I stared down at my hands folded on top of the table as the court reporter played her silent keys and Patterson went on. His rhetoric was always eloquent, though he usually did not know when to quit. When he asked me to explain the. fingerprints recovered from the envelope found in Susan’s dresser, he made such a big production of pointing out how unbelievable my explanation was that I suspected the reaction of some was to wonder why what I’d said couldn’t be true, Then he got to the money.
“Is it not true, Dr. Scarpetta, that on November twelfth you appeared at the downtown branch of Signet Bank and made out a check for cash for the sum of ten thousand dollars?”
“That is true.”
Patterson hesitated for an instant, his surprise visible. He had counted on my taking the Fifth.
“And is it true that on this occasion you did not deposit the money in any of your various accounts?”
“That is also true,” I said.
“So several weeks before your morgue supervisor inexplicably deposited thirty-five hundred dollars into her checking account, you walked out of Signet Bank with ten thousand dollars cash on your person?”
“No, sir, I did not. In my financial records you should have found a copy of a cashier’s check made out to the sum of seven thousand, three hundred and eighteen pounds sterling. I have my copy here.”
I got it out of my briefcase.
Patterson barely glanced at it as he asked the court reporter to tag it as evidence. “Now, this is very interesting,” he said. “You purchased a cashiers check made out to someone named Charles Hale. Was this some creative scheme of yours to disguise payoffs you were making to your morgue visor and perhaps to others? Did this individual termed Charles Hale turn around and convert pounds flack into dollars and route the cash elsewhere – perhaps to Susan Story?”
“No,” I said. “And I never delivered the check to Charles Hale.”
“You didn’t?”
He looked confused “What did you do with it?”
‘I gave it to Benton Wesley, and he saw to it that the a was delivered to Charles Hale. Benton Wesley -”
He cut me off. “The story just gets more preposterous who is Charles Hale?”
“I would like to finish my previous statement,” I said.
“Who is Charles Hale?”
“I’d like to hear what she was trying to say,” said a man in a plaid blazer.
“Please,” Patterson said with a cold smile.
“I gave the cashier’s check to Benton Wesley. He is a special agent for the FBI, a suspect profiler at the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico.” A woman timidly raised her hand. “Is he the one I’ve read about in the papers? The one they call in when there are these awful murders like, the ones in Gainesville?”
“He is the one,” I said. “He is a colleague of mine. He was also the best friend of a friend of mine, Mark James, who also was a special agent for the FBI.”
“Dr. Scarpetta, let’s get the record straight here,” Patterson said impatiently. “Mark James was more than a quote, friend of yours.”
“Are you asking me a question Mr. Patterson?”
“Aside from the obvious conflict of interest involved in the chief medical examiner’s sleeping with an FBI agent, the subject is non-germane. So I won’t ask-.“
I interrupted him. “My relationship with Mark James began in law school. There was no conflict of interest, and for the record, I object to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s reference to whom I allegedly was sleeping with.”
The court reporter typed on.
My hands were clasped so tightly my knuckles were white.
Patterson asked again, “Who is Charles Hale and why would you give him the equivalent of ten thousand dollars?”
Pink scars flashed in my mind, and I envisioned two tigers attached to a stump shiny with scar tissue.
“He was a ticket agent at Victoria Station in London,” I said.
“Was?”
“He was on Monday, February eighteenth, when the bomb went off.”
No one told me. I heard reporters on the news all day and had no idea until my phone rang on February 19 at two-fourty-one A.M. It was six-forty-one in the morning in London, and Mark had been dead for almost a day. I was so stunned as Benton Wesley tried to explain, that none of it made any sense.