Patricia Cornwell - Trace

Marino's doctor told him that if he keeps on smoking he'll be carrying an oxygen tank around like a papoose by the time he's sixty. Eventually he will die gasping for air just like poor little Gilly was fighting for air while that freak sat on her and pinned her hands, and she was under him and panicking, every cell in her lungs screaming for air as her mouth tried to scream for her mommy and daddy, just screaming, Marino thinks. Gilly was unable to make a sound, and what did she ever do to deserve a death like that? Nothing, that's what, Marino thinks as he looks around at boxes of cigars on dark wooden shelves inside the cool fragrant rich man's tobacco shop. Scarpetta should be boarding the plane right about now, he thinks, noticing the boxes of Romeo y Julieta cigars. If she isn't delayed, she may already be on the plane, heading west to Denver, and Marino feels a hollowness around his heart and somewhere in an off-limit part of his very soul he feels shame, and then he feels very angry.

"Let me know if you need some help," a man in a v-necked gray sweater and brown corduroys says from behind the counter. The color of his clothes and his gray hair remind Marino of smoke. The man works in a tobacco shop full of smokes and he has become the color of smoke. He probably goes home at the end of the day and can have all the smokes he wants while Marino goes home or back to a hotel alone and can't even light up a smoke, much less inhale smoke. Now he sees the truth. He knows it. He can't have it. He was kidding himself to think he could have it, and he is filled with grief and shame.

He reaches inside a jacket pocket and pulls out the receipt Scarpetta found on the bone-dusty floor in the Anatomical Division of her old building. The receipt is inside a transparent plastic bag, and he places it on the counter.

"How long you worked here?" Marino asks the smoky-looking man behind the counter.

"Going on twelve years," the man says, giving him a smile, but he has a look in his smoky gray eyes. Marino recognizes fear and does nothing to allay it.

"Then you know Edgar Allan Pogue. He came in here on September fourteenth of this year and bought these cigars."

The man frowns and bends over to look at the receipt inside the plastic evidence bag. "That's our receipt," he says.

"No joke, Sherlock. A short little fat guy with red hair," Marino says, doing nothing at all to ease the man's fear. "In his thirties. Used to work at the old morgue over there." He points toward 14th Street. "Probably acted weird when he was in here."

The man keeps glancing at Marino's LAPD baseball cap. He is pale and uneasy. "We don't sell Cuban cigars."

"What?" Marino scowls.

"If that's what this is about. He may have asked, but we don't sell them."

"He came in here asking for Cuban cigars?"

"He was very determined, more so last time he was in here," the man says nervously. "We don't sell Cubans or anything else illegal."

"I ain't accusing you and I ain't ATF or the FDA or the Surgeon General or the goddamn Easter Bunny," Marino says. "I don't give a rat's ass if you sell Cuban shit under the counter."

"I don't. I swear I don't."

"I just want Pogue. Talk to me."

"I remember him," the man says, and now his face is the color of smoke. "Yes, he's asked me for Cubans. For Cohibas, not the Dominicans we sell, but Cubans. I told him we don't sell Cuban cigars. They're illegal. You're not from here, are you? You don't sound as if you're from here."

"I sure as hell ain't from here," Marino replies. "What else did Pogue say? And when was this, when he came in here last?"

The man looks down at the receipt on the counter. "Probably since then. Seems like it might have been in October when he came in last. He came in here maybe once a month. A very strange man. Very strange."

"In October? Okay. What else did he say when he came in?"

"He wanted Cuban cigars, said he would pay what he had to for them, and I told him we don't sell them. He knew that. He'd asked me before when he came in here, but not so insistently, not like he was when he came in last. Strange, that man. He'd asked me before and was asking me again, but very insistent. Seems like he said Cuban tobacco is better for the lungs, some nonsense like that. You can smoke all the Cubans you want and they won't hurt you, in fact they're good for you. They are pure and better for the lungs and actually have a medicinal quality, something silly like that."

"What did you tell him? Don't lie to me. I don't give a shit if you sold him Cubans. I need to find him. If he thinks the shit's good for his screwed-up lungs, he's buying it somewhere. If he's got a thing about it, he's getting it from somewhere."

"He's got a thing about it, at least last time he was here, he was adamant. Don't ask me why," the man says, staring down at the receipt. "There are plenty of good cigars. Why they had to be Cuban, I don't understand, but he wanted them. It reminded me of sick people desperate for some magic herb or marijuana or people with arthritis who want gold injections or whatever. Obviously a superstition of some sort. Very strange. I sent him to a different store, told him not to be asking me about Cubans anymore."

"What store?"

"Well, actually it's a restaurant where I hear they sell things and know where to get things. In the bar they do. Anything you want, I guess.

That's what I've heard. I don't go in there. I don't have anything to do

. i»,, with it.

"Where?"

"Down in the Slip," he says. "Just a few blocks from here."

"You know any places in South Florida that sell Cubans? Maybe you recommended a place in South Florida to him."

"No," the man replies, shaking his gray head. "I don't have anything to do with that. Ask them in the Slip. They probably know."

"Okay. So here's the million-dollar question." Marino tucks the plastic bag back inside his jacket pocket. "You tell Pogue about this place in the Slip so maybe he could find his Cubans?"

"I told him some people buy cigars in the bar there," the man says.

"What's the name of this place in the Slip?"

"Stripes. The name of the bar is Stripes, just down Gary Street. I didn't want him coming back. He was very strange. I always thought he was strange. He'd been coming in here for years, every few months. Never said much of anything," the man says. "But the last time he was in here, in October maybe, he was stranger than usual. He was carrying a baseball bat. I asked him why and he never answered me. He didn't used to be so insistent about wanting Cubans, but he was just bizarre about it. Cohibas, he kept saying. He wanted them."

"Was the bat red, white, and blue?" Marino asks, thinking about Scarpetta and grinders and bone dust and everything else she said when she was leaving Dr. Philpott's office.

"It might have been," the man says with a strange look. "What the hell is this about?" he asks.

In the woods around the town homes the shadows are deep and cold around patchy white and gray aspen trees. The trees are bare but thick in the woods. To get through them Lucy and Henri have to duck and push branches and winter-dormant saplings out of the way. Their snowshoes don't stop the snow from coming up to their knees with each step and wherever they look the smooth white surface is unmarked by the tracks of humans.

"This is a crazy thing to do," Henri says, breathing hard smoky breaths. "Why are we doing this?"

"Because we need to get out and do something," Lucy replies as she steps into snow that comes almost up to her thigh. "Wow! Look at this. Unbelievable. It's beautiful."

"I don't think you should have come here," Henri says, pausing and looking at her in deepening shadows that tint the snow blue. "I've gotten through it and had enough and I'm going back to Los Angeles."