Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

“Maybe you can help me set the table,” I suggest to Benton, as the door opens to the right of the dining area, and I stop what I’m doing. I stand perfectly still.

Lucy’s hair is wet and combed straight back. Barefoot, she’s in pajama bottoms and a gray FBI T-shirt she’s had since she went through its academy.

I want to say something to her, but I can’t.

“There’s something you need to see. Something you need to hear, too,” she says to me, as if nothing has happened, but I recognize the puffiness around her eyes and the set of her mouth.

I know when she’s been crying.

“I logged in to the security camera,” she says, and I look at Benton, and his face is unreadable but I know what he would think of what she’s done.

He wants nothing to do with it and begins to stir the tomato sauce, his back to us. “I’ll finish up here,” he says. “I think I remember how to boil pasta. I’ll let you know when it’s ready. The two of you talk.”

“Did Marino give you the password?” I ask Lucy, as I follow her into her room.

“He doesn’t need to know about this,” she says.

Two red tugboats with black tire bumpers push a cargo ship west along the river, multicolored containers stacked high like bricks, reminding me of what I must guide and carry. It feels like more than I can manage. I’m not sure I can, and I pray for strength.

Dear God, I used to address the Almighty when I was a child, but I haven’t of late, not in many years, if I’m honest, not knowing who or what God is, in fact, since He or She is differently defined by everyone I might ask. A Higher Power or a majestic being on a golden throne. A simple man carrying a staff traveling a dusty path or walking on the water and showing kindness to the woman at the well while inviting those without sin to cast the first stone. Or a female spirit found in nature or the collective consciousness of the universe. I don’t know.

I don’t have a clear definition of what I believe, except there is something and it’s beyond me, and I think to myself, Help me, please. I don’t feel strong. I don’t feel justified or sure of myself. It might just destroy me if Lucy holds me up to the light like a crystal or a gemstone and points out the flaw that she never knew I had. I will see it in her eyes, like shades pulled down in a window or the hesitation in someone who wants to fire you or replace you or doesn’t respect or love you anymore. I stare Jaime Berger’s death in the face, and it is a mirror I would give anything to escape. I’m not who Lucy thought I was.

Lights flicker along the shore, the stars out and the moon bright, as I move the only extra chair in Lucy’s room, an armchair upholstered in blue. I drag it from the window overlooking the river, across the carpet, to the desk where she has set up a workstation or cockpit, as I call it, that includes her own secure wireless network. She might hack into whatever she wants, but others aren’t going to do unto her what she does unto them.

“Don’t be upset,” she says, as I sit down.

“Funny you would be the one saying that to me,” I remark. “We need to talk about last night. I need to talk about it.”

“I didn’t ask Marino for the password because I wouldn’t put him in that position, not that I needed anything from him,” she says, as if she didn’t catch my reference to Jaime and the fact that I abandoned her because I was angry and now she’s dead. “And Benton’s going to have to be blind and deaf and have amnesia. He needs to get over himself.”

“We have to do things….” I start to say that we have to do things the right way, but I can’t get the words out. I didn’t do things the right way last night, so who am I to tell Lucy what to do. Or anybody. “Benton doesn’t want you getting into trouble,” I add, and it sounds ridiculous.

“There’s no way I wasn’t going to view the security footage. He needs to quit being so fucking FBI.”

“Then you’ve already seen it.”

“Sitting around waiting, playing by the rules, while that piece of shit is trying to frame you,” Lucy says, staring at a computer screen. “Out there free as a bird, and here we are, holed up in this hotel, afraid to eat the food or drink the water. She’ll kill someone else, maybe a lot of people, if she hasn’t already. I don’t have to be a profiler, a criminal intelligence analyst, to tell you that. I don’t have to be Benton.”

She’s angry with him, and I know why. “What piece of shit? Who?” I ask.

“I don’t know. But I will,” she promises.

“Benton has an idea about who it is? He told me he didn’t. That the FBI has no idea.”

“I’m going to find out, and I’m going to get her.” Lucy clicks the mouse pad of a MacBook and types in a password I can’t see.

“You can’t take matters into your own hands.” But there’s no point in saying it. She already has, and I don’t have a right to say it.

I took matters into my own hands when I came to Savannah, and then last night and also today. I did what I thought was best or simply what I wanted to do, and Jaime is dead and it could be said that I’ve compromised the case, certainly the crime scene. All because I was determined to rid myself of guilt and hurt, to somehow fix what can’t be fixed. Jack Fielding is still gone, and what he did is still terrible, and now I feel guilty about everyone, and others have died.

“Benton did what he thought was best for you,” I say to Lucy. “I know you’re upset with him for keeping you out of the apartment.”

“It’s not accidental you happened to be at the building when she showed up with the take-out bag,” she says, as a printer starts, and she’s not going to discuss Jaime or Benton.

She’s not going to allow me to confess that I was negligent, that I broke the oath I’ve sworn to. I did harm by doing nothing.

“She wanted to hand it to you,” she goes on. “She wanted you to carry it inside. So maybe your prints are on it, your DNA. You’re on camera clear as day, walking into the building with that bag of sushi you ordered.”

“I ordered?” I think of the forged letter sent to Kathleen Lawler, allegedly by me.

“I called Savannah Sushi Fusion before anybody else did.”

“That probably wasn’t the best idea.”

“Marino told me about the delivery, and I called and asked. Dr. Scarpetta placed the order a few minutes after seven last night. Sixty-three dollars and forty-seven cents. You said you’d pick it up.”

“I never did.”

“And it was picked up about seven-forty-five.”

“Not by me.”

“Of course not by you. Payment wasn’t a credit card. It was cash. Even though her credit card was on file.” She means Jaime’s was.

“And the person who delivered the bag knew the credit card was on file. She mentioned it to me.”

“I’m aware,” Lucy says. “It’s recorded on the security DVR. Cash is cleaner. No follow-up phone calls. No questions asked. No discussion about why someone named Scarpetta would have a right to charge something to another person’s credit card. Small family-run restaurant, doesn’t have a lot of seating and most of their business is take-out. The person I talked to doesn’t have a good recollection of what this individual looked like, the one who showed up for the order.”

“On a bicycle?”

“Doesn’t remember, and I’ll get to the bicycle in a minute. Youngish woman. White. Medium-size. Spoke English.”

“That fits the description of the person I encountered outside Jaime’s building, for what it’s worth.”

“You would think Dawn Kincaid was doing all this, but she has the minor problem of being brain-dead in Boston.”