“I guess there’s nothing about Marino.”
“Look. Give me time, Kay. And I don’t fault you. We’ll work our way past this. I want to touch you again and not think of him. There, I’ve said it. Yes, it bothers the hell out of me.” He reaches for her hand. “Because I feel partly to blame. Maybe more than partly. Nothing would have happened if I’d been here. I’m going to change that. Unless you don’t want me to.”
“Of course I do.”
“I’d be happy if Marino stays away,” Benton says. “But I don’t wish any harm to him, and I hope nothing has happened to him. I’m trying to accept that you defend him, worry about him, still care about him.”
“The plant pathologist is coming in an hour. We have spider mites.”
“And I thought what I have is a headache.”
“If something’s happened to him, especially if he did it to himself, I won’t get over it,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe my worst flaw. I forgive people I care about, and then maybe they do it all over again. Please find him.”
“Everybody’s trying to find him, Kay.”
A long silence, nothing but birds. Bull appears in the garden. He starts uncoiling the hose.
“I need to take a shower,” Scarpetta says. “I’m a disgrace, didn’t take a shower over there. Wasn’t the most private locker room, and I had nothing to change into, why you put up with me I’ll never know. Don’t worry about Dr. Self. A few months in prison would be good for her.”
“She’ll film her shows there and make more millions. Some woman inmate will become her slave and knit her a shawl.”
Bull waters a bed of pansies, and there’s a rainbow in the spray of the hose.
The phone rings again. Benton says, “Oh, God,” and answers it. He listens because he’s skilled at listening, and, if anything, he doesn’t talk enough, and Scarpetta tells him so when she feels lonely.
“No,” Benton says. “I appreciate it, but I agree there’s no reason for us to be there. I won’t speak for Kay, but I don’t think we’d do anything but get in the way.”
He ends the call and says to her. “The captain. Your knight in shining armor.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t be so cynical. He hasn’t earned your wrath. You should be grateful.”
“He’s on his way to New York. They’re going to search Dr. Self’s penthouse apartment.”
“To find what?”
“Drew was there the night before she flew to Rome. Who else was there? Possibly Dr. Self’s son. Probably the man Hollings suggested was the chef. The most mundane answer is often the right one,” Benton says. “I had the flight checked. Alitalia. Guess who was on the same flight Drew was?”
“Are you saying she was waiting for him at the Spanish Steps?”
“It wasn’t the gold-painted mime. That was a ruse, because she was waiting for Will and she didn’t want her friends to know. My theory.”
“She’d just ended it with her coach.” Scarpetta watches Bull fill the shallow pond. “After Dr. Self brainwashed her to do it. Another theory? Will wanted to meet Drew, and his mother didn’t put two and two together and realize he was the one sending the obsessive e-mails signed the Sandman. Inadvertently, she matchmade Drew with her killer.”
“One of those details we may never know,” Benton says. “People don’t tell the truth. After a while, they don’t even know it.”
Bull stoops down to deadhead pansies. He looks up at the same time Mrs. Grimball is looking down from her upstairs window. Bull pulls a leaf bag close and minds his own business. Scarpetta can see her nosy neighbor lifting a phone to her ear.
“That’s it,” Scarpetta says as she gets up, smiles, and waves.
Mrs. Grimball looks their way and slides up the window while Benton watches with no expression on his face, and Scarpetta keeps waving as if she has something urgent to say.
“He just got out of jail,” Scarpetta calls out. “And if you send him back, I’ll burn your house down.”
The window quickly shuts. Mrs. Grimball’s face disappears from the glass.
“You didn’t just say that,” Benton says.
“I’ll say whatever the hell I want,” Scarpetta says. “I live here.”
PATRICIA CORNWELL
THE LAST PRECINCT
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Last Precinct
A G. P. Putnam’s Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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ISBN: 1-101-15591-4
A G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS BOOK®
G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books first published by The G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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First edition (electronic): September 2001
TO LINDA FAIRSTEIN—
PROSECUTOR. NOVELIST. MENTOR.
BEST FRIEND.
(THIS ONE’S FOR YOU)
THE LAST PRECINCT
PROLOGUE:
AFTER THE FACT
THE COLD DUSK gives up its bruised color to complete darkness, and I am grateful that the draperies in my bedroom are heavy enough to absorb even the faintest hint of my silhouette as I move about packing my bags. Life could not be more abnormal than it is right now.
“I want a drink,” I announce as I open a dresser drawer. “I want to build a fire and have a drink and make pasta. Yellow and green broad noodles, sweet peppers, sausage. Le papparedelle del cantunzein. I’ve always wanted to take a sabbatical, go to Italy, learn Italian, really learn it. Speak it. Not just know the names of food. Or maybe France. I will go to France. Maybe I’ll go there right this minute,” I add with a double edge of helplessness and rage. “I could live in Paris. Easily.” It is my way of rejecting Virginia and everybody in it.
