“Look, there’s nothing new to add,” I say, suddenly on the verge of tears, cold and trembling and smelling Chandonne’s awful stench again.
“And why was it you had the jar in your home? And what exactly was in it? That stuff you use in the morgue, right?” Galloway positions herself to take Marino out of her sight line.
“Formalin. A ten percent dilution of formaldehyde known as formalin,” I say. “It’s used in the morgue to fix tissue, yes. Sections of organs. Skin, in this case.”
I dashed a caustic chemical into the eyes of another human being. I maimed him. Maybe I permanently blinded him. I imagine him strapped to a bed on the ninth-floor prison ward of the Medical College of Virginia. I saved my own life and feel no satisfaction in that fact. All I feel is ruined.
“So you had human tissue in your house. The skin. A tattoo. From that unidentified body at the port? The one in the cargo container?” The sound of Galloway’s voice, of her pen, of pages flipping, reminds me of reporters. “I don’t mean to be dense, but why would you have something like that at your house?”
I go on to explain that we have had a very difficult time identifying the body from the port. We had nothing beyond a tattoo, really, and last week I drove to Petersburg and had an experienced tattoo artist look at the tattoo from my case. I came directly home afterward, which is why the tattoo in its jar of formalin happened to be in my house last night. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have something like that in my house,” I add.
“You kept it at your house for a week?” she asks with a dubious expression.
“A lot was happening. Kim Luong was murdered. My niece was almost killed in a shoot-out in Miami. I was called out of the country, to Lyon, France. Interpol wanted to see me, wanted to talk about seven women he”I mean Chan-donne”probably murdered in Paris and the suspicion that the dead man in the cargo container might be Thomas Chan-donne, the brother, the killer’s brother, both of them sons of this Chandonne criminal cartel that half of law enforcement in the universe has been trying to bring down forever. Then Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray was murdered. Should I have returned the tattoo to the morgue?” My head pounds. “Yes, I certainly should have. But I was distracted. I just forgot.” I almost snap at her.
“You just forgot,” Officer Calloway repeats while Marino listens with gathering fury, trying to let her do her job and despising her at the same time. “Dr. Scarpetta, do you have other
body parts in your house?” Calloway then asks.
A stabbing pain penetrates my right eye. I am getting a migraine.
“What kind of fucking question is that?” Marino raises his voice another decibel.
“I just didn’t want us walking in on anything else like body fluids or other chemicals or…”
“No, no.” I shake my head and turn my attention to a stack of neatly folded slacks and polo shirts. “Just slides.”
“Slides?”
“For histology,” I vaguely explain.
“For what?”
“Galloway, you’re done.” Marino’s words crack like a gavel as he rises from the bed.
“I just want to make sure we don’t need to worry about any other hazards,” she says to him, and her hot cheeks and the flash in her eyes belie her subordination. She hates Marino. A lot of people do.
“The only hazard you gotta worry about is the one you’re looking at,” Marino snaps at her. “How ’bout giving the Doc a little privacy, a little reprieve from dumb-ass questions?”
Galloway is an unattractive chinless woman with thick hips and narrow shoulders, her body tense with anger and embarrassment. She spins around and walks out of my bedroom, her footsteps absorbed by the Persian runner in the hallway.
“What’s she think? You collect trophies or something?” Marino says to me. “You bring home souvenirs like fucking Jeffrey Dahmer? Jesus Christ.”
“I can’t take any more of this.” I tuck perfectly folded polo shirts into the tote bag.
“You’re gonna have to take it, Doc. But you don’t have to take any more of it today.” He wearily sits back down on the foot of my bed.