The Last Precinct ks-11 Page 3

  Dark dusting powder smudges furniture and walls, and the colorful Persian rug is pulled back, exposing antique French oak underneath. An endtable lamp is unplugged and on the floor. The sectional sofa has craters where cushions used to be, the air oily and acrid with the residual odor of formalin. Off the great room and near the front door is the dining room and through the open doorway I am greeted with the sight of a brown paper bag sealed with yellow evidence tape, dated, initialed and labeled clothing Scarpetta. Inside it are the slacks, sweater, socks, shoes, bra and panties I was wearing last night, clothes taken from me in the hospital. That bag and other evidence and flashlights and equipment are on top of my favorite red Jarrah Wood dining room table, as if it is a workbench. Cops have draped coats over chairs, and wet, dirty footprints are everywhere. My mouth is dry, my joints weak with shame and rage.

  "Yo Marino!" a cop barks. "Righter's looking for you."

  Buford Righter is the city commonwealth's attorney. I look around for Jay. He is nowhere to be seen.

  "Tell him to take a number and wait in line." Marino sticks to his deli-line allusion.

  He lights the cigarette as I open the front door, and cold air bites my face and makes my eyes water. "Did you get my crime scene case?" I ask him.

  "It's in the truck." He says this like a condescending husband who has been asked to fetch his wife's pocketbook.

  "Why's Righter calling?" I want to know.

  "Bunch of fucking voyeurs," he mutters.

  Marino's truck is on the street out front and two massive tires have chewed tracks into my snowy churned-up lawn. Buford Righter and I have worked many cases together over the years and it stings that he did not ask me directly if he could come to my house. He has not, for that matter, contacted me to see how I am and let me know he is glad I am alive.

  "You ask me, people just want to see your joint," Marino says. "So they give these excuses about needing to check this and that."

  Slush seeps into my shoes as I carefully make my way along the driveway.

  "You got no idea how many people ask me what your house is like. You'd think you was Lady Di or something. Plus, Righter's got his nose in everything, can't stand to be left out of the loop. Biggest fucking case since Jack the Ripper. Righter's bugging the hell out of us."

  Flash guns suddenly explode in bright white stutters and I almost slip. I swear out loud. Photographers have gotten past the neighborhood guard gate. Three of them hurry toward me in a blaze of flashes as I struggle with one arm to climb into the truck's high front seat.

  "Hey!" Marino yells at the nearest offender, a woman. "Goddamn bitch!" He lunges, trying to block her camera, and her feet go out from under her. She sits down hard on the slick street, camera equipment thudding and scattering.

  "Fuckhead!" she screams at him. "Fuckhead!"

  "Get in the truck! Get in the truck!" Marino yells at me.

  "Motherfucker!"

  My heart drills my ribs.

  "I'm going to sue you, motherfucker!"

  More flashes and I shut my coat in the door and have to open it again and shut it again while Marino shoves my bags in back and jumps into the driver's seat, the engine turning

  over and rumbling like a yacht. The photographer is trying to

  get up, and it occurs to me I ought to make sure she isn't injured. "We should see if she's hurt," I say, staring out the side window.

  "Hell no. Fuck no." The truck lurches onto the street, fishtails and accelerates.

  "Who are they?" Adrenaline pumps. Blue dots float before my eyes.

  "Assholes. That's who." He snatches up the hand mike. "Unit nine," he announces over the air.

  "Unit nine," the dispatcher comes back.

  "I don't need pictures of me, my house…" I raise my voice. Every cell in my body lights up to protest the unfairness of it all.

  'Ten-five unit three-twenty, ask him to call me on my portable." Marino holds the mike against his mouth. Unit three-twenty gets back to him right away, the portable phone vibrating like a huge insect. Marino flips it open and talks. "Somehow the media's gotten in the neighborhood. Photographers. I'm thinking they parked somewhere in Windsor Farms, came in on foot over the fence, through that open grassy area behind the guard booth. Send units to look for any cars parked where they shouldn't be and tow 'em. They step foot on the Doc's property, arrest 'em." He ends the call, flipping the phone shut as if he is Captain Kirk and has just ordered the Enterprise to attack.

