Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

She isn’t with the Manhattan DA’s office anymore, he tells me. She resigned. She quit. Like a lot of sharpshooting prosecutors, she’s switched to the other side. Almost all of them do it eventually, vacate low-paying thankless jobs in drab government offices turgid with bureaucracy, finally fed up with the never-ending parade of tragedies, parasites, remorseless thugs, and cheaters passing through. Bad people doing bad things to bad people. Despite public perception, victims aren’t always innocent or even sympathetic, and Jaime used to comment that I was lucky my patients couldn’t lie to me. It was a cold day in hell when a witness or a victim told her the truth. I think it’s easier if they’re dead, she said, and she was right on one count at least. It’s much harder to lie when you’re dead.

But I never thought Jaime would defect to the private sector. I don’t believe her decision was driven by money as I listen to Marino describe her refusal of a retirement party or any sort of send-off, not even a luncheon or a cake or drinks at the local pub after work. She left silently, without fanfare, with virtually no notice, around the same time she called the CFC to ask about Lola Daggette, he says, and I know something has happened. Not just to Jaime but to Marino. I sense that both of their lives have been redirected somehow, and it disappoints me that I didn’t know before this moment. It’s very sad if neither one of them felt they could tell me.

Maybe I really am impossibly hard on people, and I hear Kathleen Lawler’s cruel comments and see the triumphant expression on her face as she made them, as if she’d been waiting most of her life to make them. I’m raw. I realize just how raw I am, and it’s because I know there’s a grain of truth in what Kathleen said. I’m not easy. It’s a fact I’ve never really had friends. Lucy, Benton, some former staff. And throughout it all, Marino. As bad as it’s ever gotten, he’s still here, and I don’t want that to change.

“I have a feeling that’s not all Jaime asked when she called the CFC,” I say to him, and there is nothing accusatory in my tone. “I suspect it’s not a coincidence that about the time she called the CFC and you took the train to New York, you also started talking about fishing and boats, about missing the South.”

“We got along better when I didn’t work for you.” He turns around and wanders back to his chair. “I used to feel better about myself when I was called in as an expert, you know, a homicide detective, a sergeant detective with A Squad instead of working for your office, working for Jaime’s office, now working for your office again. I’m an experienced homicide detective and trained in crime scene and death investigation. Shit, all I’ve done and seen? I don’t want to play out the rest of my days stuck in a little cubicle somewhere, waiting to take orders, waiting for something to happen.”

“You’re quitting,” I reply. “That’s what you’re trying to say.”

“Not exactly.”

“You deserve the life you want. You deserve it more than anyone I know. It disappoints me you would think you couldn’t share what you’ve been feeling. That probably bothers me most.”

“I don’t want to quit.”

“Sounds like you already have.”

“I want to switch to being a private contractor,” he says. “Jaime and me talked about it when I went to New York. You know, she’s struck out on her own and she said I should think about it, that she could use my help on cases, and I know you can use my help. I don’t want to be owned by anyone.”

“I’ve never looked at it as my owning you.”

“I’d like a little independence, a little self-respect. I know you can’t relate to that. Why would someone like you ever lack in self-respect?”

“You’d be surprised,” I reply.

“I want to have a little place on the water, to ride motorcycles, go fishing, and work for people who respect me,” he says.

“Jaime’s hired you as a consultant on the Lola Daggette case?”

“She’s not paying me. I said I can’t do that until I change my status with the CFC, and at some point I was going to talk to you about it,” Marino says, as I hear the metal sound of a key in a lock and the door opens.

Jaime Berger walks in, and I smell savory meat. I smell french fries and truffles.

She sets two large blue paper bags on the stone peninsula in the kitchen and acts remarkably relaxed and cheerful for a New York prosecutor or even a former one who has set up a clandestine operation in coastal Georgia that requires security cameras and what I suspect is a handgun concealed in the brown cowhide hobo handbag slung over her shoulder.

Her dark hair is smartly styled, a little longer than I remember it, her features sharply defined and very pretty, and she is as lithe as a woman half her age in faded jeans and an untucked white shirt. She wears no jewelry and very little makeup, and while she might fool most people, she can’t fool me. I see the shadow in her eyes. I detect the brittleness in her smile.

“I apologize, Kay,” she says right off as she hangs her unattractive heavy-looking pocketbook on the back of a barstool, and I wonder if it’s Marino’s influence that possibly has her packing a gun.

Or is this a habit she acquired from Lucy, and it occurs to me that if Jaime is carrying a concealed weapon, she’s likely doing so illegally. I don’t know how she could have a license in Georgia, where she may rent an apartment but wouldn’t qualify as a resident. Security cameras and a gun that isn’t legal. Perhaps just the usual precautions, because she knows the same harsh realities I do about what can happen in life. Or it might be that Jaime has gotten fearful and unstable.

“I’d be absolutely livid if someone pulled something like this on me,” she says, “but it’s going to make more sense, if it doesn’t already.”

I think of getting up to hug her, but she’s already involved with opening the take-out bags, which I interpret as her preferring to keep a safe distance from me. So I stay where I am on the couch and try not to feel anything about last Christmas in New York and the many times all of us were together before that or what Lucy would do if she could see where I am. I don’t want to think about how she would react if she could see Jaime looking very pretty but with haunted eyes and a stiff smile, unpacking take-out food in an old loft that’s reminiscent of the one Lucy had in Greenwich Village, a handbag nearby that might have a gun in it.

I’m nagged by a growing distrust that is fast reaching critical mass. Jaime’s the sort of woman who is accustomed to getting what she wants, yet she gave up Lucy without a fight, and now I find out she’s given up her career just as easily. Because it suited her purposes for some reason, it enters my thoughts like a judgment. I have to remind myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except my being here and why and if what I suspect will turn out to be true — that I’m being deceived and used by my niece’s ex-lover.

“I’m sure you remember Il Pasticcio just a few blocks from here?” Jaime takes out foil-lined cardboard containers covered with plastic lids, and plastic quart containers of what might be soup, and the loft fills with aromas of herbs, shallots, and bacon. “Well, now it’s the Broughton and Bull.” She opens a drawer and starts collecting silverware and paper napkins. “They make an amazing pot pie with pearl onions. Braised rabbit. Shrimp bisque with poblano — green tomato oil. Seared scallops with bacon-wrapped jalapeños.” She opens one container after another. “I thought I’d just let you help yourselves. Well, maybe it’s easier if I serve,” she reconsiders, glancing around as if expecting a dining-room table to appear, as if she’s unfamiliar with the rented space she’s in.