"You didn't tell him the manuscript you found was receipted to my office?" I asked.
"Hell, no."
He looked strangely at me. "Why would I tell him that? It isn't true. I had Vander check the thing for prints, stood there while he did it. Then I took it back out of the building with me. It's in the property room with all her other shit even as we speak."
He paused. "Why? What did Sparacino tell you?"
I got up to refill our coffee cups. When I returned, I told Marino everything. When I was finished, he was staring at me in disbelief, and there was something else in his eyes that thoroughly unnerved me. I think it was the first time I had ever seen Marino scared.
"What are you going to do if he calls?" he asked.
"If Mark does?"
"No. If the Seven Dwarfs does," Marino said sarcastically.
"Ask him to explain. Ask him how he can work for Orndorff amp; Berger, ask him how he can live in Chicago when there's no record of it."
My frustration was mounting. "I don't know, but I'll try to find out what the hell is really going on."
Marino looked away, his jaw muscles flexing.
"You're wondering if Mark's involved… tied in with Sparacino, involved in illegal activities, crime," I said, barely able to put into words this chilling suspicion.
He angrily lit another cigarette. "What else am I supposed to think? You haven't seen your ex-Romeo for more than fifteen years, haven't even talked to him, heard a word about his whereabouts. It's like he fell off the edge of the earth. Then he's suddenly on your doorstep. How do you know what he's really been doing all this time? You don't. You only know what he tells you-"
We both started at the clangor of the telephone. I instinctively glanced at my watch as I went to the kitchen. It was not quite ten, and my heart was tight with fear as I picked up the receiver.
"Kay?"
"Mark?" I swallowed hard. "Where are you?"
"Home. Flew back to Chicago, just got in…"
"I tried to get you in New York and Chicago, at the office…" I stammered. "Called while I was at the airport."
There was a pregnant pause.
"Listen, I don't have much time. I just wanted to call to tell you I'm sorry about how it went and to make sure you're all right. I'll be in touch."
"Where are you?". I asked again. "Mark? Mark!"
I was answered by a dial tone.
7
The next day, Sunday, I slept through the alarm. I slept through Mass. I slept through lunch and felt sluggish and unsettled when I finally climbed out of bed. I could not remember my dreams, but I knew they had been unpleasant.
My telephone rang at a little past seven P.M. as I was chopping onions and peppers for an omelet I wasn't destined to eat. Minutes later I was speeding along a dark stretch of 64 East, a slip of paper on the dash scribbled with directions to Cutler Grove. My mind was like a computer program caught in a loop, thoughts going round and round, processing the same information. Gary Harper had been murdered. An hour ago he drove home from a Williamsburg tavern and was attacked as he got out of his car. It happened very fast. The crime was very brutal. Like Beryl Madison, he'd had his throat cut.
It was dark out, pockets of fog reflecting the low beams of my headlights back into my eyes. Visibility was reduced to almost zero, and the highway I had traveled countless times in the past suddenly seemed strange. I wasn't sure where I was. I was tensely lighting a cigarette when I realized headlights were gaining on me. A dark car I could not make out rushed alarmingly close, then gradually dropped back. The car maintained the same distance from me mile after mile whether I sped up or slowed down. When I finally found the exit I was looking for, I turned off, as did the car behind me.
The unpaved road I turned onto next wasn't marked. The headlights remained fixed to my bumper. My.38 was at home. I had nothing but a small canister of chemical Mace in my medical bag. I was so relieved I said, "Thank you, Lord," out loud when the great house appeared around a bend, its semicircular drive pulsing with emergency lights and lined with cars. I parked, and the car still tailing me rocked to a halt at my rear. I stared in amazement as Marino climbed out and flipped his coat collar up around his ears.
"Good God," I exclaimed irritably. "I can't believe it."
"Ditto," he grumbled, his long strides bringing him to my side. "I can't believe it, either."
He scowled into the bright circle of lights set up around an old white Rolls-Royce parked near the mansion's back entrance. "Shit. That's all I got to say. Shit!"
Cops were all over the place. Their faces seemed unnaturally pale in the flood of artificial light. Engines rumbled loudly and the static of fragmented sentences from radios drifted on the damp frigid air. Crime-scene tape tied to the back-step railings sealed off the area in an ominous yellow rectangle.
A plainclothes officer wearing an old brown leather jacket headed our way.
"Dr. Scarpetta?" he said. "I'm Detective Poteat."
I was opening my medical bag to get out a packet of surgical gloves and a flashlight.
"No one's disturbed the body," Poteat informed me. "I done exactly what Doc Watts said to do."
Dr. Watts was a general practitioner, one of my five hundred appointed MEs statewide, and one of my top ten pains in the ass. After the police called him earlier this evening, he immediately called me. It was SOP to notify the chief medical examiner whenever there was a suspicious or unexpected death of a well-known personage. It was also SOP for Watts to avoid any case he could, to pass it along or pass it by because he couldn't be bothered with the inconvenience or the paperwork. He was notoriously bad about not responding to scenes, and I saw neither hide nor hair of him at this one.
"Got here about the same time the squad did," Poteat was explaining. "Made sure the guys didn't do nothing more'n necessary. Didn't turn him over or remove his clothes or nothing. He was DO A."
"Thank you," I said abstractedly.
"Looks like he was beaten about the head, cut. Maybe shot. Bird shot all over the place. You'll see in a minute. We ain't found a weapon. Appears he pulled in around quarter of seven, parked where his car is now. Best we can figure, he was attacked as he got out."
He looked over at the white Rolls-Royce. The area around it was thick with shadows cast by boxwoods older and taller than he was.
"Was the driver's door open when you got here?" I asked.
"No, ma'am," Poteat answered. "The car keys is on the ground, like he had 'em in his hand when he went down. Like I said, we ain't touched nothing, was waiting till you got here or till the weather forced us to proceed. Gonna rain."
He squinted up at the layer of dense clouds. "Could be snow. No sign of any disturbance inside the car, no sign of a struggle at all. We're figuring the assailant was waiting for him, hiding in the bushes prob'ly. All I can tell you is it happened mighty fast, Doc. His sister in there didn't hear a gun go off, nothing, she says."
I left him to talk to Marino as I ducked under the tape and approached the Rolls-Royce, my eyes instinctively probing everywhere I stepped. The car was parallel parked less than ten feet from the back steps, the driver's door toward the house. Rounding the hood with its distinctive ornament, I stopped and got out my camera.
Gary Harper was on his back, his head just inches from the car's front tire. The white fender was speckled and streaked with blood, his beige fisherman's knit sweater almost solid red. Not far from his hips was a ring of keys. In the glare of floodlights all I saw was glistening sticky red. His white hair was matted with blood, his face and scalp laid open by lacerations caused when he was struck with severe force by a blunt instrument that had split the skin. His throat was cut from ear to ear, almost severing his head from his neck, and everywhere I directed the flashlight bird shot glinted like tiny beads of pewter. There were hundreds of them on his body and around it, even a few scattered over the hood of the car. The bird shot had not been fired from any sort of gun.