Four Scarpetta Novels (33 page)

“I didn't.”

“What do you call it?”

“The worst thing I ever did,” Marino says.

Lucy won't take her eyes off his. “How about that silver-dollar necklace you got on? Where'd you get it?”

“You know where.”

“Shandy ever tell you about her potato-chip daddy's house getting burglarized not long before she moved here? Burglarized right after he died, matter of fact. Had a coin collection, some cash. All gone. Police suspect an inside job but couldn't prove it.”

“The gold coin Bull found,” Marino says. “She's never said nothing about a gold coin. The only coin I've seen is this silver dollar. How do you know Bull didn't lose it? He's the one who found that kid, and the coin's got the kid's print on it, right?”

“What if the coin was stolen from Shandy's dead daddy?” Lucy says. “What does that tell you?”

“She didn't kill the kid,” Marino says with a hint of doubt. “I mean, she's never said nothing about having kids. If the coin has anything to do with her, she probably gave it to somebody. When she gave me mine, she laughed, said it was a dog tag to remind me I was one of her soldiers. Belonged to her. I didn't know she meant it literally.”

“Getting her DNA's a fine idea,” Lucy says.

Marino gets up and walks off. He comes back with the red panties. Puts them in a sandwich bag. Hands it to Lucy.

“Kind of unusual you don't know where she lives,” Lucy says.

“I don't know nothing about her. That's the damn truth of it,” Marino says.

“I'll tell you exactly where she lives. This same island. A cozy little place on the water. Looks romantic. Oh. I forgot to mention, when I checked it out, I happened to notice a bike was there. An old chopper with a cardboard license tag, under a cover in the carport. Nobody was home.”

“I never saw it coming. I didn't use to be like this.”

“He's not going to come within a million miles of Aunt Kay again. I've taken care of him, because I don't trust you to do it. His chopper's old. A piece of junk with ape-hanger handlebars. I don't think it's safe.”

Marino won't look at her now. He says, “I didn't use to be like this.”

She opens the front door.

“Why don't you just get the hell out of our lives,” she says from his porch, in the rain. “I don't give a shit about you anymore.”

 

The old brick building watches Benton with empty eyes, many of its windows broken out. The abandoned cigar company has no lights, its parking lot completely dark.

His laptop computer is balanced on his thighs as he logs in to the port's wireless network, hijacks it, and waits inside Lucy's black Subaru SUV, a car not generally associated with law enforcement. Periodically, he looks out the windshield. Rain slowly slides down the glass, as if the night is crying. He watches the chain-link fence around the empty shipyard across the street, watches the shapes of containers abandoned like wrecked train cars.

“No activity,” he says.

Lucy's voice sounds in his earpiece. “Let's hold tight as long as you can.”

The radio frequency is a secure one. Lucy's technological skills are beyond Benton, and he's not naïve. All he knows is she has ways of securing this and that, and scramblers, and she thinks it's great she can spy on others and they can't spy on her. He hopes she's right. About that and a lot of things, including her aunt. When he asked Lucy to send her plane, he said he didn't want Scarpetta to know.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“Because I'll probably have to sit in a parked car all night, watching the damn port,” he said.

It would make matters worse if she knew he was here, just a few miles from her house. She might insist on sitting here with him. To which Lucy offered that he was insane. There was no way Scarpetta would stake out the port with him. In Lucy's words, that's not her aunt's job. She's not a secret agent. She doesn't particularly like guns, even though she certainly knows how to use them, and she prefers to take care of the victims and leave it to Lucy and Benton to take care of everybody else. What Lucy really meant was that sitting out here at the port could be dangerous, and she didn't want Scarpetta doing it.

Funny that Lucy didn't mention Marino. That he could have helped.

