Four Scarpetta Novels (99 page)

“Shut up about him, you hear me? I hope he gets fucking AIDS in prison and dies! All the suffering he's caused! Now it should be his goddamn turn!”

“Whose suffering?” Benton doesn't flinch at Marino's hot, beery breath. “Your suffering?”

“Start with his mother's suffering. And keep on going.” Marino still has a hard time thinking about Doris, his ex-wife and Rocco's mother.

She was Marino's sweetheart when he was in his prime. He still thought of her as his sweetheart long after he stopped paying attention to her. He was stunned when she left him for another man.

While this is crossing Marino's mind, he is yelling at Benton, “You can come home, you fucking idiot! You can live your life again!”

Marino sits down on the couch, breathing hard, his face a deep red that reminds Benton of the 575M Maranello Ferrari he has seen around Cambridge. Its color is a deep burgundy called Barcetta, and thinking of that car reminds him of Lucy, who has always been in love with fast, powerful machines.

“You can see the Doc, and Lucy, and . . .”

“Untrue,” Benton whispers. “Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has manipulated himself into this position. He is exactly where he wants to be.
Connect the dots, Pete. Go back to how it started after he was arrested. He shocked everyone by offering an unsolicited confession to yet another murder, this one in Texas, and then, of all things, pled guilty. Why? Because he
wanted
to be extradited to Texas. It was
his
choice, not the governor of Virginia's.”

“No way,” Marino challenges. “Our ambitious Virginia governor didn't want to piss off Washington by pissing off France—the anti–death penalty capital of the world. So we gave Chandonne to Texas.”

Benton shakes his head. “Not so. Jean-Baptiste gave Jean-Baptiste to Texas.”

“And how the hell would you know, anyway? You talking to people? I thought you didn't talk to no one.”

Benton doesn't reply.

“I don't get it,” Marino goes on. “Why would Wolfman give a shit about Texas?”

“He knew he would die quickly there, and he wanted to die quickly. It was part of his master plan. He had no intention of rotting on death row for ten or fifteen years. And his chances of gamesmanship are much greater in Texas. Virginia might very well fold to political pressure and stay his execution.

“Virginia is also claustrophobic. His every move would be watched. He would get away with much less, because law-enforcement and corrections officers would make it their mission to ensure his safety and good behavior. He would be monitored to the extreme. Don't tell me that if he were in Virginia, his mail wouldn't be secretly checked. The hell with his legal rights.”

“Virginia would want to fry his ass,” Marino argues. “After what he done.”

“He killed a store clerk. He killed a cop. He almost killed the chief medical examiner. The governor at that time is now a senator and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He didn't piss off
Washington because he wasn't about to piss off the French. The governor of Texas, now in his second term and a trigger-happy Republican, by the way, doesn't give a damn who he pisses off.”

“
The chief medical examiner?
You just can't bring yourself to say her name, can you?” Marino exclaims, incredulous.

A
FEW YEARS BACK,
Lucy Farinelli's Aunt Kay recalled an anecdote about the decapitated head of a German soldier who died in World War II.

His body was discovered buried in sand somewhere in Poland, she recounted to Lucy, and arid conditions remarkably preserved his Aryan short blond hair, attractive features and even the stubble on his chin. When Scarpetta saw the head in a Polish forensic medical institute showcase while visiting as a forensic lecturer, she thought of Madame Tussaud's, she said.

“His front teeth are broken,” Scarpetta went on with the story, explaining that she didn't think the damaged teeth were a postmortem artifact or due to an antemortem injury that had occurred at or around the boyish Nazi's death. He simply had poor dental care. “Loose-contact gunshot wound to the right temple,” she cited the Nazi's cause of death. “The angle of the wound points the way the gun was directed—in this case,
downward.
Often in a suicide, the muzzle will be straight on or directed
upward.
There's no soot in this case, because the wound was cleaned, the hair around it shaved at the morgue, where the mummified remains were sent to make certain the death wasn't recent, or so I was told when I was lecturing at the Pomorska Akademia Medyczna.”

