The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  She was drying off inside the shower with the glass door half open. She didn’t want to come out. He didn’t ask her what was wrong, why she was hiding inside the shower like a little kid.

  “I’ve searched everywhere—again—for your phone. It’s not in the apartment,” he added.

  “Did you try calling it?”

  “Betting it’s on the closet floor in the makeup room at CNN. Where you always hang your coat, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Lucy can find it if I ever talk to her again.”

  “I thought you talked to her earlier today while she was still in Stowe.” His way of encouraging her to be reasonable.

  “Because I called her.” It wasn’t possible for Scarpetta to be reasonable right now. “She never calls me, hardly ever these days. Maybe if she ever gets around to calling once in a while, such as when she’s delayed because of a blizzard or hasn’t landed yet.”

  Benton looked at her.

  “She can find my damn phone then. She sure as hell should, since it was her idea to install a Wide Area Augmentation System- enabled receiver in my BlackBerry, in your BlackBerry, in Jaime’s BlackBerry, in Marino’s BlackBerry, in the nape of her bulldog’s neck, so she can know where we are—or, more precisely, where our phones and her dog are—with a position accuracy of something like ten feet.”

  Benton was quiet, looking at her through the steamy air. She was still in the shower drying off, which was useless because of the steam. She would dry herself and then sweat.

  “Same technology the FAA’s considering for use in flight approaches and autopilot landings, of course.” It was as if someone else was talking through her mouth, someone she didn’t know or like. “Maybe they’re using it in drones, who the hell gives a shit. Except my goddamn phone knows exactly where it goddamn is even if I don’t right this goddamn minute, and that sort of tracking is child’s play for Lucy. I’ll send her an e-mail. Maybe she’ll get around to finding my phone.” Toweling her hair, about to cry and not sure why. “Maybe she’ll call because she’s just a little concerned that someone might have left a bomb for me.”

  “Kay, please don’t be so upset. . . .”

  “You know I really hate it when someone tells me not to be upset. I spend my entire life not being upset because I’m fucking not allowed to be fucking upset. Well, right now I’m upset and I’m going to feel it because I can’t seem to help it. If I could help it I wouldn’t be upset now, would I.” Her voice shook.

  She felt shaky all over, as if she was coming down with something. Maybe she was getting sick. A lot of the staff at the OCME had the flu. It was going around. She closed her eyes, leaning against wet tile that was getting cool.

  “I told her to call me before they took off from Vermont.” She tried to calm down, to ward off the grief and rage overwhelming her. “She used to call me before she took off and landed or just to say hello.”

  “You don’t know that she didn’t call. You can’t find your phone. I’m sure she’s tried to call.” Benton’s conciliatory voice, the way he sounded when he was trying to de-escalate a situation that was rapidly becoming explosive. “Let’s try to retrace your steps. Do you remember taking it out at any time after leaving the apartment?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re sure it was in your coat pocket when you left the apartment.”

  “I’m not sure of a damn thing right now.”

  She remembered dropping her coat in one of the makeup chairs when she was talking to Alex Bachta. Maybe it had fallen out then, was still in the chair. She’d send Alex an e-mail, ask him to have someone look for it and keep it locked up until she could retrieve it. She hated that phone, and she’d done something stupid. She’d done something so stupid she almost couldn’t believe it. The BlackBerry wasn’t password-protected, and she wasn’t going to tell Benton. She wasn’t going to tell Lucy.

  “Lucy will track it down,” Benton said. “Marino mentioned you might want to go to Rodman’s Neck to see what they find, if you’re curious. He’ll pick you up whenever you want. First thing, like around seven. I’ll go with you.”

  She wrapped the towel around her and stepped onto a no-slip bamboo mat. Benton, shirtless and barefoot, pajama bottoms on, sat with his back to the vanity. She hated how she felt. She didn’t want to feel like this. Benton hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

  “I think we should find out everything we can from the bomb guys, the labs. I want to know who the hell sent that package and why and what exactly it is.” Benton was watching her, the air warm and filmy with steam.

  “Yes, the box of cookies some thoughtful patient of yours left for me,” she said cynically.

  “I guess it could be battery-operated cookies and a test tube- shaped bottle of liquor that smells like an accelerant.”

