Flesh and Blood

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’m sorry about Beth Eastman.” I haven’t really said that to him yet.

  “The first girl I went steady with. It’s kind of unbelievable to look at each other now. I kind of wish I hadn’t and the truth is there’s no going back. I remember when she was on the homecoming court, you know, the prom and all that shit,” Marino slurs. “Lucy’s stuff about Carrie is just ridiculous any way you look at it, Doc, and I think she should see a shrink and she’d better get a damn good lawyer.”

  When I don’t reply he’s silent for a moment.

  Then he says, “You’re not telling me you believe her, that you think we should be chasing a fucking ghost?”

  “There’s no physical evidence that Carrie Grethen is dead,” I reply. “Only circumstances and a long silence that could very well be explained if she was living in another country for the last decade or longer.”

  “What Lucy needs is a shrink and a lawyer, Doc. The best she can find. I know the friggin’ FBI’s sniffing around her. Some suit called me asking questions but I didn’t give him shit.”

  I hear the spurt of a lighter.

  “There’s a lot going on at home and maybe she’s not thinking right,” says Marino the de facto big brother, the de facto uncle who taught Lucy how to shoot, how to drive his truck and ride a motorcycle while she taught him how to be tolerant. “You know, the stuff with Janet’s nephew. They’ve already fixed up a room for him and Lucy doesn’t want a kid. Let’s be honest. She’d probably suck at it.”

  Tears sting my eyes. He knew before I did, and I hear him smoking. I tell him to be safe and not stay up all night. I sit on the edge of the bed staring down at my phone until my vision is swimming and what I see is the dark road dividing FBI field offices from firing ranges and then a clearing, barbecues and picnic tables beneath the dense shapes of trees. The wind is humid and smells like summer. As the wind moves through leaves it sounds like rain, and their voices drift toward me. I hear the spurt of a match being struck.

  I can’t hear what they’re saying as I get closer in the dark and a lit cigarette glows as it’s passed back and forth. The FBI Academy when Lucy was barely more than a child, and her voice was wounded and filled with longing. Carrie’s was soothing and in command as they shared a cigarette and it was then I knew.

  Why did it have to be you? Why did it have to be you!

  I remember what I sensed and what happened when I said it.

  I saw you in the picnic area the other night. I brought it up in normal conversation as if it was nothing.

  So now you’re spying on me. Lucy said it as if she hated me. Don’t waste your sermons.

  I’m not judging. Help me understand.

  The child I had helped raise was gone. I didn’t know this Lucy and I agonized over what I’d done wrong. What had I done to make this happen, to make her choose something so damaging and dangerous?

  You can’t possibly make me anything, she said, and it wasn’t what I meant.

  What I meant is the same thing I would mean if I were saying those words to her now. Her first taste of solid food shouldn’t have been poison, and all these years and what I’ve felt, and I would eradicate Carrie Grethen from the face of the earth easily. It dismays me how little I’d care if I could make her dead, really dead and forgotten. Maybe I should be ashamed that I loathe anyone that much but it’s true of human nature. People are more alike than they’re not.

  “I’M SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. This is Doctor Scarpetta.” I have Benton’s field office on the line.

  “How can I help you, ma’am?”

  “I’m looking for my husband.”

  “Who’s your husband, ma’am?” Some young agent working the desk on midnight shift, the usual wooden demeanor that makes me want to touch him with a cattle prod.

  “I’m Doctor Scarpetta. Benton Wesley’s wife.”

  “What can I do for you?” he says and my anger burns colder, harder like frostbite.

  “I’m trying to reach him. It’s important and please stop saying ma’am.”

  “I’m not allowed to give out information …”

  “I’m the chief medical examiner. I’m his wife and it’s urgent I get hold of him.”

  “Have you tried leaving a message?”

  “No. I’m too stupid to think of that.”

  “No offense intended, ma’am. I’ll pass along the message. I believe he’s tied up right now.”

