I ignored him.
“You head to the nearest fire station, okay? Why? Because there’s always somebody there. Even at two in the morning on Christmas. That’s the first place you head.”
Waiting for a break in traffic, I began digging for my keys. Glancing across the street, I noticed an ominous white rectangle under the wiper blade of my state car. Hadn’t I put in enough change? Damn.
“They’re all over the place,” Marino went on. “Just start looking for ’em on your way home or when you’re running around doing your shopping.”
I shot him one of my looks, then hurried across the street.
“Hey,” he said when we got to my car, “don’t get hot at me, all right? Maybe you should feel lucky I hover over you like a guardian angel.”
The meter had run out fifteen minutes ago. Snatching the ticket off the windshield, I folded it and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
“When you hover back to headquarters,” I said, “take care of this, please.”
He was scowling at me as I drove off.
3
Ten blocks away I pulled into another metered space and dropped in my last two quarters. I kept a red MEDICAL EXAMINER plate in plain view on the dash of my state car. Traffic cops never seemed to look. Several months ago, one of them had the nerve to write me up while I was downtown working a homicide scene the police had called me to in the middle of the day.
Hurrying up cement steps, I pushed through a glass door and went inside the main branch of the public library, where people moved about noiselessly and wooden tables were stacked with books. The hushed ambiance inspired the same reverence in me as it had when I was a child. Locating a row of microfiche machines halfway across the room, I began pulling up an index of books written under Beryl Madison’s various pen names and jotting down the titles. The most recent work, a historical novel set during the Civil War and published under the pen
name Edith Montague, had come out a year and a half ago. Probably irrelevant, and Mark was right, I thought. Over the past ten years, Beryl had published six novels. I had never heard of a single one of them.
Next I began a search of periodicals. Nothing. Beryl wrote books. Apparently she had not published anything, nor had there been any interviews of her, in magazines. Newspaper clips should be more promising. There were a few book reviews published in the Richmond Times over the past few years. But they were useless because they referred to the author by pen name. Beryl’s killer knew her by her real name.
Screen after screen of hazy white type went by. “Mab-erly,” “Macon,” and finally “Madison.”
There was one very short piece about Beryl published in the Times last November:
AUTHOR TO LECTURE
Novelist Beryl Stratton Madison will lecture to the Daughters of the American Revolution this Wednesday at the Jefferson Hotel at Main and Adams streets. Ms. Madison, protegee of Pulitzer Prize-winner Gary Harper, is most known for historical fiction set during the American Revolution and the Civil War. She will speak on “The Viability of Legend as a Vehicle for Fact.”
Jotting down the pertinent information, I lingered long enough to locate several of Beryl’s books and check them out. Back at the office, I busied myself with paperwork, my attention continually tugged toward the phone. It’s none of your business. I was well aware of the boundary separating my jurisdiction from that of the police.
The elevator across the hall opened and custodians began talking in loud voices as they went to the janitorial closet several doors down. They always arrived at around six-thirty. Mrs. J. R. McTigue, listed in the paper as being in charge of reservations, wasn’t going to answer anyway. The number I had copied was probably the DAR’s business office, which would have closed at five.
The phone was picked up on the second ring.
After a pause, I asked, “Is this Mrs. J. R. McTigue?”
“Why, yes. I’m Mrs. McTigue.”
It was too late. There was no point in being anything other than direct. “Mrs. McTigue, this is Dr. Scarpetta…”