Trace (23 page)

    
Edgar lied and said she was, knowing Scarpetta wouldn't use a claimed body because that wouldn't be in the spirit of what the person wanted when he donated his body to science. But Pogue knew this pink old woman wouldn't have cared. Not a bit. All she wanted was to pay God back for a few injustices, that was it.

    
"I guess it will be all right," Scarpetta decided. "I hate to cancel. So it will work out."

    
"I sure am sorry," Dave said. "I know it's not ideal to do a demo autopsy with an embalmed one."

    
"Don't worry about it." Scarpetta patted Dave's arm. "Wouldn't you know there aren't any cases today. The one day we don't have any, I happen to have the police academy coming through. Well, send her up."

    
"You betcha. I'm doing you a favor," Dave said with a wink, and sometimes he flirted with Scarpetta. "Donations are on the lean side."

    
"Just be grateful the general public doesn't see where they'd end up or you wouldn't get any donations at all," she replied, heading back to the elevator. "We got to work on those specs for the new building, Dave. Soon."

    
So Pogue helped Dave unhook their most recent donation, and they placed her on the same dusty gurney Scarpetta had been complaining about minutes earlier. Pogue wheeled the pink old lady across brown tile and onto the rusting service elevator and they rode up together and he pushed her out on the first floor, thinking that this was a ride the old woman never planned to take. No, she certainly didn't envision this detour, now did she? And he should know. He talked to her enough, didn't he? Even before she was dead, didn't he? The plastic shroud he had draped over her rustled as he rolled her through the heavy, deodorized air, and wheels clattered along white tile as he guided her toward the open double doors that led into the autopsy suite.

    
"And that, Mother Dear, is what happened to Mrs. Arnette," Edgar Allan Pogue says, sitting up on the lawn chair, photographs of the blue-haired Mrs. Arnette spread out on the yellow and white webbing between his naked, hairy thighs. "Oh I know, it sounds unfair and dreadful, doesn't it? But it really wasn't. I knew she'd rather have an audience of young policemen than to be carved on by some ungrateful medical student. It's a nice story, isn't it, Mother? A very nice story."

Chapter 18

    
The bedroom
is big enough to hold a single bed and a small table to the left of the headboard, and a dresser next to the closet. The furniture is oak, not antique but not new, and it is nice enough, and taped to the paneled wall around the bed are scenic posters.

    
Gilly Paulsson slept at the steps of Siena's Duomo and woke up beneath the ancient Palace of Domitian on Rome's Palatine Hill. She may have dressed and brushed her long blond hair in the full-length mirror near Florence's Piazza Santa Croce with its statue of Dante. She probably did not know who Dante was. She may not have been able to find Italy on a map.

    
Marino is standing next to a window that overlooks the backyard. He does not have to explain what he is seeing because it is obvious. The window is no more than four feet from the ground and locks by two thumb latches that when pressed allow the window to be slid up easily.

    
"They don't catch," Marino says. He is wearing white cotton gloves and pushes in the thumb latches, demonstrating how effortlessly one can raise the window.

    
"Detective Browning should know about this," Scarpetta says, getting out gloves, too, a white cotton pair that are slightly soiled because they permanently reside in a side pocket of her handbag. "But there is nothing in any of the reports I've seen that mentions the window lock is broken. Forced?"

    
"Naw," Marino replies, sliding the window back down. "Just old and worn out. I wonder if she ever opened her window. Hard to believe someone just happened to notice she was home from school and Mom's on a quick errand, and Hey, I'll break in, and Hey, aren't I lucky the window lock is busted."

    
"More likely someone already knew the window doesn't lock," Scarpetta says.

    
"My guess."

    
"Then someone familiar with this house or able to watch it and gather intelligence."

    
"Huh," Marino says, walking over to the dresser and opening the top drawer. "We need to know something about the neighbors. The one with the best view of her bedroom's going to be that house." He nods toward the window with its worn-out lock, indicating the house behind the back fence, the one with the mossy slate roof. "I'll find out if the cops questioned whoever lives back there." It sounds odd when he refers to police as cops, as if he never was one. "Maybe whoever lives there has noticed someone hanging around the house. I thought you might find this interesting."

    
Marino reaches inside the drawer and lifts out a man's black leather wallet. It is curved and smooth the way wallets are when they are habitually kept in a back pocket. He opens it and inside is the expired Virginia driver's license of Franklin Adam Paulsson, born August 14, 1966, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are no credit cards, no cash, nothing else inside the wallet.

    
"Dad," Scarpetta says, giving thoughtful attention to the photograph on the license, to the smiling blond man with a hard jaw and light gray-blue eyes the color of winter. He is handsome but she isn't sure what she thinks of him, assuming one can judge a person by the way he looks on a driver's license. Maybe he is cold, she thinks. He is something, but she doesn't know what and feels uneasy.