  “You believe?” It’s all I can do not to yell at him.

  “When he checks in next I’ll make sure he knows you called.”

  “Checks in from where?”

  “I’m sorry but …”

  I hang up on him and throw my phone on the bed and it bounces. I go to the minibar and open the door. I find another gin but put it back. I grab a bottle of water and turn off the lights. I wait for it all to go away like an awful dream but it can’t.

  CHAPTER 45

  I SNAP ON A LAMP and imagine distant gunfire. Not an explosive noise or a sharp crack but more like the dull snap of a raw carrot, a celery stalk, a green pepper I break in my bare hands. I envision my kitchen and remember I’m not home.

  I turn off the alarm on my phone after a poor night’s sleep. It seems I was awake every hour, speculating, working out problems, worrying about Lucy as Carrie Grethen ranged back and forth through my mind like a rabid animal. I saw her eyes and the way she used to pierce me with her stare. I know she wanted to hurt me. I know she wanted me dead. I sit up in bed.

  Soft light illuminates antique furniture, cut glass fixtures with ivory shades, the wallpaper creamy damask. I remember where I am. The Madison Hotel. On the fourth floor, a corner room facing the courtyard and my attention finds a space between the floral drawn drapes, complete darkness showing through. I feel a tug of impatience and my awareness kicks up a notch.

  Despite my efforts the drapes didn’t stay completely closed even after I propped a chair in front of them, shoving the heavy fabric panels together, pinning them against the glass. At some point they crept open and as I stare at the black vacuum in the gap I’m reminded of what Nietzsche said: When you look into the abyss, it also looks into you. I lower my feet to the floor and rearrange the chair.

  I’m not afraid of the dark but have no intention of making it easy for someone to spy on me as I read or work on my laptop with lights off or worse as I sleep. All it would take is a high-resolution night vision scope and then Carrie is there. I feel her inescapable presence. I turn to see her and she steps around me. Whichever way I look she’s behind me like a long shadow when the sun is in my face.

  Predators watch their quarry. It starts with the eyes.

  Benton penned those words in sepia ink on a sheet of watermarked stationery, his initials BW engraved in an understated script, no address, phone number or personal information. I still have the letter, the first one he wrote to me more than twenty years ago when he was married to someone else. I feel empty from missing him but at least he’s safe, texting me at three A.M. to say he’d call. He hasn’t yet. I point the remote at the TV to catch the news.

  The usual economic woes, local crimes and disasters. A small plane crash, four killed. A fire, two hospitalized with smoke inhalation. I remove my bags from the closet and set them on the bed as the anchorwoman begins an update on Bob Rosado.

  “… His body was transported to the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office last night but still no details about what might have caused the congressman’s death while he was scuba diving off his yacht late yesterday,” she reports. “Let’s go to Sue Lander and see what she has for us. Sue? Good morning.”

  The dark back parking lot of the medical examiner’s office materializes. White scene vehicles and palm trees are barely visible in the glow of sodium vapor lights, and the correspondent named Sue grips a microphone, a blank look on her face, then recognition that she’s on the air.

  She says, “Good morning.”

  “Sue? What’s happening at this early hour in South Florida? H
ave there been any updates?”

  “There was quite a media presence here most of the night but now you can see how quiet it is. What we do know is Doctor Raine drove out of this parking lot about two hours ago and hasn’t come back.”

  More footage, this time the silhouette of the flat-roofed one-story stucco complex, the bay door loudly cranking open and the sound of a rumbling engine as a white SUV drives out, headlights blazing on hibiscus bushes. A pack of correspondents and a constellation of shoulder-mounted lighted cameras surge forward, and through the driver’s window Abe Raine’s face is resolute. He won’t look at anyone and that’s not like him. Young, energetic, a former quarterback for Notre Dame, he’s not the sort to duck a confrontation with journalists or anyone else.

  “Doctor Raine?”

  “Doctor Raine!”

