Book of the Dead (7 page)

    
“I feel as if I’m standing all alone in the middle of a fucking explosion, everything flying all around me. And I’m just standing here. You ruined me. You fucking ruined me, Benton.”

    
“Now who’s saying ‘fuck’?”

    
She wipes her eyes. “Now you’ve made me cry.”

    
He moves closer to her, touches her. They sit on the couch and gaze out at the twin bell towers of Trinità dei Monti, at the Villa Medici on the edge of the Pincian Hill, and far beyond, Vatican City. She turns to him and is struck again by the clean lines of his face, his silver hair, and his long, lean elegance that is so incongruous with what he does.

    
“How is it now?” she asks him. “The way you feel, compared to back then? In the beginning.”

    
“Different.”

    
“Different sounds ominous.”

    
“Different because we’ve been through so much for so long. By now it’s hard for me to remember not knowing you. It’s hard for me to remember I was married before I met you. That was someone else, some FBI guy who played by the rules, had no passion, no life, until that morning I walked into your conference room, the important so-called profiler, called in to help out with homicides terrorizing your modest city. And there you were in your lab coat, setting down a huge stack of case files, shaking my hand. I thought you were the most remarkable woman I’d ever met, couldn’t take my eyes off of you. Still can’t.”

    
“Different.” She reminds him of what he said.

    
“What goes on between two people is different every day.”

    
“That’s okay as long as they feel the same way.”

    
“Do you?” he says. “Do you still feel the same way? Because if…”

    
“Because if what?”

    
“Would you?”

    
“Would I what? Want to do something about it?”

    
“Yes. For good.” He gets up and finds his jacket, reaches into a pocket, and comes back to the couch.

    
“For good, as opposed to for bad,” she says, distracted by what’s in his hand.

    
“I’m not being funny. I mean it.”

    
“So you don’t lose me to some foolish flirt?” She pulls him against her and holds him tight. She pushes her fingers through his hair.

    
“Maybe,” he says. “Take this, please.”

    
He opens his hand, and in his palm is a folded piece of paper.

    
“We’re passing notes in school,” she says, and she’s afraid to open it.

    
“Go on, go on. Don’t be a chicken.”

    
She opens it, and inside is a note that says, Will you? and then a ring. It’s an antique, a thin platinum band of diamonds.

    
“My great-grandmother’s,” he says, and he slides it over her finger, and it fits.

    
They kiss.

    
“If it’s because you’re jealous, that’s a terrible reason,” she says.

    
“I just happened to have it with me after it’s been in a safe for fifty years? I’m really asking you,” he says. “Please say you will.”

    
“And how do we manage? After all your talk about our separate lives?”

    
“For Christ’s sake, for once don’t be rational.”

    
“It’s very beautiful,” she says of the ring. “You better mean it, because I’m not giving it back.”

Chapter 3

    
Nine days later, Sunday. A ship’s horn is mournful out at sea.

    
Church steeples pierce the overcast dawn in Charleston, and a solitary bell begins to ring. Then a cluster of them joins in, clanging in a secret language that sounds the same around the world. With the bells comes the first light of dawn, and Scarpetta begins to stir about in her master suite, as she wryly refers to her living area on the second floor of her early-nineteenth-century carriage house. Compared to the somewhat sumptuous homes of her past, what she has is a very odd departure.

    
Her bedroom and study are combined, the space so crowded she can barely move without bumping into the antique chest of drawers or bookcases, or the long table draped with a black cloth that bears a microscope and slides, latex gloves, dust masks, camera equipment, and various crime scene necessities – all eccentric in their context. There are no closets, just side-by-side wardrobes lined with cedar, and from one of them she selects a charcoal skirt suit, a gray-and-white-striped silk blouse, and low-heeled black pumps.

    
Dressed for what promises to be a difficult day, she sits at her desk and looks out at the garden, watching it change in the varying shadows and light of morning. She logs into e-mail, checking to see if her investigator, Pete Marino, has sent her anything that might confound her plans for the day. No messages. To double-check, she calls him.

    
“Yeah.” He sounds groggy. In the background, an unfamiliar woman’s voice complains, “Shit. Now what?”

    
“You’re definitely coming in?” Scarpetta makes sure. “I got word late last night we have a body on the way from Beaufort, and I’m assuming you’ll be there to take care of it. Plus, we have that meeting this afternoon. I left you a message. You never called me back.”

    
“Yeah.”

    
The woman in the background says in the same complaining voice, “What’s she want this time?”

    
“I’m talking within the hour,” Scarpetta firmly tells Marino. “You need to be on your way now or there will be no one to let him in. Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I’m not familiar with it.”

