He was leaning back in a swivel chair, his feet propped on a desk, as he continued reading the transcription of writings Will had deciphered from the ribbon removed from Gary Harper's typewriter. The ribbon wasn't carbon, meaning the pages Miss Harper burned could not have come from her brother's typewriter. It appeared that the novelist had been working in fits and starts on yet another book attempt. Most of what Marino was looking at didn't make much sense, and when I had perused it earlier I had wondered if Harper's inspiration had been of the bottled variety.
"Wonder if you could sell this shit," Marino said.
Will had fished another sentence fragment out of the god-awful sooty mess, and I was leaning close to inspect it.
"You know," Marino went on. "They're always coming out with stuff after a famous writer dies. Most of it crap the poor guy never wanted published to begin with."
"Yes. They could call it Table Scraps from a Literary Banquet," I muttered.
"Huh?"
"Never mind. There's not even ten pages there, Marino," I said abstractedly. "Rather hard to get a book out of that."
"Yeah. So it gets published in Esquire, maybe Playboy, instead of a book. Probably still worth some bucks," Marino said.
"This word is definitely indicating a proper name of a place or company or something," Will mused, oblivious to the conversation around him. "Co is capitalized."
I said, "Interesting. Very interesting."
Marino got up to take a look.
"Be careful not to breathe," Will warned, the tweezers in his hand steady as a scalpel as he gingerly manipulated the wisp of white ash on which tiny black letters spelled out bor Co.
"County, company, country, college," I suggested. My blood was beginning to flow again, waking me up.
"Yeah, but what would have bor in it?" Marino puzzled.
"Ann Arbor?" Will suggested.
"What about a county in Virginia?" Marino asked.
We couldn't come up with any county in Virginia that ended with the letters bor.
"Harbor," I said.
"Okay. But followed by Co?" Will replied dubiously.
"Maybe something-Harbor Company," Marino said.
I looked in the telephone directory. There were five businesses with names beginning with Harbor: Harbor East, Harbor South, Harbor Village, Harbor Imports, and Harbor Square.
"Don't sound like we're in the right ball park," Marino said.
We didn't fare any better when I dialed directory assistance and asked for the names of any businesses in the Williamsburg area called Harbor-this or Harbor-that. Other than one apartment complex, there was nothing.
Next I called Detective Poteat of the Williamsburg Police, and other than that same apartment complex, he couldn't think of anything, either.
"Maybe we shouldn't get too hung up on this," Marino said testily.
Will was engrossed in the box of ashes again.
Marino looked over my shoulder at the list of words we had found so far.
You, your, I, my, we, and well were common. Other complete words included the mortar of everyday sentence constructions-and, is, was, that, this, which, a, and an. Some words were a bit more specific, such as town, home, know, please, fear, work, think, and miss. As for incomplete words, we could only guess at what they had been in their former life. A derivation of terrible apparently was used numerous times for lack of any other common word we could think of that began with terri or terrib. Nuance, of course, was forever lost on us. Did the person mean terrible, as in "It is so terrible"? Did the person mean terribly, as in "I am terribly upset" or "I miss you terribly"? Or was it as benign as "It is terribly nice of you"?
Significantly, we found several remnants of the name Sterling and just as many remnants of the name Gary.
"I'm fairly certain what she burned was personal letters," I decided. "The type of paper, the words used, make me think that."
Will agreed.
"Do you remember finding any stationery in Beryl Madison's house?" I asked Marino.
"Computer paper, typing paper. That's about it. None of this high-dollar rag you're talking about," he said.
"Her printer uses ink ribbons," Will reminded us as he anchored an ash with tweezers and added, "I think we may have another one."
I took a look.
This time all that was left was a C.
"Beryl had a Lanier computer and printer," I said to Marino. "I think it might be a good idea to find out if that's what she always had."
"I went through her receipts," he said.
"For how many years?" I asked.
"As many as she had. Five, six," he answered.
"Same computer?"
"No," he said. "But same damn printer, Doc. Something called a sixteen-hundred, with a daisy wheel. Always used the same kind of ribbons. Got no idea what she wrote with before that."
"I see."
"Yo, glad you do," Marino complained, kneading the small of his back. "Me, I'm not seeing a goddamn thing."
10
The FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, is a brick and glass oasis in the midst of an artificial war. I would never forget my first stay there years ago. I went to bed and got up to the sound of semiautomatics going off, and when I took a wrong turn on the wooded fitness course one afternoon, I was almost flattened by a tank.
It was Friday morning. Benton Wesley had scheduled a meeting, and Marino perked up visibly as the Academy's fountain and flags came into view. I had to take two steps for his every one as I followed him inside the spacious sunny lobby of a new building that looked enough like a fine hotel to have earned the nickname Quantico Hilton. Checking his handgun at the front desk, Marino signed us in, and we clipped on visitor's passes while a receptionist buzzed Wesley to affirm our privileged clearance.
A maze of glass hyphens connect sections of offices, classrooms, and laboratories, and one can go from building to building without ever stepping outside. No matter how often I came here, I always got lost. Marino seemed to know where he was going, so I dutifully stayed on his heels and watched the parade of color-coded students pass. Red shirts and khaki trousers were police officers. Gray shirts with black fatigues tucked into spit-polished boots were new DBA agents, with the veterans dressed ominously in solid black. New FBI agents wore blue and khaki, while members of the elitist Hostage Teams wore solid white. Men and women were impeccably groomed and remarkably fit. They carried with them a mien of militaristic reserve as tangible as the odor of the gun-cleaning solvent they left in their wake.
We boarded a service elevator and Marino punched the button designated LL (for Low Low, so the joke goes). Hoover's secret bomb shelter is sixty feet under ground, two stories below the indoor firing range. It has always seemed appropriate to me that the Academy decided to locate its Behavioral Science Unit closer to hell than heaven. Titles change. The last I heard, the Bureau was calling profilers Criminal Investigative Agents, or CIAs (an acronym destined for confusion). The work doesn't change. There will always be psychopaths, sociopaths, lust murderers - whatever one chooses to call evil people who find pleasure in causing unthinkable pain.
We got off the elevator and followed a drab hallway to a drab outer office. Wesley emerged and showed us into a small conference room, where Roy Hanowell was sitting at a long polished table. The fibers expert never seemed to remember me on sight from one meeting to the next. I always made a point of introducing myself when he offered his hand.
"Of course, of course, Dr. Scarpetta. How are you?" he inquired, just as he always did.
Wesley shut the door and Marino looked around, scowling when he couldn't find an ashtray. An empty Diet Coke can in a trash basket would have to do. I resisted the impulse to dig out my own pack. The Academy was about as smokeless as an intensive care unit.
Wesley's white shirt was wrinkled in back, his eyes tired and preoccupied as he began perusing paperwork inside a folder. He immediately got down to business.