Patricia Cornwell - Trace

"Fifty cents for the Garbage-Patch," he snidely refers to the local Times-Dispatch. "Got one just yesterday out of the machine in front of the hotel and it cost me two quarters. Twice what The Washington Post is."

"It's unusual to leave money in a place where no one lives," Scarpetta says, shutting the drawer.

The hallway light is out, but she follows Marino into the kitchen. Right away it strikes her as odd that the sink is full of dirty dishes and the water is disgusting with congealed fat and mold. She opens the refrigerator and is increasingly convinced that someone has been staying in the house, and not long ago at all. On the shelves are cartons of orange juice and soy milk that have expiration dates for the end of this month, and dates on meat in the freezer show it was purchased some three weeks ago. The more food she discovers in cabinets and the pantry, the more anxious she becomes as her intuition reacts before her brain does. When she moves to the end of the hallway and begins to explore the bedroom at the back of the house, and smells cigars, she's sure of it, and her adrenaline is rushing.

The double bed is covered with a cheap, dark blue spread, and when she pulls it back she sees that the linens beneath it are wrinkled and soiled and scattered with short hairs, some of them red hairs, probably head hairs, and others darker and curlier and probably pubic hairs, and she sees the stains that have dried stiff and she suspects she knows what those stains are. The bed faces a window, and from it she can see over the wooden fence, she can see the Paulsson house, she can see the dark window that was Gilly's. On a table by the bed is a black and yellow ceramic Cohiba ashtray that is quite clean. There is more dust on the furniture than there is in the ashtray.

Scarpetta does what she needs to do and has little awareness of time passing or shadows changing or the sound of rain hitting the roof as she goes through the closet and every dresser drawer in that room and finds a withered red rose still in its plastic wrapper; men's coats, jackets, and suits, all out of style and grim and buttoned up and primly arranged on wire hangers; stacks of neatly folded men's pants and shirts in somber colors; men's underwear and socks, old and cheap; and dozens of dingy white handkerchiefs, all folded into perfect squares.

Then she is sitting on the floor, pulling cardboard boxes out from under the bed and opening them and going through stacks of old trade publications for mortuary science and funeral home directors, a variety of monthly magazines with photographs of caskets and burial clothes and cremation urns and embalming equipment. The magazines are at least eight years old. On every one she has looked at so far, the mailing label has been peeled off and all that is left are only a few letters and part of a zip code here and there but nothing more, not enough to tell her what she wants to know.

She goes through one box after another, looking at every magazine, hoping for a complete mailing label and finally there are a few, just a few, at the very bottom of a box. She reads the label and sits on the floor staring at it, wondering if she's confused or if there might be a logical explanation, and all the while she is yelling for Marino. She calls out his name as she gets to her feet and stares at a magazine that has a casket shaped like a race car on the cover.

"Marino! Where are you?" She steps into the hallway, looking and listening. She is breathing hard and her heart is beating hard. "Damn it," she mutters as she walks quickly along the hallway. "Where the hell did you go? Marino?"

He is on the front porch, talking on his cell phone, and when his eyes meet hers, he knows something too, and she holds up the magazine, holds it close to him. "Yeah. We'll be here," he says into the phone. "I have a feeling we'll be here all night."

He ends the call, and his eyes have that flat look in them that she's seen before when he smells his quarry and has to find him. No matter what, he has to. He takes the magazine from her and studies it in silence. "Browning's on his way," he then says to her. "He's at the magistrate's right now, getting a warrant." He turns the magazine over and looks at the mailing label on the back cover. "Shit," he says. "Jesus Christ," he says. "Your old office. Jesus Christ."

"I don't know what it means," she replies, as a soft cold rain pats the old slate roof. "Unless it's someone who used to work for me."

"Or someone who knows someone who used to work for you. The address is the OCME." He checks again. "Yeah, it is. Not the labs. June 1996. Definitely when you were there, all right. So your office had a subscription to this." He steps back into the living room, moving close to the lamp on the table, and flips through the magazine. "Then you must know who was getting it."

O.D.

"I never authorized a subscription to that magazine or anything like it," she replies. "Not a funeral home magazine. Never. Someone either didn't have my permission or got it on his own."

"Got any idea who?" Marino places the maga/ine beneath the lamp on the dusty table.

She thinks of the quiet young man who worked in the Anatomical Division, the shy young man with red hair who retired on disability. She hasn't thought of him since he left, probably not once. There would be no reason to think of him.

"I have an idea," she replies unhappily. "His name is Edgar Allan Pogue."

No one is home inside the salmon-colored mansion, and he realizes the disappointing truth that somehow his plans were spoiled. They had to be, or he would notice some sort of activity around the mansion or evidence of earlier activity, such as crime scene tape, or he would have heard about it in the news, but when he drives slowly past where the Big Fish lives, the mailbox looks fine. The little metal flag is down and there is no sign that anyone is home.

He drives around the block back out to A1A and can't resist looping around again as he thinks about the mailbox flag. It was up when he placed the Big Orange in the mailbox, he's quite sure of that. But it does enter his racing mind that the chlorine bomb might still be inside the mailbox, all swollen with gases and ready to explode. What if it is? He has to know. He won't sleep or eat unless he knows, and anger writhes in its deep place, an anger as familiar and present as the short breaths he breathes. Just off AlA on Bay Drive is a row of one-story apartments that are painted white, and he pulls into the parking lot and gets out of his white car. He begins to walk, and the kinky long tresses of his black wigstray in front of his eyes and he pushes them back and heads down the street in the low sun.

He can smell the wig at times, usually when he is thinking about something else or busy, and then the odor touches the inside of his nose and is hard to describe. The odor of plastic is about the best he can come up with, and he is puzzled because the wig is human hair, not synthetic, and it shouldn't smell like plastic, new-plastic, unless what he is really detecting is some chemical it was treated with when it was put together. Palm fronds flutter against the dusky sky, and fragile ribbons of clouds are lit up pale orange around the edges as the sun settles in. He follows the sidewalk, noticing the cracks and the grass sprouting up between them. He is careful not to look at the fine houses he passes, because people in neighborhoods like this are fearful about crime and keenly aware of strangers.

Just before he reaches the salmon-colored mansion he passes a big white house that rises squarely against the sunset, and he wonders about the lady inside. He has seen her three times and she deserves to be ruined. Once late at night when he was on the seawall behind the salmon-colored mansion, he saw her in the third-floor bedroom window. The shades were up and he could see the bed and other furniture and a huge flat-screen TV that was on, and pictures of people running and then a high-speed motorcycle chase flashed on the screen. She was naked in front of the window, pressed up against it, her breasts grotesquely flattened against the glass, and she touched the glass with her tongue and moved in disgustingly immoral ways. At first he worried that she might see him out on the seawall, but she seemed half asleep as she put on her act for boaters out at night and the Coast Guardsmen across the inlet. Pogue would like to know her name.