“Why are you exhuming Emily Steiner?” one of them called out.
“Is it true the police have a suspect?” yelled another.
“Dr. Scarpetta?”
“Why has the FBI been called in?”
“Dr. Scarpetta?” A woman pushed a microphone close to my face.
“It sounds like you’re second-guessing the Buncombe County medical examiner.”
“Why are you desecrating this little girl’s grave?” And above the fray Marino suddenly bellowed as if he had been wounded, “Get the fuck out of here now! You’re interfering with an investigation! You hear me, goddam it?” He stomped his feet.
“Leave now!” The reporters froze with shocked faces. They stared at him with open mouths as he continued to rail against them, complexion crimson, blood vessels bulging in his neck.
“The only one desecrating anything around here is you assholes! And if you don’t leave right now, I’m gonna start breaking cameras and anything else in my reach, including your goddam ugly heads!”
“Marino,” I said, and I placed my hand on his arm. He was so tense he had turned to iron.
“All my goddam career I’ve been dealing with you assholes and I’ve had it! You hear me! I’ve goddam had it, you bunch of mother fuckin sonofabitch, BLOOD SUCKIN’ PARASITES! ”
“Marino!” I pulled him by the wrist as fear electrified every nerve in my body. Never had I seen him in such a rage. Dear Lord, I thought. Don’t let him shoot anyone.
I got in front of him to make him look at me, but his eyes danced wildly above my head.
“Marino, listen to me! They’re leaving. Please calm down. Marino, take it easy. Look, every last one of them is leaving right now. See them? You’ve certainly made your point. They’re almost running.” The journalists were gone as suddenly as they had appeared, like some phantom band of marauders that had materialized and vanished in the mist. Marino stared across the empty expanse of gently rolling lawn with its sprigs of plastic flowers and perfect rows of gray markers.
The clarion sound of steel striking steel rang out again and again. With hammer and chisel the diggers broke the vault’s coal tar seal, then lowered the lid to the earth as Marino hurried into the woods. We pretended not to notice the hideous grunts and groans and gagging sounds coming from mountain laurels as he vomited.
“Do you still have a bottle of each of the fluids you used for embalming?” I asked Lucias Ray, whose reaction to the advancing troops of media and Marino’s outburst seemed more quizzical than bothered.
“I may have half a bottle left of what I used on her,” he said.
“I’ll need chemical controls for toxicology,” I explained.
“It’s just formaldehyde and methanol with a trace of lanoline oil–as common as chicken soup. Now, I did use a lower concentration because of her small size. Your detective friend sure don’t look too good,” he added as Marino emerged from the woods.
“You know, the flu’s going around.”
“I don’t think he has the flu,” I said.
“How did the reporters find out we were here?”
“Now, you got me on that one. But you know how folks are.” He paused to spit.
“Always someone who’s got to run his yap.” Emily’s steel casket was painted as white as the Queen Anne’s lace that had grown around her plot, and the diggers did not need the winch to lift it out of the vault and gently lower it to the grass. The casket was small like the body inside it. Lucias Ray slipped a radio out of a coat pocket and spoke into it.
“You can come on now,” he said.
“Ten-four,” a voice came back.
“No more reporters, I sure hope like heck?”
“They’re all gone.”
A shiny black hearse glided through the cemetery’s entrance and drove half in the woods and half on the grass, miraculously dodging graves and trees. A fat man wearing a trench coat and porkpie hat got out to open the tailgate, and the diggers slid the casket inside while Marino watched from a distance, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
“You and I need to talk.” I had moved close and spoke quietly to him as the hearse went on its way.