Dust (40 page)

“Out, out, out.” I take the bags from Marino and shoo him out of a kitchen that can’t possibly hold both of us. “I don’t think you bought enough.”

“I need a beer,” he says and that’s when I catch the look on his face, and then a different look on Benton’s face as he appears in the doorway.

“When you get to a stopping place,” Benton says to me and something has happened.

I dry my hands on a towel as I look at both of them in jeans and button-up shirts, their nondescript windbreakers hiding the pistols they carry. Marino’s face is stubbly and pink from long days and the sun while Benton’s looks the way it always does when something is wrong.

“What is it?”

“I’m surprised your office hasn’t called,” Benton says.

I check my phone and there’s an e-mail from Luke Zenner I didn’t notice while I was buying fish and driving and then distracted by my mother. Luke writes that everything is under control and not to worry, he won’t get started on the autopsy until later tonight when the Armed Forces chief medical examiner General Briggs is there. He’s flying in from Dover Air Force Base to assist and act as a witness, and what a shitty thing to happen Christmas Eve. They’ll take care of it and hopefully everyone can have tomorrow off. Have a nice holiday, Luke wishes me.

“It’s better you’re out of town anyway,” Benton informs me, and then he tells me what little he knows and there isn’t much to know, really. There rarely is when someone makes the simple decision to end life and end it easily.

Ed Granby waited until his wife had gone out to her spinning class today at around four p.m. and he locked all of the doors of their Brookline house, using the key on dead bolts that could be opened only from the inside so she couldn’t get back in and find him first. Then he sent an e-mail to the assistant special agent in charge, a close friend, telling him to drive to the house right away and let himself in by breaking out a window in the basement.

Granby’s e-mail has been forwarded to Benton and he shows it to me inside my mother’s kitchen as oil heats in the deep fryer.

“Thanks, buddy,” Granby wrote. “I’m done.”

He went down into the basement, looped a rope over the chin-up bar of a cable machine, wrapped a towel around his neck, sat on the floor, and hanged himself.

“Come on.” I turn off the deep fryer and grab the Sancerre and two glasses, and Benton and I walk out of the kitchen, past everyone in the living room, where piles of presents from my compulsive shopping are around the small tree.

My sister Dorothy has just arrived, wearing skintight faux-lizard designer pants, a low-cut leotard, and heavy makeup that make her look exactly the way she doesn’t want to look, which is older, flabbier, with oversized augmented breasts as rigid and round as rubber balls.

“I believe I will.” She eyes the wine and I shake my head
Not
now
. “Well, excuse me, I guess I’ll have to serve myself.”

“We only came down so we could wait on you,” Lucy says.

“As you should. I’m your mother.”

Lucy doesn’t go after her the way she usually would, her eyes on Benton and me as I open the back door and feel the pleasantness of the late afternoon and see the long shadows in my mother’s small yard, not the yard from my childhood, and I always remind myself of that when I come here and don’t recognize anything, not the plantings or the house or the furniture, everything new or redone and soulless.

The grass is thick and springy beneath my feet, and the air is cool as it blows through old grapefruit and orange trees still heavy with fruit. We sit in webbed lawn chairs near the rock garden, with its palms and small statues – an angel, the Blessed Mother, a lamb – amid sunflowers and firecracker plants.

“So that’s what he does to his family the day before Christmas.” I pour wine and give Benton a glass. “I’m not sorry for him. I’m sorry for them.”

I lean back and close my eyes, and for an instant I see the key lime tree my mother had in her backyard when I was growing up. The citrus canker got it and it’s not the same part of town and not the same yard, and Benton reaches for my hand and laces his fingers through mine. The sun smolders a fiery orange over the low, flat roof of a neighbor’s house and we don’t talk. There’s nothing to say and nothing that’s happened is a surprise, and so we are quiet as we drink and hold hands.

When most of the wine is gone and the yard is in the shade, the sun too low to see, only a tangerine hint in the lower part of the darkening sky, he tells me he knew Granby was going to kill himself.

“I figured he might,” I reply.

