don’t see how it can be.”
“Not a good time for you to go on the air. I don’t need Rockman to tell us that.”
Rockman is the press secretary. Briggs doesn’t need to talk to him because he already has. I’m sure of it.
“I understand,” I reply.
“Remarkable timing. If I was paranoid, I might just think someone has orchestrated some sort of bizarre sabotage.”
“Based on what I’ve been told, I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I said if I was paranoid,” Briggs replies, and from where I stand, I can make out his formidable sturdy shape but can’t see the expression on his face. I don’t need to see it. He’s not smiling. His gray eyes are galvanized steel.
“The timing is either a coincidence or it’s not,” I say. “The basic tenet in criminal investigations, John. It’s always one or the other.”
“Let’s not trivialize this.”
“I’m doing anything but.”
“If a living person was put in your damn cooler, I can’t think of much worse,” he says flatly.
“We don’t know—”
“It’s just a damn shame after all this.” As if everything we’ve built over the past few years is on the precipice of ruin.
“We don’t know that what’s been reported is accurate—” I start to say.
“I think it would be best if we bring the body here,” he interrupts again. “AFDIL can work on the identification. Rockman will make sure the situation is well contained. We’ve got everything we need right here.”
I’m stunned. Briggs wants to send a plane to Hanscom Field, the air force base affiliated with the CFC. He wants the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab and probably other military labs and someone other than me to handle whatever has happened, because he doesn’t think I’m competent. He doesn’t trust me.
“We don’t know if we’re talking about federal jurisdiction,” I remind him. “Unless you know something I don’t.”
“Look. I’m trying to do what’s best for all involved.” Briggs has his hands behind his back, his legs slightly spread, staring across the parking lot at me. “I’m suggesting we can dispatch a C-Seventeen to Hanscom. We can have the body here by midnight. The CFC is a port mortuary, too, and that’s what port mortuaries do.”
“That’s not what port mortuaries do. The point isn’t for bodies to be received, then transferred elsewhere for autopsies and lab analysis. The CFC was never intended to be a first screening for Dover, a preliminary check before the experts step in. That was never my mandate, and it wasn’t the agreement when thirty million dollars was spent on the facility in Cambridge.”
“You should just stay at Dover, Kay, and we’ll bring the body here.”
“I’m requesting you refrain from intervening, John. Right now this case is the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts. Please don’t challenge me or my authority.”
A long pause, then he states rather than asks, “You really want that responsibility.”
“It’s mine whether I want it or not.”
“I’m trying to protect you. I’ve been trying.”
“Don’t.” That’s not what he’s trying. He doesn’t have confidence in me.
“I can deploy Captain Avallone to help. It’s not a bad idea.”
I can’t believe he would suggest that, either. “That won’t be necessary,” I reply firmly. “The CFC is perfectly capable of handling this.”
“I’m on the record as having offered.”
“Whatever you decide,” he then says. “I’m not going to step on you. Call me as soon as you know something. Wake me up if you have to.” He doesn’t say good-bye or good luck or it was nice having me here for half a year.
2
Lucy and Marino have left my room. My suitcases, rucksacks, and Bankers Boxes are gone, and there is nothing left. It is as if I was never here, and I feel alone in a way I haven’t for years, maybe decades.
I look around one last time, making sure nothing has been forgotten, my attention wandering past the microwave, the small refrigerator-freezer and coffeemaker, the windows with their view of the parking lot and Briggs’s lighted suite, and beyond, the black sky over the void of the empty golf course. Thick clouds pass over the oblong moon, and it glows on and off like a signal lantern, as if telling me what is coming down the tracks and if I should stop or go, and I can’t see the stars at all. I worry that the bad weather is moving fast, carried on the same strong south wind that brings in the big planes and their sad cargo. I should hurry, but I’m distracted by the bathroom mirror, by the person in it, and I pause to look at myself in the glare of fluorescent lights.
My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same, considering my age. I have held up well in my windowless places of concrete and stainless steel, and much of it is genetic, an inherited will to thrive in a family as tragic as a Verdi opera. The Scarpettas are from hearty Northern Italian stock, with prominent features, fair skin and hair, and well-defined muscle and bone that stubbornly weather hardship and the abuses of self-indulgence most people wouldn’t associate with me. But the inclinations are there, a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply, but I’m an aberration, too. I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviors are learned. I believe they are necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m not so sure about.
My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the Roman Inquisition.
My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.
I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then that more is always less if you can’t be sated.
Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My only recourse was to accept a military scholarship as some of my peers had done, including Briggs, who I was acquainted with in the earliest stage of my profession,
