Black notice (9 page)

I couldn't stand to hear her talk this way.

"Of course, the victim's undercover, too," Lucy went on as big, dark crows began making rude noises and lights went on across the street.

I noticed candles in windows and wreaths on doors. I had given virtually no thought to Christmas and it would be here in less than three weeks. Lucy dug her wallet out of her back pocket and showed me her driver's license. The photograph was her, but nothing else was.

"Terry Jennifer Davis," she read to me. "White female, twenty-four years old, five-six, one hundred and twenty-one pounds. It's really strange to be someone else. You ought to see my setup down there, Aunt Kay. I got this cool little house in South Beach and drive a Benz V -twelve sports car confiscated in a drug raid in Sao Paulo. Sort of silver, smoky.

And you ought to see my Glock. A collector's model: Forty caliber, stainless steel slide, small. Talk about sweet."

The poison was beginning to suffocate me. It cast a purple hue behind my eyes and made my hands and feet go numb.

"Lucy, how 'bout we cut the show and tell," Jo said, sensing how all this was affecting me. "It's like your watching her do an autopsy. Maybe more than you want to know, right?"

"She's let me watch," Lucy bragged on. "I've seen maybe half a dozen."

Jo was getting annoyed now.

"Police academy demos." My niece shrugged. "No axe murders."

I was rocked by her insensitivity. It was as if she were talking about restaurants.

"Usually people who died of natural causes or suicide. Families donate the bodies to the anatomical division."

Her words drifted around me like noxious gas.

"So it doesn't bother them if Uncle Tim or Cousin Beth is autopsied in front of a bunch of cops. Most of the families can't afford a burial anyway, and might in fact get paid something for body donations, isn't that right, Aunt Kay?"

"No, they don't, and bodies donated by families to science are not used for demo autopsies," I said, appalled. "What in God's name is wrong with you?" I lashed out at her.

Bare trees were spidery against the overcast dawn, and two Cadillacs drove past. I felt people staring at us.

"I hope you don't plan on making this tough act a habit." I dashed my cold words in her face. "Because it sounds stupid enough when ignorant, lobotomized people do it. And for the record, Lucy, I have let you watch three autopsies, and although police academy demos may not have been axe murders, the cases were human beings. Someone loved those three dead people you saw. Those three dead people had feelings. In love, happy, sad. They ate dinner, drove to work, went on vacations."

"I didn't dean . .~." Lucy started to say.

"You can be sure when those three poor people were alive they never thought they'd end up in a morgue with twenty rookies and some kid. like you staring at their naked, opened-up bodies," I went on. "Would you want them to hear what you just said?"

Lucy's eyes brightened with tears. She swallowed hard and looked away.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Kay," she quietly replied.

"Because it's always been my belief you ought to imagine the dead listening when you speak. Maybe they hear those sophomoric jokes and asides. For sure, we hear them. What does it do to you when you hear yourself say them or hear someone else say them?"

"Aunt Kay . . : "

"I'll tell you what it does to you," I said with simmering fury. "You end up just like this."

I threw my hand out as if introducing the world to her, as she looked on, stunned.

"You end up doing just what I'm doing right now," I said. "Standing on a driveway as the sun comes up. Imagining someone you love in a fucking morgue. Imagine people making fun of him, joking, making comments about the size of his penis or how much he stinks. Maybe they banged him around a little too hard on the table. Maybe halfway into the goddamn job they threw a towel over his empty chest cavity and went to lunch. And maybe cop wandering in and out on other cases made comments about crispy critters or being burned by a snitch or FBIflambe."

Lucy and Jo were staring at me in astonishment.

"Don't think I haven't heard it all;" I said, unlocking my car door and yanking it open. "A life passing through indifferent hands and cold air and water. Everything so cold, cold, cold. Even if he had died in bed, it's all so cold in the end. So don't you talk to me about autopsies."

I slid behind the wheel.

"Don't you ever wave an attitude around me, Lucy." I couldn't seem to stop.

My voice seemed to be coming from another room. It even occurred to me that I was losing my mind. Wasn't this what happened when people went insane? They stood outside themselves and watched themselves do things that really weren't them, like killing someone or walking off a window ledge.

"Mese things ring in your head like a bell forever," I said. "Slamming their ugly clapper against the sides of your skull. It isn't true that words will never hurt you. Because yours just hurt the hell out of me," I said to my niece. "Go back to Miami."

Lucy was paralyzed as I jammed my car into drive and sped off, a back tire bumping over the granite border. I caught her and Jo in my rearview mirror. They were saying something to each other, and then getting inside their rental car. My hands shook so badly I couldn't light a cigarette until I was stopped in traffic.

I didn't let Lucy and Jo catch up with me. I turned off on the Ninth Street exit and imagined them flying by toward I-64, heading to the airport, back to their lives of undercover crime.

"Goddamn you;" I muttered to my niece.

My heart slammed against me, as if trying to break free.

"Goddamn you, Lucy." I wept.

The new building where I worked was the eye of a fierce storm of development I never could have imagined when I moved into it in the seventies. I remembered feeling rather betrayed when I charged in from Miami just as Richmond's businesses decided to charge out to neighboring counties and malls. People stopped shopping and dining downtown, especially at night.

The city's historic character turned victim to neglect and crime until the mid-nineties, when Virginia Commonwealth University began to reclaim and revitalize what had been relegated to ruin. It seemed that handsome buildings began springing up almost overnight, all of similar brick and glass design. My office and morgue shared space with the labs and the recently established Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, which was the first training academy of its type in the country, if not the world.

