Patricia Cornwell - Trace

"Do you remember what time?" Lucy asks as her cell phone on the coffee table continues to record their conversation.

"Let me see. Nine? Or close enough." Kate points behind her, toward Lucy's house. "She sat by the pool."

"And then what?"

"I was on the elliptical machine," she says, and in Kate's way of thinking everything is about Kate. "Let me see, I believe I was distracted by something on one of the morning shows. No, I was on the phone. I do remember looking out and she was gone, apparently had gone back into the house. She wasn't out there long, my point is."

"How long were you on the elliptical machine, and do you mind showing me your gym so I can see exactly where you were when you saw her?"

"Sure, come right on, darling." Kate gets up from her big white chair.

"How about something to drink? I believe I could use a little mimosa right about now, with all this talk about stalkers and big noisy movie trucks rolling in and helicopters and all. I usually do the elliptical machine for thirty minutes."

Lucy picks up her cell phone from the coffee table. "I'll have whatever you're having," she says.

The hour is half past eleven when Scarpetta meets Marino by the rental car in the parking lot of her former building. Dark clouds remind her of angry fists flailing across the sky, and the sun ducks in and out of them and sudden gusts of wind snatch at her clothing and hair.

"Is Fielding coming with us?" Marino asks, unlocking the SUV. "I'm assuming you want me to drive. Some son of a bitch held her down and smothered her. Goddamn son of a bitch. Killing a kid like that. Had to be somebody pretty big, don't you think, to hold her down and she can't

mover

?"

"Fielding's not coming. You can drive. When you can't breathe, you panic and struggle like hell. So her assailant didn't have to be huge, but he did have to be big and strong enough to keep her down, to pin her down. More than likely, she's a mechanical asphyxiation, not a smothering."

"And that's what ought to be done to his ass when he gets caught. Let a couple of huge prison guards pin him down and sit on his chest so he can't breathe, see how he likes it." They climb in and Marino starts the engine. "I'll volunteer. Let me do it. Jesus, doing that to a kid."

"Let's save the 'Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' part for later," she says. "We have a lot to handle. What do you know about Mama?"

"Since Fielding's not coming, I assume you called her."

"I told her I want to talk to her and that was about the extent of it. She was a little strange on the phone. She thinks Gilly died of the flu."

"You going to tell her?"

"I don't know what I'm going to tell her."

"Well, one thing's for sure. The Feds will be thrilled when they hear you're making house calls again, Doc. Nothing thrills them more when they get their hooks in a case that ain't any of their business and then you show up making your damn house calls." He smiles as he drives slowly through the crowded lot.

Scarpetta doesn't care what the Feds think, and she looks out at her former building called Biotech II, at its clean gray shape trimmed with deep red brick, at the covered morgue bay that reminds her of a white igloo sticking out to one side. Now that she's back, she may as well have been here all along. It doesn't feel strange that she is headed to a death scene, most likely a crime scene, in Richmond, Virginia, and she doesn't care what the FBI or Dr. Marcus or anyone else thinks about her house calls.

"Got a feeling your pal Dr. Marcus will be thrilled too," Marino adds sarcastically, as if he is following her thoughts. "Did you tell him Gilly's a homicide?"

"No," she replies.

She didn't bother looking for Dr. Marcus or telling him anything after she finished with Gilly Paulsson and cleaned up and changed back into her suit and looked at some microscopic slides. Fielding could give Dr. Marcus the facts and pass on that she would be happy to brief him later and can be reached on her cell phone, if necessary, but Dr. Marcus won't call. He wants as little to do with the Gilly Paulsson case as possible, and Scarpetta now believes he decided long before he contacted her in Florida that he wasn't going to benefit from this fourteen-year-old girl's death, that nothing but trouble was headed his way if he didn't do something to deflect it, and what better deflection than calling in his controversial predecessor, Scarpetta the lightning rod? He's probably suspected all along that Gilly Paulsson was murdered and for some reason decided not to dirty his hands with the case.

"Who's the detective?" Scarpetta asks Marino as they wait for traffic rolling off 1-95 to pass on 4th Street. "Anyone we know?"

"Nope. He wasn't here when we was." He finds an opening and guns the engine, rocketing them into the right lane. Now that Marino's back in Richmond, he's driving the way he used 10 drive in Richmond, which is the way he used to drive when he started out as a cop in New York.

"Know anything about him?"

"Enough."

"I suppose you're going to wear that cap all day," she says.

"Why not? You got a better cap for me to wear? Besides, Lucy will feel good knowing I'm wearing her cap. Did you know police headquarters moved? It ain't on Ninth Street anymore, is down there near the Jefferson Hotel in the old Farm Bureau Building. Aside from that, the police department hasn't changed except for the paint job on the marked units and they let them wear baseball caps too, like they're NYPD."

"I guess baseball caps are here to stay."

"Huh. So don't be griping about mine anymore."

"Who told you the FBI's gotten involved?"

"The detective. His name's Browning, seems all right but he's not been doing homicides long and the cases he has worked are of the urban renewal variety. One piece of shit shooting another piece of shit." Marino flips open a notepad and glances at it as he drives through town toward Broad Street. "Thursday, December fourth, he gets a call for a DOA and responds to the address where we're now heading in the Fan, over there near where Stuart Circle Hospital used to be before they turned it into high-dollar condos. Or did you know that? It happened after you left. Would you want to live in a former hospital room? No thank you."

"Do you know why the FBI is involved, or do I have to wait for that part?" she asks.

"Richmond invited them. That's just one of many pieces that doesn't make sense. I got no idea why Richmond P.D. invited the Feds to stick their noses in or why the Feds want to."

"What does Browning think?"

"He's not particularly revved up about the case, thinks the girl probably had a seizure or something."

"He thinks wrong. What about the mother?"

"She's a little different. I'll get to that."

"And the father?"

"Divorced, lives in Charleston, South Carolina, a doctor. An irony, ain't it? A doctor would know damn well what a morgue is like, and here's his little girl inside a body bag in the morgue for two damn weeks because they can't decide on who's making the arrangements or where she's going to be buried and God knows what else they're fighting about."

"What I'd do pretty soon is take a right on Grace," Scarpetta says. "And we'll just follow it straight there."

"Thank you, Magellan. All those years I drove in the city. How'd I do it without you navigating?"

"I don't know how you function at all when I'm not around. Tell me more about Browning. What did he find when he got to the Paulsson house?"

"The girl was in bed, on her back, pajamas on. Mother was hysterical, as you might imagine."

"Was she under the covers?"

"The covers were thrown back, in fact they were mostly on the floor, and the mother told Browning they were like that when she got home from the drugstore. But she's having memory problems, as you probably know. I think she's lying."