“I knew it when Marino lifted him off the pavement by the back of his belt,” he says. “I could see it in Granby’s eyes that something important was gone that was never coming back.”

“Nothing was ever there to come back.”

“But I saw it and I didn’t do anything.”

“What would you have done?” I look at his sharp profile in the early dusk.

“Nothing,” he decides.

We get up to go inside because it’s getting chilly and if I drink much more, I won’t be safe with the deep fryer or the grill or anything.

Benton puts his arm around me and I wrap mine around his waist and the thick grass makes a dry sound as we walk on it. The grapefruit this year are huge and pale yellow and the oranges are big and pebbly and the wind rocks the trees as we move through a yard I pay to keep up but rarely sit in.

“Let’s get Dorothy to talk about herself so we won’t have to talk about anything at all,” I suggest as we climb the three steps that lead to the door.

“That will be the easiest thing we’ve ever done,” Benton says.

Now turn the page for an exclusive profile of

‘I always have the same dilemma when I start a book. What am I going to say? What can I show people they haven’t seen before? But I also have to do things that are at least within the realms of possibility. If I don’t, it would fly in the face of everything my characters are. If Scarpetta had this little divining rod that revealed the killer, I think my readers would throw my book in the trash.’

For most of her fifty-seven years, Patricia Cornwell has lived a life of seeming perpetual motion. Any hopes of childhood tranquility diminished the moment her parents divorced, after which Cornwell was shuttled between a depressive mother and abusive foster parents. Her adolescence was wild and scattered, as intense ambition (to play professional tennis) attempted to conceal, or at least compensate for profound vulnerability: Cornwell battled anorexia for much of her adolescence, until the intervention of her mentor, Ruth Graham. A palpable restlessness pursued her into early adulthood. After graduating university, Cornwell tried her hand at several jobs: a short-lived but successful career as a crime reporter led to her writing the biography of Ruth Graham. She finally began the approach towards her vocation in 1984 when she went to work for Dr Marcella Fierro, then Virginia’s chief Medical Examiner.

Six years and three unpublished novels later, Patricia Daniels Cornwell touched down cleanly and fully-formed, or so it seemed, when she published
Postmortem
in 1990. The novel landed quietly (just 6000 hardback copies were printed at first), but gradually won admirers, then awards (the
Edgar
, Creasey,
Anthony
and
Macavity
) and finally readers – a lot of readers. Cornwell had arrived, but success quickly accelerated the frenetic pace of her existence. As
Postmortem
and its successors reached number one on bestseller charts around the world, there were reports of nights out with Demi Moore in Hollywood and weekends with George Bush (senior) in Kennebunkport. Cornwell was becoming almost as famous for flying her helicopter, driving fast cars, and later crashing them, as she was for transforming the forensic thriller into mass entertainment. An exposé in
Vanity Fair
joined the dots between rumours of FBI agents held hostage in churches, secret sexuality and depression. The headlines rolled in. Accusations of plagiarism. Lawsuits to stop an internet stalker. Vocal advocacy of the Democrats after years spent supporting the Republican Party. Millions of dollars were earned and then, as headlines from late 2012 demonstrated, millions of dollars were misappropriated.

Whatever the triumphs or turmoil, whether personal, political or economic, Cornwell continued to write the rate of over a book a year: novels for the most part, but also non-fiction and even cookbooks. Indeed, if one was searching for a single thread to unify Patricia Cornwell’s jet-propelled flight through the past two decades, one could do worse than highlight the four characters that she first created back in
Postmortem
and who have populated almost every novel she has published since, including the one you have just read. Pete Marino, the unreconstructed macho homicide cop with well-concealed depths. Benton Wesley, the smooth but enigmatic FBI profiler. Lucy Farinelli, the brilliant but unstable computer whizzkid. And, of course, Kay Scarpetta, aunt to Lucy, wife to Wesley, employer of Marino – forensic pathologist extraordinaire, the heroine of twenty-one novels and the centre of Cornwell’s imaginative universe. This isn’t to suggest that Cornwell’s cast has stood still. Lucy Farinelli was just ‘an irritating ten year old’ when the series began. Half the group – Wesley and Scarpetta – is now married to one other. And while Pete Marino has not matured exactly, there are signs that he might at last be considering it.