  We slow down at the guard booth and Joe steps out. He is an old man who has always been proud to wear his brown Pinkerton's uniform, and he is very nice, polite and protective, but I would not want to depend on him or his colleagues for more than nuisance control. It shouldn't surprise me a bit that Chandonne got inside my neighborhood or that now the media has. Joe's slack, wrinkled face turns uneasy when he notices me sitting inside the truck.

  "Hey, man," Marino gruffly says through the open window, "how'd the photographers get in here?"

  "What?" Joe instantly goes into protect mode, eyes narrowing as he stares down the slick, empty street, sodium vapor lights casting yellow auras high up on poles.

  "In front of the Doc's house. At least three of 'em." "They didn't come through here," Joe declares. He ducks back inside the booth and grabs the phone.

  We drive off. "We can do but so much, Doc," Marino says to me. "You may as well duck your head in the sand because there's gonna be pictures and shit all over the place."

  I stare out the window at lovely Georgian homes glowing with holiday festivity.

  "Bad news is, your security risk just went up another mile." He is preaching to me, telling me what I already know and have no interest in dwelling on right now. "Because now half the world's gonna see your big fancy house and know exactly where you live. Problem is, and what worries the hell out of me, is stuff like this brings out other squirrels. Gives 'em ideas. They start imagining you as a victim and get off on it, like those assholes who go to the courthouse, cruising for rape cases to sit in on."

  He eases to a stop at the intersection of Canterbury Road and West Gary Street, and headlights sweep over us as a compact dark-colored sedan turns in and slows. I recognize the narrow, insipid face of Buford Righter looking over at Marino's truck. Righter and Marino roll down their windows.

  "You leaving…?" Righter starts to say when his eyes shoot past Marino and land on me in surprise. I have the unnerving sense that I am the last person he wants to see. "Sorry for your trouble," Righter weirdly says to me, as if what is happening in my life is nothing more than trouble, an inconvenience, an unpleasantness.

  "Yeah, heading out." Marino sucks on the cigarette, not the least bit helpful. He has already expressed his opinion about Righter's showing up at my house. It is unnecessary, and even if he truly thinks it is so important to eyeball the crime scene himself, why didn't he do it earlier when I was at the hospital?

  Righter pulls his overcoat more tightly around his neck, light from street lamps glinting off his glasses. He nods and says to me, "Take care. Glad you're okay," deciding to acknowledge my so-called trouble. "This is real hard on all of us." A thought catches before it is out in words. Whatever he was going to say next is gone, retracted, struck from the record. "I'll be talking to you," he promises Marino. Windows go up. We drive off.

  "Give me a cigarette," I tell Marino. "I'm assuming he didn't come to my house earlier today," I then say.

  "Yeah, actually he did. About ten o'clock this morning." He offers me the pack of unaltered Lucky Strikes and flame spits out of a lighter he holds my way.

  Anger coils through my entrails, and the back of my neck is hot, the pressure in my head almost unbearable. Fear stirs inside me like a waking beast. I turn mean, punching in the lighter on the dash, ungraciously leaving Marino's arm extended with the Bic lighter flaming. "Thanks for telling me," I sharply reply. "You mind my asking who the hell else has been in my house? And how many times? And how long they stayed and what they touched?"

/>   "Hey, don't take it out on me," he warns.

  I know the tone. He is about to lose his patience with me and my mess. We are like weather systems about to collide, and I don't want that. The last thing I need right now is a war with Marino. I touch the tip of the cigarette to bright orange coils and inhale deeply, the punch of pure tobacco spinning me. We drive several minutes in flinty silence, and when I finally speak, I sound numb, my feverish brain glazing over like the streets, depression a heavy pain spreading along my ribs. "I know you're just doing what has to be done. I appreciate it," I force the words. "Even if I'm not showing it."

  "You don't got to explain nothing." He sucks on his cigarette, both of us shooting streams of smoke toward our partially open windows. "I know exactly what you feel," he adds.

