Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

“Put it this way,” Marino says, “there’s a Toyota Camry sitting in the lot at Lowcountry Concierge Connection with the name Dr. Kay Scarpetta on it. If anybody was hanging around, waiting for you to get in it because maybe they got access to your itinerary, your e-mails, or found out your schedule some other way, you would have been a no-show. And if they called your hotel, they would have found out you’d canceled your room because you missed your connection in Atlanta.”

“Why would Benton have me followed?”

“Maybe he wouldn’t. But maybe someone would see the itinerary that went from your e-mail to his. Maybe he knows the possibility or likelihood of that happening, and that’s why he didn’t want you coming down here.”

“How do you know he didn’t want me coming down here?”

“Because he wouldn’t.”

I don’t reply or look Marino in the eye. Instead I look around. I take in the details of Jaime’s charming loft of exposed old brick, pine floors, and high white plaster ceilings with rough oak beams, very much to my liking but definitely not to hers. The living area, simply furnished with a leather couch, a matching armchair, and a slate coffee table, flows into a large kitchen with a stone peninsula and the stainless-steel appliances of an industrious cook, which Berger most decidedly isn’t.

There is no art, and I happen to know that she is a collector. I see no evidence of anything personal beyond what’s on the desk and floor against the far wall under a big window filled with the night, the moon distant now, small and bone-white. I don’t see any furniture or rugs that might be hers, and I know her taste. Contemporary and minimalist, predominantly high-end Italian and Scandinavian, a lot of light woods, such as maple and birch. Jaime’s taste is uncomplicated because her life is its antithesis, and I’m reminded of how much she disliked Lucy’s loft in Greenwich Village, a fabulous building that once was a candle factory. I remember being offended when Jaime used to refer to it as “Lucy’s drafty old barn.”

“She’s renting this,” I say to Marino. “Why?” I sit on the brown leather couch that is a reproduction, not at all Jaime’s style. “And how do you fit into the equation? How do I fit into it? Why are you convinced someone would follow me, given the chance? You could have called me if you were so worried. What is it? Are you thinking of changing jobs? Or have you gone back to work for Jaime and forgot to let me know.”

“I’m not exactly changing jobs, Doc.”

“Not exactly? Well, she’s pulled you into something. You should know that about her by now.”

Jaime Berger is calculating, almost frighteningly so, and Marino is no match for her. He wasn’t when he was an investigator with NYPD and was assigned to her office, and he’s no match for her now and never will be. Whatever reason she’s given him for his being here and maneuvering me into what feels like nothing less than a calculated machination, it isn’t the whole truth or even close.

“You are working for her de facto because you’re here at her bidding,” I add. “You’re certainly not working for me when you swap my car and cancel my hotel and scheme with her behind my back.”

“I’m working for you but helping her, too. I haven’t walked off the job, Doc,” he says, with surprising gentleness for Marino. “I wouldn’t do something shitty like that to you.”

I don’t reply that he has done plenty of shitty things to me over the twenty-plus years I’ve known him and worked with him, and I can’t help thinking about what Kathleen Lawler said. Every other minute it enters my mind. Jack Fielding wrote to her in the early nineties, wrote to her on lined notebook paper, like a schoolboy — an immature, sophomoric, mean-spirited schoolboy who resented me. He and Marino thought I needed to be warmed up, humanized, fucked but good, and for an instant the Marino standing before me is the Marino from back then.

I envision him inside his dark blue unmarked Crown Vic, with all of its antennas and emergency lights and crumpled fast-food bags, its overflowing ashtray, the air shellacked with a stale stench of cigarettes that air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror couldn’t begin to crack. I remember the defiance in his eyes, the way he blatantly stared, making sure he reminded me that I might be the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia, but I was tits and ass to him. I remember going home at the end of each day in the Capital of the Confederacy, where I certainly didn’t belong.

“Doc?”

Richmond. Where I knew no one.

“What is it?”

I remember how alone I was.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

I focus on the Marino who has lived some twenty years since then, towering above me, as bald as a baseball and weathered by the sun.

“And if Kathleen Lawler had declined to play whatever this game is?” I say to him. “What if she hadn’t given me the piece of paper with Jaime’s phone number on it? What then?”

“I worried about that.” He walks over to a window and stares out at the night. “But Jaime knew for a fact Kathleen would give you the note,” he says, with his back to me, as he looks out and down, possibly looking for Jaime.

“She knew it for a fact. I see,” I reply. “I’m not happy about this.”

“I know you’re not, but there are reasons.” He wanders closer to me and stops. “Jaime couldn’t reach out to you directly at this stage of things. The safe thing was to have you make the first call and do it in a way that couldn’t be detected.”

“Is this a legal strategy, or is she protecting herself for some reason?”

“There can’t be a trail of Jaime initiating this meeting, of her reaching out to you at this point, plain and simple,” he says. “You’ll hook up with her tomorrow, officially, at the ME’s office in the course of doing business, but you were never here. Not here and not now.”

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. I’m supposed to pretend I’m not here now and that I didn’t see Jaime tonight.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m supposed to go along with whatever lie the two of you have concocted.”

“It’s necessary and for your own good.”

“I have no plans for hooking up with anyone and have no idea what business you’re referring to.” But I have a feeling I do know, as I think of the autopsy records of the slain Jordan family and any of the evidence from those cases stored at the local medical examiner’s office and crime labs. “I’m leaving in the morning,” I add, as my attention returns to the expansion files stacked on the floor by the desk. Each has a different-colored gusset and is labeled with initials or abbreviations that I don’t recognize.

“I’ll be picking you up at eight a.m.” Marino is standing in the middle of the room as if he doesn’t know what do to with himself, and his large physical presence seems to shrink everything around him.

“Maybe it would be helpful if you’d tell me what I’m meeting about.”

“It’s hard to talk to you when you’re this pissed.” He stares down at me, and when I’m sitting and he’s not, I don’t like it.

“Last I checked, you worked for me, not Jaime. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me, not to her or anyone else.” I sound angry, but what I am is hurt. “I wish you’d sit down.”

“If I’d said I want to help out Jaime, that I want to do some things a little different from the way I’ve been doing them, you would have told me no.” Leather creaks loudly as he settles in the deep armchair.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to or how you could know what I might say.” I feel he’s accusing me of being difficult.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what all is going on, because nobody’s in a position to outright tell you.” He leans forward, his big arms on his bare knees, which are the size of small hubcaps. “Some people want you destroyed.”