Patricia Cornwell - Body of Evidence

"Do you think Frankie talked to Hunt about Beryl, too?"

"No way to know. But I wouldn't be surprised. It would sure help explain why Hunt hung himself. He saw it coming-what his squirrelly pal finally did to Beryl. Then, next thing, Harper gets whacked. Hunt probably felt guilty as shit."

I shifted painfully in my chair as I shoved paper around in search of the date stamp I'd had in hand but a second ago. I ached all over and was seriously contemplating having my right shoulder X-rayed. As for my psyche, I wasn't sure what anyone could do about that. I didn't feel like myself. I wasn't sure what I felt except that it was very hard for me to sit still. It was impossible for me to relax.

I commented, "Part of Frankie's delusional thinking would be to personalize his encounters with Beryl and ascribe profound significance to them. He sees Beryl at the McTigues' house. He sees her at the car wash. He sees her in the airport. It would really set him off."

"Yeah. Now the schizo knows God's talking to him, telling him he has some connection with this pretty blond lady."

Just then Rose walked in. Taking the pink telephone message she offered to me, I added it to the pile.

"What color was his car?"

I slit open another envelope. Frankie's car had been parked in my drive. I had seen it when the police arrived, when my property was pulsing with red strobe lights. But nothing had penetrated. I remembered very few details.

"Dark blue."

"And no one remembers seeing a blue Mercury Lynx in Beryl's neighborhood?"

Marino shook his head. "After dark, if he had his headlights off, the car wouldn't exactly be conspicuous."

"True."

"As for when he hit Harper, he probably pulled his ride off the road somewhere and went the rest of the way on foot."

He paused. "The upholstery of the driver's seat was rotted out."

"I beg your pardon?" I asked, looking up from the letter I was glancing over.

"He had it covered with a blanket he must have swiped from one of the planes."

"The source of the orange fiber?" I inquired.

"They got to run some tests. But we're thinking that's the case. The blanket's got orangish-red pinstripes running through it, and Frankie would have been sitting on it when he drove to Beryl's house. Probably explains the terrorist shit. Some passenger was using a blanket like Frankie's during an overseas flight. The guy changes planes and it just so happens an orange fiber ends up on the one that gets hijacked in Greece. Bingo! Some poor Marine ends up with this same type of fiber stuck to his blood after he's whacked. Got any idea how many fibers must get transferred from plane to plane?"

"It's hard to imagine," I agreed, wondering why I merited being on every junk mailer's list in the United States. "And it probably also explains why Frankie carried so many fibers on his clothes. He was working in the baggage area. He was all over the airport and may even have gone inside the planes. Who knows what he did or what debris he picked up on his clothes?"

"Omega wears uniform shirts," Marino remarked. "Tan. They're made of Dynel."

"That's interesting."

"You should know that, Doc," he said, watching me closely. "He was wearing one when you shot him."

I didn't remember. I remembered only his dark rain slicker, and his face bloody and covered with the white powder from my fire extinguisher.

"Okay," I said. "So far I'm following you, Marino. But what I don't understand is how Frankie got Beryl's telephone number. It was unlisted. And how did he know she was flying in from Key West the night of October twenty-ninth, the night she returned to Richmond? And how the hell did he know when I flew in, too?"

"The computers," he said. "All passenger info, including flight schedules, phone numbers, and home addresses, is in the computers. All we can figure is Frankie sometimes played around with the computers when one of the counters was unattended, maybe late at night or early in the morning. The airport was like his damn crib. No telling what all he was into without anybody paying him any mind. He wasn't much of a talker, a real low-profile kind of guy, the sort who slips around quiet as a cat."

"According to his Stanford-Binet," I mused, grinding the date stamp into its dried-out ink pad, "he was well above average in intelligence."

Marino said nothing.

I mumbled, "His IQ was in the upper one-twenty range."

"Yeah, yeah," Marino said somewhat impatiently.

"I'm just telling you."

"Shit. You really take those tests seriously, don't you?"

"They're a good indicator."

"They ain't gospel."

"No, I won't say that Intelligence Quotient tests are gospel," I agreed.

"Maybe I'm glad I don't know what mine is."

"You could have your IQ tested, Marino. It's never too late."

"Hope it's higher than my damn bowling score. That's all I got to say."

'

"Not likely. Not unless you're a pretty sorry bowler."

"I was last time I went."

I slipped off my glasses and gingerly rubbed my eyes. I had a headache that I was sure would never go away.

Marino went on, "All me and Benton can figure is Frankie got Beryl's phone number out of the computer, and after a while was monitoring her flights. I'm figuring he knew from the computer that she'd taken a plane to Miami back in July when she ran off after finding that heart scratched on her car door-"

"Any theories as to when he might have done this?" I interrupted, pulling the wastepaper basket closer.

"When she'd fly to Baltimore she'd leave her car at the airport, and the last time she met Miss Harper up there was in early July, less than a week before Beryl found that heart scratched on her door," he said.

"So he may have done it while her car was parked at the airport."

"What do you think?"

"I think that seems very plausible."

"Ditto."

"Then Beryl flees to Key West."

I continued attacking my mail. "And Frankie keeps checking the computer for her return reservation. That's how he knew exactly when she'd be back."

"The night of October twenty-ninth," Marino said. "And Frankie had it all figured out. A piece of cake. He had legitimate access to the passengers' baggage, and I figure he probably checked out the bags from her flight as they were being loaded on the conveyor belt. When he finds a bag with Beryl's name tag on it, he snatches it. A little later, she's complaining that her brown leather tote bag is missing."

He didn't need to add that this was exactly the same maneuver Frankie used on me. He monitored my return from Florida. He snatched my suitcase. Then he appeared at my door, and I let him in.

The governor had invited me to a reception I had missed by a week. I supposed Fielding had gone in my place. The invitation went into the trash.

Marino went on to supply more details about what the police had discovered inside Frankie Aims's Northside apartment.

Inside his bedroom was Beryl's tote bag, containing her bloody blouse and underclothes. Inside a trunk that served as a table next to his bed was an assortment of violent pornographic magazines and a bag of small-gauge pellets that Frankie had used to fill the section of pipe he bashed against Gary Harper's head. Out of this same trunk came an envelope containing a second set of Beryl's computer disks, still taped between two stiff squares of cardboard, and the photocopy of Beryl's manuscript, including the opening page of Chapter Twenty-five that she had gotten mixed up with the original Mark and I had read. Benton Wesley's theory was that Frankie's habit was to sit up in bed reading Beryl's book while he fondled the clothes she was wearing when he murdered her. Perhaps so. What I did know with certainty was that Beryl never had a chance. When Frankie arrived at her door, he was carrying her leather tote bag and identifying himself as a courier. Even if she recognized him from that night when he had delivered Gary Harper's bags to the McTigues' house, there was no reason for her to give it a second thought-just as I had not given it a second thought until I had already opened my door.