The only reason Lucy is reminded of the decapitated Nazi as her car is being searched at Germany's northeast border is that the German guard is a handsome, blue-eyed blond and seems much too young to be infected with ennui as he leans inside her black rental Mercedes and sweeps the leather seats with a flashlight. Next he sweeps the black carpeted floor, the strong beam illuminating Lucy's scuffed leather briefcase and red Nike duffel bags in back. He makes several bright stabs at the front passenger seat, then moves around to the trunk, popping it open. He shuts it with scarcely a glance.

Had he bothered to unzip those two duffelbags and dig through clothing, he would have discovered a tactical baton. It looks rather much like a black rubber fishing pole handle, but with a quick flip of the wrist extends into a two-foot-long thin rod of carbonized steel capable of shattering bone and shearing soft tissue, including the internal organs of the belly.

Lucy is prepared to explain the weapon, which is relatively unknown and unused except by law enforcement. She would claim that her overly protective boyfriend gave her the baton for self-defense because she is a businesswoman and often travels alone. She really isn't quite sure how to use the thing, she would sheepishly explain, but he insisted and promised it was perfectly all right to pack it. If police confiscated the baton, so what? But Lucy is relieved that it is not discovered and that the officer in his pale green uniform checking her passport from inside his booth does not seem curious about this young American woman driving alone late at night in a Mercedes.

“What is the purpose of your visit?” he asks in awkward English.

“Geschäft.”
She doesn't tell him what kind of business, but has an answer prepared, if necessary.

He picks up the phone and says something Lucy is unable to decipher, but she senses he isn't talking about her or, if he is, it is nothing. She expected her belongings to be riffled through and was ready for it. She expected to be quizzed. But the guard who reminds her of the decapitated head returns her passport.

“Danke,”
she politely says as she silently labels him a
trag Narr.

The world is full of lazy fools like him.

He waves her on.

She creeps forward, crossing the border into Poland, and now another guard, this one Polish, puts her through the same routine. There is no ordeal, no thorough search, not a hint of anything but sleepiness and boredom. This is too easy. Paranoia sets in. She remembers she should never trust anything that is too easy, and she imagines the Gestapo and SS soldiers, cruel specters from the past. Fear rises like body odor, a fear that is baseless and irrational. Sweat rolls down her sides, beneath her windbreaker, as she thinks of Poles overpowered and disenfranchised from their own names and lives during a war she knows about only from history books.

It is not so different from the way Benton Wesley exists, and Lucy wonders what he would think and feel if he knew she was in Poland and why. Not a day goes by when he doesn't shadow her life.

H
ER CAREER EXPERIENCE
does not show unless she intentionally displays it like a weapon.

She was still in high school when she began interning for the FBI and designed their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, known as CAIN. When she graduated from the University of Virginia, she became an FBI special agent and was given free rein as a computer and technical expert. She learned to fly helicopters and became the first female member of the FBI Special Forces Hostage Rescue Team. Hostility, harassment and crude innuendos followed her on every deployment, raid and punishing training session. Rarely was she invited to join the men for a beer in the Academy bar called the Boardroom. They did not confide in her about raids gone wrong or their wives and children or girlfriends. But they watched her. There was talk about her in the showers.

Her career with the FBI was aborted on a dewy October morning when she and her HRT partner, Rudy Musil, were shooting live nine-millimeter rounds inside the FBI Academy's Tire House. As its name implies, the highly dangerous indoor range was filled with old tires that tactical agents could dive over, duck under, dart around and hide behind as they practiced maniacal maneuvers. Rudy was breathing hard and
sweating as he crouched behind a mound of tires and smacked another magazine into his Glock, peeking around a threadbare Michelin as he looked for Lucy, his partner.

“All right. Come clean,” he yelled at her through gun smoke. “What's your sexual preference?”

“To have it as often as possible!” She reloaded and snapped back the slide while rolling between stacks of tires before firing five rounds at a pop-up target thirty feet away. The cluster of head shots was so tight, it looked like a small flower.

“Oh yeah?” Two bullets loudly clinked a pop-up thug holding a machine gun. “Me and the guys got bets on it.” Rudy's voice came closer as he crawled on his belly across the filthy concrete floor.