  “Can you tell us what’s going on with …”

  “Do you know what killed Congressman Rosado?”

  “Any suggestion of foul play?”

  Their answer is ruby red taillights as the chief medical examiner drives slowly through the parking lot, past the void of an artificial lake, then gone, and we’re back to the Morristown news desk.

  “So he was there all night, Sue? That’s a little unusual?”

  “He was inside the building until just two hours ago as I’ve mentioned,” her voice says off camera. “And the most recent statement released by his office confirms that the autopsy will be finished today.”

  Finished? I think. That’s a strange way to put it. I take off the loose cotton scrubs I slept in and find clothes I brought for my idea of yoga, which is mostly stretching, staying limber. My personal time as I call it. I do it alone in my room. Spandex shorts, a sleeveless top with a built-in bra.

  “Then it’s definitely not been done yet. Maybe they’re waiting for special tests?” the anchorwoman suggests and that can’t be the reason.

  Knowing Raine as well as I do, I don’t accept that he wouldn’t do the autopsy immediately in such a high-profile fatality, and certainly the delay has nothing to do with any types of tests he might order. The longer he waits the more he’ll be swarmed by the media, and the rumors will get legs—which is what’s already happening.

  Assuming the jurisdiction is his and probably isn’t anymore.

  I revisit the same suspicion I began to entertain late last night when the news first broke, only now I feel a certainty, an inevitability. I envision Raine sequestered in his office on the phone making arrangements, discussing strategies, taking directions and orders. I’m betting he’s handed off the case like a hot potato, and there’s at least one good reason for him to do that.

  Florida’s Sunshine Law makes state government records accessible to the public, including photographs, reports and any other documented information related to a medicolegal investigation. If Raine wanted absolute discretion there’s a way to ensure it. All he had to do is request assistance from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner (AFME) and the FBI. He can legitimately claim that Rosado was a federal government official and therefore not Florida’s problem.

  He could have called me but the proper protocol was to go straight to my boss, John Briggs, and I suspect that both of them have an inkling about other disturbing factors. Rosado died suddenly when it was only a matter of time, perhaps only hours or days away before he would be publically sullied by serious crimes. Gracie Smithers’s murder and his son Troy’s part in it, a murdered insurance investigator linked to Rosado’s real estate and of course the possibility of money laundering and a crisis manager, a psychopath named Carrie Grethen who isn’t dead.

  Gordian knot, a knot impossible to unravel, and Alexander the Great solved the problem by cutting through it with his sword, in other words by cheating. A provocative name for a corporation and I wonder who came up with it and then she’s in my mind again. It’s the sort of cryptic name she would conceive, one that hints of using violence whenever it suits or in her case whenever she pleases.

  She doesn’t work alone.

  Her Clydes as Lucy used to call them. Carrie has always had a killing partner. Temple Gault. Newton Joyce. There probably have been others and her newest might be Troy Rosado, and that bends my thoughts back around to my niece. She was a teenager, about the same age as Troy when she and Carrie worked together at Quantico and began a relationship that hasn’t ended, I don’t care what Lucy claims.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed with my laptop I log on to the Internet to see what else I can find about Rosado’s death, and the most complete coverage is in the New York Times. There’s little that’s not already on the news, a few additional details from police and first responders who wouldn’t allow their names to be used.

  The fifty-two-year-old congressman died at approximately six P.M. while diving the Mercedes, a German freighter sunk in the 1980s, now an artificial reef in ninety feet of water barely a mile offshore. He chose to dive the shipwreck late in the day because he didn’t want other divers or their boats around, not only for privacy reasons but also for his safety.

  As chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on border and maritime security he was a potential target for drug cartels and organized crime, and if what Lucy says is true he was a bigger thief than anyone who might be out to get him. For his first dive of the day, I continue to read, he was witnessed stepping off the dive platform, taking his giant stride into the ocean. He was floating on the surface with his buoyancy control device, his BCD vest inflated, when it appeared his tank malfunctioned. A sudden release of pressurized gas made “several loud popping sounds” and spun him into the air.