  "You couldn't possibly." Resentment seeps up my throat like bile. "I don't even know."

  "I understand a lot more than you give me credit for," he says. "Someday you'll see that, Doc. No way you can see shit right now, and I'm telling you it ain't gonna get no better in days and weeks to come. That's the way it works. The real damage hasn't even hit. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it, seen what happens to people when they're victimized."

  I absolutely do not want to hear a single word of this.

  "Damn good thing you're going where you are," he says. "Exactly what the doctor ordered, in more ways than one."

  "I'm not staying with Anna because it's what the doctor ordered," I reply testily. "I'm staying with her because she's my friend."

  "Look, you're a victim and you got to deal with it, and you need help dealing with it. Don't matter you're a doctor-lawyer_Indian chief." Marino will not shut up, in part because he is looking for a fight. He wants a focus for his anger. I can see what is coming, and anger crawls up my neck and heats up the roots of my hair. "Being a victim's the great equalizer," Marino, the world's authority, goes on.

  I draw out the words slowly. "I am not a victim." My voice wavers around its edges like fire. "There's a difference between being victimized and being a victim. I'm not a sideshow for character disorders." My tone sears. "I haven't become what he wanted to turn me into"_of course, I mean Chandonne_"even if he'd had his way, I wouldn't be what he tried to project onto me. I would just be dead. Not changed. Not something less than I am. Just dead."

  I feel Marino recoil in his dark, loud space on the other side of his huge, manly truck. He doesn't understand what I mean or feel and probably never will. He reacts as if I slapped him across the face or kneed him in the groin.

  "I'm talking reality." He strikes back. "One of us has to."

  "Reality is, I'm alive."

  "Yeah. A fuckin' goddamn miracle."

  "I should have known you would do this." I get quiet and cold. "So predictable. People blame the prey not the predator, criticize the injured not the asshole who did it." I tremble in the dark. "Goddamn you. Goddamn you, Marino."

  "I still can't believe you opened your door!" he shouts. What happened to me makes him feel powerless.

  "And where were you guys?" I again remind him of an unpleasant fact. "It might have been nice if at least one or two of you could have kept an eye on my property. Since you were so concerned that he might come after me."

  "I talked to you on the phone, remember?" He attacks from another angle. "You said you was fine. I told you to sit tight, that we'd found where the son of a bitch was hiding, that we knew he was out somewhere, probably looking for another woman to beat and bite the shit out of. And what do you do, Doc-tor Law Enforcement? You open your fucking door when someone knocks! At fucking midnight!"

  I thought the person was the police. He said he was the police.

  "Why?" Marino is yelling now, pounding the steering wheel like an out-of-control child. "Huh? Why? Goddamn it, tell me!"

  We knew for days who the killer is, that he is the spiritual and physical freak Chandonne. We knew he is French and where his organized crime family lives in Paris. The person outside my door did not have even a hint of a French accent.

  Police.

  I didn 't call the police, I said through the shut door.

  Ma 'am, we 've gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property. Are you all right!

  He had no accent. I never expected him to speak without an accent. It never occurred to me, not once. Were I to relive last night, it still would not occur to me. The police had just been at my house when the alarm went off. It didn't seem the least bit suspicious that they would be back. I incorrectly assumed they were keeping a close eye on my property. It was so quick. I opened the door and the porch light was off and I smelled that dirty, wet animal smell in the deep, frigid night.

  "Yo! Anybody home?" Marino yells, poking my shoulder hard.

  "Don't touch me!" I come to with a start, and gasp and jerk away from him and the truck swerves. The ensuing silence turns the air heavy like water a hundred feet deep, and awful images swim back into my blackest thoughts. A forgotten ash is so long I can't steer it to the ashtray in time. I brush it off my lap. "You can turn at Stonypoint Shopping Center, if you want," I say to Marino. "It's quicker."

