“Don’t be calling me doctor, either,” Eric says. “For the good reason that I’m not one.”
He gets inside the car, giving up on telling Scarpetta where to sit.
“Hell, the only time you were a doctor was when you were, what?” Dr. Lanier starts the engine. “Ten, maybe twelve years old, and molesting all the little girls in your neighborhood? Jesus God, I hate parking between concrete damn pillars.”
“They have a way of moving in on you, don’t they, Sam?” Eric turns around and winks at Scarpetta. “They grab at his ve-hicle on a regular basis. Look over there.” He points at a concrete support gouged and streaked with black paint. “If you were working that crime scene, what would you conclude?” He peels cellophane off a pack of Dentyne chewing gum. “Let me give you a clue. That used to be the coroner’s parking place, but not so long ago, the coroner—guess which one, and there’s only one—complained it was way too narrow, and he’d be goddamned if he was parking there.”
“Now, don’t tell all my secrets.” Dr. Lanier slowly creeps out of his spot. “Besides, it was my wife who did that bit of damage. She’s a worse driver than I am, for the record.”
“She’s a death investigator, too.” Eric turns around again. “Works for nothing, which is pretty much what the rest of us do.”
“Shit.” Dr. Lanier accelerates his high-speed-chase unit more than necessary inside a parking deck. “You get paid a hell of a lot more than you deserve.”
“Can we talk now?” Scarpetta asks.
“I’m pretty sure we can. Maybe people get into my office, hell if I know. But nobody touches my car, or my Harley,” Dr. Lanier replies.
In a firm, even voice, Scarpetta confronts him. “I happened to fly here with the Dards’ young son sitting on one side of me and your U.S. Attorney, Weldon Winn, on the other. In fact, I ended up having to drive Albert Dard home. You want to tell me what that’s about?”
“Scares the hell out of me.”
“The boy just happens to be in Miami, is suddenly whisked to the airport yesterday morning and routed through Houston and just happens to be on my flight to Baton Rouge. Just as Winn happens to be on my flight. And by the way, you don’t strike me as the sort who gets scared.”
“Two things. One, you don’t know me. Two, you don’t know here.”
“Where was Albert eight years ago when his mother died in that motel room?” Scarpetta asks. “Where was his father, and why is this mysterious father, quote, gone all the time, as the boy put it?”
“That I don’t know. What I can tell you is I’m familiar with Albert. Last year, I had to examine the kid in the ER, was given a heads-up, in other words, especially in light of his wealthy family and the mysterious death of his mother. He was committed to a private psychiatric hospital in New Orleans.”
“What on Earth for?” Scarpetta asks, adding, “A psychiatric history, and his family lets him travel alone?”
“But then he wasn’t alone, according to what you’ve told me. His uncle put him in the hands of airline attendants, who also, no doubt, saw to it that he got to his proper gate in Houston. Then, best of all, you took care of him the rest of the time. He’s not psychotic.
“The story is, three years ago last October, his aunt called nine-one-one and said her nephew—he was seven at the time, I believe—was bleeding badly and claimed to have been assaulted when he was out riding his bicycle. Story is, he was hysterical, scared out of his mind. Well, nobody assaulted that poor little kid, Kay. You said I could call you that. There was no evidence whatsoever of that. In fact, he’s a cutter. Into self-mutilation. Apparently, that started up again with him not long before I examined him in the ER. Which was a pretty damn awful experience.”
Scarpetta recalls the absence of knives in the Dard kitchen.
“You’re absolutely certain his injuries were self-inflicted?” she asks.
“I try not to be absolutely certain of anything. I don’t know of much that’s an absolute certainty except death,” Dr. Lanier replies. “But I found a lot of hesitation cuts. Just scratches, really. That’s significant for someone getting started in this unfortunate pattern of self-destruction. His cuts were minor, all in places within reach but not readily visible to others. Stomach. Thighs. Buttocks.”
“That would explain why I saw no scars when I was sitting next to him on the plane,” Scarpetta remarks. “I would have noticed.”
