The Hornet’s Nest. Patricia Cornwell

tragic news as a Norfolk-Southern train loudly lumbered past.

Brazil’s flashlight swept gravel and weeds at the edge of rusty railroad tracks as the last train car loudly rumbled through the dark, hot night. Coagulating blood glistened bright

red in the strong beam, illuminating a dingy washcloth and bloody quarters, pennies, and

dimes that must have come out of pockets when the murdered senator’s pants were pulled

down. Blood and gore clung to kudzu, and there were fragments of skull and brain.

Brazil took a deep breath, looking down dark tracks, the skyline huge and bright.

j^ W Seth had images of his own blood and gore, and savored the imagined reaction of

Chief Wife when she walked into his room and found him on top of his bed, where he sat

up now drinking beer, the . 38 revolver in his lap. He could not take his eyes off the gun,

which was loaded with one Remington +P cartridge. Intermittently, Seth had been

spinning the cylinder for hours as he watched “Friends,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” and other reruns, and tested his luck. It wasn’t good.

So far, out of perhaps a hundred dry runs, he had committed suicide successfully but twice. How could that be possible? Didn’t this go against the law of averages? He

figured the cartridge should have lined up fatally at least twenty times, since it was a five-

shot revolver, and five divided into one hundred was twenty.

He had never been good in math. Seth had never been good in anything, he decided.

Everyone would be better off without him, including his wimpy sons and his

emasculating wife. She’d benefit the most, walking in, finding him slumped over, shot in

the head through a pillow, blood everywhere, finished, end of story. No longer a

problem. No more taking fatso Seth places and being ashamed, while younger men still

looked at her with interested eyes. Seth would show her. Take that.

Let his final chapter haunt her the rest of her big-shot days.

tw He would never go through with it. Hammer was quite sure of this.

Certainly, when she had slid open her vanity drawer and found the . 38 missing, it had

occurred to the top police officer in Charlotte that her depressed, self-destructive spouse

might have a clue as to the gun’s whereabouts. And for what? Self-protection. Hardly.

Seth rarely remembered to set the burglar alarm. He did not like to shoot and had never

carried a gun, not even in Little Rock, when he was a member of the NRA because most

people were. Hammer deduced and worried as she drove.

The fool. Wouldn’t this be his last and greatest revenge? Suicide was a mean and

skulking act, unless one was dying anyway and desired an earlier flight out of pain and

suffering. The vast majority of people killed themselves for payback purposes. Some of

the nastiest notes Hammer had ever read were the last comments of just such people. She

had not much sympathy because there wasn’t a soul she knew who didn’t bump over bad

stretches of life’s highways now and again, struggle over long, lonely miles where it

entered the mind that maybe one should run off the road, be done with it. Hammer was

not exempt. She was well aware of her own spells of destructive eating, drinking, not

exercising, laziness. They happened, and she picked herself up and went on. She always

chose a better lane, and got healthy again. She would not die, because she was

responsible, and people needed her.

She walked into her house, not knowing what she would find. Locking the door, she

reset the alarm. The TV was loud in Seth’s bedroom across from the kitchen. For a

moment, his wife hesitated, tempted to walk back and check, but she couldn’t. Suddenly,

she was afraid. She headed to her own part of the house, her heart filled with dread as

she freshened up in the bathroom. It was late, but she didn’t change into her nightshirt yet

or pour herself a Dewar’s. If he had done it, there would be people all over her property

within minutes. There was no point in getting out of her clothes or smelling like booze.

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