    
"See, I think this is weird," Marino says. "This top drawer's like a shrine to him. These t-shirts?" He holds up a thin stack of neatly folded white undershirts. "Size large, men's, maybe Dad's, and some are stained and have holes in them. And letters." He hands her a dozen or so envelopes, several of them greeting cards, it appears, and all with a Charleston return address. "And then there's this." His thick white cottony fingers pull out a dead long-stem red rose. "You notice the same thing I do?" he asks.

    
"It doesn't look very old."

    
"Exactly." He carefully sets it back inside the drawer. "Two weeks, three weeks? You grow roses," he adds as if that makes her an expert in wilted ones.

    
"I don't know. But it doesn't look months old. It isn't completely dried out. What do you want to do in here, Marino? Dust for prints? It should already have been done. What the hell did they do in here?"

    
"Make assumptions," he says. "That's what they did. I'll get my case out of the car, take pictures. I can dust for prints. The window, window frame, this dresser, especially the top drawer. That's about it."

    
"May as well. We can't mess up this crime scene now. Too many people got to it first." She realizes she has just referred to the bedroom as a crime scene and it is the first time she has called it that.

    
"Then I guess I'll wander out in the yard," he says. "Two weeks, though. Unlikely any of little Sweetie's poop would be out there unless it never rained once, and we know it has. So kind of hard to know if there's really a missing dog. Browning said nothing about it."

    
Scarpetta returns to the kitchen where Mrs. Paulsson sits at the table. It does not appear she has moved, but is in the same position in the same chair, staring off. She doesn't really believe her daughter died of the flu. How could she possibly believe such a thing?

    
"Has anybody explained to you why the FBI is interested in Gilly's death?" Scarpetta asks, sitting across the small table from her. "What have the police said to you?"

    
"I don't know. I don't watch that sort of thing on TV," she mutters, her voice trailing off.

    
"What sort of thing?"

    
"Police shows. FBI shows. Crime shows. Never have watched things like that."

    
"But you know the FBI is involved," Scarpetta says as her concerns about Mrs. Paulsson's mental health gather more darkly. "Have you talked to the FBI?"

    
"This woman came to see me, I already told you. She said she just had routine questions and was mighty sorry to bother me because I was upset. That's what she said, I was upset. She sat right here, right where we are, and she asked me things about Gilly and Frank and anybody suspicious I might have noticed. You know, did Gilly talk to strangers, did she talk to her father. What are the neighbors like. She asked about Frank, a lot about him."

    
"Why do you think that is? What kinds of questions about Frank?" Scarpetta probes, envisioning the blond man with the hard jaw and pale blue eyes.

    
Mrs. Paulsson stares at the wall to the left of the stove as if something is on the white-painted wall that captures her interest, but nothing is there. "I don't know why she asked about him except that women often do." She stiffens and her voice gets brittle. "Oh boy, do they ever."

    
"And he's where now? Right this minute, I mean."

    
"Charleston. We may as well have been divorced forever." She begins to pick at a hangnail, her eyes riveted to the wall, as if something on it seizes her attention, but there is nothing on it, nothing at all.

    
"Were he and Gilly close?"

    
"She worships him." Mrs. Paulsson takes a deep, quiet breath, her eyes wide, and her head begins to move, suddenly unsteady on her thin neck. "He can do no wrong. The couch in the living room below the window, it's just a plaid couch, nothing special about that couch except it was his spot. Where he watched TV, read the paper." She takes a deep, heavy breath. "After he left she used to go in there and lie down on it. I could hardly get her off it." She sighs. "He's not a good father. Isn't that the way it goes? We love what we can't have."

    
Marino's boots sound from the direction of Gilly's bedroom. This time his big, heavy feet are louder.

    
"We love what doesn't love us back," Mrs. Paulsson says.

    
Scarpetta has made no notes since returning to the kitchen. Her wrist rests on top of the notebook, the ballpoint pen ready but still. "What is the FBI agent's name?" she asks.

    
"Oh dear. Karen. Let me see." She shuts her eyes and touches her trembling fingers to her forehead. "I just don't remember things anymore. Let me see. Weber. Karen Weber."

    
"From the Richmond field office?"

    
Marino walks into the kitchen, a black plastic fishing tackle box gripped in one hand, the other hand holding his baseball cap. He has taken the cap off finally, perhaps out of respect for Mrs. Paulsson, the mother of a young girl who was murdered.

    
"Oh dear. I guess she was. I have her card somewhere. Where did I put it?"

    
"You know anything about Gilly having a red rose?" Marino asks from the doorway. "There's a red rose in her bedroom."

    
"What?" Mrs. Paulsson says.

    
"Why don't we show you," Scarpetta says, getting up from the table. She hesitates, hoping Mrs. Paulsson can handle what is about to happen. "I'd like to explain a few things."

    
"Oh. I guess we can." She stands and is shaky on her feet. "A red rose?"

    
"When did Gilly see her father last? " Scarpetta asks, and they head back to the bedroom, Marino leading the way.

    
"Thanksgiving."

    
"Did she go see him? Did he come here?" Scarpetta asks in her most nonaggressive voice, and it strikes her that the hallway seems tighter and darker than it was a few minutes ago.