Trace (7 page)

    
"Informed consent is murky." She doesn't answer his ridiculous charge. "The patient is often dealing with depression, and when people are depressed, they can't make informed decisions. This is really a societal question."

    
"Let me clarify what you're saying," Dr. Marcus replies.

    
"Please do."

    
"You have this man in hospice who says, 'I think I'd like to die today.' Should you expect your local doc to do it?"

    
"The truth is, the patient in hospice already has that capacity. He can decide to die," she replies. "He can have morphine when he wants it for pain, so he asks for more and goes to sleep and dies from an O.D. He can wear a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet and a squad doesn't have to resuscitate him. So he dies. Chances are there will be no consequences to anyone."

    
"But is it our case?" Dr. Marcus insists, his thin face white with rage as he glares at her.

    
"People are in hospices because they want pain control and want to die in peace," she says. "People who make informed decisions to wear DNR bracelets basically want the same thing. A morphine O.D., a withdrawal of vital support in a hospice, a person wearing a DNR bracelet isn't resuscitated. These are not our issues. If you get called about a case like that, Dr. Marcus, I hope you turn it down."

    
"Any comment?" Dr. Marcus asks tersely, shuffling paperwork and ready to leave.

    
"Yeah," Marino says to him. "You ever thought of writing Q-and-A's for
Jeopardy?"

Chapter 5

    
Benton Wesley
paces from window to window inside his three-bedroom town home at the Aspen Club. The signal of his cell phone surges in and out, and Marino's voice is clear, then broken.

    
"What? I'm sorry, say that again." Benton backs up three steps and stands still.

    
"I said that's not the half of it. A hell of a lot worse than you thought." Marino's voice comes through intact. "It's like he brought her in to kick the shit out of her in front of an audience. Or try. I emphasize
try."

    
Benton stares out at snow caught in crooks of aspen trees and piled on the stubby needles of black spruce. The morning is sunny and clear for the first time in days, and magpies frolic from branch to branch, landing in a flutter and then flitting off in small white bursts of snow. A part of Benton's mind processes the activity and tries to determine a reason, perhaps a biological cause and effect that might explain the long-tailed birds' gymnastics, as if it matters. His mental probing is as conditioned as the wildlife and as relentless as the gondolas swinging up and down the mountain.

    
"Try, yes. Try." Benton smiles a little as he imagines it. "But you need to understand he didn't invite her because it was a choice. It was an order. The health commissioner's behind it."

    
"And you know that how?"

    
"It took me one phone call after she told me she was going."

    
"It's too bad about Asp—" Marino's voice fractures.

    
Benton moves to the next window, flames snapping and wood popping in the fireplace at his back. He continues to stare out the floor-to-ceiling glass, his attention fixing on the stone house across the street as the front door opens. A man and a boy emerge dressed for the weather, their breath streaming out in a frozen vapor.

    
"By now she's aware of it," Benton says. "Aware she's being used." He knows Scarpetta well enough to make predictions that undoubtedly are true. "I promise she knows the politics or simply that there are politics. Unfortunately, there's more, a lot more. Can you hear me?"

    
He looks out at the man and the boy shouldering their skis and poles, walking sluggishly in half-buckled ski boots. Benton will not ski or snowshoe today. He doesn't have time.

    
"Huh." Marino has started saying that a lot of late, and Benton finds it annoying.

    
"Can you hear me?" Benton asks.

    
"Yeah, I'm copying now," Marino comes back, and Benton can tell he's moving around, roaming for a better signal. "He's trying to blame everything on her, like he brought her here to do that. I don't know what else to tell you until I get
into it more. The kid, I mean."

    
Benton is aware of Gilly Paulsson. Her mysterious death may not be national news, not yet, but details from Virginia media sources are on the Internet, and Benton has his own ways of accessing information, very confidential information. Gilly Paulsson is being used, because it is not a requirement to be alive if certain people want to use you.

    
"Did I lose you again? Dammit," Benton says, and communication would be immensely improved if he could use the land line in his own home, but he can't.

    
"I'm copying you, boss." Marino's voice is suddenly strong. "Why don't you use your land line? That would solve half our problem," he says, as if reading Benton's thoughts.

    
"Can't."

    
"You think it's bugged?" Marino isn't joking. "There are ways to detect that. Get Lucy to do it."

    
"Thanks for the suggestion." Benton doesn't need Lucy's help with countersurveillance, and his concern isn't that his line is bugged.

    
He follows the progress of the man and the boy as he contemplates Gilly Paulsson. The boy looks about Gilly's age, the age Gilly was when she died. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, only Gilly never got to ski. She never visited Colorado or anywhere else. She was born in Richmond and that's where she died, and during her short life, mostly she suffered. Benton notices that the wind is picking up. Snow blowing off trees fills the woods like smoke.

