Patricia Cornwell - Point of Origin

'Lucy?' I softly touched her shoulder.

She jerked awake, sitting half up.

'I'm leaving,' I said.

'I need to get up, too.'

She threw back the covers.

'Want to have a cup of coffee with me?' I asked.

'Sure.'

She lowered her feet to the floor.

'You should eat something,' I said.

She had slept in running shorts and a T-shirt, and she followed me with the silence of a cat.

'How about some cereal?' I said as I got a coffee mug out of a cupboard.

She said nothing but simply watched me as I opened the tin of homemade granola that Benton had eaten most mornings with fresh banana or berries. Just the toasty aroma of it was enough to crush me again, and my throat seemed to close and my stomach furled. I stood helplessly for a long moment, unable to lift out the scoop or reach for a bowl or do the smallest thing.

'Don't, Aunt Kay,' said Lucy, who knew exactly what was happening. 'I'm not hungry anyway.'

My hands trembled as I clamped the top back on the tin.

'I don't know how you're going to stay here,' she said.

She poured her own coffee.

'This is where I live, Lucy.'

I opened the refrigerator and handed her the carton of milk.

'Where's his car?' she asked, whitening her coffee.

'The airport at Hilton Head, I guess. He flew straight to New York from there.'

'What are you going to do about that?'

'I don't know.'

I got increasingly upset.

'Right now, his car is low on my list. I've got all his things in the house,' I told her.

I took a deep breath.

'I can't make decisions about everything at once,' I said.

'You should clear every bit of it out today.'

Lucy leaned against the counter, drinking coffee and watching me with that same flat look in her eyes.

'I mean it,' she went on in a tone that carried no emotion.

'Well, I'm not touching anything of his until his body has come home.'

'I can help you, if you want.'

She sipped her coffee again. I was getting angry with her.

'I will do this my way, Lucy,' I said as pain seemed to radiate to every cell in me. 'For once I'm not going to slam the door on something and run. I've done it most of my life, beginning when my father died. Then Tony left and Mark got killed, and I got better and better at vacating each relationship as if it were an old house. Walking off as if I had never lived there. And guess what? It doesn't work.'

She was staring down at her bare feet.

'Have you talked to Janet?' I asked.

'She knows. Now she's all bent out of shape because I don't want to see her. I don't want to see anybody.'

'The harder you run, the more you stay in one place,' I said. 'If you've learned nothing else from me, Lucy, at least learn that. Don't wait until half your life has passed.'

'I've learned a lot of things from you,' my niece said as windows caught the morning and brightened my kitchen. 'More than you think.'

For a long moment she stared at the empty doorway leading into the great room.

'I keep thinking he's going to walk in,' she muttered.

'I know,' I said. 'I keep thinking it, too.'

'I'll call Teun. As soon as I know something, I'll page you,' she said.

The sun was strong to the east and other people heading to work squinted in the glare of what promised to be a clear, hot day. I was carried in the flow of traffic on Ninth Street past the wrought-iron-enclosed Capitol Square, with its Jeffersonian pristine white buildings and monuments to Stonewall Jackson and George Washington. I thought of Kenneth Sparkes, of his political influence. I remembered my fear and fascination when he would call with demands and complaints. I felt terribly sorry for him now.

All that had happened of late had not cleared his name of suspicion for the simple reason that even those of us who knew we might be dealing with serial murders were not at liberty to release such information to the news. I was certain that Sparkes did not know. I desperately wanted to talk to him, to somehow ease his mind, as if perhaps in doing so I might ease my own. Depression crushed my chest with cold, iron hands, and when I turned off Jackson Street into the bay of my building, the sight of a hearse unloading a black pouched body jolted me in a way it had not before.

I tried not to imagine Benton's remains enveloped so, or the darkness of his cold, steel space at the shutting of the cooler door. It was awful to know all that I did. Death was not an abstraction, and I could envision every procedure, every sound and smell in a place where there was no loving touch, only a clinical objective and a crime to be solved. I was climbing out of my car when Marino rolled up.

'Mind if I stick my car in here?' he asked, even though he knew the bay parking was not for cops.

Marino was forever breaking rules.

'Go ahead,' I replied. 'One of the vans is in the shop. Or at least I think it is. You're not going to be here long.'

'How the hell do you know?'

He locked his car door and flicked an ash. Marino was his rude self again, and I found this incredibly reassuring.

'You going to your office first?' he asked, as we followed a ramp to doors that led inside the morgue.

'No. Straight upstairs.'

'Then I'll tell you what's probably already on your desk,' he said. 'We got a positive I.D. for Claire Rawley. From hair in her brush.'

I wasn't surprised, but the confirmation weighed me down with sadness again.

'Thanks,' I told him. 'At least we know.'

THE TRACE EVIDENCE laboratories were on the third floor, and my first stop was the scanning electron microscope, or SEM, which exposed a specimen, such as the metal shaving from the Shephard case, to a beam of electrons. The elemental composition making up the specimen emitted electrons, and images were displayed on a video screen.

In short, the SEM recognized almost all of the one hundred and three elements, whether it was carbon, copper, or zinc, and because of the microscope's depth of focus, high resolution, and high magnification, trace evidence such as gunshot residue or the hairs on a marijuana leaf could be viewed in amazing, if not eerie, detail.

The location of the Zeiss SEM was enthroned within a windowless room of teal and beige wall cupboards and shelves, counter space, and sinks. Because the extremely expensive instrument was very sensitive to mechanical vibration, magnetic fields, and electrical and thermal disturbances, the environment was precisely controlled.

The ventilation and air conditioning system were independent of the rest of the building, and photographically safe lighting was supplied by filament lamps that did not cause electrical interference and were directed up at the ceiling to dimly illuminate the room by reflection. Floors and walls were thick steel-beamed reinforced concrete impervious to human bustling or the traffic of the expressway.

Mary Chan was petite and fair-skinned, a first-rate microscopist, this minute on the phone and surrounded by her complex apparatus. With its instrument panels, power units, electron gun and optical column, X-ray analyzer, and vacuum chamber attached to a cylinder of nitrogen, the SEM looked like a console for the space shuttle. Chan's lab coat was buttoned to her chin, and her friendly gesture told me she would be but a minute.

'Take her temperature again and try the tapioca. If she doesn't keep that down, call me back, okay?' Chan was saying to someone. 'I've got to go now.'

'My daughter,' she said to me as an apology. 'A stomach upset, most likely from too much ice cream last night. She got into the Chunky Monkey when I wasn't looking.'

Her smile was brave but tired, and I suspected she had been up most of the night.

'Man, I love that stuff,' Marino said as he handed her our packaged evidence.