Patricia Cornwell: Black Notice

He ripped open his white shirt, gagging and heaving as he struggled out of its sleeves. He stripped down to his undershirt, balled up what was left of his uniform shirt and hurled it out the door.

"What if he's got AIDS?" Marino's voice sounded like a bell at midnight.

"You're not going to get AIDS from this guy," I said.

"Oh, fuck!" He gagged some more.

"I can finish up in here, Marino," I said.

"Just give me a minute."

"Why don't you go on and find a shower."

"You can't tell anyone about this," he said, and I knew he was thinking about Anderson. "You know, I bet you could get a really good deal on some uh this camera shit."

"I bet you could."

"Wonder what they're gonna do with it."

"Has the removal service come yet?" I asked him.

He raised his portable radio to his lips.

"Christ!" He spat and gagged some more.

He vigorously wiped the radio on the front of his pants and coughed and conjured up spittle from the bottom of his throat and let it fly.

"Unit nine," he said on the air, holding the'radio a good twelve inches from his face.

"Unit nine."

The dispatcher was a woman. I detected warmth in her voice and was surprised. Dispatchers and 911 operators almost always remained calm and showed no emotion, no matter the emergency.

"Ten-five Rene Anderson," Marino was saying. "Don't know her unit number. Tell -her if she doesn't mind, we sure would like removal service guys to show up down here.”,

"Unit nine. You know the name of the service?"

"Hey, Doc," Marino stopped transmitting and raised his voice to me. "What's the name of the service?"

"Capital Transport:'

He passed that along, adding, "Radio, if she's a ten-two, ten-ten, or ten-seven or if we should ten-twenty-two, get back to me.°"

A storm of cops keyed their mikes, their way of laughing and cheering him on.

"Ten-four, unit nine;" the dispatcher said.

"What did you just say that got you such an ovation? I know, ten-seven is out of service, but I didn't get the rest of it."

"Told her to let me know if Anderson was a weak signal or negative, or had time to get around to it. Or if we should fucking disregard her."

"No wonder she likes you so much."

"She's a piece of shit."

"By chance do you know what happened to the fiberoptic cable?" I asked him.

"I had it in my hand;" he replied.

I found it where he had fallen and knocked over cartons.

"What if he's got AIDS?" He started in on that again.

"If you're determined to worry about something, try gram-negative bacterias. Or gram-positive bacterias. Clostridia. Strep. If you have an open wound, which you don't as best I know."

I attached one end of the cable to the wand, the other to the assembly, tightening thumbscrews. He wasn't listening.

"No way anybody's saying that about me! That I'm a goddamn fairy! I'll eat my gun, don't think I won't."

"You're not going to get AIDS, Marino;" I repeated myself.

I turned on the source lamp again. It would have to run at least four minutes before I could turn on the power.

"I picked a hangnail yesterday and it bled! That's an open wound!"

"You have on gloves, don't you?"

"If I get some bad disease, I'm going to kill that fucking little lazy snitch."

I assumed he meant Anderson.

"Bray's gonna get hers, too. I'll find a way!"

"Marino, be quiet," I said.

"How would you like it if it was you?"

"I can't tell you how many times it's been me. What do you think I do every day?"

"You sure as hell don't slop around in dead juice!"

"Dead juice?" - "We don't know a thing about this guy. What if they got some weird diseases in Belgium that we can't treat here' "Marino, be quiet," I said again.

"No!"

"Marino.. "

"I got a right to be upset!"

"All right then, leave." My patience had walked off. "You're interfering with my concentration. You're interfering with everything. Go take a shower and throw back a few shots of bourbon."

The Luma-Lite was ready and I put on the protective glasses. Marino was quiet.

"I'm not leaving," he finally said.

I gripped the fiber-optics wand like a soldering iron. The intense pulsing blue light was as thin as pencil lead, and I began scanning very small areas.

"Anything?" he asked.

"Not so far."

His sticky booties moved closer as I worked slowly, inch by inch, into places that could not be reached by the broad scan. I leaned the body forward to probe behind the back and head, then between the legs. I checked the palms of his hands. The Luma-Lite could detect body fluids such as urine, semen, sweat and saliva, and of course, blood. But again, nothing fluoresced. My back and neck ached.

"I'm voting for him being dead before he ended up in here," Marino said.

"We'll know a lot more when we get him downtown."

I straightened up and the rapid-fire light caught the corner of a carton Marino had displaced when he'd fallen. The tail of what looked like the letter Y blazed neon green in the dark.

"Marino," I said. "Look at this."

Letter by letter I illuminated words that were French and written by hand. They were about four inches high and an odd boxy shape, as if a mechanical arm had formed them in square strokes. It took me a moment to make out what they said.

"Bon voyage, le laup-garou," I read.

Marino was leaning over me, his breath in my hair. "What the hell's a loup-garou?"

"I don't know."

I examined the carton carefully. The top of it was soggy, the bottom of it dry.

"Fingerprints? You see any on the box?" Marino asked.

"I'm sure there're prints all over the place in here," I replied. "But no, none are popping out."

"You think whoever wrote this wanted someone to find it.

"Possibly. In some kind of permanent ink that fluoresces. We'll let fingerprints do their thing. The box goes to the lab, and we need to sweep up some of the hair:on the floor for DNA, if it's ever needed. Then do photographs and we're out of here:' "May as well get the coins while I'm at it," he said.

"May, as well," I said, staring toward the container's opening.

Someone was looking in. He was backlit by bright sunlight and a blue sky and I could not make out who it was.

"Where are the crime-scene techs?" I asked Marino.

"Got no idea.” !”Goddamn it!" I said.

"Tell me about it," Marino said.

"We had two homicides last week and things weren't like this."

"You didn't go to the scenes, either, so you don't know what they were like," he said, and he was right.

"Someone from my office did. I would know if there was a problem..:' "Not if the problem wasn't obvious, you wouldn't," he told me. "And the problem sure as hell wasn't obvious because this is Anderson's first case. Now it's obvious."

"What?"

"Brand spanking new detective. Hell, maybe she stashed this body in here herself so she'd have something to do."

"She says you told her to call me."

"Right. Like I can't bother, so I dis you, and then you get pissed off at me. She's a fucking liar," he said.

An hour later we were done. We walked out of the foulsmelling dark, returning to the warehouse. Anderson stood in the open bay next to ours, talking to a man I recognized as Deputy Chief A1 Carson, head of investigations. I realized it was he whom I had seen at the mouth of the container earlier. I moved past her without a word and greeted him as I looked out to see if the removal service had shown up yet. I was relieved to see two men in jumpsuits standing by their dark blue van. They were talking to Shaw.

"How are you, Al?" I said to Deputy Chief Carson.

He'd been around as long as I had. He was a gentle, quiet man who had grown up on a farm.

"Hangin' in, Doc" he said. "Looks like we got a mess on our hands."