“Because she’s my birth mother,” she said with singsong sarcasm. “So she’s listed on various forms whether I like it or not, and of course she knows who Jo is. So Mom tracks down Jo’s parents here in Richmond and finds out everything because she’s so manipulative and people always think she’s wonderful. The Sanderses tell her where Jo’s room is and Mother shows up at the hospital this morning and I didn’t even know she was here until I was sitting there in the waiting area and she walked in like the prima donna she is.”
She clenched and unclenched her fists as if her fingers were stiff.
“Then guess what?” she went on. “Mom puts on this big sympathetic act with the Sanderses. Is bringing them coffee, sandwiches, giving them all her little pearls of philosophy. And they’re talking and talking, and I’m just sitting there like I don’t exist, and then Mom comes over and pats my hand and says, Jo isn’t having any visitors today.
“I ask her who the hell she is, telling me that. She says the Sanderses wanted her to tell me because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. So I finally just fucking leave. Mom may still be there for all I know.”
“She’s not,” I said.
Lucy got up and stabbed a log with the poker. Sparks swarmed as if in protest.
“She’s gone too far. This time she’s done it,” my niece said.
“Let’s don’t talk about her. I want to talk about you. Tell me what happened in Miami.”
She sat on the rug, leaning against the couch, staring into the fire. I got up and went to the bar and poured her a Booker’s bourbon.
“Aunt Kay, I’ve got to see her.”
I handed Lucy the drink and sat back down. I massaged her shoulders and she began to loosen up, her voice getting drowsy.
“She’s in there and doesn’t know I’m waiting for her. Maybe she thinks I can’t be bothered.”
“Why in the world would she think that, Lucy?”
She didn’t answer me, but seemed drawn into smoke and flames. She sipped her drink.
“When we were driving there in my hot little V-twelve Benz,” she said in a distant voice, “Jo had this bad feeling and she told me she did. I said it was normal to have a bad feeling when you’re about to do a takedown. I even kidded her about it.”
She paused, just staring at flames as if she were seeing something else.
“We get to the door of the apartment that these One-Sixty-Fiver assholes are using as their clubhouse,” she resumed, “and Jo goes first. There’re six of them in there instead of three. Right away we know we’re had and I know what they’re going to do. One of them grabs Jo and sticks a gun to her head to make her tell them where the Fisher Island place is we’d set up for the hit.”
She took a deep breath and was silent, as if she couldn’t go on. She sipped the bourbon.
“God, what is this stuff? The vapors alone are knocking me out.”
“A hundred and twenty proof. Usually I’m not a pusher, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to be knocked out right now. Stay here with me for a while,” I said.
“ATF and DEA did everything right,” she told me.
“These things happen, Lucy.”
“I had to think so fast. The only thing I knew to do was act like I didn’t care if they blew her brains out or not. Here they are holding a gun to her head and I start acting pissed off at her, which wasn’t at all what they were expecting.”
She took another swallow of bourbon. It was hitting her hard.
“I walked up to this Moroccan asshole with the gun and get right in his face and tell him to go ahead and waste her, that she’s a stupid bitch and I’m sick of her always getting in my way. But if he does her now, all he’s going to do is fuck himself and everybody else.”
She stared into the fire, eyes wide and unblinking, as if watching it again in her mind.
“I say, You think I didn’t expect you would use us and then do this? You think I’m stupid? Well, guess what? I forgot to tell you Mr. Tortora is expecting our company—and I look at my watch—in exactly one hour and sixteen minutes. I thought it would be nice to entertain him before you motherfuckers showed up and blew his guts out and took all his guns and money and fucking cocaine. What happens if we don’t show up? You think he won’t get nervous?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Lucy. Images flew at me from all directions. I imagined her playing out this dangerous act, and I saw her in battle dress when she was at fire scenes and flying a helicopter and programming computers. I envisioned her as the irritating, irrepressible child I had virtually raised. Marino was right. Lucy thought she had so much to prove. Her first impulse had always been to fight.
“I didn’t think they really believed me,” she said. “So I turn to Jo. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes, the pistol barrel right against her temple. Her eyes.” She paused. “They’re so calm as she looks in mine because . . .”
Her voice shook.
“Because she wants me to know she loves me . . .” Lucy chokes on sobs. “She loves me! She wants me to know because she believes . . .” Her voice went up and stopped. “She believes we’re going to die. And that’s when I start yelling at her. I call her a stupid fucking bitch and slap her face so hard my hand goes numb.
“And she just looks at me as if I’m all there is, blood trickling out of her nose and the sides of her mouth, a red river down her face, dripping off her chin. She didn’t even cry. She’s out of the story, lost her role, her training, everything she damn well knows what to do. I grab her. I shove her hard to the ground and get on top of her, swearing and slapping and yelling.”
She wiped her eyes and stared straight ahead.
“And what’s so awful, Aunt Kay, is part of it’s real. I’m so angry with her for quitting on me, for just giving up. She was going to just give up and die, goddamn it!”
“Like Benton did,” I quietly said.
