I climbed out of his truck.
“Good night;” I said.
He angrily roared away and I knew it wasn’t me he was really so angry with. He was frustrated and furious. His
self-respect and vulnerability were naked in front of me and he didn’t want me to see it. All the same, what he’d said hurt.
I threw my coat over a chair in the foyer and pulled off leather gloves. I put Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony on the CD player and my discordant nerves began to restore their rhythm like the strings that played. I ate an omelet and settled in bed with a book I was too tired to read.
I fell asleep with the light on and was shocked awake by the hammering of my burglar alarm. I got my Glock out of a drawer and fought the impulse to disarm the system. I couldn’t stand the awful clangor. But I .didn’t know what had set it off. The phone rang several minutes later.
`.`This is ADT . . :’
“Yes, yes,” I said loudly. “I don’t know why it’s gone off.
“We’re showing zone five,” the man said. “The kitchen back door.”
“I have no idea.”
“Then you’d like us to dispatch the police.”
“I guess you’d better,” I said as the air raid in my house went on.
28
I supposed a strong gust of wind might have set off the alarm, and minutes later I silenced it so I could hear the police arrive. I sat on my bed, waiting. I didn’t go through the dreaded routine of securing every inch of my house, of walking into rooms and showers and dark spaces of fear.
I listened to silence and became acutely aware of the sounds of it. I heard the wind, the faint clicking of numbers rolling on the digital clock, heat blowing, my own breathing. A car turned into my driveway and I hurried to the front door as one of the offers sharply rapped with a baton or blackjack instead of ringing the bell.
“Police,” a woman’s no-nonsense voice announced.
I let them in. There were two officers, a young woman and an older man. The woman’s nameplate identified her as J. F. Butler, and there was something about her that had an effect on me.
“The zone’s the one for the kitchen door that leads outside,” I told them. “I very much appreciate your coming so quickly.”
“What’s your name?” her partner, R. I. McElwayne, asked me.
He was acting as if he didn’t know who I was, as if I were just a middle-aged lady in a bathrobe who happened to live in a nice house in a neighborhood that rarely needed the police.
“I’m Kay Scarpetta.”
His tight demeanor loosened a bit, and he said, “I didn’t know if you really existed. Heard about you a lot, but I never been to the morgue, not once in eighteen years, for which I’m grateful.”
“‘That’s because back then you didn’t have to go to demo posts and learn all these scientific things,” Butler picked on him.
McElwayne tried not to smile as his eyes roamed curiously around my house.
“You’re welcome to come watch a demo post anytime you want,” I said to him.
Butler’s attention was everywhere; her body on alert. She hadn’t been dulled yet by the weight of her career, unlike her partner, whose main interest at this moment was my house and who I was. He had probably pulled a thousand cars and answered just as many false alarms by now, all for little pay and even less appreciation.
“We’d like to look around,” Butler said to me, locking the front door. “Starting with down here.”
“Please. Look anywhere you want.”
“If you’ll just stay right here,” she said, heading toward the kitchen, and then it hit me hard, emotions catching me completely off guard.
She reminded me of Lucy. It was the eyes, the straight bridge of the nose, and the way she gestured. Lucy couldn’t move her lips without moving her hands, as if she were conducting a conversation instead of having one. I stood in the foyer and could hear their feet on hardwood, their muffled voices, the shutting of doors. They took their time, and I imagined it was Butler who was making sure they didn’t ignore a single space big enough to hide a human being.