  “And Marino wants you to go, too? Not just me? Both of us?” She combed her hair, but the mirror over the sink was too steamed up to see.

  “What’s the matter, Kay?”

  “I’m just wondering if Marino specifically invited you, that’s all.” She wiped off the mirror with a washcloth.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Let me guess. He didn’t invite you. Or if he did, he didn’t mean it.” Combing her hair, looking at her reflection. “I’m not surprised he didn’t invite you or didn’t mean it if he did. After the way you treated him today. On the conference call. Then in his car.”

  “Let’s don’t get started about him.” Benton lifted his glass, straight bourbon on the rocks.

  She could smell Maker’s Mark, reminding her of a case she’d worked in the long-ago past. A man scalded to death in a river of fire when barrels of whisky began bursting in a distillery warehouse engulfed in flames.

  “I wasn’t friendly or unfriendly,” Benton added. “I was professional. Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “ ‘Why’?” she asked, as if he couldn’t possibly be serious.

  “Besides the obvious.”

  “I’m tired of the cold war you have with Marino. No point in pretending. You have one, and you know it,” she said.

  “We don’t have one.”

  “I don’t think he does anymore; God knows he used to. He honestly seems beyond it, but you don’t, and then he gets defensive, gets angry. I find it a remarkable irony, after all those years he had a problem with you.”

  “Let’s be accurate, his problem was with you.” Benton’s patience was dissipating with the steam. Even he had his limits.

  “I’m not talking about me right this minute, but if you’re going to bring it up, yes, he had a significant problem with me. But now he doesn’t.”

  “I agree he’s better. We’ll hope it lasts.” Benton played with his drink as if he couldn’t make up his mind what to do with it.

  In the diffusing steam, Scarpetta could make out a note she’d left for herself on the granite countertop: Jaime—call Fri. a.m. In the morning she would have an orchid delivered to One Hogan Place, Berger’s office, a belated birthday gesture. Maybe a sumptuous Princess Mikasa. Berger’s favorite color was sapphire blue.

  “Benton, we’re married,” Scarpetta said. “Marino couldn’t be more aware of that and he’s accepted it, probably with relief. I imagine he must be much happier because he’s accepted it, has a serious relationship, has made a new life for himself.”

  She wasn’t so sure about Marino’s serious relationship or his new life, not after the loneliness she’d sensed earlier when she was sitting next to him in his car. She imagined him dropping by the ESU garage, by the Two, as he called it, in Harlem, to hang out with a rescued dog.

  “He’s moved on, and now you need to,” she was saying. “I want it to end. Whatever you have to do. End it. Don’t just pretend. I can see through it, even if I don’t say anything. We’re all in this together.”

  “One big happy family,” Benton said.

  “That’s what I mean. Your hostility, your jealousy. I want it to end.”

  “Have a sip of your dr
ink. You’ll feel better.”

  “Now I’m feeling patronized and getting angry.” Her voice was shaking again.

  “I’m not patronizing you, Kay.” Softly. “And you’re already angry. You’ve been angry for a long time.”

  “I feel you’re patronizing me, and I’ve not been angry for a long time. I don’t understand why you’d say something like that. You’re being provocative.” She didn’t want to fight, hated fighting, but she was pushing things in that direction.

  “I’m sorry if it feels I’m patronizing you. I’m not, honest to God. I don’t blame you for being angry.” He sipped his drink, staring at it, moving the ice around in it. “The last thing I want to be is provocative.”

  “The problem is you really don’t forgive and you certainly don’t forget. That’s your problem with Marino. You won’t forgive him and you certainly won’t forget, and in the end, how does that help anything? He did what he did. He was drunk and drugged and crazy and he did something he shouldn’t have done. Yes, he did. Maybe I should be the one who doesn’t forgive or forget. It was me he goddamn manhandled and abused. But it’s the past. He’s sorry. So sorry, he avoids me. I go weeks and have no contact with him. He’s overly polite when he’s around me, around us, overly inclusive toward you, almost obsequious, and all it does is make things more uncomfortable. We’ll never get past this unless you allow it. It’s up to you.”

  “It’s true I don’t forget,” he said grimly.