Lucy wiped her face on her shirt. She didn’t seem to hear what I’d said.
“I’m so fucking tired of people giving up and leaving me,” she said in a shattered voice. “When I need them and they fucking give up!”
“Benton didn’t give up, Lucy.”
“I just keep swearing at Jo, screaming and hitting her and telling her I’m going to kill her as I straddle her, shaking her by her hair. It wakes her up, maybe even pisses her off, too, and she starts fighting back. Calls me a Cuban cunt and spits blood in my face, punches me, and by this time the guys are laughing and whistling and grabbing their crotches . . .”
She took another long breath and shut her eyes, barely able to sit up. She leaned against my legs, firelight playing on her strong, beautiful face.
“She starts really struggling. My knees are so tight against her sides I’m surprised I didn’t break her ribs, and while we’re going at each other like that, I tear open her shirt, and this really gets the guys going and they don’t see me grab my gun out of my ankle holster. I start firing. I just fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I bent over and put my arms around her.
“You know? I’m wearing those wide-legged street jeans to hide my Sig. They say I fired eleven rounds. I don’t even remember dropping the empty magazine, putting in a full one. Racking it back. Agents are everywhere and somehow I’m dragging Jo out the door. And she’s bleeding heavily from her head.”
Lucy’s lower lip trembled as she tried to go on, her voice far away. She wasn’t here. She was there, living it again.
“Fire. Fire. Fire. Her blood on my hands.”
Her voice rose to God.
“I hit her and hit her. I can still feel the sting of her cheek against the palm of my hand.”
She looked at her hand as if it should be put to death.
“I felt it. How soft her skin was. And she bled. I made her bleed. The skin I had touched and loved. I drew blood from it. Then the guns, the guns, the guns, and smoke and ringing in my ears and it’s a blaze when it happens like that. It’s over and ne
ver started. I knew she was dead.”
She bowed her head and wept quietly, and I stroked her hair.
“You saved her life. And you saved yours,” I finally said. “Jo knows what you did and why you did it, Lucy. She should love you all the more.”
“I’m in trouble this time, Aunt Kay,” she said.
“You’re a hero. That’s what you are.”
“No. You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter if it was a good shooting. It doesn’t matter if ATF gives me a medal.”
She sat up and got to her feet. She stared down at me with defeat in her eyes and another emotion I didn’t recognize. Maybe it was grief. She’d never shown grief when Benton was murdered. All I’d ever seen was rage.
“The bullet they took out of her leg? It’s a Hornady Custom Jacketed hollowpoint. Ninety grains. What I had in my gun.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m the one who shot her, Aunt Kay.”
“Even if you did . . .”
“What if she never walks again . . . ? What if she’s finished in law enforcement because of me?”
“She won’t be jumping out of helicopters anytime soon,” I said. “But she’s going to be fine.”
“What if I permanently damaged her face with my fucking fist?”
“Lucy, listen to me,” I said. “You saved her life. If you killed two people to do that, then so be it. You had no choice. It’s not that you wanted to.”
“The hell I didn’t,” she said. “I wish I’d killed all of them.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Maybe I’ll just be a mercenary soldier,” she bitterly said. “Got any murderers, rapists, carjackers, pedophiles, drug dealers you need to get rid of? Just call one-eight-hundred-L-U-C-Y.”
“You can’t bring Benton back through killing.”
Still, it was as if she didn’t hear me.
“He wouldn’t want you to feel this way,” I said.
The telephone rang.
“He didn’t abandon you, Lucy. Don’t be angry with him because he died.”
The phone rang a third time, and she couldn’t restrain herself. She grabbed it, unable to hide the hope and fear in her eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what Dr. Worth had told me. Now was not the time.
“Sure, hold on,” she said, and disappointment and more hurt touched her face as she handed me the phone.
“Yes,” I reluctantly answered.
“Is this Dr. Kay Scarpetta?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.
“Who is this?”
“It’s important I verify who you are.” The accent was American.
“If you’re another reporter . . .”
“I’m going to give you a phone number.”
“I’m going to give you a promise,” I said. “Tell me who you are, or I’m hanging up.”
“Let me give you this number,” and he began reciting it before I could refuse.
I recognized the country code for France.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning in France,” I said, as if he didn’t know.
“It doesn’t matter what time it is. We have been getting information from you and running it through our computer system.”
“Not from me.”
“No, not in the sense that you typed it into the computer, Dr. Scarpetta.”
His voice was baritone and smooth, like fine polished wood.
“I’m at the secretariat in Lyon,” he informed me. “Call the number I gave you and at least get our after-hours voice mail.”
“How much sense does that . . . ?”
“Please.”
I hung up and tried, and a recording of a woman with a heavy French accent said “Bonjour, hello,” and gave the office hours in both languages. I entered the extension he had given me, and the man’s voice came back over the line.
“Bonjour, hello? And that’s supposed to identify who you are?” I said. “You could be a restaurant for all I know.”
“Please fax me a sheet of your letterhead. When I see that I’ll fill you in.”
