Patricia Cornwell - Black Notice

"You ever fight with her?" Marino asked.

"Sometimes. We'd argue."

"Did you argue last night?"

"I guess so."

"Over what?"

"I didn't like her mood. Same thing."

"Then?"

"I left. Like I said. She had things to do. She always decided when a discussion or argument was over."

"You driving the rental car last night?" Marino wanted to know.

."Yes."

I imagined the killer watching her leave. He was there, somewhere in the dark. Both of them had been at the port when the Sirius had come in, when the killer arrived in Richmond using the alias of a seaman named Pascal. He probably saw her. He probably saw Bray. He.would have been interested in all of those who had come to investigate his crime, including Marino and me.

"Detective Anderson," I said. "Did you sometimes come back lure after you'd left, to try to talk to Bray some more?"

"Yes," she confessed. "It wasn't fair for her to just push me out like that."

"You.came back often?"

"When I was upset."

"What would you do, ring the bell? How did you let her know you were here?"

"What?"

"It seems the police always knock, at least when they come to my house," I said. "They don't ring the bell."

"'Cause half the rattraps we go to don't have doorbells that work," Marino remarked.

"I knocked," she said.

"And how would you do it?" I asked as Marino lit a cigarette and let me talk.

"Well..:' "Twice; three times? Hard, soft?" I kept going.

"Three times. Loud."

"And she would always let you in?"

"Sometimes she wouldn't. Sometimes she'd just open the door and tell me to go home."

"Did she ask who was there, anything? Or did she just open the door."

"If she knew it was me;" she said, "she just opened it."

"If she thought it was you, you mean," Marino said.

Anderson picked her way along our train of thought and then she stopped. She could go no further. She couldn't bear it.

"But you didn't come back last night, did you?" I said.

Her silence was her answer. She hadn't come back. She hadn't knocked three times, hard. The killer had, and Bray opened the door without pause. She probably was already saying something, resuming the argument when suddenly the monster was pushing his way into her house.

"I didn't do anything to her, I swear," Anderson said. "It's not my fault," she said again and again because it wasn't her nature to assume responsibility about anything.

"Just a damn good thing you didn't come back last night;' Marino told her. "Assuming you're telling the truth:"

"I am. I swear to God!"

"If you'd showed up, you might have been next."

"I had nothing to do with it!"

"Well, in a way you did. She wouldn't have opened the door…"

"That's not fair!" Anderson said, and she was right. Whatever she had with Bray, it wasn't the fault of either of them that the killer had been stalking and waiting.

"So you go home," Marino said. "You try to call her later? See if you could patch things up?"

"Yes. She didn't answer her phone."

"This was how long after you left?"

"Maybe twenty minutes. I called several more times, just thinking she didn't want to talk to me. Then I started getting worried when I tried several times after midnight and kept getting her machine."

"You leave messages?"

"Well, a lot of times I didn't." She paused, swallowing hard. "And this morning I came to check on her, around six-thirty. I knocked and there was no answer. The door was unlocked and I went in."

She started trembling again, her eyes wide with horror.

"And I went back there…" Her voice went up and stopped. "And I ran. I was so scared."

"Scared?"

"Of whoever… I could almost feel him, this horrible presence in that room, and I didn't know if he was still somewhere… I had my gun in my hand and ran and drove away as fast as I could and stopped at a pay phone and called nine-one-one."

"Well, I'll give you this much credit," Marino said in a tired voice. "At least you identified yourself and didn't try none of this anonymous-call shit."

"What if he comes after me now?" she asked, and she looked so small and ruined. "I've been in the Quik Cary before. I stop in there sometimes. I used to talk to Kim Luong."

"Nice of you to tell us now," Marino said, and I realized how Kim Luong might be linked to all this.

If the killer had been watching Anderson, she may have unwittingly led him to the Quik Cary, to his first Richmond victim. Or- maybe Rose had. Maybe he'd been watching when Rose and I had walked to the parking lot at my office, or even when I stopped by her apartment.

"We can lock you up if that'd make you feel safer," Marino was saying, and he meant it.

"What am I going to do?" she cried: "I live alone… I'm scared, I'm scared."

"Conspiracy to distribute and actual distribution of schedule-two drugs," Marino thought out loud. "Plus possession without a prescription. All felonies. Let's see. Since you and Chuckie-boy are both gainfully employed and have led such clean lives, bond won't be set high. Probably twenty-five hundred bucks, which you can probably cover with your drug allowance. So that's nice."

I dug in my satchel and got out my portable phone and called Fielding.

"Her body just got here," he told me. "Do you want me to start on her?"

"No," I said. "Do you know where Chuck is?"

"He didn't come in."

"I just bet he didn't," I 'said. "And if he does, sit him in your office and don't let him go anywhere."

At not quite 2:00 P.m. I pulled into the enclosed bay and parked out of the weather as two funeral home attendants loaded a pouched body into an old-model black hearse with blinds over the windows in back.

"Good afternoon," I said.

"Yes, ma'am. How are you?"

"Who you got here?" I asked.

"The construction worker from Petersburg."

They shut the tailgate and peeled off latex gloves.

"One who got hit by that train," they went on, both talking at once. "Can't imagine that. Not the way I want to go. You have a nice day."

I used my card to unlock a side door and entered the well-lit corridor, where the floor was finished in biohazard epoxy and all activity was monitored by.closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the walls. Rose was irritably pushing the Diet Coke button on the drink machine when I walked into the break room in search of coffee.

"Damnation;" she blurted out. "I thought we'd gotten it fixed."

She worked the change return in vain.

"Well, it's doing the same damn thing. Doesn't anybody do anything right anymore?" she complained away. "Do this, do that and still nothing works, just like state employees."

She exhaled a loud, frustrated breath.

"Everything's going to be all right," I said with no conviction. "It's okay, Rose."

"I wish you could get some rest," Rose sighed.

"I wish we all could."

Staff mugs were hung on a peg board next to the coffee machine, and I looked for mine with no success.

"Try your bathroom, on the sink, that's where you usually leave it," Rose said. The reminder of the mundane minutiae of our normal. worlds was a welcome relief, no matter how brief it might be.

"Chuck won't be back," I said. "He's going to be arrested, if he hasn't already been."

"The police have already been here. I won't be shedding any tears."

"I'll be in the morgue. You know what I'll be doing, so no phone calls unless it's urgent," I told her.

"Lucy called. She's picking up Jo tonight."

"I wish you'd come stay with me, Rose."

"Thank you. I need to stay put."

"It would make me feel better if you came home with me: " 'Dr. Scarpetta, if it's not him, it's always someone, isn't it? Always someone evil out there. I have to live my life. I can't be held hostage by fear and old age."