Lucy stares down at her feet and says nothing. Berger stands at the edge of the living room and is silent.
“You disappeared for days. No one would tell me where you were,” Scarpetta begins quietly. “Were you in Poland?”
A long pause, then Lucy lifts her eyes. “Yes, I was.”
“Dear God,” Scarpetta mutters. “Alleged suicide,” she repeats.
Lucy explains the tip about the murdered journalists that Chandonne divulged to her in a letter. She explains further information from him about Rocco’s whereabouts. Then she tells her aunt about the Red Notice.
“So Rudy and I found him, found him in the hotel he always stays in when he does his dirty business in Szczecin. We told him about the Red Notice, and he knew that was it. The end. Because, apprehended or not, the Chandonnes would make sure he didn’t live very long.”
“So he killed himself,” Scarpetta says, looking straight into Lucy’s eyes, searching them.
Lucy doesn’t reply. Berger walks out of the room.
“Interpol has posted the information,” Lucy then says, somewhat inanely. “The police say his death is a suicide.”
This appeases Scarpetta temporarily, only because she doesn’t have the strength to probe further.
She opens her briefcase and shows Lucy the letter from Chandonne, and then Lucy goes into Berger’s office.
“Please come,” Lucy starts to say.
“No,” Berger replies, the look in her eyes one of disappointment, of judgment. “How can you lie to her?”
“I didn’t and I haven’t.”
“By omission. The whole truth, Lucy.”
“I’ll get there. When it’s time. Chandonne wrote her. You’ve got to see it. There’s something really bizarre going on.”
“There sure is.” Berger gets up from her desk.
They return to the living room and look at the letter and envelopes through their protective plastic.
“That’s not like the letter I got,” Lucy says immediately. “It was block printing. It wasn’t mailed regular post. I guess Rocco mailed it for him. Rocco mailed a lot of things for him. Why would Chandonne write Marino and me in block printing?”
“What did the paper look like?” Scarpetta asks.
“Notebook paper. Lined paper.”
“The paper in the prison commissary is plain white, twenty-pound cheap stock. The same thing most of us use in our printers.”
“If he didn’t send those letters to Marino and me, then who did?” Lucy feels sluggish, her system overloaded.
Based on the information in the letter to her, she orchestrated Rocco Caggiano’s death. When she and Rudy held him hostage in the hotel room, Rocco never actually admitted to murdering the journalists. Lucy recalls him rolling his eyes toward the ceiling—his only response. She can’t know as fact what he really meant by that gesture. She can’t know as fact that the information she sent to Interpol is correct. What she offered was enough for an arrest, but not necessarily a conviction because, in fact, Lucy doesn’t know the facts. Did Rocco really meet with the two journalists mere hours before their murders? Even if he did, was he the one who shot them?
Lucy is responsible for the Red Notice. The Red Notice is why Rocco knew his life was over, no matter what he confessed or didn’t confess. He became a fugitive, and if Lucy and Rudy hadn’t brought about his death, the Chandonnes would have. He should be dead. He needed to be dead. Lucy tells herself the world is better off because Rocco isn’t in it.
“Who wrote me that goddamn letter?” Lucy says. “Who wrote the one to Marino and the first one to you?” She looks at Scarpetta. “The ones that came in those National Academy of Justice postage-paid envelopes? They sound like they were written by Chandonne.”
“I agree with that,” Scarpetta says. “And the coroner in Baton Rouge got one, too.”
“Maybe Chandonne changed his handwriting and paper when he wrote this one.” Lucy indicates the letter with its beautiful calligraphy. “Maybe the bastard’s not in prison at all.”
“I heard about the phone calls to your office. Zach got hold of me on my cell phone. I think we can’t assume at all that Chandonne is still in prison,” Scarpetta replies.
“Seems to me,” Berger says, “that he wouldn’t have access to lined paper or National Academy of Justice envelopes if he’s still in prison. How hard do you suppose it would it be to create facsimiles of those postage-paid envelopes on a computer?”
