Four Scarpetta Novels (37 page)

“Maybe it's just the earliest draft he stored on that particular hard drive?” she suggests. “Or maybe he opened the file two weeks ago and saved it, which would have changed the date stamp? But I suppose that begs the question of why would he have looked at those notes before we even knew he had seen the Sandman as a patient? When Dr. Maroni left for Rome, we'd never heard of the Sandman.”

“There's that,” Benton says. “And there's the fabrication of the file. Because it is a fabrication. Yes, Paulo wrote those notes right before he left for Rome. He wrote them the very day Dr. Self was admitted to McLean on April twenty-seventh. In fact, several hours before she arrived at the hospital. And the reason I can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty is because Paulo may have emptied his trash, but even those deletions aren't gone. Josh recovered them.”

He opens another file, this one a rough draft of the notes Scarpetta is familiar with, but in this version, the patient's initials aren't MS but WR.

“Then it would seem to me Dr. Self must have called Paulo. We assume that, anyway, because she couldn't just show up at the hospital. Whatever she told him over the phone inspired him to begin writing these notes,” Scarpetta says.

“Another sign of fabrication,” Benton says. “Using a patient's initials for a file name. We're not supposed to do that. Even if you do stray from protocol and good judgment, it doesn't make sense he changed his patient's initials. Why? To rename him. Why? To give him an alias? Paulo knows better than to do any such thing.”

“Maybe the patient doesn't exist,” Scarpetta says.

“Now you see what I'm leading up to,” Benton says. “I don't think the Sandman was ever Paulo's patient.”

E
d the doorman is nowhere to be seen when Scarpetta walks into Rose's apartment building at almost ten. It's drizzling, and the dense fog is lifting, and clouds are rushing across the sky as the front moves out to sea.

She steps inside his office and looks around. There isn't much on the desk: a Rolodex, a notebook with
Residents
on the cover, a stack of unopened mail—Ed's and two other doormen's—pens, a stapler, personal items such as a plaque with a clock on it, an award from a fishing club, a cell phone, a ring of keys, a wallet. She checks the wallet. Ed's. He's on duty tonight with what appears to be three dollars to his name.

Scarpetta walks out, looks around, still no sign of Ed. She returns to his office and thumbs through the
Residents
book until she finds Gianni Lupano's apartment on the top floor. She takes the elevator, and listens outside his door. Music is playing, but not loudly, and she rings the bell, and she hears someone moving around. She rings the bell again and knocks. Footsteps and the door opens and Scarpetta is face-to-face with Ed.

“Where's Gianni Lupano?” She walks past Ed, into the surround sound of Santana.

Wind blows through a window open wide in the living room.

Ed's eyes are panicked as he talks frantically. “I didn't know what to do. This is so terrible. I didn't know what to do.”

Scarpetta looks out the open window. She looks down and can't make out anything in the dark, just dense shrubbery and a sidewalk and the street beyond. She steps back and glances around a lavish apartment of marble and pastel-painted plaster, ornate molding, Italian leather furniture, and bold art. Shelves are filled with handsomely bound old books that some interior decorator probably bought by the yard, and an entire wall is occupied by an entertainment center too elaborate for a space this small.

“What's happened?” she says to Ed.

“I get this call maybe twenty minutes ago.” Excitedly. “First he says, ‘Hey, Ed, you start my car?' And I said, ‘Yeah, why do you ask?' And I was nervous about it.”

Scarpetta notices what must be half a dozen tennis rackets in cases propped against the wall behind the couch, a stack of tennis shoes still in their boxes. On a glass coffee table with an Italian glass base is a stack of tennis magazines. On the cover of the one on top is Drew Martin, about to pound a lob.

“Nervous about what?” she asks.

“That young lady, Lucy. She started his car because she wanted to look at something, and I was afraid he somehow found out. But that wasn't it, I don't guess, because then he said, ‘Well, you've always taken such good care of it, I want you to have it.' And I said, ‘What? What are you talking about, Mr. Lupano? I can't take your car. Why are you trying to give away that beautiful car?' And then he said, ‘Ed, I'll write it down on a piece of paper so people know I gave you the car.' So I hurried up here as fast as I could and found the door unlocked, like he wanted to make it easy for anyone to get inside. And then I found the window open.”

Walking toward it and pointing, as if Scarpetta can't see it for herself.

She calls nine-one-one as they run down the hallway. She tells the operator someone may have jumped out a window and gives the address. On the elevator, Ed continues to talk disjointedly about searching Lupano's apartment just to make sure, and he found the piece of paper but left it where it was, on the bed, and he kept calling out for him and he was about to call the police but Scarpetta showed up.