But, whether they are investigating murders in London or New York, Florida or Rome, Richmond or, most recently, Boston, their intersecting relationships provide the backdrop to the series as a whole and, one could argue, to their creator’s very existence. ‘I don’t really cause my characters to behave the way they do,’ Cornwell says. ‘I know that sounds strange, but I just report on them. I do know that one of the reasons my books take on a life of their own is that I am very honest about letting them do what they need to do.’

This instinctive bond between creator and character was present from the very start. After finishing
Postmortem
, Cornwell had no plans to revisit any of Scarpetta’s supporting cast again. ‘I finished the second book,
Body of Evidence
, before
Postmortem
even came out. I didn’t know Marino was going to be in that story until a car came to pick Scarpetta up and he was behind the wheel. I would never have guessed that any of them would become such dominant figures.’

What Cornwell had guessed from the very beginning was that Scarpetta at least would be a fixture in her imagination. It might be stretching logic to suggest that without Kay Scarpetta, there wouldn’t be a bestselling author called Patricia Cornwell, but the character's genre-defining combination of forensic expertise, physical courage, grace under pressure, dogged determination, and strong stomach has ensured both places in the crime-fighting pantheon. From
Postmortem
onwards, Scarpetta has been the series’ hero, its conscience and its moral centre. Just as importantly, she is the reader’s guide into an alien and alienating world of ligature marks, enzyme defects and DNA testing.

Back in 1988, Scarpetta’s impact was more practical, but no less crucial. Her first appearance, which actually occurred pre-
Postmor
tem
, was as a bit-part player in Cornwell’s third unpublished novel,
The Queen’s Pawn
. Scarpetta was the tech-savvy sidekick to a hero named Joe Constable, whom Cornwell recalls as a poor man’s Adam Dalgliesh. The story’s uneasy fusion of cosy mystery and unflinching forensics may not have won its author her longed-for publishing deal, but Scarpetta’s fleeting appearances convinced one editor, Sara Ann Freed at the prestigious Mysterious Press, to send the following encouragement: 1. Ditch Joe Constable; 2. Write what you see in the morgue, not what you read in Dorothy L Sayers; 3. Make Kay Scarpetta the lead.

The seeds of
Postmortem
were sown. The story itself took root when Cornwell allowed Scarpetta to carry the emotional as well as the narrative weight. She fashioned a plot inspired by real-life serial killer Timothy Spencer (also known as the Southside Strangler) who brought her newly adopted hometown of Richmond, Virginia, to a standstill in 1987. Newly separated from her husband and living alone, Cornwell was terrified like many other women in the city. She not only dissected these fears, she transferred them to the tough but vulnerable Scarpetta. ‘I thought, why don’t you take the bold step and walk in her shoes? How’s that for scary? If this kind of awful case was going on for her, what would she be doing? If these women who were doctors and lawyers were being killed in their homes, how would she react?’

Despite her many and diverse investigations, Scarpetta has proved remarkably resilient as a character. Indeed, she is by far the most consistent of Cornwell’s
dramatis personae
. This stability goes to the heart of her appeal for readers and her creator alike: her unyielding integrity, whether this is loyalty to friends and colleagues or her passion for forensic science. There are superficial differences, of course: Scarpetta was a smoker in
Postmortem
, and is glimpsed in stonewashed denim in
All That Remains
. But in all important respects, she is not just unchanged and unchanging, but seemingly unchangeable. When Cornwell returned to first person narration in 2010’s
Port Mortuary
after a gap of seven years, we reacquainted ourselves with an older and wiser Kay Scarpetta, but one who had weathered the ravages of time as, perhaps, only an iconic fictional hero can. Her looks had, enviably, escaped wear and tear over the years: ‘My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same considering my age.’ Her enthusiasms too remained largely unaltered: ‘a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply…’ But Scarpetta’s core steadfastness was more than skin-deep: ‘I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviours are learned.’