“God, I feel so stupid,” Lucy says. “I can’t tell you what I feel. Of course it could be done. Just scan in an envelope, then type in the address you want, and print it on the same type of envelope. I could do it in five minutes.”
Berger looks at her for a long time. “Did you, Lucy?”
She is stunned. “Me do it? Why would I do it?”
“You just admitted that you could,” Berger somberly says. “It appears you’re quite capable of doing a lot of things, Lucy. And it’s convenient that information in the letter to you resulted in your going to Poland to find Rocco, who is now dead. I’m leaving the room. The prosecutor in me doesn’t want to hear any further lies or confessions. If you and your aunt want to talk for a while, please help yourselves. I have to put the phone back on the hook. I have calls to make.”
“I haven’t lied,” Lucy says.
SIT DOWN,” SCARPETTA SAYS, as if Lucy is no longer a grown-up.
The lights are out in the living room, and the New York skyline surrounds them with its brilliant possibilities and soaring power. Scarpetta could stare at it for hours, the way she does the sea. Lucy sits next to her on Berger’s couch.
“This is a good place to be,” Scarpetta says, gazing out at millions of lights.
She looks for the moon but can’t find it behind buildings. Lucy is quietly crying.
“I’ve often wondered, Lucy, what would have happened had I been your real mother. Would you have adopted such a dangerous world and stormed through it so brazenly, so outrageously, so stunningly? Or would you be married with children?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” Lucy mutters, wiping her eyes.
“Maybe you would have been a Rhodes scholar, gone to Oxford and become a famous poet.”
Lucy looks at her to see if she’s joking. She’s not.
“A gentler life,” her aunt says softly. “I raised you, or, better stated, I attended to you as best I could and can’t imagine loving any child more than I did—and do—love you. But through my eyes, you found the ugliness in the world.”
“Through your eyes I found decency, humanity and justice,” Lucy replies. “I wouldn’t change anything.”
“Then why are you crying?” She picks out distant planes glowing like small planets.
“I don’t know.”
Scarpetta smiles. “That’s what you used to say when you were a little girl. Whenever you were sad and I’d ask you why, you’d say I don’t know. Therefore, my very astute diagnosis is that you are sad.”
Lucy wipes more tears from her face.
“I don’t know exactly what happened in Poland,” her aunt then says.
Shifting her position on the couch, Scarpetta arranges pillows behind her back, as if inviting a long story. She continues to look past Lucy, out windows into the glittering night, because it is harder for people to have difficult conversations while they are looking at each other.
“I don’t need you to tell me. But I think you need to tell me, Lucy.”
Her niece stares out at the city crowded around them. She thinks of dark, high seas and ships lit up. Ships mean ports, and ports mean the Chandonnes. Ports are the arteries for their criminal commerce. Rocco may have been only one vessel, but his connection to Scarpetta, to all of them, had to be severed.
Yes. It had to be.
Please forgive me, Aunt Kay. Please say it’s all right. Please don’t lose your respect for me and think I’ve become one of them.
“Ever since Benton died, you’ve been a Fury, a spirit o
f punishment, and there isn’t enough power in this entire city to satisfy your hunger for it,” Scarpetta talks on, still gently. “This is a good place for you to be,” she says, as both of them stare out at the lights of the most powerful city on Earth. “Because one of these days when you’re glutted with power, maybe you’ll realize that too much of it is unbearable.”
“You say that to explain yourself,” Lucy comments with no trace of rancor. “You were the most powerful medical examiner in the country, perhaps in the world. You were the Chief. Maybe it was unbearable, that power and admiration.”
Lucy’s beautiful face is not quite as sad now.
“So much has seemed unbearable,” Scarpetta replies. “So much. But no. I didn’t find my power unbearable when I was the Chief. I have found losing my power unbearable. You and I feel differently about power. I am not proving anything. You are always proving something when it is so unnecessary.”
“You haven’t lost it,” Lucy tells her. “Your removal from power was an illusion. Politics. Your true power has never been imposed by the outside world, and it follows that the outside world can’t take it away from you.”
“What has Benton done to us?”