I even had a choice parking space near the lobby door, where I sat in my car this moment gathering my belongings and my spinning thoughts. I had childishly turned off my car phone so Lucy couldn't get hold of me after I'd sped off. I turned it on now, hoping it would ring. I stared at it. The last time I had acted like this was after Benton and I had had our worst fight and I ordered him to leave my house and never come back. I unplugged my phones, only to plug them back in an hour later and panic when he didn't call.

I looked at my watch. Lucy would be boarding her flight in less than an hour. I considered calling USAir and having her paged. I was shocked and humiliated by the way I had behaved. I felt powerless because I couldn't apologize to someone named Terry Davis who didn't have an aunt Kay or an accessible phone number and lived somewhere in South Beach.

I looked pretty rough when I walked into the glass-block and terrazzo lobby. Jake, who worked the security desk, noticed right away.

"Good morning, Dr. Scarpetta," he said with his usual nervous eyes and hands. "You don't look like you're feeling so hot."

"Good morning, Jake," I replied. "How are you?"

"Same-o, same-o. Except the weather's supposed to start turning real fast and get nasty, and I could do without that."

He was clicking a pen open and shut.

"Can't seem to get rid of this pain in my back, Dr. Scarpetta. It's right between my shoulder blades."

He rolled his shoulders and neck.

"Sort of pinches like something's caught back there. Happened after I was lifting weights the other day. What do you think I should do? Or do I need to write you?"

I thought he was trying to be funny, but he wasn't smiling.

"Moist heat. Lay off the weights for a while;" I said.

"Hey, thanks. How much you charge?"

"You can't afford me, Jake."

He grinned. I swiped my computer card over the electronic lock on the door outside my office door and the lock clicked free. I could hear my clerks, Cleta and Polly, talking and 'typing. The phones were already ringing and it wasn't even seven-thirty yet.

". . . It's really, really bad."

"You think people from other countries smell different when they decompose?"

"Come on, Polly. How stupid is that?"

They were tucked inside their gray cubicles, sifting through autopsy photographs and entering data into computers, cursors jumping field to field.

"Better get some coffee while you can," Cleta greeted me with a judgmental look on her face.

"If that ain't the truth." Polly smacked the return key.

"I heard," I said:

"Well, I'm keeping my mouth shut:' .said Polly, who couldn't if she tried.

Cleta made a zipping motion across her lips without missing a keystroke.

"Where is everyone?"

"In the morgue," Cleta told me. "We've got eight cases today."

"You've lost a lot of weight, Cleta," I said, collecting death certificates from my inner-office mailbox.

"Twelve and a half pounds;" she exclaimed as she dealt gory photographs like playing cards, arranging them by case numbers. "Thank you for noticing. I'm glad somebody 'round here does."

"Damn," I said, glancing at the death certificate on top of my stack. "You think we might ever convince Dr. Carmichael that `cardiac arrest' is not a cause of death? Everyone's heart stops when he dies. The question is why did it stop. Well, that one gets amended."

I flipped through more certificates as I followed the long teal- and plum-carpeted hallway to my corner office. Rose worked in an open space with plenty of windows, and it wasn't possible to reach my door without entering her airspace. She was standing before an open filing cabinet drawer, fingers impatiently fluttering through labeled tabs.

"How are you?" she asked around a pen clamped in her mouth. "Marino's looking for you:'

"Rose, we need to get Dr. Carmichael on the line."

"AgainT>

"'Fraid so."

"He rinds to retire."

My secretary had been saying this for years. She pushed the drawer shut and pulled open another one.

"Why is Marino looking for me? Did he call me from home?"

She took the pen out of her mouth.

"He's here. Or was. Dr: Scarpetta, do you remember that letter you got last month from that hateful woman?"

"Which hateful woman?" I asked, looking up and down the hallway for Marino and seeing no sign of him.

- `"The one in prison for murdering her husband right after she took out a million-dollar fife insurance policy on him."

"Oh, that one," I said.

I slipped off my suit jacket as I walked into my office _ and set my briefcase on the floor.

"Why is Marino looking for me?" I asked again.

Rose didn't answer. I had noticed she was getting hard of hearing, and every reminder of her encroaching frailties frightened me. Lput the death certificates on top of a stack of about a hundred others I hadn't gotten around to reviewing yet and draped my suit jacket over my chair.

"Point is," Rose loudly said, "she's since sent you another letter. This time accusing you of racketeering."

I retrieved my lab coat from the back of the door.

"She claims you conspired with the insurance company and changed her husband's manner of death from accident to homicide so they wouldn't have to pay out the money. And for this you got quite a large kickback, which is-according to her--how you can afford your Mercedes and expensive suits."

I threw my lab coat over my shoulders and pushed my arms through the sleeves.

"You know, I can't keep up with the crazies anymore, Dr. Scarpetta. Some of them really frighten me, and I think the Internet is making all of it worse."

Rose peeked around the doorway.

"You aren't listening to a word I'm saying," she said.

"I get suits on sale," I replied. "And you blame everything on the Internet."

I probably wouldn't bother shopping for clothes at all if Rose didn't force me out the door every now and then when stores were clearing out last season's styles. I hated shopping, unless it was for good wine or food. I hated crowds. I hated malls. Rose hated the Internet and believed the world would end one day because of it. I'd had to force her to use e-mail.

"If Lucy calls, will you make sure I get it no matter where I am?" I said as Marino walked into Rose's office. "And try her field office, too. You can patch her through."