remembers all of it. He continues to complain about feeling sick.
“I wish you didn’t have food back there. Now’s not a good time for me to smell food.”
“Too bad. Rose has the flu.”
She parks in the lot next to Rose’s building.
“I sure as shit don’t want to get the flu,” he says.
“Then stay in the car.”
“I want to know what you did with my gun.” He has said this several times as well.
“As I’ve told you, it’s in a safe place.”
She parks. On the backseat is a box filled with covered dishes. She stayed up all night cooking. She cooked enough tagliolini with fontina sauce, lasagna Bolognese, and vegetable soup to feed twenty people.
“Last night you were in no condition to have a loaded gun,” she adds.
“I want to know where it is. What did you do with it?”
He walks slightly ahead of her, not bothering to ask if he can carry the box.
“I’ll tell you again. I took it from you last night. I took your motorcycle key. Do you remember my taking your key away from you because you insisted on riding your motorcycle when you could barely stand up?”
“That bourbon in your house,” he says as they walk toward the whitewashed building in the rain. “Booker’s.” As if it’s her fault. “I can’t afford good bourbon like that. It goes down so smooth, I forget it’s a-hundred-and- twenty-something proof.”
“So I’m to blame.”
“Don’t know why you got something that strong in your house.”
“Because you brought it over New Year’s Eve.”
“Someone may as well have hit me over the head with a tire iron,” he says as they climb steps and the doorman lets them in.
“Good morning, Ed,” Scarpetta says, aware of the sound of a TV inside his office off the lobby. She hears the news, more coverage of Drew Martin’s murder.
Ed looks toward his office, shakes his head, and says, “Terrible, terrible. She was a nice girl, a real nice girl. Saw her just here right before she got killed, tipped me twenty dollars every time she came through the door. Terrible. Such a nice girl. Acted like a normal person, you know.”
“She was staying here?” Scarpetta says. “I thought she always stayed at the Charleston Place Hotel. At least that’s what’s been in the news whenever she’s in this area.”
“Her tennis coach has an apartment here, hardly ever in it, but he’s got one,” Ed says.
Scarpetta wonders why she’s never heard about that. Now isn’t the time to ask. She’s worried about Rose. Ed pushes the elevator button and taps the button for Rose’s floor.
The doors shut. Marino’s dark glasses stare straight ahead.
“I think I got a migraine,” he says. “You got anything for a migraine?”
“You’ve already taken eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen. Nothing else for at least five hours.”
“That don’t help a migraine. I wish you hadn’t had that stuff in the house. It’s like someone slipped me something, like I was drugged.”
“The only person who slipped you something is yourself.”
“I can’t believe you called Bull. What if he’s dangerous?”
She can’t believe he’d say such a thing after what happened last night.
“I sure as hell hope you don’t ask him to help in the office next,” he says. “What the hell does he know? He’ll just get in the way.”
“I can’t think about this right now. I’m thinking about Rose right now. And maybe this would be a good time for you to worry about somebody besides yourself.” Anger begins to rise, and Scarpetta walks quickly along a hallway of old white plaster walls and worn blue carpet.
She rings the bell to Rose’s apartment. No answer, no sound inside except the TV. She sets the box on the floor and tries the bell again. Then again. She calls her cell phone, her landline. She hears them ringing inside, then voicemail.
“Rose!” Scarpetta pounds on the door. “Rose!”
She hears the TV. Nothing but the TV.
“We’ve got to get a key,” she says to Marino. “Ed has one. Rose!”
“Fuck that.” Marino kicks the door as hard as he can, and wood splinters and the burglar chain breaks, brass links clinking to the floor as the door flies open and bangs against the wall.
Inside, Rose is on the couch, motionless, her eyes shut, her face ashen, strands of long, snowy hair unpinned.
“Call nine-one-one now!” Scarpetta puts pillows behind Rose to prop her up as Marino calls for an ambulance.
She takes Rose’s pulse. Sixty-one.
“They’re on their way,” Marino says.
“Go to the car. My medical bag’s in the trunk.”
He runs out of the apartment, and she notices a wineglass and a prescription bottle on the floor, almost hidden by the skirt of the couch. She’s stunned to see that Rose has been taking Roxicodone, a trade name for oxycodone hydrochloride, an opioid analgesic that’s notoriously habit-forming. The prescription of one hundred tablets was filled ten days ago. She takes the top off the bottle and counts the fifteen-milligram green tablets. There are seventeen left.
“Rose!” Scarpetta shakes her. She’s warm and sweating. “Rose, wake up! Can you hear me! Rose!”
Scarpetta goes to the bathroom and returns with a cool washcloth, places it on Rose’s forehead, and holds her hand, talking to her, trying to rouse her. Then Marino is back. He looks frantic and frightened as he hands Scarpetta the medical bag.
“She moved the couch. I was supposed to do it,” he says, his dark glasses staring at the couch.
Rose stirs as a siren sounds in the distance. Scarpetta takes a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from her medical bag.
“I promised to come over and move it,” Marino says. “She moved it by herself. It was over there.” His dark glasses look at an empty space near a window.
Scarpetta pushes up Rose’s sleeve, slides the stethoscope on her arm, wraps the cuff just above the bend in the arm, tight enough to stop blood flow.
The siren is very loud.
She squeezes the bulb, inflates the cuff, then opens the valve to release the air slowly as she listens to the blood beating its way along the artery. Air hisses quietly as the cuff deflates.
The siren stops. The ambulance is here.
Systolic pressure eighty-six. Diastolic pressure fifty-eight. She moves the diaphragm over Rose’s chest and back. Respiration is depressed, and she’s hypotensive.
Rose stirs, moves her head.
“Rose?” Scarpetta says loudly. “Can you hear me?”
Her eye lids flutter open.
“I’m going to take your temperature.” She places a digital thermometer under Rose’s tongue and in seconds it beeps. Temperature ninety-nine-point-one. She holds up the bottle of pills. “How many did you take?” she asks. “How much wine did you drink?”
“It’s just the flu.”
“You move the couch yourself?” Marino asks her, as if it matters.
She nods. “Overdid it. That’s all.”
Rapid footsteps and the clatter of paramedics and a stretcher in the hallway.
“No,” she protests. “Send them away.”
Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits fill the doorway and push the stretcher inside. On top of it is a defibrillator and other equipment.
Rose shakes her head. “No. I’m all right. I’m not going to the hospital.”
Ed appears in the doorway, worried, looking in.
“What’s the problem, ma’am?” One of the EMTs, blond with pale blue eyes, comes over to the couch and