    
"This is what I want you to tell her," Benton says, and his emphasis on the word "her" indicates he means Scarpetta. "Her successor, if I must call him that," he says, and he doesn't want to say Dr. Marcus's name either or engage in any specifics, and he can't stomach the thought of anyone, least of all this worm Dr. Joel Marcus, succeeding Scarpetta. "This person is of interest," Benton continues, talking cryptically. "When she gets here," he adds, referring to Scarpetta again, "I'll go over all of it in person with her. But for now, use caution, extreme caution."

    
"What do you mean, 'when she gets here? I'm assuming she might be stuck here for a while."

    
"She needs to call me."

    
"Extreme caution?" Marino complains. "Shit, you would have to say something like that."

    
"While she's there, you stay with her."

    
"Huh."

    
"Stay with her, am I clear?"

    
"She won't like it," Marino says.

    
Benton looks out at the harsh slopes of the snow-laced Rockies, at a beauty shaped by cruel, scouring winds and the brute force of glaciers. Aspens and evergreens are a stubble on the faces of mountains that surround this old mining town like a bowl, and to the east, beyond a ridge, a distant gray shroud of clouds is slowly spreading across the intense blue sky. Later today, it will snow again.

    
"No, she never does," Benton says.

    
"She said you got a case."

    
"Yes." Benton can't discuss it.

    
"Well, it's too bad, being in Aspen and all, and you got a case and now she does. So you'll just stay there and work your case, I guess."

    
"For now I will," Benton says.

    
"Must be something serious if you're on it during your vacation in Aspen," Marino fishes.

    
"I can't get
into it."

    
"Huh. These damn phones," Marino says. "Lucy ought to invent something that can't be tapped into or picked up on a scanner. She could make a fortune."

    
"I believe she's already made a fortune. Maybe several fortunes."

    
"No kidding."

    
"Take care," Benton says. "If I don't talk to you in the next few days, take care of her. Watch your back and hers, I mean it."

    
"Tell me something I don't already do," Marino says. "Don't hurt yourself out there playing in the snow."

    
Benton ends the call and returns to a couch that faces the windows near the fire. On the wormy chestnut coffee table is a legal pad filled with his almost indecipherable scrawl and near that is a Glock .40-caliber pistol. Slipping a pair of reading glasses out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt, he settles against the armrest and begins flipping through the legal pad. Each lined page is numbered and in the upper right-hand corner is a date. Benton rubs his angular jaw, remembering that he hasn't shaved in two days, and his rough, graying beard reminds him of the bristly trees on the mountains. He circles the words "shared paranoia" and tilts his head up as he peers through the reading glasses on the tip of his straight, sharp nose.

    
In the margin he scribbles, "Will seem to work when fills in gaps. Serious gaps. Can't last. L is real victim, not H. H is narcissist," and he underlines "narcissist" three times. He jots "histrionic" and underlines it twice, and he turns to a different page, this one with the heading "Post Offense Behavior," and he listens for the sound of running water, puzzled that he hasn't heard it yet. "Critical mass. Will reach no later than Xmas. Tension unbearable. Will kill by Xmas if not sooner," he writes, quietly looking up as he senses her before he hears her.

    
"Who was that?" asks Henri, which is short for Henrietta. She stands on the stairway landing, her delicate hand resting on the railing. Henri Walden stares across the living room at him.

    
"Good morning," Benton says. "You usually take a shower. There's coffee."

    
Henri pulls a plain red flannel robe more tightly around her thin body, her green eyes sleepy and reticent as she takes in Benton, studying him as if a preexisting argument or encounter stands between them. She is twenty-eight and attractive in an off-tilt way. Her features aren't perfect, because her nose is strong and, according to her own warped beliefs, too big. Her teeth aren't perfect either, but right now nothing would convince her that she has a beautiful smile, that she is disturbingly alluring even when she doesn't try to be. Benton hasn't tried to convince her and won't. It is too dangerous.

    
"I heard you talking to someone," she says. "Was it Lucy?"

    
"No," he replies.

    
"Oh," she says and disappointment tugs her lips and anger flashes in her eyes. "Oh. Well. Who was it then?"

    
"It was a private conversation, Henri." He takes off his reading glasses. "We've talked a lot about boundaries. We've talked about them every day, haven't we?"

    
"I know," she says from the landing, her hand on the railing. "If it wasn't Lucy, who was it? Was it her aunt? She talks too much about her aunt."

    
"Her aunt doesn't know you're here, Henri," Benton says very patiently. "Only Lucy and Rudy know you're here."

    
"I know about you and her aunt."