The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 102

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"You knew I would be." He has a pained expression on his face. "Don't let the bastards get you, Doc. Don't give up."

I pick up my briefcase and open the office door. "I'm doing anything but give up. In fact, I've got a lot to do."

His expression asks, what"? I've just been ordered by the governor to do nothing. "Mike's a good guy," Marino says. "But don't push him. Don't give him a reason to fire you. Why don't you go somewhere for a few days? Maybe go see Lucy in New York. Didn't she head on up to New York? Her and Teun? Just get the hell out of here until the hearing. I wish you would so I don't have to worry about you every other minute. I don't even like you being out there in Anna's house all by yourself."

I take a deep breath and try to tuck in my fury and hurt. Marino is right. There is no point in pissing off the governor and making matters worse. But now I feel run out of town on top of everything else, and I have not heard a word from Anna, and that stings, too. I am almost in tears, and I refuse to cry in my office. I avert my eyes from Marino, but he catches my feelings.

"Hey," he says, "you got every right not to feel good. All of this sucks, Doc."

I cross the hallway and cut through the ladies' room, on my way to the morgue. Turk is sewing up Benny White and Jack is sitting at the counter doing paperwork. I pull out a chair next to my assistant chief and pluck several stray hairs off his scrubs. "You got to quit shedding," I say, trying to hide my upset. "You going to tell me why your hair keeps falling out?" I have been meaning to ask him for weeks. As usual, so much has happened and Jack and I have not talked.

"All you got to do is read the paper," he says, putting down his pen. "That should tell you why my hair's falling out." His eyes are heavy.

I nod as I get his meaning. It is what I expect. Jack has known for a while that I am in serious trouble. Maybe Righter contacted him weeks ago and started fishing, just as he did with Anna. I ask Jack if this is the case, and he admits it. He says he has been a wreck. He hates politics and administration and does not want my job and never will.

"You make me look good," he says. "You always have, Dr. Scarpetta. They might think I should be appointed chief. Then what do I do? I don't know." He runs his fingers through his hair and loses more. "I just wish everything could go back to normal."

"Believe me, so do I," I say as the phone rings and Turk answers it.

"That reminds me," Jack says. "We're getting weird phone calls down here. I tell you about that?"

"I was down here when we got one," I reply. "Someone claiming to be Benton."

"Sick," he says in disgust.

"That's the only one I'm aware of," I add.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" Turk calls out. "Can you take it? It's Paul."

I go to the phone. "How are you, Paul?" I ask Paul Monty, the statewide director of the forensic labs.

"First, I just want you to know everybody in this damn building is pulling for you, Kay," he says. "Bullshit. I read all that bullshit and practically spit my coffee out. And we're working our fannies off." By this he means evidence testing. There is supposed to be an egalitarian order in the workup of evidence_appropriately, no one victim should be more important than another and moved to the front of the line. But there is also an unspoken code, same as in police shootings. People take care of their own. It is a fact. "Got some interesting test results that I wanted to pass on to you personally," Paul Monty goes on. "The hairs from the campground_the ones that you suspect are Chandonne's? Well, the DNA matches. What's of even more interest is that a fiber comparison shows that the cotton linens from that campsite match fibers collected from the mattress in Diane Bray's bedroom."

A scenario forms. Chandonne took Diane Bray's linens after her murder and fled to the campground. Maybe he slept on them. Or maybe he simply disposed of them. But either way, we can definitely place Chandonne at The Fort James Motel. Paul has nothing more to report at the moment.

"What about the dental floss I found in the toilet?" I ask Paul. "In the room where Matos was killed?"

"No hit on that. The DNA's not Chandonne's or Bray's or any of the usual suspects," he tells me. "Maybe some previous guest at the motel? Could be unrelated."

I return to the counter, where Jack resumes telling me about the strange phone calls. He says there have been several of them.

"One I happened to answer and the person, a guy, asked for you, says he's Benton and then hangs up," Jack reports. "Turk answered the second time. The guy says to tell you he called and will be an hour late to dinner, identifies himself as Benton and hangs up. So add that to the mix. No wonder I'm going bald."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I absently pick up Polaroid photographs of Benny White's body on the gurney before he was unclothed.

"Thought you had enough shit going on. I should have told you. I was wrong."

The sight of this young boy dressed in his Sunday best and inside an unzipped body pouch on top of a steel gurney is so incongruous. I feel deeply saddened as I notice his pants are a little short and his socks don't quite match, one blue, one black. I feel worse. "You find anything unexpected with him?" I have talked enough about my problems. My problems, as a matter of fact, do not seem very important when I look at photographs of Benny and think about his mother in the viewing room.

"Yeah, one thing puzzled me," Jack says. "The story I got is he came home from church and never went inside the house. He gets out of the car and heads out to the barn, saying he'll be right in and is trying to find his pocket knife_thinks it might be in his tackle box and he forgot to take it out when he came home from fishing the other day. He never comes back to the house. In other words, he never ate Sunday dinner. But this little guy had a full stomach."

"Could you tell what he might have eaten?" I ask.

"Yeah. Popcorn, for one thing. And looks like he ate hot-dogs. So I call his house and talk to his stepdad. I ask if Benny might have eaten anything at church and am told no. His step-dad's got no idea where the food came from," Jack replies.

"That's very odd," I comment. "So he comes home from church and goes out to hang himself, but stops off someplace to eat popcorn and hotdogs first?" I get up from the counter. "Something's wrong with that picture."

"If it wasn't for the gastric contents, I'd say it's a straightforward suicide." Jack remains seated, looking up at me. "I could kill Stanfield for cutting through the knot. The fuck-head."

"Maybe we should take a look at where Benny was hanged," I decide. "Go to the scene."

"They live on a farm in James City County," Jack says. "Right on the river, and apparently the woods where he was hanged are at the edge of the field, not even a mile from the house."

"Let's go," I tell him. "Maybe Lucy can give us a ride."

IT IS A TWO-HOUR FLIGHT FROM THE HANGAR IN

New York to HeloAir in Richmond, and Lucy was more than happy to show off her new company vehicle. The plan is simple. She will pick up Jack and me and land us at the farm, then the three of us will check out where Benny White allegedly killed himself. I also want to see his bedroom. Afterwards, we will drop Jack off in Richmond and I will return to New York with Lucy, where I will stay until the special grand jury hear- ing. This is all planned for tomorrow morning, and Detective Stanfield has no interest in meeting us at the scene.

"What for?" are the first words out of his mouth. "What you need to go there for?"

I almost mention the gastric contents that don't make sense. I come close to inquiring as to whether there was anything Stanfield observed that made him suspicious. But I catch myself. Something stops me. "If you can just give me directions to their place," I tell him.

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