Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“You’re not stupid.”

“Oh, I’m stupid, all right. Distracted by Carley Crispin and stupid as hell.”

She rang the bell of the apartment nearest theirs, a corner unit belonging to a clothing designer she’d seen only in passing. That was New York. You could live next door to someone for years and never have a conversation.

“Don’t think he’s here,” Scarpetta said, ringing the bell, knocking on the door. “I’ve not seen any sign of him lately.”

“How was it addressed?” Benton asked.

She told him about the sender’s copy still being attached, about the reference to her being the chief medical examiner of Gotham City. She described the unusual handwriting as she rang the bell one more time. Then they headed to the third apartment, this one lived in by an elderly woman who had been a comedic actress decades ago, best known for a number of appearances on The Jackie Gleason Show. Her husband died a year or so ago, and that was the sum of what Scarpetta knew about her, about Judy, except that she had a very nervous toy poodle that began its cacophony of barking the instant Scarpetta rang the bell. Judy looked surprised and not especially pleased when she opened her door. She blocked the doorway, as if hiding a lover or a fugitive, her dog dancing and darting behind her feet.

“Yes?” she said, looking quizzically at Benton, his coat on but in his socks and holding his boots.

Scarpetta explained that she needed to borrow the phone.

“You don’t have a phone?” Judy slurred her words a little. She had fine bones but a wasted face. A drinker.

“Can’t use cell phones or the phone in our apartment, and we don’t have time to explain,” Scarpetta said. “We need to use your land line.”

“My what?”

“Your house phone, and then you need to come downstairs with us. It’s an emergency.”

“Certainly not. I’m certainly not going anywhere.”

“A suspicious package was delivered. We need to use your phone, and everyone on this floor needs to go downstairs as quickly as possible,” Scarpetta explained.

“Why would you bring it up here! Why would you do that?”

Scarpetta smelled booze. No telling what prescriptions she’d find in Judy’s medicine cabinet. Irritable depression, substance abuse, nothing to live for. She and Benton stepped inside a paneled living room overwhelmed by fine French antiques and Lladró porcelain figurines of romantic couples in gondolas and carriages, on horseback and swings, kissing and conversing. On a windowsill was an elaborate crystal Nativity scene and on another one an arrangement of Royal Doulton Santas, but no lights or Christmas tree or menorah, only collectibles and photographs from an illustrious past that included an Emmy in a curio cabinet with a Vernis Martin- style finish and hand-painted scenes of cupids and lovers.

“Did something happen inside your apartment?” Judy asked as her dog yapped shrilly.

Benton helped himself to the phone on a giltwood console. He entered a number from memory, and Scarpetta was pretty sure she knew who he was trying to reach. Benton always handled situations efficiently and discreetly, what he referred to as “mainlining,” getting information directly to and from the source, which in this instance was Marino.

“They brought a suspicious package up? Why would they do that? What kind of security are they?” Judy continued.

“It’s probably nothing. But to be safe,” Scarpetta assured her.

“You at headquarters yet? Well, don’t bother with that right now,” Benton told Marino, adding that there was a remote possibility someone had delivered a dangerous package to Scarpetta.

“I guess someone like you has all sorts of crazies out there.” Judy was putting on a full-length coat, sheared chinchilla with scalloped cuffs. Her dog jumped up and down, yapping more frantically as Judy collected her leash from a satinwood étagère.

Benton hunched his shoulder, using the phone hands-free while he put on his boots, and said, “No, in a neighbor’s apartment. Didn’t want to use ours and send out an electronic signal when we didn’t know what’s in it. An alleged FedEx. On the coffee table. Going downstairs right now.”

He hung up, and Judy tottered, bending over to snap the leash on the poodle’s matching collar, blue leather and an Hermès lock, probably engraved with the neurotic dog’s name. They went out the door and got on the elevator. Scarpetta smelled the pungently sweet chemical odor of dynamite. A hallucination. Her imagination. She couldn’t possibly smell dynamite. There was no dynamite.

“Do you smell anything?” she asked Benton. “I’m sorry your dog’s so upset.” It was her way of asking Judy to make the damn thing shut up.

“I don’t smell anything,” Benton said.

“Maybe my perfume.” Judy sniffed her wrists. “Oh. You mean something bad. I hope somebody didn’t send you Ant-trax or whatever it’s called. Why did you have to bring it upstairs? How’s that fair to the rest of us?”

Scarpetta realized her shoulder bag was in the apartment, on the table inside the entryway. Her wallet, her credentials, were in it, and the door was unlocked. She couldn’t remember what had happened to her BlackBerry. She should have checked the package before carrying it upstairs. What the hell was wrong with her?

“Marino’s on his way but won’t get here before the others do,” Benton said, not bothering to explain to Judy who Marino was. “He’s coming from downtown, from headquarters, from Emergency Operations.”

“Why?” Scarpetta watched floors slowly go by.

“RTCC. Doing a data search. Or was going to.”

“If this were a co-op, we wouldn’t have voted you in.” Judy directed this at Scarpetta. “You get on TV and talk about all these horrible crimes, and look what happens. You bring it home and subject the rest of us. People like you attract kooks.”

“We’ll hope it’s nothing, and I apologize for upsetting you. And your dog,” Scarpetta said.

“Slowest damn elevator. Calm down, Fresca, calm down. You know she’s all bark. Wouldn’t hurt a flea. I don’t know where you expect me to go. I suppose the lobby. I don’t intend to sit in the lobby all night.”

Judy stared straight ahead at the brass elevator doors, her face pinched by displeasure. Benton and Scarpetta didn’t talk anymore. Images and sounds Scarpetta hadn’t remembered in a long while. Back then, in the late nineties, life had gotten as tragic as it could get, back in the days of ATF. Flying low over scrubby pines and soil so sandy it looked like snow as rotor blades paddled the air and slung sounds in rhythm. Metallic waterways were corrugated by the wind, and startled birds were a dash of pepper flung against the haze, heading for the old blimp station in Glynco, Georgia, where ATF had its explosives range, raid houses, concrete bunkers, and burn cells. She didn’t like post-blast schools. Had quit teaching at them after the fire in Philadelphia. Had quit ATF, and so had Lucy, both of them moving on without Benton.

Now he was here in the elevator, as if that part of Scarpetta’s past was a nightmare, a surreal dream, one she hadn’t gotten over and couldn’t. She hadn’t taught at a post-blast school since, avoidance, not as objective as she should be. Personally disturbed by bodies blown apart. Flash burns and shrapnel, massive soft-tissue avulsion, bones fragmented, hollow organs lacerated and ruptured, hands gory stumps. She thought about the package she’d carried into the apartment. She hadn’t been paying attention, had been too busy fretting about Carley and what Alex had confided, too caught up in what Dr. Edison referred to as her career at CNN. She should have noticed instantly that the airbill had no return address, that the sender’s copy was still attached.