  “Not exactly equitable when you consider what some of us have had to forgive and forget,” she said, so upset it frightened her. She felt as if she might explode like the package that was hauled away.

  His hazel eyes looked at her, watching her carefully. He sat very still, waiting for whatever would come next.

  “Especially Marino. Especially Lucy. The secrets you forced them to keep. It was bad enough for me but so unfair to them, having to lie for you. Not that I’m interested in dredging up the past.” But she couldn’t stop herself. The past was climbing up and halfway out her throat. She swallowed hard, trying to stop the past from spilling out of her and all over their life, Benton’s and her life together.

  He watched her, a softness, a sadness, in his eyes that was immeasurable, sweat collecting in the hollow of his neck, disappearing into the silver hair on his chest, trickling down his belly, soaking into the waistband of the polished-cotton gray pajamas she’d bought for him. He was lean and well-defined, with tight muscles and skin, still a striking man, a beautiful man. The bathroom was like a greenhouse, humid and warm from the long shower that had made her feel no less contaminated, no less filthy and foolish. She couldn’t wash away the peculiar-smelling package or Carley Crispin’s show or the CNN marquee or anything, and she felt powerless.

  “Well, don’t you have a comment?” Her voice shook badly.

  “You know what this is.” He got up from the chair.

  “I don’t want us to argue.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I must be tired. That’s all. I’m tired. I’m sorry I’m so tired.”

  “The olfactory system is one of the oldest parts of our brain, sends information that governs emotions, memory, behavior.” He was behind her and slipped his arms around her waist, both of them looking into the hazy mirror. “Individual odor molecules stimulating all sorts of receptors.” Kissing the back of her neck, hugging her. “Tell me what you smelled. Tell me in as much detail as you can.”

  She couldn’t see anything in the mirror now, her eyes flooded with tears. She muttered, “Hot pavement. Petroleum. Burning matches. Burning human flesh.”

  He reached for another towel and rubbed her hair with it, massaging her scalp.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know exactly,” she said.

  “You don’t need to know exactly. It’s what it made you feel, that’s what we need to know exactly.”

  “Whoever left that package got what he wanted,” she said. “It was a bomb even if it turns out it’s not.”

  Lucy hovered the Bell 407 helicopter at the hold line on taxiway Kilo, the wind shoving her around like huge hands as she waited for the tower to clear her to land.

  “Not again,” she said to Berger, in the left seat, the copilot’s seat, because she wasn’t the sort to ride in back when given the choice. “I don’t believe where they put the damn dolly.”

  Westchester County Airport’s west ramp was crowded with parked planes, ranging from single-engine and experimental home-built on up to the super-midsize Challenger and ultra-long-range Boeing business jet. Lucy willed herself to stay calm, agitation and flying a dangerous combination, but it didn’t take much to set her off. She was volatile, couldn’t settle down, and she hated it, but hating something didn’t make it go away, and she couldn’t get rid of the anger. After all her efforts to manage it and some good things happening, happy things, which had made it easier, now the anger was back out of its bag, maybe more volatile than ever after too much time unattended and ignored. Not gone. She’d just thought it was. “Nobody more intelligent or physically gifted than you or more loved,” her Aunt Kay liked to say. “Why are you so aggravated all the time?” Now Berger was saying it. Berger and Scarpetta sounding the same. The same language, the same logic, as if their communications were broadcast over the same frequency.

  Lucy calculated the best approach to her dolly, the small wooden platform on wheels parked too close to other aircraft, the tow bar pointed the wrong way. Best plan was a high hover altitude between the wingtips of the Learjet and the King Air at ten o’clock. They’d handle her rotorwash better than the little guys. Then directly over her dolly, a steeper angle of descent than she liked, and she’d have to land with a twenty-eight-knot wind gusting up the tail, assuming the air traffic controller ever got back to her. That much wind blowing up her ass and she had to worry about settling with power, setting down ugly and hard, and exhaust fumes were going to back up into the cabin. Berger would complain about the fumes, get one of her headaches, wouldn’t want to fly with Lucy again anytime soon. One more thing they wouldn’t do together.

  “This is deliberate,” Lucy said over the intercom, her arms and legs tense, hands and feet firm on the controls, working the helicopter hard so it basically did nothing but hold its position some thirty feet above ground level. “I’m getting his name and number.”

