"I'm sorry to leave you."
"All I need is a car," I said as my heart beat harder.
"I wonder where you rent one around here. The airport, maybe?"
"I guess that's why you're an FBI agent. You can figure out things like that." His fingers worked their way down to my hand and he began to stroke it with his thumb. I had always known our path one day would lead to this. When he had asked me to serve as his consultant at Quantico, I had been aware of the danger. I could have said no.
"Are you in much pain?" I asked him.
"I will be in the morning, because I'm going to have a hangover."
"It is the morning."
I leaned back and shut my eyes as he touched my hair. I felt his face move closer as he traced the contours of my throat with his fingers, then his lips. He touched me as if he had always wanted to, while darkness swept in from the far reaches of my brain and light danced across my blood. Our kisses were stolen like fire. I knew I had found the unforgivable sin I had never been able to name, but did not care. We left our clothes where they landed and went to bed. We were tender with his wounds but not deterred by them, and made love until dawn began to around the horizon's edge. Afterward I sat watching the sun spill over the mountains, coloring the leaves. I imagined his helicopter lifting and turning like a dancer in air.
6
In the center of downtown, across the street from the Exxon station, was Black Mountain Chevrolet, where Officer Baird delivered Marino and me at 7:45 a. m. Apparently, the local police had been spreading word throughout the business community that the "Feds" had arrived and were staying "under cover" at the Travel-Eze. Though I did not feel quite the celebrity, neither did I feel anonymous when we drove off in a new silver Caprice while it seemed that everyone who had ever thought of working for the dealership stood outside the showroom and watched.
"I heard some guy call you Quincy," Marino said as he opened a steak biscuit from Hardee's.
"I've been called worse. Do you have any idea how much sodium and fat you're ingesting right now?"
"Yeah. About one third of what I'm going to ingest. I got three biscuits here, and I plan to eat every damn one of them. In case you've got a problem with your short-term memory, I missed dinner last night."
"You don't need to be rude."
"When I miss food and sleep, I get rude."
I did not volunteer that I had gotten less sleep than Marino, but I suspected he knew. He would not look me in the eye this morning, and I sensed that beneath his irritability he was very depressed.
"I didn't sleep worth a damn," he went on.
"The acoustics in that joint suck."
I pulled down the visor as if that somehow would alleviate my discomfort, then turned the radio on and switched stations until I landed on Bonnie Raitt. Marino's rental car was being equipped with a police radio and scanner and would not be ready until the end of the day. I was to drop him off at Denesa Steiner's house and someone would pick him up later. I drove while he ate and gave directions.
"Slow down," he said, looking at a map.
"This should be Laurel coming up on our left. Okay, you're going to want to hang a right at the next one." We turned again to discover a lake directly ahead of us that was no bigger than a football field and the color of moss. Its picnic areas and tennis courts were deserted, and it did not appear that the neatly maintained clubhouse was currently in use. The shore was lined with trees beginning to brown with the wane of fall, and I imagined a little girl with guitar case in hand heading home in the deepening shadows. I imagined an old man fishing on a morning like this and his shock at what he found in the brush.
"I want to come out here later and walk around," I said.
"Turn here," Marino said.
"Her house is at the next corner."
"Where is Emily buried?"
"About two miles over that way." He pointed east.
"In the church cemetery."
"This is the church where her meeting was?"
"Third Presbyterian. If you view the lake area as being sort of like the Washington Mall, you got the church at one end and the Steiner crib at the other with about two miles in between."
I recognized the ranch-style house from the photographs I had reviewed at Quantico yesterday morning. It seemed smaller, as so many edifices do when you finally see them in life. Situated on a rise far back from the street, it was nestled on a lot thick with rhododendrons, laurels, sour-woods, and pines. The gravel sidewalk and front porch had been recently swept, and clustered at the edge of the driveway were bulging bags of leaves. Denesa Steiner owned a green Infiniti sedan that was new and expensive, and this rather surprised me. I caught a glimpse of her arm in a long black sleeve holding the screen door for Marino as I drove away. The morgue in Asheville Memorial Hospital was not unlike most I had seen. Located in the lowest level, it was a small bleak room of tile and stainless steel with but one autopsy table that Dr. Jenrette had rolled close to a sink. He was making the Y incision on Ferguson's body when I arrived at shortly after nine. As blood became exposed to air, I detected the sickening sweet odor of alcohol.
"Good morning. Dr. Scarpetta," Jenrette said, and he seemed pleased to see me.
"Greens and gloves are in the cabinet over there."
I thanked him, though I would not need them, for the young doctor would not need me. I expected this autopsy to be all about finding nothing, and as I looked closely at Ferguson's neck, I got my first validation. The reddish pressure marks I had observed late last night were gone, and we would find no deep injury to underlying tissue and muscle. As I watched Jenrette work, I was humbly reminded that pathology is never a substitute for investigation. In fact, were we not privy to the circumstances, we would have no idea why Ferguson had died, except that he had not been shot, stabbed, or beaten, nor had he succumbed to some disease.
"I guess you noticed the way the socks smell that he had stuffed in his bra," Jenrette said as he worked.
"I'm wondering if you found anything to correspond with that, like a bottle of perfume, some sort of cologne?" He lifted out the block of organs. Ferguson had a mildly fatty liver.
"No, we didn't," I replied.
"And I might add that fragrances are generally used in scenarios like this when there's more than one person involved." Jenrette glanced up at me.
"Why?"
"Why bother if you're alone?"
"I guess that makes sense." He emptied the stomach contents into a carton.
"Just a little bit of brownish fluid," he added.
"Maybe a few nut like particles. You say he flew back to Asheville not long before he was found?"
"That's right."
"So maybe he ate peanuts on the plane. And drank. His STAT alcohol's point one-four."
"He probably also drank when he got home," I said, recalling the glass of bourbon in the bedroom.
"Now, when you talk about there being more than one person in some of these situations, is this gay or straight?"
"Often gay," I said.
"But the pornography is a big clue."
"He was looking at nude women."
"The magazines found near his body featured nude women," I restated his remark, for we had no way of knowing what Ferguson had been looking at. We knew only what we had found.
"It's also important that we didn't see any other pornography or sexual paraphernalia in his house," I added.
"I guess I would assume there would be more of it," Jenrette said as he plugged in the Stryker's saw.
"Usually, these guys keep trunk loads of it," I said.
"They never throw it out. Frankly, it bothers me quite a lot that we found only four magazines, all of them current issues."
"It's like he was really new at this."
"There are many factors that suggest he was inexperienced," I replied.
"But mostly what I'm seeing is inconsistency."
"Such as?" He incised the scalp behind the ears, folding it down to expose the skull, and the face suddenly collapsed into a sad, slack mask.