    
“Yeah.”

    
“I’ll be in around eleven to finish up what I can with the little boy.”

    
As if the Drew Martin case isn’t bad enough. Scarpetta’s first day back to work after she returned from Rome brought in another horrible case, the murder of a little boy whose name she still doesn’t know. He has moved into her mind because he has nowhere else to go, and when she least expects it, she sees his delicate face, emaciated body, and curly brown hair. And then the rest of it. What he looked like when she was done. After all these years, after thousands of cases, a part of her hates the necessity of what she must do to the dead because of what someone did to them first.

    
“Yeah.” That’s all Marino has to say.

    
“Petulant, rude…” she mutters as she makes her way downstairs. “I’m so goddamn tired of this.” Blowing out in exasperation.

    
In the kitchen, her heels are sharp on the terra-cotta tile floor that she spent days on her hands and knees laying in a herringbone pattern when she moved into the carriage house. She repainted the walls plain white to capture light from the garden, and restored the cypress ceiling beams that are original to the house. The kitchen – the most important room – is precisely arranged with the stainless-steel appliances, copper pots and pans (always polished as bright as new pennies), cutting boards, and handcrafted German cutlery of a serious chef. Her niece, Lucy, should be here any minute, and it pleases Scarpetta very much, but she’s curious. Lucy rarely calls and invites herself for breakfast.

    
Scarpetta picks out what she needs for egg-white omelets stuffed with ricotta cheese and white cap mushrooms sautéed in sherry and unfiltered olive oil. No bread, not even her flat griddle bread grilled on the terra-cotta slab – or testo – she hand-carried from Bologna back in the days when airport security didn’t consider cookware a weapon. Lucy is on an unforgiving diet – in training, as she puts it. For what, Scarpetta always asks. For life, Lucy always says. Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she’s startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window.

    
“Please, no,” she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and running to the door.

    
She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yellow finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It’s just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won’t die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform.

    
She sits on the back brick steps and doesn’t get up as she listens to the distinctive roar of Lucy’s Ferrari.

    
It turns off King Street and parks on the shared driveway in front of the house, and then Lucy appears on the patio, an envelope in hand.

    
“Breakfast isn’t ready, not even coffee,” she says. “You’re sitting out here and your eyes are red.”

    
“Allergies,” Scarpetta says.

    
“The last time you blamed allergies – which you don’t have, by the way – was when a bird flew into a window. And you had a dirty trowel on the table just like that.” Lucy points to an old marble table in the garden, a trowel on top of it. Nearby, beneath a pittosporum, is freshly dug earth covered by broken pieces of pottery.

    
“A finch,” Scarpetta says.

    
Lucy sits next to her and says, “So it appears Benton’s not coming for the weekend. When he is, you always have a long grocery list on the counter.”

    
“Can’t get away from the hospital.” The small, shallow pond in the middle of the garden has Chinese jasmine and camellia petals floating in it like confetti.

    
Lucy picks up a loquat leaf knocked down from a recent rain, twirls it by the stem. “I hope that’s the only reason. You come back from Rome with your big news and what’s different? Nothing that I can tell. He’s there, you’re here. No plans to change that, right?”

    
“Suddenly you’re the relationship expert?”

    
“An expert on ones that go wrong.”

    
“You’re making me sorry I told anyone,” Scarpetta says.

    
“I’ve been there. It’s what happened with Janet. We started talking about commitment, about getting married when it finally became legal for perverts to have more rights than a dog. Suddenly, she couldn’t deal with being gay. And it was over before it began. And not in a nice way.”

    
“Not nice? How about unforgivable?”

    
“I should be the unforgiving one, not you,” Lucy says. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it’s like to be there. I don’t want to talk about it.”

    
A small statue of an angel that watches over the pond. What it protects, Scarpetta has yet to discover. Certainly not birds. Maybe not anything. She gets up and brushes off the back of her skirt.

    
“Is this why you wanted to talk to me,” she says, “or did it just happen to pop into your mind while I was sitting here feeling awful because I had to euthanize another bird?”

    
“It’s not why I called you last night and said I need to see you,” Lucy says, still playing with the leaf.

    
Her hair, cherrywood-red with highlights of rose-gold, is clean and shiny and tucked behind her ears. She wears a black T-shirt that shows off a beautiful body earned by punishing workouts and good genetics. She’s going somewhere, Scarpetta has a suspicion, but she’s not going to ask. She sits down again.

    
“Dr. Self.” Lucy stares at the garden, the way people stare when they aren’t looking at anything except what’s bothering them.

    
It’s not what Scarpetta expected her to say. “What about her?”