Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

Marino hasn’t bathed or been to bed in at least twenty-four hours. When I move past him, I smell Chandonne’s hideous body odor and am stabbed by nausea, a burning wrenching of my stomach that locks my brain and causes me to break out in a cold sweat. I straighten up and take a deep breath to dispel the olfactory hallucination as my attention is drawn beyond the windows to the slowing of a car. I have come to recognize the subtlest pause in traffic and know when it will become some­one parking out front. It is a rhythm I have listened to for hours. People gawk. Neighbors rubberneck and stop in the middle of the road. I reel in an uncanny intoxication of emo­tions, one minute bewildered and then frightened the next. I swing from exhaustion to mania, from depression to tranquil-ity, and beneath it all, excitement fizzes as if my blood is filled with gas.

A car door shuts out front. “Now what?” I complain. “Who this time? The FBI?” I open another drawer. “Marino, that’s it.” I gesture with a fuck-you wave of my hands. “Get them out of my house, all of them. Now.” Fury shimmers like mi­rages on hot blacktop. “So I can finish packing and get the hell out of here. Can’t they just leave long enough for me to get out?” My hands shake as I pick through socks. “It’s bad enough they’re in my yard.” I toss a pair of socks in the tote bag. “It’s bad enough they’re here at all.” Another pair. “They can come back when I leave.” And I throw another pair and miss, and stoop over to pick it up. “They can at least let me walk through my own house.” Another pair. “And let me get out in peace and privacy.” I put a pair back in the drawer. “Why the hell are they in my kitchen?” I change my mind and get out the socks I just put back. “Why are they in my study? I told them he didn’t go in there.”

“We gotta look around, Doc,” is what Marino has to say about it.

He sits down on the foot of my bed, and that is wrong, too. I want to tell him to get off my bed and out of my room. It is all I can do not to order him out of my house and possibly out of my life. It doesn’t matter how long I have known him or how much we have been through together.

“How’s the elbow, Doc?” He indicates the cast that immo­bilizes my left arm like a stovepipe.

“It’s fractured. It hurts like hell.” I shut the drawer too hard.

‘Taking your medicine?”

“I’ll survive.”

He watches my every move. “You need to be taking that stuff they gave you.”

We have suddenly reversed roles. I act like the rude cop while he is logical and calm like the lawyer-physician I am supposed to be. I walk back into the cedar-lined closet and be­gin gathering blouses and laying them in the suit bag, making sure top buttons are buttoned, smoothing silk and polished cotton with my right hand. My left elbow throbs like a toothache, my flesh sweating and itching inside plaster. I spent most of the day in the hospitalnot that getting a cast put on a fractured limb is a lengthy procedure, but doctors in­sisted on checking me very carefully to make sure I didn’t have other injuries. I repeatedly explained that when I fled from my house, I fell down my front steps and fractured my elbow, nothing more. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne never had a chance to touch me. I got away and am okay, I kept saying during X ray after X ray. Hospital staff held me for observa­tion until late afternoon and detectives were in and out of the examination room. They took my clothes. My niece, Lucy, had to bring me something to wear. I have had no sleep.

The telephone pierces the air like a foil. I pick up the ex­tension by the bed. “Dr. Scarpetta,” I announce into the hand­set, and my own voice saying my name reminds me of calls in the middle of the night when I answer my phone and some de­tective gives me very bad news about a death scene some­where. Hearing my usual businesslike self-announcement triggers the image I have so far evaded: my savaged body on my bed, blood spattered all over the room, this room, and my assistant chief medical examiner getting the call and the look on his face as policeprobably Marinotell him I have been murdered and someone, God knows who, needs to respond to the scene. It occurs to me that no one from my office could possibly respond. I have helped Virginia design the best disas­ter plan of any state in the country. We can handle a major air­line crash or a bombing in the coliseum or a flood, but what would we do if something happened to me? Bring in a foren­sic pathologist from a nearby jurisdiction, maybe Washington, I suppose. Problem is, I know almost every forensic patholo­gist on the East Coast and would feel terribly sorry for who­ever had to deal with my dead body. It is very difficult working a case when you are acquainted with the victim. These thoughts fly through my mind like startled birds as Lucy asks me over the phone if I need anything, and I assure her I am fine, which is perfectly ridiculous.

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