Benton sits inside the dark Subaru. It smells new—smells like leather. He watches the rain, and looks past it across the street, and monitors the laptop to make sure the Sandman hasn't hijacked the port's wireless network and logged on. But where would he do it? Not from this parking lot. Not from the street, because he wouldn't dare stop his car in the middle of the street and just sit there sending yet another infernal e-mail to the infernal Dr. Self, who is probably back in New York by now inside her Central Park West penthouse apartment. It's galling. It's as unfair as anything could possibly be. Even if, in the end, the Sandman doesn't get away with murder, Dr. Self most likely will, and she's as much to blame for the murders as the Sandman is, because she sat on information, didn't look into it, doesn't care. Benton hates her. He wishes he didn't. But he hates her more than he's ever hated anybody in his life.

Rain pummels the roof of the SUV, and fog shrouds distant streetlights, and he can't tell the horizon from the sky, the harbor from the heavens. He can't tell anything from anything in this weather, until something moves. He sits very still, and his heart kicks as a dark figure slowly moves along the fence across the street.

“I've got activity.” He transmits to Lucy. “Anybody on, because I'm not seeing it.”

“Nobody's on.” Her voice comes back into his earpiece, and she's confirming that the Sandman has not logged on to the port's wireless network. “What kind of activity?” she asks.

“At the fence. About three o'clock, not moving now. Holding at three o'clock.”

“I'm ten minutes away. Not even.”

“I'm getting out,” Benton says, and he slowly opens his car door, and the interior light is out. Complete darkness, and the rain sounds louder.

He reaches under his jacket and slides out his gun, and he doesn't shut the car door all the way. He doesn't make a sound. He knows how to do this, has had to do it more times than he'd ever want to remember. He moves like a ghost, dark and silent, through puddles, through the rain. Every other step he stops, and he's sure the person across the street doesn't see him.
What is he doing?
Just standing there by the fence, not moving. Benton gets closer, and the figure doesn't move. Benton can barely see the shape through blowing veils of water, and he can't hear anything but the splashing of the rain.

“You okay?” Lucy's voice in his head.

He doesn't answer. He stops behind a telephone pole and smells creosote. The figure at the fence moves to the left, to the one o'clock position, and he starts to cross the street.

Lucy says, “You ten-four?”

Benton doesn't answer, and the figure is so close, he can see the dark shadow of a face, and the distinct outline of a hat, then arms and legs moving. Benton steps out and points the pistol at him.

“Don't move.” He says it quietly in a tone that commands attention. “I've got a nine-mil pointed right at your head, so stand real still.”

The man, and Benton feels sure it's a man, has turned into a statue. He doesn't make a sound.

“Step off the road but not toward me. Step to your left. Very slowly. Now drop to your knees and put your hands on top of your head.” Then, to Lucy, he says, “I've got him. You can close in.”

As if she's a stone's throw away.

“Hold on.” Her voice is tense. “Just hold on. I'm coming.”

He knows she's far away—too far away to help him if there's a problem.

The man has his hands on top of his head, and he's kneeling on the cracked, wet blacktop, and he says, “Please don't shoot.”

“Who are you?” Benton says. “Tell me who you are.”

“Don't shoot.”

“Who are you?” Benton raises his voice above the sound of the rain. “What are you doing here? Tell me who you are.”

“Don't shoot.”

“Goddamn it. Tell me who you are. What are you doing at the port? Don't make me ask you again.”

“I know who you are. I recognize who you are. My hands are on my head, so there is no need to shoot,” the voice says as rain splashes, and Benton detects an accent. “I'm here to catch a killer, just like you. Am I right, Benton Wesley? Please put away your gun. It's Otto Poma. I'm here for the same reason as you. It's Captain Otto Poma. Please put the gun away.”

 

Poe's Tavern, a few minutes' ride from Marino's fishing shack. He could use a beer or two.

The street is wet and shiny black, and the wind carries the smell of the rain and the scent of the sea and the marshes. He is soothed as he rides his Roadmaster through the dark, rainy night, knowing he shouldn't drink, but he doesn't know how to stop himself, and anyway, why does it matter? Ever since it happened, he has a sickness in his soul, a feeling of terror. The beast within has surfaced, the monster has shown himself, and what he's always feared is right in front of him.