  “Tower has nothing to do with where dollies are parked.” Berger’s voice in Lucy’s headset.

  “You heard him.” Lucy’s attention was outside the windscreen. She scanned the dark shapes of aircraft, a thick herd of them, noticing tie-down ropes anchored in the pavement, loosely coiled, frayed ends fluttering in her twenty-million-candlepower NightSun spotlight. “Told me to take the Echo Route. Exactly what I did, sure as hell didn’t disregard his instructions. He’s jerking me around.”

  “Tower’s got bigger things to worry about than where dollies are parked.”

  “He can do what he wants.”

  “Let it go. Not worth it.” The rich timbre of Berger’s firm voice like fine hardwood. Rain-forest ironwood, mahogany, teak. Beautiful but unyielding, bruising.

  “Whenever he’s on duty, it’s something. It’s personal.” Lucy hovered, looking out, careful not to drift.

  “Doesn’t matter. Let it go.” Berger the lawyer.

  Lucy felt unfairly accused, of what she wasn’t sure. She felt controlled and judged and wasn’t sure why. The same way her aunt made her feel. The way everybody made her feel. Even when Scarpetta said she wasn’t being controlling or judgmental, she had always made Lucy feel controlled and judged. Scarpetta and Berger weren’t separated by many years, almost the same age, of an entirely different generation, a full layer of civilization between Lucy and them. She hadn’t thought it was a problem, had believed quite the opposite. At last she’d found someone who commanded her respect, someone powerful and accomplished and never boring.

  Jaime Berger was compelling, with short, dark brown hair and beautiful features, a genetic thoroughbred who had taken
good care of herself and was stunning, really, and wickedly smart. Lucy loved the way Berger looked and moved and expressed herself, loved the way she dressed, her suits or soft corduroys and denim, her politically incorrect fucking fur coat. Lucy still found it hard to believe she’d finally gotten what she’d always wanted, always imagined. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t close to perfect, and she didn’t understand what had happened. They’d been together not quite a year. The last few weeks had been horrid.

  Pressing the transmit button on the cyclic, she said over the radio, “Helicopter niner-lima-foxtrot still holding.”

  After a long pause, the officious voice came back, “Helicopter calling, you were stepped on. Repeat request.”

  “Helicopter niner-lima-foxtrot still holding,” Lucy repeated curtly, and releasing the transmit button, she said to Berger over the intercom, “I wasn’t stepped on. You hear any other traffic right this second?”

  Berger didn’t answer, and Lucy didn’t look at her, didn’t look anywhere except out the windscreen. One good thing about flying, she didn’t have to look at someone if she was angry or hurt. No good deed goes unpunished. How many times had Marino said that to her, only he used the word favor, not deed. No favor goes unpunished, what he’d been saying since she was a kid and on his nerves something awful. Right about now it felt as if he was her only friend. Unbelievable. It wasn’t long ago she wanted to put a bullet in his head just like she’d done to his piece-of-shit son, a fugitive, an Interpol Red Notice, wanted for murder, sitting in a chair, room 511, the Radisson in Szczecin, Poland. Sometimes out of nowhere Rocco Junior was in her mind, sweating and shaking and bug-eyed, dirty food trays everywhere, the air foul from him soiling himself. Begging. And when that didn’t work, bribing. After all he’d done to innocent people, pleading for a second chance, for mercy, or trying to buy his way out.

  No good deed goes unpunished, and Lucy hadn’t done a good deed, wasn’t about to, because had she been charitable and let Rocco live, he would have killed his cop father, a hit, payback. Peter Rocco Marino Junior had changed his name to Caggiano, he hated his own father that much, and little Rocco the bad seed had orders, had a precise cold-blooded plan to take out his old man Marino while he was on his yearly fishing trip, minding his own business in his cabin at Buggs Lake. Make it look like a home invasion gone bad. Well, think again, little Rocco. When Lucy walked out of that hotel, her ears ringing from the gunshot, all she felt was relief—well, not exactly all. It was something she and Marino didn’t talk about. She’d killed his son, a judicious execution that looked like a suicide, black ops, her job, the right thing. But still, it was Marino’s son, his only offspring, the last branch on his family tree as far as she knew.