Four Scarpetta Novels (24 page)

A
fter dark. Scarpetta shines her flashlight on a stainless-steel Colt revolver in the middle of the alley behind her house.

She hasn't called the police. If the coroner is involved in this latest turn of sinister events, then calling the police might make matters worse. No telling who he has in his pocket. Bull has quite a story, and she doesn't know what to think. He says when the crows flapped off from the oak tree in her garden, he knew that had meaning, so he told her an untruth, said he had to go on home, when what he intended to do was some sneaking—that's how he put it. He tucked himself behind shrubbery between her two sets of gates and waited. He waited the better part of five hours. Scarpetta had no idea.

She went about her business. Finished what she was doing in the garden. Took a shower. Worked in her upstairs office. Made phone calls. Checked on Rose. Checked on Lucy. Checked on Benton. All the while, she didn't know Bull was hiding between the two sets of gates behind the house. He says it's like fishing. You don't catch anything unless you fool the fish into thinking you've left for the day. When the sun was lower and the shadows longer and Bull had been sitting on dark, cool bricks between the gates all afternoon, he saw a man in the alleyway. The man walked right up to Scarpetta's outer gate and tried to squeeze his hand through it to unlock it. When that didn't work, he started to climb the ironwork, and that's when Bull swung the gate open and got into it with him. He thinks it's the man who was on the chopper, but whoever it was, he was up to something serious, and when they got into the scuffle, the man dropped his gun.

“Stay right here,” she tells Bull in the dark alley. “If one of the neighbors comes out or anyone shows up for any reason, no one gets near anything. No one touches anything. Fortunately, I don't think anybody can see what we're doing.”

The beam of Bull's flashlight probes the uneven bricks as she returns to her house. She climbs the stairs to the second story, and in a few minutes is back in the alley with her camera and crime scene case. She takes photographs. She pulls on latex gloves. She picks up the revolver, opens the cylinder, and ejects six thirty-eight-caliber cartridges, placing them in one paper bag, the gun in another. She seals them with bright yellow evidence tape that she labels and initials with a Sharpie.

Bull continues to search, his flashlight bobbing as he walks, stops, crouches, then walks some more, all of it very slowly. A few more minutes pass, and he says, “There's something here. I think you better look.”

She walks over to him, watching where she steps, and about a hundred feet from her gates on the leaf-littered asphalt is a small gold coin attached to a broken gold chain. They blaze in the beam of her flashlight, the gold as bright as the moon.

“You were this far away from my gates when you struggled with him?” she says with doubt. “Then why's his gun way over there?” She points toward the dark shapes of her gates and garden wall.

“Hard to tell where I was,” he says. “Things like that happen fast. I didn't think I was way over here, but I can't say it as a fact.”

She looks back toward her house. “From here to there is pretty far,” she says. “You sure you didn't chase him after he dropped the gun?”

“All I can say,” Bull says, “is a gold chain with a gold coin isn't going to lie around out here long. So I could have chased him and it got broke when we tussled. I didn't think I chased him, but when you got life and death going on, time and distance don't always measure right.”

“They don't always,” she agrees.

She pulls on fresh gloves and picks up the broken necklace by a small area of the chain. Without a lens, she can't tell what type of coin it is, can make out only a crowned head on one side, a wreath and the number 1 on the other.

“So it probably broke off when I started tussling with him,” Bull decides, as if he's convinced himself. “Sure hope they don't make you turn all this over to them. The police, I mean.”

“There's nothing to turn over,” she says. “So far, there's no crime. Just a scuffle between you and a stranger. Which I don't intend to mention to anyone. Except Lucy. We'll see what we can do in the labs tomorrow.”

He's already been in trouble. He's not getting into trouble again, especially on her account.

“When folks find a gun lying around, they supposed to call the police,” Bull says.

“Well, I'm not going to.” She packs up what she carried outside.

“You're fretting they'd think I was involved in something and haul me off. Don't you get in a mess because of me, Dr. Kay.”

