Scarpetta spent as little time in the Anatomical Division as she could. It was a depressing place, and there was so little state funding for it, so little paid by the medical colleges that needed the bodies, not enough money to allow the dead any dignity at all. And the crematorium was always breaking down. There were baseball bats propped in a corner because when cremains were removed from the oven, some chunks of bone needed to be pulverized or they would not fit in the cheap urns supplied by the state. A grinder was too expensive, and a baseball bat worked fine for reducing chunks of bone to a manageable size, to dust. She didn't want to be reminded of what went on down there, and she visited that division only when necessary and avoided the crematorium, avoided looking at the baseball bats. She knew about the baseball bats and kept away from them, pretending they weren't there.
I should have bought a grinder, she thinks as she sits looking at the empty bird feeder. I should have bought one with my own money. I should never have allowed baseball bats. I wouldn't allow them now.
"Here," Dr. Philpott says as he returns to the kitchen and hands her a thick file folder with Edgar Allan Pogue's name printed on it. "I've got to get back to my patients. But I'll check in to see if you need anything."
The truth is, she wasn't keen on the Anatomical Division. She is a forensic pathologist, a lawyer, and not a funeral home director or embalmer. She always assumed that those dead people had nothing to say to her because there was no mystery surrounding their deaths. If people can die peacefully, those people did. Her mission is people who don't die peacefully. Her mission is people who die violently and suddenly and suspiciously, and she did not want to talk to the people in the vats, so she avoided that subterranean part of her world back then. She avoided the people who worked in it and she avoided the people who were dead in it. She didn't want to spend time with Dave or Edgar Allan. No, she did not.
When pink bodies were cranked up by pulleys and chains and with hooks, she didn't want to see it. No, she did not.
I should have paid more attention, she thinks, and her stomach is sour from the coffee. I didn't do as much as I could have. She slowly scans Pogue's medical records. I should have bought a grinder, she thinks, and she looks for the address Pogue gave Dr. Philpott. According to Pogue's records, he lived in Ginter Park, on the north side of the city, until 1996, then his address changed to a post office box. Nowhere in his record is there a mention of where he has lived since 1996, and she wonders it that is when he moved into the house behind the Paulssons' back fence, Mrs. Arnette's house. Maybe he killed her too and became a squatter.
A titmouse lands on the feeder outside the window, and she watches it, her hands quiet on top of Pogue's medical records. Sunlight touches the left side of her face and is warm but not hot, just a winter warmth touching her as she watches the small gray bird peck at seeds, its eyes bright, its tail flicking. Scarpetta knows what some people say about her. Throughout her career she has run from the comments ignorant people make about doctors whose patients are dead. She is morbid. She is peculiar and can't get along with living people. Forensic pathologists are antisocial and odd and cold-blooded and utterly lacking in compassion. They choose this subspecialty in medicine because they are failed doctors, failed fathers, failed mothers, failed lovers, failed human beings.
Because of what ignorant people say, she has avoided the darker side of her profession, and she doesn't want to go to that dark side, but she could. She understands Edgar Allan Pogue. She does not feel what he does, but she knows what he feels. She sees his white face stealing furtive glances at her, and then she remembers the day she took Lucy down to where he worked because she was spending the Christmas holiday with her. Lucy loved to go to the office with her, and on this occasion, Scarpetta had business with Dave, so Lucy accompanied her below ground to the Anatomical Division and she was rowdy and irreverent and playful. She was Lucy. Something happened that day while Lucy was in that place, when she was there briefly. What was it?
The titmouse pecks at seeds and looks directly at Scarpetta through the glass. She lifts her coffee mug and the bird flutters off. Pale sunlight shines on the white mug, a white mug with the Medical College of Virginia crest on it. She gets up from Dr. Philpott's kitchen table and dials Marino's cell phone.
"Yo," he answers.
"He won't come back to Richmond," she says. "He's smart enough to know we're looking for him here. And Florida is a very good place for people with respiratory problems."
"I'd better head on down there. What about you?"
"I've got just one more thing, then I'm finished with this city," she replies.
"You need my help?"
"No thanks," she says.
53
The construction workers are taking their lunch break, sitting on cinder blocks or on the seats of their big yellow machines, eating. Hard hats and weathered faces watch Scarpetta as she walks through thick red mud, holding up her long dark coat as if it is a long skirt.
She doesn't see the foreman she met the other day or anybody else who seems to be in charge, and the crew watches her and no one steps forward to see what she wants. Several men in dark, dusty clothing are gathered around a bulldozer, eating sandwiches and drinking sodas, and they stare at her as she picks her way in the mud, holding up her coat.
"I'm looking for the supervisor," she says when she gets close to them. "I need to get inside the building."
She glances at what is left of her former office. Half of the front area is now on the ground, but the back is still intact.
"No way," one of the men says with his mouth full. "Ain't nobody going inside." He resumes chewing and looks at her as if she is a crazy woman.
"The back of the building looks all right," she replies. "When I was chief medical examiner, this was my office. I came out here the other day after Mr. Whitby got killed."
