Trace (43 page)

    
"Believe me, I don't want to worry," he replies. "But it's not like you can wear a rubber if someone's biting you. It's not like you can protect yourself. You can't exactly have safe sex if someone's biting you."

    
"The understatement of the year," she replies as she turns onto 4th Street. Her cell phone rings, and it worries her when she recognizes Rudy's number. Rarely does he call her, and when he does, it is either to wish her a happy birthday or to pass along bad news.

    
"Hi, Rudy," she says, slowly winding around the back parking lot of the building. "What's up?"

    
"I can't get hold of Lucy," his stressed voice sounds in her ear. "She's either out of range or has her cell phone off. She headed out in the helicopter this morning for Charleston," he says.

    
Scarpetta glances over at Marino. He must have called Lucy after Scarpetta left his room last night.

    
"It's a damn good thing," Rudy says. "A damn good thing."

    
"Rudy, what's going on?" Scarpetta asks, and she is getting more unnerved by the second.

    
"Someone put a bomb in her mailbox," he says, talking fast. "It's too much to go into. Some of it she needs to tell you."

    
Scarpetta creeps almost to a halt inside the parking lot, heading in the direction of the visitors' slots. "When and what?" she asks.

    
"I just found it. Not even an hour ago. Came by to check on the place and saw the flag up on the mailbox, which didn't make sense. I opened it and this big plastic cup's inside, the whole thing colored orange with marker, and the lid's colored green with a piece of duct tape around the lid and over the opening, you know, the little spout you drink out of, and I couldn't see what was in it so I got one of those long poles out of the garage, what do you call it. Has the grippers on the end for changing light bulbs that are high up. I picked the damn thing up with it, carried it out back, and took care of it."

    
She takes her time parking, the car barely moving while she listens. "How did you manage that? I hate to ask."

    
"Shot it. Don't worry. With snake shot. It was a chemical bomb, a bottle bomb, you know the type. With little pieces of tinfoil balled up inside."

    
"Metal to accelerate the reaction." Scarpetta starts going through the differential diagnosis of the bomb. "Typical in bottle bombs made out of household cleaners that contain hydrochloric acid like the Works for toilet bowls that you can get from Wal-Mart, the grocery store, a hardware store. Unfortunately, the recipes are available on the Internet."

    
"It had an acid odor, more like chlorine, but since I shot it by the pool, maybe that's what I was smelling."

    
"Possibly granulated pool chlorine and some type of sugary soda pop. That's also popular. A chemical analysis will tell."

    
"Don't worry. One will be done."

    
"Anything left of the cup?" she asks.

    
"We'll check for prints and get anything we find right into IAFIS."

    
"Theoretically, you can get DNA from prints, if they're fresh. It's worth a try."

    
"We'll swab the cup and the duct tape. Don't worry."

    
The more he says don't worry, the more she will.

    
"I haven't called the police," he adds.

    
"It's not my place to advise you about that." She has given up advising him or anyone associated with him. The rules of Lucy and her people are different and creative and risky, and quite often they are inconsistent with what is legal. Scarpetta has ceased demanding to know details that will keep her awake at night.

    
"This may be related to some other things," Rudy says. "Lucy needs to tell you. If you talk to her before I do, she needs to call me ASAP."

    
"Rudy, you'll do what you want. But let me just say I hope there aren't any other devices out there, that whoever did this didn't leave more than one, didn't have more than one target," she says. "I've had cases of people who died when these chemicals exploded in their faces or were thrown in their faces and it got into the airway and lungs. The acids are so strong the reaction doesn't even need to go to completion before the thing blows."

    
"I know, I know."

    
"Please find some way to make sure there aren't other victims or potential victims out there. That's what concerns me if you handle things on your own." It is her way of saying that if he doesn't intend to call the police, he should at least be responsible enough to do what he can to protect the public.

    
"I know what to do. Don't worry," he says.

    
"Jesus," Scarpetta says, ending the call and looking over at Marino. "What in God's name is going on down there? You must have called Lucy last night. Did she tell you what's going on down there? I haven't seen her since September. I don't know what's going on."

    
"An acid bomb?" He is sitting up straighter in his seat, always ready to pounce if anyone is after Lucy.

    
"A chemical-reaction bomb. The kind of bottle bombs we had trouble with out of Fairfax. Remember all those bombs in northern Virginia some years ago? A bunch of kids with too much time on their hands who thought it was funny blowing up mailboxes and a woman died?"

    
"Dammit," he says.

    
"Easily accessible and terribly dangerous. A pH of one or less, so acidic it's off the scale. It could have blown up in Lucy's face. I hope to God she wouldn't have pulled it out of the mailbox herself. I never know with her."

    
"At her house?" Marino asks, getting angrier. "The bomb was at that mansion of hers down in Florida?"

    
"What did she say to you last night?"

    
"I just told her about Frank Paulsson, what was going on up here. That was it. She said she'd take care of it. At that huge house of hers with all the cameras and shit? The bomb was at her house?"

    
"Come on," Scarpetta says, opening her car door. "I'll tell you as we go in."

Chapter 38

    
Close to
the window, the morning light warms the desk where Rudy sits typing on the computer. He hits keys and waits, then rapidly types and waits some more, pressing arrows and scrolling, searching the Internet for what he believes is there. Something is there. The psycho saw something that set him off. Rudy now knows the bomb isn't random.