Her question startles Lucy, as if Scarpetta somehow knows the truth.
“Since he died . . . I still can scarcely bring myself to say that word. Died.” She pauses. “Since then it seems the rest of us have gone to ruin. Like a country under seige. One city falling after another. You, Marino, me. Mostly you.”
“Yes, I am a Fury.” Lucy gets up, moves to the window and sits cross-legged on Jaime Berger’s splendid antique rug. “I am the avenger. I admit it. I feel the world is safer, that you are safer, all of us are safer with Rocco dead.”
“But you can’t play God. You’re not even a sworn law-enforcement officer anymore, Lucy. The Last Precinct is private.”
“Not exactly. We are a satellite of international law enforcement, work with them, usually behind the curtain of Interpol. We are empowered by other high authorities I can’t talk to you about.”
“A high authority that empowered you to legally rid the world of Rocco Caggiano?” Scarpetta asks. “Did you pull the trigger, Lucy? I need to know that. At least that.”
Lucy shakes her head. No, she didn’t pull the trigger. Only because Rudy insisted on firing that round and having gunpowder and tiny drops of Rocco’s blood blow back on his hands, not hers. Rocco’s blood on Rudy’s hands. That wasn’t fair, Lucy tells her aunt.
“I shouldn’t have allowed Rudy to put himself through that. I take equal responsibility for Rocco’s death. Actually, I take full responsibility, because it was by my instigation that Rudy went on the mission to Poland.”
They talk until late, and when Lucy has relayed all that happened in Szczecin, she awaits her aunt’s condemnation. The worst punishment would be exile from Scarpetta’s life, just as Benton has been exiled from it.
“I’m relieved that Rocco’s dead,” Scarpetta says. “What’s done is done,” she adds. “At some point, Marino will want to know what really happened to his son.”
DR. LANIER SOUNDS AS IF he is on the mend, but he is as taut as a cocked catapult.
“You got a safe place for me to stay down there?” Scarpetta asks him over the phone inside her single room at the Melrose Hotel at 63rd and Lexington.
She opted not to spend the night with Lucy, resisting her niece’s persistent urging. Staying with her would make it impossible for Scarpetta to leave for the airport in the morning without Lucy’s knowing.
“The safest place in Louisiana. My guest house. It’s small. Why? Now you know I can’t afford consultants . . . .”
“Listen,” she cuts him off. “I’ve got to go to Houston first.” She avoids being specific. “I can’t get down your way for at least another day.”
“I’ll pick you up. Just tell me when.”
“If you could arrange a rental car for me, that’s what would work best. I have no idea about anything right now. I’m too tired. But I’d rather take care of myself and not inconvenience you. I just need directions to your house.”
She writes them down. They seem simple enough.
“Any particular kind of car?”
“A safe one.”
“I know all about that,” the coroner replies. “I’ve peeled enough people out of unsafe cars. I’ll get my secretary on it first thing.”
TRIXIE LEANS AGAINST THE COUNTER, smoking a menthol cigarette and glumly watching Marino pack a large ice chest with beer, luncheon meats, bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, and whatever his huge hands grab out of the refrigerator.
“It’s way past midnight,” Trixie complains, fumbling for a bottle of Corona in a longneck bottle that she clogged by stuffing in too large a slice of lime. “Come on to bed and then you can leave, can’t you? Don’t that make more sense than zooming out of here, half-lit and all upset, in the middle of the night?”
Marino has been drunk since he returned from Boston, sitting in front of the TV, refusing to answer the phone, refusing to talk to anyone, not even to Lucy or Scarpetta. About an hour ago, he was kicked hard by a message on his cell phone from Lucy’s office. That sobered him enough to pry him out of his reclining chair.
Trixie holds the bottle straight up and tries to push the lime away with her tongue. She succeeds, and beer gushes into her mouth and over her chin. Not so long ago, Marino would have found this hilarious. Now nothing will make him smile. He jerks open the freezer door, pulling out the container of ice cubes and dumping them into the chest. Trixie, whose real name is Teresa, is thirty years old and not even a year ago moved into Marino’s small house in its blue-collar neighborhood, right off Midlothian Turnpike on the wrong side of the James River in Richmond.
