“It’s not a holiday. I’ve been here every night this week and never seen you.”
“What are you? The bar police?” Stevie smiles and looks into Lucy’s eyes so intensely it has an effect.
Lucy feels something. No, she thinks. Not again.
“Maybe I don’t come in here only at night like you do,” Stevie says, reaching for the tequila bottle, brushing Lucy’s arm.
The feeling gets stronger. Stevie studies the colorful label, sets the bottle back on the bar, taking her time, her body touching Lucy. The feeling intensifies.
“Cuervo? What’s so special about Cuervo?” Stevie asks.
“How would you know what I do?” Lucy says.
She tries to make the feeling go away.
“Just guessing. You look like a night person,” Stevie says. “Your hair is naturally red, isn’t it. Maybe mahogany mixed with deep red. Dyed hair can’t look like that. You haven’t always worn it long, as long as it is now.”
“Are you some kind of psychic?”
The feeling is awful now. It won’t go away.
“Just guessing,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “So, you haven’t told me. What’s so special about Cuervo?”
“Cuervo Reserva de la Familia. It’s special enough.”
“Well, that’s something. It looks like this is my night for first times,” Stevie says, touching Lucy’s arm, her hand resting on it for a minute. “First time in P town. First time for one hundred percent agave tequila that costs thirty dollars a shot.”
Lucy wonders how Stevie can know it costs thirty dollars a shot. For someone unfamiliar with tequila, she seems to know a lot.
“I believe I’ll have another,” Stevie calls out to Buddy, “and you really could pour a little more in the glass. Be sweet to me.”
Buddy smiles as he pours her another, and two shots later, Stevie leans against Lucy and whispers in her ear, “You got anything?”
“Like what?” Lucy asks, and she gives herself up to it.
The feeling is fueled by tequila and plans to stay for the night.
“You know what,” Stevie’s voice says quietly, her breath touching Lucy’s ear, her breast pressed again her arm. “Something to smoke. Something that’s worth it.”
“What makes you think I’d have something?”
“Just guessing.”
“You’re remarkably good at it.”
“You can get it anywhere here. I’ve seen you.”
Lucy made a transaction last night, knows just where to do it, at the Vixen, where she doesn’t dance. She doesn’t remember seeing Stevie. There weren’t that many people, never are this time of year. She would have noticed Stevie. She would notice her in a huge crowd, on a busy street, anywhere.
“Maybe you’re the one who’s the bar police,” Lucy says.
“You have no idea how funny that is,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “Where you staying?”
“Not far from here.”
Chapter 6
The state Medical Examiner’s Office is located where most are, on the fringe of a nicer part of town, usually at the outer limits of a medical school. The red-brick-and-concrete complex backs up to the Massachusetts Turnpike, and on the other side of it is the Suffolk County House of Corrections. There is no view and the noise of traffic never stops.
Benton parks at the back door and notes only two other cars in the lot. The dark-blue Crown Victoria belongs to Detective Thrush. The Honda SUV probably belongs to a forensic pathologist who doesn’t get paid enough and probably wasn’t happy when Thrush persuaded him to come in at this hour. Benton rings the bell and scans the empty back parking lot, never assuming he is safe or alone, and then the door opens and Thrush is motioning him inside.
“Jeez, I hate this place at night,” Thrush says.
“There’s not much to like about it any time of day,” Benton remarks.
“I’m glad you came. Can’t believe you’re out in that,” he says, looking out at the black Porsche as he shuts the door behind them. “In this weather? You crazy?”
“All-wheel drive. It wasn’t snowing when I went to work this morning.”
“These other psychologists I’ve worked with, they never come out, snow, rain or shine,” Thrush says. “Not the profilers, either. Most FBI I’ve met have never seen a dead body.”
“Except for the ones at headquarters.”
“No shit. We got plenty of them at state police headquarters, too. Here.”
He hands Benton an envelope as they follow a corridor.
“Got everything on a disk for you. All the scene and autopsy pictures, whatever’s written up so far. It’s all there. It’s supposed to snow like a bitch.”
Benton thinks of Scarpetta again. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and they’re supposed to spend the evening together, have a romantic dinner on the harbor. She’s supposed to stay through Presidents’ Day weekend. They haven’t seen each other in almost a month. She may not be able to get here.
“I heard light snow showers are predicted,” Benton says.
“A storm’s moving in from the Cape. Hope you got something to drive other than that million-dollar sports car.”