Cornwell will admit to superficial parallels between herself and Scarpetta. Compare their timelines, and one can see that they tend to move house at similar times and to matching locations: Richmond, Florida, Charlotte, New York, and Boston. Both have had to cope with the vagaries of celebrity. Both have suffered at the hands of an internet stalker. Both married at roughly the same time, away from the public eye: Cornwell wed Dr Staci Gruber in 2005, a couple of years before Scarpetta and Wesley tied the knot offstage between
Predator
and
Book of the Dead
.

‘A lot of what she feels is something that I can relate to. I’m not sure that I could write about what she feels if I didn’t feel it myself. We have a lot of things in common. Where we are similar is our sensibilities, and the belief that at the root of all evil is the abuse of power.’

Nevertheless, Cornwell is quick to highlight their differences. Here, in lighthearted mood, on their appearance: ‘Scarpetta is holding up a hell of a lot better than I am,’ she laughs. ‘She doesn’t run to the dermatologist all the time saying, “Fix me! Fix me!” I’m jealous. She can’t age as fast as I am or she will be retired. She will stay around fiftyish, with good bones and good genetics, while the rest of us struggle.’ Or, more seriously, on Scarpetta presenting an idealised reflection of herself: ‘She is a bit of a fantasy version of me. I wish I could be like her. If you were having this conversation with her, she probably wouldn’t say anything she shouldn’t; I am Miss Rattlemouth. I get myself in trouble. I’m an artist; she is very disciplined. She is not going to get a DUI and flip her car. She is not going to say something stupid that gets touted all over the internet. She is not going to go on spending sprees without trying clothes on and then none of it fits just because she is in the mood to do it.’

Cornwell’s admiration for Scarpetta is profound: the character and her adventures have provided Cornwell with imaginative shelter from the various storms of her life. But she will identify weaknesses when prompted, even if they do stem from Scarpetta’s desire for perfection: ‘She has tremendous emotional discipline, but that is also a bad thing about her. She would be better off if she could go beyond it sometimes because she is so careful. She learned to be careful as a child, and she has to be careful as a scientific doctor.’ Cornwell's own personality inverts this equation: she argues that her inherant weaknesses have become her greatest assets. Without her early battles for emotional stability, she would not have been compelled to write. ‘Can you imagine what these novels would be like if Scarpetta wrote them? She would say, “Why would I ever want to talk about that kind of pain and suffering? And frankly, I don’t want to have this interview because I don’t want to talk about it now”.’

Scarpetta’s measured, crystal-clear perspective dominated for ten books until 2003’s
Blow Fly
, when Cornwell switched from first person narration to an omniscient third person point of view. The transition had several consequences. The reader was suddenly distanced from Scarpetta, and just as suddenly brought closer to those around her. We were also granted access to the demented imaginings of Scarpetta’s adversaries (for the record, she names her recurring villain Jean-Baptiste Chandonne as her favourite baddie). These uncomfortably intimate portraits of serial killers did not make for easy reading, but she strove to give even her most dastardly murderers three dimensions. ‘As I’ve gotten older, I don’t dehumanise killers as much as I used to,’ she told me when we met in 2007 to discuss
The Book of the Dead
. ‘I’ve realised that although what these people do is extraordinarily wrong and devastating, and they should be removed from society, it doesn’t mean they are entirely unlikable or unsympathetic, or that the best thing to is to kill them. In fact, at this point I really don’t think [the death penalty] solves anything at all. I think we have such an inequality in the judicial system and criminal justice system. People who have no means don’t get the same representation as the rich. And those with no means are more likely to get capital punishment than wealthy people – if they go to jail at all.’

This sympathy reflected a broader shift in Cornwell’s political affiliations. ‘Back in the nineties, being involved with Republicans was very different than it is right now,’ she said told me in 2010. ‘They had a lot of values – fiscal responsibility, smaller government, law enforcement, very pro-civil rights in many ways. Now, the Republican Party has become the morality gatekeeper of the country, and they don’t believe in the separation of church and state any more. It’s not a democracy so much as it wants to become a theocracy. And those are not the principles that this country was founded upon.’