He lights a cigarette and looks at her, at her face, puffy from booze, the mascara so chronically smeared under her eyes that it looks tattooed on. Her platinum hair has been scalded by so many treatments that Marino hates to touch it, told her once while he was drunk that it felt like insulation. Some of her hurt feelings are permanently crippled, and when Marino catches a glimpse of them hobbling out of her eyes or mouth, he leaves the room, either with his thoughts or his feet.
“Please don’t go.” Trixie sucks hard on a cigarette and shoots the smoke out of the side of her mouth, barely inhaling. “I know what you’re doing. You ain’t coming back, that’s what. I saw what you’ve been packing in your truck. Guns, your bowling ball, even your trophies and fishing poles. Not to mention your usual clothes, nothing nice like those suits that have been hanging in the closet since Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments.”
She steps in front of him and grabs his arm as he rearranges ice in the chest, smoke making him squint.
“I’ll call ya. I’ve got to get to Louisiana, and you know it. The Doc’s down there, or is about to be down there. I know her. I know damn well what she’s gonna do. She don’t have to tell me. You don’t want her dead, Trixie.”
“I’m so fucking tired of the Doc this and the Doc that!” Her face darkens, and she shoves Marino’s hand away, as if touching had been his idea, not hers. “Ever since I’ve known you, it’s been the Doc this and the Doc that. She’s the only woman in your life, if you’re honest about it. I’m just the second-draft choice in your basketball game of life.”
Marino winces. He can’t stand Trixie’s colorful near-miss expressions, which remind him of a piano out of tune.
“I’m just the girl who sits out the dance in the prom that is your life,” she continues the drama, and by now that’s all it is.
A drama. Like a bad soap opera.
Their fights are by rote, for the most part, and although Marino has a special aversion to psychology, not even he can avoid an insight as big as a mountain. He and Trixie fight about everything because they fight about nothing.
Her fat bare feet with their chipped red-painted nails pat across the kitchen as she paces, wildly waving her plump arms, cigarette ashes snowing down on the stain
ed linoleum floor. “Well, you just go on to Louisiana and get with the Doc this and that, and by the time you come back—if you ever do—maybe someone else will be living in this dump of yours and I’ll be gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.”
Half an hour ago, Marino asked her to put his house on the market. She can live in it until it sells.
Her flower-printed acetate robe flutters around her feet as she paces, her breasts sagging over the sash she keeps tightening around her thick waist. Marino feels pangs of anger and guilt. When Trixie nags him about Scarpetta, he flies out of control like a pissed-off bird out of a knothole, with no place to go, no way to defend himself, no way to counterattack, not really.
His wounded ego can’t be assuaged by implying indiscretions with Scarpetta that unfortunately have never occurred. So the arrows of the jealous Trixies in his life find their spot and draw their blood. Marino isn’t bothered that he’s lost every woman he’s ever had. He’s bothered by the one he never got, and Trixie’s tantrum is mounting dangerously close to the necessary crescendo that will bring about the necessary coda.
“You’re so crazy for her it’s disgusting,” Trixie yells. “You’re nothing but a big redneck to her. That’s all you’ll ever be. A big, fat, stupid redneck!” she shrieks. “And I don’t care if she ends up dead! Dead is all she knows anyhow!”
Marino picks up the ice chest as if it weighs nothing and walks through his shabby, cluttered living room and stops at the front door. He looks around at the thirty-six-inch color TV—not a new one, but a Sony and plenty nice. He stares sadly at his favorite reclining chair, where it seems he has spent most of his life, and he feels an ache so deep it’s a cramp in his bowels. He imagines how many hours he has spent half-drunk, watching football and wasting his time and efforts on the likes of Trixie.
She’s not a bad woman. She’s not evil. None of them have been. They’re simply pitiful, and he is even more pitiful than any of them because he has never insisted on more for himself, and he could have.
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