focus on something about yourself. I’ve left you alone about it all morning, and now it’s enough. I can’t anymore.”
Scarpetta starts clearing off a countertop, putting things away.
“I sit here listening to you talk so calmly on the phone to Benton. To Dr. Maroni. How can you do it and not choke on denial and avoidance?”
Scarpetta runs water in a steel sink near an eyewash station. She scrubs her hands as if she’s just done an autopsy instead of working inside a pristinely clean lab where nothing much goes on except photography. Lucy sees the bruises on her aunt’s wrists. She can try all she likes, but she can’t hide them.
“Are you going to protect that bastard for the rest of your life?” Lucy means Marino. “All right. Don’t answer me. Maybe the biggest difference between him and me isn’t what’s obvious. I won’t let Dr. Self drive me to doing anything fatal to myself.”
“Fatal? I hope not. I don’t like it when you use that word.” Scarpetta busies herself with repackaging the gold coin and its chain. “What are you talking about? Something fatal.”
Lucy takes off her lab coat, hangs it on the back of the shut door. “I’m not going to give her the pleasure of goading me into something that can’t be repaired. I’m not Marino.”
“We need to get these to DNA immediately.” Scarpetta tears off evidence tape to seal envelopes. “I’ll hand them over directly to keep the chain of evidence intact, and maybe in thirty-six hours? Maybe less? If there are no unforeseen complications. I don’t want the analysis to wait. I’m sure you understand why. If someone came to visit me with a gun.”
“I remember that time in Richmond. Christmas, and I was spending it with you, home from UVA, had brought a friend with me. He hit on her right in front of me.”
“Which time? He’s done that more than once.” Scarpetta has an expression on her face that Lucy’s never seen before.
Her aunt fills out paperwork, busies herself with one thing after another, anything so she doesn’t have to look at her, because she can’t. Lucy doesn’t recall a time when her aunt seemed angry and shamed. Maybe angry but never shamed, and Lucy’s bad feeling gets worse.
“Because he couldn’t handle being around women he wanted desperately to impress, and worse than not being impressed, at least in the way he’s always wanted, we had no interest in him except in a way he’s never been able to handle,” Lucy says. “We wanted to relate to him as one person to another, and so what does he do? He tries to grope my girlfriend right in front of me. Of course, he was drunk.”
She gets up from the work station and walks over to the counter where her aunt is now preoccupied with removing color markers from a drawer and taking off their caps, testing each one to make sure the ink hasn’t been used up or dried out.
“I didn’t put up with it,” Lucy says. “I fought back. I was only eighteen and I called him on it, and he’s lucky I didn’t do something worse. Are you going to keep distracting yourself as if somehow that will make it go away?”
Lucy takes her aunt’s hands and gently pushes up the sleeves. Her wrists are a bright red. Deep tissue damage, as if she’s been clamped hard by iron manacles.
“Let’s don’t get into this,” Scarpetta says. “I know you care.” She pulls her wrists away, pulls down her sleeves. “But please leave me alone about it, Lucy.”
“What did he do to you?”
Scarpetta sits.
“You’d better tell me everything,” Lucy says. “I don’t care what Dr. Self did to provoke him, and we both know it doesn’t take much. He’s gone too far, and there’s no going back and there’s no exception to the rule. I’ll punish him.”
“Please. Let me deal with it.”
“You aren’t, and you won’t. You always make excuses for him.”
“I’m not. But punishing him isn’t the answer. What good will it do?”
“What exactly happened?” Lucy is quiet and calm. But inside she goes numb, the way she gets when she’s capable of anything. “He was at your house all night. What did he do? Nothing you wanted, that’s for sure, or you wouldn’t be bruised. You wouldn’t want anything from him anyway, so he forced you, didn’t he? He grabbed your wrists. What did he do? Your neck is raw. Where else? What did the son of a bitch do? All the trash he sleeps with, no telling what diseases…”
“It didn’t go that far.”
“How far is
“He was drunk,” Scarpetta says. “Now we find out he’s probably on a testosterone supplement that could make him very aggressive, depending on how much he’s using, and he doesn’t know the meaning of moderation. His excesses. Too much. Too much. You’re right, his drinking this past week, and his smoking. He’s never good with boundaries, but now there are none. Well, I suppose it’s all been leading up to this.”
“All been leading up to this? After all these years, your relationship has been leading up to his sexually assaulting you?”
“I’ve never seen him like that. He was someone I didn’t know. So aggressive and angry, completely out of control. Maybe we should be more worried about him than me.”
“Don’t start.”
“Please try to understand.”
“I’ll understand better when you tell me what he did.” Lucy’s voice is flat, the way she sounds when she’s capable of anything. “What did he do? The more you dodge it, the more I want to punish him, and the worse it will be when I do. And you know enough to take me seriously, Aunt Kay.”
“He went only so far then stopped and started crying,” Scarpetta says.
“How far is ‘only so far’?”
“I can’t talk about this.”
“Really? And if you’d called the police? They’d demand details. You know how it goes. Violated once. Then violated again when you tell all and some cop starts imagining it happening, and secretly gets off on it. These perverts who go from courtroom to courtroom looking for rape cases so they can sit in the back and listen to all the details.”
“Why are you going off on this tangent? It has nothing to do with me.”
“What do you think would have happened had you called the police and Marino were charged with sexual battery? At the very least? You’d end up in court, and God knows what a spectator sport that would be. People listening to all the details, imagining all of it, as if, in a sense, you were undressed in public, viewed as a sexual object, degraded. The great Dr. Kay Scarpetta naked and manhandled for all the world to see.”
“It didn’t go that far.”
“Really? Open your shirt. What are you hiding? I can see abrasions on your neck.” Lucy reaches for Scarpetta’s shirt, starts on the top button.
Scarpetta pushes her hands away. “You’re not a forensic nurse, and I’ve heard enough. Don’t make me angry with you.”
Lucy’s own anger begins to work its way to the surface. She feels it in her heart, in her feet, in her hands. “I’ll take care of this,” she says.
“I don’t want you to take care of it. Clearly, you’ve already broken into his house and searched it. I know how you take care of things, and I know how to take care of myself. What I don’t need is some confrontation between the two of you.”
“What did he do? What exactly did that drunk, stupid son of a bitch do to you?”
Scarpetta is silent.
“He takes that garbage girlfriend on a tour of your building. Benton and I watch every second of it, can see as plain as day he has a hard-on in the morgue. No wonder. He’s a walking hard-on doped up on some hormone gel so he can please that fucking bitch who’s less than half his age. And then he does this to you.”
“Stop it.”
“I won’t stop it. What did he do? He rip your clothes off? Where are they? They’re evidence. Where are your clothes?”
