“Kay Scarpetta, please.”
“Speaking.”
“This is John with Amtrak. I’ve finally got your information, ma’am. Let’s see… Sterling Harper had a round-trip ticket on The Virginian for October twenty-seventh, returning on the thirty-first.
According to my records, she was on the train, or at least somebody with her tickets was. You want the times?”
“Yes, please,” I said, and I wrote them down. “What stations?”
He answered, “Originating in Fredericksburg, destination Baltimore.”
I tried to call Marino. He was on the street. It was evening when he returned my call with news of his own.
“Do you want me to come?” I asked, stunned.
“Don’t see no point in it,” Marino’s voice came over the line. “No question what he did. He wrote a note and pinned it to his undershorts. Said he was sorry, he couldn’t take it no more. That’s pretty much it. Nothing suspicious about the scene. We’re about to clear on out. And Doc Coleman’s here,” he added, referring to one of my local medical examiners.
Shortly after Al Hunt left my house he drove to his own, a brick colonial in Ginter Park where he lived with his parents. He took a pad of paper and a pen from his father’s study. He descended the stairs leading to the basement and removed his narrow black-leather belt. He left his shoes and
trousers on the floor. When his mother went down later to put in a load of wash, she found her only son hanging from a pipe inside the laundry room.
11
A freezing rain began to fall past midnight, and by morning the world was glass. I stayed in my house Saturday, my conversation with Al Hunt replaying in my mind, startling the solitude of my private thoughts like the thawing ice suddenly crackling to the earth beyond my window. I felt guilty. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.
Numbly, I added him to the list. Four people were dead. Two deaths were blatant, vicious homicides, two of them were not, and yet all of the cases were somehow connected. Perhaps connected by a bright orange thread. Saturday and Sunday I worked in my home office because my downtown office would only remind me that I no longer felt in charge–for that matter, I no longer felt needed. The work went on without me. People reached out to me and then were dead.
Respected colleagues like the attorney general asked for answers, and I did not have anything to offer.
I fought back in the only feeble way I knew how. I stayed in front of my home computer typing out notes about the cases and poring over reference books. And I made a lot of phone calls.
I did not see Marino again until we met at the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road Monday morning. We passed between two waiting trains, the dark, wintry air warmed by engines and smelling of oil. We found seats in the back of our train and resumed a conversation we had started inside the station.
“Dr. Masterson wasn’t exactly chatty,” I said about Hunt’s psychiatrist as I carefully set down the shopping bag I was carrying. “But I’m suspicious he remembers Hunt a lot more clearly than he’s letting on.”
Why was it I always got a seat with a footrest that didn’t work?
Marino yawned voraciously as he pulled down his, which worked just fine. He didn’t offer to exchange seats with me. If be had, I would have accepted.
He answered, “So Hunt would’ve been eighteen, nineteen when he was in the bin.”
“Yes. He was treated for severe depression,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I guess so.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“His type’s always depressed.”
“What is his type, Marino? “‘Let’s just say the word fag went through my mind more’n once when I talked to him,” he said.
The word fag went through Marino’s mind more than once when he talked to anybody who was different.
The train glided forward, silently, like a boat from a pier.
“I wish you’d taped that conversation,” Marino went on, yawning again.