Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

Madelisa imagines someone — probably a man — drunk and depressed or sick, maybe explaining why the dog got out. Someone was in here not long ago, drinking, she thinks, and whoever it was started cooking on the grill and seems to have vanished. Her heart pounds. She can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched, and she thinks, My Lord, it’s cold in here .

“Hello? Anybody home?” she calls out hoarsely.

Her feet seem to move on their own as she explores in awe, and fear hums inside her like electricity. She should leave. She’s trespassing like a burglar. Breaking and entering. She’s going to get in trouble. She feels something looking at her. The police will be looking at her, all right, if and when they find out, and she’s getting panicky, but her feet won’t listen. They keep moving her from one place to the next.

“Hello?” she calls out, her voice cracking.

Beyond the living room, off to the left of the foyer, is another room, and she hears running water.

“Hello!”

She hesitantly follows the sound of running water, can’t seem to stop her feet. They keep right on, and she finds herself in a large bedroom with fancy, formal furniture and drawn silk curtains and pictures all over the walls. A beautiful little girl with a very pretty, happy woman who must be her mother. The little girl joyous in a wading pool with a puppy — the basset hound. The same pretty woman crying, sitting on a couch talking to the famous talk-show psychiatrist Dr. Self, big cameras rolled in close. The same pretty lady posing with Drew Martin and a handsome man with olive skin and very dark hair. Drew and the man are in tennis clothes, holding racquets on a tennis court somewhere.

Drew Martin’s dead. Murdered.

The pale blue duvet on the bed is messy. On the black marble floor near the head of the bed are clothes that seem to have been dropped there. A pink jogging suit, a pair of socks, a bra. The sound of running water gets louder as her feet move toward it, and Madelisa tells her feet to run the other way but they won’t. Run , she tells them as they walk her into a bathroom of black onyx and copper. RUN! She slowly takes in the wet, bloody towels in the copper sink, the bloody saw-toothed knife and bloody box cutters on the back of the black toilet, the neat stack of clean, pale rose linens on top of the hamper.

Behind tiger-striped curtains drawn around the copper tub, water runs, splashing on something that doesn’t sound like metal.

After dark. Scarpetta shines her flashlight on a stainless-steel Colt revolver in the middle of the alley behind her house.

She hasn’t called the police. If the coroner is involved in this latest turn of sinister events, then calling the police might make matters worse. No telling who he has in his pocket. Bull has quite a story, and she doesn’t know what to think. He says when the crows flapped off from the oak tree in her garden, he knew that had meaning, so he told her an untruth, said he had to go on home, when what he intended to do was some sneaking — that’s how he put it. He tucked himself behind shrubbery between her two sets of gates and waited. He waited the better part of five hours. Scarpetta had no idea.

She went about her business. Finished what she was doing in the garden. Took a shower. Worked in her upstairs office. Made phone calls. Checked on Rose. Checked on Lucy. Checked on Benton. All the while, she didn’t know Bull was hiding between the two sets of gates behind the house. He says it’s like fishing. You don’t catch anything unless you fool the fish into thinking you’ve left for the day. When the sun was lower and the shadows longer and Bull had been sitting on dark, cool bricks between the gates all afternoon, he saw a man in the alleyway. The man walked right up to Scarpetta’s outer gate and tried to squeeze his hand through it to unlock it. When that didn’t work, he started to climb the ironwork, and that’s when Bull swung the gate open and got into it with him. He thinks it’s the man who was on the chopper, but whoever it was, he was up to something serious, and when they got into the scuffle, the man dropped his gun.

“Stay right here,” she tells Bull in the dark alley. “If one of the neighbors comes out or anyone shows up for any reason, no one gets near anything. No one touches anything. Fortunately, I don’t think anybody can see what we’re doing.”

The beam of Bull’s flashlight probes the uneven bricks as she returns to her house. She climbs the stairs to the second story, and in a few minutes is back in the alley with her camera and crime scene case. She takes photographs. She pulls on latex gloves. She picks up the revolver, opens the cylinder, and ejects six thirty-eight-caliber cartridges, placing them in one paper bag, the gun in another. She seals them with bright yellow evidence tape that she labels and initials with a Sharpie.

Bull continues to search, his flashlight bobbing as he walks, stops, crouches, then walks some more, all of it very slowly. A few more minutes pass, and he says, “There’s something here. I think you better look.”

She walks over to him, watching where she steps, and about a hundred feet from her gates on the leaf-littered asphalt is a small gold coin attached to a broken gold chain. They blaze in the beam of her flashlight, the gold as bright as the moon.

“You were this far away from my gates when you struggled with him?” she says with doubt. “Then why’s his gun way over there?” She points toward the dark shapes of her gates and garden wall.

“Hard to tell where I was,” he says. “Things like that happen fast. I didn’t think I was way over here, but I can’t say it as a fact.”

She looks back toward her house. “From here to there is pretty far,” she says. “You sure you didn’t chase him after he dropped the gun?”

“All I can say,” Bull says, “is a gold chain with a gold coin isn’t going to lie around out here long. So I could have chased him and it got broke when we tussled. I didn’t think I chased him, but when you got life and death going on, time and distance don’t always measure right.”

“They don’t always,” she agrees.

She pulls on fresh gloves and picks up the broken necklace by a small area of the chain. Without a lens, she can’t tell what type of coin it is, can make out only a crowned head on one side, a wreath and the number 1 on the other.

“So it probably broke off when I started tussling with him,” Bull decides, as if he’s convinced himself. “Sure hope they don’t make you turn all this over to them. The police, I mean.”

“There’s nothing to turn over,” she says. “So far, there’s no crime. Just a scuffle between you and a stranger. Which I don’t intend to mention to anyone. Except Lucy. We’ll see what we can do in the labs tomorrow.”

He’s already been in trouble. He’s not getting into trouble again, especially on her account.

“When folks find a gun lying around, they supposed to call the police,” Bull says.

“Well, I’m not going to.” She packs up what she carried outside.

“You’re fretting they’d think I was involved in something and haul me off. Don’t you get in a mess because of me, Dr. Kay.”

“No one’s hauling you anywhere,” she says.

Gianni Lupano’s black Porsche 911 Carrera is permanently located in Charleston, no matter how seldom he’s here.

“Where is he?” Lucy asks Ed.

“Haven’t seen him.”

“But he’s still in town.”

“I talked to him yesterday. He called and asked me to get maintenance up there because his air-conditioning wasn’t working right. So while he was out, and I don’t know where he went, they changed the filter. He’s a private one. I know about his coming and going because he gets me to start his car once a week so the battery don’t go dead.” Ed opens a foam to-go box, and his small office smells like french fries. “You mind? Don’t want it to get cold. Who told you about his car?”