He pounced through towers of sooty tires and grabbed an unsuspecting Lucy by her steel-reinforced Red Wing boots.

“Gotcha!” He laughed, setting his pistol on top of a tire.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Lucy cleared a round from the chamber of her pistol, the ejected cartridge bouncing off the floor. “We're using live ammo, you fucking idiot!”

“Let me see that thing.” Rudy got serious. “It doesn't sound right.”

He took the pistol from her, dropped out the magazine. “Loose spring.” He shook the pistol before setting it next to his gun on the tire. “Aha. Rule number one: Never lose your weapon.”

He got on top of her, laughing as he wrestled with her, somehow believing this was what she had been waiting for, and that she was excited and didn't mean it when she continued screaming, “Get off of me, asshole!”

Finally, he restrained both her wrists in one of his powerful hands. He plunged the other inside her shirt and shoved his tongue inside her mouth as he pushed up her bra. “The guys only say,” he panted, “you're a dyke 'cause”—he fumbled with her belt buckle—“they can't have you . . .”

Lucy bit through Rudy's bottom lip and knocked her forehead hard against the bridge of his nose. He spent the rest of the day in the emergency room.

FBI attorneys reminded her that litigation benefitted no one, especially since Rudy believed that she “wanted it” and had probable cause to believe it. Lucy told Rudy she wanted it “as often as possible,” he reluctantly stated in the forms he was forced to complete for Internal Affairs.

“It's true,” Lucy calmly agreed during a sworn statement before a panel of five lawyers, not one of whom represented her. “I said that, but I didn't say I wanted it
with him
or with anyone
right then
in the middle of live fire in the middle of the Tire House in the middle of a maneuver in the middle of my period.”

“But you'd led him on in the past. You'd given Agent Musil reason to think you were attracted to him.”

“What reason?” Lucy was baffled under oath. “Offering him a stick of gum now and then, helping him clean his guns, hanging with him to run the Yellow Brick Road and other obstacle courses, the worst one at the Marine Corps base, joking around, that sort of thing?”

“Quite a bit of togetherness,” the lawyers agreed with one another.

“He's my partner. Partners have quite a bit of togetherness.”

“Nonetheless, you seemed to devote quite a lot of your time and attention to Agent Musil, including personal attention, such as asking him about his weekends and holidays, and calling him at home when he was out sick.”

“Perhaps
joking around,
as you put it, might have been interpreted as flirting. Some people joke around when they flirt.”

The lawyers agreed once again, and what was worse, two of them were women—women in masculine skirt suits and high-heel shoes, women whose eyes reflected an identification with the aggressor, as if their irises were glued on to their eyeballs backward and were dull instead of bright, and blind to what was in front of them. The women lawyers had
the dead eyes of people who kill themselves off to get what they want or to become what they fear.

“I'm sorry,” Lucy said as her attention sharpened and she avoided the dead eyes. “You stepped on me. Please repeat,” she muttered aviation jargon.

“I'm sorry? Who stepped on you?” Frowns.

“You interfered with my transmission to the tower. Oops, there is no tower. This is uncontrolled air space and you get to do whatever you want. Right?”

More frowns. The lawyers glanced at one another as if Lucy was very weird.

“Never mind,” she added.

“You're an attractive single woman. Can you see how Agent Musil might have misinterpreted joking around, phone calls at home, et cetera, as your being sexually interested in him, Agent Farinelli?”

“It has also been stated that you often referred to Agent Musil and yourself as ‘yin and ylang.' ”

“I've told Rudy a hundred times that ylang is a Malayan tree. Ylang-ylang, to be more precise. A tree with yellow flowers that perfume is distilled from . . . but he doesn't always tune his ears to the right frequency.” Lucy fought a smile.

The lawyers were taking notes.

“I never called Rudy ‘ylang.' Now and then I did call him ‘yang' and he called me ‘ying,' no matter how many times I told him the word was
yin,”
Lucy explained further.

Silence, pens poised.