“What really disturbs me is the obvious,” he says. “Somebody wants you here in Baton Rouge. Why?”
“You tell me. You tell me who leaked my travel plans, because it seems the most likely suspect is you—or whoever else in your office knew I was coming.”
“I can see why you’d think that. No question about it. I knew enough to arrange the whole damn scenario, assuming I’m on friendly terms with Weldon Winn. And I’m not, can’t stand the son of a bitch. He’s dirtier than a landfill and got a lot of money. His explanation is he grew up with money. Well, guess what, he’s from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His father managed a golf course, and his mother worked like a dog as a nurse’s aid. The son of a bitch isn’t from shit.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Ask Eric.”
The death investigator turns around and smiles. “I started out with the FBI. Now and then, I can find my way out of a paper bag and look for things.”
“Point is, Weldon Winn is involved, deeply involved, with illegal activities,” Dr. Lanier continues. “Now, how anyone will ever prove that, or even care, is another matter. What is a fact is that a number of people arrested here over the years have somehow managed to escape Project Exile, didn’t get the automatic five years in federal prison added to their sentences for possession of a firearm while committing a crime. Our U.S. Attorney somehow overlooked those cases, as did the committee that’s supposed to track them.
“One of the reasons I’m given so much grief in my lovely city is because I won’t kowtow to the politicians. I’m up for reelection next year, and I’ve got a whole Noah’s ark full of assholes who would love for me not to be coroner anymore. I’m not appreciated by any of the bad guys, don’t socialize with them. I consider that a compliment.”
Scarpetta says, “You and I talked on the phone. Your office arranged my rental car.”
“A mistake. Damn stupid as hell of me. I should have done it myself, away from the office. My secretary is trustworthy. That certain clerk you just met may have overheard, snooped, I don’t know.”
They drive through a rather unremarkable area of Baton Rouge, at the edge of the university that dominates the town. Swamp Mama’s on 3rd Street is a popular hangout for students. Dr. Lanier parks in a tow-away zone and tosses an Officer of the Coroner’s red metal plate on the dash, as if lunch has suddenly turned into a crime scene.
MARINO TURNS INTO THE LOUISIANA AIR parking lot and stops cop-style, driver’s window to driver’s window, with Lucy’s SUV.
“Good man. You got rid of the truck,” Lucy commends him without saying hello. “Don’t need a monster-garage truck with Virginia plates around here.”
“Hey. I’m not stupid. Even if this is a piece of shit.”
His rental truck is a six-cylinder Toyota. It doesn’t even have mud flaps.
“Where’d you ditch it?” Lucy asks.
“The regular airport, long-term parking. Hope nobody breaks in to it. Everything I own’s in there. Even if it ain’t much.”
“Let’s go.”
They park, but not near each other.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Marino asks as they walk toward the FBO.
“Prowling. Seeing if he can find Rocco’s place in Spanish Town, the historic district where Rocco kept a place.”
She stops briefly at the desk. “The Bell four-oh-seven,” she says, not giving the tail number.
It isn’t necessary. Her helicopter is the only one on the tarmac at the moment. The woman at the desk pushes a button that unlocks the door. A Gulf Stream is starting its engi
nes, the roar painfully loud, and Lucy and Marino cover their ears, making sure they don’t walk around the back of the plane and get blasted with exhaust, a good way to smell like jet fuel, which is sure to give one a headache when confined to a small cockpit. They hurry to the helipad, which is at the outer edge of the tarmac, far away from planes, because people ignorant of helicopters assume their rotor wash will kick up rocks and sand and scour the paint right off fixed-wing aircraft.
Marino is ignorant of helicopters and doesn’t like them. He can barely force his massive body into the left seat, which doesn’t adjust. He can’t slide it back.
“Goddamn son of a bitch,” is all he says, loosening his harness as far as it will go.
