked the attention even if it was negative, and now he’s just gotten a whole lot more, every major news outlet on his trail. By this time tomorrow his name will be a household word.

  “He tweeted from his personal account.” Lucy’s left index finger flicks the iPad’s display, scrolling through data as two men open up the back of the black van.

  Josh and Diego Bean, in jeans, button-up cotton shirts and sweater vests. Identical twins I can’t tell apart, they run their removal service out of their home, are on call twenty-four/seven and consider themselves an ambulance service for the dead. It’s a new way of doing business, civilized, minimalist, just gloves and casual attire, and a vehicle that doesn’t look like a hearse.

  Rusty and Harold have gone inside to get the body of Gracie Smithers. Bryce has left too, propelled by his latest adrenaline r
ush. I look over at La Morte Café, at the cigars put out and the pastry box. Next I look at Lucy’s Ferrari and the mortuary van on its rear bumper. Now and then I’m struck by the absurdity of things.

  “The IP is his wireless network at home in Somerville,” my niece is saying. “Earlier tweets, and there are a lot of them, indicate an unstable, angry person who mouths off to everyone including the president and the pope. I mean it literally.”

  I notice her left index finger is missing the large gold signet ring she always wears. It has an eagle on it and has been in her partner’s family for more than a hundred years. Lucy never takes it off. She and Janet were flying together this morning when they buzzed the house but Lucy isn’t wearing the ring. She must have driven here from the Norwood Airport where she recently built a hangar for her helicopter, which also is new, and I wonder where Janet is and what is going on with them.

  “I didn’t notice injuries at the scene that might be consistent with his being in an altercation this morning,” I say to Marino. “He had no abrasions or contusions on his hands, for example. But I’m going to look carefully.”

  “Luke didn’t point out anything like that,” Benton says, and he must have witnessed Jamal Nari’s autopsy or asked about it.

  “Because there’s nothing to point out,” Marino retorts. “Leo Gantz sure as hell didn’t look hurt when we saw him late this morning, right?”

  “He also had a cap on,” I reply. “If he had an injury to his head we might not have seen it.”

  “The kid’s lying. You need to look at him too,” Marino says to me. “Supposedly Nari whacked him in the head? I’m betting the kid whacked himself in the head, that it’s self-inflicted. He probably did it right before he started tweeting his fake story about committing murder.”

  “I’ll examine his injuries if it’s helpful,” I reply.

  “I’m officially requesting your assistance,” he says snidely.

  “The question is where to do that.” I ignore his obvious dig at Machado and have given up on signals.