“No one's hauling you anywhere,” she says.

 

Gianni Lupano's black Porsche 911 Carrera is permanently located in Charleston, no matter how seldom he's here.

“Where is he?” Lucy asks Ed.

“Haven't seen him.”

“But he's still in town.”

“I talked to him yesterday. He called and asked me to get maintenance up there because his air-conditioning wasn't working right. So while he was out, and I don't know where he went, they changed the filter. He's a private one. I know about his coming and going because he gets me to start his car once a week so the battery don't go dead.” Ed opens a foam to-go box, and his small office smells like french fries. “You mind? Don't want it to get cold. Who told you about his car?”

“Rose didn't know he has a place in the building,” Lucy says from the doorway, watching the lobby, seeing who walks in. “When she found out, she figured who he is and told me she's seen him driving an expensive sports car that she thought was a Porsche.”

“She's got a Volvo as old as my cat.”

“I've always loved cars, so Rose knows a lot about them, whether she likes it or not,” Lucy says. “Ask her about Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, she'll tell you. Around here, people don't rent Porsches. Maybe a Mercedes but not a Porsche like he's got. So I figured he might keep it here.”

“How's she doing?” Ed sits at his desk, eating a cheeseburger from the Sweetwater Cafe. “That was a bad time of it earlier.”

“Well,” Lucy says. “She's not feeling all that great.”

“I had the flu shot this year. Got the flu twice, plus a cold. It's like giving you candy so you don't get a cavity. Last time I'm doing it.”

“Was Gianni Lupano here when Drew was murdered in Rome?” Lucy asks. “I was told he was in New York, but that doesn't mean it's true.”

“She won the tournament here on a Sunday, the middle of the month.” He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, picks up a big soda, and sucks on the straw. “I know that night Gianni left Charleston, because he asked me to look after his car. Said he didn't know when he'd be back, then all of a sudden, here he is.”

“But you haven't seen him.”

“Almost never do.”

“You talk to him on the phone.”

“That's usually it.”

“I don't understand it,” Lucy says. “Other than Drew playing the
Family Circle
Cup, why would he be in Charleston? The tournament's what? One week a year?”

“You'd be surprised the people who got places in the area. Movie stars, even.”

“His car have a GPS?”

“It's got everything. That's some car.”

“I need to borrow the key.”

“Oh.” Ed sets the cheeseburger back in the container. “I can't do that.”

“Don't worry. I'm not going to drive it, just need to check something, and I know you won't say a word about it.”

“I can't give you the key.” He's stopped eating. “He ever found out…”

“I need the key for ten minutes, fifteen at the most. He'll never find out, I promise.”

“Maybe you could start her up while you're at it. No harm in it.” He rips open a packet of ketchup.

“Will do.”

She goes out a back door and finds the Porsche in a secluded corner of the parking lot. She turns on the engine and opens the glove box to check the registration. The Carrera is a 2006 and registered to Lupano. She turns on the GPS, checks the history of the stored destinations, and writes them down.

 

The rapid respiration of the magnet keeping cool.

Inside the MRI suite, Benton looks through glass at Dr. Self's sheet-draped feet. She's on a sliding table inside the bore of the fourteen-ton magnet, her chin taped down to remind her not to move her head, which is against a coil that will receive the radio frequency pulses necessary to image her brain. Over her ears is a set of gradient-damping headphones. Through them, a little later, when the functional imaging starts, she'll hear the audiotape of her mother's voice.

“So far, so good,” he says to Dr. Susan Lane. “Except for her fun and games. I'm awfully sorry she's kept everybody waiting.” To the tech: “Josh? How about you? Awake?”

“Can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to this,” Josh says from his console. “My little girl's been throwing up all day. Ask my wife how much she'd like to kill me right now.”

“Never known one person to bring such happiness into the world.” Benton means Dr. Self, the eye of the storm. He looks through glass at her feet, catches a glimpse of stockings. “She's wearing hose?”

“You're lucky she's wearing anything. When I brought her in, she insisted on taking everything off,” Dr. Lane says.

