“Well, it’s only the most important position in terms of how it affects absolutely everything.” Bryce is back in my earpiece. “You end up with a shitty lead investigator and you know what they say? Garbage in, garbage out.”
We walk through the bay as big as a hangar. Parked off to one side is my niece’s two-ton black SUV built of ballistic hardened steel, according to her, with an explosives protection system, surveillance cameras, searchlights, a survival kit, a siren, and strobes. It has a black box like an aircraft and a PA system with loudspeakers, among other things. I’ve not had a chance to ask her what such an ominous-looking vehicle costs or why she suddenly feels the need for one.
“Who wants to spend the rest of our lives with a bully who crashes on an inflatable bed when he’s drunk, picks up women on Twitter, and lives in a house that’s become a stop on the tacky tour?” Bryce exclaims. “I won’t forgive Marino for using e-mail to walk off the job. Not even the decency to tell me to my face. Anyway, what’s your answer about Armando’s and can I rob petty cash?”
At the top of a ramp the door that leads into the lower level opens. Lucy is dressed in a black flight suit that accentuates her slender, strong build, her bright green eyes, and her rose-gold hair that she’s cut boyishly short.
“…Dr. Scarpetta? I think I’m losing you inside the bay. Hello, hello…?” Bryce says, and I end the call as I realize how intolerant I’ve become of chatter after days of being alone and quiet.
Lucy holds the door open, leans against it to avoid a hug, and I can feel her mood like a blast of hot air. I wrap my arms around her whether she likes it or not.
“Don’t tell me something I shouldn’t hear,” I say quietly.
“I don’t care what you hear. I’m sure Benton gave you the important points anyway.”
My open affection for my niece usually is reserved for outside the office and a shadow of annoyance crosses her pretty face as she pulls away. Then she looks tense, a glint of aggression showing.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her and her reaction is stoical and steely as if she has no feelings at all about what happened to Gail Shipton.
What I sense is a resolve that always goes the same way, in a direction that’s predictable and troubling. My niece is gifted at vengeful anger and bad with sad.
“I’m taking Bryce up on his offer and borrowing a pair of shoes.” Benton steadies himself with the doorframe, struggling with the boots one at a time, tugging them off.
He parks them at the top of the ramp, where they flop over like wilted traffic cones, and he walks past us in his stocking feet. Inside the building he turns left toward the elevator, busy on his phone again, his expression unreadable, the way it is when he’s met with resistance and ignorance and maybe something far worse than that.
“We need to talk.” I take Lucy by the arm. I steer her away from the door she holds.
24
Alone inside the bay, we head to the small round plastic table and two chairs that Rusty and Harold have christened La Morte Café. On temperate days they drink coffee and smoke cigars with the door rolled up, waiting for the dead to arrive and be taken away.
I set my fanny pack on the table and Lucy picks it up. She unzips it to check what’s inside. Then she zips it back up and returns it to the table.
“Why?” she asks.
“It probably was my fever and having too much time to think.”
“It probably wasn’t.”
“Something didn’t seem right. I assumed it had to do with my bout of bad health and taking Sock out.” I don’t want to get sidetracked right now by talking about the person who may have been spying on me because it will send Lucy on the warpath.
I don’t want her looking for Haley Swanson or someone else. She already has enough trouble with Marino.
“You should come over and go on the range with me at least.” She watches me carefully. “When’s the last time you practiced?”
“We will. I promise.”
I place a pod in the Keurig set up on a spraddle-legged surgical cart with rusted seams and bent wheels. Its decrepit condition has been draped with a French country vinyl cloth, red and yellow vent du sud and there’s an arrangement of plastic sunflowers and a Bruins ashtray on it.
“I’m sure you must feel slammed. Out of the office since Friday and returning to this.” Lucy stands behind a chair with her arms crossed. “You look pale and tired. You should have let me come over.”
“And catch the flu?” I open a pack of cheap paper towels, the type found in public restrooms.
“That could happen anywhere, and I’d never leave you alone because I’m afraid of what might happen to me. Janet and I would have brought you to the house and taken care of you. I should have come and gotten you.”
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
“It’s not a chore like with my mother.”
“Chore isn’t the word that comes to mind with Dorothy.”
“I’m just saying.” Her green eyes are intense on me.
“I know and I’m sorry if I didn’t seem grateful.”
She doesn’t make an insincere effort to reassure me. I’m not good at seeming a lot of things and both of us know it, and I’m reminded again of what I don’t like about myself.
“It’s not about being grateful,” Lucy then says. “You wouldn’t let me stay alone if the situations were reversed, if I’d just been through what you had and then got sick. Especially if I were scared enough to carry a gun everywhere.”
“You’re never scared and you do carry a gun everywhere.”
“You’d be camped out and showing up every other second with the thermometer.”
“I admit I have ways of doing things that aren’t easy for others.”
Brewing coffee spews into a brown paper cup with a fish icon, Navy surplus that Bryce orders by the pallet.
“Creamer, sugar? Or the usual black?” I ask.
“The usual. Nothing’s changed.” She looks at me with a face I love, angular and strong, more striking than beautiful.
I remember when she was a pudgy little know-it-all too smart for anyone’s damn good and missing the genetic piece responsible for boundaries and rules. As soon as she could walk she followed me from room to room, and when I sat she was in my lap. It would infuriate her mother, my selfish, miserable sister who writes children’s books and has no use for her own flesh and blood or for anyone, really, only characters she invents and can control and kill off. I haven’t talked to my family in Miami for a while and for a second I feel guilty about that, too.
“Bryce is ordering pizza. I might eat an entire pie by myself.” I set a coffee and a paper towel in front of Lucy.
“These cups suck.”
“They’re biodegradable.”
“Yes. They fall apart while you’re still drinking out of them.”
“They don’t damage marine life and are invisible to spy satellites.” I smile at her.
“You need to eat an entire pizza and then some.” Lucy scrutinizes me, arms crossed stubbornly. “Bryce is telling everyone you’ve turned into a skeleton.”
“The first time he’s seen me was five minutes ago on a security monitor. Please sit down, Lucy. We’re going to talk.”
I start a second cup, the aroma overpowering. My stomach feels inside out it’s so empty and Marino’s calling me at four a.m. seems a year ago. It doesn’t seem like it happened.