In the lobby, an old woman with a cane clicks her way across marble. Scarpetta and Ed rush past, and out of the building. They run through the dark around the corner, stopping directly below Lupano's open window. It is filled with light at the top of the building. Scarpetta shoves through a tall hedge, branches snapping and scratching, and finds what she feared. The body is nude and contorted, limbs and neck at unnatural angles against the brick side of the building, blood glistening in the dark. She presses two fingers against the carotid and feels no pulse. She repositions the body flat on its back and begins CPR. When she looks up, she wipes blood off her face, off her mouth. Sirens wail, blue and red lights flashing blocks away on East Bay. She gets to her feet and pushes back through the hedge.

“Come here,” Scarpetta says to Ed. “Take a look and tell me if that's him.”

“Is he…?”

“Just look.”

Ed pushes through the bushes, then crashes back through them.

“My God in heaven,” he says. “Oh, no. Oh, Lord.”

“Is it him?” she asks, and Ed nods yes. In the back of her mind, it bothers her that she just did mouth-to-mouth without protection. “Right before he called you about his Porsche, you were where?”

“Sitting at my desk.” Ed is scared, his eyes darting. He's sweating and keeps wetting his lips and clearing his throat.

“Did anyone else come inside the building maybe about that time, or maybe a little before he called?”

Sirens wail as police cars and an ambulance stop on the street, red and blue light pulsing on Ed's face. “No,” he says. Except for a few of the residents, he says, he saw no one.

Doors slam, radios chatter, diesel engines rumble. Police and EMTs get out of their vehicles.

Scarpetta says to Ed, “Your wallet's out on the desk. Maybe you'd taken your wallet out, then you got the call? Am I right?” Then she says to a plainclothes cop, “Over there.” She points to the hedge. “Came from up there.” She points to the lighted open window on the top floor.

“You're that new medical examiner.” The detective looks at her, doesn't seem entirely sure.

“Yes.”

“You pronounced him?”

“That's for the coroner to do.”

The detective starts walking toward the bushes as she confirms that the man—Lupano, it seems—is dead. “I'll need a statement from you, so don't go anywhere,” he calls back to her. Bushes crack and rustle as he pushes through them.

“I don't understand what all this is about. My wallet,” Ed says.

Scarpetta moves out of the way so the EMTs can get through with their stretcher and equipment. They head to the far corner of the building so they can maneuver behind the hedge instead of breaking through it.

“Your wallet's on your desk. Right there with the door open. Is that your habit?” she asks Ed.

“Can we talk inside?”

“Let's give our statements to the investigator over there,” she says. “Then we'll talk inside.”

She notices someone heading toward them on the sidewalk, a woman in a housecoat. The woman is familiar, then becomes Rose. Scarpetta intercepts her in a hurry.

“Don't come over here,” Scarpetta says.

“As if there's anything I haven't seen.” Rose looks up at the lighted open window. “That's where he lived, isn't it?”

“Who?”

“What would you expect after what happened?” she says, coughing, taking a deep breath. “What did he have left?”

“The question is timing.”

“Maybe Lydia Webster. It's all over the news. You and I both know she's dead,” Rose says.

Scarpetta just listens, wondering the obvious. Why would Rose assume Lupano might be affected by what has happened to Lydia Webster? Why would Rose know he's dead?

“He was quite full of himself when we met,” Rose says, staring toward the dark shrubbery beneath the window.

“I wasn't aware you'd ever met him.”

“Just once. I didn't know it was him until Ed said something. He was talking to Ed in the office when I saw him quite a long time ago. Rather rough-looking. I thought he was a maintenance person, had no idea he was Drew Martin's coach.”

Scarpetta looks down the dark sidewalk, notices Ed is talking to the detective. Paramedics are loading the stretcher inside the ambulance as emergency lights flash and cops poke around with their flashlights.

“Drew Martin comes along only once in a lifetime. What was left for him?” Rose says. “Possibly nothing. People die when there's nothing left for them. I don't blame them.”

“Come on. You shouldn't be out here in the damp air. I'll walk you back inside,” Scarpetta says.

They round the corner of the building as Henry Hollings comes down the front steps. He doesn't look in their direction, walking fast and with purpose. Scarpetta watches him dissolve into the darkness along the seawall, toward East Bay Street.

“He got here before the police did?” Scarpetta says.

