Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

“I’ve got one spine board in the back of the helicopter,” she says. “How do you want to do this, Aunt Kay?”

“We need to photograph everything. Take measurements. Get the police out here right away.” There is so much to do. “Any way we can sling two at a time?”

“Not with one spine board.”

“I want to look through everything in here,” Benton says.

“Then we’ll get them in body bags, and you’ll have to take one at a time,” Scarpetta says. “Where do you want to set them down, Lucy? Someplace discreet, can’t be the FBO where your industrious lineman is probably out there marshaling in mosquitoes. I’ll call Hollings and see who can meet you.”

Then they are silent, listening to the flapping of the makeshift tent, listening to the swishing of grass, to the soft, wet crashing of waves. The lighthouse looks like a huge, dark pawn in a game of chess, surrounded by the spreading plain of the riffled black sea. He’s out there somewhere, and it seems surreal. A soldier of misfortune, but Scarpetta feels no pity.

“Let’s do this,” she says, and she tries her phone.

Of course, she gets no signal.

“You’ll have to try him from the air,” she says to Lucy. “Maybe try Rose.”

“Rose?”

“Just try her.”

“What for?”

“I suspect she’ll know where to find him.”

They get the spine board and body bags, and plasticized sheets, and what biohazard gear they have. They start with her. She is limp because rigor mortis came and went, as if it gave up stubbornly protesting her death, and insects and tiny creatures like crabs took over. They have eaten away what was soft and wounded. Her face is swollen, her body bloated from bacterial gas, her skin marbled greenish-black in the branched pattern of her blood vessels. Her left buttock and the back of her thigh have been raggedly cut away, but there are no other obvious injuries or signs of mutilation, and no indication of what killed her. They lift her and place her in the middle of the sheet, and then into a pouch that Scarpetta zips closed.

They turn their attention to the man on the beach who has a translucent plastic retainer on his gritted teeth, and around his right wrist, a rubber band. His suit and tie are black, and his white shirt is stained dark from purge fluid and blood. Multiple narrow slits in his jacket front and back suggest he was repeatedly stabbed. Maggots infest his wounds and are a moving mass under his clothes, and in a pants pocket is a wallet that belonged to Lucious Meddick. It doesn’t appear the killer was interested in credit cards or cash.

More photographs and notes, and Scarpetta and Benton strap the woman’s pouched body — Lydia Webster’s pouched body — onto a spine board while Lucy retrieves a fifty-foot line and a net from the back of the helicopter. She hands Scarpetta her gun.

“You need this more than I do,” she says.

She climbs in and starts the engines, and blades thud, beating back air. Lights flash, and the helicopter gently lifts and noses around. Very slowly, it rises until the line gets taut and the net with its morbid burden is suspended off the sand. She flies away, and the load gently swings like a pendulum. Scarpetta and Benton head back to the tent. Were it daylight, the flies would be a droning storm and the air would be dense and loud with decay.

“He sleeps here,” Benton says. “Not necessarily all the time.”

He nudges the pillow with his foot. Beneath it is the border of the blanket, and beneath that, the mattress. A freezer bag keeps a box of matches dry, but paperback books don’t seem to mean much to him. They are soggy, the pages stuck together — the sort of obscure family sagas and romance novels one might buy in a drugstore when one wants something to read and doesn’t care what it is. Beneath this small makeshift tent is a pit where he built fires, using charcoal and the rusting grate from a grill set on top of rocks. There are root-beer cans. Scarpetta and Benton don’t touch anything, and they return to the beach where the helicopter landed, the marks from its skids deep in the sand. More stars are out, and the stench taints the air but no longer crowds it.

“At first you thought it was him. I saw it on your face,” Benton says.

“I hope he’s all right and didn’t do anything foolish,” she says. “One more thing that will be Dr. Self’s fault. Ruining what all of us had. Driving us apart. You haven’t told me how you found out.” Getting angry. Old anger and new.

“That’s her favorite thing to do. Drive people apart.”

They wait near the water, upwind from Lucious Meddick’s black cocoon, and the stench is carried away from them. Scarpetta smells the sea and hears it breathe and softly break on the shore. The horizon is black, and the lighthouse warns of nothing anymore.

A little later, in the distance, winking lights, and Lucy flies in and they turn away from blasting sand as she lands. With Lucious Meddick’s body securely in the cargo net, they lift off and carry him to Charleston. Police lights throb on the ramp, and Henry Hollings and Captain Poma stand near a windowless van.

Scarpetta walks in front of them. Anger moves her feet. She scarcely listens to a four-way conversation. Lucious Meddick’s hearse being found parked behind Hollings’s Funeral Home, keys in the ignition. How did it get there unless the killer left it — or maybe Shandy did. Bonnie and Clyde — that’s what Captain Poma calls them, then he brings up Bull. Where is he, what else might he know? Bull’s mother says he’s not home, been saying that for days. No sign of Marino, and now the police are looking for him, and Hollings says the bodies will go straight to the morgue. Not Scarpetta’s morgue. The MUSC morgue, where two forensic pathologists are waiting after working most of the night on Gianni Lupano.

“We could use you, if you’re willing,” Hollings says to Scarpetta. “You found them, so you should work it through. Only if you don’t mind.”

“The police need to get to Morris Island now and secure the scene,” she says.

“Zodiac boats are on the way. I’d better give you directions to the morgue.”

“I’ve been there before. You said the head of security is your friend,” she says. “At the Charleston Place Hotel. What’s the name?”

As they walk.

Hollings then says, “Suicide. Blunt-force trauma from a jump or a fall. Nothing to indicate foul play. Unless you can charge someone with driving a person to it. In that event, Dr. Self should be indicted. My friend at the hotel, her name’s Ruth.”

Lights are bright inside the FBO, and Scarpetta steps into the ladies’ room to wash her hands and her face and the inside of her nose. She sprays a lot of air freshener and moves into its mist, and she brushes her teeth. When she walks back out, Benton is standing there, waiting.

“You should go home,” he says.

“As if I can sleep.”

He follows her as the windowless van drives away, and Hollings is talking to Captain Poma and Lucy.

“I’ve got something I need to do,” Scarpetta says.

Benton lets her go. She walks to her SUV alone.

Ruth’s office is near the kitchen, where the hotel has had numerous problems with theft.

Shrimp, in particular. Cunning petty criminals disguised as chefs. She tells one amusing story after another, and Scarpetta listens attentively because she wants something, and the only way to get it is to play audience to the head of security’s performance. Ruth is an elegant older woman who is a captain in the National Guard but looks more like a demure librarian. In fact, she looks a little bit like Rose.

“But then, you didn’t come see me to hear all this,” Ruth says from behind a desk that is likely hotel surplus. “You want to know about Drew Martin, and probably Mr. Hollings told you the last time she stayed here, she was never in her room.”