Lucy has already done her usual thorough preflight, checks breakers and switches and throttle one last time and turns on the battery. She waits for automatic checks to go through their routines and she goes through hers, flipping on the generator. Headset on, she eases the throttle up to 100 RPMs. This is a time when the GPS will be of no value, nor will any other navigational instruments. A flight chart isn’t going to be of much use, either, so she spreads open a Baton Rouge map on her lap and runs her finger southeast, along Route 408, also known as Hooper Road.
“Where we’re going is off the map,” she says into her mike. “Lake Maurepas. We keep going in this direction, towards New Orleans, and hopefully don’t end up at Lake Pontchartrain. We’re not going that far, but if we do, we’ve overflown Lake Maurepas, and Blind River and Dutch Bayou. I don’t think that will happen.”
“Fly fast,” Marino says. “I hate helicopters, including yours.”
“On the go,” she announces and stabilizes into a hover, taking off into the wind.
SWAMP MAMA’S IS A BAR that smells like beer, with old vinyl booths and a stained, unvarnished wooden floor.
While an LSU student waiter takes drink orders, Eric and Dr. Lanier disappear into the men’s room.
“I tell you,” Eric says as they push through the restroom’s door. “I’d take her home with me any time. What about tonight?”
“She’s not interested in you,” Dr. Lanier says in a cadence that rises in pitch at the end of each sentence, causing his comments to sound like questions when they aren’t. “Come on now.”
“She’s not married.”
“Don’t be messing with my consultants, especially this one. She’ll eat you alive.”
“Oh, please, God. Let her.”
“Every time you get dumped by your latest girlfriend, you turn into a mental case.”
They are conducting this conversation at the urinals, one of the few places on the planet where they don’t mind having their backs to the door.
“I’m trying to figure out how to describe her,” Eric says. “Not pretty like your wife. Stronger-featured than that, and to me there’s nothing sexier than a really great body in a suit or maybe a uniform.”
“You’re goofy as a shit-eating fly. Don’t go buzzing around her geography, Eric.”
“I like those little glasses she wears, too. I wonder if she’s dating anybody. That suit doesn’t hide what’s important, you notice?”
“No, I didn’t notice.” Dr. Lanier vigorously scrubs his hands in the sink, as if he’s about to perform a heart transplant. “I’m blind. Don’t forget to wash up.”
Eric laughs as he moves to the sink, blasts on the hot water and pumps globs of pink soap into his palms. “No kidding, what if I ask her out, Boss? What harm could there be in that?”
“Maybe you should try her niece. She’s closer to your age. Very attractive and smart as hell. She might be too much of a handful for you. She’s also with a guy. But they didn’t sleep in the same room.”
“When do I meet her? Maybe tonight? You cook? Maybe we can go to Boutin’s?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I ate oysters last night.”
Dr. Lanier snatches paper towels out of a metal dispenser on the wall. He places a short stack of them on the edge of Eric’s sink. Walking out of the men’s room, he watches Scarpetta, noticing that every detail of her is unusual, even the way she reaches for her coffee, slowly, with deliberation, exuding confidence and power that has absolutely nothing to do with drinking coffee. She is scanning notes in a diary that has a black leather slipcover so she can refill it as often as needed. He suspects she is constantly refilling that diary. She’s the sort who would record any detail or conversation that in her mind might prove important. Her meticulousness goes beyond her training. He slides in next to her.
“I recommend the gumbo,” he says as his cell phone plays a thin, mechanical version of Beethoven’s Fifth.
“Wish you’d set your ringer on something else,” Eric comments.
“Lanier,” he answers. He listens for a minute, frowning, his eyes fixing on Eric. “I’m leaving right now.”
He gets up from the booth and tosses his napkin on the table.
“Come on,” he says. “We got a bad one.”
THE TERRAIN BETWEEN the Baton Rouge airport and Lake Maurepas is a series of swamps, waterways and creeks that make Lucy nervous.
Even with pop-out floats, she would worry about a forced landing. How anyone would get to them is a valid question, and she doesn’t want to imagine the reptiles that lurk in those dark waters, on mucky shores and in the shadows of moss-draped trees. In the baggage compartment, she always carries an emergency kit that includes handheld radios, water, protein bars and insect repellent.
