Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“I’m talking reality.” He strikes back. “One of us has to.”

“Reality is, I’m alive.”

“Yeah. A fuckin’ goddamn miracle.”

“I should have known you would do this.” I get quiet and cold. “So predictable. People blame the prey not the predator, criticize the injured not the asshole who did it.” I tremble in the dark. “Goddamn you. Goddamn you, Marino.”

“I still can’t believe you opened your door!” he shouts. What happened to me makes him feel powerless.

“And where were you guys?” I again remind him of an un­pleasant fact. “It might have been nice if at least one or two of you could have kept an eye on my property. Since you were so concerned that he might come after me.”

“I talked to you on the phone, remember?” He attacks from another angle. “You said you was fine. I told you to sit tight, that we’d found where the son of a bitch was hiding, that we knew he was out somewhere, probably looking for another woman to beat and bite the shit out of. And what do you do, Doc-tor Law Enforcement? You open your fucking door when someone knocks! At fucking midnight!”

I thought the person was the police. He said he was the po­lice.

“Why?” Marino is yelling now, pounding the steering wheel like an out-of-control child. “Huh? Why? Goddamn it, tell me!”

We knew for days who the killer is, that he is the spiritual and physical freak Chandonne. We knew he is French and where his organized crime family lives in Paris. The person outside my door did not have even a hint of a French accent.

Police.

I didn ‘t call the police, I said through the shut door.

Ma ‘am, we ‘ve gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property. Are you all right!

He had no accent. I never expected him to speak without an accent. It never occurred to me, not once. Were I to relive last night, it still would not occur to me. The police had just been at my house when the alarm went off. It didn’t seem the least bit suspicious that they would be back. I incorrectly as­sumed they were keeping a close eye on my property. It was so quick. I opened the door and the porch light was off and I smelled that dirty, wet animal smell in the deep, frigid night.

“Yo! Anybody home?” Marino yells, poking my shoulder hard.

“Don’t touch me!” I come to with a start, and gasp and jerk away from him and the truck swerves. The ensuing silence turns the air heavy like water a hundred feet deep, and awful images swim back into my blackest thoughts. A forgotten ash is so long I can’t steer it to the ashtray in time. I brush it off my lap. “You can turn at Stonypoint Shopping Center, if you want,” I say to Marino. “It’s quicker.”[“_Toc37098904”]

CHAPTER 2

DR. ANNA ZENNER’S IMPOSING GREEK REVIVAL house soars up-lit into the night on the southern bank of the James River. Her mansion, as the neighbors call it, has large Corinthian columns and is a local example of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington’s belief that the new na­tion’s architecture should express the grandeur and dignity of the ancient world. Anna is from the ancient world, a German of the first order. I believe she is from Germany. Now that I think about it, I do not recall her ever telling me where she was born.

White holiday lights wink from trees, and candles in Anna’s many windows glow warmly, reminding me of Christ-mases in Miami during the late fifties, when I was a child. On the rare occasion when my father’s leukemia was in remis­sion, he loved to drive us through Coral Gables to gawk at houses he called villas, as if somehow his ability to show us such places made him part of that world. I remember fantasiz­ing about the privileged people who lived inside those homes with their graceful walls and Bentleys and their feasts of steak or shrimp seven days a week. No one who lived like that could possibly be poor or sick or regarded as trash by people who did not like Italians or Catholics or immigrants called Scar-petta.