Thrush is a big man who has spent his life in Massachusetts and talks like it. There isn’t a single R in his vocabulary. In his fifties, he has military-short gray hair and is dressed in a rumpled brown suit, has probably worked nonstop all day. He and Benton follow the well-lit corridor. It is spotless and scented with air deodorizer and lined with storage and evidence rooms, all of them requiring electronic passes. There is even a crash cart—Benton can’t imagine why—and a scanning electron microscope, the facility the most spacious and best equipped of any morgue he has ever seen. Staffing is another story.
The office has suffered crippling personnel problems for years because of low salaries that fail to attract competent forensic pathologists and other staff. Added to this are alleged mistakes and misdeeds resulting in scathing controversies and public-relations problems that make life and death difficult for everyone involved. The office isn’t open to the media or to outsiders, and hostility and distrust are pervasive. Benton would rather come here late at night. To visit during business hours is to feel unwelcome and resented.
He and Thrush pause outside the closed door of an autopsy room that is used in high-profile cases or those that are considered a biohazard or bizarre. His cell phone vibrates. He looks at the display. No ID is usually her.
“Hi,” Scarpetta says. “I hope your night’s been better than mine.”
“I’m at the morgue.” Then, to Thrush, “One minute.”
“That can’t be good,” Scarpetta says.
“I’ll fill you in later. Got a question. You ever heard of something that happened at a Christmas shop in Las Olas maybe two and a half years ago?”
“By something I assume you mean a homicide.”
“Right.”
“Not offhand. Maybe Lucy can try to track it down. I hear it’s snowing up there.”
“I’ll get you here if I have to hire Santa’s reindeer.”
“I love you.”
“Me, too,” he says.
He ends the call and asks Thrush, “Who are we dealing with?”
“Well, Dr. Lonsdale was nice enough to help me out. You’ll like him. But he didn’t do the autopsy. She did.”
She is the chief. She got where she is because she’s a she.
“You ask me,” Thrush says, “women got no business doing this anyway. What kind of woman would want to do this?”
“There are good ones,” Benton says. “Very good ones. Not all of them get where they are because of their gender. More likely, in spite of it.”
Thrush is unfamiliar with Scarpetta. Benton never mentions her, not even to people he knows rather well.
“Women shouldn’t see shit like this,” Thrush says.
The night air is penetrating and milky-white up and down Commercial Street. Snow swarms in lamplight and lights the night until the world glows and seems surreal as the two of them walk in the middle of the deserted silent street east along the water to the cottage Lucy began renting several days ago after Marino got the strange phone call from the man named Hog.
She builds a fire, and she and Stevie sit in front of it on quilts and roll a joint with very good stuff from British Columbia, and they share it. They smoke and talk and laugh, and then Stevie wants more.
“Just one more,” she begs as Lucy undresses her.
“That’s different,” Lucy says, staring at Stevie’s slender nude body, at the red hand prints on it, maybe tattoos.
There are four of them. Two on her breasts as if someone is grabbing them, two on her upper inner thighs as if someone is forcing her legs apart. There are none on her back, none where Stevie couldn’t reach and apply them herself, assuming they are fake. Lucy stares. She touches one of the hand prints, places her hand over one of them, fondling Stevie’s breast.
“Just checking to see if it’s the right fit,” Lucy says. “Fake?”
“Why don’t you take off your clothes.”
Lucy does what she wants, but she won’t take off her clothes. For hours, she does what she wants in the firelight, on the quilts, and Stevie lets her, is more alive than anyone Lucy has ever touched, smooth with soft contours, lean in a way Lucy isn’t anymore, and when Stevie tries to undress her, almost fights her, Lucy won’t allow it, then Stevie gets tired and gives up and Lucy helps her to bed. After she is asleep, Lucy lies awake listening to the eerie whining of the wind, trying to figure out exactly what it sounds like, deciding it doesn’t sound like silk stockings after all, but like something distressed and in pain.
Chapter 7
The autopsy room is small with a tile floor and the usual surgical cart, digital scale, evidence cabinet, autopsy saws and various blades, dissecting boards and a transportable autopsy table latched to the front of a wall-mounted dissecting sink. The walk-in refrigerator is built into a wall, the door partially open.
Thrush hands Benton a pair of blue nitrile gloves, asks him, “You want booties or a mask or anything?”
“No thanks,” Benton says as Dr. Lonsdale emerges from the refrigerator, pushing a stainless-steel cadaver carrier bearing the pouched body.