It’s like he fell off the edge of the earth. Then he’s suddenly on your doorstep. How do you know what he’s really been doing all this time? You don’t. You only know what he tells you–”
We both started at the clangor of the telephone. I instinctively glanced at my watch as I went to the kitchen. It was not quite ten, and my heart was tight with fear as I picked up the receiver.
“Kay?”
“Mark?” I swallowed hard. “Where are you?”
“Home. Flew back to Chicago, just got in …”
“I tried to get you in New York and Chicago, at the office …” I stammered. “Called while I was at the airport.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“Listen, I don’t have much time. I just wanted to call to tell you I’m sorry about how it went and to make sure you’re all right. I’ll be in touch.”
“Where are you?”. I asked again. “Mark? Mark!”
I was answered by a dial tone.
7
The next day, Sunday, I slept through the alarm. I slept through Mass. I slept through lunch and felt sluggish and unsettled when I finally climbed out of bed. I could not remember my dreams, but I knew they had been unpleasant.
My telephone rang at a little past seven P.M. as I was chopping onions and peppers for an omelet I wasn’t destined to eat. Minutes later I was speeding along a dark stretch of 64 East, a slip of paper on the dash scribbled with directions to Cutler Grove. My mind was like a computer program caught in a loop, thoughts going round and round, processing the same information. Gary Harper had been murdered. An hour ago he drove home from a Williamsburg tavern and was attacked as he got out of his car. It happened very fast. The crime was very brutal. Like Beryl Madison, he’d had his throat cut.
It was dark out, pockets of fog reflecting the low beams of my headlights back into my eyes.
Visibility was reduced to almost zero, and the highway I had traveled countless times in the past suddenly seemed strange. I wasn’t sure where I was. I was tensely lighting a cigarette when I realized headlights were gaining on me. A dark car I could not make out rushed alarmingly close, then gradually dropped back. The car maintained the same distance from me mile after mile whether I sped up or slowed down. When I finally found the exit I was looking for, I turned off, as did the car behind me.
The unpaved road I turned onto next wasn’t marked. The headlights remained fixed to my bumper.
My .38 was at home. I had nothing but a small canister of chemical Mace in my medical bag. I was so relieved I said, “Thank you, Lord,” out loud when the great house appeared around a bend, its semicircular drive pulsing with emergency lights and lined with cars. I parked, and the car still tailing me rocked to a halt at my rear. I stared in amazement as Marino climbed out and flipped his coat collar up around his ears.
“Good God,” I exclaimed irritably. “I can’t believe it.”
“Ditto,” he grumbled, his long strides bringing him to my side. “I can’t believe it, either.”
He scowled into the bright circle of lights set up around an old white Rolls-Royce parked near the mansion’s back entrance. “Shit. That’s all I got to say. Shit!”
Cops were all over the place. Their faces seemed unnaturally pale in the flood of artificial light.
Engines rumbled loudly and the static of fragmented sentences from radios drifted on the damp frigid air. Crime-scene tape tied to the back-step railings sealed off the area in an ominous yellow rectangle.
A plainclothes officer wearing an old brown leather jacket headed our way.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” he said. “I’m Detective Poteat.”
I was opening my medical bag to get out a packet of surgical gloves and a flashlight.
“No one’s disturbed the body,” Poteat informed me. “I done exactly what Doc Watts said to do.”
Dr. Watts was a general practitioner, one of my five hundred appointed MEs statewide, and one of my top ten pains in the ass. After the police called him earlier this evening, he immediately called me. It was SOP to notify the chief medical examiner whenever there was a suspicious or unexpected death of a well-known personage. It was also SOP for Watts to avoid any case he could, to pass it along or pass it by because he couldn’t be bothered with the inconvenience or the paperwork. He was notoriously bad about not responding to scenes, and I saw neither hide nor hair of him at this one.