“Goddamn you;” I muttered to my niece.
My heart slammed against me, as if trying to break free.
“Goddamn you, Lucy.” I wept.
10
The new building where I worked was the eye of a fierce storm of development I never could have imagined when I moved into it in the seventies. I remembered feeling rather betrayed when I charged in from Miami just as Richmond’s businesses decided to charge out to neighboring counties and malls. People stopped shopping and dining downtown, especially at night.
The city’s historic character turned victim to neglect and crime until the mid-nineties, when Virginia Commonwealth University began to reclaim and revitalize what had been relegated to ruin. It seemed that handsome buildings began springing up almost overnight, all of similar brick and glass design. My office and morgue shared space with the labs and the recently established Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, which was the first training academy of its type in the country, if not the world.
I even had a choice parking space near the lobby door, where I sat in my car this moment gathering my belongings and my spinning thoughts. I had childishly turned off my car phone so Lucy couldn’t get hold of me after I’d sped off. I turned it on now, hoping it would ring. I stared at it. The last time I had acted like this was after Benton and I had had our worst fight and I ordered him to leave my house and never come back. I unplugged my phones, only to plug them back in an hour later and panic when he didn’t call.
I looked at my watch. Lucy would be boarding her flight in less than an hour. I considered calling USAir and having her paged. I was shocked and humiliated by the way I had behaved. I felt powerless because I couldn’t apologize to someone named Terry Davis who didn’t have an aunt Kay or an accessible phone number and lived somewhere in South Beach.
I looked pretty rough when I walked into the glass-block and terrazzo lobby. Jake, who worked the security desk, noticed right away.
“Good morning, Dr. Scarpetta,” he said with his usual nervous eyes and hands. “You don’t look like you’re feeling so hot.”
“Good morning, Jake,” I replied. “How are you?”
“Same-o, same-o. Except the weather’s supposed to start turning real fast and get nasty, and I could do without that.”
He was clicking a pen open and shut.
“Can’t seem to get rid of this pain in my back, Dr. Scarpetta. It’s right between my shoulder blades.”
He rolled his shoulders and neck.
“Sort of pinches like something’s caught back there. Happened after I was lifting weights the other day. What do you think I should do? Or do I need to write you?”
I thought he was trying to be funny, but he wasn’t smiling.
“Moist heat. Lay off the weights for a while;” I said.
“Hey, thanks. How much you charge?”
“You can’t afford me, Jake.”
He grinned. I swiped my computer card over the electronic lock on the door outside my office door and the lock clicked free. I could hear my clerks, Cleta and Polly, talking and ‘typing. The phones were already ringing and it wasn’t even seven-thirty yet.
“. . . It’s really, really bad.”
“You think people from other countries smell different when they decompose?”
“Come on, Polly. How stupid is that?”
They were tucked inside their gray cubicles, sifting through autopsy photographs and entering data into computers, cursors jumping field to field.
“Better get some coffee while you can,” Cleta greeted me with a judgmental look on her face.
“If that ain’t the truth.” Polly smacked the return key.
“I heard,” I said:
“Well, I’m keeping my mouth shut:’ .said Polly, who couldn’t if she tried.
Cleta made a zipping motion across her lips without missing a keystroke.
“Where is everyone?”
“In the morgue,” Cleta told me. “We’ve got eight cases today.”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight, Cleta,” I said, collecting death certificates from my inner-office mailbox.
“Twelve and a half pounds;” she exclaimed as she dealt gory photographs like playing cards, arranging them by case numbers. “Thank you for noticing. I’m glad somebody ’round here does.”