Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

Sixth gear, tucked in, and passing cars on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge with its soaring peaks and vertical cables that remind her of the Stanford Cancer Center, of the lady playing incongruous songs on her harp. Marino may have been messed up already, but he didn’t bargain for the chaos Dr. Self could cause. He’s too simple to comprehend a neutron bomb. Compared to Dr. Self, he’s a big, dumb kid with a slingshot in his back pocket. Maybe he started it by sending her an e-mail, but she knows how to finish something. She knows how to finish him.

Racing past shrimp boats docked in Shem Creek, crossing the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island, where Marino lives in what he said at one time was his dream home — a tiny, run-down fishing shack on stilts, with a red metal roof. The windows are dark, not even a porch light on. Behind the shack, a very long pier cuts through the marsh and ends at a narrow creek that snakes to the Intracoastal Waterway. When he moved here, he bought a drift boat and enjoyed exploring the creeks and fishing or just cruising and drinking beer. She’s not sure what happened. Where did he go? Who’s living in his body?

The patch of a front yard is sandy and dappled with spindly weeds. Under the shack, she picks her way through an assortment of junk. Old ice chests, a rusting grill, crab pots, rotting fishnets, garbage cans that smell like a swamp. She climbs warped wooden steps and tries the paint-peeled door. The lock is flimsy, but she doesn’t want to pry it open. Better to take the door off the hinges and get in that way. A screwdriver, and she’s inside Marino’s dream house. He has no alarm system, always says his guns are alarming enough.

She pulls the string of an overhead bulb, and in the harsh glare and uneven shadows, she looks around to see what’s changed since she was here last. When was that? Six months ago? He’s done nothing new, as if he stopped living here after a while. The living room is a bare wooden floor with a cheap plaid couch, two straight-back chairs, a big-screen TV, a home computer and printer. Against a wall is a kitchenette, a few empty beer cans and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter, lots of cold cuts and cheese and more beer inside the refrigerator.

She sits at Marino’s desk and from the USB port of his computer removes a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabyte thumb drive attached to a lanyard. She opens her tool kit and selects needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver pen, a battery-powered drill — as tiny as one a jeweler might use. Inside the small black box are four unidirectional microphones, each no more than eight millimeters in size, or about the size of a baby aspirin. Pulling the plastic casing off the thumb drive, she removes the shaft and the lanyard, and embeds a microphone, its metal mesh top unnoticeable in the small hole where the lanyard originally was attached. The drill makes a quiet hum as it bores a second hole in the base of the casing, where she inserts the ring of the lanyard, reattaching it.

Next she digs into a pocket of her cargo pants and pulls out another thumb drive — the one she retrieved from the lab — and inserts it into the USB port. She downloads her own version of a spyware application that will relay Marino’s every keystroke to one of her e-mail accounts. She scrolls through his hard drive, looking for documents. Almost nothing except the e-mails from Dr. Self that he copied onto his computer at the office. No big surprise. She doesn’t imagine him sitting around writing professional journal articles or a novel. He’s bad enough about doing paperwork. She plugs his thumb drive back into the port and begins a quick walk around, opening drawers. Cigarettes, a couple Playboy magazines, a.357-magnum Smith & Wesson, a few dollars and loose change, receipts, junk mail.

She’s never figured out how he fits inside the bedroom, where the closet is a rod attached between the walls at the foot of the bed, clothes jammed and sloppily hung, other items on the floor, including his huge boxer shorts, socks. She spots a lacy red bra and panties, a studded black leather belt and a crocodile one, way too small to be his, a plastic butter tub filled with condoms and cock rings. The bed is unmade. God knows when the linens were washed last.

Next door is a bathroom the size of a phone booth. A toilet, a shower, a sink. Lucy checks the medicine cabinet, finds the expected toiletries and hangover remedies. She removes a bottle of Fiorinal with Codeine prescribed to Shandy Snook. It’s almost empty. On another shelf is a tube of Testroderm, prescribed to someone she’s never heard of, and she enters the information on her iPhone. She reattaches the door to its hinges and makes her way down the dark, rickety stairs. The wind has kicked up, and she hears a faint noise coming from the pier. She slips out her Glock, listening, shining the light in the direction of the noise, but the beam falls short, the length of the pier dissolving into solid darkness.

She climbs stairs that lead to the pier, old with curling boards, some of them missing. The smell of pluff mud is strong, and she begins to swat at no-see-ums and remembers what an anthropologist told her. It’s all about your blood type. Pests like mosquitos like type O. That would be her, but she’s never been sure how a no-see-um can smell her blood type if she isn’t bleeding. They swarm around her, attacking her, even biting her scalp.

Her footsteps are quiet as she walks and listens, hearing a bumping sound. The flashlight moves over weathered wood and bent rusty nails, and a breeze touches the marsh grass, whispers through it. The lights of Charleston seem distant in the sulfur-smelling, humid air, the moon elusive behind thick clouds, and at the end of the pier, she looks down at the source of the disconcerting sound. Marino’s bass boat is gone, and bright orange bumpers rock against pilings in dull thuds.

Karen and Dr. Self on the front steps of the Pavilion in the almost-dark.

A porch light that isn’t too bright, and Dr. Self slides a folded piece of paper out of her raincoat pocket. She opens it, gets out a pen. In the woods beyond them, the high-pitched static of insects. The faraway cry of coyotes.

“What’s that?” Karen asks Dr. Self.

“Whenever I have guests on my shows, they sign one of these. It simply gives me permission to have them on the air. To talk about them. No one can help you, Karen. That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“I feel a little better.”

“You always do. Because they program you. Just as they tried to program me. It’s a conspiracy. That’s why they made me listen to my mother.”

Karen takes the waiver from her, tries to read it. There’s not enough light.

“I’d like to share our wonderful conversations and the insights from them that might help my millions of viewers around the world. I need your permission. Unless you’d rather I use an alias.”

“Oh, no! I’d be very happy for you to talk about me and use my real name. And even be on your show, Marilyn! What conspiracy? Do you think it includes me?”

“You need to sign this.” She gives Karen the pen.

Karen signs it. “If you’ll let me know if you’re going to talk about me so I can watch. I mean, if you do. Do you think you really will?”

“If you’re still here.”

“What?”

“It can’t be my first show, Karen. My first one is about Frankenstein and shocking experiments. Being drugged against my will. Subjected to torment and humiliation in the magnet. Let me repeat, a huge magnet, while I listened to my mother, while they forced me to hear her voice lying about me, blaming me. It could be weeks before you’re on my show, you see. I hope you’re still here.”

“You mean the hospital? I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”