Marino gave me a ride home, and I took the jar of formalin with me because I would not give up hope that the flesh inside it had something else to say. I would keep it on my desk in my study and now and then put on gloves and study it in sidelight like an archaeologist trying to read crude symbols worn away on stone.
“You coming in?” I asked Marino.
“You know, my damn pager keeps going off and I can’t figure out who it is,” he said, shoving his truck in gear.
He held it up and squinted.
“Maybe if you turned on the overhead light:’ I suggested.
“Probably some snitch too stoned to dial right,” he replied.. “I’ll eat something if you’re offering. Then I gotta go.”
As we stepped inside my house, his pager vibrated again. He grabbed it off his belt in exasperation, tilting it until he could read the display.
“Screwed up again! What’s five-three-one? Anything you know that’s got those numbers in it?” he asked, exasperated.
“Rose’s home number does,” I said.
27
Rose had grieved when her husband died, and I thought t she would fall apart when she’d had to put down one of her greyhounds. Yet somehow she’d always worn her dignity the sate way she dressed, properly and with discretion. But when she learned on the news that morning that Kim Luong had been murdered, Rose got hysterical.
“If only, if only. . . ,” she went on and on, crying in the wing chair near the fire in her small apartment.
“Rose, you got to quit saying that,” Marino said.
She had known Kim Luong because Rose often shopped at the Quik Cary. Rose had gone there last night, probably at the same time the killer was still inside beating and biting and smearing blood. Thank God the store had been closed and locked.
I carried two mugs of ginseng tea into her living room while Marino drank coffee. Rose was shaking all over, face swollen from crying and gray hair hanging over the collar of her bathrobe. She looked like a neglected old woman in a nursing home.
“I didn’t have the TV on. I was reading. So I didn’t know about it until I heard it on the news this morning.” She kept telling us the same story in different ways. “I had
no idea, was sitting up in bed reading and worrying about all the problems in the office. Mainly Chuck. I think that boy’s as twisted as they come and I’ve been working to show it.”
I set down her tea.
“Rose,” Marino said. “We can talk about Chuck another time. We need you to tell us exactly what happened last…”
“But you’ve got to listen to me first!” she exclaimed. “And Captain Marino, you’ve got to make Dr. Scarpetta listen! That boy hates her! He hates all three of us. I’m trying to tell you, you must do anything to get rid of him before it’s too late.”
“I’m going to take care of it as soon as . . .” I started to say.
But she was shaking her head.
“He’s pure evil. I believe he’s been following me, or at least someone involved with him,” she claimed. “Maybe even that car you saw in my parking lot and the one following you. How do you know it wasn’t him who rented it under a phony name so he didn’t have to use his car and be recognized right away? How do you know it’s not whoever he might be involved with?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Marino interrupted her, holding up his hand. “Why would he follow anybody?”
“Drugs,” she answered as if she knew it for a fact. “This past Monday we had an overdose case come in, and it just so happened I decided to come in an hour and a half early because I was going to take a long lunch break to get my hair done.”
I didn’t believe that Rose just happened to come in early. I had asked her to help me find out what Ruffin was up to, and of course, she had made that her mission.