“You mixed it with vodka.”
Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red handprints again.
“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.
“You asked me a lot of things last night.”
“I asked you where you got them done.”
“Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.
“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”
“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”
“What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the handprints.
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Then whose?”
“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”
Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.
“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.
“We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.
She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.
“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”
Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.
“It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”
“It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”
“You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just… Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”
Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.
“God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”
“At least call me the right thing!”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”
“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.
Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.
9
Half an hour later, Lucy zips up her ski jacket and tucks the pistol and two extra magazines in a pocket.
She locks the cottage and climbs down the snow-covered wooden steps to the street as she thinks about Stevie and her inexplicable behavior, feeling guilty. She thinks about Johnny and feels guilty, rememberingSan Francisco, when he took her to dinner and reassured her that everything would be all right.
“You’re going to be fine,” he promised.
“I can’t live like this,” she said.
It was women’s night atMeccaonMarket Street, and the restaurant was crowded with women, attractive women who looked happy and confident and pleased with themselves. Lucy felt stared at, and it bothered her in a way it never had before.
“I want to do something about it now,” she said. “Look at me.”
“Lucy, you look great.”
“I haven’t been this fat since I was ten.”
“You stop taking your medicine and…”
“It makes me sick and exhausted.”
“I’m not going to let you do anything rash. You have to trust me.”
He held her gaze in the candlelight, and his face will always be in her mind, looking at her the way he did that night. He was handsome, with fine features and unusual eyes the color of tiger eyes, and she could keep nothing from him. He knew all there was to know in every way imaginable.
Loneliness and guilt follow her as she follows the snowy sidewalk west along theCape CodBay. She ran away. She remembers when she heard about his death. She heard about it the way no one should, on the radio.
A prominent doctor was found shot to death in aHollywoodapartment in what sources close to the investigation say is a possible suicide…
She had no one to ask. She wasn’t supposed to know Johnny and had never met his brother, Laurel, or any of their friends, so who could she ask?
Her cell phone vibrates, and she tucks the earpiece in her ear and answers.
“Where are you?”Bentonsays.
“Walking through a blizzard in Ptown. Well, not literally a blizzard. It’s starting to taper off.” She is dazed, a little hung-over.
“Anything interesting come up?”
She thinks of last night and feels bewildered and ashamed.
What she says is, “Only that he wasn’t alone when he was here last, the week before he died. Apparently, he came here right after his surgery, then went down toFlorida.”
“Laurel with him?”
“No.”
“How did he manage alone?”
“As I said, it appears he wasn’t alone.”
“Who told you?”
“A bartender. Apparently, he met someone.”
“We know who?”
“A woman. Someone a lot younger.”
“A name?”
“Jan, don’t know the rest of it. Johnny was upset about the surgery, which wasn’t all that successful, as you know. People do a lot of things when they’re scared and don’t feel good about themselves.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” she lies.
She was a coward. She was selfish.
“You don’t sound okay,”Bentonsays to her. “What happened to Johnny isn’t your fault.”
“I ran away from it. I didn’t do a damn thing.”
“Why don’t you spend some time with us. Kay’s going to be up here for a week. We’d love to see you. You and I will find some private time to talk,” Benton the psychologist says.
“I don’t want to see her. Somehow make her understand.”
“Lucy, you can’t keep doing this to her.”
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” she says, thinking of Stevie again.
“Then tell her the truth. It’s that simple.”
“You called me.” She abruptly changes the subject.
“I need you to do something for me as soon as possible,” he replies. “I’m on a secured phone.”
“Unless there’s anyone around here with an intercept system, I am too. Go ahead.”
He tells her about a murder that supposedly occurred at some sort of Christmas shop, supposedly in the Las Olas area about two and a half years ago. He tells her everything Basil Jenrette told him. He says Scarpetta is unfamiliar with any case that sounds similar, but she wasn’t working inSouth Floridaback then.
“The information came from a sociopath,” he reminds her, “so I’m not holding my breath that there’s anything to it.”
“The alleged victim in the Christmas shop have her eyes gouged out?”
“He didn’t tell me that. I didn’t want to ask him too many questions until I check out his story. Can you run it in HIT, see what you can find?”