    
He's been at the training camp office for the past two hours doing nothing but maneuver through the Internet while one of the forensic scientists in the nearby private lab has scanned prints and partial prints into IAFIS, and already there is news. Rudy's nerves are screaming like one of Lucy's Ferraris in sixth gear. He dials the phone and tucks the receiver under his chin as he types and stares at the flat video screen.

    
"Hey Phil," he says. "Big plastic cup with the Cat in the Hat on it. Big Gulp type of cup. Lid originally white. Yeah, yeah, the type of big cup you get
in a convenience store, a gas station, and fill it up yourself. The Cat in the Hat, though. How unusual? Can we track it? No, I'm not kidding. That's a proprietary thing, right? But the movie, it's not recent. Last year, Christmastime, right? No, I didn't go see it and quit being funny. Seriously, what place would still have Cat in the Hat cups left after all this time? Worst case, he's had 'em for a while. But we gotta try. Yeah, we got prints on it. This guy's not even trying. I mean, he doesn't give a rat's ass about leaving his prints all the hell over the place. On the drawing he taped to the boss's door. Inside the bedroom where Henri was attacked. Now on a bomb. And now we got a hit in IAFTS. Yeah, can you believe it? No, don't have a name yet. Might not, either. The hit's on a latent-to-latent search, matching up with partials from some other case. We're checking. That's all I've got right now."

    
He hangs up and turns back to the computer. Lucy has more search engines in the Internet than Pratt & Whitney has jet turbines, but she has never worried that information on the World Wide Web might have to do with her. Not so long ago, she had no reason to worry. Special operatives don't usually court publicity unless they're inactive and hungry for Hollywood, but then Lucy got hooked into Hollywood, and then she got hooked into Henri, and then life changed dramatically and for the worse. Damn Henri, he thinks as he types. Damn her. Damn failed actress Henri who decided to be a cop. Damn Lucy for recruiting her.

    
He starts a new search, typing in the key words "Kay Scarpetta" and "niece." Now this is interesting. He picks up a pencil and starts twirling it between his fingers like a baton as he reads an article that ran last September on the AP. It is a very short article and simply states that Virginia has appointed a new chief medical examiner, Dr. Joel Marcus from St. Louis, and it mentions his taking Scarpetta's place after years of limbo and chaos and so on. But Lucy's name appears in the brief article. Since leaving Virginia, the article says, Dr. Scarpetta has worked as a consultant for the private investigation firm The Last Precinct, founded by her niece, former FBI agent Lucy Farinelli.

    
Not quite true, Rudy thinks. Scarpetta doesn't exactly work for Lucy, but that doesn't mean they don't find themselves involved in the same cases now and then. There is no way Scarpetta would ever work for Lucy, and he can't blame her, and he's not sure how he works for Lucy. He had forgotten all about the article, and now he remembers getting angry with Lucy about it and demanding to know how the hell her name and the name of The Last Precinct ended up in a damn story about Dr. Joel Marcus. The last thing TLP needs is publicity, and there never used to be publicity until Lucy got involved with the entertainment industry, and then all sorts of gossip started leaking into the newspapers and onto television magazine shows.

    
He executes another search, squinting his eyes, trying to come up with something he hasn't thought of, and then his fingers seem to type on without the rest of him and he types in the key words "Henrietta Walden." A waste of time, he thinks. Her name when she was a B-list out-of-work actress was Jen Thomas or something forgettable like that. He reaches for his Pepsi without looking at it and can't believe his good fortune. The search returns three results.

    
"Come on, be something," he says to the empty office as he clicks on the first entry.

    
A Henrietta Taft Walden died a hundred years ago, was some sort of wealthy abolitionist from Lynchburg, Virginia. Whoa, that must have gone over like a lead balloon. He can't imagine being an abolitionist in Virginia around the time of the Civil War. Gutsy lady, he'll give her that. He clicks on the second entry. This Henrietta Walden is alive but ancient and lives on a farm, also in Virginia, raises show horses and recently gave a million dollars to the NAACP. Probably a descendant of the first Henrietta Walden. he thinks, and he wonders if Jen Thomas borrowed the name Henrietta Walden from these somewhat noteworthy female abolitionist types, one dead, one barely alive. If so, why? He envisions Henri's striking blond looks and uppity ball-busting attitude. Why would she be inspired by women who were passionate about the plight of blacks? Probably because it was the liberal Hollywood thing to do, he cynically decides, clicking on the third entry.

    
This one is a short article from
The Hollywood Reporter.
It was published in mid-October:

    
THIS
  
ROLE'S
  
FOR
  
REAL

    
Former actress-turned-LAPD-cop Henri Walden has signed on with the prestigious international private protection agency The Last Precinct, owned and directed by a former special ops helicopter-flying, Ferrari-driving Lucy Farinelli, who just so happens to be the niece of the famed real-life Quincy Dr. Kay Scarpetta. TLP, which is headquartered in a lesser Hollywood, the one in Florida, recently opened an office in Los Angeles and has expanded its cloak-and-dagger activities to protecting stars. Although its clients are top-secret, the
Reporter
has learned that some of them are the biggest names on the A list and in the music industry and include such mega-luminaries as actor Gloria Rustic and rapper Rat Riddly.