“It has to do with Chinese philosophy.” Lucy might as well have been talking to a chalkboard. “Balance, counterparts.”

“Why did you call each other . . . whatever?”

“Because we're two peas in a pod. Do you know
that
expression?”

“I think we're familiar with the term
two peas in a pod.
Again, such nicknames suggest a relationship . . .”

“Not the kind you're talking about,” Lucy replied without rancor, because she did not hate Rudy in the least. “He and I are two peas in a pod because neither of us fit in. He's Austrian and the other guys call him Musili because he's, quote,
full of shit,
which he doesn't think is the least bit funny. And I'm a lesbian, a man-hater, because no
normal
woman
who likes men
would want to be HRT and make the cut. According to the laws of machismo.”

Lucy scanned the women's dead eyes and decided the male attorneys' eyes were dead, too. The only sign of life in them was the glint of small, miserable creatures who hated someone like Lucy because she dared to resist being overpowered and frightened by them.

“This interview, deposition, inquisition, whatever the hell it is, is bullshit,” Lucy told them. “I have no interest in suing the Fucking Bureau of Investigation. I took care of myself in the Tire House. I didn't report the incident. Rudy did. He had to explain his injuries. He claimed responsibility. He could have lied. But he didn't, and the two of us are eye to eye.” She used the word
eye
to remind the lawyers of their dead eyes, as if somehow the lawyers knew their eyes were dead and incapable of seeing a reality that flexed with truth and possibilities and begged humans to partake of it and war against the dead-eyed people who were ruining the world.

“Rudy and I have acted as our own mediator,” Lucy went on, calmly. “We have reestablished that we are partners, and one partner doesn't do what the other doesn't want or commit any act that might betray the other partner or place him or her in harm's way. And he told me he was sorry. And he meant it. He was crying.”

“Spies say they are sorry. They also cry.” A flush was climbing up the throat of a hostile woman attorney in pinstripes and skinny high heels that reminded Lucy of bound feet. “And your accepting his apology isn't an option, Agent Farinelli. He attempted to rape you.” She emphasized the point, assuming it would humiliate and victimize Lucy again by inviting the male attorneys to envision her naked and sexually assaulted on the sooty concrete floor of the Tire House.

“I didn't know Rudy was accused of being a spy,” Lucy replied.

She resigned from the FBI and was hired by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which the FBI unfairly considers a collection of backwoods boys who bust up moonshine stills and wear tool belts and guns.

She became an expert fire investigator in Philadelphia, where she helped stage Benton Wesley's murder, which included procuring the body of an anatomical donation bound for dissection at a medical school. The dead man was elderly, with thick silver hair, and after he was incinerated inside a torched building, a visual identification was unreliable if not impossible. All a shocked Scarpetta saw at the filthy, water-soaked, smoking scene was a charred body and a faceless skull with silver hair and a titanium wristwatch that had belonged to Benton Wesley. Under secret orders from Washington, the chief medical examiner in Philadelphia was ordered to falsify all reports. On paper, Benton was dead, just one more homicide added to the FBI's crime statistics for 1997.

After he vanished into the black hole of the witness protection program, ATF immediately transferred Lucy to the Miami Field Office where she volunteered for dangerous undercover work and talked her way into it, despite reservations on the part of the Special Agent in Charge. Lucy had an attitude. She was volatile. No one close to her except Pete Marino understood why. Scarpetta didn't know or remotely suspect the truth. She assumed Lucy was going through a terrible phase because she couldn't cope with Benton being dead, when the truth was that Lucy couldn't cope with Benton being alive. Within a year of her new post in Miami, she shot and killed two drug dealers in a takedown that went bad.

Despite video surveillance tapes that clearly showed she had saved herself and the life of her undercover partner, there was talk. There was ugly gossip and disinformation, and one administrative investigation after another. Lucy quit ATF. She quit the feds. She cashed in her dot-com
stocks before the economy destabilized and crashed after 9-11. She invested a portion of her wealth, along with her law enforcement experience and talent, into creating a private investigative agency she calls The Last Precinct. It's where you go when there's no place left. It isn't advertised or listed in any directory.