He hung up, and Judy tottered, bending over to snap the leash on the poodle’s matching collar, blue leather and an Hermès lock, probably engraved with the neurotic dog’s name. They went out the door and got on the elevator. Scarpetta smelled the pungently sweet chemical odor of dynamite. A hallucination. Her imagination. She couldn’t possibly smell dynamite. There was no dynamite.
“Do you smell anything?” she asked Benton. “I’m sorry your dog’s so upset.” It was her way of asking Judy to make the damn thing shut up.
“I don’t smell anything,” Benton said.
“Maybe my perfume.” Judy sniffed her wrists. “Oh. You mean something bad. I hope somebody didn’t send you Ant-trax or whatever it’s called. Why did you have to bring it upstairs? How’s that fair to the rest of us?”
Scarpetta realized her shoulder bag was in the apartment, on the table inside the entryway. Her wallet, her credentials, were in it, and the door was unlocked. She couldn’t remember what had happened to her BlackBerry. She should have checked the package before carrying it upstairs. What the hell was wrong with her?
“Marino’s on his way but won’t get here before the others do,” Benton said, not bothering to explain to Judy who Marino was. “He’s coming from downtown, from headquarters, from Emergency Operations.”
“Why?” Scarpetta watched floors slowly go by.
“RTCC. Doing a data search. Or was going to.”
“If this were a co-op, we wouldn’t have voted you in.” Judy directed this at Scarpetta. “You get on TV and talk about all these horrible crimes, and look what happens. You bring it home and subject the rest of us. People like you attract kooks.”
“We’ll hope it’s nothing, and I apologize for upsetting you. And your dog,” Scarpetta said.
“Slowest damn elevator. Calm down, Fresca, calm down. You know she’s all bark. Wouldn’t hurt a flea. I don’t know where you expect me to go. I suppose the lobby. I don’t intend to sit in the lobby all night.”
Judy stared straight ahead at the brass elevator doors, her face pinched by displeasure. Benton and Scarpetta didn’t talk anymore. Images and sounds Scarpetta hadn’t remembered in a long while. Back then, in the late nineties, life had gotten as tragic as it could get, back in the days of ATF. Flying low over scrubby pines and soil so sandy it looked like snow as rotor blades paddled the air and slung sounds in rhythm. Metallic waterways were corrugated by the wind, and startled birds were a dash of pepper flung against the haze, heading for the old blimp station in Glynco, Georgia, where ATF had its explosives range, raid houses, concrete bunkers, and burn cells. She didn’t like post-blast schools. Had quit teaching at them after the fire in Philadelphia. Had quit ATF, and so had Lucy, both of them moving on without Benton.
Now he was here in the elevator, as if that part of Scarpetta’s past was a nightmare, a surreal dream, one she hadn’t gotten over and couldn’t. She hadn’t taught at a post-blast school since, avoidance, not as objective as she should be. Personally disturbed by bodies blown apart. Flash burns and shrapnel, massive soft-tissue avulsion, bones fragmented, hollow organs lacerated and ruptured, hands gory stumps. She thought about the package she’d carried into the apartment. She hadn’t been paying attention, had been too busy fretting about Carley and what Alex had confided, too caught up in what Dr. Edison referred to as her career at CNN. She should have noticed instantly that the airbill had no return address, that the sender’s copy was still attached.
“Is it Fresca or Fresco?” Benton was asking Judy.
“Fresca. As in the soda. Had a glass of it in my hand when Bud walked into the apartment with her in a bakery box. For my birthday. That should have been my first clue, all the holes in the top. I thought it was a cake and then she barked.”
“I bet she did,” said Benton.
Fresca began tugging the leash and barking at a shattering pitch, piercing Scarpetta’s ears, stabbing deep into her brain. Hy persalivating, her heart skipping. Don’t get sick. The elevator stopped, and the heavy brass doors crept open. Red and blue lights flashed through the lobby’s front glass door, freezing air sweeping in with half a dozen cops in dark-navy BDUs, tactical jackets, and boots, operator belts heavy with battery holders, mag pouches, batons, flashlights, and holstered pistols. A cop grabbed a luggage cart in each hand and wheeled them out the door. Another made his way straight to Scarpetta as if he knew her. A big man, young, with dark hair and skin, muscular, a patch on his jacket depicting gold stars and the cartoonish red bomb of the bomb squad.
“Dr. Scarpetta? Lieutenant Al Lobo,” he said, shaking her hand.
“What’s going on here?” Judy demanded.
“Ma’am, we’re going to need you to evacuate the building. If you could just step outside until we’re clear in here. For your own safety.”
“For how long? Lord, this isn’t fair.”
The lieutenant eyed Judy as if she looked familiar. “Ma’am, if you’ll please go outside. Someone out there will direct you… ”
“I can’t stay outside in the cold with my dog. This certainly isn’t fair.” Glaring at Scarpetta.
“What about the bar next door?” Benton suggested. “Okay if she goes over there?”
“They don’t allow dogs in the bar,” Judy said indignantly.
“I bet if you ask them nicely.” Benton walked her as far as the front door.
He returned to Scarpetta and took her hand, and the lobby was suddenly a chaotic, noisy, drafty place, with the elevator doors dinging open and squad members heading upstairs to begin an evacuation immediately above, below, and on either side of Scarpetta and Benton ’s apartment, or what the lieutenant called “the target.” He began machine-gunning questions.
“I’m pretty sure there’s no one left on our floor, the twentieth floor,” Scarpetta answered. “One neighbor didn’t answer and doesn’t seem to be home, although you should check again. The other neighbor is her.” She meant Judy.
“She looks like someone. One of those old shows like Carol Bur-nett. Just one floor above you?”
“Two. There are two above ours,” Benton said.
Through glass Scarpetta watched more emergency response trucks pull up, white with blue stripes, one of them towing a light trailer. She realized traffic had stopped in both directions. The police had closed off this section of Central Park West. Diesel engines rumbled loudly, approaching sirens wailed, the area around their building beginning to look like a movie set, with trucks and police cars lining the street and halogen lights shining from pedestals and trailers, and red and blue emergency strobes stuttering nonstop.
Members of the bomb squad opened bin doors on the sides of the trucks, grabbing Pelican cases and Roco bags and sacks, and harnesses, and tools, trotting up the steps with armloads and piling them on luggage carts. Scarpetta’s stomach had settled down, but there was a cold feeling in it as she watched a female bomb squad tech open a bin and lift out a tunic and trousers, eighty-something pounds of heavily padded tan fire-retardant armor on hangers. A bomb suit. An unmarked black SUV pulled up, and another tech climbed out and let his chocolate Lab bound out of the back.
“I need you to give me as much information as you can about the package,” Lobo was saying to the concierge, Ross, standing behind the desk, looking dazed and scared. “But we need to take it outside. Dr. Scarpetta, Benton? If you’ll come with us.”
The four of them went out to the sidewalk, where the halogen lights were so bright they hurt Scarpetta’s eyes and the rumbling of diesel engines resonated like an earthquake. Cops from patrol and the Emergency Service Unit were sealing the perimeter of the building with bright yellow crime-scene tape, and people were assembling by the dozens across the street, inside the deep shadows of the park and sitting on the wall, talking excitedly and taking photographs with cell phones. It was very cold, and arctic blasts bounced off buildings, but the air felt good. Scarpetta’s head began to clear, and she could breathe better.