Camouflaged in thick trees are duck blinds and an occasional fishing shack. She flies lower and slower but sees no signs of human occupation. In some areas, only a very small boat, perhaps an airboat, could work its way through narrow waterways that from the air look like veins reticulating through saw grass.
“See any gators down there?” she asks Marino.
“I ain’t looking for gators. And there ain’t nothing down there.”
As creeks move into rivers and Lucy spots a faint blue line on the horizon, they begin to reach civilization. The day is balmy and partly cloudy, good weather for being on the water. A lot of boats are out, and fishermen and people on pleasure crafts stare up at the helicopter. Lucy is careful not to fly too low, avoiding any appearance of surveillance. She’s just a pilot heading somewhere. Banking east, she starts looking for Blind River. She tells Marino to do the same.
“Why do you think they call it Blind River?” he says. “ ’Cause you can’t see it, that’s why.”
The farther east they go, the more fishing camps they see, most of them well cared for, with boats docked in front. Lucy spots a canal, turns around and follows its convolutions south as it gets wider and turns into a river that empties into the lake. Numerous foreboding canals branch out from the river, and she circles, getting lower, finding not a single fishing shack.
“If Talley baited that hook with the arm,” Lucy says, “then I have a feeling he’s hiding out not too far from here.”
“Well, if you’re right and keep circling, he damn well is going to see us,” Marino replies.
They head back, keeping up their scan, mostly concentrating on antennas and careful not to overfly petrochemical plants and find themselves intercepted. Lucy has spotted several bright orange Dauphine helicopters, the sort usually flown by the Coast Guard, which is now part of homeland security and constantly on alert for terrorists. Flying over a petrochemical plant is not a wise move these days. Flying into a thousand-foot antenna is worse. Lucy has pushed back the airspeed to ninety knots, in no hurry to return to the airport as she debates if now is the time to tell Marino the truth.
She won’t be able to look at him while airborne and keeping alert to avoid coming anywhere near obstacles. Her stomach tightens and her pulse speeds up.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she begins.
“You don’t have to say nothing,” he replies. “I already know.”
“How?” She is baffled and scared.
“I’m a detective, r
emember? Chandonne sent two sealed letters, one to you, one to me, both of them inside NAJ envelopes. You never let me read yours. Said it was a lot of deranged crap. I could’ve pushed, but something told me not to. Then next thing, you’ve disappeared, you and Rudy, and a couple days later I find out Rocco’s dead. All I ask is if Chandonne told you where to find him and gave you enough info to get Rocco pinned with a Red Notice.”
“Yes. I didn’t show you the letter. I was afraid you’d go to Poland yourself.”
“And do what?”
“What do you think? If you found him inside that hotel room and finally confronted him, saw him up close for what he was, what would you have done?”
“Probably the same thing you and Rudy did,” Marino says.
“I can tell you all the details.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Maybe you really couldn’t have done it yourself, Marino. Thank God you didn’t. He was your son,” she tells him. “And in some very hidden part of your heart, you loved him.”
“What hurts worse than him being dead is I never did,” he says.
THE FIRST BLOOD IS THREE feet inside the front door, a single drop the size of a dime, perfectly round with a stellate margin reminiscent of a buzzsaw blade.
Ninety-degree angle, Scarpetta thinks. A drop of blood moving through the air assumes an almost perfect spherical shape that is maintained on impact if the blood falls straight down, at a ninety-degree angle.
“She was upright, or someone was,” Scarpetta says.
She stands very still, her eyes moving from one drop to the next on the terra-cotta tile floor. At the edge of the rug in front of the couch is a bloody area that appears to have been smeared by a foot, as if the person who stepped on the blood-spotted tile slipped. Scarpetta moves in for a closer inspection, staring at the dry, dark red stain, then turning her head and meeting Dr. Lanier’s eyes. He comes over, and she points out an almost indiscernible partial footwear impression of a heel with a small undulating tread pattern that reminds Scarpetta of a child’s drawing of ocean waves.
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