Trace (56 page)

    
She is almost dressed when she becomes aware of the silence. Quietly swearing and suddenly frantic, she digs in a pocket of her ski jacket and finds her cell phone. The battery is dead. Last night she was too tired and unhappy to think about her phone and she forgot it and left it in her pocket, and that isn't like her, that is so unlike her. Rudy doesn't know where she is staying. Neither does her aunt. Neither of them knows the alias she is using, so even if they tried the St. Regis, they wouldn't find her. Only Benton knows where and who she is, and for her to cut Rudy off like this is unthinkable and unprofessional and he will be furious. Of all times, now was not the time to push him farther away. If he quits, what then? She trusts no one else she works with the way she trusts him. Finding the charger, she plugs in the phone and turns it on, and she has eleven messages, most of them left since six
a.m.
Eastern Standard Time, most of them from him.

    
"I thought you'd dropped off the map," Rudy says the instant he answers. "I've been trying to get you for three hours. What are you doing? Since when don't you answer the phone? Don't tell me it's not working. I don't believe it. That phone works anywhere, and I've been trying you on the radio too. You've had the damn thing turned off, haven't you?"

    
"Calm down, Rudy," she says. "My battery went dead. The phone, the radio don't work when the battery's dead. I'm sorry."

    
"You didn't bring a charger?"

    
"I said I'm sorry, Rudy."

    
"Well, we have a little bit of intelligence. It would be good if you could get back here ASAP."

    
"What's going on?" Lucy sits down on the floor near the socket where her phone is plugged in.

    
"Unfortunately, you're not the only one who got a little present from him. Some poor old woman got one of Pogue's chemical bombs, only she wasn't so lucky."

    
"Jesus," Lucy says, shutting her eyes.

    
"A waitress at a sleazy bar in Hollywood that's right across the street from a Shell station where guess what? They sell Big Gulps in Cat in the Hat cups. The victim's burned pretty bad but is going to make it. Apparently he's been coming into the place she works, the Other Way Lounge. Ever heard of it?"

    
"No," she says almost inaudibly, thinking of the burned woman. "Jesus," she mutters.

    
"So we're canvassing the area. I've got some of our people out. Not the recruits. They ain't the sharpest knives in the drawer, these ones aren't."

    
"Jesus," is all she can think to say about it. "Can anything go right?"

    
"They're going more right than they were. Two other things. Your aunt says Pogue might be wearing a wig. A long black curly wig. A dyed black human-hair wig. I guess the mitochondrial DNA was going to be pretty funny, right? Probably come back to some hooker who sold her hair to a wig company so she could buy crack."

    
"You just telling me this now? A wig?"

    
"Edgar Allan Pogue has red hair. Your aunt saw the red hairs in the bed in his house, in the house where he was staying. A wig could explain the long wavy dyed black hairs recovered from Gilly Paulsson's bed linens and from your bedroom and also the duct tape on the chemical bomb left in your mailbox. A wig would explain a lot of things, according to your aunt. We're also looking for his car. Turns out the old woman who died in the house where he's been staying, Mrs. Arnette, had a white 1991 Buick, and no one knows what happened to it after she died. The family never gave it a thought. Sounds like they never gave her a thought either. We think Pogue might be driving the Buick. It's still registered to Mrs. Arnette. It would be good if you come on back here ASAP. Probably not a good idea for you to stay in your house, though."

    
"Don't worry," she says. "I won't ever stay in that house again."

    
Chapter 51

    
Edgar Allan Pogue
closes his eyes. He sits in his white Buick in a parking lot off A1A, listening to what people call adult rock these days. He keeps his eyes shut and tries not to cough. Whenever he coughs, his lungs burn and he feels dizzy and cold. He doesn't know where the weekend went, but it went all right. The adult rock station says it's rush hour, Monday morning. Pogue coughs, and tears fill his eyes as he tries to breathe deeply.

    
He has caught a cold. He is certain he caught it from the red-haired waitress at the Other Way Lounge. She came close to his table when he was leaving Friday night. She came close, wiping her nose on a tissue, and she got much too close to him because she wanted to make sure he paid. As usual, he had to push back his chair and stand up before she bothered to check on him. The truth was, he would have liked another Bleeding Sunset and would have ordered one, but the redhaired waitress couldn't be bothered. None of them can be bothered. So she got a Big Orange and that's what she deserved.

    
The sun comes through the front windshield and is warm on Pogue's face as he sits behind the steering wheel, the seat pushed back, his eyes shut. He hopes the sun will cure his cold. His mother always said that sunlight has vitamins in it and cures just about everything, which was why when people get old they move to Florida. That's what she told him. Someday, Edgar Allan, you'll move to Florida. You're young now, Edgar Allan, but someday you'll be old and worn-out like I am, like most people are, and you'll want to move to Florida. If only you had a respectable job, Edgar Allan. I doubt you'll be able to afford Florida the rate you're going.

    
His mother nagged him about money. She worried him to death about it. Then she died and left him enough to move to Florida someday if he wanted, and then he retired and started getting a check in the mail every two weeks, and the last check must be sitting in his post office box because he isn't in Richmond to pick it up. He has a little money even without his checks. For now, he has enough. He can still afford his expensive cigars, so he has enough, and if his mother were here she would nag him about smoking with a cold, but he's going to smoke. He thinks about the flu shot he missed, all because he heard that his old building was being torn down and that the Big Fish had opened an office in Hollywood. In Florida.