  Why several?

  I ponder this as the anchorwoman starts in on the local weather, warning that the high today in New Jersey will be record setting.

  Popping sounds, as in more than one?

  I flick off the TV and skim for an explanation, finding nothing further, only theories and wild speculations. His neck was broken. An O-ring was loose or failed. Someone tampered with the first stage of his regulator. A bomb was attached to the anchor line. A shark got him. His gear was sabotaged by the Mafia. Maybe his wife wanted him gone. I decide against my floor exercises. I sit on the bed and think. I wait for my phone to ring because I’m sure it will.

  General Briggs is an early riser. He’s usually up by four. Unless he’s somewhere else, Florida for example, he should be in his office at Dover Air Force Base port mortuary where several years ago I spent long months of radiologic training. I wait a few more minutes, pacing the room, and there’s no answer at his office. I try his cell with no better luck. Maybe he’s still at home and I enter that number.

  The phone rings three times, then, “Hello?”

  “Ruthie?”

  “Yes?” His wife sounds barely awake and startled. “Oh my God. Kay? Is he all right?”

  “Is there a reason he might not be?”

  “Then you’re not with him.” She sounds congested and upset from crying.

  “No. I’m sorry to call so early. I woke you up. I was hoping to speak to him about the Rosado case in Florida.”

  “I assumed you might be with him.” Her voice is shaky and depressed.

  “No, I’m in New Jersey,” I reply.

  “I see. John’s down there and whatever’s happened exactly? I don’t know but I can tell you he was very stressed. He flew out the door last night like a bat out of hell right after he got the phone call.”

  “About the congressman?”

  “A few minutes before seven last night.”

  I was on the range then and Benton wasn’t answering his phone.

  “As much as he hates the CIA as you well know since it seems to be their favorite pastime to harass him? Spying, showing up with their latest accusation about him leaking information,” she says and I didn’t know she was so paranoid.

  In fact she sounds almost hysterical.

  “And you know what I say? I say John? How are you any different? A life of secrets, lies and threats of being locked up i
n Leavenworth. There. If anybody’s tapping our phone I don’t care. I turn fifty next week and … Life is short and I don’t need to tell you that. Will you talk to him?”

  “About what exactly?”

  “His blood pressure and cholesterol are through the roof. He has Raynaud’s syndrome and had to have his beta-blocker changed because his heartbeat is so slow he was almost blacking out. He’s not supposed to dive! He was specifically told not to!”

  “He’s planning on diving?”

  “He took his gear so what do you think? And it’s strictly against his doctor’s orders but you know how he is. Everything he sees, everything that kills people and he believes it will never happen to him!” She starts to sob. “We got in a big fight about it before he left. Please don’t let him. I don’t want to lose my husband.”

  CHAPTER 46

  MOVING THE CHAIR AWAY from the sliding doors, I step out onto the balcony, the concrete warm and dry beneath my bare feet.

  I know how stubborn Briggs can be, and scuba diving is out of the question right now especially if strenuous underwater searching is involved. Hard-boiled Army he’s fearless. He thinks he’s invincible. He’s ungracious about aging and fiercely proud. He’ll kill himself if he’s not careful. I will have to outmaneuver him.

  Stagnant air settles over me as I check the weather app on my phone. It’s already eighty-six degrees at five A.M., hotter than South Florida, which is a balmy seventy-three with afternoon thunderstorms expected. The sound of traffic is a constant rush like a heavy surf or the wind. A power line hums. If diving is required then something needs to be recovered and I wonder what it is.

  I look down at the illuminated swimming pool as blue as turquoise in the hot darkness four floors below. I can barely make out red umbrellas furled like rock candy swizzle sticks and white lounge chairs lined up like piano keys. I return to the coolness of the living room and check flights into Fort Lauderdale. There’s a nonstop Virgin America flight out of Newark in two and a half hours.