“He lives only five minutes from here,” Rose says. “He has a quite a place on the Battery.”

Scarpetta stares in the direction Hollings headed. On the harbor's horizon, two lighted ships look like yellow LEGOs. The weather is clearing. She can see a few stars. She doesn't mention to Rose that the Charleston County coroner just walked past a dead body and didn't bother to look. He didn't pronounce him. He didn't do anything. Inside the building, she gets on the elevator with Rose, who does a poor job disguising how much she doesn't want Scarpetta with her.

“I'm fine,” Rose says, holding open the doors, the elevator not going anywhere. “It's back to bed for me. I'm sure people want to talk to you out there.”

“It's not my case.”

“People always want to talk to you.”

“After I make sure you're safely inside your apartment.”

“Since you're here, maybe he assumed you'd take care of it,” Rose says as the doors shut and Scarpetta presses the button for her floor.

“You mean the coroner.” Even though Scarpetta has yet to mention him or point out that he inexplicably left without doing his job.

Rose is too breathless to talk as they follow the corridor to her apartment. She stands before the door and pats Scarpetta's arm.

“Open the door and I'll leave,” Scarpetta says.

Rose gets out her key. She doesn't want to open the door with Scarpetta standing there.

“Go on inside,” Scarpetta says.

Rose doesn't. The more reluctant she is, the more stubborn Scarpetta gets. Finally, Scarpetta takes the key from her and lets them in. Two chairs have been pulled up to the window that overlooks the harbor, and between them on a table are two wineglasses and a bowl of nuts.

“The person you've been seeing,” Scarpetta says, inviting herself inside. “Henry Hollings.” She shuts the door and looks into Rose's eyes. “That's why he hurried out of here. The police called him about Lupano and he told you, then left so he could come back without anyone knowing he was already here.”

She moves to the window as if she might see him on the street. She looks down. Rose's apartment isn't very far from Lupano's.

“He's a public figure and has to be careful,” Rose says, sitting on the couch, exhausted and pale. “We're not having an affair. His wife is dead.”

“That's the reason he's sneaking?” Scarpetta sits next to her. “I'm sorry. That doesn't make sense.”

“To protect me.” A deep breath.

“From what?”

“If it got out the coroner was seeing your secretary, somebody might make something of it. Certainly, it would end up in the news.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't,” Rose says.

“Whatever makes you happy makes me happy.”

“Until you visited him, he assumed you hated him. That hasn't helped,” Rose says.

“Then it's my fault for not giving him a chance,” Scarpetta says.

“I couldn't assure him otherwise, now, could I? You've assumed the worst about him, just as he's assumed the worst about you.” Rose struggles to breathe, and she's getting worse. The cancer is destroying her right before Scarpetta's eyes.

“It will be different now,” she says to Rose.

“He was so happy you came to see him,” Rose says, reaching for a tissue, coughing. “That's why he was here tonight. To tell me all about it. He talked of nothing else. He likes you. He wants the two of you to work together. Not against each other.” She coughs some more, the tissue speckled with blood.

“Does he know?”

“Of course. From the start.” She gets a pained expression on her face. “In that little wineshop on East Bay. It was instant. When we met. Started talking about burgundy versus Bordeaux. As if I know. Out of the blue, he suggests we try a few. He didn't know where I work, so it wasn't that. He didn't learn I work for you until later.”

“It doesn't matter what he knew. I don't care.”

“He loves me. I tell him not to. He says if you love someone, that's the way it is. And who can say how long any of us will be here. That's how Henry explains life.”

“Then I'm his friend,” Scarpetta says.

She leaves Rose, and finds Hollings talking to the detective, the two of them near the shrubbery where the body was found. The ambulance and fire truck are gone, nothing parked nearby except an unmarked car and a cruiser.

“I thought you'd ducked out on us,” the detective says as Scarpetta walks toward them.

She says to Hollings, “I was making sure Rose got safely back into her apartment.”

“Let me bring you up to speed,” Hollings says. “Body's en route to MUSC and will be autopsied in the morning. You're welcome to be present and participate in any way you see fit. Or not.”

“Nothing so far to indicate it's anything other than a suicide,” the detective says. “Except it bothers me he's got no clothes on. If he jumped, why did he take all his clothes off?”

“You might get your answer from toxicology,” Scarpetta says. “The doorman says Lupano sounded intoxicated when he called him not long before he died. I think all of us have seen enough to know that when people decide to commit suicide, they can do a number of things that seem illogical, even suspicious. By chance did you find clothes inside that might be what he took off?”