"You can't go in there," the same man replies, and he gives his comrades a look as they stand around listening to the conversation. He gives them a look that says she is cra7.y.
"Where's your foreman?" she asks. "Let me talk to him."
The man removes a cell phone from his belt and calls the foreman. "Hey Joe," he says. "It's Bobby. Remember the lady who was down here the other day? The lady and the big cop from L.A.? Yeah, yeah, that's right. She's back and wants to talk to you. Okay." He ends the call and looks at her. "He went to get cigarettes and will be here in a minute," he says to her. "Why do you want to go in there anyway? I wouldn't think there's anything in there."
"Except ghosts," another man says, and his comrades laugh.
"When exactly did you start tearing this down?" she asks them.
"About a month ago. Right before Thanksgiving. Then we got weathered out for about a week because of the ice storm."
The men talk among themselves, arguing in a good-natured way about when exactly the wrecking ball struck the building the first time, and Scarpetta watches a man come around the side of the building. He is dressed in khaki work pants, a dark green jacket, and boots, his hard hat tucked under an arm as he heads toward them through the mud, smoking.
"That's Joe," the construction worker named Bobby says to her. "He's not gonna let you go in there, though. You don't want to go in there, ma'am. It ain't safe for a lot of reasons."
"When you started tearing this place down, did you have the power shut off or was it already off?" she asks.
"No way we'd start if the power was on."
"It hadn't been shut off long," another man says. "Remember before we started? People had to go through it. There were lights on then, weren't there?"
"Got no idea."
"Good afternoon," Joe the foreman says to Scarpetta. "What can I do for you?"
"I need to get inside the building. In the back door near the bay door," she replies.
"No way," he says adamantly, shaking his head and looking at the building.
"Could I talk to you for a minute?" Scarpetta says to him, and she moves away from the other workers.<
br />
"Hell no, I'm not letting you go in there. Why the hell would you want to?" Joe says, now that they are a good ten feet from the others and have a little privacy. "It isn't safe. Why do you want to?"
"Listen," she says, shifting her weight in the mud and no longer holding up the hem of her coat, "I helped examine Mr. Whitby. We found some strange evidence on his body, suffice it to say."
"You're kidding me."
She knew that would get his attention, and she adds, "There's something I need to check inside the building. Is it really unsafe or are we worried about lawsuits, Joe?"
He stares at the building and scratches his head, then rakes his fingers through his hair. "Well, it isn't going to fall down on us, not in the back there. I wouldn't go in the front."
"I don't want to go in the front," she replies. "The back is fine. We can go through that back door next to the bay door, and off to the right at the end of the hallway are stairs. We can take the stairs down one more level, to the lowest level. That's where I need to go."
"I know about the stairs. I've been in there before. You want to go down there to the first level? Good God. Now that's something."
"How long has the power been cut off?"
"I made sure of that before we started."
"Then it was on the first time you went through?" she says.
"There was lights. That would have been back in the summer, the first time I had to walk through the place. Be dark as pitch in there now. What evidence? I don't get it. You thinking something happened to him besides the tractor running him over? I mean, his wife's making a fuss, accusing all kinds of people of this and that. A lot of nonsense. I was here. Ain't nothing happened to him except he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to fool with the starter."
"I need to look," she says. "You can come with me. I'd appreciate it if you would. All I need to do is take a look. I imagine the back door is locked. I don't have a key."
"Well, that's not what's going to keep us out." He stares at the building, then looks back at his men. "Hey Bobby!" he calls out. "Can you drill out the lock in the back door? Do it now. All right then," he says to her. "All right. I'll take you in there as long as we don't go near the front and we don't stay but a minute."
54
Lights dance over cinder-block walls and beige-painted concrete steps, and their feet make scuffing sounds as they go down to where Edgar Allan Pogue worked when Scarpetta was chief. There are no windows in the first two levels of the building because the level they entered the building from was where the morgue used to be, and there shouldn't be windows in morgues and usually aren't, and there aren't windows below ground. The darkness in the stairwell is complete, and the air is sharp and damp and thick with dust. "When they gave me a tour of this place," Joe is saying as he goes down the steps ahead of her, his flashlight bobbing with each step, "they didn't take me down here. All I did was do a walk-through upstairs. I thought this was a basement. They didn't take me down here," he says, and he sounds uneasy.
"They should have," she replies, and dust tickles her throat and prickles her skin. "There are two floor vats down here, about twenty feet by twenty feet and ten feet deep. You wouldn't want to roll a tractor into one or fall in, for that matter."
"Now that really makes me mad," he says, and he sounds mad. "They should have at least showed me pictures. Twenty by twenty feet. Damn! Now that really pisses me off. This is the last step. Be careful." He sweeps his light around.
"We should he in a hallway. Turn left."
"Looks like that's the only way we can turn." He starts moving again, slowly. "Why the hell didn't they tell us about those vats?" He just can't believe it.
"I don't know. Depends on who showed you around."
"Some guy, oh hell, what was his name. All 1 remember is he was with General Services and didn't like being in here worth a damn. I'm not sure he even knew much about the building."
