The small blue eyes fixed back on me. “She doesn’t have a lock box in a bank, no other place she might have kept it–not that she would have, anyway. She had it with her while she was out of town, was working on it. Obviously, when she came back to Richmond she would have had the manuscript with her.”
“She’d been out of town for quite a while,” I repeated. “You’re sure of that?”
Mark wouldn’t look at me.
Sparacino leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers over his big belly.
He said to me, “I knew Beryl wasn’t home. I had been trying to call her for weeks. Then she called me about a month ago. She wouldn’t tell me where she was but said she was, quote, safe, and
proceeded to give me a progress report on her book, said she was hard at work on it. To make a long story short, I didn’t pry. Beryl was running scared because of this psycho threatening her. It didn’t really matter to me where she was, just that she was well and working hard at meeting her deadline. Might sound insensitive, but I had to be pragmatic.”
“We don’t know where Beryl was,” Mark informed me. “Apparently, Marino wouldn’t say.”
His choice of pronouns bit into me. “We” as in he and Sparacino.
“If you’re asking me to answer that question–”
“That’s exactly what I’m asking,” Sparacino cut in. “It’s going to come out eventually that for the past few months she was staying in North Carolina, Washington, Texas–hell, wherever it was. I need to know now. You’re telling me your office doesn’t have the manuscript. The police are telling me they don’t have it. One sure way for me to get to the bottom of this is to find out where she was last, begin tracking the manuscript that way. Maybe someone drove her to the airport. Maybe she made friends wherever she was. Maybe someone has an inkling as to what happened to her book.
For example, did she have it in hand when she boarded the plane?”
“You’ll have to get that information from Lieutenant Marino,” I replied. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of her case with you.”
“I didn’t expect you to be,” Sparacino said. “Probably because you know she had it with her when she got on that plane to come home to Richmond. Probably because it came into your office with her body and now it’s gone.”
He paused, his eyes cold on mine. “How much did Gary Harper or his sister or both pay you to turn it over to them?”
Mark was tuned out, his face without expression.
“How much? Ten, twenty, fifty thousand?”
“I believe this terminates our conversation, Mr. Sparacino,” I said, reaching for my pocketbook.
“No. I don’t believe it does, Dr. Scarpetta,” Sparacino answered.
He casually shuffled through the file folder. Just as casually, he tossed several sheets of paper across the desk in my direction.
I felt the blood drain from my face as I picked up what I recognized as photocopies of articles the Richmond newspapers had published more than a year ago. The story on top was depressingly familiar:
MEDICAL EXAMINER ACCUSED OF STEALING FROM BODY
When Timothy Smathers was shot to death last month in front of his residence, he was wearing a gold wristwatch, a gold ring, and had $83 cash in his pants pockets, according to his wife, who was witness to the homicide allegedly committed by a disgruntled former employee. Police and members of the rescue squad responding to Smathers’ residence after the shooting claim that these valuables accompanied Smathers’ body when it was sent in to the Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy….
There was more, and I didn’t have to read on to know what the other clippings said. The Smathers case had precipitated some of the worst publicity my office had ever received.
I passed the photocopies to Mark’s outstretched hand. Sparacino had me on a hook and I was determined not to squirm.
“As you’ll note if you’ve read the stories,” I said, “there was a full investigation of that situation, and my office was cleared of any wrongdoing.”