“I'm not surprised.” He's careful. Although Dr. Self can't hear them unless they use the intercom, she can see them. “Manic as hell. Has been since she got here. Been a productive stay. Ask her. She's as sane as a judge.”

“I did ask her about anything metal, asked if she had on an underwire bra,” Dr. Lane says. “Told her the scanner has a magnetic pull sixty thousand times greater than the earth's and nothing ferrous can be near it, and bra burning would have a different meaning if there was underwire and she didn't tell us. She said she did, was quite proud of the fact, and went on and on about the—
ah-hmmm
—burden of having large breasts. Of course, I told her she had to take off the bra, and she said she preferred to take off everything and asked for a johnny.”

“I rest my case.”

“So she has on a johnny, but I did convince her to keep her pants on. And her stockings.”

“Good job, Susan. Let's get this over with.”

Dr. Lane pushes the talk button of the intercom and says, “What we're going to do now is start with some localizing images—structural imaging, in other words. This first part is going to last about six minutes, and you're going to hear some rather loud, strange noises that the machine makes. How are you doing?”

“Can we start, please?” Dr. Self's voice.

Intercom off, and Dr. Lane says to Benton, “You ready for the PANAS?” Positive and Negative Affect Scales rating.

Benton pushes the intercom button again and says, “Dr. Self, I'm going to start with a series of questions about how you're feeling. And I'll be asking you these same questions several other times during our session, all right?”

“I know what a PANAS is.” Her voice.

Benton and Dr. Lane exchange glances, their facial expressions relaxed, revealing nothing as Dr. Lane says sarcastically, “Wonderful.”

Benton says, “Ignore it. Let's just do this.”

Josh looks at Benton, ready to start. Benton thinks of his conversation with Dr. Maroni and the implied accusation that Josh told Lucy about their VIP patient, and then Lucy told Scarpetta. It still puzzles Benton. What was Dr. Maroni trying to say? As he looks at Dr. Self through the glass, something comes to him. The file that isn't in Rome. The Sandman's file. Maybe it's here at McLean.

A monitor displays vital signs remotely relayed by Dr. Self's finger holder and a blood pressure cuff. Benton says, “BP one twelve over seventy-eight.” He writes it down. “Pulse seventy-two.”

“What's her pulse ox?” Dr. Lane asks.

He tells her that Dr. Self's arterial oxyhemoglobin saturation—or the measurement of oxygen saturation in her blood—is ninety-nine. Normal. He presses the intercom button to start the PANAS.

“Dr. Self? Are you ready for a few questions?”

“Finally.” Her voice over the intercom.

“I'll ask questions, and I want you to rate what you're feeling on a scale of one to five. One means you feel nothing. Two means you feel a little. Three is moderately, four is very much, and five is extremely. Make sense?”

“I'm familiar with a PANAS. I'm a psychiatrist.”

“It appears she's a neuroscientist, too,” Dr. Lane comments. “She's going to cheat this part of it.”

“I don't care.” Benton presses the intercom button and goes through the questions, the same ones he'll ask her several more times during the testing. Is she feeling upset, ashamed, distressed, hostile, irritable, guilty? Or interested, proud, determined, active, strong, inspired, excited, enthusiastic, alert? She assigns a rating of
one
to all of them, claiming she feels nothing.

He checks her vitals and writes them down. They are normal, unchanged.

“Josh?” Dr. Lane indicates it's time.

The structural scan begins. What sounds like loud hammering, and images of Dr. Self's brain are displayed on Josh's computer screen. They don't reveal much. Unless there is some gross pathology, such as a tumor, they will see nothing until later, when thousands of images captured by the MRI are analyzed.

“We're ready to begin,” Dr. Lane says over the intercom. “You all right in there?”

“Yes.” Impatient.

“The first thirty seconds, you're not going to hear anything,” Dr. Lane explains. “So be silent and relax. Then you're going to hear an audiotape of your mother's voice, and I want you to just listen. Be completely still and just listen.”