"Probably didn't," Scarpetta says, looking at the filthy white tile floor shining dully in her light. "They just wanted it torn down. The guy from GSA probably didn't even know about the floor vats. He may not ever have been down here in the Anatomical Division. Not many people have been down here. They're right over there." She points her light ahead of them, and the beam of light pushes back the dense darkness of a huge empty room and dimly illuminates the dark iron rectangular covers of the vats in the floor. "Well, the covers are on. I don't know if that's good or not," she says. "But this is a terrible biological hazard down here. Be sure you're aware of what you're dealing with when you start knocking down this part of the building."
"Oh don't you worry. I just can't believe it," he says angry and nervous as he shines his light around.
She moves away from the vats, back to an area of the Anatomical Division that's on the other side of the big space, passing the small room where the embalming used to be done, and she shines her light in it. A steel table attached to thick pipes in the floor gleams in her light, and a steel sink and cabinets flow by in her light. Parked against the wall in that room is a rusting gurney with a wadded plastic shroud on top. To the left of that room is an alcove, and she imagines the crematorium built into cinder block before she sees it. Then her light shines on the long dark iron door in the wall and she remembers seeing fire in the crack of the door, remembers the dusty steel trays that got shoved in with a body on them and pulled out when there was nothing much on them but ashes and chunks of chalky bone, and she thinks of the baseball bats used to pulverize the chunks. She feels shame when she thinks of the bats.
Her light moves over the floor. It is still white with dust and small bits of bone that look like chalk, and she can feel grit under her shoes as she moves. Joe hasn't come in here with her. He waits just beyond the alcove and helps from his distance by shining his light around the floor and in the corners, and the shape of her in the coat and hard hat is huge and black on the cinder-block wall. Then the light flashes over the eye. It is spray-painted in black on beige cinder block, a big black staring eye with eyelashes.
"What the hell is that?" Joe asks. He is looking at the eye on the wall, even though she can't see him looking. "Jesus Christ. What is it?"
Scarpetta doesn't answer him as her light moves around. The baseball bats are gone from the corner where they were propped when she was chief, but there is a lot of dust and bits of bone, quite a lot, she thinks. Her light finds a spray can of black paint, and two touch-up paint bottles, one red enamel paint and the other blue enamel paint, both empty, and she places them inside a plastic bag and the can of spray paint in a separate bag. She finds a few old cigar boxes that have a residue of ashes inside and she notices cigar butts on the floor and a crumpled brown paper bag. Her gloved hands enter her beam of light and pick up the bag. Paper crackles as she opens it, and she can tell the bag hasn't been down here eight years, not even one year.
She vaguely smells cigars as she opens the bag, and it isn't smoked cigars she thinks she smells but unburnt cigar tobacco, and she shines her light inside the bag and sees bits of tobacco and a receipt. Joe is watching her and has steadied his light on the bag in her hands. She looks at the receipt and feels a sense of disconnection and unreality as she reads the date of this past September fourteenth, when Edgar Allan Pogue, and she feels sure it was Pogue, spent more than a hundred dollars at a tobacco store just down the street at the James Center for ten Romeo y Julieta cigars.
55
The James Center is not the sort of place Marino used to visit when he was a cop in Richmond, and he never bought his Marlboros in the fancy tobacco shop or in any tobacco shop.
He never bought cigars, not any brand of cigars, because even a cheap cigar is a lot of money for a single smoke, and besides, he wouldn't have puffed, he would have inhaled. Now that he hardly smokes anymore, he can admit the truth. He would have inhaled cigar smoke. The atrium is all glass and light and plants, and the sound of splashing water from waterfalls and fountains follows Marino as he walks swiftly
toward the shop where Edgar Allan Pogue bought cigars not even three months before he murdered little Gilly.
It is not quite noon yet and the shops aren't very busy. A few people in stylish business suits are buying coffee and moving about as if they have places to go and important lives, and Marino can't stomach people like the ones in the James Center. He knows the type. He grew up knowing the type, not personally, but knowing about the type. They were the type who didn't know Marino's type and never tried to know his type. He walks fast and is angry, and when a man in a fine black pinstriped suit passes him and doesn't even see him, Marino thinks, You don't know shit. People like you don't know shit.
Inside the tobacco shop the air is pungent and sweet with a symphony of tobacco scents that fill him with a longing he doesn't understand and immediately blames on smoking. He misses it like hell. He is sad and upset because he misses cigarettes, and his heart hurts and he feels shaken somewhere deep inside his very soul because he knows he'll never be able to smoke again, not like he used to, he just can't do it. He was kidding himself to think he might sneak one or two now and then. What a myth to think there was any hope. There is no hope. There was never hope. If anything is hopeless, his insatiable lust for tobacco, his desperate love for tobacco, is hopeless, and he is suddenly crushed by grief because he will never light up a cigarette and deeply inhale and feel that rush, that sheer joy, that release he aches for every minute of his life. He wakes up aching, he goes to sleep aching, he aches in his dreams and he aches when he is wide awake. Glancing at his watch, he thinks about Scarpetta, wondering if her flight has been delayed. So many flights are delayed these days.
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