Richmond Police Captain Pete Marino dominates my bedroom like a thick lighthouse, his giant hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. He doesn’t offer to help me pack the suit bag and tote bags laid open on the bed, knowing me well enough to not even think about it. Marino may look like a redneck, talk like a redneck, act like a redneck, but he is as smart as hell, sensitive and very perceptive. This very moment, for example, he realizes a simple fact: Not even twenty-four hours ago, a man named Jean-Baptiste Chandonne tracked through snow beneath a full moon and tricked his way into my house. I was already intimately familiar with Chandonne’s modus operandi, so I can safely project what he would have done to me given the chance. But I haven’t quite been able to subject myself to anatomically correct images of my own mauled dead body, and nobody could more accurately describe such a thing than I. I am a forensic pathologist with a law degree, the chief medical examiner of Virginia. I autopsied the two women Chandonne recently killed here in Richmond and reviewed the cases of seven others he murdered in Paris.
Safer for me to say what he did to those victims, which was to savagely beat them, to bite their breasts, hands and feet, and to play with their blood. He doesn’t always use the same weapon. Last night, he was armed with a chipping hammer, a pec
uliar tool used in masonry. It looks very much like a pickaxe. I know for a fact what a chipping hammer can do to a human body because Chandonne used a chipping hammer—the same one, I presume—on Diane Bray, his second Richmond victim, the policewoman he murdered two days ago, on Thursday.
“What day is it?” I ask Captain Marino. “Saturday, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Saturday.”
“December eighteenth. One week before Christmas. Happy holidays.” I unzip a side pocket of the suit bag.
“Yeah, December eighteenth.”
He watches me as if I am someone who might spring into irrationality any second, his bloodshot eyes reflecting a wariness that pervades my house. Distrust is palpable in the air. I taste it like dust. I smell it like ozone. I feel it like dampness. The wet swishing of tires on the street, the discord of feet, of voices and radio chatter are a disharmony from hell as law enforcement continues its occupation of my property. I am violated. Every inch of my home is exposed, every facet of my life is laid bare. I may as well be a naked body on one of my own steel tables in the morgue. So Marino knows not to ask if he can help me pack. Oh yes, he sure as hell knows he better dare not even think about touching a damn thing, not a shoe, not a sock, not a hairbrush, not a bottle of shampoo, not the smallest item. Police have asked me to leave the sturdy stone house of dreams I built in my quiet, gated West End neighborhood. Imagine that. I am quite certain Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—Le Loup-Garou or The Werewolf, as he calls himself—is getting better treatment than I am. The law provides people like him with every human right conceivable: comfort, confidentiality, free room, free food and drink, and free medical care in the forensic ward of the Medical College of Virginia, where I am a member of the faculty.
Marino hasn’t bathed or been to bed in at least twenty-four hours. When I move past him, I smell Chandonne’s hideous body odor and am stabbed by nausea, a burning wrenching of my stomach that locks my brain and causes me to break out in a cold sweat. I straighten up and take a deep breath to dispel the olfactory hallucination as my attention is drawn beyond the windows to the slowing of a car. I have come to recognize the subtlest pause in traffic and know when it will become someone parking out front. It is a rhythm I have listened to for hours. People gawk. Neighbors rubberneck and stop in the middle of the road. I reel in an uncanny intoxication of emotions, one minute bewildered and then frightened the next. I swing from exhaustion to mania, from depression to tranquility, and beneath it all, excitement fizzes as if my blood is filled with gas.
A car door shuts out front. “Now what?” I complain. “Who this time? The FBI?” I open another drawer. “Marino, that’s it.” I gesture with a fuck-you wave of my hands. “Get them out of my house, all of them. Now.” Fury shimmers like mirages on hot blacktop. “So I can finish packing and get the hell out of here. Can’t they just leave long enough for me to get out?” My hands shake as I pick through socks. “It’s bad enough they’re in my yard.” I toss a pair of socks in the tote bag. “It’s bad enough they’re here at all.” Another pair. “They can come back when I leave.” And I throw another pair and miss, and stoop over to pick it up. “They can at least let me walk through my own house.” Another pair. “And let me get out in peace and privacy.” I put a pair back in the drawer. “Why the hell are they in my kitchen?” I change my mind and get out the socks I just put back. “Why are they in my study? I told them he didn’t go in there.”
“We gotta look around, Doc,” is what Marino has to say about it.
He sits down on the foot of my bed, and that is wrong, too. I want to tell him to get off my bed and out of my room. It is all I can do not to order him out of my house and possibly out of my life. It doesn’t matter how long I have known him or how much we have been through together.
“How’s the elbow, Doc?” He indicates the cast that immobilizes my left arm like a stovepipe.
“It’s fractured. It hurts like hell.” I shut the drawer too hard.
“Taking your medicine?”
“I’ll survive.”
He watches my every move. “You need to be taking that stuff they gave you.”