He gave me the number. I put him on hold and went back to my study. I faxed a sheet of my stationery to him while Lucy remained in front of the fire, elbow on her knee, chin in her hand, listless.
“My name’s Jay Talley, the ATF liaison at Interpol,” he said when I got back with him. “We need you to come here right away. You and Captain Marino.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You should have my reports. I have nothing more to add to them at this time.”
“We wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.”
“Marino doesn’t have a passport,” I said.
“He went to the Bahamas three years ago.”
I had forgotten that Marino had taken one of his many bad choices in women on a three-day cruise. Their relationship didn’t last much longer than that.
“I don’t care how important this is,” I said. “There’s no way I’m getting on a plane and flying to France when I don’t know what . . .”
“Hold on a second,” he cut in, politely but with authority. “Senator Lord? Sir, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Frank?” I said in amazement. “Where are you? Are you in France?”
I wondered how long he had been conferenced in and listening.
“Now listen, Kay. This is important,” Senator Lord told me in a voice that reminded me of who he was. “Go and go right away. We need your help.”
“We?”
Then Talley spoke. “You and Marino need to be at the Millionaire private terminal at four-thirty. That’s A.M. your time. Less than six hours from now.”
“I can’t leave right now . . .” I started to say as Lucy filled my doorway.
“Don’t be late. Your New York connection leaves at eight-thirty,” he told me.
I thought Senator Lord had hung up, but suddenly his voice was there.
“Thank you, Agent Talley,” he said. “I’ll talk to her now.”
I could hear Talley get off the line.
“I want to know how you’re doing, Kay,” my friend the senator said.
“I’ve got no idea.”
“I care,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Just trust me. Now tell me how you’re feeling.”
“Other than being summoned to France and about to be fired and . . .” I started to add what had happened to Lucy, but she was standing right there.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Senator Lord said.
“Whatever everything is,” I replied.
“Trust me.”
I always had.
“You’re going to be asked to do things that you’re going to resist. Things that will scare you.”
“I don’t scare easily, Frank,” I said.
31
Marino picked me up at quarter of four. It was a heartless hour of the morning that reminded me of sleepless rotations in hospitals, of early days in my career when I was the one who got the calls for cases nobody else wanted.
“Now you know what it feels like to be on midnight shift,” Marino commented as we cut through icy roads.
“I know all about it anyway,” I replied.
“Yeah, but the difference is, you don’t have to. You could send someone else to scenes and stay home. You’re the chief.”
“I’m always leaving Lucy when she needs me, Marino.”
“I’m telling you, Doc, she understands. She’s probably gonna be heading up to D.C. anyway to deal with all this review board shit.”
I hadn’t told him about Dorothy’s visit. It would have served no purpose other than to set him off.
“You’re on the faculty at MCV. I mean, you’re a real doctor.”
“Thank you.”
“Can’t you just go talk to the administrator or something?” he said, punching in the cigarette lighter. “Couldn’t you pull some strings so Lucy could go in there?”
“As long as Jo isn’t capable of making
decisions, her family has complete control over who visits and who doesn’t.”
“Fucking religious wackos. Bible-banging Hitlers.”
“There was a time when you were pretty narrow-minded, too, Marino,” I reminded him. “Seems to me you used to talk about queers and fags. I don’t even want to repeat some of the words I’ve heard you use.”
“Yeah. Well, I never meant any of it.”
At the Millionaire jet center the temperature was in the low twenties and hard, icy wind grabbed and shoved me as I collected luggage out of the back of the truck. We were met by two pilots who didn’t say much as they opened a gate to lead us across the tarmac, where a Learjet was hooked up to a power cart. A thick manila envelope with my name on it was in one of the seats, and when we took off into the clear, cold night, I turned off cabin lights and slept until we landed in Teterboro, New Jersey.
A dark blue Explorer glided our way as we climbed down the metal steps. It was snowing small flakes that stung my face.
“Cop.” Marino gave the nod as the Explorer stopped close to the plane.
“How do you know?”
“I always know,” he said.
The driver was in jeans and a leather coat and looked as if he’d seen life from every angle and was happy to pick us up. He packed our baggage in the trunk. Marino climbed in front and off they sailed into one comment and story after another because the driver was NYPD and Marino used to be. I floated in and out of their conversation as I dozed.
“. . . Adams in the detective division, he called around eleven. I guess Interpol got him first. I didn’t know he had anything to do with them.”
“Oh yeah?” Marino’s voice was muted and soporific like bourbon on the rocks. “Some tear-ass I bet . . .”
“Naw. He’s okay . . .”
I slept and drifted, city lights touching my eyelids as I began to feel that empty ache again.
“. . . got so shit-faced one night I woke up the next morning and didn’t know where my car or creds were. That was my wake-up call . . .”
The only other time I had flown supersonic had been with Benton. I remembered his body against me, the intense heat of my breasts touching him as we sat in those small gray leather seats and drank French wine, staring at jars of caviar we had no intention of eating.
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