Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“Did you just get here?” I hug her good morning. “Actually, last night,” she replies, squeezing me tight. “I couldn’t resist. Thought I’d drop by and we’d have a slumber party. But you were down for the count. It’s my fault for get­ting here so late.”

“Oh no.” I go hollow inside. “You should have gotten me up. Why didn’t you?”

“No way. How’s the arm?”

“It doesn’t hurt as much.” This is not at all true. “You checked out of the Jefferson?”

“Nope, still there.” Lucy’s expression is unreadable. She drops to the floor and pulls off her warm-up pants, revealing bright spandex running tights underneath.

“I am afraid your niece was a bad influence,” Anna says. “She brought over a very nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot and we stayed up much too late. I would not let her drive back down­town.”

I feel a twinge of hurt, or maybe it is jealousy. “Cham­pagne? Are we celebrating something?” I inquire.

Anna replies with a slight shrug. She is preoccupied. I sense she carries very heavy thoughts that she does not want to set down before me, and I wonder if the phone really did ring last night. Lucy unzips her jacket, revealing more bright blue and black nylon that fits her strong, athletic body like paint.

“Yeah. Celebrating,” Lucy says, bitterness lacing her voice. “ATF’s put me on admin leave.”

I can’t believe I heard her right. Administrative leave is the same thing as being suspended. It is the first step in being fired. I glance at Anna for any sign that she already knows about this, but she seems just as surprised as I am.

“They’ve put me on the beach.” ATF slang for suspension. “I’ll get a letter in the next week or so that will cite all my transgressions.” Lucy acts blase but I know her too well to be fooled. Anger is about all I have seen boiling out of her over recent months and years, and it is there now, molten beneath her many complex layers. “They’ll give me all the reasons I should be terminated and I get to appeal. Unless I decide to just fuck it and quit. Which I might. I don’t need them.”

“Why? What on earth happened? Not because of him.” I mean Chandonne.

With rare exception, when an agent has been in a shooting or some other critical incident, the routine is to immediately involve him in peer support and reassign him to a less stress­ful job, such as arson investigation instead of the dangerous undercover work Lucy was doing in Miami. If the individual is emotionally unable to cope, he might even be granted trau­matic leave time. But administrative leave is another matter. It is punishment, plain and simple.

Lucy looks up at me from her seat on the floor, legs straight out, hands planted behind her back. “It’s the old damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she retorts. “If I’d shot him, I’d have hell to pay. I didn’t shoot him and I have hell to pay.”

“You were in a shoot-out in Miami, then very soon after you come to Richmond and almost shot someone else.” Anna states the truth. It doesn’t matter if the someone else is a serial killer who broke into my house. Lucy has a history of resort­ing to force that predates even the incident in Miami. Her troubled past presses down heavily in Anna’s kitchen like a low-pressure front.

“I’m the first to admit it,” Lucy replies. “All of us wanted to blow him away. You don’t think Marino did?” She meets my eyes. “You don’t think every cop, every agent who showed up at your house didn’t want to pull the trigger? They think I’m some kind of soldier of fortune, some psycho who gets off on killing people. At least, that’s what they’re hinting at.”

“You do need time off,” Anna says bluntly. “Maybe it is about that and nothing more.”

“That’s not what this is about. Come on, if one of the guys had done what I did in Miami, he’d be a hero. If one of the guys almost killed Chandonne, the suits in D.C. would be ap­plauding his restraint, not nailing him for almost doing some­thing. How can you punish someone for almost doing something? In fact, how can you even prove someone almost did something?”

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