Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“I’m afraid I need to be the one asking the questions,” she says.

Uncle Samis pointing his finger at YOU and saying I WANT YOUR CITRUS.”

Dr. Self pauses dramatically. She looks comfortable and confident in a leather chair on the set ofTalk It Out. In this segment she has no guests. She doesn’t need them. She has a telephone centered on the table next to her chair, and cameras catch her from different angles as she punches buttons and says, “This is Dr. Self. You’re on the air.”

“So how about that?” she goes on. “Is the USDA stomping on our Fourth Amendment rights?”

It is an easy set-up, and she can’t wait to jump right down the throat of the fool who just called in. She glances at the monitor, satisfied the lighting and angles are catching her favorably.

“They sure are,” the fool says over speakerphone.

“What’s your name again?Sandy?”

“Yeah, I…”

“Stop before you chop,Sandy?”

“Ah, what…?”

“Uncle Sam with an ax? Isn’t that the image the public has?”

“We’re being screwed. It’s a conspiracy.”

“So that’s how you think of it? Good Old Uncle Sam cutting down all your trees. Chop, chop.”

She catches the cameramen, her producer smiling.

“The bastards came into my yard without permission, and next thing I know, all my trees are going to be cut down…”

“And you live where,Sandy?”

“CooperCity. I don’t blame people for wanting to shoot them or siccing their dogs on…”

“Here’s the thing about it,Sandy.” She leans into the point she’s about to make, the cameras zooming in. “You people don’t pay attention to the facts. Have you attended meetings? Have you written your legislators? Have you bothered to ask questions point-blank and consider that maybe, just maybe, the explanations offered by the Department of Agriculture might make sense?”

It is her style to take whatever side the other person isn’t on. She’s known for it.

“Well, the stuff about hurricanes is [bleep],” the fool snaps, and Dr. Self suspected it wouldn’t be long before the profanity started.

“It’s not bleep, ” she mimics him. “There’s nothing bleep about it. The fact is”-she faces the camera-“we had four major hurricanes last fall, and it is a fact that citrus canker is a bacterial disease carried by the wind. When we come back, we’re going to explore the reality of this dreaded blight and talk it out with a very special guest. Stay with me.”

“We’re off,” a cameraman says.

Dr. Self reaches for her bottle of water. She takes a sip through a straw so she doesn’t smear her lipstick and waits for the makeup person to touch up her forehead and nose, impatient when the makeup person is slow getting to her, impatient when the makeup person is slow to hurry up and finish.

“All right. Okay. That’s enough,” Dr. Self holds up a hand, shooing off the makeup person. “This is going well,” she says to her producer.

“I think in the next segment, we need to really focus on the psychology. That’s why people tune in to you, Marilyn. It’s not the politics, it’s their problems with their girlfriends, bosses, mothers, fathers.”

“I don’t need coaching.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Listen, what makes my shows unique is the blend of current affairs and our emotional responses.”

“Absolutely.”

“Three, two, one.”

“And we’re back.” Dr. Self smiles into the camera.

Marino stands beneath a palm tree outside the Academy, watching Reba walk off to her unmarked CrownVictoria. He notes the defiance in her step, tries to determine if it’s genuine or if she’s putting on an act. He wonders if she sees him standing under the palm tree, smoking.

She called him a jerk. He’s been called that a lot, but he never thought she would say it.

She unlocks her car, then seems to change her mind about getting in. She doesn’t look in his direction, but he has a feeling she knows he’s standing there in the shadow of the palm tree, his Treo in hand, the earpiece in his ear, a cigarette going. She shouldn’t have said what she did. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta. The Effexor ruined things. If he wasn’t depressed before, he was after that, then that comment about Scarpetta, about all these cops having the hots for her.

The Effexor was a blight. Dr. Self has no right to put him on a drug that ruined his sex life. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta all the time, as if Scarpetta is the most important person in Marino’s life. Reba had to remind him. She said what she did to remind him he couldn’t have sex, remind him of men who can and want it with Scarpetta. Marino hasn’t taken the Effexor for several weeks, and his problem is getting better except he is depressed.

Reba pops the trunk, walks around to the back of the car and opens it.

Marino wonders what she’s doing. He decides he may as well find out and be decent enough to let her know he can’t arrest anyone and could probably use her help. He can threaten people all he wants, but he can’t legally arrest anybody. It’s the only thing he misses about policing. Reba grabs what looks like a bag of laundry out of the trunk and throws it into the backseat as if she’s pissed off.

“Got a body in there?” Marino asks, casually walking up to her, flicking his cigarette butt into the grass.

“Ever heard of using a trash can?”

She slams shut the door, barely looking at him.

“What’s in the bag?”

“I’ve got to go to the cleaners. Haven’t had time in a week, not that it’s any of your business,” she says, hiding behind a pair of dark glasses. “Don’t treat me like shit anymore, at least not in front of other people. You want to be a jerk, at least be discreet about it.”

He looks back at his palm tree as if it’s his favorite spot, looks at the stucco building against the bright blue sky, trying to think how to put it.

“Well, you were disrespectful,” he says.

She looks at him in shock. “Me? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Last I remember, we had a nice ride and you dragged me to Hooters, never asked if that’s where I wanted to go, by the way. Why you’d take a woman to an ass-and-tits place like that beats the hell out of me. Talk about disrespectful? Are you kidding? Making me sit there while you ogle all the tartlets jiggling past.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Were too.”

“I sure wasn’t,” he says, sliding out the pack of cigarettes.

“You’re smoking too much.”

“I wasn’t staring at nothing. I was minding my own business drinking my coffee, then out of the blue you started in on all this crap about the Doc and I’ll be damned if I have to listen to such disrespectful bullshit.”

She’s jealous, he thinks, pleased. She said what she did because she thought he was staring at the waitresses in Hooters, and maybe he was. To make a point.

“I’ve worked with her a million years and don’t let anybody talk about her like that and I’m not going to start now,” he goes on, lighting up, squinting in the sun, noticing a group of students dressed in field clothes walking past on the road, heading to the SUVs in the parking lot, probably heading off to the Hollywood Police Training Facility for a demonstration by the Bomb Disposal Team.

Seems like they were scheduled for that today, to play with Eddie the Remote Tec robot, watch it move on its tractor belts, sounding like a crab crawling down the trailer’s aluminum ramp, connected to a fiber-optic cable, showing off, and Bunky the bomb dog showing off, and firefighters in their big trucks showing off, and guys in their bomb-and-search suits showing off with dynamite and det cord and disrupters, maybe blowing up a car.