    
Virginia hired a new chief medical examiner, and next thing Pogue knew, they were going to tear the old building down so the city could build a parking deck, and Lucy was in Florida, and if Scarpetta hadn't abandoned Pogue and Richmond, there would have been no need for a new chief and therefore the old building would be fine because everything would have stayed the same, and he would not have been late for his flu shot and would have gotten one. Tearing down his old building wasn't right or fair and no one bothered to ask him how he felt about it. It was his building. He still gets a paycheck every two weeks and he still has his key to the back door and he still works in the Anatomical Division, usually at night.

    
He worked there all he wanted until he heard the building was coming down. He was the only one using the building. No one else cared about it in the least, and now he suddenly had to get his things out of there. All those people he had down there in little dented boxes had to be moved late at night, when no one could see him do it. What an ordeal, going up and down the stairs, in and out of the parking lot, his lungs burning as ashes leaked everywhere. One box slid off the stack he was carrying and spilled on the parking lot, and it was very hard to pick up ashes that seemed lighter than air and blew everywhere. What an awful ordeal. It wasn't fair, and next thing he knew, a month had passed and he was late for his flu shot and there was no more vaccine. He coughs and his chest burns and his eyes tear up, and he sits very still in the sun, soaking in the vitamins, and he thinks of the Big Fish.

    
He feels depressed and angry when he thinks of her. She knows nothing about him and never even said hello to him, and now he has stiff lungs because of her. He has nothing because of her. She has a mansion and cars that cost more than any house he's ever lived in, and she couldn't bother to say she was sorry the day it happened. In fact, she laughed. She thought it was funny when he jumped and gave out a little yelp like a little dog as he was walking out of the embalming room and she rattled past, riding a gurney. She was standing on a rung of the gurney, rattling past, laughing, and her aunt was standing by an open vat, talking to Dave about something going on with the General Assembly, some problem.

    
Scarpetta never came down unless there was a problem. This particular day, and it was this same time of year, Christmastime, she brought the spoiled know-it-all Lucy with her, and he already knew about Scarpetta's niece. Everybody there did. He knew that she was from Florida. She lived in Florida, in Miami, with Scarpetta's sister. Pogue doesn't know all the details, but he knows enough, and he knew enough back then to realize that Lucy could soak in vitamins and not have anyone nag and complain that she would never do well enough to live in Florida.

    
She already lived there, was born there and did nothing to earn it, and then she laughed at Pogue. She rode by on the gurney and almost hit him when he was walking past, pushing an empty fifty-gallon drum of formaldehyde on a dolly, and because of Lucy, he jumped and came to an abrupt halt and the dolly tipped and the drum toppled over and rolled, and Lucy clattered by on the gurney like a bratty kid riding a shopping cart in the grocery store, only she wasn't a kid, she was a teenager, a very bratty pretty prideful seventeen-year-old, and Pogue remembers her age exactly. He knows her birthday. For years he has sent her anonymous sympathy cards on her birthday, in care of Scarpetta at the OCME at the old 9 North 14th Street address, even after the building was abandoned. He doubts Lucy ever got them.

    
That day, that fateful day, Scarpetta stood by the open vat, and she was wearing a lab coat over a very smart dark suit because she had a meeting with a legislator, she told Dave, and was going to address whatever the problem was. She was going to talk to the legislator about some proposed cockeyed bill, and Pogue can't remember what it was because at the time the bill wasn't the point of anything. He takes a breath and it rattles in his stiff lungs as he sits in the sun. Scarpetta was a very good-looking woman when she was dressed smartly like she was that morning, and it always pained Pogue to look at her when she wasn't looking at him, and he would feel a deep twinge that he couldn't define when he watched her from a distance. He felt something for Lucy but it was different, what he felt for her. He sensed the intensity of what Scarpetta felt for her, and that made him feel something for Lucy. But it was different.

    
The empty drum made the most god-awful racket as it rolled across the tile, and Pogue rushed to grab it as it rolled right toward Lucy on the gurney, and it was never possible to get every drop of formaldehyde out of a fifty-gallon metal drum, and the swill in the bottom was spilling and splashing as the drum rolled. Several drops hit his face as he grabbed the drum, and one drop went into his mouth and he inhaled it. Then he was coughing and vomiting in the bathroom and no one came to check on him. Scarpetta didn't. Lucy certainly didn't. He could hear Lucy through the closed bathroom door. She was riding the gurney again, laughing. No one knew that Pogue's life was broken at that precise moment, broken for good.

    
Are you all right? Are you all right, Edgar Allan? Scarpetta asked through the shut door, but she didn't come in.

    
He has replayed what she said, replayed it so many times he is no longer certain he has her voice right, that he has remembered it right, exactly right.

    
Are you all right, Edgar Allan?

    
Yes, ma'am. I'm just washing up.

    
When Pogue finally emerged from the bathroom, Lucy's gurney go-cart was abandoned in the middle of the floor and she was gone and Scarpetta was gone. Dave was gone. Only Pogue was there, and he was going to die because of a single drop of formaldehyde that he could feel exploding and burning into his lungs like red-hot sparks, and nobody was there but him.

    
So you see, I know all about it, he later explained to Mrs. Arnette when he was lining up six bottles of pink embalming fluid on the cart next to her stainless-steel table. Sometimes you have to suffer in order to feel the suffering of others, he told Mrs. Arnette as he cut off sections of string from a roll on the cart. I know you remember how much time I spent with you when we talked about your paperwork and your intentions and what would happen to you if you went to MCV or UVA. You said you love Charlottesville, and I promised you I'd make sure you went to UVA since you love Charlottesville. I listened to you for hours in your house, didn't I? I came by whenever you called, at first because of the paperwork, then because you needed someone to listen and were afraid your family would overrule you.