Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“A Bell four-oh-seven, yup, I’m getting it.” Lucy dips into an endless stream of red taillights flowing sluggishly along Parham Road. “What do I plan to do with it? Fly it, that’s what. And use it in the business.”

“About this new business, what’s next?”

“Well, Teun’s living in New York. So that’s where my new headquarters will be.”

“Tell me more about Teun,” I prompt her. “Does she have family? Where will she spend Christmas?”

Lucy stares straight ahead as she drives, always the serious pilot. “Let me go back, give you a little history, Aunt Kay. When she heard about the shootout in Miami, she contacted me. Then I went to New York the other week and had a rather bad time.”

How well I remember. Lucy vanished, sending me into a panic. I tracked her down by phone in Greenwich Village, where she was at Rubyfruit on Hudson, a favorite hangout in the Village. Lucy was upset. She was drinking. I thought she was angry and hurt because of problems with Jo. Now the story is changing right before my eyes. Lucy has been finan­cially involved with Teun McGovern since last summer, but it wasn’t until this incident in New York last week that Lucy made the decision to change her entire life. “Ann asks me if there’s someone she can call,” Lucy explains. “I wasn’t ex­actly in a frame of mind to get myself back to my hotel.”

“Ann?”

“A former cop. She owns the bar.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“I admit I was pretty whacked, and I told Ann to try Teun,” Lucy says. “Next thing I know, Teun’s walking into the bar. She pumped me full of coffee and we stayed up all night talk­ing. Mostly about my personal situation with Jo, with ATF, with everything. I haven’t been happy.” Lucy glances over at me. “I think I’ve been ready for a change for a long, long time. That night I made a decision. The decision had already been made even before this other thing happened.” This other meaning Chandonne’s trying to kill me. “Thank God Teun was there for me.” Lucy doesn’t mean at the bar. She is talking about McGovern’s being there for her in general, and I feel happiness radiating from some space deep within Lucy’s core. Common psychology dictates that other people and jobs can’t make you happy. You have to make yourself happy. This is not entirely true. McGovern and The Last Precinct seem to make

Lucy happy.

“And you had already been involved in The Last Precinct for some time?” I encourage her to continue the story. “Since last summer? Is that when the idea first came up?”

“It started out as a joke in the old days, in Philly, when Teun and I were driven nuts by bureaucrats with lobotomies, by people getting in the way, by watching how innocent vic­tims get ground up in the system. We came up with this fan­tasy organization which I dubbed The Last Precinct. We’d say, Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go?” Her smile is forced and I sense that all of her upbeat news is about to get questionable shadings. Lucy is going to tell me something I don’t want to hear. “You realize this means I need to move to New York,” she says. “Soon.”

Righter has surrendered the case to New York and now Lucy is moving to New York. I turn up the heat and pull my coat more tightly around me.

“I think Teun’s found me an apartment on the Upper East Side. Maybe a five-minute jog from the park. On Sixty-seventh and Lexington,” she says.

“That was quick,” I comment. “And close to where Susan Pless was murdered,” I add, as if this is an ominous sign. “Why that part of town? Is Teun’s office near there?”

“A few blocks. She’s just a couple doors down from the nineteenth precinct, apparently knows a bunch of NYPD guys who work that tour.”

“And Teun had never heard of Susan Pless, of that murder? How strange to think she ended up just several streets from there.” Negativity carries me along. I can’t help it.

“She knows about the murder because we’ve discussed what’s going on with you,” Lucy replies. “Before that, she’d never heard of the case. Neither had I. I guess the preoccupa­tion of our neighborhood is the East Side Rapist, which is something we’ve gotten involved in, as a matter of fact. They’ve had these rapes going on for some five years, same guy, likes blondes in their thirties to early forties, usually they’ve had a few drinks, have just left a bar and he grabs them as they’re going into their apartments. New York’s first John Doe DNA. We got his DNA but not an identity.” All roads seem to lead back to Jaime Berger. The East Side Rapist would most certainly be a high-priority case for her office.

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