We have suddenly reversed roles. I act like the rude cop while he is logical and calm like the lawyer-physician I am supposed to be. I walk back into the cedar-lined closet and begin gathering blouses and laying them in the suit bag, making sure top buttons are buttoned, smoothing silk and polished cotton with my right hand. My left elbow throbs like a toothache, my flesh sweating and itching inside plaster. I spent most of the day in the hospital—not that getting a cast put on a fractured limb is a lengthy procedure, but doctors insisted on checking me very carefully to make sure I didn’t have other injuries. I repeatedly explained that when I fled from my house, I fell down my front steps and fractured my elbow, nothing more. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne never had a chance to touch me. I got away and am okay, I kept saying during X ray after X ray. Hospital staff held me for observation until late afternoon and detectives were in and out of the examination room. They took my clothes. My niece, Lucy, had to bring me something to wear. I have had no sleep.
The telephone pierces the air like a foil. I pick up the extension by the bed. “Dr. Scarpetta,” I announce into the handset, and my own voice saying my name reminds me of calls in the middle of the night when I answer my phone and some detective gives me very bad news about a death scene somewhere. Hearing my usual businesslike self-announcement triggers the image I have so far evaded: my savaged body on my bed, blood spattered all over the room, this room, and my assistant chief medical examiner getting the call and the look on his face as police—probably Marino—tell him I have been murdered and someone, God knows who, needs to respond to the scene. It occurs to me that no one from my office could possibly respond. I have helped Virginia design the best disaster plan of any state in the country. We can handle a major airline crash or a bombing in the coliseum or a flood, but what would we do if something happened to me? Bring in a forensic pathologist from a nearby jurisdiction, maybe Washington, I suppose. Problem is, I know almost every forensic pathologist on the East Coast and would feel terribly sorry for whoever had to deal with my dead body. It is very difficult working a case when you are acquainted with the victim. These thoughts fly through my mind like startled birds as Lucy asks me over the phone if I need anything, and I assure her I am fine, which is perfectly ridiculous.
“Well, you can’t be fine,” she replies.
“Packing,” I tell her what I am doing. “Marino’s with me and I’m packing,” I repeat myself as my eyes fix on Marino in a frozen way. His attention wanders around and it seeps into my awareness that he has never been inside my bedroom. I don’t want to imagine his fantasies. I have known him for many years and have always been aware that his respect for me is potently laced with insecurity and sexual attraction. He is a hulk of a man with a swollen beer belly, and a big disgruntled face, and his hair is colorless and has unattractively migrated from his head to other parts of his body. I listen to my niece on the phone as Marino’s eyes feel their way around my private spaces: my dressers, my closet, the open drawers, what I am packing and my breasts. When Lucy brought tennis shoes, socks and a warm-up suit to the hospital, she didn’t think to include a bra, and the best I could do when I got here was to cover up with an old, voluminous lab coat that I wear like a smock when I do odd jobs around the house.
“I guess they don’t want you in there, either,” Lucy’s voice sounds over the line.
It is a long story, but my niece is an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and when the police responded, they couldn’t exile her from my property fast enough. Maybe a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and they feared a big-shot federal agent would insert herself into the investigation. I don’t know, but she is feeling guilty because she wasn’t here for me last night and I almost got murdered, and now she isn’t here for me again. I make it clear I don’t blame her in the least. I also can’t stop wondering how different my life would be had s
he been home with me when Chandonne showed up—instead of out taking care of a girlfriend. Maybe Chandonne would have known I wasn’t alone and would have stayed away, or he would have been surprised by another person in the house and would have fled, or he would have put off murdering me until tomorrow or the next night or Christmas or the new millennium.
I pace as I listen to Lucy’s breathless explanations and comments over the cordless phone and catch my reflection as I go past the full-length mirror. My short blond hair is wild, my blue eyes glassy and puckered with exhaustion and stress, my brow gathered in what is a mixture of a frown and near-tears. The lab coat is dingy and stained and not the least bit chiefly. I am very pale. The craving for a drink and a cigarette are atypically strong, almost unbearable, as if almost being murdered has turned me into an instant junkie. I imagine being alone in my own home. Nothing has happened. I am enjoying a fire, a cigarette, a glass of French wine, maybe a Bordeaux because Bordeaux is less complicated than Burgundy. Bordeaux is like a fine old friend you don’t have to figure out. I dispel the fantasy with fact: It doesn’t matter what Lucy did or didn’t do. Chandonne would have come to murder me eventually, and I feel as if a terrible judgment has been waiting for me all of my life, marking my door like the Angel of Death. Bizarrely, I am still here.
CHAPTER 1
I KNOW FROM Lucy’s voice that she is scared. Rarely is my brilliant, forceful, helicopter-piloting, fitness-obsessed, federal-law-enforcement-agent niece scared.
Four Scarpetta Novels Page 39