Peter Rocco Marino isn't a decent person. As is true of almost every criminal he's caught, he has believed little in life is his fault, that he's inherently good, brave, and well-intentioned, when the truth is quite the reverse. He's selfish, sick, and bad. Bad, bad, bad. That's why his wife left him. That's why his career has gone to hell. That's why Lucy hates him. That's why he's ruined the best thing he ever had. His relationship with Scarpetta is dead. He killed it. Brutalized it. Betrayed her again and again because of something she can't help. She never wanted him, and why would she? She's never been attracted to him. How could she be? So he punished her.

He shifts into a higher gear as he gives his bike more gas. He rides much too fast, rain painful pinpricks against his bare skin, speeding to the strip, as he calls the hangouts of Sullivan's Island. Cars are parked wherever there is space. No bikes, only his, because of the weather. He's chilled, his hands stiff, and he feels unbearable pain and shame, and laced with it is a venomous anger. He unstraps his useless brain bucket of a helmet and hangs it from the handlebars and locks the bike's front fork. His rain gear swishes as he walks inside a restaurant of unpainted worn wood and ceiling fans, and framed posters of ravens and probably every Edgar Allan Poe movie ever made. The bar is crowded, and his heart bumps hard and flutters like a startled bird when he notices Shandy between two men, one of them wearing a do-rag—the man Marino almost shot the other night. She is talking to him, pressing her body against his arm.

Marino stands near the door, dripping rainwater on the scuffed floor, watching, wondering what to do as the wounds inside him swell, and his heart races, feels like horses galloping in his neck. Shandy and the man in the do-rag are drinking beer and shots of tequila and snacking on tortilla chips with chili con queso, the same thing she and Marino always order when they come here. Used to. In days past. Over and out. He didn't use his hormone gel this morning. Threw it away with reluctance as the vile creature inside his darkness whispered mocking things. He can't believe Shandy is so brazen as to come in here with that man, and the meaning is clear. She put him up to threatening the Doc. As bad as Shandy is, as bad as he is, as bad as they are together, Marino's worse.

What they tried to do to the Doc is nothing like what he did.

He approaches the bar without looking in their direction, pretends he doesn't see them, wondering why he didn't spot Shandy's BMW. She's probably parked on a side street, always worried about someone dinging one of the doors. He wonders where the man with the do-rag's chopper is and remembers what Lucy said about it. About it looking dangerous. She did something. She'll probably do something to Marino's bike next.

“Whatcha have, hon? Where you been, anyway?” The bartender looks maybe fifteen, the way all young people look to Marino these days.

He's so depressed and distracted, he can't remember her name, thinks it's Shelly but is afraid to say. Maybe it's Kelly. “Bud Lite.” He leans close to her. “Don't look. But that guy over there with Shandy?”

“Yeah, they've been in here before.”

“Since when?” Marino asks as she slides a draft beer his way and he slides back a five.

“Two for the price of one. So you got another one coming, hon. Oh, gosh. On and off for as long as I've worked here, hon. The past year, I guess. I don't like either one of 'em, and that's 'tween you and me. Don't ask his name. I don't know. He's not the only one she comes in here with. I think she's married.”

“No shit.”

“I hope you and her are taking a time out. For good, hon.”

“I'm done with her,” Marino says, drinking his beer. “It was nothing.”

“Nothing but trouble, my guess,” Shelly or Kelly says.

He feels Shandy's stare. She's stopped talking to the man in the dorag, and now Marino has to wonder if she's been having sex with him all along. Marino wonders about the stolen coins and where she gets her money. Maybe her daddy didn't leave her anything and she felt she had to steal. Marino wonders about a lot of things and wishes he'd wondered all of them before. She sees him as he lifts his frosty mug, takes a swallow. Her glaring eyes look half crazy. He thinks about walking over to where she's sitting, but he can't bring himself to do it.

He knows they won't tell him anything. He's sure they'll laugh at him. Shandy nudges the man in the do-rag. He looks at Marino and smirks, must think it's real funny, sitting there feeling up Shandy and knowing that all along she's never been Marino's woman. Who the hell else does she sleep with?