  Chapter 2

  DR. ANNA ZENNER'S IMPOSING GREEK REVIVAL house soars up-lit into the night on the southern bank of the James River. Her mansion, as the neighbors call it, has large Corinthian columns and is a local example of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's belief that the new nation's architecture should express the grandeur and dignity of the ancient world. Anna is from the ancient world, a German of the first order. I believe she is from Germany. Now that I think about it, I do not recall her ever telling me where she was born.

  White holiday lights wink from trees, and candles in Anna's many windows glow warmly, reminding me of Christ-mases in Miami during the late fifties, when I was a child. On the rare occasion when my father's leukemia was in remission, he loved to drive us through Coral Gables to gawk at houses he called villas, as if somehow his ability to show us such places made him part of that world. I remember fantasizing about the privileged people who lived inside those homes with their graceful walls and Bentleys and their feasts of steak or shrimp seven days a week. No one who lived like that could possibly be poor or sick or regarded as trash by people who did not like Italians or Catholics or immigrants called Scar-petta.

  It is an unusual name of a lineage I really don't know much about. The Scarpettas have lived in this country for two generations, or so my mother claims, but I don't know who these other Scarpettas are. I have never met them. I have been told we are traced back to Verona, that my ancestors were farmers and railway workers. I do know for a fact that I have only one sibling, a younger sister named Dorothy. She was briefly married to a Brazilian twice her age who supposedly fathered Lucy. I say supposedly, because when it comes to Dorothy, only DNA would convince me of who she happened to be in bed with on the occasion my niece was conceived. My sister's fourth marriage was to a Farinelli, and after that Lucy stopped changing her name. Except for my mother, I am the only Scar-petta left, as far as I know.

  Marino brakes at formidable black iron gates and his big arm stretches out to stab an intercom button. An electronic buzz and a loud click, and the gates slowly open like a raven's wings. I don't know why Anna left her homeland for Virginia and never married. I have never asked her why she set up a psychiatric practice in this modest southern city when she could have gone anywhere. I don't know why I am suddenly wondering about her life. Thoughts are odd misfires. I carefully get out of Marino's truck and step down on granite pavers. It is as if I am having software problems. All sorts of files are being opened and closed unprovoked, and system messages are flashing. I am not sure of Anna's exact age, only that she is in her mid-seventies. As far as I know, she has never told me where she went to college or medical school. We have shared opinions and information for years, but rarely our vulnerabilities and intimate facts.

  It suddenly bothers me considerably that I know so little about Anna, and I feel ashamed as I make my w
ay up her neatly swept front steps, one at a time, sliding my good hand along the frigid iron railing. She opens the front door and her keen face softens, She looks at my thick, crooked cast and blue sling, and meets my eyes. "Kay, I am so glad to see you," she says, greeting me the same way she always does.

  "How'ya doin', Dr. Zenner!" Marino announces. His en- thusiasm is overblown as he goes out of his way to show how popular and charming he is and how little I matter to him. "Something sure smells mmm-mmm-good. You cooking for me again?"

  "Not tonight, Captain." Anna has no interest in him or his bluster. She kisses both of my cheeks, careful of my injury and not hugging me hard, but I feel her heart in the light touch of her fingers. Marino sets my bags inside the foyer on a splendid silk rug beneath a crystal chandelier that sparkles like ice forming in space.

  "You can take some soup with you," she tells Marino. "There is plenty. Very healthy. No fat."

  "If it don't got fat, it's against my religion. I'm gonna head out." He avoids looking at me.

  "Where is Lucy?" Anna helps me off with my coat, and I struggle to pull the sleeve over the cast, and then am dismayed to realize I still have my old lab coat on. "You have no autographs on it," she says to me, because no one has signed my plaster and no one ever will. Anna has an arid, elitist sense of humor. She can be very funny without so much as a hint of a smile, and if one is not attentive and quick-witted, he will completely miss the joke.

  "Yeur joint ain't nice enough so she's at the Jefferson," Marino ironically comments.

  Anna goes inside the hall closet to hang up my coat. My nervous energy is dissipating fast. Depression tightens its grip on my chest and increases pressure around my heart. Marino continues to pretend I don't exist.