“You ever talked to them?” he asked me.
“No. That’s for you guys to do.”
“You ought to hear all these cops hoping they get a case that involves Interpol, but if you ask ’em what Interpol is, they ain’t got a clue,’ Marino said. “You want to know the truth, I got no interest in dealing with Interpol. They scare me like the CIA. I don’t even want people like that knowing I exist.”
“That’s ridiculous. You know what Interpol means, Marino?”
“Yeah. Secret Squirrels.”
“It’s a contraction of international police. The point is to get police in member countries to work together, talk to each other. Sort of what you wish people in your department would do.”
“Then they must not have a Bray working for them.”
I was watching Ruffin on the phone. Whomever he was talking to, he was trying to keep it private.
“Telecommunication, a restricted worldwide law enforcement web . . . You know, I don’t know how much more I can stand this. He not only counters me, he flaunts it,” I muttered, staring at. Ruffin as he hung up.
Marino glared at him.
“Interpol circulates color-coded notices for wanted and missing people, warnings, inquiries,” I went on in a distracted way as Ruffin stuffed a towel in the back pocket of his scrubs and got a pill counter out of a cabinet.
He sat on a stool in front of a steel sink, his back to me. He opened a brown paper bag marked with a case number and pulled out three bottles of Advil and two bottles of prescription drugs.
“An unidentified body is a black notice,” I said. “Usually suspected fugitives with international ties. Chuck, why are you doing that in here?”
“Like I told you, I’m behind on it. Never seen so many damn pills come in with bodies, Dr. Scaipetta. I can’t keep up anymore. And I get up tó sixty or seventy or something, and the phone rings and I lose count and have to start all over again.”
“Yeah, Chuckie-boy,” Marino said. “I can see why you’d lose count real easy.”
Ruffin started whistling.
“What are you so happy about all of a sudden?” Marino irritably asked, as Ruffin used tweezers to fill rows with pills on the little blue plastic tray.
“We’re going to need to get fingerprints, dental charts, anything we can,” I said to Marino as I removed a section of deep muscle from the thigh for DNA. “Anything we can get needs to be sent to them,” I added.
“Them?” Marino asked.
I was getting exasperated.
“Interpol,” I said tersely.
The phone rang again.
“Hey, Marino, can you get that? I’m counting.”
“Tough shit,” he said to Ruffin.
“Are you listening to me?” I looked up at Marino.
“Yeah,” he said. “The state liaison’s at State Police Criminal Investigation, used to be some guy who was a first sergeant and I remember asking him if he wanted to have a beer sometime at the F.O.P, or go grab a bite at Chetti’s with some of the guys. You know, just being friendly, and he never even changed his tóne of voice. I’m pretty sure I was being taped.”
I worked on a section of vertebral bone that I would clean with sulfuric acid and have trace check it for microscopic organisms called diatoms that were found in water all over the world.
“Wish I could remember his name,” Marino was saying. “So he took all the info, contacted D.C., and D.C. contacted Lyon, where all the secret squirrels are. I hear they got this real spooky-looking building on a hidden road, sort of like Batman and his cave. Electrified fences, razor wire and gates and guards carrying machine guns, the whole nine yards:’
“You’ve watched too much James Bond,” I said.
“Not since Sean Connery quit. Movies suck these days, and nothing’s good on TV anymore. I don’t even know why I bother.”
“Maybe you ought to consider reading a book now and then.,.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” Chuck said, hanging up. “That was Dr. Cooper. The STAT alcohol’s oh-point-oh-eight in the effusate, and zip-o in the brain.”
The 0.08 didn’t mean much, since the brain didn’t show an alcohol level, too. Perhaps the man was drinking before he died, or maybe what we had was postmortemgenerated .alcohol caused by bacteria. There were no other fluids for comparison, no urine or blood or fluid of the eye known as vitreous, which was too bad. If 0.08 was a true level, it might, at the very least, show that this man would have been somewhat impaired and therefore more vulnerable.